There are two things to note right away about I.S. Berry’s debut spy novel, The Peacock and the Sparrow. One is Ms. Berry’s credentials: her six years as an operative for the CIA and prior to that, impressive academic credentials—graduation from an elite women’s college (Haverford) and the University of Virginia Law School. Impressive that the CIA can still recruit people like that, two decades on from the intake inspired by the 9/11 attacks. But, of course, Ms. Berry didn’t stay with the Agency. Maybe she was always an aspiring novelist. Maybe, and there are lots of hints of this in the novel, she just didn’t like the spy game.
The other thing that is instantly striking is the six pages of encomiums (excerpted) about the novel that greets the reader when you open the book.
Lots of eminent people liked the novel, I guess. As a long-time reader of spy novels, mostly from the British side of the genre, I didn’t.
There is a certain style of American spy novel that The Peacock and the Sparrow, emulates. Call it the hard-boiled, spy noir. Characteristic features are dissipated, over-the-hill spies, corrupt officials, lots of action, romance angles that never work out, twisty plots. If this sounds like your game, the Berry novel is for you. It has it all. The central protagonist, Shane Collins (plus cover-names) is a CIA Middle East expert on his last posting before alcohol gets to his liver, but hey, he still has his street-smarts. There is a venal, stuffed-shirt US Admiral; a too-young, insubstantial CIA station chief on a fast track to success (who doesn’t get there). There are portraits of piteous wives of spies (I suppose Berry came across lots of those); and a mysterious Bahraini woman artist who Collins has an ill-fated affair with and who turns up at the end of the novel as a suicide bomber. Much less interesting than her mosaic creations. There are tons of tradecraft, knowing in the beginning, but which eventually fades to boring. And yes, a twisty plot. Berry’s narrative resembles a crazy surveillance run, in which she drags the reader through a long, tortuous path to throw us all off the plot—and disappears into the encomiums. Oh yes, the novel is set in a very dusty and depressing Gulf kingdom, Bahrain, whose rulers will end up badly at the hands of an Arab spring uprising, that itself quickly turns nasty and fundamentalist.
This is a downer of a book review, I appreciate. My real reason for writing, is just to briefly ponder the mystery of different national styles behind the spy novel (there is, no surprise, no Canadian style, and hardly any Canadian spy novels).
What is missing in the American hard-boiled spy novel? What is, by contrast, present in the British spy novel, which gave birth to this very popular genre?
The short answer is, I think—Machiavelli. The best of the British tradition (John le Carre, Graham Green, Somerset Maugham et al) has a knowing way of conveying a world of spying that operates beneath the pavement of politics, is consequential, yet devious in its ways and means. Creating such a Machiavellian world, in which ends-means calculations dominate in the spy bureaucracy, also means creating a complicated moral environment which presses at the souls of its street-wise operatives and even its masterminds, sometimes creating traitors out of loyal servants of the state, sometimes just destroying souls. If you haven’t read Le Carre’s The Spy who Came in from the Cold, it exemplifies the quintessence of the British spy novel (forget Ian Fleming).
I miss this in American hard-boiled spy fiction. The spies turn into action automatons, the spy masters are missing in action. I couldn’t care a fig about any of them. Nowhere is there a hint of The Prince. The only moral dilemma is just how rotten the enterprise might turn to be. Nothing in the US genre that suggests the spy novel’s mission as a hidden text of global politics. But lots to suggest a possible screen-play.
On the Canadian side, I would note the two CSE novels by former Canadian intelligence community Rhiannon Beaubien.
I find American spy novels to be excessively cliched storytelling, better suited for Netflix screenwriting.