Customer Reviews

The Spanish Game

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Alec Milius, who made his debut in A Spy By Nature, returns to action in The Spanish Game. Six years have passed since the events described in A Spy by Nature and Milius is still worried that the CIA and the SIS are out to get him. After bouncing around the world, Milius has come to an uneasy rest in Madrid where he does freelance intelligence work for a private British bank. His boss, Julian Church, sends him to San Sebastián to determine whether Basque unrest will have an impact on business development in the region. Julian puts Milius in touch with an old friend there, a Basque politician named Mikel Arenaza. When Arenaza goes missing after arranging to meet Milius again in Madrid, Milius is drawn back into the world of espionage while investigating his disappearance.

I suspect some readers don't like this novel because they don't like Milius. He is self-centered, obsessively paranoid (perhaps with reason, but that makes him no less unlikable) and a bit amoral (even sleezy). None of that bothered me. I don't need to like the characters in order to enjoy a novel, so long as the characters and story are interesting. If you're looking for a morally pure or likable hero, however, you should probably pass this one by. Having said that, it's only fair to point out that at the end of this novel, as was true in A Spy By Nature, Milius shows himself capable of remorse, if not change.

Other readers won't like this novel because they're looking for more action or less ambiguity. You don't get thrilling chases, gunplay, explosions, high tech weaponry, or nonstop action in a Cumming novel. You don't get larger than life, morally pure good guys or cartoonishly evil bad guys. Instead, Cumming gives you an intelligent, credible plot and interesting, ethically challenged characters. That's not to say that the novels are dull or that they lack action. In The Spanish Game, the story develops slowly, piece by piece. The pace begins to quicken at the novel's midway point as the pieces begin to cohere, and there's quite a bit of action by the end, but Milius spends more time thinking than fighting. The novel has some elements of a mystery as the reader, along with Milius, tries to understand the relationship between the major players. As in any good mystery, the ending came as a complete surprise to me, and a very satisfying one.

The Spanish Game departs from the conventions of the typical spy novel by centering the conflict around Basque terrorists (or liberationists, as you prefer), about whom I knew little before reading the novel. I was drawn into the story and even started to feel a bit of sympathy for Milius. Cumming writes well, bringing a literary quality to his prose that, while falling short of Le Carre, is a pleasure to read. This is a better novel than A Spy By Nature, although not quite as good as his second novel, The Hidden Man (an espionage novel that doesn't feature Milius). I would give The Spanish Game 4 1/2 stars if Amazon made that option available.

Charles Cumming's "A SPY BY NATURE" was brilliant and original, containing a voice that rivals the great Le Carre. Alec Milius, the protagonist of that novel, is a realistic young spy who could very well be the bloke next door. "THE SPANISH GAME" is the second novel featuring the character, and the story takes up a few years after the end of the first book.

I enjoyed "THE SPANISH GAME" a lot. Great sense of place and locations, well-drawn characters, and a plot that keeps you guessing. It's not quite the revelation that "SPY BY NATURE" was, hence the 4-star rating, and I felt that the first half of the book took a while to start moving in a page-turning fashion--but the second half of the book is riveting.

I look forward to more Alec Milius. Cheers to Charles Cumming, who effortlessly makes it obvious that he's a very talented author.

I stumbled upon this wonderful author, and have absolutely enjoyed A Spy by Nature and the follow-up book, The Spanish Game. The plot has been well chronicled by other reviewers. I have read LeCarre, Ludlum, Littell, McCarry, Seymour - this young man definitely deserves a spot amongst these authors. The plots are intricately woven, full of twists that keep the reader staying up late; one is never quite sure of anything or anyone, and as often is the case in a Ludlum novel, there is "madness" everywhere! The characters have substance and depth. They linger with you long after you have finished the last page.
I look forward to the next book and have already ordered his other books. Great effort and bravo!
Igor Dumbadze

Alec Milius, protagonist of "The Spanish Game," is a British expat who has been living in Madrid for five years after a short-lived career as an agent for the MI-5. The disastrous failure that caused him to be tossed out of the service has led him to a nervous exile as far away from his former life as he can imagine. Trouble is, Spain is not so far away from the UK and his former professional adversaries, the CIA. So Milius lives the life of an extreme paranoid. He covers his tracks on every daily routine he follows, trusts no one, confides not even in his mistress (the wife of his boss) and can see nothing positive or promising in his future.

For the reader all of this adds up to a protagonist who is so off-balance, faithless and immoral that it is very difficult to feel any interest or sympathy for him as he inevitably finds himself in serious trouble related to the Basque terrorists still active in Spain and to the hangover of his days as a spy. Therein lies a basic problem of "The Spanish Game" for this reader. The central character acts foolishly at every turn of events e.g. he exercises poor judgement in dealing with practically every other character in the story. The author goes too far in building these flaws--there is no turning back, no real redemption.

Two other problems that I had with the book: there is an over reliance on events in the first book in the series to explain Milius' actions in "The Spanish Game"; and in the same vain, the author wishes us to believe that the contretemps between the junior spy Milius and the CIA in the first book has motivated the Americans to an elaborate revenge some five years later in the current book.

Author Cumming is a good writer and has constructed a reasonably good plot in "The Spanish Game," but he needs to rethink his Alec Milius character, give him some backbone, common sense and a moral compass, if the series is to continue and prosper.

After reading A Spy by Nature I looked for a sequel and the sequel was even better. It picks up our flawed hero five years later and pulls him into another situation where nothing is as it seems at first. If you are looking for James Bond, this isn't for you. The protagonist is often scared, he doesn't have magic devices, doesn't always get it right, is deeply flawed and makes major mistakes in judgement along the way. In other words he's real. After reading spy stories where the protagonist is a cross between Houdini and Bond, where there are drones with cameras the size of bumblebees flying in windows, and guys getting shot every three pages, a real spy story, with real people, is a pleasure.

Charles Cumming has written a flawless collection of spy novels. "The Spanish Game" is the sequal to his first novel, "A Spy by Nature." Characteristic to all of the novels is a well-researched, highly-plausible and unique intelligence operation, but the driving force is always the characters, their relationships and their flaws.

What should delight the reader about the intelligence operations that Cumming depicts is that they are not hackneyed derivatives of daily headlines in English language newspapers. His characters are not battling Bin Laden in Pakistan. They're pulling off subtle operations that Cumming has devised from research, ingenuity and, perhaps, some excellent sources. So the reader is interested in the plot precisely because it isn't one that had already been related in every newspaper.

Yet it is always the characters and the relationships that propel Cumming's books. The intelligence operation in "The Hidden Man" was the least inventive, yet I enjoyed that novel best because the author made the lives of the characters so interesting. In all of his novels, the plot concerns the political intrigue of intelligence operatives, but the impact relies especially on the domestic intrigue among the characters: jealousy, adultry, pride and, especially, ambition.

No, as other negative reviewers have observed, the central characters are not likeable. Alec Milius, the main character of "The Spanish Game," is especially flawed.

That doesn't mean that the reader should be disinterested in his fate, though. Milius' ambition has driven him into difficult circumstances, and what little solace he is finding there he is stealing from the person who has been kindest to him. I'd assert that every human being has felt the tug of ambition though and has contemplated a heinous action. Alec is someone who has succumbed to those temptations. Indeed, he is remarkably incapable of resisting such temptations. I find him to be neither unsympathetic nor uninteresting. Rather, I find him fascinating to watch. The interesting character in "MacBeth" is not Duncan, and it is facile to say that MacBeth is not a sympathetic character.

Comparisons between Cumming and Le Carre are natural and useful. The Le Carre novels that I've read have all been naratted from an external perspective. We've learned about the characters by watching their behavior. Cumming takes us inside his characters. We learn about them by listening in on their thoughts. In Le Carre's novels, layers of deception are exposed and further layers are implied. In Cumming's novels, it is layers of self-deception that are exposed. In Le Carre's novels, there is some power that asserts and retains control, behind the machinations of the characters that we observe. In Cumming's novels, there is no ultimate power. The characters flail around one another, and we sense governments flailing around beyond them.

The writers offer different experiences, then, but I'd expect that fans of the one will also be fans of the other. They're both literary novelists first, who happen to have chosen the secret world as their context.

This is one of the rare examples of its kind: the perfect spy story.
It's well written, the characters are detailed and realistic, the plot is exciting and credible and keeps unraveling throughout the story, and it's an exciting read. I don't want to give anything away, but let's just say that the story does not let up until the very last page.
Add to that a colorful description of the location, Spain, and you have a book that you look forward to every time you pick it up, unless you race through it in a single read.
Most best-selling spy stories feature muscular, clever, incredibly good-looking men and ravishing, seductive women in plots that can be charitably described only as "hard to swallow."
There are lamentably few great spy stories and authors: Eric Ambler, John LeCarre, Alan Furst, David Ignatius, Rudyard Kipling (Kim), some Len Deighton.
This book belongs in the top of its class. This one is perfect!

Following the disastrous events that went totally wrong (see A SPY BY NATURE), M-16 blames espionage agent Alec Milius for the fiasco although he was a rookie and his side failed to communicate with their American counterparts; he also blames himself. Fired by his agency and no longer seeking adventure, Alex relocates to Madrid where he works for a British owned bank. Filled with guilt and doubts, Alex hopes staying low key will keep him safe as he would not be shocked to find his former employers, the CIA sending assassins or a rogue colleague holding him responsible by taking him out.

In Spain, Alec is having an affair with the wife of his boss Julian Church while using alcohol to numb his crippling remorse. Julian assigns Alec with a special project that has him traveling into the Basque sector of Spain. There he meets Mikel Arenaza, a former Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) Basque separatist party member. Soon after their encounter someone kills Mikel. Alec is caught in the middle between ETA hardliners, Spanish cops, and apparently his former British associates and their cross Atlantic partners.

This is a superb espionage thriller as Alec, filled with remorse and uncertainty about his skills, expects his former colleagues or their peers to take him out. He lives looking over his shoulder with a hesitant step. The story line is fabulous with timely solid twists, but Alec makes the tale; as a disgraced spy in exile waiting for the cold to come to him. THE SPANISH GAME will be on most short lists as one of top three espionage thrillers of the year.

Harriet Klausner

Charles Cummings is the writer standing in the gold medal spot at the Spy Thriller Olympics. The Spanish Game is brilliant. Page after page it keeps you hooked. It reads fast and it keeps you guessing: where's this turn and twist taking me now? Being familiar with Spain and Spanish customs I can say with certitude that Cummings has the setting bang on. The characters and the plot are colourful and very much alive. You want a good, entertaining, and extremely well written spy novel? Look no further. You will enjoy this one!

As some people remarked w/r/t his earlier Alec Milius book, "A Spy by Nature", Cumming's spy novels are in the Le Carre / Deighton cerebral mold rather than the bang bang action mold. If you like that approach, you should love this book. It offers an offbeat main character, an unusual setting, and an intricate plot. What more could anyone ask? I can't say I LIKE Alec -- he enjoys lying too much -- but I find him to be fascinating, and he has the capacity to be one of those characters that grows and changes over time. I can't wait to see what happens to him next.