Product Description

Alec Milius is young, smart, ambitious and comfortable with deceit. So when a chance encounter leads him to MI6, Alec thinks he’s landed the perfect job for his talents. But working alone, relying on instinct, he’s soon spinning a web of deception that has him caught between his new masters and powerful opponents. For in his new line of work the difference between the truth and a lie can be the difference between life and death. And Alec is having trouble telling them apart … A Spy by Nature is the calling card of a major new talent; compellingly told, utterly authentic and heart-racingly tense, it will grip you till the very last page.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #101108 in Books
• Published on: 2002
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Sunday Telegraph
'Gripping, exciting and deftly plotted...a book one would be seriously annoyed to put down.'

Mail on Sunday
'Tautly written and believable...a complex tale of code words, betrayal of frienship, bluff and counterbluff...Cumming writes it like it is.'

Literary Review
'Plotting both plausible and persuasive, with horrors which mount stealthily behind a veneer of seemingly straightforward cloak-and-dagger games. Don't miss.'

Customer Reviews

Very promising
There are a lot of plaudits surrounding Charles Cumming at the moment, being hailed as the latest British spy novelist carrying forward the tradition shaped by greats such as Graham Greene, John le Carre and Len Deighton. In terms of a first spy novel, this is not of the calibre of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but there's enough promise in it to make you realise this is not your average thriller. Most writers of spy thrillers can be smart, clever and engaging (current examples such as Tom Bradby, Henry Porter), but few are able to really get to grips with the moral ambiguity of the world of espionage. As you read A Spy by Nature though, you can tell the difference. It reeks of moral ambiguity.

Much of it lies in the creation of the novel's anti-hero, Alec Milius. He is a fantastically flawed character; a man who is able to lie and talk his way out of any situation, amoral, and comfortable leading the double life of a spy. However, he is also greedy, ambitious, and is not good at telling himself to quit while he is ahead. Alec Milius has much in common with Patricia Highsmith's similar creation of Thomas Ripley - you get that same buzz reading Alec Milius trying to charm his way out of very sticky situations. As with Thomas Ripley, the trick Charles Cumming uses is to make Alec Milius normal enough that you relate to him. His frustrations are that of most young men; a feeling of unfulfilled potential, an ambition to do better, a certain brashness indicating a lack of maturity. It's very convincing. Without the flawed Alec Milius, this would be another run-of-the-mill thriller. Most spy thriller writers (excepting Greene, Le Carre and Deighton) make the mistake of making the main character un upstanding super-man, so thank goodness Charles Cumming resisted this.

I won't mention the plot in any detail, as other reviewers have already done this. There are some criticisms of this book by some of the other reviewers, some which are I think justified. The book does seem to come in two clear parts - the first part the MI6 recruitment, the second the MI5 industrial espionage shenanigans. The reviewer mentioning the ex-girlfriend as the blindingly obvious `Achilles heel' is also right - it's a little bit obvious, but somehow underplayed as well. I got the impression that Charles Cumming wasn't too sure how to finish the book.

But I think the plusses easily outweigh the minuses. And it's tantalising to read an author who truly understands that great spy fiction relies on moral ambiguity, not just a snappy plot to tell the story.

The story behind The Spanish Game
I bought A Spy By Nature after loving The Spanish Game and wanting to know how exactly Alec Milius came to be living in Madrid. The events are paraphrased in Spanish Game, but all the detail is here! It's fascinating to see what sort of character Alec Milius was in his mid-twenties. much more cocksure, amoral, greedy and ambitious; it made me realise what a subtle job Cumming had done in the second book, ageing and maturing his hero. Spy By Nature isn't as clean and well strcutured as The Spanish Game but as a pyschological study of what happens to someone working in the spy business it's probably the best book of its kind that I've ever read. Strongly recommended.

Promising but deeply flawed.
This young author's entry into the well-explored MI5 / SIS genre is enjoyable but unsatisfying. Protagonist Alec Milius stumbles into corporate espionage because it seems like an adventurous alternative to his going-nowhere-fast proto-adult life. The bulk of the book suspensefully describes his descent into an isolated world of lies. While I saw certain plot developments coming hundreds of pages before Alec did, I kept reading for the deftly portrayed characters and thrillingly claustrophobic atmosphere. Eventually, Alec's undiminished love for an ex-girlfriend ends up costing him everything. Cumming convincingly portrays Alec's lonely existence, complete with realistic details of tradecraft and minor characters. However, "A Spy By Nature" has major structural problems. It feels as if the author completely revised the plot about a hundred pages in. Those first hundred or so pages (before Alec gets involved in corporate espionage) introduce us at considerable length to Alec's fellow interviewees at MI5. All of them are fascinating characters, and all but one of them promptly vanish, never to be referred to again. The plot then takes off in a completely new direction. Another and more serious flaw is that Alec's ex-girlfriend, who involuntarily brings about his downfall, doesn't appear once until about page 400, when it's finally time for her to walk across the stage, holding up a sign that says "Hero's Achilles Heel," and vanish again. All in all, this book was readable thanks to its pacy prose and snappy dialogue, but Cumming needs to work on organizing his material.