Book review: The Long Room
She remembers his vivid imagination when he was a child. Certainly, on the evidence of his performance as a ‘listener,’ transcribing the tapes of a possible traitor whose Battersea flat is bugged, Stephen could have made a better stab at fiction than spying.
His problem is that he is a hopeless romantic who thought his job would be glamorous and exciting. But with its tedious monitoring of old communists and hapless would-be revolutionaries, it offers little other than “a future pushing paper in an insignificant little outpost and nothing to look forward to but an index-linked enhanced pension.”
