Fair Game: the Steps of Odessa

The continuous mutations of human infamy are an inexhaustible source for James Watson’s socio-political thrillers. Here we have, not a re-run of The Battleship Potemkin, but nefarious goings-on in newly independent Ukraine which are brought to a climax on the Odessa Steps. Oligarchs, an only slightly cleaned-up version of the KGB, and a journalist possessed of incriminating tapes make up the political thread, while the social one celebrates the current New Woman: the journalist’s daughter playing soccer for the nation’s Under-19s and an artist restoring the cupola frescoes of St Cyril the Lesser with God the Mother and Her female Apostles.

The plot of Fair Game is not so much tangled as erratic, swerving around at speed as new characters and new events tumble in chapter by chapter. It is, in fact, very typical of earlier, much-praised narratives by James Watson and it’s not easy to see why he has had difficulty in finding a regular publisher for it. For this is the book referred to in my notes on the phenomenon of ‘print-on-demand’ (see p.3) and its publication has been largely in the hands of the author himself. The result is a solid, attractive volume with some supplementary information in the Preface and End Note. Proofing errors are probably no more numerous than in professionally-produced books in these lackadaisical times, and in one or two cases they have real culinary flair. ‘Leaks’ we thought are now only cooked up by the Home Office, and we ponder what life must have been like in the Ukraine before ‘liberation from the Russian yolk’.