Lies, not Lasers
James. Cameron
The Druid Leonard Mosley (Eyre Methuen pp. 256, £7.50) rrlhe double-decade 1930s-1950s is almost I certainly the last historical period in which any decent spy story can ever again be credibly set; thereafter the trade of es- pionage moved inexorably out of the human realm into electronics and technology; aliases and false whiskers were forever gone. This may well be a pity; it is difficult to feel emotionally involved with some dreary satellite thousands of miles up there which does what it is told at anyone's bidding. Which, if we are to credit The Druid, is what most of the old-fashioned spies did anyhow.
Even today the thrillers of Leonard Mosley, excellent and persuasive as they are, have a faintly William Le Queux-ish flavour to them. Even at this short remove the spies and agents of the last Great War could be a company of Scarlet Pimpernels and John Hannays in modernish dress, of the exciting age when people used codes and not computers, lies and not lasers; they may have been clumsy but they were comprehen- sible.
Let us therefore savour Leonard Mosley's latest croSsword-puzzle of espionage-intrigue which sends the whole genre off with a flourish.
The Druid is written and presented in an oddly ambivalent way. It is obviously a work of elegant fiction, but anyone who did not know Mr Mosley's resources and gifts of serious research could mistake it for unusually precise historical record. This is the result of interweaving into his ingeniously-contrived tale so many veri- fiable incidents and indentifiable characters, both famous and sometimes only known to a specialised few — Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, Caradoc Evans, multitudes of German operatives on the record — that the borderline between straight fiction and manipulated fact becomes shadowy. This is not criticism; it just makes The Druid a little hard to place and assess, though this should not matter in the least to anyone under middle age, who did not share this preposterous inter- national acrostic.
Whether it be embroidered fact or in- genious invention makes no difference to the narrative persuasion of the novel. If one might be allowed a friendly comment, Leonard Mosley takes up almost the first half of his book setting his historical scene before he brings his real people on stage, The theme is that British Intelligence claimed that every Nazi spy sent to Britain was captured, and either executed, im- prisoned, or turned round to work for the Allied side, feeding discreet misinformation to the enemy. But one of them, says Mr Mosley, evaded this process, this 'Druid'. 'Through sifting through old dossiers and tracking sources' — which I am sure does less than justice to Mr Mosley's gifts of in- vention — he has reconstructed the extraor- dinary career of this man of the SS, which already distrusted the traditional German espionage service the Abwehr, his parachuting into Wales, his alerting the Nazis to the Dieppe raid, and his failure to give the timely tip-off for D-Day.
It all makes for gripping stuff, and a lasting memorial to the days when spies were spies, and took their own considerable risks.
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