The Spanish Game/Charles Cumming
My recent reviews of the Charles Cumming espionage novels reflect an admiration for this novelist. Indeed I would have put this admiration as high as nominating him as the successor to John le Carre. So I read an earlier one of his called The Spanish Game and having just finished it I am less convinced of my assessment.
The novel is set in Madrid in the early years of this century and features an anti-hero Alec Milius not unlike Thomas Kell who appears in his subsequent books. Milius, like Kell, has left SIS under a cloud. He works for a private bank in Madrid and research brings him into contact with Mikel Arazuna a Basque politician who disappears. Milius decides to investigate this disappearance personally bringing him into the terrorist world of ETA, the dirty tricks of the Spanish government and a SIS team sent over to Madrid. I won’t do a spoiler but suffice to say everybody is not whom they say they are in that shady world of false identity, subterfuge and deceit.
My difficulty with the writer is that on one hand he provides a technical realistic account of modern espionage, especially surveillance, but against this the plot is too far-fetched and melodramatic. There are too many coincidences, too many contrived set pieces, too many improbabilities, to the extent that I felt this was not a novel but a scenario for a pulp action film. The ending should have tied up the various plot threads out I was left baffled. I tried to work it out and then could not and then wondered why should I?
This is not to denigrate the novel entirely or place it on the shelf of holiday reading. He gives a vivid account of the politics of Spain and the National Rust group that travelled to Madrid would have appreciated his description and identification of bars and restaurants there. The anti-hero is study of paranoia with multiple identities and a pathological difficulty in telling the truth. The “running” of a stooge by his controller is well depicted. A novelist has to make a living and it’s too easy for a critic – as often as not a writer who cannot make a living from his craft – to denigrate the popular writer. Nonetheless I believe previous masters of this genre – Ian Fleming, Len Deighton and John Le Carre – demonstrate an ability to write successful books that became films that somehow left you more satisfied than this writer.
