‘It’s a confusing story,’ I told him. ‘I’m in a very confusing business.’
(The Ipcress File, page 2)

‘You’re a cool young man,’ Jay said. (p.293)

‘IPCRESS? It’s a word one of Ross’s men invented from the words Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress…’ (chapter 34)

‘The Ipcress File’ was Deighton’s début, his first and still most famous novel (partly because of the success of the iconic movie version made just a few years later – in 1965 – starring Michael Caine in one of his earliest roles). The book made Deighton a household name overnight. Having never read it before, I was very surprised to find how arty, elliptical and detached it is; funny, stylish, poised tiptoe on the brink of ‘Swinging London’, and hugely enjoyable.

The Narrator

The story is told in the first person by an unnamed Narrator (the name Harry Palmer appears to have been invented for the film – the Narrator of ‘IPCRESS’ specifically says his name is not Harry in chapter 5).

The narrator is 5 foot 11 inches tall, dark-haired, round-faced with a jutting cleft chin. He has deep-sunk blue eyes with bags under them and wears horn-rimmed glasses. He’s from Burnley, where he attended grammar school.

His age

He is a male employee of British Security and old enough to have had experience of World War Two – there is an implication he was born in 1922 or 1923, thus turning 40 when the series begins. In fact this is an important difference from the movie: Michael Caine was 32 when he appeared in the film and all the way through radiates cheeky chappie, Cockney, insubordinate charm; whereas the narrator is a subtler figure – he is still insubordinate to his two bosses, Ross and Dalby, but when the latter goes out into the field, the narrator is put in charge of the unit and himself becomes the boss, bossing round the unit secretary Alice, and deserving of his own personal secretary, Jean Tonnesen. In other words, the Narrator is older, more experienced, more senior and has more responsibility than the movie version.

A footnote helps to explain why the Narrator has a special place in the department:

I had done a lot of work with the Swiss banks for Ross. By the time I came to Dalby’s department, I had enough good solid contacts there to trace any secret account, given enough time. As well as this I had learned every legal and illegal way of moving money about the globe. Money is to espionage what petrol is to a motor-car, and it was because I had kept the wraps on my contacts there that I had been so insubordinate to so many for so long. (Ch 8)

Culture and cooking

The immediate and enduring impression is that our man is intelligent and cultivated, knowledgeable about food and clothes and music – he references Kierkegaard and Brecht and Xenophon, he likes the jazz of Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker and Lee Konitz but also recognises Mozart’s Jupiter symphony when he hears it played on a gramophone in the mountains outside Beirut.

And he knows his food and drink. He describes the coffee made in various Soho coffee bars in loving detail, is precise about his sandwich fillings, notes exactly how their Lebanese contact prepares his kebabs:

The smell of Dgaj Muhshy (chicken stuffed with nutmeg, thyme, pine nuts, lamb and rice, and cooked with celery)… First sambousiks (small pastries containing curried meat served freshly baked)… (Ch 7)

Army insubordination

And he is cocky, stroppy, facetious and sarcastic in a post-Angry Young Men way. His Burnley origin (in Funeral in Berlin he is described as ‘an upstart from Burnley’) contrasts with the various public school-educated intelligence officers he has to deal with. Humour is his weapon; insubordination is what the Army calls it. He is sardonic about the Army and its tangled bureaucracies, keen to avoid paperwork, grumpy about his back pay and delayed expenses. He rarely misses an opportunity to answer back, or to be smarter, dryer and wittier than his ‘superiors’.

He’s been exited from the Army to join the Security Services. He’s been working in Military Intelligence ‘for nearly three years’. At one point he seems to indicate that he had a spell at the CIA?

calling me ‘boy-scoutish’ which he knew would hit me where it hurt. Me, the slick modern intelligence agent. Six months with the C.I.A. and two button-down shirts to prove it. (p.125)

The novel opens with him being transferred from the bit of Military Intelligence run by Ross to a tiny specialist unity called W.O.O.C.(P) run by a man named Dalby who answers directly to the Cabinet.

Detached and elliptical

And the narrator is distanced from the action, even when it involves his own beatings and imprisonment – an Asperger’s syndrome level of alienation from himself and events around him. Everything is described in a wry, elliptical style. For example, I only realised that he has begun an affair with his attractive secretary, Jean, when he casually says:

While standing still, her smooth body would move – slowly and imperceptibly – under the thin summer uniform fabric, and I would think of the small circular gold ear-ring of hers that I had found in my bed-clothes on Wednesday morning. (Ch 21)

At least, I think that means he slept with her. Almost no other reference is made to it, certainly there is no description of the lead-up to the event or the event itself. That is what I mean by ‘elliptical’. The text is made up of much detail and snappy phrasing, but the important facts are frequently deliberately buried.

Oblique descriptions

This is his description of a band playing at a party.

Three army musicians moved coolly and mathematically within the modal range of ‘There’s a small Hotel’ and linking modulated inversions walked around the middle eight with creditable synchronisation. Here and there a laugh walked up the foothills of noise. (Ch 21)

This is how clever, stylish and self-conscious the narrative is throughout. One of the many gimmicks is his habit of recounting snippets of overheard conversation, fragments of speech. Touch of James Joyce.

I left the Horseguards Avenue entrance, and walked down Whitehall to Keightly at Scotland Yard. Inside the entrance an elderly policeman was speaking into a phone. ‘Room 284?’ he said. ‘Hello Room 284? I’m trying to locate the tea trolley.’… (Ch 15)

These ‘overheard fragments’ occur frequently and their inconsequentiality does… what? Reinforces that he’s a spy who notices everything? Are examples of dry humour? Or that his world is made up of fragments which have a hole at the centre, where the Narrator’s character should be.

In a similar spirit of decentring the narrative, he opens a newspaper and then spends a page summarising all the main stories – or lists the offers in the junk mail which has come through his letterbox this morning:

Tuesday was a big echoing summer’s day. I could hear the neighbour’s black Airedale dog, and they could hear my FM. I sorted the letters from the mat; Times magazine subscription dept said I was missing the chance of a lifetime. My mother’s eldest sister wished I was in Geneva; so did I, except that my aunt was there. A War Office letter confirmed my discharge from the Army and told me that I was not subject to reserve training commitments, but was subject to the Official Secrets Act in respect of information and documents. The dairy said to order cream early for the holiday and had I tried Chokko, the new chocolate drink that everyone was raving about. (Ch 14)

Mordant commentary on our times? Satire? Plain laughs? There’s lots of this dead-eyed observation and it is deliberately deployed to almost completely conceal any sense of the Narrator’s feelings or emotions, and also to obscure numerous crucial moments in the plot.

(This wilful obscurity is the opposite of the breathless physical involvement created by Alistair MacLean’s intensely physical thrillers – the breathless The Golden Rendezvous and The Satan Bug were published in the same year as IPCRESS, 1962; or the minute descriptions of Bond’s tribulations – 1962 saw publication of the ninth Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me.)

Plot

The plot is long and convoluted. The story opens with the Narrator (N) being transferred from his one-time boss, Colonel Ross’s part of military intelligence, to the newer, smarter, so-called WOOC(P), run by younger man, Dalby. Whereas John le Carré’s ‘Circus’ is a rather vague organisation, populated by ageing men who meet in their various London clubs, Dalby’s small defined team have their offices in Charlotte Street. (Twenty-five years later I worked in TV studios in Charlotte Street, I knew it well.)

The Narrator spends a lot of time going to a small screening room to familiarise himself with the appearance of one Jay, a man with a long history of espionage, working for Polish government in exile, then returning to work for the Polish communists. He was with the exposed spies Burgess and MacLean when they made their flight abroad. He doesn’t really know why and we, like the Narrator, are in a fog of confusion. He makes the point he has some 600 files open on his desk, all of which require further action.

Dalby tells him Jay is involved in the abduction of top-ranking scientists, one (Raven) has just gone missing. The Narrator is ordered to find Jay and offer him £18,000 for Raven’s return. N meets Jay in a Soho bar, and then pursues him upstairs where he sees, through a window, the unconscious body of the scientist laid out on a roulette table. As he’s pondering his next move Raven is picked up and carried out by Jay’s bodyguard, nicknamed Housemartin. The Narrator breaks through the window to give chase but Housemartin gets away and the Narrator blunders out of one of the exits of the club to find the police closing in, for some reason; maybe they’d been tipped off, too.

Lebanon Dalby orders the Narrator to accompany him to the Lebanon where they ambush a car carrying Raven from Beirut into the interior, a violent scene where they use a sticky bomb which burns and melts the baddies, who Dalby shoots just to be sure. They then hole up in the safe house of a Lebanese drug smuggler who HMG now use as an agent, before flying Raven by helicopter to a nearby ship; then N and Dalby fly home.

The empty house Back in London, Housemartin is reported as having been arrested by enterprising police after he crashes a car. But by the time the Narrator arrives at the police station, Housemartin has been visited by other ‘officials’ and killed. (I never really understand why – simply to stop him talking? Surely he was tough enough to withstand a British interrogation.) Housemartin had been seen leaving a darkened house in a suburban street, so the Narrator orders a large-scale assault on the house and leads it, breaking in with a colleague, before the other police advance. But they find it completely stripped and abandoned, empty except for a large glass tank which turns out to contain a tape machine and some old tape.

Soho Back to the Charlotte Street office and the daily routine: managing Alice (Bloom) the wise old lady who knows everything; wangling a pretty young secretary, Jean Tonnesen; dealing with the toffee-nosed twit Chico; listening to a data scientist called Carswell’s complex statistical analyses of where the missing scientists worked, correlated with other aspects of their lives; worrying about various other ‘cases’.

Tokwe atoll When, out of the blue, Dalby, the Narrator and Jean are ordered to fly to the other side f the planet, to an atoll in the Pacific as guests of the Americans to watch the explosion of a new nuclear device. The setting is vividly described in its surrealness, thousands of American soldiers in a home-from-home on a barren rock. However, things turn odd: The Narrator receives warnings from old friends in the CIA that he is being set up. Jean, also, tells him that Dalby has told the Yanks the Narrator is a double agent. (It seems a long way to go to set him up.)

In a difficult-to-follow sequence Dalby invites the Narrator to drive with him to a part of the island where N’s old friend Barney Barnes is reported as having had an accident but, at a crucial place, a massive flare goes up blinding him, it is near a watch-tower to which a high-powered cable has been attached frying the American soldier inside, and the Narrator discovers that high-powered insulation gloves and cutter have been planted in his car. He is being framed for murdering the guard, and somehow sending high-speed TV images of the test site to a Soviet submarine which had surfaced and fired the flare. I think that’s what happens, it is written very obscurely and doesn’t quite make sense.

American interrogation He is thrown in a cell and beaten up the Americans who believe he’s a commie spy who killed one of their men. He is interrogated for weeks, given physical tests, forced to tell his life story again and again, but nothing he says can clear him: all the evidence implicates him. Then he is told he is being exchanged with American spies the Hungarians are holding (?). He is injected with anaesthetic and has woozy memories of being loaded aboard an ambulance and a plane and an ambulance, again, and then –

Hungarian prison He awakes in a Hungarian prison cell. For the next 35 days or so he is fed little or nothing, and routinely beaten and roughed up by a sadist named KK, made to repeat nonsense phrases with the aim of reducing him to a state of complete incapacity. He is visited by a junior official from the British embassy in Budapest who doesn’t really believe in him. Finally, he manages to escape by knocking the kind old man who sometimes visits him unconscious, making his way to an empty office, tripping the fuses for the entire building, thus opening the window without setting off the alarms, making it across the garden and climbing over a wall to discover that…

On the run He is not in Hungary at all, he is in England, and has just hopped over a wall into the allotment of a grumpy old geezer who tells him he is in Wood Green, north London. The whole Hungary thing has been a complicated deception. He has no idea who put him there or why. He makes a coded call to the dad of a friend from the War (Charlie Cavendish, a former undercover man for C.-S.I.C.H) who gives him a place to stay in London and some old clothes. Once the Narrator’s recovered he collects money, passports, a gun, from safe locations he had set up earlier.

But the Narrator returns from one outing to find the dad murdered and his house turned upside down, and goes on the run again, switching taxis and buses to shake any tail. He then hires a private detective (the titular owner of Waterman’s World-Wide Detective Agency in Shaftesbury Avenue), and a car, and drives down to Dalby’s house. He has no idea what is going on but Dalby is his immediate superior and must be able to help.

Dalby Dalby welcomes him into his Surrey home without batting an eyelid. He tells him he had been kidnapped by Jay who was demanding a ransom of £20,000. Glad you’ve escaped, old chap, now we’ve work to do back in Charlotte Street. Reassured, the Narrator returns to his car and is about to return to London when Waterman, the private detective who’s accompanied him, says, what about the other men surrounding the house? What? The Narrator goes back and through the window sees Dalby talking to Murray, one of his colleagues – and then to Jay!! The scientist abductor!! Is Dalby a double agent after all?

As he’s pondering all this, he feels a gun in his back. It is his colleague Murray, the one who was in Dalby’s living room a few moments earlier – happening to be in the kitchen, he heard Dalby’s alarms being set off and came out to warn the Narrator – and to tell him that he (Murray) is himself an under-cover intelligence agent pretending to be on Dalby’s side. He has just started doing this when, unfortunately, Waterman clobbers Murray, knocking him out.

Jay Really confused, the Narrator and the detective hide until Jay gets into his car, then tail him back to London and the Cromwell Road, turning off near the Brompton Oratory. They walk up to the door Jay entered, pondering their next move, when two of his goons corner them from the rear – they have themselves been tailed and are now forced up to Jay’s hyper-modern flat at gunpoint.

There is a surreal scene with Jay, the master-crook, who chats to the Narrator while he spits and prepares a lobster; with typical Deighton élan the Narrator minutely observes the culinary details. Jay explains the brainwashing technique he’s been perfecting. He says some 300 people have passed through the technique to date. That’s what the empty water tank they found in the empty house was for, to float people in it and play them white noise till they’ve snapped mentally, and can be rewired as double agents… That, in a cruder way, was the treatment he was undergoing in the ‘Hungarian’ house.

At which point, someone called Henry phones Jay and tips him off that the police are closing in. Jay remains calm and unflustered and tells his goons not to shoot.

Resolution The Narrator’s first boss, Ross, reveals all – well, nearly all, and the Narrator fills in the remaining gaps in a long exposition at the end. Jay had been kidnapping scientists and other top chaps and selling them on to whoever bid for them, with the help of the traitor Dalby. But in the past year he’d been developing a new line in brainwashing – wearing down people using a number of different techniques – they were subjecting the Narrator to it in the fake Hungarian prison; another approach was to submerge victims in a big tank of water with earphones clamped to their head to aid disorientation and ‘softening up’: it was this tank and bits of the tape which were found in the abandoned house which the Narrator arranged to be raided. Some 300 well-placed figures had passed through the technique and rounding up all Jay’s accomplices, and identifying the victims of the scheme – what the Narrator calls the IPCRESS network – takes some time.

A lot of this exposition is done as the Narrator explains it all to Jean. He also explains what the IPCRESS of the title means. Here’s Jean asking the questions and the Narrator mansplaining:

‘By the way, is IPCRESS a figure from Greek mythology, the allusion to which I should immediately catch?’
I said, ‘No, it’s a distorted word that one of Ross’s men invented from the words Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress, which is a clinical description of what they did in the haunted house.’
‘And what they started to do to you at Wood Green,’ said Jean.
‘Exactly.’ (Ch 31, page 302)

He goes on to explain the four different methods of brainwashing that Jay and his team deployed. I was tempted to summarise them here but it goes on over 6 pages or so, with lots of detail, so read it yourself in chapter 34 of the PDF (link below). He refers to the whole operation, with typical flippancy, as Brainwashing Incorporated (p.295).

The odd scene in the nightclub where the Narrator sees Raven’s body on a roulette table is explained as an early attempt to frame the Narrator – they were going to plant a hypodermic needle on him, and the police were closing in on the club on Dalby’s orders with a view to finding the Narrator red-handed. But he was impatient, followed Housemartin and broke out of the building just before the police broke in.

Ross takes the Narrator to meet an Exalted Military Personage (EMP) who congratulates N on doing such a splendid job – at the same time, by implication, demonstrating that Ross can be trusted – but the Narrator ruins the moment by demanding to know who the ‘Henry’ is who rang Jay to tip him off. It must have been someone very high up indeed. The atmosphere turns frosty. The Eminent Person says they are trying to track him down. The Narrator wonders… although they’ve got Dalby, is there still some kind of cover-up?

As to Jay, is he thrown into prison for his crimes? No, he is paid £160,000 to co-operate with British Intelligence and becomes a reliable colleague working alongside the Narrator.

The American brigadier who had supervised the Narrator’s interrogation on the atoll appears and confirms that, with a lot of help from Jean, the Americans eventually figured out how Dalby framed him, so now he’s in the clear.

In a sly last two pages, the Narrator gives false passports and money to the old man who had acted as his gaoler in the fake gaol (in Wood Green). This man is in fact a Russian intelligence operative soon to return to Russia. Not turning him in and giving him money, is a precaution in case he (the Narrator) ever gets caught by the commies; or, as he drily puts it: ‘This, too, was a spy’s insurance policy.’ (p.326)

Cast

Deighton spends a lot of time describing the physical appearance of his characters in some detail.

• the Narrator – recently released from the Army into British Intelligence – ‘a darkhaired, round-faced character; deep sunk eyes with bags under horn-rim glasses, chin jutting and cleft. On the back of the photos was written “5ft. 11 in.; muscular inclined to overweight. No visible scar tissue; hair dark brown, eyes blue” – weighs 14 stone (p.112)
• Colonel Ross – the narrator’s original boss, before he is seconded to work with Dalby – ‘Ross was a regular officer; that is to say he didn’t drink gin after 7.30 p.m. or hit ladies without first removing his hat. He had a long thin nose, a moustache like flock wallpaper, sparse, carefully combed hair, and complexion of a Hovis loaf’ – later, described as ‘a balding man with spectacles and a regimental tie’
• Brigadier Dalby – upper-class manager of W.O.O.C.(P) – ‘Dalby was an elegant languid public school Englishman of a type that can usually reconcile his duty with comfort and luxury. He was a little taller than I am: probably 6 ft. 1 in. or 6 ft. 2 in. He had long fine fair hair, and every now and then would grow a little wispy blond moustache. At present he didn’t have it. He had a clear complexion that sunburnt easily and very small puncture-type scar tissue high on the left cheek to prove he had been to a German University in ’38’
• Chico real name Phillip Chillcott-Oakes – phenomenally posh and well-connected – ‘Chico’d been to one of those very good schools where you meet kids with influential uncles… His profusion of long lank yellow hair hung heavily across his head like a Shrove Tuesday mishap. He stood 5 ft. 11 in. in his Argyll socks, and had an irritating physical stance, in which his thumbs rested high behind his red braces while he rocked on his hand-fasted Oxfords. He had the advantage of both a good brain and a family rich enough to save him using it’
• Alice (Bloom) – unflappable secretary in Dalby’s office.
• Captain Carswell – data analyst – ‘Gentle in disposition, his gold spectacle frames glinted among hair whitened by Indian sun. He wore a cheap, dark ready-made suit with a regimental tie. I guessed him to be a Captain or a Major of fifty-three, past any chance of further promotion. His eyes were grey and moved slowly, taking in his surroundings with care and awe. His large hairy hands held on to his brief-case before him on the table, as though even here there was a danger of it being stolen before he could reveal his strange mysteries’
• Sergeant Murray – ‘Murray was a tall and large-muscled man who, had he been a few years younger would have made a John Osborne hero. His face was large, square and bony, and it would be equally easy to imagine him as an R.S.M. or the leader of a wildcat strike… His eyes, thin slits, as though he constantly peered into a brightness, would wrinkle and smile without provocation’ – at the end of the novel it is revealed that Murray is actually Lieutenant-colonel Harriman who has had Dalby under observation for some time
• Jay – ‘He had small piggy eyes, a large moustache and handmade shoes which I knew were size ten. He walked with a slight limp and habitually stroked his eyebrow with his index finger’
• Housemartin – ‘a six feet tall handsome man in a good quality camel-hair overcoat. His hair was waved, shiny and a little too perfectly grey at the temples. He wore a handful of gold rings, a gold watch strap and a smile full of jacket crowns. It was an indigestible smile—he was never able to swallow it’
• Mr Adem – their host in the Lebanon – ‘about in his mid-sixties; gentle and humorous with a face like an apple that’s been stored through the winter. He was a fine judge of horses, wines and heroin, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of an area stretching from Northern Turkey to Jerusalem… His role was a giver of information and, understanding this, he had, or showed, no curiosity about the affairs of his employers’
• Jean Tonnesen – halfway through the story the narrator is assigned Jean as his new assistant – ‘She was wearing that ‘little black sleeveless dress’ that every woman has in reserve for cocktail parties, funerals and first nights. Her slim white arms shone against the dull material, and her hands were long and slender, the nails cut short and varnished in a natural colour. I watched her even, very white teeth bite into the croissant. She could have been top kick in the Bolshoi, Sweden’s first woman ship’s captain, private secretary to Chou-en-lai, or Sammy Davis’s press agent. She didn’t pat her hair, produce a mirror, apply lipstick or flutter her eyelashes’
• Skip Henderson – the narrator’s friend in the CIA, who got himself captured in the Korean War in order to find out about collaborating US prisoners
• Barney Barnes – Skip’s assistant and ‘the only negro officer in the CIA’, dies in an accident which is blamed on the Narrator after the Yanks arrest him
• KK real name Swainson – the Narrator’s brutal interrogator and beater in the ‘Hungarian house’
• Charlie Cavendish – former undercover man for C.-S.I.C.H, the Narrator knew his son during the War, and personally took him the news that his son was killed just days before it ended, hence their bond of trust and friendship
• Waterman – private detective the Narrator hires to accompany him down to Dalby’s place in Surrey – ‘a thin shiny black-suited detective looked up like the subject of a photo in a divorce case. He was removing a piece of wax from his ear with a match stick. He thought I should have  knocked; if it hadn’t prejudiced his income he might have told me about it. Instead he took off his bowler hat..’

Humour

The book is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and almost always maintains a dry ironic humour, a tone established on the first page.

They came through on the hot line at about half past two in the afternoon. The Minister didn’t quite understand a couple of points in the summary. Perhaps I could see the Minister.
Perhaps. (p.1)

‘Perhaps’ is a one-word paragraph. It a) satirises the periphrastic circumlocutions of the Civil Service b) captures at a stroke the narrator’s amused and satirical attitude to it. It is playing with the language but also with the layout and formatting of texts. This playfulness continues throughout the novel.

A lot of the humour is in the dry dialogue, mostly too long to quote properly. I like this exchange at the big party the Americans throw on the atoll. Dalby is talking about the American brigadier they’ve just met.

‘Wanted to borrow you for a year,’ Dalby said. We both continued to look at the dance floor.
‘Did he get me?’
‘Not unless you particularly want to go. I said you’d prefer to stay with Charlotte.’
‘Let me know if I change my mind,’ I said, and Dalby gave me the slanted focus. (p.217)

A writer like le Carré gives you very long passages of dialogue in which you can observe the characters subtly and astutely positioning themselves. Deighton feels the opposite. From whole conversations just a sentence is selected as the sassiest, most oblique or telling. When Ross raids Jay’s house and brings the Narrator’s wayward flight to an end, Deighton selects only two sentences of dialogue. (Bear in mind that the Narrator has just spent half an hour chatting to Jay while the latter very elaborately prepared lobster in champagne – all the time wondering whether he was going, eventually, to be bumped off. Finally Ross and his men arrive.)

Ross made a joke then. He said, ‘Do you come here often?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I know the chef.’ (p.299)

He is smart and sardonic about the people he works with. But he has a flashy way of describing nature, too, of backgrounds and settings and environment.

The rain dabbed spasmodically at the glass pane, and another plane ground its way across the sky. (p.113)

‘It’s OK,’ I told him, ‘and thanks.’ Outside the clouds had put dark glasses on the moon. (p.221)

Uneven style

The prose is, then, a funny mix of tones and voices, the most consistent of which is a very dry wry sense of humour and a tremendous understatement. But there are unexpected patches of poetic prose, and also sections of technical specification. No wonder contemporary reviews called the novel ‘zany’ or referred to Deighton as an ‘oddball’.

Though some of the text is zippy and smart, others parts have an oddly formal voice: given a choice he will always say ‘upon’, ‘within’, whilst’ instead of on, in, while. He cordially dislikes the chinless public schoolboys he works with but sometimes the prose adopts their patrician tone.

As Adem finished speaking a radio somewhere within the house pierced the grey velvet twilight with a needle of sound. The polished opening notes of the second movement of the Jupiter. It seemed that every living thing across the vast desert space heard the disturbing chilling sound. For those few minutes of time as the wire edge modulated to a minor key and as the rhythm and syncopation caught, slipped and re-engaged like a trio on a trapeze, there was only me and Adem and Mozart alive in that cruel, dead, lonely place. (Ch 7)

From inside the house the crick-crack of freshly ignited fruit-tree wood proclaimed the approach of dinner-time.

The window swung open and Murray dived head first through. I saw the soles of his hand-made shoes (eighteen guineas) with a small sticky rectangular price tab still affixed under the instep. (Ch 12)

No-one answered, and here and there an unkind grin clearly stated the social alienation that his success had wrought. (Ch 20)

There was a smell of freshly ground coffee, a spitting of grilling bacon, and a big coal fire that had reached that state of perfection that the manufacturers of plastic fronts for electric ones seek to emulate. (Ch 27)

‘Seek to emulate.’ He’s a late-1950s Soho coffee bar author using a late-Victorian idiom to… to do what precisely? To mock the modern world? To mock himself? On every page it feels like the text is very knowing about being ‘a spy novel’, in fact about being a fiction at all. The ostentatious correctness of passages like these are part of the performance.

Grumpy

Although the Narrator enjoys undermining the public school world of clubs, school ties and official culture, yet he is not in full-throated rebellion against it. In fact, as noted above, in some places he seeks to outdo it in punctiliousness, as he frequently outdoes his superiors – Ross and Dalby – in general, technical and cultural knowledge.

In fact, he has an ambivalent attitude towards ‘pop’ culture, liking it as rebellion, but despising so much of it as kitsch rubbish.

A sour-faced young waitress flung a smelly dishcloth around the table, said Two cappercheeny,’ then went back to three young men in black imitation-leather jackets and jeans, with genuine rivets, for a conversation about motor cycles. (Ch 120

By the time I read them in the 1970s, the once Angry Young Men of the 1950s had themselves become grumpy old men, complaining how standards had slipped, everyone was scruffy, no-one had any manners. In among the self-consciously cool attitude, there are signs of incipient Kingsley Amis grumpiness in Deighton:

Behind Jay’s voice I could hear the radio playing very quietly. An English jazz singer was even now Gee Whizzing, Waa Waa and Boop boop booping in an unparalleled plethora of idiocy. (Ch 30)

Steady on, grandad. He’s sufficiently in the Soho coffee house world to write about it, and vividly too – but he hasn’t embraced it to the exclusion of all else, as the pop artists and pop culture would do just a few years later; in his mind he is rising above it.

He writes scornfully of Chico, the upper-class twit in his office who parades an endless list of relatives in high places with spiffing country estates, or his boss the public-school-educated Dalby with his bourgeois tastes; but is himself scornful of plebeian culture, of pop music and strip clubs and the daily papers. He is a grammar school boy, caught between public school toffs and the roughs from the secondary modern. But in the Security world he moves in, it’s mainly toffs that he meets and so they are the most prominent subjects of his satire.

The iced Israeli melon was sweet, tender and cold, like the blonde waitress. Corrugated iron manufacturers and chinless advertising men shared the joys of our expense-account society with zombie-like debs with Eton-tied uncles. (Ch 8)

(Three months before the novel was published, The Establishment, a nightclub hosting jazz and satirical comedy acts, had opened in Greek Street, Soho. It was satire – sending up the MacMillan government and chaps in bowlers and umbrellas – but satire which itself wore a clean shirt and smart tie and was fussy about the cut of its suit.)

Similes

The smart savviness of the narrator’s tone is exemplified in numerous exuberant, sometimes rather far-fetched, similes and metaphors:

His profusion of long lank yellow hair hung heavily across his head like a Shrove Tuesday mishap (Ch 1)

The Colosseum – Rome’s rotten tooth – sank behind us, white, ghostly and sensational. (Ch 5)

He was about in his mid-sixties; gentle and humorous with a face like an apple that’s been stored through the winter. (Ch 7)

Like a clumsy Billy Bunter the machine heaved itself hand over hand into the sky. A touch of rudder had the tail rotor slip it sideways, and, silhouetted against the five-o’clock-shadowed chin of twilight, they hedge-hopped in 100 mph gallops across the sea. (Ch 7)

Outside, the driver of a wet fish van was arguing violently with a sad traffic warden. The traffic had welded itself into a river of metal… (Ch 16)

She came into Led’s old broken doorway and into my life and like the Royal Scot, but without all the steam and noise… Her face was taut like a cast of an Aztec god. (Ch 16)

Tokwe Atoll was a handful of breakfast crumbs on a blue coverlet. (Ch 18)

The enormous juke-box glowed like a monkey’s bottom, and the opening bars of a cha cha cha rent the smoke. (Ch 18)

Wriggling away from the legs of the tower, black smooth cables and corrugated pipelines rested along each other like a Chinese apothecary’s box of snakes. (Ch 19)

The sun was a two-dimensional magenta disc, and the sunset lay in horizontal stripes like finger-nails and torn gold lacerations across the ashen face of the evening. (Ch 20)

Outside the clouds had put dark glasses on the moon. (Ch 21)

It is confident and brash: look at me, watch me write!

Jean stopped and turned back to me; across her gold face a strand of black hair hung like a crack in a Sung vase. (Ch 20)

Paratextuality

Complementing the elliptical and often puzzling approach is the paraphernalia surrounding the text. The novel is presented as an official report to give us readers the sense of being given privileged access to this top secret world – and yet with strange contradictions which confused me:

• the fly leaf says The Ipcress File / Secret File No. 1 as if we are about to read a sequence of secret files and this is the first – but there is no other file (readers had to await the next book in the series, Horse Under Water, to realise that that was File No.2, setting up the expectation that all his novels would be so numbered)
• the text purports to be an official intelligence agency report and includes a graphic of the header of an official War Office document
• there are numerous footnotes explaining espionage-related references, initialisms etc throughout the text, and
• the novel proper is followed by 20 pages of appendices, very thoroughly following up on references in the text, with detailed explanations of events in history, the neutron bomb, Indian hemp, secret operations, an excerpt from a manual on handling guns etc etc

So the novel is presented masquerading as an official report – BUT

• Nothing could be less report-like than its self-consciously writerly style. I thought there was a tremendous clash between the would-be bureaucratic format in which it’s laid out and the jokey, angled style it is actually written in.
• This report scenario – The Ipcress File / Secret File No. 1 – is contradicted on the very next page by the brief prologue which describes the Narrator going for a meeting with a Minister who says ‘Just tell me the whole story in your own words, old chap.’ That’s not the kind of thing you put in a report, it’s a fictional frame.

So the text simultaneously claims to be a spoken verbatim account and an official report with appendices, notes etc. Which is it?

Horoscopes

Furthermore, how do we square its presentation as an official report with the fact that almost all of the 32 chapters have, as epigraph, the horoscope for that week (they’re all for Aquarius so presumably that’s the star sign of the Narrator):

Aquarius Jan 20-Feb 19: If you are a stick-in-the-mud you’ll get nowhere. Widen your social horizons. Go somewhere gay and relaxing.

(This particular one jokily/ironically prefaces the short chapter where the Narrator has escaped from prison and makes a rendezvous with an old friend who gets him clean clothes and puts him up at his place.)

I suppose the horoscope thing is meant to be a joke, a witty commentary on the text, a dig at the trashiness of contemporary culture (joining the slighting references to beatniks, loud music, junk mail etc) or just stylish and witty – though I confess I was struggling enough just to figure out what was going on in the main story and so quite quickly stopped reading them.

Reveal

In the end, the puzzling pieces of jigsaw are more or less pulled together to explain what happened and it is part of the book’s cool appeal that not all the loose ends are tied up or even explained. In terms of plot I was astounded that the trigger for the dénouement seemed so simple: Dalby is exposed as a double agent because he has invited the kidnapper-baddy to his house for cocktails and the Narrator sneaks up and sees them through the window. After all the divagations and confusions, the plot isn’t solved by elaborate cerebration or cunning calculation, but by sneaking up and looking through a window in the manner of the Famous Five or Tintin.

But then the plot is only one element in this remarkably fresh, original, elliptical, funny and hugely enjoyable spy novel.

The movie

is a 1960s landmark, starring a young and gorgeous Michael Caine as the hero (here named Harry Palmer) with a classic score by John Barry and supporting appearances by umpteen London buses. Wisely, the screenwriters dropped both the carjacking in Lebanon and the extended atom bomb atoll sequence, confining all the action to London in order to make the plot more straightforwardly about the brainwashing plot, and the slow revealing of Dalby the double agent.

Michael Caine interview about the movie

Credit

‘The Ipcress File’ by Len Deighton was published in 1962 by Hodder and Stoughton. Page references are to the 2007 Harper paperback edition. All quotations are used for criticism and review.

Related links

• The Ipcress File Wikipedia article
• Interview with Len Deighton
• Article about TIF on the London Fictions website
• The Ipcress File article on the Deighton Dossier

Related reviews

• Len Deighton reviews