SOURCE: Barnacle, Hugo. “Novel of the Week.” New Statesman 15, no. 692 (4 February 2002): 57.

In the following review, Barnacle describes Spies as fascinating, pleasurable, and powerful, despite its implausibility and recycling of familiar themes.

Books read in adulthood almost never seize and enwrap your imagination like the books you read as a child, but here is one that might do the trick. [Spies] is about children and the intense, “half-understood” world that they inhabit, and it has the brevity and compactness of books written for the young, yet neither of these factors can quite explain its remarkable grip. It recycles some familiar themes and suffers from a major drawback in the area of plausibility; all the same, it works like a charm.

Stephen, an old man living somewhere abroad, is assailed one summer by the overpowering reek of a privet hedge, which brings on a Proustian recollection of his wartime childhood...