The Torqued Man: A Novel
This WWII-era novel offers a gorgeous if sometimes grim tapestry of character, contrast, and perspective. Two very personal journals are discovered, one belonging to the enigmatic Irish double agent Frank Pike, the other to his handler, friend, and sometime-lover, Adrian de Groot, intelligence officer for the Germans. Pike’s version of events is poetically expansive to the point of metaphor; De Groot’s, like many great spy novels, is matter of fact but poignant.
The characters are densely layered. The pansexual, polyamorous Pike is courageous, tenacious, an unbounded lover of life, yet capable of murderous malice. His impoverished youth in Limerick and New York City’s Irish ghettos, his battle for Irish independence, his survival of torture in a Spanish fascist prison: all barely scratch the surface of the man he has become. De Groot details his reluctant drift from academic life to Nazi apparatchik; the loneliness of concealing his orientation in wartime Europe while caring for his dying sister and attempting to rescue his disabled niece from Nazi eugenicists; his erotic and spiritual fascination with Pike.
But they share salient similarities: a prewar upbringing marked by injury and loss, a mutual love of language, moral and physical displacement, and ultimately an ever-surprising mutability in the face of conflict. The novel is both a fine spy thriller and a great love story in the tradition of The Maltese Falcon. The minor players are also lively and compelling.
The novel features vivid, all-but-ghastly descriptions of wartime Berlin and daily life amid the contradictions and injustices of the Nazi regime. One does well to overlook a persistent vulgarity which rings adolescent for the modern reader but would have seemed edgy and Bohemian to the apocalyptic sensibilities of wartime Europe.
As events unfold to reveal each man’s true motives and conflicts to one another, the reader’s allegiances and boundaries of identification are tested. Highly recommended.
