Dan's Book Review: The Contractor

By George Held

Billed as "the first novel to address the issue of American secret prisons in the war on terrorism," The Contractor begins and ends on Omega, a tropical island where CIA and extra-governmental operatives interrogate Arab prisoners. The central incident - the unintended death of prisoner #4141 while being tortured - is based on actual people and press reports, and the novel is narrated by one of the interrogators, an American innocent named George Young, the contractor of the title. His quest becomes to answer the question, "Who are you?" posed by #4141 just before his heart fails.

Charles Holdefer, a college English professor, weaves a suspenseful story that links George's job as an interrogator, his troubled marriage, his responsibility to his brother and a reunion with his ex-wife. Holdefer initially spares us the ugliness of the torture used to get prisoners to reveal their secrets, and George has "never seen the inside of one of [their] cells - only heard about them." Even the dead prisoner "didn't look so dead." Using George's point of view allows the author to draw us in as George awakens to the deadly game he is playing as a contractor.

Holdefer writes sympathetically about women, including George's wife Bethany, ex-wife Denise and a colleague Miss Breese. It is through Denise that Holdefer expresses many Americans' disillusionment with the war in Iraq and the use of torture in which George is involved. In their one scene together Denise movingly expresses her resentment of the death of her brother, a 41-year-old reservist who was recently killed by a roadside bomb near Fallujah. Holdefer makes her expressions of grief and detestation of torture represent those of all who dissent against the war. And when George tries to justify the war after Denise calls it a mistake, she says, "Spare me the sermons. No political opinion of yours interests me. Just give me back my brother. If you can't do that, well, shut the fuck up."

During this showdown, Holdefer allows George, at last, to hear the hollowness of his defense of the war, and afterward he resolves to redeem himself in part by answering the question, "Who are you?" While George can't afford to confide in Bethany about his work and strikes out with Denise, he finds it possible to talk to elderly Miss Breese. After she has told him about a lost love, he feels a chance "for the kind of conversation I'd been groping toward with Bethany, then Denise. Goddamnit, I did need to talk." His narrative finally becomes an exercise in talk therapy, leading to an emotional and psychological catharsis that surprises him.

In the final third of the novel, Holdefer raises George's emotional and psychological temperature, plunging him into an inferno for which he bears substantial responsibility. The tension and excitement of these pages create a payoff that will have readers of The Contractor catching their breath.

Back to Contents