Matt McAvoy Book Review

I’ll have to be harshly frank here, but in truth I really found this book a little of a struggle.  Not that it isn’t very good and Hayden is not a tremendously experienced, talented and articulate author – he absolutely is; the problem for me was that I just didn’t quite get into it from the outset, and was then playing catch-up for the whole duration of the book.  The story is a tangled one, with an ensemble cast, and in honest I was pretty lost throughout; the disappointing fact is that I got off on the wrong foot and never recovered. 

Hayden, whilst undeniably a superb craftsman of the English language, tends to write in a very subjective, almost abstract narrative style, straight from mind to pen almost unfiltered, and readers are well advised to shut themselves away and throw their full concentration into getting on his wavelength from the beginning.  Bear in mind that he writes in a very dialogue-heavy style, in a lot of vernacular, and the quickfire exchange between characters is often his method of sharing the narrative, so can be quite difficult to keep pace with.  Get to know the author’s style, the characters and each of their narrative strands; if you do, I genuinely think you will experience a fantastic reading experience.

I truly felt it something of a shame that I didn’t manage to gain traction with this superb spy thriller, and my high praise for it may seem somewhat at odds with my rating, but I understand fully the work and talent which has gone into this book, and of course I did read it in full, so I concur that it is a very good work of fiction, dark and sinister, whilst I am sure wonderfully researched and presented in gritty style.  Telling a tale of the murky dealings at the top levels of international terrorism, the intelligence communities’ dealings with each other and the blurred lines in between is always going to involve brutality and ambiguity, and this is a good example of that.  There is glamour but no gloss, as you would expect in the world of billionaire fundamentalists and top-level intelligence wet work.  Frankly, this book has all of that, and is a great example of it – I wish I was able to enjoy it as much as I would have liked to.  So, despite the rating, I do recommend this book to those who like an intensely composed, convoluted espionage tale.