That’s the very old-fashioned premise at the heart of the very modern novel “The Travelers” (Crown Publishers, New York, 2016, 433 pages), which revolves around Will Rhodes, a travel writer for a New York-based magazine called Travelers: “Will knows that he’s very lucky, that he does something uniquely enjoyable for a living. But he is jaded, and he is bored. He increasingly suspects that he chose the wrong career, and possibly the wrong wife, too.
He is 35 years old, halfway to dead, and he has already made the most important decisions of his life. Have they all been wrong?”
But in France, Will meets a gorgeous woman named Elle, but what he thinks will lead to adultery leads to something else—recruitment into the Central Intelligence Agency through blackmail—with his job the perfect excuse to journey all over the world to recruit other spies. “This is Will’s life—in countries not his own, with people he doesn’t know.”
The interesting thing about “Travelers” is that, while the set-up is James Bondish, Will is anything but a savvy operator. He’s insecure, clumsy and fretful, making him possibly the worst spy out there. He’s constantly debating with himself whether or not to tell his disaffected wife Chloe about what he’s doing. He struggles at the spy games, feeling trapped and ineffective instead of sure and debonair.
All that is quaint, but then Pavone throws the entire situation up in the air because everything is literally not what it seems. Why was Will really recruited? What’s the deal with Travelers magazine and its odd-acting boss Malcolm? And what is really going on with Chloe? “Travelers” swoops in and out of different places, following a dizzying array of subplots.
Pavone certainly knows his destinations. He offers up details even if the cities are just in the background, and there are a lot of places: Buenos Aires, Paris, Capri, Naples, Stockholm, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Barcelona, Boston, Husavik.
“Travelers” is Pavone’s third novel, with the previous two (2012’s “The Expats” and 2014’s “The Accident”) also set in cool destinations with interesting professions as well. With “Travelers,” Pavone is also doing a bit of world-building, and it is apparent his three books all happen in the same fictional universe.
Will can get annoying at times but he does make for an unusual protagonist. “Travelers” spends the second half jumping into a truly over-the-top jumbling of conspiracies, with secret lives colliding with one another. It may be patently ridiculous at times, but it is also really entertaining.
Pavone’s prose is effective and busy, keeping readers flipping pages as the events lead Will to the truth. Pavone flips the script, making travel writing anything but a glamorous occupation and espionage anything but a smooth operation. The subplots all coalesce into a finished whole. For all the coincidences and conveniences, Chris Pavone’s “The Travelers” sets itself up as an engaging global adventure with the familiar spy tropes and perhaps the beginning of a popular new series.
Available in paperback from National Book Store.