A black American woman with young twin sons successfully defends her family against an attempt to kill them by a night intruder. Feeling to her mother's farm in Martinique, she starts to recall the events that led up to this point: her frustrating career as an FBI agent leading to her recruitment as an intelligence agent targeting Thomas Sankara (a real figure), president of Burkina Faso.
This is a classic espionage novel, set at the height of the Cold War, and structured like a normal thriller. But its emphasis on the everyday practices of the intelligence agents, on the humdrum details of the bureaucracies and the shabby morals of those who work in the service, reads much more like a John Le Carre spy novel (such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold) and even more like a Graham Greene (I was repeatedly reminded of The Quiet American) than anything with James Bond or Jason Bourne.
But I felt it didn't quite succeed like those two classics did. The characters didn't convince me. I suppose the narrator-protagonist was supposed to be an American Mom whose over-riding concern was the defence of her children but the ease with which she killed in the first few pages, her lack of guilt, and the lack of reaction from the authorities rather undermined her later moral qualms.
I found this book was an uncomfortable chimaera: half classic all-action thriller, half world-weary novel.
Selected quotes:
- "I'm so glad to be your mother, and for the most part I enjoyed being pregnant with you. But the endgame could've used some improvement." (Ch 1)
- "If there are regional variations in speech, I think it stands to reason that they also exist in handwriting." (Ch 2)
- "Recruiting and running informants was about cultivating their trust. To do that I found it worked best to lie frequently to them." (Ch 2)
- "My mother and I have always innately understood the best ways to irritate each other." (Ch 10)
January 2022; 287 pages
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