All posts tagged Ross

Congo by Michael Crichton (1980)

This book recounts the thirteen days of the last American expedition to the Congo, in June 1979 (p.xii)

Crichton’s habit of stuffing his techno-thriller novels with factual digressions, losing no opportunity to give the reader the full fruits of his up-to-the-minute research about the geography and climate and culture and peoples of the book’s setting and then stuff it with a cornucopia of gee-whizz gadgets, especially anything relating to computers, often completely overwhelms the plot.

Sometimes his books feel like a series of educational magazine articles only just held together by contrived storylines, which, as soon as you stop and think about them, you realise are utterly preposterous. And then there are the so-called ‘characters’, who are given names, ages and CVs but remain little more than cardboard cutouts.

According to Wikipedia, Crichton pitched the idea of writing a modern-day version of King Solomon’s Mines to 20th Century Fox who bought the film rights before the story had even been written, paying him a $1.5 million advance for the novel, screenplay and as a directing fee.

It sounded like a good idea but the result of this big, expensive promise was a serious case of writer’s block, as Crichton struggled to make a start and then to create any kind of coherent narrative. And boy, does it show. He ended up throwing about five separate plot ideas into the mix in the hope that they’d somehow add up to a ripping yarn, and overloading the text with every factual digression he could think of in order to give the text a sense of substance.

Congo is a messy, scrappy, dumb mess of a book, but some of the factual background is interesting; you don’t get to read novels about Africa that often; it was interesting to see what was considered up-to-the-minute technology in 1980 and compare it to the present day; and there was a kind of dumb dogged interest in the narrative itself: I was curious to see what preposterous, contrived and absurd incident he’d chuck in next to try and keep the whole thing afloat. Probably the encounter with the angry hippopotamuses wins the prize for silliest episode.

No doubt hippopotami do have the character and temperament he describes in a typical Readers Digest digression about them, no doubt they do attack by raking their razor sharp teeth sideways over their intended victim, no doubt this would rip and deflate an inflatable raft. But it’s still silly.

1. Earth Resources Technology Services and the race for IIb diamonds

Earth Resources Technology Services Inc (ERTS) is a Houston-based American corporation devoted to locating and extracting rare and precious minerals and resources for industrial use. It is (inevitably) run by a maverick genius R.B. Travis (backstory p.17). The hottest computer analyst in the corps is 6 foot-tall, cold, calculating Karen Ellen Ross.

The entire plot rotates around the desperate search to locate a rumoured source of ‘Type IIb boron-coated blue diamonds’ (pp.109, 115) in the dense rainforests of the Virunga region, in the remote eastern part of the vast Congo jungle. Extended factual digressions explain that this particular type of diamond is very valuable as semiconductors, ‘important to microelectronics applications’, and since, as Crichton explains at length, the future is going to be all about faster and faster computing speeds, possession of a source of diamonds which speed up computer technology will be vastly valuable. Especially the future of weaponry.

Computer speed now stands at the centre of the armament race…The new generation of optical computers will be dependent on the availability of Type IIb boron-coated diamonds. (p.342)

This is why the ERTS expedition into the Congo is not alone, but is shadowed every step of the way by a ‘consortium’ of industrial rivals, made up of a temporary partnership of German and Japanese industrial interests. These guys are hacking into ERTS’s radio communications back to Houston as well as vying for important resources for such an expedition, not least the services of the renowned White African mercenary Charles Munro (backstory pp.101 to 103) who, after bargaining with all the interested parties at his plush pad in Tangiers, opts to go with the ERTS expedition.

So the fact that the ERTS team is trying to get to the rumoured location of the diamonds before their rivals is supposed to give the narrative grip and thrill. For me, it didn’t at all. If this had been a Hammond Innes or Desmond Bagley novel, then this story in and of itself would have been enough, and people would have got killed, probably in gruesome circumstances and it would have felt desperate and tense. At no point did this book feel desperate and tense.

2. The ‘Consortium’

Anyway, it’s not as simple as that. Crichton adds in a few other plot strands which, in my opinion, had the effect of turning what could have been a decent thriller into a ridiculous cartoon. First, there is the important fact that the expedition led by Karen Ross and which recruits Charles Munro, is not the first one sent by ERTS. An earlier one had gone out and the novel actually starts with this first team, camped in the darkest rainforest as the old Africa hand they’ve hired to guide them, Jan Kruger, fires up a satellite video connection with ERTS Houston to report on progress.

But in the 5 or 6 minutes it takes both sides to establish contact (remember the book was written in 1979, 42 years ago, and all the technology is accordingly basic or old fashioned) the entire expedition is wiped out, every member massacred and the campsite wrecked. By the time the camera comes online there’s no-one there. Karen Ross is at the Houston end in charge and she gets the techs to rotate the camera on its tripod, thus surveying the wreckage, then a dark shadow moves across the screen and the camera is smashed, signal ends. What was it? What wiped out the expedition?

Very early on I figured it was either a lost tribe of humans or human-gorilla mutants, as anyone who’s watched a thousand rubbish American films or watched episodes of American adventure TV shows could entirely have predicted.

3. The lost city of Zinj

But meanwhile, I have to explain about the lost city of Zinj. Yes. That’s really what it’s called. Crichton gives us a number of digressions about the (patchy) history of Western exploration into the Congo jungle or up the Congo river (he is particularly fond of the expeditions of Henry Morton Stanley for the simple reason that Stanley was the great pioneer and explored further and more definitively than all previous explorers).

Anyway, Crichton makes up a legendary lost city of Zinj (pp.58 to 60, 82), a clear hommage to the great late-Victorian adventure storytellers such as Rider Haggard (She) and Conan Doyle (The Lost World) and the novel reaches its climax when our heroes arrive after many adventures, at the lost city of Zinj and discover its connection both to a) a culture which use to mine the very type IIb diamonds they are looking for but which also holds the key to understanding

4. Amy the talking gorilla

Yes. A talking gorilla. Because after the first expedition is wiped out and while Karen Ross is persuading Travis that she is the person to lead the second expedition a) to find the diamonds b) to discover what happened to the first expedition, ERTS contacts one of the leading researchers in America into teaching apes American sign language. As you might expect this leads into several lengthy digressions about the entire history of trying to teach apes language, right up to the present (well, 1979 when the book was written) and researchers have managed to teach chimpanzees 200 or so ‘words’ in American Sign Language (vide Washoe, Koko) (pp.35 to 38 and 292).

The researcher is named Peter Elliott (backstory pp.35 to 41), 6 foot tall and bearded, and Peter has been leading Project Amy, i.e. seven years or so of teaching a tame gorilla named Amy to an advanced level of communication. The text settles into conveying their conversations as Peter signing or saying something and Amy’s replies are given in italics. In reality I understand communication between humans and gorillas is very limited, but in this tall story Peter and Amy can hold lengthy discussions.

Now why does ERTS and Karen Ross want a talking gorilla to go on an expedition to the lost city of Zinj in search of industrial diamonds (see how ludicrous the plot is when you spell it out in black and white?)? Because the brief shadow that flickered across the camera of the massacred first expedition looked like a gorilla. So why not take a talking gorilla along in the hope that it can act as ambassador to whoever or whatever massacred the first team.

But why would a comfortably placed American academic want to leave his cosy perch at the University of California at Berkeley to go on some cock and bull expedition into remote rainforest? Crichton must have spent a while mulling over what could possibly motivate Prof Peter Elliott to leave his crib and in the end comes up with a plausible reason.

He invents the notion that Elliott’s work just happens to have recently been picked upon by a high-minded organisation devoted to liberating primates from scientific experiments, the Primate Preservation Agency (p.43). They’ve written harsh articles, are picketing his university office and published Elliott’s address such that he is living in fear of a possible attack. Thus when he gets a call late one night from Karen Ross asking if he wants to pack up and go on a journey to gorilla country in eastern Congo, he leaps at the chance.

And Amy the gorilla is going along, too, of course. The practicalities of ‘explaining’ all this to Amy, and packing for her, and getting her onto a plane and so on, quickly become so ludicrous that…

There’s another element to Amy which is that, when Amy likes doing finger drawings of images she tells Peter she sees when she’s asleep. And these drawings are often of what might be taken for buildings with half-moon entrances. And guess what? Other illustrations of the conjectured lost city of Zinj show it as having half-moon-shaped entrances. Are the dreams actual memories of seeing such a place or ancestral (pp.41 to 42)? Or could this be an example of genetic memory (cue a Crichtonian digression about the history and provenance of genetic memory, ‘Genetic memory was first proposed by Marais in 1911…’ p.46).

5. Congo civil war

There have been a number of civil wars in the region known as the Congo including the massive Second Congo War (1998 to 2003). But back at the time Crichton was writing (1979) the war he refers to involved Ugandan troops fleeing across the border into Zaire when theior country was invaded by Tanzania (p.100). In Crichton’s hands this morphs into a campaign by some parts of the Zaire army to exterminate the Kigani tribe of cannibals. Our heroes go to lengths to avoid both these violent elements, the Zaire army and Kigani, at least until the very end of the book (see below).

Its relevance to the story is that at several key moments the Ross expedition finds itself enmeshed between warring parties, most importantly when they are flying in a small aircraft towards the site of the lost city of Zinj and come under attack from heat-seeking missiles. As you might imagine, the resourceful ERTS team have snappy modern technology to foil the missiles and survive. But it’s just one more element which triggers umpteen Crichtonian factual digressions, and which Crichton throws into the mix hoping something will stick.

Recap

An American company which specialises in sourcing rare and precious raw resources sends 24-year-old  computer whizzkid Karen Ross, along with ape linguist Peter Elliott, his talking gorilla Amy and African mercenary Charles Munro (plus half a dozen Kikuyu porters) into the remote eastern Congo to find the lost city of Zinj in order to find out what happened to the previous expedition and locate the source of the rumoured diamonds which are worth a fortune in industrial processes.

Fact obsessed

As well as the factual digressions on every page, Congo also features academic footnotes and no fewer than three pages of references at the end, including academic papers in learned journals to show just how much research Crichton has done. Some of the many magazine-style digressions concern:

  • Henry Morton Stanley (xii-xiii, 60, 83, 154, 169, )
  • animal rights (50-52)
  • the history of Congo (57-60)
  • the Pearl thesis of animal intelligence (pp.76-77)
  • competitive advantage in information technology (73)
  • the Great Rift Valley (pp.83-84)
  • albedo ie using different light reflection levels to distinguish ancient forest from secondary growth (85-87)
  • B-8 problems in computing (90)
  • holographic night goggles (99)
  • the future of superconducting computers (116-118)
  • computer message hacking (128)
  • electrophoresis and the difference between gorilla and human hair (129)
  • the character of Kikuyu tribesmen (they love to talk) (147, 155) and consider themselves all ‘brothers’ (190)
  • China’s spy operations, foreign aid to and influence in Zaire (147-149)
  • how to distract surface to air missiles with rolled up balls of in foil (156)
  • how automatic parachutes work (162)
  • the Kigani, a tribe of cannibals Crichton appears to have invented (170-172)
  • description of the Kigani’s belief in magic of Angawa
  • cannibalism in central Africa (172-173)
  • Zaire government genocide against the Kigani cannibals (175)
  • levels of electronic jamming and ‘interstitial coding’ (p.180)
  • the rate of global species extinction (189)
  • pygmies and their definitions of different types of ‘death’ (193-196)
  • the Congo river i.e. although it’s vast it’s not easily navigable (201)
  • the character of the hippopotamus (207-209) just before they attack our heroes
  • a history of the attempts to climb Mount Mukenko (which our heroes parachute onto and have to climb across) (218)
  • what to do when faced by a charging male silverback gorilla (don’t move and look at the ground) (230-231)
  • Degusto’s infra-red light technology for making out images hidden under dirt, sand, vegetable matter etc (250)
  • Maurice Cavalle’s 1955 paper ‘The Death of Nature’ (252)
  • the legend of the kakundakari, African equivalent of the yeti (262-263)
  • chimpanzee violent behaviour, especially kidnapping and eating human infants (266)
  • Freud’s theory that a dreamer, confronted with the reality their dream is based on, is often surprisingly apathetic (274)
  • British scientist R.V.S. Wright’s attempts to teach an orangutan to use tools (293)
  • DNA similarity between humans and chimps i.e. 99% identical (294)
  • S.L. Berensky’s 1975 paper about primate language suggesting the apes are smarter than humans (296)
  • the difference between different sign languages of different nations (297)
  • primates stop fighting if infants get in the way or are taken up by one or other of the combatants (312)
  • the origin and periodicity of solar flares, one of which interferes with our heroes communications back to Houston (314)
  • which part of the brain language comes from (Broca’s area) (335)
  • explanation of brontides, the loud explosions that accompany earthquakes (335)
  • most people caught in a volcanic eruption die from the poison gas (336)
  • General Franklin Martin’s Pentagon presentation which argued that Zaire had been vital to US military efforts since the war because of its mineral resources and also that super-fast computers would being to an end the age of nuclear weapons (340-343)
  • US military Project Vulcan to detonate timed resonance explosions in order to graduate the impact of eruptions of Mouna Loa in Hawaii (347-349)

But none of this blizzard of factual information can prevent Congo from being preposterous bollocks.

The expedition encounters a handful of problems such as flying through an anti-aircraft attack mounted by the Zaire army, parachuting into the jungle (everyone lands just fine), rafting down some river into the remote East (they are attacked by angry hippopotami), and trekking across the unstable crust of recently active volcanoes (the Virunga range of volcanoes, as described in an extended factual digression which names the main ones as being Mukenko, Mubuti, Kanagarawi, p.84), all in order to reach the lost bloody city of Zinj which, they eventually discover, is now an overgrown, empty ruin.

a) This is more extensive than they expected. They use high tech radar stuff to see through the layers of grime to the extensive reliefs which describe the ordinary life of the city centuries ago when it was inhabited. The carvings appear to show the inhabitants mined extensively and seem to have trained gorillas to act as security and police (!!) and this is the ridiculous reason for:

b) The final revelation that the previous expedition wasn’t wiped out by gorillas as science currently knows them, but by a new species of intelligent gorilla which the Zinjans bred and developed.

Luckily our heroes had put up an electrified fences round the perimeter of their camp and had brought along loads of fancy laser-guided machine guns which do a good job of killing some of the New Species of Gorilla when they launch their inevitable attack.

Other reasons this is a terrible book

1. Format

In The Andromeda Strain Crichton used the format of a report produced by an enquiry into what went wrong at a virus isolation unit. The pseudo-scientific/bureaucratic format worked well. Here he uses the tone of something more like a documentary. In particular he keeps writing that ‘many months later Peter Elliott realised his mistake’ or ‘speaking later, Karen Ross explained why she made this decision’.

Presumably the narrative is cast in this format to give it the feel of a later report or documentary. But it has the unintended side effect of confirming that the three main characters all survive. In other words, it destroys all suspense or sense of jeopardy. We know they all get out alive. OK, then, well, why bother reading to the end?

2. Out of date

Crichton busted a gut doing all that research and shoehorned it into his text throughout and yet… it’s all hilariously out of date. If you want to read about how fiddly it was to rig up a satellite camera link in 1979 or how big and fast people in 1979 thought computers would become in the 1980s then this is the book for you. There is, quite obviously, nothing about the internet, smart phones, social media or any of the other tech discoveries of the past 40 years. It’s sweet that Crichton thinks ERTS’ technology is ‘staggering’ because it can acquire 16 new satellite images of the earth per hour (p.20).

Acronyms and initialisms

I found it more enjoyable collecting a list of the acronyms than following the ridiculous plot which came more and more to resemble a movie-length episode of Scoobie Doo. My only excuse for reading such twaddle is I was on holiday and picked it up for £1 in a second hand shop.

ADP – Animal Defence Perimeter (p.238)

APE – Animal Pattern Explanation (p.307)

APNF – Animation Predicted Next Frame (p.27)

ASL – American Sign Language aka Ameslan (p.36)

BF – Bona fortuna = good luck (p.123)

C3I – Command, control, communications and intelligence units (p.74)

CFS – Congo Field Study (p.351)

CCR – Communications Control Room (p.12)

CCT – Computer Compatible Tape (p.21)

ECM – Electronic Countermeasures (p.179)

ERTS Earth Resources Technology Services

FZA – Forces Zairoises Armoises, Zaire army (p.157)

GPU – Geopolitical Update (p.98)

LAC – Local Atmospheric Conditions (p.351)

LATRAP – Laser-Tracking Projectile, which consists of multiple LGSDs attached to sequential RFSDs (p.280)

MERS – Mineral Exploration Rights, such as you negotiate with the host government (p.25)

NCNA – New China News Agency, cover for Chinese espionage (p.148)

PNF – Predicted Next Frame: technology for improving poor quality images (p.27)

PPA – Primate Protection Agency (p.43)

PSOPS – Prior Significant Orbital Passes by Satellite (p.97)

RC – Resonant Conventionals: timed explosives (p.345)

SESC – Space Environmental Services Centre in Boulder Colorado (p.315)

Triple E – Expedition Electronics Expert (p.74)

UECL – Unit Extraction Cost Limit (p.115)

WEIRD – Wilderness Environment Intruder Response Defences (p.242)

I work in the civil service and so I recognise the mindset which says that, if you spell something out in title case i.e. you capitalise the names of things it immediately makes them more important; and if you can make an acronym out of them, it makes them sound really grand and makes you sound very big and important when you casually allude to acronyms or initialisms which other people don’t understand.

Bearing this in mind helps to explain why America has some 35 distinct intelligence agencies, each with its own shiny logo and acronym and whip-smart, fast-talking executives, and they all failed to prevent 9/11. And why the US Army, possibly the world epicentre of grand-sounding acronyms, nonetheless made a complete bollocks of invading Iraq and liberating Afghanistan. (I mention this because America’s humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan was all over the news as I read Congo so the comparison made itself.)

No amount of clever-sounding names and titles and acronyms and hi-tech gadgetry can redeem ignorance, stupidity and terrible decisions. Or, in this case, an embarrassing train wreck of a novel.

The end

Our heroes are attacked a couple of times in their camp. Elliott undertakes a ridiculous plan to record the grey gorillas’ strange whispering language, to use Houston’s computers to analyse and interpret it, and then to play it back to attacking gorillas in order to stall them. Despite all the improbabilities Elliott makes this work in a matter of hours and during the next gorilla attack it does, indeed, manage to slow and halt the attack of the puzzled silver gorillas, although a torrential tropical downpour interferes with the experiment.

What brings this farrago of nonsense to an end, in the best boys own adventure tradition, is a huge volcanic eruption which starts rocking the ground during what had promised to be the gorillas’ final assault, when they have killed a few more porters and have our heroes pinned to the ground about to crush their skulls.

The ground starts shaking, the gorillas flee, random lightning strikes electrocute a few more of the African porters, as our dazed heroes grab their most important possessions and flee the ruined camp, trekking through jungle while ash falls all around them, the earth trembles, the volcano spews ash and lava.

They arrive at the crashed container plane of the rival consortium which had been shot down a few days earlier by Zaire army forces (they’d heard the plane flying overhead and seen the surface to air missiles fired at it a few days earlier).

First our heroes have to fight off the Kigani cannibals who were in the middle of eating the dead consortium members and resent being turfed out of the plane’s treasure trove. But then Ross discovers huge tanks of propane in the plane which are designed to inflate a balloon which the consortium had brought along for precisely such an emergency!

And so the preposterous narrative ends with Ross, Elliott, Munro and the couple of porters who haven’t been killed by the silver gorillas or the bolts of lightning or the volcanic ash or the poison gas, inflating, climbing into and flying off over the jungle in a big balloon, a very Jules Vernes ending to a novel which sets out to be a homage to the great Victorian adventure writers but turns into a car crash of overcomplex but completely improbable narrative, drowning in endless Readers Digest factual digressions and hosted by characters which make a puddle look deep.

And the Lost City of Zinj? In the finest tradition of the old storytellers, is buried forever under half a mile of volcanic ash so nobody will ever be able to check the three explorers’ bold claims. It’s almost as juvenile as saying: ‘and then I woke up and it was all a dream.’

The movie

The original deal had been for Crichton himself to direct the movie version and from 1981 to 1987 he maintained the hope of directing it with Sean Connery in the lead, but that version of the project never came to fruition.

Instead Congo was finally made into a movie in 1995, directed by Frank Marshall and starring Laura Linney as the permanently stressed-out woman scientist, Dylan Walsh as the sensitive primatologist, Ernie Hudson as the mercenary and hunter who leads the group and Tim Curry as the camp Romanian millionaire who finances the whole farrago.

I don’t mean to be rude but when two leads in what is meant to be a serious thriller played defining parts in Ghostbusters (Hudson) and The Rocky Horror Show (Curry) you know you’re talking about a turkey.

I’m not at all surprised to learn the movie version received a critical drubbing and was nominated for not one but several Golden Raspberry awards, given to real stinkers.

Michael Crichton reviews

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by Simon on July 28, 2021  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 28, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/07/28/congo-michael-crichton/

Billion Dollar Brain by Len Deighton (1966)

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

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

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

Differences from previous novels

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Narrator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As his bosses see him

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

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

Executive summary

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

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

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

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

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

The plot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Killer?

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

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

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

Cast

London

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

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

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

Abroad

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

The Brain

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

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

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

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

Class consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

Olde England

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

Locations

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

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

Influence of films

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or TV:

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

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

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

Similes and style

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

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

Or:

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

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

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

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

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

Raymond Chandler

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

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

Humour

Still plenty of dead-pan humour.

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

Jazz

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

The movie

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

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

Credit

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

Related links

1966 Penguin paperback cover of Billion Dollar Brain

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

Related reviews

1966 in thrillers

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

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

The Ipcress File by Len Deighton (1962)

‘It’s a confusing story,’ I told him. ‘I’m in a very confusing business.’
(The Ipcress File, page 2)

‘You’re a cool young man,’ Jay said. (p.293)

‘IPCRESS? It’s a word one of Ross’s men invented from the words Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress…’ (chapter 34)

‘The Ipcress File’ was Deighton’s début, his first and still most famous novel (partly because of the success of the iconic movie version made just a few years later – in 1965 – starring Michael Caine in one of his earliest roles). The book made Deighton a household name overnight. Having never read it before, I was very surprised to find how arty, elliptical and detached it is; funny, stylish, poised tiptoe on the brink of ‘Swinging London’, and hugely enjoyable.

The Narrator

The story is told in the first person by an unnamed Narrator (the name Harry Palmer appears to have been invented for the film – the Narrator of ‘IPCRESS’ specifically says his name is not Harry in chapter 5).

The narrator is 5 foot 11 inches tall, dark-haired, round-faced with a jutting cleft chin. He has deep-sunk blue eyes with bags under them and wears horn-rimmed glasses. He’s from Burnley, where he attended grammar school.

His age

He is a male employee of British Security and old enough to have had experience of World War Two – there is an implication he was born in 1922 or 1923, thus turning 40 when the series begins. In fact this is an important difference from the movie: Michael Caine was 32 when he appeared in the film and all the way through radiates cheeky chappie, Cockney, insubordinate charm; whereas the narrator is a subtler figure – he is still insubordinate to his two bosses, Ross and Dalby, but when the latter goes out into the field, the narrator is put in charge of the unit and himself becomes the boss, bossing round the unit secretary Alice, and deserving of his own personal secretary, Jean Tonnesen. In other words, the Narrator is older, more experienced, more senior and has more responsibility than the movie version.

A footnote helps to explain why the Narrator has a special place in the department:

I had done a lot of work with the Swiss banks for Ross. By the time I came to Dalby’s department, I had enough good solid contacts there to trace any secret account, given enough time. As well as this I had learned every legal and illegal way of moving money about the globe. Money is to espionage what petrol is to a motor-car, and it was because I had kept the wraps on my contacts there that I had been so insubordinate to so many for so long. (Ch 8)

Culture and cooking

The immediate and enduring impression is that our man is intelligent and cultivated, knowledgeable about food and clothes and music – he references Kierkegaard and Brecht and Xenophon, he likes the jazz of Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Charlie Parker and Lee Konitz but also recognises Mozart’s Jupiter symphony when he hears it played on a gramophone in the mountains outside Beirut.

And he knows his food and drink. He describes the coffee made in various Soho coffee bars in loving detail, is precise about his sandwich fillings, notes exactly how their Lebanese contact prepares his kebabs:

The smell of Dgaj Muhshy (chicken stuffed with nutmeg, thyme, pine nuts, lamb and rice, and cooked with celery)… First sambousiks (small pastries containing curried meat served freshly baked)… (Ch 7)

Army insubordination

And he is cocky, stroppy, facetious and sarcastic in a post-Angry Young Men way. His Burnley origin (in Funeral in Berlin he is described as ‘an upstart from Burnley’) contrasts with the various public school-educated intelligence officers he has to deal with. Humour is his weapon; insubordination is what the Army calls it. He is sardonic about the Army and its tangled bureaucracies, keen to avoid paperwork, grumpy about his back pay and delayed expenses. He rarely misses an opportunity to answer back, or to be smarter, dryer and wittier than his ‘superiors’.

He’s been exited from the Army to join the Security Services. He’s been working in Military Intelligence ‘for nearly three years’. At one point he seems to indicate that he had a spell at the CIA?

calling me ‘boy-scoutish’ which he knew would hit me where it hurt. Me, the slick modern intelligence agent. Six months with the C.I.A. and two button-down shirts to prove it. (p.125)

The novel opens with him being transferred from the bit of Military Intelligence run by Ross to a tiny specialist unity called W.O.O.C.(P) run by a man named Dalby who answers directly to the Cabinet.

Detached and elliptical

And the narrator is distanced from the action, even when it involves his own beatings and imprisonment – an Asperger’s syndrome level of alienation from himself and events around him. Everything is described in a wry, elliptical style. For example, I only realised that he has begun an affair with his attractive secretary, Jean, when he casually says:

While standing still, her smooth body would move – slowly and imperceptibly – under the thin summer uniform fabric, and I would think of the small circular gold ear-ring of hers that I had found in my bed-clothes on Wednesday morning. (Ch 21)

At least, I think that means he slept with her. Almost no other reference is made to it, certainly there is no description of the lead-up to the event or the event itself. That is what I mean by ‘elliptical’. The text is made up of much detail and snappy phrasing, but the important facts are frequently deliberately buried.

Oblique descriptions

This is his description of a band playing at a party.

Three army musicians moved coolly and mathematically within the modal range of ‘There’s a small Hotel’ and linking modulated inversions walked around the middle eight with creditable synchronisation. Here and there a laugh walked up the foothills of noise. (Ch 21)

This is how clever, stylish and self-conscious the narrative is throughout. One of the many gimmicks is his habit of recounting snippets of overheard conversation, fragments of speech. Touch of James Joyce.

I left the Horseguards Avenue entrance, and walked down Whitehall to Keightly at Scotland Yard. Inside the entrance an elderly policeman was speaking into a phone. ‘Room 284?’ he said. ‘Hello Room 284? I’m trying to locate the tea trolley.’… (Ch 15)

These ‘overheard fragments’ occur frequently and their inconsequentiality does… what? Reinforces that he’s a spy who notices everything? Are examples of dry humour? Or that his world is made up of fragments which have a hole at the centre, where the Narrator’s character should be.

In a similar spirit of decentring the narrative, he opens a newspaper and then spends a page summarising all the main stories – or lists the offers in the junk mail which has come through his letterbox this morning:

Tuesday was a big echoing summer’s day. I could hear the neighbour’s black Airedale dog, and they could hear my FM. I sorted the letters from the mat; Times magazine subscription dept said I was missing the chance of a lifetime. My mother’s eldest sister wished I was in Geneva; so did I, except that my aunt was there. A War Office letter confirmed my discharge from the Army and told me that I was not subject to reserve training commitments, but was subject to the Official Secrets Act in respect of information and documents. The dairy said to order cream early for the holiday and had I tried Chokko, the new chocolate drink that everyone was raving about. (Ch 14)

Mordant commentary on our times? Satire? Plain laughs? There’s lots of this dead-eyed observation and it is deliberately deployed to almost completely conceal any sense of the Narrator’s feelings or emotions, and also to obscure numerous crucial moments in the plot.

(This wilful obscurity is the opposite of the breathless physical involvement created by Alistair MacLean’s intensely physical thrillers – the breathless The Golden Rendezvous and The Satan Bug were published in the same year as IPCRESS, 1962; or the minute descriptions of Bond’s tribulations – 1962 saw publication of the ninth Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me.)

Plot

The plot is long and convoluted. The story opens with the Narrator (N) being transferred from his one-time boss, Colonel Ross’s part of military intelligence, to the newer, smarter, so-called WOOC(P), run by younger man, Dalby. Whereas John le Carré’s ‘Circus’ is a rather vague organisation, populated by ageing men who meet in their various London clubs, Dalby’s small defined team have their offices in Charlotte Street. (Twenty-five years later I worked in TV studios in Charlotte Street, I knew it well.)

The Narrator spends a lot of time going to a small screening room to familiarise himself with the appearance of one Jay, a man with a long history of espionage, working for Polish government in exile, then returning to work for the Polish communists. He was with the exposed spies Burgess and MacLean when they made their flight abroad. He doesn’t really know why and we, like the Narrator, are in a fog of confusion. He makes the point he has some 600 files open on his desk, all of which require further action.

Dalby tells him Jay is involved in the abduction of top-ranking scientists, one (Raven) has just gone missing. The Narrator is ordered to find Jay and offer him £18,000 for Raven’s return. N meets Jay in a Soho bar, and then pursues him upstairs where he sees, through a window, the unconscious body of the scientist laid out on a roulette table. As he’s pondering his next move Raven is picked up and carried out by Jay’s bodyguard, nicknamed Housemartin. The Narrator breaks through the window to give chase but Housemartin gets away and the Narrator blunders out of one of the exits of the club to find the police closing in, for some reason; maybe they’d been tipped off, too.

Lebanon Dalby orders the Narrator to accompany him to the Lebanon where they ambush a car carrying Raven from Beirut into the interior, a violent scene where they use a sticky bomb which burns and melts the baddies, who Dalby shoots just to be sure. They then hole up in the safe house of a Lebanese drug smuggler who HMG now use as an agent, before flying Raven by helicopter to a nearby ship; then N and Dalby fly home.

The empty house Back in London, Housemartin is reported as having been arrested by enterprising police after he crashes a car. But by the time the Narrator arrives at the police station, Housemartin has been visited by other ‘officials’ and killed. (I never really understand why – simply to stop him talking? Surely he was tough enough to withstand a British interrogation.) Housemartin had been seen leaving a darkened house in a suburban street, so the Narrator orders a large-scale assault on the house and leads it, breaking in with a colleague, before the other police advance. But they find it completely stripped and abandoned, empty except for a large glass tank which turns out to contain a tape machine and some old tape.

Soho Back to the Charlotte Street office and the daily routine: managing Alice (Bloom) the wise old lady who knows everything; wangling a pretty young secretary, Jean Tonnesen; dealing with the toffee-nosed twit Chico; listening to a data scientist called Carswell’s complex statistical analyses of where the missing scientists worked, correlated with other aspects of their lives; worrying about various other ‘cases’.

Tokwe atoll When, out of the blue, Dalby, the Narrator and Jean are ordered to fly to the other side f the planet, to an atoll in the Pacific as guests of the Americans to watch the explosion of a new nuclear device. The setting is vividly described in its surrealness, thousands of American soldiers in a home-from-home on a barren rock. However, things turn odd: The Narrator receives warnings from old friends in the CIA that he is being set up. Jean, also, tells him that Dalby has told the Yanks the Narrator is a double agent. (It seems a long way to go to set him up.)

In a difficult-to-follow sequence Dalby invites the Narrator to drive with him to a part of the island where N’s old friend Barney Barnes is reported as having had an accident but, at a crucial place, a massive flare goes up blinding him, it is near a watch-tower to which a high-powered cable has been attached frying the American soldier inside, and the Narrator discovers that high-powered insulation gloves and cutter have been planted in his car. He is being framed for murdering the guard, and somehow sending high-speed TV images of the test site to a Soviet submarine which had surfaced and fired the flare. I think that’s what happens, it is written very obscurely and doesn’t quite make sense.

American interrogation He is thrown in a cell and beaten up the Americans who believe he’s a commie spy who killed one of their men. He is interrogated for weeks, given physical tests, forced to tell his life story again and again, but nothing he says can clear him: all the evidence implicates him. Then he is told he is being exchanged with American spies the Hungarians are holding (?). He is injected with anaesthetic and has woozy memories of being loaded aboard an ambulance and a plane and an ambulance, again, and then –

Hungarian prison He awakes in a Hungarian prison cell. For the next 35 days or so he is fed little or nothing, and routinely beaten and roughed up by a sadist named KK, made to repeat nonsense phrases with the aim of reducing him to a state of complete incapacity. He is visited by a junior official from the British embassy in Budapest who doesn’t really believe in him. Finally, he manages to escape by knocking the kind old man who sometimes visits him unconscious, making his way to an empty office, tripping the fuses for the entire building, thus opening the window without setting off the alarms, making it across the garden and climbing over a wall to discover that…

On the run He is not in Hungary at all, he is in England, and has just hopped over a wall into the allotment of a grumpy old geezer who tells him he is in Wood Green, north London. The whole Hungary thing has been a complicated deception. He has no idea who put him there or why. He makes a coded call to the dad of a friend from the War (Charlie Cavendish, a former undercover man for C.-S.I.C.H) who gives him a place to stay in London and some old clothes. Once the Narrator’s recovered he collects money, passports, a gun, from safe locations he had set up earlier.

But the Narrator returns from one outing to find the dad murdered and his house turned upside down, and goes on the run again, switching taxis and buses to shake any tail. He then hires a private detective (the titular owner of Waterman’s World-Wide Detective Agency in Shaftesbury Avenue), and a car, and drives down to Dalby’s house. He has no idea what is going on but Dalby is his immediate superior and must be able to help.

Dalby Dalby welcomes him into his Surrey home without batting an eyelid. He tells him he had been kidnapped by Jay who was demanding a ransom of £20,000. Glad you’ve escaped, old chap, now we’ve work to do back in Charlotte Street. Reassured, the Narrator returns to his car and is about to return to London when Waterman, the private detective who’s accompanied him, says, what about the other men surrounding the house? What? The Narrator goes back and through the window sees Dalby talking to Murray, one of his colleagues – and then to Jay!! The scientist abductor!! Is Dalby a double agent after all?

As he’s pondering all this, he feels a gun in his back. It is his colleague Murray, the one who was in Dalby’s living room a few moments earlier – happening to be in the kitchen, he heard Dalby’s alarms being set off and came out to warn the Narrator – and to tell him that he (Murray) is himself an under-cover intelligence agent pretending to be on Dalby’s side. He has just started doing this when, unfortunately, Waterman clobbers Murray, knocking him out.

Jay Really confused, the Narrator and the detective hide until Jay gets into his car, then tail him back to London and the Cromwell Road, turning off near the Brompton Oratory. They walk up to the door Jay entered, pondering their next move, when two of his goons corner them from the rear – they have themselves been tailed and are now forced up to Jay’s hyper-modern flat at gunpoint.

There is a surreal scene with Jay, the master-crook, who chats to the Narrator while he spits and prepares a lobster; with typical Deighton élan the Narrator minutely observes the culinary details. Jay explains the brainwashing technique he’s been perfecting. He says some 300 people have passed through the technique to date. That’s what the empty water tank they found in the empty house was for, to float people in it and play them white noise till they’ve snapped mentally, and can be rewired as double agents… That, in a cruder way, was the treatment he was undergoing in the ‘Hungarian’ house.

At which point, someone called Henry phones Jay and tips him off that the police are closing in. Jay remains calm and unflustered and tells his goons not to shoot.

Resolution The Narrator’s first boss, Ross, reveals all – well, nearly all, and the Narrator fills in the remaining gaps in a long exposition at the end. Jay had been kidnapping scientists and other top chaps and selling them on to whoever bid for them, with the help of the traitor Dalby. But in the past year he’d been developing a new line in brainwashing – wearing down people using a number of different techniques – they were subjecting the Narrator to it in the fake Hungarian prison; another approach was to submerge victims in a big tank of water with earphones clamped to their head to aid disorientation and ‘softening up’: it was this tank and bits of the tape which were found in the abandoned house which the Narrator arranged to be raided. Some 300 well-placed figures had passed through the technique and rounding up all Jay’s accomplices, and identifying the victims of the scheme – what the Narrator calls the IPCRESS network – takes some time.

A lot of this exposition is done as the Narrator explains it all to Jean. He also explains what the IPCRESS of the title means. Here’s Jean asking the questions and the Narrator mansplaining:

‘By the way, is IPCRESS a figure from Greek mythology, the allusion to which I should immediately catch?’
I said, ‘No, it’s a distorted word that one of Ross’s men invented from the words Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress, which is a clinical description of what they did in the haunted house.’
‘And what they started to do to you at Wood Green,’ said Jean.
‘Exactly.’ (Ch 31, page 302)

He goes on to explain the four different methods of brainwashing that Jay and his team deployed. I was tempted to summarise them here but it goes on over 6 pages or so, with lots of detail, so read it yourself in chapter 34 of the PDF (link below). He refers to the whole operation, with typical flippancy, as Brainwashing Incorporated (p.295).

The odd scene in the nightclub where the Narrator sees Raven’s body on a roulette table is explained as an early attempt to frame the Narrator – they were going to plant a hypodermic needle on him, and the police were closing in on the club on Dalby’s orders with a view to finding the Narrator red-handed. But he was impatient, followed Housemartin and broke out of the building just before the police broke in.

Ross takes the Narrator to meet an Exalted Military Personage (EMP) who congratulates N on doing such a splendid job – at the same time, by implication, demonstrating that Ross can be trusted – but the Narrator ruins the moment by demanding to know who the ‘Henry’ is who rang Jay to tip him off. It must have been someone very high up indeed. The atmosphere turns frosty. The Eminent Person says they are trying to track him down. The Narrator wonders… although they’ve got Dalby, is there still some kind of cover-up?

As to Jay, is he thrown into prison for his crimes? No, he is paid £160,000 to co-operate with British Intelligence and becomes a reliable colleague working alongside the Narrator.

The American brigadier who had supervised the Narrator’s interrogation on the atoll appears and confirms that, with a lot of help from Jean, the Americans eventually figured out how Dalby framed him, so now he’s in the clear.

In a sly last two pages, the Narrator gives false passports and money to the old man who had acted as his gaoler in the fake gaol (in Wood Green). This man is in fact a Russian intelligence operative soon to return to Russia. Not turning him in and giving him money, is a precaution in case he (the Narrator) ever gets caught by the commies; or, as he drily puts it: ‘This, too, was a spy’s insurance policy.’ (p.326)

Cast

Deighton spends a lot of time describing the physical appearance of his characters in some detail.

  • the Narrator – recently released from the Army into British Intelligence – ‘a darkhaired, round-faced character; deep sunk eyes with bags under horn-rim glasses, chin jutting and cleft. On the back of the photos was written “5ft. 11 in.; muscular inclined to overweight. No visible scar tissue; hair dark brown, eyes blue” – weighs 14 stone (p.112)
  • Colonel Ross – the narrator’s original boss, before he is seconded to work with Dalby – ‘Ross was a regular officer; that is to say he didn’t drink gin after 7.30 p.m. or hit ladies without first removing his hat. He had a long thin nose, a moustache like flock wallpaper, sparse, carefully combed hair, and complexion of a Hovis loaf’ – later, described as ‘a balding man with spectacles and a regimental tie’
  • Brigadier Dalby – upper-class manager of W.O.O.C.(P) – ‘Dalby was an elegant languid public school Englishman of a type that can usually reconcile his duty with comfort and luxury. He was a little taller than I am: probably 6 ft. 1 in. or 6 ft. 2 in. He had long fine fair hair, and every now and then would grow a little wispy blond moustache. At present he didn’t have it. He had a clear complexion that sunburnt easily and very small puncture-type scar tissue high on the left cheek to prove he had been to a German University in ’38’
  • Chico real name Phillip Chillcott-Oakes – phenomenally posh and well-connected – ‘Chico’d been to one of those very good schools where you meet kids with influential uncles… His profusion of long lank yellow hair hung heavily across his head like a Shrove Tuesday mishap. He stood 5 ft. 11 in. in his Argyll socks, and had an irritating physical stance, in which his thumbs rested high behind his red braces while he rocked on his hand-fasted Oxfords. He had the advantage of both a good brain and a family rich enough to save him using it’
  • Alice (Bloom) – unflappable secretary in Dalby’s office.
  • Captain Carswell – data analyst – ‘Gentle in disposition, his gold spectacle frames glinted among hair whitened by Indian sun. He wore a cheap, dark ready-made suit with a regimental tie. I guessed him to be a Captain or a Major of fifty-three, past any chance of further promotion. His eyes were grey and moved slowly, taking in his surroundings with care and awe. His large hairy hands held on to his brief-case before him on the table, as though even here there was a danger of it being stolen before he could reveal his strange mysteries’
  • Sergeant Murray – ‘Murray was a tall and large-muscled man who, had he been a few years younger would have made a John Osborne hero. His face was large, square and bony, and it would be equally easy to imagine him as an R.S.M. or the leader of a wildcat strike… His eyes, thin slits, as though he constantly peered into a brightness, would wrinkle and smile without provocation’ – at the end of the novel it is revealed that Murray is actually Lieutenant-colonel Harriman who has had Dalby under observation for some time
  • Jay – ‘He had small piggy eyes, a large moustache and handmade shoes which I knew were size ten. He walked with a slight limp and habitually stroked his eyebrow with his index finger’
  • Housemartin – ‘a six feet tall handsome man in a good quality camel-hair overcoat. His hair was waved, shiny and a little too perfectly grey at the temples. He wore a handful of gold rings, a gold watch strap and a smile full of jacket crowns. It was an indigestible smile—he was never able to swallow it’
  • Mr Adem – their host in the Lebanon – ‘about in his mid-sixties; gentle and humorous with a face like an apple that’s been stored through the winter. He was a fine judge of horses, wines and heroin, and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of an area stretching from Northern Turkey to Jerusalem… His role was a giver of information and, understanding this, he had, or showed, no curiosity about the affairs of his employers’
  • Jean Tonnesen – halfway through the story the narrator is assigned Jean as his new assistant – ‘She was wearing that ‘little black sleeveless dress’ that every woman has in reserve for cocktail parties, funerals and first nights. Her slim white arms shone against the dull material, and her hands were long and slender, the nails cut short and varnished in a natural colour. I watched her even, very white teeth bite into the croissant. She could have been top kick in the Bolshoi, Sweden’s first woman ship’s captain, private secretary to Chou-en-lai, or Sammy Davis’s press agent. She didn’t pat her hair, produce a mirror, apply lipstick or flutter her eyelashes’
  • Skip Henderson – the narrator’s friend in the CIA, who got himself captured in the Korean War in order to find out about collaborating US prisoners
  • Barney Barnes – Skip’s assistant and ‘the only negro officer in the CIA’, dies in an accident which is blamed on the Narrator after the Yanks arrest him
  • KK real name Swainson – the Narrator’s brutal interrogator and beater in the ‘Hungarian house’
  • Charlie Cavendish – former undercover man for C.-S.I.C.H, the Narrator knew his son during the War, and personally took him the news that his son was killed just days before it ended, hence their bond of trust and friendship
  • Waterman – private detective the Narrator hires to accompany him down to Dalby’s place in Surrey – ‘a thin shiny black-suited detective looked up like the subject of a photo in a divorce case. He was removing a piece of wax from his ear with a match stick. He thought I should have  knocked; if it hadn’t prejudiced his income he might have told me about it. Instead he took off his bowler hat..’

Humour

The book is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, and almost always maintains a dry ironic humour, a tone established on the first page.

They came through on the hot line at about half past two in the afternoon. The Minister didn’t quite understand a couple of points in the summary. Perhaps I could see the Minister.
Perhaps. (p.1)

‘Perhaps’ is a one-word paragraph. It a) satirises the periphrastic circumlocutions of the Civil Service b) captures at a stroke the narrator’s amused and satirical attitude to it. It is playing with the language but also with the layout and formatting of texts. This playfulness continues throughout the novel.

A lot of the humour is in the dry dialogue, mostly too long to quote properly. I like this exchange at the big party the Americans throw on the atoll. Dalby is talking about the American brigadier they’ve just met.

‘Wanted to borrow you for a year,’ Dalby said. We both continued to look at the dance floor.
‘Did he get me?’
‘Not unless you particularly want to go. I said you’d prefer to stay with Charlotte.’
‘Let me know if I change my mind,’ I said, and Dalby gave me the slanted focus. (p.217)

A writer like le Carré gives you very long passages of dialogue in which you can observe the characters subtly and astutely positioning themselves. Deighton feels the opposite. From whole conversations just a sentence is selected as the sassiest, most oblique or telling. When Ross raids Jay’s house and brings the Narrator’s wayward flight to an end, Deighton selects only two sentences of dialogue. (Bear in mind that the Narrator has just spent half an hour chatting to Jay while the latter very elaborately prepared lobster in champagne – all the time wondering whether he was going, eventually, to be bumped off. Finally Ross and his men arrive.)

Ross made a joke then. He said, ‘Do you come here often?’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘I know the chef.’ (p.299)

He is smart and sardonic about the people he works with. But he has a flashy way of describing nature, too, of backgrounds and settings and environment.

The rain dabbed spasmodically at the glass pane, and another plane ground its way across the sky. (p.113)

‘It’s OK,’ I told him, ‘and thanks.’ Outside the clouds had put dark glasses on the moon. (p.221)

Uneven style

The prose is, then, a funny mix of tones and voices, the most consistent of which is a very dry wry sense of humour and a tremendous understatement. But there are unexpected patches of poetic prose, and also sections of technical specification. No wonder contemporary reviews called the novel ‘zany’ or referred to Deighton as an ‘oddball’.

Though some of the text is zippy and smart, others parts have an oddly formal voice: given a choice he will always say ‘upon’, ‘within’, whilst’ instead of on, in, while. He cordially dislikes the chinless public schoolboys he works with but sometimes the prose adopts their patrician tone.

As Adem finished speaking a radio somewhere within the house pierced the grey velvet twilight with a needle of sound. The polished opening notes of the second movement of the Jupiter. It seemed that every living thing across the vast desert space heard the disturbing chilling sound. For those few minutes of time as the wire edge modulated to a minor key and as the rhythm and syncopation caught, slipped and re-engaged like a trio on a trapeze, there was only me and Adem and Mozart alive in that cruel, dead, lonely place. (Ch 7)

From inside the house the crick-crack of freshly ignited fruit-tree wood proclaimed the approach of dinner-time.

The window swung open and Murray dived head first through. I saw the soles of his hand-made shoes (eighteen guineas) with a small sticky rectangular price tab still affixed under the instep. (Ch 12)

No-one answered, and here and there an unkind grin clearly stated the social alienation that his success had wrought. (Ch 20)

There was a smell of freshly ground coffee, a spitting of grilling bacon, and a big coal fire that had reached that state of perfection that the manufacturers of plastic fronts for electric ones seek to emulate. (Ch 27)

‘Seek to emulate.’ He’s a late-1950s Soho coffee bar author using a late-Victorian idiom to… to do what precisely? To mock the modern world? To mock himself? On every page it feels like the text is very knowing about being ‘a spy novel’, in fact about being a fiction at all. The ostentatious correctness of passages like these are part of the performance.

Grumpy

Although the Narrator enjoys undermining the public school world of clubs, school ties and official culture, yet he is not in full-throated rebellion against it. In fact, as noted above, in some places he seeks to outdo it in punctiliousness, as he frequently outdoes his superiors – Ross and Dalby – in general, technical and cultural knowledge.

In fact, he has an ambivalent attitude towards ‘pop’ culture, liking it as rebellion, but despising so much of it as kitsch rubbish.

A sour-faced young waitress flung a smelly dishcloth around the table, said Two cappercheeny,’ then went back to three young men in black imitation-leather jackets and jeans, with genuine rivets, for a conversation about motor cycles. (Ch 120

By the time I read them in the 1970s, the once Angry Young Men of the 1950s had themselves become grumpy old men, complaining how standards had slipped, everyone was scruffy, no-one had any manners. In among the self-consciously cool attitude, there are signs of incipient Kingsley Amis grumpiness in Deighton:

Behind Jay’s voice I could hear the radio playing very quietly. An English jazz singer was even now Gee Whizzing, Waa Waa and Boop boop booping in an unparalleled plethora of idiocy. (Ch 30)

Steady on, grandad. He’s sufficiently in the Soho coffee house world to write about it, and vividly too – but he hasn’t embraced it to the exclusion of all else, as the pop artists and pop culture would do just a few years later; in his mind he is rising above it.

He writes scornfully of Chico, the upper-class twit in his office who parades an endless list of relatives in high places with spiffing country estates, or his boss the public-school-educated Dalby with his bourgeois tastes; but is himself scornful of plebeian culture, of pop music and strip clubs and the daily papers. He is a grammar school boy, caught between public school toffs and the roughs from the secondary modern. But in the Security world he moves in, it’s mainly toffs that he meets and so they are the most prominent subjects of his satire.

The iced Israeli melon was sweet, tender and cold, like the blonde waitress. Corrugated iron manufacturers and chinless advertising men shared the joys of our expense-account society with zombie-like debs with Eton-tied uncles. (Ch 8)

(Three months before the novel was published, The Establishment, a nightclub hosting jazz and satirical comedy acts, had opened in Greek Street, Soho. It was satire – sending up the MacMillan government and chaps in bowlers and umbrellas – but satire which itself wore a clean shirt and smart tie and was fussy about the cut of its suit.)

Similes

The smart savviness of the narrator’s tone is exemplified in numerous exuberant, sometimes rather far-fetched, similes and metaphors:

His profusion of long lank yellow hair hung heavily across his head like a Shrove Tuesday mishap (Ch 1)

The Colosseum – Rome’s rotten tooth – sank behind us, white, ghostly and sensational. (Ch 5)

He was about in his mid-sixties; gentle and humorous with a face like an apple that’s been stored through the winter. (Ch 7)

Like a clumsy Billy Bunter the machine heaved itself hand over hand into the sky. A touch of rudder had the tail rotor slip it sideways, and, silhouetted against the five-o’clock-shadowed chin of twilight, they hedge-hopped in 100 mph gallops across the sea. (Ch 7)

Outside, the driver of a wet fish van was arguing violently with a sad traffic warden. The traffic had welded itself into a river of metal… (Ch 16)

She came into Led’s old broken doorway and into my life and like the Royal Scot, but without all the steam and noise… Her face was taut like a cast of an Aztec god. (Ch 16)

Tokwe Atoll was a handful of breakfast crumbs on a blue coverlet. (Ch 18)

The enormous juke-box glowed like a monkey’s bottom, and the opening bars of a cha cha cha rent the smoke. (Ch 18)

Wriggling away from the legs of the tower, black smooth cables and corrugated pipelines rested along each other like a Chinese apothecary’s box of snakes. (Ch 19)

The sun was a two-dimensional magenta disc, and the sunset lay in horizontal stripes like finger-nails and torn gold lacerations across the ashen face of the evening. (Ch 20)

Outside the clouds had put dark glasses on the moon. (Ch 21)

It is confident and brash: look at me, watch me write!

Jean stopped and turned back to me; across her gold face a strand of black hair hung like a crack in a Sung vase. (Ch 20)

Paratextuality

Complementing the elliptical and often puzzling approach is the paraphernalia surrounding the text. The novel is presented as an official report to give us readers the sense of being given privileged access to this top secret world – and yet with strange contradictions which confused me:

  • the fly leaf says The Ipcress File / Secret File No. 1 as if we are about to read a sequence of secret files and this is the first – but there is no other file (readers had to await the next book in the series, Horse Under Water, to realise that that was File No.2, setting up the expectation that all his novels would be so numbered)
  • the text purports to be an official intelligence agency report and includes a graphic of the header of an official War Office document
  • there are numerous footnotes explaining espionage-related references, initialisms etc throughout the text, and
  • the novel proper is followed by 20 pages of appendices, very thoroughly following up on references in the text, with detailed explanations of events in history, the neutron bomb, Indian hemp, secret operations, an excerpt from a manual on handling guns etc etc

So the novel is presented masquerading as an official report – BUT

  • Nothing could be less report-like than its self-consciously writerly style. I thought there was a tremendous clash between the would-be bureaucratic format in which it’s laid out and the jokey, angled style it is actually written in.
  • This report scenario – The Ipcress File / Secret File No. 1 – is contradicted on the very next page by the brief prologue which describes the Narrator going for a meeting with a Minister who says ‘Just tell me the whole story in your own words, old chap.’ That’s not the kind of thing you put in a report, it’s a fictional frame.

So the text simultaneously claims to be a spoken verbatim account and an official report with appendices, notes etc. Which is it?

Horoscopes

Furthermore, how do we square its presentation as an official report with the fact that almost all of the 32 chapters have, as epigraph, the horoscope for that week (they’re all for Aquarius so presumably that’s the star sign of the Narrator):

Aquarius Jan 20-Feb 19: If you are a stick-in-the-mud you’ll get nowhere. Widen your social horizons. Go somewhere gay and relaxing.

(This particular one jokily/ironically prefaces the short chapter where the Narrator has escaped from prison and makes a rendezvous with an old friend who gets him clean clothes and puts him up at his place.)

I suppose the horoscope thing is meant to be a joke, a witty commentary on the text, a dig at the trashiness of contemporary culture (joining the slighting references to beatniks, loud music, junk mail etc) or just stylish and witty – though I confess I was struggling enough just to figure out what was going on in the main story and so quite quickly stopped reading them.

Reveal

In the end, the puzzling pieces of jigsaw are more or less pulled together to explain what happened and it is part of the book’s cool appeal that not all the loose ends are tied up or even explained. In terms of plot I was astounded that the trigger for the dénouement seemed so simple: Dalby is exposed as a double agent because he has invited the kidnapper-baddy to his house for cocktails and the Narrator sneaks up and sees them through the window. After all the divagations and confusions, the plot isn’t solved by elaborate cerebration or cunning calculation, but by sneaking up and looking through a window in the manner of the Famous Five or Tintin.

But then the plot is only one element in this remarkably fresh, original, elliptical, funny and hugely enjoyable spy novel.

The movie

is a 1960s landmark, starring a young and gorgeous Michael Caine as the hero (here named Harry Palmer) with a classic score by John Barry and supporting appearances by umpteen London buses. Wisely, the screenwriters dropped both the carjacking in Lebanon and the extended atom bomb atoll sequence, confining all the action to London in order to make the plot more straightforwardly about the brainwashing plot, and the slow revealing of Dalby the double agent.

Michael Caine interview about the movie

Credit

‘The Ipcress File’ by Len Deighton was published in 1962 by Hodder and Stoughton. Page references are to the 2007 Harper paperback edition. All quotations are used for criticism and review.

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by Simon on September 11, 2014  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 11, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/the-ipcress-file-len-deighton/