Spy games.

Conspirators

Michael Andre Bernstein

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 506 pp.

Michael Andre Bernstein's Conspirators is a historical thriller set in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The author's first foray into fiction, it is energetic and ambitious, but is, unfortunately, almost all windup and no pitch. On page 385, when a dead body is finally found, I breathed a sigh of relief: now, more than two-thirds of the way through the book, maybe the action would begin.

Conspirators depicts a world of intrigue, a spy-vs.-spy scenario set in Galicia, the Hapsburgs' easternmost outpost, between December 1912 and May 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. Galicia is not only farthest from the court at Vienna, but also the empire's most multiethnic, benighted, and seething locale.

Here, in not-so-splendid isolation, sits Galicia's governor, Count Wiladowski, who has been quasi-banished as punishment for his undiplomatic behavior in Vienna. Things are simmering around him. A cadre of young, disaffected aristocratic leftists led by the son of Moritz Rotenburg, the rich and powerful Jewish financier, has been meeting to plan something--but what? There may be dangerous anarchists at work, too. Another group of zealots, led by a messianic rabbi named Brugger, has arrived from farther east. Wiladowski is terrified of being assassinated. His cousin's grisly murder--another political assassination?--haunts him. Of course, in a parallel, real-history universe, what haunts the book is the June 1914 assassination the reader knows will be the opening shot of the Great War.

Wiladowski recruits Jakob Tausk to be his spymaster, his eyes and ears; indeed Tausk is the eyes and ears of the novel itself. He's a brilliant, solitary figure, a rebellious reject from the yeshiva. He sits at the center of the spider web, responsible for knowing all and for saving his master from disaster.

Conspirators has the makings of a fine movie, if only you could find a screen-writer to compose the dialogue the book lacks, to bring it the action it so badly needs. Bernstein has clearly done his homework on the details of daily life, but these descriptions too often feel like stage directions and background material, instructions to costumers and set designers about the fashions actors would wear, the food that would sit on their tables.

Here, for instance, is Hans Rotenburg, dining late at an elegant restaurant:

  [Hans] knew the menu by heart and quickly decided on some chicken a la
  gelee and cold smoked hare with red currant jelly, accompanied by a
  potato salad and an assortment of vegetables, pickled in the chef's
  own cellars. He also asked for a double serving of the restaurant's
  specialty, thin-sliced cold goose breast, which came to their table at
  the same time as a basket of poppy seed rolls and a half loaf of
  fragrant pumpernickel bread on its own small cutting board. Instead of
  wine, he chose a bottle of old Madeira, remembering that one of his
  father's English business associates always insisted there was nothing
  better for keeping out the cold.

This is vivid enough as food writing, but it stands out awkwardly against the novel's long discursive letters, monologues, and dialogues, which too often sound like academic panel discussions. Bernstein is determined to instruct us on the history and social currents of the period.

Religion, for instance, is depicted largely as a matter of ancestry, habit, and caste, leading to either power or exclusion. In this Catholic-ruled empire, it goes without saying that Jews are outsiders, no matter how rich or socially presentable. As the narrator relates some scurrilous rumors about Count Wiladowski's background, we get a taste of these assumptions. We also get a taste of the awkwardness of Bernstein's prose.

  Indeed, among those for whom Wiladowski's putative Masonic connections
  had been accepted as self-evident, a new skein of suppositions began
  to emerge that hinted at an ancestral mesalliance, perhaps even an
  intermingling with a shade of insufficiently baptized Jewish blood,
  somewhere in the family ancestry--perhaps in the Italian branch, where
  such matters were less strictly regulated--until it was remembered
  that [his wife] Marie-Luise's parents, whose anti-Semitism was beyond
  reproach, would never have permitted their daughter to marry someone
  about whose racial purity there could be any doubt.

Bookending the novel's main structure are the opening and closing commentaries of fictional writer Alexander Garber, who had been a youthful friend of spymaster Jakob Tausk. In the "Overture" section, as he seeks information on what had become of Tausk, Garber utters a sentence that, in retrospect, is either an elaborate joke or else ominously prophetic for the narrative to come: "The story to which he was drawn seemed to call for exactly the kind of fractured, shifting perspectives from which he drew so little pleasure as a reader and for which, in any case, he had never shown any flair as an author."

A respected writer of nonfiction (Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History, among other books), Bernstein is a professor of English and comparative literature at Berkeley, and at home with the language of high abstraction, with words like topoi and ressentiment. He has much to overcome in building the illusion that fiction requires.

Still, the book has its engaging, even compelling, passages. The author has imagined characters that we want to know about, but we need to hear their voices, see them move, not just read their thoughts and learn their histories. There is material here for a fine thriller of about 300 pages--one in which the first body is found before page 150.

Marietta Pritchard is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.