I am off to London today for a few days so thought I had better get this done as once I am with grandchildren I will not have a minute to do anything. But that is how it should be and how I like it.
Papers full of Summer Reading recommendations by the Great and the Good of the Litterati all of which I read with huge enjoyment as (1) i have usually heard of none of the books they choose or if I have (2) have no desire to read them and (3) I never believe any of them. If anybody is going to sit on a beach or a balcony with a cocktail or two and read the lastest biography of Proust well, good for them, but I find in the summer I read lighter stuff.
Now you may think But you Read Lighter Stuff all the time and you may be right. Gone are the days when I feel I need to read Booker lists, Orange Lists, or Books which will Bore you Stiff lists. I read what I want. And so I have been immersed in the usual mix of Murder and Mayhem and Spies.
When my daughter was over she left me a book, The Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews. Oh you will love this mum, full of spycraft and involving the CIA, FBI, Russian Moles etc. So she left it behind and I read it and, yes, she was right. I really enjoyed it.
The Red Sparrow of the title is Dominika Egorova, a ballet dancer with the Bolshoi, whose career is ruined when a jealous dancer stamps on her during a performance and breaks her foot, thus finishing her career (she gets her own back I can assure you). Dominika's uncle, who is a high up in the Intelligence Service, recruits her with threats of turning her ill mother out onto the street and out of the apartment they live in, if she does not comply.
She is forced to entrap an oligarch who Putin wishes to eliminate and after she has witnessed his murder she is sent to the Sparrow School where she is trained to become a sexual predator and honey trap officer for the SVR, the Soviet Intelligence department. As she witnesses the elimination of some of her friends and the venality and vileness of those purporting to be supporting Russia, she decides to offer herself to the CIA as a spy.
Enter her handler, Nate, with whom of course she falls in love. Now this could be a weak link in the story but, in fact, it adds to the tenseness of it all. And so she starts her life as an agent for the USA.
After reading the book I rented the film on Netflix and watched it and it is a very good adaptation of the story. Jennifer Lawrence stars as Dominika and she is excellent. it may be a bit difficult to watch in places and some feminists have complained about the sexual content and the portrayal of Dominika as a sex object (completely missing the point that it is because of this she turns against her country) and also a rather unpleasant section when she is "interrogated". I admit I looked away a few times. So this film or this book may not be for you.
I discovered there were two other books, The Palace of Treason and the Kremlin's Candidate which I also read this week and could not put down. The author is ex-CIA so his background is impeccable and the ins and outs of the politics on Capitol Hill as well as the spycraft used is fascinating.
If you want a really exciting read I can recommend these three but, as I said, be warned there are graphic descriptions of violence which you may not like. I didn't but I just skipped over them. And there area also pages of information re missiles and nuclear weapons which can pall after a while but on the whole a terrifc trilogy.
If you do read the Red Sparrow before seeing the movie, be warned, they change the end. It is a good change and I can see why they did it as I understand there is a possiblity of another film, but a shame in a way.
And if Putin should ever read these in translation I don't think he will like the way he is portrayed very much....
