“With this monumental work David Cleveland has achieved nothing less than the disinterment of the various skeletons of the American psyche from the Civil War to Vietnam and beyond, and the painting of a multi-generational portrait of a pedigreed American family whose own skeletons not only refuse to stay buried, but actively haunt its progeny. There will be those who, captivated by the author’s brilliant insights into the inner workings of the CIA, KGB and M16, and by a canvas that stretches from New England to Prague and Greece to Southeast Asia, will describe Time’s Betrayal as an international spy novel, which it is, if only in the sense that Moby-Dick is a yarn about a big fish and Huckleberry Finn a tale of a boy on a raft. But this is not Ludlum, folks, nor is it LeCarré. It is in a league of its own and a class by itself. Time’s Betrayal is a large-hearted American epic that deserves the widest possible, most discriminating of readerships.”
—Bruce Olds, Pulitzer Prize–nominated author for Raising Holy Hell and The Moments Lost
“Time’s Betrayal is a vast, rich, endlessly absorbing novel engaging with the great and enduring theme of literary art, the quest for an identity. Moreover, it seamlessly expands that quest beyond the individual to the family, to the nation. Time’s Betrayal achieves a rare state for massively ambitious novels: it is both complex and compelling. David Adams Cleveland has instantly taken a prominent place on my personal list of must-read authors.”
—Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
—Evan Thomas, Author of The Very Best Men: the Early Years of the CIA
The author’s ‘previous’ with regard to Venice earns him his review here regardless of the amount of the action that takes place there. His first two novels also earn him my unhesitant trust that this one’s 1165 pages will be worth the considerable investment of time and muscle strain. It shares its daunting length roughly with The Lord of the Rings, War and Peace and Infinite Jest, for examples. The book begins with Peter Alden, through whose eyes and life we view the unfolding, at high school and beginning to question the certainties of his life, family and country. The school’s history is all mixed up with his family’s, they having been its founders – a history which then gets embroiled in wars, archaeology, art, and the history of the CIA and the wider world of spies and lies, including the Cambridge Four – Kim Philby looms large. Also scandals both literary and sexual. And through it all Venice is a constant background shimmer of remembered visits and gossip, with Greece a tempting and glowing presence too, in a paler blue light. The later chapters of the novel spent in Venice are effortlessly evocative, and include an important scene in the Madonna dell’ Orto in front of the Bellini Madonna and Child, mere years before it was stolen. The plot’s central concern with spies and lies has earned this novel comparison to the works of John Le Carre, but this book has a much wider sweep. It’s a wide-screen detailed tapestry of American and European history, centred on WWII and its aftermath, and taking in the American Civil War, civil rights, Ancient Greece, the Vietnam war and the decoding of Linear B. And through it all the story probes the complex boundaries between truth and fiction, and the limits of self-invention. One can’t help but be impressed by the bravery involved in the writing and publishing of such a big and deep book, when attention spans are anecdotally said to be ever shrinking. I read it in a little over two weeks, but as a retired person I have plenty of free time to devote to curling up with an exceptional book – a deeply satisfying and involving novel, well worth the expenditure of time, that ends up leaving you wanting more!
— Jeff Cotton, Fictional Cities
This novel covers four generations of the Alden family from the Civil War through the 20th century. It opens in 1965, when Peter is a student at the prep school founded by his prominent New England family. Here he begins his decades-long search to learn about the father he never knew. In 1953 Peter’s father disappeared into communist East Berlin and was never seen again. The story moves between Peter’s great grandfather, a Civil War hero; his grandfather, a doctor in WWI; his father, a renowned archaeologist who served in WWII as an OSS agent, then a CIA agent; and Peter, whose search lasts into the 1990s. Through his father’s colleagues, acquaintances, writings, letters, diary entries, Stasi files, and newspaper clippings, Peter pieces together who his father was, and his fate. He uncovers family secrets, lies, betrayals, spy scandals, and illicit love affairs.
This is a literary page-turner with many philosophical themes running throughout. The narrative is nonlinear, with details revealed in pieces as the reader is brought back and forth in time and place: the Berkshires, Vienna, Prague, Greece, London, Vietnam. It is a challenging read to pull all the scattered pieces together into a cohesive story, and I feel I lost some while wading through the volume of detail. The writing is outstanding yet overburdened with too much flowery description that does little to move the story along: “…the templed slopes beribboned with streamers of amethyst light, the lichen-spangled marble of the ancient sanctuaries showing in silvery blue planes of cubist jottings, while the walls and stony contours of the ancient town began to merge as one moiré stain on the twilight.” Despite these drawbacks, I enjoyed the book. It is a worthwhile read for anyone who loves to lose themselves in a big book and willing to make the investment in time and effort.
— Janice Ottersberg, Historical Novel Society