ABSTRACT
The spy novels, at least of Anglophone provenance, refer to the skills which their protagonists learn, picking locks and recognizing disguised spies on the other side, following without being detected, and so on, as “tradecraft”. The woman protagonist of Kate Atkinson’s recent post-Gulf War thriller, When Will There be Good News? 1 accepts that there will always be tradecraft, lies, bluffing, even killing, but ends the novel with the thought that some of it, she has in mind torture, will always be wrong: not merely open to criticism from another discipline, that of moral philosophy, but inherently, ethically, wrong. She rejects all the familiar arguments about the urgent need to discover from the detainee which mall s/he may have planted the bomb in, the exceptions that justify inhumanity. For her, tradecraft is a cloak, each thread of which forms a politics in need of constant evaluation.
