How To Betray Your Country by James Wolff

 

August Drummond is a disgraced British intelligence officer. He’s been drummed out of his job under suspicion of leaking information for moral purposes – information he felt the public or foreign law enforcement should know, and which his employers were keeping secret for their own bureaucratic reasons. He found his conscience after meeting an idealistic activist who he fell in love with, and who challenged his preconceptions. After her death in a traffic accident, and his being forced out of the service, Drummond has sunk into alcoholic despair. He’s taken a job in Turkey, and is on the flight there, when he sees a young man acting suspiciously. Guessing he’s an ISIS recruit on his way to fight in Syria, Drummond follows him when they land. The man is arrested by the Turkish police, but not before he dumps something in a bin. Drummond retrieves it and discovers a note detailing a rendezvous in a cemetery. He guesses the meeting to be with an ISIS facilitator/recruiter and on a whim decides to take the arrested man’s place. Needless to say, things aren’t all they seem, and soon August is out of his depth and in serious trouble.

 

How to Betray Your Country is the author’s second novel, following on from a brilliant debut, Beside The Syrian Sea. It’s a standalone really, in that the story doesn’t follow on from the tale the debut told, and while the main character and plot of the author’s debut is touched upon, this is a self-contained narrative that can be read on its own. That said, the author plans a third novel, and the trilogy is thematically related, and the novels certainly complement each other. They’re both extremely good books too, and I would recommend them both.

 

Like with the author’s debut, How to Betray Your Country centres around what happens when an intelligence officer acts against the system. The main character (as with the protagonist of his debut) is not a traitor turned by a foreign power or terrorist group but has his own reasons for his rebelliousness. Both novels do not portray the intelligence services in a good light, which is perhaps (or perhaps not) a surprise, seeing as the author is writing under a pseudonym and the publishers tell us he worked for the UK government for over ten years. Reading between the lines, it appears Wolff might well have worked for the intelligence services himself, and thus perhaps his negative portrayal might be more nearer the mark than the intelligence services themselves would care to admit.

 

Like Mick Herron’s Slough House series, James Wolff’s novels buck the trend of espionage novels, which tend to portray the intelligence services as all-powerful and their personnel as superhuman James Bonds. Instead, we have all too human people, many incompetent and/or venal, employed by clunking bureaucracies which are as keen to cover up their own errors as they are dangerous plots.  

 

How to Betray Your Country is a brilliantly written novel and well worth a read. I would recommend the author’s debut as well and look forward to reading the third title in the trilogy whenever it might come.