The Diary of Lies by Philip Miller review: 'splendidly atmospheric'
Its plot may feel improbable at times, but Philip Miller’s new novel still offers much rich entertainment, writes Allan Massie
In crime fiction, conspiracies used to be left-wing, with Reds, anarchists or agents of a revolutionary regime threatening the security of the State. They would be thwarted by the security services with a bit of freelance help from well-to-do good fellows, often ex-army themselves. The British State might be under attack, but there were always patriotic chaps who would leap to its defence. Such novels were very satisfying, and in a curious way they remained so even when George Smiley took over the defence of the realm from James Bond, himself an heir of Richard Hannay and Sandy Artbuthnot. Things are very different today. It is apparently the Establishment and Big Business that threaten us. That's where evil lies, where monsters lurk.
Philip Miller's engaging if at times irritating The Diary of Lies is such a novel, one where there is a destructive monster at the heart of government. The conspirators have even given their monster a code name: Grendel. Grendel is of course the name of the monster in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. Since, for all the damage that monster did, it came to a nasty end at the hero's hand, it doesn't seem a well-chosen code name.
Nevertheless this Grendel at the heart of an abominable plot against the British people, and the plot is being hatched in Scotland, in a top-secret department of what we still call the Civil Service. Can the villains, members of the Establishment, be thwarted?
Happily, award-winning investigative journalist Shona Sandison (formerly of The Scotsman, as is the author Phllip Miller himself) is soon on the case, alerted to the conspiracy by a man she first views with some suspicion, but whose honesty is soon made painfully clear - or, at least, fairly clear.
The plot of the novel leads us to some dark and rather horrible places, which would indeed be even more horrible if credulity didn't sometimes snap. It has too, for me anyway, rather too many boring passages, so much of Shona's investigation requiring her to get help from technicians who can break into smartphones and suchlike devices. You know the secret will be cracked, so the tension is slacker than it might be.
Nevertheless many readers, more at home with these matters than this reviewer, will no doubt find this sort of investigation compelling. In any case, what matters in novels of this genre is not what is done, but how well it is done, and Miller writes with such confidence and flair that, preposterous though his plot surely is, it is no more so than, for instance, the plot of The Three Hostages, the fourth Hannay novel which is almost as good as Greenmantle, itself a novel not lacking in the improbable, even absurd.
Still, I'm inclined to think that this time Miller starts too many hares running and loses sight of some of them. That said, the novel is full of splendid scenes and must be judged high entertainment, no matter how improbable so much of it is. It is, after all, a necessary part of the author’s craft to create something improbable that stops just short of the impossible and make it acceptable to the reader.
This is a novel that holds the attention, offers much rich entertainment and has splendidly atmospheric and even comic scenes. Miller also has the courage or ruthlessness to kill off his one of his most likeable characters. There's not much room for such folk in this kind of novel; they are lost in a swirl. Sad, really.
The Diary Of Lies, by Philip Miller, Polygon, £9.99
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