Adventure Story

Red Anger – Geoffrey Household

This 1977 story is in the traditions of the British thriller and rural novel.

To escape a sticky situation in which a faithless politician is setting him up, Adrian Gurney takes on the identity of a Romanian defector. He teams up with Alwyn Rory, an MI5 operative on the run who been falsely accused of being in Soviet pay.

With Rory as the hinge, the first-person narrative by Gurney sidesteps the problem of many adventure stories: the me-me-me tone of the self-absorbed narrator. Beautifully evoked in this chase novel are the South Devon coast and Marlborough Downs.

In his 1939 minor masterpiece Rogue Male, Household had the hero lie doggo in an abandoned badger’s den and in this one too he has protagonists hide in a boyish rural refuge. Some scenes are so strange as to be barely plausible but this confusion is balanced by the useful message “Don’t let the ends justify the means.”