I’m glad I slept on this review. I confess to some disappointment when I finished it…that was the resolution? That was the best Deighton could do after an excellent two-book buildup? I expected a massive conflict and was sort of let down.
But then I thought about the final conversation in the book, which I won’t use to spoil the plot but basically talks about the stagnancy of the spy game. You’re never really winning, per se, and you almost don’t know what constitutes winning. Occasionally, you pull off a major operation that hinders the other side but they’re still there and you just kind of go tit-for-tat until the inevitable war or the other side’s government capitulates.
Robert Ludlum made this point too in one of his books, can’t remember which but it was basically like we advance to square two, but they beat us to square three so we buy our way to square four and where does it end?
To that end, London Match and by extension Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy is a spy-novel-as-noir. If noir is about mood and how things get resolved, then Deighton’s Resolution(?) here makes it a fitting identity.
It does perhaps ding it a bit in my estimation, however. Because it means that a lot of the time we spent on auxiliary characters I didn’t find interesting now does feel like a waste. But perhaps it’s a most apt end. I wonder if, had Tarantino adopted these three into one mega-movie, he would’ve stuck with it or somehow gone Inglourious Basterds with it. Sadly, we’ll never know although if someone in his circle can whisper in his ear to do this, I’d be grateful.
