Irish Fiction: Good espionage fiction is about much more than the clandestine conspiracies of secret intelligence agencies or the titillating adventures of tuxedoed globe-trotting sybarites.
In the hands of Greene, Deighton or Le Carré, the spy novel becomes a vehicle for exploring the darker recesses of the human soul where dilemmas of faith, loyalty and justice endure. Although his recent novels resist easy categorisation, Philip Davison occasionally aspires to such metaphysical profundity in his portrayal of Harry Fielding, a disillusioned MI5 agent whose search for order, companionship and "Love in a secret, parallel existence" continually gets in the way of his being a biddable, effective operative.
The Long Suit is Harry's third fictional outing, his previous undercover activities having been chronicled in MacKenzie's Friend (2000) and The Crooked Man (1997), the television adaptation of which is soon to be broadcast. Set in contemporary London, the novel opens with the brooding anti-hero attempting to extricate himself from a corrupt demi-monde of house-breaking and hostage-taking. However, the fresh start he embarks upon quickly catapults him back into "the same murky pool from which I thought I had finally escaped".
The subsequent action alternates between Harry's efforts to understand the true nature of his role in this latest MI5 surveillance operation and his attempts at emotional intimacy with his amnesiac father and reconciliation with his estranged wife, who has started dating his ruthless boss, Jack Bradley. While this double narrative focus facilitates Davison's skilled management of plot, pace and dialogue, it also contributes to the novel's rather clichéd characterisation.
The portrayal of Harry as a world-weary yet sensitive agent who retains a fragile capacity for grace and generosity - a mole with a soul, as it were - sometimes threatens to topple into spy caricature. His emotional sensitivity is counterpointed by the volatility of Johnny Weeks, his thuggish accomplice who has been rescued from a "debauched exile" to provide the muscle for an anti-terrorist offensive. Johnny's ultimate narrative function is to test one of Harry's last remaining principles, his elevation of personal loyalty above professional duty. Harry's infirm father fulfils an equally formulaic role, that of facilitating his melancholy ruminations on the indignities of ageing and death.
The spy novel is a highly polemical sub-genre whose exponents include such politically diverse figures as Erskine Childers and Frederick Forsyth. It is, moreover, a sub-genre which feeds off popular anxieties about the powerlessness of the individual in times of national or global crisis. Davison nods in the direction of this tradition by making a "former Balkans warlord and despot", complete with a Russian-made nuclear suitcase-bomb, the elusive target of MI5 operations. But this is as political as it gets, unfortunately.
The characters in The Long Suit move in an ideological and ethical vacuum, with Davison seemingly uninterested in exploring the political forces within and against which they operate. The novel's conclusion underlines this apolitical quality, the climactic shoot-out scene being precipitated by revelations of internecine duplicity and power games. Like many of the scenes that precede it, it is an ending more worthy of a screenplay than a work of literary fiction.
Liam Harte is a lecturer in the Academy for Irish Cultural Heritages at the University of Ulster
Liam Harte