Typhoon

Product Information

The last section (probs 100 pages) really ramped up and trying to read it under my own time constraints added spectacularly to the tension and bubbling to the finale which overall I have to give credit for. First impression of the UK first edition, and first edition thus, in its original cloth-covered boards. The principal actors in this drama are officers of the two intelligence services Joe Lennox and Miles Coolidge. He is undercover in Hong KOng right before the turnover of that country from Great Britain to the Chinese. The plot is their fate, as they roll about the hold—unsecured during a dangerous typhoon—in a bloody, tangled mess.

Charles Cumming is touted as the 'new' Lecarre, an odd description since we still have Lecarre but publicists are publicists. It was a pleasant story very well written--not high falluting stuff but vedry good and highly recommended. Additionally, Conrad's experience of exile from Poland manifests itself in the themes of isolation and migration found throughout the text, especially in "Amy Foster" and "To-Morrow. When the conniving leader of the Beacon, Secretary Guo, tasks Hengyen with rounding up all survivors in the area for a desperate last stand, the military man sees it for the foolish, futile directive that it is.What I found somewhat tedious in the telling was the fact that so much of this novel is just matter-of-fact dialogue between the main characters. The plot is driven by a personal triangle between the British SIS agent, Joe Lennox, the CIA agent, Miles Coolidge, and an expatriate woman, Isabella, initially Joe's girlfriend, and then Miles' wife. The hurricane, with its power to madden the seas, to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong walls and dash the very birds of the air to the ground, had found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a few words.

The wind carried with it faint traces of rot but also the freshness of spring and the minute promise of new life. People from the cities tried to flee to the countryside to get away from the rivers of dead, and those from the villages tried to flee to the cities where they thought the government could protect them. Paper repair at head of jacket spine with small portion of paper supplied, light marking where old tape removed, still a remarkable survival, the book in fine condition.If there is a distinction between the thriller and the spy novel (and mostly, they overlap), it has to do with the uncertainty of knowledge. The break in the chronology is particularly effective, and jarring, as the preceding passages had been so detailed that the time it took to read the novel and the real time of the story were not so far apart. Lucy MacWhirr, Lydia, and Tom, the Captain's wife, daughter and son, who all comment upon him in one way or another from their home in London.

Joe acts as a businessman, to encourage Miles to seek him out, and meanwhile he tracks down the professor. From their scruffy base in Cyprus, Sutton as the Boss of 1 (Fighter) Squadron – the oldest most prestigious squadron in the RAF – leads his team of 15 Typhoon fast jet pilots on hundreds of precision strikes in five months of round-the-clock operations. Joe Lennox is a NOC (non-official cover) agent, working for a logistics company, and describes how he was recruited by MI6 at Oxford and persuaded his girlfriend, Isabella, to join him in Hong Kong, she unaware of the double life he is leading. Light foxing on endpapers only, minor wear on corners and spine ends, bubbling to cloth at spine and along rear cover edges, otherwise very good with gilt quite bright. He was about to bury his machete in Maribelle’s neck when an arrow streaked over his shoulder and punched into her skull.

Much had changed over the years and nothing looked familiar anymore, especially after the world had fallen apart. Especially in Hong Kong, I remembered many of the locations in the book from when I lived there, and Cumming captured the atmosphere in both cities very nicely. The sparse living room had a couch on one end, a tube television in the corner, and a broken rocking chair.

The air had no trace of rot, thankfully, but he paused at the doorway as a wave of familiar memories and nostalgia washed over him. Typhoon alternates between his third-person limited point of view, the third-person limited point of view of MacWhirr, and the third-person omniscient point of view of the narrator.It seems a common occurrence that in spy novels the female characters aren’t much more than accessories. The short story "Typhoon" was originally serialised in Pall Mall Magazine between January and March 1902 and first published in book form in America by G.