2008-06-09 Flawed but fascinating

The spy novel has always, to me, demanded a higher calling of prose than the traditional thriller. That higher plane of reasoning, above squeamishness, emotion and moral relativity, all that great game stuff - it's the SAS to Tom Clancy's reliable GI. Of the current generation of spy novelists it's hard to pick a winner. Henry Porter is unimpeachable on detail and realism but cannot apparently write an action sequence to save his noble Blair-bothering life. David Wolstencroft is at heart a scriptwriter and his books read like treatments. And Charles Cumming: perhaps the only British writer yet to equal the authority of American spy novelists such as David Ignatius and Olen Steinhauer. Others have noted flaws: his character Alec is full of weaknesses, secondary characters appear in detail and are then consigned to fates we the reader shall apparently never know, the ending has all the resolution of Sopranos's famous black out... the fact that a sequel exists may or may not make this forgivable but Cummings' skill is give to place inside the mind of a serial deceiver in a minute-by -minute sense. Yes, there is a sense that much of what's here is fleshing out a fairly straightforward and basic plot but at the same time, reading those sequences is gripping - it's only afterwards you realize that much of the significant details and observations are in fact insignificant red herrings that provide merely colour and character. A meeting in a restaurant takes up 40 odd pages for example - good prose but at the end of which you'll think `well so what?' Much later of course, you might think of Fortner's petulant outburst over his mint choc chip in a different light...
Cumming gives us an assured and interesting introduction to the Alec Milius story though readers may bear in mind is like a Chinese meal: it takes ages to prepare, goes down pretty quickly and you're hungry again half an hour later. But that doesn't mean it didn't taste great.