The Corporal’s Wife by Gerald Seymour - reviewed by The Bookman on Radio New Zealand National this morning

The Corporal’s Wife by Gerald Seymour

Hodder & Stoughton - $37.99

I reviewed this title with Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand National this morning.

Gerald Seymour is a highly regarded, hugely successful writer of international thrillers of which this is his 30^th. He was initially a television journalist with ITN covering such topics as Vietnam & Ireland, the Munich Olympics massacre, Germany’s Red Army, Italy’s Red Brigade and Palestinian militant groups. So unsurprisingly the subjects of his books often feature these areas.
Seymour exploded onto the book scene in 1978 with the massive bestseller HARRY'S GAME, the first major thriller to tackle the modern troubles in Northern Ireland, it was described by Frederick Forsyth as like 'nothing else I have ever read' and it changed the landscape of the British thriller.

In this new one, published just this month, the setting is Iran, a country that has featured in several of his previous titles.  MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service have caught an Iranian in a “honey trap” in Dubai and have flown him to a safe house in Austria for interrogation. While he is only a corporal in the Revolutionary Guard he is a long-serving and loyal chauffer to a high ranking Brigadier and as such he knows the location of secret military and nuclear sites as well as the names of principal players in Iran’s nuclear programme. The British agents set out to convince the Corporal that he must cooperate with them or the secretly shot video footage in a Dubai brothel will be made public and his life in Iran would be finished.

Initially Mehrak, the corporal, is cooperative, and he does indeed have a lot of valuable information, but then he  demands that he will not cooperate further unless they get his wife out of Iran to join him in the new life they are promising him. Hence the title of the book, The Corporal’s Wife. Clearly because of the information the corporal can impart it is in MI6’s interests to do this and so with some grudgingly agreed support from the Americans and the Israelis  a four person team of private security contractors plus a recent university graduate who is fluent in Farsi is put together and smuggled in to Iran via Turkey.

The setting of the story moves between London, Vienna and Tehran , and various other parts of Iran especially the area around the Turkey/Iran border near 

Mount Ararat. There is a large cast of characters all well drawn, as always in Seymour’s novels. 

And also as usual with his novels I was appalled at the decisions taken back in London that have little regard for the life and death of those on the ground out in the field.. They have no qualms about the consequences of their decisions on those lower down the line. I know it is fiction but I do get so involved and I have to say I was angered at times.It is murky stuff, to put it mildly. 
I should finally add that in the end there really are no winners in this very well constructed and complex story that runs to some 420 pages. An excellent plane read.