Life of Intrigue

On Fathers, Paperbacks, and Unsolvable Mysteries

Ross Bleckner, Throbbing Hearts, 1994, Oil, powdered pigment, and wax on canvas

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What a man can’t remember, doesn’t exist for him.

—Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Identity

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The news came by text from my older sister. Just had a policeman at the door. Dad died. Found deceased in his apt. No other details yet. I was grocery shopping with my daughter, and she was growing impatient, squirming in her stroller. I quickly wrote back: Thanks for letting me know. Call you later. I tried calling my sister that night, but she didn’t answer. I didn’t call again.

My father’s death didn’t come as a shock. Months before, he’d been hospitalized for respiratory failure, his lungs ravaged from decades of smoking, his cirrhotic liver barely functioning. He’d pulled through that time, but by all reports, just barely.

I hadn’t seen or spoken to him in almost two decades. What scarce information I had about his life in recent times came filtered through my sister, who still lived back in Nova Scotia. She too knew very little. For years, he’d resided in the same rented basement room in Lower Sackville. By his landlady’s account, he never went anywhere, never saw anyone, mostly drifted back and forth between his room and the house’s back porch, where he was permitted to smoke. Occasionally he’d head out at night then make a noisy return, stumbling and lurching around down there. Sometimes he did the landlady’s laundry for her. But as far as she knew, he spent the entirety of his days alone, reading.

Reading, always reading, was how I remembered him: on the loveseat in our upstairs den, the television on but with volume low, eyes on a paperback. Or on a plastic recliner on the beach at our cottage in Pictou, a beer always at hand, butting his cigarettes in the sand. For hours he’d sit like that, immovable and unapproachable, reading in silence.

It took my sister less than an hour to gather his belongings and clean out his room. The only furnishings were a twin bed, a television, the hot plate where he warmed up canned meals, a single chair — the recliner where he sat and read for hours every day.

His landlady had also packed up several boxes of books, all cheap paperbacks. Here were names familiar to me from family bookshelves, long ago. Titans of espionage and suspense: John le Carré, Len Deighton, Ken Follett, Robert Ludlum. Blockbuster procedurals: John Grisham, Tom Clancy. Tech-infused spine-tinglers: Michael Crichton and the like. Eric Van Lustbader. Clive Cussler. Mass-market thrillers from drugstore racks: J. D. Robb, James Patterson.

These authors are of my father’s generation, the postwar boom that generated, dominated, and profited from much of 20^th-century popular culture. Most of the books we found in his apartment were subgrade later entries from these authors’ bibliographies, when their names had been established as marketable brands, producing endlessly iterative franchises: Tom Clancy’s Net Force, Ludlum’s Covert-One, the endless reincarnations and redeployments of Jason Bourne and Alex Cross.

In the weeks following my father’s death, I became drawn to these books, perhaps hoping to understand why they’d captured his interest when so much else in his life — family, friends, any lasting connections to this world — he’d cast aside.

Reading these novels, I quickly ascertained, is an activity at the polar opposite of what might be considered difficult, hermeneutically speaking. From their first pages, they provide near-instant gratification, free of any arduous conceptual barriers to entry. Constant propulsion is achieved through twisty, tightly structured plots, the characters less recognizable people than components of a machine fueled by pure conflict — what the back cover copy often terms intrigue. Allegiances are starkly defined, then swiftly undermined through dramatic turns. Mysteries swirl; cliffhangers abound. Things happen.

And the protagonists are men, always men. Exemplars of professionalism, assured of their intentions and methods. Their mandate: to carve order out of chaos, distilling truth from lies, restoring stability to a threatened world. They work diligently, wielding specialized, often archaic, skill sets, tearing through webs of deception, cutting to the core of what must be done. They abide by codes. Submersed in covert operations, they follow directives but oppose authority’s abuse, privileging justice above all.

The men of these stories are flawed, surely, but their greatest defect is being too fervent in their principles — believing too fully in what’s right.

In one box I found Robert Ludlum’s The Prometheus Deception — two copies, for some reason. In classic Ludlum style, the novel centers on battle-hardened agents operating amid a global network of shadowy entities. The hero Nicholas Bryson is refined and effectual, conservative in manners and, one gathers, in his politics. But he’s aged out of the spy racket, and in the novel’s opening chapters faces dismissal from his post at “The Directorate,” with a new identity thrust upon him.

In a fog of existential doubt, he pines for his wife and drinks himself to oblivion. But this fall is merely a setup for a rebound; when called upon, Bryson capably summons the energy for a return to action. He pushes on in dogged pursuit of the truth, despite any damning consequences for himself. His foes are operatives of “Systematix,” a cartoonish yet not entirely farfetched global behemoth of late capitalism: “one of those companies that people know everything and nothing about.” The persistence of Bryson’s unfaltering ideals means they will always be tested. And so he works within the system, even as he writhes against its corruptive reach.

Naturally, he triumphs over his adversaries, even patches things up with his wife. It’s a victory not only for law and order, but for his own process of self-reclamation. This, I found, is a recurring motif in these stories: men falling into despair, only to claw their way back through sheer will and fidelity to a greater cause.

It was impossible to not recognize the irony: my father, a man repeatedly thwarted by his own worst impulses, finding entertainment in this grand narrative of redemption. In a world of duplicity and deception, the hero’s task is to champion rectitude against prevailing bewilderment. And yet everything about my father was bewildering to me.

From the same box I dug out Ken Follett’s Code to Zero. Follett made his name with WWII spy stories and historical epics, but his later efforts saw less ambitious forays into tech-espionage terrain. In this vein, Code to Zero opens with a setup much like Ludlum’s. Our hero wakes from a blackout, without any memory of where he’d come from, and things aren’t adding up. Clearing away the cobwebs, he vaults back into action, disentangling the mystery before him and dispatching his foes.

How many mornings did my father rise in just such a state? Shaky and wrung out, in dread of the burden of self to be excised, past mistakes to swallow. For Follett’s woozy hero Luke Lucas, a physicist embroiled in U.S.-Soviet machinations, this setup is only a launchpad for adventure, not the story itself. Men like my father, however, remained forever stalled in the prefatory void.

When I visualize my father’s bookshelf, what I recall most vividly are the distinctive covers of novels by Len Deighton: titles in authoritatively chunky typefaces, creepy imagery of skulls and switchblades. Deighton operated in a traditional spy mode, with his wearied hero Bernard Sampson a product of the Cold War and its clearly delineated binaries. In Berlin Game, which forms a trilogy with Mexico Set and London Match, we first meet Sampson in all his faded glory. Assigned to desk duties, he’s past his prime. Nonetheless, he remains committed to MI6’s processes, mission, and hierarchy. He’s a sharp yet reluctant hero. He sips gin and tonics. He makes ironic quips.

Berlin Game’s mystery pivots around the revelation of a dual betrayal: not only has a mole been found to be operating within “the Department” (not to be confused with Ludlum’s “Directorate”), but the defection from the agency is Sampson’s own wife. Such dishonor, to a man like Sampson, is the most contemptible of affronts — to exhibit such spinelessness, to go back on one’s pledged duties, is to commit the lowliest of treacheries.

Most of this tight, exacting novel’s pages are dedicated to dialogue, with spiky banter between allies-turned-enemies in dramatic standoffs, peeling away layers of damning information. In this arena of underhandedness and subterfuge, Sampson fights to maintain uprightness. Though the outcome only rarely turns in his favor, he continually does what must be done to set things right, not only for his country, but for his own conscience. This, the novel makes understood, is simply how a man like this has to be.

Reading fiction inherently involves a process, on some level, of projection. We’re invited to explore a voice, a perspective, a condition, and almost unwittingly weigh it against our own. In so doing, as Claire Messud nicely puts it, “We are challenged to articulate our own experiences, and through the articulation we live more deeply. The hurtling slows.”

Whether with the assurances of the “relatable,” or an encounter with territory heretofore unknown, whether in repulsion or ignition, or all too often the wasted effort of the humdrum — whatever the effect or experience, a book does something to us.

What reading these stories did to my father, I have no idea. But surely he couldn’t have consumed these books by the stack, day in and day out, and been left unaffected. Tracing his path through these pages, I’m flooded with questions. What did he make of such men? Did he see in them any reflection of himself, or what he might have been? Did he, reading of their exploits, long for such a life of action, of purpose? Did he see their tribulations as mirroring his own?

“The process is empathy, fear and dramatization,” le Carré told the Paris Review of his own methods, how he constructs each narrative around his own heroes. “I have to put him into conflict with something, and that conflict usually comes from within.”

I wonder: What conflicts plagued my father from within? Where did his loyalties lie? Who were his foes?

In James Patterson’s Double Cross, also in that carton of paperbacks, his recurring detective-psychologist hero Alex Cross reflects, “I have always felt that life was on the borderline of being absurd and meaningless, but it can still be pretty, if you look at it in the right light.”

Reading these lines, did my father nod knowingly? Did he recognize such absurdity, such meaninglessness? Did finding it voiced here provide him any solace? Had he found the “right light” with which to view the life he’d made for himself?

Patterson’s fiction (or, at least, the dozens of books with his name on the cover) is fluffier than the rigorous, tightly buttoned spy novels of Deighton or le Carré. These are page-turners, unabashedly formulaic, with dialogue and setups owing more to television than any finely etched spy-fiction sensibilities. Alex Cross embodies easily parsed conceptions of virtuous, all-American manhood. He’s a rational, lucid figure, possessed of firm values and unswerving focus. He loves his kids. He volunteers at his church. He’s emotionally available to the women in his life.

And so, when crises arise that threaten that stability, as in Double Cross, the stakes feel visceral. Patterson himself attributes the colossal commercial success of these books to “the intensity of emotions they create, particularly those of apprehension and exhilaration, of excitement and breathlessness, all designed to generate that all-important thrill.”

Nothing I knew of my father suggested any desire for thrills. He grew up in smalltown Nova Scotia, a coal mining community long past its prime. He played football in university, ran a few marathons, enjoyed tossing a Frisbee. He was a waterskier of considerable finesse.

But time went on. His working life was a sequence of humiliating dismissals, most often for drinking-related missteps. He lost his driver’s license multiple times, spent a few nights behind bars. Unable to embrace the expected moves of middle-class domesticity, he gave up on a loveless marriage and three children for a life of beery solitude.

The tropes of thriller fiction disallow this kind of resignation. The opening of Double Cross finds Alex Cross as yet another hero in repose, having forsaken his previous life of outwitting serial killers for burgeoning romance, a family’s embrace, and, he imagines, a peaceful life. Naturally, this tranquility is short-lived, and within a couple of chapters Cross is summoned back into action. Again and again, the heroic impulse can’t be curbed, and the man of action can’t be held back.

My father slowed down as he got older. He gave up running but kept smoking and drinking. He broke off ties with friends and family, and into his senior years worked a menial job at a home building supplies warehouse. When I moved away from my hometown in my 20s, we exchanged no goodbyes, and gradually lost touch entirely. This, I think, came as a relief to both of us.

His extended retreat into non-experience was, by all signs, a purposeful act of self-erasure. The books he left behind all featured men of action, driven by principles, tireless in the righting of wrongs. And yet the life he made for himself was static, inert, defined by an almost ascetic nothingness.

Considering this withdrawal now, I almost admire him for it. Our contemporary moment disdains inaction. Life hits us as an incessant churn: the politics of rage, the rampant systemic venality and the inequity it fosters, the frenzied popular discourse. There is so much said, and so much that leaves us deadened. Our dismay is bellowed from every channel, and to not join the fray feels almost immoral. Energy is demanded, even as so much is exhausting. The temptation is strong to escape these skirmishes, inner and outer — Messud’s “hurtling” — and disengage entirely.

Men of my father’s generation currently run the show, clinging to control and luxuriating in the spoils. But these glories will soon fade, and in the changing tides these men will surely be lost — like some Cold War spook, once assured of his role in a recognizable geopolitical architecture, spun adrift in the perplexities of a fragmented, abstracted world. The only story these men have known is one anchored by their own prominence, reinforced by narratives from a more easily understood time. And so, rankled by the suggestion of their impending irrelevance, they either lash out or resign.

My father felt no need to battle any Systematix in his own life. By all signs, the concerns that distress many of us — of ethics, of principles, of what causes to serve — weren’t ones he shared. He saw no rogue operatives to trounce, no justice to mete out. He was neither an agent of chaos nor of order.

Maybe he was justified in his withdrawal; his life was his to do with as he pleased, after all. Perhaps he’d existed in that uneasy state Sianne Ngai calls “stuplimity” — a paradoxical combination of boredom and awe, drawn out of tedium and exhaustion, at once an inverse of the sublime and nothing like it. Perhaps he’d considered the state of things, the mess of his past and what must have seemed a bleak future ahead, and simply decided: no. It would be better to simply not.

Perhaps. And yet, while he may have sought the freedom of solitude, once he’d achieved that freedom he did nothing with it. A life of absence can, in a certain light, resemble one of purity. But inaction nonetheless carries consequences. In the finely tuned plots of thrillers, the protagonist always bears a heavy burden for the life he’s found, but he dusts himself off and pushes on to the next foray. As does the author himself. “The dissatisfaction that comes with the completion of each book is the propellant that makes one start writing another one; vowing to make it better,” Deighton once told an interviewer. “So I try not to have second thoughts: I move on. No regrets, no second thoughts, no rewrites.”

My father and I never discussed books. I was an enthusiastic reader from early childhood, yet I recall no shared literary experiences between us. He never spoke to me of his favorite titles or authors, never asked about mine.

Looking back now as a father myself, this strikes me as inexplicable. Yes, raising a young child is a ceaseless test of one’s patience and tolerance for deranged reasoning. It’s also an unending source of opportunities to have your mind blown. Every day my daughter says something she’s never said before, and I want to hear every word. I want to know what baffles her, what enrages her, and what stories mean to her. And yet, like all fathers, I also live with the prospect that someday she might look at me as I looked at my own father: as an enigma, as an obstruction, as a resounding silence.

Maybe this silence was precisely what he found so satisfying about reading. It was a thing to be done alone, drink in hand, with no hectoring middle manager over one’s shoulder, no squealing family depleting one’s energies, no accountability. No hero’s burden, no demands other than the next page.

Settling his affairs upon his death, we discovered a typewritten will that hadn’t been updated in over a decade. His accounts and debts amounted to little. There were no assets to distribute other than his car, which sat in my sister’s driveway for weeks until she unloaded it for next to nothing. There were no intimate revelations or explanations. Any secrets he had, he took with him.

I try to picture how he must have been in his last years. Rising early, walking to the corner store for tins of soup and cigarettes, thumbing through shelves of $1.99 paperbacks at Value Village. I see him alone in his rented basement room, in that chair, turning pages, expressionless. His only desire was to be left alone, and he got what he wanted. Immune and insulated, he would affect no one and would go unaffected. He would be vapor, dust, inconsequential.

But even as I condemn these writers for populating their books with hokey characters within boilerplate scenarios, I find myself here committing the very same offense. This dismal figure of my father I imagine is a character of my own design, patched together from memories as unreliable as a brain-wiped Ludlum hero’s, and as unrealistic a representation of an entire person as any of Patterson’s most clichéd creations. To assuage my own regrets, I’ve invented an antagonist, and one unable to strike back in his own defense. It’s thinly drawn, hacky, and unfair.

It always seemed to me that my father gave up on us. But he very well may have felt everyone had given up on him. I’ll never know, because I didn’t know him. And any version of him, whatever narrative trajectory I might conjure, can now only be in service of my own plot — my own intrigue. He was a mystery to me, and so he’ll remain.

My father’s body was cremated and his remains were left with my sister. No memorial service was held, only a brief obituary notice in the local paper. There was talk of a gathering to spread his ashes at that beach where we’d summered, where he’d drank and read all day, returning him to where he’d seemed most content. But this talk hasn’t led to anything, and any such gathering has yet to take place.

The boxes of paperbacks, however, were scattered. Delivered with other discards from his apartment to a donation bin, there to return into the vast ecosystem of used books — passed on to another reader, another escape, another wiling away of time.

Rob Benvie’s most recent book is The Damagers (Knopf Canada). Born and raised in Nova Scotia, he currently lives in Toronto. He’s on Instagram at @robbenvie.