Tightrope - Simon Mawer

 My first encounter with Simon Mawer's fiction.   It should have been sooner, given the awards he has been nominated for.   It won't be the last.

It took a couple of dozen pages to realize that, as it says on the cover, this is 'literary espionage.'   In Mawer's case it means an extremely high literary ability with plotting and depth that comes very close to le Carre at his best.   For one thing, he is telling his story on two levels: the story of Marian Sutro, who was recruited by the SOE in World War II, and parachuted into France to extract a French scientist needed to work on the A-bomb.   Marian chooses not to accompany the scientist on the flight out.   Instead she is captured by the Nazis on a railway platform, tortured and sent to Ravensbruck concentration camp.   She survives, returns to England and spends part of her recovery with an Englih family, becoming a source of fascination to their young son Sam.   The second story is that of Sam as he investigates Marian's story, becoming personally involved in it, and ultimately tracking her down in her old age.

Marian has become bored after the war and is re-recruited by the same man who originally took her in to the SOE.  Now he is operating for an unspecified service.   Marian's task is now to persuade her Russian lover to defect.   He, meantime, reluctantly recruits her for Russia.   The Russians have kompromat on her brother, physicist Ned, and his illegal gay practices.

That gives a flavour of how complex and many-layered the plot is.   Mawer also skips back and forth in time, though we never lose track of where and when we are.   The characterisation is simply stupendous.   Marian is very much the star, the object of everyone else's fascination.   She retains her allure and mystery to the end.   Even Sam cannot get to the inner essentials of her psyche.

Impressive - and a great read.

The Brothel in Rosenstrasse - Michael Moorcock

 In 1897 Ricky and Alexandra are staying at a luxury hotel in Mirenburg.   Alexandra is sixteen, Ricky twice her age.   Ricky is one of several Counts von Bek, not the important one, but a wealthy adventurer.   He and Alexandra have exhausted the permutations of sex and Alexandra in particular is keen to try something new.   So Ricky takes her to Frau Schmetterling's internationally renowned brothel in Rosenstrasse where he himself was educated in sexual matters.   They indulge.

Meantime the prospect of war hangs over this enclave of Mittel Europe.   Wedged between three mighty imperial powers, Russia, Germany and Austria, Waldenstein has remained proudly independent but disgraced politician Holzhammer has done a deal with the Austrians.   Soon Mirenburg is under siege.   The hotel is hit by a cannonball.   Ricky and Alexander become residents of the brothel in Rosenstrasse.   For a time they are safe - Frau Schmetterling's girls have after all served the senior officers on all sides - but Ricky fears he is losing Alexandra to a houseful of lesbians (all of whom he has had sex with in the past, or hopes to soon).   He starts to plan his escape.

This is very different from the usual Moorcock.   Ricky is a von Eck but he is not a Champion, far from it.   There is a stream punk element here - balloonists, etc - but nothing far-fetched or in any way fantastical.   The fantasy here is Mireburg which, despite the minute detail served up, including extracts from books of the period, is wholly 100% imaginary.   The other fantasy element is, obviously, sexual fantasy, in particular lesbianism and, in Ricky's case, paedophilia.   Alexandra is by no means his youngest; he goes into fond reminiscence about a younger girl whose virginity he bought from her disabled father in Naples.

Indeed, the book is Ricky's memoir, written on the eve of World War II, somewhere warm.  The text is peppered with interruptions from his manservant-nurse Papadakis, who also has his secrets, it seems, though they are only hinted at.

Written in 1992 this is Moorcock's take on the decadent fin de siecle literature of the 19th century.   Some of the material here is pretty hardcore but the brilliance of Moorcock's writing just about accommodates it.

The Hollow Man - Oliver Harris

 The Hollow Man is the first of Harris's Nick Belsey series.   Belsey is already deep in trouble when we meet him.   He's up in front of Internal Inquiries and knows it's only a matter of time before he's sacked.   He's basically filling in time when he gets the call about a missing person in The Bishops Avenue, one of select Hampstead's most exclusive addresses.

The misper is a reclusive Russian oligarch called Devereux.   Even the maid has never set eyes on him.   So Belsey does what we'd all do under the circumstances.   He moves in and starts taking over Devereux's home, belongings and identity.   If he can parlay the latter into, say, a hundred grand, he can quit Britain for somewhere warmer, with no extradition treaty.

But then a sniper assassinates an eighteen year-old girl in a local Starbucks, right in front of Belsey, who remains a good enough cop not to let such things pass.   He gets drawn deeper when he realizes that the girl was an escort claiming to be in love with Devereux.   There's also the complication that Belsey has found Devereux sitting in his own safe room at the house with his throat slashed open.

Belsey digs and uncovers conspiracies and cons involving international high finance, high stakes gambling in highly unusual locations, and high level corruption in the City Council.   It's complicated, gripping, and occasionally comical.   The characters leap off the page.   The pace is incredible - and I'm reasonably sure this was Harris's debut.   I've read the third Belsey novel and also the first of Harris's spy novels.   He is different and extremely good.   Thriller is a term used too easily.   Oliver Harris is one of the few actually writing them right now.

Outbreak - Frank Gardner

 Frank Gardner writes top quality spy fiction.  Of course, he has the advantage of twenty years as the BBC's security correspondence, and we all know how he was shot and left in a wheelchair by terrorists in Saudi.   He knows how these things work.   Unlike most novelists, he knows how it feels to be shot.   All of these advantages are deployed in Outbreak, his third Luke Carlton thriller.

It's 2021, in the immediate aftermath of the Covid pandemic.   In Norway British researchers have to seek shelter from the storm and stumble upon a man with a terrible disease.   One scientist realizes she must be infected and stays with the dying man.   One of her colleagues tries to stay outside, the other runs for it.   Luke's first task is to oversee the extraction and track down the runaway.

In fact, all three have been infected.   The scientist who tried to stay outside initially checks clear and is repatriated, thus bringing the contagion into the UK.   It is fatal, incurable, and has been genetically engineered.   The obvious suspects are the Russians - the shed in which the first victim was found is near a Russian mining colony.   There are the usual stiff diplomatic exchanges - this is, after all, in the immediate aftermath of the Salisbury poisonings.   Some of the chemicals involved trace to a factory in Lithuania.   Luke is sent in with expert Jenny Li.

The people at the factory are definitely involved - but maybe the Russians aren't.   They offer to work with SIS.   General Petrov is tasked with finding out who leaked the tech required.   Luke and Jenny are invited to assist and observe.   Meanwhile, in England, people are definitely preparing some sort of bio attack.   Meanwhile, problems loom in Luke's private life.   His girlfriend Elise is pregnant but a little calendar work proves that Luke cannot be the father,

This is a good twist, the sort of twist that I wanted when I read the first Luke Carlton thriller, Crisis, back in 2017.   It's reviewed on this blog.   I enjoyed it but found a few minor faults.   Insufficient in-depth characterisation was one of them.  Gardner has come on since then.   I found no faults in Outbreak.   It's a first class thriller and highly recommended.

Empty Space - M John Harrison

 Spanning time, space and planes of existence, Empty Space is just breathtaking in conception.   It may well continue stories from earlier books - Nova Swing is the name of the beat-up spaceship owned and run by Fat Antoyne and his two shipmates, and also the title of the Harrison novel immediately before this.   It doesn't matter.   Everything we need to know is here.

On what we might call the terrestrial, twenty-first century plane, Anna Waterman is a widow in her late fifties or early sixties, living in a prosperous village on the fringes of London.   After two unsatisfactory marriages Anna has rather lost her way in life.   At her daughter Marnie's insistence she is grudgingly seeing a London psychiatrist.   Half the time Anna doesn't show up or forgets.   Marnie fears the onset of dementia.   Anna, however, is mapping out a future for herself.   It isn't easy.   Her summerhouse keeps setting on fire without being burnt, and there are copper-coloured poppies in her garden.

About as far away from this as it is possible to get, on the scrubby minor planets of the Kefahucki Tract, Toni Reno wants Fat Antoyne to collect and transport what can only be called mortsafes.   This being the far distant future, the mortsafes are self-aware.   Meanwhile an assistant investigator in Saudade City is called to a troubling death.   The victim is suspended in mid-air, as if falling in empty space.   Toni Reno soon becomes another victim, and the chop-shop proprietor who artificially enhanced (tailored) the nameless assistant.  They may not actually be dead, but they are certainly fading away, literally.

One of the mortsafes might possibly contain the Aleph.   The Aleph may be someone we have already met.

Harrison's skill in handling all the strands and bringing them together at the end is just staggering.   I was swept along throughout, totally engrossed.