THEME

During the first week of August, 1914, Admiral Mark Kerr faced a desperate choice: betray his conscience or his country. It was a choice he faced in real life, where his attempt to reconcile the competing demands of his service to Britain and Greece failed. Major Lionel Samson’s principal experience of betrayal stemmed from a more personal encounter: an affair which ends when fate (according to Edith Roberts) intervenes. The sense of loss — and betrayal — Samson feels is heightened as, at that time, he does not believe in fate, or the pre-ordained workings of some exterior force, either for good or evil. Forced to reconsider his own deeply held beliefs, Samson is also disillusioned when everyone he encounters in Athens appears to operate on two different levels, and betrayal, at both personal and official levels, is rampant. Professor Geroulanos, for example, while certainly calling himself a Greek patriot, belongs to an organization whose only aim is the furtherance of German influence in his country (another example of the activities of a real-life character being mirrored in The Traitor).

Even within the confines of the British Legation Samson comes to suspect that senior officials are hiding something. And, finally, the agent he employs is also working for someone else. Samson is forced to consider the prospect that the ability to betray, to lie at will, is part of man’s nature. Then, however, his life is saved by the same Professor Geroulanos he suspects of treason; his closest ally within the Legation is converted to share his suspicion regarding the Greek Premier; and his own agent, the Greek porter, posthumously provides the evidence to help resolve the final part of the puzzle — the identity of the traitor. Samson is almost re-converted into disbelieving the workings of a malign fate until a moment’s cowardice, which he later excuses by reasoning it was pre-ordained, results in his final test.

CHARACTERIZATION

With only a few exceptions, all the characters portrayed in The Traitor are based on their real-life counterparts. There is so much material on Churchill, in particular, that it is possible to reconstruct his activities and conversations on an almost daily basis. All the Greek characters (Premier Venizelos, King Constantine, Professor Geroulanos, the investigator Triantafyllakos, the porter at the German Legation) are portrayed as they were, as are such other notables as Sir Edward Grey and Prince Louis of Battenberg. The principle deviation from this is the character of Major Samson. Physically he appears in the novel as he did in real life; however his actions for the period involved (March 1913 to August 1914) are completely fictional. Similarly, the activities in the novel of the real-life German agent, Captain Alfred Hoffmann, are fictional. Edith Roberts and Rachel Summers are also wholly fictional characters.