The Unfortunate Englishman/John Lawton

One of the attractions of Amazon is their recommendations based on the premise that  if you enjoyed reading A, you might well enjoy reading B. Generally this works for me in one of the genres I most enjoy: the espionage novel. I was introduced to Charles Cumming who has brought espionage into the modern world of gizmos, hacking into laptops and tracing through mobile signals. I was less enthused by John Lawton after being recommended and reading The Unfortunate Englishman.

The novel had there drawbacks for me. The story was not well narrated; the writing was clunky; the writer stance was pretentiously learned. The novel is set in Berlin in the Cold War. The hero – or is it anti-hero ? -is Joe Wilderness an ex-burglar and now MI6 field man and three associates that ran scams together in 1948. Two spies are swapped and on the back of this a contraband cargo of valuable vintage claret conveyed from Bordeaux to Berlin. Sadly for me the dialogue in the final denouement was so poor that, far from being a page turner, I debated whether I would or could finish it.

I visited Berlin in 1970 and the wall made a huge impression on me. I returned after it came down and there was no trace of the barrier that divided west and east. It’s a fertile area for writers. Jim Powell wrote a particularly good one. Clearly Lawton know his stuff but does not exactly wear his scholarship lightly. Some of the dialogue is in Russian. It is translated but how many readers can read Russian, so what is the point – other then to impress how lingual the writer is.

There is a competition for the writer that writes best about sex and worst. It’s beyond most writers to convey a physical and sensual sensation into words so it’s better to concentrate on the anticipation, the urge and the consequence to add momentum to the narration. Lawton writes on sex mainly in terms  of marital coupling, his wife throwing her knickers over a bedside lamp. This adds little to the story nor is that titallating. John Updike is generally regarded as the best sex writer, which is slightly paradoxical as he was a family man and and Episcopalian, unlike say Georges Simenon who was said to have had over 1000 lovers. The novel might make for a better film but the scenario would benefit from a makeover.