A good back-cover blurb is a comparative rarity. Even rarer is a blurb that remains accurate and satisfying after one has finished reading the book it adorns.
The blurb on this book is both good and useful. It begins thus: “Throughout December 1767, Alistair Douglas has been using the Decipherers’ network of contacts in London to attempt to find two men, Pearce and Flanagan, who have been tracked to London from Boston — well-known as dangerous men and natural leaders of the mob. As rumours fly around, there has been an increasing number of anonymous printed attacks on the King and his ministers. But, frustratingly, there are few leads.”
If you are confused, you are forgiven. Nevertheless, this, and the rest of the blurb, is an admirably succinct, if not beautifully written, summary of the premise of the story. The story itself really is that intricate; the “events” that happen and leap breathlessly from page to page – it is a page-turner, despite the unpromising density of the blurb – are only the uppermost, visible layer of the happenings, processes, rivalries that move late 18th-century English society and government at the topmost and bottom-most levels.
Now to explain. Alistair Douglas is a young man of good but provincial family in his late 20s. He is a Decipherer, that is, he works at the sharper end of the spy apparatus of the Crown. Think of the Decipherers as early MI6; and of Douglas as a less decorative James Bond.
Douglas has served the Crown as a secret agent since 1757. We know this because the first title in The Decipherer’s Chronicles series was The Cobras of Calcutta (Macmillan, 2010), and in that book Douglas came of age as a young East India Company employee co-opted into the British clandestine effort to topple both the French in Bengal and the Nawab of Murshidabad. It culminates with Plassey.
Douglas is not long returned from the American colonies, where he appears to have been involved in the British struggles against the French and Native Americans. “Appears” because the author has let a decade of fictional time elapse between the first book and this one. Pearce and Flanagan have been dangerous to the British cause in America – remember, the American independence movement is about to break out – and Douglas has come to London on their trail.
At least some of the “anonymous printed attacks” on members of the British government are from the pen of John Wilkes, a radical pamphleteer and politician who is the core around which this novel turns. When the novel opens, Wilkes is in exile in Paris, where he has fled after being convicted of “seditious libel” and deprived of his parliamentary seat. In Paris he runs up huge debts and eventually has to escape back to England, where he resolves to take up his seat in Parliament despite all that the government can throw against him.
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This is where Douglas is pulled into the business. While the search for Pearce and Flanagan goes slowly, he is assigned to watch Wilkes. As the political row over Wilkes deepens and the threat to the government grows – because Wilkes has mobilised London’s working class behind him – Douglas’ multiple responsibilities begin to coalesce. Wilkes’ life may be under threat, and the two slippery Americans may have something to do with it. Douglas must keep Wilkes safe because his death would rouse the London mob to fury. And that would bring the army out on to the streets, which would result in even more slaughter.
Douglas must negotiate these deadly shoals and the no less troublesome (in fact, quite exciting) reefs of bureaucratic jealousy and intrigue. Meanwhile, his personal life begins to unravel when a woman he had loved and long thought lost resurfaces — engaged to a man who played a part in Douglas’ experiences in Bengal.
And so on. The Decipherer’s Chronicles is developing into an arresting series, and Alistair Douglas a character worth following. Author Grant Sutherland makes some odd choices — such as to let a decade elapse between the first and second books; to make a historical thriller turn on a character like Wilkes; to eschew conclusion and let the story slide along into the next instalment, which may not pick up where this one ends...
Perplexing. Perhaps Sutherland is bored with the deliberately circumscribed environment of comparable historical novels — such as Patrick O’Brian’s naval adventures, Georgette Heyer’s upper-class romances, Gore Vidal’s chronicles of American empire, Hilary Mantel’s Tudor drama.
Whatever it is, look forward to the blurb: it will help you set the complicated story in order.
THE HAWKS OF LONDON
Grant Sutherland
Macmillan,
VIII+356 pages; Rs 550
