THE FIRE AGENT, by David Baerwald
From the opening pages of “The Fire Agent,” we know that we are in the hands of a confident, capable storyteller. With fluid prose and a compelling central character, David Baerwald’s family saga, based on the life of his grandfather, encompasses two world wars and their aftermaths, although its most intensive focus is the era of rising fascism in Germany and Japan.
It isn’t easy making a historical novel feel fresh on such well-traveled ground, and as Part 1 begins at the turn of the 20th century, the path ahead seems predictable for Ernst, an intellectual German Jew who has just graduated from the eclectic Philanthropin School in Frankfurt. But instead of subjecting Ernst to the trenches of Flanders, Kristallnacht and the doom of the death camps, Baerwald dispatches him on a decades-long odyssey that takes him first to Milan and then to Tokyo. His uncanny ability as a cultural chameleon puts him at ease among the elite of Japanese society, a vantage point that lets us tune in to a bandwidth of history we seldom hear.
Ernst is tutored for this immersion by his sensei in Milan, Tetsuo, an exiled warrior who for nine years teaches Ernst the language, history and martial arts of Japan. In Milan, Ernst also meets the love of his life, Chizuko, a Japanese fashion designer, and commences his dual professional life, working openly as an emissary for a German chemical company and secretly as a spy for a well-connected network of idealist Jews known as the Frankfurt Group.
Those two roles are initially in sync, as his corporate employer races to create a process to make enough fertilizer to avert a global famine. Later, as the company, eventually known as IG Farben, begins profiting by making the most horrifying weapons of war, Ernst turns more of his energies toward espionage, haunted all the while by the words of Tetsuo, who taught him to always ask: “How may I serve with honor if my masters have none?”
At times Baerwald seems torn about whether to give us a novel or a sort of memoir, once removed, of his grandfather’s life. Interspersed in the pages of his economical prose are photos of the people, places and scenes he is fictionalizing, as if to poke us in the ribs along the way to say, “See? This stuff really happened.”
This may tempt some readers to look up further information online, as I did when I saw a photo of Col. Toyohisa Matsue, commandant of Japan’s Bando P.O.W. camp during World War I. Matsue, defying all tropes of wartime captors, transforms Bando into a utopia of learning and cultural exchange for its well-fed wards, including Ernst, who comfortably spends most of the war there while millions of his countrymen are dying in the trenches thousands of miles away. Ernst, a talented violinist, joins the camp orchestra in a celebrated performance for the local residents, a concert that introduces Beethoven to Japan. And, yes, that concert really happened.
But these same pokes in the ribs occasionally jolt us awake from what John Gardner called “the fictional dream,” so that instead of being propelled forward by the current of the narrative, we’re bobbing to the surface to find out how much of it is true.
Still, this is a wonderfully readable book, and for all the intrigue of Ernst’s spying and his many harrowing moments, its emotional anchor is the love triangle that develops between Ernst, Chizuko and Ursuline, another spy who is sent to serve as Ernst’s wife.
The novel’s only major stumble comes near the end, when, just after Ernst has received the most devastating news of his life, Baerwald takes us on a 30-page detour into a search for a purported cache of looted treasure. No one from Ernst’s family or inner circle is involved. Instead, we follow a cartoon version of the complex C.I.A. figure Edward Lansdale, who was more deftly fictionalized in William J. Lederer’s Cold War novel “The Ugly American.”
As a set piece, it’s entertaining and darkly satirical, but after such a long and exhilarating ride with Ernst it feels annoyingly like stopping off for an afternoon at Disney World on the way home from a grand tour of Asia and Europe. Baerwald puts the plot back into the hands of his forebears for the final 20 pages, but by then the spell has been broken. Maybe that was his intention, or even his point: In the end, the idealists always lose, even if, much later, they sometimes get to write the history.
THE FIRE AGENT | By David Baerwald | Spiegel & Grau | 601 pp. | $32
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