Icon by Frederick Forsyth (Corgi 1997)

IconA patchily readable yarn set in a lightly-fictionalised pre-Millennial Russia, where intrepid undercover CIA agent Jason Monk must nobble the election campaign of a hugely-popular nationalist politician with a secret “Black Manifesto” fusing all the best bits from Stalin, Hitler and Ivan the Terrible.

It’s with a weary sigh the reader opens this book, only to be greeted by a FOUR-PAGE dramatis personae listing enough similar-sounding names and job titles to make Gabriel Garcia Marquez grow pale. But the book’s not bad: again, Forsyth has done his research, though by god he wants you to know it. Time and again the narrative grinds to a halt to allow Fred to regale us with microscopically detailed accounts of post-Soviet socio-political life – not uninteresting, in and of themselves, but plonked in the middle of a supposed thriller they make for a very staccato reading experience. Even at the end, with momentum building, FF stops the plot dead in its tracks to deliver a lecture on the multifarious security garrisons in and around Moscow. (You get the feeling that if any of his cast ever sat down to write a letter, Fred would insert a two-page history of the fountain pen.)

As with his other novels, Forsyth includes real-worldnames amongst his fictional characters (De Gaulle in “Day of the “Jackal”, Kim Philby in “The Fourth Protocol”, CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames here), a tactic I find more distracting than clever; others will disagree. The character of secret service chief Sir Nigel Irvine, previously seen in Forsyth’s “Fourth Protocol” – and played in John Mackenzie’s 1987 film version by Ian Richardson – also reappears here, as does Fred’s bullishly pro-US bias. (The KGB had “thugs”; the CIA has “agents”.) “Icon” paints an extraordinarily bleak picture of the Russian political scene circa 1999, two years in the future at time of publication; eighteen years on, one wonders if the situation has changed for better or worse.

NB: A TV-movie version was aired in 2005, with Patrick Swayze as Monk; I shan’t be tracking it down.