Hubris and mayhem
Nicholas Richardson
The Warsaw Document Adam Hall (Heinemann £2.00) The Blind Side Francis Clifford (Hodder and Stoughton £1.50) Somewhere in England Reg GadneY (Heinemann £1.75)
Counter-espionage is a confused and chiaroscuro world. One way of bringing this over in fiction is sheer pace. Keel) them running (there is an awful lot of mileage in most thrillers, their equivalent to Chandler's Law) and the moonstruck reader will limp along behind. Another Is the use of a deliberately elliptical style, lots of trompe l'oeil designed to reflect the milieu described but also to mask the fundamental implausibility of the whole thing. You get to Narnia through 3 cupboard — that is fantasy — but Zenda means changing trains at the Charlottenberg so that looks like fact. Adam Hall Is an old hand at the palpably obscure, but in The Warsaw Document the narrative confusion is less a disciplined attempt te mirror the complexity of his subject than the result of a set of indecently crude stylistic devices — parataxis and the misuse of personal pronouns — and the obtrusion of an extraordinary mass of gratuitous detail.
And add to this the scientific jargon: the neologisms, place-feel, brain-thinhi mission-feel; the remorseless Baedeker of Warsaw, whole pages on the lines of "the coach dropped him at the Orbis office In Ulica Krucza and I stayed in the Fiat, letting him cross Mokolowska ,"; and such an accretion dazes more than convinces. Perhaps there would be some hope if only Quiller himself were credible: but the helmet's empty, he never was much of a character, and now he is a cliche, the hard-boiled loner with the soft' centre. Then, he never really has a chance. Like the notorious college president, he blends so well with his environment that sometimes it is difficult to tell quite which is Quiller and which the environment. Mr Hall affects the didactic, Mr Clifford the portentous. Two brothers, one a former Air Force officer now serving as a priest In Biafra, the other a serving naval officer Who became a spy in Korea; the recurrent use of words like compassion, betrayal, love, trust, despair; dearest Ma dying in the home she had made hell for her family; and one is all prepared for the wet towels in the dormitory after dark, the cockroach under the toothglass. But The Blind Side is not this kind of entertainment. Indeed not Much of an entertainment at all — like its Predecessors, it suffers from ideas above its station. So long as the focus is on the action it reads easily enough, but increasingly the narrative stalls on suggestions of moral and even philosoPhical overtones that are never sufficiently explicit, and an alternating interdependence and antithesis between the two brothers that is never properly worked out. The best things are the cameos: the rescue flight to the priest's beleaguered Village in Biafra, and the Russian diplomat, acting as the spy's contact, who is struck by lightning on a suburban golf course While carrying compromising documents. Even here, a comparative newcomer like Reg Gadney does it better. His second thriller, Somewhere in England, is an enjoyable piece of implausibility, a succession of scenes rather than a sustained narrative. David Peto is working fln a PhD whose subject is the Nazi organisation of extermination camps. He does this comfortably ensconced in a country house on the East Coast, checking a private collection of documentary film and enjoying the use both of his employer's Porsche and, ultimately, secretary. Such hubris necessarily attracts mayhem. Peto becomes a key figure in the hunt for a Nazi war criminal, G, whose identity and appearance can be proved Only from a section of the film on which Peto is working. Spurred on by a sudden death and the sack, Peto — in the best tradition — starts running (not just to get his tail out of trouble but, equally traditionally, to find things out), stalked by a variety of ambiguous but invariably unpleasant persons; notably that association of Nazi old-boys, the ODESSA network, who aim to get G out of his Present hiding-place in England.
This outline may imply more tension than actually exists. There are bravura touches, in particular a magnificent episode in the Imperial War Museum (although Mr Gadney unfortunately tromps his own ace by adding a chase over and through Waterloo), the appropriate hints of offbeat sex, a continuous level of neatly cooled violence and an engagingly astringent style. The difficulty is less the Way the narrative tends to go slack between crises, than the central figure. Peto Is a somewhat mollusc-like creation (although not indestructible: the Museum has recently been advertising for what looks very much like his successor). More nnportant, he seems to keep his innocence to the end, in spite of being fairly tolerably crunched, and few authors (Daisy Ashford excepted) manage to make this kind of Permanently bouche-bee character real. Still, if it is cold comfort for Mr Gadney if I suggest that Somewhere in England may never see the screen, as The Warsaw bocument surely will, there must be some consolation for a novelist in providing something better than the book of the film.
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