By happy coincidence, as I was writing this review of The Persian, I spied an article by the author, David McCloskey, in The Spectator in which he outlined the difficulties for the author of an espionage thriller at a time of such rapid geopolitical change in addressing the need to remain relevant.
He wrote: “The humble spy novelist faces a challenge: how to craft the world of a novel that will resonate with readers in two years’ time when the novel is published. Because one or so years — if not more — will be required for research and writing … so it might be manufactured, distributed and marketed properly. In today’s world, this is the equivalent of aiming a rocket at where the target moon or planet will be in a few years’ time, but without the benefit of knowing its orbital path or speed.”
In the 1960s and ’70s, John le Carré, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming were able to capture the tension of the Cold War and the seedy spy versus spy activities in cities such as Berlin and Vienna. That Cold War faded away, a bit, but there have been other conflicts and there remains a healthy demand for spies and spy novels.
While, arguably, the West and Russia are more foes than friends these days, with President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and threats to other neighbours, we also have the real threat of the Chinese spy machine and, of course, the tension between the West and the Islamic world.
All this geopolitical tension provides rich material for the spy novelist of the 2020s and we have an excellent insight into the present wave of intelligence operations in McCloskey’s The Persian.
Fortunately for the reader, his latest work is a highly enjoyable spy novel, featuring an exceptionally relevant tale of a Mossad agent operating undercover in Iran, in a tale that dishes up what the publisher’s blurb refers to as “strikingly cinematic action”.
McCloskey, a CIA analyst turned best-selling author, admits that in recent years real-life events have conspired to eclipse his initial ideas, with the truth indeed being stranger than fiction and so he was forced to up his game when he came to finish The Persian.
“As I was nearing completion, Mossad conducted the now infamous pager attacks in Lebanon. The Israelis pulled off an intelligence coup by feeding explosive-laden pagers into Hezbollah’s supply chain in a successful bid to bruise the group’s command and control and wreck its morale,” he writes.
“This burst of raw, brutal reality seemed far more potent and also — somehow — more ludicrous than anything I could cook up for the plot of my novel.
“I wondered if my own plot was sufficiently cutting edge or if it would appear almost quaint to readers who now understood what Mossad was capable of. To account for reality, I tried to juice things up in my own novel.”
The rather unlikely secret agent in The Persian is Kamran Esfahani, a Persian Jewish dentist from Stockholm, who is captured by the Iranians when he is trying to flee Iran after an audacious Israeli operation. He is forced by his captors to write about his earlier recruitment by Israel and the kidnapping and assassination missions he helped to carry out for Mossad.
Central to the plot is a secret, one that he may or may not be able to keep from his Iranian captors, who torture and abuse him over several years to extract every ounce of intelligence that he may be able to supply them.
We read: “Though he’s certainly been cornered and then broken, there are pieces of his former self he’s managed to hold on to. One of them is his secret. It’s what sustains him. In his shattered state, he sometimes wonders if it is him. If it might be all that’s left.”
It would be wrong to elaborate any further and spoil the plot, except to say that this secret enables some satisfying twists in the narrative.
This book lived up to its promise of page-turning tension, though I found the concluding pages more enthralling than the first part of the book. There was a lot of chopping and changing of timelines, and characters appeared and disappeared rather too frequently.
A clearer narrative, following a more disciplined timeline, might have been easier to follow.
To further complicate matters, I had been binge-watching the first few series of the excellent TV series Tehran while reading The Persian, and the TV thriller also features Mossad agents operating in Iran.
Meanwhile, the TV news bulletins were bringing distressing images of the uprising against the autocratic mullahs in Iran and the deadly tactics being used to suppress the unrest.
My advice to anyone taking on this book afresh is to learn from my mistakes and focus on one tale at a time to avoid any confusion.
As for McCloskey, he concluded his Spectator article in an upbeat mood.
“Spy novelists may not know quite where to aim, but what’s clear is there will be plenty of material to gather along the way.”
We readers will certainly have a lot to look forward to.
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