What Book to Read?

Dame Stella Rimington is Chair of the judges for this year’s Man Booker Prize. She is a former Director General of MI5, Britain’s counter-espionage agency. She has written an autobiography called Open Secret, which apparently doesn’t give any away, and spy stories featuring Liz Carlyle, also of MI5. Since she will be judging writing, I thought I’d see how she goes about it herself.

Dead Line, published in 2008, is the fourth in the series. A Middle East peace conference is to be held at Gleneagles, but there has been a tip off that unknown forces will try and disrupt it. Syria fears there will be attacks on two British residents who may be involved, and that the Syrians will be blamed for it. Is the threat to be taken seriously? Where should British counter-espionage start their investigations? Liz Carlyle gets the job. At the same time, she has friends and family to worry about, and at 35, is wondering about the direction of her own life.

I started reading expecting something along the lines of the TV series Spooks, but aside from the fact that MI5 is based at Thames House in both, and that both deal with internal threats to security, they couldn’t be much more different. Spooks is all clever computer investigation and shootouts. Dead Line owes much more to the Len Deighton tradition of tea and biscuits and inter-agency bickering. There isn’t a computer or a spy satellite in sight, and no one even glances at the CCTV footage – even when in practice I thought they would have. Given Rimington’s experience in the service, her version is doubtless far closer to the reality of counter-espionage than the more ‘kiss kiss bang bang’ version, as Ian Fleming characterised his own work (though Bond is of course MI6). Not the truth perhaps, but certainly what might have been the truth.

So how does the story stand up? Carlyle describes her investigation as being like ‘a hall of mirrors’, and certainly between MI5 and MI6, the CIA and Mossad, the left hand never knows what the right hand is doing. This makes for an intriguing story. But I would be happier if a crucial breakthrough hadn’t come about by chance. And I did feel rather confused at times, though this may have been the intention. However Rimington is making the interesting point that despite the ‘sophisticated technology and big bureaucracies’ of the security services, the human element remains crucial for both good and ill.

In my view, Rimington’s writing is perfectly adequate, rather than really compelling. For example she sometimes telegraphs her punches. Why mention not once but twice that there is a car waiting on a street, which Carlyle notices but does not question? The reader can see well in advance the car’s likely significance. It’s quite refreshing to have an ordinary fallible hero, but it seems a pity to spoil what is intended to be a point of high drama in the story. This is one place where a camera would have worked better. Then there is the question of characterisation. Rimington has chosen to humanise her characters in a way that some writers of spy thrillers don’t bother with, and while this may accord better with reality, Liz nevertheless remains rather bland and two dimensional. She is said to be tough and steely, but this never really shows.

It is true that you don’t have to write really well to be a good judge of other people’s writing. Many critics either don’t write fiction or don’t write it particularly well. (You might say this is true of me in a small way.) But I’m still a bit surprised at Rimington’s role in the Man Booker judging. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes.

You can read more about Stella Rimimgton here, and this is an interview where she talks about counter-espionage.