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The Spider of Sarajevo by Robert Wilton

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Manda Scott
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The Spider of Sarajevo by Robert Wilton

Post by Manda Scott » Tue February 4th, 2014, 1:10 pm

Those of you who write will be familiar with the phenomenon where you, the author, are reading a book - for pleasure - and you find yourself editing it in your head as you go. You delete paragraphs that weren't necessary. You shave off the blubber and sharpen the plot points that are hidden in flab, while dialing back the ones that have the metaphorical equivalent of a Post-It note written in capital, bold, 36 point comic sans with the exclamation points in italic cerise.

And then there are the ones where you read through from cover to cover and all you can think is, [expletive deleted], I wish I'd written this. Periodically, you intersperse with 'how the **** did you *do* that?'

Hilary Mantel is one of these. And Robert Low. And, at the peak of the new generation of writers, Robert Wilton whose mix of literate language, concept and plot makes him almost unique in the genre.

His first novel won our HWA/Goldsboro (as it was then) Debut Crown. His second made sense of the English Civil War in ways nothing else has ever done (to be honest, I'd given up on trying to understand, nor did I care: now I at least have some clue and I care far more) and now his new one THE SPIDER OF SARAJEVO opens up the origins of WWI.

It's 2014. We're going to be reading a lot of the period 1914-18 over the next year or three. Already, there are 1,000 novels due to be published this year which revisit thus greatest of Great Wars. Several of those are already really, really good (Rob Ryan's Dead Man's Land/The Dead Can Wait and The Dead Can Wait, or Letters from Skye by new writer Jessica Brockmole are two of the recent stand-outs for me) - but these are 'we're in the war, it's ghastly, this is how we coped' stories (which is fine). Nothing I have read so far has even attempted to make sense of the mess of European and global politics that actually lead us into conflict.

Let's face it, the war was a mess. And incomprehensible. Except, of course, nothing is incomprehensible if you actually understand it. But that doesn't guarantee you can make it comprehensible for the rest of us.

And if you can do both of those, THAT doesn't guarantee that you can make the resulting novel worth staying up late through the night to finish as this one does.

The plot at its most basic is this: two spymasters, one in the UK, one in continental Europe, are fighting a proxy war through their agents on the ground, with the highest of prizes as their stake: the survival of the Comptrollerate General for Scrutiny and Survey, the oldest, most venerable, and arguably the greatest, spy apparatus of all time, which is dedicated to preserving the welfare of the UK.

On the British side, four (extra) ordinary people are sourced and recruited and sent across the water, each to do what he or she does best. They range from a part-Irish wide-boy addicted to risk, through an anthropologist and a Scottish hard-nosed merchant, to Flora Hathaway, a delightfully intelligent, well educated widow with an apparent interest in medieval scripts.
These four, plus Major Valentine Knox who has the unenviable task of shepherding them on occasion, draw attention to themselves, and it is the responses to that attention that forms the core of the novel, the buffered back-and-forth threat and counter threat directed at a distance by two men who can see the broader pictures that other people miss but cannot take to the field in person.

As with all the best novels (Thomas Cromwell, anyone?), it's the people that make this matter. The four agents and those around them are living people, not ciphers. They are real for their time, or it seemed so to me: not 21st century actors dressed in period costume. They are lost, alone, afraid, confident, difficult, conflicted and we come to care deeply about their progress, cheering from the sidelines when they succeed, despairing with them when they fail.

Of course, at some level, we know what will happen: Archduke Ferdinand will die in Belgrade and the continent will lurch into war. The great skill of this novel, is that nothing feels inevitable. And everything feels right.
*******************************

Bestselling author of
Boudica: Dreaming. INTO THE FIRE out in June 2015: Forget what you thought you knew, this changes everything.

[url=http:www.mandascott.co.uk]http:www.mandascott.co.uk[/url]

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