Toddled Dredge

Look! There in the distance - is it an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker? A Tasmanian tiger? Perhaps a Crumple-Horned Snorkack? No, a creature even rarer than these: an actor who can write.

Hugh Laurie’s The Gun Seller is a comic take on the popular spy novel. The usual action and intrigue vie for place with wordplay and wry humor. His protagonist, Thomas Lang, is a former soldier with deadly fighting acumen and a constant inner monologue. He is introduced to us in the middle of a fight, musing on how best to break a person’s arm, because someone is trying to break his.

He gets out of that fix, and manages to hoodwink the police and avoid arrest. He explains to the reader:

I’ve been in prison, you see. Only three weeks, and only on remand, but when you’ve had to play chess twice a day with a monosyllabic West Ham supporter, who has ‘HATE’ tattoed on one hand, and ‘HATE’ on the other - using a set missing six pawns, all the rooks and two of the bishops - you find yourself cherishing the little things in life. Like not being in prison.

Lang gets involved in your standard international conspiracy. There are layers of deception, a beautiful woman or two, displays of prowess and lots of guns. Everything necessary for a spy novel.

There are Americans in this book, big, heavy-handed Americans whose mixture of idealism and hard-bitten man-of-action shtick makes them easy dupes for the real bad guys. In fact, there are a lot of complaints about Americans in this book, but Laurie writes well enough that it never degenerates into the whining tedium so common to anti-American rants. Of course, I am a frumpy middle-aged American housewife, so it may simply be that I am not likely to be offended by portrayals of Americans as hulking go-getters.

The chief pleasure of The Gun Seller is Lang’s voice: observant, self-deprecating and undecidedly cynical. As the novel draws near to its ruthless but satisfying ending, he takes the usual precautions of the spy genre to reveal the truth in case of his death.

I typed a long and incomprehensible statement, describing only those parts of my adventure in which I behaved like a good and clever man, and deposited it with Mr Halkerston at the National Westminster Bank in Swiss Cottage. It was long because I didn’t have time to do a short one, and incomprehensible because my typewriter has no letter ‘d’.

I promise I did not just love that paragraph because I am a blogger.

Laurie’s book was published in 1999, and in reading it I had to constantly remind myself that it was written before 9/11. The conspiracy does not play as well since then, and I kept wondering if he would have written the book the same way after 9/11.

It looks like I’ll have a chance to find out. He has a new book, The Paper Soldier, soon to be released.