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KENNEDY 35 marks the third appearance of that consummate 21st century spy, Lachlan Kite, and a very welcome reappearance it is too. Like its predecessors, it is billed as a thriller and like them it centres on a past event in Kite's career that affected him profoundly. In this case, the event had its roots in a great tragedy, the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 during which an estimated 600,000 Tutsis were massacred and perhaps as many as 500,000 women raped and left for dead.
The novel opens in 1995 in Dakar. A French reporter, Philippe Vauban, is appealing to Michael Strawson, the co-founder of Box 88, a hyper-secret Anglo-US intelligence group, for help in bringing to justice a man that he maintains is heavily responsible for the Rwandan catastrophe. It is an appeal that will lead to any number of deaths over several decades and to the young
Kite's increasing understanding of just what his choice of career will demand of him of commitment and degree of moral detachment.
Strawson quickly activates Kite and sends him off to Dakar with Martha, the young woman Kite has been living with. Martha has had previous experience with the possible consequences of what Kite does, but Strawson does not believe she needs to be filled in about any of the dangers he is sending both her and Kite into. Mission success is paramount and Martha isn't on the service payroll. Anyway, she is female. Strawson's views on that subject are traditional. Furthermore, he is distracted by his wife's serious illness and he cannot give his full attention to the Dakar project.
The spectacular collapse of the attempt to snatch the genocidaire and carry him away to be publically shamed and judged had little effect on Kite's career in Box 88 but eroded his relationship with Martha irrevocably. We learn what came after as Kite tells it to his wife Isobel in Sweden some twenty years later. But there is more to come as the story threatens to become public and various of those involved intervene to protect their positions.
You may infer from all this that KENNEDY 35 (it's an address, not a reference to the young JFK as I had imagined before I read the book) is not a typical spy novel. Billed as a thriller it may be, but Cumming continues along the path laid by Le Carré and extends it quite a way with the Box 88 series. Every character is complexly human in their own way and though the plot is rooted in thirty-year-old events, the issues it raises are still relevant in 2023. There is suspense, but not of the finger-clenching sort that can only be relieved by the hero's preposterous display of either gadgetry or martial arts.
Cumming continues the manipulation of different timelines that marked the preceding books but it is always clear both where and when the action is unfolding. As is true in real life, time is not linear and Kite carries the past with him into the present not as history but as living fact.
We appear at this moment in time to have slipped into a period that demands utter villains and unsullied heroes and requires us to decide which side is which and give no quarter to the other side. In his middle age, Kite has learned to be wary of that simplification and is trying his best to live with the pain that comes with the loss of certainty. KENNEDY 35 is an engrossing glimpse into a future where we all may have to come to terms with what we have done.
§ § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, November 2023
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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