''The Last Supper'' (1983) is the fourth book in the Paul Christopher series by American espionage novelist Charles McCarry.

Plot

''The Last Supper'' relates, in episodic fashion, the multi-generational saga of Paul Christopher's family. The opening chapters tell of the courtship and marriage of his father and mother: blue-blooded American writer Hubbard Christopher and the ''Baronesse'' Hannelore von Beucheler, a daughter of Prussian aristocracy. Christopher's childhood is spent on the island of

Rügen Rügen (; la, Rugia, ) is Germany's largest island. It is located off the Pomeranian coast in the Baltic Sea and belongs to the state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The "gateway" to Rügen island is the Hanseatic city of Stralsund, where ...

in the Baltic as

Weimar Germany The Weimar Republic (german: link=no, Weimarer Republik ), officially named the German Reich, was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional federal republic for the first time in history; hence it is als ...

gives way to the rise of the

Third Reich Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...

, and the boy is sent to a Francophone school in Switzerland for his own good. Ultimately, after a series of inconclusive but icy encounters with the

Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...

, the Christophers in the summer of 1939 determine to quietly flee to Paris, but are intercepted; father and son, as U.S. citizens, are beaten and expelled from the country, but Lori (as she is known) is forced to remain behind as a subject of the Reich. As war erupts, Hannelore Christopher vanishes without a trace. Her disappearance will haunt both her husband and the adult Paul Christopher throughout the coming decades.

Critical reception

Comparing the author favorably to British espionage novelist

John le Carré David John Moore Cornwell (19 October 193112 December 2020), better known by his pen name John le Carré ( ), was a British and Irish author, best known for his espionage novels, many of which were successfully adapted for film or television. ...

, reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn writes in ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' that McCarry, "a former American intelligence officer who did tours of duty in Europe, Africa, and Asia as minedhis experiences in ''The Last Supper''… Written in spare, biting prose, he noveltraverses much of the past century, from Weimar Germany to Burma during World War II, from Vietnam in the '50s and '60s to Mao Zedong's China… McCarry is the genuine article. This is a blazingly good read that is almost impossible to put down." In a wide-ranging review of McCarry's fiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic

Michael Dirda Michael Dirda (born 1948) is a book critic for the ''Washington Post''. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993. Career Having studied at Oberlin College for his undergraduate degree in 1970, Dirda took an M.A. in 1974 a ...

of ''

The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...

'' observes that the character of Barnabas (Barney) Wolkowicz, Paul Christopher's dogged mentor in espionage work, "steals the show in ''The Last Supper''. In an intelligence community dominated by blond Ivy League graduates, and in particular by the ultra WASPy Hubbard-Christopher clan, Barney is an outsider, the son of a steelworker from Youngstown, a graduate of Kent State, unkempt, overweight, almost buffoonish. He is also, according to an implacable enemy, the most brilliant spy of his generation."

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Last Supper 1983 American novels