Published by St. Martin's Press on February 12, 2019
I always count on Charles Cumming to tell a good story. Like Kit Carradine, the protagonist in The Moroccan Girl, Cumming writes spy novels that occupy a space “between the kiss-kiss-bang-bang of Ludlum and the slow-burn chess game of le Carré.” The Moroccan Girl fits nicely in that niche.
The novel is set against the background of a social protest movement known as Resurrection. Unlike Occupy or Antifa, Resurrection takes direct action against specific individuals who exemplify greed and social injustice, sometimes by kidnapping or killing them. The group’s founders included a Russian named Ivan Simakov and his girlfriend, Lara Bartok, who was born in Hungary. By the time Simakov died in an explosion in Moscow, the movement had thousands of members.
Lara begins the novel by making a statement to the Secret Intelligence Service. Her statement is divided into five parts. Between each part, Cumming reveals the backstory.
By chance (or not), Kit Carradine meets Robert Mantis, who identifies himself as a British spy. Kit has been invited to attend a literary event in Marrakech. Mantis recruits him to pass some money to an asset in Casablanca and to look for a woman in Marrakech who has gone missing. It does not take Kit long to discern the woman’s identity. She is, of course, Lara Bartok.
Kit sees the invitation as the opportunity to follow in his father’s footsteps by doing real work as a spy and hopes that a successful mission might spark a secondary career as a clandestine asset for the SIS. He feels inspired by Maugham, Greene, and Forsyth, all of whom mixed the reality of espionage with their fictional creations. That’s a clever and credible premise, because what spy fiction fan doesn’t imagine being a spy?
Kit enjoys the intrigue of Casablanca until a series of encounters with people who might also be spies convince him that his amateurism has screwed up his mission. Kit’s ego and his desire for future assignments then overcome his good judgment. He decides to prove his value by ignoring instructions and continuing to search for Lara. Along the way, Kit meets a number of shady characters, any or all of whom might be spies working for America or Great Britain or Russia.
In the tradition of spy novels, the reader is asked to question whether each character is who or what the character purports to be. Some of the answers are surprising, as they should be in a spy novel, but the story is sufficiently plausible to be convincing.
I enjoyed the ideological clashes between people who have competing viewpoints: those who want to save the world from oppressors and those who believe that most people want to join the oppressors at the seat of power; those who view violence as a revolutionary tool and those who reject violence regardless of the ideology that provokes its use. I also appreciated the timeliness of The Moroccan Girl, although to avoid spoilers, I will leave it to the reader to discover the way in which Cumming has crafted a story that parallels current events.
Cumming builds suspense nicely and caps the plot with an action scene as the suspense reaches its climax. The pace is appropriate to a novel that falls between kiss-kiss-bang-bang and slow-burn chess game. The story is never dull but it takes time to establish interest in the characters and to create the kind of atmosphere that makes events in Casablanca and Marrakech seem real. In its plot, characterization, and atmosphere, The Moroccan Girl stands among Cumming’s best spy novels.
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