The Enormous Shadow by Robert Harling
Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)
This Cold War story from 1955 is set in London, with many references streets like King’s Road and places such as Chester Square and Tower Bridge. Before WWII, Harling published The London Miscellany, a survey of the design of Victorian London, so he knew the city inside and out.
In fact, this is a newspaper thriller because the narrator is an international correspondent. While his base is in New York City, he is on vacation in London, checking in with his wily editor in chief. Said boss assigns him to interview up and coming MP’s. One of the MP’s, the reporter finds, may be a traitor. Working in tandem with a dodgy mathematician, he may be passing guided missile secrets to the Soviets.
While the action may feel slow to some readers, the pace is steady and incidents unfold with surprises all down the line to a rousing climax. Harling’s prose is clear and civilized. The love story grows naturally out of the action and is believable. To my mind, the appeal is the verisimilitude. Harling worked on Fleet Street before the advent of our information age, so his stories of tough editors, hard-bitten reporters, and their dance with the authorities in government and the police ring true to life. Any reader who likes stories about newspaper trade before Rupert Murdoch and ilk will certainly enjoy Harling’s chronicle of a vanished world, little known outside the memoirs of forgotten journalists.
Don’t confuse this writer with the playwright famous for the 1985 hit Steel Magnolias. Our Harling here was one of those versatile Englishmen who were skilled at both the arts and espionage. He worked in publishing, as a typographer and graphic designer. During WWII, his friend Ian Fleming, later creator of James Bond, got him transferred into Fleming’s Secret Navy, which “was responsible for day-to-day liaison between the naval intelligence division and the British war propaganda teams (see Harling’s obit here).”
