All posts tagged 1966

J.G. Ballard’s literary experimentalism

The most obvious thing about Ballard’s novels and short stories is that, although they have a hallucinatory intensity and routinely describe extreme mental states and characters who descend into psychosis and insanity, the outward form of them is for the most part extremely conservative.

Ballard’s prose style occasionally uses unexpected phraseology but is, at its heart, pukka – an eminently correct, professional, middle-class English voice. In other words, the searing weirdness of many of Ballard’s stories is conveyed in a disconcertingly respectable prose style.

It is, therefore, something of a surprise to learn that Ballard had a long-running interest in quite radical literary experimentation, and it’s useful to be aware of his efforts in this field because they inform your reading of the earlier and mid-period stories and novels.

This blog post is a brief overview of the most notable of Ballard’s literary experiments. (What follows is heavily indebted to a number of online articles which are referenced at the bottom.)

Project for a new novel (1958)

In the late 1950s Ballard was working on the journal of the Chemical Society in London and was much taken with the juxtaposition of snazzy layout and scientific content in related American magazines, such as Chemical and Engineering News.

He had the idea of cutting up headlines and text from it and other scientific magazines like it, in order to create collages packed with scientific words and phrases arranged in surreal combinations:

Letters, words and sentence fragments are pasted onto backing sheets with glue. Their design visually references everyday media, with headlines, body text and double-page spreads suggesting a magazine layout. Originally Ballard planned to display the work on billboards, as if it was a public advertisement.

In the end Ballard created four collage works, which became famous among his friends and close colleagues, and which are now in the possession of the British Library who curate Ballard’s collected notes and manuscripts.

One of the four collages Ballard made for his Project for New Novel. Note the phrase Mr F is Mr F, which became the title of a short story, and the names Coma, Kline and Xero, given to characters who turn up in the novel The Atrocity Exhibition

Ballard himself described the Project as:

Sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design, so making obsolete the need for a traditional text except for virtually decorative purposes.

I liked the stylish typography. I also like the scientific content, and used stories to provide the text of my novel. Curiously enough, far from being meaningless, the science news stories somehow become fictionalised by the headings around them.

It was a collage of things clipped from journals like Chemical Engineering News, the American Chemical Society’s journal – I used them a lot because I liked the typeface. I wanted to publish a novel that looked like that, you see – hundreds of pages of that sort of thing. Get away from text altogether – just headlines!

Many of the names, phrases and concerns which first appeared in the Project have resurfaced over the years, particularly the characters Coma, Kline and Xero who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition, Coma also cropping up in the classic short story The Voices of Time, and phrases such as ‘the terminal beach’ and ‘Mr F is Mr F’, both of which became the titles of short stories.

The four collages can also be seen in the background of a photograph of Ballard taken in 1960 in his garden at Shepperton, which has become a talisman for true Ballardians. The full text of Project for a New Novel was finally published 20 years after it was created, in New Worlds magazine No. 213, in 1978.

J.G. Ballard in front of his abandoned billboard novel, 1960. Photo: Mary Ballard

Advertisers Announcements (1967-71)

Between 1967 and 1971 Ballard produced five Advertisers Announcements. As he explained in an interview:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser.

Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc.

To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit, of which I was and still am Prose Editor. I would liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me…

The five ads are:

1. Homage to Claire Churchill

Homage to Claire Churchill (1967)

Claire was his girlfriend and this a pretty straightforward happy photo of her. There’s no strapline or product logo as you’d expect in a real advert. Instead there’s a dense paragraph of text at the bottom, quoting a typical paragraph from his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition, indeed the ad was published in Ambit in July 1967 and it borrows copy directly from ‘The Death Module’, simultaneously published in New Worlds and later re-named ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’ in The Atrocity Exhibition.

2. Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

The Angle Between two Walls (1967)

This is a still from the art film Alone by American filmmaker Steve Dwoskin, which records a woman masturbating, shot from floor level and pointing up between her legs to show her hand as she touches herself.

What has this got to do with the angle between walls? Well, the correlation of sex and the angles of walls and buildings is explained in The Atrocity Exhibition by the book’s psychiatrist Dr Nathan. He explains that the book’s central protagonists has moved so far beyond conventional sex that he has excavated down to the fundamental paradigm of the junction – an obsession with how entities meet and combine of which human sex is just a small sub-set.

Hence the character’s obsession with the walls of the apartments and bedrooms he finds himself in, and with modern architecture like the (then new) Hilton Hotel, and the curving ramps and inclined planes of the new concrete multi-story car parks. These are all aspects of the modern world’s obsession with junctions and angles and the meeting points of lines and planes. As such they are visual correlatives of the strange angles and postures adopted by the human animal when it has sex.

3. A Neural Interval

A Neural Interval (1968)

This is a photo from a 1960s bondage magazine. It’s not particularly sexy, is it? Because of the sea in the background I initially thought the subject was a swimmer or diver with cumbersome kit photo-collaged on top of her. But no, this really is a supposedly sexy photo of bondage gear circa 1968.

The adjective ‘neural’ crops up a lot in late-60s Ballard, and the phrase ‘neural interval’ suggests a stoppage in time, or at least a stoppage of stimuli to the senses. It’s not immediately clear how this is related to a woman wearing bondage gear in a boat, although possibly the very disjunction between the words and the image are precisely its point.

4. Placental Insufficiency

A Placental Insufficiency (1970)

Ballard appropriates a striking photo by American photographer Les Krims. I thought that some or all of it must have been collaged, but apparently this woman looked like that and was happy to pose with a hunting rifle. Those Yanks, eh.

By this stage, after four ads, I think two or three things are obvious.

1. Women The photos are all of women, sexy or naked women in 3 out of 4. If Ballard is seeking to deconstruct the glib imagery of advertising, featuring naked women is a funny way of going about it. Still, it was 1967 or 68, I suppose when plenty of women’s liberationists thought that burning their bras and stripping naked would abolish shame, embarrassment and the male gaze.

2. America For someone supposedly engaged in critiquing the modern world, deconstructing consumer capitalism, revealing the perverse fetishism which underlies the commercial packaging of homogenised sexuality etc etc, Ballard, like so many rebels and revolutionaries of his era, was strongly attracted to the epicentre of world capitalism, America, and inclined to bow the knee to every type of American consumer product, including Hollywood film actresses and the long, cool, flash American cars which feature in so much of his mid-period fiction (like the heavy American Lincoln Continental driven by Dr Robert Vaughan, the demented exponent of car crash fetishism in Crash).

3. Texts But the really obvious thing about them is that, although the images are striking, the real force of the thing comes from the texts. Ballard not only doesn’t have the courage to leave the images to stand alone, or to give them brief and clever or satirical straplines: each one has to have quite lengthy and demanding avant-garde text stapled onto them.

5. Venus Smiles

Venus Smiles (1970)

Ballard himself took this photo of his partner Claire Churchill as she was contorting herself to get into a pair of jeans after a visit to the beach, hence the flecks of seaweed and sand sticking to her white skin.

This is the most interesting of the photos because of the way it’s been turned on its side, because of the big black bush between her legs, and the way the detritus clings to her skin like flies or enlarged bacilli. And the superimposed text, which starts off with characteristic Ballard obsessions with depersonalisation, ends up being unexpectedly sweet.

Conclusion

These pictures of five women, four of them naked, tend to confirm the suspicion that the super-imposed text might be clever but this arty contrivance – like so many attempts at avant-garde art – pales into insignificance next to the immense primal urge of male voyeurism.

Condensed novels and The Atrocity Exhibition

Knowing about the cut-and-paste novel idea, and having seen the Alternative Ads, it’s a lot easier to understand why Ballard originally wanted to have The Atrocity Exhibition done as a book of collage illustrations.

I originally wanted a large-format book, printed by photo-offset, in which I would produce the artwork – a lot of collages, material taken from medical documents and medical photographs, crashing cars and all that sort of iconography.

Alas, the practicalities of publishing intervened, and Ballard amended the idea to something related but different.

The final version of The Atrocity Exhibition is his most accessible piece of experimentalism because it was published as a mass market paperback. Superficially the book is divided into fifteen short ‘chapters’ but as soon as you start reading them you realise that none of them make sense in themselves, and they certainly don’t add up to a consistent narrative in the usual way of a novel.

Instead, each chapter is what Ballard described as a ‘condensed’ novel – clips and excerpts, moments of time, brief gestures and fragments of dialogue cut and pasted together. The reader has to sort out what is going on and how the fragments are connected, in his or her own mind.

Not only that, but each ‘chapter’ or ‘condensed novel’ references the same fragments, actions and images, repeated but in distorted form. At the most obvious level, the same ‘characters’ recur in consecutive sections – Dr Nathan, Catherine Austen, Karen Novotny – but there is also a stray meeting between two characters at some kind of formal conference or symposium which is re-enacted in each chapter, there is the repeated enactment of car crashes or of a helicopter crash which is its cognate; the male characters each display obsessive behaviour, such as Talbot assembling some kind of modernist sculpture on the roof or outlining furniture in an apartment with chalk; and each chapter contains a numbered list, although the items on the list change from chapter to chapter and so does the ostensible list creator. And so on.

The point is that The Atrocity Exhibition makes a lot more sense if you don’t come to it cold, as an unexpected freak show, but see it as a logical development and extension of Ballard’s long-running interest in fragments, collage and non-narrative.

Crashed Cars exhibition (1970)

In April 1970 Ballard staged an exhibition titled Crashed Cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London.

1. In the post-war period cars became a symbol of consumer empowerment and glamour. Cars were promoted in films and adverts and car ownership rocketed. However, so did the incidence of car crashes, with a number featuring high-profile fatalities – James Dean (1955), Albert Camus (1960), Jayne Mansfield (1967) (which, obviously, continued after the exhibition and down to our day – Marc Bolan (1977), Grace Kelly (1982), Princess Diana (1997)).

2. And after all, a car crash is the centrepiece of the closing song on the decade’s keystone album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, when John Lennon sings:

I read the news today, oh boy
About a lucky man who made the grade
And though the news was rather sad
Well, I just had to laugh
I saw the photograph

He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights had changed
A crowd of people stood and stared
They’d seen his face before
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords

3. A quick search of the internet reveals that, as it happens, the highest figure for road traffic-related deaths during peacetime was 7,985 in 1966, the year before the Beatles album (by comparison, 1,782 people were killed in road accidents in 2018.)

So Ballard wasn’t being all that eccentric to envision a) the car as a key symbol of the twentieth century, and b) the mystique about car crashes – the way they had killed a number of A-list celebrities, the way people were gruesomely fascinated by them (‘Well, I just had to laugh, I saw the photograph’) – as telling us something profound and unsettling about our car-mad culture.

And so he staged an exhibition of crashed cars. Actually, there were only three car wrecks in the exhibition and – disappointingly – no photos of the event appear to have survived. Some of the visitors to the gallery vandalised the wrecks with wine, paint and urine, confirming Ballard’s belief that the growing ‘technological landscape’ was influencing human behaviour and social relationships and not in a good way.

Alternatively, they might just have been getting into the spirit of anarchic 1960s ‘happenings’.

To me Ballard’s Crash exhibition hardly seems experimental at all. It is well known that people stop to stare at car crashes and that traffic slows right down on motorways as people slowly pass the scenes of smashes. I’ve done it myself.

This is because there really is something deeply fascinating about the pathology of car crashes and something weirdly compelling about the way that objects which are promoted as smooth and curved and aerodynamically perfect are transformed into angular nests of smashed windscreens and random spikes of metal jutting out. For the last few days I’ve walked past a car parked near my work, the right half of whose bonnet and wings are buckled up and outwards like the carapaces of an enormous beetle.

Since 1970 we’ve had precisely 50 years during which all kinds of objects from the real world have been situated in galleries for our entertainment and mystification. A few years ago I came across a display at Tate Modern of a set of engine blocks from cars which had been blown up by suicide bombers in the Middle East, considered as works of art. No-one bats an eyelid at things like that any more.

So considering the exhibition as an investigation of just what it is that fascinates us about car crashes, and the suggestion that they have a strange and eerie beauty of their own, doesn’t strike me as at all weird. In fact it’s surprising that it took someone so long to come up with it.

Traditionally, the significance of the exhibition is that Ballard went on to explore the mystique and pathology of car crashes in the ‘controversial’ novel Crash (1973), although the weirdness of our obsessive car culture is also the subject of the less well-known novel Concrete Island which immediately followed it (1974). But I’m making the point that the Crash exhibition was part of a continuum of literary and artistic experiments which Ballard undertook in the first half of his career.

Practical conclusion

In the 1950s and 60s Ballard created more collages, now lost. I imagine these, like the New Project and the Advertisers Announcements were fun to make and show friends, and maybe persuade a gallery to display for a while… But in the end your agent, your wife and your publisher want standardised texts which they can publish, market and sell. Which is what, after the mid-1970s, Ballard produced in abundance.

References

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by Simon on January 30, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 30, 2020

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Designed in Cuba: Cold War Graphics @ the House of Illustration

Fidel Castro’s revolutionary 26th of July Movement and its allies defeated the military dictatorship of Cuban President Fulgencio Batista in January 1959. The new revolutionary government enacted a wide array of new domestic laws and policies, but Castro always saw the revolution in Cuba as just the beginning of the liberation of the oppressed masses in not just Latin America but war-torn Africa and around the world, wherever the poor and downtrodden were oppressed by colonial or neo-colonial masters.

OSPAAAL

And so the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America (in Spanish the Organización de Solidaridad con los Pueblos de Asia, África y América Latina – abbreviated to OSPAAAL) was set up to fight globalisation, imperialism, neoliberalism and defend human rights, in Havana, in January 1966, after the Tricontinental Conference, a meeting of over 500 delegates and 200 observers from over 82 countries.

One of the first things the organisation did was establish a magazine to publicise its causes and titled Tricontinental. From 1966 into the 1990s more than fifty designers working in Havana produced hundreds of posters and editions of the magazine which expressed solidarity with the U.S.A.’s Black Panther Party, condemned apartheid in South Africa and the Vietnam War, and celebrated Latin America’s revolutionary icons, as well as criticising the ongoing existence of U.S. military bases in Guantanamo Bay, calling for the reunification of North and South Korea and many other radical causes.

The exhibition includes some 33 of the total of 50 or so artists and designers who worked for OSPAAAL, including leading lights such as Alfredo Rostgaard, Helena Serrano, Rafael Enríquez and Gladys Acosta Ávila.

Unlike artists in the Soviet bloc the OSPAAAL designers weren’t shackled by the deeply conservative doctrine of Socialist Realism, but were free to pick and choose from all the best streams of current art, including Pop Art and psychedelia. They also co-opted images and ideas from capitalist adverts into what they called ‘anti-ads’.

The plan was for the posters to be stapled into copies of Tricontinental, and so distributed around the world. Because the posters were intended to be internationalist they had to use strong primal languages or find inventive ways of conveying their message. If any writing was used it was generally in the three major languages of Spanish, English, French, and sometimes Arabic.

By the mid-1980s heavy trade embargos and sanctions imposed by American had created such shortages that it ultimately forced the organization out of production. By that time approximately 326 OSPAAAL posters had been produced.

Altogether it’s estimated that some nine million OPSAAAL posters were distributed around the developing world. At its peak the magazine had more than 100,000 subscribers, mostly students. At one time, it was common for posters from issues of Tricontinental to be put up on the walls of student community centres.

This exhibition brings together 170 works (100 posters and 70 magazines) produced by 33 OSPAAAL designers, created between 1965 and 1992, which are not only striking and dramatic art works in their own right but shed unexpected insights onto the long history of the Cold War.

The Mike Stanfield Collection

While originally distributed freely in editions of thousands, OSPAAAL posters and magazines are now rare and highly sought-after. The works in the exhibition are all drawn from a single UK private collection – The Mike Stanfield Collection, the largest collection of OSPAAAL material in the world, gathered by British collector Mike Stanfield over a 25-year period. Every work in the exhibition is drawn from his collection.

Posters

The poster designers used every trick in the toolbox of capitalist advertising plus a lot more they invented. The diversity and inventiveness of approaches is astonishing. Obviously the cause, the fundamental political aim of the posters, was deadly serious – but this didn’t stop them using scathing satire to make their points.

And above all they didn’t limit themselves to one aesthetic but seized an extraordinary freedom to experiment, with the result that you see everything from bold typography and photomontage to psychedelic colours and pop culture-inspired graphics, iconic modern imagery or ancient native objects pressed into service, silhouettes, psychedelic reverberating, cartoons and biting satire.

Cuba

The first edition of Tricontinental included an article by Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and a folded poster by Alfredo Rostgard, thus inaugurating its two-pronged approach to radical propaganda: text for those who could read, stirring images for those who couldn’t.

Che Guevara (1969) © Alfredo G. Rostgaard, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

It’s almost too obvious to point out but, in the Soviet bloc, the canon of revolutionary heroes from Marx through Lenin, Stalin on down, were all portrayed in real, or heroically socialist realist style. It takes a moment’s reflection to realise how utterly unlike that dull stifling tradition the OPSAAAL images are, freely taking from contemporary pop and op art and psychedelic art.

Africa

The designers were tasked with distilling complex anti-colonial conflicts down into simple but striking images, symbols which would require little or no explanation. This image of African women in traditional costume and carrying their babies in baby-carriers is made vivid and powerful by the addition of the semi-automatic rifles slung over their other shoulders.

The all-consuming nature of the struggle, the need to balance ordinary life with the struggle, the empowered role of women in the struggle, and the lack of facial features indicating that these are just two out of millions and millions anonymous fighters across the continent, are all brilliantly conveyed.

After Emory Douglas (1968) © Lízaro Abreu Padron, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Apartheid

Apartheid was a sore on the conscience of the world throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Many of the OPSAAAL posters were simple images of oppression. This is unusual in being a more narrative image, with its four pictures showing the progressive, and inevitable, collapse of the repressive regime. Note the use of the four cardinal languages, Spanish, English, French and Arabic.

Day of Solidarity with the Struggle of the People of South Africa (1974) Olivio Martinez Viera, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Asia

The Vietnam War came to symbolise neo-imperialist Western super-violence against nationalist independence struggles and crystallised America’s reputation as the great enemy of freedom for many Third World countries.

This clever poster shows the word Saigon slowly morphing from being dominated by the Stars and Stripes to bearing the flag of the communist North, suggesting that the rebels would win in the end. As they did.

Saigon, International Week of Solidarity with Vietnam (1970) © Rene Mederos Pazos, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Anti-America

Cuba is just 90 miles from the American mainland.

From the moment Castro’s revolution succeeded, the Americans tried to overthrow it. In 1961 they launched the embarrassing Bay of Pigs invasion which ended in humiliation, but continued making intermittent attempts to assassinate Castro, as well as imposing crippling sanctions on its tiny neighbour.

In response Cuba helped to focus the world’s attention on America as the heartland of neo-colonial oppression. Some of the most powerful images in the exhibition distort and subvert imagery and symbols central to American culture, such as the Great Seal, the Bald Eagle, the Statue of Liberty or, as here, Uncle Sam himself, zapped by the power of the World Revolution.

World Solidarity with the Cuban Revolution (1980) © Victor Manuel Navarrete, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Using native cultural heritage

As a way into contemporary liberation struggles in Latin America, Asia or the Far East, some OPSAAAL designers had the idea of taking traditional indigenous artefacts and giving them a modern spin, mostly putting a machine gun in their hands. Some of these aboriginal peoples also represented the very first resisters to the colonial oppression which their distant descendants were now fighting against.

This approach tapped into nationalist feelings in the respective countries, and also made contemporary protesters feel, or realise, that they were in fact part of a long, long lineage of resistance and protest. The ten or so images which used old imagery like this were among my favourites.

Guatemala (1968) © Olivio Martinez Viera, OSPAAAL. The Mike Stanfield Collection

Magazine covers

To some extent the designers’ style was dictated by a shortage of materials, including good quality paper and printing ink, embargoed by the United States. This encouraged the designers to eschew subtlety in shade and contour and favour high-contrast photography and large areas of clearly defined colour. Tricontinental’s often starkly simple covers were printed in four colours by offset lithography.

Anti-America

Although little Cuba suffered badly from American sanctions, during the 60s and 70s there were many radical American supporters of the revolution. The San Francisco-based People’s Press published a North American edition if Tricontinental, and images created by Emory Douglas for the Black Panther Party newspaper were adapted for use by OPSAAAL.

There are posters here supporting the imprisoned black activist Angela Carter, as well as memorials for various black radicals shot or imprisoned in America. But in a way, it was the imaginative symbols of American oppression which make the most impact.

Tricontinental magazine 33

Anti-apartheid

Apartheid was in force in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. It was only the most extreme version of institutionalised white racism, which also included the segregation laws in America, so vehemently protested by the Civil Rights Movement.

For me the OPSAAAL posters and Tricontinental cover art are at their best when they embody a really strong design idea, as in this simple but scathing image, a piece of Pop Art collage used to withering effect.

Tricontinental 76

Thoughts

1. Taken together they make up a fascinating review of visual styles and approaches available to political poster makers in the late 60s and 70s. In many ways the magazine covers are even more inventive and biting than the posters. Lots and lots of them have a really strong visual and intellectual impact, like the image – blown up, here, into a wall-sized hanging – of an American astronaut reaching out to the moon while standing on the backs of two prone African Americans.

2. It’s a reminder of just how much conflict there was around in the world in the 1970s when I grew up, with military dictatorships running most of South America, with colonialist regimes and apartheid South Africa still repressing millions of Africans, while millions of others were caught up in brutal civil wars, and then topping everything the nightmare of Vietnam which was promptly followed by the living hell of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

When you factor in that half of Europe was under Communist tyranny and there was an endless diet of scares about whether this or that incident might trigger World War Three, the world I grew up in seemed a much more violent and dangerous place than it does today.

3. This is embodied in the way there are so many guns in the posters. Almost all the native artefacts-updated ones simply put guns in the hands of tribal gods. In the last room in particular, almost every poster seemed to feature a man or woman or sometimes an inanimate object, holding a sub-machinegun. Stepping back from the rights and wrongs of the causes, the final room in particular gave me a claustrophobic sense of violence and fighting going on in every part of the world.

That’s maybe the main feeling the exhibition gave to me, but other visitors will find their own threads and meanings. Above all I defy you not to be thrilled by the sheer inventiveness and exuberance of so many of the works on display.

Installation view of Designed in Cuba at the House of Illustration. Photo by Paul Grover

And it’s worth pointing out that the curators of the exhibition flew to Cuba specially to interview the surviving OPSAAAL designers and that the exhibition includes the resulting video, in which leading designers such as Alfredo Rostgaard, Rafael Enríquez and Gladys Acosta Ávila explain at length their motivation and approach, the design ideas and technical constraints, which lay behind the Tricontinental phenomenon.

This is another brilliantly conceived and beautifully laid out exhibition from the House of Illustration.

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by Simon on January 1, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 1, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/01/designed-in-cuba-cold-war-graphics-house-of-illustration/

Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin (1966)

This was Le Guin’s second published novel and her modus operandi was well established:

  1. Imagine a planet with a set of really unique or distinctive circumstances
  2. Work out in great detail the implications for the kind of intelligent life forms which would inhabit said planet
  3. Then, almost as an afterthought, devise a ‘plot’ or series of events, often fairly stereotyped or clichéd, whose real function is to help us explore – and allow Le Guin to explain – the ramifications and consequences of the strange world she has conceived

The premise

Thus – Planet of Exile is set on the planet Werel and the key facts about it are astronomical:

  1. Werel has a moon, and Werel and its moon orbit around each other, taking four hundred days to complete each ‘moonphase’.
  2. Together this orbiting couple circle their sun – known as Eltanin to the locals but Gamma Draconis to outsiders – in sixty moonphases – in other words, 24,000 days! (p.132)

Thus a ‘year’ – and one cycle through the traditional seasons – for the inhabitants of Werel, takes 65.75 earth years – in effect, one human lifetime.

So most inhabitants of Werel expect to experience just one spring, one summer, one autumn and one winter during their lives, and the seasonal changes we take for granted happening relatively quickly on earth (leaves turning brown and falling, it getting colder and starting to snow) last for years and years on Werel. With the result that it has flora and fauna, but they all behave in eerily different ways, ways which crop up as disconcerting details throughout the story. And the entire experience of life for the humans which inhabit Werel are utterly different from ours.

Background to the story

The farborn Over ten generations ago, colonists came from earth by spaceship to settle on Werel. To be precise, we are told on page 134 that it is the 391st day, of the 45th moonphase of the Tenth Local Year of the colony. I calculate this to be nine local years (216,000 days) + 44 complete moonphases (17,600 days) + 391 days = 233,991 days / 365 = 641 years since the colonists arrived on the planet (p.134).

They built a city they named Landin and a few others along the coast (one named Atlantika is mentioned a few times). Soon after the original settlement, however, the spaceships and some of the colonists were called away to deal with the threat of conflict with the Enemy – presumably the same extra-galactic Enemy referred to in Rocannon’s World – and since that date there has been no contact whatsoever with the mother planet.

Over this long epoch, the colonist population has been steadily declining in number due to miscarriages and infertility, and the colonists have slowly lost interest in much of the knowledge their books contain. They are very slowly reverting to barbarity. They can still read but no longer understand many of the references in the books they have carefully treasured since the Founding. As a small example, they have a good and effective doctor (Wattock) but in a scene late in the book it is made clear that, although he has read about bacteria and bacterial infections, he doesn’t actually believe in them (p.205).

The Arkatevarans The colonists live among a native population which is much more primitive, who they call ‘hilfs’ (which we learn stands for Highly Intelligent Lift Forms, p.148). The natives refer to themselves as Arkatevarans and live in what sound like mud huts, paint themselves with tribal markings, smoke a kind of marijuana, carry out primitive tribal dances and so on. Later on we learn that, much to some farborns’ contempt, the Arkatevarans have still failed to invent the wheel.

The story concerns a particular group of natives who live in a settlement they call Tevar, and so are referred to as the Tevarans. They are led by a wise, old, wilful, obstinate survivor named Wold. The Tevarans call the colonists the ‘farborn’, distrust and dislike them. They differ in a host of small ways, the oddest being that the farborn are unafraid to look directly at someone they’re talking to, while the Tevarans have a taboo about this, and always avert their gaze.

Another difference is that the colonists appear all to be black. Half a dozen passages refer explicitly to their black skin – not dark skin – black (pp.147, 156, 203, 205, 206).

Lead protagonists in later novels are also of African descent. Without some biographical reference or explicit statement, it’s difficult to know whether this represents an explicitly political move on Le Guin’s part – as a liberal academic, no doubt the was brought up to support the Civil Rights movement etc – or is part of the general science fiction strategy of ‘othering’ or making strange, comparable to the way all of her characters in all her books have made up and exotic-sounding names.

The story

What about the plot, I hear you ask. Well, the story opens as news comes to both Tevar and Landin that the Gaal are coming.

The Gaal? Yes, the Gaal are native tribes who live in the remote North but migrate south during the harsh Werel winter. Once a Werel year i.e. once in the average lifetime of our characters, the southerners have to confront this annual migration, which they call The Southing.

But whereas Wold is confident that the Tevarans have prepared and are ready for the Gaal incursion, the leader of the farborn colonists, Jakob Agat Alterra, thinks otherwise. He has heard from farborn messengers they sent out, that this year the Gaal have organised their various tribes into one massive horde and are not skirting the inhabited cities as they did in previous years, but are systematically besieging, defeating and occupying them.

So at the core of the story is going to be: Can the Tevarans and the farborn bury their differences and work together in order to prepare for the onslaught of the approaching barbarians?

As garnish to the tale, there is a burgeoning romance between Rolery, a young Tevaran woman, and Jakob Agat Alterra, leader of the farborn. They first meet when she has whimsically ventured out onto the huge mudflats by the coast, marvelling at the extraordinary causeway build on arches in the Former Times, which runs out to the black island which hosts some kind of bizarre architectural or artistic structure.

Ace paperback edition of Planet of Exile, showing one of the Tevarans admiring the long, strange causeway across the dry sand out to the weird island

As she approaches the cliffs of the island she suddenly hears someone shouting in her head to run towards the cliffs. Confused, she does so and she is scooped up into Alterra’s strong arms just as the 30-foot tidal surge comes rushing in over the mudflats. He has saved her life. The cynical reader suspects this will lead to kissing and maybe worse and, ten or so page later, it does just that. After going their ways back to their respective peoples, they bump into each other again in the forest as night is falling and go to one of the remote hunting hides where… they consummate their love.

Alliance – love – ambush

Next day Agat is back at the Tevaran ‘city’ where he agrees with canny old Wold that the two peoples should form an alliance. They agree a plan: next day a Tevaran war party led by the biggest and strongest of Wold’s sons, Umaksuman, will head north and rendezvous with as many men as the farborn can spare – about 300 young and fit enough to fight – and form a common front to be ready to confront the supposed Gaal horde.

But the plan goes belly up within hours because that evening, against his better judgement, as Agat is making his way through the dense forest to meet Rolery for another night of passion in their secret hideaway, he is ambushed by a posse of Tevarans. These young braves are led by one of Wold’s many grandsons, Ukwet, who is furious that Agat is consorting with a woman from their Kin group without their permission. They beat him to the ground and are heartily kicking him in the ribs and – we learn later – Ukwet had a knife and was ready to castrate Agat, when Umaksuman bursts in on the scene and stops them.

Le Guin describes the incident from Agat’s point of view, giving his subjective feelings, as the blows rain down on him, wanting to curl up deep into the warm mud and hide. Hours later he recovers consciousness, sort of, and it is a beguiling thread in the plot that Agat is capable of mind-speech i.e. telepathy. We are shown a number of his colleagues back in Landin suddenly overcome with unease, because he is ‘sending’ even though too damaged to make the effort to put his messages into words. But Rolery demonstrates the deep bond they have, by receiving the telepathic message, and going out into the forest, discovering him badly beaten and – she initially thinks he’s dead – before she rigs up a travois and drags him back to Landin.

Here, safe in bed and tended by the womenfolk, the badly battered Agat is told that the alliance broke down before it got started. The Tevarans refuse to rendezvous; all his own people, the farborn, would prefer to attack the Tevarans rather than fight the common foe.

The attack on Tevar

Back in Tevar we are shown the scene where headstrong Ukwet calls a tribal assembly and stands up for the tribe’s honour re. Rolery, and accuses Umaksuman of being a coward for stopping them gelding Agat. The confrontation quickly spirals out of control into a duel, while old Wold realises his time is over, he is no longer leader, and shuffles back to the big wooden communal hut where he huddles into the fire among the old women and babbling children.

I found the character of Wold very persuasive and a lot more appealing than the two heterosexual leads, Agat and Rolery who have the same kind of heterosexual love affair that I’ve read in thousands of novels or watched in millions of movies. By contrast, going inside the mind of an ancient, battered and increasingly senile leader of a primitive tribe was a genuinely novel experience, and Le Guin does it very very well, because she makes him wry and funny as well as old and wise.

When the women being him the decapitated body of Ukwet he isn’t surprised. Umaksuman – who killed him in the duel we didn’t see – is send into exile. Wold realises the city is doomed.

Next day the Gaal horde comes into sight and, sure enough, it is nothing like Wold’s experience of one long Werel Year (i.e. 65 earth years) ago. It is a vast mass of humanity, 30, 40, 50,000 men women and children swarming over the north hills and pouring into the valley. Soon enough the warriors come and there’s a vivid and exciting description of the tribal settlement being besieged then broken into, with fighting through the narrow alleys between thatched huts, mostly – again – seen from the eyes of ancient Wold, who manages to spear one of the attacking Gaal, but then retreats to his leader’s hut, ready to die.

However, we cut to Agat, patched up with bandages, and still a few aching wounds and bruises, but nonetheless up in the hills overlooking the vast tide of humanity and the siege and invasion of Tevar, with a small band of farborn fighters. Agat is surprised when out of the foliage emerges huge strong Umaksuman, looking the worse for having to live and forage in the hills. Quickly they establish a warrior-rapport and Umaksuman lustily agrees to join Agat’s men. They’re planning to swoop down into Tevar, take the Gaan by surprise and sweep through the settlement rescuing what women and children they can.

And this they do in another thrillingly described battle-cum-raid scene, in which they rescue women and children and old Wold finds himself picked up and carried out the burning village.

Later, safely in Landin, Agat and the others of the Council discuss next steps and they decide to dispatch all the Tevarans, along with Wold and their own women and children, along the mysterious Causeway to the looming Stack island. The drawbridge can be withdrawn, there’s a spring/fresh water, and provisions to sit out a siege.

Winter is coming

Now the whole reason the Gaal are heading south is because winter is coming. That phrase ring a bell? It is, of course, a central theme George R.R. Martin’s epic series of novels, Game of Thrones, set in a world which also experiences the seasons as extremely long, where ‘winter’ can last several years or even an entire generation, and where the coming of winter threatens the invasion of the north by the White Wanderers. I imagine tens of thousands of fantasy fans have pointed out the similarity between Game and this book. And Le Guin clearly has an affinity for winter, for snow and ice and cold – the award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a planet its discoverers nickname Winter, and the core of the narrative is a gruelling description of an eighty-day trek over snowy mountains up onto storm-swept glaciers.

Anyway, the point is that, as the Gaal arrive and the siege of Landin commences, so falls the first snow of winter which quickly turns into snowstorms and blizzards.

Siege of Landin

Sure enough, Gaan warriors invest Landin and the siege begins amid the first heavy falls of snow. Like everything else in the book, I found the description of the five-day siege gripping and plausible. On successive days the attackers try various weak points, manage to scale an undefended part of all and open a gate triggering a fierce fight to repel them, forcing the defenders to retreat to the central square whose four entrances can themselves be closed and barred.

As the fighters defend, the women and boys drag provisions or heavy stones or planks to the fronts to create barricades or to arm the catapults used in the early stages of the battle. Beaten back into the square, Rolery joins the nurses in the converted Records Room of the Old Hall, tending the never-ending stream of wounded who are brought back from the front, working alongside irritable but effective Doctor Wattock.

Throughout very heavy snowstorms blanket the city, blinding attackers and defenders alike giving rise to thrilling scenes where figures loom out of the snowfog, nobody is sure whether friends or foe. Rolery finds her senses sharpened and the inner mindspeech which Agat used on her alert to cries or messages from him, separated as they are for long stretches. The desperate situation also prompts various characters, from the doctor to the senior women on the city council (wise old Alla Pasfalto; Seiko Esmit, the last member of one of the founding families who is in barely concealed love with Agat) to discourse about various issues, from their long abandonment and exile from their home planet, to the possibility of their ever living in peace with the primitive natives.

We hear more about the Cultural Embargo under which all the space-travelling peoples of the League of All Worlds operate, namely not to prejudice the development of the peoples they land among by showing them advanced technology. Hence they had to hide their guns and whatnot, only allowed to retain dart guns which, in line with native culture, they are allowed to tip with poison (and which saves Agat’s life right at the end of the story).

(This Cultural Embargo is, of course, identical to the so-called Prime Directive of the Starfleet referred to throughout Star Trek, the original TV series of which launched in the same year this novel was published, 1966. Someone copied someone or it was just a piece of sci-fi commonplace.) Anyway, this explains why the colonists never flexed their full technical muscle, hid a lot of their devices and have now themselves forgotten how to use most of them.

Saved by the snowghouls

At the moment of direst extremity, our heroes are saved by a deus ex machina, namely the arrival of the snowghouls. Yes, snowghouls, white humanoid monsters with long waving necks which scare the Bejasus out of everyone, especially the besieging Gaals. The majority of the host had already left, leaving a small besieging force behind to either capture or lob in flaming brands to destroy Landin – but even those now head for the hills and our heroes and heroines go up onto the battlements, glimpse a few of the ghouls in action, and realise they are saved.

In the last few pages, there is time for a last few adventures: Agat unwisely leaves the barricaded part of the city to wander through the wrecked areas the Gaal have abandoned under the light of Werel’s dimly twinkling winter stars… and is attacked by a lone snowghoul, having just enough time to fire off his dartgun, before being thrown to the ground. The thing is just about to bite through his neck when the venom from Agat’s dart takes effect and the snowghoul falls off, shivering and dying beside him.

Chastened, he makes his way warily back to the heavily defended central square and to his beloved Rolery. The last act takes place the next morning, when the survivors of the siege march in triumph along the huge causeway out to the island with the strange building on it, and the Taveran defenders let down the drawbridge. At first Agan is full of joy until he realises that the women emerging from the Stack’s fastnesses are daubed in ashes and tear-stained. Their leader Wold died in the night. A new era has begun.

In one of the many intense conversations which took place in the Record Room during the siege, doctor Wattock had explained to Rolery that slight differences in their DNA explained why the farborn rarely get ill from Werel infections, heal quickly, but by the same token, have difficulty digesting Werel meat or crops without artificial enzyme additives.

He goes on to speculate that maybe, maybe this is why the conception rate has been so low among the farborn, and why there are so many abortions. Maybe… maybe it has been natural selection weeding out those who are really allergic to the subtle differences of the planet… maybe the survivors are steadily more acculturated to living on Werel… maybe they’ll be able to interbreed with the natives…

And with this thought planted in our minds, we watch Agat return from Wold’s Viking-style funeral pyre, back to the arms of his Tevaran wife. Maybe they will be the first to successfully interbreed. Maybe a new race will arise from the blend of Tevarans and Terran colonists, born into the generation-long wastes of winter.

Five thousand nights of Winter, five thousand days of it: the rest of their youth and maybe the rest of their lives. (p.212)

Credit

Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin was published by Ace Books in 1966. In 1996 it was republished along with Rocannon’s World and City of Illusions in an omnibus volume titled Worlds of Exile and Illusion. All page references are to the 2015 paperback edition of the combined Worlds volume.

Related links

Reviews of Ursula Le Guin novels

1966 Rocannon’s World
1966 Planet of Exile
1967 City of Illusions
1968 A Wizard of Earthsea
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
1971 The Lathe of Heaven
1972 The Word for World Is Forest
1974 The Dispossessed

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
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
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

1900s
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

1910s
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

1920s
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, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
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

1950s
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 i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fastpaced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard man Gulliver Foyle is looking for vengeance
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

1960s
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 space travelling 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
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – planetary romance or sci fantasy set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who attacked his spaceship
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 a 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’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
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 they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – the story concerns an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – who has been sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the real focus is on exploring the condition of hermaphroditism which is the state of the planet’s inhabitants, as Genly goes on the run with a disgraced lord, Estraven, and during a long, gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north, the develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love

1970s
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 is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where 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 Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the spare, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything

1980s
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, basically 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
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

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Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin (1966)

She was of an ancient family, a descendant of the first kings of the Angyar, and for all her poverty her hair shone with the pure, steadfast gold of her inheritance. The little people, the Füa, bowed when she passed them, even when she was a barefoot child running in the fields, the light and fiery comet of her hair brightening the troubled winds of Kirien.

Basically, knights in armour meet flying saucers. ‘My liege, the Starlords are upon us’. Starlords, yes, they’re called Starlords.

Original pulp cover of a joint edition of Rocannon’s World and Planet of Exile

Rocannon’s World was Ursula K. Le Guin’s first novel. It was published in 1966 as an ‘Ace Double’, along with Avram Davidson’s The Kar-Chee Reign. Though it inaugurated the cycle of sci fi stories and novels set in what came to be known as the ‘Hainish Cycle’ (after the planet Hain which is behind the Federation which sends out investigators to numerous other solar systems) the story is also rammed full of many of the elements of what is called ‘heroic fantasy’ – tall guys with swords, underground dwarves, forest people with mystical powers etc.

The anthropologist

As I’ve mentioned in my two previous le Guin reviews, the fact that she came from an academic family, and her father was a famous anthropologist, is astonishingly central to her fiction.

Here – as in The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed – the central protagonist is a highly intelligent outsider visiting a strange planet and carefully noting its culture, practices, history, myths, politics, religion and so on. He is, by profession, an ethnographer.

In fact the novel opens with a quote from the Abridged Handy Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-forms (an anticipation of The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide To The Galaxy) about the planet he visits, which I quote in full:

Galactic Area 8, No. 62: FOMALHAUT II.

High-Intelligence Life Forms. Species Contacted:

Species I:

A) Gdemiar (singular Gdem): Highly intelligent, fully hominoid nocturnal troglodytes, 120-135 cm. in height, light skin, dark head-hair. When contacted these cave-dwellers possessed a rigidly stratified oligarchic urban society modified by partial colonial telephathy, and a technologically oriented Early Steel culture. Technology enhanced to Industrial, Point C, during League Mission of 252-254. In 254 an Automatic Drive ship (to-from New South Georgia) was presented to oligarchs of the Kiriensea Area corn-munity. Status C-Prime.

B) Füa (singular Fian): Highly intelligent, fully hominoid, diurnal, av. ca. 130 cm. in height, observed individuals generally light in skin and hair. Brief con~ tacts indicated village and nomadic communal societies, partial colonial telepathy, also some indication of short-range TK. The race appears a-technological and evasive, with minimal and fluid culture-patterns. Currently untaxable. Status E-Query.

Species II:

Liuar (singular Liu): Highly intelligent, fully hominoid, diurnal, av. height above 170 cm., this species possesses a fortress/village, clan-descent society, a blocked technology (Bronze), and feudal-heroic culture. Note horizontal social cleavage into 2 pseudo-races: (a: Olgyior, “midmen,” light-skinned and dark-haired; (b: Angyar, “lords,” very tall, dark-skinned, yellow-haired)

And a little later in the narrative:

Number 62: FOMALHAUT II.

Type AE

Carbon Life. An iron-core planet, diameter 6,600 miles, with heavy oxygen-rich atmosphere. Revolution: 800 Earthdays 8 hrs. 11 min. 42 sec. Rotation: 29 hrs. 51 min. 02 sec. Mean distance from sun 3.2 A U, orbital eccentricity slight. Obliquity of ecliptic 27° 20′ 20″ causing marked seasonal change. Gravity .86 Standard.

Four major landmasses, Northwest, Southwest, East and Antarctic Continents, occupy 38% of planetary surface.

Four satellites (types Perner, Loklik, R-2 and Phobos). The Companion of Fomalhaut is visible as a superbright star.

Nearest League World: New South Georgia, capital Kerguelen (7.88 It. yrs.). History: The planet was charted by the Elieson Expedition in 202, robot-probed in 218.

First Geographical Survey, 235-6. Director: J. Kiolaf. The major landmasses were surveyed by air (see maps 3114-a, b, c, 3115-a, b.).Landings, geological and biological studies and HILF contacts were made only on East and Northwest Continents (see description of intelligent species below).

Technological Enhancement Mission to Species I-A, 252-4. Director: J. Kiolaf (Northwest Continent only.)

Control and Taxation Missions to Species I-A and II were carried out under auspices of the Area Foundation in Kerguelen, N.S.Ga., in 254, 258, 262, 266, 270; in 275 the planet was placed under Interdict by the Allworld HILF Authority, pending more adequate study of its intelligent species.

First Ethnographic Survey, 321, Director: G. Rocannon.

The background facts

So, because she is depicting an entire world and its peoples and languages and religions and histories, as with Le Guin’s other novels, there are a lot of facts to process and assimilate.

Gaverel Rocannon is a 43-year-old (p.45) ethnographer from the planet Davenant (p.81), who works for the League of All Worlds. As the name suggests this is an alliance of a hundred or so planets across the galaxy, inhabited by humanoids who find it reasonably easy to communicate with each other.

A hundred years earlier the first visitors from the Federation landed on Fomalhaut II, established that there were three intelligent species on the planet, and decided the Gdemiar, the nocturnal troglodyes, known on the planet as the ‘Claymen’, were the most technologically advanced, and gave them a basic spaceship and some tech to urge along their scientific evolution.

This is because the League is expecting at any moment a return of some feared extra-galactic force to attack them, and is reaching out and allying with as many other races as possible.

However, Rocannon, as a sensitive ethnologist, had his doubts about this policy, doubts which were confirmed when a beautiful maiden of the Angyar i.e. tall, blonde warrior caste, – named the Lady Semley – arrived in the spaceship left with the Claymen, because she insisted on reclaiming a precious jewel which the Starlords had taken away. Dumb-founded by the appearance of her, and half a dozen trog-men, Rocannon, at the museum on Kerguelen – eight light-years away from their planet – graciously handed it back.

However, when the maiden arrived back at her planet it was to find her husband dead and her baby grown into a woman. Inter-stellar travel took only days for her but sixteen years have passed in her absence. She runs off mad into the woods.

The plot

That story, which has passed into local folklore opens the novel.

It is intriguing to have such a long passage told in olde worlde, fake folk tale style, juxtaposed with the rest of the narrative which are cast in much more factual, sci fi style (apparently, the story of Semley’s Necklace was, originally, published as a stand-alone story in a sci fantasy magazine in 1964).

The second part opens with Rocannon on the planet Fomalhaut II, having persuaded his bosses to be more sensitive with the inhabitants, to enforce an embargo on interventions, while he sensitively studies the inhabitants.

Unfortunately, we’ve barely met him and his host, the tall Angyar Lord Mogien of Hallan, before the plot takes a dramatic lurch forward. Rocannon had parked his spaceship just over the hills from the castle of Hallan, when it is attacked and vaporised. His 13 colleagues with it, and all their notes, and tech.

News comes in that other settlements have been attacked and so Mogien undertakes to help Rocannon go to the caves of the Claymen to see if the old spaceship they were given seventy years ago contains a comms device to get in touch with Rocannon’s home base.

The Claymen take them deep into their underground caves and past all the shining new devices they’ve invented with Starlord encouragement, but their lord says No Dice. But Rocannon does get access to a radio and overhears part of the Enemy transmission. He doesn’t understand the language but the Enemy use Cetian numerals (all the universe uses Cetian numerals). He records them and realises they are co-ordinates (p.38). He will travel to the location indicated, in the south, and see what he can do to identify and stop the Enemy.

Lord Mogien says he will go with Rocannon on this adventure and bring some of his liege ‘midmen’. Mogien’s mother, Lady Haldre (the daughter of the Lady Semley who went mad) gives Rocannon back the Lady Semly’s necklace, as a lucky charm when he takes Mogien with him, to protect her son who his mother fears will die on the mission (p.41).

En route they come across Kyo, the survivor of a Fian village which has been destroyed. And thus, this small group of humans, alien and a sort of elf set off on a mission to save their world. Ring any bells? It would only need to be some men, a dwarf, an elf and a wizard, and you’d have Lord of The Rings.

In fact the small and mysterious Fian, Kyo, names Rocannon Olhor, meaning The Wanderer, and mysteriously announces that his coming, and his adventure, and his motley companions, were all foretold!

Adventures

They engage in ariel combat with the men of Lord Ogoren, the Lord-Errant of Plenot (p.47). I haven’t mentioned that Mogien and Rocannon and their handful of helpers are flying south riding windsteeds. Elsewhere referred to as gryphoncats (p.71), windsteeds are clearly a kind of tiger-sized wild cat with wings, which can be tamed, saddled and ridden by men. Ridden in to battle, too, rather thrillingly a battle during which Lord Mogien spears his man, but Rocannon gets a nasty barbed arrow in the calf.

Lord Mogien riding a windsteed

Having vanquished the recalcitrant lord by the simple expedient of dropping flaming brands onto his little castle, Mogien, Rocannon et all are rowed across the sea by the lord’s men, men of Tolen. However, as they near the cliffs of the southern shore, it is stormy, and one of the boats capsizes. Rocannon rescues Kyo, but all his remaining equipment, ray gun, maps etc, go to the bottom of the sea.

The survivors make it ashore the southern land of Fiern. They have three windsteeds left, four can ride two apiece on two of them, but Lord Mogien is such a man that a windsteed can noly carry him. So he tells his man Yahan to get back in the boat of Tolen and go home. Yahan refuses, and Mogien makes to strike him, so the man runs off.

The others set off marching south but Rocannon, pausing to pick up a promising stick to help him walk with, loses the others in the fog and it promptly knocked over the head and abducted. He regains consciousness tied to the stake in the primitive castle belonging to Zgama, Master of the Long Bay (p.55), who Rocannon outstares in a staring competition, but who gets his men to light the brands around Rocannon’s feet, with a view to burning him to death.

Unfortunately, Zgama, Master of the Long Bay doesn’t know that Rocannon is wearing his impermasuit, an invisible suit which gives complete bodily protection and so he endures as much flaming pyre as Zgama and his men can make, to their astonishment. After a couple of nights none other than Yahan sneaks into the castle, sets Rocannon free, and helps him escape. What if Mogien finds them? He will be duty bound to slay Yahan. Rocannon solves the dilemma by making Yahan his liege man, and therefore protected.

Much the worse for wear they come to the simple hut of a peasant Piai who after initial reluctance tells them there is another sound they must cross if they’re heading south. After a few days resting with Piai, he is joined by two fellows who have a mean look and sure enough, they draw a knife and say they’ll row the pair across the sound but in return for their riches. An unstable situation evolves in which they are rowed across the water, one man holding a knife to Yahan’s throat: at the last moment Rocannon throws them Lady Semly’s jewel, which he’d been keeping in a leather back ground his neck, and he and Yahan drive into the water and swim to the shore.

It is a dry flay vast land. They set off south, existing off streamwater and fruits and berries but both become thinner as the land  grows more arid. Camping at night, they are troubled by shadowy shapes flitting just out of sight. They had just decided to pack it and turned round to head back to the coast when swooping out of the sky comes… Lord Mogien and his men on their windsteeds! Hurray!

Mogien bridles at the sight of Yahan, but when Rocannon explains that he has made him his servant Mogied laughs at being outwitted. Not only that, but they had found Piai and his surly mates on the shore, and forced them to admit that they’d rowed Rocannon et al across the sea, and also… recovered Lady Semly’s necklace, which Mogien now throws to Rocannon. They ascertained our hero’s precise location because the Fian Kyo used his mindspeech / telepathy powers.

They fly south, and bivouac at a stream come nightfall. In the iddle of the night they are ambushed by strange tall thin spectral figures which stun them. Rocannon wakes up in a beautifully designed and built room in a palace, to find his friends comatose by his side. Long story short: he realises he is in a kind of hive-city and their captors are thin insect-link creatures with wings – the Winged Ones of ancient legend – and his friends have been stunned but are fed a little water, so that they can be give to the larvae of the Winged Ones to suck dry.

Rocannon is left free to wander round the beautifully laid out city and feel helpless, until he comes across some small furry animals which have a very primitive speech – the Kiemhrir, who Kyo also calls

‘Wordmasters, wordlovers, the eaters of words, the nameless ones, the lithe ones, long remembering.’ (p.86)

The Kiemhrir revive his paralysed colleagues (one has died) and Rocannon, Mogien, Yahan and Kyo whistle for the windsteeds who promptly arrive, and they make their escape.

Now they journey south towards the high mountains, staying at a succession of Fian village, which give the ethnographer insight into their culture and opportunity to bring out Kyo’s uncanny quietness and wisdom. But he prefers to stay at the highest of the villages, leaving Mogian and Rocannon to fly on over the high ice mountain peaks and down into the warm valleys on the other side.

Recovering on the downward slope they see a shadow at night. Mogien insists it is his death, his destiny.

Later he goes scouting below on the windsteed, and Rocannon climbs up to a ledge to get water for Yahan, who is really weak and suffering.

But Rocannon finds a dark cleft, entrance to a cave, and goes cold with fear. Inside is the shadow, the ancient voice, who offers him wisdom, but it will come at the price of what he loves. Rocannon agrees.

Emerging dazed from the cave he realises he has been given the ability of mindspeech: he can feel the minds of his enemies. And he knows one is near. He points out to Yahan something emerging from the clouds. It is one of the enemy helicopters equipped with a laser gun. As it takes aim at him and Yahan perched on their little mountain ledge, out of the clouds flies Lord Mogien on his windspeed and deliberately flies full tilt into the side of the helicopter, wrenching it from the skies, man, beast and machine tumbling to their deaths in the gulf below.

Next thing Rocannon knows he wakes in bed in Breygna Castle being tended by the beautiful Lady Ganye, daughter-in-law and heiress of the castle’s old lord. He is hurt, the helicopter’s laser gun crippled his right hand. Slowly she tends him back to health, he is visited by Yahan, who survived, albeit frostbitten and weakened. When he goes among the castle’s folk they turn away or bow. He is regarded as a sort of god for coming down from the forbidden mountain. Also something of the mindspeech shows. The Lady Ganye tells him about the invaders from the sky who have laid waste the land to the south and killed all inhabitants, including her own husband.

A hundred days of resting & recuperating, during which Rocannon’s mind reaches out and investigates every aspect of the base to the south. It has been set up by aliens from the planet Faraday who are using it as a base to attack and recruit other planets to their growing power.

One evening Rocannon gets Yahan to saddle the remaining windsteed, and he flies to the forest, ties up the creature and makes his way in darkness into the base. He enters the spaceship where he knows there is an ansible, a device which communicates instantly across infinite distances. He sets it for his home planet and sends a warning message giving precise location of the enemy base, then sneaks out, and back across the tarmac at night, to the forest and so away.

Primed by Rocannon’s information, an hour or so later the Faraday base disappears in a fireball of death. Although men have to travel in sub-light spaceships, speed of light spaceships have been created which can be guided by computer – and programmed to destroy.

As dawn breaks Rocannon arrives back at Breygna Castle where the beautiful Lady Ganye asks him to stay. She has fallen in love with him, as tall, willowy ladies fair in isolated castles often do with brave and handsome warriors…

And stay he does. Eight years later a spaceship from the League arrives (no manned spaceship can travel faster than light) to find Rocannon has died in the meantime, mourned and loved by his widow and people. And so he was never to learn that the League goes on to name the planet after him – Rocannon’s World.

Thoughts

I liked it. In many ways I liked it better than the later, prize-winning novels, because it is more purely and unashamedly fantasy, with a new adventure and a new uncanny adversary around every corner — whereas the later books are ‘tackling issues’ with all the sometimes wearing earnestness which that implies.

It’s a boys’ adventure story with flying tigers and ray guns. What’s not to love 🙂

Credit

Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin was published by Ace Books in 1966. In 1996 it was republished along with its sequels, Planet of Exile and City of Illusions, in a volume called Worlds of Exile and Illusion. All page references are to the 2015 paperback edition of the Worlds volume.

Related links

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
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
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

1900s
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

1910s
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

1920s
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, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
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

1950s
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 i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fastpaced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard man Gulliver Foyle is looking for vengeance
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

1960s
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 space travelling 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
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – planetary romance or sci fantasy set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who attacked his spaceship
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 a 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’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
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 they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin

1970s
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 is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where 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 Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the impoverished, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything – the novel is a searching exploration of the psychology of a propertyless civilisation

1980s
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, basically 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
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

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Octopussy by Ian Fleming (1966)

There are two collections of James Bond short stories – Quantum of Solace published in 1960 containing five stories – and Octopussy and The Living Daylights containing just those two stories and published in June 1966. When the paperback edition of the latter was published in 1967 another story, The Property of a Lady, was added; and the short sketch, 007 in New York, was added to the Penguin paperback edition in 2002.

1. The Living Daylights

(32 pages) First published in The Sunday Times colour supplement in February 1962.

The barbed wire fence which would evolve into the Berlin Wall was only erected in August 1961. This story a) comes from the period before there was any physical barrier between East and West, b) is the only Bond story set anywhere near the Eastern bloc.

Agent 272 has a been a long-term sleeper inside the Soviet Union. He has accumulated a wealth of information about their atomic missile programme. Now he’s trying to escape and he’s made it as far as East Berlin. He radioed a ciphered message saying exactly where he will run across the line from East to West Berlin on one of the following three evenings. However, the message was intercepted by the Russkies, who have sent their top sharp-shooter, codenamed ‘Trigger’, to be ready & waiting to kill 272 as he makes the crossing.

MI6 know about the message interception, and so have sent Bond to kill ‘Trigger’ before ‘Trigger’ can shoot 272.

So Bond undergoes a few hours intense target practice with a state-of-the-art sniper rifle at a military firing range at Bisley, before driving to London airport and flying to Berlin.

Tired, he is taken by a Foreign Office minder, Sender, to a service flat overlooking the wasteland between the Russian and Western zones (where the Berlin Wall would eventually be built) and here makes a base. The rifle he’ll use can be set up on a stand and Bond can lie on the mattress of a bed set against the window, which is almost completely covered by curtain, so that just the rifle barrel pokes out.

Sender explains that ‘Trigger’ will almost certainly be based in a big, new, concrete block for East German officials which is off to one side of the waste land – hence the rental of this derelict flat and the orientation of the window, and so on, to give Bond good sight over the ‘killing zone’ but also up into the Russian building.

Over the next three days, Bond spends the daylight hours ambling aimlessly round Berlin (which he doesn’t like very much) making sure he is back in the flat ready for the 5pm set-up and for the expected crossing time around 6pm. Two nights in a row he gets tense and hot in his blackout clothes, finger on the trigger, scanning the windows of the big Russian building – but nothing happens.

However, during these trial runs he notices something. Every day a Russian women’s orchestra troops into the Russian building and spends a couple of hours rehearsing. Bond realises that, among all the musicians, the cello player’s cello case is suspiciously light, too easily swung and carried. The woman carrying it is an attractive, vivacious blonde, smiling and joking with her fellow players. Slowly Bond forms the conviction that she may be ‘Trigger’.

On the third evening Bond is all set to go when Sender jumps to life and says he can see through his binoculars a man in the shadows on the other side – must be 272. And, yes, Bond sees a gun barrel being poked out of one of the windows of the Russian building. Bond uses his powerful telescopic sight to zero right in on the protruding gun barrel, as Sender gives him a running commentary of how our man is approaching the wide open stretch of floodlit ground where the dash for safety will take place.

With a last minute look round, 272 makes a break for it, running into the illuminated strip of land. At the same moment Bond sees in his scope a blonde head move forwards over the enemy gun. He hesitates a fraction of a second, allowing ‘Trigger’ to get off a burst from her Kalashnikov, then fires one well-aimed sniper bullet. It hits the enemy gun and sends it spinning out the window to the ground. Bond tells Sender to duck and a fusillade of bullets pours through their window. But 272 is safely across and into the waiting Opal car kept revved up by a British Army corporal, which now speeds off.

Sender and Bond crawl into the relative safety of the windowless kitchen where Sender tells Bond off, saying he will have to report that he hesitated, and then did not kill ‘Trigger’ as ordered. That hesitation could have led to 272’s death!

Bond considers lying but then tells the truth. He had developed a fellow feeling for this beautiful woman, who is his mirror image – also a paid assassin. His shot a) disabled her gun b) probably broke her hand or even arm. And she will be severely punished by the KGB for her failure. It is enough.

Bond is sick of killing. Send your message to my boss, he tells Sender. Maybe it will get me out of the wretched 007 section and into a nice cushy desk job.

Comment

The waiting for someone to cross the neutral zone is reminiscent of the opening of John le Carré’s breakthrough novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Bond’s malaise, sick of killing, reflects the illness and depression which afflicted Fleming at the end of his life.

2. The Property of a Lady

(42 pages) First published in The Ivory Hammer (Sotheby’s annual) in November 1963.

Significant that it was published in the Sotheby’s annual since this the whole story is an advert of sorts for the famous auctioneer’s. A valuable Fabergé egg worth anything up to £100,000 has been given to Sotheby’s to auction. It is given as ‘the property of a lady’ but M explains to Bond that it’s actually been put up by one of their own MI6 staff, a certain Miss Freudenstein. Miss F is in fact a double agent working for the KGB. We learned this after she had been hired but before she took up her post, and so MI6 created a special section just for her, the ‘Purple Cipher’ department, which handles worthless information mixed with occasional nuggets of disinformation. For three years Miss F has been cunningly passing secrets to the KGB which are not secrets at all.

Now she has come into possession of the egg, apparently legitimately. An expert who works with Her majesty’s Customs says a parcel insured for £100,000 was stopped by Customs and opened. it contained the egg along with validating documents showing that is had been in Miss F’s family since before the revolution. On the death of her mother, it is being willed to Miss F.

M explains this is probably a legitimate way of rewarding Miss F’s devotion to duty without the messiness of bank accounts. The egg will be sold for a fortune, and thus some ‘capitalist’ collector will be in effect paying a KGB spy. Very droll.

Bond has an idea: the KGB will probably send along to the auction an ‘underbidder’, someone who is paid to make the running on an expensive lot, and push it to the maximum before abandoning the chase just in time. In all probability the ‘underbidder’ at the egg auction will be the KGB’s Resident in London.

So Bond organises for a photographer and other officials to attend the auction and identify their man. Sure enough, after the opening salvoes, the bidding settles down into a battle between someone invisible in the crowd and the very cultured and helpful Fabergé expert, Mr Snowman, who works for the firm. The ‘underbidder’ pushes it all the way to £155,000 then quits. The photographer and Bond both get a view of the stocky, anonymous figure who did the bidding. Outside Bond jumps in an MI5 taxi and tells it to follow the stocky man’s.

Sure enough Mr Stocky’s car turns into Kensington Palace Gardens and he enters the Russian embassy. Bond’s scheme has ensured he will be identified as the Soviets’ Resident in London and expelled. A small victory in the endless chess game of the Cold War.

Comment

I was expecting a clever reverse or unexpected twist – which never came. Maybe Fleming wrote it as a favour or special commission and the real point was to flatter Sothebys.

3. Octopussy

(44 pages) Posthumously serialised in The Daily Express from the 4th to the 8th October 1965.

I think this is Fleming’s second best short story after Quantum of Solace and, seeing as that was a deliberate pastiche of Somerset Maugham, maybe this is the best. It combines a number of Bond themes: it’s set in Jamaica (as so many of his stories); there’s skin diving and the beauty of the undersea world; there’s Bond’s stern, almost Puritanical, sense of duty; and, by complete contrast, Fleming’s feel for the Alps and mountains which he got to know so well as a young man.

What’s missing is sex, gadgets or an overblown baddy. For once a Fleming fiction is a realistic portrait of the failings of human nature.

Major Dexter Smythe was a fine figure of a man during the war in the latter part of which he commanded an Intelligence section. Now he is 54, fat, drinks and smokes too heavily and has had two heart attacks. He is, in other words, something of a self-portrait of Fleming himself, who had a dashing war but by the early 1960s was in failing health.

Since Smythe’s wife died he has let himself go and now only barely manages to stay alive with the help of numerous pills. One of his last pleasures is patrolling the acre or so of foreshore off his beach-front house, where he puts on a snorkel and enjoys feeding the fish and other fauna on the reef. Recently he has been trying to tame an octopus – feebly nicknamed ‘Octopussy’ – who has a home in a certain part of the reef, and is interested in conducting a little experiment – he wants to see how the octopus will react if he offers it a scorpion fish, one of the most poisonous fish in the world.

However, his world has just been turned upside down, because that morning a man from London, a man named James Bond paid him a call. Bond coldly and officially told him that the authorities have uncovered the full story of his wartime crime. The body has been found and the bullets identified as coming from his gun.

As the pair of chaps politely sip their drinks, Smythe slips into a flashback which dominates the rest of the narrative. He begins to explain the situation at the end of the war, and his role of visiting German command bases with a mission to confiscating all their paperwork, assessing it and sending it back to London. Mostly boring, until he found one sheet among thousands, which seemed to refer to hidden Nazi gold.

Smythe pinpointed the location of the stash in a climber’s hut up a nearby mountain, checked the location on Army maps, then burned the incriminating document. He made some casual enquiries and got the name of a local mountain guide, one Herr Oberhauser. Smythe drives out to Oberhauser’s hillside house and terrorises him into accompanying him up the mountain.

It was a tough five hour hike, described by Fleming in gritty detail, but they eventually reached the hut and found the cairn of rocks indicated in the document. At which point Smythe cold-bloodedly shot Oberhauser in the back, threw his body into a crevasse, and dismantled the cairn to find an old ammunition box containing two huge bars of Nazi gold. He lugs it down off the mountain – again described in gruelling detail – and hides it in some woods. Back to base, shower and a deep sleep. Next morning Smythe is up with his unit and travelling on to the next base.

Six months later, well after the end of the war, Smythe returns, find the stash in the forest, and uses his security clearance to fly several times back and forth from Germany to England – with a gold bar each time in his suitcase.

Smythe then he met and married a pretty, middle-class gel, Mary, and told her they were moving to Jamaica. Here he rented a desirable property and made enquiries, quickly discovering that the most powerful underworld figures were a couple of Chinese brothers, the Foos, in Kingston. He approaches them with the bars and they agree to dispose of them for a 10% commission.

And from that day to the present Smythe has lived a merry life – no work, golf all day or skin diving, bridge at the club or dinner parties in the evening. But he has gone to seed. In fact it was his heavy drinking that set Mary against him, nagging him to stop until he took to hiding bottles and lying about them, and then everything else. Finally, Mary made a ‘cry for help’ overdose which actually resulted in her dying – since when he hasn’t cared about anything.

And now this man Bond arrives with his accusations. ‘How did you know?’ Smythe asks. Bond explains: The glacier has given up the dead body of the Oberhauser, along with his identity papers. The bullet holes in the skull made the cause of death obvious. His family identified the British officer he left with, all those years ago. The trail led to the Foo Brothers who have admitted their role in disposing of the gold. It is a cut-and-dried case.

We realise the flashback narrative we’ve just read was also Smythe telling Bond the true story. Confessing. Bond stands; the interview is at an end. He says the police will be here to arrest him in a week at most and prepares to leave. ‘Yes, but why do you care, why are you here?’ Smythe asks him, puzzled.

James Bond looked Major Smythe squarely in the eyes. ‘It just so happened that Oberhauser was a friend of mine. He taught me to ski before the war, when I was in my teens. He was a wonderful man. He was something of a father figure to me at a time when I happened to need one.’ (p.44)

What can Smythe say. Bond looks at him with contempt, and departs.

And so Smythe has a few more stiff drinks, slips on his diving mask and goes out into the sea in search of a scorpion fish to tempt his ‘Octopussy’ with. And sure enough he finds one, with its odd ‘eyebrows’ hanging over its glaring red eyes, and the spine of venomous quills rising from its back. As he goes to spear it, the fish darts up and under Smythe’s stomach and then off into a crevice in the reef. But Smythe spears it a second time and wades out of the sea holding his trophy aloft. Only when he sits on a rock on the beach does he realise there’s a numb patch on his stomach. Christ, the bloody scorpion fish must have stung him with is poisonous barbs! He knows from the books that he could be saved by anti-histamines and antibiotics, but the nearest doctor is an hour away. And he knows he has just fifteen minutes to live.

Smythe pulls on the mask, determined to continue his silly experiment and wades back out into the reef with the dead scorpion fish on his spear. He arrives at the Octopussy’s grotto, but is delirious with pain by now. ‘Octopussy, octopussy, look what I’ve brought for you,’ and he feebly jabs the dead fish at the octopus. But Octopussy recognises a real feast when she sees one and darts out a tentacle which grips Smythe’s arm. And then another tentacle. And, as Smythe screams into his mask, the octopus’s other tentacles close around him, pulling him into range, and the creature’s big sharp beak starts to bite!

Comment

What sets the story apart is the sense of gnawing guilt for his wartime crime which both made and ruined Smythe. He is no typical Bond baddy, no garish ogre. He is an all-too-fallible human being. The gruesome climax of the story has all the elements of the sadistic and macabre which Bond fans could want – but it is the surprising psychological power of Smythe’s wartime narrative which lingers in the memory.

Credit

Octopussy and The Living Daylights by Ian Fleming was published in June 1966 by Jonathan Cape. Page references are to the 1985 Panther paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 29, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Books, Second World War, Short stories, War
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Posted by Simon on May 29, 2016

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The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis (1966)

‘Do you believe in God?’
‘I’ll have to think about that. I’ve never been able to understand what it means, you see. It’s the most difficult idea I’ve ever heard about. And yet people seem to get results by it all the time.’
Churchill said animatedly, ‘Only people with no sense of right and wrong. No real sense of it. What would you have to be like to worship something that invented every bad thing we know or can imagine?’ He looked away. ‘Death in particular. If there were no such thing as death the whole human race could be happy.’
(The Anti-Death League, page 228)

This novel is a complete departure for Amis – I kept stopping to check it really was his name on the cover. It is a lot longer than average (304 pages to One Fat Englishman’s 170) and not funny at all for long stretches (though snips of Amis humour can’t help creeping in at odd moments). Admittedly the plot becomes a bit preposterous towards the end, but for the lion’s share of the text what is happening is compassionate, sensitive and delicate portrayals of very real people, their thoughts and feelings, captured in minute detail through interplay and dialogue.

Milieu and dramatis personae

It is set in the recent past (a scientific paper published in 1963 is referred to) in an Army camp somewhere in England set up to guard a Top Secret Weapon and prepare for a Top Secret Operation. We are introduced to a dozen or so characters, mostly of the officer class, with the occasional batman or servant or private. But for the most part it is chaps talking chaps’ talk – very different in its face value acceptance of upper-middle class values and speech from his early novels which all have a chippy, anti-posh stance. In addition there are two or three posh local women, the head of a nearby lunatic asylum and his staff.

The plot

The book opens with fine upstanding officer James Churchill, accompanied by Ayscue, the haggard padre, and an Indian officer, Mori Naidu, visiting fellow officer Max Hunter, who has been admitted to the local asylum after trying to drink himself to death. It also introduces us to the head of the asylum, Dr Best who, it is quickly conveyed, is himself of questionable judgement (i.e. bonkers) obsessed with his idées fixes and theories. Thus Best has diagnosed Max’s motive for drinking so recklessly as a method of avoiding confronting his repressed homosexuality. Which makes the other officers burst into laughter since Max is as openly and candidly gay as a man in his position could be in that era.

In the courtyard on the way back from visiting Max, the trio walk past a striking young woman out for a walk with a nurse: she is Catharine Casement, admitted after a nervous breakdown. (True to obsessive form Dr Best has diagnosed her breakdown as caused by her suppressed lesbianism.)

Back at the Army base we meet more characters, notably Brian Leonard, the insecure ‘intelligence officer’ who has been stationed in the unit to sniff out a suspected ‘spy’. His rather ludicrous obsession with finding reds under every bed obviously parallels the obsessive secret-motive-finding of Dr Best.

The novel unfolds slowly in a series of measured and in-depth scenes between combinations of all these characters. A few scenes in we meet Lady Lucy Hazell, lady of the rather run-down local manor. She kindly and compassionately takes Catharine into her big, echoing mansion, and there are tender scenes of care and compassion between them. About a third of the way in we learn from conversation between the chaps that Lady Hazell has a novel approach to love and sex: she organises evenings when three or four officers congregate in her drawing room, drinking, chatting and smoking, and then are summoned one by one upstairs to have sex with her. Churchill, the nearest thing to a hero in the book, takes us with him when he goes up and we see the thing through his eyes, see how intelligent and clear-headed Lady Lucy is.

There is no snideness about women, none of the vulgarity or crudeness which – arguably – mars Amis’s previous novels. As Lady Lucy explains to more than one of the officers (only officers, naturally) she has been in love before and it always ends badly; this way she gets what she wants with no emotional damage. It is what she wants to do. ‘Be sure to tell the next one to come up on your way out, there’s a dear, now.’ She is a benign and happy version of the malignant nymphomaniac figure, Mrs Gryffudd-Williams, in That Uncertain Feeling. She is treated with complete respect and dignity throughout, and all her officers worship and respect her. Can this be the same Kingsley Amis?

Jumping ahead a bit, there is also a comparably respectful and humane treatment of Max’s gay love life. Early in the novel a despatch rider is run over and killed, witnessed by the trio visiting Hunter. It emerges that a common soldier, Pearce, was in love with this rider or at least very good friends. One sub-plot is that Max, restored to health after his spell in the sanatorium, makes a sophisticated play for Pearce. He wines and dines him at an expensive restaurant in the village before walking him to a flat where he claims there was a party but when they get there, oh dear, the flat is empty with a feeble note from the ‘party-giver’ saying it’s cancelled, he’s been called away, please make yourselves at home.

It has all been set up by the suave and humorous Max and he begins to slowly seduce Pearce, getting as far as kissing him on the mouth when – the latter pulls away. There follows a really mature and respectful scene where young Pearce apologises and explains that he still hasn’t got over the death of his friend. Max responds astonishingly respectfully and walks him back to the jeep – although, life being what it is, he pops back into the restaurant under the pretext of having left his watch there, and makes a date with the rather dishy waiter who served them lunch!

James and Catharine

There are roughly two storylines. In one, James Churchill and Catharine fall deeply in love. No tricks, no jokes, a really heart-felt, deeply emotional love story. Lucy gets Catharine a job at a local pub, the White Hart, where both the landlord (Eames) and the other bar staff, informed of her condition and recuperation, go out of their way to be kind and considerate of her. These scenes and characters evince a lovely feeling of warmth and sympathy, I almost wanted to cry at a few moments. Can this be the same man who wrote One Fat Englishman and The Egyptologists? Churchill and his fellow officers drop into the White Hart for a drink where Catharine is working, he and Catharine recognise each other from that fleeting encounter at the asylum, and it is love at second sight.

Their relationship is beautifully and sensitively described and provides a central core to the narrative. There is a frankly wonderful scene where James sits at the bar through one lunchtime while Catharine is serving, then helps wipe the tables and clear away, before they are both thanked and bid goodbye by the landlord and James takes her for a drive in an Army truck up into the countryside. They park in an isolated spot, go through a small fence and clamber down to walk beside a stream to an isolated spot where they lie on the grass and make love.

It is made all the more powerful because in the pub, after the last customer had left, Catharine revealed to James the secret of why she had her breakdown: it was her abusive and violent husband who, she slowly realised, could only have sex with her if she was hurt, wounded, injured and crying in pain. The gentleness with which James coaxes this out of her, the horrid plausibility of the brutishness of some men, and the support and love he gives her, are as if written by a completely different man, in a completely different tone.

Catharine came out of the pub. She looked so beautiful in her white dress and white shoes and white hair-band that Churchill had an instant of sincere puzzlement at the way the passers-by went on passing by, the farmer climbing into his estate wagon over the road failed to reverse the direction of his climb and come pounding across to cast himself at her feet, the man laying slates on the roof of the barber’s shop managed to stay aloft. Churchill put his arms around Catharine and kissed her. (p.170)

It comes, then, as a shock when James feels a lump in her breast and advises her to go to a doctor straightaway. Things move very fast and she is diagnosed with breast cancer while James is on an exercise and he is devastated. She is taken into hospital and he goes into a deep depression.

The Anti-Death League

Churchill and some of the others, especially after the accident with the despatch rider, and given that one of their number is the padre, Ayscue, have occasional conversations about God and the meaning of it all, in which Churchill and to some extent Max are revealed as vehement atheists, despising a God who created so much suffering, though there is comedy when the more robust of them point out that they are in the Army, old chap, whose job is to dish out rather a lot of Death when called upon.

Out of nowhere there are two mysterious events: the padre had announced he was going to start up a magazine to try and keep morale up and one day someone leaves an upsetting poem on his desk, titled To A Baby Born Without Limbs which is fiercely anti-religious. Then carbons of a notice are pinned up everywhere informing everyone about the creation of the Anti-Death League, incorporating Human Beings Anonymous. It lists three appalling tragic deaths and says all you have to do to be in the Anti-Death League is be against horrible pointless deaths. There are no fees or rules but if you want to find out more, be at the Base Hall next Thursday.

The ‘meeting’ is a complete anti-climax as four or five of the officers we’ve got to know, plus the camp commander turn up expecting to see the originator of the notice, but there’s no-one there except a handful of bored squaddies who, after a grilling, are let go. It gives the novel its title but nothing else really happens about it, there are no members and no conspiracy and no big revelations. This is true of a number of Amis’s novels which promise Big Things which then peter out. I found it very hard to tell the tone in many places: not funny for long stretches, but not deadly serious, not as thrilling as a spy novel, not as imaginative as a science fiction novel, not as solely about emotions and feelings as, say, D.H. Lawrence – but with elements of all of these mixed together.

Atomic rifles

The other main strand in the novel is the slow revealing of the Big Project the Army unit has been created for and which the officers occasionally mention in hushed tones. For two thirds of the novel I was in suspense wondering if there was going to be the revelation of some Grand Science Fiction Technological Secret Weapon which would justify the rather rambling directionless feel to the narrative.

And indeed, about page 230 it is revealed that the big secret weapon stored in the ‘special building’ D4 is a new kind of rifle which fires ‘atomic bullets’. They look normal and require only lightly amended rifles. Load and fire in the normal way and whatever it hits a miniature atomic explosion vaporises. The third part of the novel features a large-scale demonstration of the rifles involving trucks of soldiers accompanying the officers to a firing range accompanied by helicopters overhead etc.

It is here that a number of themes collide, specifically the Brian Leonard spy theme and bonkers Dr Best, for Leonard has become convinced that Dr Best is the spy he’s after and that this exercise will flush out the ‘spy’. His worst fears are confirmed when Best is indeed spotted making his way to the perimeter of the exercise, whereupon Leonard feverishly brings all his forces into play, telling his men to pull back and lure Best into a trap. Unfortunately, half way through the test Best literally disappears; and when, after the demonstration of the atomic rifle’s awesome powers, the lorries are trundling back to camp, one of them has an accident and bursts into flames, and in the ensuing confusion, one of the rifles goes missing!!!

This prompts a full-blown panic with all soldiers formed up to scour the countryside and tear the camp to pieces looking for it, and also the arrival of a Man from the Ministry, plump, scruffy, posh Jagger. He is a little like the Fat Englishman, immediately demanding cold beer, so fat he struggles to get out of a chair and so on. But he appears to be meant to be the real thing, smart, clever decisive.

Is this satire? Does this mean it’s turned into a spy novel? Or a (very low-key) science fiction novel? Or both?

Whoever stole the atomic gun terrifies everyone by letting it off later that night and blowing to smithereens a local (already ruined) priory.

Next morning Leonard is tipped off by his men that Dr Best is back in his office at the asylum and the rifle is with him. Leonard and Max tear off there in an Army vehicle with Jagger hiding in the back seat. They gain admission to the asylum and then up to Dr Best’s office where Leonard attempts to arrest Dr Best for espionage and breaching Official secrets etc. To which Dr Best smirks and replies that, on the contrary, his expedition to the test site has confirmed his suspicions that Leonard is mad and he flourishes a sectioning order countersigned by the two other doctors in the room.

And so there’s a stand-off as they both stand there shouting that they’re arresting the other: a satire maybe on the fatuousness of human concepts of law, of authority, of power and legitimacy.

A stand-off solved by brute force for, when one of the doctors enters with hypodermic syringes to tranquilise Leonard and Max, a big complicated fight breaks out with bottles smashed and cupboards knocked over, until Dr Best takes a heavy blow to the head.

And in a not-funny but genuinely weird development Best freezes and starts to spout a kind of spy comic narrative: ‘They contacted Dr Best. Only you can save the world from the death rays. Best said he’d do what he could. He recruited his best agents and set off.’ He has gone into a kind of bizarre comic-strip psychosis. The other doctors are astonished and sedate him. Max and Leonard return to the base.

The real spy

Leonard returns to his room to be astonished to find his valet, Deering, going through all his things, with all his Top Secret reports open on the bed. Deering attacks him in another prolonged fight which ends with Leonard unconscious amid the wreck of a mirror. When he comes to he dashes down to the officers mess, has the alarm sounded but at that moment a heavy machine-gun goes off and the soldiers are rallied round the roof of D4, the Top Secret building, where Deering has coshed a guard and is letting loose. There follows some hair-raising action in which Max Hunter shows himself to be something of a hero, climbing up to the roof, having to duck the bullets, before distracting Deering long enough for him to be finished off by Jagger, who turns out to be not just a fat Englishman.

Operation Apollo

So Leonard had been briefed correctly, there was a spy in the base. It does, however, look very bad that it was his own batman. Jagger says they’ll go gentle on him, he’ll be quietly court-martialled and given a dishonourable discharge, but then quietly slipped some cash. He also confirms that Dr Best was never a spy, his madness was a pure coincidence.

Leonard is then debriefed by a minor character, the stern and logical officer, Ross-Donaldson. He explains briefly that the atomic rifles are an impractical weapon and could never be used in combat. A selected cadre of officers had been told they were taking part in Operation Apollo: this would involve being sent to the Himalayas in pairs with the equipment to spread a lethal new plague among the Chinese Army which intelligence suggested was considering invading India. The teams of officers were to capture and infect Chinese troops, releasing them to go infect their comrades. It wasn’t really expected that any of the officers would return. But this plan was a bluff. HQ had hired an inexperienced and incompetent ‘intelligence officer’, told him to promote his own existence among the men, and to guard the atomic rifles, all the time counting on his incompetence to let the information about the deadly plague be stolen and reported back to China. This has now successfully taken place. The Chinese will be frightened off; the invasion of India will be called off; the Operation was never actually about the plague: it was about Leonard’s incompetence. He is a broken man.

(In an entertaining side scene, fat Jagger – he struggles to get out of chairs or off a bed – corners Hunter, the hero of the hour who took on Deering behind his heavy machine gun nest: Jagger prompts Hunter to confess all – it was he, Hunter, who wrote the poem against God, who posted the note about the Anti-Death League, and who stole the atomic rifle, with the sole intention of blowing up the Priory as a deliberate snub to God. Since he was the hero of the hour, Jagger says he will forgive and forget Hunter, ‘unless you’re planning to do the same kind of thing again, old boy.’ He advises Hunter to leave the Forces and settle down with a nice someone (his homosexuality acknowledged and accepted), but Hunter surprises himself and us by saying he rather enjoyed being under fire, real combat, real bullets – he might volunteer for a genuinely dangerous tour of duty.)

Having learned all this, Leonard realises there is still some good he can do. He drives with Naidu out to Lady Hazell’s mansion to visit Churchill, by now comatose with despair about Catharine’s cancer, lying in a darkened bedroom. They both have speeches about God and life designed to knock James out of his stupor: Leonard saying Operation Apollo is off – it was never on – it was always a ruse to frighten the Chinese – anyway, there is no God to be angry with, Naidu saying he must learn to transcend his own greed and selfishness in order to come to learn to love the world as it is (p.268).

Neither works, so Leonard hacks off in his car and returns an hour later with Catharine, extracted from hospital against her doctors’ advice. She takes Churchill in her lap and pleads with him to return to her, to be a man again, to be there for her. And like the sleeping princess, suddenly he responds, he answers her. He returns to life.

Comments

This novel is a very puzzling blend or confusion of genres. Amis’s style remains quite detached and factual i.e. rarely becomes emotional and also lacks colour, lacks simile and metaphor, in this respect rather like David Lodge’s. His attitude is capable of flashes of satire and social comedy at almost any point, and all the scenes that include Jagger are more or less funny.

After a couple of abortive tries and a bit of shrieking Jagger pulled a loudly ticking watch out of his top pocket and glared at it. (p.285)

But the vast majority of the text isn’t trying to be funny and it’s quite a puzzle trying to define what it is trying to be, in the end. There’s a continuous thread of chatter about God, about life and the meaning of it all, but it’s hugely inconsequential. Like most novelists, Amis is most profound or thought-provoking about the weirdness of existence, about the mystery and impenetrability of life, when he’s not tackling it head-on but dramatising it in strange incidents or conversations or moments which reveal the disjunctions between our cosy expectations, our familiar chat and conventions, and the bizarre biological and psychological ‘reality’ which underlies it.

And this is what novels, literature, texts, do more than any other genre. They can be puzzling, unexpected, quirky and odd in the way film or TV can’t. For me the sci-fi scenes didn’t really convince and the spy plot wasn’t even persuasive as a spoof – much though spy spoofs infested the mediascape in the mid-1960s.

The most vivid scenes for me were the long pub-to-streamside walk between Catharine and James, and the equally mature, responsive account of the attempted seduction of Private Spencer by Max. They’re the scenes which will stay with me, and are reminders of how powerfully Amis could write about real human beings and their feelings when he wanted to.

L.S. Caton

A character named L.S. Caton appears in Lucky Jim. He promises the eponymous hero that he’ll publish his academic paper in a newly-established journal. Instead, Caton flees the country and the journal collapses – delivering a further blow to Jim’s shaky reputation – and Caton is last heard of setting off for South America.

But Caton then crops up a number of the subsequent Amis novels, making him a nice running joke:

  • In Take A Girl Like You he appears in a letter offering to deliver a lecture at Patrick Standish’s school about his experiences in South America
  • On page 159 of One Fat Englishman Roger Micheldene discovers a letter asking a reviewer to consider Caton’s book about South America for publication
  • In The Egyptoloists Caton appears on page 43, as an agenda item for a meeting of the mysterious Egyptology Society, and then again on page 158 as that night’s guest speaker.
  • In this novel Caton is booked as a guest lecturer to talk about the military in South America and he actually arrives at the Base ready for his talk at just the moment the Chinese spy Deering goes on the rampage, letting loose with a heavy machine gun from the roof of the secret building. To my horror Caton, being driven through the front gates at that instant, is the only victim of Deering’s rampage, a direct hit in the face, instant death (p.279). My God. Is that really the end of this entertaining joke? Will it turn out to be a case of mistaken identity? Will he be miraculously resurrected in the next novel? I hope so.

Credit

‘The Anti-Death League’ by Kingsley Amis was published by Victor Gollancz in 1954. Page references are to the 1980 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

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by Simon on July 2, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Novel, Science Fiction, Spy novel, War
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Posted by Simon on July 2, 2015

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Sabre-Tooth by Peter O’Donnell (1966)

‘You’ve arranged fine weather,’ she said, and handed him the glass. ‘I didn’t realise the Foreign Office had such influence.’
‘We sacrificed two Civil Servant maidens under a full moon last night,’ said Tarrant. ‘It seems to have worked better than some of our other operations recently,’ he added in a dry tone. (p.25)

Why shouldn’t a thriller be fun? I mean really enjoyable, full of amusing characters and preposterous plots and wacky gadgets and dastardly baddies and urbane toffs? Why shouldn’t it keep a smile on the reader’s lips for hours at a stretch? Why shouldn’t books, in other words, be as childishly pleasurable as James Bond movies?

In 1966 the Beatles released Revolver, Time magazine announced that London was ‘swinging’, and Peter O’Donnell published the second novel based on his successful comic strip character, the stunningly beautiful secret agent and crime-fighter, Modesty Blaise.

The first hundred pages

The opening scenes reintroduce us to Modesty, the splendidly sexy but awesomely intelligent and competent master criminal-turned-agent, and her sidekick, Willie Garvin, expert killer, schemer, babe magnet and creator of Bond-ish gadgets; and their contact with ‘The Department’, Sir Gerald Tarrant.

Sir Gerald meets them in Modesty’s penthouse flat overlooking Hyde Park, where he also meets the little girl, Lucille, rescued by Willie after her entire family were killed in some foreign hell hole, and who he has been funding through school. The servant, Weng, looks after little Lucille while the three adults drive in their Rolls Royce to enjoy an afternoon’s fishing on the Thames near Maidenhead, before repairing to Willie’s waterside pub, The Treadmill, where Sir Gerald watches Modesty and Willie work out, practicing armed and unarmed combat in the special ‘workhouse’ behind the pub. All the time Sir G is wondering when’s the best moment to present his proposition…

Meanwhile, in a secret valley somewhere in the Arab world, we are introduced to a small mercenary army recruited from the roughest, toughest, meanest freelance killers the world can offer. They are being assembled by the fearsome Karz, and whipped into shape by his lieutenant, Liebmann, watched by a clutch of new and old recruits – Hamid, Sarrat, Carter – through whose eyes we are introduced to aspects of the tough training and harsh discipline of the camp.

The Twins

Every spy romp has its evil genius but is not complete without a psycho sidekick (Goldfinger and Oddjob). O’Donnell gets top marks for creating Chu and Lok, two enormous killers who were born Siamese twins and only separated well on in life, and who now choose to go around joined by a leather strap joining their chests. Tied together psychologically and physically for life, the twist is that they loathe and hate each other. But not as much as they hate anyone in the mercenary camp who is found out to be ‘Unsound’ ie questions Karz’s orders: any such fool is thrown to the Twins to be torn to pieces in the camp’s amphitheatre, before the drooling audience of hired killers.

***

Back in Berkshire Sir Gerald slips into conversation with Modesty and Willie how he’s been keeping an eye on a political figure of fun, Es-Sabah Solon, leader of the so-called ‘Free Government of Kuwait’, who is doing the rounds of social events, speaking at fringe meetings, popping up on TV. And finally, Sir Gerald begins to outline his problem to them. Word has it there might be a coup against the government of Kuwait. Rumours there’s a mercenary army assembling somewhere. Would Modesty and Willie mind infiltrating it?

After some thought, they agree and begin to concoct a plan. Willie will put it about that Modesty is bored in retirement. Modesty will pretend to have a gambling problem, on a massive scale, enough to bankrupt her, enough to put her on the lookout for a money-making proposition…

The next hundred pages

Modesty fixes it with a friendly casino owner to lose an astronomical sum of money in a well-publicised card game against an American millionaire. Very Casino Royale.

There is then a detailed account of a complicated heist they mount to steal a priceless Watteau painting from a French art gallery; they are smuggling it out of the country when, whoops, the truck crashes and the painting is recovered. As in the previous novel Modesty has a tactical affair with an old flame – the cartoonishly named Mike Delgado – and lets him just close enough to witness her desperation at losing all that money and then, alas and alack, the Watteau caper being foiled.

Of course, it is a cover story, all fabricated to make the mercenaries think she and Willie are available and looking for paid work. And a few days later, they are indeed lifted from the beach by some thugs and locked up in an abandoned villa. Turns out this incarceration has been carefully arranged by the abductors to contain an obvious escape route – cleverly arranged as a test, like something from The Prisoner (1967).

But Modesty and Willie excel expectations by making a hammer and weapons out of the lead piping to the sink, breaking through the roof, knocking out their guard with a lead attached to a strip of blanket, and then taking out the restroom full of armed guards. This is the scene where Modesty deploys ‘The Nailer’ ie appears topless to a room of astonished goons, thus giving herself and Willie a vital 2 to 3 seconds to move into optimum positions to take out the baddies, him with his leaded weights, her with her trusty kongo, before grabbing guns, knives etc to finish them off.

In a scene typical of the broad humour of the whole book, there is no car to escape from the villa but there is an old Victorian carriage rotting in the stables. So, at gunpoint, Willie harnesses the surviving baddies to bridles and traces and gets them to pull them back into town.

A few days later they are relaxing by the pool at Modesty’s house in Tangiers when a phone call tells them the Baddies have seized Lucille and will kill her unless they join the mercenaries. Aha. That changes the tone. They expected to be offered the job for money, that had been their plan. The abduction of Lucille means the army are much more ruthless than they expected – now they’re playing for real stakes. And a qualm enters the reader’s mind: threatening children – even in fiction – leaves a sour taste…

The last 80 pages

So Modesty and Willie are kidnapped and taken to the secret base of the mercenary army, high in the Hindu Kush, north of Afghanistan.

Here they put on another act, pretending to have fallen out as a result of their imprisonment and Modesty’s gambling ‘addiction’. A tad implausibly, they are both allotted squadrons to command. We’d been warmed up for this since it was in conversations about the lack of intelligent captains in his army, that the Evil Genius Karz and his lieutenant, Liebmann, had first mentioned Modesty and Willie as possible recruits.

There’s a great scene where Modesty has to confront her group of 20 or so murdering psychopaths and assert her authority. She does this quickly by identifying the alpha male in the pack and knocking six bells out of him; and then, shrewdly, picking him up and dusting him off and appointing him her second in command.

But when Modesty and Willie grab some time together they assess the scenarios: jointly break out – Lucille dies; alert Britain – Lucille dies; go along with the military coup, in which case a lot of innocent children die and maybe Lucille dies anyway, given how ruthless Karz has shown himself to be. Modesty comes up with a self-sacrificing plan.

She breaks into the radio shack, knocks out the operator and sends a coded radio message to Britain with details of the planned assault on Kuwait. Then arranges for the operator to come round to witness Willie and Modesty fighting, making it look like Modesty is the traitor and Willie caught her at it. They stage manage it that Willie and the operator overcome Modesty (as if!) and then haul her before Karz who, inevitably, condemns her to death.

Which sets up a great scene in the amphitheatre the next day, as the crowd of cheering thugs watch an epic fight between Modesty and the Twins. Guess who wins? But, like all the fight scenes in these books, it is described clinically and precisely and persuasively. Willie pleads for Modesty’s life, using the grim reason that Modesty can be used in the seraglio, the comfort rooms, as one of the army’s sex slaves.

Hmm. In my review of the first MB novel I mentioned the unspoken pact between O’Donnell and the reader: we promise not to burst out laughing at the preposterous plots and cartoon characters, and he promises not to be cheap, vulgar or degrading about his heroine. This pushes the agreement right up to the brink. But I think it works and the novel emerges the stronger for it and even gains a measure of depth and true dignity.

For three hard nights Modesty is made a sex slave in the harem, and Willie has to put up with the taunts and boasts of the men who’ve had her. I think it’s well and persuasively done that Willie suffers most. When his allotted evening comes round, and he goes into her cell/bedroom, the pair keep up the pretence of animosity between them until they’ve disabled the inevitable bug, and then he quickly releases her.

But it is Willie who has suffered. Modesty was raped and abused as a child and is still able to turn it off, to leave her body, making it happening to someone else. It is Willie’s mental torment at knowing what was being done to his ‘princess’, the woman he has pledged to protect with his life, that is dwelt on at length. It isn’t exactly ‘literature’ – but it isn’t pulp played just for exploitation, either. And this new tone lasts to the end of the book, adding a measure of depth to Modesty and Willie’s characters and really bringing to life the special bond they enjoy – much deeper than love or sex or friendship.

Long story short, they find Lucille is being held in the same building as the sex slaves, rescue her, go under dark to the airfield, kill the guards (who just happen to be the ones who boasted about ‘having’ Modesty – ah justice is done).

They mine the huge arms cache hidden in a cave by the side of the dam (yes, dam!) holding back the enormous lake (enormous lake!), set the fuses – oh and there’s just time for them to be caught and held at gunpoint by Modesty’s lover from the early stages of the book, big Mike Dalgado, and some goons – before they take them out, run to the plane, and just manage to take off as the rest of the army comes running up with machine guns. Phew.

As the plane circles over the valley they see the arms dump explode big time, demolishing one wing of the dam and letting the vast lake of water flood through the camp, drowning half the army and wrecking their base.

They crash land in Afghanistan among American contractors building a road, are treated for their wounds and then flown back to Europe. In the final scene Sir Gerald meets them at Modesty’s home in Algiers. She is being courted by the American millionaire to whom she lost at cards in the rigged game at the casino. And now Sir Gerald arrives to apologise for putting her through such a horrendous ordeal.

Dignity

On the drive up the hill Sir Gerald tells Willie that he doesn’t know if he can even face Modesty, knowing what his initial suggestion ended up putting her through. Willie stops the car and explains there is no guilt: he and Modesty went into the ‘caper’ with eyes wide open and it was her plan all along. They’re professionals and they’ve put it behind them and so should Sir G.

O’Donnell conveys real delicacy and sensitivity in both the characters in that scene, and then builds up Sir G’s nervousness and embarrassment as he finally arrives at Modesty’s house – so that there is a real sense of relief and release when she welcomes him in the old polite and civilised way, going out of her way to reassure him and put him at his ease. It is a psychologically important moment in the story, which Modesty, and her author, meet with panache.

Tarrant stood very still, watching the dimly seen figure in white moving down the broad stairs which led up from one side of the living-room. He heard a series of clicks, and wall-lights sprang up in different parts of the room. She was just turning at the angle of the staircase, moving quickly and lightly down the last few steps into the room.

She wore a very simple sleeveless dress in white nylon. It was short, with the hem just above the knees. Her brown legs were bare and she wore open pale-blue sandals with small heels. Her hair was loose and gathered back at the nape of her neck by a jet clip.

She was smiling at him, moving towards him with both hands extended.

‘Sir Gerald.’ Her eyes were warm with welcome. (p.281)

In a number of scenes throughout the book, O’Donnell’s characterisation achieves a kind of dignity and depth which lift it far above its comic-strip origins. I really like these characters. Crisply written, with a good steady pace, a comprehensible plot, and a warm feeling throughout, this is a hugely enjoyable and uplifting novel.

Related links

Paperback cover of Sabre-Tooth

US paperback cover of Sabre-Tooth

Modesty Blaise novels

  • Modesty Blaise (1965) Introducing Modesty and sidekick Willie Garvin, as they protect government diamonds from a fiendish international criminal, Gabriel.
  • Sabre-Tooth (1966) Modesty and Willie get involved with a small army of hardened mercenaries who are planning to overthrow the government of Kuwait.
  • I, Lucifer (1967) An eccentric bunch of crooks have got hold of a mentally ill young man who thinks he is the Devil but has the useful knack of being able to predict natural deaths: they are using this to blackmail VIPs, until Modesty and Willie intervene.
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by Simon on March 24, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Books, Novel, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on March 24, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/sabre-tooth-peter-odonnell/

The Comedians by Graham Greene (1966)

She laughed and held me still and kissed me. I responded as well as I could, but the corpse in the pool seemed to turn our preoccupations into comedy. The corpse of Dr Philipot belonged to a more tragic theme; we were only a sub-plot affording a little light relief.
(The Comedians, page 57)

The Comedians is Greene’s longest novel (287 pages in the Penguin edition) and among his most enjoyable. The tone is equable, the style concise and expressive, the text relatively unblemished by the Catholic despair and bucket theology of his other novels, and there is a steady flow of deft descriptions and urbane ironies which, although they intertwine with some gruesome scenes, on the whole keep a slight smile permanently hovering on the reader’s lips.

Plot

It’s narrated in the first person by a middle-aged Englishman, Brown, the owner of a hotel in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He’s been in the States for three months and the novel opens with him aboard a tramp steamer puffing to Haiti, accompanied by a handful of other guests: Mr and Mrs Smith the American evangelists for vegetarianism; the loud and probably fake Englishman ‘Major’ Jones; a travelling pharmaceutical salesman; and a mournful black man named Mr Fernandez. Brown, Smith and Jones – the narrator comments on the comic unlikelihood of these notorious aliases appearing together, and that sets the tone…

As soon as he arrives in Port-au-Prince, Brown re-enters the adulterous relationship with Martha, wife of a South American ambassador. And he returns to the hotel, the Trianon, which he had built up into a 5-star operation and compulsory stop on every well-heeled tourist’s itinerary – until, that is, Papa Doc’s reign of terror destroyed the tourist trade, until his staff were roughed up by the thuggish Tontons Macoute, until he himself abandoned it to flee to the States a few months earlier.

Haiti, Papa Doc Duvalier and the Tonton Macoutes

Dr Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier was elected president of Haiti in 1957 on a populist and black nationalist platform. After a coup attempt against him in 1959 he sacked senior Army staff and created an alternative police-cum-militia, the terrifyingly ill-disciplined, cruel and sadistic Tonton Macoute. They routinely raped and beat to death anyone who got in their way. As he got older Papa Doc went mad. He turned against the head of the Tontons who went on the run. When Papa Doc was told the fugitive Tonton had turned himself into a black dog, Duvalier ordered all black dogs in Haiti be put to death. Duvalier ordered the head of an executed rebel to be packed in ice and brought to him so he could commune with the dead man’s spirit. Peep holes were carved into the walls of the interrogation chambers, through which Duvalier personally observed Haitian detainees being tortured and submerged in baths of sulphuric acid.

Haiti under this grotesque regime is the macabre setting of the novel. It is not so much a country as a nightmare come to life, a place of perpetual fear.

Comedians

Despite – or because of – all this, the central idea of the novel is that we are all comedians on the great stage of life. In very appealing chapters the narrator tells us about his early life being educated at a Catholic boarding school in Monte Carlo. He had a flair for theatre and it was while made-up for a play that he absconded to gamble in the famous Casino and drew the attention of a middle-aged woman who seduced him and took his virginity. When the Fathers discovered it all, he was expelled. His mother was a great self-dramatist and liar, who routinely changed her name and image and had sent him away to school to free herself for her numerous roles. On the rare occasions he sees her leading up to her death, she is permanently on stage.

I knew very little of her, but enough to recognise an accomplished comedian. (p.76)

So he is an actor, from a line of actors, inclined to think we are all just passing players caught up in the great farce of Life. This theme was strongly present in Greene’s previous novel, A Burnt-Out Case, which descended, at its climax, into absurd farce; here the theme is brought home repeatedly as we witness various characters acting out roles on the grim stage of Papa Doc’s theatre of the absurd. And commenting on it.

‘I remember looking at him one night on the boat from America – it was after the ship’s concert – and wondering, are you and I both comedians?’ (p.133)

‘They can say that of most of us. Wasn’t I a comedian with my verses smelling of Les Fleurs du Mal, published in hand-made paper at my own expense?’ (p.133)

The ambassador said, ‘Come on, cheer up, let us all be comedians together. Take one of my cigars. Help yourself at the bar. My Scotch is good. Perhaps even Papa Doc is a comedian.’ (p.134)

The ambassador said, ‘We mustn’t complain too much about being comedians – it’s an honourable profession. If only we could be good ones the world might gain at least a sense of style. We have failed – that’s all. We are bad comedians.’ (p.134)

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Martha said in English as though she were addressing me directly, ‘I’m no comedian.’ (p.134)

There was not a false note in her voice; she was perfectly at ease, and I thought of her anger when we talked of comedians, although now she proved to be the best comedian of us all. (p.140)

Adultery

I’ve recently read novels by Eric Ambler, Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, Desmond Bagley, Len Deighton, Peter O’Donnell and Adam Hall, and the novels by Greene are the only ones which feature adultery – not only feature it, but make it a central strand of the plot. I mentioned to my son that the plot of the novel I’m reading is about a middle-aged man having an affair which makes him unhappy, and he said, ‘Not another Graham Greene?’ Quite.

It is his signature tune. Adultery – miserable adultery – is the motor of The Heart of The Matter, The End of the Affair, The Unquiet American and A Burnt-Out Case. From Norman Sherry’s exhaustive biography of Greene we learn that miserable adultery was the almost permanent condition of his private life after about 1940. And so here, in this novel, there are numerous scenes where the lovers (Brown the narrator and Martha, the ambassador’s wife) meet and torment each other with recriminations, guilt, or shabby sex. And the narrator generously shares with us his many insights into the wretched nature of affairs – though thankfully not nearly as intensely, or so drenched in the Catholic guilt, as those which overflow The Heart of The Matter and The End of The Affair.

If a husband is notoriously blind to infidelity, I suppose a lover has the opposite fault – he sees it everywhere. (p.48)

Time was needed for a home as time was needed to turn a mistress into a wife. (p.49)

This is one of the pains of illicit love: even your mistress’s most extreme embrace is a proof the more that love doesn’t last. (p.49)

Sooner or later one always feels the need of a weapon against a mistress. (p.130)

Maybe Greene acquired a reputation for being cosmopolitan, a sophisticate, a man of the world, because a) he travelled widely, and confidently set his novels in a fascinating variety of countries b) he emigrated and lived in the south of France, then Switzerland c) but maybe most of all because he displayed what was then, in the late 50s and 60s, a Continental openness about sex and adultery.

In which case the pose has dated. There is something not liberating but coercive about his continual assumption that adultery is the common condition of all marriages, that infidelity is inevitable.

The Society of Jesus is used to unsettled bills; it works assiduously on the fringes of the aristocracy where returned cheques are almost as common as adulteries. (p.59)

Brown’s affair with Martha dominates this long novel. It provides a central spine to a text which also includes observations about political dissidents and comic sub-plots about Mr and Mrs Smith, the American vegetarians, and the misadventures of the mysterious ‘major’ Jones. The affair is brought under the aegis of the central conceit that we are all ‘comedians’ by being routinely presented as farcical – Brown and the ambassador’s wife drive all round the city trying to find somewhere safe and discreet to have sex and are continually interrupted, by her son, by the Americans, by the Tontons.

It is nonetheless lowering that a great writer can devote such a large percentage of his pages to describing pretty much the same the kind of squalid, hopeless, miserably unhappy affairs which made such a wreck of his own life.

Everything was just as before. After ten minutes we had made love, and after half an hour we had begun to quarrel. (p.50)

Sex

From the start of his career Greene was unsqueamish about / very interested in, writing about sex. I was surprised by the reference in one of the 1930s novels to young couples masturbating each other under the protection of raincoats on park benches or deckchairs. Or by the crudeness of a phrase in The End of The Affair where Bendrix describes his feeling when he is with Sarah, with her ‘or in her’. Or him casually referring to her crying out at orgasm. Same here. It is 1966 and London is swinging but there is no joy whatsoever in Greene’s description of a black woman getting down on her knees, her head on the ground, pulling up her skirts to be taken by a Tonton thug. Or the queue at Mère Catherine’s brothel. Or the protagonist Brown screwing the ambassador’s wife in the cramped back seat of her Peugeot.

Once I had looked out of my window at two in the morning. There was a great yellow moon and a girl was making love in the pool. She had her breasts pressed against the side and I couldn’t see the man behind her. She didn’t notice me watching her; she didn’t notice anything. (p.51)

Some of the younger writers emerging in the 1960s seem to have enjoyed sex. Not Greene, for whom it is a pitiful physical urge, to be sated with illiterate whores in the stable-like brothel or in cramped rooms above a Syrian grocer’s shop.

Hamit watched me, ironic and comprehending. I remembered the stains we had left on his sheets, and I wondered whether he had changed them himself. He knew as many intimate things as a prostitute’s dog. (p.134)

Depth and description

Tedious though the affair with a married woman which forms a major thread of the novel may be, there is much pleasure to be gained from the rest of the book: in his account of his boyhood, of his escapades at the Monte Carlo Casino, how he was thrown out of the Catholic seminary and then made his way in the world, first bluffing his way through a variety of kitchen jobs then selling bogus art for the gullible to invest in. It is a rich, interesting and amusing backstory.

Similarly, his distant relationship with his grande dame of a faking mother is urbane and entertaining, as his brief acquaintance with his mother’s young black lover, Marcel, is urbane and upsetting (Marcel hangs himself after the narrator’s mother dies – it is a first, I think, for a Greene narrator to have to admit that someone else is more despairing and unhappy than he is). Away from the boring affair, the protagonist’s character is one of the most imaginative and filled-in of any Greene hero.

The detailed infilling of his biography is matched by the depth and thoroughness of Greene’s depiction of Papa Doc’s terrifying Haiti: the electricity failing, the demoralising poverty, the appalling physical disfigurements of the beggars, the casual beatings-up or rapes, the pomposity of the smoothly lying Ministers, the trip to the ruins of the new capital, Duvalierville, being built high up and pointlessly in the dry mountains, the dark sunglasses of the moody and violent Tontons.

As travelogue, capturing the grim atmosphere of a weird time and place, the novel is a triumph.

Greene the lecturer

A regrettable but central element in Greene’s style is the wish to lecture and pontificate. His novels are full of would-be quotes and ‘insights’ into human nature, which are nearly crisp enough to adorn a teenage t-shirt or a coffee mug in the office kitchen. They sound good, they have a plausible rhetoric of wisdom but, in my opinion, evaporate as soon as you reflect on them.

Cynicism is cheap – you can buy it at any Monoprix store – it’s built into all poor-quality goods. (p21)

Cruelty’s like a searchlight. It sweeps from one spot to another. We only escape it for a time. (p.162)

I read the message again now; I thought it movingly phrased… And he had died for her, so perhaps he was no comédien after all. Death is a proof of sincerity. (p.253)

What the manic-depressive Greene means by this last phrase is that suicide is a proof of sincerity. The Norman Sherry biography shows that he was obsessed with suicide and on various occasions threatened to kill himself unless his mistresses did what he wanted. The whining tone of the jealous lover comes to the fore in the last 50 pages of the novel when the narrator becomes irrationally consumed with jealousy, suspecting his mistress is sleeping with the con-man Jones who he has helped find political asylum in the embassy.

This drives the dénouement of the novel: the conman ‘Major’ Jones is caught out trying to hoodwink the régime, and comes to Brown’s hotel for asylum. Brown drives him down to the boat they arrived on and there is a comic scene when the Tontons arrive, Jones hides, and the captain in his nightgown has to face up to them. When the captain refuses to let him stay on board, Brown has to smuggle him off the boat again and has the bright idea of driving him to his mistress’s embassy.

Not only is Jones made welcome there, but he becomes the life and the soul of the party, becoming friends with the ambassador, his little boy, and even Brown’s mistress. –Earlier in the novel one of the former guests at Brown’s hotel, disgusted by the régime, says he is heading into the hills to set up an armed resistance. The narrator makes it perfectly clear he thinks this is a ridiculous waste of time which can only end badly. The so-called resistance are one more set of comedians, jokers on a gruesome stage.

Now Brown conceives the rather nasty idea of taking ‘Major’ Jones at his own word (he’s always bragging about his heroics in the War) and smuggling him up to the resistance in the hills – thus conveniently removing him from the embassy and from what his silly jealousy imagines to be the arms of his mistress.

The journey itself involves lying to the Tontons, who have already beaten him up once – and capture would lead to a bad beating or worse. The rendezvous with the resistance is arranged for an isolated cemetery, among the voodoo gravestones – a gruesomely atmospheric setting – but, inevitably, goes wrong.

Unusually for Greene – and an indication of the just-about comic intention of the novel – the major protagonist does not die (unlike the key figures in Heart of The Matter, The Third Man, End of The Affair, The Quiet American, A Burnt-Out Case). Instead, although the Tontons do intercept them, the scene cuts suddenly and unexpectedly to the Dominican Republic across the border a few weeks later. Turns out the resistance saved him and Jones and then smuggled them across the border. The nine-day journey was quite an ordeal – twenty-five years earlier Greene might have described it in excruciating detail rather in the style of The Power and The Glory, which amounts to a 200-page-long gruelling journey.

But instead, we jump to the lightly comic scenes of Brown safe and sound in the Dominican republic where he has the good fortune to bump into Mr Smith the American evangelist for vegetarianism and even his mistress, whose ambassador husband has been expelled from Haiti. After desultory end-of-the-affair conversations with the mistress, the kindly American fixes him up with a job as assistant to the monosyllabic funeral director we first met on the ferry to Haiti, in the opening pages, and that’s that.

Everything: Papa Doc’s Haiti with its absurd new capital built of concrete; Brown’s dreams of running the best hotel in the Caribbean; his affair; Jones’s lies about his military record; the resistance (12 men and three rusty machine guns)’s fantasies about overthrowing the regime. All bitter farce. We are all comedians.

Verbal felicities

The text is a rich interweaving of themes and ideas, some of which (the local description) I prefer to others (the preaching, the adultery). But the thing I really enjoy about Greene is the small verbal affects which crop up throughout the text. Greene is no Chandler, he is not a flashy stylist. Most of his prose is limpid, clear and uncoloured. Concisely effective, occasionally clumsy. But that makes the metaphors and similes, the moments of colour, when they do occur, all the more vivid. A lot of the pleasure of the novel comes from the sharp asides, ironic touches and deft comparisons it displays on almost every page.

[Petit Pierre] giggled up at me, standing on his pointed toe-caps, for he was a tiny figure of a man. He was just as I remembered him, hilarious. Even the time of day was humorous to him. He had the quick movements of a monkey, and he seemed to swing from wall to wall on ropes of laughter. (p.44)

A man in a torn shirt and a grey pair of trousers and an old soft hat which someone must have discarded in a dustbin came trailing his rifle by its muzzle to the door. (p.47)

‘I have known your mother many years. I have a great respect…’ He gave me the kind of bow with which a Roman emperor might have brought an audience to an end. He was in no way condescending. He knew his exact value. (p.69)

We quarrelled. I told her [her son] was a spoilt child, and she admitted it, but when I said that he spied on her, she was angry, and when I said he was getting as fat as his father, she tried to slap my face. I caught her wrist and she accused me of striking her. Then we laughed nervously, but the quarrel simmered on, like stock for tomorrow’s soup. (p.91)

The sun was almost vertically above us now: splinters of light darted here and there from the glass of the hearse and the bright brass-work of the coffin. The driver turned off his engine and we could hear the sudden silence extending a long long way to where a dog whined on the fringes of the capital. (p.122)

The Duponts were sitting on the veranda with the little boy, and all three were eating vanilla ices with chocolate sauce. Their top hats stood beside them like expensive ash-trays. (p.126)

‘Good-night.’ I put a false friendly hand on his head and ruffled his tough dry hair. My hand smelt afterwards like a mouse. (p.137)

On my right were a line of wooden huts in little fenced saucers of earth where a few palm trees grew and slithers of water gleamed between, like scrap-iron on a dump. An occasional candle burned over a small group bowed above their rum like mourners over a coffin. (p.141)

He handed the revolver to the second officer. ‘You will give it him,’ he said, ‘at the foot of the gangway.’ He turned his back and left the officer’s black hand floating in mid-air like a catfish in an aquarium. (p.216)

For me, this is what a writer should do – not the quotable quotes about love and faith and sin and despair – nor the rather heavy-handed deployment of a dominant theme (we are all comedians on the great stage of life) – but this, the skilful deployment of language to uplift reality and illuminate the reading mind. It is in these apt and expert turns of phrase that Greene, for me, is truly religious, taking the water of mundane life and transforming it into the wine of literature.

The movie

Greene, who had seen about a dozen of his novels turned into movies by this stage, and who famously wrote the screenplay for the classic film The Third Man, himself adapted this novel for the big screen. Directed by Peter Glenville and starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Ustinov and Alec Guinness, it should have been brilliant – but it looks rather bad, and can’t have been helped by the bloated running time of two-and-a-half hours.

Credit

‘The Comedians’ by Graham Greene was published by William Heinemann in 1966. Page references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for the purpose of criticism and review.

Related links

Graham Greene reviews

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by Simon on January 20, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, English literature, Novel
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Posted by Simon on January 20, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/the-comedians-graham-greene/

The 9th Directive by Adam Hall (1966)

To respond to the threat of a grenade-burst the sub-conscious has to evaluate a mass of data: the angle of the thrower’s arm, which governs the time-period from the beginning to the end of the throw; the size (and thus the weight) of the grenade – data which affects the time taken to throw it (the heavier the slower) and the degree of explosive force; the distance of the thrower to the intended point of impact; the height of the thrower above that point (gravity aiding momentum); and all factors pertaining, which include mass, inertia, trajectory, air resistance, so forth. (p.152)

Everything that irritated me about the first Quiller novel is here in the second. There’s a big stake – a Royal is making a state visit to Thailand and security have received realistic information that there’ll be an assassination attempt – but not much actually happens – Quiller argues with the supervisor who called him over from France to manage the project and spends a lot of time, nearly two weeks in fact, driving round Bangkok hoping to catch a glimpse of the assassin. Seriously. Just as in The Quiller Memorandum there is a steady, constant amount of ‘tagging’ or following, and counter-tagging, of driving round following other cars or being followed.

The tedium of the eventless plot is routinely interspersed with psychobabble masquerading as tradecraft and spy technique.

A simple rule of mnemonics is that if a face is to be remembered it must be forgotten in its absence. Attempted recall in the absence of the image is dangerously prone to distort it… Most instances of poor memory are examples of retroactive interference producing qualitative changes: the memory, goaded into conscious service, begins making things up. If left alone, the initial neural traces will remain absolutely clear, and will recognise the image immediately the next time it is seen – because no change has taken place. (p.34)

Psychoanalysis is crossed with the shiny new world of computer science to lace the text with themes and threads which must have seemed achingly up-to-the-minute in 1966.

The Maltz system of psycho-cybernetics breaks new ground in that it likens the subconscious to a computer to which the forebrain submits problems for resolution. Some of its concepts derive from accepted disciplines including that of the sleep processes. (p.42)

And, just as there is a detailed but utterly detached, scientific paper-style account of being injected with truth serum in the first novel, so, here, there is a similarly super-detached account of being caught in an explosion.

Reaction time covers three phases: time required to sense the signal, to decide on the correct response, and to respond. Relevant factors: age, state of health, muscle-tone, fatigue, alcohol, caffeine, so forth. Greatest artificial influential factor: training (i.e. habit formation). (p.151)

Old tech

The entire plot turns out to be about this piece of cutting edge technology, known as a ‘laser’.

The project concerned a refinement of the Laser device (Light Amplification by Stimulate Emission of Radiation). This is an electro-magnetic oscillator producing light-waves massed into an ultra-narrow wave-length band and directed along a fixed path in a ray one million times brighter than is possible in any normal way. (p.121)

Trainspotting

The tough-minded and often angry first-person narrator is as humourlessly factual about his gadgets as about every single other aspect of his world.

They let me take my pick from what they had on the shelves and I came up with a compromise: a Pentax X-15 25 mm single reflex with a 135 mm lens that took a 2 Auto teleconverter and a stock adapter for my Jupiters. This 135 x 2 x 8 (lens plus converter plus field-glasses) gave a total focal length of 2160 mm and a magnification of X 16. (p.62)

Don’t worry, there’s plenty more.

All the Husqvarnas are beautiful but the finest they make is the 561. It is a .358 Magnum, centre-fire, with a three-shot magazine, 25½-inch barrel, hand-chequered walnut stock, corrugated butt-plate and sling swivels. The fore-end and pistol-grip are tipped with rosewood. The total weight is 7¾lbs and the beech-pressure is in the region of 20 tons p.s.i., giving a high muzzle-velocity and an almost flat trajectory with a 150-grain bullet. (p.72)

I think what I don’t like about the books (apart from the ludicrous plots which consist of lots of wandering round being tagged or ‘flushing’ your tags or tagging other people) is that the tone is so relentlessly lecturing, haranguing and expounding. If it’s not guns and cameras, it’s long humourless lectures about the forebrain and the unconscious, the stomach-mind versus the head-brain. How an agent should behave before, during and after an ‘overkill’ operation. What you should know about safe houses.

A safe-house is no ordinary place: it is a cornerstone of security and bad security can wreck a mission and kill you off. You’ve got Local Control if you’re lucky but you can’t always rely on getting there if the operation hots up and you’re jumping. A safe-house is a home and sometimes it’s the only place you can run to. We think of it as a shrine, sacrosanct. It’s really a bolt-hole. (p.117)

It is always left to the discretion of the intelligence director in the field whether a killing is reported or not. (p.148)

Got that at the back? There’ll be a test on Friday.

Sex

It’s a spy novel in the 1960s, so of course there’s a dolly bird (sorry, an operative working for Mil. 6 – note the cool way he doesn’t write MI6, no, Mil.6 is what real insiders call it). Turns out she’s been tasked with ‘tagging’ Quiller all along. She is unnerved by the execution which happens in the book and so they drive to a hotel room and mechanically undress with no words.

We had nothing to say to each other; it was now too urgent for that. In the glow from the bedside lamp she moved without awkwardness, revealing her lean body with feline arrogance until she was naked except for the wafer-flat ·22 that was holstered on the inside of her thigh. She unclipped it deftly and dropped it on to her clothes. (p.127)

Ambler, Innes and MacLean wisely have little or no sex in their novels. Len Deighton’s hero refers to it in an oblique and characteristically dry way. Hall’s touch is brutal and humourless and clumsy.

She cried out the first time, and afterwards the heat of her tears touched my hand. (p.128)

The first time, eh? Give her multiples, did you, Mr Big? The next morning she apologises for crying out her boyfriend’s name ‘in the moment of passion’. This made me smile, because it is such a cliché.

But I laughed out loud when she goes on to explain why: ‘At those times we… often say things. It was because you were so… magnificent. I forgot where I was, who you were.’ (p.130) So magnificent, eh? So magnificient he makes a girl forget who she is, where she is. Modest chap, this Quiller. In his mind, the only agent who can save the Royal, an expert at psychological control, a master of all known weapons, a demon between the sheets. —Presumably, this is all meant to be serious? It isn’t all a colossal satire?

Somewhat inevitably, it turns out her man was killed on their last assignment together and, well, she just had to get it out of her system… You know how women are.

Their moment of release past, the agents both dress and get on with the job of going off to ‘tag’ the bad guys, while trying to avoid getting too ‘tagged’ in return.

Oh and more lecturing.

The sole advantage of the spring-gun is silence. It is more silent than any powder-gun, however heavily baffled. At even medium range – six feet and over – it is inefficient it it has to fire through clothing. Even at four feet an overcoat will shield the body from most of the impact. The spring-gun can kill through light clothing at any range below two feet providing it can be aimed to strike at a vital organ without hitting bone. As a useful weapon it has value only if its limitations are known and allowed for. (p.137)

The stupid plan

This continual lecturing, the complete absence of humour, the tedious expounding of Spy Basics, might all be bearable if the plot had pace or intelligence. But the first half of the book describes how Quiller is brought to Bangkok by a controller who tells him the mission is to protect a visiting Royal from a well-known Asian assassin named Kuo. Quiller tags Kuo all over Bangkok until, abruptly, he disappears – then spends over ten days driving round town trying to find him again. He figures out it will be a hit with a long-range rifle and finds the location, a tower in a Buddhist temple close to the route of the Royal car procession.

BUT, despite knowing the identity of the assassin and the location, Quiller and his Control agree a ludicrous plan which is to wait till the last possible moment, until the Royal car is coming down the parade and into view, and until the assassin is lifting his rifle to take aim, and only then giving Quiller a few seconds to shoot the assassin – from the window of a room Quiller has found in a derelict building across the way.

This seems like a bad plan. I explained it to my son and he said, how stupid. Really – you’re not going to tell MI6 (sorry, Mil.6), the local police or military or intelligence – you are going to make saving the life of a senior Royal entirely dependent on your own shooting ability and leave it to the last possible moment? Not have him arrested? Not bump him off earlier in the day? Leave everything to the last possible moment?

The absurdity of this approach closely echoes the absurdity of The Quiller Memorandum wherein Quiller lets himself be picked up twice by the Nazi gang and then lets himself be ‘tagged’ all round town before managing to slip away to make a phone call to his local Control. That’s the plot. How Quiller slips his tail to make one phone call to the office.

I wasn’t in the least bit surprised when the ‘plan’ goes horribly wrong. Who would have predicted that? Despite having cocked things up really badly, the narrator doesn’t leave off his barrage of hectoring, except it is now like trying to keep a straight face in front of a teacher who has hilariously screwed up in front of the whole class. Now you can’t take anything he says seriously, and the more deadly earnest and man-of-the-world he tries to be, the more ludicrous a figure he cuts.

There had been only a slight phuttt from the gun. Its barrel had swung up a degree to meet my hand and the dart had ripped flesh away. A trained athlete reacts as fast as a cat, and muscle-obedience to the motor nerves is almost instantaneous. (p.138)

Ah so.

He held a ·38 automatic and it had a silencer. ‘Silencer’ is a misnomer. No gun can be made silent. A full baffle will absorb a lot of noise but it will also cost a lot of impact and can make the difference between a kill and a maiming wound – and a man with a maiming wound can run and can even fight and can even close in before the second shot comes. This was a half-baffle designed to cut down the noise without costing too much fire-power. (p.140)

In many places this ‘novel’ approaches as close to a textbook or manual as a work of fiction can. And all the people in it are faultless professionals who have all been to the same finishing schools for spies and secret agents.

His hand moved fractionally into the killing-attitude, pressing the gun against his side to cushion the recoil. (p.142)

The Chinese hadn’t moved. Blood came from the hole in his neck. She had shot for the third vertebra in the cervical region, smashing it and severing the nerves. It was a surgically accurate shot, consideration having been taken of the limitations of so small a gun. (p.146)

They were working as a perfectly disciplined cell controlled by a professional of talent. (p.166)

So it’s odd, eerie, then, that the overwhelming impression the narrator makes is of an idiot, permanently angry, always shouting at his calm boss, arrogantly declaring he has the only plan to protect the visiting Royal – a plan which completely misfires allowing the Royal to be kidnapped by the gang – an idiot, and who then deliberately lets himself be cornered in a warehouse, hand grenaded, poisoned by cyanide and then has his car shot away from under him.

There are countless pages of manual-speak but next to no intelligence. Instead the crucial breakthroughs in the plot are complete accidents – he happens to see Kuo going into the temple which will be used for the hit; and he happens to glimpse out the corner of his eye a Rolls Royce with the Union Jack being flown incorrectly on it and so suspects it is being used to smuggle the Royal out of Bangkok.

The narrator goes to great lengths to show off his expertise, but comes across as a technocrat buffoon. On page 174 he accuses himself of gross stupidity and it is hard to disagree.

Related links

Fontana paperback edition of The 9th Directive, tie-in with the BBC TV series

Fontana paperback edition of The 9th Directive, tie-in with the BBC TV series

The Quiller novels

  • 1965 – The Berlin Memorandum Quiller tangles with a group of neo-Nazis led by Oktober, trying to get details of their organisation til the capture and interrogate him to get the details of his organisation.
  • 1966 – The 9th Directive Quiller is in Bangkok where he uncovers a plot to assassinate ‘a leading Royal’, which he incompetently fails to realise is really a disguised plot to kidnap him. After much shooting and a high speed road chase the Royal is exchanged for an enemy spy on the Chinese border.
  • 1968 – The Striker Portfolio Quiller investigates the unexplained crashes of NATO’s latest high speed jet and uncovers a sinister conspiracy.
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by Simon on January 16, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 16, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/the-9th-directive-adam-hall/

Billion Dollar Brain by Len Deighton (1966)

‘There’s only one General Winter,’ Stok said, ‘and he’s on our side.’
(Billion Dollar Brain, page 229)

You British are such clever losers,’ Mercy said.
‘It comes with practice,’ I said.
(p.162)

In the year England won the World Cup, Len Deighton published the fourth in his series of spy novels featuring the unnamed, middle-aged, bespectacled employee of the W.O.O.C.(P.) section (the initials are never explained) of British Intelligence.

Differences from previous novels

Less clutter First thing you notice is there’s less of the paraphernalia – none of the business about ‘Secret File 1’ and ‘Secret File 2’, and pages at the start purporting to be forms and letters such as you’d find in a government dossier, which characterised its predecessor The Ipcress File and Horse Under Water.

Fewer chapters The text is divided into 28 chapters, which are themselves grouped into 10 ‘parts’, each focusing on a specific location as the Narrator pops back and forth between London, Helsinki, Petersburg, Riga, New York and Texas.

No puzzle epigraphs In Ipcress each chapter was introduced by a horoscope, in Horse by crossword clues, in Funeral by chess tips. Here only the 10 main parts (i.e. not the 28 chapters) have an epigraph and they aren’t puzzles but nursery rhymes – I’d heard of a few of them (who killed cock robin? round and round the garden) but most of them I’d never seen before and strongly suspect Deighton made them up. Reading Deighton makes you suspicious of everything.

Hey diddle dinkety, poppety, pet,
The merchants of London, they wear scarlet,
Silk in the collar and gold in the hem,
So merrily march the merchant men. (p.171)

Fewer references There are fewer footnotes and only three appendices rather than the 6 of Funeral (concerning Soviet military districts; Soviet intelligence; Privately owned intelligence units).

The text is longer than Ipcress and although there’s still plenty of grandstanding style, there’s noticeably less of it, with some paragraphs sounding a bit anonymous, just good effective description. Ipcress had zingers on every page, Billion once every 3 or 4 pages.

Altogether, it feels just a bit less ‘zany’ and elliptical than the previous three novels, a tad more traditional – though still very obviously from the same stable.

Character And I felt in some way there was more of a focus on character, less on style: the young Finnish girl, Signe, and the KGB colonel, Stok, both emerge very clearly as strong characters, in a way characters in earlier novels didn’t so much. Mad General Midwinter, too. In the end the entire novel is about character, an enquiry into the fantasy-driven ‘manic-depressive’ (p.197) character of Harvey Newbegin, the Russian émigré’s son-turned-double agent, who struggles to tell fact from fantasy. But also, it’s only right at the end that a trio of strong women comes fully into focus: Mercy Newbegin, the real force behind her husband; Signe Laine, the kittenish assassin; and Mrs Pike, a more effective spy than her husband.

In fact you could argue that the last three novels resolve into being studies of specific individuals who turn out to have divided identities and loyalties:

  • Horse – Senhor Manuel Gambeta do Rosario da Cunha, pillar of Albufeira society who turns out to a former German U-boat captain
  • Funeral – Johnny Vulkan who turns out to be a former Jewish concentration camp prisoner
  • Billion – Harvey Newbegin who is torn between his American identity and his Russian roots

The Narrator

I had few friends. I stayed well clear of the sort of people who thought I had a dead-end job in the Civil Service, and these who knew what the job was stayed clear of me. I poured myself a drink. (p.120)

Physical description According to his passport description, the Narrator is ‘5’ 11″, blue eyes, dark-brown hair, dark complexion, no visible scars’. He wears glasses and is overweight.

Fat At the start of this novel he takes a long lunch with his secretary-girlfriend and returns to the office at 3.45 so drunk he trips on the lino and falls down the stairs. Despite the slickness of his narrating style – and the way we all tend to identify with the narrator of any story – I wonder if we’re meant to pick up on the notion that the Narrator is actually an overweight, womanising, incipient alcoholic? Even the General comments on it:

Midwinter pedalled in silence for a moment or two, then he said, ‘Keep yourself fit boy. Healthy mind in a healthy body. Get rid of that surplus weight.’
‘I’m happy the way I am,’ I said. (p.174)

And has his personal trainer give him a punishing massage ‘while explaining some of the finer points of coronary heart disease’ (p.176).

Tastes He smokes Gauloise cigarettes. He knows a good wine when he sees the label or tastes one. He appreciates good food. He has tea, and coffee, with milk no sugar.

Financial whizz As we know from the previous novels, he owes his position in W.O.O.C.(P) to his expertise in international finance i.e. moving money around. At one point he describes his job more explicitly than ever before:

As a general rule – and all general rules are dangerous – agents are natives of the country in which they operate. I wasn’t an agent, nor was I likely ever to be one. I delivered, evaluated and handled information that our agents obtained, but I seldom met one except a cut-out or go-between. (p.27)

Military history Like his author, the Narrator is interested in military history; he is reading Major-General J.F.C. Fuller’s The Decisive Battles of the Western World. (In Funeral we saw him meeting old German General Borg while the latter was re-enacting the Battle of Waterloo in a sandpit, and making detailed comments on the precise progress of the battle.) In fact this interest is ironically satirised later in the novel:

I fixed coffee for [Harvey] while he went poking through my bookshelves. ‘The Fall of Crete. Histoire de L’Armee Francaise. Ruller’s Campaign. Weapons and Tactics. What are you, some kind of nut about soldiers?’
‘Yes,’ I answered from the kitchen. (p.195)

And we know that Deighton would go on to write factual histories of the Second World War (Blitzkrieg, Fighter) as well as intensely researched fictions on the same subject (Bomber, SS-GB, Goodbye Mickey Mouse) about which he knew a very great deal indeed.

As his bosses see him

On the last page Dawlish is bemused that the Narrator accompanied Mrs Pike and her son, direct from the school play and dressed as a soldier, to the airport, and tells him he had a laugh about it with the Narrator’s old boss, Ross (at the War Office):

‘I said that to Ross the other day when he was objecting to you going down to Salisbury. I said he may be a little captious, he certainly has a chip on his shoulder and he is liable to get hold of the wrong end of the stick; but he does keep the department lively.’

Executive summary

A mad American billionaire, ‘General’ Midwinter, has created a secret organisation called Facts for Freedom, including recruiting and brainwashing agents to be deployed overseas, all co-ordinated by a billion-dollar intelligent computer, and devoted to overthrowing the Soviet Union.

I said, ‘You think that the best way to contribute to a dangerous situation is to raise a private army out of your profits on cans of oil and beans, frozen orange juice and advertising, and to operate your own undeclared war against the Russians.’
He [General Midwinter] waved his good hand in the air; the large emerald ring flashed in the cold morning light. ‘That’s right son.’ (p.176)

Midwinter thinks he can finance an insurrection which will overthrow the current repressive regime. I am rereading and expanding this review in April 2026, in week 4 of Donald Trump’s attack on Iran which began with him imbecilically calling on the Iranian population to rise up against their repressive regime. Not only this, but:

I was tired, and frightened of Midwinter because he wasn’t tired… Politics [to him] were simple black-and-white toughness – like a TV Western – and diplomacy was just a matter of demonstrating that toughness. (p.176)

Remind you of anyone? Sounds to me just like gung-ho US Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth.

The plot

Helsinki Snow and cold. The Narrator is told by his boss Dawlish to visit a journalist, Olaf Kaarna, in Helsinki. This Kaarna has contacted the Foreign Office about publishing a piece claiming there is a big British spy organisation operating across northern Europe and Finland (which is not true). So the Narrator gets a fake passport in the name of Liam Dempsey, an Irish citizen, made up by an old contact of his, and flies to Helsinki. Here he finds Olaf’s apartment door open and Olaf dead on his bed, his clothes covered in raw egg (?). As the Narrator explores the apartment, the lift comes up and he encounters a beautiful young Finnish woman, Signe Laine. She clumsily tells him she’s working for British Military Intelligence then introduces him to her lover, who is none other than the American ex-agent Harvey Newbegin. We encountered Newbegin in Funeral In Berlin where he drank too much and was just being dismissed from the US State Department. Back then the Narrator had suggested to his boss they recruit him, though this is blocked by higher-ups.

England Instead the Narrator allows himself to be recruited by Newbegin for his organisation. Newbegin explains it’s run by a right-wing American billionaire (General Midwinter) who plans to overthrow the Soviet Union. He despatches the Narrator back to London to make a secret rendezvous with one Dr Felix Pike. Pike takes him to a grand Georgian house in the country, to meet his brother, Dr Ralph Pike, a research scientist. (Though pretending to be posh English, both brothers are obviously foreign, the Narrator finds out Latvian; Colonel Stok later reveals they are Latvian war criminals.) They give him a small package to deliver back to Helsinki. Once alone the Narrator takes it to Dawlish and his people, who discover it is a pack of six eggs stolen from the Porton Down Research Institute. Aha. Germ warfare. They switch them for a pack of harmless household eggs and the Narrator sets off to fly back to Helsinki. However, at London airport his luggage and everyone else’s is stolen, including the (swapped, harmless) eggs.

Helsinki Back in Helsinki the Narrator allows himself to be seduced by the teenage Signe. She tells him all about Newbegin’s spiteful wife back in the US and how Newbegin is sending a lot of the money he gets paid back to his wife’s bank account. Seems as if Newbegin is obeying the instructions of his employer but, cynically, doesn’t expect the plan to succeed.

The Brain Newbegin tells the Narrator more about the organisation: all the missions are worked out by a massive computer – it assigns agents tasks, they report back to it whether successful or failed, and the computer calculates their new plans and orders. They call it The Brain. Our man is not impressed.

I said yes to everything, but to me machines tend to look alike.

Helsinki Back in Helsinki, Newbegin and the Narrator receive the biochemist Dr Pike from London, equip him in parachute gear, rendezvous with a plane on the ice which takes off to parachute Dr Pike over Russia. The Narrator doesn’t know what Dr Pike intends to do there but thinks he’ll be captured immediately. Newbegin is cynical about the whole deal, and is just taking the money and obeying orders emitted by the Brain.

Leningrad Newbegin and the Narrator fly to Leningrad and rendezvous with an Italian girdle salesman named Fragolli. Here they exchange the eggs – at which point the Narrator realises they were stolen at the airport, not by a random thief but by someone working for ‘the Organisation’. Fragolli says the Narrator has to memorise a message and fly to Riga with it. The Narrator meets up on the Leningrad metro with another familiar face, Colonel Oleg Stok, the joking KGB officer from Funeral In Berlin.

He was a heavy muscular man of about sixty. He had a round face that hadn’t done much smiling until middle age, and an uptilted nose that perhaps had been busted and reset by a plumber. His eyes were small black sentries that marched up and down, and his hands were bunches of bananas unsold over the weekend. (p.91)

The hold-up Stok warns our man not to get caught up with these fantasists but the Narrator finds himself forced to travel out to the frozen woods outside Riga to help with the ambush of a Soviet truck carrying supplies. The bald-headed man in charge, who works for Midwinter’s organisation, wants the ration books which will reveal a lot about front-line troops dispositions. But the gangsters he’s hired are just thugs and, once they’ve intercepted the truck, they casually kill the bald-headed man and it’s only by assaulting the lead gangster who’s holding a machine gun and then running into the woods that the Narrator survives. Here he bumps into the mounted Soviet army unit which is about to surround the gangsters, and gets hit over the head, knocked unconscious.

The Narrator regains consciousness in a barracks under a pile of corpses and terrifies the guard who enters and thought he was dead. Then enters Colonel Stok (he turns up everywhere like the fairy godmother). Told you not to go, he says. He cleans the Narrator up and takes him to a restaurant where they see Dr Ralph Pike enter and spot them. Narrator realises he is being set up – Pike’s arrest will coincide with the Narrator being seen with Stok, and Midwinter’s Organisation will think the Narrator betrayed him.

New York and General Midwinter Next the Narrator leaves Russia and flies in to New York where he meets the short billionaire ‘General’ giving a fancy dress party at which Mozart is being played by a live chamber orchestra. Newbegin is there and very drunk but he and the Narrator dance a duet together. Later that night Signe turns up as he’s eating in a diner. It’s not a chance encounter: the Organisation instruct him to move in with her. She continues to tell the Narrator about her confused love affair with Newbegin, while seducing him.

Texas Next the Narrator flies in Midwinter’s private jet to Houston Texas and is driven north to the General’s big private ranch. Lots of security, and ‘the Brain’ turns out to be housed in an underground complex, complete with airlocks, compulsory showers and antiseptic white clothing before you can enter the dirt-free white corridors around which are located the vast $100 million servers of the largest computer in the world, all spliced tape and punch cards – very 1960s.

The Narrator has to undergo the 14-day induction course required to enter the Organisation. He also sees the tensions in Newbegin’s marriage from close-up: Mrs Newbegin, Mercy, is the general’s right-hand lady, tough and ambitious for her husband, while Newbegin secretly thinks the whole thing is bunk.

In an uncanny scene, Signe invites the Narrator to meet her for a meal in San Antonio, but at their bar rendezvous she leaves a message for him to go to a dentist’s surgery in a rough part of town. When he arrives it’s deserted, he explores into the clinic room itself and discovers the Italian girdle salesman Fragolli sitting dead in the dentist’s chair. Signe and Harvey suddenly arrive and drag him away to a bar but the Narrator has doubts and runs back, just in time to collide with the local cops who’ve arrived at the scene. They start to arrest him before Harvey pulls his clout with the local detective and gets the Narrator released. What was that all about?

New York Having completed the induction course, the Narrator returns to New York where the General summons him to his skyscraper, where he’s riding an exercise bike in the centre of a vast gym or, later, watches hawks among New York’s high-rise buildings with binoculars. The General tells him that Newbegin has done a bunk across the Mexican border, leaving his wife and children. The General asks the Narrator to track him down. The Narrator tells the General that his plans are mad, that the Russians will never ‘rise up’ against their rulers, that Newbegin faked the British and Finland ‘networks’, pocketing the funds he was given for fake agents, and stashing all the money in a bank account held by Mrs Newbegin.

The General instructs the Narrator to find and neutralise Newbegin before he betrays his whole organisation. (Feeble organisation, if one man’s defection can wreck it; also feeble, if the General can’t set umpteen sleuths to finding Newbegin; the excuse Deighton has him make is that the Narrator knows Newbegin uniquely well and so is best placed a) to find him b) to persuade him to give himself up. The General promises they’ll give him a year’s leave to come to his senses.) The Narrator says that, in order to do so, he’ll need full details of everyone Newbegin’s been in contact with for the past few years. The General grudgingly agrees. We realise this is a coup for the Narrator and British intelligence.

Charlotte Street So the Narrator flies back to London where the narration resumes its sanity after the mad right-wing American conspiracy scenes. Back in his dingy Charlotte Street office, the Narrator discusses the case so far with his boss, Dawlish (and allows the reader to catch their breath). To recap, Newbegin:

  • has been faking agents and salting away their pay
  • passing all the Organisation’s information on to the Russians, who are probably also paying him
  • arranged the assassination of Kaarna at the start of the plot, because he was finding out too much
  • was himself the thief who stole the (switched, non-Porton Down) eggs at the airport
  • tried to have the Narrator assassinated by the gangsters on the road outside Riga
  • suggested to Stok that he be seen with the Narrator just before Pike is picked up, thus throwing suspicion on the Narrator. (The General had spotted the reason for this last ploy: casting suspicion on the Narrator gave Newbegin just the extra bit of time he needed to make his arrangements to flee across the border into Mexico and then – who knows where?)

Track him down, says Dawlish, if necessary, get rid of him. But in fact, later the same day Newbegin comes to the Narrator’s flat in London and asks a) can he be given a home by British Intelligence (No) b) can he hide out there for a few days (Yes) c) will the Narrator come to Helsinki to persuade Signe to run away with him (Reluctant yes).

The Narrator takes some other agents and the police to arrest Dr Pike for smuggling the virus eggs out of Porton Down, a broadly comic scene counterpointed with the very smart party his wife struggles to continue hosting downstairs while the Narrator and his accomplices are upstairs: the Narrator plays the part of a fellow conspirator who’s been caught and is about to spill the beans to the two detectives with him, in the hope that this will prompt Pike to make a similar confession.

Helsinki Newbegin and the Narrator fly back to Helsinki and are met with Signe who has fixed up a dummy apartment to decoy any tails, and a secret apartment where they go and hide out. (How do they do this without British police and/or American agents noticing?)

Uncharacteristically, the Narrator tells us what is going on i.e. Dawlish ordered him to do this in order to have Newbegin arrested by American agents not on British soil, for minimum embarrassment. There have been enough British spy scandals of late (the British government confirmed that Kim Philby had been a spy in the summer of 1963.)

Newbegin is convinced he wants to defect. They get on a train to Leningrad, and are kissed goodbye at the station by Signe. On the train journey Newbegin tells the Narrator he really loves Signe, she really loves him. He also says it was Signe who assassinated Kaarna as well as several other agents – in fact, she is the Organisation’s assassin in the region. (As she has told so many flighty fancies it is difficult to know if this is true or not.)

On the train On this fateful last train journey Newbegin and the Narrator talk, the latter trying to persuade him not to defect, to do a deal with Midwinter. Russian border guards order Newbegin off the train, then try to shoot him but he just about makes it back to the train as it pulls away. Newbegin accuses them of being the Narrator’s agents; the Narrator counters that they were US agents paid to assassinate him and masquerading as Russians.

They make it Leningrad and are walking down the Nevsky Prospekt, Newbegin saying he feels ill, his elbow hurts, and then he suddenly steps out in front of a bus and is instantly killed. What? The bus stops, cops come running, the Narrator tries to back away, but finds standing directly behind him is Colonel Stok (he turns up everywhere) who whistles up a Zis car and takes the Narrator directly to the airport. (He’s had his passport fetched from the hotel he and Newbegin only just checked into.)

Newbegin is dead and so all the plot stands rotating round him disappear. Since the Narrator persuaded the General to hand over a great list of Newbegin’s contacts, it is assumed the organisation has been neutralised (though that seems a bit unlikely to me).

Epilogue As with all the other novels, you feel the bulk of the story is over but then there’s a final act. Back in Britain, the Narrator and Jean are ordered to drive down to Salisbury where Dr Pike’s brother is being kept in a mental ward by the Army, overseen by Ross, the Narrator’s boss in The Ipcress File. The reason is simply that revealing that top secret viruses were being smuggled out of Porton Down would (further) damage our relationship with the Americans. They are to pressurise him into writing a letter to his wife telling her to emigrate – because Ross has tipped off Special Branch who are going to arrest her, for it is now revealed that it was she who actually handled the stolen eggs, and evidence has just come in that she couriered another stolen set to Russia just a week earlier. The reason for wanting her off British soil is the same: to avoid embarrassment, not just to Intelligence but to the government.

The Narrator and Jean track Mrs Pike down to a prep school Christmas show and there is another farcical scene where their whispered attempts to persuade her to drop everything and flee the country are counterpointed with the innocent children singing nursery rhymes on stage. She agrees to go. In a comic last page Dawlish admonishes the Narrator for turning up at passport control with a child still wearing its panto costume, which drew unnecessary attention.

Killer?

Colonel Stok bluntly accuses the Narrator of pushing Newbegin out in front of the bus which kills him, and he doesn’t deny it. And his boss Dawlish is delighted. he appears to have cold-bloodedly murdered his ‘friend’. Mind you, that ‘friend’ had tried to have him murdered by criminals in the Riga forests so… No-one has friends in this business.

Nothing more is heard of the Midwinter organisation, as if this setback would have neutralised it, which seems unlikely. Even if the Narrator got a lot of detail about their agents, surely someone as rich and mad as Midwinter wouldn’t be deterred.

The real hole in the plot and plausibility problem, is where are the FBI and CIA in all this? Wouldn’t they have gotten a teeny bit involved in a massive geopolitical conspiracy on their home soil?

Cast

London

  • Narrator – ‘5’ 11″, blue eyes, dark-brown hair, dark complexion, no visible scars’, wears glasses, smokes Gauloise cigarettes, overweight
  • Dawlish – his boss, dryly humorous, always ahead of the game; grows wild flowers; always buying knocked-down antiques which he then regrets; has the only office in the dingy Charlotte Street offices with two windows; has a recurring catchphrase ‘[x] is just a state of mind’:

I’d spent long enough in both the Army and the Civil Service to know that I didn’t like working in either; but working with Dawlish was an education, perhaps the only part of my education that I had ever enjoyed.

  • Jean Tonnesen – his secretary, ‘a tall girl in her middle twenties. Her face was as calm as Nembutal and with her high cheekbones and tightly drawn back hair she was beautiful without working at it’ – Jean is a long-suffering love interest because on each of the previous 3 novels the Narrator has slept with attractive young women; she knows about this but appears to put up with it
  • Alice Bloom – redoubtable office manager – ‘I could have told him that he’d never win an argument with Alice. No one ever had’
  • The Dispatch Department (duty drivers) – worth mentioning because in all four books it’s mentioned that they love playing brass band music on their gramophone (p.187)
  • Bessie Butterworth – phone exchange operator at the office, wife of Austin ‘Ossie’ Butterworth, the burglar and safecracker who appeared in the previous two novels
  • Sonny Sontag – passport forger based in Whitechapel who makes him the fake Irish passport in the name of Liam Dempsey – calls the Narrator Mr Jolly after the first passport he forged for him

Abroad

  • Olaf Kaarna – Finnish journalist supposedly writing an article about a British intelligence network; the Narrator is despatched to interview him but discovers him murdered
  • Signe Laine – beautiful young Finnish woman, passionate, impulsive, in love with Harvey but has a fling with the Narrator – only at the end does Harvey reveal that she’s ‘the official killer for the Midwinter organisation’, who murdered the journalist Kaarna and salesman-spy Froggali
  • Harvey Newbegin – US State Department agent who we met (getting drunk) in Prague, in Funeral – ‘Harvey Newbegin was a neatly dressed man; grey flannel suit, initialled handkerchief in top pocket, gold watch, and a relaxed smile… Under those droopy eyelids Harvey had quick, intelligent eyes’ – son of Russian immigrants to the States – turns out to be embezzling funds from the General’s organisation and planning to defect with the precious germ warfare eggs
  • Mercy Newbegin (Texas) – Harvey’s wife, independently rich – ‘a good-looking woman who looked even better in the light of the flickering candles. Her frame was small, her arms looked frail and very white against the raw silk. Women would say she had ‘good bones’. Her skin was tight across her ivory face and although one suspected that the tautness was maintained by a beauty parlour, it didn’t lessen the harmony of the face, in which brown eyes seemed bigger than they really were, like a sun at sunset. She was a silk-and-satin girl; it was hard to imagine her in denim and cotton’ (p.161)
    • two children, smallest named Hank
    • cat, Simon
  • General Midwinter (New York and Texas) – Texan multimillionaire and mastermind of the plan to conquer Soviet Russia – ‘a tiny man, dapper and neat like most small men, and he wore a gold-encrusted eighteenth-century English general’s uniform with its complex aiguillette and thigh-length boots…His voice was soft but with a hard mechanical edge like a speak-your-weight machine’ – his left hand is false, made of wood
  • Dr Felix Pike (London) – ‘a large, impeccably groomed man of about fifty-two. His hair was like a black plastic swimming cap. His suit was made of thin uncreasable blue steel and so was his smile’ – ‘Pike and I loathed each other on sight, but he had the advantage of breeding and education, so he swallowed hard and went out of his way to be nice to me.’
  • Ralph Pike (London and Riga) – affects British upper-class manners, likes to cite Latin tags – ‘both these Pike brothers are Latvian; they hold extreme right political views and the one named Ralph is a top biochemist’
  • Harriman (London) – ‘a big, hard man who looked more like a doorman than a lieutenant-colonel from Special Field Intelligence. His hair was black and tight against his bony skull. His skin was wrinkled and leather-like, and his teeth were large and uneven’
  • Signor Fragolli (Helsinki) – a very tall man in an overcoat and an astrakhan hat came in – ‘a large man with a deeply lined muscular face and a large hooked nose like a Roman Emperor.’
  • The bungled lorryjacking (outside Riga):
    • the bald man – Lithuanian operative working for the General
    • soldier driving the hijacked lorry
    • Ivan – psychopathic ‘bastard’ who kills the bald man and soldier and the Narrator flees from
    • Soviet cavalryman who knocks the Narrator unconscious with his pistol grip
  • General Stok – senior figure in Soviet intelligence, recurring character in the novels; Narrator tells Dawlish he’s nicknamed ‘Beef Stroganoff’ because he pours so much cream over you, you don’t realise you’re being torn to shreds (p.190)
  • Guards Major Nogin GRU – attending the General Stok when the latter saves the Narrator then arrests Ralph pike when N, Stok and he go to a restaurant

The Brain

‘The Brain’ is a billion dollar super-computer owned by eccentric Texan billionaire General Midwinter. In 1965 Deighton’s account of a huge artificial intelligence kept in vast underground air-conditioned rooms and tended to by white uniformed technicians was bang on trend, the kind of thing that appeared in half a dozen Bond films and other movies of the spy wave.

Harvey opened the door. This room was gigantic: like the hangar deck of an aircraft carrier. The banks of computer machines stretched away into the distance and there were only a few dim lights glowing. Our footsteps echoed as though there were other people walking to meet us from the far end… The machines hummed and snick-snicked as if they had been warned to keep their voices down. The thin oil that coated each vital component, the enamel and metal tapes were warm enough to aromatize the air as, fast as the air-conditioning changed it. The smell was sobering and efficient like ether and antiseptic, as though this was the casualty ward of a vast hospital run by machines for machines. (p.156)

That said, the Narrator is continually amazed at the ridiculous procedures connected with contacting it (by phone) and the uselessness of the orders it issues.

It was all very well for Dawlish to tell me to take orders from the Brain, he didn’t have to obey them. (p.120)

Class consciousness

Most of the British agents went to public school, as did the Narrator’s boss, Dawlish (Harrow).

‘What are the socialists going to do about the public schools?’ he asked. I was one of the few grammar-school boys that Dawlish ever came in contact with. He considered me an authority on all aspects of left-wing politics…
‘Send their sons to them,’ I said. (p.188)

‘Eton,’ said Dawlish, ‘that’s not a public school; that’s group therapy for congenital deviates.’ Dawlish was a Harrow man.

With Dawlish there was Bernard, one of the brighter of the public-school boys we had recruited of late…

Upper-class twits are embodied in the hapless figure of Chico, real name Philip Chilcott-Oates, who is given a basic tail job and completely muffs it, getting taken in by a pub joker into the bargain.

Olde England

Just placing a chapter describing New York with its millionaires, 24-hour culture, aggressive, competitive, can-do atmosphere, before a chapter describing the offices of the Narrator’s intelligence unit, with its rickety stairs, badly fitting carpet, peeling wallpaper, and fires that don’t work, is satire on shabby England without lifting a finger.

Locations

As mentioned in previous reviews, the spy novel has many appeals but an obvious one is the way it jets the reader to exotic locations, in this case:

  • London
  • Helsinki
  • Riga
  • St Petersburg
  • New York – Greenwich Village
  • San Antonio, Texas

Influence of films

Difficult to tell the direct influence of films, and the experience of film-making on thriller writers – Greene, Ambler, Innes, MacLean, le Carré, Deighton, all had plenty of movies based on their novels. But what is for the first time slightly detectable in this book is the anxiety, the self-consciousness, which thriller writers acquire, as they realise the kinds of scenarios and scenes and dialogues they are inventing often come perilously close to those used up and turned into clichés by the vast film factory. They then all develop this strange compulsion to highlight the fact that the scenes and dialogue sound as if they’re coming from bad films – as if that somehow defuses the issue instead of highlighting it…

‘Why have they started all this?’
I shrugged. ‘Someone in the Organisation Department read one of those spy books.’ (p.20)

Ralph said ‘Good man’ in the low sincere voice they use in films just before they do something dangerous.

So we meet again, Colonel Stok?’ I said like they say it in films. (p.92)

Stok went across to the window and looked through the side of the curtain like they do in gangster films. (p.98)

I splashed more [cold water] over my face. It looks therapeutic in movies but it made me feel worse than ever. (p.107)

[She] sipped at the champagne and narrowed her eyes at me in a gesture of passion that she had seen in some bad film. (p.143)

We show some of them the dirty tricks, but it’s pretty elementary because none of those boys are likely to be used in any sort of field work. They don’t get much more out of it than they would from reading a James Bond paperback. (p.148)

Midwinter was sitting under a Mathieu in a strange wiry throne that made him look like an actor in a bad film about space ships. (p.177)

Or TV:

‘Assignment Danger. Da-da-da-di-da-da,’ said Harvey, imitating the opening chords of a TV serial. (p.167)

‘Next year,’ said Bessie, ‘they are going to have some satellite receivers and we will be able to draw lines on a map to show where the penceiver is transmitting from.’
‘Very Dick Tracy,’ I said. (p.194)

‘I couldn’t make anyone believe that there were people like you [Harvey] around any more except on late-night TV.’

Similes and style

Deighton’s prose is consistently inventive and entertaining. Look how much effort goes into just two sentences:

Through the french windows the lawn was the size of a small landing strip. Beyond it six bonfires built tall columns of smoke on flickering bases of flame, as though a besieging army were encamped there among the bare foggy trees.

Or:

The fog had become thicker and was that sort of green they call a ‘pea-souper’. The shoe shops were prisms of yellow light and past them buses were trumpeting, ambling aimlessly like a herd of dirty red elephants looking for a place to die.

A bit lurid, that one, but you get the idea. He puts a lot of effort into his writing, into making every sentence jazzy and often beautifully inventive.

Stok looked at me calmly, trying to read the small print in my eyes. (p.97)

The car followed Broadway all the way to Wall Street, stopping outside a glass cliff that reflected the smaller buildings as though they were trapped inside it. (p.173)

That said, there are noticeably fewer of these kinds of flashy sentences in this fourth novel than in the earlier ones. The wattage is measurably lower.

Raymond Chandler

My feeling in the earlier novels that Deighton was channeling Raymond Chandler – especially in the American sections or around American characters, specially in the later passage of Horse Under Water – is confirmed by the scenes set in New York and Houston in this book. Not oppressively – he retains his own oblique English attitude. But at moments the Narrator just sounds American:

The prowl-car boys handed me downstairs and gave me the hands-flat-against-the-roof-of-the-car routine while they frisked me. (p.169)

Humour

Still plenty of dead-pan humour.

[The chauffeur] rolled a cigarette across the width of his mouth without using his hands. I followed him. I’d follow anyone who can do that. (p.147)

Jazz

The Narrator is old enough to be a jazz fan, and not to like the still-not-quite-born-yet rock music. When he first visits Newbegin’s flat there’s ‘Artie Shaw on the turntable’. When he thinks he might be about to die he jokingly hopes his sister will get his hi-fi and LP collection ‘some of the Goodman ones are quite valuable’, meaning the Benny Goodman albums. Jean sends him a message in New York asking him to bring back discs by John Coltrane, Roland Kirk and Sonny Rollins (p.136). Although he comes over as hip and with-it, it’s in more of a 1950s than a ’60s way.

The movie

This novel was made into the third of the trilogy of movies starring Michael Caine as Deighton’s unnamed spy who, for the purpose of the movies, is named Harry Palmer. It was directed by notorious British director Ken Russell and, while one of his least preposterous creations, was still a dog’s dinner. It was the first one to flop at the box office and helped to persuade Caine not to play the character a fourth time, which is why the pencilled adaptation of Horse Under Water was dropped. As a reviewer on Amazon pithily puts it:

‘Ipcress’ is brilliant.
‘Funeral’ is good.
‘Brain’ is weird but watchable.

Credit

‘Billion Dollar Brain’ was published by Jonathan Cape in 1966. Page references are to the 1967 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for criticism and review.

Related links

1966 Penguin paperback cover of Billion Dollar Brain

Cover of the 1966 Penguin paperback edition of Billion Dollar Brain (the edition I own)

Related reviews

1966 in thrillers

  • Wyatt’s Hurricane by Desmon Bagley – A motley crew of civilians led by meteorologist David Wyatt are caught up in a civil war on the fictional island of San Fernandes just as a hurricane strikes.
  • Octopussy by Ian Fleming – Three short stories in which: Bond uses the auction of a valuable Fabergé egg to reveal the identity of the Russians’ spy master in London; shoots a Russian sniper before she can kill one of our agents escaping from East Berlin; and confronts a former Security Service officer who has been eaten up with guilt for a wartime murder of what turns out to be Bond’s pre-war ski instructor. This last short story, Octopussy, may be his best.
  • The 9th Directive by Adam Hall – British agent Quiller is sent to Bangkok to stop an assassination attempt on a visiting royal by a known killer, Kuo; after days of surveillance and tracking, he identifies the sniper’s location but adopts a risky last-minute plan to stop the attack, which fails—revealing the plot was actually a kidnapping.
  • When Eight Bells Toll by Alistair MacLean – British Treasury secret agent Philip Calvert defeats a gang who have been hijacking ships carrying bullion off the Scottish coast.
  • Sabre-Tooth by Peter O’Donnell – Glamorous British agent Modesty Blaise and her sidekick Willie Garvin get involved with a small army of hardened mercenaries who are planning to overthrow the government of Kuwait.
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by Simon on January 3, 2015  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 3, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/01/03/billion-dollar-brain-len-deighton/

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