THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE by Kingsley Amis. 307 pages. Harcourt, Brace. $5.95.
IT'S A FREE COUNTRY by Leonard Brain. 192 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.50.
THE STATESMAN'S GAME by James Aldridge. 309 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.
Three spy novels that came in out of the cold war raise questions beyond the mere mechanics of this kind of fiction.
They are each by an English writer, and the English have excelled at this kind of thing since Doyle, Buchan and Oppenheim foiled the foreign malefactors. But something has happened to the genre since those simple times when everybody knew who the enemy was. Eric Ambler led a school during the United Front period of the '30s with wonderfully atmosphered thrillers in which the heroes, or their allies, were Soviet security men.
These three novels might be described as documents of the vague and nervous neutralism to which Britain's intellectuals incline, a neutralism in which the villain is just as likely to be the CIA or MI-5 as the KGB, or in which the security system itself is made an object of loathing and derision. Precisely because they are popular, such books may indicate a state of mind. Together they may suggest a trend of British thought in marked divergence from that of the U.S.
∙The Anti-Death League is knowledgeable, or perhaps merely confident, about security and also about such matters as psychoanalysis, theology, homosexuality and alcoholism. The story begins in a private mental hospital, where mixed-up army officers are vetted, but the focus shifts to a nearby military installation engaged on a sinister project known as Operation Apollo. Kingsley Amis, whose The James Bond Dossier shows a theoretical as well as a practical interest in secret agentry, plays fair with the reader. Atomic rifle ammunition for issue rifles seems to be the secret of Apollo; the suspected leaks include a friendly neighborhood nymphomaniac, a particularly nasty psychiatrist, an alcoholic-homosexual and the chaplain, who is a devout atheist. Amis keeps the reader looking in the wrong direction until the highly sophisticated and almost credible solution. By this time, one thing is clear. Apollo is really a cover for an even more dreadful military weapon—germ warfare. As a terror deterrent to the Red Chinese, the British have developed a technique for transmitting rabies to an enemy army. It is too much for one of the officers (unduly sensitive to such questions, as his beloved broad has just been diagnosed for cancer), who would maybe like to join a way-outfit called the Anti-Death League. This is an intelligent man's nightmare, with the famous Amis wit flickering as an unkindly light amid the encircling gloom.