Monday, March 11, 2013

3/11/2013- A Nest of Spies by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre

I was going to start trying to start each of my posts here with a summary of the book that I was writing about, but A Nest of Spies, by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, may not be the best book with which to begin that. This novel, released in English in 1917, is the fourth book in the Fantomas series, which I've written about here before. What I've read of the series so far is about a super-detective, Juve, and his journalist friend, Jerome Fandor (though his identity is way more complicated than that) going after the inexplicably resourceful super-villain, Fantomas. I'm not sure what I can say specifically about A Nest of Spies without inadvertently spoiling the whole thing, but am pretty sure that I can safely say that it's about a remarkably complicated plot against the nation of France in which, shockingly enough, Fantomas happens to be an instrumental figure.

Despite some slow parts in the middle, A Nest of Spies is a very entertaining novel. It is only barely plausible, and the number of footnotes that refer back to massively convoluted plot points from earlier in the series gets really ridiculous, especially towards the end. Having read the last three books, however, I thought that reading this one was quite fun. It had stolen bears, bands of anarchists, and a royal ball, with all of that just within the novel's final stretch, so I'm not sure what else I could have possibly expected from it.

As entertained as I was by A Nest of Spies, however, I can't deny that it had some issues. First of all, if you read this without being willing to keep track of the characters' extensive lists of aliases, you'll have to be prepared to get quite lost. Since the novel is about spies, some of that is unavoidable, and, to be completely fair, most of the characters keep their false identities down to just one. There were some points, though, particularly when I was reading late at night, where I had to backtrack like crazy to remember who I'd been told, particularly among the secondary characters, was pretending to be who or was working for who. Fandor's disguise, which becomes one of the central parts of the book, is clearly presented, but some of the others just get ridiculous.

My other problem with the book, which is more superficial, is with the disguises themselves. I'll grant that Juve and Fantomas get to be awesome at putting together disguises that no one could possibly see through, since I bothered to put "super" in front of both of their character descriptions. When it comes to Fandor, though, who admits that he's a bit iffy on the quality of his disguise, I feel that I can say without spoiling too much that, if he's spending days on end with someone he knows, and they're spending the night in a hotel room with him on top of that, they should probably be smart enough to recognize him, especially if slightly later in the novel, they can spot him on a crowded street. Since we're not supposed to believe that this character is a total idiot, I couldn't get past his or her apparent inability to recognize faces as anything but a major plot hole.

Even though I'm complaining a lot now, I did really like A Nest of Spies and am disappointed that I'm almost out of Fantomas books. If you'd like to read this one, or any of the other books in the series, for yourself, all five of the translated volumes in the public domain are available at both Project Gutenberg and Amazon.com.

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