Brian Freemantle - Charlie M

 

Rating: 1/5

 

Review:

Very disappointing 

 

Everyone seems to have loved Charlie M, but I really didn’t. I read a hundred pages or so with increasing annoyance and then gave up.

In Charlie M, first published in 1977, the British Secret Service has had a complete change of leadership. The Service now, apparently, consists in its entirety of four absurdly stereotypical, incompetent upper-class twits and Charlie Muffin, who is a hangover from the 50s. He is Mancunian, grammar-school educated, an extremely clever and shrewd operator, and therefore an anathema to the aforementioned upper-class twits who hate his working-classness and plot to get rid of him. Much of the point of the book is the twits predictably messing things up and Charlie sorting everything out with quiet smugness and showing the twits up. I just found it all clumsy and rather silly. It wouldn’t have been out of place in a boys’ comic from the early 1960s – a sort of espionage version of Alf Tupper. In an adult novel from the late 70s I found it absurd.

I found the casual sexism really grating, too, even making allowances for the time; the only two female characters - his wife and male-fantasy, beautiful, posh, sexually voracious mistress - are there almost solely for Charlie’s sexual gratification, which is wholly gratuitous and irrelevant to the plot.

Then there’s the prose. It’s generally pretty good, but Brian Freemantle will insist on regularly using clumsy synonyms for “said”. Just a few examples:

“This is good,” he complimented.

“No way, Bill,” dismissed the director;

“Any idea who he is?” floated Harrison;

Harrison had done bloody well, congratulated Snare.

“Braley,” the man introduced.

Some of these are plain bad grammar (compliment, introduce and congratulate are all transitive verbs, not intransitive), and all felt both infelicitous and redundant to me. It began to grate early on and by half way through I was rolling my eyes at least one per page; combined with the crudity of the characters and the absurdity of their behaviour it was too much and I bailed out.

This book is billed as “a must for fans of le Carré or Deighton.” I disagree. Both those authors had written brilliant, subtle and insightful books about all these issues by the time Charlie M came on the scene and continued to do so. For me, the almost adolescent clumsiness and crudity of Brian Freemantle isn’t anywhere near their league.