Thursday 14 May 2009

Kudos to Kudos for squeezing the fans - Spooks Harry's Diary: Top Secret

Advantages: Provides a subtle degree of backstory. Fills in a few holes.

Disadvantages: It doesn't come across as Harry Pierce.

I didn't really know how I was going to approach this book. 

Should I approach it as a serious text on the back of the wonderful BBC drama "Spooks"? 
Or as a bit of fun, with the knowledge that the producers are just trying to squeeze a little extra cash out of the public, or to be more specific from fans, starved of Spooks, inbetween series. 

Well I like Spooks, so I thought I would give it a serious approach. This quickly changed as I got past the first few pages. 

There is no discernible author. Amazon state the author as being K Udos - the production company is called Kudos. Of course we all know the author is Harry Pierce, but someone in the real world had to write this. Whoever has written this I feel has certainly got Harry's story across, but not Harry's voice. I quickly found that the text didn't come across as Harry. OK it could be argued that a diary reveals our private self, not that which the public sees, but I still feel more of Harry Pierce could have shone through. 

That aside the diary does a fairly good job of telling it as Harry saw it from when he finished MI5 training. One of the most valuable aspects of this book is the notion of backstory. It subtly fills in a few holes and answers some questions left unanswered in the series. There is a huge glaring error in the writing of this, approaching a continuity error, which I wont say here, but it can be forgiven to a degree, when Harry later reveals something about how he decides to keep his diary. 

This is the difficulty with doing a book review is in not giving anything away, so hopefully I have given something here for you to grasp. 

Diehard fans will either love or hate this, simple as that. I like Spooks, but I am not a diehard. This book kept me occupied, and filled in some backstory. I would not go and spend £12.99, new, on it though (the cover price).

Summary: Not a bad read for when you want to relax and not think too hard

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