Spy Story (novel) - Reception

Reception

The book was a bestseller in Great Britain, reaching number 2 on The Bookseller bestseller list. The Jonathan Cape hardover sold 40,000 copies.

Critics generally praised the book, though several complained about the wafer-thin characterizations and the convoluted plot.

The Times Literary Supplement deemed it "a vintage Len Deighton thriller" but complained that Deighton had made "no real advance on his books of ten years ago. Mr. Deighton has, after all, written himself into the position of being judged by rather high standards." The TLS critic praised Deighton's "impeccable handling of the widely different locations", however complained that "the story the characters are empty (though not by the standards of the genre)." Despite this, the TLS critic believed "there is an overall impression of richness. We have been to these, or similar, locations before on spying trips: an isolated castle in Scotland, a nuclear submarine under the northern ice-pack, a party of brittle richesse in Camden. The action and the high life are familiar enough, but the skill with which each is drawn and integrated is beguiling. Too laconic for an old-fashioned cliffhanger, Mr Deighton yet produces a sort of dispassionate cerebral excitement which, like the polar ice itself, is nine-tenths submerged and all the more menacing for that."

Roderick MacLeish, in The Washington Post Book World remarked that Deighton is fun, and unlike John le Carre, Deighton recognizes the amoral darkness of intelligence, politics and the spiritual rot that infects anyone who gets involved "is relegated to the status of cushioning for good, exciting stories." MacLeish says Spy Story is almost as much fun as "the superb yarn" Funeral in Berlin. MacLeish praised Deighton's sense of place: "the atmospherics ring forever true. Deighton seems to know the places he writes about—the bone-buckling cold and interminable rain of the Highlands will be familiar to anyone who has ever tramped across those wastes of appalling beauty. The hushed, lifeless world of ice, emptiness and stars that look as if they would break from the sky while submarines, with the power to incinerate the world, play tag miles below, is redolent of the desolation which, said Tacitus, the conquerors of his time called peace." MacLeish said that the polar ice-cap climax is "one of the most hair-raising passages ever written about sea warfare." However, writing about the protagonist Patrick Armstrong, MacLeish writes, "He needs a bath and loses his mistress in the end because of the things he's done in the beginning and the middle. Deighton is better at plots and settings than he is at people. But the plots are marvelous and the settings alone are worth the price of admission."

Gene Lyons, writing in The New York Times Book Review noted that Deighton's success as a writer of spy thrillers "has always rested on his recognition of the humorous possibilities of the form." Lyons calls the book a "superior entertainment" and remarks that "Deighton seeks a literate audience" but that protagonist Patrick Armstrong "display only the vestigial personal memory needed to flesh him out, so that he may neither learn significantly from previous adventures, nor (God forbid) intellectualize overmuch."

However Pearl K. Bell writing in The New Leader called the book "an impenetrable lemon". "The artful fuzziness so completely overwhelmed the plot that the book was unreadable, all murk and no menace." Bell said that "evasive indirection has been Deighton's trademark since his first spy novel, The Ipcress File, appeared in 1963. At the time, his obsessive reliance on the blurred and intangible, on loaded pauses and mysteriously disjointed dialogue, did convey the shadowy meanness of the spy's world, with its elusive loyalties, camouflaged identities and weary brutality. But Deighton's later efforts have bloated these cryptic and inscrutable mannerisms into a dense fog of unknowing."