“Peter was brilliant with facts and systems but he
couldn’t deal with stories. He should have seen that making up stories was
easy. If he’d done it more he would have understand that. You made up a story
and then you could turn to it when you needed it, and sometimes it might be
true and sometimes not but that wasn’t what mattered the most. What was
difficult was telling your story to somebody else. If you did that it got
stronger and more real, and then you didn’t have control any more.”(p.76)
I suppose one could argue that it goes without saying to declare that Georgina Harding’s novel “The spy game” is a book about “spies” and “the spy game”. It may be too obvious to put it that way, so I will try to avoid this kind of stereotyping. The novel, however, provides a wealth of material to avoid the title of the book to a large extend, however, to not mention it at all would be a mistake, since a title like this might well draw heaps of mislead curiosity. So, yes, this is a book about spies, but despite this it is also a book that is mostly not about spies.
What is striking about this book is that Harding is being compared to Harper Lee, author of the very well-known book “To kill a mockingbird”. The reason this comparison is made seems to be purely the fact that the story is told from the perspective of a child. It must be flattering to be compared to an all-time great like Harper Lee, and despite the comparison being a tad too drastic for my liking, one can see why some commentators has been carried away a bit by this novel.
The spy game is a simple story about a woman who dies. This woman, Caroline Wyatt, functions as a sort of main character in the book. The book is really all about Caroline (or Karoline), and the whole story is overshadowed by her not being present and part of her daughter Anna’s life. Isn’t it so typical of many post-modern stories to have main characters like these, people who are not really functioning? Distorted types of characters whom you struggle to wrap your mind around... Well, Harding’s Caroline Wyatt is one of these - an almost mythical figure to her children, a missing link. A haunting figure and a loose end in Anna and Peter’s life. A type of figure she was never supposed to become. A stranger to her loved ones. But the big question, what is it that was really distorted? Was it Caroline, or was it the picture of Caroline that took shape in the minds of Anna and Peter?
The spy game is set against the background of the post-world war II era. It is the time of the Cold War and Russia and the United States are the new up and coming superpowers. It is in the midst of this new unfolding world drama that Anna’s mother disappears from the map. Anna’s father holds firm that Caroline died as a result of an accident, but Peter and Anna never really swallows this. With their imaginations spurred on by stories of spies, they become convinced that Caroline must have been a spy and that her sudden disappearance from their lives must be linked with her activities as a spy.
The shadowy past of Caroline doesn’t help in any way to temper the suspicions of Anna and Peter. Her faint German accent and seemingly secret past adds a lot of fuel to the imagination of the two children who almost pointlessly tries to make sense of the disappearance of their mother. As children, it is especially Peter who gets swept away by the thoughts of his mother being a spy, but it is Anna who, even eventually as a grown up tries to fit the entire puzzle together.
‘The spy game’ is a very enjoyable read, but the title of the book can be very deceiving. The book is not a work romanticizing the practice of spying as one so often finds in for example James Bond stories. Instead it tells the story of how the minds of people is seemingly almost in a fight-like relation to the world around us, wrestling with reality as well as history in order to stake our claim and make sense in a world that is often devoid of any.
Recommended leisure reading, that is ‘The spy game’. Sure, not in the class of a book like “To kill a mockingbird”, but still, worth the read.
I suppose one could argue that it goes without saying to declare that Georgina Harding’s novel “The spy game” is a book about “spies” and “the spy game”. It may be too obvious to put it that way, so I will try to avoid this kind of stereotyping. The novel, however, provides a wealth of material to avoid the title of the book to a large extend, however, to not mention it at all would be a mistake, since a title like this might well draw heaps of mislead curiosity. So, yes, this is a book about spies, but despite this it is also a book that is mostly not about spies.
What is striking about this book is that Harding is being compared to Harper Lee, author of the very well-known book “To kill a mockingbird”. The reason this comparison is made seems to be purely the fact that the story is told from the perspective of a child. It must be flattering to be compared to an all-time great like Harper Lee, and despite the comparison being a tad too drastic for my liking, one can see why some commentators has been carried away a bit by this novel.
The spy game is a simple story about a woman who dies. This woman, Caroline Wyatt, functions as a sort of main character in the book. The book is really all about Caroline (or Karoline), and the whole story is overshadowed by her not being present and part of her daughter Anna’s life. Isn’t it so typical of many post-modern stories to have main characters like these, people who are not really functioning? Distorted types of characters whom you struggle to wrap your mind around... Well, Harding’s Caroline Wyatt is one of these - an almost mythical figure to her children, a missing link. A haunting figure and a loose end in Anna and Peter’s life. A type of figure she was never supposed to become. A stranger to her loved ones. But the big question, what is it that was really distorted? Was it Caroline, or was it the picture of Caroline that took shape in the minds of Anna and Peter?
The spy game is set against the background of the post-world war II era. It is the time of the Cold War and Russia and the United States are the new up and coming superpowers. It is in the midst of this new unfolding world drama that Anna’s mother disappears from the map. Anna’s father holds firm that Caroline died as a result of an accident, but Peter and Anna never really swallows this. With their imaginations spurred on by stories of spies, they become convinced that Caroline must have been a spy and that her sudden disappearance from their lives must be linked with her activities as a spy.
The shadowy past of Caroline doesn’t help in any way to temper the suspicions of Anna and Peter. Her faint German accent and seemingly secret past adds a lot of fuel to the imagination of the two children who almost pointlessly tries to make sense of the disappearance of their mother. As children, it is especially Peter who gets swept away by the thoughts of his mother being a spy, but it is Anna who, even eventually as a grown up tries to fit the entire puzzle together.
‘The spy game’ is a very enjoyable read, but the title of the book can be very deceiving. The book is not a work romanticizing the practice of spying as one so often finds in for example James Bond stories. Instead it tells the story of how the minds of people is seemingly almost in a fight-like relation to the world around us, wrestling with reality as well as history in order to stake our claim and make sense in a world that is often devoid of any.
Recommended leisure reading, that is ‘The spy game’. Sure, not in the class of a book like “To kill a mockingbird”, but still, worth the read.
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