A peculiar amalgam of historical facts and pure fiction, this novel by a Canadian best known as a conservative, often controversial, Ottawa broadcaster and radio talk show host, was abandoned in the William’s Court mailroom from whence I rescued it from an uncertain future. It doesn’t fit neatly into the usual historical fiction mold as most of the verifiable facts are contained in footnotes, but it does provide a rather unique Belorussian survivor’s perspective on WWII and the subsequent Cold War, even if that survivor’s story as presented here is largely fictional. He provides the documentation of events by a long tape recording supposedly delivered anonymously to the author.
Suspense spy thriller lovers will delight in the hijinks involved in the true, but probably embellished, episode of the killing of the incredibly sadistic Nazi chief administrator of Belorussia and the even more embellished adventures of the young real Soviet Igor Gouzenko, allegedly a defector from the their embassy in Ottawa in 1945, the speaker on the tapes, as he evades would-be killers around the world.
As the story progresses, the realism completely vanishes as Igor’s wild travels around the U.S., the Bahamas and Scotland evading FBI chasers, become ever more unrealistic and stuffed with cheap dramatically overblown adventures and all the tricks of writing a mystery thriller, including beautiful women to bed down, hidden document drops, doubles, and harrowing escapes. All of the major spies on both sides of the Cold War including Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Julius Fuchs, and even the Nazi sympathizer King Edward the XIIl after his abdication make an appearance. Although a lot of details of the lives of the very real Igor Gouzenko and his wife Valentina were undoubtedly adventurous and remain mysterious, this wildly imaginative account does little to fill in the many blanks. Fun entertainment but little enlightenment.
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The Passionate Reader 