NOT SINCE The Honourable Schoolboy has there been a satisfactory spy novel about Britain's relations with China: the global power of the 19th century tussling with that of the 21st, all the time complicated by that still bolshie 20th-century giant, America.

The obvious fulcrum is Hong Kong. In John le Carré's book - perhaps the most underrated of all his prodigious output - the ogre offstage is the Soviet Union, but it is the one-sided “special relationship” that provides the sweet-and-sour flavour.

In Charles Cumming's well-timed and excellently executed Typhoon, the seasoning is similar, though the pantomime villain lurking in the background this time is the spectre of Islamic fundamentalism.

This might at first glance seem opportunistic and a mite improbable, but that only reflects one of the book's key themes: how little any of us know or apparently cares, especially since 9/11, about the rampant human rights abuses in China's other controverisally annexed province: Xinjiang.

Also known - though not by the Chinese - as Eastern Turkestan, this ancient homeland of the mainly Muslim Uighur people lies to the north of Tibet, but has suffered every bit as much repression as separatist movements, backed up by allegations of “terrorist” attacks.

Typhoon begins in 1997 in Hong Kong on the eve of the handover with Joe Lennox, a young SIS operative deeply in love with his beautiful half-French girlfriend, worried about telling her the truth about his job, and where to party as the flag comes down.

In the background is Miles Coolidge, a cynical, hard-bitten CIA operative whose overriding ambition is to have sex with as many attractive women as a career spent in East Asia can offer. Including, as an exotic extra, those attached to other men.

As the empire surrenders Hong Kong to China, so Joe is doomed to lose Isabella to Miles. At the same time he also loses his first high-profile case: a supposedly prominent defector who disappears from a “safe” house.

Swoop on a decade to almost the present day and Joe goes back to China to find all his old nemeses waiting for him, coiled up within a cold-blooded maverick plot to use Uighur separatists to damage China's reputation on the eve of the Olympic Games.

The story is narrated by a third party bit-player, ostensibly a journalist on the SIS payroll, with the full benefit of hindsight, which gives it a further le Carré-esque touch: that all-knowing, mildly wistful feeling of an inquest.

The comparison is a heavy one for a young author, but Typhoon, with its deep plotting, flawed characters, climactic conclusion and undercurrent of mistrust is another step in the footprints of the master.

Typhoon by Charles Cumming
Michael Joseph, £18.99; 464pp Buy the book here

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