THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, March 28 - 29, 2020 |C11
MYSTERIES
TOMNOLAN‘WHY COULDN’Tanything just
be simple?” wonders Milo
Weaver, chief protagonist of Olen
Steinhauer’s“The Last Tourist”
(Minotaur, 375 pages, $27.99).
Milo has recently been head
of the Library: a super-secret
service hidden inside the United
Nations funneling up-to-the-
minute information to the intelligence chiefs
of the world’s top nation-states. Before that,
he was involved with the so-called Department
of Tourism: New York-based shock troops
deployed abroad who served as “the sharp end
of American foreign policy.”
The Department of Tourism has been
shuttered for a decade. The Library has more
recently ceased operations, after Milo’s
research-only agents went proactive in the
field. But some of the former Librarians stay
loosely affiliated with Milo; and now a group of
terrorist types has appropriated the old Tourists
moniker and seems to be stalking the Librarians
and their coveted archives. Should Milo and his
colleagues go into hiding? Or should they take
the initiative and go to battle with their
ruthless foes?
The Librarians do a bit of
both, in a whirlwind odyssey
whose action jumps from
Langley, Va., to the Western
Sahara; Madrid to New York
City to Davos, Switzerland.
“The new Tourists,” it seems,
are a private army, capitalis-
tic in nature, global in scope.
To confront this bottom-line
juggernaut, Milo and
company conceive a plan
“held together,” in the words
of one ally, “with Elmer’s
Glue and Band-Aids.” Mr.
Steinhauer does a bang-up
job showing how Milo’s team
navigates this escapade—and
conveying why any one of them might wish to
retire and “get the hell off the potholed highway
that was the twenty-first century.”
Nick Averose, the ex-Marine and former
Secret Service agent at the forefront of
Matthew Quirk’s“Hour of the Assassin”
(Morrow, 336 pages, $27.99), kills people for
a living—or rather, he pretends to kill people.
An independent D.C.-area security consultant,
he exposes the vulnerabilities of clients by
infiltrating their defense systems and finding
opportunities to dispatch them. Instead of
proving his point by creating a corpse, though,
he leaves an “Indicator of Compromise” at the
scene: a “gotcha” note.
But things go awry at the site of his
assignment to mock-murder a former head of
the CIA. As Nick is leaving the target’s home
after completing his task, men break in and
kill the former spy chief for real. Nick escapes
but discovers that all proof of his assignment
has been stolen. “I understand if you don’t
believe me,” he tells his shocked assistant Delia.
“I wouldn’t.”
Delia is one of the few people that Nick feels
he can trust as he races to expose a conspiracy
that has cast him as its fall guy. He fears that
even police officers are complicit in the far-
reaching plot that he and Delia discern—a
scheme involving the long-hidden secrets of
a group of D.C. movers and shakers. “Hour of
the Assassin” is written in terse, swift prose
as it sketches a panorama of “Washington at
its worst,” a place ruled by “the corruption
and blood sport of high politics.”
John Lawton’s“Hammer to Fall” (Atlantic
Monthly, 380 pages, $26), the author’s third
novel to feature MI6 agent Joe Wilderness,
takes place primarily in London and Finland in- Thanks to flashbacks and trudge-forwards,
the reader is also transported to East Berlin in
1948, West Berlin in 1965, Vienna in 1955 and
so on. The fractured chronology reflects the
patchwork identity of Wilderness: born Joe
Holderness and also known as Michael Young,
Walter Hensel and all the other cover-identities
he has professionally assumed. To supplement
his income and stave off ennui, he is also on
occasion a smuggler of such necessities as
coffee and vodka.
In neutral Finland, Joe shows up as a cultural
attaché hoping to win Cold War hearts and
minds by touring the hinterlands screening
British films. His real task is to account for
the presence in Finland of a young KGB officer
that he knew in Germany some years earlier.
“We need to string him out until I find out why
he’s really here,” Joe tells some local contacts.
What the KGB is really after, Joe concludes,
is cobalt: an element the Finns have lots of and
the Russians need to make atom bombs. But Joe
can’t be entirely certain about his theory. In a
series of actions by turns farcical and grim, he
forces a split decision: “There are people who’d
like to shoot you,” his London chief tells him,
“and people who want to give you a medal.”
“Hammer to Fall”—a witty, melancholy,
first-class work—shifts into even higher gear
when it jumps ahead to 1968, with Joe posted
to Czechoslovakia in time for the liberalizing
Prague Spring. Here various men and women
from Joe’s past and present meet, mingle
and manipulate, while Joe tries to turn
the historical moment to his and his
employer’s advantage.
THIS WEEK
The Last
Tourist
By Olen
SteinhauerHour of the
Assassin
By Matthew
QuirkHammer
to Fall
By John
LawtonA Battle
Of Tourists
And Librarians
Dressed
By Shahidha Bari
Basic, 335 pages, $30BYANNLANDII
N THE COURSEof read-
ing Shahidha Bari’s
“Dressed: A Philosophy of
Clothes,” I found myself
thinking about my own
wardrobe, past and present. In
particular, a Calvin Klein coat I
bought while in the throes of a
divorce more than two decades
ago. This was an elegant black
wool winter-weight garment,
trimmed in mink at the collar and
cuffs, and at around $500, beyond
what I might normally spend on
a coat. But I enjoyed sticking it
to my about-to-be ex on his Plat-
inum Card, and the gesture
seemed to signal a newfound
independence. I didn’t wear the
coat much—and, yes, felt guilty
about that fur—but it was deeply
symbolic of a difficult period in
my life.
It’s not particularly new to
remark that clothes say much
about our sense of style or socio-
economic status, but Ms. Bari’s
entertaining and wide-ranging
overview reminds us of how
deeply woven they are into the
stuff of literature, movies, art,
mythology and even sports. The
book is subtitled “a philosophy,”
but I would argue that it is much
more like a sustained meditation,
taking us nimbly into the well-
provisioned corners of the au-the author, that belonged to a be-
loved and now deceased friend. In
the last chapter—“Pockets, Purses,
and Suitcases”—she remembers a
black leather handbag carried by
her mother and containing such
exotic items as a vial of Arabian
attar and “neatly folded betel
leaves.” This is a nice touch, help-
ing us understand how Ms. Bari’s
sensibilities could lead to a profes-
sional preoccupation with clothes.
Throughout “Dressed” are
sharp-eyed observations, suitable
for reading aloud, and astute anal-
yses of art high and low. Ms. Bari’s
position on women’s clothing is,
for the most part, acerbically fem-
inist: “This [is] the scandal of
womenswear. It invites touch so
much more than any other catego-
ries of dress, as if the female body
were itself intended to be made
available to the grasp of others
and its clothing only ever a solici-
tation of the hand that will reach
for it.”
On suits, she moves easily from
the suavity of Cary Grant, who
wears a “single, simple grey suit”
throughout the movie “North by
Northwest,” to Charlie Chaplin’s
tramp suit, cobbled together from
the studio wardrobe. “The clothes
seemed to imbue me with the
spirit of the character,” the actor
later wrote. The bespoke tailored
suit, as the author wryly observes,
serves as the perfect costume for
characters as diverse as the serial
killer in “American Psycho” to the
brilliant and brittle modernist poet
T.S. Eliot. But when women adopta menswear look, the semblance of
authority swings in a different
direction. Whether she’s Diane
Keaton’s character in “Annie Hall”
or singer-actress Janelle Monáe,
the “suited woman is confident
in her right to possess all the com-
mand ordinarily claimed by men.”
Some of Ms. Bari’s most enter-
taining and perceptive deconstruc-
tions are in the realm of film, such
as the “unhappy identification of
women with birds” in Hitchcock’s
tale of avian frenzy. In her reading,
the director can scarcely conceal
a streak of savage misogyny. He
takes the heroine’s “outward ele-
gance” as an insult and “abandons
her to creatures that relentlessly
tear and nip, unraveling the fabric
of her femininity.” In her dissec-
tion of the screwball comedy
“Bringing Up Baby,” starring a
young Cary Grant and Katharine
Hepburn, she sums up the hare-
brained plot “that spills over with
an animal madness” and bristles
with cinematic metaphors like a
negligée trimmed in marabou.
You may find yourself caviling
at certain omissions—how can
anyone write a chapter on shoes
without a nod to Carrie Brad-
shaw’s expensive and ongoing ob-
session in “Sex and the City”?—
but this is a turbocharged and
delightful romp through more
things on heaven and earth than
are implied in the dry notion of
“a philosophy.”Ms. Landi writes about art and
culture from Taos, N.M.CHILDRENS
BOOKS
MEGHANCOX
GURDONthor’s copious mind (she is a
London-based journalist and pro-
fessor of fashion history, dubbed
a “New Generation Thinker” by
BBC Radio 3 nine years ago).
In the prologue and introduc-
tion alone, Ms. Bari segues from
thecheongsamsworn by the lead
actress in the Hong Kong film “In
the Mood for Love” to van Gogh’s
paintings of his battered shoes
to Madonna’s jackets to observa-
tions from Marx, Freud, Foucault,Goethe, Barthes, Nietzsche and
Susan Sontag. Reader, be warned:
This writer has read and seen and
looked at a whole lot more than
youorI.
The book is divided into five
chapters devoted to different kinds
of garments and accessories, and,
as Ms. Bari writes, underlying each
section is “a concern for the
body—invested with authority as
it is for men and subject to sur-
veillance as it is for women.” She
begins the chapters with a remi-
niscence about an item of clothing
or an accoutrement that was of
particular importance to her. In
“Dresses,” she recalls a black lace
evening dress, carefully mended byMeditations on
Madonna’s jackets,
Cary Grant’s suits and
van Gogh’s paintings
of his battered shoes.A dog
tired of
being
cooped
up
dashes
out to
enjoy the
Eternal
City.CLAIRE KEANE
ROME ATthe moment is
nothing like the vibrant,
romantic destination of
the tourist’s fantasy.
The streets are empty,
the museums are locked
and even Pope Francis is
reduced to communicating
with the world via
technology. So the time
could not be better, really,
to dive into a vision of
Rome as it has been (and,
God willing, will be again),
by means of Mac Barnett’s
joyful picture book,
“Paolo, Emperor of
Rome” (Abrams,
48 pages, $17.99).
The emperor in this
case is a dachshund, a
low-slung, copper-colored
animal who, when the story
opens, is as frustrated by
being confined to quarters
as real Romans are today.
Paolo lives in a beauty
parlor run by a certain
Signora Pianostrada, who
is unwilling to let him out
to revel in the city’s “salty,
sour, meaty, flowery”
smells. But one day her
vigilance flags, giving Paolo
his chance. Out he dashes
into the thrumming streets
and into a series of
adventures that will
summon the noblest
parts of his character.
He marvels at the
beauty of Rome,
with its
bridges, plazas
and statues.
He’s especially
taken with astatue of the famous she-
wolf of Roman legend:
“How like this wolf I am,”
he observes. (See below.)
Roaming the city, Paolo
triumphs in an encounter
with bullying cats, takes
in an opera and rescues a
half-dozen drowning nuns.
As readers give their
hearts to the doughty little
dog, their eyes will devour
Claire Keane’s illustrations,
which, with their supple
black lines and
dashes of color,
evoke the noise
and vitality of
Rome at its
most rewarding.
Paolo even gets
an audience at
the Vatican in
this charmer
for children
ages 3-9.
From Italy
comes another
picture book,
Gek Tessaro’s
“The Little
Duckling Who
Wouldn’t Get
Wet” (Holiday
House, 28
pages, $16.99).
In vivid, torn-paper
collages, we see a bright
yellow duckling perched at
the water’s edge, its head
lowered in an attitude of
obstinacy. A big duck
explains patiently that all
ducks must swim, and so
the duckling should jump
into the pond. “But the
little duckling would NOTget wet. No. Not yet.”
So the big duck resorts
to pushing, and when that
fails the duck calls first
for a cat, then a dog, then
a turkey to help shove the
recalcitrant duckling where
it doesn’t want to go.
But then along comes...
a wolf. Will the duckling
finally see sense? The
answer will delight children
ages 2-5 in this satisfying
tale of determination and
good timing.
The life
stories of 72
Christians of
surpassing
holiness fill the
action-packed
pages of
“Stories of
the Saints”
(Workman,
232 pages,
$24.95),by
Carey Wallace.
In this acces-
sible and
dynamic
compendium
for children
ages 7-14, each
lively biography
begins with
a short list of dates,
emblems and feast days—
though not themanner of
the saint’s death; the em-
phasis here is on humanity
and faithful deeds, not
grisly martyrdom. We
encounter Patrick, patron
saint and converter of
Ireland, who was “just a
teenager when he wascaptured by Irish pirates.”
We learn about the great
healer, Camillus de Lellis,
who had “such a terrible
temper that his mother
didn’t know what to do
with him.” And we meet
Catherine of Siena, who
“drove her family crazy,
by giving away their food
and clothing to anyone
she saw in need.”
What matters about
these men and women is
not that they’re “always
good and never afraid,”
as Ms. Wallace notes. From
their stories we learn that,
whatever their frailties and
whatever dread obstacles
they must face, “saints
believe in a God who is
bigger than the world,
whose law is love, and
whose justice is mercy.”
Nick Thornborrow’s
pictures are an interesting
choice for this collection.
Only occasionally do they
draw on classical religious
imagery, as when he
paraphrases Fra Angelico’s
painting of the
Annunciation; otherwise,
his illustrations have a
modern cinematic quality,
with moody coloration
and dramatic contrasts
that seem to come
from the big screen.
If somewhat lacking in
reverence, the artwork
certainly heightens the
sense of the supernatural
that runs through the
lives that Ms. Wallace
describes.Italy Revived, Holy Lives Revisited
THIS WEEK
Paolo, Emperor
of Rome
By Mac Barnett
Illustrated by
Claire KeaneThe Little
Duckling
Who Wouldn’t
Get Wet
By Gek TessaroStories of
the Saints
By Carey Wallace
Illustrated by
NickThornborrowWearYouWant to Be
AUTHORITYCary Grant in Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’ (1959).
ALAMY
BOOKS
‘Vain trifles as they seem, clothes...change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.’—VIRGINIA WOOLF