Ashenden, or, The British Agent

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One Thursday lunchtime the Earth gets unexpectedly demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass. Where the idea begins to fail is that the book is really a series of very short stories which end up having not enough connection with one another.

There she is given the chance to undo her regrets and try out each of the other lives she might have lived.Then there are the outlandish characters: the hairless Mexican, a rather unquiet American, a woman acrobat madly in love with a rebel that British Intelligence wants to kill. Many spy novelists could learn a lot about writing more varied and interesting characters by reading Ashenden. And there's the tiresome revisionist history of 'Hitler was a bad man' so my character will be good and not be a fascist. Dr Gavin Ashenden, a former Royal Chaplain, offers his own insightful and extremely well-informed perspectives on the death of a Queen and the coming of a King in this 18th episode of Merely Catholic, the podcast series for the Catholic Herald.

This might be the first time that I read a book after adding it to be TBR based on what a character in another book says after meeting the author in that other book. Ashenden is a fictionalized version of Maugham himself, who did actually work for the British Secret Service in Switzerland and Russia during the First World War. His preface is a spirited—although prickly-- defense of the traditional literary concepts of “a beginning, a middle and an end. Perhaps if this had taken three distinct period's and three families it would have worked - as it is, I'm just not sure.He sees its eventual “collapse into a secularized progressive Protestant splinter gro Michael Pollan, known for his best-selling nonfiction audio, including The Omnivores Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind, conceived and wrote Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World as an Audible Original. Of course the book is of its time and stereotypes like this turn up in many other authors' works, but I find them harder to put up with here because the hero/narrator is so blissfully certain of his own superiority.

Il che echeggia la vicenda personale dello stesso Maugham che durante la Grande Guerra fu coinvolto dal servizio di spionaggio inglese, proprio come anni dopo capitò a Graham Greene. Do you feel weighed down by stress and pressure, held back by judgement and lack of opportunity, and critcised by everyone – including yourself? They are beginning to share the perspective that began to clarify [for me] about 20 years ago: that Anglicanism was a 400-year-old ecumenical experiment that had suddenly and terminally failed.

It is beautifully written with just the right touch of description and a way of bringing the characters alive and I liked the concept. For example, in The Traitor, the description of the German spy learning that the British have executed her husband leaves the reader sympathising with her, not with Ashenden. The writing is adept and enjoyable, especially for those who enjoy old estate tales such as `Downton Abbey' and the building is seen to almost come to life. The shockwaves following his “swimming the Tiber” were felt and noted throughout England’s established church.

The problem is that no amount of good writing, and it is good, makes up for a lack of plotting and not making the reader engage with the characters.He knows that he functions as a "tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine," in which he "never had the advantage of seeing a completed action," most of the time not knowing "what his own doings led to.