All posts in category Thriller

The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan (1932)

‘Half the fun of an adventure is to be able to gossip about it.’
(The financier, Tavanger, in The Gap in the Curtain, page 76)

This is the fourth of Buchan’s five novels featuring Scottish barrister and Conservative MP living in London (apparently, ‘the most beautiful city on earth’, p.143), Sir Edward Leithen. Unlike the first and third novels, there’s no frame story, it’s just a straightforward narrative told directly, in the first person, by Leithen himself.

It’s a weird story and Buchan emerges from it as a strange and uneven writer. His protagonists present themselves as bluff, no-nonsense, unimaginative men of the world – and yet the stories themselves overflow with eerie visions, strange presentiments, hallucinations, nightmares, moments of vertiginous disorientation and so on.

The previous novel in the sequence, 1926’s The Dancing Floor, sets out (once the characters have arrived at a remote Greek island) to develop a brooding sense of threat and menace, which eventually rises to a mad visionary intensity, the appearance of the old pagan gods which triggers mass panic in a hysterical crowd. This, the next in the sequence, one doesn’t feature the same kind of mass hysteria, is far more domestic in scope, but is, at least to being with, just as weird and strange.

Chapter 1. Whitsuntide at Flambard (50 pages)

In a nutshell, Leithen, the wise, dry old bachelor barrister, goes to stay with some old friends, Lord and Lady Flambard, at their country house in the Cotswolds, over the Whitsuntide holiday. (Whitsuntide: ‘the name used in Britain and other countries among Anglicans and Methodists for the Christian holy day of Pentecost. It falls on the seventh Sunday after Easter and commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s disciple.’ In 2024 it falls on 19 May. In the year when the novel is set, it seems to occur in early June.)

There are eight or nine guests at Lady Flambard’s and the first 10 or 15 pages spend some time introducing them to us and giving us Leithen’s opinion of them, maybe in the manner of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. But the plot they’re involved in is much weirder than that. For the key guest at the house is an eminent scientist, Professor Moe, physically large, but frail and ailing, a maths and physics genius on a par with Einstein.

What slowly emerges is that this professor has highly advanced theories about the nature of Time. Buchan has the professor take Leithen for a stroll through the country house’s lovely gardens and slowly unfold to him his theories. Leithen being a non-scientist means Buchan doesn’t have to present a coherent theory, because his bluff narrator can endearingly say that he didn’t follow this or that aspect of the theory.

But the upshot is very practical. Moe thinks that time isn’t linear, that all moments of time are permanently present, it is just the evolution of the human body and mind which limits our perceptions to a straight, railway-like line from past to future. The professor has come to the conclusion that some humans, with the right biological and mental predisposition and the right training, be taught to see into the future – more precisely, to see the future which runs alongside us all the time, which is around us everywhere.

Therefore, and wildly improbably, the professor has decided to carry out his experiment using guests at an upper class English country house weekend (of all the people in all the universities or scientific institutes of all the world!) Thus the prof weeds out the strong and shouty guests, focusing in on seven of the guests who seem frailer than the rest, in both body and spirit. This includes Leithen who (as in every one of these Leithen tales) is tired and jaded from overwork.

These seven agree, with various stages of reluctance or scepticism, to sign up for the experiment, and the professor puts them on a special diet, forbids them physical exercise, and administers amounts of a secret potion. The result, over the course of three or four days, is that the volunteers come to feel increasingly weak in body and spirit. That is exactly the purpose – to weaken their physical and mental attachment to the present in order to open a gap in the curtain which normally confines us to the present moment, and allow us to see into the future.

So it’s sort of a science fiction story but lacking any real science, certainly any gadgets or gizmos. In its focus on physical austerity it reminds me of the fashion for Eastern mysticism which swept the West between the wars. But it’s probably more like a hangover from the golden age of seances and spiritualism, which had begun in the late-Victorian period and underwent a great efflorescence after the First World War, as so many widows and orphans wanted more than anything to contact their dead husbands and fathers.

All this introductory matter builds up to the novel’s One Big Event. This is when the professor decides his guinea pigs are ready for the Big Experiment. I haven’t mentioned yet that the professor discusses with Leithen (and presumably some of the others) what kind of thing they should focus on seeing in the future. Not an organic object like a tree, which changes too slowly. Not a static artifact like a house, which might simply not be there. Instead they settle (again, rather improbably) on a newspaper, specifically the posh chap’s newspaper of record, The Times.

So the professor has their bemused hostess, Lady Flambard (who’s fully up for the experiment, even if she doesn’t really understand it) provide them with seven broadsheet-sized blank pieces of white paper, for the seven experimentees to focus on each day. The aim is to project their minds forward one calendar year and read what is in next year’s edition of the paper.

So at the climactic Grand Event, they all sit in chairs in a circle, each holding a copy of that morning’s Times, for 10 June, in their hands and the professor gives his instructions:

‘For three minutes you will turn your eyes inward – into the darkness of the mind which I have taught you to make. Then – I will give the sign – you will look at the paper. There you will see words written, but only for one second. Bend all your powers to remember them.’

At the last minute the spell doesn’t quite work for Leithen, and the only woman in the group, Sally, faints away from the strain. That leaves five men who, each for a brief moment, under the influence of their strange training and the intense presence of the spectral Professor Moe, each have a few seconds vision of the contents of the Times newspaper for one year hence. As they do so, only Leithen, failing to properly enter the trance state, realises that in some mystic way, Moe gives the last of his psychic energy to the group mind and actually dies during this intense moment. Thus chapter 1 ends on a cliffhanger:

In that fateful moment, while the soul of a genius was quitting the body, five men, staring at what had become the simulacrum of a Times not to be printed for twelve months, read certain things. Mayot had a vision of the leader page, and read two sentences of comment on a speech by the Prime Minister. In one sentence the Prime Minister was named, and the name was not that of him who then held the office. Tavanger, on the first City page, had a glimpse of a note on the formation of a great combine, by the Anatilla Corporation, of the michelite-producing interests of the world. Reggie Daker, on the Court page, saw an account of the departure of an archaeological expedition to Yucatan, and his name appeared as one of the members. Goodeve and Charles Ottery – the one on the page opposite the leaders and the other on the first page of the paper – read the announcement of their own deaths.

I suppose the professor dying 1) adds intensity and seriousness to the moment and 2) ensures that the experiment can never be repeated.

But it’s only at this moment, at the end of chapter 1, and checking the names of the remaining five chapters in the book, that you realise that each of them will be devoted to describing how their brief insight into one year into the future, effects the five men who saw it.

Thus the book is by way of being an anthology or omnibus, a package or portmanteau novel, in the sense that this long first chapter has set the scene and explained the premise, and then each of the five subsequent chapters addresses the question, What if a man was given a sneak preview of the world one year into the future?

Chapter 2. Mr Arnold Tavanger (34 pages)

Chapter 2 kicks off with no backward linking to the experiment at Lady Flambard’s. Instead it jumps straight into a detailed account of what this fellow Tavanger (to rhyme with scavenger) did with his brief sight into the future.

Arnold Tavanger is something in the City, a businessman or speculator or stockbroker. He buys and sells shares and companies. His glimpse into the future showed him that there would be a worldwide consolidation of companies mining and purifying a (fictional) substance called ‘michelite’. It’s a rare metal which improves the industrial process of making steel.

Right, so the entire chapter gives us Leithen’s account of this Tavanger scheming to buy up all companies presently mining michelite. There are two big established companies in the field, being the Anatilla Corporation and the Rosas-Sprenger. The one other company in the market is the Rhodesian company, the Daphne Concessions and Tavanger discovers that shares in this are held by five individuals.

The chapter consists of an improbably detailed account of Tavanger’s treks as he travels to Egypt, then on into South Africa and Rhodesia, to track down the very varied individuals (one just a simple backwood fruit farmer), how he gets introduced to them and plays them in order to buy their shares off them.

On one (rather dry, Financial Times) level, it is sort of interesting to read about a) the travel and b) the negotiations and c) the business strategy employed by Tavanger. But ultimately, as the plot of a novel, or story from a compendium of stories, it’s pretty dull. It feels like a long 34 pages, and also quite easy to put down, pick up, and completely forget where you were in the story because there is no story.

The whole dull narrative builds up to a punch line which I suppose is intended to be humorous which is that Tavanger finally acquires all the shares available for the one rival to the two big michelite-mining corporations, Anatilla Corporation and the Rosas-Sprenger, and they make him a very handsome offer but he is determined to hold out for more (he bought most of them for about 18 shillings (90p in today’s money) but is holding out to sell them at £5). When the bottom falls out of the market because a scientist attached to one of the other companies perfects and patents a technique which will make their michelite many, many times more useful and Tavanger’s michelite almost impossible to sell.

So the price of all those shares which he travelled so fat and wide to collect collapses and he is forced to sell the Anastilla Corporation his entire holding ‘at par’ i.e. what he bought them for. Buchan then points a trite suburban moral of the story, having Tavanger wisely but sadly tell Leithen that:

‘Our ignorance of the future has been wisely ordained of Heaven. For unless man were to be like God and know everything, it is better that he should know nothing.’ (p.87)

Chapter 3. The Rt. Hon. David Mayot (25 pages)

If Tavanger stands for the world of business, The Right Honourable David Mayot stands for politics. When the story starts he’s a Labour politician, although Buchan gives him a very detailed biography, explaining that he started off as a Tory, then sat as an independent, then cross the House in time to become a Minister in the 1929 government. He is a bachelor with an independent fortune, not that bright but consumed by ambition. This is all sort of interesting as a sort of fictional profile of a certain kind of politician from the era, maybe.

Anyway, when this Mayot took part in The Experiment, he saw in next year’s Times a few lines in a leader indicating that the Prime Minister at the time of the main narrative was going to be replaced, surprisingly, by the leader of the small Liberal Party.

So Leithen’s account describes how this rich bachelor and scheming politician set out to take advantage of this knowledge. To do so he gives pen portraits of the party leaders of the time, the League of Nations-supporting old school, Free Trade Liberal leader Waldemar; the principled conciliatory Labour leader Sir Derrick Trant, and the leader of a Conservative Party which was moving towards protectionism, Geraldine.

Leithen gives what is presumably a realistic account of the characters and political manoeuvrings of the political leaders, their biases and backgrounds and beliefs – but he also goes into mind-numbing detail about the numerous factions within the Labour, Liberal and Conservative parties, and the ever-changing meetings and discussions and alliances, the endless negotiations and backroom deals and calculations which make up the actual business of politics.

It has some merit for capturing the spirit of the times just as the Great Depression really kicked in, so in 1930.

But with February came one of the unlooked-for upheavals of opinion which make politics such a colossal gamble. The country suddenly awoke to the meaning of the unemployment figures. These were appalling, and, owing to the general dislocation of world credit and especially to the American situation, held no immediate hope of improvement. The inevitable followed. Hitherto sedate newspapers began to shout, and the habitual shouters began to scream. Hunger-marchers thronged the highways to London; there were mass-meetings in every town in the North; the Archbishops appointed a day for public prayer; and what with deputations, appeals, and nagging questions in the House… (p.105)

And then a summary of the different policies which emerged, along a spectrum from massive government intervention at one end, to laissez-fair free marketism at the other. But it’s the nitty gritty of personalities, which the narrative is about, and the guiding thread is Leithen’s educated guess at what he thinks Mayot was up to.

The Labour leader resigns, a general election is called in May. It’s interesting to realise that a central issue in a 1930s UK election was the role of the British Empire, specifically whether it should, as imperialists had been proposing for decades, become a unified economic bloc with tariffs to keep out products from outside and protect industry, agriculture etc across the quarter of the world included in it. Or, whether this would lead to economic inefficiency, stagnation and, what did for Joseph Chamberlain’s protectionist vision in the 1900s, more expensive food.

Interestingly, there’s talk of a pact between Liberal and Labour not to stand against each other in seats where either is likely to win against the Tories – exactly the kind of thing you read about today, in 2024, in the progressive press (Guardian, New Statesman et al).

To his surprise, Mayot who had spent a year scheming with the foreknowledge that the Liberal leader would be the next Prime Minister, is left out in the cold as new stars arise in the Labour Party, impressing with their firebrand oratory or their ability to do backroom deals. After all his clever scheming Mayot loses his own seat.

So it’s another ‘life’s little ironies’-type conclusion, summarised by the now-retired Labour leader, Trant, chatting with Leithen once the new government is formed:

‘Poor old Mayot,’ he went on, his pleasant face puckered into a grin. ‘Politics are a brutal game, you know. Here is an able fellow who makes one mistake and finds himself on the scrap-heap. If he hadn’t been so clever he would be at No. 10 today…’ (p.115)

Maybe all this is entertaining to a certain kind of mind. Very dry. Not very interesting (unless all the characters are thinly-veiled real people). And impossible to care tuppence about the downfall of this fictional Mayot.

Chapter 4. Mr Reginald Daker (34 pages)

So the next one to have had a glimpse of the future and come a cropper because of it, is Mr Reginald Daker. Daker was one of the most susceptible of Moe’s disciples and genuinely believes what he foresees in the Times of a year hence, that the Times will write that he will be a member of an expedition to Yucatan – but he doesn’t actually believe he’ll go. ‘Got no idea where Yucatan is, old boy! Not my sort of thing at all.’

Daker is what the posh boys at my university called ‘a thick’. He inherited money from the sale of family land which put him through Eton and Oxford, where he was dim but immensely sociable, building up a large connection of friends. He’s tried numerous jobs since leaving uni but never last more than a week or two at any of them. At the time of the fateful weekend at Flambard, he was trying out being a dealer in antique books.

Digression

All the characters in these Leithan novels live such breath-takingly carefree, privileged lives. For example, this dim rich parasite, Daker, takes a couple of months holiday in the Highlands and:

liked a civilised country house where the comforts of life were not forgotten. He was a neat shot at driven grouse, and loved a day on a mild moor where you motored to the first butts and had easy walks to the others. He liked good tennis and golf to be available on by-days, and he liked a large house-party with agreeable women…

And he:

had a very pleasant two months in comfortable dwellings, varied with a week in a yacht among the Western Isles. It was a fine autumn in the north, and Reggie returned with a full sketch-book – he dabbled in water-colours – and a stock of new enthusiasms. He had picked up a lot of folklore in the Hebrides, had written a good deal of indifferent verse…, had conceived a scheme for the making of rugs with Celtic designs coloured by the native Highland dyes, and had learned something about early Scottish books – David Lyndesay and the like – on which he hoped to specialise for the American market.

Everybody in these books is an expert in something or other, eminent this, famous that. When Daker goes to stay with the Earl of Lamancha (at his country estate of Leriot) he finds it difficult to keep up with all the other guests who have had such wizard adventures overseas:

There was Maffit who had solved the riddle of the Bramaputra gorges, and Beavan who had been the first to penetrate the interior of New Guinea and climb Carstensz, and Wilmer who had been with the second Everest expedition, and Hurrell who had pursued his hobby of birds to the frozen tundras of the Yenesei. (p.124)

Back in London, Daker’s day consists of going for an early canter in the Park, followed by a leisurely breakfast, the newspaper with the first pipe, write a few letters, then stroll east through the city to one of his clubs for luncheon, in the afternoon visits to museums or galleries, researches in bookshops, then home for tea, and reading for a few hours before it’s time to dress for dinner out, at a club or restaurant with friends. For exercise he plays polo at the Roehampton, a lot of tennis, spends the weekends on a Berkshire trout stream (p.144).

Buchan and his characters float in this sea of privilege, enjoying unbelievably blessed and comfortable lives, enjoying all the classic outdoor activities of a gentleman, when they’re not off exploring remote bits of the Empire.

Buchan’s novels are not set among ordinary mortals, but among a privileged class as remote from my experience as the Greek gods. It is this which, I think, makes so many of his stories feel cold, aloof – so detached from most people’s ordinary lives as to be actively offputting, actively deterring sympathy or identification with his characters – unless you live such a charmed life yourself, or fantasise about leading one.

Back to Dakar

Anyway, back to Daker. He is really put off by these hearty explorers and white man’s burden types, so flees from Lamancha’s place back to Town (Town with a capital letter like this always refers to ‘London’).

The heart of the chapter is that Daker falls in love with a dashing gel called Verona Cortal (Buchan is consistently bad with names – they all sound arch and contrived; fancy calling the leader of the Conservative Party Geraldine!?).

Verona is, of course, a great rider to hounds and has a visionary feel for the Englishness of Old England. They meet at country house weekends and become inseparable. She it is who focuses Daker’s diffuse energies onto this business of antique bookselling, and the chapter contains a lot of what feels like raw research about antique book dealing repeated in a lightly fictionalised form.

Anyway, the point is that this Verona turns out to be a termagent (‘an overbearing woman’) who takes command of Daker’s book business, writes a hard-headed prospectus, maps out Daker’s schedule for him with a relentless series of meetings and when he’s not meeting clients and customers, he is having lunch or dinner with Verona’s ferociously successful banker brothers or fiercely ambitious mother.

The last few times he bumps into him, Leithen finds Daker hag-ridden, pale and anxious. All his joy and whimsy have been burned off by the unrelenting business mind of his supposed lady love. Finally Daker snaps. Leithen hears of his final lunch with Tallis, the Welsh book collector at whose house Daker first met Verona. Suddenly he breaks and starts ranting about her being a juggernaut of a woman riding roughshod over everything he holds rare and precious and how he is being stifled by her ruthlessly ambitious family. And the very next evening he’s been invited to one of their ghastly family evenings where he knows everyone is expecting him to propose to the beastly woman.

As it happens Tallis had a similar experience 25 years previously. He did a runner, hopping it as far away as he could, in his case to Tibet! Suddenly Daker sees a way out of his predicament and then Tallis announces that he is leaving that very evening on a year-long mission to follow up his fascination with Central American art, he is setting off for Yucatan. Will Daker hurriedly pack his stuff and come with him? And Daker leaps at the chance.

And so the prophecy or future vision vouchsafed to Daker exactly 12 months earlier, comes true. This is the most attractive of the three stories so far, because the figure of the bossy woman domineering the faint-hearted aesthete is funny (or at least used to be) in a way that the complex financial deals or knotty political manoeuvring of the first two stories very much aren’t.

Chapter 5. Sir Robert Goodeve, Baronet (33 pages)

OK so who is this guy and what happens to him over the fateful 12 months? Well, this is another political chapter. It kicks off with Goodeve standing in a by-election in Dorset for, of course, the Conservative Party. Some of the themes and policies mentioned in the Mayot chapter are repeated, because they cover the same 12 months in the same field.

Leithen goes down to help him with election speeches then, once the campaign is over, drives him home to his country house (of course) which boasts ‘the loveliest hall in England’ (of course). After dinner they sit by the grand old fire, smoking pipes and the mood completely changes from politics to ghost story. The tone is identical to when Leithen listened to young Vernon Milburne tell his dark secret (recurring nightmares) in the hall of his ancestral home, in The Dancing Floor.

Goodeve is tense and nervous. They discuss Moe and that long weekend at Lady Flambard’s and what it all meant. Leithen can tell that Goodeve saw something which spooked him and eventually gets confirmation that Goodeve read his own obituary in the Times of a year hence. They had walked through a corridor lined with portraits of his ancestors many of whom died young. Now, with a haggard face, he tells Leithen he fears the same will happen to him. Leithen tries several ways to distract him, cheer him up, reject the Moe experiment as poppycock. None work.

Cut to Goodeve a few weeks later making a stunning maiden speech as an MP in House of Commons (a maiden speech is the first speech a newly elected MP gives). However, it’s all downhill from there. Leithen personally is in the House on numerous occasions to watch Goodeve’s speeches lack punch or interest and fizzle out. Only he, Leithen, knows it is because Goodeve is increasingly haunted by foreknowledge of his own death. After a particularly humiliating failure Goodeve stalks out of the House never to return.

Next thing Leithen bumps into Goodeve in Glasgow. He had told him that when he glimpsed a few pages of his obituary it had mentioned a chap named Colonel Dugald Chatto. He has travelled up to Scotland where he secured an introduction to this fellow at, inevitably, his gold club. In fact they’ve subsequently played many games, arguing about politics, and become friends. Little does the stocky, vulgar, argumentative Chatto realise it is because their destinies were bound together according to Goodeve’s brief glimpse of the future.

The month of May is taken up with the general election whose origin and course were described in chapter 3. Leithen bumps into Chatto down south, who describes the pair’s fishing expeditions. When Leithen finally bumps into Goodeve he is appalled at how thin and gaunt the latter looks, a shadow of his former buoyant self. But Goodeve tells him he has a plan. He’s getting away from England on a Scandinavian cruise. Nothing can happen there.

But things hasten to their predestined end. Chatto goes fishing in miserable weather, gets soaked to the skin, develops a chill which worsens into pleurisy and is admitted to hospital. Meanwhile, Goodeve cancelled his ticket for the cruise and returned to his ancestral home. Here he ate little and wasted away to the worry of his staff. When he got a telegram saying Chatto was at death’s door, he gave up, had the fires lit in the long gallery full of portraits of his doomed ancestors, and slept in an old armchair. That’s where they found him dead on 10 June. The coroner’s report attributed death to heart failure. Only Leithen knew it was due to accumulated anxiety which had turned into downright fear and corroded the man from within.

Chapter 6. Captain Charles Ottery (27 pages)

Another instance of someone who, during the Moe experiment, sees their obituary in The Times. In that ‘small world’ way of the upper classes, Leithen has known Ottery since he was a boy because he’s a friend of his nephew, Charles. He was in the Royal Scots Fusiliers when the war broke out and had a good war. He inherited a large estate and after the war got a job as a merchant banker. He rose to become a director of the Bank of England, sat on various government commissions. (It’s as if Buchan is trying to write in upper class clichés.)

Then into his life came Pamela Brune, lovely lithe young woman. She is, of course, Leithen’s god-daughter. He falls heavily in love with her, but he’s a heavy 35 year old and she’s a flighty 19, so they argue and he had just been more or less rejected when they both were invited to the house party at Flambard and he took part in the Moe experiment.

Prediction of his death a year hence throws him into depression from which he rouses himself by throwing himself into frenetic activity, first sports in England (tennis, golf, sailing) but then he organises a trip into the back of beyond, hunting caribou in the wild interior of Canada. He keeps a diary which, for some reason, came into Leithen’s hands and which he summarises. After much agonising and speculation about God and heaven, Ottery comes to the conclusion that he must live the remainder of his days with pluck and fortitude, like a good public school boy (p.197).

Back in England he throws himself into distraction, taking to gambling for high stakes at his club, frequently getting drunk and then throwing himself into hunting (the Birkham hunt) with obsessive determination. But nothing can blot out the knowledge of his coming death. He gains an unsavoury reputation for dissoluteness.

Meanwhile, his one-time love Pamela is going off the rails. Instead of going on holiday to Scotland she goes off with some family to the Riviera where she’s snapped by Society photographers (all of which Leithen appears to disapprove of) then goes off as guest of another family on a cruise of the Red Sea. You can see why the Jarrow Marchers attacked the Ritz, can’t you?

Leithen sees her at a ball in December and dislikes the way she has caked herself in make-up in the modern fashion and affects a raffish bravado. Being blessed with insight, Leithen realises that she’s hiding a secret sorrow, the brave girl!

Next thing is Leithen is at a house party before Christmas given by the Earl of Lamancha at his place in Devonshire, pheasant shooting during the day and cards in the evening. Charles is there and then Pamela shows up. He gets drunk and she is unpleasant.

He gets up early next morning and goes for a mighty walk across the moors, blind to their beauty, sunk in despair. As chance has it, he bumps into her in the home woods on his way back. They politely greet each other, then she sympathises with his wretched appearance, then he tells her that he loves her but it can never work because he is doomed to die and takes her hands but she says this is all nonsense and runs off.

Back in London, she turns up unannounced at his rooms in Mount Street. She makes him repeat the whole story about Moe and seeing the future and then boldly announces that it is balderdash and she is going to help him escape his fate. This is arguably the best of the five stories, and arguably the best scene, because she not only tells Charles he is going to defy his fate because it’s all stuff and nonsense, but also because on 10 June she will be starting her honeymoon. With him.

That fetched him out of his chair. He gazed blindly at her as she stood with her cheeks flushed and her eyes a little dim. For a full minute he strove for words and none came.
‘Have you nothing to say?’ she whispered. ‘Do you realise, sir, that I am asking you to marry me?’ (p.209)

Pamela (his god-daughter) comes to see him (Leithen) and confides everything, how she is helping Charles through his depression, how she is spending all her time bolstering his nerve, and Leithen can see how it’s exhausting her and how jolly brave she is!

I do not think that I have ever in my life so deeply admired a fellow-mortal. Pamela was the very genius of fortitude, courage winged and inspired and divinely lit… I told myself that such a spirit could not fail if there was a God in Heaven. (p.211)

January and February pass. In March she offers to marry him there and then but he doesn’t want to make her a widow, insists they must wait till 10 June has been and gone. Then startling news. Pamela has caught a cold and it develops into pneumonia.

Weeks of mental anguish as Pamela declines and Charles throws himself into his work or spends the nights walking round Mayfair in agonies. He forgets about his own impending doom and is only concerned for his love. Then Leithen, following his diary, realises that Charles breaks through his anguish into an unexpected serenity. Faith. He becomes convinced that so deep is their love it will transcend death, it will continue after death, and somehow he isn’t worried any more.

On the last page Leithen describes attending their wedding, which is an idyllic affair at Wirlesdon. Pamela shows him the copy of The Times with his obituary in it, that much came true. Later, in the autumn, Charles jokes of it to Leithen. It was a case of mistaken identity. Seems Charles had third cousin of his great-grandfather, who had also served in a Scots regiment, who lived in some villa in Cheltenham which he’d named after the family home, and this old boy died on 9 June and his servant informed the Times. Hence the obituary on 10 June. Case of mistaken identity, old boy. Rum do, eh?

This is the best of the stories and has vivid descriptions of love and despair (maybe I liked it because it fits archetypes of what a love story should be). But the payoff felt a bit, well, cheap.

The theme of boyishness and rejuvenation

It’s a truism that ripping yarns are designed to appeal to ‘boys of all ages’, as Haggard out it in a preface, that the adventures either happen to boys or bring out the boyish side of grown men.

But there’s something more in Buchan stories. Adventures restore men’s youth, adventures make stolid middle-aged men young again. This was true of Leithen in the previous novel in the series, The Dancing Floor, who, when he got swept up in the fervid course of events, felt the years fall away. And it’s true of Tavanger the financier during his complex business negotiations.

We parted at Hyde Park Corner, and I watched him set off westward with his shoulders squared and his step as light as a boy’s. This Daphne adventure was assuredly renewing Tavanger’s youth.

His adventures seemed to have renewed his youth, for he looked actually boyish, and I understood that half the power of the man – and indeed of anyone who succeeds in his line – lay just in a boyish readiness to fling his cap on the right occasion over the moon

and:

He laughed – not ironically, or ruefully, but with robust enjoyment. Tavanger had certainly acquired a pleasant boyishness from this enterprise.

In this book grown men behave with puckish boyishness. In the politics chapter the Prime Minister, Trant, retires in the spirit of a naughty schoolboy:

I walked down to the House that afternoon with one assured conviction. Trant was about to retire. His air had been that of a schoolboy who meant to defy authority and hang the consequences. He had the manner of one who knew he was going to behave unconscientiously and dared anybody to prevent him.

While the protagonist of chapter 3:

I have come down to breakfast before a day’s partridge shooting, apathetic about the prospect, and have been compelled by Reggie to look forward to it with the ardour of a boy. Small wonder he was popular; many people remain young, but few can communicate youthfulness. (p.121)

And not just the men are juvenilised. After a rough day’s riding Daker’s love interest is shaken and red-faced, her clothes and adult self-possession shaken.

As they jogged home Reggie wondered that he had not thought her pretty before; the polished young lady had gone, and in its place was something very girlish and young, something more primitive and more feminine.

The regression from self-possessed lady to ‘girl’, parallels the move backwards from ‘civilisation’ to ‘primitive’, and both involve a move to the ‘more feminine’ (p.131). Part of the juvenile mindset which British public school education seemed to inculcate, then as now.

Thoughts

I grew up on the stories of H.G. Wells, writer of wild science fiction stories placed in cosy suburban settings (Martians travel millions of miles through space and land in Woking; the key witness to the terrifying war which destroys the world is Bert Smallways, keeper of a failed second-hand bicycle shop in suburban Kent, etc).

Wells is a brilliantly vivid and, at the same time, often very funny writer. Buchan is neither. As I’ve read his books I’ve tried to nail down what it is that keeps Buchan’s books so second-rate, why hardly any of the 30 or so novels he wrote are read (or worth reading) these days.

Rackety plots

A major part of the problem is that Buchan’s plots really don’t hang together very well. We still read Conan Doyle’s stories (both the Holmes ones but also the Professor Challengers ones which I loved as a boy) because they make sense. Doyle went to great pains (and found it exhausting) to nail down every link in the convoluted plots which he had Holmes and Watson unravel.

In his science fiction works the premises are sometimes fantastic but are kept simple and therefore somehow believable (like a remote plateau in South America where dinosaurs never died out, in The Lost World). Same is true of Wells. His story ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’ struck me, as a boy, as very much what would happen to an ordinary man if he was suddenly given the ability to work miracles.

Buchan has neither of these gifts. His plots are rackety, bent and contrived – we never find out what international conspiracy is at work in The Power-House, while The Dancing Floor relies on not just one but a whole series of silly and contrived coincidences. And many aspects of the individual sub-plots or incidental incidents, are themselves riddled with holes, full of ridiculous implausibilities on virtually every page.

So his stories 1) lack the grand simplicity of Wells’ or Doyle’s one-concept fantasies, but at the same time 2) their complicated plots lack the elegant complexity of the Holmes stories, instead relying on so many contrived implausibilities as to fail to win us over.

Charmless snobbery

But there’s a third element brooding over these two structural ones, which really keeps Buchan locked in the third division, which is his lack of charm. Both Conan Doyle and Wells are often funny, charming, invite the reader to join in a sense of humour which (remarkably) still works a hundred year later. The interplay between Holmes, Watson and their housekeeper, Mrs Hudson, has charmed and delighted readers round the world for over a century. Buchan has moments of drollness, and all of John MacNab is one big joke, but he is rarely charming. He is never loveable.

No, the vibe that comes from Buchan is cold, aloof and standoffish. And this is connected with his snobbery. Before we get to any of his creaking, Heath Robinson plots, we are bombarded with reminders that the central protagonist, Sir Edward Leithen, is a leading member of the pukka British upper classes. There’s reams of stuff about dinner parties, and country house weekends, and hunting, shooting and fishing, tediously persistent reminders of how he rides with famous fox hunting packs in the Home Counties (the Wyvern, the Bicester), records of dinner and chat at his pukka London club, or casually dropping into the House of Commons to represent the Conservative landed interest, listen to this or that speech, hobnob with the great party leaders.

Instead of charming his readers, Buchan, certainly in the Leithen novels, goes out of his way to flaunt his class privilege, his social rank, his gilded lifestyle, and his immaculate social connections at every opportunity. The lasting impression of all his stories isn’t so much the creaky and contrived plots but his persistent need to remind us at every turn of his social superiority.

Evelyn Waugh was on the face of it every bit as snobbish but in Waugh it doesn’t matter because he is so very, very funny, so inventive and unexpected, and such a supreme prose stylist. Buchan is none of these things.

So I’d itemise Buchan’s shortcomings as:

over-complicated plots with too many moving parts
parts which rely on too many improbable coincidences
but which still don’t really justify the sense of hysteria he wants to generate (in both The Power-House and The Dancing Floor)
accompanied by an almost complete lack of warmth, humour or charm
but instead, an officious insistence on his impeccable social superiority i.e. snobbery

Interesting words

incunabula, plural of incunabulum – an early printed book, especially one printed before 1500
to ingeminate – repeat or reiterate (a word or statement), typically for emphasis
pachydermatous – thick-skinned; insensitive to criticism, insult etc
a pourparler – a discussion preliminary to negotiations
a prepossession – a preconceived opinion, a prejudice
stand-patter – term used in America in the early 20th century describing stubbornly conservative members of the members of the Republican Party
vouchsafement – the granting of a favour

Credit

The Gap in the Curtain by John Buchan was first published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1932. References are to the 1992 B&W paperback edition, which is littered with typos.

John Buchan reviews

John Buchan reviews

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by Simon on February 26, 2024 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on February 26, 2024

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John McNab by John Buchan (1925)

‘Could you have me at Crask this autumn?’ [Lamancha] asked…
‘I should jolly well think so,’ cried Archie. ‘There’s heaps of room in the old house, and I promise you I’ll make you comfortable. Look here, you fellows! Why shouldn’t all three of you come? I can get in a couple of extra maids from Inverlarrig.’
(Early exchange from John McNab by John Buchan, page 17)

‘Of course we’re all blazing idiots – the whole thing is insanity – but we’ve done the best we can in the way of preparation. The great thing is for each of us to keep his wits about him and use them, for everything may go the opposite way to what we think.’
(The Earl of Lamancha admitting the absurdity of their prank, page 163)

This is the second of Buchan’s series of books featuring the fictional character, Scottish barrister and Conservative MP, Sir Edward Leithen.

Executive summary

Three posh Scots, eminent figures in the British Establishment, discover they are all bored to tears. They concoct a plan to go stay on the Highland estate of a fourth member of their group and send a challenge to the owners of his three neighbouring estates, to the effect that they will poach game off their estates. They won’t steal the game, they’ll place it on the respective front doorsteps. It’s a bet made in a gentleman’s club like at the start of ‘Around The World in 80 Days’.

Who should these letters of challenge come from? They invent a name, ‘John McNab’. What none of them anticipate is that the very lairds they set out to defeat will themselves come in on their side, that the population around the estates will hear about John McNab’s brave exploits, that they will even be reported in the local and then the national press and even that, in some conversations, some of the characters see in John McNab’s pluck and daring a solution to the widespread malaise afflicting post-First World War Britain.

This atmosphere of comedy reefed with sometimes serious themes, and the way all members of a highly stratified society are brought together in a common endeavour, reminded me of the Powell and Pressburger movie I Know Where I’m Going and, on a lighter tone, the Scotland-based Ealing comedy, Whiskey Galore.

Longer version

Three middle-aged posh Scots meet up at their London club. They were at school and then ‘the University’ together, have prospered in their careers and now discover they are bored and restless, suffering from taedium vitae, ennui. They are:

Sir Edward ‘Ned’ Leithen (lawyer, Member of Parliament and ex-Attorney General)
John Palliser-Yeates (banker)
Charles, the Right Hon. the Earl of Lamancha, M.P., His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Dominions, possessor of ‘insatiable ambition’

They are joined for dinner by Captain Sir Archibald Roylance, D.S.O., prospective Conservative candidate for Wester Ross and Laird of Crask, an estate in the Highlands, an irritatingly boisterous and good-humoured war veteran (game left leg giving him a pronounced limp).

Over dinner and cigars they tell yarns about figures back in Scotland and one mentions Jim Tarras, the fellow who played a prank by poaching game on other people’s estates (this class of character only knows people who own estates) but warning them in advance that he was coming.

The idea catches fire and the bored threesome agree to travel incognito to the estate of Archie Roylance. It is August, fine hunting weather. They arrange to send out letters to the owners of neighbouring estates announcing that they will poach game off their land between set dates. It is an ironic point of gentlemanly etiquette that they will not remove the game from the estate owner’s land, in fact they will deliver the shot stag or caught salmon to their doors, thus not being guilty of anything as common as theft. Lamancha’s letter template reads:

‘Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I propose to kill a stag [or a salmon as the case may be] on your ground between midnight on – and midnight –. [We can leave the dates open for the present.] The animal, of course, remains your property and will be duly delivered to you. It is a condition that it must be removed wholly outside your bounds. In the event of the undersigned failing to achieve his purpose he will pay as forfeit one hundred pounds, and if successful fifty pounds to any charity you may appoint. I have the honour to be, your obedient humble servant.’

Obviously they can’t sign the letters with any of their real names and so cook up the nom de guerre i.e. fictional name, John McNab, hence the title.

The point of poaching is that it is not only technically challenging in itself i.e. stalking game or catching salmon, but also dangerous in that it is illegal and so getting caught, taken to court, named in the papers, would potentially end all their careers.

For example Roylance, whose mansion they hide in and make their base of operations, is planning to stand as Conservative candidate for his constituency; getting caught poaching would ruin him.

‘You’re an ass, John,’ said Leithen. ‘It’s only a couple of pounds for John Macnab. But if these infernal Edinburgh lawyers get on the job, it will be a case of producing the person of John Macnab, and then we’re all in the cart. Don’t you realise that in this fool’s game we simply cannot afford to lose – none of us?’

The thing is that, unlike the other Buchan books I’ve read, John McNab is a comedy, written in high good humour. Here’s an example of Buchan’s dry, understated humour:

Sir Edward Leithen sighed deeply as he turned from the doorstep down the long hot street. He did not look behind him, or he would have seen another gentleman approach cautiously round the corner of a side-street, and, when the coast was clear, ring the doctor’s bell. He was so completely fatigued with life that he neglected to be cautious at crossings, as was his habit, and was all but slain by a motor-omnibus.

Boisterous young Sir Archie in particular is an upper-class noodle with the same posh mannerisms as Bertie Wooster et al, dropping their gs etc. Here’s an example of some of the replies they get to their letter, this is probably the funniest.

‘Sir, I have received your insolent letter. I do not know what kind of rascal you may be, except that you have the morals of a bandit and the assurance of a halfpenny journalist. But since you seem in your perverted way to be a sportsman, I am not the man to refuse your challenge. My reply is, sir, damn your eyes and have a try. I defy you to kill a stag in my forest between midnight on the 28th of August and midnight of the 30th. I will give instructions to my men to guard my marches, and if you should be roughly handled by them you have only to blame yourself. Yours faithfully, Alastair Raden.’

It’s all done in this kind of joshing, posh tone. The three men draw straws to decide who will poach what on which of Lord Archie’s neighbouring estates.

Lamancha is set to poach in the Haripol forest
Palliser-Yeates draws the straw to shoot a stag on the Glenraden estate
Leithen is set to poach salmon on the estate of Strathlarrig

Highland setting

It’s all set in the Highlands with a regular bombardment of Scots place names which might have well been in Ecuador or ancient Greece for all they meant to me. Here’s Lord Archie explaining that:

‘Haripol is about the steepest and most sportin’ forest in the Highlands, and Glenraden is nearly as good. There’s no forest at Strathlarrig, but, as I’ve told you, amazin’ good salmon fishin’. For a west coast river, I should put the Larrig only second to the Laxford.’

There’s miles of description like this, detailed word portraits of places with venerable Scottish names. In his introduction and notes, Buchan scholar David Daniell makes the elementary point that Buchan grew up in rural Fife with regular family holidays in Tweeddale, many hours spent yomping across the heather, through woods etc. He was a keen and expert fisherman from boyhood, publishing a book on the subject when he was barely 21 and continued fishing throughout his life.

So the point being that the descriptions of the landscape encountered by the three bored poachers, and especially the technical details of Leithen’s fly fishing, are painted from life, deep experience and love. It’s a love poem to the land.

However, it’s also a pretty basic fact that all the placenames in the book are fictional. They combine aspects of the various regions Buchan knew well to create a kind of perfect huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ paradise. There’s a map but all the place names and the entire layout are invented. On reflection, the map is a bit too simple and conveniently arranged around the narrative to be true.

Complications

It’s a comedy so there are comic complications, mainly in the shape of new characters. The poaching forays are set for consecutive 2-day periods, so we are introduced to the owners of each of the targeted estates in order.

The Raden family

First up is Glenraden castle where John Palliser-Yeates is slated to shoot a stag and deposit it at the castle door. We are introduced to father of the house, Colonel Radel. More importantly he has two marrying-age daughters.

The Bandicotts

The eldest Radel girl, Agatha, is falling moonily in love with Junius Bandicott, the grown-up son of an elderly American archaeologist, Mr Acheson Bandicott, who has the Colonel’s permission to excavate an ancient barrow on his land, because he is convinced it’s the burial mound of the renowned Viking Harald Blacktooth.

The Bandicotts have rented the second of the neighbouring estates, Strathlarrig House, whose magnificent but very exposed salmon streams Leithen is set to poach.

Janet Raden

Colonel Radel’s youngest daughter is Janet or ‘Nettie’ for short. She’s small and shrewd. In an early comic encounter she watches Lord Archie jumping over stepping stones in order to test his gammy leg, but when he realises he is being watched he slips off a stone and plunges into three foot of water, further emphasising his character as an upper class twit.

Janet sits in on the meetings convened by her father with their groundsmen and gamekeepers as they plan how to prevent this phantom ‘John McNab’ stalking a deer on their land and it’s she who makes the shrewdest suggestions. In the event, she goes out walking over the heather on the second day McNab has promised to strike and catches him, in this case John Palliser-Yeates.

Mission 1. Palliser-Yeates against Glenraden

Our guys had got wind that the American archaeologist was going to use dynamite (!) to blow out the heavy stones concealing the barrow and so the man tasked with the Glenraden estate, Palliser-Yeates, makes his shot in between this series of small explosions. But unlucky for him, Janet was sitting on hilltop not far away, comes running and confronts him just as he’s bending over to hoist the stag up. Being a gentleman, Palliser-Yeates tips his hat, says it’s a fair catch and he’s lost, but then turns and runs.

Fish Benjie

At this point I need to introduce Fish Benjie. Chapter 4 opens with a long and beguiling description of a certain type of all-purpose tinker and hobo you see on the roads of Scotland, then zeroes in on the life story of the young tinker, hustler and survivor, Benjamin Bogle. He’s acquired his nickname because, with his father in prison and his mother unwell, he’s independently travelling the roads of the area where the novel is set and among other hustles, collects fresh fish from the coast and sells it at the big houses.

The point is that Benjie becomes aware of the three posh strangers hiding at Lord Archie’s house and catches one of them, Leithen, sneaking around. Faced with having their whole scam blown, Leithen makes a snap decision to let Benjie in on the secret and take him on the team. He becomes a spy, recording the comings and goings at each of the estates and in the early evening reporting all to our guys at Crask Lodge.

When Palliser-Yeates shoots his stag the plan had been for him to lug it a hundred yards or so to where Benjie was waiting with his cart, towed by a knackered old horse. But Janet came running up before he could hook up with Benjie and, after Palliser-Yeates took to his heels and Janet came across Benjie a 100 yards down the track, she mistakenly thought he just happened to be passing. In the event, she gets Benjie to help her load the dead stag onto the cart telling him to take it to the castle. In fact being the hustler he is, Benjie instead trots in the opposite direction and finds Palliser-Yeates, offering him the stag. Palliser-Yeates is touched by his loyalty (and cunning) but explains that he (Palliser-Yeates) is a gentleman and has given his word to a lady – so Benjie must turn round and deliver the stag to the castle. Here he is richly rewarded by the Radens for his help, thus getting paid twice, by the attackers and defenders. Benjie is that kind of character and deeply enjoyable for it.

Harald Blacktooth

Incidentally the day of dynamiting turns up trumps for the American archaeologist who does indeed discover impressive relics – two massive torques, several bowls and flagons, spear-heads from which the hafts had long since rotted, a sword-blade, and a quantity of brooches, armlets, and rings – but most strikingly, a necklace of shells which could only have come from North America!

On the basis of which Bandicott Senior makes the wild claim that this Harald Blacktooth must have sailed to and back from America (compare The Saga of Eirik the Red) and the even wilder and comic suggestion that, as a result, the Radel family include among their ancestors the discoverers of America! A trope which is repeated with droll humour by other characters for the rest of the story.

But more than that, Bandicott, being American, is all about press and publicity and so he rings up the local and national press, the British Museum, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, telling them about his amazing discovery.

The practical results of this are that a dozen or more journalists descend on Glenraden Castle and the neighbourhood, snooping round, trespassing and generally making the self-appointed mission of the three toffs significantly more difficult.

Mission 2. Leithen against Strathlarrig

Long story short the next night Leithen manages to catch his salmon but is spotted by one of the Strathlarrig gillies, Jimsie who, with two assistants, quickly captures him. Now Leithen had disguised himself as a tramp with a dirty face, ragged clothes and dishevelled hair and so he tries to pretend the salmon had been caught by an otter, which had taken a chunk out of it and he had come across it half eaten. Jimsie hands him over to the Strathlarrig head-keeper, Angus (‘a morose old man near six-foot-four in height, clean-shaven, with eyebrows like a penthouse’) who doesn’t buy Leithen’s story and has him thrown in the estate garage and the door locked pending arrest and charge for trespassing and poaching the next day.

Now it gets a bit complicated. The Americans who have rented Strathlarrig, the Bandicotts, are hosting a fine dinner for their neighbours and persuaded Sir Archie to go along. Now, Angus’s men not only captured Leithen but one of the many journalists brought to the area by the discovery, who recognised Leithen and Leithen was forced to let in on his secret. In fact Leithen had recruited this man, Crossby, to create a distraction by trespassing up near the house.

Now when Junius Bandicott learns that his zealous head-keeper has imprisoned these men, he thinks he’s over-reacted. Also it’s clear that neither of them are the famous John McNab everyone’s het up about. And so he orders them released.

It’s Agatha who goes to the garages and orders the servants to set the men free. Leithen is so discombobulated at the sight of her that he forgets to put on a yokel accent and speaks with his posh educated accent. Agatha realises he is indeed of her class. Leithen quickly improvises a story about being down on his luck having made many bad life decisions.

It’s only the next morning, when the salmon, complete with the bit Leithen cut out to make it look like it had been caught by an otter, restored, and deposited on the doorstep of Strathlarrig House along with a message from ‘John McNab’ saying here is the poached animal he promised, that Agatha, Junius, Archie and Jimsie all realise the rough old tramp they locked up – then released – was McNab himself!

Lord Archie at the hustings

Another complication is that Lord Archie had forgotten that slap bang in the middle of the McNab campaign he has a pre-arranged appointment to give a political speech, part of his campaign to elected Conservative candidate for Wester Ross (arranged by his enthusiastic agent, Brodie, ‘a lean, red-haired man’) a short train ride from Crask Lodge. Buchan gives a vivid description of what it’s like to stand up in front of an audience of thousands and your mind to go completely blank, completely forgetting the tissue of bromides and clichés he had spent days memorising.

But more than that, he finds himself inspired to use the story of ‘John McNab’ who, of course, his entire audience knows about, taking him up as an example of how we must ‘challenge’ ourselves in order to become fully awake, to test the old values which he, as a Tory, believes in but also believes just be renewed in every generation. To his surprise he gets a standing ovation. McNab has become a figure who lights up political campaigns!

Mission 3. Lamancha against Haripol

The owner of Haripol House is a different kettle of fish. He’s not Scots. He’s an Englander, Lord Claybody, who made his pile from business in the Midlands. He’s bought Haripol House and adorned it in horrendous taste. He reacts worst of the three addressees of the John McNab letters, getting his lawyers to send a formal reply threatening arrest and conviction. Now, while the campaigns against Glenraden Castle and Strathlarrig House have garnered a lot of support among the local population and even among the owners of those houses (!) Claybody’s attitude has hardened. He sees McNab’s prank as an assault on property everywhere. To this end, our heroes learn that Claybody has imported 100 navvies from a major dam building project he is responsible for in the vicinity. These men will guard his property making the McNab assault almost impossible.

But that is precisely why Lamancha is determined to see it through. On the eve of the campaign, there comes a night so dark and stormy night that none of the conspirators, poring over maps and exchanging battle plans, notice the front door open and Colonel Raden and his two daughters cross the threshold to escape the weather. At just the moment that Leithen and Palliser-Yeates enter the hall from different rooms. the two daughters, Agatha and Janet both exclaim ‘John McNab!’ for each man is the John McNab who they’ve encountered.

Lord Archie enters, greets his guests, gets them to take off their wet things, come into the study by a fire, and proceeds to come clean, telling them they see before them the collaborators on the great John McNab scam. To everyone’s merriment, the Colonel accepts the situation and goes so far as to say he and his daughters will help the conspirators poach a deer off Claybody, so much do the old lairds of the locality despise the jumped-up new English owner.

But what with all those navvies the situation seems impossible until Janet and Benjie pull off a masterstroke. They kidnap Lady Claybody’s adored little doggie, Roguie. Janet had paid her a visit and noticed a) how she doted on the little critter and b) how she let it off the leash to run wild. So she got Benjie to kidnap it, the idea being that she will insist on a large number of navvies being sent out to find it. Genius!

Long vivid description of Lamancha being led a-stalking by top Crask gillie Wattie Lithgow. He gets a shot at the oldest biggest legendary stag in the region, doesn’t kill him in one but fatally wounds him. They follow the blood trail and find the stag dead in a burn. Wattie lugs him across country to where Lord Archie and Janet are waiting. They load it up and drive it back to Crask without incident.

(While they waited, Janet and Archie had built a bridge across the river Doran (from old planks) during which they’d both gotten wet and messy and as he watched her wash herself in the stream Archie suddenly realised this slender young women was one with the heather and the hills and he proposes to her. ‘Yes,’ she turned a laughing face, ‘of course I will.’ It’s a festive comedy.)

To cut a long story short:

Lamancha bags his stag, which is dragged away by Wattie, down to the car where Lord Archie and Janet drive it back to Crask.
Lord Archie and Janet wash and change and drive over to Haripol House to return Lady Claybody’s kidnapped dog. En route Palliser-Yeates emerges from the heather and they invite him to come along.
Meanwhile Leithen had been given the task of distracting the gillies and navvies and does a very good job of it, his tortuous journeys and then flight from the navvies described in immense detail. It has a comic denouement when he stumbles down towards Haripol House and is astounded to see Lord Archie and Janet there being politely entertained.

Lamancha, the man who shot the stag, is not, however, so lucky. He is cornered by a tough navvy who he can’t dodge, they get into a clumsy wrestling match, fall into a hollow and the navvy’s leg is broken, only at this point does Lamancha realise the fellow is Stokes, his old orderly in the army. Suddenly (when he no longer poses any threat) Lamancha is all aristocratic concern. When a bunch of other navvies and gillies surround him, Lamancha is only concerned that Stokes gets the best treatment, has his leg splinted, and is carried by the gillies down to Johnson Claybody’s car.

In all this Lamancha displays natural, unforced compassion and gentlemanliness, which is strongly contrasted with Johnson Claybody’s selfishness, ill manners and bad grace. Johnson really hates the way Lamancha makes all the right moral decisions and effortlessly commands Johnson’s own keeper and gillies. He has class, dontcha know, whereas Johnson is forced to resort to caddish bluster: ‘Damn your impudence! What business is that of yours?’ etc.

When Lamancha approaches Haripol House, under guard by the head-keeper etc, he is astonished to find waiting for him, not just Lord and Lady Claybody, but his partners in crime, Palliser-Yeates, Leithen, Lord Archie and the lovely Janet!

Happy ending

And there’s a happy ending worthy of a stage comedy. Lamancha admits they he and his friends as ‘John McNab’, something the other two had not, in fact, let on. After their initial astonishment, Lord and Lady Claybody react well, if perplexed. Claybody says he would have given them free range of his estate if they’d wanted it; or organised a real challenge to poaching on it, if only they’d asked.

As they all discuss it, Ned, John and Lamancha come round to feeling they’ve misunderstood the whole enterprise. They were never in any real danger, it was never a real challenge, they feel silly and heartily apologise. Janet apologises for kidnapping Lady Claypole, which momentarily introduces an ill note into proceedings which is glossed over when Lady C learns that young Archie and Janet are engaged, at which point she gives them a big-bosomed hug. Even Johnson Claybody who has behaved so ill-manneredly to Lamancha, now changes his tune and apologises. Everyone shakes hands and Lord and Lady C say they will hold a big dinner tonight, and invited Lord Radel and the Bandicotts, to celebrate the triumph but also the death of the fictional character of ‘John McNab’. If it was a Jacobean or restoration comedy they would have all joined hands, come forward and bowed to the applauding audience.

Snobbery, class, body shape and clothes

Snobbery

The final part of the third mission exists solely, as far as I can see, to express Buchan’s Tory snobbery. The Right Honourable the Earl of Lamancha, MP, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Dominions, is caught by one of the navvies deployed by Claybody. Their bodies reflect their class: Lamancha tall and erect, the navvy bent by labour.

He was a tall fellow in navvy’s clothes, with a shock head of black hair, and a week’s beard—an uncouth figure with a truculent eye.

But the working class navvies are really an extension of Lord Claybody who is depicted as a gauche arriviste, a ghastly industrialist who has earned his wealth instead of inheriting it, as all right-minded aristocrats do. He is depicted as lacking all the depth and class, as faking a tartan kilt, doing up his mansion with hideous modern extension while his wife is depicted as foolishly trying to recreate an English country garden in the Highlands which, Janet waspishly observes, won’t last long.

The correct response to this beastly nouveau rich is expressed by Colonel Radel: ‘He and his damned navvies are an insult to every gentleman in the Highlands.’ When Lamancha has his extended argument with Claybody’s son, he comes within an ace of using the ultimate insult and calling him an ‘infernal little haberdasher.’ This is plain snobbery.

The argument is a dramatised contrast between the true class and gentlemanly attitude and behaviour of Lamancha vividly contrasted with the selfish, ill mannered and unchivalrous behaviour of Johnson Claybody towards his own injured employee. Lamancha insists that Stoke is carried down off the moors and then insists that he is placed in the car and driven to the nearest house which a doctor can be called from, Claybody furiously bridling at being ordered about on his own property.

Buchan vividly describes and explains the nature of aristocratic confidence:

The truth is, that if you belong to a family which for a good many centuries has been accustomed to command and to take risks, and if you yourself, in the forty-odd years of your life, have rather courted trouble than otherwise, and have put discipline into Arab caravans, Central African natives, and Australian mounted brigades – well, when you talk about wringing necks your words might carry weight. If, too, you have never had occasion to think of your position, because no one has ever questioned it, and you promise to break down somebody else’s, your threat may convince others, because you yourself are so wholly convinced of your power in that direction. (p.222)

And draws the Conservative conclusion:

It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.

Class

Alongside it goes the Tory notion of duty. This is vividly depicted in Lamancha’s fight with the navvie. When he’s just an anonymous navvie, he is depicted as foul-mouthed and bent, leaning over i.e. not straight and erect like a gentleman. But after he’s fallen badly and broken his leg it isn’t the fall as such but Lamancha suddenly recognising who he is which transforms him in Lamancha’s eyes.

He recalled now the man who had once been his orderly, and whom he had last known as a smart troop sergeant…’You remember me – Lord Lamancha?’ He had it all now – the fellow who had been a son of one of Tommy Deloraine’s keepers –a decent fellow and a humorous, and a good soldier.

So long as he is an anonymous working class man, he is just a brute antagonist. As soon as he enters into the network of contacts, via gamekeepers and the army, he acquires an identity, a name, and becomes of value. To the Tory ruling class, the great mass of the population have no identity or worth unless they enter into the aristocrats’ networks of privilege. At that point they cease to be a blundering swearing drunken threat and suddenly swim into focus as a gamekeeper’s son or someone’s servant or orderly etc. Only then do they count as human beings.

Body shape and class

All this, believe it or not, is correlated with body shape. Aristocratic men are tall and thin, like Sir Archie:

No other country, she thought, produced this kind of slim, graceful, yet weathered and hard-bitten youth.

Or Colonel Alastair Raden:

A lean old gentleman dressed in an ancient loud-patterned tweed jacket and a very faded kilt. Still erect as a post, he had a barrack-square voice, and high-boned, aquiline face, and a kindly but irritable blue eye.

Or John Palliser-Yeates:

A tall man, apparently young, with a very ruddy face, a thatch of sandy hair, and ancient, disreputable clothes.

Or Edward Leithen:

A tallish man, they said, lean and clean-shaven, rather pale, and with his skin very tight over his cheek-bones. He had looked like a gentleman and had behaved as such.

And:

Before it became the fashion he had been a pioneer in guideless climbing in the Alps, and the red-letter days in his memory were for the most part solitary days. He was always in hard condition, and his lean figure rarely knew fatigue… (p.198)

By sharp contrast, ghastly nouveau riche types like Lord Claybody and his son, are short and squat:

Lord Claybody entered, magnificent in a kilt of fawn-coloured tweed and a ferocious sporran made of the mask of a dog-otter. The garments, which were aggressively new, did not become his short, square figure…(p.196)

A stout gentleman in a kilt…(p.227)

Same goes for what this class calls the memsahibs. The most salient aspect of lovely Janet who Lord Archie falls in love with is that she is slender and boyish.

A slight girl with what seemed to him astonishingly bright hair and very blue and candid eyes

Compare and contrast Lady Claybody, whose ghastly taste, whose foolish plan to plant an English country garden in the Highlands, and whose tacky obsession with her little yapping dog, are all summed up by the fact that she has an extensive bosom:

Lady Claybody was a heavily handsome woman still in her early fifties. The purchase of Haripol had been her doing, for romance lurked in her ample breast, and she dreamed of a new life in which she should be an unquestioned great lady far from the compromising environment where the Claybody millions had been won.

The contrast between busty vulgarity and slender classiness is explicitly made:

For swelling bosoms and pouting lips and soft curves and languishing eyes Archie had only the most distant regard. He saluted them respectfully and passed by the other side of the road – they did not belong to his world. But that slender figure splashing in the tawny eddies made a different appeal. Most women in such a posture would have looked tousled and flimsy, creatures ill at ease, with their careful allure beaten out of them by weather. But this girl was an authentic creature of the hills and winds – her young slimness bent tensely against the current, her exquisite head and figure made more fine and delicate by the conflict.

Bosoms bad, boyish slimness good.

And clothes

Johnson Claybody is pernickety about being properly dressed, clean and trim. Lamancha is a true gentleman because he doesn’t care. He knows his class will shine through no matter what he’s wearing:

Now Johnson was the type of man who is miserable if he feels himself ill-clad or dirty, and discovers in a sense of tidiness a moral superiority. He rejoiced to have found his enemy, and an enemy over whom he felt at a notable advantage. But, unfortunately for him, no Merkland had ever been conscious of the appearance he represented or cared a straw about it. Lamancha in rags would have cheerfully disputed with an emperor in scarlet, and suffered no loss of confidence because of his garb, since he would not have given it a thought.

So hopefully you agree with me that this novel, harmless entertainment though it appears at first sight, is in fact a kind of primer of snobbish, class consciousness.

Disguises

In my review of Buchan’s novel Prester John, I noted how the baddie, the leader of the black rebellion John Laputa, was a man of many disguises, now a Christian minister, now leader of a pagan ritual, a suited and tied westerner among London MPs, a leopard-clad war leader in Africa, and so on. I’ve just watched a kids TV programme where a class went from uniformed, dull and bored, to being allowed to dress up in garish costumes and dance around, and the change in mood and engagement was startling. Maybe dressing up is just a basic element of play.

Intellectuals, historians, theologians, all lard their descriptions of the religious ceremonies of Catholics, the Byzantine Church, Islamic centres or the African ceremonies Chinua Achebe describes, with serious interpretations of symbolism and deep meanings and so on. But maybe, at the same time, it’s just fun, it’s a release and an escape from everyday routine and it’s also, as women know better than men, a very community and team-building and bonding activity to dress up and fuss and fret over costumes and make-up and presentation.

Comedy has always overflowed with disguise and dressing-up. I think of the comic plays of ancient Rome I read last year where at least one of the characters dressed up as someone else, with comic consequences. Or the cross-dressing in most of Shakespeare’s comedies, or in almost all the Restoration comedies.

In a sense reading fiction is a sort of dressing up, an imaginative dressing-up: it allows our imaginations to assume the persona of other people, narrators and characters, for the duration of the reading. Apart from all the heavyweight moralising which fiction often does, and the arousal of serious or intense emotions, maybe its most primal function is to take us out of ourselves. Maybe we need regular holidays from ourselves.

So a little light dressing up and disguising is the least you’d expect in a humorous novel like this. At least some of the comedy derives from supposedly strict and stern, upright and proper Establishment figures like a top lawyer and banker behaving like children. I imagine this had more impact in 1925 than in 2024.

But dressing up and disguise can, of course, have a serious darker side and this is gestured towards in the fertile imagination of Janet Radel, who over-worries about who John McNab is and what he’s going to do.

Horrible stories which she had read of impersonation and the shifts of desperate characters recurred to her mind. Was John Macnab perhaps old Mr Bandicott disguised as an archaeologist? Or was he one of the Strathlarrig workmen? (p.69)

Visions of John Macnab filled her mind, now a tall bravo with a colonial accent, now a gnarled Caliban of infinite cunning and gnome-like agility. Where in this haunted land was he ensconced—in some hazel covert, or in some clachan but-and-ben, or miles distant in a populous hotel, ready to speed in a swift car to the scene of action?

In this excerpt we can clearly see that disguise allows a large element of indeterminism to enter a narrative. Our everyday lives may contain large amounts of uncertainty – will we be given a mortgage, will the man we fancy agree to a date, will you get the pay rise you’ve asked for etc – but generally within finite and boring limits. You can see how, as soon as you allow disguise into a fictitious narrative, the possibilities hugely expand, whether for comic or tragic purposes.

Making fictions

The book is ostensibly about the poaching, but at its centre it is about making fictions and telling stories. John McNab is a completely invented person, but all four conspirators find themselves drawn, despite themselves, into feeling somehow committed to the idea he represents. Arrived at Crask, on the first evening all express overt reluctance to get drawn into this silly prank, but at the same time find it difficult to let the non-existent figure of John McNab down. This makes no logical sense but a lot of emotional sense. It explains how the thing grows into being described as the ‘John Macnab proposition.’ And once they’ve reconnoitred the ground and weighed up the obstacles and begun to commit to the prank, the entirely non-existent persona of ‘John McNab’ begins to assume greater and greater power.

In a different way, all three of the households which receive the John McNab letter are plunged into speculation about who he is, what he looks like – big and bluff or small and cunning – especially in the vivid imagination of young Miss Janet Raden, with her ‘taste for the dramatic’ (p.83).

So the figure of McNab turns into a kind of symbol of the power of creating a fictional character; he comes to demonstrate the uncanny power of fictional characters. It’s one thing that he imposes himself on the three households he has announced he will ‘attack’, that’s understandable, they know no better. But that he comes to dominate the lives and feelings of the three men who invented him says something fascinating about the power of fiction and invention.

Fictions make news

The newspapermen gathered to report on the Harald Blacktooth find that all their editors give ancient archaeology perfunctory attention before switching their interest to the glamorous mystery of ‘John McNab’. Millions of readers read about his failure to get his stag at Castle Raden, his

Nature painting

There are numerous descriptions of this, Buchan’s idealised Scottish landscape.

Darkness gave place to the translucence of early dawn: the badger trotted home from his wanderings: the hill-fox barked in the cairns to summon his household: sleepy pipits awoke: the peregrine who lived above the Grey Beallach drifted down into the glens to look for breakfast: hinds and calves moved up from the hazel shows to the high fresh pastures: the tiny rustling noises of night disappeared in that hush which precedes the awakening of life: and then came the flood of morning gold from behind the dim eastern mountains, and in an instant the earth had wheeled into a new day. (p.67)

Since the war

‘What about yourself?’ she asked. ‘In the words of Mr Bandicott, are you going to make good?’ She asked the question with such an air of frank comradeship that Sir Archie was in no way embarrassed. Indeed he was immensely delighted. ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know…I’m a bit of a slacker. There doesn’t seem much worth doing since the war.’ (p.127)

Various characters express the feeling that the war knocked the stuffing out of the generation who went through it. It’s dramatised in the dinner party Colonel Raden gives:

‘I suppose,’ said old Mr Bandicott reflectively, ‘that the war was bound to leave a good deal of unsettlement. Junius missed it through being too young – never got out of a training camp – but I have noticed that those who fought in France find it difficult to discover a groove. They are energetic enough, but they won’t ‘stay put’, as we say. Perhaps this Macnab is one of the unrooted. In your country, where everybody was soldiering, the case must be far more common.’
Mr Claybody announced that he was sick of hearing the war blamed for the average man’s deficiencies. ‘Every waster,’ he said, ‘makes an excuse of being shell-shocked. I’m very clear that the war twisted nothing in a man that wasn’t twisted before.’
Sir Archie demurred. ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen some pretty bad cases of fellows who used to be as sane as a judge, and came home all shot to bits in their mind.’
‘There are exceptions, of course. I’m speaking of the general rule. I turn away unemployables every day – good soldiers, maybe, but unemployable – and I doubt if they were ever anything else.’
Something in his tone annoyed Janet. ‘You saw a lot of service, didn’t you?’ she asked meekly.
‘No, worse luck! They made me stick at home and slave fourteen hours a day controlling cotton. It would have been a holiday for me to get into the trenches. But what I say is, a sane man usually remained sane. Look at Sir Archibald. We all know what a hectic time he had, and he hasn’t turned a hair.’
‘I’d like you to give me that in writing,’ Sir Archie grinned. ‘I’ve known people who thought I was rather cracked.’

It’s given a comic turn at the end but there are clearly four points of view here. Bandicott Senior, as a foreigner, makes a valid generalisation about young men of Britain, traumatised by the war. Claybody is revealed as a loudmouth reactionary who is down on the young but did not himself serve in the war, classic example of the reactionary armchair expert. Archie himself did serve and was injured, but takes the thing lightest of all. And Janet, type of the zealous young woman who would have been a suffragette 20 years before and would be a woman’s libber 40 years later, takes up the cudgels on his behalf.

In Chapter 8 Janet and Lord Archie go for a walk across the moors, hills and whatnot, and she reveals herself to be quite a radical, not in a doctrinaire socialist way (she herself and various other characters refer to the ‘Bolsheviks’ who were, of course a relatively recent phenomenon in 1924), but in saying that her family are fading out, their time is up and the land should be held by newcomers.

‘I’m quite serious about politics,’ said Lord Archie. ‘I wonder,’ said Janet, smiling. ‘I don’t mean scraping into Parliament, but real politics – putting the broken pieces together, you know. Papa and the rest of our class want to treat politics like another kind of property in which they have a vested interest. But it won’t do – not in the world we live in to-day. If you’re going to do any good you must feel the challenge and be ready to meet it.’

Basically, she believes in force and energy. In the confused landscape after the war, describing her like that makes her sound more like a proto-fascist. Her emphasis on primal values reminds me of D.H. Lawrence.

Janet had got off her perch, and was standing a yard from Sir Archie, her hat in her hand and the light wind ruffling her hair. The young man, who had no skill in analysing his feelings, felt obscurely that she fitted most exquisitely into the picture of rock and wood and water, that she was, in very truth, a part of his clean elemental world of the hill-tops. (p.127)

Later, in his election speech, Lord Archie articulates sentiments which reminded me of Ernest Hemingway’s rejection of the old words and the old values which the war had destroyed, albeit clothed in posh pukka phraseology:

He began by confessing that the war had left the world in a muddle, a muddle which affected his own mind. The only cure was to be honest with oneself, and to refuse to accept specious nonsense and conventional jargon. (p.145)

McNab started as a prank by three bored toffs but it is instructive to discover just how many other people it gives a sense of purpose. Janet reports that her father has never been so energised as in the few days he got his staff together to repel the advertised attack, and the various groundsmen and gillies reflect this excitement. Beginning as a small personal gag the turns out to shine a light on an entire civilisation, revealing how bored and directionless it is.

For 20 years this generation looked for and hoped for something new but, like Janet, struggled to express it in any meaningful way. In the event, all their hopes for new worlds and new values were sunk by the rise of horrifying evil on the Continent and the advent of the Second World War.

(Incidentally, it’s interesting to see the words ‘waster’ and ‘slacker’ which I thought were of contemporary coinage, being freely used a hundred years ago.)

The active narrator

Breaching protocol, the narrator from time to time refers to himself in the first person:

I am at a loss to know how to describe the first shattering impact of youth and beauty on a susceptible mind. The old plan was to borrow the language of the world’s poetry, the new seems to be to have recourse to the difficult jargon of psychologists and physicians; but neither, I fear, would suit Sir Archie’s case. (p.46)

Colonel Raden plucked feebly at his moustache, and Janet, I regret to say, laughed. (p.87)

He even claims to have visited the scene of one of the hunts and of the book’s triumphant conclusion:

If you go to Haripol, as I did last week, you will see above the hall chimney a noble thirteen-pointer, and a legend beneath proclaiming that the stag was shot on the Sgurr Dearg beat of the forest by the Earl of Lamancha on a certain day of September in a certain year.

This makes the story feel very chummy, like a yarn being told you over dinner. At the same time it places that narrator very much among the charmed circle of this blithe and happy circle of aristocrats, lawyers and bankers. A sound member of the British ruling class.

Tory irony

The well-off can afford to enjoy life little’s ironies.

Sir Edward Leithen was a philosopher, with an acute sense of the ironies of life, and as he reflected that here was a laird, a Tory, and a strict preserver of game working himself into a passion over the moral rights of the poacher, he suddenly relapsed into helpless mirth. (p.155)

An awful joy fell upon Sir Archie’s soul. He realised anew the unplumbed preposterousness of life.

Credit

John McNab by John Buchan was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1925. References are to the 1994 World Classic’s paperback edition, edited and introduced by David Daniell.

John Buchan reviews

John Buchan reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on February 21, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Comedy, Novel, Thriller

Tagged Acheson Bandicott, Agatha Radel, Alastair Raden, Angus, Archaeology, Archie Roylance, Benjamin Bogle, Bolsheviks, Brodie, by-election, Captain Sir Archibald Roylance, Castle Raden, Colonel Radel, comedy, Crask Lodge, Crossby, David Daniel, David Daniell, Earl of Lamancha, Ernest Hemingway, Fife, Fish Benjie, fly fishing, gillies, Glenraden, Grey Beallach, Harald Blacktooth, Haripol, Highlands, Janet Raden, Jim Tarras, Jimsie, John Buchan, John McNab, Johnson Claybody, journalism, Junius Bandicott, Lady Claybody, Lamancha, landscape, Lord Claybody, Merkland, Mr Bandicott, narrative, novel, Palliser-Yeates, poaching, Politics, practical joke, prank, Roguie, salmon fishing, Scotland, Scottish Highlands, Sgurr Dearg, Sir Edward Leithen, slacker, stag hunting, story, Strathlarrig, Strathlarrig House, Suffragettes, taedium vitae, The Bandicotts, Tommy Deloraine, waster, Wattie Lithgow, Wester Ross

Posted by Simon on February 21, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/21/john-mcnab-john-buchan/

Zanzibar by Giles Foden (2002)

‘My dear boy, this is Africa.’
(Beaten-up old Brit, Ralph Leggatt, to naive young American, Nick Karolides, in Zanzibar, page 97)

This is a 389-page thriller about the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa:

The 1998 United States embassy bombings occurred on 7 August 1998. More than 220 people were killed in nearly simultaneous truck bomb explosions in two East African cities, one at the United States Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and the other at the United States Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya.

Like many a thriller it opens with short, elliptical sections devoted to a handful of disparate characters. Only slowly do we find out more about them and begin to realise that their paths are ‘destined’ to cross. They are:

Khaled al-Kidr, native of Zanzibar who, aged 21, comes home to find his mother and father dead with their throats cut. He wastes his inheritance on drinking and women until an uncle figure, Zayn Mujuj, confides that his father worked for a secret Islamic organisation and was murdered by American-Israeli agents (p.53). At which point Khaled signs up for jihad, travelling to work for ‘the Sheikh. in Sudan and then onto an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan where, after extensive training, he is flattered to be chosen for a special mission.

Jack Queller, a former CIA agent and expert on the Arab world, conduit of resources to the mujahideen in the 1980s (p.306), who had his arm amputated after a firefight in Afghanistan, is now a consultant at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (known as DS), in his personal life haunted by the death from cancer of his wife who we wasn’t there to support, lives an isolated depressed existence on a seafront property on Martha’s Vineyard (p.141).

Nick Karolides, an American of Greek descent, a marine biologist, taking up a new job on a coral reef protection scheme off the island of Zanzibar. Unhappily haunted by the death of his father who was a keen diver till a shark bit off his arm and he died on the way to hospital, whereupon his mother retreated into (Greek Orthodox) religious fervour.

Miranda Power, keen young American State Department trainee who, as we meet her, has been given her first posting, as an Executive Assistant, Logistical and Security, to the American Embassy at Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

By about page 50 we’ve been introduced to these characters and have a strong feeling that their lives are going to intersect.

(Notice how all the western characters are American. So quite apart from the extraordinary range and depth of research demonstrated in the text – about life in Zanzibar or marine biology or al-Qaeda – Foden is also ventriloquising the lives and speech patterns and culture of a range of American characters, a distinct new departure from the British or African characters depicted in his previous novels.)

A book teaches readers how to read it. By about page 70, we’ve realised that Foden is going to be interleaving, interweaving and interspersing narratives about these different characters. It’s going to be very episodic. This leads to several results:

it creates narrative tension, because you realise they’re going to meet and interact so the interest is in seeing how, and with what results
it creates dramatic irony i.e. juxtaposing characters who see the same thing but from different angles (the huge example is the completely different interpretation the Americans and al-Qaeda give to the previous 20 years of history)
this irony can be used for comic effect, as in the chapter which juxtaposes very short, half-page fragments of dialogue of the two enemies: between, on the one hand, Osama bin Laden and his acolytes in their Afghan hideout; and lectures being given about Osama bin Laden by a series of CIA and security experts (we see these lectures because they’re attended by one of the central character, Miranda)

This kind of jumping between scenes featuring characters who are going to eventually meet up in a fateful event is standard operating procedure for many thrillers. Or you could describe the effect as musical, the deliberate counterpointing of different characters, atmospheres and motifs. Or maybe compare it to collage, in art – like cutting out images from magazines and pasting them next to each other in unexpected juxtapositions.

Cast

Page numbers refer to when someone is first introduced, or first speaks, or when a significant fact about them is mentioned. I suppose it’s a kind of index of characters. Or cast list.

Khaled al-Kidr, young recruit to al-Qaeda
Queller, retired badly injured American agent (p.7), now works at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, known as DS (p.47), first name Jack, used to be top Arabist under Reagan (p.52), full title (p.52)
Lucy, Queller’s wife who died from cancer and he feels guilty about not having been around to support
Nick Karolides, marine biologist, born and raised in Florida – tall, tanned, handsome, fit from his daily swim
his mother (unnamed), who’s become a religious fanatic since the death of his father (p.14)
Nick’s dad (unnamed), keen diver, who had his arm bitten off by a shark and died on the way to hospital
Dino, wiry 60-year-old owner of Dino’s Wine Shop, was diving with Nick’s dad when the shark attacked (p.20)
Inspector Chikambwa, unfriendly and (it turns out) corrupt marine policeman on Zanzibar, the USAID contact for the project Nick goes to Zanzibar to work on (p.27)
George Darvil, Nick’s predecessor who died in suspicious circumstances, found drowned, his boat riddled with holes (p.28)
Mr de Souza, proprietor of the Macpherson Ruins Hotel (p.29), very short and extraordinarily beautiful (p.32)
Leggatt, European clove farmer who also does boat tours, Ralph by name (p.82), made his money in copper and silver then diamonds in Sierra Leone (p.121), runs a clove farm, owns a yacht, the Winston Churchill (p.96)
Zayn Mujuj, changes Khaled’s life by recruiting him for jihad (p.45), big man, ‘enormous’ (p.230), Palestinian (p.222)
Ahmed the German, Osama bin Laden’s companion and cameraman (p.45) wears a Sport Team Osnabrück t-shirt, which becomes a leitmotif identifying him as the bomber (pages 143 and 282)
Yousef, al-Qaeda bomb maker (p.45), last name Mourad (p.295)
Ayman al-Zawahari, leader of Egyptian Jihad (p.62)
Muhammed Atef, al-Qaeda’s military commander (p.62)
al-Qaeda, first mentioned (p.43), described (p.66)
the Taliban, keeping guard over the al-Qaeda base (p.50)
Miranda Power, executive assistant, Logistical and Security, American Embassy, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania (p.51), Boston Irish, dad a cop (pages 151 and 184)
Morton Altenburg, Director of Operations, FBI (p.55), young and successful and scornful of Queller’s obsession with al-Qaeda
General Tom Kirby, Department of Defence (p.56)
Osama bin Laden (p.62) described by Queller (p.66 and elsewhere)
Tim Catmull, Brit working for the Department for International Development (DFID) (p.78)
Sayeed, boy accompanying the thugs who beat up Leggatt and tie him up on Lyly before Nick comes to his rescue; who they coax down from the rigging of Leggatt’s yacht; and who Leggatt gives a job
Ray Delahoya, American comms guy at the Dar embassy (p.103), cheerfully vulgar, likes junk food and low culture, apparently gay (fancies the tough Marine guards, pages 245 and 249)
Turtle Mo, a big imposing East African trawler baron, who Nick hires his diving gear from (p.126)
Olivier Pastoreau, Belgian land reclaimer who works for the European Development Fund, proud owner of a handsome white motor cruiser, the Cythère (p.130), amusingly pessimistic
Clive Bayard, only African American in the Dar Embassy (p.244)
Nisha Ghai, Asian employee in the embassy (p.244), killed in the bombing
Lee Denham, the one intelligence officer at the Dar embassy (p.245)
Corporal Rossetti, Marine on duty when the bomb goes off, helps badly injured Ray (p.247)
Juma, gate guard at the embassy
Dr Macintyre, embassy physician (p.259)
President Bill Clinton phones the chargé d’affaires’ house where the wounded have been brought to condole with them (p.262), condemns the attacks on TV (p.270), makes an extensive speech on TV (pages 305 to 306), forced to defend himself in the Starr investigation that he perjured himself lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky (p.325), announces retaliation against al-Qaeda (p.331)
William Cohen, US Secretary of Defence, seen on TV condemning the bombing (p.270)
Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, seen on TV (p.270)
National Security Director Sandy Berger, explaining America’s retaliatory strikes against Sudan (p.332)
Omar el-Bashir, President of Sudan, calling the American attack on the pharmaceuticals factory ‘a terrorist act’ (p.339)

Part 1

Nick settles into his new post as USAID coral guy in Zanzibar, meeting locals friendly and unfriendly. Miranda flies out and settles into her new job at the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam. Khaled undergoes further training in preparation for his mission to blow up the same US Embassy.

As usual Foden is very, very good indeed, supernaturally good, at imagining these people’s lives and thoughts, and the hundreds of details, interiors, accessories, food and drink, cars and bikes and boats and tropical stuff they interact with. It is incredibly well imagined.

Nick gets to know a raddled, grumpy old Brit named Leggatt via an adventure. He had observed Leggatt’s yellow boat slowly cruising across the bay in the same direction every day. The hotel owner tells him he (Leggat) is visiting a small island named Lyly. Nick decides to go explore in his dinghy and outboard. He finds the island and beaches his dinghy and walks along the shore where, through binoculars, he spots Leggatt digging up turtle eggs. The bastard! But then a native dhow approaches and two men and a boy get out, swim ashore. Nick thinks they must be nature wardens so is astonished when they beat up Leggatt, tie him to a tree, and take all the eggs themselves. The attackers head back to their boat, Nick runs over and unties Leggatt (he’s bleeding from the beating), they run back to Nick’s boat and start the engine and motor round the coast to find the boy up in the sails of Leggatt’s boat, ripping up the sails and rigging with a knife. He has the idea to fire a safety/rescue flare at the bad guys’ dhow, where it sets fire to their sails. Nick and Leggatt get to the latter’s yacht, climb up the side ladder, Nick tying his dinghy to the stern, Leggatt starts the yacht’s motor and they chug away from the island and the burning dhow. Nick corners the boy who is quickly subdued.

Leggatt explains that he is not the bad guy, he is the one trying to protect the turtle eggs by digging them up and moving them to a secret location. When Nick naively suggests reporting the egg thieves and boy to the USAID contact, Inspector Chikambwa, Leggatt snorts with laughter an says he’s corrupt and commission the stealing of the eggs, among many other scams (p.97).

Leggatt tells him the island’s named Lyly which comes from the Swahili lala which means sleep. It’s 2 miles wide with a lighthouse on the highest point, built by a Brit in the 1930s. Nowadays it’s owned by a rich Saudi. Leggatt tells Nick about the Black African slaughter of Arab civilians soon after Zanzibar became independent i.e. 1964 (p.99).

Zanzibar: Arabs, Africans and a forgotten legacy of slavery and ethnic cleansing

Leggatt’s an old hand, he’s been fishing and monitoring these waters for decades, owns a house and several boats, made his pile from diamonds. He drops Nick and his dinghy off at the hotel. A few days later Leggatt takes Nick fishing for barracuda, a strong fighting fish. This fishing expedition is a set-piece which makes you think Foden must have done it, and been shown how to do it, in order to produce such a detailed description (pages 112 to 115).

There’s a lovely description of Nick rowing a rowboat back to his oceanside hotel (the Macpherson Ruins Hotel). I used to row at school, so I know exactly what he means (p.100).

Meanwhile Miranda settles into a completely new society. I think we are meant to register the decisions she makes as small moral compromises, accustoming herself to the grotesque poverty of most of the population, while she licks ice cream by the embassy pool. She soon hires a watchman and a ‘housegirl’ for her accommodation in Oyster Bay, as all the other ex-pats do. She falls in with Ray Delahoya, cheerful, fun, not a threat or boyfriend material (only a hundred pages later is it made explicit that he’s gay).

We’re shown security reports she files which are conscientious. If the reader is paying attention they’ll spot that a character described in bin Laden’s entourage is caught on security camera himself filming the Embassy layout, from outside the walls (p.123).

Part 2

Carries on in the same style. Khaled and the al-Qaeda team (Khaled’s mentor Zayn and Yusef the bomber) drive south through Afghanistan into Pakistan, fly to Dubai, to Muscat, then direct to Zanzibar (p.139). The movement of their van is picked up by spy satellites and the message sent to the CIA etc in America. Queller is asked to comment and thinks they’re embarking on an attack and need to be monitored. But his suggestion is shot down by his enemy within the CIA, Alternburg. Queller really hates Altenburg because he a) nixed a spy operation he’d set up and b) has been politicking to get Queller sacked as a consultant.

Nick and Miranda finally meet, as he’s in Dar to pick up the scuba gear he had sent on from the States. She bumps into him, they get talking, they go for a swim. She notices he is tall, dark, fit and handsome, almost like the hero of a movie. She gets into a bit of trouble in the sea; is pulled out by his strong arms etc. She gives him a lift into town and when he says he’s shopping, drives him past security into the Embassy where he fills up at the PX, the American supermarket found in all overseas bases.

Nick goes on a solo mission to Lyly, the deserted island where he and Leggatt had the adventure with the turtle egg thieves, ‘the island of sleep’. Beaching his dinghy he scratches his ankle. He has come surprisingly unprepared, without a toilet bag, for example or, more importantly, sunblock and a sunhat. He explores the small derelict house and abandoned mosque, manages to fire up the lighthouse light using paraffin he’s brought but half-blinds himself in the process. Diving through the spectacular coral, he finds a sea cave which, amazingly, appears to have Arab writing carved into the (slime-covered) walls (p.171). Later, Leggatt explains that it’s part of a whole cave and tunnel network where slaves used to throw recalcitrant or recaptured runaway slaves. Oubliettes. Hence the long-ago writing.

Nick invites Miranda to come visit Zanzibar from Dar for a weekend. He takes her (and the reader) on a tour of the sights. (I wonder if it’s a safe place for a tourist to visit, now, in 2023.) He takes the traditional male role i.e. showing her round, explaining history etc. She takes the traditional female role, passive, deferring to his knowledge. When they dance he has ‘strong hands on her hips’ etc. All very conventionally heteronormative and well mannered. In the refined, polite tone of this book no-one fantasises or masturbates or farts or menstruates, as they do in Leslie Thomas’s vulgar comedies. Makes me realise that the thriller genre is not only serious (obviously) but also, in a strange way, prissy, at some level, respectable. It’s the tiniest details but when Miranda is upset she doesn’t cry, as you or I might, but weeps, like the heroine of a Racine play. Even when it’s at its most gritty, there’s a kind of high-minded decorum about the thriller genre.

Anyway, I didn’t like this lovey-dovey stuff at all. Also the romance dialogue is very stilted and, well, boring. Next day, Nick takes Miranda to a beachfront restaurant then onto a tropical garden where he finally kisses her.

Something had happened, a change had taken place, the needle had swung around in the compass of her heart. (p.188)

Foden is a very savvy writer indeed, capable of deploying lots of different registers and styles. Surely he knows he’s writing Mills and Boon here. For the lolz I googled ‘Mills and Boon top titles’ and found the following: ‘Song of the Waves’; ‘The Emerald Garden’; ‘Tabitha in Moonlight’; ‘Rapture of the Desert’; ‘Whispering Palms’. To which could be added these passages from ‘Romance in Zanzibar’. The only slight fly in the ointment being that we know this is all heading towards a monstrous terrorist attack. I wonder if one or both of them will be killed in it. Or maimed. Both Foden’s previous novels contain scenes of brutal violence and bump off characters you’d become quite attached to. I suppose I should savour the kisses in the tropical garden while I can…

Nick persuades Leggatt to take him and Miranda back to Lyly. He shows her how to scuba dive, they frolic, find their way to an isolated spot of beach and have sex, mercifully passed over in silence and undescribed. Then an incident where they find a huge mamba snake uncovering the turtle eggs with a view to eating them, and Nick catches it with a forked branch and throws it into the undergrowth. More interesting that her being lulled and seduced is the way Nick starts to get on her nerves, a bit charmless, a bit clumsy, unempathetic, and then assuming masculine ownership of her.

The al-Qaeda cell

What happens next utterly transforms the tone and feel of the book. When they’d left Lyly, a powerful cruiser had crossed their path, apparently en route to the island. Miranda had looked at its crew and skipper through the telephoto lens of her camera and nearly taken a photo but then it veered away.

A day or so later Leggatt and Nick had gone back to the island and discovered there were two dhows and a cruiser pulled up. Nick had gone inshore in the diving gear and this section opens with him watching them from a distance, going in and out of the buildings where he slept, apparently Arabs, some sporting sub-machineguns.

Then a huge storm comes up which sinks the Churchill. Leggatt and Nick manage to abandon ship and get into the dinghy and cut the painted just before the big yacht goes down. With heroic strength Nick rows the dinghy through the coral barrier (guided by Leggatt) and ashore. Leggatt says they’ll never make it back to the mainland in a rowing boat; the only thing for it is to steal one of the dhows and to do it now, in the dead of night and while the aftersqualls of the storm are still making bad weather. They wade through the thick jungle, emerge on the side of the island where the Arabs are, try to sneak across the beach but are spotted. The Arabs open up with the machine guns, killing Leggatt and brushing Nick’s forehead. When he comes to, he is trussed up hand and foot and the enormous Arab, Zayn, whacks him with the flat of a machete, asking if he is American, hitting him, insulting him, till he says he’ll be back tomorrow to interrogate him and…throws Nick out the lighthouse window, attached by a rope, so that he is dangling upside down, his head bangs against the outside wall of the lighthouse and he loses consciousness again.

See what I mean by changing the tone of the narrative? We were in the western world of pampered tourists, all ice cream, skindiving and scotch on the veranda. Now we are in the world of jihad and unmitigated brutality.

Thing is, the way Zayn slit their throats reminded Khaled of how he returned home that terrible evening to find his parents’ throats cut. Zayn always told him it was done by Israeli-American agents but…but what if Zayn did it? Plus Zayn has been riding Khaled, pushing him and bullying and belittling him, on one occasion pushing his face right into their campfire. This isn’t jihad. This is sadistic bullying. And so…

So he goes up to the top of the lighthouse, hauls Nick’s unconscious body up and over the window sill, then leans down with a knife…Next morning the American is gone and Zayn angrily kicks and punches Khaled to find out what happened, at which Khaled shows him the American’s ear, says he cut it off as punishment then threw the body in the lagoon. Zayn is angry because he wanted to interrogate the American and also suspicious, as is the reader.

Miranda

Cut to Miranda at the US embassy and we discover that they didn’t have sex that time, on the island. I misread it. They were goofing in the waves, walked up the beach out of sight of Leggatt and lay down…there’s a gap in the text…which resumes with ‘Later, they walked back round to the fire’ (p.197). I misread this as them having sex. No. Because now, in this section, Miranda wonders whether she should have had sex with Nick, and worries whether the kiss she let him give her in the tropical gardens ‘meant more’.

I’m not sure, but I think all this fussing about lovey-dovey is meant to be an indicator of how shallow and naive Miranda is, on a par with her not understanding why America is so hated, and being upset by slavery and African poverty i.e. generally not understanding where she is. Conversely, maybe she is there to bring out the extraordinary distance between the poorest people on the earth and the richest.

7 August 1998: the bombing

Miranda is going about her normal day when, on page 252, the bomb goes off. It was 7 August 1998. The Wikipedia article gives forensic details about the make-up of the explosives then states that at Dar es Salaam 11 were killed and 85 wounded (p.260), considerably less than the bomb which went off at the Nairobi embassy, killing 213 and wounding about 4,000 (p.261).

Part 3

Hundreds of FBI, CIA, medical and forensics experts fly in from the Sates, including the prick Altenburg and kindly old Queller. These personality traits are on display when Miranda finds herself being given the third degree in an interview by Altenburg, and then horrified to find he has gotten her suspended for dereliction of duty for not inspecting the van which is now thought to have been carrying the explosives. Distraught, her world in tatters, her self confidence shot, she goes home weeping.

Queller sees all this and takes steps, calling up his old buddy Madeleine Allbright to ask for Miranda to be reinstated and assigned to him as his personal assistant. Which is what happens.

I thought the buildup to the explosion might be tense and exciting but it isn’t. It just happens, out of the blue, while Miranda’s going about a mundane morning’s work. If ‘grip’ or excitement there is, it comes from a completely different direction, which is The Hunt For Nick Karolides. Miranda becomes increasingly obsessed with the way he hasn’t been in touch, hasn’t replied to phone calls or emails. So flies from Dar to Stone Town (capital of Zanzibar) then taxis out to the Macpherson Ruins Hotel whose owner, Mr de Souza, is just as perplexed by Nick’s prolonged absence.

When she goes out to Leggatt’s farm she finds him also absent, but persuades the boy Leggatt hired, Sayeed, to organise a boat to take her back to Lyly. On the beach at Lyly they find the rotted body of Leggatt with an ear missing. So the reader realises it wasn’t Nick’s ear that Khaled cut off.

This happens on page 302. The book is 389 pages long. In these last 90 or so pages the interest focuses on two things: Miranda’s search for Nick; and the bitter contest between the two American intelligence operatives, Altenburg (who thinks the al-Qaeda connection is poppycock) and Queller, who is sure of it.

In a flashback we learn that Queller not only helped the mujahideen in Afghanistan but met Osama bin Laden several times, helped channel funds which not only armed the fighters but built airstrips, the cave complex in the Tora Bora mountains etc (pages 306 to 315). And then, extraordinarily, that it was Osama bin Laden himself who shot Queller in the elbow at their last meeting, as a warning to him, and all American ‘crusaders’ to get out of Muslim lands.

Where is Nick?

On page 317 (of 389) we discover what happened to Nick. We haven’t seen or heard of him since page 236, so he’s been absent for 80 pages or a fifth of the text. Presumably, one aim of this is to build up suspense about his fate, amplified by Miranda’s growing concern.

We find him cast adrift in a rowing boat without oars on the open ocean. He vaguely remembers someone bundling him into the boat then throwing away the oars and himself jumping overboard – presumably Khaled, saving his life. Over several pages we watch the effects of exposure, heatstroke, sunburn and dehydration. Nick has both ears and is unharmed except for the rope burns and where the bullet grazed his head but he quickly degenerates after a few days into a burned, blistered, hallucinating wreck.

Until he is picked up by a passing Greek cargo ship. He sees it emerge from the blurred horizon, stands up, waves his arms and shouts etc. The Greek crew wash him, slowly give him water, then soft food and restore him to health. Lucky, eh? Big ocean, the Indian Ocean.

Nick is of Greek heritage so when he starts speaking Greek, the crew and captain rally to his support. Presumably this is thrown in to explain/justify why the captain lets himself be persuaded to sail close to Zanzibar and not to dock in the main port – where he’d incur ruinous charges – but get close enough to the Macpherson hotel to be rowed ashore.

Which explains why, on the night when Miranda has flown to Zanzibar and taken a taxi to the hotel to enquire about him, and persuades the manager to let her sleep in Nick’s room…she hears the chalet door opening and…Grand Reunion! He staggers into her arms, tries to explain, she makes him have a shower while she gets a first aid kit from de Souza, makes him lie on the bed, tends his wounds like a good nursey, they lie facing each other, they touch, they make love.

His pains forgotten for a while – loving her for that mercy, and for the adventure of her body – he gathered her into his arms once more. (p.330)

Well…’Romance in Zanzibar’. Apparently, Mills and Boon novels are organised into sub-genres, one of which is ‘Heroes – Enjoy a thrilling story filled with danger and finding love no matter what.’ Well, these passages are a fine example.

He moved down her body, covering her stomach and pelvis with subtle kisses till, like a hummingbird over a flower, he began flicking his tongue over her. (p.330)

I’m not sure this is what a man who’s just returned from days in an open boat, who’s still suffering from wounds to his head and knee, which are still bleeding, would be up for. But the conventions of the thriller genre override any kind of realism.

Bill Clinton

It’s a funny mix, this text, because it goes from ripe Mills and Boon-type soft porn to our newly committed couple watching President Bill Clinton on TV explaining why he ordered US air strikes on the al-Qifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan and a complex of training bases near Khost in Afghanistan (p.332). Nick and Miranda consume the TV news in puzzlement at the randomness of this target.

Passages describing the process whereby the targets were listed, assessed and agreed, and then the process of launching the missiles, read like magazine journalism, possibly from a military magazine. At one point Foden directly quotes a US Navy press release describing the operation of Tomahawk cruise missiles (pages 335 to 339).

Foden gives a roundup of responses to the US cruise missile attacks which reads like a Wikipedia article, giving quotes from the President of Sudan, the Taliban government, Arab newspapers etc, all of which describe the Americans as war criminals operating outside the law. Tony Blair gives Clinton his whole-hearted support. This is all very interesting but a) not really a novel and b) was all to be swept away in the vast tsunami of 9/11 and the War on Terror. The US retaliation prompted Foden to snide and snarky remarks about America being ‘one nation under God, indivisible etc’ which feel like cheap sarcasm, unworthy of his extraordinary gifts.

A passage describing Osama bin Laden’s thoughts as he rides a horse, far from where the missiles struck, with his closest lieutenants – Ayman Zawahari and Muhammad Atef – and personal bodyguards.

Khaled

A passage describing Khaled al-Khidr, praying in the mosque in Jambangona, on the island of Pemba where his parents came from and his jumbled thoughts, containing an impressive number of quotes from the Holy Koran and Khaled’s theological speculations, in particular whether Zayn, with his bullying and murder, led him from the path of righteousness.

The passage quoting Bill Clinton describing America as ‘one nation under God, indivisible’ (p.337) is deliberately paralleled by Khaled thoughts about the redeemed in Islam, ‘one nation, indivisible’ (p.345) – just one of many examples where Foden juxtaposes the value systems of ‘the West’ and ‘the Islamic world’ to bring out how their belief systems are so similar and yet so different.

Khaled is giddy with guilt, confused, wanders the streets of his home town in utter confusion, falls to his knees.

Cut to Zayn Mujuj, the big strong killer. He and Khaled had escaped after the bombing and gone to meet the cargo ship appointed to pick them up but it never showed. Instead they moored off the island of Pemba for a few days, Zayn calling the Sheikh for daily updates. We learn that Zayn, himself, is motivated by revenge, namely the wiping out of his family in Beirut, by the Israeli air force and the Christian phalange. Maybe he’s talking about the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September 1982. This is the source of his burning hatred. And now we learn Khaled was right to suspect that Zayn killed his (Khaled’s parents); he did, as punishment for embezzling al-Qaeda funds (p.348).

Now the boy has disappeared. Zayn phones the Sheikh on the sat phone. They speak in light code. Zayn says the boy (the finch) knows too much and must be eliminated. He takes a dinghy from the boat up the creek to Jambangona.

Exciting climactic chase

Foden reverts to small snippets giving different characters’ points of view: this is meant to jack up the tension. Thus, Queller gets a call from Altenburg back in Washington telling him SIGINT has picked up those sat phone calls off Pemba: could he go and investigate. He asks Nick and Miranda (instead of, say, some US marines or security forces) to help him. They putter off to Pemba in the Belgian guys’ boat (seeing as all the others have been lost earlier in the story). Meanwhile the killer Zayn has arrived in Jambangona with a big knife in his long boots. Who will get to Khaled first? Will Khaled recognise Nick as the American he saved? Will Nick recognise Khaled as the boy who saved him, dragging him half-conscious into the rowing boat and casting it adrift back on Lyly?

Zayn doesn’t find Khaled in Jambangona and so chugs upriver to Chake Chake, roaming the streets with murder in his heart. Nick, Miranda and Queller arrive at the map reference given by Alternburg to find nothing so they, also, chug upriver to Chake Chake, and here they spot the same motor cruiser they saw an age ago cutting them off as they returned from Lyly, the terrorist’s boat.

The climax comes when our heroes discover that they have arrived in town at the exact same moment when an annual festival takes place, the mchezo wa ngombe, the game of the bull, when brave youths taunt and try and jump onto two enraged bulls (named Bom-Bom and Wembe, I thought you’d like to know) in an arena. Lucky coincidence. Also improbable is that, at this moment of peril for his life, Khaled, throwing caution to the winds, tries his luck in the arena against the bulls. And that Zayn, attracted by the hullabaloo, sees him. And that Nick, amid the pressing crowd, sees both of them, tells Queller, and starts elbowing towards them. You can see how this has the logic more of a move than a novel.

Long story short: Zayn chases Khaled across the arena; one of the bulls gores and tramples him; Khaled escapes over the arena fence, through the crowd, and down backstreets, pursued by Nick, Miranda and Queller. First he’s cornered in a tourist shop, then escapes, then Nick tackles him, Queller steps forward with a gun, but Khaled grabs a dagger from a stall and Miranda and puts it to her neck, backing away as in ten thousand American movies. He drags her down to the quayside and into the terrorists’ boat, finds the key, powers up, casts off and motors away, hotly pursued by Nick and Queller, suddenly feeling his age, feeling tired, overcome by a sense of depression and failure.

Out of the crowded streets emerges Zayn, bleeding and furious to see his boat cruising away so he cuffs a white tourist off his jet ski and sets off in hot pursuit. Now the narrative has gone full James Bond.

Showdown on Lyly

Khaled steers out to the island of sleep, location of quite a few nightmares by now. Nick and Queller watch him beach and drag Miranda up the sand into the jungle. Queller shoots a way through the coral breach and they, also, beach their boat. Nick tells Queller to stay behind and guard the boat, takes Queller’s gun and sets off in pursuit. God, the excitement!

Khaled drags terrified Miranda through the caves at gunpoint. Nick gets lost pursuing. Queller investigates various jungle trails and on returning to the beach notices a jet ski lying on its side. Zayn is clearly badly injured, needs a stick to lean on. Queller, binocular distance away, takes a marlinspike out of the boat and slowly sets off in pursuit.

It’s called ‘suspense’ but what it boils down to is, Who is going to die? Khaled and Zayn, I’d guess, and possibly Queller, for his sins in aiding bin Laden. But it’s anyone’s guess; Foden is a brutal writer and hasn’t hesitated to wipe out sympathetic characters in previous books.

In the slimy caves Khaled undergoes a crisis, becomes hysterical , tells Miranda about Zayn killing his parents, admits involvement in the bombing, no longer knows what is jihad, what is righteous, drops the knife, pulls out a gun he found on Zayn’s boat, then disappears into the darkness.

On the beach Queller gets to the lighthouse then loses the trail. Turns round just as Zayn smacks him in the face with a plank of wood, grabs the marlinspike, lifts it to skewer Queller.

Nick finds Miranda cowering, shivering, in the caves.

Queller looks up at the man about to kill him when there’s a gunshot and, as in a thousand American movies, a hole appears in Zayn’s forehead, he shudders, and falls dead across the terrified American. Khaled appears, explaining – to Queller – who shot Zayn. He then delivers his Speech the speech which explains his Change of Heart. It is time for him to stop killing, to turn to do good work for Muslims. Queller asks him to come back with them but Khaled very reasonably says, just because I stop trusting al-Qaeda doesn’t mean I start trusting America. Then he’s gone.

Soon afterwards Nick and Miranda appear and pull the big heavy dead Zayn off Queller. Khaleed steals the Belgian’s very expensive cruiser and shoots holes in his own one, so our guys are stranded. Nick and Miranda wash the slime off themselves in the sea, they all sleep in the lighthouse, next morning helicopters find them.

The end

Nick, Miranda and Zayn’s body are choppered back to the mainland where they find themselves celebrities, the story of their chase and shootout somehow all over CNN. Then in a convoy of those huge black FBI SUVs which appear in all the movies, to some local base.

Miranda stares blankly out the window, Nick falls asleep and Queller has last thoughts about bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Will he ever be tracked down? (Yes) Can such an organisation be defeated? (No) Queller reflects that globalisation only entrenches local elites, often working hand in glove with multinational corporations, to maintain most of their populations in resentful poverty, from which are spawned endless fundamentalisms (p.377). Improbably, he has an old man’s hope for a better world, more equality, defusing violence etc. Pipe dream. There are 8 billion humans alive today. In 20 years it will hit 9 billion. More crushing poverty. More grievance. More violence.

All improbable as it is an American security service official wishing for the end of capitalism or its superseding by a fairer system. Not very likely. Sounds more like the thoughts of some Limey pinko novelist.

(Oh, I spotted Foden’s placing of a micro-joke; the SUV convoy roars past a hoarding advertising ENVI skin cream (p.377). Now a hoarding advertising this same product plays a role at the end of ‘The Last King of Scotland’ when Idi Amin, his regime overthrown, asks the novel’s protagonist, Dr Garrigan, to meet him at the ENVI hoarding to drive him to safety. Garrigan doesn’t go. I wonder if there are other sly echoes I didn’t spot.)

Coda

Miranda’s in Washington. Queller’s being investigated, for some reason. Nick didn’t want to stay, asked her to come back to Zanzibar but she didn’t want to leave, so they’ve split up and she wanders round Washington’s memorials feeling soulful.

Queller is being called for questioning in Washington about his links with al-Qaeda in the 80s. He knows he’s being set up as the fall guy. He writes a complete documentary account of his actions and sends it to Miranda. Tries on the latest spiffy prosthetic limb that’s arrived through the post. Has a drink. Reaches for his pistol and shoots himself in the head.

Nick after toying with staying in the States, has come back out to Zanzibar, done up the derelict cottage on Lyly and made it into a home. He is going to protect the turtles as homage to Leggatt. He is trying to be mindful. He is trying not to live in illusions. But he can’t help missing Miranda. It wasn’t true love but it was a lot.

Thoughts

Moral debate?

Because of the focus on the main characters at the start, because we are given such privileged access to Khaled’s life, tragedy, training and motivation, and because the book’s blurb says that Nick and Miranda become ’embroiled’ in a terrorist conspiracy – I thought they might have met Khaled, got to know and like him, then found out what he was going to do and there might have been some kind of agonising moral debate and so on when they try to talk him out of it, he goes ahead anyway… But no.

Inventive structure?

Again, Foden writes that ‘the event’ as the Americans quickly take to calling it, messed with people’s sense of time and place and identity, severely traumatising all involved, and so it crossed my mind that Foden could conceivably have run with that idea and created a postmodern jumping back and forth in time. At a few moments when Nick or Miranda were dazed and disorientated, the psychotic fictions of J.G. Ballard briefly came to mind.

But no. The narrative is much, much more straightforward than that, almost totally vanilla. This happened then this happened then this happened then this happened. The characters do stuff then there’s a big explosion then they rush off to catch the baddies. However brilliantly imagined and vividly written every scene is, and despite a few passages of tricksy juxtapositions, for the most part, structurally, it’s a very conservative book.

Al-Qaeda

The book contains several set-piece passages where the kindly old Queller gives straight explication about al-Qaeda’s history and aims, bin Laden’s speeches, the group’s structure and bases in Afghanistan. He describes how the US government funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of training and munitions to the mujahideen, building secret hideouts, training them in guerrilla warfare etc, all skills and weapons which, with world-class irony, once the Soviets had finally quit Afghanistan, bin Laden and al-Qaeda turned against their western backers.

I’m guessing that at the time Foden drafted the book, all this was relatively specialist, niche stuff, and his up-to-the-minute research was news, and it was cutting edge to include it in a novel.

Unfortunately for Foden, before his book could be published along came 11 September 2001 and the entire world’s media suddenly overflowed with everything known about bin Laden and al-Qaeda, who became the subject of hundreds of books, thousands of documentaries, millions of articles – and the novelty of Foden’s book, its claim to shed light on a little-known terror organisation, evaporated overnight.

Must have been very galling. Then came the US invasions of Afghanistan then Iraq and the chaos they caused, covered on the telly and across all the media every night for years. So for the modern reader, the passages where Queller carefully explains bin Laden and al-Qaeda to Miranda (like pages 290 to 293), interesting refreshers though they are, can’t help but feel somewhat quaint and dated.

The risk of writing about contemporary politics or world affairs is that your text will be overtaken by events even as you write it. Compare with anyone half-way through writing a novel about Ukraine when Russia invaded and rendered the whole thing academic. Imagine you were just putting the finishing touches to your book about the current situation in Israel when Hamas attacked. It’s a high-risk strategy for a novelist. Safer to go that much further back in time, to when events are settled, complete, assimilated and contextualised – which is precisely what Foden did in his next novel, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika, set during the First World War. Can’t get more past, finished and over than that.

And yet…

For all my nitpicking, it’s an awesome book, an epic book. You really feel like you’ve been through the wringer, on a long journey, had an epic adventure. I felt quite shattered by the end of this long, dense book – informed about al-Qaeda and bin Laden, thrilled by the plot, and delighted by the thousand and one precise descriptions Foden encodes in his prose.

Swahili phrases

chamchela – hurricane squall (p.210)
chibuku – the local beer (p.252)
dar es salaam – haven of peace (p.243)
mlango – door
mnara – lighthouse (p.224)
mpuga za peponi – the gardens of paradise (p.220)
muzungu – white man
mchezo wa ngombe – the game of the bull (p.355)
pole-pole – slowly slowly
papabawa – Zanzibar vampire
twende! – let’s go (p.295)
zinj el-bar – coast of the black people (p.153)

Credit

Zanzibar by Giles Foden was published by Faber and Faber in 2002. References are to the 2003 Faber paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

The Last King of Scotland (1998)
Ladysmith (1999)
Zanzibar (2002)
Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika (2004)
Freight Dogs (2021)

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by Simon on December 22, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel, Thriller

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Posted by Simon on December 22, 2023

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Dictator by Robert Harris (2015)

‘My skill is statecraft and that requires me to be alive and in Rome.’
(Cicero talking to Tiro, Dictator, page 36)

This is the third and concluding novel in the Robert Harris’s epic ‘Cicero trilogy’. Harris is a highly successful writer of intelligent thrillers and in the Cicero trilogy he has applied the style and mentality of a modern thriller to the life of the Roman lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC) with great success.

Book one, Imperium, covered Cicero’s life and career over the years 79 to 64 BC, the second novel, Lustrum, covered the five years from 63 to 58, and this concluding volume covers the last 15 years of his life, from 58 to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC.

I’ve covered the outline of Cicero’s life in my reviews of his letters and Plutarch’s Life:

Tiro’s memoirs

As with its two predecessors, Dictator (a weighty 504 pages long) purports to be part of the multi-volume first-person memoir of Cicero written by his loyal slave and personal secretary Tiro almost 40 years after Cicero’s death:

I still possess my shorthand notes…it is from these that I have been able to reconstruct the many conversations, speeches and letters that make up this memoir of Cicero (p.37)

A summary cannot convey the skill with which Harris plunges you right into the heart of the toxic politics of republican Rome, or into the mind of Tiro, the shrewd, literate observer of the dilemmas and experiences of Cicero, a figure who combined wit and dazzling oratory with a profound interest in contemporary philosophy and, above all, deep embroilment in the complex power politics of his day. It is an utterly absorbing and thrilling read.

Tiro is aged 46 when the narrative opens (p.40).

Sources

Because there is so much information flying in from different places about so many events, Harris relies much more than in both the previous books combined on actual historical documents, on Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars in the early part (for example, pages 147 to 148), then on the letters to and from Cicero, for example to and from his lifelong friend Atticus.

Like the preceding two novels Dictator is divided into two substantial parts:

Part one – Exile (58 to 47 BC)

‘Exile’ is a slightly misleading title as Cicero was only in exile from Rome for 18 months, returning in late 57 BC. And it doesn’t really refer to a spiritual or political exile either since, once he returned to Rome, he was right back in the thick of political intrigue and returned to his position as Rome’s leading barrister.

The narrative begins exactly where Lustrum broke off, with Cicero, Tiro and a few slaves secretly leaving Rome at night due to the threat against his life issued by the populist politician Publius Clodius Pulcher. Clodius issues a law saying anyone who gives Cicero help, food or fire within 500 km of Rome is liable to execution.

They clandestinely travel south but their attempt to sail to Sicily is blocked by the governor (p.7). Travel back across Italy to Brundisium (11). Nightmare sea crossing to Dyrrachium (13 to 15). Governor of Macedonia, old friend Apuleius Saturninus, sends a message saying Cicero can’t stay with him (16). But one of Saturninus’s junior magistrates, the quaestor Gnaeus Plancius, offers to put him up in his town house in Thessalonika. News of Cicero’s wife and family’s mistreatment back in Rome (21). His luxury house has been burned down, the land confiscated and a shrine to ‘Liberty’ erected.

Clodius and his gangs have complete control of Rome. His sort-of ally Cato the Younger has been packed off to serve as governor of Cyprus (22). Atticus tells him about a fight between Gnaeus Pompey’s men and Clodius’s men for possession of the son of the King of Armenia, a hostage held by Rome, in which one of Pompey’s friends is killed. This decisively turns Pompey against Clodius and he now regrets having supported Cicero’s exile (24).

Unexpected arrival of the fierce ex-gladiator Titus Annius Milo, who has just managed to be elected tribune and offers his services to Cicero, accompanied by a really hard-looking gladiator named Birria (30). He explains he offered Pompey the services of 100 hardened gladiators to confront Clodius’s gangs in exchange for Pompey helping him (Milo) get elected tribune. Pompey himself has been attacked and forced back to his house by Clodius’s gangs so now he whole-heartedly wants Cicero back.

But there’s a catch: Cicero must ‘reassure’ Caesar i.e. promise not to oppose him. So Cicero’s exile will be ended if he agrees to truckle to the Triumvirate. Milo says he must send a letter and emissary to Caesar in person, so Tiro sets off on the long journey across the Adriatic, up Italy and finds Caesar doing his assizes at a town called Mutina in Cisalpine Gaul (41).

Publius Crassus, son of Marcus, spots Tiro in the queue of supplicants and takes him to see the great man in person. Tiro finds Caesar naked on a table being given a massage by a big black man (46). He scans Cicero’s letter in which he promises to meekly support Caesar’s legislation and keep out of politics and simply signs it ‘Approved’ (48). (While waiting, Publius shows Tiro copies of the Commentaries Caesar is writing, the annual account of his campaigns which he is having published back in Rome to win support – see my reviews of Caesar’s Gallic Wars for a summary. Harris also uses it to meditate on the appalling atrocities Caesar carried out against the Gauls, see below.)

Atticus is sending him letters from Rome keeping him informed and tells him that although Clodius’s gangs are still beating up their opponents (including Cicero’s brother, Quintus) the tide is turning against him. Friendly senators arrange a vote of the entire citizenry which is unanimous to have Cicero’s exile ended (52) and then restore full rights of citizenship (57).

Cicero’s triumphant march from Brundisium to Rome, feted and welcomed at every village and town. Reunion with brother Quintus who he hasn’t seen for 2 years (while he’s been off serving with Caesar in Gaul) (61). A vivid description of his triumphal entry into Rome and the ceremonies around his restoration as a citizen (63).

Because his house was demolished, Cicero’s household move in with brother Quintus. The two wives do not get on, but Cicero’s marriage to Terentia is under strain. She gave him her full support on the understanding he would be a success. Exile was the extreme opposite of success and exposed her, back in Rome, to any number of threats and humiliations (65).

Straight back into toxic politics. In return for his support in having his exile rescinded, Pompey wants Cicero to propose a bill giving Pompey executive control over Rome’s food supply for the next five years (68). This will redirect the people’s loyalty from Clodius’s crowd-pleasing back to Pompey, an establishment figure.

Clodius still has control of street gangs and sets a crowd to besiege Cicero and his family in Quintus’s house (73 to 78) until they smuggle a slave out to fetch Milo and his gladiators who see off Clodius’s thugs.

Next day Cicero presents Pompey’s grain powers bill in the senate and wins a huge ovation, supporters carry him to the rostra where he addresses a cheering crowd and then introduces the man of the hour, Pompey (81-81). Pompey accompanies Cicero home and tries to strong arm him into becoming one of the 15 food commissioners; is disgruntled when Cicero refuses (he’s only just got back to Rome and his family), so Pompey bullies Quintus into reluctantly taking up a post in Sicily (82).

Vivid description of Cicero presenting his case to the College of Pontiffs to have ownership of his (ruined) house returned to him, claiming it was never properly sanctified, helped by the discovery that the so-called Statue of Liberty Clodius set up in the ruins is actually a half-naked statue stolen from Greece where it adorned the tomb of a famous courtesan. Clodius’s case is laughed out of court and the land restored to Cicero to rebuild his mansion (85-89).

But workmen starting to rebuild it are attacked and Clodius’s gangs throw firebrands onto Quintus’s house nearly burning it down (93), forcing the family to go and stay at Atticus’s empty house. Eight days later they are walking along the Via Sacra when they are attacked by Clodius and a dozen of his hoods carrying cudgels and swords and only escape by dodging into a nearby house (94).

Terentia shows Cicero the weals on her back where she was savagely whipped on the orders of Clodia, Clodius’s fearsome sister, while Cicero was in exile (96)

The affair of Dio of Alexander, philosopher from Alexandria who had come to Rome to petition against the return of the pharaoh Ptolemy and is one day found murdered. Ptolemy is staying with Pompey and so suspicion falls on him, specifically on one of his managers, Asicius. Pompey strong-arms Cicero into defending him (100). Asicius chooses as alibi the young protege of Cicero’s, Calius Rufus. Now this smooth young man had defected from Cicero to Clodius in the previous novel. Now Cicero meets him and realises he has fallen out with Clodius. Cicero discovers his affair with Clodia ended badly with her accusing him of trying to poison her.

Pompey lobbies for a bill giving him sole command of a commission to restore Auletes to power in Egypt. Crassus is so jealous he pays Clodius to launch a campaign to stop him. Meetings and speeches to the people are broken up in violence. Cicero is delighted because it heralds the end of the Triumvirate (105).

The Rufus strategem (pages 105 to 122)

Cicero learns Rufus is scheduled to prosecute Lucius Calpurnius Bestia for corruption. Bestia was a creature of Cataline’s and so a sworn enemy of Cicero’s but Cicero conceives a Machiavellian plan. First Cicero amazes everyone by volunteering to defend Bestia, does a great job and gets him off. Irritated, Rufus issues another write against Bestia. Bestia comes to Cicero for advice. Cicero advises the best form of defence is attack; he should issue a counter-writ. More than that, he should meet with Clodius and Clodia and get them to join his case. They loathe Rufus. With them on his side Bestia can’t lose. Delighted, Bestia goes away, meets with Clodius, and issues a writ against Rufus accusing him of a) murdering the Egyptian envoys b) poisoning Clodia (110).

Cicero chuckles. His plan is working. He takes a puzzled Tiro on a visit to Rufus and finds him disconsolate: just the accusation means his budding career as a lawyer is in tatters. To Rufus’s amazement Cicero offers to be his defence counsel. Neither Rufus nor Tiro understand what is going on.

First day of the trial passes without Cicero’s intervention. Clodius is one of the three prosecutors. He depicts his sister (Clodia) as the innocent victim of a cruel libertine (Rufus). On the second day Cicero takes to the stage (trials were held on raised platforms in the Forum) and proceeds to lay into Clodia with unparalleled fury and accuracy, describing her as a whore, a courtesan, Medea, hinting at her incest with her brother, depicting her as having countless lovers, depicting him as the sensual immoral seducer of a boy half her age (Rufus) and she the daughter of an infamous, merciless, crime-stained, lust-stained house. Clodius is infuriated, Clodia sits motionless. Cicero eviscerates her in front of a cheering Roman audience who end up pointing their fingers at her and chanting ‘Whore, whore, whore.’ It is said she never went out in public again (122).

And this entire elaborate scam? Revenge for Clodia having his wife, Terentia, whipped. Cicero presents the result to his wife as a gift and atonement for her sufferings during his exile.

Cicero makes one more intervention in politics. Next day he speaks in the Senate to the bill to assign 20 million sestercii to Pompey for his grain commission but he uses the opportunity to ask whether they should reconsider the land reform legislation Caesar passed before he left for Gaul. This pleases the anti-Caesarians but infuriates his supporters, not least Crassus (125).

He makes an evening visit to Pompey’s villa outside Rome, politely greeting the great generals’ beautiful young wife. Pompey tut tuts over Cicero’s speech against the land reform but Cicero goes on the offensive saying Crassus’s insensate jealousy of Pompey is far more dangerous than anything he, Cicero, can say. Pompey agrees. Cicero comes away well pleased at his work undermining the unity of the anti-republican triumvirate (130).

Tired, Cicero takes a holiday at Cumae, in a villa left to him by a rich tax collector he did some legal work for (126). They notice it’s surprisingly empty for the time of year (132). Then dusty soldiers approach. Scared, they receive them and they turn out to be envoys from Luca.

After Cicero’s disruptive speech, Crassus went to see Caesar and they then summoned Pompey to what turned into the Conference of Luca, designed to shore up the Triumvirate. Now this soldier has brought an ultimatum to Cicero. He must shut up. He must stop criticising the triumvirs. He must reverse his position and support the land reform.

And astonishes him by telling him Pompey and Clodius have been publicly reconciled. Crassus and Pompey are going to stand for election as consuls. If they stood in the summer they would fail. But the elections will be delayed because of the escalating violence Clodius will provide. By the time it’s safe enough to hold election in the winter, campaigning season in Gaul will be over and Caesar will send thousands of his soldiers to vote for Pompey and Crassus. When they have finished their year as consuls they will be awarded provinces, Pompey to Spain, Crassus Syria. These commands will be for five years, and Caesar’s command in Gaul will also be extended.

Altogether these plans are known as the Luca Accords (136). If Cicero doesn’t support them, bad things will happen to him. After the soldiers leave Cicero is shaken but furious with Pompey. Can’t he see he is being turned into Caesar’s dupe? He is securing Caesar the few more years he needs to thoroughly subjugate and pillage Gaul and then, when he’s done, Caesar will return to Rome and dispense with Pompey.

But Terentia intervenes. She is fed up with Cicero thinking he and he alone must save the Republic. There are hundreds of other senators and ex-consuls. Let them do something about it for a change. Cicero knows he is right. After this ultimatum from the three most powerful men in Rome he realises his time is up. He should back away from active politics (139).

Vivid description of Cato the Younger returning from two years as governor of Cyprus with vast wealth (140). He is shocked at the Senate’s obeisance before the Triumvirate and at Cicero’s pessimism. From now on Cato becomes the leader of the opposition to Caesar (143). Cicero kowtows. In the Senate he humiliatingly withdraws his suggestion that Caesar’s land reform be reviewed – and receives a letter of thanks from Caesar (146).

(150-154) Portrait of Crassus as he prepares to set off on his military campaign against the Parthian Empire. He is only interested in looting everywhere and amassing as much money as possible. It is unpopular with the people. Cato makes speeches against it, declaring it immoral to commence a war against a nation Rome has treaties with. But when Crassus asks for Cicero’s support the latter is happy to invite him and his wife round for supper and pledge his heartfelt support. Anything to appease the Triumvirate and get them off his back. Tiro notes the slack, dilettantish behaviour of the officers who accompany Crassus, a sharp contrast with the whip-smart and efficient officers who surround Caesar. (This is all by way of being anticipation of Crassus’s disastrous defeats and miserable death in Syria the following year).

Over the next 3 years Cicero writes and rewrites the first of his works, On the Republic. Harris has Tiro give a useful summary (p.156):

politics is the most noble of callings
there is no nobler motive for entering public life than the resolution not to be ruled by wicked men
no individual or combination of individuals should be allowed to become too powerful
politics is a profession not a pastime for dilettantes
a statesman should devote his life to studying the science of politics in order to acquire all the knowledge that is necessary
that authority in a state must always be divided
that of the three known forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy and people – the optimum is a combination of all three, since kings can be capricious, an aristocracy self-interested, and an uncontrolled multitude is a mob

Tiro has a severe fever during which Cicero promises to finally make him free – description of Tiro’s manumission

Crassus is killed at Carrhae – Harris chooses to quote Cassius’s long message as read out by Pompey to the assembled senators

detailed description of the affray which leads to the murder of Clodius – Cicero defends Milo at his trial but can’t be heard above the barracking (p.194)

Cicero is forced to go serve as governor of Cilicia as the political situation in Rome intensifies. Tiro doesn’t want to go but Cicero persuades him with the offer of buying him the farm he’s always wanted (p.198). Terentia wants him to play the traditional Roman governor and fleece the province for everything he can but Cicero knows this will play into the hands of his enemies as well as being against his temperament (202).

En route to take ship at Brundisium, the party is invited to go stay with Pompey at his nearby villa. They discuss the political situation. With Crassus dead the triumvirate is now an unstable duumvirate. Because Caesar has now successfully conquered and pacified all of Gaul, the question becomes what to do about him. Caesar wants to stand for the consulship in absentia to ensure that he gets it and secures immunity from prosecution which the office provides (204).

In Athens discussion with Aristatus, leading exponent of Epicureanism (206). He argues that physical wellbeing, the avoidance of pain and stress, is all. But Cicero argues that physical illness and pain are unavoidable and so the Epicurean notion of ‘good’ is weak and vulnerable. A more robust notion of the Good is needed, namely the moral goodness of the Stoics which endures no matter what state our body is in. Which inspires Cicero to write a guide to the Good Life.

Harris skimps on Cicero’s governorship, giving a very brief account of the one military campaign he led, to besiege the capital of a rebellious tribe. He omits two aspects described in Cicero’s own letters, namely a) his difficult relationship with his predecessor who just happened to be a brother of his bitter (and dead) enemy, Clodius and b) his very real achievement of setting a ruined province back on its feet, reducing taxes, reviving trade and administering justice fairly. You can see that these nuts and bolts aspects of actual administrative work don’t fit the thriller template.

Before his governorship is quite over, Cicero packs and sets off back to Rome, accompanied by Tiro and his entourage. He detours via Rhodes to visit the tomb of his tutor in oratory, Apollonius Molo. However, the winds change and block them there. Finally they sail on to Corinth but Tiro is taken very ill and eventually cannot be moved. He is left in the care of a banker friend of Cicero’s who he was not to see again for 8 months.

So he is forced to watch from a distance as the Roman Republic collapses for it was in January of that year, 49 BC, that Caesar crossed the River Rubicon and sparked civil war against Pompey, the defender of the constitution and senate.

Harris uses a series of Cicero’s actual letters to describe events. Pompey panics, thinking Caesar has his entire army with him (whereas he only had one legion) and orders the authorities to evacuate Rome and head east, ultimately holing up in Brundisium before sailing for Greece.

Caesar just fails to stop him then, without ships of his own, is forced to march back to Rome. En route he stops off at Cicero’s house in Formiae and has a brief meeting. He asks him to come back to Rome, to address the senate supporting him. Cicero refuses. Caesar is angered but leaves.

Cicero realises he must throw in his lot with Pompey and heads back to Greece. Tiro travels from his sickhouse to rendezvous back in Thessalonika, the same house where he spent his exile. Everyone is miserable (226). Cicero talks to Pompey, attends meetings. 200 senators are there with their families and staffs, bickering and politicking.

Caesar finally secures a fleet and sends half his army to Dyrrachium. Pompey marches there and surrounds his camp. It settles down into trench warfare, with the soldiers yelling abuse at each other and the occasional outbreak of fraternisation. Defectors tell Pompey about a weak place in Caesar’s defences so he attacks there. In a confused fight it is generally thought Caesar lost. Next morning his fortifications are abandoned. He is marching east into Greece. Pompey resolves to chase him and also strikes camp. Cicero’s son, brother and nephew all march off, but he doesn’t like war and elects to stay in a villa near the now liberated town of Dyrrachium (249). Cato is put in charge of forces there.

It is here that, weeks later, rumours reach them of disaster. Then Labienus arrives in a terrible state having ridden for days from the disaster that was the Battle of Pharsalus, 9 August 48 BC (252).

The senators and leaders who stayed behind at Dyrrachium hold a meeting and resolve to fight on and rally the Pompeian forces at Corfu, an island and so defensible.

And so amid scenes of chaos and panic the Pompeian forces pack up and sail for Corfu. Here another summit meeting is held in the Temple of Jupiter. Cato proposes Cicero be their leader, but Cicero laughs out loud and says he is fit for nothing. In his opinion they should immediately sue for peace in order to end the bloodshed. Pompey’s son Gnaeus is incensed by Cicero’s defeatism and goes to stab him with a sword, only Cato’s restraining words prevent him and save Cicero’s life (259). Cato lets anyone who wants to, leave, so Cicero slowly rises and walks out:

out of the temple, out of the senatorial cause, out of the war and out of public life. (p.260)

In Patrae they are delighted to come across Cicero’s son, Marcus, his brother Quintus and young nephew, who all fought in the battle but survived (260). Cicero speaks tactlessly of the meeting of leaders he attended, ridiculing them and their cause, not realising how deeply it was offending these three men who put their lives at risk for the cause. This prompts a furious tirade from Quintus in which he expresses a lifetime of resentment at being forced to play second fiddle to his oh-so-clever brother and he and his son walk out (264).

Heart-broken at this family rupture, Cicero returns to Italy accompanied by Tiro who has been away three full years. They find the region round Brundisium controlled by a legate of Caesar’s, Publius Vatinius, who, however, Cicero defended in a trial and so is helpful (267). Cicero is given a villa under guard for his protection and only slowly realises that he is in fact under house arrest while Vatinius finds out what Caesar wants done with him.

Cicero and Tiro realise this is life under a dictatorship: no freedoms, no magistrates, no courts, no elections. One lives at the whim of the dictator.

Cicero’s heart sinks further when Vatinius tells him that while Caesar is absent on campaign, Italy is ruled by his Master of Horse (traditional post for second in command) Marcus Antonius. Cicero and Antonius have always had a distant relationship but there is an underlying animosity because Antonius’s stepfather, Publius Lentulus Sura, was one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death in 63 BC (as described in detail in the previous novel in the series, Lustrum).

Depressing months of house arrest follow. Cicero is deeply upset by the rift with his beloved brother. All the news is of death, including that of Milo the gladiator and Cicero’s promising pupil, Marcus Caelius Rufus (269). Then they all hear news of the the miserable end of Pompey, treacherously stabbed as he went ashore in Egypt (270).

In the spring of 47 the news is that Caesar is still in Egypt with his alleged paramour, Cleopatra. Cicero is still stuck in Brundisium. His beloved daughter Tullia makes the dangerous journey to visit him. Her husband, Dolabella, now ignores her completely and has affairs. Worse, Tullia brings news that his wife, Terentia, has been conspiring with her steward Philotimus, to plunder his estate and belongings for years. Cicero’s private life is in ruins.

Then a letter comes from Caesar, no less, announcing he is returning to Italy and will come to visit Cicero. Soon afterwards Cicero is summoned to meet the dictator at Tarentum. Cicero is rising there with an entourage of cavalry and lictors when they encounter the huge column of Caesar’s army. The dictator dismounts from his horse, greets Cicero and walks with him.

It is a perfectly genial conversation. Cicero asks to be relieved of the damned lictors who still accompany him everywhere because he still, legally, is governor of Cilicia, but are a damned inconvenience. Caesar agrees on the spot. But shouldn’t that take a vote in the senate? Caesar replies: ‘I am the senate’. Caesar politely says he isn’t sure he wants Cicero back in Rome making speeches against him. Cicero assures him that he has utterly retired from politics. He intends to devote his life to studying and writing philosophy. Caesar is pleased. Then Harris has Cicero ask one of the Great Questions of History: Did Caesar always aim at this outcome, a dictatorship? No, is Caesar’s swift reply.

‘Never! I sought only the respect due my rank and my achievements. For the rest, one merely adapts to the circumstances as they arise.’ (p.281)

The thoughtful reader reels at the impact of these words, on the light they shed on the real processes of history, and this encounter makes you review everything, the long complex violent sequence of events which has led to the collapse of the Roman Republic and Cicero’s hectic chequered career which has brought the two men to this encounter on a dusty road amid a huge entourage of battle hardened soldiers. Then Caesar mounts his horse and gallops off (282).

Part two – Redux (47 to 43 BC)

They head back to Rome but Cicero decides to stop and live outside the city, at his country house at Tusculum (287). Description of the house. Here he settles down to translate the best of Greek philosophy into Latin (289). He starts with a history of oratory he called the Brutus and dedicated to him, though the dedicatee didn’t like it (290).

He divorces Terentia (286). They still have much in common but she’s been robbing him blind, stripping his properties of their furnishings and selling them off.

Cicero gives oratory lessons to Caesar’s exquisite lieutenant Aulus Hirtius (who is rumoured to have written many of the commentaries on the Gallic War) (291). He is soon joined by Gaius Vibius Pansa and Cassius Longinus as pupils of Cicero (292). Cassius admits that he regrets allowing himself to be pardoned by Caesar and confides in Cicero that he has already planned to assassinate Caesar (292).

Tullia’s errant husband Dolabella is back from fighting in Africa. He asks to come visit Cicero and Tullia. He tells them about the war in Africa, about Caesar’s great victory at Thrapsus, and about the hideous suicide of Cato (297). The deep impact on Cassius and Brutus, both of whom were related to Cato i.e. shame for having accepted Caesar’s pardon and living on under his dictatorship. Cicero writes a short eulogy to Cato (299).

Caesar holds four triumphs in a row and absurdly lavish games (300) but during one of them his chariot’s axle snaps and he’s thrown to the ground. Caesar’s clemency, forgiving errant senators (302). He pardons many of his enemies, notably Brutus, some said because Brutus was his son by his long-term mistress Servilia, herself half sister of Cato.

Cicero is forced to marry the totally unsuitable Publilia for money (Tiro reviews the three eligible i.e. rich candidates) (306). Description of the wedding including the disarmingly simple Roman marriage vow (‘Where you are Gaia, I am Gaius’) (308). After only a few weeks the marriage isn’t working (309).

His daughter Tullia comes to stay to bear the child she was impregnated with when Dolabella visited (she had been staying with her mother since the divorce). But she is ill with tuberculosis. She gives birth to a healthy boy (named Lentulus) but never recovers. Death bed scene, Cicero holds her hand, she dies peacefully in her sleep (312).

Stricken with grief, Cicero flees his young wife and hides himself away in a succession of friends’ houses and remote villas, writing a handbook of Greek philosophy about consolation (314). Eventually he divorces Publilia (315), and invites Tiro to join him in Tusculum where he sets about dictating the Tusculan Disputations (317). There are to be five books cast in the form of a dialogue between a philosopher and his student:

On the fear of death
On the endurance of pain
On the alleviation of distress
On the remaining disorders of the soul
On the sufficiency of virtue for a happy life

One must train for death by leading a life that is morally good:

to desire nothing too much
to be content with what you have
to be entirely self sufficient within yourself so that whatever you lose, you can carry on regardless
to do no harm
to realise it is better to suffer an injury than inflict one
to acknowledge that life is a loan from nature which must be paid back at any time

‘Such were the lessons that Cicero had learned and wished to impart to the world’ (319).

Dolabella comes to visit. He is back from the war in Spain. He was badly injured. He asks to take possession of his son by Tullia, and Cicero agrees. Dolabella tells Cicero the fight in Spain was different from the other campaigns, more hard fought, more bitter. When Pompey’s son Gnaeus was killed in battle, Caesar had his head stuck on a lance (321). They took no prisoners. They killed 30,000 enemy i.e. Roman troops. Many of the enemies he pardoned after the earlier wars had fought against him. Caesar has returned a different man, angry and embittered.

Cicero continues turning out books at speed. Burying himself in Greek philosophy , reading, studying, dictating to Tiro, all help him manage his grief over Tullia’s death. He writes On the nature of the gods and On divination.

Caesar is a changed man, angrier, more controlling. His grasp on reality seems to have slipped. He writes a petty-minded riposte to Cicero’s eulogy of Cato. His infatuation with Cleopatra leads him to set up statues of her in Rome, including in temples. He has himself declared a god with his own priesthood (323). He announces a grandiose plan to take 36 legions (!) to the east to smash the Parthian Empire, march back round the Black Sea conquering all the territory, approach Germany from the East to conquer and pacify it. Basically, to conquer the whole world (323). Alexander the Great.

Cicero goes to stay on the Bay of Naples. On the Feast of Saturnalia he gives all his staff presents and finally, after years of prevaricating, gives Tiro the farm he’s always yearned for. It is described in idyllic terms but the thing that struck me was that is staffed by six slaves and an overseer. This doesn’t cause a bump or hesitation in the description by Tiro, the ex-slave (330).

Caesar sends a letter announcing he will drop by. Cicero is thrown into a panic and makes massive preparations. Caesar arrives with his entourage and cohorts of soldiers. Dinner conversation. Caesar flatters him by saying he enjoyed reading the Tusculan Disputations. This leads Cicero to ask Caesar whether he thinks his soul will survive his death. Caesar replies he doesn’t know about anyone else, but he knows that his soul will survive his death – because he is a god! Simples. Cicero concludes the intensity of his isolation, achievements and responsibility have driven him mad (328).

Caesar is made dictator for life. He has the seventh month of the year renamed July. He is given the title Emperor and Father of the Nation. He presides over the Senate from a golden throne. He has a statue of himself added to the seven statues of the ancient kings of Rome. Harris repeats the famous story that at the Lupercal festival Mark Antony repeatedly tries to crown Caesar with a laurel wreath, though the crowd boos (331).

Caesar plans to leave Rome on 18 March 44 BC to commence his huge campaign in the East. A meeting of the Senate is arranged for the 15th or Ides of March, to confirm the list of appointments to all the magistracies which Caesar has drawn up for the three years he intends to be away.

On the morning of the fifteenth Cicero and Tiro get up early and arrive at the Senate ahead of time. The meeting is being held in the theatre built by Pompey because the old Senate house still hasn’t been rebuilt after Clodius’s mob burned the old one down on the day of his funeral in 52.

Harris manages the tense build-up to one of the most famous events in Western history, the assassination of Julius Caesar very well. Tiro gives an eye witness account the main point of which is confusion and delay. Caesar was warned by a soothsayer and his wife’s bad dreams not to attend the session and so the assembled senators mill around increasingly impatient for hours. Eventually Caesar arrives having been cajoled into coming by Decimus Brutus, one of the conspirators.

Assassination of Caesar (338). Conspirators retreat to the Capitol Hill. Cicero meets them and is staggered that they have no plan (347). Instead of seizing power they expect the republic to magically reconstitute itself. Leaving this vacuum is their tragic mistake (353 and 368). Lepidus moves troops into Rome and takes control. The assassins address the crowd but don’t win them over:

A speech is a performance not a philosophical discourse: it must appeal to the emotions more than to the intellect. (p.349)

Meeting of the Senate at which Antony makes a commanding speech calling for compromise and amnesty for the assassins (358). Several sessions of the Senate trying to reconcile the parties. Nervously the assassins agree to come off the hill and negotiate with Antony, the serving consul after both sides have given hostages (as in The Gallic Wars, the only mechanism for gaining trust between chronically suspicious partners.)

So Caesar’s assassins and supporters sit in a further session of the Senate, which agrees to keep magistrates in place, Caesar’s laws unaltered, then agrees with Antony’s suggestion that Caesar’s will is opened and read publicly (364).

The big surprise of Caesar’s will, that he leaves three-quarters of his estate to his nephew Octavianus, who he legally adopts and is to be named Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (367).

Five days after the assassination there is a grand funeral for Caesar, complete with elaborate cortege. Tiro thinks it was stage managed by Fulvia, Antony’s venomous wife. It climaxes with Antony’s speech to the crowd in which he drops all pretence at reconciliation and says Caesar was cruelly murdered by cowards (370). Antony displays Caesar’s corpse and then says he left the people 300 sestercii each in his will to inflames the crowd. When the pyre is lit the crowd go mad, tear off their clothes and throw them in, loot nearby shops and chuck furniture on. Then go rampaging through the streets attacking the houses of the assassins. They tear Helvius Cinna the poet to pieces under the misapprehension he is Cinna the conspirator (372). The assassins leave Rome.

Cicero flees Rome and devotes himself to writing, producing in feverish outburst the books On auguries, On fate, On glory, and begun sketching On Friendship (375). Visitors from Rome bring stories of Antony’s high handed behaviour.

One day Cornelius turns up with a short skinny kid with pimples. This is the famous Octavian who is staying with neighbours (there is ambiguity about his name so Harris gets the boy himself to tell everyone he wants to be referred to as Octavian, p.377). Octavian butters Cicero up and seeks his advice. He has no small talk. He is a logical machine.

An extended dinner party at which Octavian’s father, advisors, some of Caesar’s senior officers and Cicero discuss what he should do. Cicero is blunt. Go to Rome, claim your inheritance and stand for office. He tells Tiro he doesn’t think the boy stands a chance but his presence will undermine Antony.

Cicero sends Tiro to attend the next meeting of the Senate (he is too concerned for his own safety to go). Tiro witnesses Antony award himself the command of Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul for five years and arrange other allies in positions of power. Octavian is nowhere to be seen. He visits Cicero’s son-in-law Dolabella. Cicero wants the dowry which accompanied Tullia back. Instead Dolabella gives him a document which assigns Cicero as Dolabella’s legate in Syria. He doesn’t have to do anything but it gives him the legal right to travel and Greece and immunity for 5 years (385).

Cicero and Tiro travel to Brutus’s family home at Antium to discuss what the leading assassins should do. Brutus’s mother Servilia is disgusted at the thought her son will be merely handed on of Pompey’s grain commissioners, but Cicero advises Brutus and Cassius to take these posts and wait on events (388). But the real point is the assassins are falling out among themselves and have no plan.

Cicero moves on to another of his properties. He is working simultaneously on three books, On friendship, On duties and On virtues (391). Reluctantly Tiro decides it is time to quit Cicero and go live on that farm. He is 60. Cicero accepts it calmly and returns to his work. Tiro’s farm (393). Nonetheless, he still frequents spas and there overhears gossip about Rome, opposition to Antony.

He meets again Agathe, the slave girl he paid to have liberated but never to to see again. With her freedom she worked, saved money and bought the spa where Tiro has bumped into her (398). [Right at the end of the narrative we are told her full name is Agathe Licinia and she owns the baths of Venus Libertina at Baiae, p.488).

Cicero comes to visit him on the farm. Antony is failing, and Brutus and Cassius have determined to revive the opposition. He is energised and going back to Rome to throw himself back into the fray. His daughter’s dead, he’s divorced from his wife, he has nothing to lose. He doesn’t mean to but Cicero is so charismatic that…he lures Tiro back into his service (402).

It takes them 8 days to travel to Rome. The roads are dangerous. Gangs of Caesar’s demobbed soldiers roam the countryside, stealing, killing, burning. People are terrified. Once in Rome Cicero attends the next sitting of the Senate and makes a speech against the corruption and distortion of the law by Antony. This becomes known as the First Phillippic, in a jokey reference to the speeches Demosthenes delivered against the Macedonian tyrant, Philip II (411).

Antony replies with an excoriating speech to the Senate dragging up every disreputable scrap he can about Cicero, and highlighting his flip-flopping support for great men as signs of a self-seeking sycophant (412).

It is December 44 BC. The military situation is chaotic. There are no fewer than seven armies with different leaders (413). Octavian’s army occupies Rome. Antony is in Brundisium trying to bribe legions returned from Macedonia into supporting him. Octavian makes a speech about calling his adoptive father the greatest Roman, to applause from the crowd. He leaves Rome, Antony exits it but then has to speed to one of his legions which Octavian has bribed away. Chaos.

Cicero’s second Philippic against Antony, packed with scurrilous gossip and accusations of corruption (418). Cicero explains his position to Tiro and Atticus: Antony is the enemy, ‘a monstrous and savage animal’ (432), often drunk dictator in the making. Octavian, with the name of Caesar and many of his legions, is the only force which can stop Antony. Atticus wisely asks whether Octavian will not himself then become dictator. But Cicero naively thinks that he can control and steer the young man, in order to restore the Republic (421).

Cicero meets Octavian at one of Atticus’s houses by Lake Volsinii. Harris is in his element. He imagines the power plays and negotiations. Octavian agrees to be guided by the Senate if Cicero persuades the Senate to give him imperium and legal authority to fight Antony (426).

Antony has marched with his legions to besiege Decimus Brutus, governor of Cisapline Gaul, in the town of Mutena. Brutus remains loyal to the state and Senate, so Antony is clearly everyone’s enemy. Cicero makes a big speech in the Senate claiming the state is being rescued by the boy Octavian. This speech became known as the Third Philippic (430). When he goes out to repeat it to the people in the Forum he is drowned by cheers.

BUT when the Senate meets early in January 43 Cicero is shocked when both new consuls (Hirtius and Pansa) and other senators reject his criticism of Antony and hope peace can still be negotiated. Next day Cicero makes the speech of his life, the Fifth Philippic in which he scorns any peace overtures to Antony, proposes he be declared an enemy of the state, and that Octavian be given full official backing (438).

But the next day Antony’s wife and mother are presented in the Senate. If Antony is declared an enemy of the state, his property will be confiscated and they will be thrown out on the streets. To Cicero’s disgust this moderates the Senate’s decision from open war down to sending peace envoys.

A month later the peace envoys return from Mutena, where Antony is besieging Decimus. Antony refused all their proposals and made his own counter-proposals including 5 years command of Further Gaul. Once again a debate in the Senate where Antony’s friends and relations sway things. Once again Cicero rises the following day to utterly condemn Antony as the instigator of war. As Cato was Caesar’s inveterate enemy, so Cicero has made himself Antony’s.

The two consuls lead a conscript army off to face Antony in the north. The leading magistrate left in Rome, the urban praetor Marcus Cornutus, is inexperienced and turns to Cicero for advice. Thus at the age of 63 he becomes the most powerful man in the city, dictator in all but name.

It takes a while for despatches to return from the north and when they do they initially tell of a great defeat of Antony. Cicero is triumphant. It is the most successful day of his life. But then further despatches reveal that not one but both consuls were killed in the Battle of Mutena. Then Decomus Brutus reveals that his weakened army allowed Antony to flee with his over the Alps.

Worst of all, word has got to Octavian of some casual slighting remarks of Cicero’s. Octavian warns he is not prepared to be subordinate to Decimus, as the Senate ordered. Since there are 2 vacancies for consul, why can he not be made one? (He is only 19; the lower age limit for the consulship is meant to be 43.)

In May 43 Antony and his army arrived at the base of Lepidus, who was meant to be holding Gaul for the Senate. Instead he goes over to Antony. He claims his troops mutinied and wanted to join Antony’s.

When official news reaches the Senate Cicero is called on to make a speech summarising the situation. This is that Antony, far from being extinguished, is more powerful than ever. Deep groans from the senators. To Cicero’s horror the traditionalist Isauricus announces that he has swung his power and influence behind Octavian, and offered him his daughter’s hand in marriage, and proposes that Octavian be allowed to stand as consul in absentia. In other words, Octavian has dropped Cicero. In his shock, Cicero gives a speech crystallising his political beliefs in a nutshell:

That the Roman Republic, with its division of powers, its annual free elections for every magistracy, its law courts and its juries, its balance between Senate and people, its liberty of speech and thought, is mankind’s noblest creation (p.475)

And goes on to say that, for this reason, he thinks Octavian should not be awarded the consulship. It’s precisely this kind of bending of the rules which brought them the rule of Pompey, then Caesar. This speech places Cicero, for the first time, directly against Octavian’s wishes.

Crucially, he points out to the Senate that even if Lepidus goes over to Antony and Octavian is of increasingly uncertain loyalty, they can call on the legions commanded by Brutus in Syria and Cassius in Macedon. The point is that, without realising it, Cicero is creating the conditions under which Octavian and Antony will unite as the Caesarian party and declare war on the army of the assassins.

At the end of the new month of ‘July’ they learn that Octavian has struck camp, crossed the Rubicon with his army and is marching on Rome. Cicero had repeatedly assured the Senate of Octavian’s good intentions. Now he looks naive at best, Octavian’s tool at worst (476).

Legions arrive from Africa and Cornutus assures they will be loyal. But when Cicero goes to address them they remain resolutely silent. What do his fancy words about ‘liberty’ mean to them? They want money (480).

Next day the African legions mutiny and join Octavian’s. Cornutus kills himself in shame. Octavian’s troops now occupy Rome. Cicero contemplates suicide, but goes to see him. Their relationship has completely changed. Octavian tells Cicero he has organised to have the consulship, and who his fellow consul will be, an obscure relative who will be a puppet. Soon he will go to meet Antony and Lepidus. He recommends Cicero leaves Rome. Go to Greece and write philosophy. He won’t be allowed to return without permission. Don’t write anything against Octavian. Octavian is the new dictator (483).

Broken in spirit, all his hopes crushed, Cicero retreats to his country villa at Tusculum (485). They hear Octavian has set up a special court to try Caesar’s assassins. Then that he has left Rome with 11 legions, marching to confront Antony.

A month goes by and he conceives the idea of collecting all his letters. Tiro has kept all of them. He unpacks them. Cicero has them read out in chronological order. His whole hectic public and private life. He is fully aware that they amount to:

the most complete record of an historical era ever assembled by a leading statesman. (p.487)

So he instructs Tiro to assemble his letters in the right order, then make several complete copies to be hidden and preserved. Atticus, always keen to ingratiate himself with everyone, averse to all risk, insists that all his letters to Cicero are burned, burns them with his own hands. But copies of the rest are made and Tiro sends his copies down to his farm to be hidden for posterity.

At the end of November 43 Cicero sends Tiro into Rome to recover the last of his papers from his properties. That night there is screaming in the streets. Tiro learns the devastating news that Antony, Octavian and Lepidus have joined forces to create a Second Triumvirate. They have published a list of hundreds of senators and knights who have been proscribed: their properties are to be confiscated and a bounty of 100,000 sesterces on their heads. Both Marcus and Quintus Cicero are on the list (490).

Panic, pandemonium, the city at night is full of death gangs seeking out the proscribed men in order to kill them, cut off their heads, and present them to the auditors. In mad haste, Tiro tells the remaining slaves in Cicero’s houses to flee, scribbles a message to be taken by courier to Cicero at Tusculum telling him to flee to his villa on the small island of Astura, then follows in a carriage.

It’s several days before Marcus and Quintus arrive on the shore. It’s the depths of winter, it’s raining, they look bedraggled. Tiro had a slave go and hire a boat in nearby Antium to carry them down the coast and abroad, but Quintus refuses to get in it.

They spend a miserable night in the little house on the island. Cicero elaborates on what happened: Octavian, Antony and Lepidus have met in Bononia and struck a deal to divide the empire between them. They’ve agreed to fund their armies by the simple expedient of killing the richest 2,000 men in the republic and seizing their property. To vouch for their good intentions they each agreed to include in the list someone dear to them: Antony his uncle, Lucius Caesar; Lepidus his own brother; and Octavian, after several days of holding out, Cicero, his former mentor and adviser (494).

They set off by ship but the seas and the winds are against them. Ten men are rowing the ship but it makes almost no headway. They put into a cove, beach the ship and try to shelter from the elements under the sails. Misery.

Next morning Tiro wakes to find Cicero gone. There is a path up from the beach. Tiro finds Cicero wandering along it, distracted. He tells Tiro he plans to head back to Rome to kill himself on Octavian’s doorstep. He’ll die of the shame. No he won’t, says Tiro. Cicero will just be captured and tortured to death, then decapitated. Reluctantly Cicero turns and returns with him to the beach.

They all embark back in the ship and set off rowing again. But it is hard going, the wind against them, the seas heavy. Cicero recognises the headland of Caieta and knows he has a house nearby. He insists they dock at a small jetty. Tiro checks the villa hasn’t been occupied by soldiers or death squads but it appears untouched so he sends slaves to fetch Cicero from the beach and tells the housekeeper to light fires and prepare a bath.

They sleep deeply but are wakened next morning by a slave saying soldiers are coming. Cicero insists on having a bath and dressing formally. Only then will he enter the litter Tiro has arranged and is being carried down to the sea to board the ship when they are cut off by a dozen legionaries. The slaves turn about face and carry the litter hastily back up the path but are met by more legionaries.

The tribune leading the soldiers turns out to be one Caius Popillius Laenas. By a supreme irony he was one of Cicero’s first clients in law. He defended him against a charge of parricide when he was a measly 15 year old and got him acquitted on condition he join the army. Oh the irony (which Harris appears to havey confected; none of this is in the historical accounts I’ve read).

Popollius orders the centurion under him to execute Cicero. Cicero is utterly resigned and insists they do it while he lies back on the litter, assuming the position of a defeated gladiator. And so with one stroke of his sword the centurion cuts off the head which composed some of the greatest speeches and works of literature in the Latin language. Little good they all did him in the end.

They then chop off his hands and put them all in a basket and depart. Tiro hears Antony was so delighted by the hands he gave Popillius a bonus of a million sestercii. Antony had Cicero’s head and hands nailed to the public rostra as a warning to anyone else who opposed the triumvirate. It is said that Antony’s wife, Flavia, who hated Cicero, stuck needles through his witty tongue (502).

Tiro and the slaves carry Cicero’s body down to the beach and burn it on a pyre. Then he headed south to his farm. Quintus and his son were caught and executed. Atticus was spared because he had helped Fulvia when anti-Antony feeling was at its height.

All the loose ends are neatly tied up and Harris gives Tiro the briefest of spaces, just one page, to reflect on the extraordinary life he has described and the epic times it sheds light on.

My work is done. My book is finished. Soon I will die too. (p.503)

The Victorians achieved moving literary effects by writing too much. Modern writers strive for the same emotional impact by writing too little.

It is a moving and emotional end because Cicero’s life itself was so awesome and his end so wretched. The facts themselves are very moving for the reader who has accompanied Cicero this far, however. Harris’s treatment is a little disappointing. He winds up the narrative by telling us that Tiro marries that slave girl he freed all those years ago, Agath,e and they often spend the evenings together reminiscing. Sounds like a Disney movie or the Waltons.

And he quotes the passage from Cicero’s work, The Dream of Scipio, where Cicero tells the statesman to look down from the vast heavens on the insignificant earth and dismiss the petty activities of humans.

Ah, but that’s what politicians all say when their careers are over. Contrary to all Cicero’s preaching in his literary works, the consolations of philosophy are feeble compared with the full-blooded excitement of action.

Key words

Politics

As I made abundantly clear in my reviews of the first two books, these are novels about politics, not in the broad theoretical sense, but in the narrow sense of the day to day scrabble to win and then maintain positions of power in the state. One of the many pleasures of the previous books is the way Harris has characters state sententiae – maxims or sayings about politics – which are perfectly meaningful in their context but framed in such a way as to be widely applicable to any time and place, including our own.

There is always this to be said of politics: it is never static. (p.51)
‘Nothing in politics can be planned in advance for seven years.’ (p.137)
It is the most important rule in politics always to keep things moving. (p.433)

But having got into the habit of writing out all the apothegms in all three books made me realise there are far, far fewer uses of the word, and hardly any zingy apothegms about it in this one.

Power

I think the word ‘politics’, central to the previous two novels, is superseded in this one by use of the word ‘power’, signifying a shift in subject and in historical events. With the advent of the Triumvirate the time for petty politics passes and is replaced by the more naked manipulation of power.

And then, possibly, the word ‘power’ is itself superseded half-way through the book by ‘war’. And neither Cicero nor Tiro can make casual, knowing generalisations about war since neither of them are soldiers.

It’s a subtle, lexical indication of the way the focus of a novel supposedly about Cicero shifts its emphasis, spreads it more widely, in this novel. Well before the end of part one the energy centre of the narrative, as of Cicero’s world, has shifted to Caesar. Caesar is the true protagonist and Cicero an increasingly passive cork floating on the huge ocean of disruption and war he causes.

With the outbreak of civil war Cicero – and the text – become increasingly reliant on letters and third person accounts of events scattered all round the known world (Greece, Egypt, Spain).

And then, after the assassination of Caesar, not only all the characters but the narrative itself feels adrift. Retreating to the country, Cicero tries to make sense of the fast-moving series of events where no-one is in control, certainly not the assassins, but not Mark Antony either.

It’s in this chaos that slowly emerges from the confusions of the narrative the cold-eyed, steely determination of young Octavian who is to astonish the world by mastering the chaos created by his elders. Initially Octavian is keen to meet Cicero, ask his advice, when he departs with his army keeps in touch by letter. But when he hears about Cicero’s fateful slighting remark, he goes ominously silent. No letters, no replies, no despatches.

Octavian’s silences signal the text’s final abandonment of Cicero. Tiro’s narrative continues to focus on Cicero’s activities and attitudes but the narrative has moved through three key words – politics, power, war – and the final buzzword is nothing, nothingness.

The authorities in Rome hear nothing about Antony for months, Cicero hears nothing from Octavian for months. But in this ominous silence they are cooking up the Second Triumvirate, which will seize power and unleash an army of assassins whose aim is the end of all words. The end of Cicero. The end of the text.

The law

A little into this one I realised I’d been missing the importance of an obvious subject, the law. Cicero was first and foremost a lawyer. He made his name with the Verres case (described in great detail in part one of Imperium). Even when he ducked out of politics he continued to advocate cases in the courts. And what comes over very loudly is that in ancient Rome the law had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with fancy notions of ‘Justice’ but was entirely a tool of political manipulation, attack and revenge.

Trials in ancient Rome were wildly different from modern trials. They involved a jury of scores, sometimes hundreds (75 jurors were sworn in for the trial of Rufus, p.116), were conducted in the open air with the Roman crowd watching, sometimes in their thousands. Speeches were astonishingly ad hominem, not only dishing up all kinds of dirt on the accused and witnesses but also on the opposing advocates, who were often accused of the most grotesque crimes themselves.

Above all, cases could descend into violence as the onlookers behaved more like a football crowd than the limited number of public allowed into a modern court, and started yelling or applauding or booing, or sometimes throwing things, and sometimes invading the platform where the trial was being conducted.

So much highfalutin’, self-serving rhetoric surrounds the practice of the law but the Roman reality was obvious a shambles. Harris has Cicero tell Rufus:

‘My dear Rufus, have you learned nothing? There is no more honour in a legal dispute than there is in a wrestling match.’ (p.108)

War atrocities

As always, I am appalled at the gross violence, war crimes and atrocities carried out by the Roman army:

Dyrrachium is still recovering from the fate ordained by the Senate in the 150s, namely razed to the ground and its entire population of 150,000 sold into slavery
Harris makes room for a scene in which Tiro reads through Caesar’s Commentaries on his Gallic Wars and works out that by Caesar’s own account, he has been responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 Gauls and Germans in just one campaigning season (p.45)
Metellus Nepos reads out a despatch from Caesar to the senate in which the great man admits that of the 65,000 strong army of the Nervii only 500 were left alive (p.70)
Caesar’s lieutenant wins a great naval battle against the Celts, has their leaders executed and their entire nation sold into slavery. (p.147)
Caesar lures 430,000 members of the Usipetes and Tencteri tribes across the Rhine and then annihilates them. (p.148)

It is notable that the only member of the entire ruling class who protests against this behaviour is Cato, who makes a speech in the senate saying Caesar should be declared a war criminal, removed from his command and prosecuted. His suggestion is shouted down.

Even Cicero does’t care that much about these atrocities. But Tiro does. Harris has Tiro dwell on them with horror and this confirms for me, not that Tiro is a sensitive soul, but that he is the representative of the modern liberal consciousness in the novel. Tiro would be a more interesting character if he were either malicious or unreliable. Instead he is the simplest kind of narrator possible, the loyal friend of the protagonist who reports everything he sees with utter honesty. And is as appalled as a Guardian editorial by violence and war.

Family ties

The stern republican Brutus was the nephew of the stern moralist Marcus Portius Cato (140).
Julius Caesar married off his daughter Julia to Pompey.
Mark Antony was the stepson of Publius Lentulus Sura, one of the five Catiline conspirators Cicero had put to death. One among many sources of enmity between the two men.
Cassius Longinus was married to Brutus’s sister.
Domitius Ahenobarbus was married to Cato’s sister.
The consul Marcus Philippus was married to Caesar’s niece (142).
Octavian was Caesar’s great-nephew.

Dated diction

In my review of Lustrum I mentioned the way the thriller, as a genre, uses stereotypical characters, situations and language to guarantee an enjoyable read. The characters and events may be unpleasant (betrayal, murder etc) but the shape and feel of the incidents is almost always super-familiar and, in a paradoxical way, despite being superficially unpleasant, at a deeper level, cognitively reassuring.

I meant to mention something else I noticed, which is that Harris’s characters often speak like characters from a 1950s British movie. I mean they use a reassuringly old fashioned and very pukka diction.

Some of the reviewers suggest Harris has rewritten Roman history for our times, and insofar as his narrative focuses on cynical abuses of political power that may be true. But I was struck by how very 1950s the language of a lot of the characters is. They often reminded me of characters from Ealing Comedies or the St Trinian’s movies.

It first struck me when Cicero talks about one of the other characters as ‘not being such a bad fellow’. From then on I noticed this 1950s upper-middle class professional register.

‘Very well, young man, that’s enough’ (p.29).

On page 107 Tiro refers to Bestia as ‘the old rogue’. Who uses the word ‘rogue’ any more unless they’re talking about the Star Wars movie Rogue One or a ‘rogue state’ or maybe describing a ‘loveable rogue’ in a review of a movie?

Bestia had with him ‘his son Atratinus, a clever lad’.

When characters address each other they’re likely to say things like, ‘My dear Rufus…’ or ‘My dear, poor boy…’ Atticus speaks with the overemphasis typical of the English upper-middle classes: ‘Tiro, my dear fellow, thank you so much for taking care of my old friend so devotedly‘ (p.113). And:

‘What an utter villain that fellow is.’ (Cicero about Crassus, p.154)
‘The man’s ingratitude is unbelievable!’ (Milo on Pompey, p.178)
‘I am delighted to meet you! My wife has always talked of you most fondly.’ (Dolabella to Tiro, p.296)

Now you could argue that the dialogue is a bit old fogeyish as part of a broader authorial strategy by which Tiro’s language as a whole has a definite oldster tinge, like the pages of an old paperback which have yellowed with age.

I slept, and very deeply despite my anxieties, for such was my exhaustion… (p.499)

Not ‘because I was so exhausted’ but ‘such was my exhaustion’. It’s not exactly Victorian or really old diction and it’s not dominant in every sentence; but at moments when he has a choice, Harris always chooses the more old-fashioned, stiffer phrase.

Presumably this dated tinge is a conscious effort. I can see it has two intentions: one is to subtly convey that this is a 2,000 year old document describing a lost world. It is meant to feel, not archaic exactly, but slightly dated, in order to convey its pastness.

The other, more obvious motivation, is that the narrator is 100 years old. Tiro is an oldster. So of course his turn of phrase would be dated, even in his own time. When you ponder that fact, you could argue that the phrasing throughout the book is not dated enough.

But at the end of the day this is not a literary work, but a popular novel, a historical thriller and its default prose style is the crisp, factual manner of the thriller and most literary effects are clinically dispensed with in order to achieve its strong, direct, intelligent but simple impact.

Scraps

Cicero tells Tiro that Cato is the only one of them who clearly sees they they’re on the road to ruin (p.149).

Tiro the slave (p.20). His (sketchy) thoughts about slavery (p.226).

Caesar is like a whirlpool (p.147).

Credit

Dictator by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 2015. All references are to the 2016 Arrow paperback edition.

The Cicero trilogy

Robert Harris reviews

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on July 29, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Politics, Thriller

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Posted by Simon on July 29, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/29/dictator-robert-harris/

Lustrum by Robert Harris (2009)

The senate was not the arena for brute force. The weapons here were words, and no one ever knew how to deploy words as well as Cicero. (p.184)

‘What are the only weapons I possess, Tiro?’ he asked me, and then he answered his own question. ‘These,’ he said, gesturing towards his books. ‘Words. Caesar and Pompey have their soldiers, Crassus his wealth, Clodius his bullies on the street. My only legions are my words. By language I rose and by language I shall survive.’ (p.402)

This is the middle novel in the Robert Harris’s ‘Cicero trilogy’. Harris is a highly successful writer of intelligent thrillers and in the Cicero trilogy he has applied the style and mentality of a modern thriller to the life of the Roman lawyer and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC) with great success.

Cicero is an excellent historical figure to dramatise for at least two reasons.

1. We know more about Cicero than any other figure from the ancient world. a) He wrote a prodigious amount, not only his speeches as an advocate but books about oratory, philosophy, politics and morality, most of which have survived. when he writes about Cicero, Harris has an unprecedented amount of primary source material to refer to. b) The extraordinary survival of some 1,000 letters from and to him, many from the leading figures of the day such as Julius Caesar, Gnaeus Pompeius, Marcus Junius Brutus, Marcus Antonius, Gaius Octavius and others. Harris says as much in his Author’s Note, where he says he’s used, where possible, Cicero’s own words from letters or speeches (for example Cicero’s lament at feeling lonely after his brother and best friend both leave Rome, page 344, which is, I think, a direct quote from one of Cicero’s letters).

2. The second reason is that Cicero was right at the heart of the web of allegiances and alliances which made up the toxic politics of the last decades of the Roman Republic. He was consul at the time of the Cataline conspiracy, he was important enough to be invited to join the first triumvirate in 60; when Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49, Cicero was one of the half dozen figures in Rome whose opinion he really valued. In the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination Cicero advised the killers and, after they were defeated, he became a sort of mentor to Caesar’s heir, young Octavian and a bitter opponent of Mark Antony.

No other figure was as central to the high politics of the age or left such an extensive documentary record.

Tiro the narrator

As I thoroughly explained in my review of the first novel in the trilogy, Imperium, the novels are narrated by Cicero’s slave and private secretary Tiro, a real-life figure who Cicero devoted several letters to praising and thanking and who we know was responsible for editing and publishing Cicero’s letters after his death.

I had been his secretary for sixteen years by this time and there was no aspect of his life, public or private, with which I was not familiar. (p.13)

In other words, Tiro is the perfect person for a narrator, the amanuensis and secretary to Cicero, observer and analyst of his behaviour as Dr Watson is to Sherlock Holmes.

The premise of all three books is that Tiro is writing his memoirs long, long after the events he recounts, just a few years before the start of the Christian era and Tiro is a very old man of nearly 100. The three novels are represented as the memories of this old man, looking back at particularly high points in the life of his lord and master, as he himself witnessed and recorded them at the time.

Two parts

The first novel was in two parts. Part one, ‘Senator (79 to 70 BC)’, led up to Cicero’s career-making prosecution of a corrupt Roman governor, Gaius Verres. Part two, ‘Praetorian (68 to 64 BC)’ covered his campaign to be elected consul, which becomes entangled with a major plot by Julius Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus to stitch up control of the Roman state. Taken together it covers 15 years.

This book covers the next five years in Cicero’s life and career (which explains the title, the Latin word lustrum referring, among other things, to the religious sacrifice offered every five years by the state officials known as ‘censors’ and so, by extension, to a period of five years. This is clearly explained in an epigraph to the book and is referenced in the text on page 392). Once again the novel is divided into two parts:

Part one – Consul

This covers the dramatic and fateful year of 63 BC and gives a compelling and thrilling description of the slow escalation of the crisis which developed into Lucius Sergius Catalina’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman state. I’ve described the events in my review of Sallust’s Cataline War, but Harris brings it astonishingly, vividly, harrowingly to life, unforgettably conveying the astonishing, unbearable pressure Cicero came under, as the lead consul in Rome, of proving the existence of the conspiracy and then punishing the conspirators.

The climax of the Cataline conspiracy is the agonised decision to execute the five patrician senators who were foolish enough to be Cataline’s accomplices in the city and allow themselves to be caught (Cataline himself was hundreds of miles away, safely protected by the army raised by his colleague Manlius). It was an agonising decision because the executions were carried out without a formal trial, solely on the basis of a vote in the Senate, and this rash act would come back to haunt Cicero.

Part two – Pater Patriae

This covers the next four years, 62 to 58 BC, describing a number of key events which followed in the aftermath of the conspiracy. Beneath a blizzard of more overt incidents and challenges, the two underlying themes are the unstoppable rise of Caesar and his creation of the First Triumvirate (in 60 BC), and the concomitant rise of the slippery young demagogue Publius Claudius Pulcher, aided by his clever sexy sister, Clodia.

No words can convey the vividness with which Harris describes both the key players in late re[publican power politics, but also the gripping shifts in the endless political powerplay which Cicero finds himself trying to ride and survive.

The book contains many thrilling, nerve-biting scenes, but maybe the most shocking or heart-stopping is the moment when Caesar, doubly powerful in his roles of pontifex maximus and consul, forces the senator Lucius Lucullus to apologise for opposing him in the senate on his knees, commanding he do so like an outraged monarch, and the old general, realising he has no choice and creakily sinking to his knees to beg forgiveness of the dark-eyed force of nature which is Caesar, and the entire senate looking on in silent impotence (p.408).

The book rises to a climax as Clodius triumphs, being first adopted by a plebeian family, then winning the tribuneship, proposing a range of populist measures (a free grain dole for every family) before moving in on his old enemy, Cicero, by proposing a bill accusing him of murder in having the Cataline conspirators executed without a trial and enacting that:

It shall be a capital offence to offer fire and water to any person who has put Roman citizens to death without a trial. (p.417)

This innocent-sounding measure spells death for all around Cicero, his wife, his household and all his friends. The only way not to imperil all of them is to flee the city as quickly as possible and so that is how the second novel ends,

Power

Above all these books are about power, political and personal and Harris brilliantly and thrillingly conveys the world of the Rome’s senior aristocracy where every meeting, every dinner, every conversation is dominated by politics, not just chat about the powerful but every meeting between the social elite was politics: the jungle of social rivalry never stops and never ends.

‘From now on everything is to be written down.’
‘Yes, Senator.’
‘We’re heading into dangerous waters, Tiro. Every reef and current must be charted.’ (p.28)

Because every single reef and current conceals threat, power plays, the strategies and power plays of immensely rich and powerful people like Caesar (with his ‘divine recklessness), Crassus and Pompey, the populares or populists, on one side, and the leaders of the optimates or aristocratic party such as Quintus Lutatius Catulus, Quintus Hortensius (Cicero’s rival to the title best lawyer in Rome) and father of the senate, Vatia Isauricus.

In this way he cut through the posturing and sentiment to the nub of the issue which was, as it always is, power. (p.49)

Ancient and modern

One of the features of the first book was the way the narrator, Tiro, Cicero’s freed slave and secretary, not only loyally described all the events, meetings, conversations and so on which he witnessed, but also drops in comments and reflections – on people, places and situations. Above all Harris has him drop generalisations about the nature of power, especially political power, which are carefully phrased so that they can be applied to contemporary British politics as much as to ancient Roman politics. The result is a pleasant psychological shimmer, where the reader registers the comment’s appropriateness to the plot but also realises it can be applied to much more recent events.

Sura was a man of great ambition and boundless stupidity, two qualities which in politics often go together. (p.18)
It is one of the tricks of the successful politician to be able to hold many things in mind at once and to switch between them as the need arises, otherwise life would be insupportable. (p.31)
‘Unfortunately,’ replied Cicero, ‘politics is neither as clean as a wrestling match, nor played according to fixed rules.’ (p.80)
The really successful politician detaches his private self from their insults and reverses of public life, so that it is almost as if they happen to someone else. (p.81)
‘This is the business of politics – to surmount each challenge as it appears and be ready to deal with the next.’ (p.92)
‘In politics one cannot always pick and choose one’s enemies, let alone one’s friends.’ (p. 114)
‘There’s nothing more fatal during an election campaign than to appear unconfident.’ (p.124)
There are times in politics, as in life generally, when whatever one does is wrong. (p.137)
Once a leader starts to be laughed at as a matter of routine, he loses authority, and then he is finished. (p.147)
Politics has loyalties all of its own and they greatly supersede those to in-laws. (p.164)
There are no lasting victories in politics, there is only the remorseless grinding forward of events. If my work has a moral, this is it. (p.186)
‘You sometimes have too many scruples for the dirty business of politics, Tiro. (p.280)
Sometimes in politics a great weakness can be turned into a strength. (p.293)
He had learned from Cicero the tricks of political campaigning: keep your speeches short, remember names, tell jokes, put on a show; above all, render an issue, however complex, into a story anyone can grasp. (p.294)
It was yet another lesson to me in politics – an occupation that, if it is to be pursued successfully, demands the most extraordinary reserves of self-discipline, a quality that the naive often mistake for hypocrisy. (p.337)
‘In politics how things look is often more important than what they are.’ (p.341)
Up to that point Cicero had been treating the Spaniard with a kind of friendly disdain – as a joke figure: one of those self-important go-betweens who often crop up in politics. (p.353)
‘We both know how politics is played. Sooner or later failure comes to us all.’ (p.431)

Like the descriptions mentioned below, these sententiae are superficially intelligent, insightful and compelling but many, on a moment’s reflection, melt like a snowball in sunshine. They are very like the truisms and bromides (‘a trite statement that is intended to soothe or placate’) which pad out opinion columns in newspapers and magazines, which you nod agreement to then can’t remember half an hour later. For example, saying it is in the nature of politics to deal with one thing another another, is not very different from how you have to cope with one thing after another in your work, in being a parent, or life in general. It is in the nature of the thriller, as a genre, to present a heightened simulacrum of reality which grips and thrills your imagination at the time of reading, but which you can barely remember a few days later.

A checklist of references

Having read my Plutarch and Suetonius, as well as modern historians who reference other ancient sources, I’m familiar with attributes and anecdotes about many of the key players, not only Cicero, but Caesar, Crassus, Pompey and so on. It is entertaining to watch Harris slip them into his narrative at appropriate moments, like hearing a composer slip snippets of popular songs into a symphony. Thus:

A variation on the much-repeated story that Caesar burst into tears because by the age when Alexander the Great died, having conquered the known world, Caesar had achieved nothing (referenced on p.25, and then reprised but this time with Cicero being the one mournfully wishing he’d matched Alexander on p.145) (Plutarch’s Life of Caesar chapter 11, Suetonius’s Life of Caesar chapter 7.)

Caesar telling his mother he will return pontifex maximus or not at all (p.85) (Plutarch’s Caesar, chapter 7, Suetonius’s Caesar, chapter 13).

The most famous courtesan in Rome (Flora) saying she never left Pompey’s house without bite marks on her neck (p.336) (Plutarch’s Life of Pompey, chapter 2).

Actually there aren’t as many of these as there are in the first novel (or I missed some). Rather more obvious is Harris quoting directly from set piece speeches which were recorded and have survived from antiquity, namely Cicero’s ferocious attack on Catiline in the senate, and the debate about whether to execute the conspirators featuring diametrically opposed speeches from Caesar (advocating clemency and life imprisonment) and Cato (immediate death penalty) which, I think, are sourced from Sallust’s account.

When Caesar as consul drives his fellow consul to retreat to his house but continues to pass laws, Cicero is said to have quipped that the laws were being passed by the joint consulship of Julius and Caesar (p.369) (Suetonius’s Life of Cesar, chapter 20).

Realistic in two ways

The novel is vividly imagined and hugely pleasurable to read in at least three ways:

1. Sensual

The smell, the feel, the noise, the sight of Rome, its streets and people, the crowd cheering a procession, the packed and dusty Field of Mars on election day, the crowd of the white toga-wearing elite waiting outside the Senate house, the queue of clients outside every senator’s door, Cicero’s breath visible on a cold December morning, the chirping of cicadas on a hot Italian evening – the novel presents a steady stream of vividly imagined scenes which bring ancient Rome vibrantly alive (as they say).

The vivid Caesar’s pokey house in a rundown neighbourhood, or Cicero and Tiro’s visit to Lucullus’s stupendous luxury villa overlooking the Bay of Naples (p.107).

2. Socio-political

But more important is the detailed descriptions Harris gives of Roman processes and rituals, religious, social and political.

Now that Cicero is consul there are more scenes set specifically in the Senate and Harris makes this feel eerily like the House of Commons with a great central aisle separating two sets of stepped benches occupied by the opposing parties, the patricians and the populists.

the strange and spooky taking of the augury on the morning Cicero assumes his post as consul
the inauguration of the two new consults accompanied by prayers, the slaughter of a sacred bull, flags and trumpets (p.45)
the weird details of the Latin Festival held on the Alban Mount (p.57)
the dignified funeral procession for the old pontifex maximus, Metellus Pius (p.81)
the triumph of Lucullus (p.127)
the hot dusty crowd packing the Field of Mars to elect next year’s consuls and praetors (p.142)
the preparations for the Feast of the Great Goddess (p.211)

This vivid imagining of set pieces of the Roman constitution and procedures exceeds anything I’ve read in any other book. Harris really explains what went on at the ceremonies, how they looked and felt and smelled.

It is fascinating to read his account of the chief augur taking the auguries on the eve of his consulship and then the importance of auguries preceding all other state events, such as sessions of the Senate or elections on the Field of Mars.

It is fascinating to follow the precise sequence of rituals, prayers, the order of procession and so on involved in a classical Roman triumph up to and including the ritual strangling of the foreign kings and captives by the carnifex or public executioner (p.128).

It is illuminating to read the description of a Roman wedding, the wedding of Cicero’s beloved daughter Tullia, aged just 14, to Gaius Frugi of the Piso clan (p.146).

The ceremony of adoption, even it is the travesty conducted under coercion of Clodius being adopted as a plebeian so he could stand as a tribune (pages 386 to 387).

3. Drama

Then there are scenes which are just thrillingly dramatic:

The dramatic ambush of the conspirators on the Mulvian Bridge (pages 203 to 207).

The description of the trial of Publius Clodius Pulcher for blasphemy at which he scandalously bribes the jurors to acquit him despite his obvious guilt (pages 304 to 320).

The dramatic trial in which Cicero’s once-time pupil Marcus Caelius Rufus confidently crushes Cicero’s defence of his corrupt partner as consul, Caius Antonius Hybrida (pages 369 to 384).

The reassuring familiarity of thriller tropes

So far I haven’t conveyed how immensely enjoyable this book is. It is well written, packed with interesting facts about ancient Rome, steeped with insight and intelligence into the workings of power and influence.

Harris makes it live through a hundred vividly imagined details – his description of Caesar’s ancient, venerable but shabby house in the now rundown neighbourhood of the Subura; Caesar’s distinctively dry rasping voice (p.29); Cicero and Tiro’s atmospheric visit to the augurs who take them up onto the roof of their building to observe the prevailing winds and the flight of birds.

The narrative starts at the end of December, just as Cicero is about to commence his year as consul and Rome is experiencing unusual snowfall, so the whole city is white with snowdrifts, vividly described.

A feature of thrillers is the action is all in the events and their threatening, thrilling implications, rarely in the prose style. The prose generally has to be as plain and transparent as possible in order to clearly and quickly explain the facts and let the reader thrill to their accumulating threat and implications.

Therefore thrillers are not afraid of clichés. It’s like a painter painting pictures long after the era of painting has died, because there continues to be a market for painting long after all possible avenues and permutations of painting have been exhausted.

In the same way, despite a hundred years or more of experimentation designed to expand, subvert or blow up the novel as a literary form, the thriller genre continues to thrive, generating endless new novels telling similar stories and using time-honoured techniques and phraseology. Just because there is no longer a literary avant garde doesn’t mean books don’t continue to sell. In fact more novels are sold every year than ever before in human history, just as there are more TV shows and more movies than ever before. More of everything.

There has to be an arresting opening sentence and event:

Two days before the inauguration of Marcus Tullius Cicero as consul of Rome, the body of a child was pulled from the river Tiber, close to the boat sheds of the republican war fleet. (opening sentence)

An evil antagonist:

‘Damn Caesar!’ said Cicero suddenly. ‘There’s nothing dishonourable about ambition. I’m ambitious myself. But his lust for power is not of this world. You look into those eyes of his, and it’s like staring into some dark sea at the height of a storm.’
(Lustrum, page 34)

The baddies confront each other in tense standoffs:

Catalina’s eyes glittered and his large hands contracted into fists. ‘My first ancestor was Sergestus, companion of Aeneas, the founder of our city – and you dare to tell me to leave?’ (p.169)

And the phenomenally charged confrontation right at the end between a miserable, defeated Cicero being hounded out of his beloved Rome and Julius Caesar, brisk in his shining armour, mustering his legions to set off for his command in Gaul. When Caesar offers Cicero the legateship with him which would ensure his safety from prosecution, Cicero realises he must turn it down:

‘Thank you for your consideration,’ replied Cicero, ‘but it would never work.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because…what is wicked about you Caesar – worse than Pompey, worse than Clodius, worse even than Catalina – is that you won’t rest until we are all obliged to go down on our knees to you.’ (p.439)

Sudden alarms:

I was woken by fists pounding on the front door. I sat up with a start. I could only have been asleep for a few moments. The distant hammering came again, followed by ferocious barking, shouts and running feet. (p.148)

And the hero realising a conspiracy is afoot:

Cicero grabbed my arm. ‘So the actual crime will be to help keep me alive? They won’t even give me a trial.’ (p.418)

All very, very well done and yet, somehow, utterly predictable. The cosy familiarity of thriller tropes extends down to the level of individual sentences and metaphors. These are good in their way, but utterly familiar and slip down like an iced drink by the swimming pool at a Mediterranean resort. Here is Tiro’s description of Rome in the depths of winter:

The smoke from the altar fires was curling above the temples. I could smell the saffron burning, and hear the lowing of the bulls awaiting sacrifice. As we neared the Arch of Scipio I looked back, and there was Rome – her hills and valleys, towers and temples, porticoes and houses all veiled white and sparkling with snow, like a bride in her gown awaiting her groom. (p.44)

‘Like a bride in her gown awaiting her groom’ – a metaphor which has been around as long as fiction, for centuries, predigested and processed by the reader with barely a flicker of recognition.

Portraits of Rome

Speaking of Rome, I slowly realised that Harris describes Rome so regularly, in different seasons and moods, that it is obviously part of a concerted strategy to make ‘Rome herself’ a character in the novel. This wasn’t so apparent in Imperium (or I just missed it) but seems to me a deliberate tactic in this novel. At the same time I think these descriptions demonstrate the reliance of this kind of thriller on cliché and stereotype. There are never any surprises; things always exactly fit the mood and needs of the narrative.

The strategy is apparent from the start, when Harris paints an opening picture of Rome as the capital of a great Mediterranean empire but nonetheless stricken with social and economic turmoil, resulting in a decadent febrile atmosphere – which, of course, suits the writer of a tense thriller down to the ground.

Such was the state of the city on the eve of Cicero’s consulship – a vortex of hunger, rumour and anxiety; of crippled veterans and bankrupt farmers begging at every corner; of roistering bands of drunken young men terrorising shopkeepers; of women from good families openly prostituting themselves outside the taverns; of sudden conflagrations, violent tempests, moonless nights and scavenging dogs; of fanatics, soothsayers, beggars, fights. (p.8)

Then, here is Tiro’s description of Rome in midsummer:

It was one of those endless hot summer days when the sun seems reluctant to sink, and I remember how still it was, the motes of dust motionless in the shafts of fading light. On such evenings, when the only sounds even in the city are the drone of insects and the soft trilling of the birds, Rome seems older than anywhere in the world; as old as the earth itself; entirely beyond time. (p.130)

‘One of those endless hot summer days’ – see what I mean be generic description: this sentence could come from any one of hundreds of thousands of popular novels. Here is Tiro’s description of Rome at the height of the Cataline panic:

By the time Cicero set off for the temple, tightly protected by lictors and bodyguards, an atmosphere of real dread hung over the city, as tangible as the grey November mist rising from the Tiber. The streets were deathly quiet. Nobody applauded or jeered; they simply hid indoors. In the shadows of their windows the citizenry gathered, white-faced and silent, to watch the consul pass. (p.182)

Here is Tiro’s description of Rome on the night Cicero finally confirms the Catiline conspiracy to the senate:

We stepped out from the library onto the narrow terrace. Down in the valley, the effect of the curfew was to make Rome seem as dark and fathomless as a lake. Only the Temple of Luna, lit up by torches on the slope of the Palatine, was distinctly visible. It seemed to hover, suspended in the night, like some white-hulled vessel descended from the stars to inspect us. (p.226)

Good, isn’t it? Efficient, effective and highly atmospheric but, for me, ultimately, soulless. Harris’s prose tastes of chrome. It feels a beautifully designed, expensive sports car, recently washed and gleaming in the sun. Perfect of its kind.

Terentia

We get to know all the characters well, from the public figures such as Caesar, Crassus, Hortensius, Catalina, Clodius, Cato, Lucullus, Metellus, through to members of Cicero’s household, his brother Quintus and above all his fearsome wife Terentia. Harris steadily builds up a portrait of Terentia as not conventionally attractive but radiating personality and determination and fierce in argument.

It was around this time that Terentia began to play an important role in Cicero’s consulship. People often wondered why Cicero was still married to her after fifteen years, for she was excessively pious and had little beauty and even less charm. But she had something rarer. She had character. She commanded respect, and increasingly as the years went on he sought her advice. She had no interest in philosophy or literature, no knowledge of history; not much learning of any sort, in fact. However, unburdened by education or natural delicacy, she did possess a rare gift for seeing straight through to the heart of a thing, be it a problem or a person, and saying exactly what she thought. (p.98)

Cicero had married Terentia for her money and it was her money which funded his successful campaigns to gain magistracies and so enter the senate. Harris rarely mentions her without adding to the impression of fearsome redoubtability:

Was Caesar hinting by this remark that he wanted to seduce Terentia? I doubt it. The most hostile tribe of Gaul would have been a less gruelling conquest. (p.24)
I must not forget Terentia, who carried a heavy iron candle-holder at all times, and who would probably have been more effective than any of us. (p.177)
Terentia had the coolest head present. (p.421)

This gives the impression of painting a character, the kind of thing which people like in their fictions – except that it is all very familiar, the politician’s wife as fearsome termagent, the protagonist’s wife the only person he’s truly afraid of. It feels like another fictional cliché. One of the descriptions of Terentia raising merry hell in Cicero’s household for some reason triggered a memory of Les Dawson dressed as a northern housewife, wearing a hairnet over her curlers and brandishing a rolling pin ready to pick a fight with her henpecked husband.

Tricks of oratory

Harris has Tiro from time to time share with us Cicero’s tips for delivering an effective speech. Presumably these are taken from Cicero’s writings about oratory.

Cicero’s first law of rhetoric, a speech must always contain a surprise. (p.52)
The bigger a crowd is, the more stupid it is.
When addressing an immense multitude it is always good to invoke the supernatural and call on the gods. (p.73)

Finally

All the texts we have from republican Rome were written by the elite. Not aristocrats, necessarily, but nonetheless from the wealthy, slave-owning upper classes. (As a side issue it’s notable that two of the most memorable writers from the period did not belong to this class, but were men on the make, Cicero and Caesar, whose writings were motivated, in part, by the need to prove themselves and improve themselves and lift themselves up into the ruling class. The writings of both men are heavy with self-promotion. LinkedIn literature.)

In all these thousands of pages we never hear the voices of ‘ordinary’ people, meaning farm workers, labourers, shopkeepers, businessmen, merchants, tax collectors and the millions of ordinary people who populated the Roman Empire.

Which makes it all the more striking that the narrator of all three of these Cicero novels is a slave. Well educated, highly literate, shrewd and tactful, Tiro is an idealised narrator and it is only occasionally that he reminds us that he is not free. He is utterly reliant on his master for food, lodging and protection and must obey his orders at all times.

Tiro’s character is ‘dramatised’ a bit more in this novel than the previous one because Harris gives him a love interest, namely a slave girl in the household of the super-rich retired general, Lucullus. She is called Agathe and is assigned to Tiro to give him a bath and massage after his long journey to Lucullus’s palace to deliver a message (not in his own right, only because he is Cicero’s secretary) and proceeds, easily and casually, to have sex with him, as nubile young women often do in thrillers written by men, from James Bond downwards.

Tiro glimpses Agathe on a couple of other occasions (pages 307) and on the final occasion is saddened to see she is so worn out with slave life that all her softness and beauty has gone. She doesn’t even recognise him (p.424). But it’s not a major plot strand, in fact it’s very minor, but her presence serves to bring out what may be obvious but I’ll say anyway: the entire Cicero trilogy, consisting of over 1,200 pages, is a slave’s eye view of republican Rome.

I don’t want to belabour the point but it is a mark of the thriller’s lack of depth or seriousness, its determination to remain no more than an intelligent poolside read, that Tiro’s condition as a slave and dependent is from time to time mentioned but the state of slavehood, the central fact of the narrator’s life, is nowhere really explored.

Two or three times Tiro mentions he’d like to gain his freedom and set up on a nice little farm. Three quarters of the way through the book, Cicero’s brother, Quintus, about to set off for a governorship in Macedonia, promises Tiro his freedom when he returns (p.324).

And right at the very end, as Cicero is being forced into exile, he magnanimously gives Tiro his freedom and tells him to leave him, as being in his presence jeopardises his life. But Tiro promptly rejects the offer of freedom and pledges to remain Cicero’s slave, secretary and confidante, as the pair, along with a couple of other (unnamed) slaves, scuttle through the midnight streets to elude Clodius’s henchmen, bribe their way out of one of the city’s gates, and set off into exile.

This is a very moving scene to end the long narrative on and yet…To me what was striking was that… these are novels written by a slave in which the condition of slavery is never really broached or investigated or dramatised or experienced.

Tiro mentions that he’s a slave, as you might mention needing to buy a new car or get your roof fixed. It is referred to half a dozen times as a fact. But the condition of slavehood is never really adequately dramatised or investigated, the psychology of slavery not at all. Tiro remains to the end a timid version of the sensible, intelligent but perpetually impressed Dr Watson-style sidekick, in awe of his large-than-life master, observant, obedient and respectful.

This is an immensely enjoyable book, on multiple levels. But the absence of meditation on this subject is a reminder of the limited ambitions and rewards of the thriller as a genre.

Catullus

The poet Gaius Valerius Catullus was, during the period covered by the novel, madly in love with Clodia, sister of the disreputable Publius Clodius Pulcher who is a central figure in part two, and wife of Metellus Celer. Harris makes a sly reference to Catullus without mentioning him by name, designed to please the cognoscenti, having Celer tell Cicero, who’s come round on a social call, after Clodia is quite rude to him before walking off:

‘Well, there it is. I wish she talked to you as much as she does this damned poet who’s always trailing round after her…’ (p.340)

A reference to Catullus, for anyone who’s read a bit around the subject. Probably the book contains more sly amused references like that, not all of which I got.

Credit

Lustrum by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson books in 2009. All references are to the 2010 Arrow paperback edition.

The Cicero trilogy

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by Simon on July 27, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Novel, Politics, Thriller

Tagged Aeneas, Agathe, Alban Mount, Alexander the Great, ancient Rome, Bay of Naples, Caesar, Caius Antonius Hybrida, carnifex, Cataline conspiracy, Cataline War, Cato, Catullus, Cicero, Cicero trilogy, Clodia, Clodius, Crassus, fiction, Field of Mars, First Triumvirate, first-person narrator, Flora, Gaius Frugi, Gaius Octavius, Gaius Valerius Catullus, Gaius Verres, Gnaeus Pompeius, Imperium, Julius Caesar, Latin Festival, Lucius Lucullus, Lucius Sergius Catalina, lustrum, Marcus Caelius Rufus, Marcus Junius Brutus, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Mark Antony, Metellus Celer, Metellus Pius, Mulvian Bridge, narrator, novel, Octavian, optimates, Pater Patriae, Politics, Pompey, pontifex maximus, populares, Publius Claudius Pulcher, Putarch, Quintus Hortensius, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, River Rubicon, Robert Harris, Roman history, Roman Republic, Roman Senate, Sallust, Sergestus, Slavery, Suetonius, Terentia, The Cicero trilogy, the Subura, thriller, Tiro, Tullia, Vatia Isauricus

Posted by Simon on July 27, 2022

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Imperium by Robert Harris (2006)

‘Politics is history on the wing! What other sphere of human activity calls forth all that is most noble in men’s souls, and all that is most base? Or has such excitement? Or more vividly exposes our strengths and weaknesses?’
(Cicero defending his fascination with politics to his secretary, Tiro, in Imperium, page 263)

What you notice first about this book are a) its length (480 pages) and b) the blank flatness of its style. Here’s how it opens:

My name is Tiro. For thirty-six years I was the confidential secretary of the Roman statesman Cicero. At first this was exciting, then astonishing, then arduous, and finally extremely dangerous. During those years I believe he spent more hours with me than with any other person, including his own family. I witnessed his private meetings and carried his secret messages. I took down his speeches, his letters and his literary works, even his poetry – such an outpouring of words that I had to invent what is commonly called shorthand to cope with the flow, a system still used to record the deliberations of the senate, and for which I was recently awarded a modest pension. (p.3)

Very clear, plain and factual, with a complete absence of literary effects or colour. Opening my review of Harris’s 2016 thriller Conclave to extract the list of my reviews of Harris’s other novels, I see this is exactly what I thought about that work, too, so I might as well quote myself:

A cliché can be defined as a thought or description which you’ve read or heard so many times before that it slips past the eye or ear with the minimum amount of disturbance, barely registering, like soothing background music in a hotel lift or lobby. It is designed not to detain you but speed you on your way to your business appointment.

This is true of a great deal if not most of Harris’s writing – it is smooth and effective without stirring any ripples. If you pause for thought, it is at what he is reporting – documentary explanations of the personalities and politics of 1st century BC Rome – but never the way he reports it. As befits a man who worked for decades in high level journalism, Harris’s English is unfailingly clear and lucid, a servant of the subject matter, never drawing attention to itself.

Harris isn’t an awful writer, he is a very good writer, but of a kind of clear and rational prose which is almost devoid of colour. This is very effective when conveying factual information (and his novels tend to be packed with factual information which needs to be written out as clearly as possible in order for the reader to understand what is at stake). But it leaves something be desired when it comes to character, setting or atmosphere.

Having read four histories of ancient Rome which all feature passages about Cicero, Sallust’s Catiline War in which he plays a starring role, Plutarch’s Life of Cicero and a selection of Cicero’s letters, I feel pretty familiar, if not slightly bored, by the actual content of the book i.e. the setting, characters and main events of Republican Rome from 79 to 64 BC (the exact dates are indicated on the title pages of the novels two parts).

For me, already over-familiar with the course of events, the interest was not in the narrative as such, but in the way Harris ‘brings the history alive’ by vividly imagining particular moments. These are hardly great literature but they have an uncanny knack of ringing true and, slowly, subtly, without you realising it, placing you right there, in the houses of the great, in the forum and senate house and numerous other locations of ancient Rome, watching the characters interact, the voters queue up on the dusty Field of Mars, the scrum of senators waiting outside the senate house, the night time stink coming from the public dumps just beyond the city walls, Cicero’s habit of tossing a leather ball from hand to hand as he thinks, or working a crowd of clients, pressing the flesh and greeting everyone by name.

The prose is as interesting as tap water, style-wise, but quite quickly the sheer intelligence Harris brings to his descriptions of ancient Roman power politics and the deftness with which he describes scenes and settings, really draw the reader into the narrative.

Ticking the boxes

Having just read Plutarch’s Life of Cicero and Cicero’s letters, I recognise well-known anecdotes or remarks popping up throughout the novel. It feels slightly, to someone familiar with the source texts, as if Harris made a list of key anecdotes about and descriptions of Cicero and then found places to insert them into his text. It has a slightly mechanical feel. Thus we get mention of:

Cicero’s habit of making witty jokes about people which mortally offended them, thus making unnecessary enemies (pages 62, 296, 325, 326, 347, 403)
how Marcus Licinius Crassus got rich by sending his people to wherever a fire had broken out in Rome and offering to buy their houses from the owners at rock bottom prices then, when they’d sold them, sending in his fire brigade to put out the fires and make a massive profit on the properties (pages 79 and 306)
Cicero’s touchiness about his lowly provincial origins (p.97)
the fact that the leading lawyer in Rome, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, owned a statuette of the sphinx, the subject of one of Cicero’s wisecracks as reported in Plutarch’s life (pages 237 and 444; Plutarch’s Life of Cicero chapter 7)
the anecdote in Plutarch of pushy young Gnaeus Pompeius telling the dictator Lucius Cornelius Sulla that more people worship the rising than the setting sun (p.218)
the much-told story of how Caesar was captured by pirates and, after he was eventually ransomed and released, returned with Roman soldiers, tracked down all his captors and supervised their crucifixions (p.287)
the anecdote in Plutarch of the raven flying over the forum when Pompey was acclaimed to the special command to eliminate the pirate threat, and which was killed by the roar of approval from the crowd, dropping stone dead out of the sky (p.324 and Plutarch’s Life of Pompey chapter 25)

There’s a steady stream of these little flash bulbs going off in the narrative, as one by one anecdotes from the sources are deftly inserted into the text and ticked off the list.

Politics

But the real subject of the novel is not Cicero’s life but politics.

Harris was famously close to the Blair family during Tony Blair’s years as leader of New Labour. Although not directly involved in politics he saw how power and personality played out at the highest levels, experience which underpins The Ghost, his 2007 novel about a fictional Labour Prime Minister and his wife, which is blatantly based on Tony and Cherie Blair. That novel was published just a year after this one and you can’t help thinking they were worked on simultaneously, insights into the nature of power allotted to one or other of the closely related texts as appropriate.

All this is relevant because political power is also the subject of Imperium. It’s a novel about power and Harris takes every opportunity to really imagine what the exercise of power would have looked and felt like in ancient Rome. Harris’s descriptions can perhaps be categorised into implicit and explicit descriptions.

1. By explicit all I mean is explicit comments on and about the nature of power. Tiro’s narrative is littered with apothegms and reflections on the exercise of power, which are phrased in such a way that they could apply to Westminster today or to any place where power is exercised:

Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them. (p.2)
‘The first rule in politics, Tiro, never forget a face.’ (p.29)
‘Sometimes if you find yourself stuck, in politics, the thing to do is start a fight – start a fight, even if you do not know how you are going to win it, because it is only when a fight is on, and everything is in motion, that you can hope to see your way through.’ (p.58)
As every fool knows, the quickest way to get to the top on politics is to get yourself close to the man at the top. (p.76)
Politics is a country idiot, capable of concentrating on only one thing at a time. (p.77)
There are certain politicians who can’t stand to be in the same room as one another, even if mutual self-interest dictates that they should try to get along…This is what the Stoics fail to grasp when they assert that reason rather than emotion should play the dominant part in human affairs. I am afraid the reverse is true, and always will be, even – perhaps especially – in the supposedly calculating world of politics. (p.84)
I have frequently observed this curious aspect of power: that it is often when one is physically closest to its source that one is least well informed as to what is actually going on. (p.90)
No one can really claim to know politics properly until he has stayed up all night, writing a speech for delivery the following day. (p.132)
There are few forces in politics harder to resist than a feeling that something is inevitable, for humans move as a flock and will always rush like sheep towards the safety of a winner. (p.188)
‘The trouble with Lucius is he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.’ (p.234)
The work gave Cicero his first real taste of what it is to have power – which is usually, when it comes down to it, a matter of choosing between equally unpalatable options – and fairly bitter he found it. (p.235)
Cicero knew that the way to a great man‘s confidence, curiously enough, is often to speak harshly back to him, thus conveying an appearance of disinterested candour. (p.271)
Is this not the dream of every proud and ambitious man? That rather than having to get down in the dust and fight for power, the people should come crawling to him, begging him to accept it as a gift? (p.292)
How important appearance is in politics. (p.296)
The journey to the top in politics often confines a man with some uncongenial fellow passengers and shows him strange scenery. (p.301)
You can scheme all you like in politics, the gesture seemed to say, but in the end it all comes down to luck. (p.333)
It is dangerous in politics to find oneself a great man’s whipping boy. (as Cicero began to find himself ‘owned’ by Pompey, p.340)
What a heap of ash most political careers amount to, when one really stops to consider them! (p.394)
‘Cicero, you disappoint me. Since when has idiocy been a bar to advancement in politics?’ (p.398)
‘The ability to listen to bores requires stamina, and such stamina is the essence of politics. It is from the bores that you really find things out.’ (p.405)
It is always said of elections, in my experience, that whichever one is in progress at the time is the most significant there has ever been. (p.469)

As mention of Tony Blair suggests, quite a few of these sayings about politics could be applied to the contemporary British political world which Harris had seen at first hand. The kind of generalised rules Tiro articulates are designed to be widely applied. Thus when he has Cicero say:

‘The most fatal error for any statesman is to allow his fellow countrymen, even for an instant, to suspect that he puts the interests of foreigners above those of his own people.’ (p.251)

it made me think of how Jeremy Corbyn was monstered in the Tory press for his associations with the IRA and Hamas i.e. was accused of being unpatriotic. When Tiro describes the hysterical fear triggered in Rome when pirates attacked and burned the port city of Ostia, and how Pompey and Caesar describe this as a new kind of threat, international, with no centralised power structure, which must be crushed – it was impossible not to hear echoes of the kind of rhetoric which filled thousands of articles and op-eds about al-Qaeda in the aftermath of 9/11 (p.268).

Tiro’s thoughts are designed to make the reader hover, equivocally, between the ostensible setting of Rome 70 BC and London 1990s or 2020s. If there’s any consistent ‘literary’ effect in the book, maybe it’s this.

2. What I mean by implicit is the way Harris brilliantly captures the dynamics of power as it plays out in personal confrontations, in dramatic scenes and situations cleverly constructed to demonstrate how power politics really works in practice; how cunning political operators handle themselves and manipulate others. Thus:

The meeting with Lollius Palicanus who represents Pompey’s interest and tries to persuade Cicero to join up to Pompey’s cause. (p.61)
The meeting with Crassus outside Rome after the latter had crushed the Spartacus rebellion and crucified 6,000 of the rebel gladiators along 350 miles of the Appian Way. That’s all very Hollywood, but the point of the scene is the way the two men, intellectually and psychologically, sound each other out, assess each other, sparring and disagreeing while on the surface remaining immaculately polite, all while Tiro looks on. (p.81)
The way Cicero is invited to Pompey’s first big levée in the city after returning from his successful campaigns in Spain, and then only cursorily greeted by Pompey in a lineup like the cast meeting a royal at a movie premiere. It is a memorable image of the relationship between true, exceptional power (Pompey) and a rather desperate aspirer (Cicero). (p.97)
The entire extended description of the trial of Gaius Verres amounts to Cicero creating power from his oratory and the wealth of evidence he has amassed, and then wielding it against Verres along with the lawyer he has bought (Hortensius) and the corrupt senators he has bribed until they are all swept away in mob anger at the governor (Verres’s) scandalous, criminal behaviour. (chapter 9, pages 203 to 238)
‘There is as much skill in knowing how to handle a meeting of ten as in manipulating a gathering of hundreds.’ (p.290)
‘He leaned in close and moistened his lips; there was something almost lecherous about the way Crassus talked of power.’ (p.309)

And then the climax of the plot, the sequence of events leading up to Cicero’s big meeting with the grandest of Rome’s aristocrats and the Faustian pact he enters into with them in order to get elected consul, is an elaborate, multi-levelled and quite thrilling dramatisation of power in action, dirty deals, betrayals, compromises and all.

Imperium

Hence the title of the book. The plot centres on Cicero as described by his loyal freedman and secretary Tiro, but its real subject is power, how to win it, use it and keep it, as the narrator Tiro himself explains on page 2 with its hokey reference to the opening of Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid. ‘Arms and the man I sing’, wrote Virgil. Harris writes:

It is of power and the man that I shall sing. By power I mean official, political power – what we know in Latin as imperium – the power of life and death, as vested by the state in an individual.

I looked up the Wikipedia definition:

In ancient Rome, imperium was a form of authority held by a citizen to control a military or governmental entity. It is distinct from auctoritas and potestas, different and generally inferior types of power in the Roman Republic and Empire. One’s imperium could be over a specific military unit, or it could be over a province or territory…In a general sense, imperium was the scope of someone’s power, and could include anything, such as public office, commerce, political influence, or wealth.

Tiro writes that:

Whenever I picture the word imperium it is always Pompey who comes to mind. (p.326)

But the same is true of half a dozen of the other characters who each exemplify really dizzying, intimidating top-level power in action – the terrifying Crassus, slippery Caesar, suave Publius Clodius Pulcher or half-mad Catiline. The whole novel is heady with the aroma of power and the endless threat and risk from the machinations of super-powerful men. Harris doesn’t need much literary styling because the subject matter itself is so psychologically powerful.

The plot

The text is divided into two parts:

Part one – Senator (79 to 70 BC)

This introduces the narrator, Marcus Tullius Tiro, freed slave and secretary to up-and-coming lawyer and aspiring politician Marcus Tullius Cicero. Tiro tells us he is writing his memoirs as he approaches the ripe old age of 100, long after Cicero and everyone else he will describe is dead. (Since Tiro tells us he was aged 34 in the year Cicero won the Verres case (p.230), which was in 70 BC, then 65 years later, the date must be 5 BC, well after the Roman Republic disintegrated and was replaced by the sole rule of Augustus, who established the template for the emperors who followed.)

Part one quickly jumps over Cicero’s early career, describing his sojourn in Athens where he learned oratory from the best teachers available, his election to the senate, and then the one-year governorship he served in Sicily, followed by his return to Rome and election as aedile.

But the majority of part one is devoted to Cicero’s involvement in the prosecution of the Roman governor of Sicily, Gaius Verres, for outrageous corruption and extortion, showing how it all began when a Sicilian whose business had been ruined by Verres arrives on Cicero’s doorstep, and following the subsequent twists and turns as Cicero and Tiro get drawn into his ‘case’, eventually travelling to Sicily to assemble evidence, and how the case itself gets tangled up in the bitter rivalry between Rome’s two strong men, the great general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus and the menacing plutocrat Marcus Licinius Crassus.

Part one ends with Cicero overcoming all the vested interests facing him and triumphantly winning the Verres case. Along the way we have been introduced to key politicians and leading figures in Cicero’s personal life, his fearsome wife, Terentia, and beloved daughter, Tullia, his support network of brother Quintus Tullius Cicero and cousin Lucius. And enjoyed Harris’s well-researched descriptions of various aspects of life in ancient Rome, from the squalid apartment blocks known as insulae to the richest mansions, the festivals and triumphs, with special emphasis on the forms and rituals surrounding elections to public posts and ill-tempered debates in the senate.

Part two – Praetorian (68 to 64 BC)

The first part had a really strong central subject in the Verres case. Part two is a bit more diffuse. It starts by giving an insider’s view of the machinations surrounding the senate’s decision to appoint Pompey to a special command to deal with the threat from pirates, against the opposition of the aristocratic party, most of the senate and, most menacing of all, Crassus.

Then the narrative settles onto Cicero’s attempts to be elected one of Rome’s 8 praetors and, once he achieves that position, his manouevring for the ultimate prize, election as consul. Many obstacles present themselves but none as big as the enmity of the half-mad Lucius Sergius Catilina.

The novel develops into a genuinely nerve-wracking thriller as Tiro is smuggled into a secret meeting of Caesar, Crassus, Catiline and others who have developed a master plan to take over the running of the state and then make huge sums by selling off state land and taking over Egypt. Cicero then attends a late-night private meeting of Rome’s senior aristocrats, informs them about this plot and persuades them, reluctantly, that the only way to foil it is to give Cicero their vote in the consular elections, and it is this election which forms the climax of the second part.

Harris has this great knack of generating genuine excitement in a narrative – not anything to do with his style, but with the intelligent laying on of facts and his vivid depiction of the psychology of power politics. The result is that the novel builds to a real climax in the form of a thriller-style conspiracy which Cicero cleverly turns against the conspirators by revealing it to the aristocrats in exchange for their support.

And then…Cicero has won! Achieved his lifetime’s ambition. He is a consul, one of the two most powerful men in Rome for a year. And the book ends with a little family celebration on the roof of his house underneath the stars, where his entourage learn the details of the deal he made with the aristocrats and the compromises he will have to make during his time in power. Politics is nothing if not the art of compromise, dirty deals in smoke-filled rooms.

Imperium is the first in a trilogy of novels about Cicero’s career so the reader can be confident that the consequences of this deal will be described in the second book of the trilogy, Lustrum. Anyone who knows about Cicero, knows that it was during his year as consul that the Cataline conspiracy erupted, one of the most dangerous and florid events in late Republican Rome. Wow, what a feast of political intrigue for Harris the political novelist get his teeth into!

The multi-layered connectivity of Roman politics

From a factual point of view, one thing comes over very strongly in this novel which is often missing from the history books and this is the tremendous importance of family, clan, tribe and social connections among Rome’s elite in creating the very complex political ‘system’ or just situation, seething with competition and rivalry.

Elections in ancient Rome were a complicated business:

The Centuriate Assembly elected the highest offices of consul, praetor, and censor. This assembly divided all adult male citizens into 193 centuries organised into tiers by rank and property, with the equites or knights at the top and the unarmed and unpropertied at the bottom. Which century voted first was decided by lot and the winning century was called the centuria praerogativa (p.471)
Quaestors and curule aediles were elected by the Tribal Assembly, while tribunes and plebeian aediles were elected by the Plebeian Council. The electorates for both these assemblies were divided into 35 tribes or geographical units of voters. Harris names and gives pen portraits of the important tribes in his description of the election of Cicero as aedile (pages 198 to 200).

A really important point to grasp is that all votes were not equal. The votes of the wealthy and upper classes counted for a lot more than the votes of the average citizen. In the Centuriate Assembly the oldest established tribes voted first and their votes counted for more.

As well as tribes, the city was divided into wards. Each of these had community meeting halls and community (or gang) leaders, who could turn their members out if you needed a crowd, to jeer at a trial or cheer a triumph or jostle senators on their way into the senate house.

The novel gives a vivid description of the ‘voting syndicates’ based on local wards, which had organisers and which could be bought at a price (the precise, elaborate and well established method of bribing these syndicates is described in detail on pages 406 to 408).

The reader is made aware of the way these tribes and wards fed into political situations and calculations.

But sitting above this complicated electoral system was the intricate web of family connections which dictated or rather, made up Roman politics. It had arguably two aspects.

1. Like any aristocracy, the Romans had very ancient, super-well-established families which could trace their origins right back to the legendary times when the monarchy was overthrown (about 500 BC). Their authority was bolstered by their family’s track records in holding office and this was made visible because the atriums of the worthiest families contained wax busts of the ancestors who had held public office, in particular the consulship. These busts could be removed from the home and paraded by the proud descendant at festivals or political events.

The Togatus Barberini, a marble sculpture from first-century Rome depicting an unknown Roman of noble birth holding effigies of his ancestors in either hand

Let’s take a detour into structural linguistics for a moment:

Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A synchronic approach considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. A diachronic approach considers the development and evolution of a language through history.

The Roman upper classes can be considered in both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. I’ve just outlined the diachronic perspective, namely the history of each family and its eminent members. But the ruling class must also be seen synchronically in terms of its alliances in the present.

2. Thus someone like Cicero, trying to play the political game, had to be aware not only of the histories of all the most eminent families, but also of the super-complicated mesh of marriage alliances, of uncles, aunts, first and second cousins which connected families and factions at the highest level.

In addition to the complex interlinking of powerful families by marriage went the uniquely Roman custom of adopting someone from a different family into yours, but not in our modern sense of adopting a baby or toddler. It meant adopting a full-grown adult from one family into another. To take two famous cases, Publius Clodius Pulcher came from a very distinguished and ancient family but in a demonstration of aristocratic eccentricity, in the 50s had himself adopted by an obscure plebeian family so that he could be elected tribune of the plebs. More famously, Octavian was adopted by Julius Caesar as his heir, a legal position he used to maximum advantage when he arrived in Rome after Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC.

Laid on top of this was political alliances which came in at least two flavours: First, as a rule, the aristocracy stuck together and thought of themselves as the optimates or best people (hero figure Sulla, contemporary leader Quintus Lutatius Catulus). Anyone who opposed them was liable to be tarred as populares i.e. upstart representatives of the ever-unruly ordinary people of Rome, unpredictable, cowardly, ignoble (hero figure Marius, contemporary star Caesar).

But of course, the unrelenting competition for power of the ambitious often cut across class divides. Thus the psychopathic Cataline (‘A jagged streak of violent madness ran through Catalina like lightning across his brain’, p.351) who ended up trying to lead an abortive rebellion came from one of the oldest patrician families in Rome, gens Sergia. In his frustrated furious ambition to seize power he ended up allying himself with the working classes and political outcasts of all kinds.

His younger contemporary, Clodius, also came from one of Rome’s oldest and noblest patrician families, the Claudia gens. But, again, lust for power and a certain aristocratic perversity, led him to get adopted by an obscure plebeian so that he could be elected tribune of the plebs, which is why he changed his middle name from the aristocratic ‘Claudius’ to the more plebeian ‘Clodius’.

In addition to all this was the complicated system of clients and patrons. Rich and influential Romans acquired clients who they had done or would do favours for in return for their political or financial support, and so whose patron they would be. Powerful individuals such as Crassus, Caesar or Pompey were continually working behind the scenes to acquire and cultivate networks of hundreds of clients. Nothing came for nothing. All the deals which businessmen, lawyers, politicians and military commanders were doing all the time created new alliances, new networks of clientilism and patronage.

So as you read about figures in Republican Rome, you have to be aware that they operated in a society where people were individuals but also came enmeshed in a tribe, a clan, a family, with both a particular family history and the complexity of recent familial alliances (through marriage or adoption), as well as their position in the simmering conflict between optimates and populares, as well as their calculated commitments to this or that powerful patron.

Taken together these elements or strands created the fantastically complex matrix of history, family, class, financial, legal and political obligations which Tiro at one point (in a rare departure from Harris’s use of the plainest of plain English) describes as the ‘webwork’ of Roman society.

It’s into this webwork of 1st century BC Rome that the book swiftly plunges the reader, and a great deal of the pleasure of reading it derives from getting used to this multi-levelled game of allegiance and obligation which Cicero (and everyone else) finds themselves playing all their adult lives. With the whole thing acutely observed by the clever but non-participating eye-witness, Tiro.

Family connections

Publius Clodius Pulcher’s biography demonstrates the complex interlinking at the top of Roman society. His elder brothers were Appius Claudius Pulcher, consul in 54 BC, and Gaius Claudius Pulcher, praetor in 56 BC and subsequently governor of Asia. His sisters included Claudia, the wife of Quintus Marcius Rex, Claudia Quadrantaria, the wife of Celer, and Claudia Quinta, the wife of the fantastically successful general Lucius Licinius Lucullus.

Through his family, Clodius was closely connected with a number of prominent Roman politicians. His brother-in-law, Lucullus, was consul in 74 BC, while brother-in-law Celer was consul in 60, and the latter’s brother, Quintus Caecilius Metellus Nepos, in 57. Mucia Tertia, a half-sister to the Caecilii, was the wife of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, and later Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, praetor in 56 BC. A half-brother, Publius Mucius Scaevola, was a pontifex, while his brother Quintus was an augur, and tribune of the plebs in 54.

So anyone who tangled with Clodius had to be aware that he was also going to provoke some or all of his extended network of family members and spouses, who each had their own positions of power, ambitions and networks of clients to consider. Matrices and intricate webworks of alliance, patronage and position, in every direction…

Aspects of ancient Rome

The hubbub as senators gathered in the senaculum before entering the chamber for a debate.
Sumptuous description of Pompey’s grand triumph. (p.115)
The look, feel and smell of rundown apartment blocks.
The stench of decay coming from the public dump outside the Esquiline Gate. (p.193)
Detailed description of the melée on the Field of Mars on election day. (pages 196 to 200)

Harris has Tiro describe Catullus as ‘that cruellest of poets’ (p.307).

Cicero describes Tiro as his second brother (p.428).

Lowering

Right at the end of the book I realised what it is I find so depressing about Harris’s books. Not a word in any of his political books hints for a moment that politics is about making a fairer, juster, safer world, could be about plans for building a better society, helping the vulnerable, righting historic wrongs, supporting hard-working families, planning carefully for the future etc. In Harris’s discourse none of this exists.

‘The trouble with Lucius is he thinks politics is a fight for justice. Politics is a profession.’ (p.234)

Like the outstanding political journalist he was, Harris sees politics is just another career, like medicine or the law. Tiro (like the narrator of Harris’s novel of contemporary politics, Ghost) never mentions policy or political programmes, what is best for Rome and its people, but thinks only in terms of individual politicians, their scams and strategems, and the special buzz you get from being in the room with the big beasts as they are making seismic decisions.

It’s depressing because in this world of professional politicians and their journalistic hangers-on nothing ever changes and nothing ever will. A succession of charismatic crooks, desperate wannabes, blustering liars, and bullying blowhards will create coalitions of supporters enough to scrabble their way to the leadership of their parties, then do anything, say anything, make any promise and cook up any impractical policy, in order to ensure good headlines in tomorrow’s papers and cling onto power for another day.

I found that Cicero was fond of repeating certain phrases and these I learned to reduce to a line or even a few dots – thus proving what most people already know, that politicians essentially say the same thing over and over again. (p.14)

Harris’s journalistic cynicism may be intelligent and witty, and the speed of the narrative as it builds up to the big conspiracy at the end is certainly thrilling. But to any thinking reader it is also pretty dispiriting.

If you’re right in the thick of the political vortex it is no doubt tremendously exciting, and this novel powerfully projects Harris’s first-hand knowledge of the nail-biting psychology of power 2,000 years back onto the dramatic political career of Cicero. Countless memoirs testify to how thrilling it can be to be right in the thick of the political world, talking to the leaders of nations as they wage the daily struggle to stay in power, please the people and shaft their rivals. But you only have to walk out of the room, down the corridor and out into the fresh air to suddenly find the hype and hysteria surrounding most politics pathetic and squalid.

And if you’re a citizen of the country unlucky enough to be ruled by these bloviating blunderers, then there is no excitement at all, but depressed resignation at the spectacle of the unending bickering and mismanagement of idiots.

The visceral thrill of the political manoeuvrings which Harris describes so well make it easy to lose sight of the basic fact that the personal rivalries described in Imperium destabilised the late Roman Republic for decades, eventually leading to nearly 20 years of civil war and social upheaval, deaths, destruction, starvation, ruin.

Politics in our own time has given us Brexit, the mismanagement of the Covid crisis, widespread corruption, now a pointless war in Ukraine and a global food crisis. The stupidity of human mismanagement, which some people dignify with the term ‘politics’, never ends.

The Cicero trilogy

Robert Harris reviews

Cicero reviews

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

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by Simon on July 25, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, History, Novel, Thriller

Tagged 9/11, adoption, Al Qaeda, Ancient history, ancient Rome, Appian Way, Appius Claudius Pulcher, aristocracy, auctoritas, Æneid, Brexit, Caesar, Catiline War, Catullus, censor, centuria praerogativa, Centuriate Assembly, Cherie Blair, Cicero, clientelism, consul, corruption, COVID-19, curule aediles, diachrony, equites, Esquiline Gate, fiction, Field of Mars, Gaius Claudius Pulcher, Gaius Marius, Gaius Verres, gens, gladiators, Gnaeus Pompeius, Hamas, historical novel, Imperium, insulae, IRA, Jeremy Corbyn, knights, Life of Cicero, linguistic analysis, Lollius Palicanus, Lucius Sergius Cataline, Lucius Sergius Catilina, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Marcus Tullius Tiro, New Labour, novel, optimates, Ostia, patronage, pirates, plebeian aediles, Plebeian Council, plebs, Plutarch, Politics, populares, potestas, praetor, Publius Clodius Pulcher, Quintus Hortensius Hortalus, Quintus Lutatius Catulus, Republican Rome, Robert Harris, Roman history, Roman politics, Roman Republic, Sallust, senaculum, Senate, Sergius Catalina, Sicily, Spartacus, Sulla, synchrony, Terentia, The Ghost, thriller, Tiro, Tony Blair, Tribal Assembly, Tullia, Ukraine, Virgil, voting syndicates

Posted by Simon on July 25, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/07/25/imperium-robert-harris/

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

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton (1969)

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by Simon on July 28, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Thriller

Tagged Africa, albedo, American sign language, Amy, animal rights, book, Broca's area, brontides, cannibalism, cannibals, Charles Munro, chimpanzee, China, Conan Doyle, Congo, Congo civil war, Democratic Republic of Congo, diamonds, DNA, Dylan Walsh, Earth Resources Technology Services, Elliott, Ernie Hudson, ERTS, Frank Marshall, Freud, genetic memory, gorilla gorillas, Great Rift Valley, Hawaii, Henry Morton Stanley, IIb diamonds, industrial espionage, Jan Kruger, Jules Vernes, kakundakari, Kanagarawi, Karen Ellen Ross, Karen Ross, Kigani, Kikuyu, King Solomon's Mines, Koko, Laura Linney, lost city of Zinj, Maurice Cavalle, Michael Crichton, Mouna Loa, Mount Mukenko, Mubuti, Mukenko, Munro, Pearl thesis, Peter Elliott, Primate Preservation Agency, Project Vulcan, R.B. Travis, Rider Haggard, Ross, S.L. Berensky, Second Congo Civil War, semiconductors, solar flares, Stanley, superconducting computers, Tangiers, The Andromeda Strain, thriller, Tim Curry, Type IIb boron-coated blue diamonds, University of California Berkeley, Virunga range, volcanoes, Washoe, Zaire, Zaire army, Zinj

Posted by Simon on July 28, 2021

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

Edwardian reviews

Although King Edward VII reigned from the day his mother, Queen Victoria, died, on 22 January 1901, until the day he passed away on 6 May 1910 to be replaced by his son, King George V (reigned 6 May 1910 to 20 January 1936), most historians define the ‘Edwardian period’ as stretching from Victoria’s death to the outbreak of World War One in August 1914 i.e. four years into George V’s reign – with some historians, for example, Eric Hobsbawm extending it as far as 1915, the year the full scale and calamity of the war began to strike home and the era of Edwardian optimism was finally extinguished.

1905

Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul by H.G. Wells
A Modern Utopia by H.G. Wells

1906

1908

1909

Actions and Reactions by Rudyard Kipling
Tono-Bungay by H.G. Wells
Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells

1910

Prester John by John Buchan
Rewards and Fairies by Rudyard Kipling
Reginald in Russia, and other sketches by Saki
The History of Mr Polly by H.G. Wells

1911

The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki

1912

The Unbearable Bassington by Saki

1913

1914

1915

The Valley of Fear by Arthur Conan Doyle (serialised 1914 to 1915)
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
His Last Bow: Some Later Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (stories published 1908 to 1917)

History

The Crisis of Imperialism 1865 to 1915 by Richard Shannon (1976)
Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd (1977)
The Boer War 1899 to 1902 by Thomas Pakenham (1979)
The Age of Empire: 1875 to 1915 by Eric Hobsbawm (1987)
Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts – 2 (1991)

The Edwardians by Roy Hattersley (2004)
The Scramble for China by Robert Bickers (2011)
Unfinished Empire by John Darwin (2012)

Exhibitions

Peter Pan and Other Lost Children @ The Heath Robinson Museum (November 2018)

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by Simon on July 9, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Novel, Short stories, Thriller

Posted by Simon on July 9, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/07/09/edwardian-reviews/

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen (2006)

‘Face it, we live in a stinking shitwash of cruelty and greed and rotten manners.’
(Honey Santana, the nature girl of the title, page 264)

Chapter one

Tommy Tigertail was the strong, silent Native American member of the four-strong eco-‘terrorist’ group led by renegade journalist Skip Wiley, who wreaked havoc in Hiaasen’s farcical first novel, Tourist Season. At the end of that novel, Tommy returned to south Florida’s reservation for Seminole Indians to help run their lucrative casinos.

Ten books and 20 years later, Hiaasen’s eleventh comedy crime thriller opens with Tommy’s young nephew, Sammy Tigertail, disposing of the body of a fat, drunk, middle-aged white tourist named Jeter Wilson. Tommy didn’t murder him. He was giving Wilson a tour of the Everglades when the airboat he was driving through some high grass accidentally threw a harmless, non-poisonous banded water snake up onto Wilson’s neck. Such was Wilson’s panic that he thrashed around screaming trying to get the snake off him till he dropped dead of a heart attack.

Knowing that if he contacted the racist authorities, he would immediately be blamed and arrested, Sammy weighted down Wilson’s body, dropped it in a deep point of a canal, drove to meet his half brother Lee, to collect his favourite belongings (including a spiffy Gibson electric guitar), then, rather than return to the reservation (where he might be tracked down by police and so cause trouble for his community) hitch-hikes off into the boondocks (definition: ‘rough or isolated country.’)

At the start of a completely different storyline, in a trailer in a park not far away, single mum Honey Santana, aged 39 (p.353) explains to her son, Fry, that she’s lost her latest job at the fish market because the boss, Mr Louis Piejack, crept up and grabbed her right breast, whereupon she turned round and hit him with a crab hammer in the nuts.

In mid-explanation she gets a call from a phone sales company, Relentless Inc, based in a disused B-52 hanger in Fort Worth, Texas; specifically from smooth-talking Boyd Shreave, who tries to sell her a property in some new housing development. When Honey Santana, a smart cookie, effortlessly dances round his call, taking the mickey out of him, Shreave forgets the golden rule of telesales (which is never lose your temper), loses his temper and calls Honey ‘a dried-up old skank’.

This shocks sales operatives sitting in the booth next to Boyd, Eugenie Fonda with whom he’s having an affair. Eugenie herself has a colourful backstory. In 1999 she began an affair with a tree trimmer named Van Bonneville, who claimed to have lost his wife in the recent hurricane – until, that is, police found her body, badly beaten around the head and strapped into the seat of their car which had been dumped in the St John’s River. Van Bonneville was convicted of murdering her and the story became notorious, dubbed the ‘Hurricane Homicide’ trial in the press.

Eugenie, at that point going by her real name of Jean Leigh Hill, was offered a publishing deal whereby a ghost writer came down from New York and helped her knock out her account of the story which, titled Storm Ghoul, became a bestseller and netted her half a million dollars. By this point Eugenie had hooked up with a stockbroker who persuaded her to invest it all in shares in a red hot company from Texas named Enron. Two years later went spectacularly bankrupt in one of America’s largest cases of corporate fraud and Eugenie lost everything.

Which is why she now finds herself sitting in a booth in a converted B-52 hanger in Texas, trying to sell people shares in a new property development and having a sexual fling with not particularly appealing Boyd Shreave, more out of boredom than anything else. After ending the call to Honey, Shreave takes a coffee break and wonders if his career has finally hit rock bottom. And indeed, the call had been recorded, his managers listen to it, and fire him.

Meanwhile Honey, fulled by rage against Mr Piejack, men in general and Boyd’s hideous insult in particular, decides she is going to phone back the company, insist on speaking to Shreave’s supervisor, and generally make his life a misery. She discovers the company has one of those number blockers, so she calls her brother, Richard Santana, a journalist in upstate New York, and he uses his databases to quickly ascertain the telecompany’s phone number and give it to Honey, who commences bombarding its switchboard with calls. Eventually she uses the ploy of pretending to be an insurance company which is trying to find a ‘Boyd’ employed by Relentless Inc in order to give him his payout on a crash. The guileless HR person gives Honey Boyd’s full name and address. Right.

As the story has developed we have learned that Honey Santana has mental health issues. To be precise, she has an obsessively vengeful personality, bordering on the bipolar, which is easily triggered, much to the exasperation of her long-suffering son, Fry. The boy’s father is Perry Skinner, a reformed dope smuggler, who Honey fell in love with, got pregnant by, but who was then busted and sent to gaol.

An example of Honey’s obsessiveness is that, while Skinner was in Elgin prison, she wrote him 147 letters, none of them forgiving him for getting busted for drug smuggling (p.230). She once sent the White House 97 emails to complain about the president’s support for a bill to allow oil drilling in an Alaska national park, bringing her to the attention of the Secret Service, who gave her a full assessment and concluded she didn’t pose a threat. They were wrong. Her doctor has prescribed medication, which she throws away. Her long-suffering son, Fry, tries to help and support her but he’s only 12.

Meanwhile, after the novel has described Boyd’s casual flirting with Eugenie it comes as a surprise to learn that he has a wife, Lily Shreave, though less of a surprise to learn that she has hired a private detective, Dealey, to tail him and take incriminating photos of Boyd and his mistress, Eugenie.

We get to know Dealey, hear his backstory, and to understand why he is particularly proud of a long-lens photo he took of Eugenie fellating Boyd in the car park of a takeaway delicatessen. It’s a career best for Dealey, which he sends off to a private investigator magazine who publish it (faces blurred out), much to the admiration of his fellow professionals (p.148). Amusing.

Pause for breath

All this information, the range of characters and their dense backstories, are conveyed in just the first 40 pages of this 400-page book. It’s a lot of information to process, isn’t it?. The bombardment of facts, people and descriptions suggests both Hiaasen’s characteristic strengths and weaknesses. The strengths are:

lots of characters, with colourful and varied backgrounds
their backstories described in great detail with journalistic concision and precision
the certainty that these storylines are set to intersect and the pleasure of trying to figure out how and why
extremely crisp and pithy dialogue, brilliantly capturing the characters’ modern, slangy, abbreviated speech rhythms

The main weakness being that all the characters have the shallowness of people mentioned in newspaper articles. You get name, age, weight, hair colour, a bit of backstory, then they’re thrown into the tumultuous pell-mell of farcical events. Close the book, as you would put down a newspaper, and half an hour later you’ve forgotten about them.

There’s precious little psychology. The characters are what they are and mostly stay the same throughout the narrative. The sense you get in each novel of a large cast of well-defined but somehow shallow characters reminds me a bit of the extravagantly large cast of characters in The Simpsons. And just as in The Simpsons, Hiaasen’s novels offer the amusement and comfort of recurring characters (the main ones being the ex-governor and eco-warrior Skink and his trusty side-man, Highway Patrolman Jim Tile; or, as here, rather poignant references to Tommy Tigertail and Skip Wiley from way back in that first novel, p.150).

Characters from The Simpsons cartoon series

Characters tend to stand out form the general scum if they have one of two qualities:

they conform to well-established thriller or Hollywood stereotypes: strong manly heroes like Mick Stranahan, hero of the previous novel, Skinny Dip, or corporate crooks such as Red Hammernut, or preening, cocky but ultimately weak cowards like the would-be wife-killer, Charles Perrone, also from Skinny Dip
or they have grotesque qualities or meet a grotesque fate: such as the over-hairy man-bear ‘Tool’ in Skinny Dip, or the assassin in Double Whammy who is bitten by a pitbull whose jaws he can’t unclamp from his arm, even after he’s killed it, even after he’s sawed its head off, and so goes through the rest of the novel with a rotting dog’s head at the end of one arm

I suppose one way of accounting for the grotesque characters or events in Hiaasen (beside them being gruesomely funny in and of themselves) is the way their fictional garishness compensates for the general lack of psychological depth.

Plot developments

Honey Santana

As we read on we encounter Honey Santana’s back story. We learn about her impulsive marriage to a working man ten years older than her, Perry Skinner, dope smuggler, who discovers her wearing a prom dress by the side of the road next to the car where her drunken teenage prom date was busy throwing up (pages 121 to 123). Skinner took her away, they fell in love, he got busted for smuggling dope and served a few years inside, and was surprised to find Honey waiting for him when he got out (p.230). They got married, they had a son Fry and then her mental disorder, some kind of bipolar condition, never officially defined (her ‘manic spirals’), became steadily worse, till they parted by mutual consent.

One among the many symptoms her son has learned to recognise is when Honey can barely hear anything around her because of the deafening noise going on in her head, ‘the rising babel in Honey’s skull’ (p.171), being combinations of multiple pop music tracks playing inside her head at the same time (for example, ‘Bell Bottom Blues’ at the same time as ‘Karma Chamelon’, p.125, or a disco track and CSN’s ‘Marrakesh Express’, p.82, Smoke on the Water and ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’, p.170, Nat King Cole and Marilyn Manson, p.214).

(It’s noteworthy that Hiaasen had used this riff in the previous novel, Skinny Dip, where Skink, his most frequent recurring character, was having exactly the same problem, of hearing two loud and catchy pop tunes playing inside his head at the same time. I wonder whether the repeat of this idea is an indication that Hiaasen himself suffered from a similar condition. Or just the repetition of quite a good bizarre character angle. Odd that he uses it in two consecutive books, though, as if we wouldn’t notice.)

Honey conceives a Cunning Plan to take revenge on Boyd Shreave. Once she’s got his phone number she rings him at home, herself pretending to be a real estate salesperson with the made-up name Pia Frampton (p.170). She spins him a line about how lucky buyers will get an all-expenses paid trip to stay in a wildlife lodge in Florida (remember that Boyd, Mrs Boyd and Eugenie all live up in Texas) and gets Boyd hooked. He thinks a city break for 2 in Florida is just what he needs to restart his relationship with Eugenie.

Eugenie

For her part Eugenie has already moved on and has seduced a new guy at work, Sacco, who she gets back to her flat and naked but he won’t stop talking about his obsessions with Bill Gates and Microsoft, so she’s becoming exasperated which is exactly when Boyd knocks on the door with a bunch of flowers and the offer of an all-expenses paid trip to Florida. Eugenie thinks, Well, why not?

Honey’s scam and Richard’s airmiles

So now Honey has suckered Boyd to think he’s going on an all-expenses-paid weekend break to a luxury Florida hotel, how is (slightly demented) Honey going to arrange all this? First the air tickets. She phones her successful journalist brother and persuades him to part with enough airmiles to pay for the 2 American Airlines tickets which she sends to Boyd.

As to the hotel, well, er… She lies to her son, Fry, that she’s got friends coming to stay and paints her double-wide trailer amateurish pictures of macaws and tropical foliage. Ha! Then she gets the boy’s father, Skinner, to take him for a few days, and sits back to wait for Boyd and Eugenie to arrive and their ritual humiliation to begin.

Lily and Dealey

Complicating things nicely is Boyd’s wife, Lily. Lily has all the evidence she needs that Boyd is being unfaithful, but flabbergasts the private investigator, Dealey, by telling him a photo of her husband getting a blowjob in a car park is not enough. She wants a photo of actual penetration. Dealey starts to protest but Lily says she’ll pay him $10,000 cash for it. She is good for the money because she runs a little chain of pizza parlours which she is on the brink of selling to a larger chain for a big figure plus stock options.

So, very reluctantly, Dealey establishes what flight Boyd and Eugenie are getting, books himself onto it, and sets off on his quest to take a photo of them unambiguously having penetrative sex for his client.

Boyd’s excuses

What lies is Boyd going to tell Lily to excuse his absence for a couple of days? He comes up with the story that he is not only still employed by Relentless Inc. but is their star salesman, but, alas, has only just been diagnosed with the very rare condition of aphenphosmphobia (page 122) which means he can’t bear to be touched. So work are going to send him to Florida to visit a clinic which may be able to cure his sad condition.

Lily knows he’s lying and so sets out to torment him, by presenting herself in sexually alluring guises i.e. in bra and panties, in skimpy thongs, and in one memorably pornographic scene, tells Boyd to sit on the sofa, close his eyes, and focus on the fact that she is not wearing any panties (p.132) to focus on her pussy, imagine her shape, the outline of her vulva against her tight jeans in its ‘velvet detail’… then Boyd hears the sound of her slipping out of her jeans and he opens her eyes to see his wife’s naked pussy only yards from him as he nurses what is by now a rearing and straining erection.

But now he’s come up with this preposterous phobia story, he has to stick to it and resist even Lily’s crudest advances. Comedy of a not particularly subtle type.

Sammy and Ginny

Remember how we left Sammy Tigertail canoeing deeper and deeper into the Florida Everglades? He’s not a very competent Indian, much though he wants to emulate his heroic Seminole ancestors. We learn that Sammy’s daddy was a white truck driver who impregnated an Indian woman but, when he was born, took him away to live with him and his white stepmom. They brought him up as a white boy named ‘Chad McQueen’ in the suburb of Broward, till the old guy died from a heart attack on a friend’s stag night, whereupon his Indian mom reclaimed him and took him to live in the Indian community of Big Cypress.

But the rest of the Indian community regarded him as not part of it, both on account of his half-white parentage and also that he seems to be endlessly unlucky (p.163). Sammy thinks of himself as ‘a fucked-up half-breed’ (p.286); ‘I’m only half Seminole… My father was white’ (p.309) and the narrator agrees he is dogged by ‘chronic bad luck’, (p.330).

Above all, Sammy is self-conscious and sensitive about his bright blue eyes, a permanent reminder that he is not pure-blood Indian (p.331).

Proving his bad luck, while he sleeps on an island that first night on the run, a high tide washes away his canoe. But then he hears noises coming from the other side of the island, sneaks over and discovers a fraternity party of students dancing to a boogie box round a campfire, stoned and drunk.

When they’ve all eventually passed out, Sammy tiptoes round to their canoes and starts to steal one. But he is stopped by a voice from among the comatose bodies, a girl’s voice, asking if she can come with him. It belongs to a girl whose name we will discover is Gillian St Croix.

Just as Honey’s prom night date turned out to be useless all those years ago, now this girl, Gillian St Croix (full name p.141; fully backstory p.172), also wants to get away from the lame man who brought her to the island, Ethan.

— Useless men. This is a recurring theme. Pieback, Boyd and Dealey are sorry apologies for masculinity and their womenfolk have correspondingly low opinions of the male sex.

‘One time a guy almost croaked on me in bed,’ [Eugenie] was saying. ‘Lucky I’d passed a CPR class. I kept him goin’ till the paramedics got there, and guess what? He still had his hard-on when they carried him out on the stretcher – that’s all you need to know about men.’ (p.277)

Sammy whispers no way is he going to take her, but Gillian threatens to scream and wake her comatose student buddies up, so, with massive reluctance, Sammy puts her in the canoe, stops once safe round round the headland, then fires a few shots of the rifle to wake the dopey students up, making them panic and hurriedly dress and head off in the remaining canoes.

Which leaves Sammy stuck with Gillian, who turns out to be an incredibly irritating chatterbox, who only stops wittering on when Sammy ties her hands and stuffs a sock in her mouth. But not for long. He paddles blindly for a while, having no compass or map of familiarity with this area, eventually arriving at a remote island called Dismal Key (p.136), though neither of them know it.

Clearly the four storylines of:

Honey Santana setting up Body Shreave for some merciless humiliation at her trailer in Florida
private detective Dealey’s attempts to photograph Boyd and Eugenie in flagrante
Tommy Tigertail and his annoying ‘kidnap’ victim, Gillian, who refuses to leave him alone
Perry Skinner and his son Fry

are going to crash into each other and create all kinds of comic complications. Nature Girl is very well written, elaborately structured, with detailed characterisation, snappy dialogue, vivid imagining of the exotic and outlandish scenes and settings. But somehow, hard to nail down, it lacks the really vehement outrageousness of the earlier novels.

Native American themes

All Hiaasen’s novels are interspersed with factual interludes giving backgrounders on the big issue of the novel. If they were in magazines, they’d be in call-out boxes or side panels, separate from the main text. In the previous novel, Skinny Dip, there were 3 or 4 of them explaining how the runoff of fertilisers and pesticides from vast agricultural landholdings were allowed to illegally leach into the Everglades and destroy their ecosystems.

In this novel we get a series of interludes giving factual background about native American tribes, namely the Seminole nation, which Sammy belongs to (pages 72, 152, 286), also background history of the Calusa people who inhabited Florida at the time of the Spanish conquest and who were decimated by European diseases (pages 202 to 203).

Native American themes are present in other ways throughout the book:

1. Sammy has vivid dreams, dreams in which spirits appear and talk to him, most notably dreams in which the spirit of the dead white man Jeter Wilson appears to him and complains about being weighted down with anchors in some canal where the water’s cold and he’s being bitten to pieces by sharks. In these dreams Wilson angrily asks Sammy to come back and move his body. Later, when Dealey pitches up on the island where Sammy’s taken Gillian, Sammy refuses to believe he’s real, considering him a spirit throughout all their interactions, which is both comic and genuinely a bit spooky. Thus Sammy’s dreams are so vivid that at several points he mistakes people, for example Gillian when she first speaks, for spirits talking to him.

2. Dismal Key turns out to be largely constructed of clam shells by the Indian tribes who lived in this part of Florida for over a thousand years, the Calusa people (p.175) and the story of how they dominated the area but were then wiped out by the diseases brought by the Spanish invaders is not only tragic, but also spooky. For Sammy, their long-gone presence still weighs heavily on his mind.

3. Sammy is also haunted by the memory of his great-great-great-grandfather, Chief Thlocklo Tustenuggee, tricked into signing a treaty with the white man then thrown into prison.

Manifest destiny, otherwise known as screwing native peoples out of their homelands, had been a holy crusade among white people of that era. (p.361)

4. One of these factual callout boxes explains the rise of the casinos and gambling empires which native Americans have built on their reservations to sucker gambling-addicted white folks out of their money (p.357), Many Indians have become very wealthy this way, Sammy describes them as the ‘new Arabs’ in terms of mushroom wealth. Sammy’s uncle Tommy, who we met way back in Hiaasen’s debut novel, is credited with being one of the architects of the Seminole nation’s rise to enormous wealth.

Once written off as a ragged band of heathens, the Seminole Nation grew into a formidable corporate power with its own brigade of lawyers and lobbyists. (p.357)

5. On a personal level, Gillian and Sammy spend a lot of time together and their conversation repeatedly rotates around the issue of ‘race’, her teasing him about having white girlfriends, he very self-conscious of his half-white heritage, determined not to submit to what his uncle calls white pussy’. Whenever we enter Sammy’s storyline, the word ‘white’ recurs almost continually, and white people don’t come out well in Sammy’s worldview:

The first white person to betray Sammy Tigertail had been his stepmother… The second white person to betray him had been Cindy, his ex-girlfriend… (p.356)

The book bangs on, again and again, that you can’t trust white people and you can’t trust men, impeccably woke anti-men and anti-white attitudes but, as so often, expressed, without a shred of irony, by a…er… white man.

Nature Girl can may be considered Hiaasen’s novel about native Americans (in Florida), their history and current plight (Sammy’s mixed-blood heritage symbolises the way they’re caught between dying notions of their old culture and their full absorption into the capitalist white world) in maybe the same way that Lucky You is his novel about black people, with its feisty black heroine JoLayne and its pair of repellent white supremacists, Bode Gazzer and Chub, whose beliefs, values and temperaments are systematically ripped to shreds. (Note, again, the same tendency of the characterisations in Lucky You: black woman clever and good; white men very bad and very stupid.)

I’m not criticising or damning Hiaasen for the way the themes of race and gender run very loud through his novels. I’m just pointing out how their prominence reflects how dominant they have become in an American society which, over the period he’s been writing in (1986 to the present), he himself is the first to point out has become utterly dysfunctional through the triumph of greed and selfishness, the disappearance of manners and kindness.

In my opinion the two phenomena are connected, and represent twin aspects of a culture and society becoming ever-more putrid. Funny reading about it, but I wouldn’t want to live there, amid the ever-increasing inequality, violence and cultural disintegration.

Highlights of the rest of the novel

Boyd and Eugenie fly down to Florida and catch a cab to the address on the holiday brochure Honey has knocked up and mailed them. You can imagine that they are vastly disillusioned to arrive at Honey’s badly painted trashy trailer and discover that this is the destination of their supposed dream holiday. Eugenie is all for turning round and going straight back to the airport but a) it is now late at night b) it is raining c) Boyd is a cheapskate and despite the obvious crappiness of the situation, insists that they accept Honey’s ‘welcome’ and put up for the night in the trailer’s none -too-clean double bed.

Meanwhile, the private investigator Dealey had been on the same flight as Boyd and Eugenie and trailed them to this trailer park. He is loitering outside Honey’s trailer and is just peeking through a window, when he is surprised from behind by a guy with a shotgun. It turns out to be Mr Piejack from the fish market. He’s in bad shape. Not only did Honey hit him in the nuts with a crab-cracking hammer, but a day later some Latinos turned up and forced Piejack’s hand into a basket of angry live crabs. His screams brought colleagues and then paramedics who hammer the crabs off his fingers, but many of them are clinging onto his fingers. I.e. the fingers of his right hand are all severed. Paramedics rush Piejack to a hospital where an incompetent surgeon sews them back onto the wrong stumps, his thumb being reattached to his little finger stump.

There’s generally one major grotesque incident in a Hiaasen novel and this is it, the case of the wrongly sewn-on fingers. Despite this grotesque mishap, Piejack is more sexually obsessed by Honey than ever (backstory about PIejack, his fishy career and miserable marriage pages 248 to 250). Piejack takes Dealey off at gunpoint…

Next morning, Honey tells Boyd and Eugenie that the next part of the ‘holiday’ is packing some bags and going kayaking along nearby waterways, which Eugenie is rightly suspicious of, but Boyd insists they play along. Truth is Honey doesn’t know exactly where she is going and they kayak badly for a few hours till they arrive at an island in the middle of nowhere.

Little are they to know that this is the exact same island where Sammy Tigertail has brought irritating Gillian, who won’t stop talking, who keeps teasing Sammy about her whiteness, who keeps provoking him with her semi-nudity and asking why he won’t ‘bone’ her.

So that’s two of the groups of characters on the island. The third set consist of the sex-obsessed Piejack and Dealey. Having kept him under guard all night, next morning Pijack forces Dealey to accompany him as they drive to a boat hire place, rent a powerboat and set off to follow Honey and her two luckless kayakers to the unknown island.

Piejack and Dealey are able pick them up using binoculars, then trail them at a distance so as not to be seen and moor their boat on the other side of the island. Things quickly go wrong when Piejack, in the middle of threatening Dealey, is whacked from behind by Sammy, falling into a dense cactus patch. Sammy thinks he’s killed Piejack (damn! the second white man he’s killed in just a few days!) and takes Dealey off with him, poor Dealey, as one character comments, maybe the only person in history to be kidnapped twice in one day!

But that’s not all. The fourth component is Honey’s ex-husband Perry Skinner, the crab fisherman. That morning he spotted Piejack driving with a stranger through the streets of Everglade City (the tiny rural community where Honey and Perry live), realises something is up, quickly picks up his son, and takes out his crabbing boat to pursue Piejack and Dealey in their boat, at a safe distance.

And thus the narrative brings all four sets of characters – Sammy and Gillian; Honey, Boyd and Eugenie; Piejack and Dealey; Perry and his son – to the same remote, mosquito-infested island, with what blurb writers would call ‘hilarious consequences’.

What ensues is almost textbook farce, with a complex series of comings and goings, encounters, violence, threats, running away, and the couples splitting up and partnering off with someone from another pair, comic misunderstandings and confrontations.

It could almost be performed onstage as a Feydeau farce, set in one big room with multiple doors, and characters entering in various combinations, having comical mishaps before exiting and another little set of characters entering to perform their comic scene. The fact that it’s set on an island with four sets of characters and a lot of rueful comedy reminded me a little of The Tempest.

Among a welter of incidents, Boyd, the soulless lunkhead, manages to tazer his own penis. (He thinks it’s a gun and shoves it down his pants like a tough guy only for it to go off accidentally. Men, eh?)

At one point Sammy is confronted in the middle of the day with dead Mr Wilson’s spirit, whining about being stuck in the cold water and eaten by sharks. To get rid of it Sammy shoots his rifle but the bullet ricochets off a tree and hits Dealey, shattering his shoulder. He collapses, loses consciousness, the women tend him but he’s in a poor way.

In other scenes, Gillian wears Sammy down with her incessant chatter till he gives up and agrees to have sex with her, which mainly involves her vigorously riding his erection while continuing her endless chatter.

Boyd demonstrates in a hundred ways what a selfish, useless, spineless, soulless goon he is. Honey had arranged this whole scam in order to get Boyd into the back of beyond and then deliver a lecture about his bad morals and behaviour re. his rude telesales phone call to her which is where the entire narrative began.

And yet, when it comes to it, nothing works. As dawn rises the day after they came to the island, Honey marvels at the change in the quality of the light, the calmness of the water, the beauty of a flight of egrets across the sky. Boyd doesn’t get it, and announces he needs to have a crap.

The man was unreachable, a dry hole. For such a lunkhead there could be no awakening, no rebirth of wonderment. (p.296)

On one level the novel is simply about a mentally ill woman who tries to reform a soulless dolt and fails, leaving her feeling ‘foolhardy and defeated, the queen of lost causes’ (p.297). (By the way, Honey appears to be the ‘nature girl’ of the title.)

On day one on the island Sammy had snuck up on Piejack while the latter was pointing his shotgun at Dealey and whacked him real hard. Piejack was out for a long time, finally came to and crawled off to hide in a cistern tank where he fell on cactus, managing to get covered in prickles. Also a colony of fire ants discovers the juicy food of his recently transplanted fingers under the surgical gauze.

Thus he awakes on the second day on the island looking like a drooling, demented walking puffer fish ‘benumbed by the derangement of lust’ (p.302). He has metamorphosed into the Grotesque Figure who can be found in most of Hiaasen’s novels (cf Chemo, Tool etc al.) Piejack stumbles across Honey alone in her camp and kidnaps her, fitting a noose round her neck and dragging her off into the undergrowth.

Meanwhile, a coast guard helicopter arrives. Dealey had phoned for it with the last power in his cell phone.

Perry Skinner, who, despite his former prison sentence, emerges as the strong, manly hero of the book, doesn’t want to leave the island till he’s found his ex-wife, Honey, who he still loves. On the other hand he’s sort of in charge of the good guys and knows that Dealey is badly wounded by Sammy’s shot to his shoulder and so needs to be choppered out.

So he and Gillian and Sammy put Dealey’s half-conscious body into one of the brightly coloured kayaks and push it out into the main body of water where the coastguard quickly see it. Unfortunately, as the chopper hovers low, Dealey tries to stand up to signal to it and promptly capsizes the kayak, flailing in the water and likely to drown. So Gillian quickly strips to her mesh panties (for the umpteenth time) and swims out to save him. So she and Dealey are winched to safety by the coastguard chopper which flies away. Shame. Sammy was just starting to like her.

In another part of the island, Eugenie had been tending Skinner’s son, Fry, who is only 12 and managed to hit a truck while skateboarding before his dad collected him and brought him on this wild goose chase to some remote island in the Everglades.

Here, Fry has begun to suffer symptoms of concussion and gotten separated from his dad (I told you it’s a labyrinthine series of people getting split up, lost, encountering people from the other groups, with or without guns).

Fry has just fainted and been discovered by Eugenie, who is tending him when they both hear the Coast Guard chopper. Fry tells her not to worry about him and go and so, reluctantly, Eugenie runs off in the direction of the creek where the Coast Guard has spotted Dealey flailing round his kayak and Gillian swimming out to save him.

The narrative then cuts away to a factual account of the precise make and number of Coast Guard patrol, and explains how it had been called to the island after Dealey rang Lily Shreave (his client, remember; the one who sent him to get photos of Boyd actually penetrating Eugenie), describes how he has been kidnapped and brought to some godforsaken island in the ‘Glades. Lily rang the coastguard. Hence the helicopter.

Anyway, the net result is that by page 320 Eugenie, Gillian and Dealey have been choppered back to civilisation.

Leaving Sammy Tigertail and Perry Skinner and the latter’s ill son, Fry, looking for the gruesomely maimed pervert Piejack and Honey, who he’s kidnapped and is leading around on a leash, with the cowardly Boyd blundering around as a kind of wild card.

There is no subtlety about the characterisation. The narrator describes Boyd as a drooling moron, explaining to the reader at factual length what a GPS tracker is and why Boyd had to be an imbecile not to realise what it was and to mistake it for a radio (p.322). And he tazered his own penis.

Sorry apologies for men

Hiaasen’s novels usually have a central topic which is the butt of his factual exposures and satirical flaying. About half way through this book I began to wonder whether the subject being flayed in this one is men and masculinity. Boyd the useless creep. Piejack the pervert. Dealey the craven investigator. The narrative marshals a long list of evidence against men.

Eugenie remembers her former lover, Van Bonneville, who was useless the one and only time they had sex, and then didn’t get any better in the sack after she discovered he had murdered his wife.

We get a vivid scene where Eugenie tries to seduce Boyd’s replacement at the telesales centre, Sacco, who turns out to be a knock-kneed obsessive.

The text keeps up a steady barrage of criticism of the entire male gender, either via the narrator or the no-holds-barred comments of all the female characters:

Honey’s outlook on men was sinking to a point of abject revulsion. The day was new, and yet already she’d been ridiculed by a soulless twit and kidnapped by a reeking pervert. (p.304)

‘Don’t ever change,’ [Eugenie tells Fry]. ‘By that I mean don’t grow up to be a jerkoff like ninety percent of the men I meet.’
‘Mom always tells me the same thing, except she says it’s more like ninety-five.’ (p.307)

‘Don’t be a typical dumb-ass male and get yourself lost in the woods.’ (p.318)

Even the natural world is roped in to make the point. When Fry points out two chameleons on a branch to Eugenie he explains that the one puffing out its chest and doing what look like little press-ups is the male doing a mating dance.

‘That’s the male,’ said Fry. ‘He’s showin’ off.’
‘Go figure,’ said Eugenie. (p.316)

I wonder if an author wrote a book in which characters said 95% of the black people they met were jerkoffs, black people show off all the time, one character told another not to be a typical dumb-ass black, and so on – I wonder whether sweeping abuse and insults about blacks or Jews or Muslims would be seen as quite so funny as sweeping insults and abuse of white men.

When the narrative stops to reflect on the five men Honey dated after divorcing Perry, it’s really just another opportunity to give examples of piss-poor men, namely:

Dale Rozelle, ‘a duplicitous shithead’, who lies about being a member of the Sierra Club in order to get into Honey’s pants (or get her to ‘give up the velvet’), slaps his own bum and makes barnyard noises during sex (now there’s something I must try out :)).
Dr Tyler Teehorn, her son’s orthodontist, who she gives a ‘mercy fuck’ after his wife left him, but who then clings to her like a mollusc and is a suffocating bore.

When the Coast Guard helicopter appears, Hiaasen makes a joke of the way the routine rescue of a fat white guy in a kayak is transformed when the crew see a nubile woman strip virtually naked (down to just her mesh panties, for it is Gillian) and another hottie waving brightly coloured underwear at them (Eugenie). These sights invigorate the male rescuers, lending them, in the sardonic tones of the narrator, ‘unbreakable focus and esprit de corps‘ (p.323).

Gillian went on, ‘Ethan doesn’t really care about me. It’s just the sex.’
‘Well, he’s a boy.’
‘Why are they all like that?’ (p.364)

Men, eh. Do anything for the promise of poon. Pathetic. In the last hundred pages I collected adjectives used to describe men: lame (345) sonofabitches (351) bores (325), shitheads (324), schmucks, bumblefucks (343), sexual harassers (344), sex fiends (347), toads (352), dumb-ass drooling morons (322), brutish criminals (350) and rancid buckets of scum (347).

Admittedly most of this abuse is targeted at Piejack, the gangrenous, drug-addled, sex-obsessed stalker, but then he was invented precisely to be the butt of this torrent of anti-male abuse. And is unsubtly contrasted with the sterling qualities of the three female leads: confident knows-what-she-wants Gillian; tall, sexy Eugenie; and Honey, the nature girl who wanted to reform slimy Boyd Shreaver, who is a super-devoted loving mother to young Fry, and is ‘tough and outspoken and damn near fearless’ (p.355). Shit men, heroic women.

It’s a tiny comic detail when the Coast Guard tells Gillian that the single most common name men gave their dinghies and boats in Florida is Wet Dream (p.338). Ha ha. Men and their dicks and their dumb-ass sense of humour, eh.

One last thought: it isn’t a new theme for Hiaasen. Reviewing my notes on Strip Tease, I see that that novel, also, as you’d expect from a text all about the ‘erotic dancing’ industry, was crammed full of dismissive comments about men and their desperation for pussy.

‘Men will try anything,’ Monique Jr said, sceptically. ‘Anything for pussy.’ (Strip Tease, page 16)
It taught Erin one of life’s great lessons: an attractive woman could get whatever she wanted, because men are so laughably weak. They would do anything for even the distant promise of sex. (p.26)
Erin was constantly reminded of the ridiculous power of sex; routine female nakedness reduced some men to stammering, clammy-fingered fools. (p.87)

Is this general statement true of men in the real world? Is it true for all men even just in Carl Hiaasen’s novels? Or is it a kind of satirical trope, the kind of predictable, fixed parameter which then enables savage satire to be written, alongside other generalisations such as all white people are racist, all politicians are corrupt, all property developers are evil, and so on.

In other words they are conventions of the genre. Certainly having read a dozen or so Restoration comedies a while ago, and then a set of Ben Jonson’s citizen comedies, sex and, more precisely, the sex-obsession of some men has always been a theme of comedy, and is cranked up to the max in the over-driven form of comedy which is farce.

The climax – Skinner kills Piejack

The climax of the novel comes when Skinner and Sammy come into a beach clearing to discover lurid, ill Piejack threatening Honey with the shotgun and ordering her to strip. Honey’s son, Fry, who got separated from his dad some time back, has snuck up behind Piejack and hits him with a plank but Piejack recovers and points the shotgun at both Fry and Honey.

Seeing this from the trees, Skinner goes running forward but Piejack shoots him in the knee, forcing him to flop to the sand. That just leaves Sammy, still standing on the edge of the clearing, witness to the entire scene, who has to make a choice. In his head he hears his wise uncle saying this is all white people craziness and that he should walk away, and Piejack points the gun at him and tells him to do just that.

Now, among his personal belongings which his half-brother Lee had brought him to take into the boondocks right at the start of the story, was a lovely Gibson guitar (which he can’t actually play, although Gillian turns out to be able to play it).

Now Sammy sees the guitar has gotten tossed to one side of the beach and politely asks Piejack if he can retrieve it. He walks across with Piejack keeping the shotgun aimed at him, picks up the guitar walks a few paces but then, unexpectedly, hands it to Skinner, still on his knees. Skinner labours to his feet, staggers forward and, as Piejack shoots him, brings the guitar down like an axe and cleaves Piejack’s skull in two.

Postscript

So that’s the end of the jeopardy which had been driving the plot for the previous 100 pages. Now there’s just tying up the loose ends.

We are told Piejack’s last shot blew away part of Skinner’s hip and he is bleeding badly. Honey and Fry carry him to Piejack’s hire boat and she charts a course back to the dock at Everglades City and tells Fry to run as fast as the wind to get help and call an ambulance.

Sammy Tigertail loads Piejack’s corpse into a different boat and chugs back to the canal where he sank the body of Jeter Wilson. He does the same to Piejack’s corpse, stringing it with weights and dumping it in the same deep underwater hole. Almost immediately he starts seeing Jeter Wilson’s death spirit appearing to him, complaining about his new companion.

All this leaves flabby Boyd the coward still on the island. He had climbed up a huge poinciana tree to escape from the general mayhem and from up there he’d tried to the Coast Guard helicopter, though the pilots were, as Hiaasen emphasises, totally entranced when they saw the prospect of picking up not one but two scantily clad women.

When he hears the two shots Piejack fires, Boyd heads off in the opposite direction, eventually hitting another beach and discovering an untended canoe. He quickly sets off but is, of course, useless at paddling, plus night is falling.

In the middle of the night he hears a boat passing nearby and shines a small torch he has, but it is only Sammy in a powerboat towing the body of Piejack and the rest of the canoes, and he flips Boyd the bird, and putters off, leaving Boyd literally all at sea.

The First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God

Then there is a weird comic afterlude. Boyd comes to a beach and finds himself landing on another island. Much earlier in the story Perry and Fry, in search of Honey, had briefly landed on this island and discovered it was being used as a retreat by a small group of revivalist Christians, to be precise, five members of the First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God wearing only white gowns (p.371).

It had already been hinted that these folk are not as pure as they claim to be and, sure enough, Boyd staggers out of his canoe onto the beach and interrupts the Assembly’s leader, Brother Manual, gripping Sister Shirelle by the hips and boning her enthusiastically from behind. Hiaasen points out that Sister Shirelle’s formidable and unbound breasts are jouncing in tandem, which is good to know.

There follows an unexpected passage of broad, farcical satire, as Manuel and Shirelle hurriedly make themselves decent and greet Boyd (almost naked, with hands bloodied from climbing up then back down the big poinciana tree) as the Promised One and the Messiah. For a few days they devout Bible bashers worship, feed and water him. But Boyd turns out to be an obnoxious whiner and even the most deluded devotees quickly lose faith. The congregation depart the island leaving him with a few rations but no canoe.

Boyd is leaning back against the big cross the Assembly had erected on the beach in bleak despair when a huge wild eagle lands on its top and takes a big dump on him. Comedy.

He runs into the sea to wash himself and makes such a racket and commotion that he is spotted and picked up by Coastal Rangers out on patrol, returned to civilisation, hosed down, dressed in charity clothes.

Boyd‘s storyline comes to a savagely farcical conclusion when, thus tidied up, he is enjoying a few beers in a local bar when he overhears some tourists from up north fantasising about moving to the Sunshine State. Boyd smoothly introduces himself as the agent for some (totally fictional) prime beachfront properties and realises with a flash that this is the role which suits his worthless, soulless, slimeball character – he will be an estate agent in Florida!

Eugenie, Sammy and Skinner

Talking of agents, Eugenie quits her job in telesales and presents herself at the office of private investigator Dealey, now much restored after an operation to repair his shot-up shoulder.

Eugenie suggests that, after all the fuss and bother, they send Boyd’s wife, Lily, not a video of Boyd and herself boning, but a video she shot during the brief time she spent with young Fry, a sequence of two chameleons copulating on a tree branch. (Right till the end of this book, ‘boning’ in one form or another is the central subject.) Impressed by her confidence, sales skills and insights into relationships, Dealey decides to take her on as a partner in his detective agency.

Sammy finds peace on another island. He had recovered some parts of the smashed Gibson guitar after it was used to brain Piejack, and starts whittling a new body from treewood. He fishes, cooks and eats, lies under the huge sprawl of night-time stars. The same great eagle which shat on Boyd comes and roosts in the trees every evening. Sammy begins to think of him as a guardian spirit. Slowly, we get the sense of him becoming attuned to the wilderness and the simple life of his ancestors. A fairly happy ending.

And Skinner and Honey get back together. Her jaw is clamped shut while it heals from an almighty whack Piejack gave it back on the island which broke it, and Skinner is walking with a cane while his new artificial hip beds in, so they decided to move back in together and look after each other.

Twelve-and-a-half-year-old Fry is anxious that they’ll just end up arguing and splitting up again. But the novel ends with a symbolic scene. Once again Fry and Honey are sitting at dinner (with Skinner) when the phone rings. Honey gets irate about dinner being interrupted, just as she did at the very start of the novel.

However, both Fry and Skinner tell her to let it ring, let it go. It’s hard for such an obsessive, but Honey takes their advice and eventually it stops. People don’t really change, but they can learn new tricks. The book ends with the happy family joking together over dinner.

Construction

It should be obvious from this detailed summary that this novel, like all Hiaasen’s novels, is wonderfully constructed, the multiple storylines and the complex backstories of its large-ish cast of characters beautifully dovetailed and woven together by a master carpenter. He is an absolute master of narrative construction, it’s one of the most impressive things about his books.

More sex than previously

It might just be me, but it seemed to me that sex – almost pornographically explicit imaginings of naked pussies and willies, and jokey references to cocks and fannies and thongs and bras and breasts and vibrators – is far more present in this novel than any of the previous ones.

‘I’d blow Dick Cheney for a Corona,’ she said. (p.225)

We are casually told Eugenie loves straddling Boyd’s cock and was, indeed, starting to do the same to his replacement, Sacco, when the front door rings. Lily tries repeatedly to provoke Boyd into having sex with her, wearing thongs, straddling him, slipping under the table at a restaurant, unzipping his flies and starting to suck his cock. Later in the story, they haven’t been together long before irritating Gillian (see below) is presenting herself to Sammy Tigertail in ‘mesh panties and a white bikini top’ (p.163) to arouse him.

‘White pussy is bad medicine.’ (Tommy Tigertail, p.142)

All three of the women in the book – Honey, Eugenie and Gillian – are not only described as attractive:

‘Sammy Tigertail had never seen a woman so lovely’ as Honey (p.290)
when the Coast Guard appear at the end of the story it is to rescue ‘two extremely attractive female evacuees’ (p.323)
Honey is ‘athletically built’ (p.358)

But are impressively sexually active. They are tall and shapely, with nice boobs (Eugenie has ‘outstanding breasts’, in Fry’s opinion, p.316), are continually slipping into thongs and mesh panties, offering blowjobs at the drop of a hat.

I know these are comic, escapist poolside paperbacks, but there does seem to be a more than usually amount of male wish fulfilment in this one.

Eugenie chuckled tiredly. ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to get off this island, and that includes hand jobs, blow jobs, butt jobs, even singin’ opera stark naked.’ (p.279)

When Sammy stumbles late at night into the little camp Honey, Eugenie and Boyd have made, he accidentally wakens Eugenie, who begs him for water, since they’re all thirsty. And she immediately offers to anything – ‘I’ll do whatever you want. And I mean whatever‘. She is, after all, very proud of her metal tongue stud and the pleasure it gives the men she fellates.

I suppose Eugenie leaping immediately to offer sex at every opportunity is meant to be a comic part of her over-sexed character. But they’re all obsessed with sex, Piejack and Boyd and Lily, who is obsessed with seeing photos of her husband penetrating another woman, and Gillian uses every opportunity to propose sex to her handsome half-Indian abductor:

‘Meanwhile, Big Chief Thlocko, let me show you what my people call a “quickie”.’ (p.310)

Even the comic details have a more than usually sexual tinge: for example, part of Boyd’s general uselessness is the way he once had a domestic accident in such a way as to straddle a cactus and get his entire groin studded with painful cactus needles (p.341).

When they get to Dismal Island Boyd brandishes the implement he found under Honey’s bed and which he takes to be a gun, swirling it round his hand before sticking it back in his pants, like a tough guy with a revolver, only for it to jolt him with a phenomenal electric shock because it was not a gun but a taser; leaving him with ‘a half-barbecued cock’ (p.239).

We are told that the PI Dealey has only ever been subject to violence once in his career and, you could imagine thousands of forms this could take, but it is entirely in line with the book’s focus on sex that this attack took the shape of the woman he was illicitly photographing as part of a snooping job, spotting him and throwing her nine inch vibrator at him. (It hit him directly in the throat and he couldn’t speak for three weeks, p.196.)

‘Damn, boy, you could be quite the rock star… All the free poon and dope you can stand.’ (p.226)

When Boyd and Eugenie are paddling a two-person canoe, Boyd is so useless that Eugenie wants him to stop altogether. There are many ways she could do this, starting with using the gift of speech. Instead, it’s very much in line with the soft porn vibe of the book, that she prefers to express this wish by taking off her halter top so as to be topless. This appearance of her boobs distracts Boyd so much that he stops paddling alright, but it also… continues the tone of titillation which colours the whole text.

When Skinner and Fry come ashore on a remote island attracted by a fire on the beach, they discover it is in fact a small group of Christian zealots holding an unorthodox act of worship. The point is the narrator draws our attention to the fact that the prettiest one, Shirelle is dancing and gyrating without a bra… and when the leader of the congregation follows them to give them a leaflet, Skinner angrily confronts him with the shrewd guess that he has ‘balled’ Sister Shirelle, that she has kneeled down and worshipped him in a very special way (p.258). And, as we’ve seen, at the end of the book Boyd interrupts the group’s leader in the act of energetically boning Shirelle from behind. Of the religious devotee Sister Shirelle, not only do we learn that her big breasts jounce joyfully around but that, in Brother Manuel’s opinion, she would ‘go down on Judas Iscariot if he was a hottie’ (p.385).

And the entire character of Mr Piejack, the lecherous manager of the fish market who fires Honey after he grabs her breast as she’s placing fresh wahoo steaks on display, such that she turns round and hammers in the nuts (p.232), he is nothing more than sexual obsession personified. He goes to ridiculous lengths to try and see Honey nude and/or touch her, he is a slavering stalker, who’s played for laughs, but is also one more strand of the novel’s sex-obsession. When he abducts Honey, he says he’ll only turn her loose if she promises to ‘give up the velvet’ in a particularly creepy and repellent way (p.304).

Eventually, Gillian (the ‘rambunctious college girl in mesh panties’, p.394) wears Sammy down and he gives in to having sex with her, which is described as her boisterously riding him. That’s the sex position of choice in Hiaasen’s novels, in which all the female characters are depicted as modern, liberated and active, rather than passive recipients.

What stood out in this particular description is the way Hiaasen goes out of his way to describe the way Gillian clenches her cervical muscle around Sammy’s cock, describing it not once but twice (p.287) – just that bit more pornographic detail than we’ve had in the previous novels.

Boyd lies to his wife that his work are sending him to a special clinic in Florida to be cured of his aphenphosmphobia and she pretends to go along with the story, all the while knowing she’s sending Dealey the private dick to photograph his penetration of his mistress. This is the precise term that is used, repeatedly, on pages 112, 113, 115, 147. Lily rings up Dealey to check: ‘Penetration? You got penetration?’, p.242.) Lily wants an unambiguous photo of her husband’s cock entering his mistress’s vulva. If Dealey is unsure how to get the shot, Lily tells Dealey to hire some porn and study the technique and the angles. Which he does and which the novels gives us descriptions of.

I think I know that lots of people are sex mad. It’s not such a novel or informative theme as the bass fishing in Double Whammy or the agricultural pollution in Skinny Dip or the plastic surgery industry in Skin Tight or the extended satire on tacky theme parks in Native Tongue or the detailed explanations of corrupt property development in Sick Puppy. What industry or sector is being satirised here? Telesales, maybe, a bit, at the start. But mostly it’s sex-obsessed creepy men.

A critic might say that all this titillation is here to make up for a slight lack of something else, the lack of a really meaty political or social subject.

Words for sex

Small thing but I was struck by the way lots of characters use the word ‘bone’ for the f word. ‘He just wanted to bone me’, ‘Has he boned her yet?’, ‘She’s paying you twenty-five grand to tape her old man boning some bimbo?’ (p.241) etc. Gillian calls Sammy ‘a serious blue-eyed Bone Machine’ (p.316). Presumably that’s why an erection is referred to as a ‘boner’, because it’s what men use for ‘boning’.

Other synonyms include the more traditional ‘ball’ (‘so I’d ball him’); ‘sleep with’, or just plain ‘do’.

‘I’m getting a complex,’ she said; ‘why aren’t you trying to do me?’ (p.245)

Whatever word is used, ‘boning’ or characters obsessing about ‘boning’, is a much more central theme to the novel than in previous ones. It’s all Gillian or Eugenie or Lily or Piejack or Boyd seem to think about.

Dad rock

Having established in previous novels that the narrator – or at least all his sympathetic characters – are fans of 1970s Adult-Oriented Rockers such as Neil Young and the Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival, Hiaasen keeps up the Dad Rock ambience with references throughout this novel to more Dad Rock classics such as The Eagles (p.163), James Taylor (p.225), The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix (p.227), the Rolling Stones (p.245), Johnny Cash (p.266), the Allmann Brothers (p.312), Kiss (p.316), Neil Young again (p.393). Is it a deliberate marketing ploy, to appeal to boomer rock fans?

Having mulled it over, I think the recurring references to Dad Rock make up one of the 3 or 4 components of Hiaasen’s Good Place. Almost all Hiaasen’s energy goes into eviscerating the forces of evil and corruption at very great length, with often gruesome and violent consequences.

What is there to balance against a world of corruption and lies? Well, I think there is a handful of good things in Hiaasen’s world and good ole rock and roll is one of them. The epitome of Good is the image of the strong, competent, decent guy, Mick Stranahan (who features in Skin Tight and Skinny Dip) alone on his remote house built on stilts out in Biscayne Bay, quietly fishing with a loyal dog by his side and Neil Young on the cassette player as the dawn comes up over the ocean. Good times. Simple down-home values. Beautiful unspoilt scenery. Quiet fishing. Loyal dog. Cool sounds. Maybe light up a half-smoked doobie. Life is sweet. It is still possible to get away from all the crap, and the old-time music which recurs throughout the books are markers for that.

J.B.

Obligatory James Bond reference, p.303.

Credit

Nature Girl by Carl Hiaasen was published by Bantam Press in 2006. All references are to the 2007 Black Swan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

Tourist Season (1986)
Double Whammy (1987)
Skin Tight (1989)
Native Tongue (1991)
Strip Tease (1993)
Stormy Weather (1995)
Lucky You (1997)
Sick Puppy (2000)
Basket Case (2002)
Skinny Dip (2004)
Nature Girl (2006)
Star Island (2010)
Bad Monkey (2013)
Razor Girl (2016)
Squeeze Me (2020)

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by Simon on June 9, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Crime, Novel, Thriller

Tagged aphenphosmphobia, Ben Jonson, Big Cypress, bipolar, Boyd Shreave, Brother Manuel, Carl Hiaasen, Chad McQueen, Charles Perrone, dad rock, Dale Rozelle, Dealey, Dismal Key, Dr Tyler Teehorn, Enron, Eugenie Fonda, Everglades, farce, Feydeau, First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God, Florida, Fort Worth, Fry Santana, Gibson guitar, Gillian St Croix, Honey Santana, Jean Leigh Hill, Jeter Wilson, Manifest Destiny, masculinity, mercy fuck, Mick Stranahan, Mr Louis Piejack, native Americans, Nature Girl, Neil Young, Perry Skinner, pornography, race, Red Hammernut, Relentless Inc, Restoration comedy, Richard Santana, Sacco, Sammy Tigertail, Seminole, Seminole Indians, Seminole Nation, sex, Simpsons, Sister Shirelle, South Florida, Strip Tease, Texas, the tempest, Thlocklo Tustenuggee, Tommy Tigertail, Tourist Season, Van Bonneville

Posted by Simon on June 9, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/06/09/nature-girl-carl-hiaasen/

Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen (2002)

The pros and cons of a first person narrator

Well, this is an oddity, a Carl Hiaasen novel told in the first person. His previous eight comedy crime novels were all told in the voice of a gung-ho, whip-smart, third-person narrator. This one is a departure and an experiment and I didn’t like it nearly as much.

At a stroke it makes you realise a big part of the appeal of Hiaasen’s novels is their relatively large cast of the characters, all engaged on half a dozen different storylines, and a lot of the fun and dynamic comes from the way a third-person narrator can cut at will from one scene and storyline to another. This has two obvious results: 1. it means there’s constant change and variety, giving the reader a sense of dynamism and energy; and 2. it means the scenes he cuts to can be at their best and juiciest moments; the less interesting lead-up to them, or aftermath of them, can be dealt with by an overarching narrator with a few sentences of explanation.

By contrast 1. it’s quite surprising to realise just how boring it is to be trapped in the consciousness of one first-person narrator. Instead of flitting from scene and encountering all manner of outrageous characters and improbable events, you are confined to just the one person’s point of view. 2. Being stuck with one person means that, almost by definition, only so much can plausibly happen.

Not only do you quickly get fed up of that person’s voice and restless at being confined to just the one point of view, but, in terms of ‘events’, a lot less happen in a first-person narrative, because the person you’re following only has so many hours in the day, can only be in one place at a time, can only be drinking in one bar, chatting to a girl in his flat, driving his car or sitting at work, at any one moment. Whereas an omniscient narrator can describe half a dozen characters all doing completely different things at any given point in time.

Therefore an author who chooses to tell their story from a first-person narrator’s point of view has to work quite hard to overcome these built-in obstacles – especially if, like Hiaasen, their previous novels have been spectacularly effective examples of how to create multi-character, multi-scene narratives.

Thinking about it, a first-person narrative must compensate for the loss of narrative breadth with an increase of narrative depth. In other words, a first-person narrative needs more psychological interest: if you’re going to be stuck inside one person’s head for 400 pages, it better be a pretty interesting head.

Hiaasen works hard at it but the way he does so graphically exposes his weakness as a writer, because he doesn’t really do psychological depth; what he tends to do instead is psychological quirks and kinks, and that’s precisely what is on florid display here.

Hiaasen gives his narrator a number of quirks and hangups and obsessions (see below) which are very entertaining, but they are no replacement for the greater depth of psychological complexity the reader is used to from first person accounts.

And he makes another big formal decision which is to write the whole thing in the present tense, an obvious bid to give the narrative more immediacy, and yet… as a result of this one central decision (to be a first-person narrative) Basket Case lacks the panoramic vistas, the range of background fact, the variety of incident and the fast pace of his other novels.

That said, it’s still a Carl Hiaasen novel, he writes his usual super-snappy description and dialogue, and his story features the usual variety of scumbags and amoral users, with a host of other characters, large and small and consistently diverting. So it’s still a gripping, easy and very entertaining read. He is a very skillful writer, an arranger of complex plots, an inventor of all manner of interesting characters, a writer of snappy descriptions and pithy dialogue. It’s a very good book. Just not as good as the others.

Jack Tagger

Jack Tagger Junior is a journalist (p.20). He works for the Union-Register newspaper. He’s 46 (p.39) and will turn 47 in a week (p.200). He’s worked for a number of papers in his time, and came to the Union-Register to work on the news desk. But then the Union-Register was sold by its owner, Macarthur Polk, to the Maggad-Feist Publishing Group for $47 million (p.69), and in the press conference to announce the deal, Tagger was foolish enough to insult the new CEO, smooth yuppie Race Maggad III (‘a money-grubbing yupster twit,’ p.214), on the record, in front of numerous TV cameras (p.70).

He didn’t get fired, Maggad was too canny of public relations to cause a fuss. Instead Jack was relegated to the obituary department, stripped of all investigative powers and reduced to churning out an obituary a day, under the watchful eye of the relatively inexperienced editor, Emma Cole (p.235), aged just 27, who he despises for her callow youth. (It is, as soon as you process this, almost inevitable that they end up having an affair.)

One of the quirks Hiaasen gives Tagger is that he is obsessed with the ages the famous have died at. Whoever he meets, he asks their age and instantly knows the names of the great and the good who died at that age: Bob Marley and F. Scott Fitzgerald (dead aged 44), Franz Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe (40) and, from his own age group, George Orwell, John F. Kennedy and Oscar Wilde, all died aged 46 (p.222).

Over and above this oddity, Hiaasen gives Jack a neurosis about the age his birth father died at, which he doesn’t know because his dad walked out on him and his mum when he was 3. Jack endlessly bugs his mom to know what age his dad died (p.88) and his stepfather died (p.151). He has a morbid obsession that he’s fated to die at the same age.

When you write this obsession out in black and white you can see how contrived it is, but it is made into a massive part of Jack’s character. His ex, Anne Candilla, says part of the reason she left him was because of his endless monologues about age, because of his uneasy the dreams, the midnight monologues, the actuarial charts of people’s life expectancies taped to the fridge (p.223).

Jack has a recurring nightmare of his dad turning up looking like he did in an old photo and the exact same age as Jack now, and then Jack sees himself chasing his dad across a golf course, tackling him to the ground and his dad suddenly being dead and rotting before his eyes. This recurring dream which used to wake him up sweating next to ex-girlfriend Anne, is described on pages 348 to 349.

Jack is not, in other words, a bland and neutral narrator, he is quite a fruit loop himself.

I’m not the most reliable authority on who’s normal and who’s well adjusted. (p.244)

The obsession with the dead helps explain why the last woman he slept with was Karen Penski, mainly because she has a job in the local morgue and overflows with details and anecdotes about the dead, in which Tagger is morbidly interested.

The mysterious death of James Bradley Stomarti

Unlike its lead character, the setup of the novel is fairly straightforward. One day Tagger is commissioned to write the obituary of James Bradley Stomarti, who found fame as the songwriter and singer with the ‘legendary’ rock group ‘Jimmy Stoma and the Slut Puppies’.

Stomarti has just drowned on a scuba dive in the Bahamas, so Tagger digs up the address of his widow, ‘Cleo Rio‘, phones to make an interview, drives over to her condo to interview her, she cries, gives a description of the tragic dive (she was sunning herself on the boat, Jimmy went down with his best friend and band keyboardist, Jay Burns, the pair got separated, Jimmy must have gotten confused and his air run out). And Cleo is the main source of the quotes Tagger then uses for the long, competent obituary which he then writes and is published next day in his newspaper, the Union-Register.

But slowly details crop up which indicate all is not as simple as it seems. The dead man’s sister, Janet Thrush, laughs down the phone when he describes his trip to Cleo, as if the whole thing was a setup. Some backing singers he meets when he attends Stomarti’s funeral tell him Jimmy was working on an album when he died, directly contradicting his widow’s claim that he had severed all ties with the music industry (p.75). A few days later national papers publish obituaries of the singer and the description Cleo gives of the fatal dive are significantly different from what she told Tagger.

The sister, Janet, invites Tagger out to the crematorium to look at Jimmy’s embalmed body ahead of the funeral service and they take the opportunity to unbutton his shirt and discover to their surprise that the body bears no marks of an autopsy (p.46). Why not?

So, it is a murder mystery, with the first-person narrator stumbling into a situation which is much more complex and shady than it first appears and uncovering various dirty secrets. In other words, it is one of Raymond Chandler’s countless descendants.

In the course of his investigations Tagger meets:

As you might expect, sooner or later someone breaks into Jack’s apartment, that always happens in novels, movies, TV programmes like this. He and the masked intruder have an epic fight, rolling round on the floor till Jack grabs the three-foot iguana lizard he keeps in his freezer and so is hard as a rock (obviously, this has its own little backstory) and whacks the (masked) burglar with it, who staggers to his feet and runs off, but not before swiping Tagger’s laptop.

The fight means that Jack appears throughout the rest of the narrative with a ripe collection of cuts and bruises on his face and legs. The narrators of all thrillers since Raymond Chandler are required to be beaten up and appear next morning to their womenfolk who gasp, ‘Jack, you look awful! What happened?’ which is the hero’s cue to play the whole thing down in a bluff, manly way. ‘Shucks, honey, just guy stuff, you wouldn’t understand.’ All these clichés of the genre are present and correct in this novel.

Hiaasen knows he’s channeling Raymond Chandler (just like William Gibson knows he’s channeling James Bond in his novels) so much so that even the characters realise they’re in a Chandler novel. At one point Jack’s friend, Juan, tells him to ‘quit playing [Philip] Marlow’ (p.199) i.e. Raymond Chandler’s famous private eye.

This plot synopsis takes us up to a little over a third the way through this 30-chapter, 400-page-long book. As you can imagine, there continues to be a steady drip-drip of clues throughout the book, but there are also two big recurring themes.

The newspaper business

One is a number of descriptions of the offices of a modern newspaper, at various hours of day and night and over the weekend, about the hard realities of modern newspapers, how they are being gutted by corporate owners more interested in advertising revenue than journalism, and yet what an important social function journalism performs (pages 186, 267, 300, 328, 410, 416).

Obviously these atmospheric descriptions are based on Hiaasen’s own first-hand experience as an award-winning journalist and they are interesting bits of social history or sociological observation in their own right. But they are also an important part of the storyline about the newspaper’s owner handing Tagger a controlling interest in its future (see below). Out of this storyline spin numerous thoughts and reflections about the role and current state of newspaper journalism (as of 2002).

The big snore: rock music in 50-something men’s fiction

The second theme is rock music, not surprisingly as the suspected murder victim is a rock musician.

As anyone who’s read my reviews of William Gibson knows, I went right off his novels as they became increasingly obsessed with crappy-sounding fictional rock bands and the worlds of contemporary fashion and advertising. The older Gibson got, the more he got addicted to making references to Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, managing to turn himself from a really cool pioneer of cyberpunk into an old dad droning on about the Doors and the Rolling Stones.

Well, same here. Hiaasen was turning 50 as this book was published and it displays all the symptoms of Dad Rock. His hero, Jack, still adulates the Rolling Stones as if it’s 1972 not 2002. He admires the district attorney because he’s got a photo of the Stones on his wall signed by Keith Richards (p.310). He has an argument with a woman he’s just stripped to have sex with because he wants to hear the Stones track ‘Ventilator Blues’ off Exile on Main Street (1972) while they have sex and she really doesn’t want to (p.251).

I put a Stones record on the stereo because you can’t go wrong with the Stones. (p.63)

Oh yes you can. By the 1980s and certainly by the 1990s the Rolling Stones were the soundtrack of choice for bankers and oligarchs, driving round in their Porsches, twanging their red braces, blagging $1,000 a seat corporate boxes at stadium concerts, and somehow managing to persuade themselves they were still ‘street fighting men’.

On page 74, when Hiaasen starts describing the different members of his fictional band, the Slut Puppies. When he came to ‘the band’s notoriously moody lead guitarist, Peter P. Proust’, who was stabbed to death a few years earlier, it felt almost identical to the half dozen times I read in William Gibson’s tediously flashy, corporate ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, about the ‘legendary’ rock band The Curfew (which features in all three of those novels) whose ‘legendary’ bassist, Jimmy Carlyle, died of a fatal heroin overdose.

The way these fictional bands consist of the super-traditional fourpiece, and the way one of these four has died an untimely end, is identical in both novels. And both writers were writing about traditional four-piece rock bands in the 2000s, as if rap, rave, drum and bass, hip hop, techno, trance, garage and grunge and grime had never happened. These are the kind of people who iron their jeans, fret about their pensions… but still think they are in some way ‘streetfighting men’.

It’s in this rather tiresome spirit that the title of the book, Basket Case, is itself one of the ‘tracks’ of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies’ hit album, Floating Hospice (p.347).

Music references litter to the book, including mention of Little Richard, Billy Preston, Led Zeppelin and Bob Seger (p.207), James Taylor (p.261), Derek and the Dominoes (p.345), Neil Young (p.380) and Paul McCartney (p.391). Jack’s laptop (which gets stolen) has a Grateful Dead decal on it (p.271), Jack gives his district attorney contact tickets to a Bruce Springsteen gig (p.311).

You could argue that these are all the interests of a fictional character. a) Same difference. Still feels very Dad Rock (or, by now, in 2021, Grandad Rock). b) all Hiaasen’s other heroes have the same taste, popping a Neil Young of Creedance Clearwater Revival song on their record decks as if the past 50 years of music never happened.

The rest of the plot (spoilers)

Jack follows the man he saw at Cleo Rio’s apartment to a nightclub (named Jizz; Hiaasen likes taking the mickey out of nightclubs; the one in Sick Puppy is named Pubes).

Jack approaches him as a journalist and gets his name, Loréal, and the fact that he’s a record producer, claiming to be producing Cleo’s album although, when Jack does some research, he discovers he’s never produced an album in his life.

After being beaten up by the guy who broke into his apartment, Jack makes it round to Emma’s apartment and she puts him up on the sofa, applies ice to his cuts and bruises and, to both their surprise, gives him a soft kiss goodnight. Ah. Shagging on the horizon.

He and Emma then learn that Guy Burns, who he had the fight on the boat with, has been found dead, apparently so drugged up that he laid down behind a garbage truck which promptly rolled over his head. Hmm. It’s possible, but Emma and Jack think it sounds suspicious.

Next day, Jack calls in on young gutter-mouthed Carla and is gutted to hear that her mother (his former lover, Anne) is about to marry a British spy novelist named Derek Grenoble. (Is this some obscure joke about John le Carré? Is it a sly reference to the fact that le Carré’s most famous character, Smiley, is separated from a wife named Anne, for whom he still carries a torch?)

Back in the newspaper office, Tagger has an aggressive confrontation with Race Maggad III, reprising the argument which got him relegated to the obituaries desk.

Jack takes Emma to the Rio Rio boat, now sealed off by police tape following Guy Burns’s death, but they climbed through that and gave the boat a thorough search. Hidden in the fake bottom of an oxygen diving cylinder they discover a portable hard drive. So we all now come round to suspecting that the burglars are after the hard drive.

What is on the hard drive?

My guess is it’s the tapes of James Stomarti’s final album and his ‘wife’, Cleo Rio a) had him bumped off and b) now wants the tapes and has hired goons to get hold of them. Her motive is simple: to dub her voice over Jimmy’s tapes and claim they’re all hers and be a big star and make lots of money. That’s my theory as of half way through the book.

When Tagger takes Emma to meet Janet Thrush he is upset to discover her front door has been forced open and the studio room where she strips for pervey webcammers has been completely trashed. She is nowhere to be seen and there’s a pool of dried blood on the front carpet. They call 911 then leave quickly, but both are traumatised.

Tagger meets with Polk’s lawyer, Charles Chickle (p.229) who confirms what Polk told him in the hospital, namely that he hates Race Maggad III even worse than Tagger does and, having heard that Tagger publicly insulted him, has decided to make Tagger administrator of the shares he still owns in the Register’s parent company. Tagger’s sole job will be not to sell them to Maggad but to stymie everything the Maggad-run board proposes, and to generally piss Maggad off for the rest of his life. For this task, he will be paid $100,000 a year. Tagger is amazed at the offer.

Juan takes Tagger to meet a young 12-year-old black kid computer whizzkid named Dominic Dominguez who opens up the hard drive and, lo and behold, it is music, it’s a whole load of studio recordings, each instrument with a separate track, some of them final mixes, some still being assembled (chapter 12).

Emma Cole drops by with her toothbrush. She’s decided she wants sex. What a woman wants, a woman gets. So they have sex. In fact they have sex three times through the course of the evening and early hours. Life is great in novels. They are now an investigative team and an item.

Next thing we know Jack’n’Emma learn that the Slut Puppies bassist, Tito Negraponte has been shot, though not fatally, at his Los Angeles home.

‘Somebody’s killing off the Slut Puppies!’ (p.281)

Emma gets funds for Jack to fly to Los Angeles to interview Tito in his hospital bed, tells him everything he knows, and in return Tito, stoned on painkillers, confirms Jack’s hunch that it’s Cleo behind everything. She wants one particular track off the album, Shipwrecked Heart, which she’s going to put her vocals on and issue as a single. And she needs to get the master tapes a) to learn the song b) to remix it c) to make sure no-one else has it or can release it to prove she’s ripping off her dead husband.

That, in a nutshell, is the motor for the plot.

Jack breaks back into Janet’s house and cuts a swatch from the blood-stained carpet and swipes a used tampax from the bin, takes them to a forensics guy who owes him a favour and who rings back a few days later with the result. Yes, the blood on the carpet matches the blood on the tampon. It’s Janet’s blood. Jack is crushed. He didn’t have any designs on her but he really liked her. Now looks like she’s been murdered.

But then someone calls the cops on a bad line claiming to be Janet and that the wreckage was caused by an ex-boyfriend who went postal. Jack fears it’s a fake call and the reader is left to stew for 30 or 40 pages, fearing, like Jack, that nice Janet has been wasted.

And this causes deliberate confusion when Jerry, Cleo Rio’s hitman, phones up and tells Jack they’ve got her and want to do an exchange, to exchange her for the hard drive. Jack’s obsession with Janet means it takes stupid Jack a score of pages to realise that who ‘they’ have kidnapped is not Janet but Emma!!

Meanwhile Janet has not been murdered. Turns out she had rung and left messages on Jack’s answer-machine a couple of times stating that it was her who called the cops and the story is true: a jealous boyfriend really did trash her place and hit her. She ran off and is staying with friends in the south, bit bruised but basically OK. But Jack didn’t pick up these answerphone messages till a lot later.

Meanwhile – the bad guys have got Emma and they contact Jack with the details of how to get her back.

He is told to take a call at a payphone at the end of a pier by the sea (where Jack gets chatting to a 92-year-old who’s out there fishing and explains his strategy for avoiding death!).

The pier-end call tells him to go that evening to the nightclub named ‘Jizz’ (which keeps being the setting for meetings throughout the novel).

Here Jack meets with Cleo, Jerry and Loréal, is typically aggressive and insulting, is slapped upside his head a few times, but makes every effort to a) make it clear Janet knows nothing and is not a danger to the bad guys, b) emphasise that quite a few people know the truth including Tito, the backing singers and so on, and will put pieces together if he goes missing. So they oughtn’t to bump him off.

But he promises to bring the hard drive wherever they want and they part.

That night Jack can’t sleep, stays up all night tinkering with an old guitar he played in college, drags his ass to work the next day. The bad guys eventually call and give Jack a long set of instructions for hiring a boat, a GPS system and meeting them smack bang in the middle of the huge Lake Okeechobee.

Juan calls by his desk and Jack tells him the terrible news (Emma has been kidnapped by the guys he’s been investigating; he’s got to hand over the hard drive in exchange for her; he’s been told to do so in the middle of Lake Okeechobee) so Juan says he’ll come along and help out.

Then there’s a kicker. Just as he’s about to leave, the Managing Editor of the paper, Abkazion, comes up to him, tells him old man Polk just passed away this morning. Magad wants Jack to write the obituary, Polk wanted Jack to write the obituary, Abkazion now demands that he write the obituary, and Jack knows the offer of the job as Polk’s executor and manager of the decisive shares, along with the $100,000 salary are dependent on him writing the obituary, that evening, to make the next day’s front page (p.355).

But he can’t. He has to drive to Lake Okeechobee and save Emma. Right away. And he can’t tell Abkazion the real reason or it will endanger Emma’s life.

Abkazion rants and raves and then is dumbstruck when Jack doesn’t relent. Jack gathers up all his notes and dumps them on the desk of timid Evan, a lowly intern, who’s helped out with a few other details of the plot. ‘This is your big change, kid,’ Jack tells Evan, like Harrison Ford in a movie, then runs off.

Jack and Juan do the 3 hour drive up to Lake Okeechobee at record speed (listening, inevitably, to the Rolling Stones), hire a boat from a sceptical rental guy (from Ernie Bo Tump’s Bass Camp), use the GPS to motor out into the dead middle of the lake, and then wait around being bitten by mosquitoes. It is night-time, it is pitch black.

They hear the enormous whacking sound of a huge airboat. Soon it comes within sight of Jack and Juan, steered by Jerry while Loréal minds Emma who has a sack over head sitting passively in a chair. It’s important to understand what an airboat is in order to follow what happens next.

An airboat (Credit: Wikipedia)

From the description it sounds like a bigger version of the above. What follows is: Jerry demands the hard drive; Jack says, ‘Not till you throw away your gun’ and holds the hard drive over the side of their hire boat and starts counting down. Reluctantly Jerry tosses his gun which Jack hears splash in the lake. Jack insists they hand Emma down into the hire boat. Once she’s safe he throws the hard drive up at Jerry and Juan hits the motor and they speed off.

However, the bad guys’ airboat can go many times faster than them and their outboard is clogging up with weeds bringing them almost to a standstill, certainly unable to escape. They hear the airboat approaching from the side as if to ram over their boat, aiming to smash it to matchsticks.

Juan advises everyone to jump off but Jack stands up in the stern, ramrod straight and fires off every bullet in the little .38 handgun he was loaned by Carla last time he saw her. It’s unlikely the bullets hit anyone but it’s enough to scare Jerry into taking evasive action. They hear a great swash as the airboat passes close to them, but then… a crash and a scream!

Once they’ve got the outboard working again, our guys putter over towards the noise to discover the cause of the crash and scream. What happened is the airboat, in making its abrupt swerve to avoid Jack’s shooting, hit reeds, ground to a halt and upended.

Juan and Jack use the little spotlight fixed to the hire boat to make out that Jerry was thrown backwards and, when the airboat upended, the huge spinning propeller which drives these things cut his head off, which went flying with a splash into the lake. Loréal managed to keep his place at the front of the boat but his long stylish ponytail dangled down into the fast-moving propeller, got tangled round it, dragging him down down down until the machine’s torque ripped his scalp off. Yuk.

Our guys size all this up, then turn and putter calmly back south, back to the boat hire place and their car, and slowly carefully drive traumatised Emma back to safety.

Epilogue

They make it back to Jack’s apartment in the early hours. Emma sleeps like a log then rises and cooks Jack a lumberjack breakfast. Over brekkie they check out that morning’s edition of the Union-Register and Jack is astonished to find that the Polk obituary did get written in the end, is front page and, most surprising of all, appears under his byline, even though obviously written by young Evan.

He and Emma feel bad about this because of their journalistic scruples, but I hardly think the reader gives a monkey’s. Anyway, they ring up Evan and he sheepishly admits that, given the Big Opportunity, he froze with fear and it was the seasoned editor, Abkazion, who knocked it out in 20 minutes. Their consciences are absolved.

By the way, a running thread has been that his ex is not only marrying this cheap spy novelist, Derek Grenoble, but is doing so on Jack’s birthday. Now cheeky young Carla phones up to tell them what a lame pukefest the wedding was, featuring a terrible 3-page poem which Derek wrote Anne.

And Jack gets a birthday card from his mother which finally includes the obituary of his dad who a) died aged 46 – it is Jack’s birthday, he is 47, so he has outlived the jinx – and b) the obituary describes him as a penniless waterfront entertainer who made tips from crowds by being able to juggle anything, even pets, and died after drunkenly climbing up a tree to retrieve a raccoon and falling to his death when a branch broke. So not some big shot mystery man; a drunk street entertainer. Oh well.

Next day Jack meets up with Janet, who has rung him to tell him she’s back, for muffins and coffee.

She confirms that, on the night of her disappearance, she was getting changed into her SWAT outfit when the front door was broken open and two dudes started ransacking the place. Jack identifies them from her description as Jerry and Loréal. Janet got mad and burst into the hall in full SWAT outfit brandishing a (plastic) semi-automatic, which was enough to make them run out. Then she ran in the other direction and caught a cab to a friend’s house. As to the blood on the carpet, they guys had trashed her big studio lights and she trod on some glass. Bled like a hippo. Otherwise unharmed. Ah.

Not only that. Janet then leads Emma and Jack to the grave of a certain Eugene Marvin Brandt. Who? Why? She explains.

She reveals that this guy’s corpse was in the crematorium viewing room at the same time as Jimmy’s and, when everyone had left, she switched the tags. That is: Eugene got cremated while Jimmy now lies buried in this plot under Brandt’s headstone.

Jack is delighted. Now a proper autopsy can be performed! Jack sends the state prosecutor an anonymous message with the result that Jimmy’s body is dug up and the forensic scientists show his stomach was full of now fewer than 20 Benelyn tablets which Cleo Rio had crushed up and mixed into his clam chowder just before he made the fatal dive. Jimmy would have passed out and drowned.

There’s enough evidence for the prosecutor to charge Cleo with murder, to bring in various witnesses who’d seen the couple bitterly arguing, to give as motive the fact that she wanted to steal his best song to further her own career. After a three-week trial, Cleo is convicted and sentenced to 20 years.

Then Jack has a very satisfying meeting with Race Maggad III in his new role as trustee of Polk Macarthur’s shares in Maggad-Feist publishing. Jack tells a furious Maggad he will sell back Polk’s shares in Maggad-Feist on one condition – that they sell the Union-Register to Polk’s widow, the tough nurse who tended him in his last days, Ellen who he knows will look after and protect it.

Maggad is eventually forced to do this, and Ellen becomes the paper’s first female publisher., Her first act is to hire a load of news reporters and restore the paper to its former reporting strength. Given the careful explanations Hiaasen has given us throughout the novel about the financial pressures undermining old-style reporting and newspapers, this is in many ways the book’s real happy ending.

The final scene shows Jack taking Emma out to the pier where he took the goons’ phone call what seems like months ago, and they bump into old Ike the fisherman, the guy Jack chatted to while waiting for the bad guys’ phone call and who proudly tells them he’s just turned 93.

As they turn to go Ike catches a huge tarpon, nearly getting dragged over the safety rail and into the sea, till Jack and Emma grab hold of him. Jack can’t help thinking what his obituary would say and so the book ends with the two subjects closest to Hiaasen’s heart, fishing and journalism.

Thoughts

It has breadth, doesn’t it? Like all Hiaasen’s novels it ramifies out to feature about 20 named characters, many of whom have their own backstories described in some detail. And the first-person narrator is fleshed out with his obsession about dates, his love of newspapers, his oddities (the iguana in his deep freeze), his loving relationship with his mother who used to take him fishing as a boy, his still carrying a torch for the lovely Anne, and so on.

All the usual elements are here and neatly assembled into a cleverly constructed plot. But… for the reasons explained at the start, it lacks the ability to move at speed between characters which is a key aspect of Hiaasen’s novels, and the quirks and oddities Hiaasen ladles onto Jack don’t really compensate for the lack of real psychological depth.

One liners

‘Derek is a good guy. He’s fun, he’s affectionate, he doesn’t take life so damn seriously…’
‘You’ve just described a beagle, not a husband.’ (p.221)

‘Maybe I hit ’em with a shot.’
‘Right, Jack. And maybe one day hamsters will sing opera.’ (p.372)

Credit

Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen was published by Macmillan in 2001. All references are to the 2002 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

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by Simon on June 4, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Comedy, Novel, Thriller

Posted by Simon on June 4, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/06/04/basket-case-carl-hiaasen/

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All posts in category Thriller

Chapter 1. Whitsuntide at Flambard (50 pages)

Chapter 2. Mr Arnold Tavanger (34 pages)

Chapter 3. The Rt. Hon. David Mayot (25 pages)

Chapter 4. Mr Reginald Daker (34 pages)

Digression

Back to Dakar

Chapter 5. Sir Robert Goodeve, Baronet (33 pages)

Chapter 6. Captain Charles Ottery (27 pages)

The theme of boyishness and rejuvenation

Thoughts

Rackety plots

Charmless snobbery

Interesting words

Credit

Related link

John Buchan reviews

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Executive summary

Longer version

Highland setting

Complications

The Raden family

The Bandicotts

Janet Raden

Mission 1. Palliser-Yeates against Glenraden

Fish Benjie

Harald Blacktooth

Mission 2. Leithen against Strathlarrig

Lord Archie at the hustings

Mission 3. Lamancha against Haripol

Happy ending

Snobbery, class, body shape and clothes

Snobbery

Class

Body shape and class

And clothes

Disguises

Making fictions

Fictions make news

Nature painting

Since the war

The active narrator

Tory irony

Credit

Related links

John Buchan reviews

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Cast

Part 1

Part 2

The al-Qaeda cell

Miranda

7 August 1998: the bombing

Part 3

Where is Nick?

Bill Clinton

Khaled

Exciting climactic chase

Showdown on Lyly

The end

Coda

Thoughts

Moral debate?

Inventive structure?

Al-Qaeda

And yet…

Swahili phrases

Credit

Giles Foden reviews

Africa reviews

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Tiro’s memoirs

Sources

Part one – Exile (58 to 47 BC)

The Rufus strategem (pages 105 to 122)

Part two – Redux (47 to 43 BC)

Key words

Politics

Power