The Double Agent

THE BIRDS FALL DOWN by Rebecca West. 435 pages. Viking. $5.95.

Treason has many faces, and most of them are familiar to Dame Rebecca West. Her studies of such traitors as Lord Haw-Haw, Klaus Fuchs, Pontecorvo and the Rosenbergs, explored the wide range of motives that can impel a man to betrayal. Sometimes, as in the case of Lord Haw-Haw or Fuchs, the traitor is distinguished from the patriot mainly by a loyalty turned upside down. Sometimes the reason is outside compulsion: John Vassall, a homosexual in the British embassy in Moscow, claimed that he turned informer under threat of exposure by the Russians.

In this long novel, her first in ten years, Dame Rebecca, 73, examines that most unscrupulous of all traitors, the double agent. To say that The Birds Fall Down is a spy story is only to measure the distance between its author and, say, Eric Ambler. Dame Rebecca grants few if any concessions to the literary appetites that batten on furious pace, high action and calculated suspense. Her study is a labyrinthine exercise exploring the riddle of a man who lives on the blood of both enemy and friend.

Cloak & Cricket. The double agent is Alexander Kamensky, a minor functionary in the household of an Imperial Russian count living in Paris in the 1900s. Kamensky arranges the murder of czarist leaders, while he fingers his revolutionary comrades for the Czar's secret police. Dame Rebecca hints of his duality, but she is in no hurry to expose him. After all, the effect of a double agent depends partly on the ability to wear his ambiance like a cloak.

Until the moment of revelation, in fact, Kamensky remains a pale figure, repeatedly upstaged by other characters and by Dame Rebecca herself, whose keen eye for detail alights frequently on the tableaux of fin-de-siecle Europe and the Byzantine complexities of expatriate Russian life.

Kamensky's exposure and murder are engineered by Vassili Chubinov, himself a revolutionary and terrorist--and, to be sure, a traitor as well. Chubinov is surely the most appealing anarchist ever conceived. Even his ungainly figure is sketched with sympathy, down to his very overcoat, "hanging on the door in obvious deformity, so badly cut that it did not even fit the air." To him, conspiracy is "a game he happened to enjoy ... his kind of fun."

This engaging traitor steals the show from Kamensky--but not without blunting the purpose of Dame Rebecca's book, which was to explain the double agent's rationale. Kamensky had a real-life counterpart, one levno Aseff, who operated around the turn of the century, accepting missions from Russian revolutionaries as well as from the Czar. The abstract motivation that Dame Rebecca gives to Kamensky would have baffled such a man as Aseff.

Hegelian Collision. "Why not join one set of people who devoutly observe a system of morality," says Kamensky, "and why not at the same time join another set of people who live as devoutly by another system of morality?" Out of the collision, he adds, "will come the synthesis, both the organizations will destroy each other, and a third will emerge which will be superior."

This kind of Hegelian doubletalk does not really explain the double agent, a man who approaches his work naked of any ideals, swearing no human allegiance, subscribing to no cause but his own. It could be said for Aseff, at least, that his motives were understandable: he sold out to both sides purely for profit--and got away with it. Escaping to Germany after exposure, Aseff peacefully lived out his last years with a mistress, known as "Madame N," and died of a kidney ailment in 1918.

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