Hostage: London

by Geoffrey Household

Writing as Michael Hastings

Genres: Fiction, Thriller

Hardcover

First published April 27, 1978

About the author

British author of mostly thrillers, though among 37 books he also published children's fiction. Household's flight-and-chase novels, which show the influence of John Buchan, were often narrated in the first person by a gentleman-adventurer. Among his best-know works is' Rogue Male' (1939), a suggestive story of a hunter who becomes the hunted, in 1941 filmed by Fritz Lang as 'Man Hunt'. Household's fast-paced story foreshadowed such international bestsellers as Richard Condon's thriller 'The Manchurian Candidate' (1959), Frederick Forsyth's 'The Day of the Jackal' (1971), and Ken Follett's 'Eye of the Needle' (1978) .

In 1922 Household received his B.A. in English from Magdalen College, Oxford, and between 1922 and 1935 worked in commerce abroad, moving to the US in 1929. During World War II, Household served in the Intelligence Corps in Romania and the Middle East. After the War he lived the life of a country gentleman and wrote. In his later years, he lived in Charlton, near Banbury, Oxfordshire, and died in Wardington.

Household also published an autobiography, 'Against the Wind' (1958), and several collections of short stories, which he himself considered his best work.

Reviews

[Jayaprakash Satyamurthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my review of Rogue Male, I commented that if all Household's work was of a similar quality, he deserved a full-scale revival. Well, Hostage:London didn't have the Platonic purity of the former work, so it felt a little less intense although the actual stakes were even higher. However, the larger supporting cast aside, this was in every way as deft and taut a thriller as Rogue Male, and as informed with larger themes, justifying Household's own description of his work as a mix of Conrad and Buchan.

It's interesting reading this novel 34 years after its initial publication, in an era that is even more defined by the constant threat of terrorism. The terrorist group in this novel hopes to detonate a nuclear bomb in London, forcing the authorities to impose a police state which in turn will help inspire a New Revolution. In reality, we've found that the tightening-up of security measures in the wake of terorrist attacks on prominent locations, including London, and closer home, Bombay, has been accepted, albeit not always with good grace. We grumble about being searched at airports and shopping malls, but we don't really seem to do much more about it than that. People by and large are content to trade a certain amount of liberty for apparent gains in security. Magma, the underground organisation in this novel, may well have overestimated the efficacy of their plan, another reason why acts of terror are fundamentally futile if not counter-productive.

Also, Household offers an eloquent and quite definitive argument against torture during the course of this novel, noting in his common-sensical way that if the torturer knew enough to tell which of the many grasping confessions offered in extremity were reliable, he would know enough that torture was not necessary in the first place. He goes on to say that torture can only work on those who have no strong ideals and nothing to gain except the cessation of pain; clearly not an apt description of a fanatical militant.

Household also offers us a comment on various forms of ideology, and a tense, gripping narrative which delivers a great deal of suspense and thrills, questions the nature of idealism and loyalty and offers no easy answers. The ending is superbly bleak and left me feeling quite drained. A Household revival begins to look more and more necessary. I'd take this novel over many of the fictional engagements with terrorism and idealism currently being churned out.

[Derek Collett · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting and readable novel but not quite on a par with the best examples of Household's fiction that I've read so far (namely Rogue Male and A Rough Shoot).

Household is of course best known for writing 'man on the run' pursuit novels and this one is no exception. But in my experience to date it is not fair to say that the author churned out endless rubber-stamp impressions of Rogue Male having achieved success with that book relatively early on in his writing career. Household was a clever, inventive writer seemingly capable of multiple variations on a theme. Here, the twist is that, rather than a hunt to find a man we have a hunt to find a bomb, although the man chasing after the bomb is himself being chased, thus the plot does adhere after all to Household's primary theme.

Briefly, an anarchist group plant a rudimentary nuclear device somewhere in London and Julian Despard, one of their number, is so appalled at this sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut protest against capitalist society that he turns renegade and endeavours to find (and then disarm) the device in question. Despard makes for a good central character (and one who is rather more serious than certain other of Household's jokey, wise-cracking protagonists) and some of the other people he enlists in the struggle to discover the bomb, including a number of his erstwhile terrorist colleagues, are also good value. The book plays with the notion of who can you trust and who can you not when you are in a tight corner without ever fully exploiting that potentially rich philosophical seam. The locations are good and it is nice to see Household moving away from his habitual Dorset settings and introducing some new ones: Greece (very briefly at the start of the book); Dartmoor; my adopted home of The Cotswolds (hooray!); and central London.

Written in diary form, the book unfolds in a logical, convincing fashion (I agree with the Sunday Times reviewer quoted on the back cover who observes that Household gets the details "All chillingly right") and builds towards a suitably tense climax. But here come the negatives. The trouble with the diary format is that we know well in advance that the diarist must be alive in order to write the last entry and thus must succeed in his quest to find and defuse the bomb (this is a novel after all). Household offers a solution to that problem but not I think a wholly convincing one. Absorbing as the book undoubtedly is, I had the feeling that punches were being pulled and that the story should perhaps have been more suspenseful, exciting and dramatic given the promising premise. Hostage:London is very nicely written and represents an absorbing read but, in the final analysis, I just found it a bit underwhelming and anticlimactic.

[Mick Scrimshaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written as the diary of a sophisticated and successful member of an international terrorist gang, this book offers a fascinating glimpse of the characters mindset and political motivation for both his criminal activities against the state and his decision to turn against his former colleagues when he discovers they mean to set off a nuclear bomb in the heart of London. For me this was the most enjoyable part of the book and the descriptions of his politics and philosophy were quite imaginative.
However, clearly off its time, this 1970’s book wasn’t the most enjoyable book I’ve ever read and the plot itself was weak and verging on unbelievable at times, and even though in a couple of places I got slightly confused as to what was being described, in general it was easy to read although not the most gripping thriller.

[Virginia Rand · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a bit conflicted about this book. It has some problems with how it portrays women, as you might expect from a 70s book by a man, but the actual story is really well done and it feels relatively realistic most of the time.

[Deborah · Rating 2 out of 5]

silly setup but consistent with the narcissistic libertarianism that makes Household novels kind of fun.

[Wilde Sky · Rating 2 out of 5]

The hunt is on for an atomic bomb hidden in London.

I found the writing style / format confusing and this book felt dated.

[Erik Tanouye · Rating 2 out of 5]

Got this at the Second Story Books warehouse in Rockville in September 2017.

[Suzanne Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m working my way through Tim Shipman’s Top 100 Spy Thrillers, and Hostage London stands comfortably among the best. It doesn’t move at the relentless clip of Rogue Male - which may frustrate readers who demand breathless suspense on every page, but it is so crisp, so economically written, that it’s impossible to look away.

Household’s trademark restraint is on full display: not a word wasted, not a punctuation mark out of place. His protagonist, Julian Despard, carries the ruthlessness of a seasoned assassin and the moral clarity - almost innocence - of a classic hero. The prose is lean, incisive, and devastatingly effective.

A genuine classic, and one that fully earns its reputation.

[Dominic Londesborough · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geoffrey Household is eloquent as ever in this tense 'race against time' thriller. A perfect length at around 240 pages, he combines vivid descriptions of location (he does countryside particularly well) with distinctive characters. However, his earlier novel Rogue Male remains my favourite by far.