Yesterday was a day of relative activity so today I have decided to take it easy. Did a bit of food shopping earlier so if I do decided I don't want to go out any more I won't starve. I have some snacky bits, a bottle of wine and plenty of books to read.... what could possible go wrong?!
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The Fourth Protocol - Frederic Forsyth
I liked this one. It has a good pace and a story line that goes round one way then another with plenty of red herrings in the process. The body count is moderate but some of the stuff that happens is a bit underworldly gruesome. To balance it out Forsyth has created a perfectly likable character in John Preston who is a dogged investigator who is disliked by one of his superiors but turns out to be the man of the moment in the end. I have to say that none of the characters in this novel have a lot of depth but with the pace at which the story moves that is not a bad thing. Deep personal development and man's motive to change the world would just get in the way of the story.
What it kind of boils down to is that it seems that the naughty Russian have infiltrated the British Labour Party to the core and are planning a revolution. In order to get the public to sympathise more with the Labour Party they plan an event that will devastate England, shift the blame squarely on the Conservatives so that Labour will ride to the rescue of the nation in the next elections. The plan is tricky and risky and it will take some of England's finest to stop it. This brings us to John Preston. He is a man stuck in an MI5 job he does not like only to get shifted to a job he likes even less. He keeps stumbling on little things that just do not seem quite right and reports them to his bosses only to have them hushed up. Fortunately for him the good people of MI6 seems to be very interested in what he has to say and this makes sure that Preston is able to remain involved in the investigation into what the Russians are planning. Preston seems to be clutching at straws some of the time but through his persistence manages to get his man, track him down to his hide out and prevent large scale disaster.
One thing i liked about the book was that apart from John Preston doing his investigating and saving the world bit you also get to see what is going on in Russia with those that set the plan in motion. The suggestion that the Russians have spent literally decades infiltrating the English political landscape and plan to overthrow it from the inside out is mind boggling. Not as mind boggling as the fact that it is orchestrated by an former Brit who defected to the USSR. Mr Philby has a pigeon that is pining for some good old British corn to pick at. The plan that they come up with in the end seems almost to crazy for words but so crazy that it might just work. When reading about the meetings and the plan you also get an idea of how Russia was ruled and in what kind of atmosphere and society the idea is born. No-one trusts anyone and every single communist idea seems well and truly overthrown... yet.... they must persist and spread the Russian ideology. At times life inside Forsyth's Russia seems to be the breeding ground for defeatism more than communism and dreariness surrounds everyone's life.
Another thing I liked was that the story does twist and turn and keeps the true motives of some of the main players hidden until the end. There are agents, double agents, people who are not who they seem to be, undercover operatives, true patriots and pretend patriots and each of them have their own motives for doing what they do. It all makes for a divers gang of characters who operate in the shadowy world of espionage. When the plan to send Britain into a revolution is set in motion it seems that nothing can stop it but.. maybe that is not entirely true. There seems to be one who may be able to, but it all depends on just how much drink he can handle. In the end the British intelligence services save the day. However, how much of this was achieved by themselves and how much help really did come from the Russians directly? In the end the book does leave you questioning who is pulling whose strings, who betrayed who and who knew. Did Russia beat the British or did the British strike the final blow?
All in all... low on character development but a fast paced read with lots of things happening on the main stage and in the wings.
Title: The Fourth Protocol
Author: Frederic Forsyth
526 pages
Corgi Books
ISBN# 0-552-12569-5
Books to be read: 147
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