It is said that there are no new stories in the world, just the way they are told with Christopher Booker claiming there are only seven. Spy stories generally fit the overcoming a monster pattern with a good vs evil theme and The Seventh Floor fits into this. In fact it felt like a very old story with a traitor in the CIA, one of a group of friends who had risen through the floors of the building, with two reaching the seventh.

The book reminded me very much of le Carre with its taut writing, little is wasted, and the action of two of the spies who were kicked out of the CIA and go on a mole hunt by themselves. This has disastrous consequences but ultimately means that attention is paid to them and their story when they finally tell it. What was a bit disappointing when the mole was identified is that it seemed to be over in a second, no big gun fights, just a shuffling of the person out of the door into retirement although, to be fair, that is often what happens in big institutions.

At one point Sam, a spy in the field, says that spying is like writing and I tried to make the sentence work. However, at the end of the book McCloskey acknowledges that the book ‘tips its hat’ in the direction of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by Le Carre and when I looked up the quote I found this:

A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it. 

John Le Carre

Whilst we watch the mole hunt in the USA, McCloskey allows us into Russia to see the opposite end of the hunt where the handler Rem Zhomov, an aging and tired SVR officer, keeps his long-standing plan of bringing down the CIA with an agent that is built for longevity rather than speed. What we also see is the ways in which both agencies work, the similarities of in-fighting, removal of officers sometimes permanently, and loyalties paid back.

As the pace of the story picks up, the structure changes. We move to short chapters, sometimes only one paragraph on a page surrounded by a sea of white. This really works in driving the pace of reading and as soon as the chapters lengthen again, the pace slows down.

A good read but not an exciting one.