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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 reviews

Len Deighton reviews
Dr Strangelove by Peter George (1963)

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.

Funeral In Berlin by Len Deighton (1964)

‘What I’d like is an interest-free loan of eight hundred quid to buy a new car’, I said.
Dawlish gently packed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe with a match. He put the pipe into his mouth before looking up at me.
‘Yes,’ he finally said.
‘Yes I want it or yes I can have it?’ I said.
‘Yes, everything they say about you is true,’ said Dawlish. ‘Go away and let me work.’
(Funeral in Berlin, Chapter 13)

‘You live only once,’ said Stok.
‘I can make once do,’ I said.
(p.37)

There is no point in just wondering about the things that puzzle us. (p.105)

It’s O.K. to have soft feelings knowing that years of training preclude one from obeying them. (p.217)

‘You are a terrible tease,’ said Hallam. ‘I never know when you’re serious.’ (p.230)

Funeral In Berlin, the third novel of the Ipcress File tetralogy, strikes me as being more relaxed and funnier than its predecessors.

‘Do you ever imagine what it would be like to be on the moon?’ Sam said.
‘Nearly all the time,’ I said. (Ch 15)

The humour works better and the disconnected, angular style is, initially at least, less impenetrable than in The Ipcress File. Several times I even thought I knew what was going on although, no, it was as murky and rifted by double meanings, ambiguities and uncertainties as the first two. Even when things are made (relatively clear) in a brief explanation in chapter 44, it turns out this explanation needs further explanation in chapter 49, pages 245-6.

‘I never joke, Chico. The truth is quite adequately hilarious.’ (Ch 13)

Street smart

It’s set just slightly before the Swinging Sixties, when people still talked about ‘beatniks’ and hung out in Soho coffee bars and the most raucous sounds seem to come from loud jazz. A world where the nameless Narrator is keen to demonstrate his street smarts, his cool, his savvy.

Charlotte Street runs north from Oxford Street and there are few who will blame it. By mid-morning they are writing out the menus, straining yesterday’s fat, dusting the plastic flowers and the waiters are putting their moustaches on with eyebrow pencils. (Ch 13)

The colour and detail of ‘pads’ which are about to feature in colour supplements about Jean Shrimpton or Burt Bacharach.

I walked into the lounge. It was about thirty foot of ankle-high carpeting from silk wall to silk wall. The cocktail cabinet was in the corner. I opened it and was socked in the head by pink neon. (Ch 14)

And yet, as I’ve noted before, the cool of Deighton (b. 1929) is combined with what later generations, or even the Beatles generation (b.1940), would think of as still very high-brow intellectual pursuits: when he wines and dines the sexy American girl he’s picked up – or who’s picked him up – they agree to go to a concert at the South Bank which includes the music of Charles Ives, Berg and Schoenberg. In fact the Schoenberg piece – Variations for Wind band – appears three times, in different places, like a leitmotiv. Maybe its recurrence is a hint that the novel itself is made out of a theme and variations, as the Schoenberg piece is, with the same recurring motifs given different treatment, seen from different angles (and, in an innovation for Deighton, we are given the points of view of several characters, see below).

Security Service savvy

Deighton does a very good job of conveying how we imagine the Security Services to actually be i.e. not at all glamorous jetsetting but a pettifogging bureaucratic cross between the Army and the Civil Service, snowed under with paperwork, its employees fussing about pay and pensions and expenses, thrilling to little perks like luxury lunches at the club – except that the petty jealousies and rivalries which plague all bureaucracies in this context overlap with very real plots and conspiracies to frame each other (as in Ipcress) or to hamstring each other’s projects to double-cross or treble-cross the Russian, or German, or Israeli secret services.

Textual apparatus

The security savviness is reinforced by more of the larky apparatus surrounding the text that was deployed in Ipcress and Horse Under Water:

in the classic spy manner, each short chapter has a date stamp (e.g. Berlin, Monday, October 7th – since Bonfire Night, November 5th, is a Tuesday, it must be set in 1963)
there are, again, numerous footnotes explicating Security Service acronyms or military practice, specialist knowledge such as what a D notice is, 18 in the first 60 pages alone
there are half a dozen appendices at the end of the text giving longer explanations of aspects of the story (poisonous insecticides; Gehlen Organisation; the Abwehr; Soviet security systems; French security systems; Official Secrets Act 1911)
as Ipcress File had horoscopes at the head of each chapter, and Horse Under Water had crossword clues, so each of Funeral‘s 52 chapters has an epigraph which is a rule or tip about chess. I play chess pretty well so was mildly interested in some of them, but they added nothing to my enjoyment and, as far as I could see, nothing to the meaning of the story so, like the horoscopes, I learned to ignore them
right at the end we learn that throughout the adventure, the Narrator has been doing an ‘It pays to increase your word power’ game. His rating is ‘fair’

The Narrator

The greatest tribute you can pay to a secret agent is to take him for a moron. All he has to do is to make sure he doesn’t act too exactly like one. That was my concern now. (p.109)

Funeral has the same unnamed, first-person Narrator as The Ipcress File, working for the same obscure intelligence unit (W.O.O.C.(P.)) and the same boss – Dawlish – as in Horse:

Dawlish and I have a perfect system. It is a well-known fact that I am an insolent intractable hooligan over whom Dawlish has only a modicum of control. Dawlish encourages this illusion. One day it will fail. Dawlish will throw me to the wolves. (p.170)

He has the same secretary (Jean Tonnesson) and staff (Alice Bloom, Chico), working out of the same dingy Charlotte Street office. As in Horse, it is emphasised that the Narrator owes his position to his specialist knowledge of finances:

The system upon which we ran the department was that I took responsibility for all financial problems, although what might be called ‘accounts’ were seen by Alice and I merely initialled them. It was my special knowledge of finance which had brought me into W. O. O. C.(P) and compelled them to put up with me. (p.225)

He wears spectacles. He smokes Gauloise cigarettes. He is knowledgeable about modern classical music. He lives in a flat in Southwark, although he tells old General Borg ‘I live behind Waterloo Station’.

And he’s getting fat. There are half a dozen references to him ‘throwing caution to the wind’ when he eats out, just casual throwaway moments like:

The steak was O.K. and I was strong-willed enough not to hit the sweet-trolley too hard.

These hints are reinforced in the sequel, Billion Dollar Brain.

Plot

The novel follows a series of trips the Narrator makes to Cold War Berlin (under the pseudonym Edmond Dorf) and starts off being about the defection of a Russian scientist, Semitsa, reputedly an expert on enzymes used in pesticides and so useful to the West, the deal being arranged by ‘our’ Berlin fixer and chancer, Johnnie Vulkan.

Slowly it emerges that this is a red herring and that the plot is really about the legacy of the war, about the fate of a German murderer who was in a concentration camp during the Nazi era and who has survived into post-War Berlin, although wanted by both the Communists and the Israelis.

The progress of the plot and of the Narrator’s efforts are closely monitored by the Russian General Stok, who pops up throughout the book, initially hinting that he himself wants to defect and that Semitsa’s passage will be a dry run for him. Later on, Stok admits that he just wants to keep an eye on everything. Stok is a broadly comic character, forever making toasts with vodka and caviare, engaging in witty banter with the wryly understated Narrator. Though there are a couple of sinister moments when the Narrator is pulled over by police in East Germany, then in Czechoslovakia, and thinks he might be about to be arrested – only for Stok to emerge from the shadows with a big grin and a bottle of vodka!

In Ipcress the Narrator says plots aren’t as easy to define or tie up as writers of spy fiction would have you expect. He claims to have some 600 files open at any one time, each of which is highly complex and may not even be a definite ‘case’, may just be an accidental overlapping of circumstances, while real ‘cases’ i.e. interconnected purposeful events, are going undetected.

All three novels dramatise this sense of uncertainty. It’s difficult to know what’s going on because in the ‘real world’ which the spy inhabits, everyone is lying, everyone has multiple identities and concealed agendas, you’re not even certain what your ‘own’ side wants, let alone the other official agencies, let alone the numerous freelancers you continually meet and who are continually making dubious offers and suggestions.

Thus for most of the novel it’s difficult to know whether this is:

a true case of a Russian scientist defecting
something to do with the Gehlen Bureau or Organisation, a branch of German Intelligence – creepy Teutonic types we meet a couple of times and who offer to help facilitate the smuggling of Semitsa through the wall – or are they up to something more?
a dummy run for General Stok’s own plan to defect. In the end it turns out he doesn’t want to and is interested in something else completely

The main love interest is the gorgeous Samantha Steele, who seduces the Narrator while posing as an American agent. In the final quarter she is revealed to be an Israeli agent (for the Shin Bet) and for a while it seems the plot might be about the Israelis tracking down a concentration camp guard who was responsible for murders in the death camps, and is still alive, and therefore deserves punishing…

At one point is seems as if Johnnie Vulkan has taken British money to facilitate the smuggling of the Russian scientist Semitsa, across the Berlin Wall hidden in a coffin – hence the title – but plans to double cross the Narrator and the British by selling Semitsa on to Sam and Israeli Intelligence.

But when Vulkan and the Narrator open the coffin as delivered to them in a West Berlin garage, they find no scientist, just a load of propaganda pamphlets. It seems this is a joke the ubiquitous Colonel Stok has played on them; not only did he never intend to defect himself, he never intended to supply any Russian scientist either – all along he simply wanted to poke and pry into British Intelligence methodology, and also entrap the members of the Gehlen Bureau who had been helping, five of whom mysteriously disappear.

But in any case it then turns out that Vulkan doesn’t give a damn about Semitsa or the Israelis – all along Vulkan had insisted the papers for the ‘corpse’/coffin be made out in the name of one Paul Louis Broum. For a while it seemed to be merely a coincidence that, upon deeper investigation, this Broum had been a real person who had survived for a while in Treblinka concentration camp before being murdered on the long walk West escaping the advancing Russians – it was just a useful name to put on the documentation covering the smuggling of Semitsa through the wall.

But slowly this Broum figure becomes more important: could it be that he had lived on and that his murder was really a story and Broum was in fact Vulkan or one or other of his dodgy underworld contacts?

The Narrator probes this murky history on a vividly described trip to Prague where he meets two ageing Jews (Jan-im-Gluck and Josef-the-gun) who survived the camps and knew the real Broum, and claimed to witness his murder. It is typical of the novel (and of ‘reality’?) that they give sharply differing accounts of Broum’s character and fate…

the novel builds up to an extended set-piece wherein a hearse navigates the security checks and concrete traffic blocks at Checkpoint Charlie, carrying a dead Berliner who wants to be buried in the West, which passes through unhindered and drives on to an abandoned warehouse.

Here the Narrator and Vulkan open the coffin and discover it contains no Russian scientist but is packed with propaganda pamphlets – this is Colonel Stok’s little joke. Thinking the Narrator has double crossed him Vulkan turns nasty and pulls a gun, demanding the Narrator hands over all the Broum paperwork. Through sheer (bad) luck the Narrator knocks Vulkan backwards onto a rack of drills and Vulkan dies a horrible agonising death from a punctured lung.

The Narrator promptly takes out the pamphlets and packs Vulkan’s body into the coffin in time for the Israeli agents to arrive and collect it at gunpoint. This team is led by his brief one-time lover Sam Steele whose real name is now revealed as Hannah Stahl, who explains to the Narrator that they need Semitsa because his innocent-sounding work on enzymes is a cover for research into deadly nerve gases, and this information will be vital for Israel when the next Arab-Israeli War breaks out (as it, of course, did, three years after this novel was published).

Boy, is she in for a surprise when she opens the coffin and finds no Russian scientist, just the embarrassing corpse of a Berlin playboy and chancer (with whom, incidentally, she had also had a fling; the chapter giving her point of view has her comparing Vulkan and the narrator as lovers, and potential fathers) – although we are not shown this scene, Deighton leaves her and the truck carrying the coffin as it drives through West Germany, so leaving the revelation to our imagination.

And then there’s the departmental politics back in dear old London, where the narrator can never be sure whether his boss is backing him up or framing him, or whether other departments like the War Office or Foreign Office or Home Office are helping whatever it is he’s trying to do, or are playing completely different games in which he is only a pawn.

Explanation 1

It’s only right at the end that, in two conversations with his boss, the Narrator finally explains everything:

‘In a concentration camp there is a very wealthy man named Broum. Broum’s family left him about a quarter of a million pounds in securities in a Swiss bank. Anyone who can prove he is Broum can collect a quarter of a million pounds. It’s not hard to understand; Vulkan wanted those papers to prove that he was Broum. All the other things were incidental. Vulkan made Gehlen’s people ask us for the papers to make it appear more genuine.’
Sam the Israeli intelligence agent wanted Semitsa for the Israeli scientific programme.
‘Vulkan wanted to give Semitsa to the Israeli Government. In exchange for this they would endorse his claim to the Broum fortune. The Swiss banks are very sensitive to the Israeli Government. It was a brilliant touch.’

Explanation 2

Goes into more detail:

‘Vulkan existed all right,’ I said. ‘He was a concentration-camp guard until a wealthy prisoner (who had been an assassin for the Communist Parties) arranged to have him killed. This man was Broum, and an S.S. medical officer named Mohr… ‘
‘The one in Spain now. Our Mohr.’
I nodded. ‘… made a deal. The S.S. officer staged a death scene and made sure that Broum was believed dead by all the prisoners. Broum meanwhile dressed as a German soldier and disappeared. In 1945 even being a German soldier was better than being a murderer. What’s more Broum (or Vulkan) got along very well financially even without the £250,000, but it was nice to think it was there waiting. Perhaps he intended to leave it to someone. Perhaps on his death-bed, beyond the reach of the guillotine, he was going to say who he really was. No. It was this new law about unclaimed property that made him suddenly start to move. What he needed was a way of proving he was Broum and then of not being Broum just as quickly.’
‘It’s astonishing,’ said Dawlish, ‘to think of a Jewish prisoner who had suffered so much going all through his life saying that he had been a Nazi guard in a concentration camp.’
‘He didn’t know whether he was up or down,’ I said. ‘He came to the conclusion that if you throw enough money around you don’t have enemies. Vulkan, Broum, whatever you want to call him, his final allegiance was to cash.’

The new law referred to had just been passed by the Swiss government and allowed any descendants of Jews murdered by the Nazis to apply for Nazi money which had been deposited in Swiss banks. As per explanation 1, ‘Broum’s family left him about a quarter of a million pounds in securities in a Swiss bank. Anyone who can prove he is Broum can collect a quarter of a million pounds.’ So the man who had been passing himself off as Johnny Vulkan for so long, wanted the paperwork in the name of his own actual, real identity, Broum, so as to apply for the money. He only arranged ‘the defection of Semitsa to the West’ with a view to immediately handing him over to the Israelis to help their war effort, in exchange for their ratifying his claim for the Swiss money. In doing so he was planning to completely double-cross the Narrator and British Intelligence. In the event they were all double-crossed by Colonel Stok who had the last laugh by stringing everyone along without the slightest intention of helping a Russian scientist defect. In a bid to make the smuggling look genuine, Vulkan had the Gehlen Group ask the British security services for paperwork in the name of Broum as if it was plucked at random, and to throw them off the scent, when in fact the paperwork was all he wanted out of the whole complicated scenario. And so the trajectory of the novel is us following the Narrator as he slowly pieces together the true history of this Broum/Vulkan, and piecing together the motivation of the various players.

To recap: the entire scientist-smuggling operation was, for Vulkan, purely a pretext to get his hands on a set of British government-authenticated identity papers in the name of Broum. He would then use these to reclaim Broum’s fortune. It was a straightforward criminal scam.

The Hallam connection

As with the previous novels, the plot felt like it was over with the failure of the Semitsa defection and the death of Vulkan but there is one last act. This is where the homosexual official in the Home Office, Hallam, who had commissioned the documents in Broum’s name which were given to the Narrator to hand over to Vulkan, turns nasty. He takes the Narrator to a fireworks night display in a bombed-out vacant lot near Gloucester Road. Here, amid the bangs and crashes, and in an impenetrably thick London fog, Hallam tries to shoot the Narrator, confirming the Narrator’s hunch that he was in on Vulkan’s scam and is now after the Broum documents (which he knows are worth quarter of a million pounds).

Only in the Narrator’s final wind-up conversation with his boss, Dawlish, does it emerge that they both knew that Hallam was on the verge of being sacked for his ‘homosexual tendencies’. This is what drove him to throw in his lot with Vulkan and then to make a rather panicky attack on the Narrator. In this dramatic scene, the Narrator avoids Hallam’s shots while throwing fireworks at him until Hallam’s long flamboyant scarf catches fire then ignites the bottle of booze in his pocket, so that he goes up like a Roman candle. Nasty.

What gives the novel its peculiarly Deightonesque quality – apart from the vivid descriptive passages, zippy similes and elliptical dialogue – is that the narrator – who holds all the cards i.e. has his suspicions and is calculating the angles on all the scenarios mentioned above – does not share this knowledge with the reader. In this novel, as in Ipcress, it is only at the very, very end that any kind of order or pattern emerges from the events described, and then only in laconic conversations with his secretary or boss – and even this ‘final roundup’ still leaves holes in the narrative and motivation. Like, is any of this long complicated farrago actually remotely believable?

Cast

Narrator
Jean Tonnesson – his secretary and girlfriend
Dawlish – his boss, Hallam disrespectfully calls him ‘Granny’ Dawlish – is cultivating English wildflowers (also known as hedgerow flowers) at home
Hallam – gay, corrupt, upper-class Home Office civil servant – owner of two cats, Confucius and Fang – dies horribly after a shooutout at a Bonfire Night party (chapter 2 is told from his point of view)
Johnny Vulkan – freelance agent in Berlin: on the payroll of British Intelligence, but doesn’t work only for them, not for ‘a lousy two grand a month’ – ‘Growing older seemed to agree with him. He didn’t look a day over forty, his hair was like a tailored Brillo pad and his face tanned’ – according to Stok, the best chess player in Berlin – the novel turns out to centre on his secret identity, a Jew, Broum, who escaped from a Nazi concentration camp
Colonel Stok – Soviet intelligence officer who offers to help Semitsa defect to the West – ‘He was a big-boned man, his hair was cropped to the skull and his complexion was like something the dog had been playing with. When he stood up to greet us his huge hands poked out of a bright red silk smoking-jacket with gold-braid frogging’ (chapter 34 is told from his point of view)

‘It’s not my job to think,’ said Stok. ‘I employ youngsters to do that; their minds aren’t so
cluttered up with knowledge.’ (p.150)

the Gehlen Bureau – Later the B.N.D. or Federal German Intelligence Service, but still generally referred to as the ‘Gehlen Bureau’, it has an appendix devoted to it
Semitsa – Soviet scientist, enzyme specialist, we never meet him, might be completely fictional
Sam Steele – 5 foot 10, sexy American young woman the Narrator starts an affair with – he thinks she’s an American agent then realises she’s working for The Shin Bet, or Israel Security Agency, real name Hannah Stahl (chapter 43 is told from her point of view)

She combed her hair through her fingers. It was soft and young; fine silky hair. She let it fall against her neck like murmurs of love.

Austin Butterworth aka ‘Ossie’ – professional burglar who the Narrator pays to break into and ransack Sam’s flat, cover for searching for clues to her real identity
Grenade – French agent working for Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST)
Harvey Newbegin – US State Department man in Prague; takes the Narrator out to a rural pub to meet…
Jan-im-Gluck (Lucky Jan) – Jewish, the dark vole-like old man Harvey takes him to see in a peasant restaurant outside Prague who tells him about the character of Paul Louis Broum, a charismatic figure in Treblinka concentration camp, the last days of the camp, the death march, how Broum was strangled that night, how in the morning several prisoners were shot point blank for his murder
Josef-the-gun – so named because of his stutter, Jan-im-Gluck’s brother, ‘they hate each other’ – at the Pinkas synagogue in Prague he stuns the Narrator by telling him the man who murdered Broum on the death march from Treblinka was named Vulkan!
Paul Louis Broum – Czech German Jew who, according to the brothers, was killed on the death march from Treblinka (Alice christens the Broum report Death’s-head hawk moth) – only late in the novel do we realise that Johnny Vulkan is this Broum who arranged his own ‘death’ on the march from Treblinka, took the identity of a German guard and disappeared, has been concealing his identity for 20 years, but has organised the entire defection scenario solely to get his hands on UK government paperwork for Broum, in order to present it to the Swiss government and claim the £250,000 left him by relatives in a Swiss bank
Colonel-General Erich Borg, Commander Panzer Group ‘Borg’ – ‘General Borg was a tall thin man. Sitting low in the ancient armchair, all knees and elbows, he looked as delicate as a stick insect. His face was very white and very wrinkled like a big ball of string’ – the Narrator visits him to confirm details of Broum’s fate because he has kept ‘one of the best collections of military records in the whole of Germany’ – assisted by his daughter, Heidi
Heidi Borg – daughter and secretary for the above
Dr Ernst Mohr – Nazi doctor who helped arrange Broum/Vulkan’s escape, identified thanks to a photo taken at the camp – survived the war and now a successful businessman in Spain, where Vulkan goes to visit him – Vulkan blackmails Mohr into keeping silent about his true identity by claiming Sam and Shin Bet are after him but he’ll throw her off the trail

Multiple points of view

In a narrative development over the previous two novels, some of the chapters in Funeral take the perspective of characters other than the main narrator. These chapters are told by an omniscient third-person narrator who allows us into these other characters’ thoughts. This is a small mercy and makes Funeral easier to enjoy, if not exactly to follow, than Ipcress, which is so dominated by the concealing, allusive style of the narrator. Deighton relaxes (slightly) and draws extended pen portraits of other key characters and these are enjoyable in their own right.

It’s in two of these alternative POV chapters that we learn about the Narrator’s coming from Burnley. In chapter 2 Hallam the homosexual gives us a brief and much-quoted description of the anonymous narrator:

An upstart from Burnley – a supercilious anti-public school technician who thought he was an administrator.

While, towards the end, in chapter 43, Samantha Steel, now revealed to be Hannah Stahl, reflects on her brief fling with the Narrator:

She wished she had known him many years ago when he was at his red-brick university, this provincial boy wandering through the big city of life. She envied him his simplicity and briefly wished she had been the girl next door in Burnley, Lancs – wherever that was! (p.218)

Smart similes

In this slightly more forgiving book the similes also seem less incongruous, more of a piece with the humour. Similes, like metaphors are, after all, a kind of joke, a revelation of incongruous similarities.

‘Ha ha ha,’ said Stok, then he exhaled another great billow of cigar smoke like a 4.6.2 pulling out of King’s Cross. (Ch 6)

Damp leaves shone underfoot like a million newly struck pennies. (Ch 15)

Now the powdery skin [of his face], sun-lamped to a pale nicotine colour, was supported only by his cheek-bones, like a tent when the guy ropes are slackened. (Ch 16)

Though some of the comparisons, as in Ipcress, strain a little harder than others.

From underfoot the sweet smell of damp grass rose like perfume. Birds were still singing in the trees that stood across the major surgery of sunset like massed artery forceps. (15)

Inside the semi-precious light of the stained glass softly dusted the smooth, worn pews, and a complex of brass candlesticks glinted like a medieval oil refinery. (15)

These last two indicate the fundamentally anti-Romantic, unsentimental stance of his no-nonsense Narrator: he dumps his secretary-girlfriend of the first book, Jean in order to have an affair with the leggy American agent, Sam Steele; then arranges for her flat to be burgled to establish who she really is, confirming his hunch that she is an Israeli agent. He mistakenly beats up an elderly messenger in the street in Berlin and has no regrets (Ch 19). He kills two more major – and rather sympathetic – characters (Johnnie Vulkan and Hallam). And this hard, metallic attitude extends all the way down to small descriptions and casual phrases.

In Horse Guards Avenue and right along the Thames Embankment, hollow tourist buses were parked and double-parked. The red-cloaked Horse Guards sat motionless clutching their sabres and thinking of metal polish and sex. In Trafalgar Square pigeons were enmeshed in the poisonous diesel gauze. (Ch 17)

I walked out along the moonlit sea front. The phosphorescent breakers crumbled into shimmering lacework and the moon was an overturned can of white paint that had spilled its contents across the sea. (Ch 24)

This tough but humorous tone is the distinctive feature of the novel’s worldview and of its prose. Tough but humorous also characterises Raymond Chandler’s innovative style in the detective genre, and it is probably this elliptical humour – along with the impenetrable plots – which are Deighton’s big contribution to the spy novel. A tone of underplayed humour which is perfectly captured by Michael Caine’s performance in the movie adaptations of these books. It’s full of dryly humorous quips.

‘I wish you would try to understand,’ said Stok. ‘I am really sincere about giving you my allegiance.’
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I bet you say that to all the great powers.’ (Ch 5)

Russian sayings

Deighton enjoyed littering Horse Under Water with Portuguese proverbs. Proverbs, like similes, are related to the kind of pithy, gnomic puzzles that appeal to him (like the books’ crossword puzzles and chess rules). In the same spirit Colonel Stok is given a few entertaining Russian sayings:

‘In my country we have a saying, “a man who trades a horse for a promise ends up with tired feet”.’
In Russia we have a proverb, “Better a clever lie than the foolish truth”.’ (p.38)

Jokes

And jokes:

‘I heard a very good joke the other day.’ He [Stok] was speaking very softly now as though there was a chance of us being overheard. ‘Ulbricht is going about incognito testing his own popularity by asking people if they like Ulbricht. One man he asks says, “Come with me.” He takes Ulbricht on a train and a bus until they are deep in the Saxon hills near the Czechoslovak border. They walk in the country until they are many kilometres from the nearest house and then they finally stop. This man looks all around and whispers to Ulbricht, “I personally,” the man says, “don’t mind him at all.” ‘ Stok roared with laughter again. ‘I don’t mind him at all,’ said Stok again, pointing at his own chest and laughing hysterically.

Stok was bubbling over with gaiety. He prodded Harvey and said, ‘I tell you a joke. The factory workers say that it’s impossible to do anything right. If you arrive five minutes early you are a saboteur; if you arrive five minutes late you are betraying socialism; if you arrive on time they say, “Where did you get the watch?” ‘ Stok laughed and spilled his drink. (p.144)

‘Another,’ said Stok. ‘Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Yes? Well socialism is exactly the reverse.’ Everyone laughed and swilled down another drink. (p.145)

Later, in the chapter devoted to his point of view, as he shares a drink with the humourless Czech apparatchik Vaclav, Stok is more cynical.

‘We are policemen, Vaclav; and policemen can’t get mixed up with justice. It’s bad enough being mixed up with the law.’ Vaclav nodded but did not smile. (p.154)

The anxiety of influence

By 1964 there was already quite a boom of spy novels, TV shows and movies:

Danger Man started in 1960, with Patrick McGoohan playing John Drake, an American NATO investigator.
The Avengers TV series started in January 1961.
The Bond movies – Dr No (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964)
The Modesty Blaise cartoon strip started appearing in the Evening Standard in May 1963.
The Man From UNCLE TV series started in September 1964.

And all this is reflected in the text’s arch self-awareness. When the Narrator is arrested in East Berlin and taken to a police station, he reflects:

I knew there must be a way out. None of those young fellows on late-night TV would find it any sort of dilemma. (p.34).

The Narrator gets a bit riled when ordered to give Hallam some money to establish his identity:

Who the hell is he going to think I am if I don’t give him four half-crowns – James Bond?’ (p.57)

Then his employee, upper-class twit Chico, comes in.

‘I’ve got a file from A.E.A.S.D.’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Atomic Energy Authority, Security Department,’ Chico said.
‘That’s better,’ I said. ‘You’ve been watching those spy films on TV again.’ (p.68)

When he mistakenly beats up Stok’s messengers, he reflects:

These were no B-picture heavies, just two elderly messengers.

In the early 1960s spy fictions went from a minority genre to becoming big business in books, films and TV so that by the late 1960s, TV schedules were packed with special agents and the cinemas bulged with Bond lookalikes. Why? Is it as simple as that the genre is desperately romantic? Handsome capable men defeat baddies, bed willing dollybirds, get to drive fast cars, and play with guns? Fulfilling every adolescent boy’s fantasies?

Google AI suggests something a bit more cunning. It was an era of genuine Cold War tension, marked by the 13 tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 16 to 28 October 1962, when the world held its breath. So it was a period of genuine geopolitical stress. The spy boom transformed a terrifying geopolitical reality into fashionable, fast-paced, sexy, stylish media products. It was a form of sublimation. And then it just became another fashion, a cultural wave, with everyone – authors, producers, film makers – trying to capitalise on the trend.

Foreign locations

London
Berlin
the France-Spain border
Prague

One aspect of spy fiction’s glamour was that the boom coincided with the advent of jet airliners and the Sunday supplement world of travel to exotic destinations. When I was a boy in the 1970s, Spain and Italy and Greece were still Romantic destinations. Bond was always swanning off to the Caribbean and admittedly Deighton isn’t quite that glamorous; but still, there’s a fair bit of jetsetting in these early novels: Beirut and a Pacific island in Ipcress; Portugal and Marrakesh in Horse; Berlin, France and Prague in this one.

Not only are the locations colourful in themselves, but some of Deighton’s extended descriptions sound very much like travel writing of the time, like it could be taken right out of a spy novel and put in a travel article or book:

The roads out of Prague are lined with cherry trees; in the spring the blossom follows the road like smoky exhaust and in the summer it is not unusual to see a driver standing on top of his lorry munching at the fruit. Now it was autumn and the trees had just the last few tenacious leaves hanging on like jilted lovers. Here and there young girls or tiny children dressed always in trousers attended to a cow or a goat or a few geese. High-wheeled bullock carts moved ponderously along the narrow roads and sometimes a big truck filled with mocking gesticulating girls being taken home from their work in the fields.

And foreign food:

Harvey probably knew how to carve a goose but it was his co-ordination that proved such a handicap. We all got large torn pieces of hot, crisp, juicy, oily goose and we had a large plate of those breadrolls that come with great chunks of sea-salt and poppy seeds baked to the top of them. There was slivovice which Harvey liked and tiny pots of Turkish coffee of which he wasn’t so fond.

Homosexuality

Hallam the Home Office official is gay – the narrator teasing/bullying him about his campness right from the beginning – but then his chief significance becomes that his homosexuality has made him a ‘security risk’ and led to his early retirement, and it is this, the official attitude, which drives him into criminal behaviour. In the final pages, the hero and his boss discuss the stupidity of anti-gay laws which make it easier to turn closet gays into security risks, a sympathetically liberal point of view. It was only in 1967 that homosexual acts in private between two men over the age of 21 were decriminalised.

Cars

There’s quite a lot of driving around. Only when you Google the cars mentioned in the text do you realise how antiquated they are, how distant that world is, how long ago it all was.

The movie

Michael Caine was signed up to reprise the role of Harry Palmer he had first played in the film version of The Ipcress File. The movie was released in December 1966 and was directed by Guy Hamilton, who had directed Goldfinger in 1964 and went on to direct three more Bond films in the early 1970s.

‘Girls always make passes at spies who wear glasses.’

Credit

‘Funeral in Berlin was published by Jonathan Cape in 1964. Page references are to the 1966 Penguin paperback edition. All quotations are used for purposes of criticism and review.

Related reviews

Len Deighton reviews

1964 in spy novels

A Kind of Anger by Eric Ambler – Journalist Piet Maas is tasked with tracking down a beautiful woman who is the only witness to the murder of an exiled Iraqi colonel in a remote villa in Switzerland.
You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming – Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits.
Robert Harris’s debut novel, Fatherland (1992), is set in 1964, in an alternative unverse where Germany won the Second World War.

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by Simon on September 14, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel, Thriller

Tagged 1963, Abwehr, Alice Bloom, Arab-Israeli War, Austin Butterworth, Beirut, Berg, Berlin, Bonfire Night, Bordeaux, Burnley, Charles Ives, Charlotte Street, Checkpoint Charlie, chess, Chico, civil service, Cold War, Colonel Stok, Colonel-General Erich Borg, Communism, concentration camp, Confucius, Cuban Missile Crisis, Czechoslovakia, Danger Man, Dawlish, Death's-head hawk moth, Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, Dr Ernst Mohr, Dr No, DST, East Germany, Edmond Dorf, enzymes, Evening Standard, Fang, Federal German Intelligence Service, fiction, first-person narrator, From Russia With Love, Funeral In Berlin, Gauloise, Gehlen Bureau, Gehlen Organisation, German, Gloucester Road, Goldfinger, Granny Dawlish, Grenade, Guy Hamilton, Hallam, Hannah Stahl, Harry Palmer, Harvey Newbegin, hedgerow flowers, Holocaust, Home Office, homosexual tendencies, homosexuality, Horse Guards, Horse Guards Avenue, Horse Under Water, humour, insecticides, Israeli Government, Israeli secret service, James Bond movies, Jan-im-Gluck, Jazz, Jean Tonnesson, John Drake, Johnnie Vulkan, jokes, Josef-the-gun, Len Deighton, Lucky Jan, Marrakesh, Michael Caine, Modesty Blaise, Mohr, novel, November 5th, Official Secrets Act 1911, Ossie, Patrick McGoohan, Paul Louis Broum, Pinkas synagogue, Portugal, post-War Berlin, Prague, proverbs, Raymond Chandler, Sam Steele, Samantha Steele, Schoenberg, Security Service, Semitsa, Shin Bet, similes, slivovice, Southwark, Soviet Bloc, Spy novel, Thames Embankment, the Avengers, the B.N.D., the Gehlen Bureau, The Ipcress File, The Man From UNCLE TV, the Shin Bet, Trafalgar Square, Travel writing, Treblinka, Treblinka concentration camp, Ulbricht, US State Department, USSR, Variations for Wind band, W.O.O.C.(P), Waterloo station, wildflowers

Posted by Simon on September 14, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/09/14/funeral-in-berlin-len-deighton/

The Ipcress File by Len Deighton (1962)

‘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 reviews

Len Deighton reviews

3 Comments

by Simon on September 11, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel, Thriller

Tagged Alice, Alice Bloom, Aquarius, Barney Barnes, brainwashing, British Security, Burnley, C.-S.I.C.H, Captain Carswell, Charlie Cavendish, Charlotte Street, Chico, CIA, Colonel Ross, comedy, cookery, Dalby, Exalted Military Personage, Harry Palmer, Horoscopes, Housemartin, humour, Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress, Jay, Jazz, Jean, Jean Tonnesen, John Barry, John Le Carre, John Osborne, KK, Lebanon, Len Deighton, Lieutenant-colonel Harriman, Michael Caine, military intelligence, Mr Adem, neutron bomb, novel, Paratextuality, Phillip Chillcott-Oakes, public school, Raven, Ross, Secret File No. 1, Sergeant Murray, Shaftesbury Avenue, similes, Skip Henderson, Soho, Spy novel, Swainson, The Ipcress File, the IPCRESS network, thriller, Tokwe atoll, W.O.O.C.(P), Waterman, Waterman's World-Wide Detective Agency, Wood Green, World War Two

Posted by Simon on September 11, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/the-ipcress-file-len-deighton/

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