Authentic thriller reading - "Rip Tide" by Stella Rimington

I feel a connection with Stella Rimington. Her Mum used to live in the same street as my Mum, in a house to which I, as a boy, regularly delivered the village newsletter, though not, I think, at the time that the aforementioned mother lived there. That came later, and was surrounded by some wonderfully naive gossip about the special protection laid on by Britain's security services for the mother of the head of MI5. Well, this was pre-9/11 and not a lot happened (or indeed happens now) in this place, so it's entirely reasonable that the occasional unfamiliar car parked in the street should provoke a little flurry of excitement about "heightened security". 

So it was with a degree of somehow personal curiosity that, rather later, I noted the new career as novelist of Stella Rimington, who, for non-Brits, I will confirm was the first female head of the UK's domestic intelligence service, MI5, (and perhaps too - can anyone confirm? - its first publicly appointed head). I have to say it didn't seem quite right, either, that the most senior of spooks should turn to writing fiction about her professional world. After all, I was brought up on Cold War spy fiction, notably that of John Le Carré, where spies were stiff upper lip, stiff upper class, occasionally elegantly treacherous, but in all cases decidedly taciturn, certainly not the type to take you into the ladies loo at some ludicrously and inappropriately flashy London headquarters of MI5.

Was it this feeling which stopped me reading any of these books for so long, in spite of my mother-generated curiosity? Perhaps. But on a journey sometime, one of those nice airport editions ambushed me.

Perhaps a rather long prelude to actually describing this book, but there are two reasons for that. First, so you know about my spy-novel prejudices, which this novel disrupts, and, second, perhaps because I don't think I have an awful lot to say.

As I remarked in the previous review, this book suffered somewhat for being picked up literally straight after I finished an accomplished work by a major literary author. In terms of language, style, sheer writing, this was such an obvious downgrade that it felt vaguely embarrassing. Rimington isn't a bad writer, but she is clearly in that thriller writer's idiom which cannot really stand direct comparison with the work of a Julian Barnes. And that's not a problem, either. You pick up a thriller in order to be, well, thrilled, not to linger over delicious sentences.

So how does it work at that level? The story is a page turner, with an up-to-date Al-Qaeda enemy pitched against the combined forces of British, French and, to as small an extent as possible (given their gung-ho, bomb-their-asses proclivities) US security services.  The story is nicely told, with some nice sketches of the kind of intelligence types Rimington clearly finds (found) unbearable, and you do want to find out what comes next. It could hardly be described as an action thriller, for even though the SAS do get involved at one point, and a number of characters prematurely meet their maker, this is clearly not really Rimington's thing.

This is where the "authenticity" comes in. The story is really more procedural, the unravelling of a network through solid intelligence work, where the principal goodies are a diligent and devoted operative (the heroine Liz Carlisle), a smart, slightly bookwormy back office researcher called (I think) Peggy, a smart French spy, Martin Seurat, who loves Liz but respects her devotion to her career (yes) and a plucky Pakistani girl who knows right from wrong. James Bond it ain't.

As I said, it's nonetheless a highly readable, plot-driven story. The trouble is that this reader didn't actually care too much about any of the characters. Though I am to some extent reassured to think that my safety is in the hands of devoted competent people like Liz Carlisle, that doesn't mean I find her particularly interesting as a fictional character, or care much either about her delight at hooking up with Martin Seurat or then her worries that she might face a choice between him and the job (she doesn't - he politely spares her the choice). 

On the other hand, I did like the other side of the authenticity, the sense of picking up some of the entirely plausible atmosphere inside MI5 - not George Smiley anymore, more the altogether more contemporary feel of, say, a high-powered university administration: some good hard-working people, some time-servers, endemic small-scale turf wars, frequent over-long meetings, train journeys to provincial towns, keeping a lid on expenses, and so on. And then the glimpses of Rimington's own prejudices: as mentioned, the regrettably out-for-no.1 types and those shoot-first-ask-questions-later Americans who, however, are "often much sharper than you might think from their manner". I guess Rimington is mainly targeting the UK market…

That's it really. Slight, readable, missable, but with its moments. Up to you.

Liz Carlisle: we're safe in her hands