Mirrors and lies

Chris Petit is impressed by Dan Fesperman's historical insight in a quest for the truth about Balkan atrocities, The Small Boat of Great Sorrows
The Small Boat of Great Sorrows by Dan Fesperman
Buy The Small Boat of Great Sorrows at amazon.co.uk

The Small Boat of Great Sorrows
by Dan Fesperman
348pp, Bantam, £12.99

Just as US intelligence failed to foresee the demise of the Shah in Iran in the 1970s, few predicted the collapse of the Soviet empire at the end of the 1980s. Many thriller writers, grown comfortable on the fat of the cold war, were caught on the wrong foot. What followed seemed fragmented and intensely local by comparison.

The cold war with its "wilderness of mirrors" was a grand philosophical conceit as much as anything. James Angleton, head of CIA counter-intelligence and a noted cold warrior, considered a close study of William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity as good a training as any for the job. The young Angleton gets an ambiguous cameo in Dan Fesperman's engrossing exercise in what author Robert Littell calls "walking back the cat", or working a case backwards to see what dank truths are revealed - in this case a sequence of shunts that connects recent Balkan atrocities with previous genocides and a history of ethnic violence unresolved for centuries.

Fesperman's initial setting is a newly undivided Berlin at the end of the 20th century, a vast building site awaiting new glass towers. Most of the labour is foreign and casual, and includes Vlado Petric, a former detective from Sarajevo, reduced to uncomfortable refugee status. Germany's buried past is brought into sharp relief with the unearthing of a bunker for SS drivers. This discovery prepares the way for a more complex and ambiguous historical excavation with Petric's uneasy return to his homeland.

Hired by enigmatic Americans working for the international war crimes tribunal, Petric is run as a lure for an old soldier from the 1940s involved in wholesale slaughter which, even by the standards of that war's genocide, took some beating. During the second world war Croatia gained independence by siding with the Nazis, and the puppet Ustashe government, with active encouragement from a militant Roman Catholic Church, embarked on a bloodthirsty programme of such atavistic hands-on savagery that even Nazi observers, advocates of more distanced methods of dispatch, blanched. Having grown up in Tito's Yugoslavia, Petric's grasp of his country's history is obscured. Cultural amnesia makes his discoveries truly shocking. The painful lesson is compounded by his realisation of possible family involvement. The investigation becomes one of uncomfortable self-interrogation.

The American role then, as now, is not straightforward. Petric's quest takes him to Italy, back into a murky world of postwar horse-trading where ambitious young intelligence men like Angleton cut every corner to prepare for the fight against communism. In a variation of the more publicised Nazi-Vatican rat lines, Croatian war criminals, including their leader, ended up under Vatican diplomatic protection thanks to the efforts of native clergy who relocated to Rome to run refugee programmes that doubled as escape routes. Many of those who ended up in the United States became Republican party stalwarts and proved big fundraisers for Nixon in particular.

Fesperman - a Baltimore journalist - tells his atmospheric tale with great elegance. The teasing out of historical elements displays a sharp analytical curiosity. He asks pointed questions about US conduct throughout. His uncovering of history's interstices reveals how an apparently lesser conflict, swept aside by the larger manipulations of the time, resurfaces decades later with international repercussions. American intelligence activity at the end of the second world war still remains undertold. One of Fesperman's acknowledged sources, John Loftus and Mark Aarons's Unholy Trinity, reveals how intensely fictional much of that material is, in terms of the lies that needed to be told to cover it up, and - in the case of some of the more radical scenarios - so daring that you couldn't make it up. Fesperman's fiction more than does justice to this source. He also shows how, through the intelligence filter, history becomes less about tangibles than about ambiguity, guilt and suggestion, and revision at the expense of individual lives. History, depending on who's telling it, becomes no more than the official lie.

· Chris Petit's most recent thriller is The Human Pool (Scribner).

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