‘There’s one thing about being in an organisation of spies – news gets around fast.’ (p.163)
This is another belting thriller from Bagley; man, he really hit his stride in the 1970s. There’s a question mark over some of his novels from the 1960s, which often become a bit over-excited (eg Wyatt’s Hurricane, which starts sensibly, ends up featuring a hurricane, a tsunami and a civil war all in a frenzied 200 pages). But by the 1970s his stories are much more calm, focused, factually anchored and, for that reason, when the action kicks in, all the more plausible and genuinely gripping. Like The Snow Tiger, I just couldn’t put this one down and read it through into the early hours.
Sweary
It’s a first-person narrative. Either Bagley’s style evolved during the 1970s or, as I suspect, he deliberately created a different voice for each of these books. There was swearing in the last two novels – and certainly more swearing than you get in MacLean, who tells you people swear but not necessarily the words they use. The protagonist of this one, Malcolm Jaggard, is 34, the optimum age for heroes of this kind of thriller (Bagley himself was 54 when this novel came out). His voice starts out fairly traditional, almost posh (as well as his job he enjoys a private income of £11,000 per annum, a lot in 1977) mixed with rather dated slang. But as the novel proceeds he becomes steadily more vulgar – until right at the end he, rather surprisingly, tells his boss where he can shove his job.
To stitch together some sample snippets of speech and thought…
‘Stuff the record,’ I said… ‘Who’s pinched our Who’s Who?’… ‘The man keeps a bloody low profile…’ A couple of hours later I was having a mild ding-dong with Larry… ‘Oh Christ!’ I said, ‘Nellie is a tattle-tale, too bloody gossipy by half’… I was knocking croquet balls around on the lawn when Ashton pitched up… ‘Nip round to the garage and see what’s missing,’ I said… I told her a damned sight more than I ought to have done, and to hell with the Official Secrets Act… We can have another noggin at the Coach and Horses… ‘… and has been freezing his balls off ever since…’ ‘… the bloody Russian embassy.’ ‘I’m making bloody sure I do stay out of sight’…. He was doing it deliberately, the bastard…’Oh Christ!’ I said… ‘Caught in a shell blast, my arse!’… ‘I think it’s a bloody disgrace.’…’It is bloody difficult’… Jaggard, you bastard!… there was a hell of a lot missing… ‘The bloody thing beat me in the end’… ‘We’re going to talk to that bloody auctioneer’… ‘Ashton was a clever bastard,’ I said… What a ruthless bastard he had turned out to be!…’I won’t take compliments from you, damn it!’
I said bluntly, ‘Get lost.’
He was not a man who showed astonishment easily, but he did then. ‘What did you say?’
‘You heard me. Get lost. You can take Kerr’s job and your job and stuff them wherever you like. The Minister’s backside might be a good place’ (p.251)
The plot
British Intelligence agent Malcolm Jaggard is falling in love with Penelope, daughter of well-off self-made industrialist George Ashton, when someone throws acid in the face of Ashton’s other (grown-up) daughter, in the drive to his country house. When Jaggard digs into Ashton’s background he discovers he was a high-ranking child prodigy and Soviet scientist who defected to England in the 1940s. But his life is shrouded in mystery and, when Ashton and his loyal man-servant, Benson, suddenly disappear, Jaggard can’t get access to the Classified files.
The novel turns into a Quest, a Pursuit. Jaggard’s boss, Ogilvie, tasks him with finding the two men and, after a lot of false trails, Jaggard discovers them living in Stockholm, under false names, suspiciously close to the Russian border. His daughters, his household, know nothing about it. It was a very professional disappearing act.
Jaggard suggests he simply presents himself to Ashton and asks him to return to England, but his boss, Ogilvie, insists he mount a major operation to snatch him. Half a dozen men tail Ashton round Stockholm, alerting him to the fact he’s rumbled, scaring the pair into catching a train west. Following the train Jaggard and his team detect them alighting at a tiny village stop and are planning to corral them into a car, and thence to a plane and home to Blighty. But Ashton and Benson are stubborn – what is their secret, what are they so afraid of? – and make off into snow-covered woods, where the pursuing agents are horrified to hear the sound of guns – single shots, then machine guns. My God, they’re blundering towards a Swedish Army exercise! Now Jaggard and his men close in at speed on the old man and his loyal servant when, to everyone’s amazement, just as Ashton turns towards Jaggard who is shouting to warn him – Benson shoots his master twice, and is immediately shot dead by one of the agents. Disaster!
On his return to London Jaggard has not only to explain the catastrophic failure of his mission to his boss – and then to a committee including the Home Secretary – but has to live with the knowledge he has helped kill his fiancée’s father.
But this is only half way through the book. There’s something very wrong about the whole affair and Jaggard’s boss, Ogilvie, while pretending to downgrade him, in fact gives him free rein and orders to get to the bottom of the business. In doing so Jaggard uncovers a plot which extends to the highest levels in Whitehall and which dates back to the War, and which leads Jaggard from a comfy Home Counties mansion to a grim, storm-tossed Scottish island where a secret laboratory is carrying out hair-raising germ warfare experiments.
There are some light and amusing scenes along the way – especially around the slowly-emerging significance of the enormous model train set which the agents find in the attic of the dead Ashton’s mansion – but the brutal deaths in a Swedish forest mean the book can never have a happy ending, and in fact its last few pages contain an unexpected twist which contain a horrifying message for all of us, even 40 years later. Hence the title which is lifted from an American satirist, Walt Kelly: ‘We have met the enemy – and he is Us.’
No descriptions
Bagley just isn’t into descriptions, visual descriptions, the way other novelists are. When the narrative moves to Stockholm, the opening of chapter 18 sets the scene. Or rather it doesn’t. Even when a sentence or paragraph starts out describing something it always veers back to human or anthropomorphised activity. People, animals, scenery, architecture – they aren’t painted, they always have to be doing something in Bagley. His is a dynamic imagination.
It was dark and cold in Stockholm at that time of year. All the time I was in Sweden it didn’t stop snowing; not heavily most of the time, but there was a continual fall of fine powder from leaden-grey clouds as though God up there was operating a giant flour-sifter. I was booked into the Grand, which was warm enough, and after I had made my call to Henty I looked out over the frozen Strömmen to the Royal Palace… There were swans on the Strömmen, walking uneasily on the ice and cuddling in clusters as though to keep warm. One was on an ice floe and drifting towards Riddarfjärden; I watched it until it went out of sight under the Ström bridge then turned away feeling suddenly cold in spite of the central heating. (p.117)
It’s not intended as a criticism. I’m just trying to identify the differences between, to individuate the strengths and weaknesses of, Bagley, Deighton, Innes, MacLean et al.
Instead of description of scenes and places, what you do get in Bagley is lots of factual background. And so at several places there are detailed explanations of genetics and genetic engineering, circa 1976, each instalment picking up ideas from the previous one and exploring them further, thus adding depth (and tension) to the plot.
The way Bagley incorporates his obviously in-depth background research into the drama of the text is one of his great achievements.
Computers
Same goes for his extensive knowledge of computers demonstrated by his technically precise descriptions of:
- the Department’s central database with its remote terminals and passwords
- the complex computer language which Ashton turns out to have programmed into his labyrinthine train set with its advanced micro-processors
- the links along a landline which the investigating computer scientist sets up from his remote terminal to another, central information-processing computer
All this isn’t clunked into the text, it is woven seamlessly, it is part of the imaginative fabric of the story: the computers and the genetics turn out to be what the novel is, ultimately, all about.
The anxiety of influence
As in every spy thriller from this period, there are the obligatory comments trying to distance the narrator (and the text) from the enormous shadow of Ian Fleming. After using his organisation’s new, super-powerful computer, Jaggard remarks:
Strange how the real world is catching up with James Bond. (p.28)
Later, he explains his profession to his fiancée, Penelope.
‘State security! You mean you’re some sort of secret agent. A spy?’
I laughed and held up my hands. ‘Not a spy. We’re not romantic types with double-o numbers and a licence to kill – no nonsense like that.’ (p.60)
‘You people amaze me. You think you’re James Bonds, the lot of you. Well, I don’t think I’m living in the middle of a highly coloured film, even if you do.’ (p.120)
Social history
The novel turns out to be about genetics and genetic engineering and it’s a bit of a shock to realise just how long this has been a ‘hot’ topic of debate. Same goes for three or four other political/social issues, altogether making me realise how little things really change:
- Genetic engineering Typically thorough Bagleyesque explanation of the state of genetics in the mid-1970s, what genes are, how phagocytes are used to carry snippets of DNA etc, and the risk of it all going wrong, of creating virulent new viruses and diseases.
- The internet Jaggard and his team use remote computer terminals to access a central computer database. They require login details and passwords, just like the computer I sit down in front of every day. When the ‘boffins’ analyse the train set they set up a link by phone line with a remote computer. Here, pre-1977, are the seeds of the internet.
- Scottish devolution As soon as the narrative switches to Scotland, the narrator mentions Scottish nationalism and the Scots desire for devolution or even independence. In the pub in Ullapool:
There was talk of English absentee landlords and of ‘Scottish’ oil and of the ambivalent attitude of the Scottish Labour Party, all uttered in tones of amused and tired cynicism as if these people had lost faith in the promises of politicians. (p.220)
Thank goodness, 40 years later, all these issues have been sorted out by the wise men who govern us.
Related links
1977 Fontana paperback edition of The Enemy
Bagley’s books
1963 The Golden Keel – South African boatbuilder Peter ‘Hal’ Halloran leads a motley crew to retrieve treasure hidden in the Italian mountains by partisans during WWII, planning to smuggle it out of Italy and back to SA as the golden keel of a boat he’s built for the purpose.
1965 High Citadel – Pilot Tim O’Hara leads the passengers of a charter flight crash-landed in the Andes in holding off attacking communists.
1966 Wyatt’s Hurricane – 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.
1967 Landslide – Tough Canadian geologist Bob Boyd nearly died in a car wreck ten years ago. Now he returns to the small town in British Columbia where it happened to uncover long-buried crimes and contemporary skulduggery.
1968 The Vivero Letter – ‘Grey’ accountant Jeremy Wheale leads an archaeology expedition to recover lost Mayan gold and ends up with more adventure than he bargained for as the Mafia try to muscle in.
1969 The Spoilers – Heroin specialist Nick Warren assembles a motley crew of specialists to help him break up a big drug-smuggling gang in Iraq.
1970 Running Blind – British secret agent Alan Stewart and girlfriend fend off KGB killers, CIA assassins and traitors on their own side while on the run across the bleak landscape of Iceland.
1971 The Freedom Trap – British agent Owen Stannard poses as a crook to get sent to prison and infiltrate The Scarperers, a gang which frees convicts from gaol but who turn out to be part of a spy network.
1973 The Tightrope Men – Advertising director Giles Denison goes to bed in London and wakes up in someone else’s body in Norway, having become a pawn in the complex plans of various espionage agencies to get their hands on vital secret weapon technology.
1975 The Snow Tiger – Ian Ballard is a key witness in the long formal Inquiry set up to investigate the massive avalanche which devastated the small New Zealand mining town of Hukahoronui.
1977 The Enemy – British Intelligence agent Malcolm Jaggard gets drawn personally and professionally into the secret past of industrialist George Ashton, amid Whitehall power games which climax in disaster at an experimental germ warfare station on an isolated Scottish island.
1978 Flyaway – Security consultant Max Stafford becomes mixed up in Paul Billson’s quixotic quest to find his father’s plane which crashed in the Sahara 40 years earlier, a quest involving extensive travel around North Africa with the charismatic American desert expert, Luke Byrne, before the secret is revealed.
1980 Bahama Crisis – Bahamas hotelier Tom Mangan copes with a series of disastrous misfortunes until he begins to realise they’re all part of a political plot to undermine the entire Bahamas tourist industry and ends up playing a key role in bringing the conspirators to justice.
1982 Windfall – Max Stafford, the protagonist of Bagley’s 1978 novel Flyaway, gets involved in a complex plot to redirect the fortune of a dead South African smuggler into a secret operation to arm groups planning to subvert Kenya, a plot complicated by the fact that an American security firm boss is simultaneously running his own scam to steal some of the fortune, and that one of the key conspirators is married to one of Stafford’s old flames.
1984 Night Of Error – Oceanographer Mike Trevelyan joins a boatload of old soldiers, a millionaire and his daughter to go looking for a treasure in rare minerals on the Pacific Ocean floor, a treasure two men have already died for – including Mike’s no-good brother – and which a rival group of baddies will stop at nothing to claim for themselves, all leading to a hair-raising climax as goodies and baddies are caught up in a huge underwater volcanic eruption.
1985 Juggernaut – Neil Mannix is the trouble shooter employed by British Electric to safeguard a vast transformer being carried on a huge flat-bed truck – the juggernaut of the title – across the (fictional) African country of Nyala towards the location of a flagship new power station, when a civil war breaks out and all hell breaks loose.
Books & Boots 