Spies and Other Gods by James Wolff: When spooks get spooked by self-doubt

Famously, where Ian Fleming glamorised spies, John Le Carré placed his former spook colleagues in more lifelike circumstances, making them grimmer, grubbier and more mortal. Many, though, sought also to be moral, struggling Greene-like with personal fallibility, compromise, great power politics and the search for good deeds in a naughty world. But these figures, as with Fleming, were all about heroics — fighting the good fight, usually against communism/totalitarianism. Smiley, after all, was based in part on a vicar.

There is rather less room for righteousness in James Wolff’s latest thriller, Spies and Other Gods. In Le Carré, the characters just are spies: it is what they get up to in that role that exercises him. But Wolff is just as interested in why people become spies and what it does to them. Exhibit A is Sir William Rentoul, chief of an unnamed intelligence outfit whose brain is going — or is it? — and who awards himself a last fling out “in the field” (a term no spy ever uses, Wolff tells us). Rentoul realises that a life of deceiving and manufacturing uncertainty has shut out many of those closest to him, including his recently deceased wife (much missed, notwithstanding his infidelities).

“It’s remarkable that this thought has never before occurred to him,” writes Wolff, “that secrecy might have driven his wife away, or at least kept her at a distance, created a cavity wall between them stuffed with operations that didn’t quite come off, old files no one’s going to revisit, the half-dozen or so alias identities that he used in the field. No wonder they couldn’t feel each other’s warmth.” It’s a more benign version of the disillusion of failed spooks in Mick Herron’s Slough House.

What’s more, senior folk like Rentoul aren’t appreciated as they used to be. “He’d once imagined he would depart with a fanfare: a reception at Downing Street, tea with the king, a party for key global allies. The Americans would no doubt fly him over to Washington for something.” Imagine Donald Trump wasting his ballroom’s money-making opportunities on that. Nowadays a text message does the job.

But it’s not all crusty old men living in the past. In keeping with the times, Wolff’s women are far more convincing than Fleming’s and Le Carré’s, more on a par with Herron’s. They have pivotal roles, for one thing, and bring further realism and intrigue to the plot, which is right up to the minute, about the search for Caspian (sorry, CASPIAN, in spook-speak), a hitman who tours Europe murdering Iranian dissidents.

Zak, a young Birmingham-based dentist tangentially connected to the killer, agrees to help with the search, believing he will find excitement and meaning to enliven his humdrum, druggy life.

Wolff conveys a world of expedience, uncertainty, default mendacity and motive-mongering with economy, deftness and wit. Potential sources have to be approached using aliases and with enough stealth to avoid a commotion, so that their secrets “slide out sideways like wooden blocks”. Elsewhere, the narrator — a ghostly, all-seeing figure who refreshingly breaks fiction’s point-of-view rules — observes: “Sometimes there’s smoke because there’s fire, sometimes it’s a piece of bread stuck in a toaster.”

You fancy Wolff, an ex-spy writing under a pseudonym, struggled with life’s Big Questions when he was in service. There is even a glimpse of that healthy self-doubt when, having lampooned the clunky style of a “former intelligence officer” turned novelist, he writes: “Anyone who chooses writing spy novels over spying itself can’t have been much good in the first place.”

Another character says: “We assume that God and spies have our best interests at heart but the evidence so far is mixed. You both work according to some sort of ethical yardstick that permits waterboarding and dead babies.”

Wolff’s next book will be about the overlap between espionage and journalism. I can’t wait.