Shane Collins, the protagonist of The Peacock and the Sparrow, is a late-career spy playing out the string in a minor post in the kingdom of Bahrain. Rebellion is in the air, but the main opposition group is poorly-funded and lacking in weapons and material. Collins has a source inside the group, but isn’t sure how much he really knows and how much he is willing to divulge. Collins is also struggling to impress his much-younger boss, partly because he finds it hard to respect someone without his field experience. All of this becomes more complicated when Collins meets, and falls for, a local artist. Almaisa is a beautiful woman caught between two worlds. Western-educated thanks to her white mother, her natural sympathies are nevertheless aligned more with the revolutionaries in the streets.
Collins is practically a parody of fictional spies. He’s a tough-minded semi-intellectual who thinks he’s smarter than he is. He drinks too much. He treats seduction as just another form of spycraft. He’s dismissively racist of the local population, despite speaking their language and feigning sympathy for their cause.
Collins is, as the kids say, a tough hang. His sourness makes the book a slog to get through. The plot seems to just plod from event to event, rendering even the most extreme turning points flat and uninspiring. There are the typical bombings, kidnappings, and betrayals associated with the spy genre, but they fail to arouse the reader’s interest.
The most surprising thing I read in the whole book was the line in the author bio that said I.S. Berry (a pen name) had actually worked for the CIA. Perhaps in real life espionage is exactly as boring as it is in the pages of The Peacock and the Sparrow. I wouldn’t know. But if so, then I’m thankful that John Le Carre had the decency to make stuff up.