The Moroccan Girl, by Charles Cumming

A simple thing that became complicated.

Literary spy novels often involve a protagonist who has a profession other than an undercover career in intelligence. Novelists didn’t make this stuff up. A recent example is Valerie Plame, who worked as a private energy consultant when she wasn’t working at CIA. Most often, a real world spy works on a specific caper with a one-time alias, but novelists love the idea of the “nonofficial cover,” and so it is fitting that a common alter ego for a spy is the writer, mainly in the pages of fiction, but sometimes in real life. Somerset Maugham is the poster child for that. In The Moroccan Girl, Charles Cumming’s protagonist, Kit Carradine, who is a writer of spy fiction, is approached by a man claiming to be a British MI6 Agent and asked if he would do one “simple” mission for MI6 during a trip Kit is taking to a writers conference in Morocco. How could any self-respecting writer of spy fiction refuse such an offer? Kit accepts, of course, and goes off to his conference in Morocco with cash and a secret envelop.

The plot has many twists and turns, all of which heighten a peculiar tension in the story based on reveals that heap mystery upon mystery. Since the build-up of tension in this way is integral to the novel, any more detail of the novel’s plot development would in effect be a spoiler. One could say that the starts and stops in the plot line are convoluted. A reader wanting to move steadily toward a climax will be disappointed with this pace, and the fact that there is not one but several conclusory moments in the story. But a search for the big finale misses the point. The Moroccan Girl is more a literary novel than a spy thriller. Kit is a troubled character, disappointed with parts of his life, bored, regretful, and unsure whether he wants to continue to slog through writing his required minimum words on a daily basis. And the novel is all about him. So it is appropriate that he is a part of a story line that speeds up, decelerates, stops and accelerates on a random time line. For Kit, the events make his pathos all the worse. His character is brilliantly crafted. He bumbles his way through the plot, far more mistaken and confused than he is prescient. His instincts are uncertain in dangerous situations, and his successes owe as much to luck as they do to the vague sense of intelligence work he brings with him from his novels. And he fails at romance, his love for the Moroccan (really Hungarian) girl being unrequited. These diversions from the plot are what distinguishes Cumming from many other spy novelists. The pace of his storytelling is on a path paved with the progress of an awkward man toward a personal self-revelation (or not). The plot is not a superhighway leading to the foiling of a Russian threat.

Kit would like to make himself into a Frederick Forsyth. Cummings has himself said this in an interview with The Chiswick Calendar. The Moroccan Girl is certainly a worthy addition to the great spy novels written by Forsyth, Graham Greene, and John le Carre. It probably doesn’t compare to Julia Child’s work, but that’s another matter. And finally, it is perhaps ironic that Charles Cumming before he became a spy novelist was himself approached by MI6 but didn’t go forward. Or is it?

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