All posts tagged Finland

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson (1972)

When the southwest wind was blowing, the days seemed to follow one another without any kind of change or occurrence; day and night, there was the same even, peaceful rush of wind. Papa worked at his desk. The nets were set out and taken in. They all moved about the island doing their own chores, which were so natural and obvious that no one mentioned them, neither for praise nor sympathy. It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace. (p.41)

Tove Jansson (1914-2001) is famous for writing the Moomin comic strips, picture books and stories which are still phenomenally popular 70 years after the first book was published (1945), and have been turned into cartoons, animations, TV series, movies, plays and even an opera, as well as a world of merchandise.

The last Moomin book is the sad and melancholy Moominvalley in November, published in 1970. It’s around this time that she made the transition to writing fiction for adults. The semi-autobiographical Sculptor’s Daughter: A Childhood Memoir came out in 1968 (her father and mother were both artists). But her big breakthrough came with The Summer Book, published in 1972, which has come to be regarded as a classic across Scandinavia.

The Summer Book

It’s short, at just 150 pages of text. It’s divided into 22 ‘chapters’ or sections i.e. the average length is just under seven pages.

The shortest is Moonlight at just two pages. Little Sophia wakes in the middle of the night to see the fire in the stove reflected several times in the windows. She tugs her Grandmother’s plait and Grandmother wakes up and reassures her that all is well. Slowly little Sophia drifts off to sleep again. Her father gets up and puts more wood in the stove.

As this chapter/story/anecdote suggests, the tales are all set on a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland (very like the ones Jansson spent her childhood on and, specifically, like the one where she built a cabin and lived with her partner for most of adult life).

They focus on the relationship between an unnamed Grandmother and little Sophia. Grandmother is 85 (p.108). Her husband is long dead and referred to only once. The only other member of the household is Sophia’s father – Papa – who occasionally appears but never speaks. He is in his room writing, tending the house, fixing things around the island or – in the one story he dominates, The Enormous Plastic Sausage – buying loads of bulbs and saplings to plant across the island.

We learn that Sophia’s mother is dead (p.25), not least in the story where they make a little model ‘Venice’ out of stones and twigs on a mossy bog near the house and Sophia imagines her mother living inside a splendid palace on the Grand Canal.

The family has lived on the island for 47 years (p.101). They know every inch, they know the impact of the seasons, they know the feel of all the winds and every type of sunrise or storm.

It’s not really a novel. Certainly the same characters recur in every ‘chapter’ but there is no continuous narrative and no attempt to explore the ‘development’ of character, two attributes of your traditional novel.

It’s more like a collection of epiphanies or insights, what reading the American Beat writers taught me to think of as moments of satori, a Buddhist term for enlightenment.

The cat

Their point is their apparent inconsequentiality, an elliptical quality which is, nonetheless, charged with meaning. In The Cat Sophia is given a fisherman’s kitten which quickly grows out of being fluffy and cuddly and turns into a lean killer. Sophia grows to hate the way it brings bird corpses into the house. She shouts at it but the indifferent cat stalks out to do more hunting. Neighbours arrive by boat with a fluffy cat which they thought would catch mice but doesn’t, so they agree to swap fluffy for Sophia’s killer. Sure enough fluffy is lovely and cuddly and docile to stroke, and snuggles on Sophia’s pillow at night. After a few days she wants her killer cat back.

What you make of that, what conclusions you draw about human nature, about love, about the relationship between humans and animals or their pets – well, it’s all entirely up to you.

Unsentimental

So the anecdotes are not sentimental, they are not ‘nice’. The blurb around the book suggests it’s about one summer when a grandmother and her grand-daughter grow close but that’s very misleading. Grandmother is not a nice old lady. She smokes (though she’s struggling to cut down), fumbles with her false teeth, feels dizzy, and needs regular rests – an accurate depiction of old age.

The old woman stood up too quickly. Her walking stick rolled down into the pool, and the whole rock became an uncertain, hostile surface, arching and twisting in front of her. (p.64)

And, strikingly, she’s not even that fond of the child.

‘Bloody nitwit,’ Grandmother muttered to herself. (p.63)

Quite regularly she just wants to get away from the needy, whining, little girl to have a nap or be by herself. She gets angry. She has another crafty fag. She swears.

‘The fishing’s bloody awful,’ Grandmother said. (p.62)

She creeps off into the little pine forest by herself or lies on the moss watching the leaves or looks down at the tadpoles in a pool. She is very ungrandmotherly. She is, in other words, entirely human and wonderful.

Sophia is persistent but capricious. She’s probably what middle-class English mums I know would call rude. Certainly blunt.

‘When are you going to die?’ the child asked.
And Grandmother answered, ‘Soon. But that is not the least concern of yours.’
‘Why?’ her grandchild asked.
She didn’t answer. She walked out on the rock and on towards the ravine. (p.22)

Their lack of English good manners and hesitancy are a big part of the appeal. Quite routinely, they get pettish, fretsome and plain angry – very angry – with each other.

Both of them tend to obsess about little things and then forget them and walk away. Jannson magically conveys the strange, intense but shallow passions of childhood. ‘Oh well, it’s broken, let’s play a different game now.’

Many of these involve making and creating. Grandmother is always carving shapes out of driftwood or building a little Venetian palace out of balsa wood and she inspires her grand-daughter to follow suit.

Satori is a term from Zen Buddhism and the stories’ elliptical quality keeps prompting comparison with haikus or Chinese painting, with traditions of art which are a) set in an unspoilt natural world b) spare and minimal in style, with the minimum amount of brushstrokes or description c) hint and suggest some deeper meaning or purpose but are never vulgar enough to spell it out.

Nature notes

Sophia and Grandmother’s little adventures play out against the massive unchanging landscape of this isolated Nordic island and, like a painting, between the moving human figures, you see all kinds of glimpses of the natural world – the trees, the rocks, the moss, the lichens, the seaweed and driftwood, sometimes described plainly and factually, sometimes charged with Jansson’s special tone, a kind of matter-of-fact marvelling, or a matter-of-fact prose style in which the marvelling is implicit, immanent.

It’s a funny thing about bogs. You can fill them with rocks and sand and old logs and make a little fenced-in yard on top with a woodpile and a chopping block – but bogs go right on behaving like bogs. Early in the spring they breathe ice and make their own mist, in remembrance of the time when they had black water and their own sedge blossoming untouched. (p.32)

The poetry is in the simple knowledgeability which, because it is conveyed in such spare prose, reads like wisdom.

Moss is terribly frail. Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on it, it dies. Eider ducks are the same – the third time you frighten them up from their nests, they never come back. (p.29)

Since most of us live in towns and cities and spend all our work time and most of our leisure staring at screens (as you are right now), anyone with real in-depth knowledge of the natural world now appears to us like a shaman from a distant tribe, bearing wisdom most of us have long lost. So there’s a basic nature nostalgia running through the book. This was, after all, 1972, 45 years ago. We’ve destroyed a lot of the natural world since then. Anyone who comes with reports of the world beyond our air-conditioned offices is treated like a messenger from exotic worlds.

She heard the cry of the long-tailed ducks. They are called scolders, because their cry is a steady, chiding chatter, farther and farther away, farther and farther out. People rarely see them. They are as secretive as corncrakes. But a corncrake hides in a meadow all alone, while the long-tails are out beyond the farthest islands in enormous wedding flocks, singing all through the spring night. (p. 33)

Some of the decorating and arts and crafts playing with bits and bobs from the natural world morph seamlessly from childreny crafts into the beginnings of pagan ritual.

Sophia and Grandmother carried everything they found to the magic forest. They would usually go at sundown. They decorated the ground under the trees with bone arabesques like ideographs, and when they finished their patterns they would sit for a while and talk, and listen to the movements of the birds in the thicket. (p.31)

And some of the stories reference Nordic traditions which are novel to us Anglo-Saxons, like the big celebrations on Midsummer’s Eve which, however, are treated to Jansson’s anti-romantic, dis-illusioned approach. The Midsummer Eve described in Midsummer is a total washout, with torrential rain preventing almost any fires being lit, and all but one of the fireworks bought for the occasion being too wet to light.

Setting the tone

All these elements are very well announced in the opening paragraphs of the first story, which set the natural scene, the irritating inquisitiveness of the little girl and the short-tempered character of Grandmother.

It was an early, very warm morning in July, and it had rained during the night. The bare granite steamed, the moss and crevices were drenched with moisture, and all the colours everywhere had deepened. Below the veranda, the vegetation in the morning shade was like a rainforest of lush, evil leaves and flowers, which she had to be careful not to break as she searched. She held one hand in front of her mouth and was constantly afraid of losing her balance.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Sophia.
‘Nothing,’ her grandmother answered. ‘That is to say,’ she added angrily, ‘I’m looking for my false teeth.’ (p.21)

Anthony Burgess suggested that all novels should be read twice, once to find out what happens, and once to see how it was done. But this is a book to read multiple times, in order to savour the sharp tang of the dry, astringent prose, and to let the brisk unsentimental depiction of people and the natural world sink really deep into your soul.

Credit

Sommarboken by Tove Jansson was published in Finland in 1972. This translation by Thomas Teal was published by Random House in 1974. Page references are to the Sort of Books paperback edition published in 2003.

Related links

Tove Jansson’s books for adults

Novels

The Summer Book (1972)
Sun City (1974)
The True Deceiver (1982)
The Field of Stones (1984)
Fair Play (1989)

Short story collections

Sculptor’s Daughter (1968)
The Listener (1971)
Art in Nature (1978)
Travelling Light (1987)
Letters from Klara and Other Stories (1991)
A Winter Book (1998)

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by Simon on November 24, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in Novel, Short stories
Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on November 24, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/11/24/the-summer-book-tove-jansson/

The Vanquished by Robert Gerwarth (2016)

‘Everywhere counter-revolutionaries run about and swagger; beat them down! Beat their heads where you find them! If counter-revolutionaries were to gain the upper hand for even a single hour, there will be no mercy for any proletarian. Before they stifle the revolution, suffocate them in their own blood!’
(Hungarian communist Tibor Szamuely, quoted page 134)

The sub-title sums it up – Why the First World War Failed to End 1917-1923. We Brits, like the French, date the end of the Great War to Armistice Day 11 November 1918, and the two-minute silence every year confirms our happy sense of finality and completion.

But across a wide swathe of Eastern Europe, from Finland, through the Baltic states, all of Russia, Poland, down through the Balkans, across Anatolia and into the Middle East, the violence didn’t end. In many places it intensified, and dragged on for a further four or five years.

Individual studies have long been available on the plight of individual nations – revolutionary Russia, post-Ottoman Turkey and so on. But Gerwarth claims his book is the first one to bring together the tumult in all these places and deal with them as symptoms of one deep cause: losing the war not only led to the break-up of Europe’s defeated empires – the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire – it undermined the very idea of traditional governments and plunged huge areas into appalling violence.

Gerwarth categorises the violence into a number of types:

  1. Wars between countries (of the traditional type) – thus war between Greece and Turkey carried on until 1923 (200,000 military casualties), Russia’s invasion of Poland in 1920 (250,000 dead or missing), Romania’s invasion of Hungary in 1919-1920.
  2. Nationalist wars of independence i.e. wars to assert the independence of ethnic groups claiming a new autonomy – the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Ukrainians.
  3. Revolutionary violence i.e. the attempt to overthrow existing governments in the name of socialist or other political causes. There were communist putsches in Berlin, Munich and Vienna. Hungary became a communist state under Bela Kun for 115 days in 1919.
  4. Civil wars – the Russian civil war was the biggest, with some 3 million dead in its three year duration, but Gerwarth also describes the Finnish Civil War, which I’d never heard of, in which over 1% of the population died and whose ramifications, apparently, continue to this day.

The lesson is best summarised in a blurb on the back of the book by the ever-incisive Max Hastings. For many nations and peoples, violent conflict had started even before 1914 and continued for another three, four or five after 1918 — until, exhausted by conflict, for these people, order became more important than freedom. As the right-wing Waldemar Pabst, murderer of Rosa Luxemberg and Karl Liebknecht and organiser of Austria’s paramilitary Heimwehr put it, the populations of these chaotic regions needed:

the replacement of the old trinity of the French Revolution [liberté, egalité, fraternité]… with a new trinity: authority, order and justice.’ (quoted on p.141)

The communist coups in all these countries were defeated because:

  1. the majority of the population didn’t want it
  2. the actual ‘class enemies’, the landowners, urban bourgeoisie, conservative politicians, were able to call on large reserves of battle-hardened officer class to lead militias and paramilitaries into battle against the ‘reds’

No wonder T.S. Eliot, in 1923, referred to James Joyce’s use of myth in Ulysses as the only way to make sense of ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.

Gerwarth’s book gives the detail of this panorama, especially in the relatively unknown regions of central and eastern Europe – Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania – and with special attention to the catastrophic Greek invasion of Turkey and ensuing war.

Turkey

Turkey experienced the Young Turk revolution against the old rule of the Sultan in 1908. During the ensuing confusion across the Ottoman Empire, Austro-Hungary annexed the Ottoman territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Then in 1911, across the Mediterranean, Italy invaded and seized modern-day Libya from the Turks. The Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913 led to the loss of almost all of the Empire’s European territories, and was followed by a series of coups and counter coups in Istanbul.

All this upheaval was before Turkey even entered the Great War, which it did with an attack on the Russian Black Sea coast in October 1914. Skipping over the Great War itself – which featured, for Turkey, the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Arab Revolt of 1916 – defeat in the war led the Allies to dismember the remainder of the Ottoman Empire by the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920.

Opposition to this treaty led to the Turkish War of Independence led by Mustafa Kemal (later given the surname ‘Atatürk’) and the final abolition of the sultanate and the old Ottoman forms of government in 1922.

At which point the Greeks invaded, hoping to take advantage of Turkey’s weakness and seize the Aegean coast and islands. But the Greek attack ran out of steam, the tide turned and Turkish forces under Atatürk swept the Greek forces back down to the sea. Greek atrocities against Turkish villagers was followed by counter-reprisals by the Turks against the Greek population of the coast, which escalated into the mass exchange of populations. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were forced to flee the Turkish mainland.

The point is that by 1923 Turkey had been in violent political turmoil for some 15 years. You can see why the majority of the population will have opted, in Max Hasting’s words, for Order over Freedom, for any party which could guarantee peace and stability.

Brutalisation and extermination

Gerwarth questions the ‘brutalisation thesis’, an idea I had broadly subscribed to.

This theory is that the Great War, with its four long years of grindingly brutal bloodshed, dehumanised enormous numbers of fighting men, who returned to their respective societies hardened to violence, desensitised, and that this permanently brutalised European society. It introduced a new note of total war, of the killing of civilian populations, the complete destruction of towns and cities, which hadn’t existed before. Up till now I had found this thesis persuasive.

Gerwarth says modern scholarship questions the brutalisation thesis because it can be shown that the vast majority of troops on all sides simply returned to their societies, were demobbed and got on with civilian lives in peace. The percentage who went into paramilitaries and Freikorps units, the numbers which indulged in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary violence, was very small.

But he partly contradicts himself by going on to say that the violence immediately after the war was new in nature: all the parties in the Great War were fighting, ultimately, to wring concessions from opposing regimes which they envisaged staying in place and legitimacy. This is how war had been fought in Europe for centuries. You defeat your enemy; he cedes you this or that bit of territory or foreign colony, and things continue as before.

But in the post-war period a completely new ideology appeared – something unprecedented in history – the wish not just to defeat but to exterminate your enemy, whether they be class enemies (hated by communists) or ethnic enemies (hated by all brands of nationalists) or ‘reds’ (hated by conservatives and the new fascist parties alike).

This extermination ideology, mixed with the unprecedented collapse of empires which had given rise to a host of new small nations, created a new idea – that these new small nations emerging in and after the war needed to feel ‘cleansed’ and ‘pure’. Everyone not genuinely German or Czech or Hungarian or Ukrainian or whatever, must be expelled.

This new doctrine led to the vast relocations of peoples in the name of what a later generation would call ‘ethnic cleansing’, but that name doesn’t really capture the extraordinary scale of the movements and the depths of the hatreds and bitternesses which it unleashed.

For example, the final peace in the Turko-Greek war resulted in the relocation of some 2 million civilians (1.2 million Greeks expelled from Turkey, 400,000 Muslims expelled from Greece). Huge numbers of other ethnic groups were moved around between the new post-war nations e.g. Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc.

And of course Britain experienced none of this. Between the wars we found Europe east of Germany a dangerous and exotic place (see the pre-war thrillers of Eric Ambler for the noir feel of spies and secret police they convey) but also left us incapable of really imagining what it felt like to live in such completely fractured and damaged societies.

The ‘only now…’ school of history

Although the facts, figures, atrocities, murders, rapes and violence which plagued this period are hard to read about, one of the most striking things in the whole book comes in Gerwarth’s introduction where he discusses the ebb and flow of fashion, or waves of historical interpretation regarding this period.

He dismisses traditional French and especially British attitudes towards Eastern Europe and the Balkans as a form of ‘orientalism’ i.e. the racist belief that there is something intrinsically violent and brutal about the people of those regions. Part of this attitude no doubt stemmed from Great War-era propaganda which portrayed the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires as somehow intrinsically despotic and repressive. Part from the political violence which plagued these countries in the post war era, and which generally ended up with them being ruled by ultra-conservative or fascist regimes.

Modern scholarship, Gerwarth says, has switched to the opposite view, with many modern historians claiming those regimes were more liberal than is often claimed, more stable and more open to reform than the wartime allies claimed. As he puts it:

This reassessment has been an emphatic one for both Imperial Germany and the Hapsburg Empire, which appear in a much more benign (or at least more ambivalent) light to historians today than they did in the first eight decades after 1918. (p.7)

That last phrase leapt out at me. He seems to be saying that modern historians, working solely from written documents, claim to know more about these empires than people alive at the time, than contemporaries who travelled through and experienced them and encountered and spoke with their rulers or populations and fought against them.

Quite casually, it seems to me, he is making a sweeping and quite unnerving statement about the control which historians exert over ‘reality’. Gerwarth’s remark echoes similar sentiments I’ve recently read by historians like Rana Mitter (China’s War with Japan 1937–1945) and Chris Wickham (The Inheritance of Rome) to the effect that only now are we getting to properly understand period A or B of history because of reasons x, y or z (the most common reason for reassessments of 20th century history being the new access historians have to newly-opened archives in the former Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, China).

I am a sceptic. I don’t believe we can know anything with much certainty. And a fan of later Wittgenstein who theorised that almost all communication – talking, texts, movies, you name it – are best understood as games, games with rules and regulations but games nonetheless, which change and evolve as the players do, and are interpreted differently by different players, at different times.

Currently there are some seven and a half billion humans alive on the planet – so there’s the potential for at least seven billion or so interpretations of anything.

If academic historians produce narratives which broadly agree it is because they’re playing the same academic game according to the same rules – they share agreed definitions of what history actually is, of how you define ‘evidence’, of what historical scholarship is, agreement about appropriate formats to present it in, about style and voice and rhetorics (dispassionate, objective, factual etc).

But the fact that the same set of evidence – the nature of, say, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, can give rise to such wildly divergent interpretations, even among the professionals, only fuels my profound scepticism about our ability to know anything. For decades historians have thought the Austro-Hungarian Empire was a repressive autocracy which was too encrusted and conservative to cope with changes in technology and society and so was doomed to collapse. Now, Gerwarth informs me, modern scholarship claims that, on the contrary, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was more flexible and adaptive than its contemporaries or anyone writing in the last 80 years has thought.

For contemporary historians to claim that only now can the truth revealed strikes me as, to put it politely, optimistic.

  1. Unless you are a religious zealot, there is no absolute truth
  2. There are plenty of dissenting voices to any historical interpretation
  3. If there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that future historians will in turn disagree and reinterpret everything all over again a) because fashions change b) because they’ll be able to do so in the light of events which haven’t happened yet and trends which aren’t clear to us c) because they have to come up with new theories and interpretations in order to keep their jobs.

When I was a young man ‘we’ i.e. all the students I knew and most of the liberal media and political commentators, all thought Ronald Reagan was a doddery imbecile. Now I read books about the Cold War which claim he was among the all-time greatest American Presidents for playing the key role in the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism.

Which story is true ? Or are they both true and will more ‘truths’ be revealed in the future? If Vladimir Putin unleashes a nuclear war, will the collapse of communism – which 20 years later has given rise to a new aggressive Russian nationalism – come, in time, to be seen as a bad thing, as the prelude to some disastrous world war?

History is, in the end, a matter of opinion, a clash of opinions. Historians may well use evidence scrupulously to support thoroughly researched points of view – but they can only access a subset of the evidence (no historian can read everything, no historian can read every human language, no book can reference every text ever written during a period) and will tend to use that evidence selectively to support the thesis or idea they have developed.

Therefore, I don’t believe that any of the history books I’m currently reading reveal the only-now-can-it-be-told truth.

But I do understand that academics are under more pressure than ever before to justify their salaries by churning out articles and books. It follows that historians, like literary critics and other humanities scholars, must come up with new interpretations, or apply their interpretations to new subjects, simply in order to keep their jobs. It’s in this context that I read the pronouncements of only now historians – as the kind of rhetoric which gets articles published and books commissioned, which can be proclaimed in lecture theatres, at international conferences and – if you’re lucky and manage to wangle a lucrative TV deal – spoken to camera (as done by Mary Beard, Niall Ferguson, Ruth Goodman, Bettany Hughes, Dan Jones, David Reynolds, Simon Schama, Dan Snow, David Starkey, Lucy Worsley, Michael Wood).

In other words, I read statements like this as reflections of the economic and cultural climate, or discourse, of our times – heavily embedded in the economic necessity of historians to revise and review their predecessors’ findings and assumptions in order to keep their jobs. Maybe these new interpretations are bolstered by more data, more information and more research than ever before. Maybe they are closer to some kind of historical ‘truth’. But sure as eggs is eggs, in a generation’s time, they in their turn will be outmoded and outdated, fading in the sunlight outside second-hand bookshops.

For now the new historical consensus is a new twist, a new wrinkle, which appeals by its novelty and its exciting ability to generate new ideas and insights. It spawns new discourse. It creates new vistas of text. It continues the never-ending game of hide-and-seek which is ‘the humanities’.

History is a cousin of literature with delusions of grandeur – at least literature knows that it is made up. And both genres, anyway, come under the broader rubric of rhetoric i.e. the systematic attempt to persuade the reader of something.

Notes and bibliography

One of the blurbs on the back says Gerwarth’s achievement has been to synthesise an unprecedented amount of primary and secondary material into his new narrative and this is certainly supported by the elephantine size of the book’s appendices. The book has 446 numbered pages but no fewer than 161 of these are made up of the acknowledgements (5 pages), index (22 pages), bibliography (62 pages) and endnotes (72 pages). If you subtract the Introduction (15 pages), Epilogue (19 pages) and the three blank pages at the start of each of the three parts, then there’s only 446-198 = 248 pages of main text. Only 55% of the book’s total pages are actual text.

But it’s the length of the bibliography and endnotes which impresses – 134 pages! I think it’s the only set of endnotes I know which is so long that it has 8 pages of glossy illustrations embedded within it, rather than in the actual text.

Conclusion

As with so many histories of the 20th century I am left thinking that humanity is fundamentally incapable of governing itself.

Bumbling fools I can see why so many people believe in a God — because they just can’t face the terrible thought that this is it – Donald Trump and Theresa May, Kim Jong-un and Vladimir Putin, these are as good as you’re going to get, humanity! These are the people in charge and people like this will always be in charge: not the terrifyingly efficient totalitarian monsters of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, but bumbling fools, incompetents and paranoid bullies.

The most ill-fated bumblers in this book must be the rulers of post-war Greece who decided (egged on by the foolish David Lloyd-George) to invade the western coast of Turkey in 1921. The book ends with a comprehensive account of their miserable failure, which resulted not only in appalling massacres and bloodshed as the humiliated Greek army retreated to the coast and was shipped back to Greece, but led to the expulsion of all Greek communities from Turkey – some 1.2 million people – vastly swelling the Greek population and leaving the country almost bankrupt for decades to come.

Hats off to the Greek Prime Minister who supervised all this, Eleftherios Venizelos. Well done, sir.

Intractable But half the reasons politicians appear idiots, especially in retrospect, is because they are dealing with impossible problems. The current British government which is bumbling its way through Brexit cannot succeed because they have been set an impossible task.

Similarly, the Western politicians and their civil servants who met at Versailles after the Great War were faced with the impossible challenge of completely redrawing the map of all Europe as well as the Middle East, following the collapse of the Hohenzollern, Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires, with a view to giving the peoples of Europe their own ‘nation states’.

Quite simply, this proved too complicated a task to achieve, and their multiple failures to achieve it not only led to the Second World War but linger on to this day.

To this day ethnic tensions continue to exist in Hungary and Bulgaria about unfair borders, not to mention among the statelets of former Yugoslavia whose borders are very much still not settled.

And what about the violent can of worms which are the borders of the Middle East – Iraq, Syria, Jordan – or the claims for statehood of the Kurds, still the cause of terrorism and counter-terrorism in eastern Turkey, still fighting to maintain their independence in northern Iraq.

If the diplomats of Versailles failed to solve many of these problems, have we in our times done so very much better? How are Afghanistan and Iraq looking after 15 years of intervention from the West? Are they the peace-loving democracies which George W. Bush promised?

Not easy, is it? It’s so simple-minded to ridicule diplomats and civil servants of the Versailles settlements for making a pig’s ear of so much of their task. But have we done much better? Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Reading this book makes you begin to wonder whether managing modern large human societies peacefully and fairly may simply be impossible.

Rainbow nation or pogroms? Reading page after page after page describing how people who were essentially the same flesh and blood but happened to speak different languages or have different religious beliefs or wear funny hats or the wrong design of jacket, proved not only incapable of living together, but all too often turned on each other in homicidal frenzy — reading these 250 pages of mayhem, pogroms, genocide, mass rape and massacres makes me worry, as ever, about the viability of modern multicultural societies.

People from different races, ethnic groups, languages, religions and traditions living alongside each other all sounds fine so long as the society they inhabit is relatively peaceful and stable. But put it under pressure, submit it to economic collapse, poverty and hardship, and the history is right here to prove that time and again people will use the pettiest differences as excuses to start picking on each other. And that once the violence starts, it again and again spirals out of control until no one can stop it.

And sometimes the knowledge that we have created for ourselves just such a multicultural society, which is going to come under an increasing number of economic, social and environmental stresses in the years ahead, fills me with fear.

Petersburg. Belgrade. Budapest. Berlin. Vienna. Constantinople. The same scenes of social collapse, class war and ethnic cleansing took place across Europe and beyond between 1918 and 1923

Related links

Great War-related blog posts

1 Comment
by Simon on August 29, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in European History, Great War, History, War
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Posted by Simon on August 29, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/08/29/the-vanquished-robert-gerwarth/

Billion Dollar Brain by Len Deighton (1966)

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

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

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

Differences from previous novels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Narrator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As his bosses see him

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

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

Executive summary

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

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

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

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

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

The plot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killer?

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

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

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

Cast

London

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

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

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

Abroad

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

The Brain

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

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

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

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

Class consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

Olde England

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

Locations

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

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

Influence of films

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or TV:

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

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

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

Similes and style

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

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

Or:

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

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

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

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

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

Raymond Chandler

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

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

Humour

Still plenty of dead-pan humour.

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

Jazz

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

The movie

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

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

Credit

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

Related links

1966 Penguin paperback cover of Billion Dollar Brain

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

Related reviews

1966 in thrillers

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

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

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