The Persian - David McCloskey

 Having found my way to McCloskey via The Seventh Floor (reviewed very recently below), I was made up to find The Persian in my local library.   I mean, how of-the-moment is it possible to get?   And that, I'm afraid, was the problem.   Israelis and Iranian false flag ops - it's too painfully of the moment - the only element lacking is a demented and corrupr US President blackmailed into participating (but who would dream that up?).   There can be no question about McCloskey's skill as a writer but I couldn't engage with this at all.   My fault, not his.

One problem for me, technically, was the lack of a major player I could identify with.   I don't care about the 'hero' Kam Esfahani, a failed Iranian-Swedish-Jewish dentist who gets drawn into Mossad black ops whose story is being extracted under duress by his Iranian captors.   Perhaps if we'd been shown more of what breaks him ...   The core of his story, which should I suspect is meant to make us empathise with him - is his affair with Roya Shabani, the widow of an Iranian scientist who Kam helped assassinate.   Kam rather cynically seduces her and turns her into a double agent but he still has feelings for her.   It's plausible, I suppose - Stockholm Syndrome and all that - but I just don't buy it on an emotional level.   At the end of the day what we have here is a weak momma's boy and a woman victimised by two mysogynistic theocracies.

For me the most captivating character here is the Mossad action man Arik Glitzman.   His motivation, by the end, we can absolutely identify with, and I would love to see him reappear in a future McCloskey novel.   The action sequences are superbly executed, the fieldcraft, as in The Seventh Floor, completely convincing.   McCloskey, in my view, is now 100% the most significant US writer of contemporary spy fiction.    

The Seventh Floor - David McCloskey

 The critics hail the new le Carre ... and, for once, they're right.  Strictly speaking, at the heart of The Seventh Floor is the old le Carre, as McCloskey freely admits in the acknowledgements at the end.   He takes the essential element of the great Smiley double-tap and, incredibly, makes them better.   No mean feat for only his third novel.

It's the hunt for a suspected mole inside the CIA.   Artemis Proctor is forced out of the Agency after twenty-five years by the incoming directorate.  She finds work wrestling alligators at her cousin's theme park in Florida.  Yes, Proctor is very different from George Smiley; but like him she cannot give up on spycraft.   She knows that any mole has to be one of her own tightknit group in the Russian unit.   Also, one of her team, Sam Joseph, has been taken and tortured by the Russians, having been betrayed by the mole.   On his release (and subsequent retirement) Proctor and Joseph team up to investigate.

To say much more about the plot risks giving too much away.   Suffice to say it is clever, twisty and thoroughly thought through.   I would like to talk about McCloskey's skill as a writer.   His characters are complex and deep.   They all have lives, of a sort, outside spying.   Artemis Proctor is a powerhouse, all the cliches of a debased Bond crammed into a tangle-haired Amazon barely five feet tall.   McCloskey also gives us the Russian side - better-mannered but more ruthless and both willing and able to play the long game.   McCloskey's prose is refined, his dialogue spot-on. 

It came to the denousement and I thought, Wait, there's forty or more pages still to go.   And I thought, oh no, McCloskey's plodding through what happened next, tying up all the loose ends.   Well, I tried to reassure myself, it could be worse.   It could have been a taster from the next in the series...   How wrong I was.   McCloskey was playing with me like a cat with a fatally injured bird.   Yes, ends were tied up.  But what a twist!   Absolutely brilliant.

On the front cover General David Petraeus calls McCloskey "The best contemporary spy novelist", and I'm not inclined to argue wit  h the US commander in Iraq and Afghanistan whose retirement job was as CIA Director.  In other words, the man with the office on the seventh floor at Langley.