Customer Reviews

Typhoon

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Charles Cumming's spies are engaged in an endless game of lying. All of them lie to everyone all the time, while they attempt to discern the lies in each other's statements.

Typhoon occurs in two sections, eight years apart. In the first section Joe Lennox, a junior MI6 agent living in Hong Kong just before the handover of that city to China, tries to figure out why a Chinese defector whom he was the first to interview subsequently disappeared. Although his superiors in MI6 and colleagues in the CIA tell him that the defector was a plant, and was sent back to China, Joe believes they are all lying to him.

The second section of the story picks up 8 years later, when Joe is sent by MI6 to Shanghai to spy on his old CIA frenemy, Miles Coolidge. Joe is pleased to do this because, among other things, Miles stole the Love of His (Joe's) Life, aided by some sneaky tricks.

As compared with his earlier novels, Cumming is here working with a larger canvas and at a greater distance from his characters. His focus is politics within China and between China and the West, with emphasis on the dark side of the Chinese economic miracle and the utter pointlessness of the spy game.

The story is narrated, not by Joe Lennox, but by a journalist who works part time for MI6. I think this distance dulled my concern for the characters, especially compared with Alex Milius, the hero of two other Cumming novels. While Joe is a "better" person than Alex, I didn't get close enough to Joe to develop for him the affection I have for Alex. And let's face it -- there's something "off" about a guy who still isn't over a former girlfriend after eight years.

As for the girlfriend, Isabella, being myself a woman who grew up after the '50s, I find her aimlessness annoying rather than endearing. She seems to have no interior life, no interests, and no goals. Really, I thought Joe was well rid of her.

In sum, I always look forward to the next Charles Cumming novel, but I hope it is about Alex.

One of the benefits of the end of a world political system with only two major players (US/Soviet Union) is that the multitude of twisted regimes and complex relationships gives a host of new targets for writers of political thrillers to choose from. Charles Cumming's book Typhoon begins in Hong Kong at the time of the turnover to the Chinese and posits a covert operation to destablize China.

Joe Lennox is a bright young star of British Intelligence. He has the opportunity to interview a defector who is promptly snatched from him by Ameican CIA operative Miles Coolidge. Whle he's stealing the defector Coolidge also steals Lennox's girlfriend.

Flash forward 10 years. The Olympics are coming to town. The operation to destabilize China (Typhoon) has been shut down. Or has it? Lennox returns to China and ...

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The characters are well written, the action well done, the plot (post Bush) is plausable. It's well executed, put you on the edge of your seat and don't put down the book good. Highly recommend

The year is 1997 and Great Britain is about to hand Hong Kong over to the Chinese government. MI6 agent Joe Lennox interrogates a Chinese defector who requests a meeting with the British Governor. The defector claims to have information the west would want to know. The next day, the defector is gone; supposedly taken back to China by the CIA because he was a Chinese spy. Typhoon is the code name for the CIA's plan for the political and economic destabilization of the People's Republic of China.

The book is very timely because a large part of the story deals with the Uighur uprising that is still going on in China today. And the bigger picture of how the events of 9/11, the neocons, Bush, Blair, Rumsfeld and Cheney connect to these uprisings.

Cumming has written a compelling story no matter your political view. It is a fictional page-turner!

Comparisons to John le Carre's Honourable Schoolboy are impossible to avoid. The setting is China, British will is broken by China's shear mass and trust as a measure of character is no where to be found. le Carre fans, have no fear, the king is not dead, but Cummings' Typhoon is an excellent novel and sure to be enjoyed by anyone that takes pleasure in the offerings of le Carre.

Page one is set in 1997, just prior to the British empire surrendering Hong Kong to the Chinese. The main characters are Joe Lennox, an MI-6 agent, and Miles Coolidge, a hardened CIA agent. After developing the characters and setting the stage for the intrigue to come, Cummings takes us a full decade forward, just prior to the Beijing Olympics. At this moment in time, the CIA is attempting to destabilize China through the use of Islamic extremists from Turkestan. The British government is not quite aligned with this policy and Lennox's orders are to see what he can do to "politely" foil the CIA's efforts.

What first appears simple quickly becomes complex as the characters past history interferes with their ability to properly deal with the present. In excellent spy novel fashion, what appears to be so isn't and reality resides ill-defined in the shadows. An excellent novel and one I can readily recommend.

This is an astonishing novel about espionage, counter espionage and global political realities where ethical behavior often clashes in the ever expanding world market place where business goes on as usual regardless of the cost in lives lost - all in the pursuit of economic expansion. The black and white realities of right and wrong are lost in a murky surreal gray zone. It is not unsual for opposing factions to aid, abet and foment political unrest in unstable regions of the world regardless of the unexpected consequences. Human rights issues and abuses are part of the reason for the development of an underground movement which engages in terrorist activities to help free the Turkic people known as the Uighurs from the yoke of oppression imposed by the Communist China. Joe Lennox, a handsome, intelligent Secret Agent in his mid-to late twenties is working for the British side, specifically MI6. He is asked to interrogate a presumed Chinese defector who claims to be a disgruntled professor possessing secret information he is willing to share only with the right people and for the right reasons - so long as he gets what he wants from the exchange. Unknown to Joe, the C.I.A is keeping close tabs on the situation and clandestinely swoops into the investigation turning Professor Wang Kaixuan into one of their own agents. The author ties together many realities of the modern spy game and includes a fascinating love/hate relationship among the allies who play a deadly game of cat and mouse with terrorist factions in an attempt to manipulate and control outcomes, all the while complicating an already chaotic world gone wild. Included in the novel is a romantic game played out by two of the main secret agents - both of whom love the same woman and each of whom has won a piece of her heart. However, all is fair in games of love, war, and espionage and there is only one real winner. This is a dynamic, engaging, masterfully written modern spy thriller filled with believable scenarios and well developed characters who engage in the deadly game of espionage. The book will satisfy most readers who love this genre. Erika Borsos [pepper flower]

In the world of spy thrillers there are, essentially, two kinds of writers: Those who follow Ian Fleming and those who follow John LeCarre. The Flemingists (Flemingos?) are little concerned with character or story and just want to see how many thrills and spills they can fit into their narrative. These tales can be a lot of fun and, even when they're bad, they can be entertaining (similar to a Dan Brown novel). The LeCarre school faces a much deeper challenge. They must, not only offer the thrills, but also give us believable characters in a compelling story. Other than LeCarre himself, the only one who has been able to do this consistently has been Daniel Silva... until now. Charles Cumming manages, with "Typhoon", to pull off this feat amazingly well (the fact that his publishers actually compare him to LeCarre, thereby daring him to live up to it, doesn't weaken this in any way!). Joe Lennox,Miles Coolidge, and the Hong Kong of both 1997 and Today, are three highly memorable characters who will give you more than your share of thrills AND hold you enthralled in their personal stories, as well.

This is an average read that starts out reasonably well, but never really picks up any steam or suspense. The narrative device of Will the journalist writing a book about an incident over a decade in the making tends to make it lumber and be rife with the benefit of hindsight, thus ruining the suspense. In addition, the focus on the love triangle between the two agents and Isabelle gets pretty tedious after a while. The whole Muslim extremists and defector from China angle is too watered down, and the issue of the Hong Kong Handover could have been interesting but was watered down by endless disputes over whether or not Margaret Thatcher, Chris Patten and the Tories were good people. I think history has already answered that one. The worst thing about the book is the ending, where he tries to wrap things up. Again, because of the narrative device of Will the journalist writing the book, we get things from his perspective, and a whole lot of reported speech instead of dialogue, which breaks the cardinal rule of storytelling: "Show, don't tell."

The way he captures life in Hong Kong is well done, but for me, not exactly the best book in the suspense/thriller/espionage genre that I've ever read.

Charles Cumming is a very good writer, but good writing can only go so far in rescuing a mediocre plot and characters involved in tedious inter-personal relationships. Typhoon posits the unlikely activities of a rogue unit in the Pentagon/CIA trying to destabilize China in the run up to the Beijing Olympics, on the one side, against the good-guys British Intelligence, who are in opposition to the Americans and are trying to save the Chinese from the CIA. Add to this a boring and repetitious love affair between the British intelligence hero of our story and an attractive female, who dumps him at the beginning of the story to marry a disliked rival of sorts in American intelligence, a loss which plaques our hero-unrequited-lover for seven years. Still, there's a enough forward momentum and local Chinese color to keep you reading, but with the gnawing feeling that you're wasting your time.

With Typhoon, Charles Cumming delivers his third espionage/spy thriller, a CIA/MI5 romp spanning the period from handover-era Hong Kong to the period just before the Beijing Olympic Games, and considering China's reemergence onto the global stage.

While Cumming's hero Alec Milius is gone, Cumming readers will quickly recognize several of the themes that have been central to Cumming's often very skillful blend of the profoundly personal and globally analytical.

His books have something to say about the world (Iraq, Islamist Jihadism, post-colonialism, etc.) and here again, Cumming does most of the substantive talking in long, drawn-out dialogues between the agents and handlers at the center of the narrative.

Plumbing those subjects in that way redounds to Cumming's great benefit in terms of character development, because it gives him ample opportunity to fill in his spies around the edges, giving them a depth that is not common in many serial spy novels. If there is a criticism to be made here, it is that Cumming's own obsessions seem to resurface for tug-of-war in book after book.

For example, like the relationship between Milius and Saul in Cumming's first book, we have a delicate and often adversarial "friendship" at the heart of this book, between Joe Lennox - the new MI5 protagonist - and CIA cowboy Miles Coolidge. As much as geopolitics and tradecraft, these men work out their issues about women, careers, ambition and existentialism over drinks. Cumming has a fascination with picking at the scabbed-over juvenilia of male-male relationships, and what happens when one starts to probe at that comfortable default setting. How do young men who have forged bonds over beer, women and wild nights get "serious?"

Similarly, Cumming returns with a mentor/father figure for Lennox who - like Milius' absent father - has motives that remain unclear as personal relationships and are further unsettled by the demands of a life of clandestine intelligence. The mentor is always using the younger agent, but then, isn't the agent doing much the same thing to the silverback stationed a world away (even if only down the street), behind a desk, in London.

One particular exchange in the middle of the book, when Lennox discusses his intention to marry his girlfriend, is particularly revealing. As he listens, Lennox parses his mentor's advice and reflects on what the decision means for the long-term. The transition from twenty-something Milius to thirty-something Lennox is most vivid here, perhaps a reflection on Cumming's own progression in a series of novels that is if not autobiographical, at least self-referential. A thirty-something married man has very different obligations, his mentor advises; and, a fifty-something father and husband, different ones yet again.

Like Milius though, Lennox seems consumed not by those obligations, nor by Queen and Country, but by the obsessive bereavement of lost love. As in the earlier books, the ruination brought on by abandonment at the hands of a woman is ever-present, even driving Lennox back to China, years after his departure, to the source of his infatuation. It is not hard to draw the parallel between Lennox's longing for a return to that good, comfortable state of affairs and the reckless subversive effort that the US agent (Lennox's target) is undertaking in China, with the help of a Uighur sleeper cell.

As a spy novel, Typhoon delivers again on one of Cumming's central strengths: his ability to powerfully yet simply convey the utter paradox of the life of a spy. Cumming conveys clearly and personally that he identifies with the simple deceit that is necessarily a part of the lifestyle. Upon meeting a new love interest, reuniting with the old flame, or just engaging in conversation with a casual acquaintance, Lennox struggles with how quickly and how mundanely lies come to define those relationships (i.e., "so, what do you do?")

It is Cumming's talent that this is not overwrought, nor is it melodramatic; but, in the end, I suspect that for many readers, that aversion may be his flaw. The plots and the endings are not "page-turners," "white knucklers," or any other dust jacket blurb. Even as Lennox does execute his final attempt at James Bond heroism, Cumming is not in his element. For me, it's a virtue. Typhoon, like most of Cumming's work that I have read, is a book that rewards careful, close reading. In this genre, that does place him alongside Greene and Le Carre -- and there is your dust jacket blurb.

"Professor Wang Kaixuan emerged from the waters of the South China Sea shortly before dawn," and so begins this well-constructed tale of high-stakes espionage, betrayal, and unforeseen consequences set in modern-day China. The story revolves around an improbably capable young MI6 agent, his flamboyant CIA counterpart, the young woman they both lust after, and a right-wing Washington cabal and the corporation that does its bidding. The book is well-researched, cogently written, and expertly plotted. If your taste runs to spy thrillers, this is one of the best of recent years. Cumming is sometimes referred to as the successor to John Le Carre, but I'd like to see him write about a more believable protagonist before I go along with that judgment.

(From Mal Warwick's Blog on Books)