Lately, the movie industry has been capitalizing on a number of great novels - many of which are on my own Goodreads.com “Read” shelf. Accordingly, one of the most recent books that I enjoyed and saw transition to the silver screen is the first installment in Jason Matthew’s Red Sparrow trilogy.
Each of the trilogy's novels were extremely well received, even amongst the bloated bookshelves of the spy-genre aisle. To my smug satisfaction (thinking myself ultra-clever to have spotted a good story six months before a movie executive realized he or she could make serious rubles by putting Jennifer Lawrence in a Russian mink coat) the 2013 novel was formally picked up for production by Hollywood only three years later.
Written by Matthews (who is a real-world former CIA operative himself), Red Sparrow focuses on a Russian bombshell, Dominika Egorova, who starts her career as a “Sparrow” - the KGB’s version of super-seductress spy. From there, the reader gets to enjoy a sultry, action-packed and occasionally humorous dance between Egorova and her CIA lover/recruiter/handler, Nate Nash, throughout the course of all three books.
At the risk of sounding like a resonating echo through the grand halls of Steemit, the character development is, of course, what drives these books (though the suspense and action really do keep the plot moving nicely). Matthews creates a number of personalities that hold our intrigue and is even bold enough to plop us behind the Kremlin’s doors for some intimate one-on-one time with Vladimir himself.
As the trilogy doesn’t shy from poking fun at the bureaucracies that plague The Agency, a number of the quotes I pulled from the final book (The Kremlin’s Candidate) are humorous in nature. And to their credit, I may even have to deploy a few of these for use in my own workplace.
Muttered by the perpetually grumpy but wicked smart chief of counterintelligence, Simon Benford, this quick rebuke of Nate Nash made me chuckle:
“Since light travels faster than sound, some people appear bright until you hear them speak. Endeavor not to be one of those people. A good place to start is not to speak unless spoken to.”
Conversely, Nash had some entertaining quips about one of the piss-poor bosses he had worked for in the past. (I assure you, this clever piece of comedic gold will be unleashed with vigor throughout the offices of my own employer):
”… his boss, a nontechnical outsider whom he called a seagull manager. 'Swoops in, starts screaming, shits on everything, then flies away.’”
Finally, I thought to include this last snippet as it eloquently described the gray haze of morality that intelligence operatives often need to manage and endure. This was another unflinching delivery from Chief Benford to Nash:
“Nash, we operate in a hostile fog bank, we deal with ambiguity, and if we must, we apply expedient amorality to accomplish moral goals. Embrace it or tell me what else you want to do with your life.”
Overall, the Red Sparrow books are strung together nicely to create an excellent trilogy, specializing in action with authentic glimpses into the spy-world. Perhaps not as emotionally compelling as some of my usual book preferences, but still undeniably enjoyable. 4 Russian Red Stars out of 5.
Keep on Steem’n, folks!
Awesome quotes. How applicable to our own environment. Lol.
Lol, you know it @coldsteem! I cannot wait to use "seagull manager" in the right context.
Long before it was known to me as a place where my ancestry was even remotely involved, the idea of a state for Jews (or a Jewish state; not quite the same thing, as I failed at first to see) had been 'sold' to me as an essentially secular and democratic one. The idea was a haven for the persecuted and the survivors, a democracy in a region where the idea was poorly understood, and a place where as Philip Roth had put it in a one-handed novel that I read when I was about nineteen even the traffic cops and soldiers were Jews. This, like the other emphases of that novel, I could grasp. Indeed, my first visit was sponsored by a group in London called the Friends of Israel. They offered to pay my expenses, that is, if on my return I would come and speak to one of their meetings.I still haven't submitted that expenses claim. The misgivings I had were of two types, both of them ineradicable. The first and the simplest was the encounter with everyday injustice: by all means the traffic cops were Jews but so, it turned out, were the colonists and ethnic cleansers and even the torturers. It was Jewish leftist friends who insisted that I go and see towns and villages under occupation, and sit down with Palestinian Arabs who were living under house arrest if they were lucky or who were squatting in the ruins of their demolished homes if they were less fortunate. In Ramallah I spent the day with the beguiling Raimonda Tawil, confined to her home for committing no known crime save that of expressing her opinions. (For some reason, what I most remember is a sudden exclamation from her very restrained and respectable husband, a manager of the local bank: 'I would prefer living under a Bedouin to another day of Israeli rule!' He had obviously spent some time thinking about the most revolting possible Arab alternative.) In Jerusalem I visited the Tutungi family, who could produce title deeds going back generations but who were being evicted from their apartment in the old city to make way for an expansion of the Jewish quarter. Jerusalem: that place of blood since remote antiquity. Jerusalem, over which the British and French and Russians had fought a foul war in the Crimea, , on the matter of which Christian Church could command the keys to some 'holy sepulcher.' Jerusalem, where the anti-Semite Balfour had tried to bribe the Jews with the territory of another people in order to seduce them from Bolshevism and continue the diplomacy of the Great War. Jerusalem: that pest-house in whose environs all zealots hope that an even greater and final war can be provoked. It certainly made a warped appeal to my sense of history.
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Um...cool!
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Seagull manager HAHAH!!