Last Book Read... (Page 26 of 28)

Red sparrow by Jason Matthews

First a thank you to the local library 
When I asked for this book they didn't have it, so they got me the only copy available in libraries nationally. When I was finished reading Red Sparrow I asked for the other books in the trillogy, "Palace of trason" and "Kremlin's Canidate". The library decided that since the trillogy had such good reviews, it's rarity in the library system and since I wanted it they would buy the books. How nice of them!

The novels are written by a former CIA agent, Jason Matthews. The novel was reviewed in the CIA's website and the discriptions of the tradecraft and the invirorment was compared to le Carre. The main character is Dominika Egorova, an elite ballet dancer who also has the abilty to see people's nature and feelings in colours. This is a form of synesthesia and it's aparently a real thing. An injury cuts her dancing career short and her FSB uncle recruits her as an agent and (this is creepy for an uncle) as a 'sparrow', an agent who uses sex and seduction in her work. The Americans have a highly placed source codenamed 'Marble' in the FSB. Marble's handler is the CIA officer Nate Nash.
While there is more descriptions of sex than in many espionage novels, this is a complex thriller with a very good plot. Dominika is an interesting hero and worth following.
I nice detail is that a a type of food is mentioned in every chapter and the the recipe is printed at the end of the chapter.

The novel is filmed with Jennifer Lawrence as Dominika. I liked the movie. The moviemakers wisely dropped the synesthesia and Dominika's way into the FSB and Sparrow School is actually more convincing in the movie. The novel has other qualities and I look very much forward to reading the copy of "Palace of treason" sitting on my desk.

For me one of the greatest espionage books I've ever read, whilst the film was ok I felt the book was far superior.

re Flashman

I've been thinking Flashman is probably a very unreliable narrator, and Fraser's tone in those footnotes is a bit of a gag as well.
Flashman tells us right off he is a liar as well as a coward, and in his interactions with other characters is perpetually misrepresenting himself. That's how he got to be a decorated hero in the fist place, and he is continuously building on those lies all through his adventures, enjoying the undeserved rewards and evading the consequent responsibilities. I don't think it would ever occur to him to tell the truth.

So why are we believing any of his memoirs? The footnotes confirm the places he claims to have been and the people he claims to have met were all there more or less at the times he describes, but they never provide any confirmation there was ever a man named Harry Flashman, despite the hundreds of historic records cited. (aside from Tom Brown's Schooldays)

So presuming some of it is "true" and some of it lies, what bits are most likely to be lies? All the stuff with the women, for starters. That's what lads always lie about when talking to other lads. Flashman claims to have slept with something like a thousand women, which even for a real lad's lad seems a bit unlikely. Every queen or empress he encounters tears his clothes off within minutes, but nobody else ever finds out? In Flashman's Lady there is a bit where he is thrown clear of a naval battle just as it gets dangerous, flies through a roof, right into the middle of a harem, where he is spontaneously molested by the ladies within even as the battle rages just inches away on the other side of the wall.

Of course we know the whole thing is a very clever lie on Fraser's part, that's why its called fiction. But assuming there is a fictional level of reality that we believe as authentic while we read, some of the things our narrator I telling us must be more or less "real" than others.

I recently read two early John le Carre books:

the Spy Who Came in from the Cold
this is a tightly structured tragedy, with our hero Alec Leamas dutifully serving his country only to find he is the one being played through levels within levels of deception. It all builds up to an inevitable punch on the last page that really hurts when it comes, yet has been foreshadowed plainly since the beginning of the story. It's just that as a reader I want to trust the good guys, and probably you do too, that's why it works.
There is some nice narrative sleight-of-hand, we watch Leamas reinvent his identity before he returns to East Germany, yet are not told what he is doing, so as far as we know he is indeed an unsympathetic selfdestructive character. Theres is no internal monolog or exposition to tell us different. If we cant trust our protagonist to be who he seems, why should we trust the supporting characters he works for?

The Looking Glass War
This is more of a satire, a bit like some of Graham Greene's stuff. There is a leftover espionage department from WWII, old guys wallowing in nostalgia, and the Circus would like to be rid of them, though that motive is only ever shown to us in hints. We see it all from the point of view of these nostalgic old guys, going back into action one more time, clueless as to why their phony passports are getting cancelled or why they are being given heavy out of date radio equipment.
The bit where their agent finally crosses the border is very scary, a sudden change of tone where the old guys fantasy world suddenly becomes real for one sucker, while they continue to pat themselves on the back on the safe side of the border.

Smiley and Control are only seen in brief glimpses in both books. Although Smiley was a normal protagonist in Call for the Dead, in these next few books he is a largely unseen assistant puppetmaster. He is the nice one, he seems to actually care for these people being manipulated. Control is his boss, and he's the real cynic, coldly making the choices that doom countrymen who trust him, so as to succeed in a larger game which is not part of the story  being told.

Bulldog Drummond
by Sapper (H. C. McNeile), 1920

It's taken me most of a lifetime to find a copy of this book!
Amis mentions Bulldog Drummond as an influence on Fleming in his Dossier, and I remember he was not complimetary. Most latterday commentators focus on the xenophobia, without telling us anything else about the story.
This book should sit on the spy-lit fan's shelf alongside John Buchan's Richard Hannay novels, and Leslie Charteris' The Saint. But whereas the 39 Steps gets filed under literature, and random volumes of The Saint are not hard to find, I've never actually come across a Bulldog Drummond before. My bookshop had it filed under D, as if Drummond was the author and "Sapper" the title.

This is fun stuff, an easy entertaining read. Fighting spies is good sport, and everybody has a good laugh as the evil foreigners meet their fate at the hands of the very unofficial Drummond.
The story: Drummond is a young vet of WWI, now sitting round London bored, so he places an ad in the paper looking for adventure, and quickly becomes entangled in a scheme to provoke a Communist Revolution in Britain, to the advantage of the plots' sponsors: Industrial interests in Germany and the United States (i.e Communism is itself a Capitalists' conspiracy).
His rapport with ladyfriend Phyllis Benton is very similar to Simon Templar's with Patricia Holm. Benton calls Drummond "boy" as they laugh about their fun plans to fight dangerous spies, just as Holm addresses Templar. But Drummond and Benton came first.
His rapport with the evil mastermind Carl Peterson is exactly like that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer tried to match wits with Elaine's psychiatrist the Svenjolly. Or perhaps more familiarly, James Bond and Dr No debating fine wines and the philosophy of power over a nice dinner. Then following the oh so polite chit-chat he breaks a few bones.

Apparantly there were nine sequels, then another writer continued the series after Sapper's death.

Når landet mørknar by Tore Kvæven

I'm going to review a book that hasn't been translated into English or any other language as far as I know. But it will be translated to several languages for sure and hopefully English too. I guess the title will be "When the land darkens", but who knows? The author has published one viking-themed novel earlier (With really good reviews) and one novel for children. I worked at the same office as the author for two years and we are friends. He likes to to write while hiking or skiing, since nature gives him solitude and inspiration.

From the publisher:

The year is 1293. Arnar Vilhjálmsson, a young boy, is rowing out on his first walrus hunt. After the hunt, a girl stands before him. She looks down at the beast he has slain, her eyes full of defiance, and her words full of scorn. Then she turns and runs away from him, without looking back. Her name is Eir.

In the Norsemen’s Western Settlement, on Greenland, a sense of unease has been creeping in. The walrus that gave the settlers their wealth have been retreating. The ships that used to sail from Norway and Iceland to trade there have become few and far between. The Greenlanders’ own vessels are rotting. The people are wondering: is this the end?

Arnar dreams of one day building his own ship and sailing towards the lands further west, seeking timber, iron and hope for the future. Eir is part of that dream. In this quest for a future, Arnar is even willing to defy his own chieftain, gods, and the laws of men.

"Når landet mørknar" takes place in Greenland at the end of the thirtheenth century in the Norse colony there. The culture is in decline and during the next two hundred years the Norse colony mysteriously vanishes completely. At the time of the novel some of the people living in the farms in the  inland valleys still worshiped Odin and Thor, but the majority are Christian. The protagonist is the young farmer Arnar who is in love with the Christian girl Eir in a sort of Romeo and Juliet situation. The novel is writen from several points of view, including that of animals. When was the last time you read a chapter written from the POW of a walrus? It works surprisingly well and the book is written in a style that both lyrical and brutal. I hope they find first-rate translators. Sidenote: There are two written forms of Norwegian: Bokmål is used by the majority and is influenced by Danish and the dialects urban areas, especially around Oslo. Nynorsk is influenced by the many dialects and old Norse. Tore uses a conservative version of Nynorsk. Other than Icelandic this is the closest you can get to Old Norse today.
The reviews are among the best for any novel this year and it's one out of four nominees for the major litterary award in Norway. If you like good litterature and have an interest in vikings, keep an eye out for the name Tore Kvæven in the bookstores.

Last edited by Number24 (20th Nov 2018 20:31)

Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews (second book in the Red Sparrow trillogy)

The trillogy about Dominika Egorova of the Russian SVR and Nate Nash from the CIA. I won't say much more about them and the relationship between them because some might not have read the first book in the trillogy. What I can say is that Dominika is a graduate of the SVR Sparrow School where agents learn to manipulate people emotionally and sexually. She is born with the ability to see people's emotions in colours and in The Palace of Trason she can also see and hear the "ghosts" of people close to her who dies. Strangely, I think it this works. In every Chapter some meal is mentioned and the recipe is at the end of the chapter. It's a nice feature, but sometimes it gets too convoluted and unnatural.
The author is a former CIA agent and the plot and spycraft is very impressive. Unlike John le Carre, another ex- agent who uses his experience in  his novels, there is hardly any grey areas here. Doninika and Nash are good and heroic and their adversaries are plain evil. Even Fleming was less simplistic at times. Vladimir Putin was in the first book too, but then we barely saw him and only in situations one could reasonably assume how he would act. Now he is more involved in the plot and we meet him in private situations and the author tries to get inside his head. You may like or dislike this side of the book, but I think most will agree it's problematic. But the writing is good, the plot is convincing and exiting, the characters are interesting and The Palace of Trason is a very noteworthy book in the spy genere.

Anthony James - Acting My Face. (starred in Naked Gun 2, The A-Team, Clint Eastwood movies) great read.

I’ll be buying it at some point...hope it’s an improvement on his last...

Read the blurb for it the other day...sounded promising....

The Honourable SchoolBoy
John leCarre
the first of two sequels to Tinker Tailor ..., collectively known as the Karla Trilogy

le Carre must have gotten especially good reviews for Tinker Tailor, because he's really over-writing here. The first hundred pages introduce various mostly irrelevant characters very slowly, all from highly unreliable second or third hand points of view ... the first chapter even ends with our narrator announcing he has introduced his Greek chorus (a gang of hard-drinking journalists), and a hundred pages in a literary agent character is debating the merits of Greene, Maughm, and Conrad (all literary novelists who happened to write spy stories) before slamming the Hemingway approach to telling a story.

and except for two significant paragraphs, whenever we see Smiley it is through the eyes of Peter Guillam, who makes the Nigel Bruce version of Watson look perceptive.

That all said, this book is massive, and three hundred pages in, when the narrative finally settles on the title character's trek through Hong Kong and South East Asia, le Carre drops the tricky PoV stuff and we get two hundred pages of exotic globetrotting action adventure and excitement unlike we've ever seen from leCarre before. Didn't actually know he had it in him!

good stuff, those last two hundred pages, and it leads to another cryptic ambiguous ending where whatever was really going on has only been hinted at, while the little people lick their wounds in confusion.

I re-read "Soldier Spy" by "Tom Marcus" during my holiday.

It still comes off as a self aggrandizing story told by some toothless yob in a track suit, you know the type "... then dat guy pulled a knoif, but I couldnna let 'im scare me 'cause then I woulda been inna piss..."

Some of it I find credible, a lot of it plausible, but all the parts about "him" being the "best there ever was" and UK intel services "being the best out there" as well as his disparaging remarks about UK law enforcement.... that all reads a little bit too "Tom Clancy-ish" all that was left out was a MSgt "who could teach manners to the meanest NFL linebackers out there"....