Cold Victory

October 30, 2023
Marlantes (Deep River) sets his stirring story of innocents abroad in 1946 Finland as the Cold War is heating up. Arnie Koski is a taciturn Finnish American and champion skier assigned as the military attaché to the American legation in Helsinki. His wife, Louise, is an Oklahoman and former sorority president whose guilelessness contrasts with the savvy machinations of American and Soviet agents who are spying on them. At their first embassy party, Arnie and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Bobrov, who met as allies during the war, get drunk and challenge each other to a clandestine ski race through Northern Finland. As they prepare for the 500-kilometer course (“their own little Olympics”), Louise attempts to befriend Mikhail’s glamorous and wary wife, Natalya, and, in a subplot that causes the novel to drag, raise money for a Finnish orphanage. Owing to Louise’s carelessness, the ski race gets picked up by the press and spun into a proxy battle between democracy and communism. Louise’s naivete strains credulity, but the novel comes alive in its last third, as the former soldiers finally embark on the race, having agreed on acceptable types and doses of performance enhancing drugs but unprepared for the dire stakes, as Mikhail’s death is all but certain should he lose and embarrass the Soviet Union. Marlantes sticks the landing in this satisfying drama.

November 1, 2023
A cross-country ski race between former soldiers snowballs into a Cold War crisis, but the real high-stakes diplomacy occurs between the competitors' wives. The year is 1947. Louise Koski, sincere but naive, accompanies her attach� husband, Arnie, on a posting to Helsinki, where a fragile calm hides deep fissures. Her foil is Natalya Bobrova, the reserved, wary wife of Red Army officer Mikhail. When the men's drunken boasting prompts an endurance challenge--a frigid week-long trek across northern Finland--Louise and Natalya reach a tentative d�tente and find common cause in raising money for a cash-strapped orphanage. But Louise's well-intentioned plan to use the ski race as a fundraising vehicle collides with the Stalin regime's ruthlessness, and terrible things will happen if Mikhail loses the race. Marlantes' (Deep River, 2019) well-plotted, briskly moving novel explores the psychological afterlife of war. The men may court death on the tundra, but their needs are uncomplicated. It's the women who, in building cross-cultural bridges and making impossible sacrifices, truly demonstrate sisu (Finnish for "toughness in the face of hopelessness").

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December 15, 2023
In his new novel, Marlantes moves from the jungles of Vietnam to the spectral tundra of a very cold Cold War-era Finland. It's 1947. Arnie Koski, a U.S. Army colonel, has a delicate mission: As military attach� in Finland, a tributary state to Nazi Germany during the war but now a buffer against an increasingly inimical Soviet Union, he has to keep a bunch of constituencies happy, not least the Pentagon brass. Arnie's wartime friend, a Soviet officer named Mikhail Bobrov, is now his counterpart in Helsinki, with a different agenda but the same need for tightrope-walking skills. Their wives, Louise and Natalya, who form a careful friendship of their own, share that need, too. Louise is sometimes overwhelmed but no-nonsense, for "Army wives [are] used to getting things done alone." The soulful, cautious Natalya's life is more complicated still, for she lives under the doubtful eye of Oleg Sokolov, a colonel in the secret police, who monitors every step the Bobrovs take. For all that, Arnie and Mikhail hatch a friendly-wager plot to race by skis across northern Finland in February, perhaps not the smartest but certainly a suitably macho scheme. Alas--and here Marlantes' rather relaxed narrative picks up speed--Louise and Natalya take the contest up a notch, with Louise sketching out a press release: "Two war heroes, friends and allies, making money for a joint Soviet-American orphanage project." When, thanks to subterfuge, it actually lands in the hands of the press and the contest is widely publicized, governments get involved--and, naturally, things get ugly. Marlantes is better than Tom Clancy when it comes to the human element, but he's similarly fascinated by militaria ("a Shpagin could fire a thousand rounds a minute") and historical detail. All in all, it's not John le Carr� or Alan Furst, but it serves. A few longueurs aside, there's enough cat and mouse here to keep Cold War thriller buffs engaged.

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