My first review post of 2016 brings two very different perspectives on the clandestine world of spies. Set in 1981, The Long Room shows what can happen when those undertaking the tedious tasks of monitoring intercepted messages decide to create their own excitement. Like I Can’t Begin to Tell You, Tightrope features a brave heroine of the Second World War, now confronting the “normality” of dull and drab post-war England. My experience of the genre is rather limited – and one might argue that both of these novels would be classified as literary rather than thriller – but my reading suggests that, like acting and adultery, espionage is about creating and maintaining fictions, something close to the writer’s heart.
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Stephen and his colleagues spend their working days marooned at their individual desks in the long room, listening intently to recorded conversations of which they can never be a part. The work is both extremely tedious and important: missing a vital clue could result in loss of life through, perhaps, an IRA bomb. This, combined with the necessary secrecy around the work of the Institute, and their lowly status within it, makes the work particularly stressful. They’re also denied the satisfaction of completion as, when the supervisors decide a case should be abandoned, they don’t get to hear the end of the story in which they’ve invested so much.
Like the unnamed narrator of By Blood, who becomes obsessed with a woman whose therapy sessions he happens to overhear, Stephen, with a rather empty life beyond the long room, is particularly vulnerable to making more of his role than he ought. When he’s allocated a case in which the surveillance level is increased from the basic tapped telephone to a bugged room, he convinces himself he’s in love with the target’s wife. His desire to meet her, along with his determination that his supervisor should not prematurely close the case, leads to some risky behaviours, of which fabricating a report “knowing that the truth was unlikely to be helpful” (p97) is only the beginning.
I enjoyed this novel both for its close attention to the often neglected subject of work and for the depiction of a character with invisible vulnerabilities. Stephen makes some extremely dodgy decisions, taking him in the space of a couple of weeks from a humdrum existence to a position of notoriety. The novel stands or falls on the basis of whether the reader can believe in his choices. I was convinced, via both the unusual circumstances of the run-up to Christmas (snow outside, the office party, increased alcohol consumption) and his character, as revealed through his own reminiscences and those of his mother. He’s lived with loss virtually all his life, with the premature death of his twin sister and his father’s exodus from the family. His intelligence (testified by his rise from council house to Oxford University) has generally masked his lack of social capital, but even he has never really acknowledged just how lonely he is.
Like the unnamed narrator of By Blood, who becomes obsessed with a woman whose therapy sessions he happens to overhear, Stephen, with a rather empty life beyond the long room, is particularly vulnerable to making more of his role than he ought. When he’s allocated a case in which the surveillance level is increased from the basic tapped telephone to a bugged room, he convinces himself he’s in love with the target’s wife. His desire to meet her, along with his determination that his supervisor should not prematurely close the case, leads to some risky behaviours, of which fabricating a report “knowing that the truth was unlikely to be helpful” (p97) is only the beginning.
I enjoyed this novel both for its close attention to the often neglected subject of work and for the depiction of a character with invisible vulnerabilities. Stephen makes some extremely dodgy decisions, taking him in the space of a couple of weeks from a humdrum existence to a position of notoriety. The novel stands or falls on the basis of whether the reader can believe in his choices. I was convinced, via both the unusual circumstances of the run-up to Christmas (snow outside, the office party, increased alcohol consumption) and his character, as revealed through his own reminiscences and those of his mother. He’s lived with loss virtually all his life, with the premature death of his twin sister and his father’s exodus from the family. His intelligence (testified by his rise from council house to Oxford University) has generally masked his lack of social capital, but even he has never really acknowledged just how lonely he is.
In Tightrope, Simon Mawer revisits the character of Marian Sutro, the daring SOE agent and heroine of his previous novel, The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. We join her as, bewildered and emaciated, she’s repatriated from Ravensbruck concentration camp towards the end of the Second World War. Normality is hard to find for someone “special, strange, both courageous and dangerous, a good friend and someone you wanted to treat with caution, exciting to know but shot through with a sinuous vein of delinquency” (p5). A reluctant celebrity, ridden with guilt over the deaths for which she is both directly and indirectly responsible (as well as guilt at her lack of guilt for her extramarital affairs), and suffering the after-effects of the trauma of her incarceration, much as she tries to settle down to an ordinary life, the identity she used to occupy no longer fits. Marian hates the fear but craves the excitement of her early adulthood; but she soon discovers that Cold War espionage lacks the certainties and heroics of the resistance movement that made her the woman she is.
With a plot as lively as her character that leaves the reader worrying variously for her safety, sanity and morals, Tightrope is about trust, betrayal and compromise, and the peculiar politics of the post-nuclear age. Marian visits a bombed-out Hamburg as a witness in a war-crimes trial. She shocks her colleagues by challenging Bertrand Russell after a speech in which he states that it would be morally preferable to go to war with the USSR before they develop the atom bomb. She endeavours to protect her brother, a physicist, whose methods of satisfying his illegal sexuality has parallels with hers as a spy.
I was a little surprised when she was allocated a clinical psychologist on her return to England (a very rare breed at that time), but subsequent references identified Dr Morgan as a psychiatrist who has developed his listening skills alongside WHR Rivers at Craiglockhart in the First World War. We don’t see much of these sessions which, though reassuring to Marian, don’t prevent her from experiencing a fugue state during which she re-enacts some of her experiences as a spy, her false self seeming more real than reality.
Although I enjoyed the adventure and intrigue, it was the insight into her mental state that most appealed to me, and the inevitable barrier that her unusual experiences impose between her and other people. As she says to a journalist (p89): “You cannot tell anyone what it was like. It wasn’t the stuff of words …”
The Long Room is published tomorrow by Faber and Faber. Tightrope was published in June last year by Little Brown. Thanks to both publishers for providing review copies. If you’d like to delve into the murk of contemporary espionage, see my review of The Laughing Monsters.
With a plot as lively as her character that leaves the reader worrying variously for her safety, sanity and morals, Tightrope is about trust, betrayal and compromise, and the peculiar politics of the post-nuclear age. Marian visits a bombed-out Hamburg as a witness in a war-crimes trial. She shocks her colleagues by challenging Bertrand Russell after a speech in which he states that it would be morally preferable to go to war with the USSR before they develop the atom bomb. She endeavours to protect her brother, a physicist, whose methods of satisfying his illegal sexuality has parallels with hers as a spy.
I was a little surprised when she was allocated a clinical psychologist on her return to England (a very rare breed at that time), but subsequent references identified Dr Morgan as a psychiatrist who has developed his listening skills alongside WHR Rivers at Craiglockhart in the First World War. We don’t see much of these sessions which, though reassuring to Marian, don’t prevent her from experiencing a fugue state during which she re-enacts some of her experiences as a spy, her false self seeming more real than reality.
Although I enjoyed the adventure and intrigue, it was the insight into her mental state that most appealed to me, and the inevitable barrier that her unusual experiences impose between her and other people. As she says to a journalist (p89): “You cannot tell anyone what it was like. It wasn’t the stuff of words …”
The Long Room is published tomorrow by Faber and Faber. Tightrope was published in June last year by Little Brown. Thanks to both publishers for providing review copies. If you’d like to delve into the murk of contemporary espionage, see my review of The Laughing Monsters.
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