Stella Rimington - The Moscow Sleepers

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Not for me

I didn’t get on well with The Moscow Sleepers. It felt rather formulaic and wasn’t well enough written to convince me of the characters or the plot.

The book is about possible Russian agents (“sleepers”) in the west and MI5 and related agencies’ attempts to uncover them and their activities, with her principal character, Liz Carlyle of MI5 at the centre of things. Stella Rimington obviously knows this world intimately, but portraying it convincingly in a novel is another matter. She has a slightly forced prose style, as though she hasn’t quite moved from official documents to a relaxed, flowing style of her own in fiction. Some stale usages and clichés crop up fairly regularly, like the character who, before going away, “had to get her ducks in a row first” for example, which I found off-putting.

There are an awful lot of characters, almost invariably introduced as they are travelling somewhere or waiting for something and thinking about...followed by a lengthy, sometimes very over-lengthy, potted history. All these rather clunky introductions made each one seem less like a rounded, real person and more like yet another slightly unconvincing character to keep track of. I began to mutter “Oh, for heavens’ sake” to myself when, even well into the novel, yet more new characters were introduced in exactly the same way, complete with physical description and biographical background. It gets very wearing.

Rimington does like to tell us things rather than show us, often at tediously painstaking length; there is none of the subtlety and tension of le Carré or the wit of Mick Herron, for example, nor even the slow, meticulous plot and character development of Gerald Seymour. Take this little extract, for example: “Liz window-shopped apparently aimlessly, though a close observer would have noted how she lingered at the fronts with large curved windows, and a professional observer might have concluded that she was using the windows to keep an eye on what was going on behind her. She seemed to conclude that nothing was amiss, for she turned with no hesitation into Stresemannstrasse.” Quite apart from the infelicity of the use of “conclude” twice so close together, it’s a terribly laboured description of something so easy and basic. It all got too much for me, I’m afraid.

All this made the book rather a slog for me. I found it pretty unconvincing throughout, it didn’t engage me and I can’t really recommend it.

(My thanks to Bloomsbury for an ARC via NetGalley.)