You can’t really make this stuff up any more, political reality having long since outpaced fiction, but thank goodness there are people who continue to try. Recent history has supplied more than enough intrigue, misinformation, diplomatic doublespeak and sheer zone-flooding mad shit to challenge even the most inventive writer of political thrillers, but fortunately Andrew Rosenheim is more than up for it.
His new novel, The Interpreter’s Secret, is an interesting sort of crossbreed of the old Le Carré-style of spy thriller – rich in ambiguities, details of bureaucratic intrigue and hand-wringing moral compromises – and the contemporary high-octane, hyperkinetic kind of thing in which super-jacked, tooled-up people are forever running around and which tend to read more like Netflix pilot scripts than actual books.
The novel’s premise is simple. Thomas Weaver, an interpreter working for the State Department in New York, finds himself attending a G20 summit in Stockholm, where he is unexpectedly drawn into a clandestine meeting between senior American and Russian figures. What he hears suggests the existence of a secret understanding between Washington and Moscow. Having accidentally recorded the conversation, Weaver is suddenly transformed from innocent observer into unwilling participant: classic. His resulting flight as he is relentlessly hunted down across London and some of the pleasanter parts of England provides the plot. Hints here of John Buchan, Rogue Male and indeed Cary Grant in North by Northwest.
