CATSPAW

A first person, self-revelatory novel of ideologies conquered by positive faith and human goodness -- this, from a slow start, builds up to a story that has its hold in the contest of individual values. For Alex, cold, Communist dedicated, is given the job of spying on Prince Louis who is destined by the Soviet as a front for their activities in his country, Nazi-hating and fighting, but ready to be taken over. Prince Louis, with his wealthy American wife. Isobel, whose deeply felt Catholic religion and wholehearted sincerity helps to sabotage Alex's fervent partisanship, remains an enigma to Alex to the end -- an end which has seen the puppet head of the government pushed, by sickness and pressure to the left, which has known the infiltration of long-term Soviet plans, which has taken toll of a man of God, a priest who, even through enforced idiocy, tries to protect his friends- and an end which leaves Alex completely divorced from the beliefs that made his life. Painstaking, allied to contemporary events, this has double-vision on a landscape -- with figures -- which is illuminating personality-split history, for serious tastes.