Spy stories are hardly that anymore. They have become an entertainment craze with wide-screen, super-color demands for gumshoe gimmickry and tongue-in-cheek cynicism, Most refreshingly, Requiem in Utopia makes no concessions to such demands. It is best described as a superbly readable, intelligent novel about the Cold War.
Maxwell Speed is an veteran, prize-winning journalist who is sent to Stockholm by his newspaper for a series of articles about Sweden. But while there, Speed intends to pay a private call on Nils Lund, an old friend, Lund is Sweden's most distinguished elder statesman and one of Russia's -- and America's -- throniest problems. For instead of taking sides in the Cold War, or even remaining neutral, he prefers to champion the cause of international peace as aggressively as possible.
However, the Cold War stakes are too great for the participants to ignore either idealistic peace-lovers or objective reporters, Speed's arrival triggers an incredible chain of suspicion, intimidation, and violence.
But most frightening for Speed -- and the reader -- is the murderous cynicism of the Central Intelligence Agency, even when dealing with its own countrymen. The bearded American student who befriends Speed, the beautiful young Swedish student with whom Speed falls in love -- are both, it turns out, in the employ of the CIA. And both, in spite of their youth, are already familiar with the agency's deadly tactics, even when those tactics involve something like a plot a "murder" Speed.
In a climax that is as sobering as it is surprising, the reader is left with a remarkably clear-eyed view of this dance of death we call the "Cold War."