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GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS is a spy novel like no other you've read. Don't come to it expecting George Smiley-type characters hanging around in doorways, or derring-do sorts careering round the world to save the universe. Instead we get Charlie and George, who work in a tiny photographic cubicle in a ticket hall at a London Underground station. It's a pretty grotty job, and they more or less tolerate each other. But very soon, after a burst of the sort of action you don't normally get on the Tube, you start to wonder if they're who they say they are. GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS is by David Wolstencroft, the bloke behind BBC's Spooks (known to those of you on the other side of the pond as MI5). Yes, the one where Matthew Macfadyen reprised his look of constipated concern and a trainee agent met a nasty end in a deep fat fryer. There's none of that sort of stuff in GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS, you'll be relieved to know. Instead, it's a book where you spend most of it wondering if anyone is really what they seem, and running out of fingers and toes on which to tally the double-crossing. The ending, though, seems to belong to a different book. For a book focussed mainly on two characters, I'd have liked a little more meat on their skinny bones. The supporting cast are generally from the pages of a comic book, although Charlie's school chum Neil has lots of possibilities. The title of the book, incidentally, is based on Charlie and Neil's school playground game -- all will become clear when you read it. Wolstencroft might be a good screenwriter, but he's got some way to go on novel writing. The book's actually a bit of a plod, and he perpetrates some juddering point of view changes, sometimes within the same paragraph. According to the biography he's a Scotsman now living in Los Angeles, so I wish a British editor had caught a few of his Americanisms -- the only stoop we have over here is when you lean forward. The book itself is faintly barmy, rather like one of George's beloved locked room puzzles, but not quite as clever as it thinks it is. The good news is that Wolstencroft has an entertaining novel in him. The bad news is it isn't this one.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, May 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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