In "MI5 & Me" veteran fiction author, Bingham has written the prequel of her bestseller "Coronet Among the Weeds", and we discover how much – as an ostensibly guileless girlish narrator – she was actually holding back.
Cold war British counter-espionage was often cruel. Lottie’s friend Arabella explains, over a teacake in the canteen, that the service’s purpose is to make socialists’ lives “unmitigated hell. But in a very nice way, of course, because that is what we British do.”
This book is frivolous, but in refusing to take spooks seriously it may be as sensible as it is amusing. “You’re in danger of becoming a lightweight,” Lottie’s father tells her. Perhaps it’s cleverer to be light than it is to be ponderously paranoid. Some of what he himself does is in danger of becoming not only morally reprehensible, but plain daft.
read more here @ Sydney Morning Herald and @ The Telegraph
No comments:
Post a Comment