
After all the Serious Literature I’ve been reading lately, I thought I’d reward my brain with some literary fast food in the form of a classic spy thriller. I should have been more careful what I wished for. The gentility of the main characters combined with the looseness of the structure somehow makes the suspension of disbelief utterly unattainable; I don’t think it’s any more preposterous than most spy novels, but evidently it’s easier to believe in a highly trained killing machine with amnesia being hunted by various hostile governments than to believe that a person wanted by the police traipsing through the Scottish moors could encounter quite as many benevolent strangers as populate this book.
Well, I guess it was a simpler time. A simpler, more casually racist time in which white men could roam the countryside having benign adventures, entirely unmolested by people with dark skin or vaginas (or, heaven forbid, both). Things I forgive other, more tightly-plotted novels were all begrudged in this one. It’s mercifully short, in part because of the unexpected suddenness of the ending, but it does, at least, move pretty smartly along from start to finish.