A Black Legend

Rating:
Summary: The CIA boys are very good, the KGB boys are very bad.
Review: A Black Legend is a simplistic story about the good CIA boys and their efforts to fight those evil communists. The saintly chief of station won't even consider committing adultery. He is the kind of father that reads good books to his children before tucking them in bed at night. (I imagine he also is the kind of son who calls Mom on Mother's Day to thank her for all those apple pies and the immaculate, loving home she created. But at less than 250 pages the story doesn't mention those calls to Mom.) In contrast, those godless, motherless KGB people are so bad they are even capable of committing murder. Imagine that!

The only redeeming quality of the story is that it got the basic facts about Uruguay and Uruguayans right. Obviously, the author has intimate knowledge of that little country. What a pity that Norman Mailer, who wrote, shall we say, a more accurate portrait of the CIA in Harlot's Ghost, didn't even bother to get the basic facts about Uruguay straight. (In case anybody is wondering, I, too, lived in Montevideo for a while.)