Thrillers are like life

Oh, puke. I cannot stand the way this show makes women act like retards with a guru. "Women feel like they're watching themselves"? Do you live like that? Do you fucking want to live like that? I can't even begin to think about it without wanting to explode in a torrent of pseudo-Marxist ranting that would touch on the shoddy purchasing power of 80% of British women, the way credit enslaves the middle and lower classes, the idiocy of vastly overpriced ready-to-wear brands, and the nauseating fact that this story is in the same paper giving us news about 10,000 dead Chinese and a kajillion dead Burmese. And that would be unseemly because I quite liked the first season.

So moving on. The Ministry of Fear was great. The transparent plot twists were not the point, and the story wrapped up with something that wasn't a plot twist so much as a natural evolution of the story that nonetheless kneecapped me. It was very, very good, and seemed to be not so much a spy story as a study of pity, like The Human Factor was a study of loyalty and The Power and the Glory was a study of duty and The Quiet American was a study of prejudice or innocence or something.

The thing is, as far as a spy novel or thriller, it's not great at all - not just because of the transparency of the plot twists (perhaps they were opaque in those days, like how Agatha Christie could surprise people back then). Also there are big gaping holes in the plot, holes that make Weeds look like tightest-wound skein of television you can imagine. Why such a likely pass-phrase for the cake? Why stage a death to frighten Rowe away? Why put him in the loony bin instead of finish the job the bomb started? Tonnes of holes. But it's still a great book, because it's such a great and believable study of the inescapability of pity and moral - what's the word? - you know - when something isn't black or white. Moral Mediterranean-ness.

And what I wonder is - a 'thriller' with that many holes, that transparent a plot - would it find a publisher today? I doubt it. Or if it did, not the sort of publisher who would promote it as a work of genius. How many Graham Greenes are there floating around out there with all sorts of important things to say about our human factors, but who can't express them in the sort of tight perfect-plot writing we expect now?