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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Street smart

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

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

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

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

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

Security Service savvy

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

Textual apparatus

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

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

The Narrator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explanation 1

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

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

Explanation 2

Goes into more detail:

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

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

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

The Hallam connection

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

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

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

Cast

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

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

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

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

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

Multiple points of view

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

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

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

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

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

Smart similes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian sayings

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

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

Jokes

And jokes:

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

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

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

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

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

The anxiety of influence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foreign locations

• London
• Berlin
• the France-Spain border
• Prague

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

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

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

And foreign food:

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

Homosexuality

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

Cars

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

• Moskvich (Ch 1)
• Black Cadillac Eldorado (Ch 8)
• 1960 two door Taunus (Ch 6)
• White Sunbeam Alpine (Ch 18)
• White VW military police bus (Ch 19)
• Volga (Ch 20)
• White Citroen DS 19 (Ch 24)
• Mercedes 220 SE (Ch 24)

The movie

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

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

Credit

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

Related links

• Funeral In Berlin article on the Deighton Dossier
• Funeral in Berlin online (PDF)

Related reviews

• Len Deighton reviews

1964 in spy novels

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