Treason’s Spring by Robert Wilton Minoo Dinshaw
MINOO DINSHAW
Treason’s Spring By Robert Wilton Corvus £18.99 Oldie price £13.85 inc p&p
Robert Wilton, a British civil servant and diplomat now representing an intergovernmental organisation in Albania, purports to bring back his boxes for the entertainment of a home audience.
His series of historical thrillers pose as archival discoveries from a top-secret drawer gathering dust in the Ministry of Defence, containing the papers of the ‘Comptrollerate-general for Scrutiny and Survey’. The framing device is an ancient component of the historical novel, well-beloved of Walter Scott himself.
This one tends to a vision of British policy as sinisterly, ubiquitously efficient that seems distinctly out of tune with recent developments. In Wilton’s novel, an agent of the Comptrollerate claims it was ‘old when Walsingham thought he was new’, and has guaranteed ‘the endurance of peace and relative stability in Britain’. Any spectator of the events of 2016-17 might be forgiven a mirthless chuckle at that Mayist qualifier ‘relative’. If Britain had really masterminded international affairs since the 1500s, would the current set of Mugwumps running the country have survived this long?
Wilton’s first Comptrollerate novel, published as The Emperor’s Gold and later rebranded as Treason’s Tide, portrayed early 19th-century Cornwall saved from imminent Napoleonic invasion. He now aims to expand it in both directions into a trilogy, covering the French Revolution in this prequel and Waterloo in a forthcoming work.
This volume’s territory is a bold incursion on to the ground of Hilary Mantel’s novel A Place of Greater Safety, a massive achievement that married human insight to historical fidelity without exposing a stitch. Wilton’s Danton, especially, feels as inevitably indebted to Mantel as he is true to history.
It is probable that Wilton perceives this difficulty; Danton is confined, not without strain, to the background and Desmoulins and Robespierre, Mantel’s other great studies, never appear at all. Instead, Wilton explores the less familiar figure of Joseph Fouché, destined to become Napoleon’s Chief of Police, but this cold, committed piece of work comes out more or less like Mantel’s Robespierre anyway.
Lay anxiety of influence aside, however, and Wilton emerges as a writer of whirring calibre, a rare ambassador for the Civil Service as a nurse of prose. His steel-girded narrative follows English buccaneers, French police spies, a society hostess and a Glasgow merchant as they stumble in the dark after the missing correspondence of the imprisoned Louis XVI.
Wilton also treats us to delicious parodies of Talleyrand’s memoirs. Each chapter of sanguinary goings-on in the chaos of France is preceded by one of the arch-deceiver’s wry commentaries from his fox-hole on Pall Mall. From Wilton’s taut dialogue depend sufficient ironies to demand frenetic page-folding and re-reading (the fate of a character who vows to ‘die noisily’ must not be missed). He demonstrates loving control both of the primary sources and their fictional after-effects. Several gallant, damn-myeyes scoundrels guy The Scarlet Pimpernel with knowing panache.
Wilton might be justly summarised as a serious person’s thriller-writer. His riddlingly intricate plot and protean experiments in perspective will not suit the heavy of eyelid. Some patience is asked of even attentive readers for an unusual portion of this novel, somewhere between its first two-thirds and threequarters; the pay-off is a denouement that will not be forgotten.
Finally, for all the apparently paranoiac, conspiratorial implausibility of the Comptrollerate as a concept, the novel’s central observation rings sadly true in our own age. Wilton’s slightly stock French sexpot asks of Keith Kinnaird, a dour Scots Smiley for the 1790s, ‘Where are my bright, glorious men?’, and receives from him this snappy reply: ‘Consigned to the past.’