Ian McEwan, friend of TRP

[alice wellintown]

Itz hyperbole. If we want to be exact about it we can't call
Dostoyevsky or Poe Spy Novelists. We can't even call Poe a novelist;
he only wrote one longish work of fiction, he said the novel was not a
fit form for the man of genius or for a reader. If we loosen up the
definition we may as well include Shakespeare. Sure, Hamlet is a spy
novel. Why G&R are spies. And Polonius sicks spies on his son, and the
everyone in the play i spying on someone. A parody of the popular
revenge tragedy, Hamlet may be called a spy novel-tragedy. Ay, and
isn't the Odyssey a spy novel-epic? Sure it is. Why the Gods and the
mortals are all a bunch of spies.

Of course, I think Paul M is closer to the mark because the spy novel,
while it may be related to the quest and journey of epic and tragedy,
and to the revenge plots of tragedy, and to the detective fiction of
Dickens, the Rusiinas, Poe & Co., seems to be post-romantic modernism,
so the fragments of chivelary are only draped over the machine guns
and massive machines of mass urban murder or war as we experience it.