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A Very English Satire
Rathbone's 'A Very English Agent' opens with grim humour upon our hero, Charlie Boylan, as he enages in his latest adventure whilst the opening salvos of the Battle of Waterloo (June 1815) rage around him. A sense of self-irony prevails throughout the opening three chapters which serves to firmly establish Charlie's character and good fortune though we end on a slightly patronising note as the author feels it necessary to explain to us that we were, in fact talking about Waterloo. Still....
Part II moves to 'present Day' (1852) where we find our protagonist locked up for entering Whitehall with a loaded pistol whilst attempting to claim pecuniary redress. He claims to be able to implicate much of the government and royalty in matters of nefarious intent during the Parliamentary reforms of the past forty years and proceeds to do so by writing down everything for the reader and investigator to mull over. Given over to Charlie Boylan/Bosham's narration and Cargill's (the civil servant assigned the case of finding out what he knows) 'interrogation' of him, the main bulk of Part II is devoted to Charlie's enlisting by Whitehall as a secret agent. In a delightful parody of Fleming, in probably the finest paragraph in the entire novel and aptly ending Part II, Rathbone assigns 003 to Boylan and has him wondering who the other two people before him were given a licence to kill, (possibly Oliver - modelled on the historical William Oliver, referred to as the agent provocateur in Jeremiah Brandreth's death) as he embarks on his new career with his faithful Spinks and Pottle.
Part III deals with Charlie's various missions, revealing that he was responsible for many seditious leaders' hangings due to murders they did not commit during riots he provoked. Above it all, de Bourgeois and Stafford (later Peel takes over) sit as Charlie's M and Q, with the three political magnates, the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, Wellington and the Home Secretary, Sidmouth (the latter is replaced by Lord Castlereagh after Sidmouth's retirement in 1821), having ridiculously sublime conversations to ensure their continued political pre-eminence through the Six Acts (1819).
We discover our anti-hero was a prime instigator of the Peterloo massacre (1819), gets his cover blown in Nottingham after previously having secured the convictions of the Pentrich Plotters and ensured Cashman's death and then concludes with Thistlewood's hanging after the attempted assassination of the entire cabinet (The Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820) and subsequent exit from England having been spotted once too often.
Part IV throws up Charlie's freedom from Pentonville (on a technicality) and turning up at Cargill's house (where his wife Emily is undergoing her own private liberation) settles down with port and cigars to narrate his Mediterranean escapade in the assassination of Percy Bysshe Shelley (d.1822). He manages to insinuate himself into the group and what follows is an attempt to both catalogue and understand the mind of Shelley the poet, Shelley the revolutionary, to make sense of the ramblings and effervescent perceptivity of the poet. We follow as Charlie learns that Shelley cannot swim so arranges for his boat to capsize thus ending the life of one of england's revolutionary poets.
Part V returns us to present day as we learn that the pecuniary redress he sought was for the Shellley assassination that never got paid and we discover the means of blackmail that he is using to extract his fee - certain papers proving the royal ancestry of Captain Garth (whom Charlie later assassinated). A Mr Bucket from the Home Office turns up to ask for the papers proving the above, is sent on a wild goose chase to Bognor and returns to arrest Boylan and the maid Deirdre on suspicion of attempted murder, Mr Cargill now being hospitalised with arsenic poisoning. After shifting from Millbank to a more luxurious prison, Charlie recommences his tale in 1831, recounting his part to his new interogator - Elliott - in ensuring the hangings of James Cooper and Henry Cook and ensuring others are deported amongst various other ramblings.
We end with Part VI, a litany of short events as Charlie relates more and more to convince Elliott. We hear of the previous year where Chancellor Wormwolt comissioned Charlie to blow up Crystal Palace in order to create anarchy. However, one of the co-conspirators used it as a means to attempt the assassination of Queen Victoria and Charlie managed to prevent this. Also, of his affair with Maggie-May that ended up with his flight to America and of Wellington's funeral before concluding as we begain with him in prison about to narrate his participation in Darwin's voyage on the Beagle. As Charlie stated over four hundred pages ago, he is representative of the common unsung particpant in all histories notable efforts, but his tale can never be proved or believed and we conclude not sure of his veracity or mendacity.
As the Observer puts it, this latest novel from Rathbone is a 'tour de force', a magnificent exercise in irony and parody set against a darkly turbulent time of Georgian England. A rich vein of humour runs through as we watch our scheming government agent followed by his almost hapless, Clouseau-esque government detective who, in trying to ascertain the truth, serves only to mire the reader in more and more uncertainty. Death and promiscuity follows our early '00x' agent who appears to be (after delving in to the historical records) an pseudonym for many of the agent provocateurs around that the time, Oliver, Castle and Edwards to name some prominent ones, as Rathbone's fictionalising of the historical events surrounding the parliamentary reforms of the early nineteenth century unfolds with alacrity. Nevertheless Rathbone's latest is at the pinnacle of his literary powers and this is a book well worth delving into.