Review | Espionage thriller by former spy, about jihad in Japan, is a real page-turner
- Warren Reed’s an Elephant on Your Nose emphasises the human side of espionage in tale of an international cast of characters out to foil terror in Tokyo
- The book is let down by his tendency to overexplain, excessive narration, stilted dialogue, lessons in history, and some lapses of judgment
An Elephant on Your Nose, by Warren Reed. pub. For Pity Sake Publishing
3.5 stars
Spy thrillers, particularly those written by former intelligence agents, tend to focus on the high-stakes, high-pressure, high-speed world of field operatives and tradecraft.
But in ex-spy Warren Reed’s An Elephant on Your Nose, the emphasis is on the human side of spying – the diplomacy, deductive reasoning and interpersonal skills that make the business tick. While that might sound like less thrilling material for a thriller, the novel is a proper page-turner, only slightly let down by a tendency to overexplain everything, sometimes in a rather clunky way.
A tightly plotted story involves a warning of a possible jihadist attack in Japan given to Japanese intelligence by their counterparts in Beijing, forcing them to deal with the potential threat while trying to work out how reliable the information is (the book’s title is based on a Malay proverb, “He can see a louse as far away as China but is unaware of the elephant on his own nose”).
The nearest to a protagonist among an ensemble cast of spies, politicians, police officers and criminals is British MI6 officer Isabella Di Stefano Butterfield, in Tokyo to help Japan set up its own centralised intelligence service, who inevitably gets drawn into the terrorist intrigue.
In many ways, the book is a rather touching ode to the work of spies, portraying them as mostly individuals of high intelligence and integrity who keep the world safe, rather than the usual murky manipulators with hearts of ice and a propensity for violence.