Note: This is an older review to introduce Substackers to our house style (TCTIN). A majority of the books we review will be advanced review copies (ARCs) given to our parent companies, everafterbooks.uk and theubergroup.org.
The coolest thing I noticed about Ava Glass' 2022 debut novel Alias Emma is how it blends the more literary-leaning style of British espionage fiction with American-style action movie sequences.
There are two overarching types of spy stories: British espionage fiction, and American spy thrillers. As Eddie Izzard says:
"We've got known in Britain for making the smaller films - 'Room With a View and a Pond' that sort of thing. Films with very fine acting, but the drama is rather subdued and folded in there. [...] Whereas if the film did any bit of business in America, Hollywood would remake it, and it would be called Room With a View of HELL. [...] 'I'm going to drive going to drive around town and put babies on spikes! Oh no, space monkeys are attacking!"
There is nowhere this dichotomy is more apparent than in the case of spy stories: where Britain has John le Carré, America has Tom Clancy. What's fun about Alias Emma is how it starts out with a distinctly British tone - Ava Glass is a British author - that involves nested flashbacks and well-formed character development, before making a sharp right turn into the kind of silly shoot-em-up extended car chase sequence likely to star Matt Damon.
Another fresh twist on the shoot-em-up action thriller tropes is that our-ex-military-turned-spy, often-wont-to-go-OFP protagonist is a woman: Emma Makepeace. That's a code name, of course. She has a simple and effective origin story - her father worked for England against Russia, until Russia killed him. Her mother was rushed to England for protection, where she was born. She then joined the British Army and the shadowy Vernon Institute, an off-the-record department that exists in the liminal space between MI5 and MI6. The flashbacks that fill in her backstory are deftly executed and well earned, only brought in after one has become thoroughly curious for the information - an uncommon achievement for debut novels. They do not slow the pacing one whit, while managing to add a Le Carré style literary elevation to the format. If a flat-arc protagonist must smolder mysteriously about their secret past whilst killing bad guys for open-ended action series, at least this one is refreshingly vulnerable and believable, and not an alcoholic middle-aged man.
She isn't even truly "flat arc" in the traditional "rouge ex-military" thriller protagonist sense - she is learning and growing, albeit slowly, obviously intended for gradual development over many books. The intense and complex feelings brought up by her first big assignment to rescue Mikhail Primalov — the adult son of Russian scientists who also helped the UK — are well-developed and interesting, again in the Le Carré tradition. Glass' prose is lighter and more contemporary than Le Carré's, and she is more wont to spend time describing action sequences in extreme detail as opposed to his penchant towards extensive descriptions of people, but this will be likely be enjoyed by people who find traditional British espionage fiction too dense and slow-burning. On the other side of the coin, people who are primarily interested in character driven stories may find some of the extended high-speed car chases and detailed, multi-page fight sequences a bit Hollywood-silly, but I feel she overall achieves a good balance between classic British and classic American styles. She makes character work approachable and popcorn-consumable by not putting in too much of it at once, and the book moves at pace. I will definitely be reading the rest of her series. For those who enjoy audiobooks, narrator Sophie Colquhoun is also particularly excellent.