SPY FACT AND FICTION

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33941, 6 September 1975, Page 10

SPY FACT AND FICTION

Gentleman Traitor. By Alan Williams Blond and Briggs. 255 pp. N.Z. price $6.20.

Kim Philby, one of the more notorious British defectors of recent times, is the central figure of this bizarre story of diplomatic intrigue, security services, spying, violence and death. It opens with a bloody massacre in Rhodesia and ends in the same country in a chilling enough, though not quite so spectacular fashion. The book is a curious mixture of fact and fiction. Philby’s defection and life in Moscow are established fact; ’the author’s speculations about his motives and plans are, of course, fiction. The characters include diplomats, journalists, suave Foreign Office men, hired assassins and a fat evil Frenchman, a machinator of the worst type. The story moves along at almost breath-taking speed as the scene changes from country to country and from city to city. At first Mr Williams may seem to

be packing the story with a lot of loose ends, described in the minutest details. Here a warning is necessarv. The book must be read with the greatest care; no detail, however trivial it may appear, is irrelevant as Mr Williams, with sure and skilful pen, brings all the pieces together and fashions a powerful ending. Those who enjoy this type of book will find “Gentleman Traitor” wellconceived, well-written, exciting, and difficult to put down. An English reviewer has questioned Mr Williams’s taste in introducing a living man into a work of fiction of this nature. This surely is a personal decision. If one believes that Philby, by defecting to the Soviet Union has forfeited all his human rights and his human dignity, the question of taste does not arise. If, on the other hand, one believes that Philby retains, or ought to be allowed to retain, his rights and dignity, then Mr Williams has shown execrable taste.