Review: Successful delivery
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 11, 2012
Delivering Caliban is the second novel to feature John Purkiss, the "ratcatcher" who has to clean up where the espionage business has become even dirtier than it should be. It is rather more of a straightforward find-and-chase story than its predecessor, setting Purkiss on the track of one Darius Pope - a young ex-agent behind whose career of bland competence lurks something altogether darker and deadlier. CIA personnel are being shot and thrown out of windows, a schizophrenic musician discovers the truth of the adage that even paranoiacs can be spied on, and Purkiss and his colleagues are led to some unpleasant facts about certain dubious experiments with an interrogation enhancer of the pharmaceutical variety. As always with Stevens' work, the story is tightly plotted and told with an economy that would put most bestsellers to shame, if they had any. Unlike Ratcatcher, none of the main characters is entirely unsympathetic; and although the story has little time for psychologising, the musician in particular is drawn with commendable delicacy. Whatever the supervillain potential of his name and eidetic power, Darius Pope has his reasons; and even Pope's enemy, the cause of all the trouble, is far from irredeemable despite his many crimes. One might wish that these characters' complexities were explored a bit further - although Purkiss, at the end, gives a more or less acceptable excuse for not doing so - but on its own terms Delivering Caliban most definitely delivers.