Cold Victory

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. (Jan.)