All posts tagged cricket

Ladysmith by Giles Foden (1999)

Published the year after Foden’s famous debut, ‘The Last King of Scotland’, ‘Ladysmith’ is even longer, weighing in at a chunky 362 pages. He must have been working on them at the same time and this prompts the thought of considering them as two prisms or perspectives, from different periods, on their subjects – Africa, white people in Africa, colonialism and war.

Talking of dates, I realised Foden probably wanted the book to be published in 1999 as this marked the centenary of its subject, the start of the siege of Ladysmith. I wonder if the actual publication date was aligned as well i.e. in October or November. In fact one of the characters wonders whether the siege will go on for decades and his diary of it will be dug up a century hence, in 1999 (George Steevens the journalist, p.175).

Anyway, Ladysmith is a dazzling feat of imagination and bravura writing, hugely gripping, informative and entertaining. Also, it is very hard, grim and violent.

The siege of Ladysmith

The (Second) Boer War lasted from 11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902. Less than a month into the conflict Boer forces surrounded the town of Ladysmith in the colony of Natal on 2 November 1899 – occupied by British civilians, Asians and Africans and a contingent of the British army – and besieged it for 118 days, until it was relieved by British forces on 28 February 1900.

Prologue

The narrative opens not in Africa, but in late-Victorian Ireland (later on, we realise it’s about 1880). Four dramatic pages briskly describe the poverty and persecution suffered by the unnamed narrator, which drives him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The underlying point is the implied connection between the Irish and the Boers, small subject peoples oppressed by the British Empire. He’s involved in a shootout with British police, escapes, is hidden by comrades in the Brotherhood, then smuggled to Liverpool, where he plans to start a new life in the colonies.

Part 1. Crossways

It quickly becomes clear that a distinguishing feature of the book is its very large cast of characters. Here’s a list of the characters who appear in the first hundred pages or so:

  • Bella Kiernan, 20, eldest daughter of…
  • Leo Kiernan, red-haired proprietor of the Royal Hotel, Ladysmith (p.19)
  • Jane Kiernan, 18, Bella’s blonde younger sister (p.24), admired by gunner Foster of the Naval Brigade (p.62)
  • Gunner Herbert Foster, likely young lad and beau to Jane Kiernan
  • Antonio Torres, barber, from Lourenço Marques in Portuguese East Africa (now named Maputo and Mozambique, respectively) which he left when his beloved Isabella Teixera da Mattos (p.93) married another man (Luís)
  • Mrs Frinton, thin, ascetic, grey-haired, God-fearing widow (p.47), most religious woman in town (p.125)
  • Mr and Mrs Star, the Ladysmith bakers (p.15)
  • Tom Barnes of the Green Horse regiment (p.20), writes long descriptive letters home to his mother and sister Lizzie, one of which includes burning down the house of an absent Boer including piano and music (pages 60 to 65)
  • four journalists: George Steevens of the Mail; Henry Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle; Donald McDonald of the Melbourne Argus; William Maud the Graphic’s special artist (pages 21 and 120); MacDonald is coarse and racist (p.75); Steevens, small and bald and scholarly, is a legend for his calm under fire (p.76); Nevinson is more the neutral 40-ish narrator type (p.78) albeit a ‘dour figure’ (p.203)
  • Atkins of the Manchester Guardian
  • Perry Barnes, Tom’s younger brother who’s followed him into the army, a farrier by trade, aboard the same ship bringing the Biographer, Winston Churchill and thousands of troops to South Africa (p.26)
  • Lieutenant Norris, Tom and Bob’s superior officer
  • the Biographer who it took me a few pages to realise is not a photographer but a pioneer of moving pictures i.e. film photography – describes the loading and sea voyage of the Dunottar Castle setting off from Southampton to Cape Town – he grew up in Birmingham and considers himself an outsider at the captain’s table full of plummy posh officers (p.26); he is so-named because he works for the Mutoscope and Biograph Company (p.56)
  • Winston Churchill, correspondent for the Morning Post (p.30)
  • General Redvers Henry Buller (p.35)
  • Muhle Maseku, wife Nandi (who Maseku married when he was 13) and young son Wellington, one of thousands in a refugee column fleeing (p.36), he is separated from his wife and boy into a group of 400 Blacks by Boers who force them to work on building fortifications; in the rush down a muddy slope after a day working in the rain he breaks his ankle
  • Marwick, kindly Englishman from the Natal Native Affairs Department (p.38)
  • General Piet Joubert, Commandant-General of the Transvaal (p.40)
  • Major Mott, the military censor (p.43) started out ‘harsh’ and, as things become intense, becomes ‘merciless’ (p.97), proud possessor of a grand sealion moustache (p.195)
  • Mohandas Gandhi, speaking at a Hindu political meeting and interviewed by the Biographer (pages 54 to 57)
  • Bob Ashmead, soldier sharing a tent with Tom Barnes (p.58)
  • Dr Sterkx, doctor in the Boer camp who looks after Muhle Maseku and his broken ankle (p.66); turns out it was his house and piano and music Tom Barnes and his troop burned down and took his wife Frannie prisoner into Ladysmith; he makes primitive crutches for Muhle who he gets to become an assistant; they watch battles from a nearby hill
  • Mr Grimble of the Ladysmith town council, local farmer and leading light in Carbineers (p.86), producer of fruit jams (p.104)
  • Archdeacon Barker (p.88)
  • Lieutenant General Sir George White, overall commander of the Ladysmith forces (p.171)

The start of the bombardment

The first shell from the surrounding Boers lands in Ladysmith on 2 November 1899. The town council debates evacuating the wounded and non-combatants. Jingos are outraged. Nevinson the journalist is developing into our eyes and ears and visits the station as the first long train of wounded and women and blacks and Indians pulls out. The telegraph line has been cut so he advertises for Blacks to be paid runners i.e. sneak through the Boer lines and get to the nearest British town in order to get his despatches sent back to London. Since they might be shot on sight the Blacks are charging £20 a journey. Nevinson hires a boy, Wellington, who’s the son of Muhle Maseku who we’ve seen being co-opted into the Boer camp then breaking his ankle. Nevinson includes not only his own despatches but letters friends want posted, including Tom’s to his mum.

Bella and Jane discuss their boyfriends, how long the siege will last, what will happen afterwards. Bella drops by the Star bakery. All food is rationed now and can only be bought with coupons. Bella pays triple the price for a loaf of bread which turns out to be adulterated and makes her sick.

General of the besieging Boers, Joubert, allows trains of wounded and non-combatants to be taken to Camp Intombi down the railway line. Jingos christen it ‘Fort Funk’ (p.106). (According to Wikipedia, the Intombi Military Hospital was some 5 kilometres (3.1 miles) outside Ladysmith and run by Major General (later Sir) David Bruce and his wife Mary. During the siege, the number of beds in the hospital camp grew from the initial 100 to a total of 1900. A total of 10,673 admissions were received and treated at Intombi.)

All classes of men are conscripted into digging defensive trenches and sangars. Torres the barber is bombed out.

Ladysmith measures not 3 miles in any direction. By 5 December 1899 some 3,500 cylinders of explosive iron have been thrown at it (p.123). Growing stress at the ceaseless barrage of incoming shells. Night-time burial parties. Food becomes scarcer. Water from the river polluted with faeces. More and more disease. British forces make a few night-time sallies and spike one Long Tom, cause of celebration. But there are others and numerous other field guns surrounding them. The constant barrage continues.

Dramatic tension

In all kinds of novels the reader experiences an element of suspense and tension as they wait to see what will happen to the characters, how the story will pan out. Well, in a war story like this, there’s a pretty obvious brutal tension involved, as you read about all of these characters, share their thoughts and feelings and perceptions and that is…which of them are going to be killed, or die of disease, or be horribly maimed?

(Lots) more narrative

Tom and Bob are practising cavalry manoeuvres when interrupted by shellfire (they’re not hurt). At the Boer camp Muhle Maseku wakens to see his son, Wellington, has been caught carrying his package of messages through Boer lines, by members of the Irish Brigade, who are kicking and beating him and about to drag him away to execute him. Muhle intervenes, hitting the leader of the Irish Brigade, John MacBride, with his crutch and is shot in the thigh for his troubles, passing out.

(Mention of John MacBride is significant, because he appeared in the prologue to the entire book set, we later learn, around 1879, a member of the small group of Irish Nationalists which includes the unnamed narrator of the prologue. The significance of all of this is explained towards the very end of the book.)

The Biographer has made it by train as far as Frere where the line has been blown up by the Boers. Churchill has gone and got himself captured when the Boer derailed an armoured train he was riding in. The other correspondents are making a fuss to get him freed.

The Biographer is an eye witness to the Battle of Colenso, 15 December 1899. He gets involved in carrying stretchers of the wounded which is where he bumps into Mohandir Gandhi who, somewhat improbably, takes the opportunity to explain that all this bloodshed has helped him crystallise his worldview of satyagraha or non-violence (p.151).

Colenso was one of the three catastrophic defeats which were dubbed Black Week (Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December 1899) in which some 2,800 British troops were killed, wounded or captured (p.153). Buller sends, via the new helioscope system which has been set up to replace the broken telegraph, a depressed defeatist message to Ladysmith to surrender which the town’s commander in chief, Lieutenant General Sir George White, to his credit, ignores.

We are given the text of a letter Perry Barnes writes home to his sister from the camp at Frere i.e. Buller’s camp trying to get past Colenso to relieve Ladysmith. The point is that at the end of the narrative, Foden explains that one of the sources of the novel was an actual cache of letters written by one of his forebears who was in the siege.

A shell lands on the steps of the Royal Hotel blowing off the leg of a doctor who later dies. Bella ponders the mother she never knew, Catherine, from back in Ireland.

(At which point I realised this is probably the ‘Catherine’ we see getting shot dead by British police in Ireland in the dramatic opening Prologue. And realise at the same moment that the unnamed narrator of the Prologue must have been the man now known as Leo Kiernan, Bella’s father and owner of the Royal Hotel.)

Bella and Tom have slowly become an item though Bella is wary. Novels and love, do all ‘serious’ novels have to feature a love story?

Nevinson is astonished to spot the young Zulu he had sent with his despatches bathing in the river with his mother. Wellington explains how he was caught, beaten up, the documents taken from him, read and defaced, but he was saved from execution by General Joubert who instead tasked him with returning them to Ladysmith, which Wellington did by creeping up on a sentry post and chucking the bag in then running off.

Bella finally agrees to ‘walk out’ with Tom, they walk out to the empty orchard outside town and have first sex, breathily described: ‘She rubbed against the straining tip of him’ etc (p.187). Although they get as far as him licking her through her panties, she bridles, pulls back, unzips his trousers and masturbates him till he climaxes, giggling quietly because his name is Tom, and the big guns firing on the town are nicknamed Long Toms and she is holding his Long Tom in her hand.

George Steevens has had enteric fever for weeks and Nevinson is justifiably concerned for him and his sometimes hallucinatory feverish conversation. The bored journalists have amused themselves by setting up a home-printed broadsheet called the Ladysmith Lyre whose purpose is exaggeration, rumour and amusement.

Very long description of a cricket match put together by the General, between two teams called the Colonials and the Mother Country. Both Tom and Gunner Foster do good batting, to the admiration of Bella and Jane. Tribal courtship rituals. To his irritation Leo Kiernan is compelled to be captain of the Colonials. It all builds to a climax as Bella’s dad turns out to be an improbably fine cricketer (improbable because he’s never played the game before) and the Colonials are just one run away from victory when just the one shell is lobbed at the game by the Boers on the surrounding hills. It explodes sending red hot splinters everywhere but apparently harming no-one, the final ball is played, Bella’s dad misses it but it hits young Herbert Foster who had remained in his wicket keeper’s crouch and when Tom goes up to see him, realises he is dead, killed instantly by a liver of shrapnel from the Boer shell.

Part 2. The Tower

Two days later Jane is in deep shock, shell-shocked, PTSD, shakes, catatonic, throws up, can’t answer questions. Bella cleans up the vomit, remakes the bed, puts her in, goes downstairs to the hotel bar which promptly receives two direct hits.

When she wakes up in the makeshift hospital in the town hall, she discovers both her dad and she have gashes but otherwise unhurt. Leo has sent Jane with a nurse in that day’s train to Intombi. Leo takes Bella to see the hotel which is utterly ruined. She reclaims some dirty clothes and sheets from the wreckage then her dad takes her to the network of caves along the river Klip, where bombed-out women and children are living.

Gaza

It’s unnerving to read the account of a population traumatised (and killed and mutilated) by relentless, merciless bombardment on days when, making coffee or lunch, I turn on the radio and hear more grim details of the relentless Israeli bombardment of Gaza. Even more eerie to read about the huge network of tunnels the homeless men and women of Ladysmith constructed in the soft soil alongside the river Klip, reminding me of the vast labyrinth of tunnels Hamas has are said to have created in Gaza. Rightly or wrongly I couldn’t get the contemporary resonance out of my head as I read descriptions of crying women and children surrounded by unrelenting, random death.

‘When will it end?’
‘I never thought I would see myself like this.’
‘Mummy!’
‘My God, I have no hope left in me.’ (p.231)

It was as if they’d gone back in time to a prehistoric era; it was as if they were real cave-dwellers now. (p.234)

1899. 2023. Some people think the human race changes, that ‘humanity’ is moving forwards and upwards, that we are ‘progressing’. I don’t.

More part 2

Bella is settled into a dugout cave, has sort of bed made up for her by kindly Mrs Frinton. Standing outside she notices the Portuguese barber, Torres, digging. Turns out he’s digging up unexploded munitions. When a shell comes over Torres grabs her hand and yanks her over and into the men’s tunnels. Here a rough uitlander makes an off-colour remark prompting Torres to fight him for the lady’s honour. Arguably, this section should have been called ‘The Tunnels’ as the narrative dwells on Bella’s completely changed circumstances and how poor and alone and ill and hungry she feels. It’s called The Tower because in her distracted mind she creates a shimmering tower rising above the ruined town, an image of transcendence and escape.

On Christmas Day 1899 a shell lands nearby spattering Bella with mud as she was dressing in her best blouse, she spends hours rocking on the floor in despair. Her dad arrives with a letter from Jane at the military hospital who, mercifully, has recovered.

After two weeks Bella is sent by the river cave women to get provisions from the Commissariat in town. She visits the Royal and is distraught to see it looking like it’s been abandoned for years. In the ruins she discovers the Zulu mother Nandi and Wellington the messenger boy are squatting. Nandi tugs her skirts and begs and Bella gives her some of her precious supplies.

(The degrading immiseration of once cheerful well-fed westerners also reminds me of the imprisonment of the Europeans in the Japanese internment camp in J.G. Ballard’s ‘Empire of the Sun’.)

She goes to the Town Hall to see her father, is disconcerted to see that he is sitting on the military tribunal alongside Mayor Farquhar and Major Mott, and then horrified when they drag Torres the barber before them and arraign him for spying and treason, for which the penalty in time of war is death. Tom had reported seeing someone flashing messages using a mirror from some shrubbery on the edge of town, had fired into the bushes, missed the man who disappeared, leaving fragments of a mirror of the type which Torres used to sell from his barber’s shop, and the footprint of a boot with a big V on it.

The case is not proven but he is still roughly tied up and dragged off to the Dopper Church which has been surrounded by barbed wire and turned into an ad hoc prison for suspects.

Part 2 is much much more focused on one character (Bella) than part one had been with its cast of over 40. Now it’s all about Bella’s feelings at being bombed out, realising she doesn’t like Tom who obeys orders rather than listen to her, and hates her father after he defended the xenophobic unfairness of trying Torres.

Next day she goes back into town and to the Dopper Church, where she asks the guard to fetch Torres to the barbed wire where she apologises for everything and promises to do whatever she can. Then she goes to the ruins of the Royal Hotel, climbing gingerly up the ruined staircase to the Star Room where she finds her father, white with intense strain. His revolver is on the desk. He makes her swear not to try to find him till the siege is over but stay in the caves. In a flash it came to me that Leo is the spy, the traitor, the anti-British Irish Republican Brother who is signalling information to the Boers. I bet at some crucial moment we discover Leo’s boots have a big V pattern on them.

Part 3. Amours de Voyage

Rather mercifully, the narrative leaves Bella and her agonisings about Tom, the meaning of love, her father and Torres and we’re back with Nevinson, the dour journalist. ‘Amours de voyages’ is the ironic description Nevinson gives to the final delusions of his friend Steevens as he approaches the final stages of enteric fever. Nevinson visits the sheds at the (now disused) railway station to see for himself the vast abattoir and horse-stewing factory it’s been turned into, producing revolting foods such as ‘chevril’, made from boiling horses’ bones and guts.

There’s an interlude where Foden inserts newspaper reports, and Churchill’s telegram to Britain, giving details of his daring escape from Boer captivity and wild escape by train and walking the 300 miles north to Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique).

That night the Boers mount their biggest attack, seizing part of the vital Caesar’s Camp area. Nevinson finds command headquarters in total chaos and rides out to see for himself, ending up taking refuge in a sangar of the Irish Fusiliers, during the fierce battle and on into a sudden rainstorm. The British counter-attack and take all the key positions. 500 British soldiers killed to about 800 Boers. A significant battle. By the time he gets back to the cottage he’s been sharing with the other correspondents, Nevinson feels chill and ill.

Cut to Churchill taking a boat to Durban then hastening back to Buller’s relieving force, where he is greeted and filmed by the Biographer (quite a while since we’ve heard about him). They can see the terrible guns firing down onto the town but every attempt to cross the river Tugela is repulsed by the Boers who are firmly entrenched on the other side.

A slightly delirious, impressionistic description of the disastrous attack on Spion Kop, 23 to 24 January 1900, premonition of the Somme and First World War butchery. Ends with a letter from Perry Barnes back to Lizzy describing the slaughter and blaming the useless British generals (pages 303 to 304).

Dr Sterkx comes to the Zulu Muhle Maseku whose gunshot wound to the thigh is healing, says he will help him escape from the Boer camp into Ladysmith, if he will take a message to his wife, Frannie.

Bella now spends all her time by the filthy, faeces-full river, brooding, hungry and depressed. She is slightly deliriously metaphysical, staring at the same scene till it shimmers and wobbles, until she feels like one more shape in the lifeless scene (p.307).

Torres becomes desperate stuck inside the barbed-wired church. He becomes fascinated by the Boer woman who still has her goose with her. The reader realises it’s Frannie, distraught wife of Dr Sterkx.

Thrilling description of Muhle Maseku’s escape from the Boer camp during British shelling, under cover of drifting smoke, but still they spot and trail him, taking pot shots till he abandons the obvious route down a gulley and goes up the side and over land, hiding and resting as the full moon floods the landscape with light (p.314).

Tom is depressed, with the duration of the war, with guarding the church, with his ended relationship with Bella who just gives him a hard stare and turns away. So at some cheap estaminet he pays ten shillings to go with a Malay prostitute. Pleasantly pornographic: ‘A soft warm hood of flesh began to press itself over the tip of him’. (p.318). She blows him then rides him to a climax.

On the subject of sex we learn that the Biographer and Perry have been (male, same sex) lovers for some weeks, regularly jerking each other off in the river.

Bella seeks out Nandi and asks for her help. These days Wellington doesn’t smuggle food in, he spends all his time roaming round the surrounding country looking for the sign his father said he would make. That night Wellington appears to Torres inside the church and tells him to follow him. They wriggle through a small window he’s loosened, then sneak across the empty space to the fence which has a square cut out of it. There’s a sentry box but as he watches, Torres sees a female figure approach the sentry, engage it in conversation, then kiss. It is Bella, calculatingly distracting Tom.

Torres is led by Wellington through back streets, out of town to a copse where there’s a brazier with one of the town’s many observation balloons tethered over it. In a little while Bella arrives, they climb into the basket, undo the ropes, and drift into the sky, escaping the imprisoned town.

Tom is flogged for letting Torres escape, so badly he is sent to Intombi camp, where his bloody back is tended by Jane Kiernan. Wellington Maseku brings in his wounded, badly ill father, who he found hiding in a shallow burrow he’d dug to hide from the Boers, but weak and emaciated and his leg wound badly infected. Because of all the goods Wellington smuggled into the camp, the doctors say they’ll see what they can do.

Ladysmith is relieved. The Boers pull out and head north. Buller’s relieving force enters from the south. We are shown the characters reacting differently (Mrs Frinton, of course, praying). Most vivid is MacDonald coming across Nandi weeping at the front of the ruined Royal Hotel. She’s just learned her husband died of blood loss as a result of the amputation of his leg. Perry Barnes is decapitated by one of the last, random Boer shells. The Biographer, who had been filming his lover at the moment of his gruesome death, collapses in hysterics.

Paintings and patriotic accounts record General Buller riding up to General White, dismounting and shaking his hand as the crowds cheered but no such thing happened; Buller just rode blithely by.

Part 4. The monologues of the dead

An oddity. A series of short, sometimes very short (half page), texts by various characters from the narrative, being:

  • Tom Barnes (December 1901) – the British are in the ascendant and in this letter Tom describes razing Boer farmsteads he is completely disillusioned with empire, queen and country, thinks the entire war has been a shambles
  • Mrs Sterkx (March 1902) – an unforgiving description of the concentration camps the British herded Boer women and children into, where they died by their thousands
  • Nevinson (December 1915) – reporting at the conclusion of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, reporting that many think Churchill should be publicly hanged for his part in promoting the campaign
  • Bobby Greenacre (January 1916) – was about to sign up and go to the war when he is bitten by an adder
  • Nevison (November 1916) – talks about his friendship with W.B. Yeats, his lover Maud Gonne who has gone off to nurse soldiers on the Western front, leaving the man she married, John MacBride who a) had led the Irish Brigade in Natal and b) took part in the famous Easter Rising in Dublin; he heard that Bella and Torres landed safely in their balloon and are presumably living somewhere
  • The Biographer (February 1931) – during the main text the Biographer was always frustrated the moving pictures alone didn’t tell the full story; here he is now doing the voiceover for a Movietone News film about Mahatma Gandhi
  • Churchill (February 1931) – speech to the West Sussex Conservatives in which he takes the time to execrate Gandhi turning up to meet the Viceroy of India dressed in peasant clothes
  • Jane (May 1933) – multiple sadnesses; she has just buried Tom, who she married; and she remembers back to discovering her father dead in the ruins of the Hotel, having shot himself with his revolver and slowly discovered that he was the spy signalling information to the Boers; thought as much; then how she tracked down Bella and Torres, discovering he sold a bauxite claim for a fortune and took Bella back to Portugal where they lived the life of the 1910s and 20s rich, spats, feather boas and fast cars
  • MacDonald (December 1938) – bumped into Bobby Greenacre who is now an eminent lawyer, a KC in Australia
  • Gandhi (August 1942) – he has been arrested for publicly stating his party will not fight the Japanese if they invade India; so he’s been incarcerated, yet again; he marvels at the way everything – he, history – are misrepresented: ‘everything is distorted and misrepresented’ – this seems a rather obvious comment about the nature of fiction itself, and maybe about Foden’s own kind of historical fiction in particular
  • Churchill (27 May 1944) – a secret cypher telegram which indicates Churchill’s vehement dislike of Gandhi right to the end
  • The Biographer (July 1945) – retired now, he reflects on how Churchill will be kicked out at the election, how his time and his romance of the British Empire is over; the British will leave India as soon as they decently can; still, Churchill’s rhetoric and determination kept the British at it for six long years; respect
  • Wellington – reflects on the Sharpeville Massacre, 21 March 1960, the enduring wickedness of the Pass Laws in South Africa’s history; Wellington is a member of the African National Congress (ANC) and in prison for burning his Pass Card in front of the press; he is being represented in court by a young Nelson Mandela; he remembers Ladysmith, the experience of being in prison, and reflects how, for people like him – South African Blacks – it has never been otherwise

Obviously deliberate that a Black African is given the last word in this story about Africa.

Foden’s multifarious styles

There were fairly frequent moments in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ when I was surprised by an oddity of Foden’s prose style, but assigned it to the narrator. But there are more here, so I’m concluding they’re part of Foden’s essential approach to language.

Formal prepositions

He has an old-fashioned way with prepositions, for example he insists on using their full formal versions, ‘upon’ instead of ‘on’, ‘whilst’ instead of ‘while’.

He is much given to the old-fashioned inversion of phrases to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition.

People were saying that the first real shots of the war had been fired at Dundee, to where a column had rashly been thrown forward. (p.45)

Flight to Intombi was now a measure of which many non-combatants availed themselves. (p.105)

In a battered hansom cab Churchill, together with Atkins of the Manchester Guardian, went up to the Mount Nelson Hotel to plan their campaign and to conduct interviews with the military staff staying in that grand residence, before leaving for East London by rail, therefrom to catch the mail packet to Natal. (p.52)

Is this meant to convey the archaic quality of late-Victorian prose, the formality of late-Victorian social life, or the stilted pompousness of this particular pair of characters? Or does Foden just regard it as a valid form of phrasing he can mix in with other far more modern, even slangy, phraseology? Whatever the motive it results in a text which is a mosaic, or mashup, of multiple tones and registers.

He has a similar fondness for an antiquated use of the word ‘so’.

The Klip took a tortuous course through the town and its environs, and the bank in parts was fairly high. It was so where he was walking… (p.119)

Wouldn’t this be more naturally be phrased as ‘it was like this where he was walking’? Is the unusual phrasing ‘It was so…’ intended to evoke Victorian phraseology, because I’m not sure it does. It reminds me more of Captain Picard’s catchphrase in Star Trek Next Generation: ‘Make it so.’ It’s a conscious style decision; Foden repeats it later:

Forced to meet this turning movement in the British attack, the Boers had had to extend their line. Churchill reported it so. (p.295)

It’s one among many odd, anomalous, unmodern turns of phrase which Foden deliberately deploys. Much earlier in the book, describing the town council debate about whether the non-combatants should leave the town:

Others, in particular those who had suffered injury to family or property from the bombardment, were all for leaving the soldiers to it and getting out from under the shadow of shell. (p.87)

‘The shadow of shell’ is an odd phrase, isn’t it? It’s not Victorian or modern, if anything it reminds me of the alliteration of Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Ornate phrasing

There are many such unorthodox or contrived phrasings, not massive in themselves, just a continual trickle of unusualness:

‘Let me explain,’ intervened Bella, in agitated fashion. (p.111)

But there were larger quarrels, ones in which such discriminations counted for naught. (p.189)

All seemed set to enjoy themselves in fair measure. (p.195)

This sounds more like Shakespeare than late-Victorian prose.

Yet, if truth be told, there were other constants… (p.214)

Is the deployment of ‘if truth be told’ an attempt to mimic late-Victorian oratory? Is it conscious pastiche or irony? Or is it Foden writing in his own style? Does his own style combine this odd range of registers, taking in modern slang, through boys’ adventure clichés, oddly formal word order, to passages of fairly contemporary psychological description and analysis?

Slang

Ladysmith above ground could get very nippy at night (p.230)

‘There must be something we can do,’ said Bella. She reached up and clasped his fingers, with the wire between them. Torres gave a dry laugh, but he did not remove his hand. ‘I cannot see how. Unless you mean to bring guns and spring me out.’ (p.262)

Use of the word ‘spring’ made me think of a 1940s film noir, or the thousands of American movies where the associates of criminals ‘spring’ them out of gaol.

Grandiloquent

But sometimes Foden’s prose is the opposite of slangy and goes beyond historic pastiche to take on a conscious pomp and circumstance, as here, where the correspondent Nevinson is meditating on the futility of war:

No wonder that the armies of the past vanish, their ancient dead only rising from the furrows of buried time to laugh, invisibly, at the very pageants of memory by which we seek to summon them. (p.286)

Grandiloquent, meaning: ‘pompous or extravagant in language, style, or manner, especially in a way that is intended to impress.’ I understand that this grand style reflects the personality of Nevinson who, as the novel progresses, becomes increasingly prone to grand reflections on history i.e Foden is capturing the style of a specific character.

Grandiloquence of a different type is deliberately deployed in the climactic scene when Ladysmith is finally relieved by British troops and you can feel Foden reaching for a different, feverish style to try and convey the emotional release of the moment, to evoke the hysteria of the crowds:

The crowd opened to let them [the liberating army] trot past, and then followed as they swung into the main street, the vanguard of an exultant avenue of humanity, each crying or laughing as the moment took them, letting go their emotions as if the siege walls had tumbled in their very breasts (p.331)

‘Very breasts’. The whole liberation scene is written like this, in a deliberately high heroic but sentimental Edwardian style, which is very noticeably different from most of the rest of the book.

Prose poetry

And sometimes into the mix Foden throws long, lyrical sentences of prose poetry. Here’s the funeral of the highly literate correspondent George Steevens who dies of enteric fever after a long delirious illness:

A soft rain was falling and, every now and then the donkey pulling the hearse let out its ghastly bray, which echoed between the silent rocks. On the way, Nevinson saw Tom Barnes and his friend, who stopped and saluted in the moonlight. This silvery pall, falling down through ragged edges of cloud, reflected on the hearse, the glass of which was covered in black and white embellishments, and on the lines of white crosses marking the graves of earlier fatalities. (p.290)

It doesn’t have the lustral mellifluousness of, say, the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde, but it is obviously a conscious effort at lyrical landscape painting.

Playful prose

Sometimes Foden indulges in wordplay, picking up on his own phraseology for the lolz:

So that day the censor escaped the unconscious wish of the correspondents – although as he had been on the lavatory at the time, it didn’t really count as a hair’s-breadth escape. Some did escape by such a measure. (p.102)

I had to read that twice before I realised the phrase ‘such a measure’ is referring back to the hair’s breadth (that the person he goes on to talk about, Bobby Greenacre, did escape death by a hair’s breadth). This picking up, echoing and playing with his own phrases occurs fairly often. The soldier Perry Barnes swears when he describes the murderous effect of the Maxim gun:

In his notebook, the correspondent marked the expletive down as a double dash. That night dashes were to the point, and points also: the searchlights at Buller’s camp and in the invested town again communicated by flashing Morse on the clouds. (p.293)

See how he picks up and plays with his own phraseology.

I’m not complaining, I’m not meaning to criticise in the negative sense. The opposite. I’m celebrating the complexity of Foden’s style. I’m trying to analyse out some of the many different lexical tricks or quirks, along with the varying registers, tones and strategies going on in Foden’s prose style, which make it sometimes odd and unpredictable, always interesting and highly readable.

Imperial politics

Strangely, there’s relatively little politics in the book. Early on there’s a set-piece argument or friendly debate, between the journalists Nevinson and Steevens, about the point of the British Empire.

Nevinson, in his youth tempted by the teachings of the anarchist Kropotkin, puts the standard liberal view that the Boer War is unnecessary and has been fomented by jingos such as Lord Milner, Cecil Rhodes and Joseph Chamberlain purely out of greed, to annex the Boer republics so Britain can get its hands on their diamonds and gold.

‘Do you really believe in that stuff any more, after wat we’ve been through these last few days? Is Empire really worth it, George, after all?’ (p.83)

And his colleague, Steevens, puts the standard riposte that the war must be won because failure, or even weakness, will inspire the hundreds of millions of other subjects of the empire to rise up and end it. Nevinson:

For if Ladysmith fell, why not Natal, the Cape, indeed why not, as subject peoples everywhere saw that it was possible, the Empire itself? (p.48)

When Nevinson points out how shabby and squalid many of the doings of the supposedly ‘noble’ Empire are in reality, Steevens is given some pithy lines about how the Empire shouldn’t be judged by any of its practical applications, but as a platonic ideal of perfect community and administration:

‘I’m with Thucydides, I’m afraid. On the Athenian Empire. It may seem wickedness to have won it…but it is certainly folly to let it go….

‘It’s the vital ideal of Empire one must hang on to – however tawdry the reality, however full of outrageous postures and cheap tricks. We’ve got to keep aiming at something beyond the truth. I suppose, at base, it is all to do with spreading light.’ (p.84)

I enjoy bits like this not because I agree with them (at all) but because it’s a point of view you never hear nowadays, drowned by today’s blanket execration of everything to do with the British Empire.

Also, reading contemporary debates about the point of an empire from the 1880s, 1890s, 1900s and so on, sheds quite a bit of light on absolutely modern issues in international affairs. Michael Ignatieff’s series of books from the 1990s wonder whether there aren’t many countries which are too poor or chaotic to run themselves and where ‘the international community’ needs to step in and run them in order to save the populations from massacre – Bosnia, Yemen, Syria, Gaza.

Obviously he’s not talking about the same kind of exploitative conquest as characterised the European empires but, to many of the peoples watching the arrival of Western armies in, for example, Iraq or Afghanistan, the subtle moral differences made by liberal commentators are irrelevant: they were just the latest waves of Western invaders and they needed to be resisted.

Twentieth century politics

The short final section four has a powerful but, I think, questionable affect. In very short order (i.e. in a hurry) we are shuffled through extremely brief descriptions of:

  • the concentration camps set up in the later stages of the Boer War
  • the First World War
  • the disastrous Gallipoli campaign
  • the Easter Rising in Dublin
  • three or four brief snippets which ask us to consider the role of Winston Churchill in twentieth century British history and the defeat of Nazi Germany in particular
  • ending with Wellington talking about the Sharpeville Massacre, the ANC, Nelson Mandela and the struggle against apartheid

This is a lot of stuff to take in and process. In my opinion, too much. As in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ only more so, it feels as if the novelistic subject matter – the focus on people, their characters, and interactions and thoughts and feelings – is swamped by the powerful associations attached to the historical events Foden describes.

Just considering the role of Winston Churchill in twentieth century British history and the defeat of Nazi Germany, in particular, but also his increasingly outdated attempts to preserve the British Empire, is a vast, simply enormous subject. Its scale and complexity completely overwhelm the thousands of fine and beautifully imagined details Foden has filled his book with (the descriptions of the fruit in Mr Grimble’s orchard spring to mind, or the cricket match, or Torres’s escape from the church, Major Mott’s sealion moustache, and hundreds of others).

This final section feels like wave after wave of overwhelming, each one eclipsing the one that went before – concentration camps, Gallipoli, the Easter Rising, Indian independence, the Second World War – the scale of each of them is too enormous and also too historical, in the sense that it’s more interested in political issues than in people.

And the last wave, the last three pages containing Wellington’s thoughts, his references to the Sharpeville Massacre and then onto the figure of Nelson Mandela, now universally acknowledged to be a secular saint, completely erases everything that went before, burying much of the fine detail so carefully depicted in the previous 350 pages, to become the abiding image and memory of the book. It’s a shame.

I can see that Foden intended these snippets to demonstrate that history doesn’t end with one event but is a continuum and that people’s lives continue way after the significant events they’ve been part of. That’s seems to me a fine and fairly traditional strategy for a novel, thousands do the same thing, tying up loose ends of characters’ afterlives. It’s the fact that Foden associates every one of these loose ends with major political events which is the dubious decision, a decision which – to repeat myself – risks swamping the subtlety and detail of much of what came before.

Christian feminism 1899

Mrs Frinton, in normal times a figure of fun (to Bella, anyway) for being an uptight old widow lecturing everyone about Our Lord, in wartime becomes reliable and solid (if still given to lectures). At one point she tells Bella all this trouble is down to men, the same everywhere:

‘They [men] are just like us, really,’ [Bella] ventured. ‘Only most of the time we don’t realise it.’
‘That’s a very new-fangled view,’ said the widow. ‘It’s not one I hold with myself. You or I wouldn’t fight – not just brawling, I mean, we wouldn’t be fighting this war. This – it’s all men, just men. Believe you me, when we get to the Good Place, we will find many more women there than men.’ (p.229)

I know plenty of feminists who would wholeheartedly agree, 123 years later.

Credit

Ladysmith by Giles Foden was published in paperback by Faber Books in 1999. References are to this Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

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Damned to Fame by James Knowlson (1996) part 1

This is a brilliant literary biography, combining extraordinarily thorough research with discretion and sensitivity about Beckett’s private life, and a sure touch when it comes to analysing Beckett’s surprisingly numerous works. Everything a Beckett fan could ever want to know is covered, thoroughly and intelligently.

How James Knowlson came to write Samuel Beckett’s biography

James Knowlson (born in 1933) is Emeritus Professor of French and founder of the International Beckett Foundation at the University of Reading. He got to know Beckett after organising an academic conference to celebrate the fact that Beckett had won the Nobel Prize (1969) and founding the Beckett Archive at Reading, corresponding by letter and meeting him several times a year. As early as 1972 a publisher suggested he write a biography but when he broached the idea, Beckett said no.

But some 17 years later, the famous author changed his mind. He had realised that someone was going to write a biography come what may and that, on balance, he’d prefer it to be someone who knew and respected the actual works. He knew from their professional correspondence that Knowlson was very knowledgeable about his oeuvre and the result was that Beckett not only agreed to let Knowlson write the authorised biography, but agreed to give him a series of exclusive interviews and answer all the questions he posed.

Thus, over the last five months of his life, till Beckett’s death in December 1989, the two men had a series of long, in-depth interviews and Knowlson quotes from them liberally i.e. this book benefits hugely from Beckett’s own words and views about numerous aspects of his life and career. That is a masterstroke in the book’s favour.

But Knowlson went quite a lot further further and has spoken or corresponded with an extraordinary number of people, conducting over one hundred interviews with Beckett’s immediate family and close friends to a huge range of people he met in his professional life as a prose writer, playwright and director. The acknowledgements section lists them all and runs to six pages densely packed with names. The range is awesome and Kowlson’s stamina in meeting and corresponding with so many people, and then organising the resulting plethora of information into a coherent and fascinating narrative is awesome.

Samuel Beckett’s family and upbringing

Beckett’s family was comfortably upper-middle-class. His father, William, was a surveyor and made enough money to buy an acre of land in the rising suburb of Foxrock, south of Dublin, and build a big house on it which he named Cooldrinagh (after his wife’s family home), complete with servants’ quarters and tennis court.

The house was in sight of the Dublin hills which his father loved to go climbing and also of the sea, where the boy Beckett learned to swim and then dive into the locally famous pool named Forty-Foot at Sandycove. Not far away was the Leopardstown race track which features in various works, notably the radio play All That Fall.

Beckett’s parents were very different. His father, ‘Bill’ Beckett, was loud and sociable and not at all intellectual. He liked playing golf and going for long walks up into the Dublin hills. His mother, Amy, was tall and stern with a long face. Beckett inherited her looks and personality. The family was Protestant, the mother, in particular, being a devout church-goer.

Beckett had a brother, Frank, three years older, and a bevy of uncles and aunts who, with their own children, created a large, intelligent, well-off and cultured extended family. Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on 13 April 1906, in later life he enjoyed the symbolism of having been born on Good Friday.

As a boy Beckett was sent to a small, eccentric preparatory school, Earlsfort House then, from age 13, on to an established public school, Portora Royal School in Enniskillen (1919 to 1923) which, like most of its type, placed a big emphasis on sports and super-high standards of honesty, integrity and politeness. Everyone who ever met him later in life commented on Beckett’s immaculate manners and considerateness.

Beckett was very sporty

Beckett was a very sporty young man. At school he won medals for swimming and cross-country running, and was a very proficient boxer, becoming the school’s light heavyweight boxing champion. He was a keen golfer, joining his father’s club, Carrickmines Golf Club, playing for whole days at a stretch, and, when he went on to Trinity College, Dublin (TCD), representing the college at golf. He also played cricket for the college, and was included in the Dublin University team which went on a tour of English country clubs in 1926 and 1927. Hence the well-known fact that Beckett is the only Nobel Prize winner who is also in the cricketing ‘Bible’, Wisden.

Beckett’s extended family was very musical and Beckett played the piano very well, well enough to know piano renditions of most of Gilbert and Sullivan when a boy, and to be able to play Debussy at university. When he was down in the dumps as a young man a friend hired a piano for his rooms to cheer him up.

Beckett’s parents bought him a motorbike in his final year at school, and then a two-seater ‘Swift’ sports car at college. As a student he was affluent enough to be able to pick holiday destinations, so one year went on a tour of the Loire Valley visiting the birthplaces of notable French writers, and, in his final college vacation, went to visit Florence where he looked up the sister of his Italian tutor at TCD.

Private school, piano lessons in a music-loving family, membership of sports clubs, top university in Ireland, motorbike, sports car, cultural trips abroad. Beckett had what we would nowadays think of as a very privileged upbringing.

Influences at Trinity College, Dublin

Beckett attended Trinity College Dublin from 1923 to 1927 where he studied Modern Literature. Here he came under the wing of the Professor of Romance Languages, Thomas Browne Rudmore-Browne, a brash, aggressively freethinking, womanising intellectual who taught him the English classics and introduced Beckett to a wide range of French poets, classic and contemporary. ‘Ruddy’ as he was nicknamed, is caricatured as ‘the Polar Bear’ in Beckett’s early short story collection, More Pricks Than Kicks.

Beckett’s second formative influence was:

small, plump, middle-aged, Italian tutor named Bianca Esposito, who gave him detailed private lessons in Italian language and literature, who ignited his lifelong love for Dante and features in Pricks’ opening story, Dante and the Lobster.

Nearly 50 years later, Beckett still carried round the student copy of Dante Bianca gave him, packed with his notes and annotations.

Beckett was solitary and aloof

Despite all this physical prowess, and his height and his piercing blue eyes, Beckett was a shy boy, at prep and boarding school and at college. He often withdrew right into himself and, when forced to attend social occasions, did so without saying a word. Tall, clever and charismatic, young Beckett sometimes felt contempt for those less able than him, which he then felt guilty about, redirecting the loathing inwards at himself, creating a downward spiral of negative emotions.

In other words, despite all the privileges of his upbringing, his loving extended family, loads of material advantages, encouragement in sports and the best education money could buy, Beckett developed into a hyper-shy, extremely self-conscious young man, plagued by narcissism, solipsism and self-obsession. Here are just some of the phrases Knowlson uses about him at this period:

  • Beckett, the least gregarious of people (88)
  • Beckett was diffident and solitary (90)
  • Beckett’s cocoon of shyness and silence (90)
  • retiring and inhibited (92)
  • shy, retiring nature (95)
  • he would lapse into deep, uncomfortable silences (95)

The problem of pain

Like many a privileged young man, the discovery of the misery of the poor in his student years had a devastating effect on Beckett, and combined with intellectual doubts to undermine his Christian faith – something which went on to become a bone of contention with his pious mother.

A long time ago I was paid to do the research for a documentary series about the conflict between faith and atheism, a series which set out to define the arguments and counter-arguments across the full range of human history, culture, philosophy, psychology and so on. What emerged, at least in my opinion, was that beneath the thousand and one arguments of believers and atheists, both intellectual positions have One Big Fundamental Weak Spot:

The chief intellectual difficulty for thinking Christians is The Problem of Pain i.e. the very old conundrum that if God is all-powerful and all-loving why does he allow children to die in screaming agony? There is no answer to this, though thousands of theologians have come up with clever workarounds e.g. he is all-loving but is, for some reason, not quite all-powerful; or he is all-powerful but is not what we think of as all-loving because he is working to a plan which is beyond our understanding and presumptuous to try.

Thus Beckett was being very traditional, almost trite, in losing his faith once he came to appreciate the pain and misery in the world around him which his privileged upbringing had hitherto sheltered him from. In a way, most of his writing career went on to focus on this theologically-flavoured issue. (Actually, it might be more accurate to say that Beckett’s central subject is not the Problem of Pain so much as the Problem of Physical and Mental Decay).

The biggest weak point in the Atheist position – the mirror image of what the Problem of Pain is for Christians – is The Problem of Consciousness: If we humans are the result of millions of generations of evolution by natural selection, descended from the first amoeba, and if we are the result of the purely mechanistic and amoral struggle for survival, how come we have such complex and delightful feelings and sense impressions, can be transported by the sight of a sunset or the fragrance of a flower? How come we have such a highly developed moral sense that can lead us to spend days debating the rights and wrongs of various actions, feeling such an acute sense of guilt, wasting so much time in complicated rumination? Surely we should just do whatever benefits us or the tribe without a moment’s thought. None of those attributes seem particularly useful for a creature which has come about via the blunt and violent process of evolution.

Maybe we can see this as another of Beckett’s central themes, or the other wing of his interests: the problem of consciousness, which in his prose works in particular, but also in most of the plays, is deeply compromised, broken, fragmented, in some cases, apparently, posthumous (in Play, for example).

Paris

(pp.107+). Beckett graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1927 with a BA degree. Patrons and supporters at the college wangled him the position of lecteur d’anglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 1928 to 1930.

Paris came as a massive cultural and personal liberation. Throughout school and university Beckett had been strictly teetotal and sexually puritanical but in Paris he learned to drink, both beer and wine, becoming particularly partial to white wine. From now on there are numerous stories of Beckett getting completely trashed, passing out, being found under the table or passed out in alleyways, and so on.

Regarding sex, Knowlson gives detailed accounts of Beckett’s love affairs as a teenager and young man which were strongly shaped by his strict Protestant upbringing and the ferocious emphasis on ‘purity’ at his public school. As a result he was screwed up about sex in a predictably traditional way and Knowlson quotes from diaries, journals and early stories to show how he had the classic difficulty of reconciling the women he respected and placed on a pedestal with the ‘dirty’ shenanigans he got up to with hookers in Paris brothels, sex and love. (pp. 108, 139).

(Later, in the mid-1930s, when he was living a solitary existence in London during his two years of intensive psychotherapy at the Tavistock Clinic, Knowlson claims Beckett availed himself of London prostitutes on a regular basis.)

James Joyce

The post Beckett took up at the Ecole Normale Superieure had been occupied by another Irishman, Tom MacGreevey, who stayed on in the city he loved, and acted as guide and mentor to young Sam. MacGreevey had developed high-powered literary contacts and, among others, introduced him to James Joyce and his circle, his wife and grown-up son and daughter, his publishers and magazine editors and so on. It was a golden opportunity, an entrée into a whole new world.

Joyce was widely acknowledged to be the most important avant-garde writer in Europe. Beckett was a star-struck 23-year-old graduate. Sam quickly became one of the great man’s secretaries, tasked with finding Joyce books, reading them out loud or providing written summaries, as well as taking dictation and other chores. The master and the ephebe went for long walks along the Seine (Joyce’s flat was only 100 yards from the river).

Beckett was still so utterly shy that he hadn’t the small-talk to spend with Joyce’s wife, Nora, who, partly as a result, took against him. Whereas Joyce’s nubile and impulsive daughter Lucia, just a year younger than Beckett, became infatuated with the tall, aloof, blue-eyed sportsman, sitting near him at dinner, making eyes at him, inveigling him to take her for walks.

Countless articles have been written about the impact of Joyce on Beckett but the central, much-repeated point is that in the end, Joyce’s example helped set Beckett on a track diametrically opposite to the great man’s. Both men not only spoke the major European languages (English, French, Italian, German) and were deeply familiar with the respective canons of literature of each of these countries, but were impatient with the realist or Naturalist worldview they’d inherited from turn of the century literature – were committed to going beyond the realist worldview.

But whereas Joyce’s technique was accumulative, each sentence attracting to it multiple references and variations in other languages, breaking down English words and (by the 1930s) creating in their stead the entirely new polyglot language in which he wrote Finnegans Wake – Beckett found he could follow Joyce only so far. Indeed he did so in the short stories and novels of the 1930s, which are characterised by deliberately arcane syntax, literary references, the liberal sprinkling of obscure or foreign words, and an attitude which is deliberately contrived and non-naturalistic.

But Beckett lacked the musicality, the sensual feel for language, the world-embracing sympathy and the sheer joy of life which pours from Joyce’s pages. Beckett was by his nature much more tightly wrapped, intellectually costive, temperamentally depressive, repressed by his stern Protestant upbringing.

Compare and contrast the lovely swimming sensuality of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy which ends Ulysses with any description Beckett ever wrote anywhere of sensuality and sex. Molly is sweet and sensual and world-accepting; Beckett writes about sex a lot, but it is nearly always shameful masturbating (Malone Dies), callous sucking-off (Mercier and Camier), the disgusting rutting described in the four post-war short stories, the horrible homosexual abuse in How it is and so on. Sex in Beckett is never any fun at all.

Joyce is open to all the world, his books are overflowing with characters, incidents and brimming over with the joy of language. Beckett is locked away in one small, grey room, lying in the darkness, listening to the voices in his head punishing him with guilt and remorse, obsessively paring away language till it is reduced to blunt telegraphese, laced with one or two obsessively repeated key phrases.

Beckett’s women

One of the most boring things about biographies is the attention they are forced to pay to their subjects’ love lives. Here, as everywhere else, Knowlson does a very good, thorough job, providing all the facts without judgement or salacity.

Peggy Sinclair (1911 to 1933)

Beckett fell madly in love with his cousin, Ruth Margaret Sinclair, known as ‘Peggy’, daughter of William ‘Boss’ Sinclair who had married Sam’s aunt, Frances Beckett, generally known as ‘Cissie’. I’m not much interested in classic ups and downs of the actual ‘love affair’, the interesting thing was the way her parents moved from Dublin to Kassel in north Germany, and sent Peggy to school in Austria, so that his visits to see her accustomed Beckett to travelling all over the continent and speaking the local languages. He visited the Sinclair household in Kassel a number of times between 1928 and 1932.

Peggy was the inspiration behind the character of Smeraldina in Beckett’s first, unpublished novel, A Dream of Fair To Middling Women. Eventually the love affair burnt out, and when he visited the Sinclairs in the early 1930s, it was to be distressed by their mounting business problems and by Peggy’s deteriorating health. He was devastated when Peggy, by that stage engaged to another man, died of tuberculosis in May 1933 (page 168).

Lucia Joyce (1907 to 1982)

James Joyce’s daughter, unsmiling, squint-eyed Lucia Joyce, became infatuated with the tall, handsome Samuel and, to please his father, Sam obligingly took her for walks or out to dinner, but he was still in love with Peggy Sinclair and not in the market for affairs. Things came to a head when Lucia threw a fit, denouncing Beckett to her parents and claiming he had cruelly led her on. Egged on by Nora, Joyce cut his links with Beckett, refusing to see him again. Sam was distraught. It was only as the 1930s progress that it became increasingly obvious that Lucia was suffering from severe mental illness, and ended up being placed in a series of sanatoria. A couple of years later, the pair were quietly reconciled and when Beckett moved to Paris permanently in 1935, started to see a lot of each other again.

Ethna MacCarthy (1903 to 1954)

MacCarthy was arguably Beckett’s first mature love. She was a poet, short story writer and playwright who went on to carve a career as a paediatrician. Their love is very tenderly and respectfully traced.

These three women are singled out not least because Beckett’s first attempt at a full-length fiction was a novel about a young Irishman whose life is dominated by… three women! The novel eventually became titled A Dream of Fair To Middling Women (a typically learnèd reference to both Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem, The Legend of Good Women and Alfred Tennyson’s long poem A Dream of Fair Women).

The Dream which is structured around a central protagonist (named, with characteristic over-learnedness, Belacqua Shuah, Belacqua being the name of a minor character noted for his lazy self-absorption in Dante’s Divine Comedy) and his relations with the three women, being Smeraldina, Syra-Cusa and the Alba. Much scholarly ink has been spilt arguing about which ‘real life’ women ‘inspired’ each character. Knowlson takes them to be based on Peggy, Lucia and Ethna, respectively.

After a year or so of trying to get the Dream published in the mid-1930s, and having it continually rejected, Beckett gave up and slowly came to regret having satirised his close friends and family so closely. In the end he actively suppressed the novel and it wasn’t published until 1992, three years after his death.

Writing

When he was introduced to Joyce, he not only met his family, but the network of book publishers and magazine editors connected with him. As an obviously highly intelligent, highly literate young man, Beckett found himself presented with opportunities to publish books, stories and articles which most aspiring authors can only dream of.

In 1929 he wrote his first short story, the 3-and-a-half-page Assumption which was immediately published in the leading avant-garde magazine, transition. Then a 100-line poem, Whoroscope, knocked off in a few hours in order to win the £10 prize for a poetry competition sponsored by literary entrepreneur and anthologist Nancy Cunard and published in July 1930.

A senior editor at Chatto and Windus suggested to Beckett that he write a detailed study of Proust for a series of literary introductions they were publishing. This Beckett did, extensively researching by rereading Proust, and the study was published in March 1931. Once he had bedded in with the Joyce circle he was commissioned to write a translation of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake into French. In other words Beckett was, by 1930, very well-connected with the leading avant-garde writer in Europe, his circle and supporters and publishers.

But, despite all these advantages, Beckett failed to find a published for A Dream of Fair To Middling Women. It went the rounds of numerous publishers, both mainstream and avant-garde for two years before Beckett gave up trying, and the trickle of odd, eccentric short stories he was writing fared no better.

In 1932 the teaching post at Ecole Normale Superieure terminated, and Beckett was forced to pack his bags and return to Ireland where he was extremely lucky to be offered a prestigious teaching post at Trinity Dublin, a very sought-after position, supported by Ruddy and other patrons and supporters.

Unfortunately, Beckett hated it and discovered he was awful at teaching. Miserable, that winter he fled to ‘Boss’ and Cissie Sinclair in Kassel in northern Germany, from where he wrote a letter of resignation which dismayed his sponsors and upset his parents.

Breakdown and psychotherapy

Having chucked in his prestigious job at Trinity, completely failed to get any of his writings published, and been forced to move back in with his parents in 1933, Beckett was deeply traumatised when his father, apparently still in the prime of life in his 60s, died of a massive heart attack, on 26 June 1933.

His father’s death exposed Beckett more than ever to the cloying, critical over-attention of his mother and Beckett suffered a series of increasingly serious physical symptoms, starting with a cyst on his neck, moving to heart palpitations, night sweats and panic attacks, which on several occasions brought him to a complete dead stop, in the street, paralysed with terror, and unable to move a muscle.

Beckett consulted a good friend of his from school, a nerve specialist, Geoffrey Thompson, who was planning to move to London and recommended Beckett to come with him and try psychotherapy at the relatively new Tavistock Clinic. So in January 1934 Beckett himself moved to digs in London and began his treatment with the pioneering psychotherapist Wilfred Bion. Bion was, Knowlson informs us, himself quite a strapping, hearty, sporty chap, while also being formidably well-educated at private school. So he and Beckett bonded on a social and personal level, quite apart from the treatment.

According to Knowlson, Beckett had psychotherapy with Bion for two years, at the rate of three times a week, which equals well over 2,000 sessions, during which Beckett explored his childhood, his formative influences, and came to realise the role his love-hate relationship with his mother played in cramping his life. He came to realise that, for his entire life to date, he had created an ivory tower founded on what he felt was his physical and intellectual superiority to all around him, becoming known for his aloofness and/or shyness, what Knowlson calls an:

attitude of superiority and an isolation from others that resulted from a morbid, obsessive immersion in self (page 180)

Beckett had to learn:

to counter his self-immersion by coming out of himself more in his daily life and taking a livelier interest in others (page 181)

But more than this, Knowlson claims that Bion showed him that he could mine many of these deeply personal compulsions and tendencies to create texts.

By externalising some of the impulses of the psyche in his work – the feelings of frustration and repressed violence for example – he would find it easier to counter the self-absorption that had seemed morbid and destructive in his private life. The writing thus became essential to his later mental and physical wellbeing.
(page 181)

Over 2,000 times Beckett lay on his back in a darkened room, closing his eyes, focusing on the moment, in order to let deeply buried memories bubble up from his unconscious, struggling to express them, struggling to understand their significance – while all the while another part of his mind observed the process with analytical detachment, critiquing the shape and pose of the figures in the memories, considering the words they spoke, assessing how the scene could be improved, the dialogue sharpened up, the dramatic core reached more quickly and effectively.

This is more or less the plot of Beckett’s late novella Company and clearly the basis of the so-called ‘closed room’ and skullscape’ fictions of the 1960s. You can also see how it forms the basis of the breakthrough novels Beckett wrote immediately after the war in French, Malone Dies and The Unnameable, texts of overweening, unprecedented self-absorption and self scrutiny. As late as his last published prose piece, Stirrings Still, Beckett is obsessed with a figure who regards himself as an ‘other’, sees himself rise and leave the room, although is other ‘self’ remains seated.

Reading Knowlson’s fascinating account of Beckett’s psychotherapy makes you realise the ‘essential’ Beckett was there all the time, lying dormant. First, though:

  1. he had to spend a decade, the 1930s, getting out of his system the immature wish to clutter his texts with smartarse quotes, foreign phrases, and mock-scholarly humour in the tradition of Rabelais and Sterne and Joyce, and then
  2. his experiences during the Second World War had to sear away any residues of Romantic optimism and even the last vestiges of late Victorian naturalism

for him to emerge in the immediate post-war period as the stripped-down, minimalist, and bleakly nihilistic writer who would go on to become one of the pillars of post-war literature.

Credit

Damned To Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by James Knowlson was published by Bloomsbury Publishing in 1996. All references are to the 1997 paperback edition.

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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Posted by Simon on February 24, 2021

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Family Britain: The Certainties of Place by David Kynaston (2009)

Two more massive ‘books’ contained in one hefty 700-page paperback describing Britain after the war, the first one – The Certainties of Place, under review here – covering the period 1951-5 in immense detail. The main historical events are:

  • The Festival of Britain (May – August 1951)
  • October 1951 the Conservatives just about win the general election, despite polling quarter of a million fewer votes than Labour
  • Death of George VI (6 February 1952) and accession of young Queen Elizabeth II
  • 3 October 1952 Britain explodes its first atom bomb (in Western Australia)
  • The Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash on the morning of 8 October 1952 – 112 were killed and 340 injured – the worst peacetime rail crash in the United Kingdom
  • The North Sea flood on the night of Saturday 31 January / Sunday, 1 February
  • Rationing: tea came off the ration in October 1952 and sweets in February 1953, but sugar, butter, cooking fats, cheese, meat and eggs continued on the ration
  • 2 June 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
  • 27 July 1953 end of Korean War
  • 12 August 1953 Russia detonates its first hydrogen bomb

The book ends in January 1954, with a literary coincidence. On Monday 25 Lucky Jim, the comic novel which began the career of Kingsley Amis was published and that evening saw the BBC broadcast the brilliant play for voices Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas who had in fact died two months earlier, on 9 November 1953.

Tumult of events and impressions

But reading Kynaston’s books is not to proceed logically through the key events of the period accompanied by political and economic and diplomatic analysis: it is to be plunged into the unceasing turbulent flow of day-to-day events, mixing the trivial with the serious, it’s to see the world from the point of view of a contemporary tabloid newspaper – the Mirror and the Express competing for the title of Britain’s best-selling newspaper – with the big political issues jostling for space with the winner of the Grand National and gossip about the stars of stage and radio – and above all, to read quotes from a thousand and one contemporary voices.

Without any preface or introduction, the text throws you straight into the hurly-burly of events, festooned with comments by an enormous casts of diarists, speech-makers, article-writers, commentators, eye-witnesses and so on.

Thus at the top of page one it is Saturday 28 April 1951 and King George VI is presenting the F.A. Cup to the winners, Newcastle. Three days later, on Tuesday 1 May 1951 he is at Earls Court for the British Industries Fair. On Thursday 3 he is on the South Bank to open the new Royal Festival Hall and inaugurate the five-month-long Festival of Britain – ‘a patriotic prank’, according to the song Noel Coward wrote about it, ‘madly educative and very tiring’, according to Kenneth Williams (25).

What makes Kynastons’s books hugely enjoyable is the vast cavalcade of people, from kings to coal miners, via a jungle of ordinary housewives, newspaper columnists, industrialists, famous or yet-to-be-famous writers, actors, civil servants and politicians.

a) They are fascinating on their own account b) Kynaston deploys them not just to discuss the big issues of the day but quotes them on day to day trivia, the appearance of London, the menu at posh clubs, the ups and downs of rationing, the tribulations of shopping in the High Street. The breadth of witnesses, and the range of activities they describe, helps to make the reader feel that you really have experienced living in this era.

Labour exhausted, Conservatives win

Overall, the big impression which comes across is the way the Labour Party had run out of ideas by 1951, and how this contributed to their defeat in the October 1951 general election. (It is fascinating to learn that they only held an election that October because the king told Attlee he was going on a prolonged tour of the Commonwealth in 1952 and would prefer there to be an election while he was still in the country. Attlee duly obliged, and Labour lost. Thus are the fates of nations decided). (There is, by the by, absolutely nothing whatsoever about the Commonwealth or the British Empire: this is a book solely about the home front and domestic experiences of Britain.)

Labour were reduced to opposition in which they seem to waste a lot of energy squabbling between the ‘Bevanites’ on the left of the party, and the larger mainstream represented by Hugh Gaitskell. The bitter feud stemmed from the decision by Gaitskell, when Chancellor, to introduce charges for ‘teeth and spectacles’ in order to pay for Britain’s contribution to the Korean War (started June 1950).

The quiet Labour leader, Clement Attlee, now in his 70s, was mainly motivated to stay on by his determination to prevent Herbert Morrison becoming leader.

The most important political fact of the period was that the Conservatives accepted almost every element of the welfare state and even of the nationalised industries which they inherited from Labour.

Experts are quoted from the 1980s saying that this was a great lost opportunity for capitalism i.e. the Conservatives failed to privatise coal or steel or railways, and failed to adjust the tax system so as to reintroduce incentives and make British industry more competitive. To these critics, the 1950s Conservatives acquiesced in the stagnation which led to Britain’s long decline.

Rebuilding and new towns

What the Conservatives did do was live up to their manifesto promise of building 300,000 new houses a year, even if the houses were significantly reduced in size from Labour’s specifications (much to the growling disapproval of Nye Bevan), and to push ahead with the scheme for building twelve New Towns.

I grew up on the edge of one of these New Towns, Bracknell, which I and all my friends considered a soulless dump, so I was fascinated to read Kynaston’s extended passages about the massive housing crisis of post-war Britain and the endless squabbles of experts and architects who claimed to be able to solve it.

To some extent reading this book has changed my attitude as a result of reading the scores and scores of personal accounts Kynaston quotes of the people who moved out of one-room, condemned slums in places like Stepney and Poplar and were transported to two bedroom houses with things they’d never see before – like a bathroom, their own sink, an indoor toilet!

It’s true that almost immediately there were complaints that the new towns or estates lacked facilities, no pubs, not enough shops, were too far from town centres with not enough public transport, and so on. But it is a real education to see how these concerns were secondary to the genuine happiness brought to hundreds of thousands of families who finally escaped from hard-core slum conditions and, after years and years and years of living in squalor, to suddenly be living in clean, dry, properly plumbed palaces of their own.

At the higher level of town planners, architects and what Kynaston calls ‘activators’, he chronicles the ongoing fights between a) exponents of moving urban populations out to new towns versus rehousing them in new inner city accomodation b) the core architectural fight between hard-line modernist architects, lackeys of Le Corbusier’s modernism, and various forms of watered-down softer, more human modernism.

It is a highly diffused argument because different architects deployed different styles and solutions to a wide range of new buildings on sites all over the UK, from Plymouth to Glasgow: but it is one of the central and most fascinating themes of the Kynaston books, and inspires you to want to go and visit these sites.

Education

The other main issue the Conservatives (and all right-thinking social commentators and progressives) were tackling after the war was Education. The theme recurs again and again as Kynaston picks up manifesto pledges, speeches, or the publication of key policy documents to bring out the arguments of the day. Basically we watch two key things happen:

  1. despite the bleeding obvious fact that the public schools were (and are) the central engine of class division, privilege and inequality in British society, no political party came up with any serious proposals to abolish them or even tamper with their status (a pathetic ineffectiveness which, of course, lasts to the present day)
  2. instead the argument was all about the structure of the state education system and, in Kynaston’s three books so far, we watch the Labour party, and the teachers’ unions, move from broad support for grammar schools in 1944, to becoming evermore fervently against the 11-plus by the early 1950s

Kynaston uses his sociological approach to quote the impact of passing – or failing – the 11-plus exam (the one which decides whether you will go to a grammar school or a secondary modern school) on a wide variety of children from the time, from John Prescott to Glenda Jackson.

Passing obviously helped propel lots of boys and girls from ‘ordinary’ working class backgrounds on to successful careers. But Kynaston also quotes liberally from the experiences of those who failed, were crushed with humiliation and, in some cases, never forgave society.

The following list serves two purposes:

  1. To give a sense of the huge number of people the reader encounters and hears quoted in Kynaston’s collage-style of social history
  2. To really bring out how the commanding heights of politics, the economy, the arts and so on were overwhelmingly ruled by people who went to public school, with a smattering of people succeeding thanks to their grammar school opportunity, and then a rump of people who became successful in their fields despite attending neither public nor grammar schools and, often, being forced to leave school at 16, 15, 14 or 13 years of age.

Public school

Politicians

  • Clement Attlee (Haileybury and Oxford)
  • Anthony Wedgwood Benn (Westminster and New College, Oxford)
  • Anthony Blunt (Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Guy Burgess (Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Richard Austen Butler (Marlborough and Cambridge)
  • Winston Churchill (Harrow then Royal Military College, Sandhurst)
  • Kim Cobbold (Governor of the Bank of England 49-61, Eton and King’s College, Cambridge)
  • Stafford Cripps (Winchester College and University College London)
  • Anthony Crosland (Highbury and Oxford)
  • Richard Crossman (Winchester and Oxford)
  • Hugh Dalton (Eton and Cambridge)
  • Sir Anthony Eden (Eton and Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Michael Foot (Leighton Park School Reading and Wadham College, Oxford)
  • Sir David Maxwell Fyfe ( George Watson’s College and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford)
  • Gerald Kaufman (Leeds Grammar School [private] and Queen’s College, Oxford)
  • Harold Macmillan (Eton)
  • Harold Nicholson (Wellington and Oxford)
  • Sir John Nott-Bower (Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Tonbridge School then the Indian Police Service)
  • Kim Philby (Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Enoch Powell (King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • John Profumo (Harrow and Oxford)
  • Shirley Williams (St Paul’s Girls’ School and Somerville College, Oxford)

The arts etc

  • Lindsay Anderson (film director, Saint Ronan’s School and Cheltenham College then Wadham College, Oxford)
  • Diana Athill (memoirist, Runton Hill School and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)
  • John Betjeman (poet, Marlborough and Oxford)
  • Cecil Beaton (photographer, Harrow and Cambridge)
  • John Berger (art critic, St Edward’s School, Oxford and Chelsea School of Art)
  • Michael Billington (theatre critic, Warwick School and Oxford)
  • Raymond Chandler (novelist, Dulwich College, then journalism)
  • Bruce Chatwin (travel writer, Marlborough)
  • Dr Alex Comfort (popular science author, Highgate School, Trinity College, Cambridge)
  • Richard Davenport-Hynes (historian, St Paul’s and Selwyn College, Cambridge)
  • Robin Day (BBC interviewer, Bembridge and Oxford)
  • Richard Dimbleby (Mill Hill School then the Richmond and Twickenham Times)
  • Richard Eyre (theatre director, Sherborne School and Peterhouse Cambridge)
  • Ian Fleming (novelist, Eton and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst)
  • John Fowles (novelist, Bedford School and Oxford)
  • Michael Frayn (novelist, Kingston Grammar School and Cambridge)
  • Alan Garner (novelist, Manchester Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford)
  • Graham Greene (novelist, Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Joyce Grenfell (Francis Holland School and Mlle Ozanne’s finishing school in Paris)
  • Alec Guinness (actor, Fettes College)
  • Frank Richards (writer for popular comics, Thorn House School in Ealing then freelance writing)
  • Christopher Hill (Marxist historian, St Peter’s School, York and Balliol College, University of Oxford)
  • David Hockney (artist, Bradford Grammar School [private], Bradford College of Art, Royal College of Art)
  • Ludovic Kennedy (BBC, Eton then Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Gavin Lambert (film critic, Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford)
  • Humphrey Lyttelton (Eton, Grenadier Guards, Camberwell Art College)
  • David Kynaston (historian, Wellington College and New College, Oxford)
  • Kingsley Martin (editor of New Statesman, Mill Hill School and Magdalene College, Cambridge)
  • Frances Partridge (Bloomsbury writer, Bedales School and Newnham College, Cambridge)
  • Raymond Postgate (founder of Good Food Guide, St John’s College, Oxford)
  • V.S. Pritchett (novelist, Alleyn’s School, and Dulwich College)
  • Barbara Pym (novelist, Queen’s Park School Oswestry and Oxford)
  • William Rees-Mogg (editor of The Times 1967-81, Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Richard Rogers (architect, St Johns School, Leatherhead then the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London)
  • Anthony Sampson (social analyst, Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Raphael Samuel (Marxist historian, Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Maggie Smith (actress, Oxford High School, then the Oxford Playhouse)
  • David Storey (novelist, Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield then Slade School of Fine Art)
  • AJP Taylor (left wing historian, Bootham School in York then Oriel College, Oxford)
  • E.P. Thompson (Marxist historian, Kingswood School Bath and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
  • Alan Turing (computer pioneer, Sherborne and King’s College, Cambridge)
  • Kenneth Tynan (theatre critic, King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Magdalen College, Oxford)
  • Chad Varah (founder of Samaritans, Worksop College [private] Nottinghamshire then Keble College, Oxford)
  • Angus Wilson (novelist, Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford)
  • Colin St John Wilson (architect of the British Library, Felsted School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
  • Laurence Olivier (actor, prep school and choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street)

Grammar school

Politicians

  • Barbara Castle (Bradford Girls’ Grammar School and and St Hugh’s College, Oxford)
  • Roy Jenkins (Abersychan County Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford)
  • Margaret Thatcher (Grantham Girls’ School and Oxford)
  • Harold Wilson (Royds Hall Grammar School and Oxford)

The arts etc

  • Paul Bailey (novelist, Sir Walter St John’s Grammar School For Boys, Battersea and the Central School of Speech and Drama)
  • Joan Bakewell (BBC, Stockport High School for Girls and Cambridge)
  • Stan Barstow (novelist, Ossett Grammar School then an engineering firm)
  • Alan Bennett (playwright, Leeds Modern School and Exeter College, Oxford)
  • Michael Caine (actor, Wilson’s Grammar School in Camberwell, left at 16 to become a runner for a film company)
  • David Cannadine (historian, King Edward VI Five Ways School and Clare College, Cambridge)
  • Noel Coward (dance academy)
  • Terence Davies (film director, left school at 16 to work as a shipping office clerk)
  • A.L. Halsey (sociologist, Kettering Grammar School then London School of Economics)
  • Sheila Hancock (actress, Dartford County Grammar School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art)
  • Tony Harrison (poet, Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University)
  • Noddy Holder (musician, Walsall Grammar school until it closed, then T. P. Riley Comprehensive School)
  • Ted Hughes (poet, Mexborough Grammar School and Pembroke College, Cambridge)
  • Lynda Lee-Potter (columnist, Leigh Girls’ Grammar School and Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
  • Roy Porter (historian, Wilson’s Grammar School, Camberwell then Christ’s College, Cambridge)
  • Terence Stamp (actor, Plaistow County Grammar School then advertising)
  • John Sutherland (English professor, University of Leicester)
  • Dylan Thomas (poet, Swansea Grammar School)
  • Dame Sybil Thorndike (actress, Rochester Grammar School for Girls then the Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
  • Philip Toynbee (communist writer, Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford)
  • Colin Welland (actor, Newton-le-Willows Grammar School then Goldsmiths College)
  • Kenneth Williams (actor, Lyulph Stanley Boys’ Central Council School)
  • Raymond Williams (Marxist social critic, King Henry VIII Grammar School, Abergavenny and Trinity College, Cambridge)

Secondary modern / left school early

  • Alice Bacon (Labour MP in favour of comprehensive schools, Normanton Girls’ High School and Stockwell Teachers’ Training College)
  • Raymond Baxter (BBC presenter, Ilford County High School, expelled after being caught smoking)
  • Aneurin Bevan (major figure in the Labour Party, left school at 13)
  • Jim Callaghan (Labour Prime Minister 1976-79, Portsmouth Northern Secondary School, left school at 17)
  • Ossie Clarke (fashion designer, Beamont Secondary Technical School then Regional College of Art in Manchester)
  • Hugh Cudlipp (Howard Gardens High School for boys, left at 14)
  • Ian Jack (Dunfermline High School, left to become a journalist)
  • Clive Jenkins (left school at 14, Port Talbot County Boys’ School)
  • Stanley Matthews (cricketer, left school at 14 to play football)
  • Herbert Morrison (St Andrew’s Church of England School, left at 14 to become an errand boy)
  • Joe Orton (playwright, Clark’s College in Leicester)
  • John Osborne (playwright, Belmont College, expelled aged 16)
  • John Prescott (failed 11 plus, Grange Secondary Modern School and Hull University)
  • Alan Sillitoe (novelist, left school at 14)

Sociology

There are definitely more sociologists quoted in this book than in the previous two, especially in the very long central section devoted to class, which seems to have been the central obsession of sociologists in that era. Kynaston quotes what seems to be hundreds but is probably only scores of sociologists who produced a flood of reports throughout the 1940s and 50s, as they went off to live with miners or dockers or housewives, produced in-depth studies of the social attitudes of East End slums, the industrial north, towns in Wales or Scotland, and so on and so on.

The central social fact of the era was that about 70% of the British population belonged to the manual working class. And therefore, for me, the obvious political question was and is: why did this country, which was 70% ‘working class’, vote for Conservative governments from 1951 to 1964? What did Labour do wrong, in order to lose the votes of what should – on paper – have been its natural constituency?

This central question is nowhere asked or answered. Instead I found myself being frequently distracted by the extreme obviousness of some of the sociologists’ conclusions. Lengthy fieldwork and detailed statistical analysis result in conclusions like such as the working class are marked off from the ‘middle class’ by:

  • lower income
  • by taking wages rather than a salary
  • their jobs are often precarious
  • they are more likely to belong to trade unions
  • have distinctive accents
  • wear distinctive types of clothes (e.g. the cloth cap)
  • have poorer education
  • have distinct manners and linguistic usages (for example calling the mid-day meal dinner instead of lunch)

Other revelations include that the children of working class parents did less well at school than children of middle-class parents, and were less likely to pass the 11-plus, that rugby league is a northern working class sport compared with the middle-class sport of rugby union, that cricket was mostly a middle and upper middle class interest while football was followed obsessively by the proles, that the proles read the News of the World and the People rather than the Times and Telegraph.

As to the great British institution of the pub, in the words of the Truman’s website:

Saloon bars were sit-down affairs for the middle class, carpets on the floor, cushions on the seats and slightly more expensive drinks. You were served at the table and expected to dress smart for the occasion. You would also pay a premium on the drinks for this and usually there would be some entertainment be it singing, dancing, drama or comedy. You would generally be served bitter and in half pints.

Public bars, or tap rooms, remained for the working class. Bare wooden floorboards with sawdust on the floor, hard bench seats and cheap beer were on offer. You didn’t have to change out of your work wear so this was generally were the working class would go for after work and drink in pints, generally of mild.

Altogether this central section about class in all its forms takes some 150 pages of this 350-page book – it is a seriously extended analysis or overview of class in early 1950s Britain drawing on a multitude of studies and surveys (it’s almost alarming to see how very, very many studies were carried out by academic sociologists during this period, alongside the regular Mass-Observation surveys, plus ad hoc commercial surveys by Gallup and a number of less well-known pollsters).

And yet almost nothing from this vast body of work comes as a surprise: Most kids in grammar schools were upper-middle or middle class i.e. it’s a myth to say grammar schools help the working and lower working classes. IQ tests can be fixed by intensive coaching. The working classes liked football. The most popular hobbies (by a long way) were gardening for men, and knitting for women. Pubs were a place of comforting familiarity, where you would find familiar friends and familiar drinks and familiar conversations in familiar surroundings.

Compared to all the effort put into these studies, there is remarkably little that comes out of them.

Some of the sociologists mentioned or discussed in the text

  • Kenneth Allsop reported on Ebbw Vale
  • Michael Banton, author of numerous studies of race and ethnic relations
  • LSE sociologist Norman Birnbaum, criticising positive interpretations of the Coronation
  • Betting in Britain 1951 report by The Social Survey
  • Maurice Broady, sociologist who studied Coronation Day street parties (p.305)
  • Joanna Bourke, socialist feminist historian
  • Katherine Box, author of a 1946 study of cinema-going
  • British Institute of Public Opinion survey
  • Professor of cultural history, Robert Colls, author of When We Lived In Communities
  • Coal is our Life sociologial study of Featherstone in Yorkshire by Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Cliff Slaughter
  • Mark Clapson, historian of suburbia and Milton Keynes
  • David Glass author of Social Mobility in Britain (1954)
  • Geoffrey Gorer 1950-51 People survey of what class people saw themselves as belonging to
  • historian Richard Holt writing about football
  • 1949 Hulton Survey on smoking
  • Roy Lewis and Angus Maude authors of The English Middle Classes (1949)
  • F.M. Martin’s 1952 survey of parental attitudes to education in Hertfordshire
  • Mass-Observation 1949 survey, The Press and Its Readers
  • Mass-Observation survey 1947-8 on drinking habits
  • Mass-Observation survey 1951 on drunkenness in Cardiff, Nottingham, Leicester and Salford
  • Peter Townsend, social researcher (p.118)
  • Margaret Stacy studied Banbury (p.136)
  • T.H. Pear author of English Social Differences (1955)
  • Hilde Himmelweit study of four grammar schools in London
  • Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy (1957) which reminisces about working class Hunslet
  • sociologist Madeline Kerr’s five-year study The People of Ship Street in Liverpool (1958)
  • Tony Mason, football historian
  • Leo Kuper vox pops from Houghton in Coventry
  • John Barron Mays’ study of inner-city Liverpool in the early 1950s
  • Ross McKibbin author of Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1955
  • Gavin Mellor research into football crowds in the north-west 1946-62
  • Peter Miskell’s study of the cimema in Wales
  • John Mogey, author of a study of the Jolly Waterman pub in St Ebbe’s, a suburb of Oxford
  • Alison Ravetz, author if a study of the model Quarry Hill estate in Leeds
  • Doris Rich authored a study of working men’s clubs in Coseley
  • James Robb, author of a study of Bethnal Green in the late 1940s
  • Elizabeth Robert conducted extensive interviews in north-west England into education (p.161)
  • Robert Roberts, author of The Classic Slum (1971) about Salford either side of the war
  • Rowntree and Lavers, author of the study English Life and Leisure
  • Alice Russell, historian of occupational welfare
  • sociologist Mike Savage (pp.148, 159)
  • American sociologist Edward Shils
  • Brian Simon, communist teacher then at Leicester University
  • Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside interviewed 200 servicemen just as the war ended about education
  • 1953 report on Southamptons’s housing estates
  • Peter Stead, author of a study of Barry in south Wales
  • Avram Taylor, historian of working class credit
  • Philip Vernon, professor of Educational Psychology at London University’s Institute of Education
  • John Walton, historian of Blackpool landladies
  • Michael Young, author of Is This the Classless Society (1951) among many others
  • Ferdynand Zweig, wide-ranging sociological investigator of the post war years

As far as I could see all of these studies were focused on the working class, their hobbies, activities, beliefs and attitudes – as well as an extended consideration of what ‘community’ meant to them. This latter was meant to help the town planners who agonised so much about trying to create new ‘communities’ in the new estates and the new towns, and so on – but two things are glaringly absent from the list of topics.

One is sex. Not one of the researchers mentioned above appears to have made any enquiries into the sex lives of their subjects. Given our modern (2019) obsession with sex and bodies, it is a startling omission which, in itself, speaks volumes about the constrained, conservative and essentially private character of the time.

(There are several mentions of homosexuality, brought into the public domain by several high-profile prosecutions of gays for soliciting in public toilets, which prompted a) righteous indignation from the right-wing press but b) soul searching among liberal politicians and some of the regular diarists Kynaston features, along the lines of: why should people be prosecuted by the law for the way God made them?)

Secondly, why just the working class? OK, so they made up some 70% of the population, but why are there no studies about the behaviour and belief systems of, say, architects and town planners? Kynaston quotes critics pointing out what a small, inbred world of self-congratulatory back-scratchers this was – but there appears to be no study of their educational backgrounds, beliefs, cultural practices – or of any other middle-class milieu.

And this goes even more for the upper classes. What about all those cabinet ministers who went to Eton and Harrow and Westminster? Did no one do a sociological study of private schools, or of the Westminster village or of the posh London clubs? Apparently not. Why not?

And this tells you something, maybe, about sociology as a discipline: that it consists of generally left-wing, middle-class intellectuals and academics making forays into working class territory, expeditions into working class lives as if the working class were remote tribes in deepest New Guinea. The rhetoric of adventure and exploration which accompanies some of the studies is quite comic, if you read it in this way. As is the way they then report back their findings in prestigious journals and articles and books and win prizes for their bravery as if they’ve just come back from climbing Everest, instead of spending a couple of weeks in Middlesborough chatting to miners.

It’s only right at the end of the 150 or so pages of non-stop sociological analysis of ‘the working classes’ that you finally get some sociologists conceding that they are not the solid communities of socialist heroes of the revolution that so many of these left wingers wanted them to be: that in fact, many ‘working class’ communities were riven by jealousies, petty feuds and a crushing sense of snobbery. Umpteen housewives are quoted as saying that so-and-so thought she was ‘too good’ for the rest of us, was hoity-toity, told her children not to play with our kids etc. other mums told researchers they instructed their children not to play with the rough types from down the road.

People turned out to be acutely aware of even slight differences of behaviour or speech and drew divisive conclusions accordingly. The myth of one homogenous ‘working class’ with common interest turns out to be just that, a myth. THis goes some way to answering my question about why 70% of the population did not all vote for the workers’ party, far from it.

Above all, what comes over very strongly in the voices of ordinary people, is the wish to be left alone, to live and let live, and for privacy – to be allowed to live in what Geoffrey Gorer summed up as ‘distant cordiality’ with their neighbours.

‘You don’t get any privacy in flats,’ declared Mrs Essex from number 7 Battersea Church Road  (p.339).

Contrary to the ‘urbanists’, like Michael Young, who wanted to help working class communities remain in their city centres, large numbers of the ‘working classes’ were about to find themselves forced (by the ‘dispersionists’, the generation of high-minded, left-wing planners and architects who Kynaston quotes so extensively and devastatingly, p.340) to move into windy new estates miles from anywhere with no shops or even schools. Those that did remain near their old communities found themselves forced into high-rise blocks of flats with paper-thin walls and ‘shared facilities’ next to new ‘community centres’ which nobody wanted and nobody used and were quickly vandalised. It is a bleak picture.

Love/hate

Lindsay Anderson (b.1923) was ‘a British feature film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading light of the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave’ (Wikipedia).

But in Kynaston’s opinion, Anderson’s 10-minute film O Dreamland, shot in the Margate amusement park of the same name, ‘marked the start of a new, increasingly high-profile phase in the long, difficult, love-hate relationship of the left-leaning cultural elite with the poor old working class, just going about its business and thinking its own private, inscrutable thoughts (p.220).

Here it is, disapproval and condescension dripping from every frame.

Lady authors

For some reason women authors seem more prominent in the era than male authors. It was easy to compile a list of names which recurred and whose works I really ought to make an effort to familiarise myself with.

  • Jean Rhys b.1890 (private school and RADA)
  • Sylvia Townsend Warner b.1893 (home schooled by her father, a house-master at Harrow School)
  • Elizabeth Bowen b.1899 (private school and art school)
  • Catherine Cookson b.1906 (left school at 14 to take a job as a laundress at a workhouse)
  • Barbara Pym b.1913 (private school and Oxford)
  • Doris Lessing b.1919 (private school till she left home at 15)
  • Lorna Sage b.1943 (grammar school and Durham)
  • Sue Townshend b.1946 (secondary modern South Wigston High School, left school at 14)

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Posted by Simon on January 29, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/01/29/family-britain-certainties-of-place-david-kynaston/

The Amateur Cracksman by E.W. Hornung (1899)

He was beyond comparison the most masterful man whom I have ever known.
(Bunny on Raffles)

Ernest William Hornung wrote a series of twenty-six short stories and one novel about the adventures of by far his most successful fictional character, Arthur J. Raffles, cricketer and gentleman thief. The stories are told in the first person by his assistant and chronicler, Harry ‘Bunny’ Manders. The series was published between 1898 and 1909.

The first story, The Ides of March, appeared in the June 1898 edition of Cassell’s Magazine and the first eight adventures were collected in The Amateur Cracksman (1899), with further stories in the successive volumes The Black Mask (1901) and A Thief in the Night (1904), followed by the full-length novel, Mr. Justice Raffles in 1909.

Hornung dedicated The Amateur Cracksman to his brother-in-law, Arthur Conan Doyle, and openly declared that Raffles was a deliberate inversion of the Sherlock Holmes formula, with a faithful amanuensis recording the daring exploits of a clever, bold, resourceful, upper-class English criminal rather than detective. Raffles, as Hornung’s dedication to this volume makes clear, was intended as a ‘form of flattery’.

The eight stories in this first collection are:

1. The Ides of March

Harry ‘Bunny’ Manders is invited to a game of baccarat at Raffles’s rooms in the Albany, a posh apartment block in a little square just off Piccadilly. (Bunny himself lives in rooms in Mount Street.) Bunny was Raffles’s fag at public school. He loses badly at the card game and ends up having to write cheques for £200 to all the other players. When they’ve all left, Bunny tearfully confesses to Raffles that he hasn’t got the money, in fact he hasn’t got any money.

Suavely and confidently, Raffles confides in the young chap that – neither has he! Despite living in a swanky apartment and doing nothing except play a spot of cricket in the summer, he is in fact penniless. The interest in this first story is how Raffles converts Bunny to a life of crime. First he gets him to admit that he needs to do something for money, even something desperate. Then he reminds Bunny of how they used to break the rules at school and asks how he’d feel about ‘breaking the rules’ now. Step by subtle step, Raffles generally leads Bunny on to the brink of admitting that, yes, he would even steal to get the money.

‘Do you remember how we used to break into the studies at school? Here goes!’

At which point, after pausing and considering a bit, Raffles asks him to come along to borrow some money from a friend who lives round the corner. ‘At this hour?’ Bunny asks. ‘Chop, chop old chap’, says the suave head of the cricket eleven, and leads Bunny out into the foggy muddy pavements of Piccadilly.

Raffles takes Bunny to Bond Street and then unlocks the door which gives on to stairs leading up to a flat above a high-class jewellers. ‘So where’s this friend?’ Bunny asks, as a sinking feeling comes over him. Slowly he realises that the flat is empty, abandoned, vacant. The realisation dawns that… Raffles has come to burgle the jewellers.

Over the next few hours Bunny watches Raffles at work, and very impressive it is, too. Raffles has previously reconnoitred the place, and realised that the vacant apartment shared a backyard with the jewellers. So he had approached the estate agent expressing interest in buying the flat and was given a key.

This is how he comes to be able to let himself and Bunny in, taking Bunny through the flat and then down into the basement area between the two properties. Here Raffles crosses the line by breaking open the window into the jewellers. Through the kitchen and up the stairs where they discover… a very strong mahoganny door blocking entry into the jewellers shop.

Raffles removes the lock by painstakingly drilling a series of holes round it. Beyond it is a metal grille door, but Raffles has a set of skeleton keys, one of which opens it. they’re in!

Raffles posts Bunny as a lookout at the street window of the flat and loots all the jewellery he can find, pausing whenever Bunny makes a sign that the local policeman is walking by.

Then they wash their hands and faces (all that drilling was dirty work), lock up what can be locked up, exit and stroll back along Piccadilly to Raffles’s flat. That’s it.

‘Enjoy it?’ Raffles asks Bunny. I’ll quote the entire exchange because, in a sense, it’s the crucial temptation scene, the moment when Bunny passes over to the Dark Side.

‘Like it?’ I cried out. ‘Not I! It’s no life for me. Once is enough!”
You wouldn’t give me a hand another time?’
‘Don’t ask me, Raffles. Don’t ask me, for God’s sake!’
‘Yet you said you would do anything for me! You asked me to name my crime! But I knew at the time you didn’t mean it; you didn’t go back on me to-night, and that ought to satisfy me, goodness knows! I suppose I’m ungrateful, and unreasonable, and all that. I ought to let it end at this. But you’re the very man for me, Bunny, the – very – man! Just think how we got through to-night. Not a scratch – not a hitch! There’s nothing very terrible in it, you see; there never would be, while we worked together.’

He was standing in front of me with a hand on either shoulder; he was smiling as he knew so well how to smile. I turned on my heel, planted my elbows on the chimney-piece, and my burning head between my hands. Next instant a still heartier hand had fallen on my back.

‘All right, my boy! You are quite right and I’m worse than wrong. I’ll never ask it again. Go, if you want to, and come again about mid-day for the cash. There was no bargain; but, of course, I’ll get you out of your scrape – especially after the way you’ve stood by me to-night.’

I was round again with my blood on fire
‘I’ll do it again,’ I said, through my teeth.
He shook his head. ‘Not you,’ he said, smiling quite good-humoredly on my insane enthusiasm.

‘I will,’ I cried with an oath. ‘I’ll lend you a hand as often as you like! What does it matter now? I’ve been in it once. I’ll be in it again. I’ve gone to the devil anyhow. I can’t go back, and wouldn’t if I could. Nothing matters another rap! When you want me, I’m your man!’

And that is how Raffles and I joined felonious forces on the Ides of March.

2. A Costume Piece

Big, brash, loud multi-millionaire Reuben Rosenthall turns up from the diamond fields in South Africa, dominates the newspapers and gossip columns, and holds a huge dinner inviting all the press, at which he boasts of his enormous fortune, the two huge diamonds in his tie-pin and ring, introduces the prize fighter, Billy Purvis, as his bodyguard and pulls out a gun and wants to decorate the hall wall with bullet holes until talked out of it by his hosts.

Well, in case we hadn’t realised it before, this second story gives the author the opportunity of showing just how much Raffles considers himself an artist of crime, an ‘insatiable artist’. Stealing stuff for the sake of it is common and vulgar. The real artist likes a challenge.

Raffles would plan a fresh enormity, or glory in the last, with the unmitigated enthusiasm of the artist.

And few challenges were more obvious than the richest man in Britain offering to take on all-comers.

Raffles takes Bunny to the studio which he rents down an alley in Chelsea. He tells the landlord he’s an ‘artist’ and needs all these costume and props for his models. In fact, the costumes and props are disguises for all occasions.

A few days later, Bunny finds Raffles masquerading as a smelly old tramp near Rosenthall’s hired house in St John’s Wood. Raffles tells him the job will be the next evening.

So they dress up as Shoreditch roughs and sneak through the garden of the house next door. When they see Rosenthall, Purvis and two ladies of the night loudly exit the house and pile into a carriage which sweeps off down the drive, Raffles says, ‘Go go go.’

They leap over the wall, but have barely made it through the open french windows into the dining room before all the lights go on and they find themselves looking down the barrel of a bunch of revolvers.

Rosenthall and Purvis have double-bluffed them, known about their plans for weeks. Raffles immediately starts talking in a broad East End thief dialect. He uses the one piece of information he has about Rosenthall which is that the millionaire is suspected of receiving stolen diamond. This infuriates Rosenthal and his man, Purvis, makes a lunge at Raffles, but this momentarily blocks Rosenthall’s line of fire and Raffles is out of the window in flash, over the wall, through the bushes and gone.

While the other two search for him, Bunny legs it upstairs and hides in a bedroom where, after some searching, Rosenthall and Purvis finally find him and drag him downstairs.

They are just considering what to do with him, when there’s a ring at the door and a policeman walks in who says he is responding to reports of a disturbance from alarmed neighbours. Rosenthall and Purvis indicate that Bunny was one of the burglars at which point the constable briskly handcuffs Bunny and frog marches him out of the building, telling Rosenthall and Purvis that reinforcements will be along in a minute to investigate the burglary.

The policeman is, of course, Raffles, in yet another of his disguises. Well, their plan to rob Rosenthall didn’t come off, so be it:

‘But, by Jove, we’re jolly lucky to have come out of it at all!’

3. Gentlemen and Players

Raffles is, of course, a master of cricket, the ultimate English idea of the gentleman’s game:

a dangerous bat, a brilliant field, and perhaps the very finest slow bowler of his decade,

His cricket prowess gets them invited to a house party down at Milchester Abbey, seat of posh Lord Amersteth, who is hosting a week of Gentlemen versus Players competitions.

Every detail of this story reads like a P.G. Wodehouse comedy, from the deaf old dowager with her ear trumpet, to the callow son of Lord Amersteth, to the dainty young lady, Miss Melhuish, who sits next to Bunny at dinner and tells him an awfully, frightfully, scandalous secret.

Bunny’s reaction to the whole situation, and to Raffles’s imperturbably sang-froid, is priceless.

Of course Raffles has accepted the invitation because he plans to steal the jewels of the posh guests. But Miss Melhuish’s Big Secret had been that one of the guests is a detective from London because two famous London thieves are in the neighbourhood.

This leads to all kinds of comic complications, especially on the part of Bunny, who completely fails to realise that the Scottish ‘photographer’ he spends an hour chatting with after dinner is the detective. Bunny is now terrified that the two London thieves being pursued are him and Raffles.

But they’re not. It is a different set of London thieves. This gang proceeds to carry out an audacious burglary, with inside help from some of Lord Amersteth’s servants, and the room of the Dowager Marchioness of Melrose with the fine jewels is broken into.

Everyone is woken by the rumpus made by the London detective grappling with one of the ‘inside men’ i.e. one of the servants who had helped with the job. Raffles, first on the spot, volunteers to take over holding him guard while the detective – Mackenzie of the Yard – goes dashing out into the garden to try and catch the rest of the gang who have meanwhile shinned down a rope from her Ladyship’s room and are escaping through the garden.

Things take a slightly serious turn when Mackenzie is shot, though survives. The thieves get away. All the guests stay up the rest of the night, discussing the events, on through breakfast and the cab journey to the nearby station and the train ride home.

Only when the train has arrived at Paddington and Raffles and Bunny are alone in a hansom cab, does Raffles reveal that in all the confusion he had darted into the Marchioness’s room and – stolen her necklace!

Burglary as wizard wheeze!

4. Le Premier Pas

Raffles tells Bunny about his first caper. He was on a cricket tour of Australia when his hand was damaged in Melbourne. He desperately needed funds and, asking around and giving his name to people, was amazed to come across a doctor who knew of a relative of Raffles’s who was a bank manager. Who had just taken up a new position in a township fifty miles south, name of Yea.

Raffles saw the opportunity to go and beg money from this distant relative so he borrows the doctor’s fat old mare (who needs an outing) and sets off along a dusty road in the Outback.

At a forest of eucalyptus trees a horse comes bounding out, with a bloody saddle. Raffles blocks it, grabs the reins just as another horseman comes riding up. This horseman is a very rough looking man. He gives the explanation his mate just rode into the branch of a tree, got a bloody nose and fell off, and that he’s come to fetch his horse.

Puzzled, and a little scared, Raffles rides on, arriving at the township of Yea at sunset. He goes to the bank and makes himself known to the man there and then – realises that he’s walking into a big misunderstanding. His namesake, W.F. Raffles, hasn’t yet arrived and the bank official (Ewbank) mistakes Raffles for the new manager.

There is a moment in the conversation when Raffles could have cleared up the misunderstanding, been honest, and waited for his distant relation to arrive. In that moment, he recollects the rough guy and wild horse he saw earlier, and wonders whether they were bushwhackers who had waylaid his namesake. Maybe his namesake has been delayed, kidnapped or even shot.

In that moment, partly out of need and partly for the fun of the thing, Raffles decides to impersonate his namesake and see what opportunities arise.

There follow a couple of pages of comedy as Raffles desperately tries to keep up with what Ewbank knows about the new manager, not least the story that he once saw off an armed robber at his previous job. All this Raffles has to bluff his way through, and finds it nerve-racking but also very exciting.

He asks for a full tour round the bank, and then stays up late jawing with Ewbank, emptying his own drink when the other isn’t watching, trying to get Ewbank as drunk as possible. Eventually Ewbank goes to bed. So does Raffles – for a few hours. Then he sneaks out and saddles the mare, then sneaks down into the bank and, using the keys Ewbank has shown him, lets himself through a door, which leads to steps down into the strong room. Here he fills his pockets with gold sovereigns, carefully balancing the weight. But then—!!!!

He hears banging at the front door of the bank! Caught in the act!!

The banging keeps on till the drunk Ewbank stirs and comes downstairs. Raffles overhears it all. His namesake has arrived and, yes, he was captured and tied up by the bushwhackers. But has worked his way free and here he is more dead than alive.

Raffles hears all this, trapped downstairs in the strong room with the blood pounding in his ears. Ewbank realises that he has been taken in by an imposter (Raffles) and becomes very angry. He grabs his revolver and he and the other Raffles quietly go upstairs to the bedroom where they think our hero is asleep.

Which gives our hero the chance to very, very quietly tiptoe up the stairs from the strong room, along the corridor to the back door, out into the paddock, climb onto the mare and walk her very slowly out into the shadow of the other buildings and towards the road out of town.

There follows a vivid description of Raffles’s ride through the forest of eucalyptus at night with his head pressed against the horse’s mane. He arrives back at Melbourne, stashes the gold in his hotel room, returns the horse to the doctor who is a little puzzled and suspicious but does nothing.

The cricket tour ends. The team return to England. Raffles has discovered a new hobby – thieving!

5. Wilful Murder

Bunny learns that Raffles fences his stolen goods by dressing up in the outfit of an East End crook, and going to meet a fence and swindler named Baird. He puts on a thick slum accent for the purpose – all part of the fun of the game. Except that on his most recent visit, Baird for the first time sees though him and follows him back towards his apartment. Raffles realises he’s being followed. This could be serious.

He takes Bunny for dinner and for the first time Raffles talks about the joys of burglary, giving a surprisingly shallow speech about what larks it would be to have committed a murder and then walk into the club where all the chaps are discussing it and knowing that you are the culprit.

He then sets off to Willesden (which, it is fascinating to learn, was in 1899 still a village on the edge of open countryside) where Baird lives, with Bunny in reluctant but half-fascinated pursuit. They climb over the spiked gate into Baird’s garden, sneak up to the house and carefully cut open the glass with the diamond and treacle trick (look it up) before – discovering Baird’s body at their feet, his head beaten to a bloody pulp with a nearby poker.

This wasn’t part of the plan.

Upstairs they find young Jack Rutter, for some months now a byword among polite Society for dissolution and demoralisation. They discover he was deeply in debt to Baird, with no way to escape, was threatened with ruin and had finally – taken matters into his own hands by battering the old fence and loan shark to death.

Reeling from this discovery, Raffles decides they must take Rutter with them and they leave the house as quietly as they can. All the way home the man is raving that he has done the crime and he must hand himself in, with Raffles begging him to shut up.

Bunny doesn’t see his hero for a few days and, when he does, learns that Raffles took Rutter – still keen for martyrdom at the hands of the law – to his Chelsea hideout, where he fixed him up with a disguise, then caught the train together to Liverpool, where he bought Rutter a ticket to New York and a new life.

6. Nine Points of the Law

Raffles answers an advert in the Daily Telegraph promising two thousand pounds for anyone prepared to take A RISK. He and Bunny are invited to the chambers of a rather shady lawyer and told the problem.

Sir Bernard Debenham has a disreputable son who has drunk and gambled his way into debt. Last time he went down to Sir Bernard’s big country house in Esher the father refused to bail the son out any more. Whereupon the son secretly cut out of its frame a priceless Velasquez painting. He smuggled it up to town and sold it to an unscrupulous Australian tycoon and collector who’s visiting the Old Country, the Honourable J. M. Craggs, M.L.C.

The task is: to reclaim the stolen Velasquez.

Raffles sets off on a whirlwind tour, training it down to Esher to see Sir Bernard, then back up to town, hurrying in and out and not telling Bunny any of his plans.

Then, abruptly, he tells Bunny to make a dinner date for all three of them in Craggs’s rooms at the Metropole Hotel. Bunny assumes he is to be a decoy. He imagines that while he talks to Cragg in one room, Raffles will go to work to extract the rolled up painting from the map carrier in the other room (which is where they’ve discovered it’s hidden).

Bunny shows up for the dinner date at the Metropolem but Raffles doesn’t, and sends a telegram of apology. In actual fact, a little way into the meal, Bunny thinks he can hear Raffles working in the adjoining room and so raises his voice and laughs at inappropriate moments, all the while being subjected to hours of excruciating conversation about the wonderfulness of Australia. It becomes clear that Cragg is a vulgar bore who only bought the picture to upstage an equally vulgar rival back in Oz.

Finally, Cragg insists on showing Bunny the painting itself, and the latter nerves himself for the stream of Australian abuse which will no doubt issue from the millionaire’s mouth when he discovers that the picture is gone. Except that it isn’t. Cragg gets out the map case, opens it, takes out the Velasquez, unfurls it and generally shows off about it.

Bunny is appalled. Raffles must have muffed his opportunity.

Bunny lets Cragg replace the painting, and carries on drinking hard with him until Cragg is so drunk that Bunny has to help him back into his room, where he promptly passes out.

Bunny nips back to his own rooms in Mount Street (which are in Mayfair, only a short cab ride from the Metropole, which was at Charing Cross), then returns, letting himself back up to Cragg’s room. Here he puts a chloroform-soaked hankie over the big man’s nose to make sure he really is out for the count.

Then he extracts the painting from the map case, wraps it round his own body under his coat, gets a cab to Waterloo, and the first train to Esher. He takes a hansom cab to Sir Bernard Debenham’s house where he finds Raffles and, beaming with pride, tells him how he’s saved the day.

Except that he hasn’t. As the reader well suspects, Raffles had successfully carried out the retrieval of the painting, and had replaced the real Velasquez with a fake.

It was procuring this fake which had entailed all the rushing round town which Bunny had partly witnessed. Bunny has gone and taken – the fake! Oh well, Cragg won’t find out till he opens up the case in Australia and will probably be too embarrassed to make a fuss.

Bunny is so mortified that he declares on the spot that he’s going to pack in this life of crime, and go straight!

7. The Return Match

In the third story in this volume, Gentlemen and Players, Raffles and Bunny had gone down to Milchester Abbey for a week of cricket and been caught up in an attempted burglary. Most of the gang had eventually been caught, including the infamous ringleader, Mr. Reginald Crawshay.

Now, in his rooms at the Albany, Raffles reads to Bunny a newspaper report that Crawshay has escaped from Dartmoor prison. Not only that, but he’s stolen the clothes of at least two different civilians in order to escape in disguise.

Raffles suspects he’s heading to London. Why? Because Crawshay wrote Raffles a letter in which he politely and facetiously looked forward to a return match with our hero i.e. revenge. Barely has Raffles finished reading all this, than Mr. Reginald Crawshay emerges from the shadows of the hallway into Raffles’s own flat. Here is right there! Ah. This is tricky.

After much banter it emerges that all Crawshay actually wants is for Raffles to help him get away, and out of England.

Crawshay has, after all, one enormous advantage over our heroes, which is that he knows that they stole the Marchioness’s jewels. He could blackmail them if he wants to. It’s asmuch in Raffles and Bunny’s interest to help him escape, as it is in Crawshay’s. After agreeing that he’s got them over a barrel, our heroes leave Mr Crawshay with his feet up in front of a fire

They set off towards a station but haven’t even got out of the little square in front of the Albany before they walk past a figure they recognise as Inspector Mackenzie, the Scotland Yard detective who was shot and injured down at Milchester Abbey.

They turn and say good evening to him and are alarmed to discover that the police have tracked Crawshay all the way across London to these very buildings. Raffles reminds the inspector of the service he did the police at Milchester and asks to come along in their investigations. So Mackenzie allows Raffles and Bunny to accompany him up to a vacant room, which the Albany’s manager says funny noises have been heard coming from.

A copper then climbs out onto the lead roof and discovers a rope tied round a chimney, and dangling down above a window… six rooms in. Crawshay must have come up to this empty room, climbed along the roof, then let himself down to the window of… of which room? Mackenzie asks the manager.

Quick as a flash the latter replies, ‘That would be Mr Raffles’s rooms, sir’. ‘Aha’, says Mackenzie. Bunny feels his heart beating fit to burst.

But Raffles is coolness itself and says this has all been very interesting but in fact he now has to rush off for an appointment. He will leave his key with the constable downstairs. Mackenzie can’t say fairer than that.

Looking out the window Bunny sees him hustle, wrapped up tight against the cold fog, towards the entrance to their staircase. And a minute or so later re-emerge, stop with the constable guarding the staircase the police are investigating, and hand over the key, before moving briskly towards Piccadilly.

Then, with a heavy heart, Bunny follows Mackenzie and the police as they go down one flight of stairs, collect the key Raffles has left with the constable, and then go along and up Raffles’s flight.

They open the door to Raffles’s apartment but, instead of finding Crawshay lounging in front of a fire, they find… the figure of Raffles on the floor in front of the fire, with blood on his forehead from a gash and a bloodied poker nearby!!

Coming round, Raffles groggily tells Mackenzie that Crawshay was laying in wait and attacked him before making off with his coat. Bunny of course realises it was another wizard wheeze – Raffles, under extreme pressure, devised the plan of giving Crawshay his coat and instructing him to swaddle himself in it and give his apartment key to the waiting policeman before making his getaway, leaving Raffles to hit himself with the poker, not too hard, making it all look as if Crawshay hit him and escaped.

Just the kind of ‘sport’ which Raffles lives for.

8. The Gift of the Emperor

‘Violence is a confession of terrible incompetence.’

The opening of this story requires a historical footnote. Hornung uses rather facetious and obscure language to refer to what I take to be an actual historical event – which is that the King of Fiji in some way snubs some kind of gift or compliment from Queen Victoria; and to emphasise the snub, the Kaiser of Germany sends an immensely valuable pearl to the king.

This little diplomatic spat caused a storm of indignation in Britain but, more importantly for our hero, it meant that a jewel of immense value was very publicly being sent by steamer to the South Seas.

Thus it is that the story opens with Raffles booking a berth on the German steamer which is transporting this pearl to the South Seas.

We discover that Bunny really has gone through with his threat to give up his life of crime. He is trying to make a career as a freelance writer and, as a consequence, has been forced to give up his Mayfair flat and move out of London to suburban Thames Ditton.

Nonetheless, Raffles manages to persuade him to come on this jolly trip. Maybe he will get some writing done!

Thus it is that Raffles and Bunny take ship to Hamburg where they board the steamer. Raffles quickly identifies the courier of the pearl as one Captain Wilhelm von Heumann. Raffles annoys Bunny by paying lots of attention to a whippersnapper of a young Australian girl, which Bunny thinks is uncharacteristic and distraction from the job in hand. Until he realises that von Heumann has himself been paying the girl a very heavily Teutonic wooing, during which he has shown her the pearl: thus Raffles is flirting with her solely to ascertain its hiding place in the German’s cabin.

Once he does so, Raffles reveals his ingenious plan to Bunny. He strips naked and climbs through the ventilator shaft which connects his ventilator to those of all the other cabins on the same level (including von Heumann’s).

Von Heumann routinely drinks too much at lunchtime, so it is a doddle to suspend a hankie dipped in chloroform over the snoring German’s face until he is really unconscious – and then climb into the cabin, find the pearl, prise it out of its setting, and clamber back into the ventilator shaft, clip von Heumann’s ventilator back into place, and so back to his cabin and the anxiously waiting Bunny.

Like a scene from hundreds of heist movies.

But his triumph is quickly dashed. As the ship steams out of Genoa a new passenger is put aboard. It is none other that Inspector Mackenzie, Raffles’s old nemesis. After a tantalising delay wondering what the inspector’s presence portends, Raffles and Bunny are called into the captain’s cabin, wherein sit von Heumann, Mackenzie and a very beefy first mate.

Long story short – Mackenzie has a warrant for Raffles’s arrest, invoking the Marchioness jewels and two other burglaries. Now they all suspect him of stealing the pearl. Looks like they’ve got him bang to rights. After pretending to get a bit cross, Raffles gives up and shows them where he’s hidden the pearl – inside one of the bullets of his revolver.

But Raffles begs one last request before they put the cuffs on him. He says he’s gotten engaged to the young Australian lassie he’s been chatting to throughout the voyage, and he asks permission to say goodbye to her.

So the forces of law and order escort Raffles to the part of deck where the young lady is promenading, and he gives her a farewell kiss. Then – in a flash – pushes her aside, leaps up onto the rail, waves goodbye to all and sundry, and makes a perfect dive into the sea beneath.

It is sunset and Raffles is immediately hidden in the gathering shadows of the boat and the waves.

Bunny is thrown into the brig in shackles but he thinks he saw, before they dragged him away from the rail, a small dark shape bobbing on the water. Was it the head of a swimmer making for the shore and freedom? Did Raffles survive?

Power, love and control

Bunny was Raffles’s fag at their public school. You don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to see how it is this master-and-servant relationship which is revived in the first story and forms the basis for everything which follows. Bunny doesn’t enter into a working partnership with Raffles, so much as become his hero-worshipping slave.

It is interesting to learn that Hornung deliberately injected into the relationship a little of the feeling between Oscar Wilde and his ill-fated lover, Alfred Douglas. Raffles is very, very languid at some moments, drawling outrageous cynicisms though his cigarette smoke, while Bunny is so very much in boyish awe of him.

One had not to be a cricketer oneself to appreciate his perfect command of pitch and break, his beautifully easy action, which never varied with the varying pace, his great ball on the leg-stump – his dropping head-ball – in a word, the infinite ingenuity of that versatile attack. It was no mere exhibition of athletic prowess, it was an intellectual treat, and one with a special significance in my eyes. I saw the ‘affinity between the two things’, saw it in that afternoon’s tireless warfare against the flower of professional cricket. It was not that Raffles took many wickets for few runs; he was too fine a bowler to mind being hit; and time was short, and the wicket good. What I admired, and what I remember, was the combination of resource and cunning, of patience and precision, of head-work and handiwork, which made every over an artistic whole. It was all so characteristic of that other Raffles whom I alone knew!

Isn’t that very final sentence the sentiment of a lover? An adoring lover, smug in the knowledge that he, and only he, knows all the secrets of this charming and fascinating man.

I looked at Raffles. I had done so often during the evening, envying him his high spirits, his iron nerve, his buoyant wit, his perfect ease and self-possession.

There was never anybody in the world so irresistible as Raffles when his mind was made up… His arm slid through mine, with his little laugh of light-hearted mastery.

As he spoke he was himself again – quietly amused – cynically unperturbed – characteristically enjoying the situation and my surprise.

I confess to some little prejudice against her. I resented her success with Raffles, of whom, in consequence, I saw less and less each day. It is a mean thing to have to confess, but there must have been something not unlike jealousy rankling within me.

‘his little laugh of light-hearted mastery’

Morality?

I have little or no patience for ‘morality’ in art or literature. ‘Morality’, Freud says somewhere, ‘is obvious’, and I agree. Be decent and respectful to each other would be a start, quite a big start, for most people. Discussing arcane points of ‘morality’ is not only interminable and tedious but also irrelevant to most people’s day-to-day lives.

I can see, however, that a theme or thread running through the stories is the tension between Bunny’s hero worship attraction towards Raffles and his dazzling amorality, and the repulsion generated by his traditional ‘morality” or moral code – stealing is wrong (although it may just be – like so many ‘moral feelings’, based on cruder physical motives: Stealing is nerve-wracking and dangerous).

Anyway, I can see how this set of stories could easily be read not as a set of eight straight dashing exploits, but as a very Victorian morality tale of record of Bunny’s fall from decent behavour, then attempt to free himself by forswearing burglary, and then his come-uppance.

In the last story Raffles gets away, Bunny is clamped in irons and – we learn, rather surprisingly – is sent to prison.

Of what followed on deck I can tell you nothing, for I was not there. Nor can my final punishment, my long imprisonment, my everlasting disgrace, concern or profit you, beyond the interest and advantage to be gleaned from the knowledge that I at least had my deserts.

Public school amorality and the British Empire

I can’t help noticing that Rudyard Kipling’s collection of short stories about amoral but dashing schoolboys, Stalky and Co., was published in the same year as Raffles, 1899. Stalky and his pals are also fiercely amoral, ducking school rules, conducting feuds and vendettas and punishments – but nonetheless bound by their own schoolboy notions of honour and silence.

However, they are very different in tone – Kipling’s schoolboy stories are, as so often, cruel, gloating and sadistic, whereas Hornung’s are light and gay. Kipling’s style is clipped and sometimes all but unreadable, whereas Hornung’s are meant to be easy-to-consume after-dinner reading.

But both of them share the assumption that public school-educated chaps can get away with more or less anything, because deep down (sometimes very deep down) they are honourable and decent.

It isn’t doing things which are immoral or criminal which brings disgrace. It is doing anything vulgar or crude. It is doing anything which is ‘bad form’. It is letting the side down. After the Indian Mutiny there was a new emphasis among the British ruling classes in keeping up tone, maintaining the form of the thing, playing the game.

It wasn’t necessary to be strictly legal or play by the rules – after all, the empire had been built by a load of chaps who generally bent the rules, often to breaking point. But all this was redeemed by the fact that they were chaps like us. White men who know how to play the game, especially the game of games, the epitome of the spirit of the British Empire – cricket. Raffles’s expertise at cricket is a simple indicator that deep down, right at bottom – no matter how many burglaries and other crimes he is involved in – he is, ultimately, one of us.

Comedy

It is a comedy. Nothing serious happens and if it does it is glossed over with high good spirits, while Bunny paints both his and Raffle’s characters with humorous self-deprecation, in the stylishly amused tone of the moneyed upper classes. Arriving at a house party in the country, Bunny is overwhelmed by poshness.

The chief signs of festival were within, where we found an enormous house-party assembled, including more persons of pomp, majesty, and dominion than I had ever encountered in one room before. I confess I felt overpowered. Our errand and my own presences combined to rob me of an address upon which I have sometimes plumed myself.

‘Address’ is here used in an older sense meaning self-possession and self-presentation. ‘An address upon which I have sometimes plumed myself’ simultaneously combines toffish self-depreciation with toffish assertion. ‘Plumed’. To plume oneself. What a great word.

I’m not really familiar with P.G. Wodehouse but this feels like a precursor of the brisk, upper-class amusement of the Jeeves stories. Lots of the writing is done with great timing and dryness.

‘Candidly, and on consideration,’ said the lawyer, ‘I am not sure that you ARE the stamp of men for me – men who belong to good clubs! I rather intended to appeal to the – er – adventurous classes.’
‘We are adventurers,’ said Raffles gravely.

Language and style

I suffered from a persistent ineffectual feeling after style.

I’ve just been reading the detective stories of Arthur Morrison, more or less contemporary with Hornung, and found myself continually comparing the two writers.

Obviously, Hornung’s stories are light and funny and stylish, whereas Morrison’s are effective little puzzles but often a little dull. But the one really striking difference between them is in their use of language.

Morrison, in all his works, makes heavy weather of using pretentiously archaic and ‘literary’ words like ‘withal’ and ‘ere’ and ‘thereunto’ (none of which appear in Hornung). In his stories about East End slums, this vocabulary is used partly to create a bitter irony between the pompous language and the savage events being described. In his detective stories it is maybe intended to denote the author’s literary abilities and provenance.

But where Morrison uses posh English to create a tone or voice – Hornung uses French and Latin. The narrative voice of Bunny, and the direct speech of Raffles, use Latin or French tags with the blithe confidence of the expensively educated. Morrison’s prose is trying to appear literate and educated. Hornung’s prose effortlessly is so.

‘Enfin, he begs or borrows.’

‘Ergo, as we’re Britishers, they think we’ve got it!”

The man was au fait with cracksmen.

The diamond, the pot of treacle, and the sheet of brown paper which were seldom omitted from his impedimenta.

‘One of the most complete young black-guards about town, and the fons et origo of the whole trouble.’

‘He gives me carte blanche in the matter.’

‘And I had done it myself, single-handed – ipse egomet!’

Not only given to quoting tags from foreign languages, Raffles is just the type of languid dandy who easily quotes from the flowers of literature (Bunny is surprised to find in Raffles’s rooms at the Albany quite so many volumes of poetry – ‘there had always been a fine streak of aestheticism in his complex composition’) or makes knowing references to classic literature.

I particularly liked the moment when Raffles comes across bunny dozing in his bed on their long sea voyage, and knowingly remarks: ‘Achilles on his bunk’.

The poetry quotes aren’t extensive or particularly impressive – he quotes pretty obvious Major Poets such as Tennyson and Keats – it’s more that they indicate the cultured hinterland which Raffles can draw on at will.

A half-educated man uses long, pretentious English words, sometimes not entirely accurately. This was what made listening to trades union leaders in the 1970s so funny.

A well-educated man, by contrast, doesn’t need to – he can use common or garden English prose most of the time, but sprinkle it with just enough Latin and French tags, or casual quotes from the higher literature, to signal his cultural savoir faire.

Raffles’ and Bunny’s Latin and French and Keats and Tennyson offer the same kind of reassurance on the cultural level, that Raffles’s cricketing prowess does on the sporting front – assuring the educated reader of his day and, maybe, still, of ours, that he is one of us!

Arthur Raffles, gentleman thief (standing) and his sidekick Harry 'Bunny' Manders

Arthur Raffles, gentleman thief (standing) and his sidekick Harry ‘Bunny’ Manders

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Absolute Friends by John le Carré (2004)

‘Everyone in Berlin knows Sasha.’
(Absolute Friends, page 58)

For three-quarters of its length this is the best, the most compelling, gripping and psychologically rewarding le Carré novel for years: for excitement and plausibility I would recommend this one over all its predecessors as far back as A Perfect Spy. It is a return to the full-blown world of Cold War spying, but now continued on into the more uncertain, violent and scary post-9/11 world and also, for the first time in his fiction, gives a real sense of age and frailty and remorse.

Then bizarrely, right at the end, the narrative turns into a rant against George Bush, Tony Blair and the US invasion of Iraq, our heroes get assassinated by the wicked, imperialist Americans and the whole thing is covered up in a finale that’s reminiscent of 1970s conspiracy thrillers, only without the wit or style.

Absolute Friends

Absolute Friends feels like yet another channeling of le Carré’s own life story. Like the author, the main protagonist Ted Mundy is brought up by a braggart father – this version is a British Army Major who stays on into post-Independence Pakistan, all bristling patriotism and military lingo, his mother having died in childbirth. When his father is cashiered from the Army in the 1950s, young Ted returns with him to grey, rainy England and, like the young JLC, is packed off to a succession of boarding schools which he hates, before – exactly like JLC – discovering a liking for German language and literature and so going abroad to study, in this fictional instance, to Berlin (le Carré went to study in Basel in Switzerland).

As with A Perfect Spy, the closer le Carré is to his own life, the more grounded the text and the language feel. Granted the entire childhood in Pakistan, the food and Muslim prayers and Urdu words for things, are not directly autobiographical but the product of research – nonetheless, the character’s feelings of being puzzled, isolated, seeking escape from a childhood world which is both smothering and the only support he knows, are powerfully conveyed and give the novel more psychological conviction than its four or five predecessors.

The plot

At Oxford Ted had taken a lover (le Carré heroes are never short of women, they luxuriate in an atmosphere of sustained sensuality – the ease with which Jonathan Roper or Oliver Single or Andrew Osnard or Ted Mundy attract and bed posh totty is one of the defining characteristics of these books).

Strident young Ilse introduces him to sex and radical politics, packing him off to Berlin with a letter of introduction to the city’s top student radical, Sasha (we never learn his last name).

‘Everyone in Berlin knows Sasha.’ (p.58)

Here we come to one of le Carré’s most irritating mannerisms – the way so many of his protagonists are in awe of super-famous, notorious, legendary figures. Thus everyone in Berlin knows Sasah, just as everyone in Panama knew Harry Pendel, everyone in the City knew ‘Tiger’ Single, and so on and so on.

Sasha is a small, intense, broken-looking chap but, again, like all le Carré leading men, the smirking ‘conqueror’ of numberless women – as well as being the much-admired brains behind radical student politics in the seething Berlin of 1969.

It’s rather a relief that, for the first time in five or six novels, the books features scenes which don’t involve chaps from Eton and Winchester pointing out to each other how legendary and/or what total rotters each other are, in that insufferably self-congratulatory public school way.

Indeed, the scenes set among the free love and ‘smash the system’ radical students of late 1960s Berlin felt powerful and persuasive – helped no end by being set among foreigners who don’t end each sentence ‘old boy’, and therefore sound like normal people, not the self-regarding ‘legends’ of Eton or Harrow or Shrewsbury who populate his other post-1990s novels.

Ted enjoys free sex with, inevitably, the most beautiful and aloof of the many beautiful young women in the squat. All women in le Carré novels are young and beautiful and carefree, personally I find this thread rather creepy.

They go sticking up posters calling for the workers to overthrow the system etc, and then there’s a big demonstration in which 6-foot-tall Ted a) rescues Sasha from a beating by the police b) is himself arrested, soundly beaten, handed over to the British Consulate and deported.

Time passes during which Ted does not resume his degree at Oxford but tries various life experiments and the narrative gives a good sense of the confidence and open horizons so many people experienced in the early 1970s.

Ted teaches at schools (inevitably he has affair with one of the other master’s wives), lives for a while in the stoned writer’s colony in Taos, USA (obviously has an affair with a painter’s wife), tries his hand as a radio reporter and newspaper journalist, before drifting back to London and getting a homely little job at the British Council.

He also lowers his sexual sights from artists and free spirits and falls in love with a practical young woman, Kate, teacher in a local state school (that is, not a fee-paying boarding school – crikey, there are a few around, apparently) who also happens to be an activist in the local Labour Party.

In his new British Council role Ted is tasked with accompanying a youth theatre group across north Europe and then around the Eastern bloc countries. This meandering account all leads up to the seismic moment when Ted is hailed by Sasha backstage in an Eastern European capital. Yes, Sasha, Sasha from the old days in the Berlin commune!

Quickly Sasha makes a rendezvous with Ted at which he tells the incredulous Englishman what’s happened to him in the decade since the glory years in Berlin. Briefly, he was lured by radical colleagues to cross the Wall into the East where he was at first interrogated and grilled in the notorious ‘White Hotel’ interrogation centre, and then, finally, rehabilitated, on condition that he became a lowly employee of the State Security Police, the Stasi.

Now, by the time of this backstage meeting with Ted, Sasha has become completely disillusioned with life in the East, whose authorities he dismisses as ‘red fascists’. He has begun copying incriminating documents and building up an archive of the State’s criminality against the long-awaited day, far in the future, when the communist regime will collapse. And then he was amazed to see his old friend Ted’s name on the manifest of a travelling theatre group. And hence this meeting…

Sasha tells Ted he wants to spy for the West. He has access to files and documents and information all of which he will give to the West, for nothing, just out of anger and hatred of the regime. Ted doesn’t know what to think, and has the latest of many out-of-body experiences he has throughout the novel whenever he finds himself out of his depth. However, Sasha stipulates that he will only hand these goodies over to Ted, in person, no-one else. To manage this, Sasha explains, to cement their bond, Ted must offer himself as a spy to his Stasi masters. This will provide the perfect excuse for their meetings.

Ted becomes a spy

Sasha even explains to Ted who to get in touch with when he gets back to the West, a drawling, upper-class Intelligence officer in West Berlin, Nicholas Amory, who becomes his case officer. Ted now undergoes training in a) how to collect Sasha’s information b) how to present himself as a candidate for recruitment by the Stasi, not being too earnest, playing hard to get, then ultimately giving in and agreeing to become a double agent.

This central part of the novel is familiar territory for le Carré, but fascinating nonetheless. His classic spy novels from the 1960s and 70s emphasised the human cost of the trade and this is no different. Ted has married Kate and they have a young son, Jake, but all of them find it wearing to cope with Ted’s more and more frequent trips to Eastern Europe, ostensibly attending conferences promoting British Culture, but in every instance a) pretending to the Stasi that he has vital espionage material to feed Sasha b) in fact collecting and transporting back Sasha’s top secret information to his British handlers.

The narrative makes a deal out of the multiple versions of himself Ted has to navigate: Mundy One, his ‘true self’, Mundy Two the British spy, Mundy Three the pretend Stasi spy. Throw in playing the roles of good father and dutiful husband, and you have a very confused public schoolboy, who wishes he could just go and play cricket. I found the narrative’s portrayal of this slightly hallucinatory sense of managing multiple selves very convincing.

Amidst all the spying Ted is introduced by Amory to a tall, shaggy, comfortable American, who interviews him in depth over a number of days, and who he grows to like, one Orville J. Rourke (‘call me Jay’), whose dear old mother, like Ted’s, is of Irish descent.

Then, one day, Jay disappears, without a goodbye or anything. Amory explains to Ted that he has just been vetted by ‘the cousins’ (i.e. the CIA) and passed clean. Good for him.

Over the years Ted and Kate drift apart. She finds herself promoted within the Labour Party and put forward as the PLP candidate for her home town of Doncaster, which requires her to move up there, along with Jake. Because of his work Ted remains in London, and is often abroad anyway. The inevitable happens and, some years later, they have a summit meeting where Kate announces she’s leaving him, for a shadowy man in the background, Philip, something to do with the shiny New Labour Project.

(Le Carré, who gives every sign of loathing Tony Blair, is heavily sarcastic about Kate and her steady rise in the New Labour hierarchy).

What rings most true from these sequences is Ted’s heartfelt sorrow at missing out on his son’s childhood, sadly meeting up with the teenage Jake and realising he is a stranger to him.

Then one day they all find themselves watching on TV the Berlin Wall being hammered to the ground, while the East German police look on in bemusement. Ted has a moment of concern for his friend Sasha, liable to be lynched by the mob in the anti-Stasi reprisals; and then panic for himself, as he realises his own Stasi file, proclaiming him a communist spy, might be published. But it doesn’t happen…

The present

All le Carré’s post-Cold War novels start in media res, i.e. in the middle of the complete sequence of events they describe. After establishing the situation in ‘the present’, they then go back to explain the often long and convoluted backstories which led up to this moment. Thus Absolute Friends opens soon after the Allied invasion of Iraq (March to May 2003) to find Ted adrift in Europe again and explains everything I’ve just summarised in a flashback.

Having lost his family in England around the same time the Cold War ended and his career as a spy came to an abrupt end, Ted has returned to Germany and set up a school for teaching English to corporate executives.

So as ‘the present’ of the novel opens, this school has shut down, bankrupted by the (possibly) criminal activities of Ted’s business partner Egon, and Ted has drifted down to Munich, where he has fluked a job as an English-speaking tour guide to one of the castles of mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, giving chummy, unfunny lectures to bemused tourists.

He has also fallen in love with a poor Muslim immigrant, Zara, who approached him one night in a bar offering to prostitute herself. The decent public schoolboy and soldier’s son in him turns this down and insists on buying her a nutritious dinner. She explains that she is the victim of an arranged marriage made back in Pakistan to a man who turned out to be a crook and wife beater, and who smashed out her front teeth among other assaults, before being arrested and sent to prison. Now she prostitutes herself to support her proud little son, Mustafa.

Ever one for a lost cause (and leaking a fair bit of sentimentality), Ted becomes Zara’s protector, paying for proper food, buying the suspicious Mustafa toys, behaving honourably for he is, like so many le Carré characters, at heart a jolly decent chap, an honourable schoolboy.

And now we realise the reason why le Carré had his protagonist born and raised in Pakistan. It makes him sympathetic to Muslim culture, it makes him ready to be taken along by Zara and Mustafa to their impoverished mosque in the backstreets of Munich, it contributes to his anger at the short-sighted stupidity of the Allies for invading Iraq on a trumped-up pretext.

But despite the naked contrivance of all this, the actual descriptions of Ted’s childhood in dusty Pakistan, of playing with the native children and the sweet memories which elude him in later life, are genuinely moving.

Above all, it is a relief not to be among the braying diplomats and their bitchy wives who have dominated JLC’s past few novels. It feels a little bit like actual modern life, in its poverty and anxiety and multi-cultural confusion. And it feels like an achievement for le Carré to have reached beyond the bubble of his age and class and grasped that.

The counter-university

And so all this brings us to the final act. Out of the blue Ted gets a letter from his old comrade in arms, Sasha, who makes his third great interference in Ted’s life. This time, when they meet, Sasha introduces him to a mad new scheme: there is a secretive billionaire who is so incensed at the West’s invasion of Iraq, and by the stranglehold the new, more virulent military-industrial complex is exerting over all aspects of Western media, culture and education, that he has a magic plan at hand – he wants to set up a Counter-University, which will provide a safe space for voices speaking out against the Complex, where alternative discourses and theories can flourish.

Sasha drives Ted out to an aircraft-hanger sized barn in the countryside outside Munich, where they transfer to a 4-by-4 driven by a stern female operative, and then up hill and through a maze of forests and valleys to a remote mansion.

It is like a James Bond lair, immaculate and clean in every detail, and Sasha leaves Ted to be processed by several sets of slick young receptionists and security guards before being admitted to the vast room of Mr Big, who turns out to be a tracksuited, twinkly old man of 70, who gives his name as Dimitri and delivers a long monologue about the evils of the US military-industrial complex. He outlines his plans to set up the Counter-University and even produces a reading list of the kinds of books they should be teaching, a list which could come straight from the pages of the Guardian:

  • Naomi Klein
  • Arundhati Roy
  • George Monbiot
  • Mark Curtis
  • John Pilger
  • Noam Chomsky
  • Joseph Stiglitz
  • Susan George

I’ve read articles or books by all of these authors and even attended lectures by some of them (Klein, Stiglitz). I am broadly sympathetic to their views, but I found le Carré’s decision to promote their views via the mouth of a wizened, old James Bond-style villain, bizarre.

‘I am speaking of something even more important to the development of western society than the ballot box. I am speaking of the deliberate corruption of young minds at their most formative stage. Of the lies that are forced on them from the cradle onwards by corporate or State manipulation, if there’s a difference any more between the two which I begin to doubt. I am speaking of the encroachment of corporate power on every university campus in the first, second and third worlds. I am speaking of educational colonisation by means of corporate investment at faculty level, conditional upon the observation of untrue nostrums that are advantageous to the corporate investor, and deleterious for the poor fuck of a student.’ (p.276)

In the fiction, Ted is driven back to his flat where he agrees the whole deal with Sasha. However, Ted is not that naive and the next night hops into a car and drives back out to the aircraft hanger, only to find it full of farm equipment, and then continues up to the James Bond mansion in the forest, only to find it stripped and bare. Spooky!

Stumbling back through the woods he is aggressively captured by a large force of armed and trigger-happy Austrian security police, stripped, hooded, bundled into a jeep and interrogated before it all comes to a halt with the reappearance of Jay, the CIA man from years before.

Jay reveals to Ted that they have their eyes on Dimitri and have traced his money back to Riyadh. The Saudis. Muslims, Ted. Has it crossed Ted’s mind that Dimitri might not be a peace-loving philanthropist but part of the new web of anti-Western terrorists spreading around the world?

Ted is cleaned up and dropped home where he is paid another visit by his old MI6 minder Nick Amory. For the first time since Ted’s known him, Nick is himself at a loss and puzzled. He reveals MI6’s uncertainty about Dimitri’s background and motives: is it to found a grand new liberal university in the venerable university city of Heidelberg? Or is that the facade for some evil ‘spectacular’ like blowing the city up?

And Nick tells Ted that Jay is no longer with ‘the Company’ i.e. the CIA: he’s been a freelancer, advising big US corporations for four years or more. So whose interests does he have at heart? Ted is right to feel confused, and the reader along with him. Thirty pages from the end Ted loads Zara and Mustafa onto a plane back to Turkey, to attend her sister’s wedding, glad to have them out of the way of whatever happens next.

The big shoot-out

What happens next is Ted drives to the big, empty school building where he’s made an appointment to meet Sasha. Sasha is late. After a few drinks, Ted takes a jemmy and opens the crates of books which have started arriving as preparation for the big new university and are piled up in the big main hall.

Sure enough, he finds lots of books on philosophy etc, but then… some on how to make home-made bombs, tips on arson, and then some crates full of hand grenades and guns. Oh. OK. In a very cinematic moment he sits back in the armchair in the big unlit atrium of the schoolhouse staring at the pile of cracked-open crates in utter silence, wondering what the hell he’s got himself into.

Then he hears the moan of a motor car, a screech of brakes and all hell breaks loose – the doors and windows are smashed in by black-clad US Special Forces firing machine guns in all directions and letting off small explosions. Ted runs to the stairs and stumbles up them despite being hit in the leg and shoulder. He makes it up to the attic where he swings open the skylight, looking down into the road in time to see Sasha being shot to pieces outside. At which point half a dozen SWAT troops burst into the attic followed by a balaclava-ed, tall, shaggy guy with a smooth Boston accent – God, it’s Jay! – who takes careful aim with a sniper’s rifle and shoots Ted through the head.

The cover-up

Exactly as in The Constant Gardener a) the hero is killed by the forces of evil b) le Carré embarks on an elaborate explanation of how a completely fictional cover story is manufactured by the State and media c) one good man speaks out in a bid to tell the truth but is stifled.

So official sources give out that US forces only just managed to prevent a major terrorist atrocity right in the heart of Germany. Huge stockpiles of ammunition and guides to terrorism were seized and two of the hardened terrorists shot dead but not before an intense firefight. Ted’s life is completely rewritten to make him look like an embittered loser who has turned to Islamic radicalism (even marrying one of them, godammit!) while Sasha is characterised as a former Stasi spy and failed radical. So much for the cover-up.

We go on to learn that Dimitri was a conman and actor hired to deceive both Sasha and Ted, who has taken a big payoff and retired to the States. We learn that Zara was arrested on arrival in Ankara and is being tortured until she corroborates the official story. We learn that a high-ranking British official published a ‘true’ account of Mundy’s life on an anonymous website (this would be Nick Amory), an account which was comprehensively rubbished by the powers-that-be and gullible journalists who, in le Carré’s view, are always easily impressed by the glamorous world of ‘intelligence’.

And the motive behind this elaborate and murderous scam? Germany had refused to join the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ which invaded Iraq. This entire incident and the deaths of Sasha and Ted were engineered to terrify German public opinion, helped along by paid articles from America-friendly journalists, designed to bring pressure to bear on the German Chancellor to fall into line with US foreign policy, with the American military-industrial hyperpower which, in le Carré’s view, has gone mad, and is undermining the whole world.

A spot of biography

Le Carré’s father, on the evidence of his own interviews and the recent biography of him, was a world class con-man, who gathered round him gangs of collaborators and conspirators who all agreed with the Chief and supported his mad schemes. Within this small world, tightly knit together by its secrets and conspiracies, to the growing boy John all the adult characters around him seemed larger than life figures, with superhuman qualities.

This sense of a small, claustrophobic world in which everyone is a legend to everyone else is one of the hallmarks of le Carré’s fiction. A Perfect Spy is a great novel because it has the force of a barely fictionalised recap of le Carré’s odd childhood. The same sense of a magic circle of large-than-life characters is strongly felt in Single & Single where the legendary ‘Tiger’ Single lords it over his gang, and also in The Night Manager where ‘the worst man in the world’, Richard Roper, lords it over another close-knit bunch of cronies.

The narrator of le Carré’s fictions is always an interloper into these secret worlds, an outsider, attracted and repulsed by their phony charisma, who ends up overturning them. Thus Tiger’s son, Oliver, betrays his father, and Roper’s protégé Jonathan Pine, betrays his slick arms dealer chief.

As part of his odd childhood, young le Carré was packed off to a series of boarding schools where he encountered another self-enclosed, self-regarding world full of ‘legendary’ masters and ‘fabled’ young stars of the cricket pitch or concert hall or whatever.

From which he progressed to Oxford University, also notorious for promoting its members, either undergraduate or faculty, to mythical status.

And then, after a spell of teaching at Eton (another institution not shy of turning its masters and pupils into legends) on to the Intelligence Service, another inward-looking organisation, also not slow to lionise its leading lights, such as good old Kim Philby, solid chap.

This background of a whole series of cliqueish little worlds full of people telling each other how terrific they are, I think, explains the often smothering cliqueyness of much of le Carré’s fiction, which consistently concerns itself with small groups of figures who all regard each other as legends and stars.

The Constant Gardener is ostensibly about criminality in the worldwide pharmaceutical industry and takes the hero (the Old Etonian Justin Quayle) from Africa to Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and back in his quest for the truth. But in his mind he never leaves – and the narrative never really shakes free from – the small number of People Like Us in the Nairobi High Commission where we first meet him, their secrets and lies, all conveyed in dialogue dripping with the privileged slang and superior attitude of their gilded circle.

Use of the word ‘our’ in the fiction of John le Carré

Thus, in these later novels, all too many of the characters are ‘legendary’ and ‘fabled’, larger-than-life super-characters who simply everyone knows, darling. This verbal habit is like a chummy arm round the shoulder of the reader pushing you to buy into these cliquey circles, an over-familiar embrace which le Carré’s many fans eagerly welcome or don’t notice, but which this reader, for one, coldly resists.

It also explains why le Carré has a funny relationship with the word ‘our’. ‘Our’ is a ‘possessive determiner’ (according to linguistics) which, when used factually, simply conveys that something belongs to two or more people, one of whom is me. Our car, our house, our country.

But in le Carré’s hands it is used in a number of ways to compel the reader into the myth-making world of his ‘legendary’ characters, to pressure the reader into seeing things his, and their, way, to acquiescing in their overblown heroic status and the generally bombastic mind-set which surrounds them.

Thus JLC characters are regularly over-sold as ‘our’ hero this, ‘our very own’, ‘our dear old’ so and so. I noticed it prominently throughout this text:

… our own dear Neville Chamberlain… our beloved British monarchy… Ted Mundy, our Hyde Park Corner orator… our poor King Ludwig… our recently appointed misanthrope…

It is part of the general tone of smothering, over-familiar, hugger-muggerness, the sense that you are being jostled and coerced into a gang of upper-class twits who you would normally cross the road to avoid, which can make reading his novels feel more like an endurance test than a pleasure.

He uses the word ‘our’ to do a number of things:

1. To be vastly patronising – ‘… the photograph of our dear old queen…’ (p.148) conveys a sense that ordinary people like the Queen but you and I, dear boy, ha ha, we are so much more sophisticated and worldly wise, eh.

2. Appropriating historical or eminent figures to our cause or discourse, while simultaneously looking down on them – ‘our poor King Ludwig..’ (p.18)

3. To pour scorn and derision on political leaders – ‘Bush and Blair, our two great war leaders…’

4. To show how superior one is to history by mocking it – ‘When our Dear Führer came to power..’ (p.75) ‘… our dear Führer’s old Olympic stadium..’ (p.147) ‘our gallant British forces liberating the imperilled Suez Canal..’ (p.255)

5. To conceal anger beneath mockery – ‘As a young woman she [Sasha’s mother] was of course repeatedly raped by our victorious Russian liberators’ (p.78) Referring to the Stasi interrogation centre in East Germany as ‘… our White Hotel in East Prussia..’ (p.189)

6. To puff up his characters in that mock heroic, facetiously superior upper class drawl – ‘our very own hero of the hour’; one of the teenage actors is described as ‘Lexham, our Jamaican Macbeth…’ (p.136)

7. Loftily mocking the act of communication – ‘… for the benefit of our British and American readers…’ (p.86)

8. Normal, standard use of ‘our’, striking for its rarity – ‘Our targets for tonight are…’ (p.84) ‘our fellow activists..’ (p.90)

9. ‘Our’ as a dialect usage of working class people – Kate’s working class, northern father always refers to her as ‘our Kate’ (p.204)

10. Most of all for a self-mocking exaggeration of his own characters, as if the whole novel is a witty in-joke among public school People Like Us:

  • Ulrike our moral angel, our leading leftist, high priestess of the Alternative Life… (p.83)
  • Sasha our charismatic orator, our coming man for the leader’s throne, our Quasimodo of the social genesis of knowledge… (p.90)
  • Sasha our charismatic Socrates.. (p.119)
  • Sasha the great double agent (p.264)

This kind of pompous, overblown, superior, knowing mockery stands in for analysis throughout the book. What underlies all its forms is the breezily arrogant superiority of the true public school article, the upper-class disdain for the ordinary view, for normal phrasing, for anything which isn’t detached and ironised.

Cartoon characterisation

Something similar is going on with the tendency not just to name a character, but repeatedly to blow him up to mock-heroic proportions. We see and hear a lot of Ted’s thoughts and actions, but the narrator also overblows and mocks him in a series of comic, third-person cartoons as if he was a cardboard cutout of a human being:

  • First thing in the morning the chaste English boarding-school boy and as yet unbruised recruit to the cause of world liberation springs forth from his field bed… (p.71)
  • The good soldier is not fazed… The aspiring novelist likes to spread his notebook… (p.72)
  • ‘Ted Mundy, life’s eternal apprentice…’ (p.100)
  • ‘The former head prefect and cricketing hero signs up with a rural preparatory school…’ (p.106)

Why describe a character’s emotions when you can big him up with bombastic, if self-mocking, grandiosity? This mockery owes more to P.G. Wodehouse than the thriller tradition.

Endless comparisons to boarding school

So many English public school-educated writers seem never to escape their childhood, with the result that almost everything around them reminds them of their dear old alma mater:

  • Teddy tends to announce himself ‘in his best head prefect voice.’ (p.63)
  • Life in Berlin begins ‘for the chaste English boarding-school boy.’ (p.71)
  • Those students who don’t leave the squat in summer are ‘like uncollected children in a boarding school.’ (p.73)
  • When Ted meets his MI6 controller, his first thought is ‘whether Amory is one of the prefects who beat him in the washroom.’ (p.97)
  • As he starts his career as a spy, Ted is so scared ‘it’s like opening the bowling for the public schools at Lords every time…’ (p.225)
  • ‘To Mundy they look more like cricket umpires than removal men.’ (p.331)
  • When he puts her on the plane to Turkey, Zara clings so tight to Mundy, that ‘he imagines she is his daughter and he is sending her off to boarding school against her will.’ (p.345)

Is that really the most powerful comparison the text can think up for a terrified woman clinging to her only security in the world? This continual drawing of the wider world back into the bubble of upper-class English public school experiences, slang and attitudes, has a reductive effect on the imagination. Although the narrative travels widely across Europe and tells you it is taking in the world-spanning implications of the American military-industrial complex, it is fighting a losing battle against the narrowing impact of the le Carré’s relentlessly public school and cricket mindset.

The big issue

Belatedly, I realised that most of JLC’s post-Cold War novels gravitate around a Big Geopolitical ‘Issue’. (It reminds me a little of Charles Dickens’s early plan to write a novel about each of the vices, starting with Hypocrisy in Martin Chuzzlewit and then Pride in Dombey and Son, before he quietly dropped his plan.) Thus each of the novels deals with a Big Topic:

  • The Night Manager – the international arms trade
  • Our Game – not clear
  • The Tailor of Panama – US intervention in Latin America
  • Single & Single – City institutions laundering money for the wicked (Georgian drug suppliers)
  • The Constant Gardener – multinational pharmaceuticals resorting to conspiracy and murder to protect their profits
  • Absolute Friends – untamed aggression of global hyperpower (America) run riot

The big issue which this long fiction leads up to is the alleged stranglehold on Western culture, education and media exercised by a new, all-pervading and toxic American military-industrial complex.

‘If you tell a big lie long enough everyone will believe it,’ le Carré has Sasha yell at Ted – ‘and then anybody who speaks out against it can be labelled mad.’

Dimitri has a long speech about the evil of Bush and Blair, the wickedness of their war, the stifling of free speech. Ted nods his acquiescence.

Does it matter that a thriller contains or ends on some kind of political message? Not necessarily, no.

Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson novels contain references throughout to the wickedness of the East German state, without denting the novels’ plausibility because the thought is integrated into the narrative.

Similarly, Robert Harris’ terrifying bestseller Fatherland contains harrowing indictments of the Nazi régime, but the indictment is wholly integrated into the plot, and the seamlessness of that integration is a large part of the reason it is so satisfying as a novel.

Martin Cruz Smith’s novels manage to be very exciting but at the same time to shed fascinating light on the repressive nature of the countries and systems he is depicting (Russia, Cuba).

Even a comedy like Tom Sharpe’s Wilt On High can end on a page-long diatribe against the madness of nuclear weapons and not be damaged by it because it arises naturally out of the plot (and is all the more effective because Sharpe and his character Wilt are, on the whole, right wing and ridicule lefty politics so their anger is all the more impactful).

But it fails in this novel because it is simply so unsubtle. If JLC was already angry at the lies and hypocrisies of ‘our masters’ in the 1990s, he goes bananas after the invasion of Iraq. Just before this novel was published he wrote an opinion piece in the Times newspaper, The United States of America Has Gone Mad (link below) which I found embarrassing in its strident simple-mindedness.

If I was Arundhati, George, Naomi and all the rest, I would be flattered to be namechecked in a John le Carré novel, but also embarrassed at the guileless shoutiness of the context.

At key moments, and their central points, all these books lack analytical intelligence. Emotional depth? Often. Colourful ability with language? Yes (if much given to bombast and exaggeration). Cunning plotlines? Certainly. The artful creation of multi-levelled timeframes? Emphatically yes.

But when a character has to explain the exact geopolitical crux, the issue firing the whole narrative, the great wrong which must be understood – time and again JLC gives the speech to a drunk, bombastic, over-the-top or imbecile character: to the moronic Larry Pettifer in Our Game, to the oafish Jonah in Tailor of Panama, to the ridiculously implausible ‘Dimitri’ in Absolute Friends.

It is revealing that the first two characters are bigged up to ‘legendary’ status – ‘the one and only, the irrepressible, the immortal Jonah’ – because in these crux scenes le Carré doesn’t analyse (let alone dramatise): he creates a loud, shouty character and effectively says, ‘Look everybody – this guy is really famous and really clever and he thinks it’s a bad thing, so you should, too.’

It’s also dismayingly characteristic that these Voices of Truth swear a lot as if swearing guarantees the truth o what’s being sworn about:

‘I am talking world domination by the Yellow Man, and the end of fucking civilisation as we know it, even in the fucking Emerald Isle…’ (Jonah, Tailor of Panama, p.290)

‘West’s compassioned out, Timbo,’ he announces to the ceiling, not bothering to stifle a huge yawn. ‘Running on empty. Fuck us.’ (Larry, Our Game, p.138)

Instead of subtle and understated analysis, le Carré has the key explanations of the big theme of each of his post-Cold War novels delivered by over-hyped, swearing drunks.

What’s ultimately so dismaying and demoralising isn’t what le Carré is saying, it’s its complete unoriginality: when you read the long speeches the characters are given telling you that the invasion of Iraq wasn’t justified, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the Bush presidency was electorally invalid, that Tony Blair shamelessly sucked up to George Dubya for nothing, that the hysteria around the War on Terror was cranked up by the corporate-owned media in order to boost the profits of the arms industry, and so on – who among le Carré’s liberal readership is going to disagree with any of this?

Like all his readers I know al this already because I read about it in the papers all the time. I just don’t care very much because:

a) There is nothing I can do about it.
b) It is the way of the world. Which war in the past 150 years wasn’t good for the arms industry? Which British Prime Minister of the last sixty years hasn’t sucked up to an over-mighty America?
c) That was then. Things have moved on a lot since 2004.

Either le Carré’s arguments should be made much more forensically, analytically, dispassionately, and zero in on precise wrong-doings; or they should be woven much more cannily into the narrative (à la Robert Harris’s much more canny novels). But they do neither and feel too simple minded to be effective, too bolted onto the main plot to have as much dramatic impact as they should.

The combined effect, in this novel especially, is to make le Carré’s views look childish and shallow.

My little pony

I have a bet with my son that every post-Cold War le Carré novel will contain a reference to a private school character having a little pony. In his previous three novels key characters have shared memories of their first ponies or of competing in the local gymkhana (Oliver in Single & Single, posh totty Francesca in The Tailor of Panama, Quayle finds a photo of Tessa’s first pony in The Constant Gardener).

Disappointingly, the main character in Absolute Friends does not have a my-little-pony memory but… the receptionist at the Bedford Square house where Ted goes to see his back-up team during his spying days, is ‘a jolly girl called Laura with freckles and a pony club smile’ (p.210).

So I’m still just about winning my bet. I just need there to be a pony reference in his last four novels and I win a pound.

Credit

Absolute Friends by John le Carré was published in 2004 by Hodder and Stoughton. Page references are to the 2004 Coronet paperback edition.

Related links

John Le Carré reviews

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by Simon on March 14, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 14, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/absolute-friends-john-le-carre/