Ben Macintyre's 'The Siege': Cloak-and-swagger intrigue in London
A nonfiction thriller recalls a 1980s hostage crisis and a daring rescue by a British special-ops team
Why do people still use the term “Great American Novel”?
It isn’t just a cliché but obsolete: a relic of that testosterone-fueled era when Norman Mailer and others “fancied themselves in the boxing ring with Hemingway, delivering a succession of body blows to Papa and other writers of his celebrated generation,” as the critic Jonathan Yardley wrote.
Or so I argued in a recent piece on Medium that struck a chord with readers. People seemed intuitively to grasp its main point: The idea of the Great American novel has become a casualty of more than movies and the diversity of voices finding their way into print. It competes for attention with a boom in narrative nonfiction that at its best holds its own against high-quality fiction.
I was thinking of nonfiction like David Grann’s The Wager, Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, and Patrick Radden Keefe’s Empire of Pain. Those books dealt with different topics—a shipwreck, schizophrenia, and the opioid epidemic—but all were better than most of the recently published novels I’ve read.
Six men and submachine guns
Now comes another stellar example of narrative nonfiction: Ben Macintyre’s new The Siege: A Six-Day Hostage Crisis and the Daring Special Forces Operation That Shocked the World, which tells how six men with submachine guns stormed the Iranian embassy in London in April 1980 and took 26 hostages they held for six days.
The gunmen were Arab nationalists funded by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who hoped to strike a blow against his enemy Iran. The terrorists demanded the release of 91 prisoners held by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and a plane flight out of Britain after the siege ended.
Macintyre, a columnist for the Times of London, is perhaps best known for his Operation Mincemeat and A Spy Among Friends, espionage nonfiction centered on World War II and the early days of Cold War.
But his new book shows he’s equally adept at writing about a more recent event that British viewers watched unfold on live TV as raptly as Americans followed the two-hour chase of O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco by the Los Angeles police.
In The Siege, Macintyre artfully deploys elements of good novels—a strong plot, a swift pace, a well-evoked setting, and an appealing cast of characters—along with devices such as foreshadowing and cliffhanger chapter endings.
A policeman who’d never fired his weapon
It doesn’t hurt that Macintyre also has a fine sense of irony and a hero who’s easy to like: the Policeman Trevor Lock, a decent and honorable husband and father of six from the sublimely named town of Barking, which inspired tabloid headlines like “Trev the Barking Bobby.”
In the first pages, we learn that Lock was a Diplomatic Protection officer assigned to guard the front of door the Iranian Embassy in leafy Kensington after having only three days of training in how to use his holstered Smith & Wesson .38. He’d never had to fire his gun on the job, and if you can’t guess whether or not it will go off, at least metaphorically, you need to brush up your Chekhov.
From then on, Macintyre keeps the suspense high enough that it’s no spoiler to say that two hostages and five terrorists before or during a spectacular rescue by Britain’s elite Special Air Service. A climatic cloak-and-swagger raid by the SAS involved smoke bombs, smashed windows, and black-clad commandos rappelling down from a rooftop as terrified hostages barricaded themselves behind closed doors.
Macintyre nicely balances that “Mission Impossible”-style action with clear analyses of the geopolitical stakes of the drama.
The terrorists versus the ‘Iron Lady’
Six months earlier, a defining embarrassment of Jimmy Carter’s presidency had occurred when the U.S. failed to rescue dozens of Americans seized by Iranian students at its embassy in Tehran. “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s new prime minister, wanted to avoid looking similarly weak-kneed and refused to yield to the terrorists’ demand for safe passage out of the country.
Macintyre ably shows the often self-serving machinations of Thatcher’s advisers, her government’s futile negotiations with the terrorists, and the media frenzy that descended on Kensington amid all of it.
He also offers rare glimpses of how the SAS trained for possible tasks such as rescuing the British royals from kidnappers. And he enriches his account of the so-called Stockholm syndrome among the hostages with a discussion of the less well-known Lima syndrome that finds captors growing fond of their captives.
His small lapses go by so quickly you hardly notice them: among them, his occasional descents into overheated speech tags such as “he growled.”
For all of the high drama of his story, some of its most memorable passages are amusingly low-voltage.
As the siege wore on, Scotland Yard wanted to use as a command post a Montessori nursery school close to Iranian embassy. The school gave permission — provided the occupiers would look after the pet gerbil, Nibbles, it needed to leave behind.
The police agreed and later noted that the explosions and gunfire of the rescue operation had unsettled the animal. But the gerbil lived and during the chaos, was “in the middle of his play wheel, tearing round and round with a clatter.”
Jan Harayda is an award-winning critic and journalist who has been the book columnist for Glamour, the book editor of a large newspaper, and a vice president of the National Book Critics Circle. She also writes about books, journalism, and more on Medium.
I will look for this book, I haven’t read espionage nonfiction and I think I will like it a lot, especially since Macintynte seems to have a great writing style.
Great review! I especially loved "the sublimely named town of Barking."