Product Description

Michael Holly, mechanical engineer, is in Moscow to clinch a deal for his firm, and to run a small errand for the British Intelligence Service. But he is arrested. The Soviet secret police will exchange him for a key Soviet agent being held in London. Unfortunately the agent dies prematurely, and Holly gets fifteen years in a desolate labour camp. Alone in a world totally alien to him, Holly refuses to give in, knowing that to do so would be death. He fights back, and through the hideous weeks of a Russian winter the camp's inmates take their courage from his resistance and join him in fighting the system. Michael Holly, the quiet Englishman, will never be the same again. Nor will Camp 3.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49594 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Review
"* "As good as the best of the masters - Greene, Ambler, Le Carre" - Los Angeles Examiner * "A novel of great distinction" - Daily Mail * "An amazing feat of storytelling...Too good to miss" - The Scotsman * "Written with terrifying, informed immediacy, this holds like barbed wire" - Evening Standard"

From the Publisher
A thrilling classic from a master of the genre.

From the Back Cover
They never told Michael Holly the risks of espionage in the Soviet Union. They never said that if he was caught he would be facing fifteen years in a gulag in the midst of a frozen tundra. It was supposed to be a simple handover and he never imagined that he would be caught. But when the unimaginable happens and he finds himself staring certain, inevitable death in the face, Holly has to find the strength to gather his resources to fight the camp’s brutal regimein any way he can and with the limited means at his disposal.

But life in the camps is not like life in the outside world. It is the place where dreams are brought to die. Like the eight hundred inmates of Camp 3, Michael Holly has a dream of living through this hell. But against the might of the Soviet state, is he strong enough to keep his dream alive?

Customer Reviews

Holly goes to the wire
In ARCHANGEL, the Cold War is still frigid.

Oleg Demyonov, a convicted Soviet spy, suffers a fatal heart attack in Her Majesty's prison, Wormwood Scrubs. He was soon to be exchanged for Michael Holly, and the deal is now off.

Holly, an engineer for an English manufacturing company, was recruited by MI6 to deliver a clandestine package on his next business trip to Moscow. A piece of cake, according to his Secret Intelligence Service recruiter. But Holly was caught and convicted of espionage. Now, the swap for Demyonov off, Holly is sent to a Correctional Labor Colony in the heart of the USSR for 14 years. Because Holly was born Mikhail Holovich of Russian parents who'd escaped to Britain after WWII, he's classed as a Russian — a traitor — for the purpose of imprisonment. It's to be Camp 3, Zone 1(Strict Regime).

Back in the UK, the head of MI6 charges Alan Millet, Holly's recruiter, with investigating Michael's background. Is his agent likely to crack under continued interrogation and embarrass Her Majesty's government? As Millet discovers the mettle of the man he sent into harm's way, the reader begins to feel sorry for Michael's gaolers.

In Camp 3, the resident Political Officer, KGB Captain Yuri Rudakov, sees Holly as a giant step up the career ladder if he can extract from the new prisoner the confession the Moscow bumblers couldn't get. In the meantime, Michael fires the first shot in his own personal war with a plastic baggie of machine oil, the page from a magazine, and some coal dust.

This is the best of the several Gerald Seymour thrillers I've devoured to date. The reader's sympathies are focused solely on Holly and are rarely sidetracked, though one is tempted to feel an occasional pang of compassion for Millet and (even!) Rudakov.

As I've stated before, the charm of Seymour's novels is that he doesn't deal in absolutes of right or wrong. His venues of conflict are patterned in shades of gray. As Holly rattles the bars of his cage, both he and the reader question the moral responsibility of his actions as the consequences for his fellow prisoners mounts. This is good stuff that transcends the bulk of the genre.

With delicious anticipation, I contemplate the seven other Seymour books lined up on my shelf to be read.

Holly goes to the wire
In ARCHANGEL, the Cold War is still frigid.

Oleg Demyonov, a convicted Soviet spy, suffers a fatal heart attack in Her Majesty's prison, Wormwood Scrubs. He was soon to be exchanged for Michael Holly, and the deal is now off.

Holly, an engineer for an English manufacturing company, was recruited by MI6 to deliver a clandestine package on his next business trip to Moscow. A piece of cake, according to his Secret Intelligence Service recruiter. But Holly was caught and convicted of espionage. Now, the swap for Demyonov off, Holly is sent to a Correctional Labor Colony in the heart of the USSR for 14 years. Because Holly was born Mikhail Holovich of Russian parents who'd escaped to Britain after WWII, he's classed as a Russian - a traitor - for the purpose of imprisonment. It's to be Camp 3, Zone 1(Strict Regime).

Back in the UK, the head of MI6 charges Alan Millet, Holly's recruiter, with investigating Michael's background. Is his agent likely to crack under continued interrogation and embarrass Her Majesty's government? As Millet discovers the mettle of the man he sent into harm's way, the reader begins to feel sorry for Michael's gaolers.

In Camp 3, the resident Political Officer, KGB Captain Yuri Rudakov, sees Holly as a giant step up the career ladder if he can extract from the new prisoner the confession the Moscow bumblers couldn't get. In the meantime, Michael fires the first shot in his own personal war with a plastic baggie of machine oil, the page from a magazine, and some coal dust.

This is the best of the several Gerald Seymour thrillers I've devoured to date. The reader's sympathies are focused solely on Holly and are rarely sidetracked, though one is tempted to feel an occasional pang of compassion for Millet and (even!) Rudakov.

As I've stated before, the charm of Seymour's novels is that he doesn't deal in absolutes of right or wrong. His venues of conflict are patterned in shades of gray. As Holly rattles the bars of his cage, both he and the reader question the moral responsibility of his actions as the consequences for his fellow prisoners mounts. This is good stuff that transcends the bulk of the genre.

thought provoking thriller
...In the first place let me say that I love Gerald Seymour. He is quite simply one of the greatest thriller writers of all time, comparable to Graham Greene, and this is in many ways his best book. And I, as much as anyone, believe that we in the West are different. In my heart, I desperately want to believe that we would behave like Michael Holly. (And a part of me is paranoid enough to believe that eventually push will come to shove and we'll find out. Isn't that the unspoken reason that we all feel a little queasy about the Democrats newfound mania for gun control? When the black helicopters start circling, don't we all want to face them with a gun in our hands and not go quietly into that good night?) But I have to admit that I am somewhat skeptical. It seems somehow too facile to assume that one iron willed Englishman would suffice to bring the mill of communism grinding to a halt, in however small a corner of the USSR. Seymour too seems to recognize this. Michael Holly is a hero in the tradition of Cool Hand Luke and RP McMurphy (see Orrin's review of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). Interestingly, all three of them rebel against repressive authority and simply by force of personality rally reluctant fellow inmates to their cause but ultimately fail, before passing into the realm of myth. They seem to embody a fundamentally pessimistic, but not necessarily wrong, belief that while we aspire to be like these rebels, in the end most folks will not succeed in emulating them and the system will win out. I hope that we are made of sterner stuff and, therefore, I am a sucker for this kind of aspirational literature.

GRADE: A+