The cover advertises it as "a different kind of suspense novel set deep in the cold spy country." The reason this story is different from most other spy stories is that our hero isn't a detective, a journalist, or a cop. He is a salesman who is going through some kind of existential crisis. Phillips is a perfectly ordinary Englishman. He came to Vienna as a soldier at the very end of World War II and unthinkingly went about his orders, just as he had unthinkingly done most everything else in his life.
The only interesting thing about him is his wife, a mysterious woman named Alec who lived through the war in Vienna and won't discuss her past. But she is smoking hot. (It's impossible not to picture Alec as Marlene Dietrich.) So they get married. They live in Vienna for a bit, then England, then finally Germany (even though Phillips hates Germans). Phillips has a series of jobs, but ends up being a middleman-salesman for various factories, something he doesn't care about but is quite successful at. He travels a lot and knows his wife sometimes leaves town while he is gone. They still get along because, even after ten years of marriage, "they never became sufficiently intimate to quarrel."
Then one day, Phillips comes home and Alec is gone. All her stuff is cleared out, and he has no idea where she went. He drops out of his life in Germany for a few weeks, doesn't leave the house, and feels the ennui of an unsatisfied salesman. Then he gets a telegram from a friend in Vienna who has seen Alec -- so Phillips sells the house, drops everything, and returns to Austria.
What follows is a nicely drawn combination of a straightforward spy story (gun runners! blackmail! international espionage! communists!); a philosophical and rather interior story of Phillips trying to figure out what he has done with his life and what he is going to do now; and a mystery about Alec and the story of her background.
It all moves very quickly, and climaxes when Phillips gets in over his head with all the spies and criminals and ends up stuck behind the Iron Curtain in Budapest without a passport and with the police on his trail.
I'd like to know more about Robert Easton Pickering -- from what I can tell online, he is British, and he wrote this in 1966, and then a book called Word Game in 1982 (which they have at PCL -- I might have to get Dr. M to check it out for me...). Further search into the depths of OCLC notes that he also published a book called In Transit in 1968, although that might have been a reissue of The Uncommitted Man with a new title (it was also called Himself Again in its British version). My guess is that Pickering might be a pseudonym from another author, but I don't have much to base that guess on...
[Back cover available here.]
4 comments:
please send this book to me. i'll send it back.
Bob Pickering ("R.E. Pickering") was my mother´s boyfriend during the 1980s. He lived in Paris where he worked as a freelance translator, primarily in the UN system (French, Spanish, Russian), and wrote a small handful of good but obscure and unacclaimed novels. He used to say he was very grateful to be in print. A laid back, easy-going, very informal guy, always in blue jeans, popular and great company, and a total commitment-phobe, to my and my mother´s dismay. Even a bolshy, adult-despising teen like myself couldn´t fail to adore him. He died in or around 2000, following a collossal stroke, in Paris.
Suzi, thanks for the information on R.E. Pickering -- it's great to have some of his back story!
You´re welcome. Bob was one of my favourite people, very bright, funny, genuine and totally unaffected, and it´s great to know at least one of his resolutely obscure books is still on someone´s radar! Check out the Word Game, his final published novel. I think my mother still has the manuscript somewhere.
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