Book review: Declare

An engrossing thriller that weaves the supernatural into the historical Cold War, modelled on John Le Carre. In 1963 Andrew Hale is a university lecturer, but during WW2 and the years immediately following he was an intelligence operative for a secretive agency, which stationed him in occupied Paris, sent him to Germany to observe the layer of the foundation stone for the Berlin Wall, and on a disastrous mission to Mount Ararat that continues to haunt him. In 1963 the Soviets are embarking on a new mission to Mount Ararat, and Hale is forced to enter a maze of double- and triple-crosses before confronting the terrors of the past.

I found out about this book from Charles Stross's afterword to his own book The Atrocity Archives. That book and this one are an interesting contrast. TAA is a technothriller concerned with magic and gizmos; Declare is concerned with people haunted by their memories and playing endlessly complicated games of inference and misdirection. TAA throws the supernatural at the reader from the beginning, while for hundreds of pages Declare only hints at the forces being invoked. It's a superbly constructed novel, gently leading us deeper into the schemes and the pervasive paranoia of the characters, and wrapping up with a conclusion that fulfills the expectations built by the story's slow unfolding.