Nearly 1,300 pages long, Harlot's Ghost (1991), Norman Mailer's novel about the CIA, ends with the seemingly ironic tag: "To Be Continued." But, in fact, the novel, long as it is, has little sense of narrative finality. It does, however, stand on its own as Mailer's reading of the history of the CIA from 1955 to 1965, and as a quasi-serious presentation of a dualist view of human nature. Mailer's spokesman in this endeavor, promulgating the theory of Alpha and Omega, is Kittredge Gardiner, wife first of Hugh Montague (aka Harlot), then the narrator, Herrick (Harry) Hubbard.

As Kittredge puts it, Omega is "about the mysteries--conception, birth, death, night, the moon, eternity, karma, ghosts, divinities, myths, magic, our primitive past, so on. The other, Alpha, creature of the forward-swimming energies of sperm, ambitious, blind to all but its own purpose, tends, of course, to be more oriented toward enterprise, technology, grinding the corn, repairing the mill, building bridges between money and power." Alpha and Omega exist within each of us. Mailer's universe consists of dichotomies in conflict. The Americans are at odds with the Russians, the CIA with the FBI, Hugh Montague's faction in the CIA with William Harvey's, and all individuals, it seems, are at war with themselves. As a type, the CIA agent catches up all of these conflicts, and so it becomes the concrete embodiment of the novel's metaphysical thrust.

The narrative begins at a point in time shortly before its conclusion. CIA agent Harry Hubbard, son of CIA agent Cal Hubbard and godson of CIA legend Hugh Montague, returns through a deadly storm and an almost mythic landscape to his home in Maine, where he lives with Kittredge. Having survived the hero's perilous journey home, Harry then encounters catastrophe. Before the night is over, he has word that Montague is dead and that his wife is leaving him for his opposite and adversary in the agency, Dix Butler. A few days later, he learns that the house has been burnt to the ground, and that his ally Arnie Rosen is dead; Harry himself is soon in flight.

The novel then moves back in time to the beginning of Harry's career in the CIA. After completing his training in 1955, he is sent to work for Bill Harvey in Berlin, at the time the Berlin Tunnel is in operation. He is in a sense Hugh Montague's agent, leading to an adversarial relationship between himself and Harvey and, finally, to Harry's reposting to Uruguay, where he works for E. Howard Hunt, fresh from his triumph in Guatemala. Here Harry runs his first agent, the Uruguayan Communist Chevi Fuertes. He also has an ongoing affair with the wife of a fellow agent and a sexual encounter with Libertad La Lengua, a courtesan who may be able to get close to Fidel Castro and who turns out to be transsexual. For Mailer, spies, lovers, homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals are all double agents. All the while, Harry keeps up his correspondence with Montague's wife, Kittredge, as well as a surreptitious stream of communication with Harlot himself.

Harry follows E. Howard Hunt to Miami, where attempts to assassinate Castro are already underway. From this post, Harry monitors the entire Bay of Pigs catastrophe, even briefly setting foot on Cuban soil. After the fiasco, efforts to assassinate Castro intensify. Harry begins an affair with the airline stewardess Modene Murphy, a character based to some extent on Judith Exner. Like Exner, she has affairs with Frank Sinatra, John F. Kennedy, and mobster Sam Giancana. The last years of the narrative cover the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of Kennedy.

The novel's conclusion finds Harry Hubbard in Moscow in March 1984, shortly after the events with which it began. Harry is defecting not because of any change of heart regarding his work for the CIA, but rather because he first hopes, then begins to believe, that Hugh Montague is not really dead, that he has defected to Moscow, and that he, Harry, will be able to join him. At this point, we can either take Mailer's word that the story will be continued or look back on what we have read and conclude that the author has had his say about the universe of conflict and betrayal in which the CIA and its agents become appropriate symbols for the whole.

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