Archangel

by Gerald Seymour

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0441028845
• ISBN13: 9780441028849
• Release Date: January 1983
• Publisher: Diamond Books (NY)
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Holly goes to the wire

In ARCHANGEL, the Cold War is still frigid.Oleg Demyonov, a convicted Soviet spy, suffers a fatal heart attack in Her Majesty's prison, Wormwood Scrubs. He was soon to be exchanged for Michael Holly, and the deal is now off.Holly, an engineer for an English manufacturing company, was recruited by MI6 to deliver a clandestine package on his next business trip to Moscow. A piece of cake, according to his Secret Intelligence Service recruiter. But Holly was caught and convicted of espionage. Now, the swap for Demyonov off, Holly is sent to a Correctional Labor Colony in the heart of the USSR for 14 years. Because Holly was born Mikhail Holovich of Russian parents who'd escaped to Britain after WWII, he's classed as a Russian - a traitor - for the purpose of imprisonment. It's to be Camp 3, Zone 1(Strict Regime).Back in the UK, the head of MI6 charges Alan Millet, Holly's recruiter, with investigating Michael's background. Is his agent likely to crack under continued interrogation and embarrass Her Majesty's government? As Millet discovers the mettle of the man he sent into harm's way, the reader begins to feel sorry for Michael's gaolers.In Camp 3, the resident Political Officer, KGB Captain Yuri Rudakov, sees Holly as a giant step up the career ladder if he can extract from the new prisoner the confession the Moscow bumblers couldn't get. In the meantime, Michael fires the first shot in his own personal war with a plastic baggie of machine oil, the page from a magazine, and some coal dust.This is the best of the several Gerald Seymour thrillers I've devoured to date. The reader's sympathies are focused solely on Holly and are rarely sidetracked, though one is tempted to feel an occasional pang of compassion for Millet and (even!) Rudakov. As I've stated before, the charm of Seymour's novels is that he doesn't deal in absolutes of right or wrong. His venues of conflict are patterned in shades of gray. As Holly rattles the bars of his cage, both he and the reader question the moral responsibility of his actions as the consequences for his fellow prisoners mounts. This is good stuff that transcends the bulk of the genre.With delicious anticipation, I contemplate the seven other Seymour books lined up on my shelf to be read.

A very believable tale of one man against the sysem

Gerald Seymor's books all have a certain thing in common. They inevitably deal with one person (or a very small group of people) pitted against a formidable enemy and tasked with some single purpose to which they devote all their energy. Perhaps because he was once a journalist, these books all have the ring of truth. The smell of reality is thick on every page and the protagonists, though often 'heros' in some limited sense of the term, are very real and fallible human beings. Sometimes they don't succeed and often they don't even survive. And even when they do survive, there tends to be a tragic sense of the cost involved.In _Archangel_, the protagonist, imprisoned in a Soviet prison camp in the Gulag, wages a one man war against the camp and the system that supports it. His victories, even the small ones, provide a great deal of pleasure to the reader. Unlike the typical stoic inmate portrayed by Solzhenitsn in _One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch_, Seymor's protagonist is a 'free' man who feels the unjustness of his imprisonment deeply and fights it at every turn. I really enjoyed this odd departure for Seymor, whose books have provided me with some of the most satisfying espionage and political thriller reading of the last two decades. Though the Cold War is past, this behind the scenes human drama in the cold Siberian winter, is a satisfying reminder of what was, ultimately, an unsuccessful attempt to crush the human spirit.