Agent Running in the Field, The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Man in the Wooden Hat

 

Having read a damning review of John Le Carre's "Brexit" novel, I was dreading what it might contain. Fortunately, there seemed to me hardly any interruption to what is a very decent spy thriller. OK, the two main characters are very much pro Europe, but why not? The book is tightly written in the first person and moves along at a speedy pace. The prose is as good as ever, this is a writer still at the top of his game.

This is one of Muriel Spark's early novels written in 1960, twenty plus years before those later books that I thought were so much better: "Loitering With Intent", "A Far Cry From Kensington" and "Symposium". Peckham in South London does not come out of it well. Although our anti-hero Dougal Douglas (or is Douglas Dougal?) will not travel north of the river. I had to think back to those days in the city when I was fifteen.

The parts of the book I enjoyed most involved dialogue. This is Spark at her best. The story itself is strange and flat, until the frantic ending that is. I recently watched a documentary about the author on Sky and found out why she only wrote one long novel (The Ballad of Peckham Rye is only 140 pages). I actually chose the "The Mandelbaum Gate" for book club. It turned out that this longish book was not successful and she never wrote one of that length ever again.

This book is the "sequel" to Jane Gardam's wonderful "Old Filth". I say sequel, but it is more of a companion piece as it reveals the story of Filth's wife Betty. Well, her story from when she met her husband to be. I would have loved a section about her time as a young code breaker at Bletchley Park in the war. Maybe another book to come.

Here we are treated to some devastating moments in her later life. The author is so good at setting up an event before the actual revelation. Sir Edward Feathers QC still has a large part to play in this excellent domestic drama, as has his rival from the first book, Terry Veneering. I had forgotten that Eddie Feathers' specialty was building contracts, so when the book mentions their bible "Hudson on Building Contracts", I was transported back to my days as a QS and finding the "Hudson Formula" for the calculation of the costs of delay. (See note below).

In the Sunday Times this week, I found I was not the only one who was hugely impressed with these novels. Maggie O'Farrell, one of my very favourite authors, wrote in her full page spread about reading in lock-down, that "Jane Gardam's Old Filth trilogy (was) a revelation".

Back to Hudson. Contract Law was always my favourite of all the many subjects for my Institute of Quantity Surveyors (now the RICS) examinations. But perversely, it was the only paper I failed first time. I did have an impacted wisdom tooth during this second batch of exams (extracted the day after the last one) so I do have an excuse. It was the only paper I had to resit, that being successful in Leeds the following year. I prepared my first ever claim for delay in 1974 on a contract for 271 dwellings at Bretton in Peterborough. I used the Hudson Formula for overheads and this seemed to be partly accepted as my directors were able to negotiate a decent financial settlement. But not before we attended a lawyer's office where I was the only one of the team he wanted to talk to. Maybe it was Old Filth himself.