All posts tagged Mr Brown

The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie (1922)

‘If that draft treaty turns up—we’re done. England will be plunged in anarchy!’
(Mr Carter, not stinting on the melodrama)

‘Neither of you will leave this room alive!’
(Mwah ha ha, laughed the fiendish baddie, twirling his moustaches)

Certainly Mr Brown’s organization was a far-reaching concern. The common criminal, the well-bred Irish gentleman, the pale Russian, and the efficient German master of the ceremonies! Truly a strange and sinister gathering!
(Yes, it’s the cosmopolitan members of a secret international organisation devoted to sowing anarchy and revolution!)

‘We’ve tried all the orthodox ways, yes. But suppose we try the unorthodox. Tommy – let’s be adventurers!’
(Tuppence coming up with the starting premise of the story)

Christie’s second novel

Published in 1922, ‘The Secret Adversary’ was Agatha Christie’s second novel. Her husband, Archie Christie, playfully encouraged her to write another one after the first one had been published to moderate success in 1920. That debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, had been a straightforward detective story and introduced what nobody yet suspected would become the phenomenally successful figure of Hercule Poirot.

By contrast, Christie’s publisher, John Lane, weren’t at all keen on the new one and the way it represented such a drastic switch of genres. Because ‘The Secret Adversary’ is a full-on, John Buchanesque thriller, a spy story, all about a sinister international organisation planning to overthrow the government and spread anarchy on the streets of England, complete with secret meetings, kidnap, fake identities, frantic car chases and shoot-outs. To call it melodrama is to understate the preposterousness of the plot. But it is also very funny.

Setup

Prologue aboard a doomed ship

It was 2pm on the afternoon of May 7, 1915. The American ocean liner Lusitania had been struck by two German torpedoes in succession and was sinking rapidly. A young woman stands by the lifeboats when she is approached by a man who gets talking to her then asks a desperate favour. He hands her a bundle of papers and says they are vital to the safety of Britain. If he doesn’t make it, she must hand it in to the American embassy. She gets into a lifeboat. The ship sinks. The mysterious prologue ends…

Enter Tommy and Tuppence

The scene cuts to a London tea rooms and a completely different tone, as we are introduced to two spiffing young people, Tommy Beresford and Prudence ‘Tuppence‘ Cowley. They knew each other before the War and have now made an arrangement to lunch together.

Here’s Tuppence:

They were an essentially modern-looking couple as they sat there. Tuppence had no claim to beauty, but there was character and charm in the elfin lines of her little face, with its determined chin and large, wide-apart grey eyes that looked mistily out from under straight, black brows. She wore a small bright green toque over her black bobbed hair, and her extremely short and rather shabby skirt revealed a pair of uncommonly dainty ankles.

Later on:

‘Where’s this young lady I’ve been hearing such a lot about?’
Tommy introduced Tuppence.
‘Ha!’ said Sir William, eyeing her. ‘Girls aren’t what they used to be in my young days.’
‘Yes, they are,’ said Tuppence. ‘Their clothes are different, perhaps, but they themselves are just the same.’
‘Well, perhaps you’re right. Minxes then—minxes now!’
‘That’s it,’ said Tuppence. ‘I’m a frightful minx myself.’
‘I believe you,’ said the old gentleman, chuckling, and pinched her ear in high good-humour. Most young women were terrified of the ‘old bear’, as they termed him. Tuppence’s pertness delighted the old misogynist.
(Chapter 27)

Here’s Tommy:

His bared head revealed a shock of exquisitely slicked-back red hair. His face was pleasantly ugly—nondescript, yet unmistakably the face of a gentleman and a sportsman. His brown suit was well cut, but perilously near the end of its tether.

And later on, Mr Carter describes Tommy to no less a personage than the Prime Minister, who is (impressively) kept informed of their investigations:

‘Outwardly, he’s an ordinary clean-limbed, rather block-headed young Englishman. Slow in his mental processes. On the other hand, it’s quite impossible to lead him astray through his imagination. He hasn’t got any—so he’s difficult to deceive. He worries things out slowly, and once he’s got hold of anything he doesn’t let go. The little lady’s quite different. More intuition and less common sense. They make a pretty pair working together. Pace and stamina.’

Let’s be adventurers!

So here Tommy and Tuppence are together in this tea room and they quickly discover that neither of them can get a job and so they are both broke. Tommy had hopes of inheriting from his rich uncle but they’ve had a falling out and he can’t get a job no matter how hard he tries.

There was a silence, and then Tuppence burst out:
‘Money, money, money! I think about money morning, noon and night! I dare say it’s mercenary of me, but there it is!’
‘Same here,’ agreed Tommy with feeling.

Bantering conversation leads them to cook up the idea of forming a company – The Young Adventurers, Ltd – offering to hire themselves out, so they put an ad in The Times.

‘Two young adventurers for hire. Willing to do anything, go anywhere. Pay must be good. No unreasonable offer refused.’

High-speed summary

Whittington The plot is full of yawning holes from the beginning. Their first client, a Mr Whittington, approaches after overhearing them. He gives them his card and Tuppence goes to see him in his office at The Esthonia Glassware Co. Whittington offers her a large sum to impersonate someone in Paris but when he asks her name, on a whim she replies with the name ‘Jane Finn’, a name Tommy causally mentions having heard someone mention in the street on the way to his tea with Tuppence. She repeats it now as a lark and is astonished at the result, for it completely startles Whittington. It’s the first inkling we have that this Jane Finn is at the centre of the plot.

Advertising for leads Clearly perturbed, Whittington offers Tuppence £50. She realises that he thinks she’s blackmailing him. He asks her to return the next day for details of the job, but when she goes back, his office has been closed. Clearly there’s something in this woman’s name so Tommy and Tuppence advertise for information about Jane Finn and receive two replies, from a Mr Carter and a Mr Julius Hersheimmer.

Carter’s briefing When they go to meet Carter Tommy recognizes him from his wartime service in British Intelligence and also that it isn’t his real name. ‘Carter’ describes the story of the Lusitania, confirming our suspicion that in the scene in the Prologue, the girl who received the vital documents was this Jane Finn and the man who gave it to her, a British agent.

The secret treaty Carter explains that the document is a top secret diplomatic treaty and, if its terms were revealed, it would trigger widespread protests, a general strike and the fall of the government. As such, it is gold dust to enemies of Britain and any secret organisations devoted to sowing chaos and revolution! In fact, he goes on to explain, there is exactly such a secret organisation in operation, led by a fiendish mastermind known only by the name… Mr Brown! (Shame Christie couldn’t think up something more operatic, more James Bondish.)

‘Here is a certain man, a man whose real name is unknown to us, who is working in the dark for his own ends. The Bolshevists are behind the Labour unrest—but this man is behind the Bolshevists. Who is he? We do not know. He is always spoken of by the unassuming title of ‘Mr Brown.’ But one thing is certain, he is the master criminal of this age. He controls a marvellous organization. Most of the Peace propaganda during the war was originated and financed by him. His spies are everywhere. (Chapter 4)

Having explained all this, Carter hires Tommy and Tuppence to find her and, if possible, reveal the identity of the mysterious Mr Brown. But they must beware!

Those people are absolutely desperate and incapable of either mercy or pity. I feel that you probably underestimate the danger, and therefore warn you again that I can promise you no protection. (Chapter 9)

The first thing Tuppence does with the advance Carter gives them, is check into the Ritz Hotel and treat herself to a blowout meal.

Hersheimmer They then get in touch with the second replier, Julius Hersheimmer. He turns out to be a rangy, confident American multimillionaire, the kind of guy you want on your team. He replied to their ad because he’s none other than Jane Finn’s cousin.

If you think about it the Lusitania sank in 1915 and it is 1920…. hmmm… Where has Jane got to in the intervening years?

Rita Vandemeyer Tommy and Tuppence’s investigating leads them to the home of Mrs Marguerite ‘Rita’ Vandemeyer. She is a smooth, classy woman.

A woman was standing by the fireplace. She was no longer in her first youth, and the beauty she undeniably possessed was hardened and coarsened. In her youth she must have been dazzling. Her pale gold hair, owing a slight assistance to art, was coiled low on her neck, her eyes, of a piercing electric blue, seemed to possess a faculty of boring into the very soul of the person she was looking at. Her exquisite figure was enhanced by a wonderful gown of indigo charmeuse. And yet, despite her swaying grace, and the almost ethereal beauty of her face, you felt instinctively the presence of something hard and menacing, a kind of metallic strength that found expression in the tones of her voice and in that gimlet-like quality of her eyes.

Vandemeyer has powerful connections, including Whittington and Sir James Peel Edgerton, the famous King’s Counsellor i.e. lawyer.

Convinced she’s something to do with the missing girl, Tuppence (improbably enough) gets a job as Mrs Vandemeyer’s maid. She discovers a young lad hanging round Vandemeyer’s block of flats who earns money as a runner and fetcher, and persuades him to help her out, something he’s eager to do once he realises it’s all like something from the movies.

‘Lumme!’ came ecstatically from Albert. ‘It sounds more like the pictures every minute.’
(Chapter 9)

Edgerton is a frequent visitor to Mrs Vandemeyer’s apartment and realises Tuppence is more than she seems. He cryptically suggests that Tuppence might be better off working for someone else, which none of us understand but leads T&T to visit Edgerton at his office for a longer talk.

Found out But when Tuppence goes back to work at Vandemeyer’s apartment, the latter discovers she’s a fake and pulls a gun on her, until Tuppence, plucky gal that she is, wrests the gun away.

Locked up but murdered Tuppence offers Vandemeyer a large bribe to spill the whereabouts of Jane Finn, but when Hersheimmer and Edgerton arrive at the apartment, she screams and faints. They leave her in her bedroom but lock her in, because of their fear of Mr Brown. But when they return in the morning, Vandemeyer is dead! Someone got to her somehow, through a locked door!

Hersheimmer and Tuppence? In the middle of this mayhem, Hersheimmer is attracted to Tuppence and even makes a proposal of sorts, which throws her into confusion.

‘What about marriage?’ inquired Julius. ‘Got any views on the subject?’
‘I intend to marry, of course,’ replied Tuppence. ‘That is, if’—she paused, knew a momentary longing to draw back, and then stuck to her guns bravely—’I can find some one rich enough to make it worth my while. That’s frank, isn’t it? I dare say you despise me for it.’
‘I never despise business instinct,’ said Julius. ‘What particular figure have you in mind?’
‘Figure?’ asked Tuppence, puzzled. ‘Do you mean tall or short?’
‘No. Sum—income.’
‘Oh, I—I haven’t quite worked that out.’ (Chapter 15)

Boris The pair had learned that another of Mrs Vendemeyer’s contacts is a man named Boris Ivanovitch. Tommy tails Boris to a house in Soho but here the tables are turned. He smuggles himself in past the guard on the door, then hides himself so as to listen in on a meeting of the famous secret organisation, learning that the members assembled amount to ‘the Inner Ring’! Tommy overhears just enough to hint at large plans for chaos and disruption, when someone from behind coshes him and knocks him out. When he comes to, he’s in a windowless room like a cell. He’s been taken prisoner!

Annette helps Tommy Tommy’s incarceration in this windowless, lightless cell goes on for a surprising amount for time, for several days. Periodically he is served a meal by a French serving girl who he eventually discovers is called Annette. As you might expect, she develops a soft spot for handsome Tommy until, in a convoluted scene, she helps him to escape but, as they get to the door out into the London street, her nerve fails her and she refuses to leave. She’s obviously petrified of the gang. She’ll go back into the house and tell them that he (Tommy) overpowered her.

Tommy at liberty Surreally Tommy emerges from the incarceration which had become to feel genuinely claustrophobic to the reader into the cool night air of Soho. He walks back to the Ritz hoping to share everything he overheard in the Soho house, only to find that Tuppence has just left in a hurry.

Off to Yorkshire Tommy and Hersheimmer find the telegram that caused Tuppence to leave so hastily. It’s a note claiming to have been written by Tommy, although he’s never seen it before.

‘Come at once, Moat House, Ebury, Yorkshire, great developments—TOMMY.’

So she’s gone to get the first train to Yorkshire, so Tommy and Hersheimmer take a taxi to King’s Cross and catch the next train. From this point onwards they are on the trail of Tuppence, trying to find her. The boys get off at Ebury station and trudge out to the address in the message Tuppence was acting on only to find it a spooky, old abandoned house. The locals haven’t seen hide nor hair of Tuppence, despite the boys ransacking the locality. They waste a week looking. Obviously it was a decoy.

Jane discovered Back in London after all this, it is Edgerton who discovers Jane Finn, who is in hospital, recovering from losing her memory after an accident. So that’s how the five years since the Lusitania incident passed – Jane had an accident which gave her amnesia! Convenient.

Now she tells Edgerton, Tommy and Julius where she hid the treaty – in a picture frame back at the Soho house – but when they go there they find instead an ironic message from Mr Brown.

Earlier, While, searching for writing paper in Julius’s drawer, Tommy had found a photograph of Annette. Tommy concluded that Annette is the real Jane Finn and the Jane Finn they met was a plant to stop their investigation. He gets an original copy of the telegram which was sent to Tuppence and sees that her destination was altered on the copy he read, to the place in Yorkshire. Originally it read ‘Astley Priors, Gatehouse, Kent’. So, without Julius, Tommy and Albert proceed to the correct destination.

Comrade Kramenin Meanwhile Hersheimmer had pursued his own leads and discovered the arrival in London of a Russian conspirator, Kramenin who they know is associated with the secret organisation. Hersheimmer inveigles his way into Kramenin’s suite of rooms at Claridge’s (another grand London hotel) then pulls a revolver in the best American style (a gun, he later tells the girls, that he calls ‘Little Willy’ – paging Dr Freud!).

She’s in Kent So Hersheimmer terrifies Kramenin into revealing that Jane is being held at this place in Kent, Astley Priors, Gatehouse, Kent. It is a rest home or sanatorium. Jane is being housed there because she has severe amnesia. He forces Kramenin at gunpoint down through the hotel and into his car which he gets his chauffeur, George, to drive down to Gatehouse in Kent. So both Tommy and Julius are heading to Kent, separately.

At Gatehouse Julius forces Kramenin to knock on the door of the house in Kent, which is opened by none other than Whittington. Kramenin tells him there’s a big panic on and he needs both the young women he’s holding i.e. Finn and Tuppence. Whittington demands to know whether these are ‘his’ orders, before sending an orderly to fetch the two girls who emerge wrapped in cloaks. As Julius comes forward to help them some of Whittington’s gang suddenly recognise him. He pushes the girls into the car and tells George to floor it as one of the goons draws a gun and fire as the car screeches down the drive, with Julius standing up in the back and firing off shots at the baddies. All very cinematic!

Car chase The drive back to London is hairy, with the baddies’ car trying to head them off and a shootout, with shots only missing out heroes by a hair’s breadth, one of them nicking Julius – ‘Shucks, ladies, it’s only a scratch’ etc. When the car slows down at a crossroads, to everyone’s amazement, Tommy climbs in over the back. He had been hiding in the bushes at Astley wondering what to do when Julius’s car drew up. He watched the girls being brought out and, as the car pulled away, jumped on the back. He’s been clinging on for dear life for the last half an hour!

So the goodies are all reunited: Tommy and Tuppence and Julius and Jane, and you don’t need to be clairvoyant to see them pairing off very nicely. But things take an odd turn when Tommy forces the girls out of the car at gunpoint, tells them to go to the nearest train station and catch a train to London and make their way to Sir James’s house. He has a bone to pick with Hersheimmer, namely confronting him with the accusation that he is a fake and Mr Brown…

Jane’s story The girls’ journey to London is quite exciting as they become convinced someone on the train is tailing them, then that someone has spotted them at Charing Cross station, and then that the taxi they’re in is deliberately rammed, and then that a supposed drunk is in fact following them as they arrive at Sir James’s.

But they make it to Sir James’s door, knock and are admitted by the suave old lawyer and it’s here that Jane tells her story: after receiving the packet, she became suspicious. Mrs Vandemeyer had been on the Lusitania and took a suspiciously close interest in Jane in the lifeboats and then on the ship which took them to Ireland. So she placed blank sheets in the original packet which the spy had given her, and hid the treaty inside a magazine. Travelling from Ireland, Jane was mugged and taken to the house in Soho. To fool her captors, Jane faked amnesia and took to speaking only in French. She hid the treaty in the frame of a picture in her room, a scene from Faust, and has maintained her role as ‘Annette’ ever since.

Is Hersheimmer the baddy? The photo of Annette in Hersheimmer’s drawer and some deliberately suspicious behaviour Christie gives him, persuade Tuppence that maybe the nice, friendly American is the mysterious Mr Brown. When she runs her suspicious past the impeccably trustworthy Sir James, the latter agrees, adding the revelation that the real Hersheimmer was killed back in America, that they’ve been taken in by an imposter, and it was this imposter who killed Mrs Vandemeyer before she could spill the beans about the Secret Organisation.

So the narrative is pushing us with all its might towards suspecting Hersheimmer.

Mr Brown revealed! Tuppence and Sir James rush to the Soho house where they find the treaty where Jane said it would be, in the frame of the picture depicting a scene from Faust. But it is here, in the cell where Tommy was incarcerated, that Sir James identifies himself as the true Mr Brown! He had befriended them and lulled them into a complete sense of security.

Threats and suicide Now Sir James announces his plan to kill them, wound himself, and then blame it on the elusive Mr Brown. But unbeknown to him, Julius and Tommy are hiding in the room (!) and they now jump out and overpower Sir James! The big talking they had on the drive back from Kent had confirmed for Tommy that Hersheimmer was not Mr Brown and is who he claims to be. Hooray.

Thus caught in the act and condemned by his own confession, before they can stop him, Sir James commits suicide using poison concealed in his ring. Carter arrives shortly afterwards on the scene of the suicide and is saddened to learn that his old friend was also his bitterest foe.

He had entered the squalid room to find that great man, the friend of a lifetime, dead—betrayed out of his own mouth. From the dead man’s pocket-book he had retrieved the ill-omened draft treaty, and then and there, in the presence of the other three, it had been reduced to ashes…. England was saved! (Chapter 27)

The revolution that never happened A week or so later, Labour Day, which the conspirators had intended to be a day of revolution and chaos triggered by the publication of the incriminating treaty, passes off peacefully. And the papers are full of obituaries for the great lawyer and potential political leader, Sir James Peel Edgerton. As so often in thrillers, the real truth is carefully concealed from a credulous public.

Wedding bells The novel ends with a slap-up dinner at the Savoy Hotel, both Hersheimmer and Jane, and Tommy and Tuppence, engaged to be married. Carter arrives for the dinner accompanied by Tommy’s uncle who has been informed what a patriotic deed he has performed, and who heals their breach, announcing he is formally making Tommy heir to his country estate and fortune. Which is nice.

Money Remember how they were both stony broke when the novel ended. Well, after their sterling work for king and country, Mr Carter informs them they’ll both received very nice cheques. Plus Tommy being made heir apparent to his rich uncle. And as to work, Tuppence asks him:

‘What are you going to do, accept Mr Carter’s offer of a Government job, or accept Julius’s invitation and take a richly remunerated post in America on his ranch?’

To which Tommy replies, Neither. He’s going to stay in London and marry Tuppence!

Summary

What a ridiculous farrago. It makes Enid Blyton’s Famous Five books look like War and Peace.

I can’t help thinking that the best part of these early comic espionage novels is the first chapter while the characters are full of brio and humour and you feel anything could happen, before the long, convoluted plots get going.

Cast

Goodies

Lieutenant Thomas ‘Tommy’ Beresford – early 20s – young redheaded Englishman who fought in the Great War, wounded twice – slow but steady type
Prudence L. Cowley – known as ‘Tuppence’ – young woman with black bobbed hair, fifth daughter of Archdeacon Cowley of Little Missendell, Suffolk – like Christie, served in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) during the War – clever, quick and funny – ‘And as I’ve said before, and shall doubtless say again, little Tuppence can look after herself, thank you!’
Julius P. Hersheimmer, 35 – millionaire from America, seeking his first cousin Jane Finn, a girl he never met in America due to a family quarrel – ‘He was of middle height, and squarely built to match his jaw. His face was pugnacious but pleasant. No one could have mistaken him for anything but an American’
Jane Finn – 18, American woman we meet on the Lusitania being handed the packet of vital papers
Mr Carter – Englishman high up in the intelligence service and connected with the highest political powers – Carter is an alias
Sir James Peel Edgerton – MP and prominent London defence lawyer – socially and politically well connected, touted as a future prime minister – ”just a shade over average height, he nevertheless conveyed the impression of a big man. His face, clean-shaven and exquisitely mobile, was stamped with an expression of power and force far beyond the ordinary. Magnetism seemed to radiate from him’
Albert – lift boy at the building where Rita Vandemeyer lives, becomes helper to Tuppence (when she’s working undercover as a maid), then to Tommy (on his journey down to Kent)

Baddies

Mr Edward Whittington of the Esthonia Glassware Company – member of the conspirators who first encounters Tommy and Tuppence as they plan their joint venture over lunch in a restaurant – ‘a big man, clean shaven, with a heavy jowl. His eyes were small and cunning, and shifted their glance under her direct gaze’
‘Mr Brown’ – the anonymous leader of the conspirators
Mr Kramenin – Russian Bolshevik agent in London, one of the conspirators, called Number One
Boris Ivanovitch, Count Stepanov – leading member of ‘the conspiracy’, who keeps in touch with Whittington and Rita
Mrs Marguerite Vandemeyer – a beautiful woman in society who followed Danvers on the Lusitania – the ‘Ruth’ referred to in a conversation between Winterton and Boris – takes her orders direct from ‘Mr Brown’
Dr Hall – runs the nursing home in Bournemouth where he took in the amnesia patient claimed to be a niece of Rita Vandemeyer, under the name Janet, for several years, where Hersheimmer goes to investigate and falls out of a tree (in a scene I haven’t included in my summary – of which there are many)
Conrad – the evil-faced doorkeeper of the house in Soho

Americans

Christie’s father was American – a wealthy stockbroker from New York – so she had a whole American side to her family and this explains why so many of her stories feature Americans, or have American connections. So it is here, where the imperilled heroine Jane Finn, and her handsome rescuer Hersheimmer, are true-blue Americans.

‘We’ll ask Miss Jane Finn to tell us the story that only Miss Tuppence has heard so far—but before we do so we’ll drink her health. The health of one of the bravest of America’s daughters, to whom is due the thanks and gratitude of two great countries!’

‘I love you now, Julius,’ said Jane Finn. ‘I loved you that first moment in the car when the bullet grazed your cheek…’

Bookishness

As I unfailingly point out, all Christie’s novels contain numerous ‘meta’ moments where the characters stop and comment that events, or thoughts or conversations are just the kind of thing that happen or are said in detective novels (or movies).

For the moment this paralysed the Young Adventurers, but Tuppence, recovering herself, plunged boldly into the breach with a reminiscence culled from detective fiction. (Chapter 5)

The sport was a new one to him. Though familiar with the technicalities from a course of novel reading, he had never before attempted to ‘follow’ anyone, and it appeared to him at once that, in actual practice, the proceeding was fraught with difficulties. Supposing, for instance, that they should suddenly hail a taxi? In books, you simply leapt into another, promised the driver a sovereign – or its modern equivalent – and there you were. In actual fact, Tommy foresaw that it was extremely likely there would be no second taxi. (Chapter 7)

But Tuppence had sharp eyes, and had noted the corner of a threepenny detective novel protruding from Albert’s pocket, and the immediate enlargement of his eyes told her that her tactics were good, and that the fish would rise to the bait. (Chapter 9)

Ten minutes later the lady was ensconced comfortably on her bed, smoking cigarettes and deep in the perusal of Garnaby Williams, the Boy Detective, which, with other threepenny works of lurid fiction, she had sent out to purchase. (Chapter 9)

Julius listened spellbound. Half the dishes that were placed before him he forgot to eat. At the end he heaved a long sigh. ‘Bully for you. Reads like a dime novel!’ (Chapter 18)

‘By the way, Julius,’ she remarked demurely, ‘I – haven’t given you my answer yet.’
‘Answer?’ said Julius. His face paled.
‘You know – when you asked me to – marry you,’ faltered Tuppence, her eyes downcast in the true manner of the early Victorian heroine. (Chapter 27)

Or the movies:

‘A crook?’ he queried eagerly.
‘A crook? I should say so. Ready Rita they call her in the States.’
‘Ready Rita,’ repeated Albert deliriously. ‘Oh, ain’t it just like the pictures!’
It was. Tuppence was a great frequenter of the cinema. (Chapter 9)

Dr Hall looked at Julius. Everything that he was for the moment incapable of saying was eloquent in that look.
‘No,’ said Julius, in answer to it, ‘I’m not crazy. The thing’s perfectly possible. It’s done every day in the States for the movies. Haven’t you seen trains in collision on the screen?’ (Chapter 14)

‘Because for the last two months I’ve been making a sentimental idiot of myself over Jane! First moment I clapped eyes on her photograph my heart did all the usual stunts you read about in novels.’ (Chapter 20)

You don’t mean as the crooks have got her?’
‘They have.’
‘In the Underworld?’
‘No, dash it all, in this world!’
‘It’s a h’expression, sir,’ explained Albert. ‘At the pictures the crooks always have a restoorant in the Underworld.’ (Chapter 23)

As well as at least one reference to the greatest fictional detective of them all:

‘Now, obviously this woman, whoever she was, was saved.’
‘How do you make that out?’
‘If she wasn’t, how would they have known Jane Finn had got the papers?’
‘Correct. Proceed, O Sherlock!’ (Chapter 6)

Two, in this case.

‘What have we for lunch? Stew? How did I know? Elementary, my dear Watson – the smell of onions is unmistakable.’ (Chapter 17)

Cunning stunts

Obviously ‘stunt’ was an active part of 1920s slang.

‘I did the usual stunt. Said: ‘What’s happened?’ And ‘Where am I?’
(Chapter 9)

‘I guess I’m a mutt,’ said Julius with unusual humility. ‘I ought to have thought of the false name stunt.’ (Chapter 13)

‘How about some high-class thought transference stunt? The way I reason is this: as a last chance they’ll let Jane Finn escape in the hope that she’s been shamming this memory stunt, and that once she thinks she’s free she’ll go right away to the cache.’ (Chapter 18)

As a last chance they’ll let Jane Finn escape in the hope that she’s been shamming this memory stunt. (Chapter 22)

I left a note for Julius, in case he was Mr Brown, saying I was off to the Argentine, and I dropped Sir James’s letter with the offer of the job by the desk so that he would see it was a genuine stunt. (Chapter 27)

Envoi

‘It has been fun, hasn’t it, Tommy? I do hope we shall have lots more adventures.’
‘You’re insatiable, Tuppence. I’ve had quite enough adventures for the present.’
‘Well, shopping is almost as good,’ said Tuppence dreamily.
(Chapter 28)

Credit

‘The Secret Adversary’ by Agatha Christie was published by the Bodley Head in January 1922.

Related reviews

Agatha Christie reviews
1920s reviews

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)

Here’s an introduction to Chinua Achebe, freely adapted from Wikipedia:

Chinua Achebe, born Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe (1930 to 2013), was a Nigerian novelist, poet and critic, who is regarded as a central figure of modern African literature.

His first novel and magnum opus, Things Fall Apart (1958), occupies a pivotal place in African literature. It has been described as the most important book in modern African literature. It has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and been translated into 57 languages, making it the most widely studied, translated and read African novel.

Along with Things Fall Apart, the two subsequent novels, No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964), make up the ‘African Trilogy’.

The trilogy was followed by a fourth novel, A Man of the People (1966) but then this regular output of a novel every two years came to an end and was followed by a 21-year gap. After this long gap came his fifth and final novel, Anthills of the Savannah (1987), a finalist for the Booker Prize which turned out to be his final work of fictions and was itself followed by a long silence of 26 years until Achebe’s death in 2013.

The primacy and influence of his early novels, especially Things Fall Apart, led Achebe to be referred to in the West as ‘the father of African literature’, although he vigorously rejected the title.

A glut of summaries

The text of Things Fall Apart consists of 25 chapters divided into three parts with a glossary of Igbo terms at the end.

It tells the story of Okonkwo, ‘strong man’ and tribal elder of the village of Umuofia in the Igbo society of what would become south-east Nigeria. It paints an in-depth portrait of traditional Igbo society and then shows the impact on it of western Christianity and colonialism. All this is embodied in the story of Okonkwo’s decline and fall.

As the most heavily studied and commentated African novel, the full text of Things Fall Apart is available online in numerous places:

Things Fall Apart online

And there are any number of study guides:

Not to mention scores of book-length academic studies of Achebe and tens of thousands of academic papers on this novel. While selecting which edition to buy online I read various plot summaries. The Everyman Library edition I read it in comes with a summary on the back, a summary in the introduction by contemporary Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and a brief summary in the biographical note.

In other words, this is one of the most over-summarised and analysed-to-death books I’ve ever read. Before I’d read a word of it, I felt tired out by, and over-familiar with, the whole idea.

I can’t see any point summarising the plot or listing the characters, since this has already been done, countless times, probably better, more thoroughly and more sensibly than I could ever do.

Outside the book itself one thing that interests me is the enormous discrepancy between the ‘implied author’, the author’s voice, the omniscient narrator of Things Fall Apart who is an expert in traditional Igbo society of the 1890s, soaked in tribal life and culture and language and custom – and the reality of Achebe’s own life as a sophisticated globetrotting academic, first leaving Nigeria to work for the BBC in London in the 1950s, then travelling round Africa as a young writer in the 1960s, travelling to the US and Brazil as representative of the breakaway state of Biafra in the late 60s, going to teach in America in the 1970s. After being involved in a serious car crash in 1990, Achebe went for medical treatment to the US, was offered what turned out to be a series of academic posts, and never went back to Nigeria. He lived in the States until his death in 2013 i.e. for 23 years i.e. over a third of his adult life.

Reading the list of his awards and honours makes you wonder whether he was one of the most honoured writers of the 20th century. It’s certainly intimidating. If so many thousands of scholars, hundreds of fellow writers, institutions and prize committees think he’s a master, who am I to dissent?

Immersive technique

What becomes clear within just a few pages is how totally immersive the book is. It’s the authority which gets you. Every paragraph, almost every sentence tells you something about the traditional life Achebe sets out to depict. The narrator doesn’t look at Okonkwo, his life and acts, the values of his village and culture, from the outside, with the benefit of hindsight – it feels right from the start like you are right there, inside that world, totally inhabiting it.

Achebe rarely states facts (in the style of, say, the historical novelists Giles Foden or William Boyd, who give you paragraphs of factual explanation which could have been lifted from encyclopedias). Instead the learning is demonstrated by doing. He shows, doesn’t tell. We learn what we learn about Igbo society through the values, expectations and actions of Okonkwo and those around him (the village elders with their countless proverbial sayings, and the older, wealthier villagers who intervene and judge behaviour and infractions, come in particularly handy here).

In a calm, unhurried and unobtrusive way, the novel conveys a vast amount of lore about belief in spirits, customs surrounding marriage, war and the planting of crops, lots of detail about the daily round of village life. Look at the amount of information conveyed in just this one paragraph.

Okonkwo’s prosperity was visible in his household. He had a large compound enclosed by a thick wall of red earth. His own hut, or obi, stood immediately behind the only gate in the red walls. Each of his three wives had her own hut, which together formed a half moon behind the obi. The barn was built against one end of the red walls, and long stacks of yam stood out prosperously in it. At the opposite end of the compound was a shed for the goats, and each wife built a small attachment to her hut for the hens. Near the barn was a small house, the ‘medicine house’ or shrine where Okonkwo kept the wooden symbols of his personal god and of his ancestral spirits. He worshipped them with sacrifices of kola nut, food and palm-wine, and offered prayers to them on behalf of himself, his three wives and eight children. (p.12)

It’s the calm authoritativeness of this tone which put the reader right there, not only in the physical location, but in the mindset of the people who live there.

Okonkwo

One aspect of this lack of hindsight or outside commentary, of the way we are plunged right into the tribal world he wishes to convey, is the way Achebe doesn’t sugar coat his portrayal of the central figure. Okonkwo is depicted entirely in his own terms, without external commentary and, in particular, authorial criticism.

Thus we learn that he was a strong man, defined by his ability to win wrestling competitions, but also his achievements in war. We learn of his success in farming which means the storehouse in his large compound is always full of yams and so he can afford to maintain a household of three wives and 8 children.

Achebe doesn’t strive to make Okonkwo an attractive figure, indeed there are lots of reasons to find him unattractive or even repellent, by modern standards.

Domestic violence

Most obviously, his family are all terrified of his capricious temper.

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children.

When one of his wives, Nwoye’s mother, dares to ask him a question:

‘Do what you are told, woman,’ Okonkwo thundered.

He regularly beats his wives for even small infractions of routine and duty. When his third wife, Ojiugo, goes to visit a neighbour and is gone too long, Okokwo beats her ‘very heavily’ on her return. His other wives beg him to stop but ‘Okonkwo was not the man to stop beating somebody half-way through’. Later, on a slight pretext, Okonkwo gives his second wife ‘a sound beating and left her and her only daughter weeping.’ When his second wife, Ekwefi, makes a slighting remark he grabs a rusty old gun he owns and tries to shoot her as she scrambles over the wall of his compound to escape. (He misses.)

He thinks his eldest son, Nwoye, is getting lazy and so regularly beats him. This fear of a tyrant’s capricious moods reminds me of the extended portrait of Idi Amin in Giles Foden’s terrifying novel ‘The Last King of Scotland’, and of Wojchiec Jagielski’s parallel portrait of Amin and of the psychopathic figure of Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army, in his book ‘The Night Wanderers’.

Warrior

In my review of Jagielski’s account of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda I wondered whether the endless civil wars and insurgencies which so many African countries seem to be plagued with should be regarded not as a new phenomena but as a return to pre-colonial culture when every tribe was at war with all its neighbouring tribes.

Achebe’s account of the conflicts between the village of Umuofia and its neighbours seems to bear that out. We are told that Okonkwo has fought in two tribal wars and killed five men (p.47). He is a ‘strong man’ in his culture and Achebe explains what that means without any hesitation.

In Umuofia’s latest war he was the first to bring home a human head. That was his fifth head; and he was not an old man yet. On great occasions such as the funeral of a village celebrity he drank his palm-wine from his first human head. (p.10)

Weak father

The narrator suggests that a lot of Okonkwo’s behaviour is a reaction against his father, Unoka, who was perceived, within their culture, as being weak. Unoka borrowed lots of money and died in debt. He spent the borrowed money on palm wine and partying. He didn’t work hard at the main male occupation of planting yams and so didn’t have many in his yam store (a major indicator of wealth). People laughed at his poverty. He didn’t like fighting. He left his son no title. (The clan employs just four titles; only one or two men in each generation attain the fourth and highest; p.86.)

Okonkwo is depicted as growing up ashamed of his weak failure of a father and determined to be the opposite. This partly explains his permanent bad temper. He holds himself to a high standard of behaviour, it has required unremitting effort to get to where he is today, he feels he can’t afford to relax and so snaps at the slightest sign of dereliction of duty, whether by his 12-year-old son or any of his wives. Hence the fiery temper they’re all afraid of, hence the constant tellings-off and beatings.

Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruet man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo’s fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself. It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father…And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion-to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness. (p.11)

Thus:

Okonkwo never showed any emotion openly, unless it be the emotion of anger. To show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength. (p.22)

Hence his unstinting work ethic. Hence his success, which all agree is well deserved.

If ever a man deserved his success, that man was Okonkwo. (p.21)

Superstitions

Jagielski’s book is saturated for 300 pages with the belief in spirits of the Acholi people he describes. Achebe’s narrative also is soaked in belief in spirits and the best way to appease them.

Darkness held a vague terror for these people, even the bravest among them. Children were warned not to whistle at night for fear of evil spirits. Dangerous animals became even more sinister and uncanny in the dark. A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.

In particular the villagers regularly consult the Oracle of the Hills and the Caves. When Okonkwo offends against the tradition of the Week of Peace by beating his wife during it, he is intimidated by Ezeani, the priest of Ani, ‘the earth goddess and source of all fertility’, into making a mighty penance (one she-goat, one hen, a length of cloth and a hundred cowries).

Sexism

‘Sit like a woman!’ Okonkwo shouted at her. (p.33)

I imagine every female reader of the book has been offended by Achebe’s depiction of women, and hundreds of thousands of feminist students and academics have noted and critiqued it. But it’s part of Achebe’s technique of acceptance of tribal lore and customs, the good, the bad and the brutal. They’re all described flatly and frankly, all taken together completely oblivious of whether they offend modern sensibilities, and it is this frankness which gives the book its extraordinary power.

Anyway, in Okonkwo’s society women are very much second-class citizens. They must obey their father and then their husband in everything. They are breeding stock and their job is to bear and rear children.

She was about sixteen and just ripe for marriage. Her suitor and his relatives surveyed her young body with expert eyes as if to assure themselves that she was beautiful and ripe. (p.51)

They are involved in agricultural work but of certain defined types:

His mother and sisters worked hard enough, but they grew women’s crops, like coco-yams, beans and cassava. Yam, the king of crops, was a man’s crop. (p.18)

And:

Yam stood for manliness, and he who could feed his family on yams from one harvest to another was a very great man indeed. (p.25)

There is no insult worse than being called a woman (p.19). The word agbala means both ‘woman’ and also ‘man who lacks a title’ i.e. a woman is like the lowest form of man. When Okonkwo hears his 12-year-old son grumbling about women, it makes him happy.

That showed that in time he would be able to control his women-folk. No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man. (p.39)

Brutality

Cutting off the head of your enemy, cleaning it and using it a drinking vessel indicates a pretty brutal culture. Okonkwo’s routine beating of his wives and children gives the reader a sense of a widespread culture of brutality in the domestic sphere. We are told it is a tribal tradition to take twins, put them in earthenware pots and throw them away in the jungle, presumably because they’re perceived as bad luck (Achebe doesn’t casually mention this custom, but makes a point of it, mentioning it on pages 95, 107 and 109).

But nothing in the first six chapters had prepared me for the abrupt decision by the village elders to kill Ikemefuna, the hostage boy who had lived with Okonkwo for three years, for him to be hacked down by machete, or for Okonkwo to join in hacking him to death. Having read so many books about the Rwanda genocide it was difficult for the echoes of millions of Africans hacked to death with machetes and hoes not to come screaming into my mind at this moment.

Part 1

A woman of their tribe, the wife of a man named Udo, is killed by a neighbouring tribe. The elders meet and arrange compensation, which is that a virgin from the offending tribe should be sent to Udo to be his new wife, and a young lad from the offending tribe be handed over to our guys.

The elders decide that this boy, Ikemefuna, aged 14, should reside in Okonkwo’s household temporarily. We are shown the poor boy’s distress and unhappiness, being parted from his family for no wrong that he’s done.

Chapter 5

The feast of the New Yam approaches. Detailed description of wives and daughters cooking in Okonkwo’s obi.

Chapter 6

Description of a wrestling festival, an entire day of wrestling matches in front of the assembled village, with cheers and praise for each victor.

Chapter 7

For three years Ikemefuna lives in Okonkwo’s household. He is a pleasant boy, gets on with everyone, a fount of folk stories, Okonkwo’s own son, Nwoye, grows to love and look up to him.

A huge plague of locusts arrives. They haven’t had one for years, only old men remember when. The villagers welcome the locusts because they are good to eat (roasted in clay pots, spread in the sun to dry, then eaten with solidified palm oil if you want to try this at home).

Okonkwo is informed that the elders have decided that the boy Ikemefuna must be executed. Ogbuefi Ezeudu, the oldest man in this quarter of Umuofia, warns Okonkwo to have no hand in his killing. Next day men come, confer with Okonkwo, then tell Ikemefuna he’s going to be taken back to his village. He makes tearful farewells, especially to Nwoye, then sets off with the men. A long trek out beyond the village and into the sandy paths through woodland. A man walking behind him makes a sound to warn the other men, draws his machete and hacks Ikemefuna down. Contrary to Ogbuefi’s advice, Okwonko steps forward and joins the other men hacking Ikemefuna to death.

When Achebe wrote this he wasn’t to know that Africans hacking fellow Africans was to be practiced on an industrial scale in Sierra Leone, Uganda, Rwanda, but we know, and a million ghosts walk over the text at this moment.

Chapter 8

We learn that Ikemefuna’s killing was commanded by the Oracle. Okonkwo’s friends say nobody had any choice in the matter but chide him for taking part. It’s the kind of action will bring curse a whole family. For days afterwards Okonkwo is depressed and listless. He needs activity or, lacking that, talk with friends.

The negotiation of a bride price for Akueke, the ripe 16-year-old daughter of Okonkwo’s friend, Obierika. Description of her elaborate formal wear and body painting. Discussion of different customs in the adjacent villages i.e. the variety of folk customs.

Chapter 9

Okonkwo’s favourite daughter, Ezinma, falls ill with a fever, iba. Extended passage describing ogbanje children i.e. spirits of dead children who go back into the womb to be reincarnated and plague their mothers. Because Ezinma’s mother has borne no fewer than ten children of which nine died young. Account of how, a year previously, a holy man Okagbue, had been brought in to find the fetish or iyi-uwa which Ezinma, like all ogbanje, had buried deep by an orange tree.

Chapter 10

Description of the trial, by the nine egwugwu or ‘masqueraders who impersonate the ancestral spirits of the village’, of Uzowulu, accused of beating his wife so badly and regularly that her in-laws came and rescued her, refusing to hand her back. Hence this big trial which is attended by the entire village.

Chapter 11

Ekwefi and Ezinma are telling each other folk tales when Chielo approaches, the priestess, possessed by the god Agbala, and insists the Ezinma goes away with her, carries her off piggyback. Distraught, Ekwefi decides to follow them in a long passage through the black night haunted by evil spirits, first towards the nearest neighbour village, and then back to the circle of hills amid which lies the tiny opening in the rocks which gives entry to the cave of the Oracle.

Chapter 12

Okonkwo’s friend, Obierika’s wife cooks up a feast for kin attending the uri of his daughter, the day when her suitor would bring palm wine as a gift to her relatives. It is a communal feast prepared by many women, and accompanied by ritual gifts. Eating, drinking, singing and dancing goes on till late into the night.

Chapter 13

Ezeudi, eldest man in the village, dies, the message carried at night by the ekwe, a type of drum made of wood. The funeral is a long complicated cultural event, with eating, and dancing funeral dances. Spirits appear i.e. men in costumes, often terrifying the mourners. The world of the living and of spirits interpenetrate. After all:

A man’s life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors. (p.85)

As the dancing and firing of guns and clanging of machetes reaches a crescendo, there’s a disaster. Okonkwo’s gun explodes by accident and a piece of metal pierces the heart of the dead man’s 16-year-old son who now lies dying right in the heart of the ceremony, right in front of everybody.

There is nothing for it but for Okonkwo to flee the clan and live in exile for seven years. It is carried out peaceably. His belongings and yams are stored in the obi of his friend Obierika. Then Okonkwo and his family flee back to his motherland, to a little village called Mbanta, just beyond the borders of Mbaino. Then Ezeudi’s kinsman storm Okonkwo’s compound, kill his animals and burn it to the ground. They have no malice, They are merely acting out the justice of the earth goddess.

Part 2

Chapter 14

Okonkwu is taken in by his mother’s family. They give him land to build a compound on and yams to sow and tend. The eldest surviving family member is his mother’s brother, Uchendu. He performs cleansing ceremonies. It was the time when the long summer heat was broken by heavy rain. Okonkwo has to start out all over again and often acts defeated and depressed.

He has arrived at the time of the marriage of the youngest of Uchendu’s five sons to a new bride, a process of numerous ceremonies spread out over months. Description of the ‘confession’ ceremony.

Uchundu calls his extended family together and delivers a stern lecture to Okonkwo, telling him that many in that family assembly have had harder knocks and setbacks to overcome than he, Okonkwo, has. So he needs to man up and look after his wife and children.

Chapter 15

In the second year of Okonkwo’s exile his friend Obierika comes to visit him and is presented to the old patriarch, Uchundu. He brings news of the arrival of the white men. One first appeared in the village of Abame. The holy men consulted the oracle which said white men would bring destruction, so they killed him. Obierika then heard from survivors who made it to Umuofia that the white men returned with a horde of Africans and massacred almost the entire population of the village of Abame.

Chapter 16

Two years later Obierika returns to visit Okonkwo. During that time white Western Christian missionaries have arrived and built a church in Umuofia. Missionaries also arrive in Mbanta, five blacks led by one white man. A comical account of the white man’s attempt to proselytise, as translated by an outsider with a heavy accent. Most think the tale of the Trinity is nonsensical, but the appeal to love, and the music of the hymn they sing, appeals to Okonkwo’s sensitive son, Nwoye.

Chapter 17

When the Christians ask for some land to build a church the village elders give them part of the evil forest.

Every clan and village had its ‘evil forest’. In it were buried all those who died of the really evil diseases, like leprosy and smallpox. It was also the dumping ground for the potent fetishes of great medicine men when they died. An ‘evil forest’ was, therefore, alive with sinister forces and powers of darkness. (p.105)

The villagers expect their evil spirits to strike down the Christians but when it doesn’t happen, they gain more converts. When Okonkwo learns his son is attending church he grabs and starts beating him. Uchundu happens to arrive and tells him to desist. Nwoye walks away without a word, leaves Mbanta and returns to Umuofia where the Christians are building a school. Later, alone by his fire, Okonkwo worries that his entire culture, all belief and customs, will be erased. How could he have sired such an effeminate son?

Chapter 18

The Christians thrive and attract more converts, albeit generally the lowest weakest members of the clan. Rumour comes that they have set up not only a church but a government in Umuofia and are judging miscreants. That they hanged a man for killing a missionary. Trouble caused when the leader of the Mbanta church, Mr Kiaga, accepts osu. These are the caste of permanent outsiders, cursed, distinguished by their long dirty hair, something like the untouchables of India. Kiaga makes an impassioned defence of all being free and equal in the eyes of God, which confirms many in their faith and the osu convert en masse.

One of the Christians is alleged to have killed one of the village’s holy pythons. This gives rise to a debate among the elders. Okonkwo wants to drive the Christians out with extreme violence but is overruled, much to his disgust.

Chapter 19

Okonkwo’s seven year exile approaches its end. He sends money to Obierika to begin to rebuild his compound in Umuofia. And he throws a huge feast for his extended family in Mbanta.

Part 3

Chapter 20

Okonkwo is determined to return and regain his place in his village, determined to build a bigger compound and attain the highest title. But he finds Umuofia much changed. Some men of high caste have thrown away their tribal titles to convert. The white man has built not only a church but a court where the District Commissioner tries cases and a prison where black men are locked up.

It is an important fact that the administration i.e. the court and prison, are served by black men from a long way away, who have no sympathy with the clan in fact despise it.

These court messengers were greatly hated in Umuofia because they were foreigners and also arrogant and high-handed. They were called kotma.

His friend Obierika explains that there are only two white men, driving them out or killing them would be easy. The problem is the number of tribesmen who have converted and committed to the new regime. What to do about them? Hence the title of the book:

‘The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.’ (p.125)

Chapter 21

The white head of the mission in Umuofia is Mr Brown. A lot of its success is due to the way he is calm and respectful of local belief. He has many long debates about religion with an elder in a neighbouring village named Akunna. Brown realises a frontal assault won’t work so he builds a school and a hospital. Soon the locals realise that being able to read and write opens opportunities to earn good money in the court or prison.

From the very beginning religion and education went hand in hand. (p.128)

Okonkwo is disappointed that his return doesn’t cause much stir. The mental world, the horizons of the village people have been immeasurably expanded.

The new religion and government and the trading stores were very much in the people’s eyes and minds. There were still many who saw these new institutions as evil, but even they talked and thought about little else, and certainly not about Okonkwo’s return. (p.129)

Okonkwo’s son Nwoye has now taken the Christian name Isaac and gone to the capital of the British colony, Umuru on the big river, to attend the training college for teachers. When Mr Brown makes a courtesy call on Okonkwo the latter tells him next time he’ll be carried out of his compound.

He mourned for the clan, which he saw breaking up and falling apart, and he mourned for the warlike men of Umuofia, who had so unaccountably become soft like women.

Chapter 22

Mr Brown succumbs to illness and returns to Britain. He is replaced by the Reverend James Smith who is much more doctrinaire and unforgiving. One of the most zealous converts, Enoch, confronts the masqueraders dressed as gods at the annual ceremony to honour the earth deity, and tears off his mask, thus revealing him to be an ordinary mortal. Ripples of shock throughout the village.

All night the Mother of Spirits haunted the village and in the morning all the egwugwu from all the surrounding villages assembled in a show of strength, made a huge song and dance and then marched on Enoch’s hut which they trash. Then on to the church. The black converts flee but the Reverend Smith stands his ground, along with the interpreter, Okeke.

The egwugwu deliver a speech saying they will restrain themselves from killing Smith out of respect for his brother, Brown. But they will smash down his (red-earth) church, and this they do.

Chapter 23

The District Commissioner (DC) returns from a trip and invites the six head men to a meeting. Here he lulls them into a false sense of security then has the court officials, in effect the black police, jump them, handcuff them and throw them in the cells. The DC says he’s decided to fine them 200 cowries for breaching the peace, and promises they’ll be well treated while the money is collected, but the moment his back is turned, the kotma shave their heads and whip them. The six headmen are plunged into despair.

The court messengers or kotma then tell the villagers that they must pay a ransom of 250 cowrie shells, planning to keep the 50 surplus shells for themselves. Here we see the seeds of the institutionalised corruption which will cripple all African nations.

Instead of celebrating the festival of the full moon, the entire village is silent and subdued as if in mourning.

Chapter 24

A great meeting of the village, to which people from other villages come, starting off early in the morning. A series of speakers set off to address the great assembly on the destruction the white man is bringing to their life, when round the corner come the five leading ‘court messengers’ or kotma.

Okonkwo, all the fury and frustration of his entire life, and his unjust exile, pent up inside him, leaps from his seat to confront the lead messenger. He refuses to be cowed and rudely informs Okonkwo that the meeting is to be terminated. All his fury bursts and Okonkwo draws his machete and hacks the man to the ground then chops his head off.

The world spins round him but already he knows Umuofia won’t rise to support him. All their brave words are void. They have become women. He lives in an effeminate world. He flees.

Chapter 25

When the District Commissioner goes with armed men to arrest Okonkwo, his friend Obierika takes them through Okonkwo’s compound to the tree where Okonkwo has hanged himself. He then explains at length that a man who kills himself is unclean which is why they cannot cut him down or bury him. He asks the DC to get his men to do that. Then the village elders will carry out the appropriate cleansing rituals.

In its last paragraph the entire novel undergoes a massive heave, like tectonic plates, a vast shift of focus. For 25 chapters the narrator has entirely occupied the minds and customs of the villagers and soaked us in their mindset and culture. Now in these last few paragraphs the perspective changes to share with us the thoughts of the English District Commissioner. It tells us that in his many years of ‘bringing civilisation to different parts of Africa’, he has learned not to demean himself with simple tasks like cutting down a hanged man. He will leave that to his men. Meanwhile what the leaders have just told him about their attitude to suicides might well make a chapter in the book he’s been pondering for some time about native customs.

Well, he reflects, in a killing aside, maybe not an entire chapter. Maybe a paragraph. After all, he thinks, with what the entire preceding text has shown us to be breath-taking ignorance,

Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. (p.146)

Thus we see how the rich and complex life of a major figure, a complex nuanced character, Okonkwo famed throughout the nine villages, is erased, elided, destroyed, reduced to a small paragraph in a colonial book of African anthropology. It’s a really cutting, stinging ending.

For the Brits haven’t killed anyone, let alone carried out some awful colonial massacre. The book is all the more powerful for showing that they did something much worse. They erased entire cultures. They destroyed people’s identities. They took away people’s reasons for living.

Thoughts

I doubt I can say anything which hasn’t already been said a thousand times before. I bet there are hundreds of scholarly papers relating the novel to the sociological and cultural impact of white Europeans on traditional black African cultures. And just as many pointing out the book is a tragedy which complies with the Greek idea of a central figure crippled by a tragic flaw. In Okonkwo’s case his flaw is his righteous anger, his resort to violence in the belief that he is more righteous and validated than everyone around him. Thus the immediate cause of his death is the blind rage which overcomes him when the chief court messenger provokes him.

But the overriding impression the book leaves is of its immense poise and finish. Miraculously, it doesn’t feel dated. It feels timeless in the way of a true classic. It feels like it has always been true and always will be. All the incidents hang together and are of a piece. It feels immensely solid and authoritative.

Tiny footnote

The W.B. Yeats poem the title is taken from (The Second Coming) was obviously a favourite of Achebe’s. Twenty-five years later, in his long essay, The Trouble with Nigeria, he casually uses another phrase from it, ‘mere anarchy’ (chapter 7).

Credit

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was published in 1958 by Heinemann. References are to the 2010 Everyman edition.

Chinua Achebe reviews

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Africa reviews

The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst (2006)

Alan Furst

Furst’s novels are all historical spy adventures, set in Continental Europe, often in Eastern Europe or the Balkans, in the dark days before the Second World War and on into the early years of the conflict. They feature fairly ordinary, everyday guys who become reluctantly embroiled in ‘spying’, in its unglamorous, everyday forms – receiving and passing on information, meeting people from foreign powers who slowly take control of your life, who persuade you to take risks you’d prefer not to. So:

In Blood of Victory (set in late 1940 and 1941) the Russian émigré writer, Ilya Serebin, finds himself slowly drawn into a plot to sink barges in the Danube river to choke off Nazi Germany’s supply of oil from Romania.
In Dark Voyage (set over two months in 1941) grizzled Dutch merchant captain, Eric DeHaan, finds himself reluctantly recruited into the Dutch Royal Navy and carrying out a number of clandestine voyages, ferrying Allied soldiers, arms and equipment on a number of hazardous missions around the Mediterranean.

The Foreign Correspondent

Although they go off on missions to the East, many of Furst’s protagonists are based in Paris, safe haven for many exiles as the grim 1930s progressed. This novel, though it features trips to Berlin and Prague, is more rooted than most in the boulevards and cafés of the city of light, and includes a map of Paris at the start, with key locations in the story marked on it.

It follows the ‘adventures’ of Italian émigré journalist Carlo Weisz. He’s landed a good job as Paris correspondent for Reuters, where he’s looked after by an understanding manager, Delahanty, who doesn’t mind that in the evenings Weisz helps write and organise an anti-Fascist, anti-Mussolini freesheet, Liberazione, cobbled together by half a dozen Italian refugees who meet at the Café Europa, the galleys then smuggled to Italy, where it’s printed and distributed via an informal network.

The text is divided into four long parts, within which the numerous sub-sections are simply divided by line breaks. As with all Furst’s novels, these short sections come with date stamps and sometimes precise times of day, to convey the pace of events, and give a sense of urgency and thrill.

The narrative covers events between 4 December 1938 and 11 July 1939, ie the dark slide towards war, and features the following true historical events:

The Nazi occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia, beginning 15 March 1939
Victory of the Nationalist (fascist) forces in the Spanish Civil War on 1 April 1939
7 April the Italian navy bombarded the coast of Albania, then invaded
Signing of the Pact of Steel, 22 May 1939

Dark times, darkly captured and broodingly conveyed.

1. In the Resistenza

We meet Weisz in Civil War Spain, as that conflict grinds to an end, accompanied by the veteran female journalist, Mary McGrath, and driven around by a driver provided by the Republican side. They visit the front lines, are shot at by Nationalist soldiers across the river, then briefly interview the legendary ‘Colonel Ferrara’, an Italian commanding an International Brigade on the Republican side, then drive off to the nearest town to file their reports.

Back in Paris, the high profile Italian exile, vociferous opponent of Mussolini, and editor of Liberazione, Bottini, is assassinated by agents of OVRA, while in bed with his mistress Madame LaCroix. It is a warning to other exiles, and we are introduced to the head of the little squad which carries out the execution, an Italian nobleman and committed Fascist, Count Amandola. But as Mme LaCroix happens to have been the wife of a French politician, this prompts the French police to open a murder investigation which will wind on for the rest of the narrative.

Thus it is that on returning to Paris, Weisz discovers Bottini to be dead and is offered the editorship of Liberazione by the small band of exiles, led by Arturo Salamone, and which he reluctantly accepts. He feels it is his duty, and he is a good journalist, he should be able to manage. The meeting is followed by a short text which is the ‘report’ of ‘Agent 207’, summarising the decisions of the meeting. Aha. One of them is a spy, or at least an informer, passing on his reports to OVRA.

Soon afterwards, in a Paris bar, Weisz bumps into an acquaintance from his two years of study at Oxford, Geoffrey Sparrow, who is accompanied by his petite girlfriend, Olivia. She enjoys flirting with Weisz, who finds himself entranced by her ‘smart little breasts’ (p.43). They go on to another bar where Sparrow accidentally-on-purpose introduces Weisz to a ‘Mr Brown’, an obvious British agent (which we know for sure since we’ve met him in previous novels). So – the old friend act and the flirting were designed to ‘ensnare’ him. At this stage it’s just an introduction and an agreement that they’re on the same side, but we all know something more will come of it…

Weisz is invited to room 10 of the Sûreté National offices, to meet the French detectives investigating the Bottini murder. They let it be known that he’s being watched, and mention that an Italian official was recently expelled from France. Was that a threat or a tip-off? As so often in Furst, the main character is puzzled about what’s going on, about the deeper or ‘hidden’ meaning of sometimes the simplest conversations. As exiles, most of his protagonists are at the mercy of ‘the authorities’ and live with a permanent sense of insecurity.

Finding himself the attention of the British and French security services, and probably of OVRA into the bargain, Weisz not unnaturally becomes convinced he’s being followed, narrowing it down to a man in a check jacket who keeps popping up behind him in the street, then on the Métro. It’s mildly ironic then, when a completely different man leans over him in the Métro carriage and slips him an envelope before quickly exiting the carriage.

Weisz brings the envelope to the next meeting of the Liberazione group at the Café Europa, where it turns out to contain detailed technical specifications for what looks like a torpedo, the writing in Italian. A new design for an Italian torpedo? Who was the man who gave it to him working for? Is it a trap? Is the door about to burst open and French police find them with the evidence that they’re spies, so they’ll all be shot? Or is it a genuine bit of clandestine information but – who should it be passed on to? The French authorities? The British? Mr Brown?

This is typical of the fog of uncertainty in which Furst’s characters (and the reader) move. Also typical is the low level of suspense: it doesn’t feel like it matters all that much, and the group decide to burn the document quickly, which they do. And nothing happens. No police burst in. The man who gave it to Weisz never reappears. There are no repercussions at all. The novels are full of mysterious threats and loomings.

Weisz regularly fantasises about sex. He imagines making love with Sparrow’s girlfriend. He thinks about calling up his old girlfriend Véronique for sex. He fantasises about his lazy landlady Madam Rigaud, who has accidentally on purpose bumped his ample hips against him many a time. He remembers the myriad highly erotic encounters with his former German lover, Christa von Schurr. He remembers having sex with the well-known British spy and recruiter, Lady Angela Hope, who – apparently – made a great deal of noise, ‘as if he were Casanova’, twice, before attempting to wangle Italian state secrets out of him (futilely, it turns out). He goes to sleep.

2. Citizen of the Night

The Reuters man in Berlin, Wolf, is getting married and going on honeymoon, so Weisz’s boss, Delahanty, sends him to Berlin to cover. We have been privy to Weisz’s sensuous memories of making love with Christa – now he sees the assignment to meet her again. Sure enough, as soon as he contacts her she comes to his hotel room, and for the rest of his stay they meet every afternoon to enjoy a sequence of pornographic encounters, livened up by varieties of underwear and positions, and the ability to perform time after time. Underwear, panties, bra, camisoles are described in loving detail.

In between sex sessions, Christa invites Weisz out to a remote fairground where he is introduced to an unnamed man (p.88). He hands over a list of Nazi agents who have penetrated to high position in Italy, lots of them, over 150. Weisz is left wondering: Has Christa only revived the affair to ‘recruit’ him for her people, to make him a conduit to a free press outside Germany? What is he expected to with the list? Weisz experiences a familiar feeling of perplexity.

Furst’s men (they’re all men) move rather dreamily around Paris and other European capitals, cocooned in an atmosphere of good food, fine wines, bars and cafés high and low, seeming to end up in bed with a steady stream of uninhibited, easy and sexually inventive women, but plagued by obscure meetings and ambiguous conversations which leave them permanently puzzled about what they’re meant to be doing, and for who…

Germany threatens to occupy the remainder of Czechoslovakia which Hitler hadn’t already seized as a result of the Allied betrayal during the Munich Crisis (August 1938). And so Weisz’s boss tells him to pack and go by train from Germany to Prague to record the event.

He travels down with two other journalists, Hamilton of The Times and Simard from Havas, but the train is stopped by the Germans at Kralupy, before it reaches Prague. The three journalists pay the very reluctant town taxi to drive them through snow to the capital, the driver grumbling all the way. They’re still driving slowly around town when two students bundle into the car carrying a Nazi flag which they’ve torn down. Seems like a student prank for a few moments until a Gestapo car swings after them and starts shooting, bullets through the windows, little Simard gets injured and there’s frantic argument about how to tie a tourniquet. The taxi driver skedaddles through Prague’s snowy back streets to an old stables which the students know about, and where they help them hide out till the cops are gone.

In a separate plotline S. Kolb, a seedy little man who works for the British SIS (and who we have met in previous books) is despatched by his masters to track down Colonel Ferrara who we met in the opening pages. Ferrara had managed to escape from Spain after Madrid fell and the Spanish Civil War ended in March 1939. Kolb tracks him to a French internment camp near Tarbes, in the south, then bribes the camp’s commandant with a lot of francs to let Ferrara free.

At first sceptical that he’s going to be shipped back to Italy, Ferrara lets himself be persuaded into a taxi to a station, and then onto a train to Paris. Here Kolb fixes him up with a room at the Hotel Tournon and it is here that Weisz is introduced to him, via Mr Brown.

Mr Brown explains to Weisz that ‘they’ would like him to write Ferrara’s biography, the biography of an Italian patriot and hero who resisted Mussolini. Ferrara agrees; later, when Weisz puts it to the Liberazione group, they also agree. So Weisz gets into the habit of going every evening, after his main day’s work, to the Hotel Toulon, there to smoke lots of cigarettes and type up Ferrara’s life story.

In short order, Weisz dumps his Paris girlfriend, Véronique and buys a typewriter in a flea market. He uses it to type out copies of the list of Nazi agents in Italy which Christa gave him back in Germany and which he carried round Prague and back to Paris. He’ll post copies to the British and French authorities – the flea market typewriter was so they couldn’t match it against his own typewriter, if they manage to trace it to him,

This section closes with Furst giving us a brief sketch of the Liberazione‘s distribution network in Italy: the conductor on the Paris-to-Genoa train; Matteo, who works at the printing works of Italy’s second newspaper, Il Secolo and slips printing the free sheet in between bigger jobs; Antionio who drives a coal delivery truck from Genoa to Rapallo and takes copies with him; Gabriella and Lucia, 16-year-olds in a convent school in Genoa who help distribute free copies; ending with readers like Lieutenant DeFranco, a detective in the rough waterfront area of Genoa, who enjoys reading the copy posted in the police station’s lavatory.

3. The Pact of Steel

Back in Paris. Véronique phones to tell Weisz that a threatening man came to cross-question her about Weisz and Liberazione, pretending to be – but obviously not – a member of the Sûreté. The Liberazione group meet and discover that Salamone has been dismissed from his job. The threat from OVRA seems to be looming from different directions. Agent 207 reports the meeting.

Weisz is despatched by his Reuters boss to cover the crowd assembled outside the hotel where King Zog of Albania is discovered to be staying. King Zog shows himself at the balcony, some cheer, some throw bottles, the crowd turns ugly and Weisz is suddenly hit very hard on the head, by some kind of sharp but heavy implement, regaining consciousness on the floor and helped to a nearby café by a cop. Staggering home, he fears he’s being followed. Was it an OVRA attack? A random bit of thuggery?

Next evening he meets up with Ferrara to move the book forward, and finds Kolb and Brown there. They go to a ‘mad’ nightclub up in Pigalle, where the girls dance naked except for shoes. Here Ferrara picks up a fetching naked girl called Irina. The reader suspects this will end badly: possibly she, too, is an OVRA agent or will lure him to a sticky end…

News comes in to Reuters that Mussolini’s Foreign Minister, Count Ciano, is flying to Berlin to sign a so-called ‘Pact of Steel’ between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Delahanty orders Weisz back to Berlin to cover it for the Italian point of view.

While Weisz is packing a new guest at the hotel looms menacingly at his door and we strongly suspect something bad is going to happen to Weisz, when the old hotel retainer Bertrand arrives puffing and panting up the stairs with Weisz’s plane tickets, thus saving him in the nick of time. The novels are full of close shaves, what-might-have-beens, or even perfectly innocent events which we – sharing the protagonist’s paranoia – think of as unnecessarily sinister. Thus in a hundred little ways, we enter the atmosphere of fear and suspicion which the characters move in…

Back in Berlin, Weisz gets a cryptic message from Christa inviting him to a party at a friend’s house. When he arrives at the apartment given on the invitation, there is no party and the door is open. He tiptoes through eerily empty rooms suspecting something bad has happened and, again, the reader is thinking the worst. But Christa is simply lying in bed, naked. She had fallen asleep. They have sex several times, as she explains that she thinks she’s being watched and so arranged this rendezvous at the apartment of a friend.

Weisz is an eye witness of the signing of the Pact of Steel at a formal hall in Berlin. Up till this moment the Italian exiles Weisz moves among have been hoping Italy will somehow keep out of Hitler’s mad plans, especially as Mussolini is on record as saying Italy wouldn’t be ready for war until 1943.

Weisz notices the changed atmosphere in Berlin, the number of uniforms on the street – SS, Gestapo, Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Kriegsmarine, Hitler Youth and so on, the expectation of violence. Then he’s back in bed with Christa.

Idly, he trailed a finger from the back of her neck down to where her legs parted, and she parted them a little more. (p.186)

When his trip ends he is upset, kisses Christa goodbye in the street, she walks away and out of sight, and he wonders if it’s forever. Oddly, as in all these Furst novels, I had absolutely no sense of emotional involvement or upset whatsoever. I see the logic of these characters’ emotions – but I don’t feel them. For me, these novels are like diagrams of emotion and feeling. Blueprints.

Back in Paris Weisz discovers the café where the Liberazione group meet has been burned down. Salamone has had a heart attack. Things are not looking good for our little group. The same man who pretended to be a Sûreté officer to interview Véronique, turns up at Elena’s workplace, the Galeries Lafayette, asking about her. Infuriated, Elena tails him through the Métro back to 62 Boulevard de Strasbourg. There’s a card claiming it’s the office of a photo agency. Next day Weisz rings the number on the card and establishes it’s an obvious front, they know nothing about press photos. Then Weisz goes along himself and finds letters in the postbox with Croatian names and addresses. Possibly agents of the Croatian Ustasha, sub-contracting to OVRA.

4. Soldiers for Freedom

Weisz and Ferrara continue working on the biography. Weisz reads in a newspaper a small article about a spy circle in Berlin being rounded up and imprisoned. His heart stops, as he thinks it must be Christa and her circle – and from this point onwards, for the last 60 or so pages of the novel, its protagonist’s overwhelming motivation is to find out what’s happening to Christa and try to ensure her safety.

Mr Brown takes Weisz to meet a ‘Mr Lane’, obviously a more senior SIS figure, who talks him into considering expanding the Liberazione operation, increasing the print runs, expanding the distribution network. Now that Mussolini is an official ally of Hitler, Britain will put more effort into trying to undermine his regime. But Weisz can only think about Christa.

Taking the initiative regarding the threat from OVRA, Weisz makes an appointment to see the inspectors investigating the Bottini murder. He takes along a case full of evidence about the phony Sûreté guys, and the evidence suggesting they are Ustashe agents operating illegally in France. They are interested. ‘Leave it with us; we’ll be in touch.’ At their next meeting they show Weisz photos, some of which he identifies as the men he’s seen. This confirms something the detectives knew (though they’re very vague about it to Weisz). As a sort of reward, they tell him there’s an OVRA agent within Liberazione, Zerba the art historian. Weisz is shocked, and so is Salamone when he tells him later. The latter’s first reaction is to kill him, but the police and Weisz had said No, let him continue his activities.

Weisz has made a decision about the British suggestion to increase Liberazione activity: he asks Kolb if he can organise a meeting with his boss, Mr Brown. Here he asks if the SIS can find out Christa’s situation. Brown grudgingly agrees, but insists that, in return, Weisz a) hurry up and finish the Ferrara book b) agrees to go back to Italy to organise the printing and distribution of Liberazione on a much larger scale and in the process c) is seen, spreading the rumour of defiance, raising morale among the anti-Mussolini opposition.

Tense climax

And so the last forty pages of the novel follow Weisz’s tense journey across the border, to Genoa and then to clandestine meetings with the distribution network, as he pays Matteo to find extra capacity at the print works, meets an underworld fixer, Grassone, who can supply newsprint by the ton, and then is taken to meet an old Genoese criminal who is prepared to rent him a huge underground vault to operate in.

They’ve just been shown round the vault and emerged into the daylight into a busy marketplace, when rough hands are placed on Weisz’s collar and he realises a policeman is arresting him. He tries to get away, but is slapped and kicked to the ground and finds himself wriggling under a market stall. The cop is tugging at his legs when suddenly the market traders start throwing things at Pazzo, who turns out to be the well-known and much-hated local cop, such a barrage, that Pazzo is forced to turn and flee.

Leader of the vegetable throwers had been a huge old lady, Angelina. She picks Weisz up and dusts him off and then takes him off through a maze of alleys to a church, where she hands him over to Father Marco for safekeeping. Weisz realises he can’t go back to the hotel, so he’s abandoning his things and in fact the entire project.

Was he betrayed? Was it a misunderstanding (surely the OVRA would have sent a whole squad of heavies not a fat local policeman)? Who cares. Now he’s going home. But when he goes down to the docks to try and board the Hydraios, sailing back to Marseilles, part of the carefully worked out plan – he finds that the slack dock passport controller, Nunzio, has been joined by two serious looking detectives. There is no way through without being cross-questioned and arrested. Forlorn, he watches the ship slip its moorings and sail away.

Promptly Weisz abandons Genoa. He has money and so he buys a completely new outfit and travels to the resort of Portofino where he puts himself about among the rich tourists, hoping to get himself invited aboard one of the many rich tourists yachts. He fails with the Brits and the Americans, but then scores a success with the party of Sven, a self-made Dane, who shrewdly realises he’s in trouble but invites Weisz to join their yacht party anyway.

As if by magic, a few days later Weisz is back in Paris. And the last pages cut to Berlin where Kolb has been sent to extract Christa. Although she is being followed everywhere by the Gestapo, Kolb has a taxi driver follow her when she takes a group of Hitler Youth girls out to a lake (where many of them strip naked and frolic in the waves, to Kolb’s delight). He hisses at Christa from the treeline, and persuades her to come there and then, clamber into the boot of the car, be driven to a safe flat, where they’ll change her appearance, give her new papers and smuggle her into Luxembourg.

On the very last page Weisz arrives tired and demoralised back at the Hotel Dauphine, his Paris base, and the landlady. Madam Rigaud, tells him a new guest has checked in, a German countess, who seemed keen to see Herr Weisz. She’s put her in room 47.

Never has a man run up flights of stairs with such enthusiasm! To such a joyous happy ending.

A web of characters

Blurbs on the books tend to praise the tremendous ‘atmosphere’ of Furst’s historical novels. I personally don’t find them ‘atmospheric’ so much as stuffed with an amazing grasp of historical detail and an astonishingly large cast of characters.

The novels feature not just the main protagonist (always a fairly average, if foreign, bloke: Serebin, DeHaan, Weisz) but a realistic web of secondary, tertiary and minor characters, many of whom only appear in fleeting scenes, but are given vivid thumbnail descriptions, quick lines, enough to make an impact and create the sense of a fully-populated imaginative world.

This way that the novels just teem with people and takes us to a wealth of urban settings and locations, helps the novels read like life, like confused, hectic, twentieth-century modern life in big cities, in huge industrialised nations lumbering towards war.

Characters

I set out to make a list of all the characters which appear in the book and was amazed at just how many of them there are.

Carlo Weisz, Italian émigré journalist, Paris-based correspondent for Reuters news agency, who works part time producing Liberazione, an anti-Mussolini free sheet.
Hotel Dauphine, Weisz’s home in Paris.
Madame Rigaud, landlady of the Hotel Dauphine, broad-hipped and complaisant, about whom he has vivid sexual fantasies.
Ettore, il Conte Amandola, agent of OVRA, the pro-fascist agency.
OVRA, the Organizzazione di Vigilanza e Repressione dell’Antifascismo (p.98)
Bottini, émigré lawyer from Turin and outspoken critic of Mussolini, he is assassinated by OVRA agents in the opening pages.
Madame LaCroix, Bottini’s plump noisy mistress. The OVRA agents murder her in bed with Bottini and make it look like he killed her then committed suicide, in order to achieve maximum humiliation of the anti-fascist figurehead. However, Mme LaCroix happened to be married to a French politician minister, and this draws the French Security forces into an investigation of her death, which will eventually draw Weisz into collaborating with them.
Staff of the Liberazione freesheet, who meet in the Café Europa:
- Arturo Salamone, former insurance salesman in Italy, now main organiser of the paper
- Sergio
- Elena, fiery little exile
- Michele Zerba, art historian from Siena (p.239)
giellisti (p.8) collective name of the opponents and resisters of Mussolini’s fascism, a conflation of Giustizia e Libertà (p.220).
Agent 207 – spy inside Liberazione group, we read his reports of the secret meetings immediately after they’ve happened – obviously he or she is one of the core members. Towards the end of the novel we learn the agent is Zerba, the art historian. (pp.29, 152)
confidente – Mussolini’s secret police / secret agents.
Mary McGrath, a veteran correspondent in her 40s (p.13) a journalist who we meet accompanying Weisz in Civil War Spain.
Sandoval, Spanish driver, assigned by the Republicans to drive Weisz and McGrath around the battlefield and to nearest towns to file his copy.
‘Colonel Ferrara’ – nom de guerre of an Italian hero of the Great War who became an anti-Mussolini figurehead and volunteered to fight in Spain, where has become a legendary figure (p.18). Kolb buys his freedom from a French internment camp and accompanies him to Paris where Weisz is engaged to write his heroic biography, Soldier for Freedom.
The military censor in Castelldans (p.24)
S. Kolb (p.50), a meagre little man, his career at a Swiss bank was ruined after he was (unfairly) caught embezzling money, then recruited by the British Secret Intelligence Service, after which he has been thrown into all kinds of perilous situations. In this novel he is given the money to purchase Colonel Ferrara’s freedom, brings him to Paris, settles him in a safe apartment and supervises Weisz writing his biography.
Commandant of the French internment camp near Tarbes where Ferrara is being held.
Hotel Tournon – the Paris hotel Kolb books Ferrara into.
Monsieur Devoisin, a permanent undersecretary at the French Foreign Ministry, who Weisz visits for official briefings (p.61).
Irina – one night Ferrara, Weisz and Kolb go to a nightclub to blow away the blues, to the Club Chez les Nudistes, up in Pigalle, where the girls wear only high-heeled shoes and are illuminated by blue lights. She seduces Ferrara on the dance floor and quickly becomes his beloved – ‘she is my life. We make love all night.’ (p.235)
Véronique, one of Weisz’s lovers, works in an up-market art gallery (p.132). He has some dainty sex before formally dumping her as his affair with Christa re-ignites.
Delahanty, Weisz’s boss at Reuters Paris bureau (p.27)
Geoffrey Sparrow, Oxford friend of Weisz’s (p.41)
Olivia, Sparrow’s flirtatious girlfriend (p.43)
Edwin Brown, ‘Mr Brown’, an agent of the British Secret Intelligence Service, SIS (p.44).
Mr Lane, Brown’s superior in SIS (p.219)
Sir Roderick (p.233). We don’t get his last name. Lane refers to him as the head of SIS, also mentioned in previous books.
Count Polanyi, well known Hungarian spy (pp.48, 125)
Nicholas Morath, his nephew and central character in Kingdom of Shadows (p.125)
Lady Angela Hope, the dashing British spy and recruiter who the text goes out of its way to make clear Weisz made love to, very noisily, twice (p.49).
Inspector Pompon of the Sûreté National who interviews Weisz in room 10 of the imposing Interior Ministry on the rue des Saussaies (p.63).
Inspector Guerin, Pompon’s partner (p.223).
Eric Wolf, Reuters man in Berlin, getting married, going on honeymoon in Cornwall for a fortnight, Weisz is sent to Berlin to cover for him (p.70).
Christa Zameny, Weisz’s passionate lover, who married German count von Schirren some years before (p.75). When Weisz appears in Berlin they immediately, with barely a word spoken, resume their careers as championship sexual performers, Christa’s panties and bra repeatedly falling to the floor, ‘her breasts shining wet in the light’ (p.85).
Gerda, German secretary at Reuters Berlin office.
Dr Martz, cheerful Nazi official at the Berlin Press Club.
Ian Hamilton, journalist from The Times (p.98) on the short trip to Prague.
Prague taxi driver.
The two students in Prague.
Brasserie Heininger (p.124) the glitzy night-life bar and dance floor which appears in every one of Furst’s novels.
Moma Tsipler and his Wienerwald Companions – a Viennese Jazz band who’ve appeared in previous novels and are in residence at the Brasserie Heininger during this one.
Louis Fischfang (p.125) film scriptwriter and a lead character in The World At Night and Red Gold.
Voyschinkowsky, known as ‘the Lion of the Bourse.’ (p.125)
André Szara, protagonist of Furst’s second novel, Dark Star (p.125).
Cara Dionello, rich Argentinian, part of the Polanyi party (p.125).
King Zog of Albania, in exile in Paris after the Italians seize Albania (p.156)
Matteo, printer in Genoa who uses his job as cover to print copies of Liberazione before getting it clandestinely shipped off round Italy.
Antonio, truck driver who delivers Liberazione from Genoa to Rapallo
Gabriella and Lucia 16-year-old schoolgirls who help distribute Liberazione.
Lieutenant DeFranco, detective in the rough waterfront district of Genoa who enjoys reading Liberazione (p.139)
Gennaro, transport policeman on the Paris to Genoa train (p.171)
Perini, owner of Perini’s barbershop in the rue Mabillon (p.143).
Bertrand, loyal old porter at Weisz’s hotel, the Dauphine (p.176).
Adolf Hitler, bounding up and down with happiness after signing the Pact of Steel (p.184).
Count Ciano, Italian Foreign Minister (p.184).
The assistant manager of the Galeries Lafayette, nicknamed ‘the Dragon’ (p.194).
Old Madame Gros, secretary at the Galeries Lafayette (p.195).
Grassone, ‘fatboy’, huge underworld figure in Genoa (p.253).
Emil, slick underworld fixer in Genoa (p.255).
‘The landlord’, owner of the old wine cellar which Weisz can use as a base for the expanded printing of Liberazione (p.263).
Pazzo, the local bully boy policeman who tries to arrest Weisz in Genoa (p.265).
Angelina, immense woman wearing a hairnet who retaliates against Pazzo and secures Weisz’s freedom (p.266).
Father Marco, who gives Weisz sanctuary after Angelina has got him away from the local police (p.267).
Nunzio, easy-gong customs officer at Genoa docks.
Klemens, former German street fighter now agent for SIS, driver of the car in which Kolb collects Christa and spirits her away from her watchers (p.274).

Nets and webs

The novel is, in other words, populated by an amazingly intricate web of characters who are shown interacting in a multitude of expected or unpredictable ways. For me, Furst’s novels have complexity instead of ‘atmosphere’. It’s the sheer proliferation of characters, with numberless walk-on parts for taxi drivers, bartenders, customs officials and so on, which gives the novels their extraordinary sense of range and their imaginative suasion.

As explained in reviews of his previous novels, I don’t find Furst’s novels particularly thrilling for most of their length – not until the deliberately exciting final chapter or so. For most of their length they consist of accounts of meetings, interviews, rendezvous, the handing over of documents, discussion of secrets, making of arrangements and so on, in offices, street corners and cafés. And the making love.

Fine food They routinely feature rather sumptuous descriptions of meals at fancy restaurants (at the Ritz hotel in Paris, the Adlon in Berlin, the famous Brasserie Heininger) accompanied by fancy cocktails or champagne.

Sex And of course, the novels are laced with descriptions of knowing, sensual sex with one of the hero’s various lovers or mistresses (Marie-Galante in Blood of Victory, Demetria and Maria Sombel in Dark Voyage, and the very sensuous and imaginative Christa von Schirren in this novel). We read descriptions – muted tasteful descriptions – of Weisz having sex with Véronique, with Lady Angela Hope, with Christa, or fantasising about having sex with little Olivia or his Paris landlady.

He knew what she liked, she knew what he liked, so they had a good time. Afterwards, he smoked a Gitane and watched her as she sat at her dressing table, her small breasts rising and falling as she brushed her hair. (p.32)

In Furst’s fiction, you’re never far away from silk bras or panties suavely slipping off smooth flesh.

After a time, she moved her legs apart, and guided his hand, ‘God,’ she said, ‘how I love this.’ He could tell that she did. Sliding down the bed, so that her head was level with his waist, she said, ‘Just stay where you are, there is something I have wanted to do for a long time.’ (p.181)

Good living The fine food, the champagne cocktails, the beautiful women stripping down to their cami-knickers in each novel tend to counter-balance – or even outweigh – the rarer action scenes: the strange men following the hero down a darkened street, the shots from the police as they crash a roadblock, the dive bombers attacking the naval convoy. Much more often you get paragraphs like this:

She stood and took off her jacket and skirt, then her shirt, stockings and suspenders, and folded them over the top of the chaise longue. Usually she wore expensive cotton underwear, white or ivory, and soft to the touch, but tonight she was in a plum-coloured silk, the bra with a lace trim, the panties low at the waist, high at the hip, and tight, a style called, Véronique had once told him, French cut. (p.94)

Sensual and soft More broadly, if something actually violent isn’t happening (which it generally isn’t) Furst’s general purpose setting is noticeably sensual and gentle. It’s not just the sex and fine wine which contributes to the sense of softness about the novels, it’s the default attitude which is – oddly given the subject matter – consistently sweet and gentle.

All his life he’d gazed at rivers, from London’s Thames to Budapest’s Danube, with the Arno, the Tiber and the Grand Canal of Venice in between, but the Seine was queen of the poetic rivers, to Weisz it was. Restless and melancholy, or soft and slow, depending on the mood of the river, or his. That night it was dappled, black with rain and running high in its banks… (p.123)

Very often poetic and wistful:

For a time, Weisz just stood there, alone on the wharf, as the crew disappeared up the flight of stone steps. When they’d gone, it was very quiet, only a buzzing dock light, a cloud of moths fluttering in its metal hood and the lapping of the sea against the quay. The night air was warm, a familiar warmth, soft on the skin, and fragrant with the scents of decay; damp stone and drains, mud flats at low tide.
Weisz had never been here before, but he was home. (p.246)

It is these kind of cadences which give the novels, overall, a dreamy feel which I think explains why the reader is rarely really gripped by the storyline, but is more often absorbed by the endless variety of new characters, interested in the depictions of real historical moments and geopolitical developments – and lulled by the rhythms of much of the prose.

At times this rises to overtly physical descriptions of food or sex but, even in the absence of those obvious highlights, is everywhere characterised by a kind of sweet and gentle sensuality, which helps make the novels such easy, interesting, sexy and rewarding reads.

Credit

The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst was published in 2006 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Page references are to the 2007 Phoenix paperback edition.

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