Today we have another book I came across watching a Tristan and the Classics video This time he listed what are considered the 50 greatest espionage novels by polls, writers, and experts. The Secret of the Sands, which I reviewed not long ago came in at No. 47, and The 39 Steps, another favorite of mine came in at No. 8. Since I'm not interested in Cold War espionage, I chose a WWll espionage novel set in England.
My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett DNF 46%
I gave it a good go. But the deeper I got into it, the less I was enjoying it. So, by the time I was nearly halfway through the book, I was wishing it was finished. So I finished it.
This book didn't work for me for several reasons. The first being that the story was told from a number of points of view and spans five years. I'm simply not a fan of stories with multiple points. It's not an automatic thing, but it has to be done well for me to enjoy the book. For example, there was as young couple featured in several early chapters that basically disappeared after the first quarter, though, I gathered by a brief reference in the forward of the book, that they would be playing their part in the story near the end of it.
That brings me on to my second complaint, which is that the story was told in a very fragmented way. It was a patchwork quilt of episodes over the course of five years of a variety of characters, that included their backstories, or rather parts of them, as well as some background history, and scenes designed to set the stage for WWll England. In short, all sorts scenes, characters, and info jumbled together, destroying, for me, the flow of the story.
Of course, none of these would matter, if the characters were compelling. But I found that none of them were in the least compelling, perhaps because of their scattered appearances throughout the story. The Nazi spy is a clever, ruthless, and utterly colorless character, who sometimes does unbelievable things. We follow him through various episodes. The British counter-intelligent agents are also utterly colorless and forgettable, despite the pages spent giving them something of a backstory, most of which seemed irrelevant. Moreover, as I mentioned they appear and disappear throughout the story, often only briefly and episodically. Thus, as a reader, I was never brought into the story enough to care about them, nor for that matter, the stakes.
The stakes are a problem with books like this because we know the ending. They can say in the story, that the secret the spy discovers could change the outcome of the war, but we know that nothing of that sort actually happened. And while I'm not that knowledgeable about the history of the D-Day invasions, I still have to question if the spy did, in fact, succeed in his mission, if the secret he discovered was critical enough to change history. And thus, unless I was invested in a character, and/or the story, as just a story in and of itself, like I was in The 39 Steps, whose basic premise is much the same, the story doesn't work. This one didn't.
I believe this is Ken Follett's first published novel, and he's gone on to write some very acclaimed books. Indeed, one of the reasons I picked this book from the 50 is because his massive historical fiction books, like The Pillars of the Earth, have been highly praised. All of which is to say, this book didn't work for me, but it might work for you.
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