Istanbul Passage (2012) By Joseph Kanon

Istanbul Passage, Joseph Kanon’s most recent book, while an okay book, proved a major disappointment to me.  In part this was due to my false expectations, but it was also due to a promotional campaign that stretched to the very threshold of false advertising.

Kanon, a retired book editor, has found a very successful second career as a writer penning such best-sellers as The Prodigal Spy and Los Alamos.  His novel The Good German was even made into a movie starring no less than George Clooney.  Earlier this year he spoke at the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago, my neighborhood summer festival.   I went to see him based solely on the title of the new book, a reason that explains my false expectations. 

“My” Istanbul is a romantic fantasy shaped largely by Orhan Pamuk’s beautiful, in fact mesmerizing, book Istanbul: Memories and the City.  Pamuk, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a native of the city, and it plays a key role, either as Istanbul or as Constantinople, in his body of work.  While Kanon tried to capture the city’s mystic, he failed – though in fairness, I don’t believe he’d compare himself with Pamuk, even if his publishers would.

Equally relentless is the promotional campaign that refers to Kanon as the “heir apparent” to Graham Greene, author of the classics The Third Man and The Quiet American.  Really?

All of this said, it is a good novel if espionage is your genre.  The book is centered on the spy network left adrift in Istanbul at the end of World War II, their mission accomplished, with the Cold War era not quite yet upon us.  The main character, an American named Leon Bauer, is picked to run one last job before being down-sized.  The job puts him in the uncomfortable position of protecting a double/triple agent who is evil incarnate, to deliver a good purpose. Kanon plays this theme of good and evil being situational quite well, and masters the requisite amount of suspense necessary for an espionage novel. There is probably another movie deal here, if so rest assured it will be a controversial movie.

So, do I recommend this book?  Yes, if espionage is your interest.  As for me, let me emphasize that my disappointment was expecting the book to be something that it is not, which is my error more than the author’s.