★★★★★ A shockingly good novel

The Company

Robert Littell

When I bought Robert Littell's The Company from audible.com on 29-May-2006, I expected it to be a thinly disguised documentary about the CIA. I wasn't expecting a superb novel. But that is what I got. It is a very long novel: 41 hours and 22 minutes in audio format. If you're an avid reader, you've probably had the experience (all too rare) of reading a long novel and feeling sad when it ended, because it was so good. That was how I felt when at long last I reached the end of The Company.

The Company tells the history of the CIA from its origins in the World War II Office of Strategic Services (OSS) through the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and on to 1995. It is a multigenerational saga of a family of CIA operatives, starting with Jack McAuliffe, in the OSS. Jack is fictional, but many of the characters of The Company are historical. See the Wikipedia page for a list. The KGB is also a big part of the story, and other intelligence services such as the UK's MI5 also are portrayed, with both fictional and historical characters, as for the CIA.

I feel I ought to warn readers that, while the CIA is by no means presented uncritically, it is presented from the point of view of persons who worked for the CIA and who were deeply committed to its mission. This means, inevitably, that the CIA is more often than not portrayed sympathetically. If that's a deal-breaker for you, you probably should stay away from this novel.

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