Several degrees of bluff
Charles Mitchell
EMPIRE STATE by Henry Porter Orion, £12.99, pp. 416, ISBN 0752856839 Henry Porter's new book, Empire State, is well up to the high standard of his first two. He is strong on plotting, dialogue, violence, explosions, and — in this latest book — office politics. In this respect, Porter owes something to Len Deighton (I'm thinking of the Hook Line and Sinker and Faith, Hope and Charity trilogies). Unlike Deighton, though, Porter never lets the unworthy thought sneak into your mind that MIS office rows seem to be just like everyone else's — i.e. boring for other people to read about. There are two ways to go if you want to write board meetings into your spy story. One is not to take them seriously at all and make the reader laugh at the cynicism and slyness with which the committee men get their way. Michael Pearce does this supremely well in the Mamur Zapt books, writing with all the calm authority of a man who has sat
through a thousand academic board meetings. Porter goes the other way. He makes the meetings come alive because he makes you care who's going to win the argument. What they are arguing about in Empire State is how to deal with an al-Qaeda cell. The book concerns the efforts of the English and American secret services, post-9,41, to keep tabs on a group of Islamic fundamentalists who are spotted switching identities at Heathrow airport towards the start of the book. Counting back, I think this manoeuvre turns out to have been a triple or possibly a quadruple bluff. but I'm not going to spoil it for you by explaining my maths, and it doesn't matter anyway. Also involved are Karim Khan. an Islamic freedom fighter who has escaped from Afghanistan only to fall into the clutches of the Albanian secret police, and his friend Sammi Loz, a smooth Manhattan socialite who you know just has to be a baddie from the off. By the time MI5 agent Isis Herrick sorts it all out, you will surely feel that you've had your money's worth. The story skips about the world, taking in unpleasant CIA men in Albania and Egypt, jumping back to Muslim fighters in the Balkans, and forward again to NYC by way of several subplots, including one about a Czech agent working for Mossad that won't mean much to readers who missed Porter's last book.
A few quibbles: are Khan and Loz meant to be gay lovers, or not? Porter skirts round this point rather uneasily. Also. Isis Herrick (silly name) is cracked up to be a 'natural' at the spying game, but she's not much of a team player in my view, forever scooting off on frolics of her own without telling people what she's getting up to. The ending, too, is on the flat side, and the moral message needs work (Torture is bad, except sometimes it's OK').
But what the hell? Empire State is tightly written, well-paced and cleverly constructed. The backgrounds are well done, be they seedy Islamic bookshops on Westbourne Grove or Cairene cafés, and the action sequences are all they should be. Porter definitely knows what he's doing, and he does it very well. More, please.
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