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The Moving Finger by Agatha Christie (1943)

Just for a moment I hated Lymstock and its narrow boundaries, and its gossiping whispering women.
(Chapter 2)

‘I hope you find the devil who writes these soon. She murdered my wife as surely as if she’d put a knife into her.’
(Mr Symmington in Chapter 3 – Criminals in Christie are always maniacs, devils or fiends, or a ‘dangerous lunatic’, Chapter 5, or ‘A crafty, determined lunatic killer’, Chapter 7)

Nash nodded sympathetically. ‘Yes, it isn’t very pleasant to look upon these fellow creatures one meets as possible criminal lunatics.’
(Ditto, Chapter 6)

‘What kind of place is this for a man to come to to lie in the sun and heal his wounds? It’s full of festering poison, this place, and it looks as peaceful and as innocent as the Garden of Eden.’
(Jerry Burton appalled by what he is discovering)

‘But people have such evil minds. Yes, alas, such evil minds!’
(Miss Ginch)

‘It’s the first murder we’ve ever had in Lymstock. Excitement is terrific.’
(Hearty Aimée Griffith expressing the comic view which is never far away in Christie)

‘The Moving Finger’ is Agatha Christie’s third Miss Marple novel.

Synopsis

Jerry Burton

It’s a first-person narrative told by Jerry Burton. A fit young man, he was badly injured in a flying accident and, once he’d recovered, his doctor advised going somewhere very quiet for rest and recuperation. So he and his sister Joanna rented a cottage called Little Furze in the village of Lymstock, ‘a little provincial market town’. The charming old Victorian lady who owned it, Miss Emily Barton, moved into rooms in Lymstock.

Small town gossip

Having just finished reading some of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels, I was struck by the similarities, not of tone, style or intent – but of setting. A provincial village with a set of stock characters, even down to the way that morning is the time for everyone to head off to the High Street, bump into each other and have a good gossip.

‘That ought to give you time to pass the time of day with everyone in Lymstock.’
‘I have no doubt,’ I said, ‘that I shall have seen anybody who is anybody by then.’
For morning in the High Street was a kind of rendezvous for shoppers, when news was exchanged.

Just as in Lucia’s Riseholme where the catchphrase is ‘Any news?’ – as Inspector Nash explains about tiny little village communities:

‘Anything’s news in a place like this. You’d be surprised. If the dressmaker’s mother has got a bad corn everybody hears about it!’ (Chapter 5)

And here’s Aimée Griffith’s view:

‘Oh, I dare say you don’t hear all the gossip that goes around. I do! I know what people are saying. Mind you, I don’t for a minute think there’s anything in it – not for a minute! But you know what people are – if they can say something ill-natured, they do!’… Aimée Griffith gave her jolly laugh. ‘You’re shocked, Mr Burton, at hearing what our gossiping little town thinks. I can tell you this – they always think the worst!’

I was struck when I came across Mr Pye using the expression ‘village Parliament’ to describe the daily morning meeting of villages in the high street to exchange gossip:

‘Not joining our village Parliament? We are all agog over the news. Murder! Real Sunday newspaper murder in our midst!’

Because it echoes Benson’s novel, Queen Lucia, in which characters refer half a dozen time to exactly the same morning meeting of villagers on their green as ‘the morning parliament’, ‘the parliament on the green’ and so on. Coincidence of not just concept but precise terminology.

Poison pen letters

As to the plot, first of all we are introduced to the middle class inhabitants of the village and some of their servants, in an enjoyably leisurely way, about 15 named characters in all. Fairly early on Jerry receives an anonymous poison pen letter claiming his sister, Joanna, is not his sister at all and that he’s living in sin with his mistress masquerading as his sister. Jerry shows it to Joanna, they have a laugh and then burn it in the fireplace.

But over the next few chapters they learn that almost everyone in the village has received one of these letters – a type-written envelope containing a message made entirely from words cut out of an old textbook and pasted into paper to make poisonous accusations, nearly all of a sexual nature.

Suicide

So far, so shedding an unexpected light on the dark underside of a small tightly-knit rural community. What drastically changes the narrative is when the querulous wife of the village’s dried-up solicitor, Mrs Symmington, commits suicide. The note she left suggests it was in response to the accusations contained in one of these letters and when the letter she’d scrunched up into a ball is examined, it claims that the second of her two children by the lawyer is not in fact his i.e. that she had an affair.

The cops

So the police, in the form of Superintendent Nash, are called in and Nash requests help from a specialist in these kinds of letters, an Inspector Graves who comes down from London specially. Suddenly all the nice characters we’ve met to date acquire a nimbus of suspicion.

Megan Hunter?

There’s a fairly big red herring or storyline which is that the Symmingtons have a step-daughter – Megan Symmington was Mrs Symmington’s daughter by her first marriage, by a Captain Hunter who was a wrong ‘un and quickly despatched leaving her holding the baby who would grow up to become Megan Symmington, 20-years-old at the time of the narrative. Megan is tall and clumsy, gauche, unhappy and angry because she knows she is simply not wanted in the Symmington household.

Jerry and Joanna feel sorry for her and so, in the aftermath of her mother’s suicide, they step in and offer to look after her, leaving the Symmington household’s governess, the stunningly attractive but commonplace Elsie Holland, to concentrate on looking after the bereaved husband and their two boys.

Earlier in the story, Jerry had bumped into her in the street and they’d walked for a bit and Megan had confessed that she hates everyone, because of her profound sense of alienation and unwantedness. Could the poison pen writer be her?

Miss Barton?

Later Jerry has a slight argument with old Miss Barton who’s rented them the cottage they’re staying in. Remember how in Murder Is Easy, the killer turned out a harmless little old lady, well… Miss Barton tells Jerry that she’s never received one of these horrid letters but later on the police inspector tells Jerry this was a lie…

Miss Ginch?

And then he goes to the estate agents about his rental and discovers that Mr Symmington’s dried-up 40-year-old secretary, Miss Ginch, has quit her job with him to work at the estate agents and seems to take a gleeful delight in the mayhem being caused by the letters. So maybe she wrote them!?

Elsie Holland?

The Symmingtons employ a stunningly beautiful young woman, Elsie Holland, as a governess to their two boys, Colin and Brian.

Dr Griffiths

That nice young but harassed Dr Griffiths. At first Jerry likes him, he is a widely read and interesting young chap, but then comes to realise that he also has more access to people’s secrets than anyone else in the village. And behaves increasingly nervously as if he knows something or has done something…

The second death

So far so entertainingly puzzling and challenging as the reader shares in Jerry’s conversations with all the different characters, picking out throwaway remarks, wondering whodunnit. But the plot thickens considerably when there is a second death and this time it is no accident, this time it is murder!

A maid at Symmington’s house, Agnes Woddell, rings up her former superior and mentor, Partridge, who is housekeeper at Little Furze, in a tizzy and wanting help. Partridge can’t get out of her what the problem is and agrees to meet her but Agnes never turns up. Next day she is found brutally murdered and stuffed into the broom cupboard under the stairs. Jerry and the cops quickly conclude that she must have seen who delivered the fatal letter by hand to the Symmingtons house, which pushed Mrs Symmington over the brink into suicide – she’d come to connect someone she knew walking up the path and delivering something at the letter box (everyone else was out of the house at the time) – and that person – the Poison Pen writer must themselves have realised that Agnes knew and could identify her (everyone thinks it’s a woman), and so snuck back a week later, when the rest of the household was out, and murdered her!

At which point the atmosphere thickens and everyone becomes a suspect, quizzed by the police about their whereabouts at the time of the murder, with Jerry kept informed by the police superintendent of developments, who also asks if Jerry could keep his ear open and quiz villagers, with a view to turning up more evidence.

In other words, following the Hercule Poirot rulebook, which is to get people talking and keep them talking, until they slip up. Combined with that other Poirot technique, which is finding psychological consistency, identifying the kind of person who would write these letters and then go on to kill to protect themselves…

So life goes on in this harmless little village with a new tinge of paranoia, which verges slightly on the realm of horror:

There was a half-scared, half-avid gleam in almost everybody’s eye. Neighbour looked at neighbour… Somewhere, then, in Lymstock, walking down the High Street, shopping, passing the time of day, was a person who had cracked a defenceless girl’s skull and driven a sharp skewer home to her brain. And no one knew who that person was. As I say, the days went on in a kind of dream. I looked at everyone I met in a new light, the light of a possible murderer.

Enter Miss Marple

And it’s only here, on page 180 of this 250-page book, that Miss Marple enters, a guest invited to tea by the vicar, along with jerry, who is introduced to her for the first time… And after a few pages demonstrating her fondness for making analogies to characters in her own village, she drops out of the narrative altogether for the next 30 pages. Only 25 pages or so from the end does she reappear, after the police have arrested the person they think responsible.

And it now, in the final stretches, that Miss Marple, of course, proves everybody wrong, organising an elaborate hoax which the police stake out in order to catch the murderer red-handed.

Miss Marple dazzlingly solves the case, and the novel ends with the baddie caught and arrested, a flurry of engagements, and quite a funny joke in the last line. Very slick and enjoyable entertainment all round.

Cast

Jerry Burton – narrator, severe back injury in a flying accident and so ‘an invalid hobbling about on two sticks’
Joanna Burton – his sister, suave, independent, fond of brief love affairs, blonde
Old Miss Emily Barton – permanently pink and excited like Dresden China
- Florence Elford – Miss Barton’s faithful parlour-maid, ‘a tall, raw-boned, fierce-looking woman’
- Partridge – Miss Barton’s maid
- Beatrice – the daily help
- Old Adams – the gardener
Mr Richard Symmington the lawyer, thin and dry
- old Miss Ginch – his lady clerk – ‘forty at least, with pince-nez and teeth like a rabbit’ – ‘She had frizzy hair and simpered’
- Agnes Woddell – maid
- Rose – the cook, ‘a plump pudding-faced woman of forty’
Mrs Mona Symmington – his querulous bridge-playing wife; he is her second husband after she divorced the not-to-be-mentioned Captain Hunter – ‘a small anaemic woman, fadedly pretty, who talked in a thin melancholy voice of servant difficulties and her health’ – ‘That anaemic middle-aged prettiness concealed, I thought, a selfish, grasping nature’
Megan Hunter – Symmington’s step-daughter – ‘a tall awkward girl, and although she was actually
twenty, she looked more like a schoolgirlish sixteen. She had a shock of untidy brown hair, hazel-green eyes, a thin bony face, and an unexpectedly charming one-sided smile. Her clothes were drab and unattractive and she usually had on lisle-thread stockings with holes in them’
Elsie Holland – the Symmingtons’ nursery governess – stunningly beautiful
- Colin and Brian, Symmington’s two young boys
Dr Owen Griffith – the dark, melancholy doctor – ‘dark, ungainly, with awkward ways of moving and deft, very gentle hands. He had a jerky way of talking and was rather shy’
Aimée Griffith – his sister who was big and hearty – runs the Girl Guides – ‘had all the positive assurance her brother lacked. She was a handsome woman in a masculine weather-beaten way,
with a deep voice’
the Reverend Caleb Dane Calthrop – the vicar – a scholarly absent-minded elderly man, ‘s a being more remote from everyday life than anyone I have ever met. His existence was in his books and in his study’
Mrs Maud Dane Calthrop – his erratic eager-faced wife, ‘quite terrifyingly on the spot. Though she seldom gave advice and never interfered, yet she represented to the uneasy consciences of the village the Deity personified’ – ‘her startling resemblance to a greyhound’
Mr Pye of Prior’s End – rich dilettante – ‘an extremely ladylike plump little man, devoted to his petit point chairs, his Dresden shepherdesses and his collection of period furniture’ – gay?
- Prescott – his cook
- Mrs Prescott – his house parlour-maid
Mrs Mudge – the butcher’s wife
Jennifer Clark – barmaid at the ‘Three Crowns’
young Fred Rendell from the fish shop
Sergeant Parkins – village cop
Bert Rundle – the village constable
Mrs Cleat – the village witch – ‘Likes to show off. Goes out to gather herbs and things at the full of the moon and takes care that everybody in the place knows about it’
Colonel Appleby – ‘that awful old bore’
Miss Jane Marple – ‘That’s my expert,’ said Mrs Dane Calthrop. ‘Jane Marple. Look at her well. I tell you, that woman knows more about the different kinds of human wickedness than anyone I’ve ever known’

The police

Superintendent Nash – ‘I liked him at first sight. He was a top quality criminal investigator. Tall, with a military way, he looked tranquil and objective, besides being very simple’
Inspector Graves – an expert on anonymous letter cases, come down from London to help the local police

In London

Marcus Kent – Jerry’s doctor, who told him to go to some little place in the country to rest and recover
Mirotin – Joanna’s dressmaker – ‘Mirotin is, in the flesh, an unconventional and breezy woman of forty-five, Mary Grey’

Feminism

In most of the Christie books I’ve read to date, her feminist characters are figures of fun. Not here. Aimée Griffith is given some fiercely feminist lines that instantly reminded me of the furious denunciations on Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas.

‘I should have said Megan is at the age when a girl wants to enjoy herself – not to work.’
Aimée flushed and said sharply, ‘You’re like all men – you dislike the idea of women competing. It is incredible to you that women should want a career. It was incredible to my parents. I was anxious to study for a doctor. They would not hear of paying the fees. But they paid them readily for Owen. Yet I should have made a better doctor than my brother.’
‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said. ‘It was tough on you. If one wants to do a thing–’
She went on quickly.
‘Oh, I’ve got over it now. I’ve plenty of willpower. My life is busy and active. I’m one of the happiest people in Lymstock. Plenty to do. But I go up in arms against the silly old-fashioned prejudice that woman’s place is always the home.’
‘I’m sorry if I offended you, I said. I had had no idea that Aimée Griffith could be so vehement.

Theology

Despite having created countless vicars, and dwelling on death at great length, and endlessly invoking the concept of ‘evil’, and despite Christie herself being a Church of England Christian, her books contain surprisingly little theology. That made Jerry Burton’s little outburst stick out the more. Here he is getting cross with old Miss Barton as they discuss the author of the poison pen letters and Miss Barton says maybe they were sent by Providence to punish the villagers.

‘No, no, Mr Burton, you misunderstand me. I’m not talking of the misguided creature who wrote them – someone quite abandoned that must be. I mean that they have been permitted – by Providence! To awaken us to a sense of our shortcomings.’
‘Surely,’ I said, ‘the Almighty could choose a less unsavoury weapon.’
Miss Emily murmured that God moved in a mysterious way.
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will. I might concede you the Devil. God doesn’t really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We’re so very busy punishing ourselves.’
(Chapter 3)

Class in England

‘I shouldn’t have thought one of these bucolic women down here would have had the brains,’ I said.
Graves coughed. ‘I haven’t made myself plain, I’m afraid. Those letters were written by an educated woman.’
‘What, by a lady?’
The word slipped out involuntarily. I hadn’t used the term ‘lady’ for years. But now it came automatically to my lips, re-echoed from days long ago, and my grandmother’s faint unconsciously arrogant voice saying, ‘Of course, she isn’t a lady, dear.’
Nash understood at once. The word lady still meant something to him.
‘Not necessarily a lady,’ he said. ‘But certainly not a village woman. They’re mostly pretty illiterate down here, can’t spell, and certainly can’t express themselves with fluency.’
(Chapter 3)

The slow impoverishment of the rentier class

Late Victorian and Edwardian fiction is full of posh ladies who live off unearned income deriving from trust funds or investments in government ‘consols’. See the novels of E.M. Forster or my little philippic against the rentier class in my review of Mrs Craddock by Somerset Maugham (1902).

The point is that the Great Depression dealt this whole lifestyle a blow and began the process whereby all those lucrative stocks and shares and annual incomes began to decline and the carefree, arty lifestyle along with it – plus the kicker of higher taxes. Here’s old Miss Emily’s loyal servant, Florence, complaining about it, starting with Joanna Burton saying Miss Barton put her house on the market.

‘Well, Miss Barton wanted to let the house. She put it down at the house agents.’
‘Forced to it,’ said Florence. ‘And she living so frugal and careful. But even then, the government can’t leave her alone! Has to have its pound of flesh just the same.’ [i.e. increased taxes]
I shook my head sadly.
‘Plenty of money there was in the old lady’s time,’ said Florence. ‘And then they all died off one after another, poor dears. Miss Emily nursing of them one after the other. Wore herself out she did, and always so patient and uncomplaining. But it told on her, and then to have worry about money on top of it all! Shares not bringing in what they used to, so she says, and why not, I should like to know? They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Doing down a lady like her who’s got no head for figures and can’t be up to their tricks.’
‘Practically everyone has been hit that way,’ I said, but Florence remained unsoftened.
‘It’s all right for some as can look after themselves, but not for her. She needs looking after, and as long as she’s with me I’m going to see no one imposes on her or upsets her in any way. I’d do anything for Miss Emily.’

This, in a little village mode, is the same process of impoverishment of the old leisured class which Evelyn Waugh laments in Brideshead Revisited.

Mr Symmington, too, was a very clever lawyer, and had helped Miss Barton to get some money back from the Income Tax which she would never have known about.

Incidentally, neither Jerry nor his sister appear to have jobs. They just live a charmed and pleasant life, attended by servants catering to all their needs, without lifting a finger – an amount of pure leisure time we 21st century wage slaves can only dream of.

NB Christie’s lament for the loss of the old leisured life, and her resentment at the postwar Labour government and its introduction of ruinously high taxes, are all given full expression in her 1948 novel, ‘Taken at the Flood’.

Rise of the unconscious

I’ve mentioned many times how I’ve noticed a slow but steady increase in references to Freudian notions of the unconscious and the unconscious mind in Christie’s novels as the 1920s and ’30s progressed, matching the spread of Freudian ideas through the wider culture. More of the same, here:

Somewhere behind my conscious mind, a queer uneasiness was growing. It was connected in some way with the phrase that Joanna had used, ‘a week exactly’. I ought, I dare say, to have put two and two together earlier. Perhaps, unconsciously, my mind was already suspicious. Anyway, the leaven was working now. The uneasiness was growing – coming to a head.

I think that even then, there were pieces of the puzzle floating about in my mind. I believe that if I had given my mind to it, I would have solved the whole thing then and there. Otherwise why did those fragments tag along so persistently?

How much do we know at any time? Much more, or so I believe, than we know we know! But we cannot break through to that subterranean knowledge. It’s there, but we cannot reach it… I lay on my bed, tossing uneasily, and only vague bits of the puzzle came to torture me. There was a pattern, if only I could get hold of it….

Later, Jerry shares some more bucket psychiatry, of the kind you read in magazines in GP waiting rooms.

‘She’s rather ‘queer’ in some ways – a grim spinster – the sort of person who might have religious mania.’
‘This isn’t religious mania – or so you told me Graves said.’
‘Well, sex mania. They’re very closely tied up together, I understand. She’s repressed and respectable, and has been shut up here with a lot of elderly women for years.’

The central idea, which became so popular, that it’s bad to ‘repress’ strong urges because if you try, they come out in other, generally bad, ways.

Later, as it happens, Christie uses the name Freud for, I think, the first time in her oeuvre:

I closed my eyes. I considered the four people, these strangely unlikely people, in turn: Gentle, frail little Emily Barton? What points were there actually against her? A starved life? Dominated and repressed from early childhood? Too many sacrifices asked of her? Her curious horror of discussing anything ‘not quite nice’? Was that actually a sign of inner preoccupation with just these themes? Was I getting too horribly Freudian? (Chapter 6)

Gay

Homosexuality was, of course, illegal, so authors had to find coded ways to refer to gay or lesbian characters. Quite a few mannish women crop up in Christie’s novels who she may have been implying were lesbians. Fewer gay men. Is the following passage about homosexuality? Joanna and Jerry are discussing the gender of the poison pen writer.

‘They are sure it is a woman, aren’t they?’
‘You don’t think it’s a man?’ I exclaimed incredulously.
‘Not – not an ordinary man – but a certain kind of man. I’m thinking, really, of Mr Pye.’
‘So Pye is your selection?’
‘Don’t you feel yourself that he’s a possibility? He’s the sort of person who might be lonely – and unhappy – and spiteful. Everyone, you see, rather laughs at him. Can’t you see him secretly hating all the normal happy people, and taking a queer, perverse, artistic pleasure in what he was doing?’
‘Graves said a middle-aged spinster.’
‘Mr Pye,’ said Joanna, ‘is a middle-aged spinster.’
‘A misfit,’ I said slowly.
‘Very much so. He’s rich, but money doesn’t help. And I do feel he might be unbalanced. He is, really, rather a frightening little man.’
(Chapter 5)

And police inspector Nash’s view:

‘I don’t think men wrote the letters – in fact, I’m sure of it – always excepting our Mr Pye, that is to say, who’s got an abnormally female streak in his character…’

Bookish

In novels, I have noticed, anonymous letters of a foul and disgusting character are never shown, if possible, to women. It is implied that women must at all cost be shielded from the shock it might give their delicate nervous systems. I am sorry to say it never occurred to me not to show the letter to Joanna. I handed it to her at once.

‘She despised them, you know, for not getting married, and yet so arranged their lives that it was practically impossible for them to meet anybody. I believe Emily, or perhaps it was Agnes, did have some kind of affair with a curate. But his family wasn’t good enough and Mamma soon put a stop to that!’
‘It sounds like a novel,’ said Joanna.

Presently Nash said that he was going to interview Rose once more. I asked him, rather diffidently, if I might come too. Rather to my surprise he assented cordially.
‘I’m very glad of your co-operation, Mr Burton, if I may say so.’
‘That sounds suspicious,’ I said. ‘In books when a detective welcomes someone’s assistance, that someone is usually the murderer.’
(Chapter 5)

Slang

‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Some people have lots of looks and absolutely no S.A. That girl hasn’t. It seems such a pity.’

As in previous novels, SA stands for Sex Appeal, a phrase first used in the early 1900s but which became much more common with the spread of moving pictures in the 1920s, as well as the tremendous growth in advertising which, from that day to this, routinely relies on associating a product with youth and vitality and sexiness.

Credit

‘The Moving Finger’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in June 1943.

Related reviews

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1940s reviews

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by Simon on September 15, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Detective stories, Novel

Tagged 1943, Agatha Christie, Agnes Woddell, Aimée Griffith, Beatrice, Bert Rundle, Brian Symmington, Brideshead Revisited, Caleb Dane Calthrop, Captain Hunter, Colin Symmington, Collins Crime Club, crime novel, detective novel, Dr Griffiths, Dr Owen Griffith, E.F. Benson, E.M. Forster, Elsie Holland, Evelyn Waugh, Feminism, Florence Elford, Fred Rendell, Freud, gay, Hercule Poirot, homosexuality, Inspector Graves, Inspector Nash, Jane Marple, Jennifer Clark, Jerry Burton, Joanna Burton, lesbian, Little Furze, Lymstock, Mapp and Lucia, Marcus Kent, Mary Grey, Maud Dane Calthrop, Megan Hunter, Megan Symmington, Mirotin, Miss Barton, Miss Emily Barton, Miss Ginch, Miss Marple, Mr Pye, Mr Symmington, Mrs Cleat, Mrs Craddock, Mrs Dane Calthrop, Mrs Maud Dane Calthrop, Mrs Mona Symmington, Mrs Mudge, Mrs Prescott, murder, Murder is Easy, Murder Mystery, novel, Old Adams, Partridge, Poison Pen, poison pen letters, Prescott, Prior's End, Queen Lucia, religious mania, Reverend Caleb Dane Calthrop, Richard Symmington, Riseholme, Rose, SA, Sergeant Parkins, sex appeal, sex mania, Somerset Maugham, suicide, Superintendent Nash, The English class system, The Moving Finger, the unconscious, Theology, Three Guineas, village Parliament, Virginia Woolf

Posted by Simon on September 15, 2025

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Five Little Pigs by Agatha Christie (1943)

‘Correct me if I am wrong, Mr Poirot, but I think you are interested in—character, shall we say?’
Poirot replied: ‘That, to me, is the principal interest of all my cases.’

Hercule Poirot had the gift of listening…

‘Murder is a drama. The desire for drama is very strong in the human race.’

‘You are at least right in this – not to take what has been written down as necessarily a true narrative. What has been written may have been written deliberately to mislead.’

‘I want to show you, mademoiselle, that even in a small unimportant matter, I am something of a magician. There are things I know without having to be told.’

Three points about ‘Five Little Pigs’:

It’s another nursery rhyme story
It’s a cold case
It’s a closed circle mystery

1. Nursery rhyme

Quite obviously this is another of the detective stories Christie concocted from, or constructed in order to parallel, a nursery rhyme (compare ‘Pocket full of Rye’, ‘Crooked House’, ‘Five Little Pigs’, ‘Hickory Dickory Dock’, ‘One, Two, Buckle my Shoe’, ‘Three Blind Mice’). It has five main suspects who correlate exactly to the five pigs in the rhyme:

This little piggy went to market.
This little piggy stayed at home.
This little piggy had roast beef.
And this little piggy had none.
And this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home.

2. Cold case

Poirot is called in to solve a murder which took place sixteen years earlier. Back then beautiful Caroline Crase was convicted of poisoning her husband, the high-living artist Amyas Crale and sentenced to life imprisonment. In the end she served just a year before dying in prison.

The motive for the crime was that Amyas was openly having an affair with a beautiful 20-year old woman, Elsa Greer, and just the day before, Elsa had openly taunted Caroline, claiming Amyas was going to divorce her and how soon the family home would be hers (Elsa’s). Various witnesses overheard Caroline saying that would never happen, that she would kill her husband first; and then, later, she was heard having a stand-up row with Amyas, in which she said she would kill him rather than let him run off with another woman.

The means was a poison called coniine, extracted from the plant spotted hemlock. This coniine was the product of a neighbour of the Crales’s, a man named Meredith Blake who had spent years experimenting with herbs, plant extracts and home-brewed medicines. The day before the death, this Meredith, along with his brother Philip, had come over to the Crales’ house for tea, and had delivered quite a monologue about his hobby, and about this poison in particular.

Next day Meredith discovered that his bottle containing coniine (a volatile poisonous compound found in hemlock and other plants) was suddenly half empty. After the death, a bottle with traces of coniine in was found in Caroline’s room. Her story was that, after hearing about its deadly properties, she had stolen some from Meredith’s laboratory, with a view to killing herself if the divorce went ahead. But what clinched her conviction was that this poison was discovered in a bottle of beer she personally brought and served to her husband as he painted a portrait of Elsa in the garden, and which the doctors quickly established as the painter’s cause of death.

Sixteen years later, her daughter, Carla Lemarchant, who was 5 at the time, and was taken away and looked after by relatives in Canada, comes of age (21) whereupon the family solicitor gives her a letter written by her mother claiming that she (Caroline) was innocent, and didn’t murder her father.

Whereupon Carla tracks down Hercule Poirot, meets and hires him to find the identity of the real killer and so clear her mother’s name. As Poirot explains for the umpteenth time, this kind of case suits him because all the forensic clues have long since disappeared and so it is a question almost entirely of psychology, of meeting and questioning the suspects, finding out about their lives and motives, and slowly figuring out who had the character and personality to be the murderer.

Poirot said placidly:
‘One does not, you know, employ merely the muscles. I do not need to bend and measure the footprints and pick up the cigarette ends and examine the bent blades of grass. It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think. It is this’ – he tapped his egg-shaped head – ‘this that
functions!’
(Chapter 1)

And, less obviously, he always needs to know about the personality of the murderee.

‘Have you ever reflected, Mr Blake, that the reason for murder is nearly always to be found by a study of the person murdered?’
‘I hadn’t exactly – yes, I suppose I see what you mean.’
Poirot said:
‘Until you know exactly what sort of a person the victim was, you cannot begin to see the circumstances of a crime clearly.’
He added:
‘That is what I am seeking for – and what you and your brother have helped to give me – a reconstruction of the man Amyas Crale.’

More about psychology, below.

3. Closed circle

According to Google AI:

A ‘closed circle mystery’ is a subgenre of detective fiction where a crime, usually a murder, occurs within a limited group of suspects who are isolated from the outside world. The core concept is that the perpetrator must be one of the individuals present, and the detective’s task is to identify the killer from this select group.

Thus Poirot quickly finds out that on the day of Amyas Crale’s death, there were five people at the couple’s home (Alderbury) who he proceeds, whimsically, to nickname the five little pigs.

The five little pigs

Philip Blake – the pig who went to market – the younger Blake brother, stockbroker, lives at St. George’s Hill, ‘a prosperous, shrewd, jovial looking man – slightly running to fat’ – ‘a well-fed pig who had gone to market – and fetched the full market price’
Meredith Blake – the pig who stayed at home – the older Blake brother who inherited the estate , a basic huntin’, shootin’ fishin’ squire but who has amused himself with amateur dabbling in herbalism and chemistry – he ‘resembled superficially every other English country gentleman of straitened means and outdoor tastes. A shabby old coat of Harris tweed, a weather-beaten, pleasant, middle-aged face with somewhat faded blue eyes, a weak mouth, half hidden by a rather straggly moustache’
Elsa Greer – the pig who ate roast beef, Amyas’s painting model and the woman he was planning to leave his wife for – ‘a superb, slim, straight creature, arrogant, her head turned, her eyes insolent with triumph’ – ‘They’ve fed her meat all right,’ he [Depleach] said. ‘She’s been a go-getter. She’s had three husbands since then. In and out of the divorce court as easy as you please. And every time she makes a change, it’s for the better. Lady Dittisham – that’s who she is now. Open any Tatler and you’re sure to find her.’
Miss Cecilia Williams – the piggy who had none – Angela’s governess, a small, elderly lady in a neat shabby dress, living in very straitened circumstances in a one-room flat, but buoyed up by her Victorian sense of duty and feminist loathing of men
Angela Warren – the piggy who went wee wee wee – Caroline’s younger half-sister who, as a child, she threw a paperweight at and blinded in one eye (!) – has turned out a very distinguished woman: ‘traveller to weird places. Lectures at the Royal Geographical Society’

Schematic

Christie’s early novels are chaotic harum-scarum adventures. In the later 1920s and 1930s they become more structured. Murder on the Orient Express is a classic example of her taste for clarity and logical structure, with a chapter each devoted to the testimony of all the witnesses. ‘Five Little Pigs’ as another of the same type, its contents laid out with the clarity and logic of an official report, feeling almost like an engineer or architect’s schematic design for a novel.

Thus in book one, Poirot goes to interview the key figures form the trial 16 years earlier, the counsel for the defence, for the prosecution, a young solicitor involved in the trial, and the Crase family solicitor. Then he goes to see each of the five key suspects, in the same order as the nursery rhyme. He not only interviews them (with the thin excuse that he is involved in a book which is being written about the murder) but asks each of them to write their own account of what happened and why. And it is the five written statements by the five little pigs which make up part two of the book.

And then in part three, Poirot uses everything he’s learned in order to, as usual, create a detailed reconstruction of the crime which, at various points seems to incriminate every one of the piggies, before, of course, revealing the actual murderer with a flourish!

Book One

Counsel for the Defence
Counsel for the Prosecution
The Young Solicitor
The Old Solicitor
The Police Superintendent
This Little Pig Went to Market [Philip Blake]
This Little Pig Stayed at Home [Meredith Blake]
This Little Pig Had Roast Beef [Elsa Greer]
This Little Pig Had None [Cecilia Williams]
This Little Pig Cried ‘Wee Wee Wee’ [Angela Warren]

Book Two

Narrative of Philip Blake
Narrative of Meredith Blake
Narrative of Lady Dittisham
Narrative of Cecilia Williams
Narrative of Angela Warren

Book Three

Conclusions
Poirot Asks Five Questions
Reconstruction
Truth
Aftermath

Christie makes it neat by attributing part of the schematic, diagrammatic layout of the text to Poirot’s own, well-known symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Thus towards the end, in part 3 chapter 2, we find Poirot telling himself he doesn’t really need to interview Miss Williams, but…

Really, when he came to think of it, he did not want to ask Angela Warren any questions at all. The only question he did want to ask her could wait… No, it was really only his insatiable passion for symmetry that was bringing him here. Five people – there should be five questions! It was neater so. It rounded off the thing better.

Cast

As well as the five little pigs, additional characters are:

Hercule Poirot
Carla Lemarchant – daughter of Caroline and Amyas Crale – named Caroline after her mother, her first and last names were changed when she was sent to Montral, Canada, to live with her aunt and uncle when her mother was sent to prison
John Rattery – Carla’s fiancé, a ‘ tall, square-jawed young man with the steady grey eyes’
Sir Montague Depleach – council for the defence i.e. defended Caroline Crase 16 years ago – ‘force, magnetism, an overbearing and slightly bullying personality. He got his effects by a rapid and dramatic change of manner. Handsome, urbane, charming one minute—then an almost magical transformation, lips back, snarling smile—out for your blood’
Quentin Fogg, K.C. – ‘thin, pale, singularly lacking in what is called personality. His questions were quiet and unemotional —but steadily persistent. If Depleach was like a rapier, Fogg was like an auger. He bored steadily. He had never reached spectacular fame, but he was known as a first-class man on law. He usually won his cases’
George Mayhew – junior solicitor in the firm representing Caroline
Edmunds – managing clerk of Mayhew’s firm of solicitors
Mr Caleb Jonathan – senior solicitor in the Crale family firm, retired to Essex
Ex-Superintendent Hale – leading officer on the Crale murder investigation

Locations

The three main properties are on the south Devon coast.

Handcross Manor – home of the Blake family, inherited home of Meredith Blake – just a short row across a creek from…
Alderbury – home of Amyas and Caroline Crale
Ferriby Grange – home of Lady Tressillian, where Angela is sent after Amyas’s death

Montreal, Canada – home of Uncle Simon and Aunt Louise Lemarchant, where 5-year-old Carla was sent to live after her mother went to prison

The psychology book

‘What is the meaning of all this nonsense?’ demanded Miss Williams.
‘It is to show you that it is the eyes of the mind with which one really sees…’

When he sets off to interview the five little pigs, Poirot needs a cover story. Saying he’s actively investigating a 16-year-old crime would raise lots of questions. So he comes up with the more plausible notion that he has been commissioned to write a book about classic crimes. The sales angle is that he’ll give the crimes a modern, psychological interpretation.

‘It is proposed to rewrite the stories of certain bygone crimes – from the psychological angle. Psychology in crime, it is my speciality.’

As Poirot explains to Philip Blake, in the olden days the interest in crimes often focused on ‘romance’, about love triangles and so on. Nowadays, psychology is in the ascendant, and the reading public want to hear all about complexes and traumas etc. (This, by the way, is flatly disproved by Christie’s own works, which include very occasional references to actual psychology, to Freud, complexes and so on – but are still heavily reliant on love triangles, affairs, adultery, jealousy and so on.)

Obviously this handily chimes with Poirot’s own genuine interest in psychology and in the psychology of the five main suspects, so his cover story fits neatly with his actual interests.

‘My success, let me tell you, has been founded on the psychology – the eternal why? of human behaviour. That, Mr Blake, is what interests the world in crime today.’

Poirot uses his outsiderness

In previous novels we’ve seen Poirot consciously deploy his foreignness, his outsiderness, when it suits him, when it gives him a tactical advantage. In this novel he several times lays it on with a trowel, deliberately playing up his foreignness in order to play to his interviewees’ prejudices and lull them. For example when trying to inveigle himself with hale-fellow-well-met Philip Blake.

‘Of course you are. We all know that. The famous Hercule Poirot!’ But his tone held a subtly mocking note. Intrinsically, Philip Blake was too much of an Englishman to take the pretensions of a foreigner seriously.

So:

Hercule Poirot shrugged his shoulders. He was at his most foreign today. He was out to be despised but patronized.

Whereas with the other Blake brother, Meredith, the piggy who stayed at home and is a more traditional country squire:

Hercule Poirot prided himself on knowing how to handle an ‘old school tie’. It was no moment for trying to seem English. No, one must be a foreigner – frankly a foreigner – and be magnanimously forgiven for the fact. ‘Of course, these foreigners don’t quite know the ropes. Will shake hands at breakfast. Still, a decent fellow really…’

Poirot imagines Meredith Blake’s view of him:

Really a most impossible person – the wrong clothes – button boots! – an incredible moustache! Not his – Meredith Blake’s – kind of fellow at all. Didn’t look as though he’d ever hunted or shot – or even played a decent game. A foreigner.

But by playing up to this stereotype, Poirot lulls his interviewees into thinking he is stupid, they are clever, and so gets more information out of them.

Everyday sexism

The case, at least to start with, appears to be entirely about the eternal triangle, a married couple broken up by a young woman seducing the husband, and the murderous jealousy of the wronged wife. Which just triggers, in my mind, the tired conclusion: Humans, and their complete inability to manage their relationships! Why on earth are they called ‘adults’? How on earth do they think they can run a planet when they can’t even run their own relationships?

Anyway, the focus on sexual relationships means the novel lends itself to more than the usual quota of casual generalisations about the sexes, with the majority of them – rather inevitably – being unflattering comments about ‘women’.

Poirot said: ‘With women, love always comes first.’
‘Don’t I know it?’ said Superintendent Hale with feeling.
‘Men,’ continued Poirot, ‘and especially artists—are different.’

FOGG: ‘Very good looking, hard-boiled, modern. To the women in the court she [Elsa] stood for a type – type of the home-breaker. Homes weren’t safe when girls like that were wandering abroad. Girls damn full of sex and contemptuous of the rights of wives and mothers.’

Superintendent Hale said: ‘Oh, you know what women are! Have to get at each other’s throats.’

‘The girl [Elsa] was a good looker, all right,’ said Hale. ‘Lots of make-up and next to no clothes on. It isn’t decent the way these girls go about. And that was sixteen years ago, mind you. Nowadays one wouldn’t think anything of it. But then – well, it shocked me. Trousers and one of those canvas shirts, open at the neck – and not another thing, I should say!’

Philip Blake said: ‘I don’t know that there was much subtlety about it. It was a pretty obvious business. Crude female jealousy, that was all there was to it.’

‘Women will always see a private detective! Men will tell him to go to the devil.’ (Poirot)

‘There was Mrs Crale, there was Miss Williams, there was a housemaid. It is a woman’s job to pack—not a man’s.’ (Poirot)

And much more in the same vein, scores of casual generalisations about the character of all women, or all men, which have, maybe, become unacceptable in our time…

Countered by feminism

‘She was a great feminist and disliked men.’
(Angela Warren on Miss Williams)

The sweeping generalisations about ‘women’ made by pretty much all the men in the story are given a strong counter in the character of the impoverished old governess, Miss Williams, who is described more than once as a ‘feminist’.

For a brief moment you think Christie is fighting back against these sexist stereotypes. But then you realise that Miss Williams is herself a stereotype, a caricature of the dried-up old spinster, impoverished and bitterly anti-male. Poirot is interviewing her:

‘He was devoted to her as she was to him?’
‘They were a devoted couple. But he, of course, was a man.’
Miss Williams contrived to put into that last word a wholly Victorian significance.
‘Men—’ said Miss Williams, and stopped.
As a rich property owner says ‘Bolsheviks’ – as an earnest Communist says ‘Capitalists!’ – as a good housewife says ‘Blackbeetles’ – so did Miss Williams say ‘Men!’
From her spinster’s, governess’s life, there rose up a blast of fierce feminism. Nobody hearing her speak could doubt that to Miss Williams Men were the Enemy!

And Christie shows that feminists are just as capable of stereotyping and judging men as the chauvinist men are of stereotyping women.

‘Oh, I dare say you are a sentimentalist like most men—’
Poirot interrupted indignantly:
‘I am not a sentimentalist.’

It is of course a woman writing all this. And it’s worth making the point that all the ‘feminists’ in Christie’s novels are liable to be mocked. According to her biographer, Laura Thompson, Christie had no time for feminism. She associated it very much with anti-men i.e. misandrist attitudes (misandrist: ‘a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against men’) and this is precisely the attitude she attributes to Miss Williams. Christie thought it was as absurd for feminists to be anti-men as it was for what she called woman haters (what we nowadays call misogynists) to be anti-women. For her, the two extremes were equally as ridiculous.

Christie and stereotypes

But more broadly, the flagrancy of Miss Williams’ character reminds you all over again that Christie’s novels are made out of stereotypes. Certain ones – the stereotyping of women and, occasionally, of ethnic minorities, in Christie’s works – are what leap out to us because, a hundred years later, they are (still) the hot button topics of our day, drilled as we are at work and in all public spaces with the mantras of diversity and inclusion.

But Christie deploys stereotypical ‘wisdom’ or tropes about pretty much every human type and category. This reliance on stereotypical characters expressing stereotypical views is what makes her novels genre fiction and nowhere near ‘literature’.

Thus characters all make sweeping generalisations not only about men, women and numerous sub-types of men and women, but about servants, butlers, the police, lawyers, the entire criminal justice system, about children and teenagers, and many more…

Artists are usually careless about money matters…

Even Poirot sums up all the suspects as ‘types’ – for a start, describing them as ‘little pigs’ isn’t that flattering, is it? He thinks of Meredith as a typical country squire, of Philip Blake as a typical affluent stockbroker, of Miss Williams as a typical spinster, and so on.

And, of course, Poirot is very fond of making sweeping generalisations about criminals, about ‘the criminal mind’, murderers, and so on.

From one perspective Christie’s texts amount to a kind of battle or conflict between rival generalisations: Superintendent Hale’s generalisations about women or murder being rebutted by Poirot’s countervailing generalisations, all the characters sharing their prejudices about artists and ‘the artistic temperament’. In a sense every single conversation can be seen as a conflict of generalisations.

He looked a bit ashamed of himself. Men do when women pin them down in a corner.
(Philip Blake describing Amyas)

Then he calmed down a little and said women had no sense of proportion.
(Philip on Amyas again)

‘I have to admit that she looked incredibly beautiful that afternoon. Women do when they’ve got what they want.’
(Philip Blake)

‘It made him appear at a disadvantage, and men do not like appearing at a disadvantage. It upsets their vanity.’
(Miss Williams)

A study of Christie’s novels makes you realise just how much human conversation is made up of dodgy generalisations, very often based on a person’s own anecdotal evidence, or ‘someone told me x or y’ – or just picked up from the culture at large.

And realise just how much a person’s character can, in a sense, be defined by the generalisations or mental axioms they operate with. Most people’s generalisations aren’t meant to be taken in a statistically significant, scientific or logical way. They are just ways of expressing character, or mood. In a sense a person’s character is the totality of the generalisations they harbour. When Elsa says the following to Amyas:

‘I think you’re right about Spain. That’s the first place we’ll go to. And you must take me to see a bullfight. It must be wonderful. Only I’d like the bull to kill the man—not the other way about. I understand how Roman women felt when they saw a man die. Men aren’t much, but animals are splendid.’

That final axiom has no meaning or value whatsoever as objective information about the world. It is entirely an expression of her character and attitude, which are young and selfish, thoughtlessly cynical, conventionally rebellious. Meredith Blake, who gives us this quote, draws the correct conclusion:

I suppose she was rather like an animal herself – young and primitive and with nothing yet of man’s sad experience and doubtful wisdom.

But this is because he is a puppet in his creator’s hands. The supposed quote from Elsa, along with its sweeping generalisation, is entirely meant to characterise her, and Meredith’s comment is just an elaboration of the same point: a repetition of it in a different mode.

But since Elsa never existed, in fact none of these people ever existed, these kinds of generalisations should be seen as simply one of the techniques by which Christie creates the distinctions between the characters she’s inventing. Empty of intrinsic value or meaning, they are just rhetorical strategies associated with the textual entities referred to as characters.

Summary

In all my summaries of Christie’s novels I’ve broken off before the final act and never revealed whodunnit. I won’t here, either – except to say that the big reveal and explanation of whodunnit in lots of them, by far the majority, is often ridiculously contrived and complicated and often unbelievable. ‘Five Little Pigs’ has a claim to be one of the best of her novels because the revelation, when it comes, is not only not too preposterously contrived, but psychologically believable and convincingly bleak.

Credit

‘Five Little Pigs’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Collins Crime Club in January 1943.

Related reviews

Agatha Christie reviews
1940s reviews

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by Simon on September 12, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Detective stories, Novel

Tagged 1943, Alderbury, Amyas Crale, Angela Warren, Bolsheviks, Caleb Jonathan, Canada, Capitalists, caricature, Carla Lemarchant, Caroline Crase, Closed circle, closed circle mystery, cold case, Collins Crime Club, communist, crime novel, detective fiction, detective story, Devon, Edmunds, Elsa Greer, Feminism, feminist, Ferriby Grange, Five Little Pigs, foreignness, gender, generalisations, George Mayhew, Handcross Manor, Hercule Poirot, John Rattery, Lady Dittisham, Lady Tressillian, Laura Thompson, Louise Lemarchant, Meredith Blake, misogynist, Miss Cecilia Williams, Miss Williams, Montreal, murder, Murder Mystery, Murder on the Orient Express, novel, nursery rhyme, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, outsiderness, Philip Blake, Poirot, Poirot. Hercule Poirot, poison, Psychology, Quentin Fogg, Royal Geographical Society, sexism, Simon Lemarchant, Sir Montague Depleach, St George’s Hill, stereotype, Superintendent Hale, symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder, Tatler, Woman hater

Posted by Simon on September 12, 2025

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Alamein to Zem Zem by Keith Douglas (1946)

Alamein to Zem Zem is a shortish memoir of the Second World War, covering three months at the end of 1942 and start of 1943 which Keith Douglas spent as a tank captain in a tank regiment engaged in North Africa as part of the Eighth Army fighting against the Germans and some Italians.

Its clarity, honesty and sometimes brutal descriptions have made Alamein to Zem Zem a classic text from the Second World War, but Douglas is just as well known as a war poet as a writer of prose. Many critics consider him the finest English poet of the Second World War. Although he wrote over 100 poems only a handful really rise to the top rank, but those 3 or 4 are breath-taking.

Douglas’s motivation

But to focus on this memoir, let Keith explain (with typical forthrightness) his motivation:

I had to wait until 1942 to go into action. I enlisted in September 1939, and during two years or so of hanging about I never lost the certainty that the experience of battle was something I must have. Whatever changes in the nature of warfare, the battlefield is the simple, central stage of the war: it is there that the interesting things happen. We talk in the evening, after fighting, about the great and rich men who cause and conduct wars. They have so many reasons of their own that they can afford to lend us some of them. There is nothing odd about their attitude. They are out for something they want, or their Governments want, and they are using us to get it for them. Anyone can understand that: there is nothing unusual or humanly exciting at that end of the war. I mean there may be things to excite financiers and parliamentarians — but not to excite a poet or a painter or a doctor.

But it is exciting and amazing to see thousands of men, very few of whom have much idea why they are fighting, all enduring hardships, living in an unnatural, dangerous, but not wholly terrible world, having to kill and to be killed, and yet at intervals moved by a feeling of comradeship with the men who kill them and whom they kill, because they are enduring and experiencing the same things. It is tremendously illogical — to read about it cannot convey the impression of having walked through the looking-glass which touches a man entering a battle.

‘Exciting and amazing’. If anyone ever asks why there are wars and why men fight, there’s one of your answers: because it’s an exciting and amazing experience. A little later he describes how happy he and members of his squadron when they capture an Italian hospital packed with goodies.

Tom was in high spirits; he and Ken Tinker had found an Italian hospital, and their tanks were loaded inside and out with crates of cherries, Macedonian cigarettes, cigars and wine; some straw-jacketed Italian Chianti issue, some champagne, and a bottle or two of brandy, even some Liebfraumilch. We shared out the plunder with the immemorial glee of conquerors, and beneath the old star-eaten blanket of the sky lay down to dream of victory…

And there you have another reason: ‘the immemorial glee of conquerors’. As Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe puts it in Tamburlaine:

Is it not passing brave to be a king,
And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

And loot. Whenever they take enemy territory, come across enemy tanks or other vehicles or bases or hospitals the first thing on the minds of Douglas and his colleagues is ransacking them for a) classy food and drink to augment boring army rations b) more enduring souvenirs, the favourite of which is guns because they are stylish and, by design, portable. Thus Douglas at various points finds a German Luger and an Italian Beretta, the latter of which he sells on in a town for money to buy luxury foods.

excitement and amazement
the glee of conquerors
loot

That’s before you get to what you might call the ‘higher’ motivations. Lots of war memoirs all too vividly describe the author was lost in life, directionless, unsure what to do next – and a just war 4) gave them an immense purpose which stifled all their anxieties and doubts. Then, of course, the socially acceptable indeed praiseworthy motives, in their various forms, of 5) honour and patriotism. For religious believers 6) God is on your side and your religious training teaches you that this is a Holy War. For the religious or non-religious there’s patriotism and a sense of duty that you must 7) defend your country and those you love against an aggressor. And more broadly, 8) defending the wider world against demonstrable evil (in this case, the Nazis). Lastly, for quite a few men, whether poor working class and illiterate or upper class and well educated, 9) the army offers a career, job security, a regular salary, training, respect, and a pension. For many the army is a career like the civil service or medicine.

So next time you read or hear someone asking why there are wars and why men fight, here’s at least nine explanations to be going on with.

Potted biography

Douglas came from a middle-class family in Tunbridge Wells, which fell on hard times, his dad’s business went bust, his mother became seriously ill, the pair divorced and Douglas spent most of his boyhood and teens at boarding schools. He was a loner, an outsider who got into trouble with the authorities for his stroppy attitude. He was nearly expelled from Christ’s Church school for ‘purloining’ a rifle.

Born in January 1920, Douglas was 19 when war was declared on 3 September 1939 and immediately reported to an army recruiting centre. However, like many he had to wait, in his case until July 1940 that he started his training. After attending Sandhurst he was commissioned in February 1941 into the 2nd Derbyshire Yeomanry and posted to the Middle East in July 1941 where he was transferred to the Nottinghamshire (Sherwood Rangers) Yeomanry.

Posted to Cairo then Palestine, Douglas found himself stuck at headquarters working as a ‘camouflage officer’ as the Second Battle of El Alamein (23 October to 11 November 1942) began. His regiment had been ordered to advance and taken casualties in the opening days of the battle while Douglas chafed back in the rear.

On 27 October, with typical insubordination (or bravado, depending on point of view), against explicit orders, Douglas commandeered a truck and drove to the Regimental HQ in the field. This is the point at which the text of Alamein to Zem Zem opens.

The battle of Alamein began on the 23rd of October, 1942. Six days afterwards I set out in direct disobedience of orders to rejoin my regiment. My batman was delighted with this manoeuvre. ‘I like you, sir,’ he said. ‘You’re shit or bust, you are.’ This praise gratified me a lot.

Douglas and batman reported to his Commanding Officer in the field, Colonel E. O. Kellett (nicknamed ‘Piccadilly Jim’ in the text), lying that he had been instructed to go to the front. Short of officers, the CO accepted his arrival and posted him to A Squadron, and gave him the wonderful opportunity of taking part as a fighting tanker in the Eighth Army’s victorious sweep through North Africa. The text of Alamein to Zem Zem is a detailed and precise description of what he saw and felt over the next three months.

Zem Zem is the name of the wadi in Tunisia where Douglas was wounded in early 1943.

Plot summary

Douglas deserts his Cairo post to join his regiment in the field
quick introduction to key personnel in the regiment
a series of small scale engagements which bring out the confusion of battle, before his section is withdrawn for rest
lengthy profiles of key figures in his part of the regiment, from the colonel downwards, giving a sense of the importance of personality and temperament to a fighting unit
second and more intense description of combat over a number of days, bringing out the confusion of war: Douglas’s tank gets lost in the maze of canyons around Zem Zem and takes a direct hit; he stumbles out of it and discovers quite a few wounded colleagues in the vicinity, carries a badly wounded man on his back as far as the nearest first aid post, promising to return and collect colleagues in a jeep, but just he is just trying to convey to the medics that there are badly wounded men further forward, he snags a tripwire setting off a mine, receives multiple fragment wounds and collapses
there follows a lengthy description of the long complex journey by ambulance, plane and train back to Cairo a thousand miles away, with detailed descriptions of the medical care and personnel who administer it, of other injured soldiers he travels with all the way back to an officers’ ward in Cairo, complete with pretty nurses and his first full English breakfast in months, and it is here that the main narrative ends
a coda, a completely separate section, which skips Douglas’s treatment and recuperation and finds him back, reunited his regiment right at the end of the North Africa campaign; now there is no fighting and he is tasked with collecting supplies and spare parts from liberated towns in Tunisia, which mainly involves getting very drunk with the French forces and French inhabitants of the region

Highlights

Douglas’s writing is so straightforward, clear, honest and vivid that summarising it seems counter-productive. Big quotes best give you a sense of the man and his approach.

Being in a tank

The view from a moving tank is like that in a camera obscura or a silent film — in that since the engine drowns all other noises except explosions, the whole world moves silently. Men shout, vehicles move, aeroplanes fly over, and all soundlessly: the noise of the tank being continuous, perhaps for hours on end, the effect is of silence. It is the same in an aircraft, but unless you are flying low, distance does away with the effect of a soundless pageant. I think it may have been the fact that for so much of the time I saw it without hearing it, which led me to feel that country into which we were now moving was an inimitably strange land, quite unrelated to real life, like the scenes in ‘The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari’. Silence is a strange thing to us who live: we desire it, we fear it, we worship it, we hate it. There is a divinity about cats, as long as they are silent: the silence of swans gives them an air of legend. The most impressive thing about the dead is their triumphant silence, proof against anything in the world.

Observations

Douglas not only wrote poems but made sketches of life in a tank regiment, a lot of which are so-so, but some of which are vivid and inspired. This eye for detail informs his prose.

One gun which appeared to be firing more or less directly overhead sent a shell which whistled. Possibly at some part of the night there was some German counter-battery fire, or some heavier guns of our own joined in. At all events, there was every variety of noise in the sky, a whistling and chattering and rumbling like trains, like someone whispering into a microphone, or like the tearing of cloth.

A moment before the tank struck him I realized he was already dead; the first dead man I had ever seen. Looking back, I saw he was a Negro. ‘Libyan troops,’ said Evan. He was pointing. There were several of them scattered about, their clothes soaked with dew; some lacking limbs, although no flesh of these was visible, the clothes seeming to have wrapped themselves round the places where arms, legs, or even heads should have been, as though with an instinct for decency. I have noticed this before in photographs of people killed by explosive.

Presently an infantry patrol, moving like guilty characters in a melodrama, came slinking and crouching up to my tank.

Only human

On the occasions when Douglas comes across ‘the enemy’ he is struck by how pathetic and human they are and forgoes several opportunities to shoot them. The reverse:

In the evening I was sent down the road to Brigade in a Marmon Harrington Armoured Car which had been found at Galal. On the way down the dark road we came upon six Germans plodding along by themselves. I sat them on the outside of the car and very reluctantly got out and sat outside with them in the rain. They were dejected and said they had had nothing to eat for two days. I gave them some tins of bully which I had put in my pocket from my tank’s ration box, and some sodden pieces of biscuit. We plunged off the road according to our directions, to find Brigade, but were pixy-led by a number of distracting lights and would have spent the night in a weapon pit into which we fell and got stuck, but for the opportune appearance of a stray tank, which obligingly pulled us out. The jerk of being hauled clear threw all the prisoners on the ground, and one of them lost his kitbag, to which he had been clinging as something saved from the wreck. He asked permission to look for it, in a hopeless tone of voice; the tank crew were indignant when I helped him find it and roared off into the murk again. It was difficult to get rid of the prisoners, but I was determined to find them some food and blankets, because the few people in the regiment who had been taken prisoner and recaptured during the first days at Alamein had been well treated by the Germans. Eventually I dumped them on a guard in the Brigade area whose sergeant had been a prisoner of the Germans for two months and was also well disposed to them.

Only people like us. The whole thing ridiculous.

The new type of pistol had jammed; the moving parts had somehow seized up, and we could not make out how to strip it, so I called to four German soldiers who were walking past. They all lifted their heads in apprehension to endure something more. A corporal walked across to them holding the revolver; he could not make them understand what he wanted. When I crossed over and spoke to them in halting German they smiled in huge relief. Only to tell us how to strip the pistol; they had it in bits in a moment, but advised us to prefer the old type of Luger, which was much more reliable. I asked their spokesman, a corporal with two medal ribbons, if they had had anything to eat. He said yes, they had chocolate, and offered us some; they all had ten or more of the round packets of plain chocolate whose empty cartons we had seen so often. We exchanged some tins of bully for some of the chocolate, and stood about munching chocolate while the Germans opened the bully and passed it round. A general conversation began. The corporal pointed to the Crusader and enquired: ‘Der Panzer ist kaput?’ We explained vaguely what was wrong with it; we argued over the relative merits of some Spitfires which roared low over us, and the 110. Photographs were produced. The Corporal had been in France: in Paris — postcards from Paris; in Greece — pictures of the Parthenon. In Russia? No. And how long in Afrika? Vier Monate.

The fighting

The main thing about the ‘fighting’ is how bewilderingly confusing it is, with Douglas losing track of his regiment, of nearby tanks, blundering into a forward position, mistakenly thinking the enemy are in flight, mistakenly lining his tank up to shoot a German tank side on before realising it was a gun emplacement, and then taking his Crusader tank behind a smoking Grant tank where it promptly took a direct hit from a shell.

He finds other comrades from the regiment in various states of injury, like Robin with his mangled foot. He vows to return with help but blunders into a minefield and snags a tripwire. He’s not killed or badly wounded but receives shrapnel in both legs, calves, thigh, lower back, the hair of half his face singed off.

The last 20 pages or so are a precise, detailed description of the very long, complex journey he and other wounded took by lorry, plane, train and more lorries via umpteen transit hospitals, eventually back to a luxurious officers’ ward in Cairo. And it is here, pleasantly sedated, with his wounds being addressed, with some pretty nurses to cheer him up and savouring his first full English breakfast in months, that the ‘Alamein’ part of the narrative concludes.

The dead

A standout feature is the number of dead people he observes and the repeated oddity of their postures, appearance and, above all, their eerie silence, which really obsesses him.

About two hundred yards from the German derelicts, which were now furiously belching inky smoke, I looked down into the face of a man lying hunched up in a pit. His expression of agony seemed so acute and urgent, his stare so wild and despairing, that for a moment I thought him alive. He was like a cleverly posed waxwork, for his position suggested a paroxysm, an orgasm of pain. He seemed to move and writhe. But he was stiff. The dust which powdered his face like an actor’s lay on his wide open eyes, whose stare held my gaze like the Ancient Mariner’s. He had tried to cover his wounds with towels against the flies. His haversack lay open, from which he had taken towels and dressings. His waterbottle lay tilted with the cork out. Towels and haversack were dark with dried blood, darker still with a great concourse of flies…

The bodies of some Italian infantrymen still lay in their weapon pits, surrounded by pitiable rubbish, picture postcards of Milan, Rome, Venice, snapshots of their families, chocolate wrappings, and hundreds of cheap cardboard cigarette packets. Amongst this litter, more suggestive of holiday-makers than soldiers, there were here and there bayonets and the little tin ‘red devil’ grenades, bombastic little crackers that will blow a man’s hand off and make a noise like the crack of doom. But even these, associated with the rest of the rubbish, only looked like cutlery and cruets. The Italians lay about like trippers taken ill…

The petrol lorries had arrived beside a derelict fifteen-hundredweight truck, the driver of which lay half in, half out of it, with one leg almost entirely torn off. The battledress serge had peeled away, showing a wreckage of flesh and the ends of bones.

Understatement

The presence of so much death triggerlly English understatement:

That night we were issued with about a couple of wineglasses full of rum to each man, the effect of which was a little spoiled by one of our twenty-five-pounders, which was off calibration, and dropped shells in the middle of our area at regular intervals of seconds for about an hour. The first shells made a hole in the adjutant’s head, and blinded a corporal in B Squadron. I spent an uncomfortable night curled up on a bed of tacky blood on the turret floor.

Arguably, this ‘top hole, chaps’ attitude was created at Victorian and Edwardian public schools expressly designed to turn out unquestioningly loyal and patriotic chaps who could administer the largest empire the world has ever seen and engage in battles large and small without losing their stiff upper lips.

We came up to the line of the high ground without further excitement, though we put a six-pounder shell across the bows of one of the 11th Hussars’ armoured cars, which had moved out well ahead of us, and was under suspicion of being an enemy vehicle. We had aimed well ahead of it, and the effect was immediate. It came tearing towards us like a scalded cat and drew up alongside. Its commander, a sergeant, leaned out and said ‘Was that you firing at us?’ We admitted it, and apologised. ‘With that?’ pointing to the long snout of our six-pounder. ‘Well, yes,’ we admitted. ‘Phew!’ he said. ‘Don’t do it again, please.’ He moved out ahead of us again.

‘Would you be so frightfully kind as not to kill us, please. Thanks awfully.’ Douglas is well aware of the comedy and enjoys satirising and caricaturing many of the jolly chaps he meets around the regiment, for example in the extended portrait of the regiment’s second in command, ‘Guy’:

He was fantastically rich and handsome, and appeared, as indeed he was, a figure straight out of the nineteenth century. He was charming and entirely obsolete. His ideas were feudal in the best sense — he regarded everyone in the regiment as his tenants, sub-tenants, serfs, etc., and felt his responsibilities to them as a landlord. Everyone loved him and I believe pitied him a little. His slim, beautifully clad figure remained among our dirty greasy uniforms as a symbol of the regiment’s former glory. He seldom, if ever, wore a beret — on this particular occasion I remember he had a flannel shirt and brown stock pinned with a gold pin, a waistcoat of some sort of yellow suede lined with sheep’s wool, beautifully cut narrow trousers of fawn cavalry twill, without turn-ups, and brown suede boots. On his head was a peaked cap with a chinstrap like glass, perched at a jaunty angle. His moustache was an exact replica of those worn by heroes of the Boer war, his blue eye had a courageous twinkle, and he had the slim strong hands of a mannered horseman.

Douglas describes the dichotomy between the original members of the Yeoman regiment, nicknamed the ‘Yeo-Yeo boys’, who were wealthy landowners born and bred to ride and hunt and shoot and fish and loftily ignored the ‘riff-raff’ who had come into the regiment since it was mechanised.

At some point during yet another description of the relaxed, confident, philistine upper-class cavalry officers I realised the stereotypical form of address, ‘old boy’, was no more than the truth. They were all overgrown schoolboys.

Germans and Italians

The Germans are efficient, the Italians are a pathetic joke:

The side of the road was still littered with derelict vehicles of all kinds, interspersed with neat graves bearing crosses inscribed with the names and rank of German officers and men, and surmounted by their eagle-stamped steel helmets. More hastily dug and marked graves were those of Italians, on some of which was placed or hung the ugly green-lined Italian topee. There is something impressive in the hanging steel helmet that links those dead with knights buried under their shields and weapons. But how pathetically logical and human — one of those touches of unconscious comedy which makes it difficult to be angry with them — that the Italians should have supplemented the steel cap with a ridiculous battered cut-price topee. The steel helmet is an impressive tombstone, and is its own epitaph. But the cardboard topee seemed only to say there is some junk buried here, and we may as well leave a piece of rubbish to mark the spot.

Soldier slang

At one point he tells us every single sentence of dialogue must be understood as littered with the universal swearword used by everyone all the time in the army, by which I take him to mean the ‘f’ word.

muckin’ and blindin’
brew up = tank being hit and exploding or bursting into flames; because this takes place in a confined metal space it is metaphorically compared to brewing up tea in a kettle
canned to the wide = drunk
Monkey Orange = radio code for medical officer

The silence of the dead

Gradually the objects in the turret became visible: the crew of the tank — for, I believe, these tanks did not hold more than two — were, so to speak, distributed round the turret. At first it was difficult to work out how the limbs were arranged. They lay in a clumsy embrace, their white faces whiter, as those of dead men in the desert always were, for the light powdering of dust on them. One with a six-inch hole in his head, the whole skull smashed in behind the remains of an ear — the other covered with his own and his friend’s blood, held up by the blue steel mechanism of a machine gun, his legs twisting among the dully gleaming gear levers. About them clung that impenetrable silence I have mentioned before, by which I think the dead compel our reverence…

Douglas returned from North Africa to England in December 1943, trained for and then took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. On 9 June Douglas’s armoured unit was pinned down on high ground overlooking Tilly-sur-Seulles. Concerned by the lack of progress, Douglas dismounted his tank to undertake a personal reconnaissance during which he was killed by a German mortar. He had joined the silent dead.

Poems

But his words weren’t silenced. A collected poems was published and then this memoir, and his reputation has remained steady, among those interested in war memoirs and poetry, up to the present day. Talking of memory and reputation, these are the subjects of one of Douglas’s three great poems.

Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I’m dead.

As the processes of earth
strip off the colour of the skin:
take the brown hair and blue eye

and leave me simpler than at birth,
when hairless I came howling in
as the moon entered the cold sky.

Of my skeleton perhaps,
so stripped, a learned man will say
‘He was of such a type and intelligence,’ no more.

Thus when in a year collapse
particular memories, you may
deduce, from the long pain I bore

the opinions I held, who was my foe
and what I left, even my appearance
but incidents will be no guide.

Time’s wrong-way telescope will show
a minute man ten years hence
and by distance simplified.

Through that lens see if I seem
substance or nothing: of the world
deserving mention or charitable oblivion,

not by momentary spleen
or love into decision hurled,
leisurely arrive at an opinion.

Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I’m dead.

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by Simon on April 17, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Autobiography, Second World War, War

Posted by Simon on April 17, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/04/17/alamein-to-zem-zem-keith-douglas/

Perelandra by C. S. Lewis (1943)

As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful?

This is the second in C.S. Lewis’s theological science fiction trilogy, which consists of:

Out of the Silent Planet (1938)
Perelandra (also known as Voyage to Venus) (1943)
That Hideous Strength (1945)

A recap of Out of The Silent Planet

In the first novel the Cambridge philologist, Ransom, was kidnapped by the physicist Weston and his partner Devine, and flown in their space ship all the way to Mars. Escaping from his captors Ransom discovers that Mars is inhabited by three very different but intelligent life forms who have forged a peaceful working relationship – the Pfifltriggi, the Hrossa, and the Sorns.

Elwin (it’s only in this second book that we learn his first name) Ransom – being a philologist by trade – swiftly learns the language of Mars which is called Hressa-Hlab. he also learns fellowship from the otter-like hrossa, hears wisdom from the tall, willowy sorns, and is taken to the sanctuary of the master spirit or oyarsa who rules Mars which, he learns, is called Malacandra in the local language.

Ransom also learns:

That what humans take to be the empty space between planets is in reality teeming with spirits which the human eye can barely detect, named eldila. What humans call space should really be referred to as ‘Deep Heaven’.
That each planet in the solar system (or ‘Field of Arbol’ as it is called) is ruled by a kind of tutelary spirit and that these spirits can communicate across space.
But that some kind of primeval disaster afflicted the Earth way back in its history, so that its spirit became wicked, or ‘bent’ as the hnau (intelligent creatures) of Mars put it. Hence Earth’s name in their culture is Thulcandra, which means ‘the silent planet’. (And hence the title of the book, ‘Out of The Silent Planet’.)
Thus Earth has been ‘enemy’-occupied territory since before history began (Chapter 15).
Movement in and out of the silent planet was banned eons ago, to prevent the rest of the solar system from becoming ‘infected’ with its wickedness.

It is symptomatic of Lewis’s goal of sacramentalising the universe that he says we must learn to refer to space not as ‘space’ – it is not empty space – it is teeming with mystical life forms and replenishing energy – it should be referred to as ‘Deep Heaven’.

Looming behind and above the eldila and each planet’s oyarsa appears to be the highest power of all, which the hnau refer to as Maleldil. It isn’t made totally explicit, but I think we are meant to take this to mean ‘God’.

Towards the end of Out of the Silent Planet the baddies Weston and Devine force their way into the sanctuary of the tutelary spirit, Oyarsa, and, after disarming them, Oyarsa tells them he will send them back to Earth. Ransom is given the choice whether to stay or to go, and reluctantly agrees to return with them.

All the way home, on what turns out to be a gruelling journey, the humans are watched over by eldila who will, Oyarsa tells them, decompose/destroy their space ship within minutes of its safe arrival – to prevent their ever returning.

The space ship just about makes it back to Earth, despite running low on food, water, oxygen and flying so close to the sun that Ransom fears the three men’s sight will be permanently damaged. Ransom clambers out of the ship’s manhole cover-type hatch into good old, pouring English rain and stumbles to the nearest pub (the ship has, of course, landed in rural England) where he asks for a pint of good old English beer!

Lewis in the postscript

But of all the strange things that happened in Out of The Silent Planet, for me the strangest was the postscript in which it is revealed that the narrator all along has been named ‘Lewis’, that this ‘Lewis’ is a friend of Ransom’s, and that ‘Lewis’ has agreed to write up this account of Ransom’s adventures, changing his (Ransom’s) name, and simplifying other matters, in order to make it into a publishable book.

Thus, right at the very end the text includes a letter supposedly from ‘Ransom’ politely objecting to some of the simplifications which ‘Lewis’ has made in order to lay the tale before the public.

Perelandra

Anyway, if you hadn’t read Out of the Silent Planet it hardly matters, since almost all of this material is recapped at the start of this, the second book in the series. Once again we are in the mind of the first-person narrator, ‘Lewis’, as he walks through the gathering darkness of a summer evening towards Ransom’s remote cottage, where Ransom has invited him to come and meet him.

But as he walks towards the cottage, Lewis finds himself experiencing a mounting sense of terror, as well as all kinds of hysterical fears – of the dark itself, and a sudden fear that Ransom is maybe not on the side of the angels, but has been recruited by the Dark Side of the universe to wreak harm on earth. By the time Lewis arrives at the cottage he feels almost hysterical, and feels a physical force barring his way, as if every forward step is having to be fought for.

Finding Ransom out, Lewis lets himself into the cottage. A little later Ransom returns and cheerily explains that, yes, the house is under attack by dark forces, by ‘bent’ terrestrial eldila. it was they who placed all those terrifying thoughts in Lewis’s mind to stop them meeting. Ah. That explains the vivid fears Lewis has shared with us readers.

And it is an oblique comment on the period when the book was written. In chapter 15 we learn the story is set in 1942, a dark time for Lewis and his British readers.

Now Ransom also explains that the big, coffin-sized object in the hallway of his cottage is some kind of extra-terrestrial transport device. It turns out that Oyarsa has been in contact and told him (Ransom) that he is going to be sent on a mission to Venus, or Perelandra as it’s known by the hnau.

Why? Ransom is not sure but thinks it’s because the dark archon, the bent oyarsa of Thulcandra, is planning some kind of attack on Venus. Obviously not in person, since he cannot pass beyond the orbit of the moon without being repulsed by the other oyarsa and eldila (as explained earlier). So he must be planning to use some other means – and Ransom is being sent to thwart them.

Ransom and Lewis then carry the coffin-shaped object, made of some ice-cold white material, out into the garden, Ransom strips naked, climbs into it, Lewis places the lid on top, and – it vanishes.

A little over a year passes, with all the ongoing threats and alarms of war briefly referred to, and then Lewis receives a message from Oyarsa (he doesn’t dwell on how) and hurries down to Ransom’s cottage, accompanied by a mutual friend who is a doctor.

They stand in Ransom’s overgrown garden as a casket-shaped thing is briefly silhouetted against the sun, then glides down at their feet. They open the lid to discover Ransom nude and covered in what appear to be red flower petals, but:

glowing with health and rounded with muscle and seemingly ten years younger. In the old days he had been beginning to show a few grey hairs; but now the beard which swept his chest was pure gold

The canny reader instantly suspects that, whatever tribulations Ransom might have gone through on his year-long trip into space, Lewis is going to emphasise the fundamental justness, beauty and healthiness of the universe. Although we have no inkling of just how much he is going to do that.

Once he has awoken and had a wash and shave and gotten dressed and been thoroughly checked over by the doctor, Ransom is ready to tell his story, thus:

Ransom lands and finds the Lady

The first thing he remembers is awaking to find the coffin-spaceship disintegrating and throwing him into an enormous sea amid vast waves as big as mountains under a multi-coloured sky.

The waves tower as high as alps then plunge again, but the sea is warm and the sky is the colour of gold. Eventually he sees a huge mat-like material going past on the surface of the sea, swims towards it, clambers ‘ashore’, and falls asleep.

When he awakes he is in a kind of wonderland of beauty, sweet scents, delicious colours, wonderful food.

The world had no size now. Its boundaries were the length and breadth of his own body and the little patch of soft fragrance which made his hammock, swaying ever more and more gently. Night covered him like a blanket and kept all loneliness from him. The blackness might have been his own room. Sleep came like a fruit which falls into the hand almost before you have touched the stem.

He discovers that the mat is big, big enough to contain woods and clearings, it lies flat on the surface of the gently undulating sea, and it is – a form of paradise.

Over his head there hung from a hairy tube-like branch a great spherical object, almost transparent, and shining. It held an area of reflected light in it and at one place a suggestion of rainbow colouring. So this was the explanation of the glass-like appearance in the wood. And looking round he perceived innumerable shimmering globes of the same kind in every direction. He began to examine the nearest one attentively. At first he thought it was moving, then he thought it was not. Moved by a natural impulse he put out his hand to touch it. Immediately his head, face, and shoulders were drenched with what seemed (in that warm world) an ice-cold shower bath, and his nostrils filled with a sharp, shrill, exquisite scent that somehow brought to his mind the verse in Pope, ‘die of a rose in aromatic pain.’ Such was the refreshment that he seemed to himself to have been, till now, but half awake. When he opened his eyes – which had closed involuntarily at the shock of moisture – all the colours about him seemed richer and the dimness of that world seemed clarified. A re-enchantment fell upon him.

In fact Ransom quickly learns that it really is paradise, for on another ‘island’ floating nearby he sees a human form which, when the ‘islands’ drift closer, he realises is a full-grown naked woman coloured green.

They wave at each other until Ransom nerves himself to take a risk and plunges into the sea to swim over to her island and…

Realises he really is in the garden of Eden. This woman is wonderfully simple, innocent, trusting and pure. The animals lovingly follow her. She has no ‘home’, there is no village or settlement, there are no ‘others’. Ransom quickly feels himself to be a blunt, ugly creature intruding into a world of prelapsarian harmony. Every single one of his questions prompts the lady to pause and think and he quickly realises that she is so innocent and unspoiled that even the sophisticated assumptions behind his questions are new and puzzling to her. He realises he must be careful, chaste, polite and restrained in what he tells her about the other worlds he knows about (Earth and Mars).

The only other one of her type she knows is ‘the King’, and she says she will take Ransom to meet him. The King is on the land of green pillars, which she points out. Ransom had glimpsed these pillars amid the floating islands, and now has it confirmed to him that they are on fixed dry land, marked by a set of enormous green columns towering into the air.

The lady calls dolphin-like creatures to the edge of their island and invites Ransom to climb astride one, as she does. The dolphins carry them to the island. They walk around it, Ransom delighting to be on good solid ground again. But then they see a black shape bobbing closer through the waves. It seems to be spherical in shape. Ransom has a bad feeling. It looks exactly like the spherical, steel and glass spaceship in which he, Weston and Devine flew to Malacandra in the first book. Is this the form the ‘attack’ is to take?

Yes it is. For indeed Weston comes towards the island rowing a little collapsible canoe. Up the beach he clambers and pulls a gun on Ransom, confirming the latter’s worst fears. However, the Lady has not, of course, seen a gun before. Lewis has painted such a convincing portrait of her complete innocence that we believe it when she simply walks away from the two strangers, down to the beach and takes a dolphin off the island.

Now during the lengthy conversations she and Ransom have had, she has let slip that Maleldil has given her everything she needs for a sweet life, but on one condition, with one rule to be obeyed – that she must not spend the night on the island, she must not sleep on solid ground.

Ransom (being a fallen human) is curious to find out why not. ‘Because it is His will,’ she replies, simply. All else is allowed, everything is free. But to show her obedience to her maker, to make that obedience light and free, there is just this one rule.

This explains why, with night coming on, the Green Lady had hastened down to the shore, quickly whistled up some dolphins (she is followed everywhere by admiring animals) and ridden off. Leaving Ransom to confront Weston.

Ransom and Weston’s theological argument

Now Ransom finds himself forced into an absurd theological argument. Here on the shore of an island among mountainous seas on a strange planet thirty million miles from home, he finds himself listening to a mad rhodomontade from Weston.

Perelandra was written at exactly the same time as Lewis was giving a series of BBC radio talks about religion (1941-44) which were gathered together into his most popular work of Christian apologetics, Mere Christianity.

In his popular Christian works, Lewis not only defended Christian belief and put forward various (light and accessible) ‘philosophical’ arguments for Christianity, but also listed and attacked various ‘modern heresies’, i.e. types of contemporary belief which, he thought, were not only un-Christian but tended towards man’s unhappiness, if not the active promotion of evil.

So it is that he pro-Christian arguments and anti-‘heresy’ arguments which Lewis was working out at this period spill over into Perelandra. Or, probably more likely, he developed the arguments and counter-arguments, and then decided which would be appropriate for radio presentation and which would work best in a fictional setting. And also which could be shown in a fictional setting, such as the peace and harmony of all beings on a prelapsarian planet.

Anyway, it is obvious that Weston is made to represent what Lewis took to be the central strand of contemporary scientific and philosophical thought which he thought had brought the world to the disaster in which it found itself, had led to the rise of Fascism and Stalinism, and the plunging of the whole world into war.

Back in the first book, Weston had stood before the oyarsa of Malacandra and given a long speech declaring it was ‘man’s destiny’ to colonise the other planets of the solar system and then reach out into space. The implication – that ‘man’ would liquidate or take control of all the inhabitants of all the other planets of the solar system – was clearly depicted as totalitarian if not fascist in tone, a symptom of the disease afflicting the darkening world it was written in (1937-38).

Now Weston shows that he has adapted his beliefs and made them bigger. Previously he had talked about mankind. Now he claims that all organic life is driven by a ‘Spirit’, a Spirit which drove evolution from the very beginning, finding expression in higher and higher beings. This theory was known as ‘Creative Evolution’ and was very popular among the scientifically minded of Lewis’s day, among democrats and socialists who rejected orthodox religion, but still wished to find some kind of purpose or forward goal in Darwin’s theory of evolution.

Ransom asks whether this ‘spirit’ is good or evil, but Weston sweeps the distinction aside, saying Ransom is too shackled by traditional religious dualisms. The spirit may take ‘good’ or ‘bad’ forms, it’s irrelevant, the thing is its forward, upward momentum, from triumph to triumph (echoing the triumphal rhetoric of the totalitarian states).

And he, Weston, now knows that he has been chosen as the vessel of the Spirit of Man, to take it to the next level. How? because he hears the Spirit speaking to him, whispering the secrets of the universe. The Spirit helped him create the space ship and it helped bring him here.

Now a notable thing about C.S. Lewis’s Christianity is that he took a great deal of Christian belief literally with a kind of bluff, hearty good sense – he took the stories of Jesus casting out devils, raising the dead and performing miracles, as literal truths – much to the scorn of his ‘sophisticated’ fellow dons at Oxford. But it was a simple. bluff, literal attitude which rang a bell among a less sophisticated public and made his radio broadcasts and theology books immensely popular.

Thus Lewis believed in a literal Devil who tempted people. Whereas sophisticated Oxford theologians argued that the devil and hell were allegories or symbols or psychological states, Lewis saw them as literal persons who you could meet and who could talk to you, persuade you, or possess you.

Thus the point of this scene in Perelandra is to show how Weston’s belief in the inexorable triumph of some amoral ‘Spirit of Man’ is not only a mistaken belief which results in shockingly immoral behaviour (Weston quite happily admits he would sell England to Nazi Germany if the Spirit told him), but is the result of Weston’s literal possession by an evil spirit.

And so, listening to Weston’s increasingly demented ranting, it dawns on Ransom that whole schools of modern thought might be heresies in the most literal sense – that they are inspired by the Devil.

That opposite mode of thought which he had often mocked and called in mockery The Empirical Bogey, came surging into his mind – the great myth of our century with its gases and galaxies, its light years and evolutions, its nightmare perspectives of simple arithmetic in which everything that can possibly hold significance for the mind becomes the mere by-product of essential disorder. Always till now he had belittled it, had treated with a certain disdain its flat superlatives, its clownish amazement that different things should be of different sizes, its glib munificence of ciphers.

In case there was any doubt about Weston’s demonic possession, Lewis makes it perfectly clear at the end of the scene when, as a result of Ransom’s persistent rejection of Weston’s arguments, the latter works himself up into a frenzy and then collapses and – for a moment – Ransom can see the helpless mortal man writhing in the grip of its evil demon and trying to escape.

‘Idiot,’ said Weston. His voice was almost a howl and he had risen to his feet. ‘Idiot,’ he repeated. ‘Can you understand nothing? Will you always try to press everything back into the miserable framework of your old jargon about self and self-sacrifice? That is the old accursed dualism in another form. There is no possible distinction in concrete thought between me and the universe. In so far as I am the conductor of the central forward pressure of the universe, I am it. Do you see, you timid, scruple-mongering fool? I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that Force into me completely. . . .’

Then horrible things began happening. A spasm like that preceding a deadly vomit twisted Weston’s face out of recognition. As it passed, for one second something like the old Weston reappeared – the old Weston, staring with eyes of horror and howling, ‘Ransom, Ransom! For Christ’s sake don’t let them…’ and instantly his whole body spun round as if he had been hit by a revolver-bullet and he fell to the earth, and was there rolling at Ransom’s feet, slavering and chattering and tearing up the moss by handfuls.

If this is like a scene from The Exorcist it is because Lewis did believe in literal devils and did believe they could literally possess people, as Weston is here, quite clearly, possessed.

His ‘wrong’ beliefs about the self-importance of Man, his denial of anything, any God or Moral Law beyond man, set him down the road to becoming the mortal instrument of spirits set on evil.

The result of this conversation, and of Weston’s collapse, is that Ransom spends the rest of the novel vividly aware that the thing he is facing is not human and this is conveyed with a real thrill of horror.

The thing sat down close to the Lady’s head on the far side of her from Ransom. If you could call it sitting down. The body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man: it was more as if some external force manoeuvred it into the right position and then let it drop. It was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely non-human. Ransom had the sense of watching an imitation of living motions which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow it lacked the master touch. And he was chilled with an inarticulate, night-nursery horror of the thing he had to deal with – the managed corpse, the bogey, the Un-man.

The garden of Eden

What if earth had once also been a paradise? What if that is why the sights and smells and sounds of Perelandra seem not only sweet to Lewis, but deep, as if they recalled ancestral experiences from the origins of his race?

It was strange to be filled with homesickness for places where his sojourn had been so brief and which were, by any objective standard, so alien to all our race. Or were they? The cord of longing which drew him to the invisible isle seemed to him at that moment to have been fastened long, long before his coming to Perelandra, long before the earliest times that memory could recover in his childhood, before his birth, before the birth of man himself, before the origins of time. It was sharp, sweet, wild, and holy, all in one, and in any world where men’s nerves have ceased to obey their central desires would doubtless have been aphrodisiac too, but not in Perelandra.

What if the ancients myths and legends, recorded in the old books, are not – as sophisticated modern atheist philosophy has it – the childish stories made up by illiterate inhabitants of the Dark Ages, but the opposite? What if they are actual memories of people and values from an earlier time, when humans were closer to some prelapsarian truth, memories which lingered on after the spiritual disaster which overtook mankind?

He remembered his old suspicion that what was myth in one world might always be fact in some other. He wondered also whether the King and Queen of Perelandra, though doubtless the first human pair of this planet, might on the physical side have a marine ancestry. And if so, what then of the man-like things before men in our own world? Must they in truth have been the wistful brutalities whose pictures we see in popular books on evolution? Or were the old myths truer than the modern myths? Had there in truth been a time when satyrs danced in the Italian woods?

Lewis’s science fiction books are not only an excuse for fantasy – for the kind of fantasy mountains, flora and fauna, animals, skies and so on, that you might get in Wells and other sci-fi fantasists – but for fantasy underpinned by Lewis’s feel for both theology and ancient literature and myth.

From without, most certainly from without, but not by the sense of hearing, festal revelry and dance and splendour poured into him – no sound, yet in such fashion that it could not be remembered or thought of except as music. It was like having a new sense. It was like being present when the morning stars sang together.

Throughout the book the reader is given numerous extended descriptions of the sheer joyousness of the this Venusian paradise, less in ideas than in countless detailed physical sensations – Lewis very powerfully conveys the idea that Perelandra amounts to a kind of holiday from the normal sensations of his body.

He was riding the foamless swell of an ocean, fresh and cool after the fierce temperatures of Heaven, but warm by earthly standards – as warm as a shallow bay with sandy bottom in a sub-tropical climate. As he rushed smoothly up the great convex hillside of the next wave he got a mouthful of the water. It was hardly at all flavoured with salt; it was drinkable – like fresh water and only, by an infinitesimal degree, less insipid. Though he had not been aware of thirst till now, his drink gave him a quite astonishing pleasure. It was almost like meeting Pleasure itself for the first time.

The very names of green and gold, which he used perforce in describing the scene, are too harsh for the tenderness, the muted iridescence, of that warm, maternal, delicately gorgeous world. It was mild to look upon as evening, warm like summer noon, gentle and winning like early dawn. It was altogether pleasurable.

Eden is full of pleasure:

He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger. But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed mere pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men, out of all reckoning, beyond all covenant. For one draught of this on earth wars would be fought and nations betrayed. It could not be classified. He could never tell us, when he came back to the world of men, whether it was sharp or sweet, savoury or voluptuous, creamy or piercing. ‘Not like that’ was all he could ever say to such inquiries.

And blissful physical sensations:

He was approaching a forest of little trees whose trunks were only about two and a half feet high; but from the top of each trunk there grew long streamers which did not rise in the air but flowed in the wind downhill and parallel to the ground. Thus, when he went in among them, he found himself wading knee deep and more in a continually rippling sea of them–a sea which presently tossed all about him as far as his eye could reach. It was blue in colour, but far lighter than the blue of the turf–almost a Cambridge blue at the centre of each streamer, but dying away at their tasselled and feathery edges into a delicacy of bluish grey which it would take the subtlest effects of smoke and cloud to rival in our world. The soft, almost impalpable, caresses of the long thin leaves on his flesh, the low, singing, rustling, whispering music, and the frolic movement all about him, began to set his heart beating with that almost formidable sense of delight which he had felt before in Perelandra.

So in Lewis’s theology, pleasure, bliss and joy are not the temptations, are not the wicked things. The temptation is the fundamental mistake of not crediting God with creating everything.

We can all enjoy bliss such as we have never known – but it is all contingent on a right and proper and correct acknowledgement that God made us, that we are created beings and that the created should endlessly acknowledge the Creator for the gift of existence in all its wonder.

The beautiful setting, the lovely sky, the lapping waters, the docile creatures and the innocently dignified Lady – all make a luminous background against which Weston’s narrow-minded, egotistical, godless philosophy and pointlessly cruel behaviour, stand out all the more as wicked and squalid.

Temptation

Ransom takes a dolphin out to an island where he arrives in darkness, goes ashore and sleeps. When he wakens it is still dark and he overhears Weston tempting the Lady.

Maleldil’s prohibition of sleeping on the island clearly performs on this planet the role that God’s forbidding Adam and Eve from eating the apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil performed on Earth. it is the one rule that must be obeyed. it is the stumbling block. Meaningless in itself, it is a marker of the creature’s obedience to the Creator.

Ransom feels sick as he listens to the subtle arguments that Weston is making to tempt the Lady: that sleeping on the island will make the Lady wise, make her more of a woman, will earn the King’s respect, why should she always know less and be subservient to him? And so on.

The Lady resists his arguments. Good triumphs. Ransom falls asleep again.

When he wakes again it is to find some of the frog-like creatures he had observed among the Lady’s animal followers have been maimed and mutilated. To his horror he follows a string of their writhing bodies, each one ripped open along the spine, until he finds Weston at work, torturing one of them, for no reason, just for the random cruelty. When Weston looks up from his work, Ransom for the first time realises what a devil looks like.

The smile was not bitter, nor raging, nor, in an ordinary sense, sinister; it was not even mocking. It seemed to summon Ransom, with a horrible naïveté of welcome, into the world of its own pleasures, as if all men were at one in those pleasures, as if they were the most natural thing in the world and no dispute could ever have occurred about them. It was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence. It was beyond vice as the Lady was beyond virtue.

The days begin to blur into one another. Over and over Ransom wakes to hear Weston keep up his unending siege of the Lady’s obedience. Forced to sit by most of the time, as he has to wait for the Lady to ask his opinion, Ransom (and we the reader) witness the prolonged battery of arguments launched from every side with which the un-Man assails the Lady.

This long passage is a sort of tour de force in which Lewis imagines just what the Devil said to Eve in the Garden of Eden, how he overcame her innocence, how he persuaded her that Maleldil had not banned her sleeping on the island in order to ban it as such, but so that she could grow in maturity and confidence, so that she could show both Maleldil and the King that she was no longer a child. Yes both of them would be pleased if she would only disobey the ban.

These and hundreds of other monotonously similar lies Ransom has to listen to again and again, And he is horrified to see it working. Ransom observes the Lady, under Weston’s ceaseless corrupting barrage, for the first time adopting a rather theatrical manner, no longer unself-consciously laughing and speaking but slowly becoming aware of herself, and beginning to pose. Weston gives her a hand mirror which initially surprises here, and which he uses to emphasise her importance, her supremacy, flattering her position of First Woman.

Always the weakest point of people is shown to be their egotism – their sense of self. Always their strongest point (in Lewis’s vision) is their sense of something outside themselves, of something greater, more powerful, to which they owe gratitude and obedience.

The decision

Eventually there are several pages describing Ransom’s agonised realisation that sitting by and watching primal innocence be corrupted isn’t enough. He has had no communication from Oyarsa, none of the eldila have told him what to expect or what to do.

And again, this is part of Lewis’s strategy in these fiction books and in his apologetics: he makes the very powerful point that it is up to us. In a roundabout sort of way this chimes with the contemporary message of the Continental Existentialists (apart from the obvious fact that they were mostly atheists) – but they both lead to the same conclusion – it is up to us to fight evil, often with little or no help from outside.

Everyone must make their decision and everyone defines themselves by their decisions. We are free to make or unmake ourselves, says Lewis, as clearly as his contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre.

So Ransom has had no outside help from the moment he arrived, no communications, no hints or advice or guidance.

Now, after days of agonising, he decides that there is no alternative – he must kill Weston. Yes, it’s immoral, yes maybe he will damn himself – but he cannot stand by and allow the alternative – the corruption and damnation of an entire planet. And at this point he does hear a voice in his head. ‘It is no coincidence’, the voice tells him, ‘that his name is Ransom: he must be the price paid for the preservation of this world’.

The chase

This leads into what turns out to be a very prolonged and gruelling chase sequence.

1. Ransom gets up, goes and finds Weston and, without any warning, attacks him. They claw, scratch, bite, kick and punch each other. Eventually, the struggle breaks off as Weston staggers through forest down to the shore and straddles a dolphin fish and is away, Ransom pursuing. Day and night, night and day, falling asleep, nearly falling off, confronting the strange mute faces of the mermen beneath the waves, Ransom rides the dolphin-like creature in pursuit of the equally dazed and wounded Weston.

2. A day comes when Weston’s fish is exhausted and he stops running, turns and paddles it over beside Ransom. ‘Please,’ he wheedles, and then goes into another long, tempting speech, pretending that he is now simply Weston and that his devil has fled. Except he isn’t and it hasn’t. Only slowly does it reveal its devilish intent. Weston’s wheedling slowly turns into a grand vision of the horror and pointlessness of life, we only live briefly and then are pushed out of the bright atmosphere of the world into the darkness beneath it, squealing in pain and fear. It doesn’t matter whether there is a God or not, all that matters is escaping the darkness, the void, the horror… at which point Ransom realises that ‘it’ is still a devil, and also realises that he has been given an insight into what it means to be a devil, self-excluded from the grace of God.

3. The devil grabs Ransom’s arm and then lunges across from his dolphin, tackles his body, wrapping himself round Ransom’s waist and thighs and dragging him down, down under water. This leads to a nightmareish struggle in the cold depths of the sea, when you wonder if they will both drown and go to the underworld (anything seems to be possible).

But instead Ransom awakes to find he is in some kind of shingly beach in the pitch darkness. He finds Weston’s body and strangles him to death and breaks his ribs for good measure, and then collapses exhausted. Hours later, Ransom awakes again, again into pitch darkness, and begins to explore the ‘beach’ only to discover that it is a cave. By some chance he and Weston in their death-embrace have been washed into a cave, maybe deep under the waterline in some cliff. He tentatively tries easing down into the water but it is breaking against the sides with such violence that, in the dark, it is impossible to gauge its power and depth and Ransom has no way of knowing how much of a swim, and in which direction he should go, to escape out of the cave and make it back to the surface.

Instead Ransom sets off to explore the innards of the cave and see if he can escape that way, in a passage of nightmare intensity, bumping into walls, pulling himself up onto ledges, inching along in pitch darkness, stubbing his toes, scratching every inch of his exposed naked body, always climbing, with no idea where he is going or if there is any hope.

This passage is a form of Pilgrim’s Progress. It isn’t made explicit, but it is a Christian soul climbing up out of pitch darkness driven only by faith.

Only after a prolonged and increasingly hallucinatory climb does Ransom finally see a sliver of light up above, and walk up along a sloping stretch of rock to discover a fissure of light high above him.

He has to build a platform from loose rocks and jump up into the crevice, clinging on by his fingertips, then inching his way along it, his back against one wall, his knees and feet against the other, painfully upwards to emerge in a huge wide cavern illuminated by the light from a sheer drop at one end. He goes over to it and discovers it drops sheer, hundreds maybe thousands of yards down into raw, moiling fire.

As he turns from the blinding light back to the cavern, Ransom sees Weston, as in a dream, as in a nightmare, pull himself slowly up out of the fissure and stumble towards him. Half-mad, hallucinating, delirious, Ransom grips the nearest sizeable rock, says, ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,’ runs at Weston and smashes his face in, smashing it literally to a pulp.

He then drags the mashed-face corpse over to the ledge and tips it over to plummet down down into the fiery lava beneath. Surely, finally, he has finished his task.

Days of climbing follow in a delirium of pain and exhaustion. Finally, crossing some cave, Ransom slips and falls into a fast-moving stream which sluices him out of a rock face and into a pool outside, on a mountainside, under the golden sky of Perelandra where he lies for days, drinking the stream water and reaching his hand up for sweet fruit, delirious, unconscious of the days and nights, slowly healing in body and mind.

Eventually, after many days, healed and ready to walk, the eldila appear, fragments of light in the daytime, silently telling him that he must set off for some kind of happy valley, there beyond the hills.

The coronation

Ransom walks a long way, up hill, down dale, somehow knowing he must seek the hidden valley, climbing high into the mountains before finally descending to the most beautiful place he has seen in either of the two planets, Malacandra or Perelandra.

Here, drawn up in front of a natural temple, he encounters the oyarsa of the planet, and then witnesses an enormous horde of friendly animals attending the King and the Lady as they land at the beach and slowly progress up to the temple.

There follows an extraordinary extended coronation scene in which the Lady and the King are transformed into Tor and Tinidil, and receive stewardship of the planet and everything on it from the oyarsa. In extended speeches Ransom is told that the King and the Lady have learned about evil not by doing it, as Adam and Eve did – but by resisting it.

In this grand performance Ransom played a crucial part, allowing the Lady to learn just enough of the bad to be able to resist it, before himself disposing of the evil in a way no creature of Perelandra could have, without sullying itself.

Only a fallen man could deal with another fallen man. Ransom receives the fathomless gratitude of the King and the Lady. And in this whole story Weston, like Judas, played a preconceived role.

‘Little did that dark mind know the errand on which he really came to Perelandra!’

After the theology is explained there is a tremendous passage of three or four pages made up of twenty paragraphs, every one of which is a hymn to Maleldil, ending with the repeated phrase, ‘Blessed be He!’

‘All things are by Him and for Him. He utters Himself also for His own delight and sees that He is good. He is His own begotten and what proceeds from Him is Himself. Blessed be He!’

Not the kind of thing you get in a regular novel.

The prophecy

With no interruption, the King washes and laves Ransom’s battered body (in an obvious echo of Jesus washing his disciples in the New Testament) even the gash on his heel where Weston bit him, and which stubbornly refuses to heal.

Then the King lays Ransom in the ice-cold white coffin which has now appeared before them, of the same type which Ransom travelled there in, seals the coffin and Ransom is gone.

But not before the King has made this final prophecy, a prophecy about the Final Battle for the soul of earth, or Thulcandra, a prophecy which obviously sets the book up for its sequel, the final novel in the trilogy, That Hideous Strength.

We shall fall upon your moon, wherein there is a secret evil, and which is as the shield of the Dark Lord of Thulcandra – scarred with many a blow. We shall break her. Her light shall be put out. Her fragments shall fall into your world and the seas and the smoke shall arise so that the dwellers in Thulcandra will no longer see the light of Arbol. And as Maleldil Himself draws near, the evil things in your world shall show themselves stripped of disguise so that plagues and horrors shall cover your lands and seas. But in the end all shall be cleansed, and even the memory of your Black Oyarsa blotted out, and your world shall be fair and sweet and reunited to the field of Arbol and its true name shall be heard again.

The Discarded Image

In my review of Out of The Silent Planet I mentioned the way that most of Lewis’s books, after his conversion to Christianity in 1931, were driven by the urge to explain and proselytise for his Christian belief. Perelandra is even more overtly Christian than its predecessor, or rather all the ideas are based on Christian theology.

His openly Christian works of apologetics like Mere Christianity, the popular comic books like The Screwtape Letters, the famous series of Narnia books, and this, his science fiction trilogy, are all powered and underpinned by Lewis’s profound Christian belief working at various levels of explicitness, from High Theology about the Fall through to incidental insights about human nature – how we are less when we are selfish and self-centred, and more when we turn outwards and acknowledge others.

But to focus on the Christian element is to ignore the other, very large, possibly even larger, part of Lewis’s imagination, which was shaped by his deep and scholarly knowledge of ancient, medieval and Renaissance literature, knowledge which underpins the fantastical and beautiful sumptuousness of much of his imagery, and his sense of the stateliness and courtesy of the pure, of his spirits and kings.

I myself did a very old-fashioned English Literature degree for which I had to learn Anglo-Saxon and Middle English, and in preparation for which it was assumed that I would have read all of the Bible, Homer, the Aeneid, Ovid and Horace.

In studying Gawayne and the Green Knight or Chaucer or The Faerie Queen by Spenser, I found Lewis’s literary criticism of these works invaluable, not only for his detailed knowledge of individual facts or symbols – but for his matchless feel for the values of long-lost cultures.

Lewis’s final book was a scholarly work – The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature – a deliberately brief, almost note-form summary of the sources of much of the imagery and belief system of medieval and renaissance literature. It lays out very clearly and usefully key aspects of ancient and medieval cosmology, explaining their sources in a handful of seminal works, mostly from the ancient world, explaining (in the words of Wikipedia),

the structure of the medieval universe, the nature of its inhabitants, the notion of a finite universe, ordered and maintained by a celestial hierarchy, and the ideas of nature.

My point is that Lewis was absolutely drenched in the imagery and thought of the classical and medieval world, and in my view it is this – just as much as his Christian faith – which gives his fictional books their special feel, a really deep feel for older values, for ancient symbolism and allegory. It explains why the image from Narnia of children placing chains of flowers round the neck of a peaceful lion feels not just fanciful, but somehow profound.

That isn’t an image from anywhere in the Bible. But it is the kind of heraldic image anyone familiar with medieval texts, poems, marginalia or tapestries would appreciate. It is this – a sense of the medieval world somehow reborn across time and space – much more than the explicit Christian theology, which I kept being reminded of as I read Perelandra.

At Ransom’s waking something happened to him which perhaps never happens to a man until he is out of his own world: he saw reality, and thought it was a dream. He opened his eyes and saw a strange heraldically coloured tree loaded with yellow fruits and silver leaves. Round the base of the indigo stem was coiled a small dragon covered with scales of red gold. He recognised the garden of the Hesperides at once.

Lewis actually uses the medieval word ‘heraldic’ several times to convey the sense of dignified, richly felt, medieval symbolism which he is striving to create.

She had stood up amidst a throng of beasts and birds as a tall sapling stands among bushes – big pigeon-coloured birds and flame-coloured birds, and dragons, and beaver-like creatures about the size of rats, and heraldic-looking fish in the sea at her feet. Or had he imagined that? Was this the beginning of the hallucinations he had feared? Or another myth coming out into the world of fact…

They made the circle of the plateau methodically. Behind them lay the group of islands from which they had set out that morning. Seen from this altitude it was larger even than Ransom had supposed. The richness of its colours – its orange, its silver, its purple and (to his surprise) its glossy blacks – made it seem almost heraldic.

The heavens had vanished, and the surface of the sea; but far, far below him in the heart of the vacancy through which he appeared to be travelling, strange bursting star shells and writhing streaks of a bluish-green luminosity appeared. At first they were very remote, but soon, as far as he could judge, they were nearer. A whole world of phosphorescent creatures seemed to be at play not far from the surface – coiling eels and darting things in complete armour, and then heraldically fantastic shapes to which the sea-horse of our own waters would be commonplace

When his imagination looks for the beautiful, it is not to the Jewish imagery of the Bible, but to medieval iconography which Lewis turns, imagery forged of the strange union between popular folk tales and legends with the high art of Norman courtly chivalry, mixed in with the myths and strange arcane beliefs of the ancient world.

It is the formal beauty, the poise, the ceremoniousness, the tremendous feeling of correctness about this medieval imagery which gives Lewis’s fictional books – the Narnia books and this science fiction trilogy – a large part of their powerful imaginative impact.

The Lady and the Unicorn: À mon seul désir (1500) Musée national du Moyen Âge, Paris

Note the ubiquity of the animals in this famous medieval tapestry, both regal (lion and unicorn) and sweetly domestic (dog, rabbits, foxes, lambs).

All of creation, not just human beings, are incorporated in Lewis’s vision – and this, again, reflects his medieval imagination, where animals peep out from the corner of tapestries or intrude into Chaucerian stories.

The comedy of Oxford dons

Although we are transported to other planets and subject to heady worlds of theological and courtly seriousness, Lewis lightens his sci-fi trilogy with an occasional sense of humour, particularly when it comes to taking the mickey out of his own world of stuffy and pedantic Oxford dons. Right in the middle of discussing the future of the whole world, they will be brought up short by a pedantic quibble about a point of grammar. Thus Lewis asks him, before he leaves, about the language he expects to find spoken on Venus:

‘And you think you will find Hressa-Hlab, or Old Solar, spoken on Venus?’
‘Yes. I shall arrive knowing the language. It saves a lot of trouble – though, as a philologist I find it rather disappointing.’

Similarly, once he finds himself in the pitch black cave under the sea, initially convinced it is simply night-time and he must wait for the dawn, Ransom sets out to pass the time thus:

He recited all that he could remember of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Æneid, the Chanson de Roland, Paradise Lost, the Kalevala, the Hunting of the Snark, and a rhyme about Germanic sound-laws which he had composed as a freshman.

‘A rhyme about Germanic sound-laws which he had composed as a freshman.’ 🙂

Once Ransom has finally decided to kill Weston, once he is in the black cave astride the enemy’s chest, squeezing its throat with both hands, he finds himself, to his own surprise, shouting out a line from the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Battle of Maldon. I studied the Battle of Maldon at university and I have reviewed it for this blog. I would dearly love to know which line Ransom shouted out.

My review of the Battle of Maldon

And it is typical of the hyper-scholarly nature of his characters that Ransom declares, towards the end, that, comparing the experience of being on the two planets, Mars and Venus:

Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre.

Surprised by joy

But the final memory and impression of reading the book is Lewis’s wonderful, delicious, intoxicating depictions of Eden, what bliss it would be, how it would feed all the senses without glutting or tiring them: how it would be made perfectly for men and women to delight in.

Two things account for the popularity of Lewis’s popular Christian books. One is that they are simple. He turned complicated theology or philosophy into the language of Daily Mail editorials, into terms understandable by almost anyone, but without any sense of being patronising. He just sets out at a popular level and then keeps on at that level.

But just as important, I think, was his immense capacity for conjuring up images, motifs, descriptions, settings, words and phrases to convey an immense, bountiful, overflowing feeling of happiness.

I’ve met and debated theology with Christians who have had bad experiences in their lives – rape, abuse, suicide of parents – and they all testified to the importance of Lewis’s writings in helping them find a meaning and a purpose in their lives, in leading them through darkness to greater faith. Helped by its promise that even the most horrific experiences can be transcended because of the beauty and love of the world God has prepared for us.

In a thousand different images, this is the confidence, the faith in beauty and bliss, the deep optimism, which all Lewis’s books radiate and which helps to account for their enduring appeal.

But he said ‘Hush’ to his mind at this stage, for the mere pleasure of breathing in the fragrance which now began to steal towards him from the blackness ahead. Warm and sweet, and every moment sweeter and purer, and every moment stronger and more filled with all delights, it came to him. He knew well what it was. He would know it henceforward out of the whole universe – the night-breath of a floating island in the star Venus.

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent an earth man possessed by the devil from tempting the planet’s new young inhabitants to a second Fall
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1957 The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle – a vast cloud of gas heads into the solar system, blocking out heat and light from the sun with cataclysmic consequences on Earth, until a small band of maverick astronomers discovers that the cloud contains intelligence and can be communicated with
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1963 Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle French journalist Ulysse Mérou accompanies Professor Antelle on a two-year space flight to the star Betelgeuse, where they land on an earth-like plane to discover that humans and apes have evolved here, but the apes are the intelligent, technology-controlling species while the humans are mute beasts
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped andys
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon

1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines, and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War has become an authoritarian state. The story concerns popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world in which he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Forever War by Joe Haldeman The story of William Mandella who is recruited into special forces fighting the Taurans, a hostile species who attack Earth outposts, successive tours of duty requiring interstellar journeys during which centuries pass on Earth, so that each of his return visits to the home planet show us society’s massive transformations over the course of the thousand years the war lasts.

1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – burnt-out cyberspace cowboy Case is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which young hacker Bobby Newmark discovers there is a lot more to cyberspace than he ever imagined.
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero, while the daughter of a Japanese ganster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative history Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population under control

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by Simon on November 25, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Christianity, Novel, Science Fiction

Tagged 1943, Arbol, À mon seul désir, Æneid, Battle of Maldon, Bible, C.S. Lewis, Chanson de Roland, Christianity, Dark Ages, Deep Heaven, Devine, Eden, eldila, Empirical Bogey, existentialism, fascism, Field of Arbol, garden of Eden, grace of God, heraldry, hnau, Hressa-Hlab, Hrossa, Hunting of the Snark, Iliad, Jean-Paul Sartre, Kalevala, Lady and the Unicorn, Literature, Malacandra, Maleldil, Mars, medieval, Mere Christianity, Moral Law, Musée national du Moyen Âge, Narnia books, Nazi Germany, novel, Odyssey, Out of the Silent Planet, Oxford, Oyarsa, Paradise Lost, Perelandra, pfifltriggi, Ransom, Renaissance, science fiction, Second World War, Sorns, Stalinism, Surprised by joy, That Hideous Strength, The Discarded Image, The Exorcist, The Fall, The Hideous Strength, The Screwtape Letters, Theology, Thulcandra, Tinidil, Tor, totalitarian, Venus, Voyage to Venus, Weston

Posted by Simon on November 25, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/25/perelandra-c-s-lewis/

The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)

Sartre had been interned in a German prisoner of war camp (Stalag 12D) immediately after the fall of France, in the summer of 1940. There he wrote and staged a play (with a surprisingly Christian theme, set on Christmas Eve and titled Bariona, or the son of thunder).

After nine months he was released in April 1941 and returned to his job in Paris, teaching philosophy while also writing fiction and essays, but he had caught the theatre bug. More precisely, he had seen how theatre could dramatise a plight shared by the author and audience. However, no play which even remotely criticised the German occupation could get past the censors, so he had to look for a subject which would be officially acceptable, but still provide a vehicle for his sentiments.

Historical subjects were safe, the classics even more so. Sartre settled on the ancient Greek legend of Orestes, the centre of a cycle of stories which had been dealt with in plays by the famous ancient Greek playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.

The original myth

The Trojan prince Paris is asked to judge which of the three great goddesses is most beautiful. Hera (goddess of power) promises him kingdoms and empire, Athena (goddess of wisdom) promises him wisdom and Aphrodite (goddess of beauty) offers him the most beautiful woman in the world.

He gives the award to Aphrodite who then helps him undertake a friendly tour of the Greek kingdoms. In In Sparta he is entertained by the city’s king, Menelaus, whose wife, Helen, just happens to be the most beautiful woman in the world. That night Paris, with Aphrodite’s divine aid, steals Helen down to the ship and he and his comrades sail back to Troy.

Next morning Menelaus is outraged and contacts his brother, Agamemnon, chief among Greek kings. Agamemnon calls for an alliance of all the Greeks to sail 1,000 ships to Troy and besiege it till the Trojans return Helen.

The entire fleet is assembled and ready to sail but there is no wind. A soothsayer tells Agamemnon he must sacrifice his own daughter, Iphigenia, to please the gods and so – shockingly – Agamemnon does, a wind arises and the fleet sails to Troy, which they besiege for ten long years.

The Greeks eventually win the war due to Odysseus’s clever ruse of the Trojan Horse and Agamemnon returns to Mycenae. But his wife, Clytemnestra has never forgiven the murder of her daughter and so, along with the lover she has taken in Agamemnon’s absence – Aegistheus – she murders Agamemnon.

Before he left for the war, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had had three children. Iphigenia was, as we saw, sacrificed. Electra has stayed with her mother. But their son, Orestes, by now a young man, was not present in Mycenae for the murder of his father. When Orestes does return some years later, he avenges his father by killing his mother and Aegistheus. He is then pursued by the Furies, who hound all evil-doers.

In the last of the trilogy of plays on the subject by Aeschylus, the goddess Athena intervenes between Orestes and the Furies to institute the first ever trial, in which Orestes is spared. It is a fascinating text in which the playwright uses the story to examine and defend the social structures of his day.

Sartre’s play

The outline of the plot is the same. Orestes turns up in the city ruled by Aegistheus and Clytemnestra 15 years to the day after Agamemnon’s murder. He quickly bumps into his sister, Electra, who is fed up with being forced to skivvy for the raddled and haunted queen. After initial hesitations Orestes proceeds to kill Aegistheus and Clytemnestra, then flees with Electra to seek sanctuary in the temple of Apollo.

There are two key differences: the city has been plagued by an infestation of flies ever since the murder; and Aegistheus has instituted a religious festival, the Day of the Dead, in which the town’s dead are meant to rise from their graves and haunt the living for 24 hours. This encourages the living to fall on their knees and acknowledge all their crimes and sins. Act two takes place at the mouth of the cave where these dead ghosts appear, in a ceremony overseen by king Aegistheus in his pomp, to which a reluctant Electra has to be dragged.

That’s the action, but the play actually consists of a lot of dialogue and discussion between the characters, thus:

Zeus king of the gods is a leading character (unlike the ancient versions) who introduces himself as ‘Demetrios’ to both Orestes and Aegistheus, before dropping his disguise and speaking openly about the nature of kingship and rule.
Orestes’ slave is also his tutor, meaning the pair can be left alone to have philosophical dialogues, allowing Orestes to speak his thoughts out loud – the same function as Horatio to the prince in Hamlet.
Electra is initially reluctant to acknowledge Orestes as her brother, then becomes keen to kill the king and queen, then suffers fierce remorse, ageing overnight.
In the final and third act the Furies appear and speak, as in the original plays, explaining their role and the punishments they have in store for the errant children.

Issues

There’s a lot of words about murder, killing, justice, revenge, retribution and so on, which could keep moralists talking for days.

But the central ‘existentialist’ message seems relatively straightforward. Orestes ‘develops’, ‘evolves’, ‘changes’ from a hesitant and curious visitor to his home town, to a man reluctant (in conversation with Zeus or Electra) to intervene, into his final position of a free man who Strikes For Justice.

In a pivotal scene between Zeus and Aegistheus, the god explains what they both know, that the great secret of kingship is that men are free but are frightened of their freedom. This is just as well as he and Aegistheus both like Order. It explains why Aegistheus has instituted the utterly bogus Day of the Dead – it helps weight people down with their guilt, it makes them look backward, it makes them feel in thrall to their past actions and incapable of breaking free.

Zeus also offers another vision of unfree human nature to Orestes when he paints himself as the god of Nature and Good. Orestes defies him, in a sequence of speeches which, I think, we can be confident are the Author’s Message:

Neither slave nor master. I am my freedom.

Suddenly, out of the blue, freedom crashed down on me and swept me off my feet. Nature sprang back, my youth went with the wind, and I knew myself alone, utterly alone in the midst of this well-meaning universe of yours. I was like a man who’s lost his shadow. And there was nothing left in heaven, no right or wrong, nor anyone to give me orders.

Zeus tempts him: come back to me, believe in me, I will give you peace and forgetfulness. But Orestes is having none of it.

Outside nature, against nature, without excuse, beyond remedy, except what remedy I find within myself. But I shall not return under your law; I am doomed to have no other law but mine. Nor shall I come back to nature, the nature you found good; in it are a thousand beaten paths all leading up to you – but I must blaze my trail. For I, Zeus, am a man, and every man must find out his own way. (p.119)

That’s the existentialist message: man is hopelessly, irredeemably, unavoidably free. He has no excuses but bears full responsibility for all his actions. Full acceptance of this crushing weight is the only authenticity.

Zeus says, ‘tut tut I won’t give up without a fight,’ and exits. Electra is distraught at the plight her brother has thrown her into, and runs after Zeus begging his forgiveness i.e. she gives in to religious belief.

The slave enters to tell Orestes that the mob is at the door baying for his blood. Orestes heroically declares that he murdered Clytemnestra and Aegistheus to set them free, to abolish silly superstitions like the Day of the Dead which are meant only to keep them in their place. Orestes confronts the mob and says he will willingly, consciously bear the responsibility and the guilt of the deaths and take away the punishment, the ghosts and the flies. And so Orestes exits pursued by the Furies.

That’s the end, so we never find out what the reaction of the puzzled populace is.

You can see how, not far at all beneath the superficial classical storyline, is the narrative of a man who freely and fully accepts the responsibility for committing murder in order to free his people.

On a philosophical level, it is about a man who rejects all the consolations of false beliefs and ‘bad faith’ in order to act out his freedom.

And, on a political level, about a man who is a Resistance fighter prepared to accept the guilt of murder in order to free his people from the plague of flies i.e. the German occupation.

The diagrammatic nature of Sartre’s intent explains his changes to the traditional story, the most obvious of which is the downplaying of Clytemnestra’s role; in the myths she is the prime mover for the murder of Agamemnon and it is her murder – the terrible crime of matricide – which triggers the advent of the Furies to torment Orestes. But Sartre has no interest in the ‘crime’ of matricide which carries with it a huge freight of basic emotional, let alone Freudian, overtones.

He is more interested in political philosophy and so Aegistheus – a shadowy figure in the myths – is much more prominent in this play: as the figure of the (Nazi) tyrant, as the figure of the man imposing a spurious superstition on the people (the Day of the Dead), as the king Zeus debates the arts of kingship with, and then as the representative of all the repressive forces in the play (and occupied France) which Orestes must slay.

Thus Orestes kills Aegistheus onstage and it takes several blows with a sword during which they continue to have a philosophical dialogue; whereas Clytemnestra is slain off-stage: we only hear her piercing screams while Electra gives us a running commentary on her own feelings.

I’m no feminist but Sartre’s play is much more masculine that the original. In the Aeschylus plays, Clytemnestra, the Furies and the goddess Athena all play key roles in a text which explores femininity, law and society. Two and a half thousand years later, for Sartre, justice and freedom are essentially men’s talk.

Clytemnestra, 1882, oil on canvas by John Collier (1850-1934) Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

Clytemnestra [having just murdered Agamemnon] (1882) by John Collier. Image courtesy Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London

Credit

Les Mouches was first performed in Paris in 1943. This translation by Stuart Gilbert was published in Britain in 1946. Page references are to the 1989 Vintage paperback edition. All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

Related reviews

Sartre reviews
Camus reviews

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by Simon on October 20, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in French literature, Philosophy, Theatre

Tagged 1943, Aegisthus, Agamemnon, classics, Clytemnestra, Electra, Jean-Paul Sartre, Orestes, Philebus, Play, The Flies, theatre, Zeus

Posted by Simon on October 20, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/10/20/the-flies-jean-paul-sartre/

The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene (1943)

If you believed in God – and the Devil – the thing wasn’t quite so comic. Because the Devil – and God too – had always used comic people, futile people, little suburban natures and the maimed and warped to serve his purposes. When God used them you talked emptily of Nobility and when the devil used them of Wickedness, but the material was only dull shabby human mediocrity in either case.
(The Ministry of Fear, page 33)

After his prolific output in the 1930s, Greene published just two novels during the Second World War, The Power and The Glory (1940) about the Mexican whisky priest, which he’d been working on before the war’s outbreak anyway, and this one, his only real war novel. He was busy with other things:

on the basis of his previous travels in the region (chronicled in Journey Without Maps, 1936) he was recuited by Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and sent to Sierra Leone to spy on Axis activity in West Africa from 1941 to 1943, an experience which would provide the background for The Heart of the Matter (1948)
later in the War he signed a contract with MGM’s London agent to produce film scripts

Apparently, by the year this novel was published, 1943, Greene had acquired the reputation of being the ‘leading English male novelist of his generation’. For decades to come he would – rather defensively – continue to categorise his long texts as either ‘entertainments’ (most of his 1930s thriller-ish output, of which he was politely dismissive) or ‘novels’ (the ‘serious’, Catholic-themed works like The Power and the Glory, The Heart of The Matter, which he intended to be more ‘literary’).

The Ministry of Fear

Fear is one of the ‘entertainments’ and, like most of those, has a strong whiff of the absurd about it which only gets stronger. It opens with a surreal scene where the protagonist, the lonely, poor and downtrodden Arthur Rowe, stumbles across a fête taking place in bombed-out Bloomsbury. Beguiled by boyhood memories (contriving childhood memories for his characters is central to Greene’s fiction-making process) of village fêtes in rural Cambridgeshire, Rowe wanders in and spends pennies at various stalls. For some reason the palm reader tells him the exact weight of the Guess-the-weight-of-the-cake stall and he accordingly wins it. But at the last minute a late-comer to the fête arrives by taxi, runs to the palmist’s tent, then dashes out and over to the cake stall. The stallholders suddenly clamour for Rowe to give the cake back to the stall in a charitable gesture. Irritated, Rowe refuses and takes the cake back to his seedy boarding house.

Thus starts the plot. Because the cake quite clearly conceals a secret which ‘they’ want to get back. In the next chapter a strange man invites himself round to Rowe’s room and there is another hallucinatorily odd scene where he ingratiates himself to Rowe, saying they are both intellectuals, above the ignorant masses, while all the time both hear German bombers droning up the Thames towards them and the crump of falling bombs. At the climax of the conversation, just as the stranger is saying ‘they’ want the cake back and ‘they’ are willing to pay, a bomb lands directly on Rowe’s boarding house, ripping the roof and front wall out, plunging Rowe in his chair down to the ground floor. The mysterious stranger is stunned, then collected by his ‘friends’.

Misery and unhappiness

As a teenager Greene was mercilessly bullied at school because his father was the headmaster. Finally, he had a breakdown and was sent for treatment to a psychotherapist. The analyst suggested he write as a form of therapy. This saved his life but didn’t change his character. He was psychologically troubled, given to suicidal depression, from an early age and it shows in everything he wrote. His characters are poor, lonely, miserable men with few possessions living in shabby surroundings.

Greene’s imagination is a kind of ‘squalor-finder’ which can flush out and vividly describe the sad, failed, dirty and sordid in anybody, any place or situation.

Mrs Bellairs’ house was a house of character; that is to say it was old and unrenovated, standing behind its little patch of dry and weedy garden among the To Let boards on the slope of Camden Hill. (p.51)

The stranger who tries to take the cake off Rowe not only has mishapen shoulders, having been crippled at birth, but a nervous habit of using his fingernails to pick out the dandruff from his hair, and then pick it out from under his nails and drop on the floor. Typical.

Hammond Innes’ thrillers radiate physical health and the tremendous exhiliration of being alive in wild, bracing scenery. His protagonists are healthy, forthright, decisive men. Greene’s imagination luxuriates in shabby people with squalid habits in seedy little rooms, not doing much except feeling depressed, sorry for themselves or actively suicidal.

The sordid details accrue, for example: When Rowe visits a failing detective agency it is on the fourth floor with no lift. The reception room boasts a plate bearing a half-eaten sausage roll. He opens the door on the shabby-looking proprietor trying to hide a bottle of booze in a drawer. He notices a porn magazine in the In tray. The private detective turns out to have ill-fitting dentures and yet is puffed up with a ludicrous sense of his self-importance.

And so it goes on relentlessly, a litany of shabby, seedy, failed, horrible, balding, middle-aged men bumbling round in Greene’s ludicrous and barely existing plots. It is powerfully portrayed and horribly depressing, a vision of ‘infinite hopelessness, pain and reproach.’ (p.58)

Very far away a taxi-horn cried through an empty world. (p.57)

He wanted to dream, but all he could practice now was despair… (p.73)

Even if a man has been contemplating the advantages of suicide for two years, he takes time to make his final decision… (p.87)

He missed Mrs Purvis coming in with the tea; he used to count the days by her: punctuated by her knock they would slide smoothly towards the end – annihilation, forgiveness, punishment or peace. (p.87)

There was an exhiliration in the absurd episode; he had made up his mind now about everything – justice as well as the circumstances of the case demanded that he should kill himself (he had only to decide the method) and now he could enjoy the oddness of existence. (p.97)

He felt like a man in mortal sin who watches other people go to receive the sacrament – abandoned. (p.155)

He seemed consumed by a passion of hatred and perhaps despair. (p.175)

His key words are: insignificant, stained, weak, defensive, anxiety, scared, secretive, shabby, seedy, dry, weedy, weak, blackheads, distaste, trashy, dim, lurid, small, shifty, damp, ragged, out-of-elbow, grey, abandoned, trumpery, flimsy, despair, gloomy, failure, defeat, waning, ugly, solitary, brooding, misery, ugly, horror, hideous, helpless, pain, whimper, suicide.

If you can’t come up with a decent plot, resort to Catholic melodrama

The plot is pathetic. The cake-won-at-a-fête opening is nonsense, twaddle. Rowe engages the feeble private detective to get to the bottom of the ‘mystery’, then goes to the offices of the charity which organised the fête. There he meets the enthusiastic Austrian emigré brother & sister, the Hilfes. They take him to meet one of the women who ran one of the fête stalls and who is now having a séance with an ill-assorted mob of typical Greene losers. During the séance the man next to Rowe is murdered and everyone suspects him! Lawks a-mercy!

Rowe half-heartedly goes on the run ie sleeps in an air-raid shelter (dirty, squalid strangers snoring or pawing each other). He walks across London to dun his old friend Henry Wilcox for money but arrives just as a (surreal) funeral procession is starting for Wilcox’s wife, killed in her air raid duties.

Compared to Ambler or Innes, Greene can’t write a suspenseful plot to save his life. What he can and does do is:

inject feeble characters with the overwhelming freight of his own misery and thus lend them a fake ‘depth’
rope in Roman Catholicism to prop up the feeble plot and give the book an entirely spurious sense of ‘profundity’

Thus Greene inflates the nondescript character of Rowe – and tries to lift the feeble plot of his novel – by making Rowe a) a Catholic who b) performed a mercy killing on his wife who had some fatal illness. Oooh. The ersatz seriousness. Oooh. The factitious depth. Oooh. The fake meaningfulness.

This allows Rowe to go on at length about being a murderer and knowing what murder is like and suffering from the guilt of murder etc – without for one solitary second even faintly convincing you that he is actually a murderer. The Postman Always Rings Twice gives the reader a thousand times more sense of what it is like to murder someone, how difficult, how gruesome, how haunted you are by the deed. Rowe’s ‘murder’ is a glib fiction which allows Greene to ring the changes on his favourite themes, a convenient text-generating device. As an examination of the actual consequences of carrying out a mercy killing on a loved one it is almost an insult to the intelligence of the reader.

After all, he belonged to the region of murder – he was a native of that country. (p.60)

This kind of rhetoric sounds good but, on a moment’s reflection, is meaningless. It is not how real murderers think or talk. It is how a death-obsessed, depressive writer thinks and talks.

Thus Rowe is turned, for the next 220 pages, into a handy vehicle for Greene’s familiar suicidal soliloquies, for his long ruminations on life and death and futility, the grand-sounding but empty orations about God, Destiny, Justice; it means he can drop into quoting the Litany or any other Catholic text at the drop of the hat, giving the text utterly spurious depth and ‘meaning’; it gives him carte blanche to spout the same depressed point of view of all Greene’s characters because it is Greene’s own worldview:

There were times when he felt the whole world’s criminality was his; and then suddenly at some trivial sight – a woman’s bag, a picture in a paper – all the pride seeped out of him. He was aware only of the stupidity of his act; he wanted to creep out of sight and weep; he wanted to forget that he had ever been happy… It is easier to kill someone you love than to kill yourself. (p.40)

And long-winded. Endless. Greene is capable of spinning basically the same despairing solipsism out into an infinite number of pseudo-profound ‘insights’ or horrified descriptions:

It is impossible to go through life without trust: that is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself. (p.43)

In a dream you cannot escape: the feet are leaden-weighted: you cannot stir from the ominous door which almost imperceptibly moves. It is the same in life; sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die. (p.56)

Conventions were far more rooted than morality; he had himself found that it was easier to allow oneself to be murdered than to break up a social gathering. (p.71)

Not one of them guessed that what had come over him was the horrible and horrifying emotion of pity. (p.66)

Pity kills… we are trapped and betrayed by our virtues. (p.74)

It is only if the murderer is a good man that he can be regarded as monstrous. (p.88)

The music had stopped, the lights had gone, and he couldn’t remember why he had come to this dark corner, where even the ground whined when he pressed it, as if it had learnt the trick of suffering… He couldn’t move an inch without causing pain. (p.67)

Like a boy he was driven relentlessly towards inevitable suffering, loss and despair, and called it happiness. (p.130)

Wasn’t it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them, rather than be saved alone? (p.132)

‘Pity is a terrible thing. People talk about the passion of love. Pity is the worst passion of all: we don’t outlive it like sex.’ (p.172)

High-sounding twaddle.

Instead of plot…

…most of the book is a sequence of surreal and bizarre scenes, lent a macabre, de Chirico flavour by the backdrop of the Blitz, bombs at night, ruins by day. The bizarre urban fête with its absurdist flock of posh helpers which kicks off the novel would be badly out of place in a serious thriller, but is an appropriately amateurish way to start a half-humorous picaresque through bomb-ruined London.

In a way it’s a shame Greene didn’t have the courage of his psychoses and write a genuinely haunting hallucinatory fantasy about the London Blitz, in which ineffectual marionettes obsessed with suicide and death drifted across a flame-tormented city spouting page after page of bucket philosophy and cod theology while the bombs dropped around them. It might have been a high art or cult classic. Instead, as usual, he tried to corral his psychological obsessions into something much more conventional, into something absurdly contorting itself to be an espionage thriller.

After the scene at the fête, there follow:

the meeting with the seedy detective
the encounter with the over-enthusiastic emigré brother and sister, the Hilfes
the weird séance at which one Mr Cost is killed and everyone accuses Rowe of the murder
so he flees, spending the night in a Tube station converted into an air raid shelter
the failed attempt to dun an old friend, Wilcox, for money but he is distracted by organising the (surreal) funeral procession for his wife
Rowe leaning over the Embankment in Battersea Park contemplating suicide
decoyed into helping a shabby bookseller carry a suitcase of books across London
persuaded to carry this suitcase down hushed surreal hotel corridors to the room of one Travers: there is no Travers. When he enters the room there is the sister, Hilfe. They both realise that They are out to get them, that They are getting closer, that They are slowly turning the doorhandle, as in a surreal dream
the bomb in the suitcase goes off and Rowe wakes up in a convalescent home-cum-mental hospital having forgotten all his past life. Having forgotten he killed his wife, he is happy, happy…
until Anna Hilfe visits and stirs unfortunate memories; when the doctors try to lock him up he makes a schoolboy rebellion and breaks out of his dormitory (exactly as the real life Greene did at his school)
listens to the partly-mad colonel Strong in a straitjacket in his cell say he’s there because he came across Dr Forester and Poole doing something shifty – then on returing to his room Rowe is confronted by the furious Dr Forester who violently refreshes his memory of who he is, telling him he is a murderer
prompting Rowe to make a break for it to the nearest railway station, arriving at London to turn himself in to the police…

This isn’t a plot, it is a series of incidents, a travelogue. It is no surprise that Rowe feels manipulated:

He felt directed, controlled, moulded, by some agency with a surrealist imagination. (p.95)

Yes. That agency’s name would be Graham Greene.

Finally, some meaning

The book is divided into four parts:

The Unhappy Man, the long farrago of weird incidents in London
The Happy Man, the short interlude of the memory-less Rowe in the private clinic run by the sinister Dr Forester
Bits and Pieces, where the police take charge and swiftly clarify the plot
The Whole Man

It is only on page 150, around three-quarters in, that Rowe arrives at Scotland Yard and the feel of the novel changes dramatically because the detective Prentice is a rational adult and briskly reveals to the hopelessly self-pitying solipsistic Rowe the nature of the conspiracy which joins together all the ludicrous incidents we have had to endure in the main part of the book. It still doesn’t make a lot of sense but is the best we’re going to get: A ring of German spies have photocopied military secrets. The microfilm was hidden in the cake (ludicrously). Poole came round for tea and was going to steal the cake when the bomb landed. Nonetheless, the gang still couldn’t trust Rowe so invited him to the séance, framed him with Cost’s murder, forcing him on the run from the police. Got that? Believe any of that?

For short spells it almost begins to seem like a normal thriller or detective novel, though the holes in the plot yawn like the Mariana Trench and the pages are still larded with Greene’s trademark bunkum about justice and pity and fate and love and death and misery blah blah blah.

the Scotland Yard detective Prentice tells Rowe that the man sitting next to him at the séance, who he thought he killed – is alive and well – it was a stitch-up by Them to scare Rowe underground, to prevent him going to the police
Prentice explains the Nazis have a book recording the weaknesses of everyone in power, influential, useful, in order to blackmail them; it is a kind of Ministry of Fear set over the high & mighty
briskly, Prentice takes Rowe and the manager of the hotel where the bomb went off to a tailor’s in the City where they confront the not-murdered Cost who is also identified as the ‘Travers’ who booked the hotel room – ie he is one of Them but, before they can quesiton him, he kills himself (with a tailor’s cutting scissors)
and then on to the house of Mrs Bellairs and the séance where Rowe was framed for the murder that never was
and then by car out to the country house location of Dr Forester’s clinic where they discover that his underling Johns has shot dead both Forester and his sidekick Poole (none other than the sinister man who came to tea at Rowe’s flat right at the start of the story) after they have murdered the half-mad Stone. Why? Because Stone saw them burying the remains of Jones, the detective hired to tail Rowe, in the clinic’s grounds

Whereas Chandler or Hammett or Innes or Ambler would have the decency, the courtesy to the reader and the craft to convey these (preposterous) incidents accurately and clearly, Greene, like an amateur chef, leaves no incident to speak for itself but drowns everything in page after page of pseudo-intellectual gloop.

The doctor had been too sure of Johns: he had not realised that respect is really less reliable than fear: a man may be more ready to kill one he respects than to betray him to the police. (p.182)

Happiness should always be qualified by a knowledge of misery… One can’t love humanity. One can only love people. (p.184)

He was learning the lesson most people learn very young, that things never work out in the expected way. (p.201)

There are moments of surrender when it is so much easier to love one’s enemy than to remember… (p.204)

It isn’t being happy together, he thought as though it were a fresh discovery, that makes one love – it’s being unhappy together. (p.207)

They had to tread carefully for a lifetime, never speak without thinking twice; they must watch each other like enemies because they loved each other so much. They would never know what it was not to be afraid of being found out. It occurred to him that perhaps after all one could atone even to the dead if one suffered for the living enough. (last page)

Bromides. Truisms. T-shirt slogans.

Terrible dialogue

Instead of dialogue which develops the plot, dialogue which analyses the situation and generates insights into tricky scenarios and plans for escape (in which the reader can excitedly share), instead of needle-sharp exchanges which add to the tension, like the snappy exchanges to be found in Chandler or Innes or Ambler – there is next to no plot in Greene and so little or no suspense and so the dialogue is desperately un-tense, consisting of shabby people talking at cross-purposes or suddenly all agreeing they’re in danger without the circumstances providing the slightest justification for it or, at a slightly higher level, exchanging the same sort of truisms about life and death which fill the editorialising narration.

Greene’s dialogue does a number of things but it doesn’t move the plot along because there is almost no plot. A lot of the dialogue is 5th form philosophising. In fact the dialogue seems to take a kind of pleasure in portraying the characters as hopeless, childish, inadequate to the adult world.

He picked up [the heavy brass candlestick]. ‘He tried to kill me,’ he explained weakly.
‘He’s asleep. That’s murder.’
‘I won’t hit first.’
She said, ‘He used to be sweet to me when I cut my knees. Children always cut their knees… Life is horrible, wicked.’ (p.202)

In the last 20 pages Rowe discovers that the dying Cost made his last phone call to the Hilfes’ flat. Rather than calling the police like an adult he sets out on a boyish ‘adventure’ to collar them himself, only to take pity on Anna (who he now mysteriously ‘loves’) and, instead of capturing Hilfe outright, allowing his sister to have moments alone with him, during which he hands over a useless copy of the photographs and she, like an imbecile, lets him escape.

Rowe pursues him in a taxi to Paddington station and, again as the bombs fall closer and closer, in the characteristically seedy setting of the Gents lavatories, Hilfe finally hands over the negatives in exchange for the gun with one bullet in it. Whereupon Hilfe maliciously a) reveals to Rowe his full past i.e. the oh-so-gruseome fact that he poisoned his wife and b) shoots himself, thus depriving the police of valuable information about the spy ring. Rowe is a cretin.

Now, with a fully-restored memory and fully-restored to normal Greene levels of suicidal despair, Rowe returns to Anna, pledges his love to her but conceals the fact that Hilfe told him about his past; he is going to pretend to still be the happily post-bomb trauma amnesiac; and so he consciously commits to deliberately lying to her for the rest of their lives together. Oooh.

This is obviously meant to be some profound insight into the horror of human nature or the human predicament or something. More obviously, Greene has just justified a lifetime of infidelity to his wife. It is therefore entertaining to read in biographies of him that he was a philanderer on an epic scale, both with other people’s wive and countless prostitutes. His wife’s later admission that maybe he was not suited to married life counts as one of the geat understatements of literary history.

Obsessive thinking

His helpless, ineffectual characters are doomed to discover the same shallow ‘truths’ again and again, because the same depressive thoughts circulate obsessively in Greene’s mind throughout his life. This explains why the novels feel so static – why there is so little sense of progression or revelation.

Fear ends with Rowe as depressed and suicidal as at the beginning. The all-encompassing gloom is there from the start, the suicide-ometer levels bump up or down a bit during the text, but has returned to Deep Despair by the end, possibly intensified by the final flesh-creeping bollocks about entering into a lifetime of lies in order to ‘protect’ his beloved.

When you open a Greene text you enter the gloomy Greeneworld and continue in the same place of shadows and despair till you put it down. There is no psychological dynamism or progression because you remain in the same place.

An aspect of the ‘plot’ of a novel is that the characters somehow change. They learn things. They are altered. This doesn’t really happen in Greene. The whisky priest starts The Power and The Glory as hopeless as he ends it; Scobie is as miserably tied to his depressed wife at the start of The Heart of The Matter as he is at the end. Greene may cobble together ‘plots’ of a sort for his novels, but his grim worldview is so stifling and ubiquitous that the characters never really change. At most, they degrade.

The thriller’s compulsory reference to previous thrillers

Seems to be a law that all thrillers have to refer to the way their plot is turning out very like a thriller. In one of the many dreams or dream-like fugues which colour Rowe’s consciousness, he addresses his long-dead mother (Greene’s mother, also, died when he was young):

‘It sounds like a thriller, doesn’t it, but the thrillers are like life – more like life than you are, your lawn, your sandwiches, your pine tree. You used to laugh at the books Miss Savage read – about spies, and murders, and violence, and wild motor-car chases, but dear, that’s real life: it’s what we’ve all made of the world since you died. I’m your little Arthur who wouldn’t hurt a beetle and I’m a murderer too. The world has been remade by William Le Queuex.’ (p.65)

On his arse

When asked at the séance what he does, Rowe replies, ‘sit and think’. He has an independent income of £400 a year and so doesn’t need to work. This inanition accurately reflects the novelist’s own lack of involvement in the productive life of the world around him. He travelled, he seduced lots of women, he had famous acquaintances, but he spent most of his time sitting and thinking, mostly about how depressed he was, turning over and over the same obsessive negative thoughts endlessly.

Graham Greene’s novels aren’t novels, they are the compulsive symptoms of the author’s deep-rooted psychological illness.

Movie version

Hollywood was quick to pounce on the novel, gutted it for the melodrama about an insidious spy ring, and released a movie version, directed by Fritz Lang and starring Ray Milland, just one year after the book came out. The whole second part about Rowe losing his memory of killing his wife, the entire sequence about the private hospital in the country and all the patients and the murdered private detective and Johns killing Forester – all that is deleted to make a much simpler plotline revolving round Rowe falling for Anna and both of them exposing her spy brother. Given the continuous melodrama of the plot, the film is surprisingly static and inert. My wife fell asleep, and I struggled to keep awake.

Credit

‘The Ministry of Fear’ by Graham Greene was published in 1943 by William Heinemann. Page references are to the 1979 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

Graham Greene reviews

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by Simon on November 8, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel, Second World War, Thriller

Tagged 1943, Fritz Lang, Graham Greene, Ray Milland, Second World War, The Ministry of Fear, thriller

Posted by Simon on November 8, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/11/08/the-ministry-of-fear-graham-greene/

The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin (1943)

The Minister looked round with a very nice, rather practiced-looking smile and said, ‘These are the backroom boys, eh?’
(The Small Back Room, page 32)

Ever heard of the novelist Nigel Balchin (1908-70)? No, me neither. Came across this because it was adapted by Powell and Pressburger into a movie in 1949, starring David Farrar, a pretty much now-forgotten leading man of the time who also starred in Black Narcissus. As forgotten an actor as Balchin is a novelist.

Balchin’s biography

Balchin went to private school then Cambridge where he took a Natural Sciences degree before going to work for sweet manufacturers as a consultant, and where ‘he was intimately involved in the design and marketing of Black Magic chocolates and, he claimed, responsible for the success of the Aero and Kit Kat brands’ (Wikipedia). Sounds like early brand management.

Balchin wrote business books and screenplays besides his 15 or so novels. Another notable novel is Brightness Falls From the Air set during the Blitz. His first novel was published in 1934 which makes him roughly contemporary with Ambler (first book 1936) and Innes (first book 1937).

During the war he worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of Food and it is the crossover between research science and bureaucratic administration where this novel sits. It is not a war novel in the conventional sense. There is no action, no fighting, not even the Blitz, until the last 20 pages or so. Instead this novel is a riveting and completely convincing account of Whitehall gossiping and in-fighting. A wartime version of Yes, Minister. When the slimy civil servant Pinker tells the book’s hero that a new, rather notorious Minister is being appointed, he goes on to reassure him:

‘Oh, he’ll be alright. He’ll do as he’s told. In his last job I’m told they had a marvellous technique for dealing with him. They just used to tell him that he mustn’t bother with detail because his time was too valuable. The old boy ate it, and they got him to the point eventually where they only sent him about two papers a week. They called it his ration.’ (1968 Collin hardback edition, p.112)

The first 160 pages are all like this, conversations in which lots of clever people talk about how they are going to control and manipulate other clever people.

The Small Back Room

The book consists of a first-person narrative by one Sammy Rice, lead research scientist in a down-at-heel experimental arms laboratory in England during the Second World War. We’re thrown straight into its office politics and relations, his subordinates Tilly and Corporal Taylor, his boss Waring, the Old Man, Professor Mair, in charge. People tired, wearing patched up clothes, smoking vile pipes, working in a dingy back room, talking spiffing.

Ideas have to be vetted, reports written up, updates presented at the monthly meeting, everything turned out in a hurry for a surprise visit by the Minister. Almost all the ideas are rubbish. The other civil servants are permanently manoeuvring for power. Rice is continually involved in conversations he doesn’t quite understand as departmental politics and alliances shift around him. Through a series of encounters he realises his demanding boss is being slowly surrounded by enemies and lined up for a fall in which he is unwittingly manipulated into playing a part.

The tone is unhappy, veering from long-suffering sarcasm to bitter satire. At its lightest it is similar to the tone of Len Deighton’s early novels which are also much concerned with Whitehall bureaucracy.

The Minister looked round and said, ‘Well, there’s certainly a lot of most interesting work going on here, Mair. Most interesting.’ Just to show how fascinated he was he made for the door. (p.32)

I worked in a government ministry for a while and experienced exactly such visits from the gods where my bosses rushed to put out the shiny goods and fell over themselves to demonstrate our achievements to the Big Man, while we foot soldiers laughed up our sleeves. When Rice meets the mover and shaker Sir Lewis Easton the latter complains that different groups aren’t co-ordinated, everyone works in silos instead of being joined-up. This issue was still being ‘tackled’ in the three ministries and government agencies I worked for in the 2000s. 1943, 1963, 2003: nothing appears to change.

And was wartime research really carried out by the bored technicians, ignorant managers and mealy-mouthed civil servants portrayed in this book – how terrifying!

The focus of the Whitehall scenes is a disagreement about the viability of the Reeves gun. Balchin’s book conveys with searing accuracy how one project can become the focal point for multiple storms: it divides opinion within Rice’s little team, sets his managers at loggerheads, provides a stick for the Army to beat the government agency responsible with, and becomes the pretext for a power grab by the seasoned committee man Sir Lewis Easton.

Around the middle of the novel there is a masterful account of a committee meeting where the warring factions converge and in which the narrator, as the technician with the figures, is put right at the epicentre of the argument, to his acute embarrassment.

Eventually the inevitable happens and Rice’s superior, the head of the Research Section, is squeezed out to be replaced by a man hand-chosen by Sir Lewis, who will toe the corporate line, who will cancel most of the informal (and most interesting) work they’re doing, and limit their (previously uncoordinated) work to official commissions coming through official channels.

It went on like that for about twenty minutes. He’d no idea what things were, or who the people were, or what we were doing, or whether it mattered. All he knew was that he was going to stop pretty nearly the lot. (p.149)

Is there anyone who’s ever worked at a large organisation, who hasn’t had an experience like that?

Oedipus

A decade before the story starts the narrator had his foot amputated and replaced with an artificial one, but it hurts all the time which makes him irritable. First novel I can remember reading which is narrated by someone in constant low-level pain. Not a comfortable read. And it colours his troubled relationship with fiancée Susan, particularly at the end of each day when he has to decide whether to take painkillers, drown the pain in whisky, or stay sober and tetchy.

His battle with alcoholism has escalated into peculiar role-playing with his girlfriend: on their ‘problem’ evenings they play act to diffuse the situation. On this evening, when he’s really angry with her for being late and leaving him alone with the bottle of whisky, he storms off down the pub, and it’s pre-arranged that she turns up there too, pretending not to know him, pretending to chat him up. This enables him to pour out all his bitterness and anger against her, to her, in her playacting role as shoulder-to-cry-on. And when he’s finally spewed it all out, they go back to the flat and have sausages and mash with wartime cabbage.

These are odd scenes. They’d seem weird even in a modern novel but are positively surreal set against the posh chaps-with-bowler-hats scenes of daytime Whitehall. (This sense of two rather different types of novel existing side by side in the same book is compounded by the advent of a third theme in the surprisingly nailbiting climax, see below).

The story of an inadequate man

Around page 120 there’s a fascinating scene between Rice and his girlfriend where she really indicts his personality, systematically showing him that he always chickens out of big decisions and then blames everyone else. This is disarmingly the kind of conversation real people have in real life, nothing like the brisk, plan-making of the thrillers. Rice denies it but Susan gives him such powerful examples he’s forced to accept it and go to sleep wondering if he really is such a loser, someone who evades decisions, avoids confrontation, always does what’s easiest, and then moans and complains when things don’t turn out as he wants.

She said, ‘You really are hopeless, Sammy. You seem to go out of your way to make – to make yourself useless… You won’t face things – not real things that are difficult. You just work on little easy things, like whether you like people or have known them a long time or something. You just want to be safe. When it gets difficult you run away.’ (p.126)

Unexplosive finale

These two strands come together in the last thirty pages of this short novel. In among all his other calls and contacts, Rice had had a few conversations with one Captain Dick Stuart about a spate of explosions killing people who had picked up some kind of booby-trapped device. Rice met Stuart a couple of times and helped him with technical advice. At just the time that the big changeover comes between Rice’s easy-going old boss and the new, more by-the-book chap, Rice receives another call from Stuart who says they’ve found two examples of the device, unexploded on a Welsh beach, and asks for his help.

Relieved to be able to drop office politics and the criticism of his girlfriend, Rice takes the train to Wales only to be told, on arrival, that Stuart was blown up and killed trying to dismantle the first device. In a nerve-jangling final twenty pages to the novel, Rice follows Stuart’s notes as he dismantles the second device.

He is racked with nerves, becomes drenched in sweat, can barely see, and unscrews the tight fuse cap of the device with shaking hands. We feel the muscle in his thigh begin to twitch uncontrollably, the wire from the phone line around his neck brush for a second against the detonation terminals, we feel every inch of his fear.

And there, right at the climax of the novel, comes its great question: Rice spends an hour-and-a-half defusing the bomb, and, by a lucky chance, realises the location of the second fuse. By this time he is too weak and shaky to unscrew the second cap and it is done in a jiffy by the brave, strong, virile and whole-bodied lieutenant-colonel Strang, who has been overseeing the operation. Rice lies back and almost weeps. He had been determined to completely solve the problem or die in the attempt. He was at the same moment petrified it would explode and didn’t give a damn. But he ends up with the worst of both worlds, surviving but convinced he is a failure who ended up needing someone else to finish the job.

The question is: Is he right to feel this way? Is he a failure or a success? He is alive whereas Stuart is dead. He spotted the vital clue which Stuart missed. Using his method all similar bombs will be able to be defused. But he chooses to dwell on his physical weakness at the vital moment. Similarly, he retains his job where others have been fired. But he chooses to focus on how he missed earlier opportunities, offers from the oleaginous Pinker in a pub or in meetings with Sir Lewis Easton, where he could have manoeuvred himself into a better position. Sure he’s kept his job but with the grumpy resentment that he’s now being managed by idiots. Is he the self-pitying failure his girlfriend accuses him of being? Or is he actually reasonably successful but just twists everything so that it seems like failure in his tortured mind?

He returns to London completely demoralised and, on the last page, wanders into Hyde Park after dark at the end of his tether.

The moon was just going down behind a tree. I decided that when it disappeared I’d get up and go. I sat and watched it going and I knew there was no answer. If I’d been a bit sillier, or a bit more intelligent, or had more guts, or less guts, or had two feet or no feet, or been almost anything definite, it would have been easy. But as it was, I didn’t like what I was, and couldn’t be what I liked, and it would always be like that. (p.192)

This is an odd ending to an odd book. If it had stuck to the Whitehall merry-go-round theme and found some kind of fitting Yes, Ministerish ending to that plotline, it would have been one of the best books about office politics I’ve ever read. But it has this peculiar and insistent counter-theme which is almost tragic, or has a whiff of existentialism, concerning a man who is physically maimed and psychologically damaged and cannot be at ease with his own existence. That is the flavour which lingers when you close the book, and tends to eclipse the earlier, more humorous sections.

And then there is the nailbiting final sequence about bomb disposal, presumably a very early amateurish and more or less unsupervised bomb disposal, which also makes a powerful impression.

I think it’s the way it doesn’t really satisfactorily plumb the depths of any of these three subjects which has helped this novel sink into relative obscurity. But it’s a much more serious and searching piece of literature than the thrillers I’ve been reading recently, and well worth investigating.

Style

After the gripping narratives of Eric Ambler and Hammond Innes it’s a shock to engage with Balchin. There is little or no dynamic to the story until the (exceptional) last twenty pages. Up till then everyone is stuck in the ruts of their boring nine-to-five, circling and conspiring against each other in the best bureaucratic tradition.

And after the thriller writers’ stripped-down, practical prose and dialogue, it’s like stepping into another world to hear Balchin’s characters talk: He and everyone he interacts with speak in old hat, clichéd, posh banter. Old chap, old man, old boy, sort of thing, for the love of Mike, the professor’s an old friend of the Minister, bung ho, what ho, oh I was at school with him, good show, good man, first-rate, frightful rot, ra-ther, get the wind up, prang, on the q.t., cheerful sort of cove etc etc.

(Note: It’s consistent with the jolly Battle-of-Britain bantering style, that – according to Wikipedia – this novel helped popularise the terms ‘boffin’ and ‘backroom boys’. If I’d read it in its year of publication I’d have wondered – like the protagonist does – whether anyone in Whitehall actually wanted to win the War or whether they were all too busy with their vicious little departmental in-fighting.)

All this said, Balchin does have a nifty way with a phrase. Earlier sections, in a nightclub, in a pub, in the office, sustain an entertainingly detached, satirical, sarcastic tone and pithy phrase-making:

He sat for a bit and stared into the distance as though he had known it once but proposed to cut it now. (p.82)

Easton turned his head very slowly and gave me the flat hard stare that served him as an expression of anger, surprise, interest and amusement, depending on the context. (p.85)

The doctor was a rather fat chap, very bald, with a red face and brilliant blue eyes. He had a hearty slap-you-on-the-back manner which he switched on and off like a motorist dipping his headlights. (p.99)

Dramatis personae

Sammy Rice: the narrator: research scientist with an amputated foot and artificial replacement, an inferiority complex and a drink problem. In love with…
Susan: his fiancée, who has to put up with Rice’s moods, bad temper, struggle with the booze. Also secretary to…
Waring: his boss, not a scientist, a PR man in Civvy Street, blissfully unaware of the complicated Whitehall politics surrounding him and his team – or is he? Is he in fact just effortlessly competent at playing the game?
Tilly: co-worker and scientist, the numbers man, always punching stats into his primitive calculating machine.
Joe Marchant: victim of the new broom who comes in and sweeps him right out of the department.
Corporal Taylor: working on fuses but troubled by his foreign-looking floozy of a wife.
Corporal Ellis: working on micro photographs.
Professor Mair: ‘the Old Man’, in overall charge of the research unit, we see him perform at various departmental meetings, before being ousted.
Dick: Sammy’s younger brother, twice-decorated RAF pilot.
Pinker: creepy civil servant acquaintance who’s always pushing for inside info about the department and conspiring to get other civil servants sacked: he’s managed 14 to date.
Iles: arrogant bureaucrat Rice encounters at a nightclub who thinks the services don’t deserve the wonderful civil servants who provide for them.
Sir Lewis Easton: chair of National Scientific Council. Extremely experienced political player ie slippery fish. Manages to get Mair ousted and replaced with his appointee, Brine, who knows absolutely nothing about their work.
Knollys: a pre-War friend working in a different lab, who has a whole sub-plot to himself exemplifying the utter absurdity of Whitehall life.
Hereward: Knollys’ boss who only signs off on ideas he’s persuaded he thought of himself.

The movie

Adapted into a movie by the famous British film-making team of Powell and Pressburger in 1949. Balchin himself worked on the script. It is long and pretty faithful to the novel but very wooden and stilted –though just about worth watching for the fine array of British character actors (Jack Hawkins, Michael Gough, Cyril Cusack, Geoffrey Keen, Robert Morley, Patrick Macnee and a very young Bryan Forbes).

Surprisingly, given P&P’s reputation for oddity and the involvement of the author, they change the ending: the novel’s puzzled irresolute inconclusion is transformed into a happy ending: Rice defuses the bomb all by himself, returns to London feeling like a hero, on the back of this success is offered a job running his own department, and his beautiful wife rushes into his arms. The perennial cowardice of film makers.

It tells you a lot about the standards of the day that it was nominated for a 1950 BAFTA Award as ‘Best British Film’. I can’t find the film on YouTube but you can listen to an antique BBC radio adaptation.

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