Time's Betrayal

by David Adams Cleveland

Time's Betrayal is an epic multigenerational family saga covering the years from the battle of Antietam to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Touching on elements in John le Carr's A Perfect Spy and John Knowles's A Separate Peace, the novel chronicles a son's search for a larger-than-life father, a CIA agent who disappeared in the early fifties, leaving behind a distraught wife and lovers, not to mention a Pandora's box of devastating secrets and unanswered questions that baffled all who investigated his fate--a fate as beguiling as it is mysterious. This is also a story about the crumbling edifice of the eastern Establishment after World War II and in Vietnam-era America. A poignant coming-of-age tale, it is related though the eyes of Peter Alden, whose school days are shattered when he overhears a conversation about his father from two CIA colleagues: how John Alden, a world-famous archaeologist turned OSS and CIA officer, who vanished through Checkpoint Charlie, may have been a traitor.

Opening in New England during the late 1960s and set amid the idyllic Berkshire summer homes of the Alden and Williams clans, founders of the prestigious powerhouse school Winsted, incubator of famous statesmen and CIA operatives, Time s Betrayal takes the reader on a far-flung journey from the abolitionist Civil War era to Nazi-occupied Greece and to London during the Blitz, to the darkest days of the Cold War and Vietnam, to Prague during the Velvet Revolution, and timeless Venice. More than just an insider s chronicle of America s postwar ascendency and ensuing decline and the betrayals of love and principle that come in the wake of blind ambition--Time's Betrayal portrays the agonized compromises to America's founding ideals as glimpsed through the privileged lives of the country's best and brightest.

Tapping into spy thriller territory, and the KGB penetration of American secrets by Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, the narrative unfolds through a series of engrossing, if agonizing, love stories that cross the boundaries of generations in ways both profoundly unsettling and deeply moving. Although Time's Betrayal is a literate genre-bender and suspenseful page-turner full of twists and turns, the novel is really about how family history shapes who we are and how memory -- the river of Time-- guides our joint destinies, testing our most cherished hopes, shaping who we are and what we believe, and teaching us that the essential truths of our humanity--freedom, justice, love, and honor--must be reclaimed in every generation.

Genres: Historical Fiction

1170 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2017

About the author

Writing to me is more than just telling great stories, it is a way of probing for the things that really matter to us as human beings. My characters, like all of us, are struggling to discover some kind of truth, to answer a fundamental question about themselves as they confront life’s dilemmas. Having been involved in the art world most of my life as an historian, connoisseur, and collector, I find that the visual arts inform my writing, both in terms of description, the physical setting(always a character in its own right), and the struggle artists endure to explore the world from every angle. Great art, like great literature, must never give up all its secrets: there must always be enough mystery and ambiguity to keep the thing fresh and alive. Whistler and Joseph Conrad understood this well, as do such modern greats as Richard Ford, Alice Munro, John Updike, and James Salter: the most profound art is all about conveying feeling and the sense of spiritual quest—the fluttering glimpse of the unseen at life’s ecstatic heart. As Proust knew: we exist in thrall to the spell of memory infused with the metamorphic glories of the visual world.

Reviews

[Phil · Rating 5 out of 5]

The work is a remarkable accomplishment.

Several weeks ago I spotted Time's Betrayal on the New Books section. The book is, simply stated, a door-stop of some 1070 pages, weighing more pounds than I wanted to contemplate.

What publisher is going to make a sizable investment in a book too large for many people to pick up? (And how might a paperbound edition fair?)

So I called up the Kindle sample on my iPhone and read it on the stop. And without hesitation, I knew I wanted to read this novel. And I immediately bought the full Kindle edition.

I will not summarize the novel - Publicists are paid to do that.

Clearly, Cleveland has written at least seven novels in one. Were he an Anthony Trollope 150 years ago, he might have written seven individual and interrelated novels that form a whole, such as Barchester Chronicles or Palliser Novels.

But here we are, with one super-sized tome!

But a tome definitely worth the effort, for Cleveland's writing is not pot-boiler, boiler-plate "genre fiction."

Mr Cleveland has extensive experience as an art journalist and art historian. Consequently, he has a palette of nuanced adjectives that make his prose downright poetic.

My reading of the book was unintentionally extended because I felt impelled to read and re-read many exquisite paragraphs and pages.

The sheer scope, from the American Civil War to the fall of the Berlin War and beyond, is unparalleled.

(With an unpleasant taste in my mouth, I say I found one factual clunker. Cleveland wrote (and I regret I failed to highlight the line) words to the effect, The Summer of Love drifted away in the smoke of Watts. Watts burned in 1965. The Summer of Love was 1967, the summer during which Newark and Detroit erupted in flames.)

Not to cut the ground from under my extremely positive feelings for Time's Betrayal, but if Peter Alden were not the independently wealthy scion of a notable family, would any of the magnificently intricately plotted novel have been possible?

Nonetheless, I sincerely wish the book a wide readership. And may it be read fifty years from now - For I felt it out into context so much of America's history, our advantages and our deficits.

[Allen Peacock · Rating 5 out of 5]

TIME’S BETRAYAL, David Adams Cleveland’s ambitious and astonishing third novel (With a Gem-Like Flame and Love’s Attraction), is a huge undertaking: at once a vast American historical epic and also the tragedy of a quintessentially American family. With many moving parts, multiple settings, a time-frame that spans more than a century, a host of flesh and blood men and women across many generations, nationalities, and ethnicities, a chorus of voices beyond that of the protagonist Peter Alden’s always compelling primary narrative -- not to mention an array of letters, diaries, cables, sermons, essays, works of “fiction,” etc. -- what starts burning in the crucible of a very fine boarding school novel flares out both past, present and future to envelop no fewer than five American hot wars, and one very cold and equally deadly one. Cleveland’s recreation of the pervasive and sinister influence of Kim Philby and the rest of the Cambridge Five and of their impact on American-Soviet relations during the Cold War is better than any nonfiction account I have ever read. His use of classical Greek literature, myth, history, of the profession of archeology, always ring true and always deepens the reach of his most important themes. What’s more, TIME’S BETRAYAL is a love story rich in passion and consequence, though one finally frozen in time by the grim edifice of the Berlin Wall.

David Adams Cleveland has talent to burn, and TIME’S BETRAYAL is without question a major American novel. It brings to mind books like Styron’s SOPHIE’S CHOICE and Pasternak’s DR. ZHIVAGO: compulsively readable; epic in scope; profoundly human; and absolutely unforgettable.

[Kathryn · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is a testament to 'longer is not always better' writing. If you removed the tangents about Pearce Breckenridge and the word "halcyon," this book would automatically be 200 pages shorter. Further remove all the cliche references to Greek mythology not immediately relevant to the narrative (the name "Nausicaa" was giving me nausea), the book would drop from a tedious 1165 pages to a more readable 500-600.

I'm also amazed at how every character is either a sauvant in their field or famous (or both), and all are immensely wealthy--so much so that money is rarely ever mentioned and global travel and extensive legal investments are like petty cash exchanges. Vlada is even made a spectacle of, that, in moving back to Prague to eventually become a mechanic, is admired for his "working class" aesthetic.

Lastly, I fail to comprehend how Peter and Laura might be half-brother and half-sister, but yet they still persisted in their romantic relationship and to have children--and that it was portrayed as a comfort that Laura's parents might be first cousins. Incest is not an issue when you're wealthy, I guess.

If you are interested in an ode to white privilege (all Ivy League or Juilliard educated, all comfortable, stories of blacks run the racist theme of "if only they educated themselves like the white man they could transcend their race"), then this novel is for you.

If you're interested in a story about characters vaguely in touch with reality without the tone of pining for the "glory days" of 1940s & 50s America--presented as a better time for everyone--then look elsewhere.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite book of 2017. See review and comments posted at Reading the Past.

[Jack Sussek · Rating 5 out of 5]

File this one under 'Great American Novel.' An absolutely wonderful story that spans roughly 125 years of American history. It's an American saga following a family(ies) through the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Cold War, Vietnam War, fall of the Berlin Wall, Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five, the OSS, CIA, MI6, MI5, KGB; it's a love story that's romantic and adulterous, unrequited and resolved; a story about friendships and betrayals, a search for truth through a century of lies; a story about justice and justice denied; about Greece and the Bronze Age, Homer, The Odyssey, Linear B tablets, the Velvet Revolution and the fall of Communism, it's about a New England boarding school and the influence that school had on a cross section of Americans....It's a fantastic tale that I cannot recommend enough to anyone interested in any of the above or simply if you're just hankering for one helluva a tale.

[Brenda Hawley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very ambitious novel scanning generations and wars: the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Cold War and Vietnam. The framework is a son searching for the truth of his father's death. Was the CIA agent a traitor, was he betrayed or was it the auto accident which was the official word? Interspersed are flashbacks to the ancestor's and the present characters' complicated lives and relationships. I enjoyed reading this even though it was so heavy it was hard to manipulate.
It is amazing how much can come of an overheard conversation from the main character's youth which brings so many scandals back to life.

[Liz V. · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Readers have utterly failed to realize the superabundance of check marks on an era's to-do list." (p. 137) An apt description of Peter Alden's search for his place in a lineage beginning with his great-grandfather, a Union general at Antietam, through his grandfather on a WWI battlefield in France, to his father, an OSS then CIA officer in WWII then Civil War Greece. Only about two thirds of the way through the book is any real depth given to the characters. Admittedly, however, I wished to know whether the father was a traitor.

3.5 stars, in part due to the poor copyediting and overlong detailing of minor points.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sublime writing sustained over it's exceptional length. A multi-layered narrative that encompasses events from the American Civil War to the fall of the Iron Curtain, with allusions to ancient Greece. It ranges from the narrator's adolescence at the "Winsted School" (the thinly disguised Groton School that turned out many US political advisers and cold warriors of the mid-20th century), to Vietnam, Venice, Greece, England, Germany, Prague and other venues, as the narrator deals with his father's mysterious disappearance and death, as well as other family secrets. Captivating throughout.

[Maia Papaya · Rating 3 out of 5]

was it worth it?