Author: Lionel Davidson
Tags: #philippullman #coldwar #siberia
Discovered: The window of Daunt Books in Marylebone
Where read: (in part) Ozone Coffee, Leonard Street, London
What's the story?
This cold war spy thriller is set in the freezing tundra of Siberia, one of the most impenetrable places on Earth and home to a top secret Soviet research base and laboratory. The story follows our all adventure protagonist Jonny Porter whose verve and unique native Canadian background provides the perfect linguistic and cultural disguise to infiltrate the high security Soviet base. Classic spy fiction.
The Word's Shortlist view:
Kolymsky Heights is a page turner from the very off, a secret message in a cigarette package sent to an Oxford professor and a complete preserved Mammoth carcass turning up in Siberia - this is thriller fiction at its most compelling. Porter's journey across the Arctic Sea from Japan to Russia is a masterclass in spy fiction. Davidson invests so much attention in the detail that every aspect of the story is completley believable the only trouble is that the pages and pages of detail can, at times, hold the narrative up. At times I was actually willing the characters on.
At times this novel is brilliant but at other times boring. My guess is that fans of the genre (Le Carre et al) will delight in the pace but for the rest of us this feels a bit like committing to a 12 episode box set just because the pilot episode is so good. Still, I'll always be grateful for Daunt books for continuing to showcase old and new fiction at its very best. For more wonderful bookstores see the tweet of the week below.
Looking for a thriller in similarly freezing surroundings? My moneys on Arne Dahl's Bad Blood http://wordsshortlist.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/bad-blood-macabre-slice-of-urban-gothic.html
Tweet of the week:
Weird and wonderful #bookshops worldwide – in pictures http://gu.com/p/429at/stw #books
The Word's Shortlist
@wordsshortlist
'That book guy', tweeting mainly about fiction and reading but with occasional sidebars into art, Japanese culture and architecture #readmore
Oxfordshire
No comments:
Post a Comment