Lovers of beautifully crafted sentences, polished atmospheres and impeccable plots, move on, this column is not for you. Gallimard’s new spy series is the one you read when you want to put your neurons to rest, to give in to a moment of pure entertainment. But nothing pejorative about it, Agent Seventeen And Assassin Eighteen, signed by the British John Brownlow, are models of their kind. Effective, but original. We swallow them in a few hours, without even realizing it, we close them delighted to have had fun following the wanderings at 300 miles per hour of the hero.
Everything revolves, in fact, around a central character who, in the first opus, is defined as follows: “You will never know my name. But you will never forget my number. […] My next target is Sixteen, and one day soon, I’ll have Eighteen on my back.” The action takes place in the ruthless world of international hitmen, where Seventeen – 17, wink (almost too ) obvious to 007 – replaces Sixteen by killing him, and where he himself can overnight be eliminated by 18. At the start of the first episode, agent Seventeen is on a mission to Berlin to assassinate an old man Barely a. When he reaches his target, he is sent on a new task, which turns out to be a trap. Incredible adventures ensue which will lead to the assassin Eighteen.
A priori, you will say, there is nothing very original in this story of a remarkable spy trapped in the wars for power between international villains and who can count on neither his bosses nor his sponsors to get out. Obviously, we think of Jason Bourne and Matt Damon, an unsurpassable Hollywood figure in this register. Or, in a literary version rather than a cinematographic one, to the early Lee Child for his ability to hook the reader with a hero with an original journey, Jack Reacher, a former military investigator, who travels the United States with nothing other than a brush toothed, having eliminated everything that makes it identifiable. We also think of the universe of Impossible mission for waterfalls and variable geometry geopolitics. And to James Bond, finally. The connection is there. The author worked on the series Fleming in 2014, fictionalized version of the life of the creator of 007. And Seventeen won the Ian Fleming Award for Best Thriller in 2023.
A spy novel that turns into a coming-of-age novel
But John Brownlow’s hero is not just a summary of these déjà vu, déjà vu, he has a real “little something extra”. First of all, his humor, and his way of stringing together sentences at full speed, taking the reader to task, as evidenced by the first pages of Seventeen : “Being a secret agent isn’t what you think. It’s boring. […] All that stuff you see on TV and in the movies, the road trips to exotic lands in flashy sports cars […]romances with glamorous celebrities of varied ethnic origins and suspect allegiances […], none of this exists. Absolutely nothing. Not even a little bit. Unless you’re me.” A tone that could be annoying if the hero didn’t gain depth over the pages. Quickly, the spy novel turns into a coming-of-age novel where we discover how the young Seventeen has become what it is and the reasons which today lead a young shooter to try to kill him Then in a mature novel, with secondary characters, women in particular, who are neither pretexts nor gimmicks. , but occupy a central place and make the spy even more endearing.
His personal flaws make us forget the implausibility of his passion, his ingenuity and his sixth sense, guarantors of his survival in a context that no human being could resist. Carried by the adrenaline that the author knows how to build with skill, we watch him without flinching as he travels through the polar night, then swims in the freezing water. We watch him, panting, crushing his opponents and death lurking beyond all credibility. But whatever, the pleasure is there. At the risk of annoying the venerable Gallimard house, we cannot strongly recommend starting with Agent Seventeen, published in paperback in the spring by Folio, before launching into the most recent Assassin Eighteen. Certainly, the title of the latter does not reveal the plot as much as one might fear, but the jubilation will be all the greater by respecting the chronological order. And, no doubt, if you like the first, you will rush to the second.
The Eighteen Assassin by John Brownlow, trans. from English by Laurent Boscq. Gallimard, coll. Black series, 594 p., €22.
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