One of my Christmas books was The Marionette by Terry Fallis. It’s the first book I’ve read by Fallis, a Canadian author who seems to have developed a reputation for quality and humour. And it’s a spy book, too, so I was optimistic when I cracked it open.

And I didn’t hate it. Reading The Marionette was an amiable experience. It’s about, if you must know, a Canadian author of spy thrillers who narrates his experiences rescuing some people from a tight spot in Mali. And it’s presented as a light comedy, not a Clancy-like exercise in grimtech. That’s fine.

What’s not fine is that it’s too simple. Our hero and his allies set out to rescue the people, and they succeed. Everyone turns out to be just who we think they are, and there are no surprise twists. There is a climactic scene where danger threatens, and, to Fallis’s credit, it does seem like the plan could go very wrong here, but then they get out of it. And after that there’s a long denouement where we look at the number of pages remaining and think something interesting might happen, but it doesn’t. And that’s it.

I’m sure I’ve read books where the machinations of various factions become so complicated that I really have no idea who’s doing what or why, and that’s not good either. (To the extent that it’s the author’s fault that I can’t follow it.) I’m not asking for complication for complication’s sake. But I do think a book about spying should have a few more moving parts than this one. Unless there’s something else going on that’s the real main attraction! Like, for instance, humour. If the story, the characters, the dialogue, the prose is hilarious, it doesn’t matter if the plot’s overly straightforward. And I think that might have been the assumption here.

Unfortunately The Marionette isn’t funny. And when I say that I don’t mean that its jokes don’t work on me. I mean that there aren’t any jokes. There’s a light dad-joke kind of tone that the narrative voice provides for us, like a Linwood Barclay protagonist, but nothing that you can point to and say, “That. That part’s supposed to be funny.”

For all that, it’s a competently told story. I can’t call it good because there’s not enough to it; I might have liked it better if it had been interesting enough to be bad.