Penguin paperback edition - 2023
This is the second novel my daughter gave me for my birthday in June and I saved it for holiday reading in Spain. To use an old-fashioned term, it is a bit of a blockbuster, running as it does to 575 pages, with a further five devoted to its source material. Even the author calls it a monumental project. However, I found it an 'easy read', in that the style was fluent with an excellent narrative drive to it. I am not surprised the author studied English at Durham University and Merton College, Oxford. The list of brief (extracted) comments on the covers of the paperback were uniformly (and inevitably) positive - Hugely impressive and compelling: William Boyd; A breathtaking thriller. A classic in the making: Peter James; A shot in the arm for thriller fans: The Times (in fact it was that paper's 'Thriller of the Year' in 2023) - but I totally concur.
Max Archer, Associate Professor of Intelligence History at the London School of Economics (BA MPhil Cantab, PhD Harvard), is sent an old-fashioned calling card, like a prop from a period drama, to go to a house in Holland Park. It is in the name of Scarlet King. She was a legendary, almost mythical name in the intelligence community. Once upon a time, she'd been the top Russian expert at MI6 and even lined up to be the first female Chief. There was no public photograph of her...she was that tantalizing thing for all intelligence historians: a real-life ghost. He is met at the door by a petite woman of indeterminate age - thirtyish, perhaps, though with an older, weathered air about her. Even though Max had been told to Dry-clean thoroughly, and he had glanced into shop windows, doubled back and turned suddenly into side streets, he had failed to spot the A4 watchers on the top floor of the stuccoed house opposite. The watchers uploaded photos of Max, cross-referenced his facial features against MI5's internal database, confirmed the target name with Thames House and vacated the property. Operation Tempest was officially in motion.
Max is ushered into a sitting room, where there was a large flat-screen, iPads and laptops strewn around, the detritus of the twenty-first century. Then a small, elderly figure sitting in the middle of it all. Scarlet King looked like an anomaly in a high-backed chair by the coffee table, a leftover from a previous century. Thus begins an enthralling tale, which cross references between 1946, 1964, 1992 and 2010. It is the story of treachery, blackmail, spying and other nefarious practices and involves both fictitious and real-life people. Scarlet 'interviews' Max - her voice was stronger than he predicted...she smiled now. It was a spymaster's smile. The smile charmed while exploiting It had a venomous sincerity, like a weapon, teasing out secrets. Fe were ever fully immune.
Scarlet soon reveals that she knows all of Max's 'secrets' - his childless marriage; his wife getting a divorce to marry her lover, whose baby she is carrying; his treadmill existence marking undergraduate essays while earning less than most of his former students; and the fact that he failed to become a spy himself still rankling. Scarlet hands him some scans of a diary or notebook - it is her Memoir, which breaks the Official Secrets Act. She wants Max to publish it: Welcome to the secret world. Do you roll the dice or do you walk away? Is this gold dust or chicken-feed? She also tells Max that she has been a double-agent, spying for her actual homeland. Her real name is Colonel Anastasia Chekova and she worked for the NKVD as a so-called illegal operating within the British Empire. As another character says later in the book, She makes the Cambridge Five look like schoolboys. The reader is only on page 24 of a 573 page novel, but the rest of the story, with its twists and turns, its time travel over 60 years, stems from this. Max manages to stay (just) a step ahead of the British spy service - thanks to the help of the petite woman of indeterminate age, who turns out to be a skilful Israeli agent. On the way, the story takes in the real life Kim Philby as well as Gordon Lonsdale (Konon Moldy); Sir Anthony Blunt (Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures); Anatoliy Golitsyn, Oleg Gordievsky, Sergei Skripal, Maurice Oldfield, and the U.S. traitor, Aldrich Ames.
One interesting fictitious figure is Scarlet's 'aunt', Maria Kazakova, a White Russian who sought refuge in England after the Revolution. She taught at Oxford for most of her life. More patriotic than the British. In fact, she is Scarlet's 'handler' and responsible for recruiting others to spy against the British.
So, Miss Scarlet King of Baker Street and the Secret Intelligence Service was really Colonel Anastasia Chekova of Directorate S of the KGB. Or was she? There are two huge 'twists' at the very end of the novel, neither of which I saw coming, and I am not going to reveal them! Matthew Richardson holds the reader's attention throughout, through all the twists and turns. Max was tasked with discovering the 'truth'. But what was the truth?
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