Famously, where Ian Fleming glamorised spies, John Le Carré placed his former spook colleagues in more lifelike circumstances, making them grimmer, grubbier and more mortal. Many, though, sought also to be moral, struggling Greene-like with personal fallibility, compromise, great power politics and the search for good deeds in a naughty world. But these figures, as with Fleming, were all about heroics — fighting the good fight, usually against communism/totalitarianism. Smiley, after all, was based in part on a vicar.
There is rather less room for righteousness in James Wolff’s latest thriller, Spies and Other Gods. In Le Carré, the characters just are spies: it is what they get up to in that role that exercises him. But Wolff is just as interested in why people become spies and what it does to them. Exhibit A is Sir William Rentoul, chief of an unnamed intelligence outfit whose brain is going — or is it? — and who awards himself a last fling out “in the field” (a term no spy ever uses, Wolff tells us). Rentoul realises that a life of deceiving and manufacturing uncertainty has shut out many of those closest to him, including his recently deceased wife (much missed, notwithstanding his infidelities).
