David Ignatius is a veteran journalist, an opinion columnist for the Washington Post, where he has a long tenure and to which he provides a much-needed voice of sanity at a time when the paper seems to have lost its way. (See, for example, his column last fall making the case that Biden should not run for reelection, given the president’s evident debility.) Ignatius is also a novelist who has cracked the best-seller list a couple of times over the years; to devoted readers of spy fiction (which often involves "amateurs" as well as professionals), he needs no introduction. At a time when every day brings a host of new articles (and maybe a book or two) pertaining to Artificial Intelligence, you should know that Ignatius was writing fiction exploring this subject from multiple angles long before it was the topic du jour. His 12th novel, Phantom Orbit, from Norton (one of the best publishers remaining in a much-ravaged market), draws on that deep knowledge.
If you are a deep-dyed fan of the literature of espionage (nonfiction as well as fiction), you may well have gobbled up Phantom Orbit already. But what if you read in the genre only intermittently? I’ll come to that in a moment. You should also know that (as the title suggests) this is a novel that has to do with "space"; see, e.g., the May 17, 2024, front-page Wall Street Journal piece by Warren P. Strobel, Dustin Volz, Michael R. Gordon, and Micah Maidenberg, headlined thus: "Moscow Puts Satellite in Space with Eye on Nuclear Weapon." If you don’t follow the subject (if you skip such "news" routinely, the way I skip practically everything related to "business"), you might be surprised to learn how many such articles—involving China as well as Russia and all having to do with militaristic ambitions—have appeared just in the last couple of months. Me? I’ll read practically anything space-related. And David Ignatius’s ability to anticipate such headlines comes as no surprise; as the acknowledgments at the end of this novel suggest, he has an extraordinary network of high-profile sources.
Now, back to my question as to whether this novel would be a good bet for occasional, maybe even very selective readers of "the literature of clandestine political conflict" (as the novelist Alan Furst named the genre in his introduction to the anthology he assembled some years ago, The Book of Spies). The answer is "yes" and "no." I’ll start with "no." If you are a fastidious reader, a connoisseur of good sentences with little patience for mediocre prose, Ignatius won’t be your cup of tea. He doesn’t write elementary school prose for adults, as many (successful!) practitioners do, but neither will his sentences entice you. On the other hand, "yes": If you are willing now and then to read fiction that is merely serviceable, sentence-by-sentence, for the sake of other satisfactions, then you should give Phantom Orbit a try. When was the last time, for instance, that you read a novel in which Kepler’s Equation (previously unknown to me; that Johannes Kepler, of course) played a crucial role, and what might that have to do with the devastating U.S. strategy in the war against Iraq decades ago—and with the more recent machinations of China and the Soviet Union against the United States?
So. It may surprise you to hear that the deep structure of Phantom Orbit owes much to the genre of folktales, seemingly unsuited for a novel centering on contemporary political conflict with an emphasis on espionage and the potential for "space warfare." I will NOT disclose much of the plot, but I can say the novel features three principal characters: one from Russia, one from the United States, and one from China. The first two get many more pages in the narrative than the third, but he is nevertheless crucial to the story.
Ivan Volkov is the Russian; Edith Ryan is the American; Cao Lin the Chinese. Each one is individualized (though again, most of the book’s pages deal with the first two), but at the same time, each one is intended to be a representative figure; this is especially true of Volkov and Cao. There are clichés—Russian characters predictably quote Anna Akhmatova (whom I love!), and so on and so on; you can fill in the rest. Still, Ignatius gives us an unsparing sense of life in two very different authoritarian societies and one "democracy," flawed to be sure (Ignatius is far from being a naïve cheerleader for America), but still much to be preferred to the alternatives.
The prospect of malign action in "space," with terrible consequences for us down here below, is not at all mere fantasy. To that extent, Phantom Orbit is genuinely unsettling and is meant to be. After reading the novel, I found myself staring up at the night sky (from our peaceful block in Wheaton, Illinois) with an increased sense of vulnerability. But what Ignatius sets out to do is not simply to scare us; ultimately, his account is reassuring. There are people we can rely on, he suggests, working behind the scenes.
Of course, given the general state of things in our Republic, not all readers will be convinced, especially just now. Nevertheless, I didn’t sneer at this unfashionably optimistic outlook, given the author’s willingness to acknowledge threats many of us didn’t even know we had to worry about! May our country lurch on, still offering hope to those whose circumstances often seem hopeless.
Phantom Orbit: A Thriller
by David Ignatius
W.W. Norton, 384 pp., $29.99
John Wilson writes about books for First Things, Prufrock News, National Review, the American Conservative, and other outlets.