Spies and Other Gods - James Wolff

 James Wolff is the pseudonym of a British spy turned novelist.   Spies and Other Gods is his fourth novel, and a first for me.   It is a comic spy novel, similar to Mick Herron's Slough House series, but also very different.   Herron is character-based, Wolff more a dig at the spy system itself.   The tone is elevated, almost like le Carre or Greene.   The characters are Upper Middle Class, even the Middle Eastern ones.

The most startling aspect is the amorphous, unidentified narrator who watches everything unfold from a godlike vantage.   Is it someone who oversees British Intelligence?   Is it in fact a god?   Or is it the Secret Service itself.   It makes judgments, passes comments by the bucketful, but does not deliver either censure or punishment.   And it works remarkably well.

The story itself is driven by MI6 wanting to recruit a youngish Iranian man whose uncle is thought to be a hitman employed by the Revolutionary Guard who has taken out several British agents and assets.   One ploy has been to try and recruit the target, Ali, through a Syrian whose family he used to stay with as a child.   The Syrian, Zaki, is now a failing dentist in Birmingham.

The Service, meanwhile, has tried to impress the government oversight committee by setting up a hotline for whistleblowers.   To their immense disgust, someone has complained about the Ali project.   The committee naturally has to get involved and send in their newly recruited researcher Aphra McQueen, a Scottish academic.   The Head of Service, Sir William Rentoul, is more concerned with finding out who had the gall to complain?   First, he has to be reassured that everything has been done by the book, or, if not then properly covered up.   Aphra McQueen, at all costs, cannot be allowed to uphold the complaint.

So they clumsily plant a top secret file in her bag and call in Special Branch.   They have underestimated their antagonist.   Aphra heads straight to Birmingham, recruits Zaki to her cause, and heads for Paris, where Ali lives.   Sir William, who is dreading retirement and worried he's developing dementia, seizes the opportunity for one last field operation.   He too heads for Paris, with the agents who have been working on Ali, Ned and the other chap whose name nobody can remember.

The action gets heated and sometimes properly farcical.   Nobody really knows what the other's agenda really is.   Some flourish under pressure, others crumble entirely.   By the end there is only one player whose agenda hasn't been revealed.  Wolff reveals it with a flourish.   A really good one.

I was absolutely fascinated from Page One.   This absolutely is my cup of tea.   Like Herron in the early novels (though let me stress, he remains extremely good) only rarified.   Tone is very much Wolff's friend.   I will be reading the other three and looking out for the fifth. 

After Dark - Haruki Murakami

 I hadn'r come across this short novel by Murakami before.   I'm very glad I did.   Firstly, of course, I like short novels and some of Murakami's others have been needlessly long.   Secondly, Murakami really embraces the possibilities of brevity in After Dark.

It's the middle of the night.   Ordinary citizens are in bed.   Those still out and about have a reason to be so.   Mari is a student who doesn't sleep much.   This is because her older sister Eri is asleep all the time and has been for months.   No one knows why.   She must be awake some of the time because she eats and looks after her personal hygiene, though nobody sees her do so.   Mari is in Denny's restaurant when she is approached by Tetsya Takahashi.   Takahashi is out and about because he plays trombone in a jazz band and night is only time they can practice.   Takahashi approaches Mari because he recognises her.   A couple of years ago he was on some sort of date with Eri and Mati tagged along.

Eri is now, as we know, asleep.   We watch her sleeping.   Murakami does this as if we are watching through a surveillance camera.   The TV is on in Eri's room.   There is interference on the TV.   It interferes with an image of a man in a chair, whose face is hidden, who appears to be watching Eri sleep.   Or is he actually in the room?   Later, Eri is the one who is on the TV.   In the other place or dimension she is awake.   She can see the man in the chair in her bedroom.   She goes out through a door in wherever it is the TV is broadcasting from.   Which somehow leads her back into her room and bed and sleep.

Back in Denny's Takahashi has gone.  Kaoru takes his place across from Mari.   In fact Takahashi has sent Kaoru to find Mari because Mari is fluent in Chinese and there is a Chinese prostitute who has been stripped and beaten at the love hotel, the Alphaville, which Kaoru manages.   The man who abused her is Shirakawa, who works the night shift at his firm fixing any IT problems.   Then he goes home and watches TV as dawn breaks and the novel ends.

It is all beautifully done.   I enjoyed After Dark as much as I enjoyed1Q84.   Strongly recommended.

Into the London Fog - Elizabeth Durnley (ed)

 Eerie Tales From the Weird City, the subtitle claims.   They're not particularly eerie and there's barely any fog.   Of the few stories that do qualify - E F Benson's 'The Chippendale Mirror' is by far the best, though I was surprised at how well Marie Belloc Lowndes' 'The Lodger' stands up, at least in the shorter form included here.   Arthur Machen's 'N' is, of course, the masterpiece of weird London, but it's more psychogeography and the whole point is that the key site is outside the turn-of-the-century city in suburban Stoke Newington.

What Elizabeth Dearden has actually compiled for the British Library series is a number of sideways glances at London between the reign of William IV (Spring-Heeled Jack) and the 1950s (the Windrush Generation).   Neither Virginia Woolf nor Sam Selvon write weird fiction but I was fascinated by Woolf's 'Street Haunting' and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Burke's description of Soho during World War I.   For me the best piece of writing, and the most successful short story, was 'The Demon Lover' by Elizabeth Bowen, which is set against a background of the Second World War.  It epitomises the 'abnormal everyday' and possesses a genuine frisson.