The best of our spies

This book, by Alex Gerlis, was one of those which turned up on my Kindle after its resurrection (the battery is doing very nicely, thank you); its title was intriguing enough to earn it an early read.

The book is set during World War 2 and is a twist on the more conventional type of WW2 spy stories. It open with a French refugee woman being stopped at a checkpoint (a good way to get our sympathy and turn this woman into the protagonist) - it turns out that this woman had been recruited by the German secret service and had absconded. She is then sent to Britain with an undefined mission. Do we cheer for this woman or hope that she gets captured?

MI5 were aware of her as they found her radio man; via this man they found the female spy and then constructed a mission for her, of which she is unaware. Eventually the woman is overtly recruited by the British SOE and sent to France as an agent; there she joins the resistance, and the information that the SOE send her  (which is passed on to her German control who is aware of her return) states that the Allies' landing with be in the Calais area and not Normandy. It transpires that there really was a deception operation such as this, although of course the details vary.

This could have been a fascinating read but unfortunately the writing let it down. The novel is too long, almost everything is spelt out for the reader (at one stage, a character recapitulates the plot as it then stood in case someone didn't follow) and the ending was slightly predictable.

A good spy novel is one which leaves you scratching your head at the end and trying to work out what really happened. This isn't such a novel.

More spooks

I wrote seven weeks ago about watching this prize-winning television series. Then I was in the middle of the fourth series ... little did I know what awaited me. I've just seen the third episode of series 8 and I have to admit to being shocked. Somehow, previous cast deaths had left me somewhat apathetic but today's episode left me speechless.

A few weeks ago I found the tv tropes homepage, a site which describes and notates all the various tropes which are used in television and film. As far as Spooks is concerned, [it was] a show where Anyone Can Die: Most of the time when you finally grasp who the main characters of the story are, you can expect that these characters will survive through the end of the story. Well, this is not that trope.

If earlier series of Spooks hinted that someone was going to disappear by adding a new actor, the past few episodes have seen a total demolition of the staff with no replacements arriving in advance. Thus there is no warning that someone is about to die.....

I have managed to get my wife addicted to the series as well, although she didn't see the early series and hasn't had much time lately to watch. A few weeks ago, when I was in Tel Aviv, I knew that she intended to catch up on a few episodes, including the series 7 opener. She telephoned me to say that she was crying after the death of ...; according to the Spooks forum, this was not an uncommon event. I had purposely not warned her of what was going to happen. Probably by the time she gets to this episode, I will be somewhere else and will have forgotten what happens.

Spooks

One of the minor television channels in Israel started showing the British drama series Spooks from the beginning, and I was fortunate to see all the episodes screened, starting from the beginning (previously I had seen a few episodes from the seventh or eighth series and didn't really understand very much).

The first series started off promisingly by showing as much of top agent Tom's out of office life as it did his in office life. The second series was even better than the first and finished on a huge cliff-hanger. As episodes were being screened here on a nightly basis, I didn't have to wait long for the resolution. One thing became clear about this series: anybody could die (or at least, leave). This was signaled in only the second episode when one of the staff was killed, but the second episode of the third series had main character Tom being sacked after undergoing what amounted to a nervous breakdown.

His leaving was signaled in advance by the addition of a new character in the first episode of the third series; this signal was to be repeated twice more during the same series as two of the other mainstays (Zoe and Danny) also left the series. Might the fact that the actress playing the part of Zoe left her husband in order to live with the actor playing the part of Tom have anything to do with this?

The fourth series opened with 50% of the original cast/staff having been replaced and an emphasis on more action orientated stories. I have to admit that I prefer the more cerebral stuff. I don't think that a gun was shown at all during the first series, whereas the series 3 closer and the series 4 opener had guns alore - which were used. The body count in one episode was higher than the entire first series (and possibly the first two series). 

As I've only seen the first two episodes of the fourth series, I will refrain from making more comments, save to say that these episodes brought a change of style which I didn't care for. Although I had recorded all the episodes (for the show is shown late at night), to my chagrin I had deleted almost all of them, and only the last few episodes have found their way to permanent storage. I'm going to retain all the episodes from now on, and recover the missing episodes from the Internet.

Two spy novels

Despite having invested in a Kindle, I found myself ordering two real books a week ago, as either there aren't Kindle versions available yet or the Kindle version is more expensive.

First off was the third book by Stella Rimington in her Liz Carlyle series, "Illegal action". The basis of this book was more to my liking that the previous ones: Liz has been transferred to Counter-Intelligence (i.e. working against the Soviet threat) from Counter-Terrorism. As an old cold warrior, I much prefer the deviousness of the Soviets. I can't put my finger on the exact cause, but all the way through the book, I kept feeling unsatisfied. As I have pointed out before, Rimington is no literary stylist and seems to write by the numbers (at five sixths of the way through the book, there will be a huge twist in the story which changes one's entire outlook). There are always a few chapters in which the main character of the chapter is referred to solely as "He" or "She", meaning that Rimington is describing someone's actions but that she doesn't want the reader to guess who that person is. I won't reveal the detail for this book, but it wasn't too hard to figure out who the mystery person was. At the end of the book, I found myself so unimpressed that I decided probably not to bother buying any more books in this series. A shame, because a better writer could have done so much more with the story elements.

On the other hand, "The Trinity Six" by Charles Cumming was the real thing. Dense, intriguing and cerebral, this is a worthy successor to Le Carre, mixing fact with fiction almost seamlessly. I've read most of the books listed in the 'bibliography' at the end, so the the historical parts of the story were very familiar. Cumming's anti-hero, Dr Sam Gaddis, does come over as slightly too resourceful for an academic, but that only makes for a better story. He is also a tad too trusting during at least the first half of the novel; I would have thought that someone as well versed in all things Russian would have been more suspicious. Presumably I had an advantage over Gaddis in that I could read what other characters in the book were doing when they were not interacting with him, and so I was able to identify his babysitter well in advance. I also found the fact that Gaddis repeatedly was able to slip under the Russians' radar unbelievable. Maybe they too have lost their touch since the end of the cold war.

Looking back on the story (and this is one that deserves a second and third read, without doubt), it occurs to me that the focus of the story changes in a subtle manner about half way through: the sixth man becomes abandoned and someone else takes his place as being the the book's raison d'etre. The sixth man essentially becomes a red herring.

I hope that Cumming's other book, "A Spy by Nature" is of a similarly high quality. I note that Cumming was approached to join MI6 but turned them down.

Fictional MI5

Along with the Stella Rimington book ("At risk"), I've also been watching the BBC series "Spooks". The program is more action orientated than I would have liked, which made sense when I realised that the program is about the counter-terrorism section. Similarly, Liz Carlyle (LC) belongs to the counter-terrorism section.

I ordered an received the second LC book, "Secret asset", and read it greedily over Thursday night/Friday morning. This is more cerebral/less action orientated than its predecessor and thus found more favour in these quarters. Whilst the prose is nothing to write home about, it tells an interesting story and I'm sure that a second and more sedate reading would be rewarding.

The book begins in a very similar manner to its predecessor, so much so that I'm sure a page was lifted (the description of the recruitment of the agent whose cover name escapes me). But the agent is shortly discovered and killed; here the resemblance between the novels ends. Ostensibly, the book is about the leads thrown up by this agent and a task force assembles to follow them up. But on the side, LC is given a separate task: find an unactivated mole within the ranks of MI5.

The reader, from his privileged position, is able to see how the two strands intertwine. Having two separate strands in a story is much more rewarding than one, and their combination and resolution lead to a much more satisfying finish. So author Rimington is showing welcome signs of sophistication.

But! In the terrorism strand of the book, much is made of the mistakes in tradecraft that the terrorists make (as an aside, it is inferred that MI5 can tap any phone at will, including mobile phones; I have my doubts about this). But there is no comment about the poor tradecraft of the mole, who blows an operation then has the agent killed. After a third and similar lapse, one of LC's colleagues becomes suspicious and begins suspecting a mole himself; this conclusion is made whilst being unaware of LC's activities.

The mole, in retrospect, has several damaging conversations and disseminates information which later turns out to be disinformation. Maybe he was counting on the obscurity of that information and the low possibility of his lying being caught, but it was a dangerous thing to do and led to his downfall.

The mole is not a patch on Bill Haydon ("Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy") and should be ashamed of his poor performance in this role. Real moles are much harder to catch, and the fact that he had never been activated should have made it impossible to have caught him.

There is no real reason for MI5 to have heard about this 'unactivated mole' in the first place, although this mole's actions quite likely would have led to his being discovered anyway. The person who told MI5 had no reason to do this, and this strand of the story invokes several characters who are peripheral - if not totally irrelevant - to the story. Was the author trying to confuse the reader?

So: I enjoyed this book more than its predecessor, but it's clear that author Rimington has a long way to go before she even catches up with the shadow of 'Tinker tailor'. A film version of the latter, incidentally, has recently been made and I look forward to seeing it. It will be interesting to see how well it manages to translate the story and whether it too suffers from the same problem as the famous TV adaption which often has George Smiley (as played by Sir Alec Guiness) sitting and staring into space (or polishing his glasses on his tie).

At risk/2

Here's part of review of another of Stella Rimington's books; I think that the author makes his/her point more eloquently than I did.

What I hate most is that Liz Carlyle is portrayed as being completely omniscient. Every hunch she has, every deduction she makes, any inferences she makes from questioning people - they're always right! This feeling that MI5 could function effectively with only one member of staff - superwoman Liz - spoils it for me. She's the one who could tell you what the train driver had for lunch just knowing his shoe size. Shame - because otherwise a good read.

At risk

"At risk" is the title of the first novel written by Dame Stella Rimington, who received her damehood for running MI5. Not surprisingly, the book (and the following series) is about a female agent in MI5 - virgin territory for me (in terms of fiction, that is). Whilst Rimington is no literary stylist, her prose is far better than I had been led to believe, and reading the novel was an enjoyable experience.

As usual, the first few chapters provide background about several characters who appear later in the book; the story as such gets going at around the seventh or eighth chapter (the chapters themselves are very short). There are a few early chapters which could easily have been cut without causing damage to the story; they don't provide much background information and serve only to distract the reader.

Once the story gets going, it is an exciting read which is more similar to a police procedural than a spy novel. The story is a manhunt after two terrorists, in which protagonist Liz Carlyle provides most of the directions for the hunt. I doubt that in real life MI5 officers become so involved in such matters, and indeed, at a late stage in the story Carlyle feels that her part of the job - the cerebral analysis - is over, even though she eventually produces the final piece in the puzzle, the terrorists' target.

Carlyle does become some kind of 'wonder woman', divining intents correctly with too little input. Nowhere is this more apparent that the final chapter: in the previous scene, Carlyle suffered shell shock when the terrorists are apprehended and is hospitalised. She wakes up the next day with everything very fuzzy, but manages to make a conclusion on very slim evidence. I can't see how she had the time or the mental energy  to achieve this, and as a result the book finishes on an unbelievable note.

I enjoyed the book sufficiently to order the next installment. I hope that this is more about her life in the office as an agent-runner/analyst and less about running around in the field.