The Parallax View

Truth & Lies in “The Parallax View”

Eamonn Vincent’s The Parallax View is one of those novels that appears, at first glance, to have been written with a meticulous respect for the genre’s furniture—the sherry in Kennington, the Porters’ Lodge in Cambridge, the thick carpeting of “Borough,” that bureaucratic underworld whose corridors are always dimly lit by mutual suspicion—and yet, as it accumulates, it becomes something stranger and more morally intimate than a well-made espionage narrative. The book is, on the one hand, a Cold War story with its familiar repertory of honeytraps, “cut-outs,” leaks, safe houses, and men who say “need to know” as if it were a prayer; on the other hand, it is a novel about the privacy of desire in a culture that treats privacy as merely another field to be surveilled. It is, in that sense, a book about the ethical and aesthetic consequences of being watched—how the gaze alters the thing it gazes upon, how the self becomes a performance under the pressure of observation, and how even love can begin to feel like tradecraft.

Its title is not a flourish. “Parallax,” the astronomical effect by which an object seems to shift position when viewed from different angles, becomes the governing figure for a world in which no one is quite where they appear to be, and in which the narrative itself keeps altering its distance from its characters. Vincent is preoccupied—sometimes explicitly, sometimes slyly—with “angle”: Ulrike’s remark about “the parallax effect” in relation to “one person’s view” of another, Steve’s quip about having his poem read in an “intensely parallactic” manner, the recurring anxiety about “provenance” and who can “account for the source of the knowledge.” The novel’s formal intelligence is that it converts this epistemological anxiety into a style: a continual adjustment of narrative perspective, a constant recalibration of intimacy and irony.

At the center is Steve Percival, a Cambridge-educated young man who has drifted, almost comically, into a job as a sub-editor at a rock magazine called Buzz—“a toddlers’ playground that calls itself a magazine,” as his MI6 boss Sheena Ferguson acidly terms it—only to find that this apparently low, collaborative world of paste-up artists and phototypesetting (“Compugraphic machine,” “wax adhesive,” “scalpel”) is itself a kind of cover. Steve is a partial innocent, or perhaps a better phrase is: an ethically self-distracted man, constantly tempted to surrender decision-making to the stronger wills around him. He is not James Bond; indeed, the novel’s wry anti-Bondness is one of its pleasures. Bond would be paid to seduce; Steve is told, with humiliating bluntness, “Once we have sorted this matter out, you can have as much pussy as you want.” He is, in other words, not a fantasy of masculine agency but a study in male compliance.

Vincent’s narrative perspective stays close to Steve, though not so close that it cannot gently expose him. Often we are in something like free indirect style, living inside Steve’s apprehensions without being fully endorsed by them. “What could he possibly say?” Steve thinks, as Sheena smokes her cigar with “feline certainty”; and the question becomes a small motto for his life, which is repeatedly a life of belated speech. The narration is sympathetic to Steve’s confusions—his “ghastly anticipation,” his “lugubrious thoughts,” his tendency to feel like “a mere plaything between the women in his life”—but it also lets us see how self-exculpatory such thoughts can be. To be “played” can become, in his mind, an alibi for playing along.

Sheena Ferguson, director at MI6, is an extraordinary creation: a figure of coercive maternalism, simultaneously pastoral and predatory, who understands that the most efficient way to recruit is to offer food, wine, ritual, and grief-work, and to bind the recruit by affection as much as by fear. The supper scene at her Kennington house—Boeuf Stroganoff, “1966 Haut-Brion,” “Graham’s 1963,” the “small photograph in a silver frame of Mavis and Sheena holding hands”—is a set-piece of seduction that is not sexual so much as moral. Sheena does not need to offer her body; she offers a world. She offers, too, a philosophy of people: “No one has no secrets.” It is a line that sounds like a truism, and yet in this novel it is a metaphysical principle, almost a law of physics. If parallax is the effect of viewing from different angles, secrecy is the medium in which those angles proliferate.

Vincent is very good at objects as signatures, and he uses them to distribute character. Sheena’s cigar ritual is not merely atmosphere; it is metaphysics with props. She says, memorably, “I’ve always found cigars more honest than people… They burn predictably, and you know when they’re finished.” The line is funny, but it is also chilling, because it proposes an ethical ideal of predictability, a desire to be rid of the ungovernable. Cigars are what people are not. People go on burning after you think they are finished.

The moral seriousness of The Parallax View lies in its refusal to let the spy plot remain merely a plot. The machinery of intelligence—surveillance, control, staged identities—becomes the book’s model for intimacy itself. Sex in this novel is rarely simply sex; it is a form of information exchange, a rehearsal, a “performance.” Steve is instructed to “practise before we have to perform in public.” The language of theatre—“choreography,” “stage,” “performance,” “simulation”—is constantly imported into erotic life, until one begins to wonder whether, in Vincent’s world, there is any such thing as unperformed desire.

This is where the book’s most distinctive achievement resides: it makes the ethical texture of narrative inseparable from its formal texture. The novel keeps asking: what is it to consent under pressure? What is it to desire what one has been instructed to desire? What is it to tell the truth in a world where truth is an operational category? Even small exchanges carry a moral tremor. When Sheena tells Steve to be Collingwood’s friend—“Above all, be his friend”—we hear, behind the bureaucratic phrasing, a quiet horror: friendship itself becomes a tool, a weapon, a surveillance technique. The ethical pressure is not that characters do bad things (they do) but that ordinary goods—friendship, hospitality, teaching, sex—are continuously recruited into bad purposes.

Vincent’s sentence-level craft is frequently impressive, especially in those passages where he slows down to let the physical world thicken into meaning. Consider the return to Sheena’s drawing room: “lamplight catching the gilt edges of maritime paintings and dusty glass,” “the tick of the longcase clock,” “the faint mineral edge of a smouldering fire.” The prose is slightly baroque, but it is baroque with intention: it is an aesthetic of surfaces that hints at concealment. Likewise the Cambridge passages, with their “gleaming white bulk of the Cripps Building,” their “river reflections,” their “quiet, shaded courts,” are more than travel writing; they are a realism that longs, intermittently, to become myth. Cambridge is not only a place; it is a dream of order, a fantasy of continuity, which the spy plot repeatedly interrupts.

Indeed, one of the book’s most interesting tensions is between realism and other impulses—farce, allegory, even something like myth. The Buzz sequences are written with a documentary relish: the office politics, the typesetters, the pints at the John Snow, the “pocket reviews of those records that everyone else had rejected.” Vincent seems to enjoy the tactile labor of sub-editing as a kind of moral counterweight to the abstractions of intelligence. Subbing is a craft of humility: “tidying up a writer’s copy without compromising the individual voice.” It is, in miniature, an ethical model of attention. Espionage, by contrast, is an anti-craft: it compromises voices, rewrites lives, “dogs footsteps,” stages realities. The novel is at its richest when it lets these worlds touch.

Yet the book also knows how close realism is to farce. The idea of an MI6 director attending a “Preparing for Armageddon conference” and then smoking cigars in a Cambridge wine bar has a bleak comic edge. So does Steve’s cover story—telling his bosses he’s been to “the clap clinic”—or Sheena’s instruction to call himself “Leslie” and her “Georgia,” as if espionage were a form of amateur dramatics. The farce is not merely comic relief; it is a moral diagnosis. Systems of power often become ridiculous precisely when they are most dangerous.

Vincent’s use of free indirect style, or near-free indirect, helps sustain this doubleness. We are often in Steve’s mind, but the narration allows a thin film of irony to remain. When Steve notices that Sheena’s “first person plural pronoun applied just to the two of them, and, possibly, even just to Sheena herself,” the sentence is both his observation and the narrator’s dry aside. That “possibly” is a tiny instrument of distance; it keeps us from sinking fully into Steve’s awe. The novel repeatedly uses such modulations—qualifying clauses, parenthetical nudges—to keep the reader ethically awake.

The tradition to which The Parallax View most obviously belongs is the British campus novel crossed with the British spy novel: one thinks of le Carré, certainly, but also of the Cambridge fictions in which High Table conversation becomes a form of politicking. Yet Vincent adds to this tradition a pronounced interest in sexuality as an instrument of state and of self. The book is candid—sometimes startlingly so—about bodies, performance, impotence, desire, coercion; and while it risks, at moments, the over-explicitness of confession, its candour is also part of its ethical ambition. In a world where everything is coded, the body becomes both the last refuge of truth and the first site of manipulation. The novel refuses to sentimentalize this. It keeps insisting, grimly, that “the real always leaves a bruise.”

One could describe the book as being “about” a plot involving Müller, Ulrike, Grace, Sheena, Collingwood, and a labyrinth of shifting allegiances; but to do so would be to reduce its achievement to mechanics. The deeper subject is narrative itself: who tells what, who withholds, who frames, who stages, who believes. “Provenance is all,” Sheena says, and that becomes, implicitly, a theory of fiction as well as espionage. A novel, too, is a system of provenance; it asks us to trust a voice that can never fully reveal its sources.

Perhaps the most striking formal flourish comes late, in the “Editor’s Note” appendix, where fragments are “retrieved” from Müller’s “Schwarze Zettelkasten,” marked “UNVERORTET.” The effect is to transform the novel into an archive of itself, to make reading resemble intelligence work: sorting, indexing, doubting, tracing handwriting, deciding what belongs where. It is a clever device, but not merely clever. It intensifies the book’s central moral question: when everything is filed, who controls the filing system? Who gets to decide what counts as evidence, what counts as story?

The Parallax View is, finally, a novel of ethical unease—warm toward its characters, but unwilling to absolve them. It understands, with a kind of melancholy precision, that people are not only watched by states; they watch themselves, and they learn to collaborate in their own surveillance. Steve, who begins as someone pretending to write a novel—“No one has no secrets,” Sheena tells him, and he replies, plaintively, “I have no secrets”—gradually becomes someone who must live with secrets as his medium. The novel does not tell us, neatly, how to live in such a medium. Instead, it offers what its title promises: parallax, the slow, disorienting shift that occurs when you look again from another angle, and realize that the same scene—love, friendship, teaching, grief—has moved, and you have moved with it.