A Russian Spy Ring at the Heart of the British Establishment - Book Review of A Spy Alone by Charles Beaumont
REVIEW — When the truths of our politics are stranger than even the most fanciful fiction, is there any merit in reading political fiction? Furthermore, can serious students, scholars, and civil servants derive real educative or entertainment value from fictionized accounts of today’s politics?
A Spy Alone answers these questions in the affirmative. It is written by a former MI6 officer, using the pseudonym Charles Beaumont. The book illustrates the value and salience of political fiction to help us grapple with our disordered world. It has already received rave reviews from The Times (of London), The Financial Times, The Economist, The Guardian, and others.
A Spy Aloneisfundamentally about how the primary challenges of our current era of Enduring Disorder—from the culture wars, to hysteria over migration, to the rise of post-truth neo-populist politicians like Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, and Geert Wilders — have been aided and abetted by Russian penetration of the West’s social, political, media, and financial elites. This ‘blame it all on the Russians’ approach can certainly be taken too far; furthermore, it isn’t something easily proven by empirical analysis. That is why any scholarly work trying to conclusively ‘pin’ Brexit, Tucker Carlson, Trump’s rise, hapless financial deregulation, or popular hysteria over transgender issues on Russia’s intelligence services is bound to fail. That isn’t how scholarship works.
Enter the role of fiction. Fiction can paint a deliberately broad brushstroke picture and the reader can then assess the factual and emotional resonances judging how true to life it seems. Consider: it is widely acknowledged that religion and philosophy are helpful in grappling with the ethical and regulatory questions surrounding AI and transgenic humans, so why can’t literary fiction play that role concerning hostile foreign penetration of our politics and the failures of our Western counterespionage services to protect us?…
