Night Heron

by Adam Brookes

[viking2917]

Peanut is a Chinese dissident/spy trapped in a Chinese prison camp. Mangan is a British journalist hanging out in Beijing with a friend and a high society Chinese girlfriend. When Peanut breaks out of camp and re-establishes contact with British intelligence, in the form of Trish Patterson, a tall, attractive Army intelligence officer, Mangan is slowly drawn into an operation to penetrate the Chinese military network, with Trish as his handler.

Night Heron (Peanut’s code name is Night Heron) is a new work by Adam Brookes, formerly the BBC’s China correspondent. Brookes readily evokes the new China, the growth, the politics and the conflict between Communist Theory and Capitalist Practice. Night Heron is a bit of a polemic against the “espionage industrial complex”, and various intelligence contractor companies make their appearance. While Night Heron contains the de rigueur portrayal of senior intelligence officers and operations as amoral and ultimately soulless ala John Le Carre, this positioning doesn’t get in the way of the story. Night Heron moves quickly, although surprisingly, nothing much goes wrong for two thirds of the book. When it goes wrong, it goes wrong quickly, and the story moves quickly to a conclusion (a bit too quickly for my tastes).

I was expecting the relationship between Mangan and his handler Patterson to develop into something interesting, either romantic or not, but it never really went anywhere. There’s a whiff of a sequel in there. There’s decent renderings of spy tradecraft, although in today’s modern era, tradecraft seems to mostly consist of taking the battery out of your phone so you can’t be tracked. Finally, the bad guys (not the Chinese ones, the ones on our side) were a bit one-dimensional; I’d have enjoyed a bit more self-justifying claptrap from them, rather than simply doing their “realpolitik” without commentary.

I enjoyed Night Heron and it was quick reading. Fans of John Le Carre or Charles Cumming will enjoy it - it’s not Le Carre quality but compares very well to Cumming so far as I am concerned, especially for a first time novelist.

(I received a copy of Night Heron from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers Program)