Book Review: The Unexpected Spy by Tracy Walder

I struggled a bit with this one… From the descriptions, both in the blurb and from the publicist who introduced me to it, I expected a very different story – this did not read like fiction, it was not a spy story per se nor fast-paced throughout. While it painted a fairly involved picture of one agency (CIA), it did not do much other than offer a dark snapshot into the other (FBI). And it did all of those things with redactions that sometimes involved entire paragraphs…

In a quick aside – the redactions bugged me. A lot. They felt contrived, like a plot device that was intended to gin up extra tension and a sense of overarching drama without having to actually write it into the story. It came across like a way to avoid writing around what the government didn’t want her to say explicitly because it was easier than having to rewrite after the censors told her no…. I appreciate the need for keeping certain details out of the popular press, if they would impact (or potentially impact) the safety of individuals or the integrity of missions. So write the story with those details removed – but don’t just write the same story and cross random bits of that story out.

The redactions tended to come in groups and some were quite long – paragraphs and multiple lines on page after page. And really, what is the point of redacting an entire paragraph? I appreciate that there are details that the CIA wouldn’t want her to reveal – although a number of things she “couldn’t” mention were fairly easy to deduce if you paid even the slightest bit of attention to world news and/or stereotypes – but rather than feeling like a way of keeping certain specifics safe, it felt like a way of emphasizing that she knew things we didn’t… Obviously she does, she worked there. We get it. But leaving those bits in disrupted the flow of the narrative. It was jarring to keep having to stop and start around words, lines, or paragraphs, particularly when it wasn’t even obvious what was being kept out or why. It felt like a game of “guess what’s missing” rather than a way to keep secrets secret. And this wasn’t a narrative that did well with additional hurdles…

Which brings me to my next major issue – the pacing. I liked the way this one opened and was cautiously optimistic in the beginning, but the story felt bogged down in details and procedure in fairly short order, and I felt my attention flagging at random points throughout. Perhaps it’s because we know so much of what was learned about WMD and Zarqawi and Iraq now. But perhaps it’s because I found the constant reminders of her sorority girl background unnecessary and distracting. I get it. She wears pink and likes dressing up. And I get that those are, to her, important parts of her personality – and that they become more important as her tale progresses. But throughout much of the book those details feel thrown in rather than intentionally interwoven. By the time they become more relevant, as a result of the abysmal behavior of those she encountered at the FBI (seriously, WTF?! that was wild…),those tidbits were no longer being mentioned and the outlandishness of her treatment outshadowed those earlier details to such an extent that it all felt disjointed and cobbled together. It felt uneven in style and substance – from a great professional experience of a horrifying time in American history with fluffy details peppered in like color commentary, to a horrifying experience of unprofessionalism at the hands of her “superiors” that was stripped of all fluffiness and personality. Her FBI tale was presented as a more horrible experience than her hunt for WMDs, and I found that cognitively dissonant, even if on a personal level it may have been her reality… It jarred me and not in a good way.

And speaking of jarring, there’s the last third of the book as a whole. The CIA bits were by far the most involved of the book and the most interesting to me. The FBI was much less well developed and, as mentioned, oddly disjointed considering the detailed descriptions of process involved in the CIA section. While I appreciate that Walder spent much more time with the CIA, and that time was apparently much better spent on all levels, it affected the pacing of the narrative to skip around in descriptive levels and style so much. If the CIA bits were a love letter to the agency, the FBI was a trolling internet comment war. And then there’s the “after bits” – which are a Twitter feed by comparison. Suddenly she’s married, with a child, and a consultancy/teaching gig helping young girls get more involved in public and world affairs. No mention on how, why, or what got her there really. No details on anything, just the narrative equivalent of an Afterword blurb appended by a stranger… It felt like a completely different author wrote each of the three segments of this book, with different objectives, styles, and goals for each. It felt odd and disjointed and left me confused and dissatisfied, like I don’t really know what just happened.

On the whole, this one didn’t work for me. The book just never seemed to decide what it wanted to be or hit its stride. I gave it three stars, but that’s a bit of a rounding up. I was intrigued by the promise but it never quite delivered…

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for my obligation-free review copy.