Eye of the Needle

⚖The case for it

Follett writes the German agent with more inside him than a thriller usually allows, so readers report sympathy for a man they should want caught, and rate him “one of the best 10 villains ever written.” The pressure ratchets in stages rather than spikes, and the viewpoint rotates between the spy, the MI5 men hunting him, and a household on an island the weather cuts off. The invasion secret underneath it is real history, which gives the chase something to be about. One critic concedes that “as a piece of mechanical engineering it’s faultless.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Everyone outside the two or three leads is interchangeable, a run of intelligence and police and military men who never separate. The romance moves faster than circumstance allows, and the sex scenes are “anatomically-precise” enough to sit badly against the tension around them, which one reader files as “terrible spy smut.” The dialogue in those passages explains itself. By the second half the book settles into a “Hollywood style spy-flick” of familiar beats, and one critic sums the prose as “bland but functional.”

— the honest librarian

9h

honest hours

13

sittings