My version: Paperback
Genre: Fiction, espionage
Publisher: HarperCollins
First published: 1976
ISBN: 978-0007458356
Pages: 288
Bought
From the cover:
A Soviet space scientist defects to win academic freedom, but western intelligence has other plans for him, and sends an unnamed spy – perhaps the same reluctant hero of The Ipcress File – to look after him. But what follows is a blood-streaked trail across three continents…
Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy reveals a more mature Deighton exploring relationships between couples: professional rivals and private allies, spy and counter-spy, master and slave. some are drawn together mutual comfort, others for exploitation. With an uncanny feeling for landscape, he begins his story in the awesome emptiness and remorseless heat of the Sahara desert. From there a trail of blood leads to Manhattan, Paris, Dublin and halfway back across Africa.
“There’s often a world of difference between what things mean, and what they are supposed to mean.”
This is only going to be a short one (“phew!”), as even though it was by the (otherwise) great Len Deighton, it really didn’t connect with me in any meaningful way. I don’t feel as though I’ve ever really got to know the two main characters. Nor any of the minor ones. I never really felt attached to them in any meaningful way.
A Soviet (we’re back on the Cold War period here), is defecting (rather than defective), as – he says – he wants the freedom to search for life on other planets. The intelligence officers handling the defection, have other ideas and are looking carefully at him, wondering if he might be a plant. Or is it his wife? The main man on ‘our’ side is an American, with a British intelligence officer playing the stooge, his number two. Things go all kinds of wrong, of course, and the story goes racing over from the Sahara, to the US, Paris, Dublin and then ends up back in the Sahara desert. I think you’re supposed to think the Englishman, is ‘Harry Palmer’ from ‘The Ipcress File’, etc. I didn’t realise that until I read something about it afterwards. So that didn’t make much of an impression, did it?
For all the blurb on the jacket (of the hardback, Book Club Associates version I have) about it revealing ‘a more mature Deighton’ and it being ‘as compelling as it is tantalising’ nothing you could tie it down to or point to in the text, it really wasn’t either. It was a strangely slight tale that was was there and then it was gone. Short, but really not so sharp. Or particularly sweet.
You can buy Twinkle Twinkle Little Spy by Len Deighton from Amazon
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