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Billion Dollar Brain by Len Deighton (1966)

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

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

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

Differences from previous novels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Narrator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As his bosses see him

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

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

Executive summary

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

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

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

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

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

The plot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killer?

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

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

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

Cast

London

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

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

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

Abroad

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

The Brain

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

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

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

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

Class consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

Olde England

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

Locations

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

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

Influence of films

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or TV:

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

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

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

Similes and style

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

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

Or:

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

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

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

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

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

Raymond Chandler

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

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

Humour

Still plenty of dead-pan humour.

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

Jazz

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

The movie

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

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

Credit

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

Related 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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Posted by Simon on January 3, 2015

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

Funeral In Berlin by Len Deighton (1964)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Street smart

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

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

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

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

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

Security Service savvy

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

Textual apparatus

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

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

The Narrator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explanation 1

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

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

Explanation 2

Goes into more detail:

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

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

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

The Hallam connection

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

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

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

Cast

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

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

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

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

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

Multiple points of view

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

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

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

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

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

Smart similes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian sayings

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

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

Jokes

And jokes:

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

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

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

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

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

The anxiety of influence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foreign locations

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

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

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

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

And foreign food:

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

Homosexuality

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

Cars

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

The movie

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

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

Credit

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

Related links

Related reviews

1964 in spy novels

  • A Kind of Anger by Eric Ambler – Journalist Piet Maas is tasked with tracking down a beautiful woman who is the only witness to the murder of an exiled Iraqi colonel in a remote villa in Switzerland.
  • You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming – Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits.
  • Robert Harris’s debut novel, Fatherland (1992), is set in 1964, in an alternative unverse where Germany won the Second World War.
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by Simon on September 14, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 14, 2014

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