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Strip Tease by Carl Hiaasen (1993)

‘Men will try anything,’ Monique Jr said, sceptically. ‘Anything for pussy.’
(Strip Tease, page 16)

There are many levels on which to consider this book:

for its place in Carl Hiaasen’s series of comedy thrillers
its dramatic theme (strip club)
its socioeconomic theme (the corrupt Florida sugar cane industry)
its political theme (corrupt drunk politicians)
its feminist theme (woman objectified and abused by men, and badly let down by a patriarchal legal system)
its contribution to the thriller genre – blackmail and murder
as gruesome farce – a man’s tongue is swallowed by a wolf, a man’s arm is replaced by a golf club

At the most factual level, Strip Tease is the fifth in Carl Hiaasen’s series of 15 bitingly funny, savagely farcical comedy thrillers set in the moral swamp that is South Florida, and it closely follows the winning formula established its predecessors.

The theme: erotic dancing

Top level is the book’s main theme and setting. The previous four novels each rotated around a distinct and colourful theme, namely: eco-terrorism, corrupt fishing competitions, bogus plastic surgery and crappy theme parks. This one centres on a not-very-successful nude dance club called ‘the Eager Beaver’ (which changes its name half way through to ‘The Tickled Pink’ (p.331).

It is not, the owner and performers emphasise, a strip club, but a venue for ‘exotic dancing’ – albeit the dancers are almost naked to start with and then take off their bras or g-strings to become fully naked. Characters refer to it as a ‘nudie bar’ or a ‘tittie bar’ (p.51).

The Eager Beaver is owned by Mr Orly, a sweaty, nervous man who tries to awe his customers and the disgruntled dancers he employs with lies about the club’s mythical Mafia owners – whereas, in fact, with comic irony its main investors turn out to be harmless orthopedic surgeons from Lowell, Massachussetts (p.102).

The Eager Beaver has a bouncer (who prefers to be referred to as a ‘floor manager’) named simply Shad, owner of an enormous bald head and impervious to physical pain, which comes in handy during the various fights he gets involved in (Shad’s full name is only finally given in the Epilogue on page 403: Gerard L. Shaddick).

And the club employs a set of 6 or 7 exotic dancers, chief among them Erin, the lead character in the novel. Other dances include Monique Sr and Monique Jr and Urbana Sprawl, a black stripper with big boobs and a no-nonsense attitude. (The word ‘sprawl’ made me think of William Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy of novels and also Les Murray’s wonderful poem, The Quality of Sprawl. Great word, ‘sprawl’.)

The setting of a ‘tittie bar’ provides countless opportunities for characters or the author to reflect on the sleazy nature of strip clubs, exotic dancing, the sex trade (although there is very little actual sex), and, in particular, loads of editorialising about:

men, the sleazy men, sad men, frustrated men and scary men who attend titty bars, specially the new generation of bankers wearing Wall Street braces, driving BMWs, off their faces on cocaine, and
the generally honest women who staff them, the novel giving a realistic depiction of their day-to-day worries as discussed in the poky dressing room (they complain about the air conditioning, the temperature, the pay, the character Lorelei complains about the crappy replacement she’s given after the original boa constrictor she danced with is kidnapped and chopped to pieces) when they’re not bumping and grinding on the stage or at high-paying individuals’ private tables

Orly’s club is in fierce competition with a rival just a mile down the road, the ‘Flesh Farm’ run by the Japanese Ling brothers. This doesn’t impinge on the ‘serious’ plot much but is a source of running gags as the Lings are continually trying to persuade Orly’s dancers to go and work for them, which leads Orly and Shad to plan increasingly florid counter-attacks. This low-level feud climaxes in Shad buying a hundred rats and vermin off a snake dealer down on his luck and chucking them down the air con vents at the Flesh Farm, having previously called up a hygiene inspector who is, therefore, on the premises just in time to observe the sudden outrageous vermin infestation.

Divorce law and Erin the exotic dancer

So, the strip club is the book’s obvious setting and this sub-set of the sex trade the novel’s obvious theme. But just as powerful, just as dominating in the narrative, is the plight of Erin the dancer (I don’t think we ever discover her last name), victim of what is portrayed as a brutally unfair, patriarchal legal system.

Erin is the daughter of a woman who became a professional gold-digger, marrying and divorcing a series of richer and richer men (p.26). In a bid to be different, Erin married Darrell Grant who was tall and handsome and kind but turned out to be a drug addict, lowlife thief. Once she’d realised this, Erin was on the verge of leaving him when she got pregnant and Darell promised to clean up his act. Thus it was that Erin had a daughter, Angela, but all too soon Grant fell back on his old ways. Erin sued for divorce but two things utterly screwed her.

One is that Grant had earlier been busted by two corrupt cops, Piccata and Merkin, who made a deal to not prosecute him if he became a stoolpigeon and copper’s narc. As a result, they deleted his long and seedy criminal record from the computer records so Erin had no evidence for his egregious worthlessness.

Meantime, Erin discovered that lawyers’ fees for pursuing a divorce case are very expensive and found out the hard way that she couldn’t afford them, as a clerk working in the office of the local FBI (p.40).

So a friend recommended exotic dancing as a way of trebling her income and the novel describes Erin’s first tentative steps in front of a mirror (p.26), her first few nights at the club (p.86), and then how she settled into a regular 5 night a week job at the Eager Beaver, paying four times as much as her clerk wage.

(The trick, she says more than once, is to forget about the smutty men grabbing at your legs and lose yourself in the music and indeed a lot of music is mentioned in the book, Madonna, Prince, ZZ Top, rap music. Erin prefers white rock if she’s in the mood – ZZ Top or the Allmann Brothers – or singer-songwriter stuff if she’s feeling more soulful – Jackson Brown, or Van Morrison, ‘Dancin’ in the Moonlight’.)

Trouble is, when the divorce case came to court: a) Grant’s egregious criminal record had been disappeared by the two cops, and b) Grant can easily prove to the court that Erin is a stripper and therefore an ‘unsuitable mother’ to have custody of her child.

Thus, through the corruption and hypocrisy of the system, the drug addict thief Grant is granted custody of little Angela, now aged four. He sets a terrible example. It is a travesty of any kind of justice.

To really rub it in, we are given three additional facts:

Scumbag Grant’s latest money-making scam is stealing wheelchairs for the disabled. Turns out they have no licence plate or identifier, are easy to buff up and sell on to hospitals, old peoples homes etc. Erin is driven to distraction when she learns that her little girl is being used in these wheelchair heists, but she has no legal way of rescuing her.
Grant has a sister, Rita, who is raising and training a litter of wolves. Rita is sympathetic to her divorced sister-in-law but her husband, Alberto, who works at the Turkey Point nuclear power plant (p.36) drools over Erin on her occasional visits. Eventually, fed up of his leching, she agrees to perform a little private dance for him when his wife is out back with the wolves. Erin leads Alberto on and then, just as he’s started to froth with excitement, gives him a violent knee to the jaw which makes him bite his tongue off and knocks him out. Rita bursts in with one of the wolf pups, which promptly gobbles up Alberto’s severed tongue before anyone can stop him (p.189).
Adding maximum insult to injury, the very same judge who denied Erin custody of her daughter because of her so-called ‘immorality’, himself becomes a regular visitor to the Eager Beaver, achieving an acme of male hypocrisy by prominently displaying a Bible on his desk next to his cocktail, and loudly telling anyone who’ll listen that he’s here to ‘save’ the poor benighted girls, all the while under the table with his other hand he’s busy whacking off at the sight of all this poon.

The ultimate peak of scumbag hypocrisy is reached when this two-faced judge tells Erin, when she confronts him at his table in the club, that he’ll reverse his custody decision only if she gives him a blowjob (p.68). Erin is a woman of principles, almost the only character in the book with any, and angrily refuses. Men!

‘All you got to do is flash your twat and men throw money. Isn’t it a great country, Erin? Aren’t you proud to be an American?’ (Darrell Grant, p.62)

Sugar money

American politics has always been about money, power and corruption. It’s amazing how many journalists, commentators, academics and naive liberals think otherwise, think it’s something to do with democracy or liberty or some such.

So the other central theme of this novel is the vast amount of money generated by the Florida sugar cane industry. Hiaasen is so exercised by this that he explains it in journalistic detail not once but at least four times (pages 13, 111, 210, 366). The last chapter intersperses plot with chunks of factual exposition which could come from a magazine article about sugar cane, its agriculture, profits, work practices, how it is grown, harvested and refined (chapter 31).

Key fact is: The US Federal Government keeps the price of domestic sugar cane artificially high, thus subsidising the big sugar companies with taxpayer money. At the same time the US government also bans the import of sugar cane from the poor countries of the Caribbean and Latin America, helping to keep those nations in dependency and poverty.

Nonetheless, the wretched job of growing and in particular cutting the ripe cane crop falls to the poorest immigrants from precisely those wretched Caribbean countries, who work a punishing 10 hour day in the blistering Florida heat for a pittance.

Hiaasen invents a super-rich sugar cane family, the Rojo dynasty, who own just such a huge sugar cane growing and refining company, the Sweetheart Sugar Corporation. The senior and spooky owners of the corporation are Wilberto and Joaquin Rojo. Through these characters Hiaasen describes the nature of the business, the way government subsidises them, how they ruthlessly exploit their labour to the limit, and how all the pollution and waste from the industry is poured off into the Everglades to kill the eco-system.

The guaranteed government subsidies mean that the Rojo family has so much money it literally doesn’t know what to do with it. This is epitomised by the young scion of the family, dashing cocaine addict Christopher Rojo, who spends his entire life cruising in a chauffeur-driven limousine from high-class parties to strip clubs, awash in champagne, coke and hookers.

The drunken lecherous politician

What about the plot, I hear you ask. Well, the novel kicks off at the Eager Beaver one night when a totally drunk husband-to-be, Paul Guber, out on his stag night, drunkenly clambers onto the stage and embraces Erin while she’s doing her routine, grabs her round the waist, so close that her pubic hair looks like his goatee.

What nobody expects is that Erin has a secret, not-to-say obsessive admirer, a US Congressman named David Lane Dilbeck (p.174) (detailed backstory p.232).

On this particular fateful evening. Congressman Dilbeck also happens to be in the Eager Beaver, drunk off his face, and when he sees some guy groping his favourite dancer, he too lurches up onto the stage and starts beating Paul Guber over the head with a heavy champagne bottle. Again and again. When the Beaver’s bald bouncer, Shad, tries to stop him, Dilbeck’s minder and bagman, Erb Crandall, draws his gun as a threat. The whole thing has got wildly out of control in just a few moments.

What makes this absurd incident the trigger for a 400-page comedy thriller is that several people in the club that night recognise Dilbeck (despite his feeble disguise of a false moustache), someone takes a series of photos of the incident, and so his people are agonisingly aware that he could be blackmailed and ruined: for being in a stripclub at all, and for aggravated assault.

Now Dilbeck, routinely described by all who know him as a scumbag dickhead, is not himself unexpendable save for one big fact: Dilbeck plays a key role in Congress in getting the US sugar subsidy laws renewed each year. In other words, he may be a pitiful ‘pussy hound’, a thick-witted alcoholic and a prey to the every pretty woman he sees – but behind him stand some very seriously rich heads of the Florida sugar cane industry and they are not about to see their fortunes jeopardised. After all:

In politics, stealing is trouble but pussy is lethal. (p.260)

An election is pending and Dilbeck is up against the admittedly bonkers right-wing Republican candidate, Eloy Flickman (who wants to nuke Havana) but still, he is the sugar lobby’s swingman in Washington so anything which threatens Dilbeck threatens very rich powerful people which is why some of the little people who think they can swing a little blackmail are in for a very nasty surprise.

The political fixer

Which is where we come to the political fixer who is employed by the powerful Rojo family to keep dim Dilbert on the straight and narrow. This is the cold, calculating Malcolm J. Moldovsky. (It is a very fleeting coincidence that this Machiavellian political fixer bears the same first name as the Machiavellian political fixer in the British TV series The Thick of It, Malcolm Tucker.)

Malcolm is very short (‘no taller than a jockey’, p.236), very clever, dresses carefully and precisely and his political hero is John Mitchell, Attorney General to President Richard M. Nixon, convicted for his part in covering up the Watergate break-in (pages 126 and 323).

Moldovsky is used to doing political deals, bribery and payoffs, he is sued to the subtle interplay of power and money, so he is unhappy when the crudeness of the Eager Beaver affair forces him to take unusually direct action.

First is the murder of Jerry Killian (profile p.82). Killian is a sweet and fairly innocent guy who just adores Erin’s dancing and attends the club night after night to watch her. He was one of the few to recognise the Congressman and he makes the bad mistake of trying to shake down Malcolm. In fact, when the pair have a meeting Malcolm is genuinely surprised when all Killian wants is for the Congressman to have a word with the presiding judge in Erin’s custody case in order to award her her well-deserved custody. We learn that the judge in question wants to get promotion to the federal circuit, Killian wants Dilbert to tell this judge he will put in a good word for him in exchange for the judge reversing his decision and awarding Erin custody of Angela. That appears to be how the legal system works in America.

Despite his modest aims, Malcom realises he can’t have Killian swinging round making wild claims and so has him bumped off by three Jamaicans. His body is found in the Clark Fork River in far-distant Montana where he was wont to take his annual leave and where, by farcical coincidence, Detective Al García is on vacation with his second wife and his step-kids. Al García? Yes the very same Dade County detective we have met in the previous three Hiaasen novels. Thus, despite being on holiday, he finds himself being drawn into a murder case originating over a thousand miles away.

Second to be murdered is Paul Guber’s fiancée, Joyce Mizner (p.321), and her fat shyster lawyer Jonathan Peter Mordecai (comic backstory p.191, full name p.402). Mordecai also tries to contact the Congressman and is put through to Malcolm, meets and tries to shake him down. He claims to have photos of the whole incident.

(It is very funny the way Joyce Mizner is corrupted: at first she is amazed and shocked to discover her fiancé was at a strip club; then she is all devotion and attention when visiting Guber in hospital where it takes him several weeks to recover from his battering; then the lawyer slowly tempts her, holding out the possibility of big bucks compensation; then crosses a line by suggesting they blackmail the Congressman, Joyce becoming steadily more interested in securing her and her husband-to-be’s futures; and finally the lawyer corrupts her enough that Joyce drops all plans to share the money with Paul and settles in to becoming the lawyer’s partner in their ill-fated blackmail scam.)

Anyway, cunning Malcolm says he needs time to consider, then arranges a second meeting. He doesn’t attend the second meeting. Instead Mordecai and Joyce (Paul is away on business in New York) are met by some tough guys who kill them then attach their car to an empty freight vessel which is due to be blown up and sunk in Biscayne Bay and where, many months later, a horrified honeymoon couple on a scuba diving trip discover them. Very elaborate, violent and grotesque. Very Hiaasen.

Grotesque incidents

A lot happens in 400 pages, after all it’s one of the characteristic features of farce as a genre, that the plot becomes evermore manically complicated, featuring wildly improbable coincidences, garish characters and gruesome events. For example:

I’ve mentioned Erin’s sister-in-law’s husband biting off his own tongue when she kicks him under the jaw and that one of their pet wolf cubs eats it.

The judge who awarded against Erin in the custody case has a heart attack and dies at the Flesh Farm. ‘The man died staring at pussy, ‘says Shad. ‘There’s worse ways to go’ (p.169).

Darrell, high on drugs, gets into a fight with Shad, wrestling him down on the ground and carving a G into his bald head.

A lot later Shad is able to return the favour by swinging a tyre jack at Darrell so hard that it shatters his arm, exposing the bone (p.309). Darrell’s endlessly patient sister, Rita, fixes him up, using a golf club as a splint, arranging it head downwards so that it becomes a very effective bludgeoning tool when Darrell goes on one of his rampages.

We learn that Al García’s non-descript Chrysler always has an Igloo ice-box in the back. At one point his new buddy Shad asks him if there are any beers in it. No, García replies, he uses it to store dismembered body parts.

In what is probably the most macabre scene, Shad, an imposing figure, forces his way into the office of the Ling brothers at the Flesh Farm, strips and dangles the younger Ling brother by his hands from a wall fitting and then looses from a bag he’s carrying a live boa constrictor.

We experience Ling’s (comic?) terror as the huge snake twines round his leg and then spots something hanging between his thighs which looks like a nice juicy hamster (his penis) before it springs at lightning speed (pages 338 to 339). This extreme measure, in case you’re wondering, was payback for Ling touching up one of the Eager Beaver dancers who went to work for him and came back in tears.

Both Shad and Orly are oddly puritanical. In fact it is a running joke that after 11 years exposure to bare naked women, Shad doesn’t even realise they’re naked any more. He can only get remotely turned on by clothed women.

Late in the plot García is late to the yacht where Erin has made a date with the congressman because he is delayed by a domestic homicide. Jesse James Braden spilt some of his Bloody Mary on the freshly laundered upholstery of his wife’s Toyota Camry so she shot him three times in the genitals. According to witnesses who saw the dying man stumble from the car, his schlong was pumping like a firehose as he bled to death (p.344).

See what I mean by grotesque?

The climax

The climax comes when Erin agrees to go and do some private dancing for Dilbeck on the luxury yacht he’s allowed to use by the fabulously wealthy Rojo family (and which they have punningly named The Sweetheart Deal).

Malcolm hangs around nervously outside on deck, ostensibly to protect his ward, which is where Darrell, out of his tree on a range of painkillers and wolf medication (provided by his sister), and in pursuit of Erin who he blames for his increasingly violent accidents, confronts Malcolm and quickly bores of the short, smart man’s clever answers and simply bludgeons him to death with the club. Oh well.

When Darrell stumbles into the cabin where Erin is dancing for the Congressman, she deftly pulls a gun and guides both men out to the waiting limo. She’s gotten friendly with Dilbeck’s chauffeur, a Haitian who’s fed up of his employer’s casual racism and warms to Erin who treats him as a human being.

So the chauffeur doesn’t ask any questions but drives Erin, spaced-out Darrell and drunk Dilbeck miles out of town to, fittingly enough, a sugar cane plantation. Here Darrell brandishes his golf club before running off and Erin can’t quite bring herself to shoot him. In any case, the narrator tells us, Darrell the lowlife scumbag finds a hopper full of cut cane and falls fast asleep in it. Next morning the hopper feeds its load, along with hundreds of others, onto a conveyor belt and into a cane cutting machine which dices comatose Darrell into thousands of shreds and flakes, before the metal golf club gums up the works and prompts workers to call the cops.

Erin didn’t want Darrell anyway. Back in the cane field, she forces Dilbeck to start chopping cane with the machete she’d thoughtfully packed. Of course he is flabby and red with exhaustion in just a minute. Neither of them can believe that the Haitian and Dominican workers in these groves cut 8 tons a day each! Modern slavery.

Next Erin strips a little and allows Dilbeck to dirty dance with her. He has just got predictably carried away, and has pushed her to the ground and is fiddling with his willy, when a load of cars pull up and illuminate them in their headlights.

Remember I mentioned that back before she took up dirty dancing, Erin had worked in the Florida office of the FBI, for a cleancut good guy named Officer Cleary. Well, they had stayed in touch, he’d tried to help her with her divorce and custody case, and now she had phoned him and told him to come with backup out to this specific cane plantation and catch a crooked Congressman.

And so it is that three carloads of FBI agents catch a half-naked, sweaty Congressman rolling on the floor with a woman half his age, attempting rape. Soon afterwards Detective Al García and Shad roll up. Through the complex convolutions of the plot they have formed an unlikely buddy-buddy partnership based on joint concern for Erin’s safety and, although they arrived at the luxury yacht too late to find Erin, she had written the location of the cane plantation in lipstick on the toilet mirror, which explains why they turn up now to discover the placed crawling with Feds.

So now Erin puts her plans to the Congressman. Plan A is she prosecutes him for rape with carsfull of FBI agents as witnesses, and his name is ruined forever. Plan B, Dilbeck has a strategic heart attack, retires sick for a few weeks, thus effectively conceding the upcoming election and, at least temporarily, and in a small way, breaking the stranglehold of the sugar lobby on Congress.

I didn’t like this ending at all, it felt like it just didn’t come off. Previous novels ended in balls of flame like James Bond movies, but Erin taking the Congressman out to a field in the middle of nowhere and encouraging him to get naked and aroused by dirty dancing with him, in the hope that the Feds would turn up in the nick of time… It felt wildly implausible but not in a crazed, bizarre way, just in a ‘not very good plan’ kind of way.

The patheticness of men

Quite a steady stream of criticisms of how lame and poon crazy men are, incapable of thinking with anything except their dicks.

Men are easily dazzled. (p.368)
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)
How easily amused they are! she thought. There was little difference between this and what her mother did; it was the same game of tease, the same basic equation. Use what you’ve got to get what you want. (p.27)
Erin was constantly reminded of the ridiculous power of sex; routine female nakedness reduced some men to stammering, clammy-fingered fools. (p.87)
In such extreme states of desire, men tended to lose their fine-motor skills. (p.188)
Men were so helpless, she thought, so easily charmed. Monique Jr was right: they’d do anything for it. Anything. (p.243)

A possible solution

What to do about men’s insatiable appetite for sexual stimulation? Well, hundreds of thousands of feminists have been working on the problem for half a century. A character in this novel, clear-eyed Malcolm, suggests wanking. After all it is the ultimate in safe sex and, in our COVID times, entirely lockdown-compliant. As he tells the helpless ‘pussy hound’ Dilbeck:

‘Know what we need to do? We need to teach you to masturbate creatively. Then maybe you wouldn’t bother women.’ (p.158)

But the way both Shad and Orly have become utterly indifferent to all the naked boobs and bums around them suggests a different way forward. To some extent the naked female form excites such lust in men because it is so strictly rationed; in cold puritanical England, a bare boob is a rarity ogled at by every man in sight.

The obvious solution is for women to wear less, a lot less. In this respect the Free The Nipple campaign is onto something. If topless women were ever to become as common and everyday as men who work (doing manual work) topless or sunbathe topless, it would remove a lot of the mystique, it might even become boring, boring enough that men didn’t break their necks ogling and leering over every millimetre of cleavage to women’s disgust and, often, bewilderment. After all, what’s the big deal, as Erin tells the drunk and lecherous Congressman:

‘Two pleasant handfuls of fat… That’s your basic human breast, Davey. Ninety-eight percent fat, with a cherry on top. What’s the big attraction?’ (p.356)

But that will never happen. Nothing much has changed since this book was published 30 years ago; I don’t expect much to change in this regard in the next 30 years, if I live that long.

Miami Vice references

Hiaasen referenced the smash hit TV show Miami Vice in the previous novel. Figures, it covers his turf.

And the stubble,’ Erin said. ‘Come here, let’s see.’
‘No way.’ He stood up sullenly.
‘Is this your Don Johnson period?’ (p.61)

Except it doesn’t really. The TV show promoted an image of South Florida as cool, full of handsome dudes in designer stubble wearing Armani jackets and driving shiny convertibles. Hiaasen, as we have seen, is more about low rent strip clubs, corrupt businessmen, drunken Congressmen, lowlife psychopaths and trailer trash.

Types of fuck

In an earlier novel Hiaasen introduced me to the concept of ‘sportfucking’ i.e. sleeping around just for laughs. In Native Tongue Joe Winder’s girlfriend Nina offers him a ‘mercy fuck’. Now, Congressman Dilbeck considers he is (that sleeping with him amounts to) a ‘powerfuck’ i.e. having sex with the rich and powerful. It’s good to be educated about these matters.

Epilogue

Hiaasen’s novels routinely feature an epilogue giving us brief summaries of the fates of his characters. From this we learn that even though Dilbeck quits the election race he is still elected in his absence, but nonetheless retires. But that doesn’t stop the agricultural committee of Congress renewing the multi-million dollar subsidies to the sugar industry.Nothing can. Big money corruption is eternal (p.401).

Credit

Strip Tease by Carl Hiaasen was published in the UK by Macmillan London in 1993. All references are to the 1994 Pan 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 May 26, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Comedy, Novel

Posted by Simon on May 26, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/strip-tease-carl-hiaasen/

A Life For The Stars by James Blish (1962)

From the embankment of the long-abandoned Erie-Lackawanna-Pennsylvania Railroad, Chris sat silently watching the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, preparing to take off.

As opening sentences go, this is a cracking introduction to this, the last-written but third-in-chronological-order of Blish’s four ‘Okie’ novels, about entire cities which take advantage of anti-gravity ‘spindizzy’ technology, to depart earth and go roaming around the galaxy (already well-colonised by humans), trading and dealing and getting into scrapes.

The central Okie novel is Earthman, Come Home, the first to be published (in fact a ‘fix-up novel’ of four or five earlier short stories, brought together in 1953), set around the year 4,000 and which features a series of cracking space opera adventures starring John Amalfi, ‘mayor’ of New York as it roams across the galaxy getting in and out of trouble.

Next in the series was They Shall Have Stars, published in 1956, set in the 2010s (from 2013 to 2020, to be precise). This ‘fix up’ of two long short stories gives us the origins of the two technologies which made interstellar space travel possible, namely

the discovery of anti-death drugs, which allow humans to live for thousands of years
and the Dillon-Wagoner Graviton Polarity Generator which not only allows an object of any size to travel at any speed – faster, even, than light – but also secures a protective field around it enclosing water, atmosphere and so on

Rather than just plonk these discoveries down in front of the reader, Blish goes to great lengths to depict the way the West – specifically America – will, by the 2010s, have become an authoritarian regime dominated by an eavesdropping FBI, which is virtually indistinguishable from the repressive system in the Soviet bloc. Eventually the West, as such, will fall to Soviet domination… but not before a heroic few pioneers have used the spindizzy technology to escape to the stars.

Chapter one: Press gang

I expected this third novel to bridge the gap between those events, which climax in 2020, with the Amalfi era of 4,000 or so AD – but it doesn’t.

Instead the story is set in the 32nd century where anyone with any get up and go has got up and gone in a city to the stars. The entire (short) novel describes the adventures of young teenager Crispin DeFord (p.150, Chris to his family). He is one of the few last impoverished inhabitants of 32nd century earth, living with his father who was once a professor but now routinely suffers from diseases of malnutrition.

Chris comes from their shack to the perimeter of the raggedy old steel-manufacturing city of Scranton to watch it take off but, at the last minute, is caught by perimeter cops and press-ganged aboard. The city takes off, much to Chris’s amazement.

Chapter two: A line of boiling dust

He is dragged in front of the city’s mayor, Frank Lutz, who reminds him of a skunk and demands if he has a speciality (specialists in anything get to eat, non-specialists, not so much). On the spur of the moment Chris claims to know all about astronomy, and manages to answer some basic questions such as the order of the planets, so he is apprenticed to the city’s astronomer, Dr Boyle Warner. He spends a year studying but not getting very far.

Chapter three: ‘Like a barrel of scrap’

Then he and Boyle, attending one of the mayor’s endless public consultations, hear him saying he plans to do a swap with a much bigger city they’ve come in contact with. When he mentions that it’s led by someone named Amalfi, we know this is New York from all the stories we read about in Earthman, Come Home. New York will give them some tech and technies, plus directions to an iron-bearing planet, in exchange Scranton will hand over 300 or so of its least useful citizens.

Chris knows that includes him and finds a hiding place in a disused warehouse. But he’s tracked down by the leader of the press gang which shanghaied him, Frad Haskins (p.146), who has turned out to be a kindly protector of the boy, and persuades him it will be easier to go.

Chapter four: Schoolroom in the sky

So he joins the three hundred or so who take a rocket ship from Scranton to New York, his mind boggled by the awesome scale of the bigger city. Arriving, he is put in a cubicle and questioned by a computerised voice – the City Fathers no less – who reveal that

the first anti-death drugs were perfected in 2018
Mayor Amalfi was born in 2998

Chris is submitted to intense hypnopedia i.e. put in a trance while wearing a helmet which pumps him full of facts. This gives Blish a convenient opportunity to write a prolonged and factual history of spindizzies and anti-agathic drugs which links the years described in They Shall Have Stars (the 2010s), follows through the collapse of the West, the creation of the Bureaucratic State which banned spaceflight, how dissidents who kept secret spindizzies nonetheless set off into space where they bumped into the Vegan Empire (2289), which led to war (2310), how the spindizzy technology (repressed by the Bureaucratic State) was rediscovered by the Thorium Trust’s Plant Eight which promptly took off into space and never came back (2375), followed by other power plants, towns then cities. How the city of Gravitogorsk-Mars, calling itself the Interstellar Master Traders (IMT) annihiliated the earth colony on Thor V (2394) giving Okie cities a terrible reputation. The capital planet of the Vegan Empire was ravaged by earth cities, including IMT, in 2413. How the Third Colonial Navy under Admiral Alois Hrunta destroyed Vega II instead of subduing then fled and set up his own empire, naming himself Emperor of Space (after a battle in 2464). So many cities left earth that the Bureaucratic state collapsed in 2522. Succeeded by a police state which lacked real power, but sent out police forces to police the galaxy, giving rise to the situation whereby Arm II of the galaxy is economically underpinned by Okie cities trading and policed by the earth cops, but neither system is really efficient i.e. there’s lots of friction. And that’s where we are when the story begins.

We learn that in the middle 2000s all the fossil fuels ran out and the highlands around earth were returned to farmland.

Chapter five: ‘Boy, you are dumb!’

Chris is put in the class of the martinet Dr Helena Braziller, and meets classmate Piggy Kingston-Throop, which allows the pair to discuss issues surrounding Okie cities, the meaning of ‘citizenship’ and other backstory information Blish wants to convey. Bascially, to become a ‘citizen’, to enjoy the benefits of the anti-agathic drugs, Chris must study and must pass the citizenship exam.

Chris is made the ward of Perimeter Sergeant Anderson, who we read about in Earthman, Come Home: he is head of a sort of Marine corps which is sent out whenever the city lands.

Chapter six: A planet called Heaven

New York lands on a planet where it is always raining, broken by electrical storms – ironically named ‘Heaven’. Chris isn’t involved in any of this since he is still only 17 and still at school – intensive hypnopedia school – but his guardian being Sergeant Anderson he overhears a lot, such as the planet is ruled by a smallish (60,000) caste of aristocrats, named ‘archangels’, who lord it over a vast population of serfs.

The archangels have made a typical Okie deal, that they’ll provide food and raw materials in exchange for the Okies helping them inaugurate an industrial revolution.

Piggy and Chris hang round one of the wharves on the edge of New York, staring out into the endless rain of Heaven, lit by fierce lightning storms, and generally getting in people’s way. Chris learns that the archangels speak a debased form of Russian, ‘the now dead universal language of deep space’ (p.197) (to understand why you really have to have followed the repeated notion that the Soviet Union wins the Cold War by making the West turn into its mirror image, before finally subsuming the entire world in the Bureaucratic Rule.)

Impatient and curious, Chris tries talking to one of the Archangels who stomp back and forth across the wharves, offering him the ‘small cheap clasp knife with a tiny compass embedded in its handle’ in return for… a go on one of the kind of bubble boats the Archangels speed about in: these are boats but completely covered over in perspex to protect from the awful weather.

The Archangel laughs a big Russian laugh and agrees, they climb aboard the ship (they’re known as swan boats), the guy shows him the pretty simple controls and lets him try it out a little, pushing the accelerator and steering. There’s a call from his mates back in the cabin, so he tells Christ to be careful and goes abaft.

Chris has a happy time steering, but curiosity makes him lean back towards the door into the aft cabin and he hears snippets of Russian which he can just about understand are the six Archangels talking about a conspiracy to seize New York, mentioning hostages they’ve already taken, and a ‘Castle Wolfwhip’.

On impulse Chris throws the lock on the cabin door, takes the helm of the swan boat and sets it towards the homing beacon he’d noticed. It is Young Sherlock, Young James Bond.

Chapter seven: Why not to keep demons

Chris begins to wonder whether he’s doing the right thing and decides he better turn round and steer the boat back towards the New York wharf, when it is seized by the Archangel tractor beam and the controls stop functioning. He sees a huge building emerge from the rain and fog and then the swan boat abruptly sinks beneath the surface of the ocean, down down till its tracks hit bottom and then it clambers along, emerging back up above the surface in a sheltered cavern.

Here he is quickly arrested and thrown into the same cell as his guardian Sergeant Anderson, and a colleague Dulany, as per thousands of American adventure series and movies.

When he tells them that their ‘hover suits’ are hanging up in the main hall where he was interrogated. Anderson and Dulane break out of the cell, fight their way to their suits, and then tear ‘Castle Wolfwhip’ to pieces. Since he hasn’t got a suit, they put him in a swan ship and guide it back to New York.

Where his guardian reads Chris the riot act for being a very naughty boy.

Chapter eight: the ghosts of space

To Chris’s amazement Amalfi keeps on with the contract with Heaven’s Archangels. Business is business, and they need the raw materials.

Chris goes back to school for more densely packed hypnopedia sessions, which Blish summarises. He carries on chatting on quays with Piggy, who tells him the urban legend of the great Lost City of Los Angeles which landed on a remote planet where antiagathic drugs grow in the plants. Chris drops into a Library cubicle after school and quizzes a librarian i.e. one of the city father computers, which tells him about this kind of urban legend.

Then he discusses the idea with his guardian Anderson and wife Carla, and they end up reeling through a number of aspects of their world which are basically backstory which introduce various legends or entities we will meet in Earthman Come Home, such as:

cities that go rogue, named ‘bindlestiffs’
specifically the city of the IMT which genocided Thor V
the Vegan orbital fort

This handy little bit of exposition, or reminder, is threaded through with a bit of home-made Freud: namely that some of these stories may be true (they will, in fact, all prove to be true in Earthman, Come Home) but there is a deeper psychological force at work, namely that we make up bogies to scare us about things we ourselves actually want to do.

‘It’s always themselves that people are scared of.’ (p.207)

Chapter nine: The tramp

New York’s contract with Heaven is fulfilled and it takes off (we hear nothing at all about the supposed industrial revolution the city was meant to have organised).

Chris’s hypnopedia education continues regardless, and becomes so intense, he is being daily stuffed with so many facts via the hypnopedia headgear, that he begins to feel physically ill. He asks his tutor Dr Braziller if this is normal and she explains that the City Fathers (who run the hypnopedia) don’t care about individuals; pupils are stuffed with facts like geese with grain, because the Fathers are waiting to see what traits, what qualities will emerge, which the city can use in its eternal quest for survival.

Wistfully, Dr Braziller tells Chris she harboured hopes of becoming a composer but the City Fathers had never heard of a woman composer so that was that.

Chris is worried because the only subject he shows any gift for is history and the City Fathers are already, in effect, the city’s historians, since they contain a vast database of dates and events which he’ll never be able to match.

All this is interrupted one day when Anderson tells him the city has a new contract but it’s complicated. It’s with a planet, Argus III, to do mining, but it has slowly emerged that the planet already has another city on site, which was under contract but failed to deliver. That city? Scranton. The city which shanghaied Chris right at the start of the story. Not fulfilling your contract but squatting on the site defines you as a ‘tramp’. Theoretically Argus III could call the cops (cops always come into these city disputes) but then Scranton could counter-claim that their contract was being breached and/or New York was trying to poach the work, a serious breach of earth law and Okie tradition.

New York has picked up radio broadcasts by both parties, Scranton and the Argolids. John Amalfi himself wants Chris to listen in on the Scranton broadcasts and use every scrap of knowledge he gained on the city, to help interpret them.

Chapter ten: Argus asleep

New York lands on Argus III. There’s some nice science about how the stars of the system are relatively young and so full of metals, as are the planets. Good mining country. Chris begins to analyse Amalfi’s decisions which, of course, allows Blish to explain them to us, the reader.

Not only that he begins to make his own suggestions based on the little he picked up from seeing Scranton’s mayor in the flesh, namely that he is ruthless, treats passengers like scum, has a shortage of anti-agathic drugs. Also he points out that something must have been going wrong for a while if Scranton is so far from the planets of metal which New York recommended to her back when they did the passenger exchange.

Then the situation is transformed when it is revealed that Chris’s friend, Piggy, has defected to the other side, taking two women with him, one the unhinged wife of a New York cop who had been taught how to fly one of the city’s planes and then stole it. Piggy must have had some plan to become a big valuable man over there, but first thing New York knows is a message from Scranton saying the three are being held hostage.

Chris suggests sneaking over to Scranton on a solo mission, but his guardian emphatically rules it out.

Chapter eleven: The hidey hole

Chris does it anyway, with a plan. He meets up with Frad Haskins, the leader of the grab squad who press-ganged Chris onto Scranton right at the start of the story. Frad explains how even those close to him think Scranton’s mayor has gone nuts. He discusses with Chris what concessions and peace Amalfi would offer if Frad leads a coup to overthrow the mayor. then Chris hides away in his hidey hole in the disused warehouse, the one we saw him seeking refuge in back in chapter three, while a coup actually takes place.

When Frad comes to fetch him it’s something like a week later and Lutz has been overthrown. Frad is shabby, unshaven, dirty and has a black eye. Exiting back onto the streets Chris sees bulletholes and shell holes. Obviously the coup was violent. (It is, pretty simply, a cop-out of Blish’s part not to show any of it at all; all we get for the entire period of the coup is an account of Chris hiding, getting hungry, and trying to sleep. This reminded me a lot of Asimov’s Foundation series where there’s a lot of talk about battles and political struggles, but precious little actual description of them. This, I think, is because the entire approach of space opera is surprisingly limited: the fate of the entire galaxy hangs in the balance – again and again – and yet turns out to hang on the confrontations of a few super-clever characters in a room. This is the opposite of history as we know it, where the fate of empires and nations has been decided by wars which drag on for years and about which vast multi-volume libraries can be written.)

Chapter twelve: An interview with Amalfi

Chris is brought back to New York, along with the new leaders of Scranton to negotiate a deal with Amalfi. With fairy tale simplicity the deadline for doing a deal with Scranton had expired on Chris’s 18th birthday, which was also when his citizenship exam, the one he’s been cramming for for the previous couple of years, was due to take place.

At a stroke Amalfi announces that Chris has shown all the qualities required by a citizen, and amazes Chris and his guardian and Frad by offering to make Chris city manager of New York. Happy ending.

Coda

Very casually, half way through the last book in the series, The Triumph of Time, Blish tells us that DeFord was shot by the City Fathers for crooked dealing ‘seven centuries’ before that story is set, so about 3295 (p.559). Since The Triumph of Time was published in 1959, three years before A Life For The Stars, anyone who’d been reading the books as they came out, will have known Chris’s ultimate fate throughout their reading of this narrative.

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by embittered working class narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – a mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish –

1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s

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by Simon on December 31, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Science Fiction

Posted by Simon on December 31, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/31/a-life-for-the-stars-james-blish/

They Shall Have Stars by James Blish (1956)

The second of the four Cities in Flight novels by James Blish, this is a ‘fix-up’ novel made by joining two long short stories, ‘Bridge’ and ‘At Death’s End’, which were originally published in sci-fi magazines.

In terms of internal chronology, these stories describe the two key discoveries which make possible the world of the flying cities which we met in Earthman, Come Home, namely anti-agathic drugs and the spindizzy anti-gravity drive.

Background to the plot

It is 2013 and the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West continues. It seems to be a big idea (or fixation, or worry) of Blish’s that this sustained animosity will undermine Western society and freedoms. It will require the West to spy on its own citizens, to curtail scientific enquiry, and to enforce voluntary censorship, not least because of the vast spying and political control enforced by the hereditary head of the FBI, Francis X. MacHinery (a character clearly modelled on the Red-baiting demagogue, Senator Joe McCarthy).

Characters are careful what they say to each other and, if speaking candidly, make nervous jokes about being overheard and reported.

(There’s a scene, mid-novel, where Senator Wagoner has reported to him the key discovery which enables the anti-gravity device and Blish says the characters had to speak more or less in code because both knew the senator’s office was bugged by the FBI (pp.52-54). Similarly, on their third date Anne Abbott shows her date, Paige Russell, that the powder compact she keeps looking into is in fact a device which detects bugging devices i.e. tells you when it is safe, or unsafe, to talk freely.)

There are roughly two locations – America, in either Washington DC or New York City, and ‘the Bridge’ on Jupiter, monitored from its control room on a moon of Jupiter’s, Jupiter V.

On earth

In Washington and New York we see Senator Bliss Wagoner take the helm of the Joint Congressional Committee on Space Flight and ask the opinion of Giusseppi Corsi, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, what he should do. Between them they make a number of points and recommendations. The basic one is that space travel is going nowhere. They’re still using the same rocket technology invented during the war. Rockets have now taken man to Mars and even Jupiter, but Wagoner is frustrated that no-one is thinking big, beyond the solar system: there’s still no viable kind of trans-space engine. Corsi replies that the entire existing structure of government sponsored science is fossilised, third rate men fine-tuning existing tech. He advises Wagoner to cast the net wide, to look at oddballs, freaks, weird experiments, renegades: the future has got to come from outside existing mind-sets.

In New York Colonel Paige Russell is waiting impatiently in the lobby of Pfitzner and sons, the big pharma company. He has in his pocket samples of soil from Ganymede and Jupiter V. He’s a rocketman, has been to those places, brought back these samples at Pfitzner’s request, and is irritated to be kept waiting. Eventually he is given a cursory guided tour by a flunkey but then superseded by a visiting general and more or less kicked out. Irritated, he hits on the receptionist and persuades her to come to dinner.

The dinner scene contains various bits of information: for a start we learn that there’s been a religious revival, because Paige and the receptionist’s taxi (her name is Anne Abbot) gets caught in a chanting crowd. The religious people are now called Believers and have developed perfume bubbles which they disperse at their rallies. When they burst they disperse narcosynthetic drugs which make people feel like repenting, make them feel guilty and self pitying.

Once at the dinner table Anne slowly opens up about work at Pfitzner which has been mainly focused on developing new antibiotics which have worked very well at combating not only infectious diseases but some of the viruses which cause some cancers and so on. But eliminating infectious disease has just revealed a substrate of harder-to-cure conditions, degenerative diseases, circulatory diseases and so on.

This all hooks up with something Russell had heard while taking the tour of the labs: he thought he had heard a baby crying. Now, to his astonishment, Anne admits that they are experimenting on babies: after years of giving antibiotics to animals to make them stronger and healthier, experiments are taking place on newborn babies, giving them small doses of a range of antibiotics to see what happens.

Jupiter V

Meanwhile, some 600 million miles away, we meet two men who work on a space base on Jupiter V, one of Jupiter’s satellites. Robert ‘Bob’ Helmuth works four hours a day with headgear, visor and headphones on, monitoring the machines which repair and build ‘the Bridge’. His supervisor is Charity Dillon.

The Bridge lies six thousand miles below the top of Jupiter’s cloud layer. It is thirty miles high, eleven miles wide, and fifty-four miles long. Most of it is made of ice, Ice IV to be precise, existing under a pressure of a million atmospheres, at a temperature of 94 below zero Fahrenheit. It takes millions of megawatts to maintain it and keep it growing in Jupiter winds of 25,000 miles per hour.

Bob emerges from his shifts maintaining the Bridge’s equipment shell-shocked and drained. From the dialogue between him and Dillon, we learn that the crew who work on the Bridge project have all had ‘conditioning’; that the Bridge doesn’t go anywhere – it is built with giant pillars based on one of the few stable pieces of ‘land’ they could find on Jupiter’s surface – is more like a travelling crane which is just adding bits to itself not to ‘reach’ anywhere, but to increase its stability. Why? Because. To find out. To see if they can. Bob says the whole thing is a deplorable waste of time and effort. Dillon tells him to get some rest.

Washington

Back at the Pfitzner plant Paige comes to see Anne Abbot again, to apologise, but discovers MacHinery in the waiting room, the scary, Beria-type head of the secret police, who cross-questions him. But when MacHinery’s left, Anne and a Pfitzner scientist finally reveal what they’re investigating. They have established that all complex life forms secrete an aging toxin. Research has moved on to try and identify a drug or drugs which will neutralise this aging toxin: an anti-agathic, an anti-death drug.

Jupiter V

Bob Helmuth over-rides a more junior tech in the Bridge control room, responding to an ‘infection’ of one of the Bridge’s caissons with chemical ‘cancer’ by sending into the leg drills which locate the core of the chemical infection then detonate – badly damaging the caisson, but the cancer would have destroyed it. At least that’s what Bob argues to his boss, Dillon, who warns that Bob’s pessimism about the project is making him enemies.

Especially since a group of earth politicians is about to arrive to inspect the works. Bob is puzzled that they can skip out here to the edge of the solar system so easily and pushes Dillon who concedes that they are using a ship with a new anti-gravity rive. Anti-gravity!?

New York

Paige – now working closely with Anne and a scientist named Harold Gunn (vice president in charge of exports at Pfitzner, p.16) spots a Soviet spy in the lab, follows him to a vast camp of Believers which has is growing up in New York state, watches him go into a trailer, run up an aeriel and, presumably, broadcast his secrets to his controllers.

But when Paige tells Gunn and Anne they reveal that a) they’ve known about him all along, b) they actively don’t want to report the spy to the authorities because that will provide an excuse for MacHinery to close them down, and c) in a long passage Anne explains how the revelation of anti-death drugs will destabilise society, undermine the whole economic, legal, political and moral fabric of civilisation: i) as soon as it is revealed in the west, the Soviets will learn of its feasibility and eventually make their own anyway ii) leaking it to the Soviets will crash their system, so it is not treason to let the spy carry on spying.

Jupiter V

The subordinate he reprimanded, Eva, comes to Helmuth’s quarters to carry on the argument and to announce that she wants to have a baby. It emerges that they had been lovers some time in the past. Now he mocks her and they have a fierce argument. After the leaves Helmuth falls asleep and as his customary nightmare, of using an anti-gravity device on Jupiter which fails so that he is squashed flat – and wakes up screaming.

Book three – Entre’acte: Washington

Wagoner writes a memo to Giusseppi Corsi dated 4 January 2020 in which he explains in some detail how he followed Corsi’s advice from the Prelude, namely to seek out crackpots and radical thinkers, and how two lines of investigation led to a) the anti-gravity impact of spinning electrons and b) the discovery of anti-agathic drugs at Pfitzner.

New York

Knowing that he’s due to be posted to the remotest outpost of the solar system, the base on the newly-discovered planet Proserpine – and hearing mounting rumours that Pfitzner is about to be the subject of an investigation by Senator Wagoner, Paige heads to the company’s offices determined to make a clean breast of what he knows.

But instead he finds Wagoner already there, who briskly orders him and Anne to accompany him in a Cadillac taxi to the New York space port. Here they are bundled into a spaceship the size of a standard planetary ferry without much ceremony, told to strap in, and off they go! (In all these space operas people, completely untrained unprepared people, just get into ‘spaceships’ and off they whizz; as far as you can imagine form the reality which crystallised during the Apollo space programme, that you in fact need highly trained physically fit people to go into space.)

It’s a trick or gag: Paige can’t believe the ship is so small; he can’t believe they’re told they’re beyond earth’s atmosphere in moments; he can’t believe there’s proper one-G earth gravity on the ship, there never is on normal shuttle ships; and he is blown away when he goes up to the control and sees, through the viewing window between Wagoner and Anne – Jupiter appearing.

It is, quite obviously, a new breed of spaceship powered by an anti-gravity drive.

Jupiter V

Bob Helmuth sees what he takes to be another ferry land on the landing platform, but is preoccupied by a particularly fierce outburst of interference near the Bridge, and sends a crawling bot equipped with camera down the nearest leg… and is flabbergasted to see a) white objects fleeting past at top speed and then b) a kind of large bubble attached to the leg. It’s a laboratory, manned by a many-tentacled robot. Nobody told him about this! There’s nothing in the blueprints or plans!

A call comes through on the switchboard, plugs his helmet in and hears Doc Barth, who explains this lab was set up top secret a year ago. They now know for sure there is life on Jupiter, a kind of ammonia-based jellyfish which seems to feed on microscopic plankton!

Wagoner reveals all

But this discovery is nothing to what comes next. Helmuth is politely invited over to the ferry ship (a short walk outside the command centre for which he has to wear a spacesuit), invited into Senator Wagoner’s comfy cabin and introduced to Paige and Anne Abbott.

Helmuth states the grounds of his gloomy pessimism to the threesome: his boss Dillon thinks the creation of the Bridge shows that Man can do anything he sets his mind to, and is also a testament to the power of the West. Helmuth radically disagrees, he thinks it is a sign of the West’s decadence.

Wagoner astonishes Helmuth by saying he is even righter than he thought: the Soviets have already won. The unrelenting pressure of the Reds has made the West into an identikit copy, complete with repressive spying apparatus exemplified by H’s FBI.

‘We Sovietised ourselves’

But this history and politics is beside the point. Wagoner tells Helmuth the Bridge project is complete. They’ll keep it up for a bit longer but it has fulfilled its purpose of confirming the Blackett-Dirac equations about the relationship between magnetism and the spinning of a massive body. It could only be tested on a spinning object of enormous mass – hence, Jupiter. And the experiment has proved it.

Hence, he goes on to explain, the functioning of the Dillon-Wagoner gravitron polarity generator which makes atoms within its field refuse to recognise the existence or function or forces exerted by atoms outside its field i.e. escapes gravity. It leads to both a faster-than-light travel and effective shielding for everything within the field of its operation.

Bring together a) the fact that the West is about to collapse with b) a new technology which permits superfast space travel and you come up with c) Wagoner’s plan to evacuate the West and send freedom-loving Americans to colonise the nearest star systems. The whole thing to be led by Paige, Anne and him, Helmuth!

The final part of the jigsaw is the anti-agathic drugs. Wagoner announces they’ve brought the entire existing supply in the hold of the ferry ship. Helmuth, Anne and Paige will take them, administer them to others, live forever and colonise the galaxy!

Meanwhile, Wagoner will return to earth to face the heat (accusations of treason), probably be executed: who cares; the job will be done.

The end of the Bridge

Helmuth explains all this to his former lover, Eva. They realise that their attachments to the Bridge were, in different ways, a result of the ‘conditioning’ all the Jupiter scientists were subject to. Now they both realise it is not work saving, but was a means to something greater. At this climactic moment, the alarm bells ring. The vast red spot on Jupiter is passing close to the Bridge and threatens to tear apart its fabric. Alarm bells deafen and they hear Charity Dillon’s voice calling for all hands on deck to man the repair bots and drones. Eva, the scales fallen from her eyes, says ‘Let it fall’. In the stunned silence, she and Helmuth both hear Wagoner’s dry chuckle.

Coda

One final page describes Bliss Wagoner’s last day in the atomic pile where, as he predicted, he has been locked after being found guilty of treason. (We realise that the letter date January 2020 which he wrote to Corsi explaining his actions, must have been written from prison). The narrative’s antagonist, MacHiney, has got his way when he announces later that day that ‘Bliss Wagoner is dead’. But Wagoner’s legacy will live on across the galaxy.

Chris Foss’s cover art

Back in the 1970s it was worth buying science fiction paperbacks purely to own the stupendous cover art by Chris Foss. Quite often though, as in this case, when you read the book you discovered the cover had almost nothing to do with the text inside. They Shall Have Stars concerns the bridge – which is buried deep in the stormy atmosphere of Jupiter – controlled from what appears to be a modest little cluster of space buildings on Jupiter V – but most of all in the labs and offices of Pfister Corp in New York – none of which look like anything in this fabulous illustration.

Cover of the 1974 Arrow Books edition of They Shall Have Stars, art by Chris Foss

Other science fiction reviews

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, manages by accident to be an eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars, where they discover the Selenite civilisation

1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

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by Simon on December 30, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Science Fiction

Posted by Simon on December 30, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/12/30/they-shall-have-stars-james-blish/

The Hard Way by Lee Child (2006)

‘Very tall, heavily built, like a real brawler. He’s in his late thirties or early forties. Short fair hair, blue eyes.’ (Patti Joseph’s description of Reacher, p.91)

You remember the way episodes of Friends were titled ‘The one with…’ and then specified the core element of that week’s show. You can do the same with the 22 Jack Reacher novels. This is the one where Jack is hired to solve a kidnapping, which turns out to be much more complicated than it seems, and takes him from the streets of New York to a farm in Norfolk.

The café He is sitting in a café in New York when he sees a guy cross the street, get into a Merc and drive off. Nothing special in that. Next morning he’s at the same café when he’s approached by a tough-looking man and persuaded to come with him to meet his boss, Mr Lane. Turns out Mr Lane’s wife has been kidnapped, the kidnappers demanded a million in cash to be left in a car at that location. Lane agreed, had one of his people fill a bag with a million, put it in the boot of the car and drive it to the arranged drop zone. This was the car which Reacher had watched the kidnapper cross the street, get into and drive away. Without knowing it or intending to be, Reacher is a key witness.

The mercenaries Reacher tells them what he knows. ‘Them’? Yes, Lane runs a group of mercenaries (‘a private military corporation’, p.450) tough ex-Army, ex-Marines, U.S. Navy SEALs, British SAS etc. In fact, Reacher analyses their plight so logically and compellingly that Lane hires him on the spot to be a consultant to help manage the situation.

But there is, of course, more to the situation than meets the eye. It takes about 450 pages for Reacher to nail the real story, pages during which he, as usual:

acquires a small circle of helpers and supporters
who just happen to have privileged access to FBI/Army/Homeland Security sources
and manages to wangle financial backing to pay for the endless taxis and trains and planes he needs to take

Not the first time Firstly, it turns out this is the second time a Lane wife has been kidnapped. His first wife, Anne, was kidnapped five years earlier and, although Lane paid the ransom, was found shot dead in New Jersey.

The Dakota Building Reacher quickly discovers that some people suspect the first kidnap was a front, a put-up job. Lane’s base is the famous Dakota Building, next to Central Park, where John Lennon lived and outside which he was shot (Yoko Ono and her bodyguards make a small appearance in the book, walking past Reacher in the lobby).

Patti Joseph Outside the building he is approached by the first wife’s sister, Patti. She is convinced the first kidnap was a sham, and that Lane had her sister murdered. As the book progresses Reacher uncovers the evidence to prove this is true. He discovers that Lane had instructed a member of his inner circle, Knight, who usually drove his wife around, to return to base and tell everyone he’d dropped her off shopping as usual – but in fact to take her out to New Jersey and shoot her. Then paid someone to fake the ransom calls.

Lane had his first wife murdered Why? The first Mrs Lane had come to realise that Lane was a psychopath, and had told him she wanted to leave him. Which hurt his ego so much he had her eliminated. Although Knight – who knew all this – was loyal to his boss, on the mercenaries’ next job – to defend the government of Burkina Faso in Africa, from rebels – Lane contrived a situation whereby he ordered Knight and his best friend among the mercenaries, Hobart, to hold a forward post against the advancing army. Lane then ordered his main force to retreat, abandoning Knight and Hobart to the African rebel soldiers. The aim was to ensure that Knight was killed and along with him the evidence of his wife’s murder. Hobart was just collateral damage.

Detective Brewer The first wife’s sister, Patti Joseph, tells Reacher all this. She has been keeping a close watch on the Dakota Building for years, photographing who goes in and out, keeping a log of the movements of all of Lane’s central circle of mercs, for years. Is that obsessive or is she onto something? She phones in her results to a NYPD detective named Brewer. When Reacher meets Brewer the latter admits that he humours Patti, partly because something might come of her efforts, mostly because she’s a pretty chick.

FBI agent Pauling Turns out that Brewer passes on Patti’s observations to a third party, Lauren Pauling, an ex-FBI agent who was part of the original FBI investigation of the kidnapping of Lane’s first wife and has felt oppressed by guilt for five years that her and her colleagues screwed up the investigation and allowed the first wife to be killed. She is still interested in the case because she hopes evidence will surface to prove that it was Lane who killed the first wife, and not the kidnappers who did it, because that would get the FBI and the cops off the hook for bungling the case.

So who is carrying out the current kidnapping, five years later, of the second Mrs Lane, Kate Lane, a tall, slender, blonde, beautiful model, and her daughter by a previous marriage, Jade (also ‘a truly beautiful child’, p.424)?

Pauling becomes Reacher’s sidekick Reacher develops a close working relationship with Pauling, now a freelance investigator. She has a useful contact in the Homeland Security administration (they always do). Pauling becomes the person Reacher bounces his theories and ideas off, and who accompanies him on his investigations around New York.

Investigations They investigate the house where the kidnapper insisted the keys to each of the cars containing ransom money be dropped through the letterbox. It turns out to be empty. After clever detective work the pair track down the apartment the kidnapper used to oversee the dropping off place for the ransoms. They then manage to locate the apartment where Kate and Jade were kept hostage – though it’s now empty.

The man who doesn’t speak For a long middle stretch of the book, based on eye-witness accounts of neighbours and people who sold the kidnapper bits of furniture, they establish his appearance (non-descript white male) but the standout fact is that he never talks. From several hints they develop the theory that the kidnapper can’t talk and from descriptions of what’s happened to other white mercenaries captures in Africa, they speculate this may be because his tongue was cut out by the rebels.

Africa They think the kidnapper was one of the two men Lane abandoned in Burkina Faso – Hobart or Knight. Using Pauling’s contacts in Homeland Security to identify people who’ve flown back from Africa recently, and then another contact with access to all kinds of security databases, they track down the apartment of Hobart’s sister, which turns out to be conveniently close to the café and to the ransom-money-dropping-off point in Downtown Manhattan.

There’s a very tense moment when they break into the shabby apartment building where Hobart’s sister lives, and climb the squeaking stairs, at pains to be silent in case the kidnapper they’re seeking hears them, and has time to harm or shoot his hostages, Kate and Jade.

Hobart So the reader is surprised and shocked when they kick open the apartment door and find …. a washed-out shabby woman, Hobart’s sister, making soup, and that Hobart himself is a limbless cripple propped up on the sofa.

It is Hobart, he was a member of Lane’s mercenary gang, he was abandoned by Lane, he was captured by the rebel African soldiers. He was held captive for five long years during which he barely survived the starvation and disease and, once a year, they brought him and other prisoners out of their cells into an arena of baying warriors, and asked whether they wanted their left hand, right hand, left foot, or right foot to be hacked off with a machete – and whether they then wanted the stump seared in boiling tar, or left to bleed out.

Which explains why Hobart is in his pitiful state, without feet or hands, a wretched withered stump of a man. Hobart is clearly not the kidnapper, or the man who rented the apartments or who Reacher saw drive away the ransom car right at the start.

But he does confirm that his fellow merc and prisoner, Knight, did carry out the execution of Lane’s first wife, under Lane’s instructions, then helped the fiction that it was a kidnap. So that part of Patti’s story is correct.

Reacher and Pauling have sex Later that night, Pauling expresses to Reacher what a vast relief it is to her, to have confirmed that it was not her professional screw-up which had led to the first wife’s death. The wife was dead before the FBI was even contacted. To celebrate, she and Reacher have his usual athletic, fighting-with-a-bear, championship sex.

She is now his lover, as well as his close associate in the investigation.

The Taylor theory The book sprinkles more dead ends and deliberate false trails for Reacher (and the reader) to work through -, but the main focus of their investigation now shifts to Taylor. This man was in Lane’s inner circle of mercenaries, and was the guy who drove Kate Lane to Bloomingdale’s on the day of the kidnapping. The assumption had been that he was killed almost immediately by someone who got into the stationary car and pointed a gun at the women, forced Taylor to drive wherever they wanted him to go and then killed him.

Child has planted this false version of events in our minds by having Reacher ask not one but two of Lane’s mercs to speculate how they think the kidnapping went down, and both think it happened like that. This version of events had also been confirmed when Pauling’s cop contact, Brewer, told her that the body of a white man had been found floating off a dock in mid-town Manhattan.

Now Pauling and Reacher revisit this story and the first thing they establish is that the ‘floater’ is not Taylor. Wrong height to begin with. Taylor is still alive.

So now Pauling and Reacher develop the theory that Kate and Jade were kidnapped by a disgruntled member of Lane’s inner circle, Taylor, the very driver entrusted with their safety. He pulled out a gun, told her and Jade to shut up, drove them to a safe house, tied them up, made the ransom phone calls and picked up the money. Taylor will have needed an associate, so Reacher and Pauling spend a lot of time thinking through who that could be.

Reacher and Lane In case I haven’t made it clear, all this time – throughout this entire process – Reacher is still nominally under contract to Lane to find the kidnappers. At that first meeting in the Dakota Building, Lane offered Reacher a payment of $25,000 to find Kate and the kidnapper. Reacher is free to go off and roam the city, make his own investigations, contact whoever he likes – but periodically he has to go back to Lane’s apartment, filled with half a dozen surly mercs, and update the boss on progress.

Thus Reacher is sitting with the others when the ransom demand phone calls come through to Len’s apartment. He sits with the others when the second call comes through asking for confirmation that Lane has the cash, and then giving details of the pickup. And then he sits in suspense with the others waiting for a confirmation call that the money has been received, and – hopefully – that Kate is going to be released.

The character of Lane and the mercs Since the kidnapper ends up calling for three separate payments, there are three of these very tense scenes. They also gives Reacher plenty of time to get to know Lane, to witness his psychotic rages, and to see the hold he has over the other mercs. These are strong, well-trained men but each of them, in fact, was a failure in the military, in various ways in need of being led, and prepared to do anything for The Boss.

When there is no call-back after the third and final payment is made, Reacher along with the others begins to fear the worst. That the kidnapper has killed the girls and fled. Child reiterates this idea again and again, having Reacher emphasise that, in his experience, the majority of kidnappings end in the murder of the victims, and that the first 24 hours are key. Every hour after that increases the likelihood of failure.

A bounty on Taylor As the truth sinks in that the girls are probably dead, Lane increases the bounty he will pay Reacher to $1 million. Since he has kept Lane informed of his investigations up to the dismissal of Knight and Hobart as suspects, Lane, Reacher, Pauling and the reader all now think the kidnapping was carried out by Taylor the driver, who faked his own death, held the women hostage in Downtown Manhattan, collected the money three times, killed them, and has now absconded.

Reacher now clicks into Revenge Mode. He knows Lane is a louse, a psychopath who probably had his first wife murdered and abandoned his men to terrible fates in Africa. So he’s not doing it for Lane. He vows to track down Taylor for the sake of the women, for Kate and Jade. In the apartment they have now identified as Taylor’s, which they found empty and abandoned, Reacher noticed one of the speed dial phone numbers was to a number in Britain. He guesses it’s of a close relative.

The novel moves to England

All this has taken about 350 pages. For the last 150 pages of the novel the setting switches to England, for 20 or so pages to London, but then on to rural Norfolk, where Pauling and Reacher track Taylor down to his sister’s farm.

We know that Child – real name James Grant – is himself English. We know that he lives in New York, so we can guess that the extremely detailed descriptions of Reacher and Pauling’s investigative walks around Downtown Manhattan reflect Child’s own detailed knowledge of the area.

It adds a different, not exactly literary but psychological element – maybe a hint of tongue-in-cheek – to the English section of the book, to know that Child is himself English, but pretending to write as an American. So every description in this section is written by an Englishman masquerading as an American writing about a fictional American trying to pretend to fit in with the local Brits.

Thus Child’s description of Reacher walking into a rural pub in Norfolk is layered with ironies, as the Englishman Child imagines what it would be like for an American like Reacher to walk into a pub, and then to try and remember his own (Reacher’s own) days in the U.S. Army when he was stationed in England. All this results in Reacher ordering ‘a pint of best’ while his New York colleague and lover, Pauling, is made to point out all the quaint quirks and oddities of English life.

(The two most notable of these are that a) all the streets are absolutely festooned with signs and painted symbols giving instructions about every element of your driving, ‘the nanny state in action’ and b) London is a vast octopus extending its tendrils into the country for miles and miles, making it impossible to get into or out of at any speed. Both true enough.)

Reacher has been promised $1 million if he can deliver Taylor to Lane. Through British police contacts Reacher and Pauling track down Taylor, confirming he took a flight from New York JFK, arrived at Heathrow and then – using a different line of investigation – establish the whereabouts of his sister.

How? Using the speed dial phone number Reacher had noticed in Taylor’s New York apartment. This locates Taylor’s sister to a farm in Norfolk. Reacher and Pauling hire a car and drive there, locate the village, and the farm, and park in the early morning with binoculars, waiting for Taylor, his sister, her husband and little girl to exit the farmhouse, which they conveniently do a few hours later.

Reacher had already alerted Lane that he has confirmed that Taylor is in England, and so Lane and his crew are en route on a transatlantic flight. Sighting and identity confirmed, Reacher and Pauling drive back to London to meet Lane and his goons in the Park Lane hotel.

Lane doesn’t just want to kill Taylor. He explains how he is going to torture him slowly to death. Reacher is revolted by the psychopath, as ever. A few seats away in the lobby of the hotel, a mother is trying to quiet down her restless squabbling kids. One of them throws an old doll at her brother, which misses and skids across the floor, hitting Reacher’s foot. He looks down at it and has a blinding revelation.

The twist

In a flash Reacher realises what has been wrong with the investigation all along. In a blinding moment he realises he has made a seismic error of judgement and that his entire understanding of the case is not only wrong, but catastrophically wrong.

Why? What vital clues have he and Pauling (and the reader) missed in the last 400 pages? What can it be which totally transforms the situation? Why does he excuse himself from Lane for a moment, walk as if to the toilets, but instead hurtle down into the underground car park, call Pauling to meet him, jump into the hire car, and then drive like a maniac all the way back to Norfolk?

What is the real secret behind the kidnapping of Kate and Jade Lane?

That would be telling. It’s an expertly constructed book with many twists and false trails, tense moments, and sudden surprises. I read it in a day. Take it on your next long train or plane trip or to read by a pool. It is gripping, intelligent and – in much of its factual research (about mercenaries, about the coup in Africa) informative.

Credit

All quotes from the 2011 paperback edition of The Hard Way by Lee Child, first published in 2006 by Bantam Press.

Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

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by Simon on August 8, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in America, Thriller

Posted by Simon on August 8, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/08/08/the-hard-way-lee-child/

Make Me by Lee Child (2015)

We can’t fight thirty people. To which Reacher’s natural response was: Why the hell not? It was in his DNA. Like breathing. He was an instinctive brawler. His greatest strength, and his greatest weakness. (p.136)

Make Me is the 20th novel in the series featuring tough ex-U.S. Army Military Policeman-turned-investigator, Jack Reacher.

The series is immensely popular, with every one of the novels having been optioned for movies, and two – One Shot and Never Go Back – made into ‘major motion pictures’ starring Tom Cruise. Which is odd since Cruise is famously on the short side (5 feet 6 inches) whereas the whole point of Jack Reacher is that he is a hulking bear of a man (six foot five).

Lee Child

The single most interesting thing about the Jack Reacher novels and their star, the tall, street wise, intelligent and bullet-proof American tough guy, is that their author is English.

Lee Child was born in Coventry and grew up in Birmingham. You can hardly get less glamorous and more provincially English than that. What turned him into an international publishing phenomenon? Eighteen years working with Granada TV, writing trailers, introductions, commercials and news stories. This honed his skills for getting to the point. (In fact Lee Child is a nom de plume: his real names is James Grant.)

Praise

The cover of the book is festooned with praise from his peers in the thriller-writing business, such luminaries as James Patterson, Michael Connelly, Ken Follett, Stephen King and Frederick Forsyth. It is noticeable that all the women writers describe Reacher in terms of physique and sexual attractiveness.

Patricia Cornwell says she picks up Reacher ‘when I’m in the mood for someone big to solve my problems.’

Karin Slaughter says Reacher is ‘one of the sexiest characters in fiction.’

Joanne Harris says reading Reacher is ‘one of my essential guilty pleasures.’

The most revealing comment is from British journalist Lucy Mangan:

I am very much in love with Jack Reacher – as a man and a role model. If I can’t shag him, then I want to be him.

(The bold is in the originals.) Reacher is tall, blonde and handsome, He is strong and silent. He protects women and the vulnerable. He doesn’t start trouble but if there is trouble he can more than handle himself in a fight. ‘What do women want?’ Freud is said to have asked. Jack Reacher, apparently.

Slow buildup

I was surprised and then amazed at how slow-moving this novel is, very slow, very slow-moving indeed. It has 492 pages divided into fifty-nine short punchy chapters (8.3 pages per chapter, though each one manages to feel much briefer because of the snappy writing).

By half way through, the following has happened: Reacher has stepped off a train at a remote and minuscule settlement in the American mid-West, intrigued by its incongruous name, Mother’s Rest. A woman steps out of the shadows as he strolls towards the central strip of town, clearly expecting him to be somebody she knows, then realises he isn’t.

They get chatting and it emerges that she is Michelle Chang (a name as tokenistically ethnic, but really as bland and commonplace as his own). Chang is ex-FBI, now a freelance investigator, having set up a detective agency with a few other investigators in the same situation. One of them was named Keever. He called in to tell the others that he was investigating something here in Mother’s Rest, then disappeared. She’s come to find out why.

We, the readers, know why – because Child opened a novel with a description of ‘them’ – an unnamed group of men – burying Keever. He’s dead. They killed him. This much we know. But why?

Very slowly Reacher gets drawn into Chang’s problem, not least because he is irked by the unfriendliness of the guys in town. (All men are referred to as ‘guys’ throughout.) The one-eyed owner of the only motel in town is twitchy and nervous, refuses to answer questions about Keever, keeps an obvious eye on Reacher and Chang.

As Reacher moseys round the small town he realises he is being followed by a kid and that various store owners lift the phone as he walks by – phoning in his progress to a central figure, who goes unnamed – we only know that he wears pressed jeans and has blow-dried hair. Ooh. Creepy! They are all nervous about the way Reacher is snooping around. They all talk about ‘us’, and how ‘we’ will have to take some action…

Reacher and Chang decide to drive to Keever’s apartment in Oklahoma City to find out more. Some guys from Mother’s Rest follow them as they drive. Reacher stops the car, gets out, confronts them and, as they go for their guns, kicks one in the nuts and smashes the other’s cheekbone with his elbow. He’s so tough. He’s so strong. Men want to be him. Women want to shag him. The appeal really does seem to be as primitive as that.

Reacher’s ‘technique’ is thoroughness

Sherlock Holmes’s deductions are clever and unexpected. Reacher’s feel far more obvious. He and Chang find a scrunched-up note in Keever’s room with a phone number and a name on it. They ring the number. It’s a science journalist in LA named Westwood. He agrees to meet them. They fly to LA. The science journalist explains that he gets calls from cranks all the time. Reacher guesses that whoever had hired Keever might be one of these cranks. They check Westwood’s database of calls. They systematically ring them all and eliminate all the obvious fruitcakes or unanswered calls. This narrows it down. One particular caller made lots of calls from Chicago, from a number they identify as the public library. They fly to Chicago. They take a taxi to a hotel. They check in.

By this stage Reacher and Chang have got beyond edgy camaraderie, progressed to sharing theories and hunches, and have had dinner together. He is tall, blonde and handsome with eyes of Arctic blue. She is lean and fit with curves in all the right places. Go on. Guess what happens.

Yep. They go to bed. What do women want? To be wined and dined, to be respected and courted. And then to be shagged senseless by a tall, super-capable man. Repeatedly. In hotel rooms across America.

They visit the public library in Chicago where the calls came from. They interview the librarian who knew the old, sad man who they now think was the caller, Keever’s client, the instigator of Keever’s investigation, name of McCann.

As I mentioned, Sherlock Holmes’s deductions are deliberately made outlandish and improbable. By contrast, at every step of the way Reacher is shown working through the possibly scenarios with very clear logic and application. If Reacher has a method, it is extreme thoroughness. At every stage, almost on every page, there are options and alternatives. He considers them rationally and logically. He works through them. He chooses the best one. It generally proves to be correct.

There is more than a touch of Mr Spock about Reacher.

Lucky man

But one of the things that makes this an example of genre fiction is the easiness, the fluency and the luck. Reacher is lucky, continually lucky.

He speculates that it was Keever’s client who called the LA journalist – and is proved right.

He speculates that the caller will have called in a specific time window 3 to 4 months earlier – and is proved right.

He guesses that the caller, having been blocked by the journalist as a nuisance, will change his name and continue calling, but call from the same number or area code. He does, and that’s what helps them recognise the fake name he uses second time round, which in turn leads them to his real name – McCann.

(It helps that Chang has a contact in the US telephone system who does her favours and helps them identify the various numbers.)

All this evidence narrows the search down to Chicago so they fly there, check into a hotel, have sex, then visit the library. All of which proves to be the correct deduction.

Similarly, the polite lady librarian at the Chicago public library won’t give them the address of the man they have now identified as McCann, out of a sense of confidentiality – but Reacher asks a series of tangenital questions about whether he drove or took public transport to work (walked) and his health (poor) from which they deduce that McCann’s home must be among the surrounding three blocks. Which is correct.

A block away from the library is a dusty old pharmacy which sells the kind of temporary cell phones (known as ‘burners’) which they speculate that McCann used. So Reacher guesses that the old boy walked past it on his walk to the library – so his house must be in that general direction. Which turns out to be correct.

The librarian had said that McCann gave the impression that he was ashamed of where he lived. So Reacher guesses it’s not a nice house but an apartment, probably in a rundown block. And so it is that after half an hour of working along the street, looking at nameplates to every flat on every apartment block, Michelle finds one with ‘Peter McCann’ on it.

They pretend to be making a delivery in order to get buzzed into the block, walk up to the apartment in question, to find the door is open.

And so on.

At every juncture Reacher makes reasonable enough guesses based on the odds, working things through steadily and methodically. But he is always lucky. The cards always fall his way. The time period of calls to the journalist turns out to be dead right. Chicago turns out to be the right hunch as location for the mysterious client. Guessing the pharmacy is the one where McCann bought his disposable phones turns out to be right. His apartment has a nice legible name label (unlike most I’ve ever visited) – and it gives McCann’s real name. The door to the apartment is unlocked.

Same with women. Reacher’s guesstimates about how to pace things in his relationship with Chang turn out to be picture perfect – when to hold off, when to be polite and professional, when to be slightly more personal, when to take her to dinner, when to wait for her signal, when to make a first move (a kiss) and when to take her to bed – all turn out to be right. He is right all the time. About everything.

Tall, tough and handsome, and always right.

Fighting

This supernatural skillfulness comes into its own in the many scenes of violence, fighting and shooting.

When he gets out of the car he and Chang are driving to Oklahoma City to confront the two toughs who have been tailing them – the reader partakes in his expert assessment of the situation, his estimate of where best to stand in order to a) kick one in the nuts and still have time to b) smash the other in the face.

When an assassin confronts them outside Keever’s apartment, we once again share Reacher’s immensely detailed calculation of the best way to handle the situation, and a literal blow-by-blow account of the fight.

Later in the book, Reacher and Chang go to visit McCann’s sister to find out more about his motives for hiring Keever. She’s married to a rich doctor and they’re supervising wedding celebrations for their grown-up daughter when three assassins hired by the Mother’s Rest people burst in. Three assassins with guns. Once again Child gives us an extremely detailed account of how Reacher thinks through the problem, works the angles, creates a diversion, and ends up killing all three and saving himself, Chang and McCann’s sister’s family unscathed.

We see his careful planning and calculations, so it’s not dumb luck. He thinks the problem through, calculates the angles, waits for the right moment, and so on.

Still pretty lucky, though.

When they figure out that the assassins were sent by ‘the fat man’, who is the head of the organisation of hitmen and which has been sub-contracted by the Mother’s Rest mob to rub them out – Chang and Reacher:

a) easily identify the nightclub which is a front for the gang
b) find the gate to the fenced compound around the club conveniently open
c) find the fat man sitting inside the compound, so that
d) Reacher can walk up to him, shoot him in the head, turn and walk away.

No bodyguards protecting him, no-one comes bursting out of the club firing at him. Lucky, huh?

Reacher is always right, about everything.

No wonder men want to be him. No wonder women want to shag him.

Characteristics of a Jack Reacher novel

Simple Child’s prose style is pared right back in the standard thriller style.

1. Partly because all modern American prose is pared back – generations of American creative writing teachers have told all their students to go over and over their manuscripts to remove unnecessary adjectives or adverbs, to keep it simple. So now American prose is simple. Doesn’t mean it can’t be thoughtful, though. Imaginative. Evocative.

Three Rugers [a type of gun], three guys. Black clothes, scalped hair, pale skin. Big enough and heavy enough, but also somehow bony. Tight cheekbones. Hard times in their DNA, from not too long ago. From Europe, maybe. Far in the marshy east. Every man against his neighbour, for the last thousand years. (p.330)

2. Partly because over the past hundred years the masculine world of crime fiction with its strong silent types has been associated with tough, no-nonsense prose for tough, no-nonsense guys. Hard boiled. Nothing soft or wishy-washy. True since the 1920s at least. Dashiell Hammett. Keep it simple.

Simple sentences. Short sentences. Sometimes three words. Or two. One. Limited vocabulary. Repetition.

Reacher listened hard, and heard nothing.
He stepped around the desk to the private side.
He glanced at the ledgers. And the files. And the notebooks. Routine motel stuff. Accounts, orders, to-do lists, percentages.
He listened again. Heard nothing.
He opened a drawer. Where the guy kept the room keys. He put 113 in, and took 215 out.
He closed the drawer.
He stepped back to the public side.
He breathed out. (p.73)

It gives a bleached-out, empty effect. Obviously designed to be tense and taut. Minimum perceptions. Human as robot, as terminator, stripped of all uncertainty and hesitation. Human as pure knowing, calculating machine.

A gated community. Rich people. Taxpayers. Political donors. The Maricopa County sheriffs on speed dial.
They waited at the kerb, a hundred yards short.
It was three in the afternoon. Five, in Chicago.
There was one guard behind the glass.
Reacher said, ‘We should have figured.’
Chang said, ‘If she’s heard about her brother, we’ll never get in.’ (p.291)

Said When characters talk they never question, answer, reply, respond, smirk. They never do anything with any colour or inflection. They just ‘say’. She said. He said. The guy said. They said.

Chang said, ‘He could be a brother or a cousin…’
‘He looks like the boss,’ Reacher said…
Chang said, ‘We have to be certain…’
Reacher said, ‘Did your contact mention family members?’..
Chang said, ‘We don’t know of any family members.’
‘He looks like the boss,’ Reacher said… (p.352)

The deliberate reduction of the complex and multi-faceted human activity of speaking, questioning, answering, discussing and joking down to one monotonously reiterated word – ‘said’- typifies the general strategy of simplification.

All men are ‘guys’. All roads are blacktop. Taxis are taxis. They took a taxi to the hotel. It was part of a chain. The Mothers Rest hard goods store is like hundreds of others. The pharmacy in Chicago is the type you see everywhere.

Hardly anything is really described, certainly not given any detailed vibe or atmosphere. That would require invoking an element of subjectivity on the part of the narrator, that would involve soft, wishy-washy feelings and perceptions and these – in this genre – are banned.

Instead, atmosphere is almost entirely implied by Reacher’s reactions to a situation, sizing up the guy, weighing the odds, calculating the angles.

Paused a beat Hence another characteristic: characters often pause in speaking — pause a beat or, in another common phrase, pause until the silence becomes uncomfortable.

He paused a beat… She was quiet for a long moment, five or six seconds, right to the edge of discomfort. (p.492)

During these pauses the characters – mostly Reacher – are calculating the odds, thinking the problem through.

Which Another mannerism is, after anyone has made a decision or acted a certain way, to have a short sentence starting with ‘which’ and approving it.

Which made sense. (p.349)

Which was a good question. (p.468)

Which was good. (p.457)

If you say it out loud, in a slow tough guy drawl, you can see how it conveys laconic, wise approval. One pro nodding approval of another pro. Good choice. Wise move.

The bloody climax

In the end, you won’t be surprised to learn that the sleepy little ville of Mother’s Rest does indeed contain a gruesome and disgusting secret, a secret so sordid and violent that the townspeople are all jumpy whenever a stranger arrives, and have outsourced ‘protection’ to a Ukrainian mobster, Merchenko, and his hitmen.

(These are the hitmen Reacher deals with in the scene where they invade McCann’s sister’s house in Phoenix – referred to above – which prompts him to track down and coolly execute Merchenko.)

In fact, there turn out to be two secrets, a secret within a secret, which is very effective, in narrative and thriller terms.

As the plot moves along, Westwood introduces Chang and Reacher to a geek who can access the so-called Dark Web, the vast cyberspace with hidden websites and transactions, mainly used for pornography and crime. He is referred to simply as ‘the guy from Palo Alto’ (p.378).

This guy uses the evidence our team have assembled to tell the following story – a middle-aged man named Peter McCann had a 30-year-old son, Michael, with mental health issues who he was concerned about and who had gone missing on a bus journey through Mother’s Rest. McCann made repeat calls to Westwood asking for his help tracking his son down. Why? Because McCann had written an article way back, one he’d more or less forgotten about, on the subject of the Dark Web, and McCann wanted Westwood’s help in delving into it to find out what happened to his son. McCann had discovered that his son was a frequent visitor to dark websites concerned with suicide.

The guy from Palo Alto confirms all this and goes on to discover that it looks like Michael made a pact with someone he met on the Dark Web to go to Mother’s Rest and be euthanised.

In other words, the dark secret behind the sleepy little town, is that a dozen or so of its inhabitants have set up a euthanasia centre on a remote farm a dozen miles outside of town. Here customers can commit suicide in a number of ways. The guy from Palo Alto tracks down a hidden brochure which lists the methods: injection of poison, carbon monoxide piped into a peaceful room to nice music etc.

Having discovered all this Reacher and Chang return to Mother’s Rest along with Westwood, pretty sure there will be a welcoming committee and there is. The ten or so men in the euthanasia syndicate have posted lookouts around the town and are waiting with guns.

There is a very bloody shootout. Reacher and Chang lure out of the stronghold, cosh and tie up five of the baddies, before the situation degenerates into a prolonged shoutout with the other five.

Despite being trapped in a large shed-like building with the baddies firing rifle bullets through the thin walls, our heroes survive unscathed, while despatching all five of the armed baddies. Lucky, eh?

It is only during the shootout that they discover there is an even darker side, to the euthanasia setup than they had originally thought. I won’t give it away, partly because it’s so disgusting, partly because… you should read it yourself!

Reacher is a calculating machine

By page 492 – in among the violence, the pared-back prose style, the inevitable championship sex between Chang and Reacher and the incredible fluency and mobility of American life (on one level the book is a blizzard of planes and trains and coaches and taxis and hotels and gold cards) – I kept being struck by the surprisingly Darwinian nature of its worldview.

The longer it goes on the more you realise that Reacher is a calculating machine – not doing sums, but calculating the odds of everything. What is really going on in Mother’s Rest, why does a shopkeeper glimpsed through a window move his arm (phoning someone?), what are his chances with Chang, how will the assassin in the doorway move next, how accurate will the shooters with their M16 rifles be – and so on. He never stops. He is permanently calculating the odds and possibilities of everything.

Some of this is unconscious. On a number of occasions Child tells us that Reacher is calculating something with the frontal, conscious part of his mind – but meanwhile, the unconscious back part is making its own split-second decisions – what he refers to several times as ‘the lizard brain’.

A forty per cent chance, the back of Reacher’s brain told him, immediately and automatically… (p.332)

Then the guy in the yard opened the slider and stepped inside, and the back of Reacher’s brain showed him the whole chess game right there, laid out, obvious, in flashing neon arrows, in immense and grotesque detail… (p.327)

Meanwhile the guy [Reacher has just shot] was going down vertically, as if he had stepped into an elevator shaft, and Reacher was turning fractionally left, from the waist, shoulders braced, looking for the third-base guy, the furthest away, because some back-of-the-brain calculation was telling him the guy had a better line of fire… (p.337)

It’s like being inside the brain of a cheetah or a leopard, stalking its prey on the savannah, permanently calculating, continually alert to its next move.

At one point Reacher is described as a predator poised above the waterhole. This is exactly what he feels like all the way through. When not being pressed he is gentlemanly and courteous, to old ladies or women like Chang. But when at all pressed, he turns into super-predator, an unrivalled calculator of the odds for fighting and surviving and beating all the opposition in sight.

He’s not just tall and strong and trained to kill in twenty ways. He is a super-predator, a quintessence of the hunter-killer instinct which the biologists tell us is inside all of us.

Which, according to the blurbs, men want to be, and women want to shag – in order to have babies by him, in order to be protected by him.

The heartlessness of American life

Where does Reacher get his money from? There seems to be no end to the train tickets, hire cars, airplane flights, hotel rooms and taxis, taxis everywhere. Credit cards, cell phones, the internet, shiny hire cars, the rich doctor in his gated community, the party by the pool, power breakfasts, brunch in diners, dinners in restaurants – to me there is a sickening surfeit of wealth.

In their films and fictions, Americans seem to take it for granted that they can go anywhere, do anything, eat anything, shoot anyone. By and large Americans don’t realise how rich and privileged they are.

Which makes the contrast with the sickening sadism, violence and general heartlessness of almost the characters so upsetting and disturbing. The novel opens with a murder, there’s a lull while Chang and Reacher slowly uncover the powder trail leading to the gruesome truth – and then a steady increase in tempo of the opponents Reacher has to blow apart, behead, execute and generally eviscerate.

For me there’s an umbilical connection between the two: The casual way they accept the train tickets, plane flights, hire cars, identikit hotel rooms, everything is described in solely functional terms, as expressions of wish and desire. I wanna go there. I’ll getta plane. I’ll hire a car. I’ll getta taxi. I want, I get.

The characters apply the same instrumental mindset to each other. You’re in my way. I gotta kill you. Sorry it ain’t personal, it’s business. I’m being paid to execute you, sorry but a job’s a job.

In the scene where the assassins burst in on Chang and Reacher talking to McCann’s sister and her family, the assassins – once they’ve lined the good guys all up on the sofa – proceed to share the fact that they’re upset: they were paid to kill three people (Chang, Reacher and McCann’s sister) and now they’re confronted with five people. Well, that’s just not fair, is it? If they gotta kill five they want more money. I mean you would too, right? Am I right?

Presumably this scene is meant to be funny. In fact it’s the delay while the assassins try to figure out which of the five people in front of them are the three they’ve been sent to assassinate – Chang, Reacher and McCann’s sister (well, Chang being Chinese is easy enough, but they’re uncertain about the other two) that allows Reacher, with his lizard brain, to contrive a strategy which evens up the odds enough for him to tackle all three assassins and – lucky as usual – to go from sitting on a sofa completely unarmed, to getting the better of three armed assassins. What a guy.

It’s possible to enjoy books like this for the thrill of the narrative, for its tongue-in-cheek hard man prose, for its ridiculous love scenes – but still be appalled by the insight they give into a society which has been hollowed out and lost all its humanity.

Every possible facility of advanced twenty-first century life is laid on for these Americans. And yet, with a kind of tragic inevitability, books like this show how having everything has somehow withered Americans’ humanity and turned them into killing machines. Not every American is a soulless killer, obviously. But our time does seem to be witnessing a plague of mass shootings by Americans with plenty of guns and no soul whatsoever.

Reviews of other Jack Reacher novels

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by Simon on July 29, 2018 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, America, Books, Thriller

Posted by Simon on July 29, 2018

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/07/29/make-me-lee-child/

Atomic by Jim Baggott (2009)

This is a brilliantly panoramic, thrilling and terrifying book.

The subtitle of this book is ‘The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-49‘ and it delivers exactly what it says on the tin. At nearly 500 pages Atomic is a very thorough account of its subject – the race to develop a workable atomic bomb between the main warring nations of World War Two, America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia – with the additional assets of a 22-page timeline, a 20-page list of key characters, 18 pages of notes and sources and a 6-page bibliography.

A cast of thousands

The need for a list of key characters is an indication of one of the main learnings from the book: it took a lot of people to convert theoretical physics into battlefield nuclear weapons. Every aspect of it came from theories and speculations published in numerous journals, and then from experiments devised by scores of teams of scientists working around the industrialised world, publishing results, meeting at conferences or informally, comparing and discussing and debating and trying again.

Having just read The Perfect Theory by Pedro Ferreira, a ‘biography’ of the theory of relativity, I had gotten used to the enormous number of teams and groups and institutes and university faculties involved in science – or this area of science – each containing numerous individual scientists, who collaborated and competed to devise, work through and test new theories relating to Einstein’s famous theory.

Baggott’s tale gives the same sense of a cast of hundreds of scientists – it feels like we are introduced to two or three new characters on every page, which can make it quite difficult to keep up. But whereas progress on the theory of relativity took place at a leisurely pace over the past 100 years, the opposite is true of the development of The Bomb.

This was kick-started when a research paper showing that nuclear fission of uranium might be possible was published in 1939, just as the world was on the brink of war (hence the start date for this book). From that point the story progresses at an increasing pace, dominated by a Great Fear – fear that the Nazis would develop The Bomb first and use it without any scruples to devastate Europe.

The first three parts of the book follow the way the two warring parties – the Allies and the Nazis – assembled their teams from civilian physicists, mathematicians and chemists at various institutions, bringing them together into teams which were assembled and worked with increasing franticness, as the Second World War became deeper and darker.

If the you thought the blizzard of names of theoretical and experimental physicists, mathematicians, chemists and so on in the first part was a bit confusing, this is as nothing compared to the tsunami of names of Army administrators, security chiefs, civil servants, bureaucrats and politicians who are roped in to create and administer the facilities which were established to research and build, first a nuclear reactor, then a nuclear bomb.

Baggott unfolds the story with a kind of unflinching factual pace which is extremely gripping. Each chapter is divided into sections, often only a page long, which explain contemporaneous events at research bases in Chicago, out in the desert at Los Alamos, in Britain, in German research centres, and among Stalin’s harassed scientific community. Each one of these narratives is fascinating, but intercutting them like this creates an almost filming effect of cutting from one exciting scene to another. Baggott’s prose is spare and effective, almost like good thriller writing.

The nuclear spies

And indeed the book strays into actual thriller territory because interwoven with the gripping accounts of the British, Russian, German and American scientists, and their respective military and political masters, is the story of the nuclear spies. I read Paul Simpson’s A Brief History of The Spy a few months ago and it gives good accounts of the activities of Soviet spies Klaus Fuchs, David Greengrass, Theodore Hall, as well as the Rosenbergs. But the story of their spying and the huge amounts of top secret information they handed over to the Russians is so much more intense and exciting when it is situated in the broader story of the nail-biting scientific, chemical, logistical and political races to build The Bomb.

German failure

As everyone knows, the Nazis were not able to construct a functioning bomb before they were militarily defeated in May 1945. But it wasn’t for want of trying, and the main impression from the book was the sense of vicarious horror from the thought of what they’d done if they had made a breakthrough in the final desperate months of spring 1945. London wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here.

Baggott’s account of the German bomb is fascinating in numerous ways. Basically, once the leadership were told it wouldn’t be ready in the next few years, they didn’t make it a priority. Baggott follows the end of the war with a chapter on hos most of the German nuclear scientists were flown to England and interned in a farm outside Cambridge which was bugged. Their conversations were recorded in which they were at first smugly confident that they were being detained because they were so far in advance of the Allies. Thus they were all shocked when they heard the Allies had dropped an atom bomb on Japan in August 1945. At which point they began to develop a new line, one much promoted by German historians since, which is that they could have developed a bomb if they’d wanted to, but had morals and principles and so did all they could to undermine, stall and sabotage the Nazi attempt to build an A bomb.

They were in fact ‘good Germans’ who always hated the Nazis. Baggott treats this claim with the contempt it deserves.

Summary of the science

The neutron was discovered in 1932, giving a clearer picture of what atoms are made of i.e. a nucleus with at least one proton (with a positive electric charge) balancing at least one electron (with a negative charge) in orbit around it. Heavier elements have more than one neutron and electron (always the same number) as well as an increasing number of neutrons which give weight but have no electric charge. Hence the periodic table lists the elements in order of heaviness, starting with hydrogen with one proton and going all the way to organesson, with its 118 protons. Ernest Lawrence in California invented the cyclotron, a device for smashing sub-atomic particles into nuclei to see what happened. In 1934 Enrico Fermi’s team in Italy set out to bombard the nuclei of every known element with neutrons, starting with hydrogen (1) and going through the entire periodic table.

The assumption was that, by bombarding elements with neutrons they would dislodge one or two protons in each nucleus and ‘shift’ the element down the periodic table by one or two places. When the team came to bombard one of the heaviest elements, uranium, they were amazed to discover that the process seemed to produce barium, about half the weight of uranium. The bombardment process seemed to blast uranium nuclei in half. Physics theory, influenced by Einstein, suggested that a) this breakdown would result in the release of energy b) some of the neutrons within the uranium nucleus would not be required by the barium atoms and would themselves shoot out to hit other uranium nuclei, and so on.

The process would create a chain reaction.
Although the collapse of each individual atom would release a minuscule amount of energy, the number of atoms in such a dense element suggested a theoretically amazing release of energy. If every nucleus of uranium in a 1 kilogram lump was split in half, it would release the same energy as 22,000 tons of TNT explosive.

Otto Frisch, an Austrian Jewish physicist who had fled to Niels Bohr’s lab in Copenhagen after the Nazis came to power, heard about all this from his long-time collaborator, and aunt, Lise Meitner, who was with the German team replicating Fermi’s results. He told Bohr about the discovery. Frisch named it nuclear fission.

In early 1939 papers were published in a German science journal and Nature, while Bohr himself travelled to a conference in America. In the spring of that year fission research groups sprang up around the scientific world. In America Bohr realised anomalies in the experimental results were caused by the fact that uranium comes in two isotopes, U-235 and U-238. The numbers derive from the total number of neutrons and protons in an atom: U-238 has 92 protons and 146 neutrons; U-235 has three fewer neutrons. Slowly evidence emerged that it is the U-235 which breaks down. But it is much rarer than the stable U-238 and difficult to extract and purify. In March 1939 a French team summarised the evidence for nuclear chain reactions in a paper in Nature, specifying the number of particles released by disintegrated nuclei.

All the physicists involved realised that the massive release of energy implied by the experiments could theoretically be used to create an explosive device vastly more powerful than anything then existing. And so did the press. Newspaper articles began appearing about a ‘superbomb’. In April the head of physics at the German Reich Research Council assembled a group devoted to fission research, named the Uranverein, calling for the ban of all uranium exports, and for it to be stockpiled. British MP Winston Churchill asked a friend, Oxford physicist Frederick Lindemann, to prepare a report on the feasibility of a fission bomb. Soviet scientists replicated the results of their western colleagues but didn’t bring the issue to the attention of the authorities – yet. Three Hungarian physicists who were exiles from the Nazis in America grasped the military importance of the discoveries. They approached Einstein and persuaded him to write a warning letter to President Roosevelt, which was written in August 1939 though not delivered to the president until October. Meanwhile the Germans invaded Poland on 1 September and war in Europe began. At this point the Nazis approached the leading theoretical physicist in Germany, Werner Heisenberg, and he agreed to head the Uranverein, leading German research into an atomic bomb until the end of the war.

And so the race to build the first atomic bomb began! The major challenges were to:

isolate enough of the unstable isotope U-235 to sustain a chain reaction
to kick start the chain reaction somehow, not with the elaborate apparatus available in a lab, but with something which could be packed inside a contain (a bomb) and then triggered somehow
a material which could ‘damp’ the process enough so that it could be controlled in experimental conditions

From the start there was debate over the damping material, with the two strongest contenders being graphite – but it turned out to be difficult to get graphite which was pure enough – or ‘heavy water’, water produced with a heavier isotope of hydrogen, deuterium. Only one chemical plant in all of Europe produced heavy water, a fertiliser factory in Norway. The Germans invaded Norway in April 1940 and a spin-off was the ability to commandeer regular supplies from this factory. That is why the factory, and its shipments of heavy water, were targeted for the commando raid and then air raids dramatised in the war movie, The Heroes of Telemark. (Baggott gives a thorough and gripping account of the true, more complex, more terrifying story of the raids.)

Learnings

I never realised that:

In the end the Americans built the bomb because they were the only ones with enough resources. Although Hitler and Stalin were briefed about the potential, their scientists told them it would be three or four years before a workable bomb could be made and they both had more pressing concerns. The British had the know-how but not the money or resources. There is a kind of historical inevitability to America being the first to build a bomb.
But I never realised there were quite so many communist sympathisers in American society and that so many of them slipped across the line into passing information and/or secrets to the Soviets. The Manhattan Project was riddled with Soviet spies.
And I never knew that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man put in charge of the facilities at Los Alamos and therefore widely known as the ‘father’ of the atom bomb, was himself was such a dubious character, from the security point of view. Well-known for his left-wing sympathies, attending meetings and donating money to crypto-communist causes, he was good friends with communist party members and was approached at least once by Soviet agents to pass on information about the bomb project. No wonder elements in the Army and the FBI wanted him banned from the very project which he was in fact running.

Hiroshima

The first three parts of the book follow in considerable detail the story from the crucial discoveries on the eve of the war, and then interweaves developments in Britain, America and the USSR up until the detonation of the two A-bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945.

I was shocked all over again to read the idea that, on the eve of the first so-called Trinity test, the scientists weren’t completely confident that the chain reaction might not spread to the nitrogen in the atmosphere and set the air on fire.
I was dazzled by the casual way military planners came up with a short list of cities to hit with the bombs. The historic and (by all accounts) picturesque city of Kyoto was on the list but it was decided it would be a cultural crime to incinerate it. Also US Secretary of War Henry Stimson had gone there on his honeymoon, so it was removed from the list. Thus, in this new age, were the fates, the lives and agonising deaths, of hundreds of thousands of civilians decided.
I never knew they only did one test – the Trinity test – before Hiroshima. So little preparation and knowledge.

The justification for the use of the bomb has caused argument from that day to this. Some have argued that the Japanese were on the verge of surrendering, though the evidence presented in Baggott’s account militates against this interpretation. My own view is based on two axioms: 1. the limits of human reason 2. a moral theory of complementarity.

Limits of reason When I was a young man I was very influenced by the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. Life is absurd and the absurdity is caused by the ludicrous mismatch between human claims and hopes of Reason and Justice and Freedom and all these other high-sounding words – and the chaotic shambles which people have made of the world, starting with the inability of most people to begin to live their own lives according to Reason and Logic.

People smoke too much, drink too much, eat too much, marry the wrong person, drive cars too fast, take the wrong jobs, make the wrong decisions, jump off bridges, declare war. We in the UK have just voted for Brexit and Donald Trump is about to become US President. Rational? The bigger picture is that we are destroying the earth through our pollution and wastefulness, and global warming may end up destroying our current civilisation.

Given all these obvious facts about human beings, I don’t see how anyone can accuse us of being rational and logical.

But in part this is because we evolved to live in small packs or groups or tribes, and to deal with fairly simple situations in small groups. Ever since the Neolithic revolution and the birth of agriculture led to stratified and much larger societies and set us on the path to ‘civilisation’, we have increasingly found ourselves in complex situations where there is no one obviously ‘correct’ choice or path; where the notion of a binary choice between Good and Evil breaks down. Most of the decisions I’ve taken personally and professionally aren’t covered by so-called ‘morality’ or ‘moral philosophy’, they present themselves – and I make the decisions – based purely on practical outcomes.

Complementarity Early in his account Baggott explains Niels Bohr’s insight into quantum physics, the way of ‘seeing’ fundamental particles which changed the way educated people think about ‘reality’ and won him a Nobel Prize.

In the 1920s it became clear that electrons, one of the handful of sub-atomic particles, behave like waves and like particles at the same time. In Newton’s world a thing is a thing, self-identical and consistent. In quantum physics this fixed attitude has to be abandoned because ‘reality’ just doesn’t seem to be like that. Eventually, the researchers arrived a notion of complementarity i.e. that we just have to accept that electrons could be particles and waves at the same time depending on how you chose to measure them. (I understand other elements of quantum theory also prove that particles can be in two places at the same time). Conceivably, there are other ways of measuring them which we don’t know about yet. Possibly the incompatible behaviour can be reconciled at some ‘deeper’ level of theory and understanding but, despite nearly a century of trying, nobody has come up with a grand unifying theory which does that.

Meanwhile we have to work with reality in contradictory bits and fragments, according to different theories which fit, or seem to fit, to explain, the particular phenomena under investigation: Newtonian mechanics for most ordinary scale phenomena; Einstein’s relativity at the extremes of scale, black holes and gravity where Newton’s theory breaks down; and quantum theory to explain the perplexing nature of sub-atomic ‘reality’.

In the same way I’d like to suggest that everyday human morality is itself limited in its application. In extreme situations it frays and breaks. Common or garden morality suggests there is one ‘reality’ in which readily identifiable ideas of Good and Bad always and everywhere apply. But delve only a little deeper – consider the decisions you actually have to make, in your real life – and you quickly realise that there are many situations and decisions you have to make about situations which aren’t simple, where none of the alternatives are black and white, where you have to feel your way to a solution often based in gut instinct.

A major part of the problem may be that you are trying to reconcile not two points of view within one system, but two or more incompatible ways of looking at the world – just like the three worldviews of theoretical physics.

The Hiroshima decision

Thus – with one part of my mind I am appalled off the scale by the thought of a hideous, searing, radioactive death appearing in the middle of your city for no reason without any warning, vaporising half the population and burning the other half to shreds, men, women and little children, the old and babies, all indiscriminately evaporated or burned alive. I am at one with John Hersey’s terrifying account, I am with CND, I am against this anti-human abomination.

But with another part of the calculating predatory brain I can assess the arguments which President Truman had to weigh up. Using the A-bomb would:

End a war which had dragged on too long.
Save scores of thousands of American lives, an argument bolstered as evidence mounted that the Japanese were mobilising for a fanatical defence to the death of their home islands. I didn’;t know that the invasion of the southern island of Japan was scheduled for December 1945 and the invasion of the main island and advance on Tokyo was provisionally set to start in march 1946. Given that it took the Allies a year to advance from Normandy to Berlin, this suggests a scenario where the war could have dragged on well into 1947, with the awesome destruction of the entire Japanese infrastructure through firebombing and house to house fighting as well, of course, of vast casualties, Japanese and American.
As the US commander of strategic air operations against Japan, General Curtis LeMay pointed out, America had been waging a devastating campaign of firebombing against Japanese cities for months. According to one calculation some two-and-a-half million Japanese had been killed in these air attacks to date. He couldn’t see why people got so upset about the atom bombs.

Again, I was amazed at the intransigence of the Japanese military. Baggott reports the cabinet meetings attended by the Japanese Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and the heads of the Army and Navy, where the latter refused to surrender even after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. In fact, when the Emperor finally overruled his generals and issued an order to surrender, the generals promptly launched a military coup and tried to confiscate the Emperor’s recorded message ordering the surrender before it could be broadcast. An indication of the fanaticism American troops would have faced if a traditional invasion had gone ahead.

The Cold War

And the other reason for using the bombs was to prepare for after the war, specifically to tell the Soviet Union who was boss. Roosevelt had asked Stalin to join the war on Japan and this he did in August, making a request to invade the north island (the Russians being notoriously less concerned about their own troop losses than the Allies). the book is fascinating on how Stalin ordered an invasion then three days later backed off, leaving all Japan to America. But this kind of brinkmanship and uneasiness which had appeared at Yalta became more and more the dominant issue of world politics once the war was won, and once the USSR began to put in place mini-me repressive communist regimes across Eastern Europe.

Baggott follows the story through the Berlin Airlift of 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War (June 1950), while he describes the ‘second physics war’ i.e. the Russian push to build an atomic reactor and then a bomb to rival America’s. In this the Russians were hugely helped by the Allied spies who, ironically, now Soviet brutality was a bit more obvious to the world, began to have second thoughts. In fact Klaus Fuchs, the most important conduit of atomic secrets to the Russians, eventually confessed his role.

Baggott’s account in fact goes up to the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 and it is so grippingly, thrillingly written I wished it had gone right up to the fall of the Soviet Union. Maybe he’ll write a sequel which covers the Cold War. Then again, most of the scientific innovation had been achieved and the basic principles established; now it was a question of engineering, of improving designs and outcomes. Of building bigger and better bombs and more and more of them.

The last section contains a running thread about the attempts by some of the scientists and politicians to prevent nuclear proliferation, and explains in detail why they came to nothing. The reason was the unavoidable new superpower rivalry between America and Russia, the geopolitical dynamic of mutually assured destruction which dominated the world for the next 45 years (until the fall of the USSR).

A new era in human history was inaugurated in which ‘traditional’ morality was drained of meaning. Or to put it another way (as I’ve suggested above) in which the traditional morality which just about makes sense in large complex societies, reached its limits, frayed and broke.

The nuclear era exposed the limitations of not only human morality but of human reason itself, showing that incompatible systems of values could apply to the same phenomena, in which nuclear truths could be good and evil, vital and obscene, at the same time. An era in which all attempts at rational thought about weapons of mass destruction seemed to lead only to inescapable paradox and absurdity.

Credit

Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-49 by Jim Baggott was published in 2009 by Icon Books. All quotes and references are to the 2015 Icon Books paperback edition.

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by Simon on January 17, 2017 • Permalink

Posted in Books, History, Science, War

Tagged A Brief History of The Spy, atom, Atomic, atomic bomb, barium, chain reaction, Chemistry, Chicago, CIA, Curtis LeMay, David Greengrass, deuterium, Einstein, electron, elements, Enrico Fermi, Ernest Lawrence, FBI, firebombing, Frederick Lindemann, German Reich Research Council, heavy water, Hiroshima, hydrogen, Isaac Newton, isotope, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jim Baggott, John Hersey, Julius Rosenberg, Klaus Fuchs, Kyoto, Lise Meitner, Los Alamos, Nagasaki, Nazis, neutron, Niels Bohr, nuclear fission, nuclear weapons, nucleus, OSS, Otto Frisch, Paul Simpson, Pedro Ferreira, periodic table, physics, President Roosevelt, President Truman, proton, Stalin, the Berlin Airlift, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the cyclotron, The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb 1939-49, The Heroes of Telemark, the Korean War, The Manhattan Project, The Perfect Theory, the Trinity test, the Uranverein, Theodore Hall, U-235, U-238, uranium, uranium 235, uranium 238, USSR, Werner Heisenberg, Winston Churchill

Posted by Simon on January 17, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/atomic-jim-baggott/

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