The Amateur - Robert Littell

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The Amateur

by
Robert Littell

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	The Amateur
Author:	Robert Littell
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1981
Length:	331 pages
Availability:	The Amateur - US
	The Amateur - UK
	The Amateur - Canada
	L'amateur - France
	Sein oder Nichtsein - Deutschland

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

The Amateur has been made into a movie twice: directed by Charles Jarrott and starring John Savage, Marthe Keller, and Christopher Plummer (1981), and directed by James Hawes and starring Rami Malek and Laurence Fishburne (2025)

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Our Assessment:

B+ : tries a bit too hard and much, but it's a fun quick read

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	10/5/1981	Michael Malone
The Times	A	30/7/1981	H.R.F.Keating

From the Reviews:

"Heller is, then, an amateur in what proves to be a drab but deadly le Carre-ish world of disillusionment, compromise and banal bureaucratic evil, where truths unravel like rotted cloth. (...) The Amateur has a taut, chilling plot and a protagonist as memorable as one of Len Deighton's heroes or le Carre's George Smiley." - Michael Malone, The New York Times Book Review

"Here is the best espionage novel I have met this year (.....) Here is a writer absolutely on top of his material, able to be very funny about a very serious subject (...) and able to convert what he wants to say into purely fictional, and therefore effective, terms. There is even an excellent plot full of twists and surprises, each unexpected yet altogether likely." - H.R.F.Keating, The Times

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

The Amateur is a Cold War thriller set in the 1970s; Richard Nixon is still the American president and the computer protagonist Charlie Heller uses at his work at the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is still of the kind where: "magnetic tapes whirred" when data is retrieved. The event that sets the action going is also one much more familiar from the times: three terrorists storm the American consulate in Munich (in what was then still West Germany) and take hostages, demanding the release of two jailed "Palestinian freedom fighters" and a plane to escape in. The terrorists show they mean business by promising to kill a hostage every hour if their demands are not met -- and carrying out the threat after the first hour has elapsed, at which point the authorities cave and give in to their demands.
The hostage who is killed is Sarah Diamond, and she was Heller's fiancée; the wedding invitations have already been printed. Heller has been with 'Byzantium', as he refers to his employer (also: the Company), for almost a decade now, recruited out of Yale. Always a puzzle-solver:

He was one of a handful of men assigned to Division D of the Clandestine Service, a tiny "higher than top secret" unit that engaged in cryptography (making ciphers) and cryptanalysis (breaking them) that the Company considered too sensitive to put into the hands of the National Security Agency

(His hobby -- taking advantage also of the computing power at his disposal at work -- is searching for: "ciphers in Shakespeare's plays proving that someone other than Shakespeare was the real author".)
The death of his fiancée hits Heller hard -- all the more so because those responsible for it are known and sitting comfortably in Czechoslovakia ("'For rest and relaxation,' added Mudd, 'until their next terrorist raid'"). Heller can't believe the CIA won't go after them:

"If you can't get them legally, why don't you have some of your people go in and kill them before they come out and murder more innocent people." And he added bitterly, "You do this sort of thing occasionally, don't you ?"

       But his employers don't see that as a solution (they have lame excuses -- but also, it eventually turns out, a very good reason). Heller presses on, however, and ultimately has the means of persuasion at his disposal for them at least to let him have a go at what they won't do themselves -- not that that wins him any friends among his higher-ups. With little other choice, they humor him, giving him some basic field training and arranging for him to be snuck into Czechoslovakia so he can hunt the terrorists down himself.
       Heller is playing several dangerous games, not least with his employers, who support him until they don't, a quick turnaround that puts him in their crosshairs just as he sets out across the border into Czechoslovakia. Still, he is able to follow parts of the plan that were in place -- though now on the run from both the CIA and the Czech Intelligence Service, specifically in the form of the Professor, chief of its counterintelligence directorate (who happens also to believe that someone else wrote Shakespeare's plays).
       Heller manages to hook up with Elizabeth, a CIA asset whose messages he has regularly decoded; she too has suffered personal tragedy, her poet-husband taken from her. Her English is good but she does have a habit of sprinkling conversation with familiar sayings that she gets just slightly wrong -- "her bent clichés tossed like straws to the wind", as Heller puts it (such as: "When the mouse is away, the dog will play !"). With her help, he hunts down the terrorists, one after the other, while trying to evade both the CIA and the Czech authorities (who in turn are each pursuing their own ends, which are not quite as straightforward as one might at first have guessed).
       The action unrolls fast, and once Heller is in Czechoslovakia there is a lot of it. Littell doesn't worry too much about many of the details, allowing Heller to more or less crash from one confrontation to the next in rapid and surprisingly easy succession. A few quirks are liberally sprinkled in for a sort of color and (attempts at) lightening things up, from Elizabeth's mangled clichés to Heller repeatedly asking people for a cigarette though he had given up smoking, to close the close friend and fellow CIA specialist who is a 'crateologist', an expert at identifying what is in crates ...; there are a few Shakespearean and coding detours, too -- but Littell never forgets that this a thriller, and he generally gets back to the suspense and action in short order. It's ultimately not very plausible, and much is cartoonishly simplified (with way too many convenient coïncidences) -- even one of the Professor's assistant can't help but remark: "I've never seen anything quite like this before" --, but it is propulsive and quick good fun -- a pop thriller with just enough of a sheen of realism (such as the extended descriptions of the security measures Heller has to deal with at his CIA-workplace) so it doesn't seem entirely fantastical.
       Along the way, Littell tosses in and addresses serious issues as well, including fundamental ones of spycraft and betrayal. The mix of characters is quite good -- even if they tend to be either quite extremely black or white --, with many having suffered betrayals and losses similar to Heller's. An interesting twist is also the portrayal of the CIA and what it is willing to do -- and how things play into whose hand as far as the bigger game here goes.
       Littell offers the definitions of 'professional and 'amateur' as an epigraph to the novel, and, well into the novel, has Heller basically repeat the latter in explaining to Elizabeth that he is decidedly an amateur:

     Heller thought for a moment. "An amateur is someone who suspects that enough isn't really as good as a feast."
     Elizabeth didn't smile. "Seriously ?"
     "Seriously," Heller said, "it's someone who thinks that if something is worth doing, it may be worth doing badly."

       This does, more or less, capture Heller's approach -- it's all about the ends, regardless of how he gets there, and that works well enough for him. He tramples heedlessly ahead -- and it serves him quite well. But for all his professed amateurism, he does show professional planning and attention to detail in some regards -- allowing also then for his great final act of revenge.
       The Amateur is, from the first, a revenge-tale -- with Heller even being told by the Company psychiatrist he sees that: "From a medical point of view, revenge is therapeutic" (which is one of the novel's most discordant notes; surely even in the 1970s the American Psychiatric Association would not have been on board with such a claim). Littell even feints towards pulling back from the ugly, single-minded Dirty Harry-like pursuit at one point -- Heller realizing: "Revenge wasn't sweet; it was bitter-sweet. And then he knew that his heart was no longer in it" -- but then doubles-down with the next twist. Even though here he has a slightly better excuse -- it's not just about revenge for Heller at that point --, the unpleasant aftertaste is hard to shake -- with Littell trying to deflect from it in the novel's final turn, with its different (and more palatable) kind of revenge. (There's also quite a bit of very ugly violence in the novel -- realistic, as Littell does not shy away from its ugliness or try to soften these blows (beyond, as with practically everything in the novel, quickly moving on), but certainly not for the squeamish.)
       Littell crams a lot into his fast-paced thriller, and there's much that might have benefitted from more exposition, but the rapid-fire action and variety certainly keep the reader enagaged, and The Amateur is satisfying as a lite thriller.

- M.A.Orthofer, 23 March 2025

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Links:

The Amateur:

Soho Press publicity page
J'ai lu publicity page

Reviews:

The Amateur - the films:

Official site (2025 version)
IMDb page (2025 version)
IMDb page (1981 version)

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Mysteries and Thrillers
See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

American author Robert Littell was born in 1935.

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