Caroline's Reviews > Spies

There is something a little overly intimate about the way this book is narrated. It's not vulgar or anything like that, it's just that you get waste a lot time having to assuage the narrator's fears about the unreliability of his own memory. It's not that every book has to be written by an omniscient narrator, but here the guy keeps picking at the blurry lines of his memory like a scab until you want to shake his shoulders and say "why are you wasting my time with this then, if you're so sure that everything you're saying is false and misleading?" On a different note, I thought the narrator's use of both 1st and 3rd person when talking about his experiences was a really cool touch that I don't recall ever having seen before. It introduced that old Galen Strawson philosophical debate about episodic versus narrative selves. The way this book was written provides damning evidence to support Strawson's claim that it is possible to be both sane and episodic, which made reading the book rewarding on a number of levels.