We are talking with award-winning author T.H.E. Hill.
In May (2010) Voices Under Berlin: The Tale of a Monterey Mary was selected a winner of the prestigious NIEA annual book awards in the category "Miscellaneous." This categorization seems to match an early review that calls your book "a spy novel that breaks all the molds." So what is it about your book that keeps it from fitting in one of the standard genre categories used in the publishing industry?
When I was stationed in Berlin in the 1970s, the word that everyone used to describe the U.S. Army's role there was "unique." The memory of hearing Berlin described that way day in and day out translated into a unique novel about in Berlin. What's specifically unique about it is that it describes a SIGINT (signals intelligence) operation. Traditional spy novels are invariably HUMINT (human intelligence) operations. There's a huge gulf between the two.
Ostensibly the novel is a story of the pre-wall, cross-sector Spy Tunnel that the CIA dug to tap into Russian telecommunications cables. Two intertwined threads run through the novel. The first is about the Americans who worked the tunnel. This part of the story bears a certain similarity to other black-humor novels about the military, like Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Richard Hooker's M*A*S*H*.
The other thread is the story of the Russians whose telephone calls the Americans are intercepting. The threads are tied together because the Russians are running a "honey trap," sex for secrets operation against the Americans, and the Americans are listening to the Russians talk about the operation, but they cannot figure out who the target of the operation is. The Russians are the voices under Berlin, and their part of the story is the other unique element in the novel. Their story is told in the unnarrated transcripts of their calls.
The novel, in general, lacks the kind of visual clues that readers are accustomed to seeing on the printed page. Instead — as the novel’s title (Voices Under Berlin) suggests — it is a novel of voices, intended as much as a tale to be heard, as a text to be read. It has been compared to Henrik Ibsen’s "play for voices," "Peer Gynt," which is usually considered very hard to stage due to its accent on the aural, rather than on the visual. Even the narrative of the American half of the novel carries an “aural” signature, reflecting the ear-centric worldview of the main character, the person who had to transcribe the Russians’ conversations, Kevin. That's what makes it unique.
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