Book review: A Foreign Country

DON’T start Charles Cumming’s sixth novel close to bedtime: you are likely to be up for most of the night to find out how it ends. It grips the reader’s attention from the first page, and there is no skipping paragraphs. Every word matters.

Cumming’s publishers hail him as “the potential heir to John le Carré”, and certainly the Ayr-born Edinburgh University graduate has worked for MI6 (for a year before starting to write full-time).

But to suggest he follows in anyone else’s footsteps is unfair: he is entirely his own man with his own style.

Amelia Levene is about to become the first female head of MI6 when an event from her distant past catches up with her. She is likely to lose her job and MI6 its reputation. Thomas Kell, a disgraced former colleague, is recalled to solve the problem before there is a leak.

The story takes us to Tunis, Cairo, for a seemingly random murder, and Paris as well as rural England and in each place, the quality of description makes the reader feel present at the location as well as involved in the story. It builds up to an unexpected climax and, reassuringly, not everything is resolved as the cast might want. Too neat an ending can spoil a book.

Issues the novel raises still trouble the intelligence services. Kell struggles with his conscience over the torture of prisoners to obtain information which might save the lives of thousands of innocent citizens but which is legally and morally unacceptable.

The need to redeploy intelligence staff from Cold War commitments to the countries of the Arab Spring finds its place alongside the longstanding rivalry between the British and French intelligence services. It is all eminently plausible.

“Spying is waiting”, we are told, but reading this novel is certainly not a waiting game. It is a fast-moving treat.

• A FOREIGN COUNTRY

by Charles Cumming

Harper Collins, 350pp, £12.99