The story of ‘The Magnificent Five’, as they were known in Moscow, is sketchily rehearsed, and reference made to Victor Rothschild, André Deutsch, Harold Wilson and Dick White, but none of it comes to life, and feels more like slightly wonky background verisimilitude — Burgess was at Trinity Hall, for example, not the College — than anything to do with the story.

I called The Untouchable a spy novel, but it is more a novel about spies. Most spy novels aren’t proper novels, which is why we celebrate John le Carré for writing ones that are. On the cover of this book, Robert Harris says that Cumming’s work reminds him ‘strongly of the early books of John le Carré’, which looks like a favour but really isn’t. The Trinity Six strikes me as a spy novel tout court, and not a particularly good one.

Le Carré’s work is re-readable because it has wit, grand architecture, resonant detail and fiendish subtlety. I found it a struggle to read The Trinity Six once. With le Carré one is invariably a few steps behind, with Cumming a few ahead. The crucial process of observation and deduction tends to the portentous and rather dim. What to make of this, for example?

Visible behind a plastic cover, perhaps so that Charlotte could press the purse against a ticket machine without the need to take it out, was an Oyster card.

I mean honestly, WTF?

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