HENRY PORTER'S WHITE HOT SILENCE

Three years ago, former MI6 agent Paul Sampson was hired by his old employers to track down a 13 year old Syrian refugee who might possess key data about an ISIS attack on Europe. He met and fell in love with aid worker Anastasia Christakos while tracking Naji Touma, and the three of them were rescued by in Macedonia by billionaire Denis Hisami, who owed Sampson a huge factor for finding his sister's fate.

Now, their affair having burned out, Anastasia is married to Hisami, and she has been kidnapped in Italy and disappeared. The motive does not appear to be ransom, but something else that involves Hisami's money and investments, and the operatives he hires to track her down bring Sampson on board, though he would be impossible to keep from joining the search anyway. And he needs to, because all of a sudden, Hisami's American empire is under threat, and he's being accused of being a Kurdish terrorist in his past life.

As with Firefly, the novel that detailed the pursuit of Naji Touma, the core of Henry Porter's new thriller is a chase with multiple pursuers who may be as much in conflict with each other as with the kidnappers. Like the previous book, White Hot Silence does pick up its pace as the various agents near each other, while in the background the question of who and why keeps the reader guessing. It's a complicated tale and like its predecessor it does allow for a little deus ex machina from characters who just happen to be in the right spot with the right talents, and a certain randomness in exactly which mobile phones can and can't be traced instantly, but everything is moving so fast that hardly matters. What matters more is the resourcefulness of the characters, not least the kidnapped Anastasia and the now more mature Touma, who is a computer genius of the first order. And of course, what will happen if Paul does find Anastasia. When it all comes together in Estonia, the denoument contains a finish as suprising as it is logical.

But beneath all this action, Porter is making a very serious serious point, which ought to resonate with readers in Brexit Britain at a time when, as I write this, Tory leadership contender Boris Johnson's links to the American nationalist strategist and former Trump campaign savant Steve Bannon have been revealed and attracted virtually zero attention in the mainstream media. What follows might be a bit of a spoiler...

Anastasia's kidnapping has been arranged to prevent Hasami's revealing money laundering taking place on behalf of right-wing, Russian-backed, populist nationalist groups around Europe. It would be nice to have had the operation explained more fully by one of the characters nearer the top who needed to play Bond Villain, but the task is left to one of the actual kidnapping thugs, Kirill, an ex FSB interrogator who wants to discuss Huckleberry Finn with his captive.

As Kirill explains to Anastasia: “now Americans have lost their ability to see good or bad.They've turned on their country, their greatest enemies are their fellow citizens—imagine that! They are fearful; they see plots where there are none, their information is corrupted and no one is able to form a sensible conclusion about best interests of people. And now we watch them abandon principles of Constitution. It's like a dream for us.

The people are soft and idle and now they cannot tell difference between up and down. It was not espionage that destabilised the US. It was the vanity and weakness of its people. We played on their weaknesses and they did the rest. Same in UK.”

It was nice Kirill threw in those last three words, in case we missed his vodka-fuelled point, and he doesn't need to throw in lots of details for us to be able to connect the dots. Porter was making similar serious points in his earlier novels, about terrorism in Empire State (2003) and the roots of the new Russia in Brandenburg (2005), which was set at the fall of the Berlin Wall and featured a young KGB colonel named Putin. Both those books featured Porter's previous spy character, Robert Harland, and Harland makes his reappearance as the story reaches its climax, as he has just happened to retire to Tallinn, where he can provide some of the deus ex machina mentioned earlier. In any event, it is nice to see him back.

Harland is another link to MI6, and one of the most interesting of White Hot Silence's subplots is the return of Sampson's MI6 nemeses, Peter Nyman and Sonia Fell, agents who seem to have a different agenda, and in this case seem to be working their own game. It's another good thing Paul has his own extremely friendly MI6 source. Nyman and Fell's game ought to be part of the sequel to this novel, because there is much left unresolved, not least the futures of Paul, Anastasia and Denis Hisami. One wonders how much current affairs might impact that one.

White House Silence by Henry Porter

Quercus, £16.99, ISBN 9781787470804

note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

HENRY PORTER'S FIREFLY

Thanks to satellite imagery and an ISIS group leaving their phones on a little too long after a massacre in a Syrian village, MI6 has been able to track, and identify, at least by voice, the leader of the terrorist cell, whom they call Black Cube. They have established he and his sidekicks are in Greece, presumably on their way to northern Europe, and some new attack. But there is a witness to the Syrian slaughter, a 13 year old boy who is also in Greece, having survived a boat wreck when a dolphin saved him and a baby he was carrying. MI6 want to get to the boy, code-named Firefly, before ISIS do, and they approach a former agent, Paul Sampson, Arabic speaking of Lebanese extraction, who's now 'finding people' for a private intelligence company.

Firefly is Henry Porter's sixth thriller, but the first since 2009's The Dying Light; you can read my review of that here. That was a deeply layered dissection of Britain's burgeoning surveillance state; this one is a more straightforward book, a chase story, but one told from two points of view. As you follow Sampson's pursuit of Firefly, you're also drawn into Firefly's own pursuit, of the safety of Germany, which is threatened by the killers pursuing him. And though this might sound high-concept and plot-driven, what makes the book work is the way it treats its characters.

Sampson is the kind of resourceful but modest hero British agents are supposed to be, but what makes the story interesting is the way he has to fight past bureaucratic interference, not least from MI6 itself. But Firefly, or Naji, to give him his name, is every bit as resourceful as Sampson, with a lot less to work with, and of course, with the handicap of being only 13. But he is a boy genius, and has plenty of experience of dealing with danger on the ground.

Porter is a journalist by trade, and one of the very best to turn to thriller writing since Gerald Seymour wrote Harry's Game. As with Seymour, it is the realism of the background details, the intelligence procedures, the international agencies and their functioning, the in-fighting among government branches, and the chaos on the ground that really drives the story. And as we follow Naji from Turkey to Lesbos and through the Balkans, the realism of that background helps brings the characters to the fore; not just our two protagonists but a supporting cast both threatening and appealing.

In 2008, Porter published a young people's fantasy novel, The Master Of The Broken Chairs. It's plain from Firefly that he has the ability to create not only a convincing child hero, but to convey even more convincingly the point of view of that child forced to grow up rapidly, and in the worst possible circumstances. After that, a secret agent with a heart of gold or a beautiful English-educated Greek child psychologist in the refugee camps are pieces of cake.

Firefly by Henry Porter
Quercus £14.99 ISBN 078178470491 This review will appear also at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

MILLENNIUM, JULIA CHILD, JANE JACOBS, HENRY PORTER AND HARLEY GRANVILLE-BARKER

I was catching up with some papers on the flight to the US Wednesday, and was chuffed to see the Observer's house neo-con Nick Cohen quoting Mario Vargas Llosa's article in El Pais about the Millennium trilogy: Vargas Llosa compared them to the same sense of 'feverish excitement' he'd experienced reading 'Dumas Dickens and Hugo as a boy, those stories about what he called 'just avengers'. I couldn't agree more, in fact, Cohen could have found the same take on Stieg Larsson right here, among Irresistible Targets' Bullseyes!

The Observer comment section also included an excellent essay by the definitely non neo-con Henry Porter, arguing for a repeal of all the laws passed during the last 12 years of Blairite government aimed at eroding civil liberties and creating a security state in the UK. He fails to note that on any number of these restrictions, this government has introduced tests, or vetting, which need to be paid for: the citizen as consumer, the subject as profit centre. There is a definite feudal element to this, beyond the obvious apparatchik revival brought on by a government 'socialist' only in the most cynically Stalinist sense of the word.

I then found myself a bit baffled by Philip French's Observer review of Julie & Julia, where he complained the film gave no mention to Elizabeth David, who was writing French cookbooks for the English before Julia Child was doing her TV thing for Americans. Huh? Do we need to check other countries too, to see if they had anyone promoting French cooking? Philip French thought this was as bad as Tom Hanks 'storming up Omaha Beach on D-Day in Saving Private Ryan, and no mention being made of the British Second Army coming ashore on Gold, Juno, and Sword beaches. Unlikely as it might have been for the Yanks getting slaughtered at Omaha to wonder for the cameras about how Monty's chaps were faring at the somewhat easier beaches to the east, I should point out that for someone being hypercritical about historical accuracy it's rather churlish to forget that the toughest of those three beaches, Juno, was taken by the Canadian Third Division (although it was part of the British Second Army, Canadians are actually not British, and despite Juno's casualties being the second-highest, after Omaha's, the Canadians actually penetrated the farthest off the beaches on the first day).

But the prize for churlishness went to a review by Christopher Turner, in the previous day's Guardian, of Anthony Flint's Wrestling With Moses, a book about Jane Jacobs' battles with Robert Moses which are the background to her classic book on urban planning, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities. In that book Jacobs described the ideal urban environment, which turned out to be exactly the kind of neighbourhood she was living in in Greenwich Village, which was threatened by Moses' plans to extend Park Avenue south through Washington Square Park, and turn Houston Street into a 10 lane expressway to connect the Hudson and East River crossings.

Turner somehow transmutes this into a battle between Jacobs' crowded urban mess and Moses' wide-open spaces. As it happens, I saw my birthplace, New Haven, lose whole neighbourhoods to exactly that sort of road-building (see Murder In The Model City, by Paul Bass and Douglas Rae), and those lost neighbourhoods were re-developed into exactly the sort of urban wastelands Jacobs feared. Yes, she broke the ground for gentrification which has turned the Village into the kind of place the people who made it interesting can no longer afford, but at least you can still walk through it. And by the way, it would be easier to take Turner seriously if he knew that the classic biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, was written by Robert Caro, not Anthony Caro.

There was also a nice little appreciation in that Guardian of Harley Granville-Barker, a much under-appreciated playwright, written by Richard Eyre. I noticed that he described Barker's wife as 'an American millionairess'. How this got past the Guardian's eagle-eyed sub-editors I do not know, as they insist on changing the word 'actress' to 'actor' whenever anyone else uses it, despite whatever confusion that may cause, as when I wrote of porn-director Gerard Damiano saying his experience as a hair-dresser helped him deal with actresses. As I wrote here, the subs changing that to 'actors' rather changed its meaning.

The Guardian insists on a gender neutral word for performers, but not for the very wealthy. They will not use a gender neutral word like 'spouse' to avoid 'husband' and 'wife', nor will they use 'homosexual' or 'gay' in most instances; instead they insist on gender-specific, not neutral, reference as 'gay and lesbian'. I'm sure you can think of other anomalies; that 'millionairess' leapt out at me means either it's a silly proscription or I am a rather sad and pedantic fellow. Probably both.

HENRY PORTER'S DYING LIGHT: Welcome To Police State Britain

The Dying Light
Henry Porter
Orion £12.99 ISBN9780752874845

The problem with writing conspiracy novels, even one as gripping as The Dying Light, is that the conspiracy itself is always the strongest point: the ways in which the powerful conspire against you, use the machinery of the state, the inevitable betrayal by someone you trusted, the dark and shrinking corner into which you are inevitably backed. As a result, the weakest bit is often the resolution, the ways in which the intrepid hero/es manage to beat the system, and emerge victorious on the other side.

It's precisely because Henry Porter's portrayal of near-future Britain, in which the roots of the surveillance state which we have watched being planted all around us for the past decade have finally begun to blossom, is so chillingly accurate and believable, that this problem becomes, in narrative terms, almost insurmountable. Porter has been an eloquent and tireless campaigner against the unchecked growth of surveillance, the consolidation of power into the executive, the abuses of police power, and the diminishing of what British 'subjects' used to believe are their common-law rights as 'citizens'. This means that his picture of near-future Britain is not only chilling, but carries the ring of authenticity: it is really only a small step removed from what any of us have encountered at some point, dealing with officialdom and bureaucracy, and it makes Porter's problem of creating a believable fight-back against it all the more difficult.

His hero, David Eyam, the man committed to destroying the system, happens to be, as unlikely as it sounds, a former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, and he has just been blown up by a terrorist bomb in Colombia. Luckily for the story, Eyam is also incredibly wealthy, as well as being incredibly bright, incredibly well-connected, and relatively attractive. In short, not so much deus ex machina as deus ex Oxonia; hardly extraordinary, just your typical Oxford grad. So too his friend Kate Lockhart, former British intelligence officer turned American lawyer, whose backstory seems contrived primarily to help cast a Kate or Cate or Rachel or Kiera in the movie deal. Both these themes are reinforced by the book's cover image, which shows a woman, cycling through what looks like an Oxford college, looking back over her shoulder in the best gothic novel fashion.

In the end, however, Porter displays the power of the state so convincingly that he needs another insider, a third, more powerful, character to work against it, and here Peter Kilmartin is less a character than another Oxford type: the researcher into ancient history who just happens to be at the center of the government. Along the way you also get one powerful English solicitor, a few nobel members of the House of Lords, and one fatally attractive 'St. James Square' Library librarian without whom the whole thing would fall apart. I must keep my eyes open next time I'm in the London Library.

The plot also requires the presence of an outsider on the villain side, an international businessman even worse than the Rupert Murdoch figure who winds up opposing him; he can order the killings that it seems the British government itself wouldn't. But you never know; Porter's thinly disguised portrayals of Tony Blair and Jack Straw catch each's messianic Stalinism perfectly; they, not the evil outsider, are the book's most chilling villains, to the point you can almost, if not quite, believe one of the PM's PR aides also turning against him.

Some of the state's tactics are familiar from the news, others from fiction. The trigger for the Prime Minister's invoking the Civil Contingencies Act (2004) to assume dictatorial powers, is the spread of algae in the water supply. The process by which this gets blamed on terrorists reflects exactly the 'sexing up' process by which the vague possibility of Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction became an intelligence-backed certainty. It also mirrors the US anthrax scare, which far from being a second terrorist assault post 9/11 has very quietly turned out to be a deliberate leakage from a US germ warfare facility. On the smaller scale, the security services download child porn onto Eyam's computer, a sure way of discrediting him, especially with papers like Murdoch's News Of The World ready to 'name and shame'. This tactic featured in Paul Adam's Enemy Within; where, despite the character's good fortune in being able to prove the computer had been tampered with, his marriage suffered. We never see the same sort of personal angst in Ayem, and the issue is resolved just as neatly by the culprit's confession. But this is one small area that suggests, in real life, such things are not cleaned up so easily, a small metaphor for the greater problem.

Porter, in his afterword, calls this book part of a pair with Brandenburg (2005), which was set around the fall of the Berlin wall, and dealt in part with the apparatus of the East German security state. But I'd liken it more to his overlooked Empire State, which dealt directly with the issue of torture. There Porter was making the same point: that a society's willingness to compromise on its morals, its freedoms, in the name of security, was at heart evil. That, in the end, the victory against the seep of totalitarianism seems unconvincing doesn't it make it any less suspenseful, which is the second triumph of this novel. The first, of course, being the very clear warning signals it sends up for anyone who cares to notice.

NOTE: This review also appears at www.crimetime.co.uk