What Book to Read?

Like The Not Knowing, which I posted on last week, this spy thriller also made it onto The Guardian’s list of the ten best crime stories or thrillers of 2012. It also won the Scottish Crime Book of the Year at the 2012 Bloody Scotland Festival and the Crime Writers’ Association Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for the best thriller of 2012. Cumming comes highly recommended; his second book, The Spanish Game was described by The Times as one of the six finest spy novels of all time, alongside Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, (1974) Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin (1964) and  Baroness Orczy’s  The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). And Cumming has some firsthand knowledge. After graduating with a first in English, he was approached by the Secret Intelligence Service (M16), but did not join them.

Perhaps all this build up raised my expectations too high, because although I enjoyed the book, it certainly isn’t up to Le Carré’s standards, or probably even Len Deighton’s. Not sure about Baroness Orczy.

The story begins with a sort of foreword about the disappearance of a young women in Tunisia in 1978, then moves to a present day robbery and murder, and a kidnapping. Having put these pieces in place, it then moves to Thomas Kell, a former SIS agent who was dismissed after being blamed for condoning torture in Afghanistan. Amelia Levene, who is about to become head of the SIS, has disappeared, and the SIS wants him to find her. Kell soon discovers that everything is not as it seems, and sets out to investigate further.

It’s easy to see why Cumming is spoken of in the same breath as Le Carré and Deighton; his plot deals with same ‘the double-think and mendacity of the secret state’, that is, the same sort of intra and inter security service rivalries, and same treacheries and betrayals as they do. Thomas Kell expresses some of the same thoughts about spying as are found in Le Carré’s work; he reflects on his ‘flair for deceit’, and wonders why ‘the spy wanted to set aside his own character and to inhabit a separate self’. This is very much the territory covered by The Perfect Spy, which in turn reflects aspects of Le Carré’s own life. Cumming focuses, as do Le Carré and Deighton, on the detail of the working life of the spy, though of course Kell has rather more advanced technology at his disposal than his literary forebears. He even uses words and phrases that Le Carré says he invented to describe aspects of spying, such as ‘tradecraft’ and ‘Moscow rules’. There are also a couple of references to ‘coming in from the cold’, though neither of them carries the same meaning as they did for Alec Leamas in The Spy who Came in from the Cold – in that book, coming in from the cold means dying, in preference to living a lie, whereas for Cumming, it just means being accepted back into the espionage world.

I mention the use –or rather misuse – of this phrase because it seems to me to sum up the difference between Cumming and Le Carré: the former lacks the latter’s subtlety. Cumming writes well enough – for example I liked his description of a hotel as resembling ‘a Mexican restaurant in a suburban shopping mall, blown up to the size of an aircraft hangar’. There are literary references scattered throughout, including the title, which reprises L.P. Harley’s line: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ Kell, though perhaps a little too obviously ‘flawed’, is nevertheless a sympathetic character – he reads Seamus Heaney’s poetry, and agonizes about his unhappy relationship with his wife. But none of this makes up for a fairly predictable and mechanical plot. It would make good TV – lots of good visuals and not much depth.

The political thrust of the book – though it isn’t a major theme in the story – is also different from Le Carré’s. When Kell explains how he was made a ‘fall-guy’ for the SIS’s implicit condoning of torture, he does feel ‘the shame of his own moral neglect’. But he is also angry that ‘too many people on the Left were interested solely in demonstrating their own good taste, their own unimpeachable moral conduct, at the expense of the very people who were striving to keep them safe in their beds.’ Le Carré’s shifting world has no place for such moral certainties.

While this is Cumming’s sixth book, it is the first in a series which will feature Thomas Kell. You can read more about Cumming here. I might go back and read some of the earlier ones – maybe they are as good as claimed.  You can read my review of Tinker Tailor here.