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About ten years ago, the sixth in the series centred on double agent John Russell made its appearance. This was MASARYK STATION set in Berlin and Prague in 1948 and was assumed to mark the final appearance of its central character. Happily, this proved not to be the case. A prequel, WEDDING STATION, appeared three years ago, set in the period in which Hitler was consolidating his power. Now UNION STATION appears to be really the end. It is 1953, and Russell, his German wife Effie, and their adopted daughter Rosa have settled in Los Angeles, where Effie has been able to continue her acting career. Russell is a spy no longer and is researching a book. He has felt relatively safe from the wrath of Lavrenti Beria, whom he had essentially blackmailed into allowing him to escape certain death by threatening to arrange the revelation of incontrovertible filmed evidence of Beria's savage compulsion to rape and murder young women. This incident is described in MASARYK STATION.
All the same, the family is beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable in a changing US. Effie is disturbed by the disruption caused by the rising tide of suspicion of left-wing politics. Senator McCarthy and HUAC are constantly in the headlines and the TV series on which she plays a central role may lose another cast member as a former Communist. At the same time, Russell becomes aware that he is being followed. Given his previous history, there are a number of candidates who might be keeping an eye on him and none of them wish him well.
All of this stirs uneasy memories of the pre-war Germany where he and Effie lived and did what they could to counteract the rising Nazi movement. Disturbing flickers of parallels between Germany in the early 30s and American red-baiting twenty years later are giving rise to questions in both his and Effie's minds about whether they will be able to remain in the US. But in the short term, they are scheduled to pay a visit to Berlin.
David Downing is well-known for his rock-solid research and the couple actually doesn't get to Germany till page 220. They travel across the States by train, as one did in those days. Then a short visit in New York is followed by an Atlantic crossing to England, a visit to London, and finally Berlin. This is not a travelogue, however. The long journey was of course how one got to Europe from LA in 1953. But it does provide Russell the opportunity to reflect on the direction the US might be going and why.
Here, I think, we come to what may have prompted Downing to resurrect his retired spy and set him off on one more task before the end. The fact of the matter is that readers who were expecting another account of a complex, dangerous, and suspenseful undercover action in the hands of a double agent will be disappointed. That simply doesn't happen. There is a bit of suspense generated toward the end but that's about it. Just as Effie and Russell are troubled about the parallels between early Fascist Germany and Red Scare America, Downing is clearly disturbed by current American politics.
If readers of this series are disappointed by the relative absence of the exciting tropes of spy fiction, they may be intrigued by the nagging presence of parallels between the USA today and the country seventy-odd years ago. Downing is too sage a writer to impose any necessary interpretation of what his research has retrieved, but he may have felt the need to reconstruct something of that past for readers who were not even born when HUAC ran the show. And as many have observed, ignorance of history is an open invitation for it to bite us on an uncomfortable part of our anatomy. UNION STATION is a history lesson, but one that is pleasurable to read and useful to consider.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, March 2024
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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