Life must be filled up

I picked this up at a jumble sale, with several other ‘read and then give away’ books. The premise is one common to spy and thriller stories: innocent people get caught up in international intrigue. In this case it’s a young couple, he a don and she a barrister. They’re holidaying on Antigua when a Russian money launderer approaches them to arrange his resettlement in England in return for information. Anyone with any sense would of course run a mile, or at least get the next plane back home, but then there’d be no story. Once they’ve contacted the right people in England, Perry and Gail are in it up to their necks. The willingness of people in the Service to put the lives of others at risk is mind boggling. It reminds me of Peter Cook in the famous sketch from Beyond the Fringe: ‘Goodbye, Perkins. Don’t come back.’

This sorry tale of corrupt Western politicians, bankers, lawyers and EU officials colluding with Russian oligarchs and criminal gangs ought to be shocking, yet somehow isn’t. We know all this stuff, although we pretend we don’t. As long as we own houses, have money in a bank and a pension fund, we’re all complicit and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. I found the book sadly lacking in tension, rather boring in fact, and I think A Most Wanted Man was better.

In contrast, the book by Helen MacInnes which I read most recently, Prelude to Terror (1978) was gripping. It’s a cold war thriller set in Vienna, which also features chases, mountain hideouts and how to throw a pursuer off your trail. Robert Goddard is another author who keeps you turning the pages faster and faster. It seems unfair that these writers, although popular, aren’t taken seriously, whereas le Carré gets proper reviews and each new book is hailed as ‘masterly’.

First, a word of hope for all those who, like me, are forever moaning about how hard it is to find old books these days. I picked up this very nice copy of The Dangerous Islands at the weekend for 50p. This is my reward for always being on the lookout. I now find it’s rather a scarce title, which makes it an even more pleasing find.

There’s a bibliography of Ann Bridge’s books on the invaluable Fantastic Fiction site. Although she wrote an autobiography, there’s still no biography of her that I know of and not even a Wikipedia entry. Her papers are held in Austin, Texas.



Mary O’Malley was married to a diplomat, which gave her the background for her first and still her most famous book, Peking Picnic. It’s a story about diplomats in China and chronicles a way of life which has pretty much vanished for both the Chinese and those in the Diplomatic. Laura Leroy, the book’s heroine, is beautiful and charming and readers seem to have fallen in love with her and with the atmospheric descriptions of the country. The book was a wild success; it was even compared with A Passage to India. I find I have three copies in different editions and it’s still in print, in a new Capuchin edition. I hope someone there is sacked for letting the book go to print with the author's name wrongly spelled on the cover!

Ann Bridge’s husband had a successful career (with one major crisis which she got him out of) but he seems to have been an ineffectual sort of person compared with his wife and she became the main bread-winner, writing more than twenty books. In all of them she made good use of her travels, writing about places which were exotic to her readers.
( Julia Probyn series )