Secret agent's story

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33675, 26 October 1974, Page 10

Secret agent's story

Lili. By Melanie Pflaum. Pegasus Press. 233 pp. Melanie Pflaum is an American writer who now divides her time between Spain and New Zealand. Her latest novel is the story of Lili, sent by her impoverished father from the United States to live with her aunts in a German schloss. Lili grows into an impulsive beauty, and runs away to Berlin to be with her first great love. When he rebuffs her she becomes a secret agent for the Imperial German Government in the First World War. As a secret agent in both world wars Lili discovers that the relationship between an agent and a nation is like an indissoluble marriage, and that governments are like people; they take the

advice they want to take, even if it leads to ruin. Lili’s four marriages and innumerable affairs tell their own tale. She moves between the United States and Europe, never losing her power to respond to life, but sinking very low at times. Finally she finds happiness with her first love. The complexities of Lili’s enigmatic personality are successfully revealed through the eyes of three people. The author has painted with strong, deft strokes an absorbing and credible story of a woman enslaved by her own beauty and stubborn self-cen-tred will. Lili’s espionage activities are equally credible because the author has drawn on her wartime experiences in economic warfare.