All posts tagged first-person narrator

Lustrum by Robert Harris (2009)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tiro the narrator

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

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

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

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

Two parts

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

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

Part one – Consul

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

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

Part two – Pater Patriae

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power

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

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

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

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

Ancient and modern

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

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

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

A checklist of references

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

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

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

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

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

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

Realistic in two ways

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

1. Sensual

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

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

2. Socio-political

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Drama

Then there are scenes which are just thrillingly dramatic:

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

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

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

The reassuring familiarity of thriller tropes

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

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

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

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

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

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

There has to be an arresting opening sentence and event:

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

An evil antagonist:

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

The baddies confront each other in tense standoffs:

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

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

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

Sudden alarms:

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

And the hero realising a conspiracy is afoot:

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

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

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

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

Portraits of Rome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terentia

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

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

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

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

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

Tricks of oratory

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

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

Finally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Catullus

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

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

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

Credit

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

The Cicero trilogy

Robert Harris reviews

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen (2002)

The pros and cons of a first person narrator

Well, this is an oddity, a Carl Hiaasen novel told in the first person. His previous eight comedy crime novels were all told in the voice of a gung-ho, whip-smart, third-person narrator. This one is a departure and an experiment and I didn’t like it nearly as much.

At a stroke it makes you realise a big part of the appeal of Hiaasen’s novels is their relatively large cast of the characters, all engaged on half a dozen different storylines, and a lot of the fun and dynamic comes from the way a third-person narrator can cut at will from one scene and storyline to another. This has two obvious results: 1. it means there’s constant change and variety, giving the reader a sense of dynamism and energy; and 2. it means the scenes he cuts to can be at their best and juiciest moments; the less interesting lead-up to them, or aftermath of them, can be dealt with by an overarching narrator with a few sentences of explanation.

By contrast 1. it’s quite surprising to realise just how boring it is to be trapped in the consciousness of one first-person narrator. Instead of flitting from scene and encountering all manner of outrageous characters and improbable events, you are confined to just the one person’s point of view. 2. Being stuck with one person means that, almost by definition, only so much can plausibly happen.

Not only do you quickly get fed up of that person’s voice and restless at being confined to just the one point of view, but, in terms of ‘events’, a lot less happen in a first-person narrative, because the person you’re following only has so many hours in the day, can only be in one place at a time, can only be drinking in one bar, chatting to a girl in his flat, driving his car or sitting at work, at any one moment. Whereas an omniscient narrator can describe half a dozen characters all doing completely different things at any given point in time.

Therefore an author who chooses to tell their story from a first-person narrator’s point of view has to work quite hard to overcome these built-in obstacles – especially if, like Hiaasen, their previous novels have been spectacularly effective examples of how to create multi-character, multi-scene narratives.

Thinking about it, a first-person narrative must compensate for the loss of narrative breadth with an increase of narrative depth. In other words, a first-person narrative needs more psychological interest: if you’re going to be stuck inside one person’s head for 400 pages, it better be a pretty interesting head.

Hiaasen works hard at it but the way he does so graphically exposes his weakness as a writer, because he doesn’t really do psychological depth; what he tends to do instead is psychological quirks and kinks, and that’s precisely what is on florid display here.

Hiaasen gives his narrator a number of quirks and hangups and obsessions (see below) which are very entertaining, but they are no replacement for the greater depth of psychological complexity the reader is used to from first person accounts.

And he makes another big formal decision which is to write the whole thing in the present tense, an obvious bid to give the narrative more immediacy, and yet… as a result of this one central decision (to be a first-person narrative) Basket Case lacks the panoramic vistas, the range of background fact, the variety of incident and the fast pace of his other novels.

That said, it’s still a Carl Hiaasen novel, he writes his usual super-snappy description and dialogue, and his story features the usual variety of scumbags and amoral users, with a host of other characters, large and small and consistently diverting. So it’s still a gripping, easy and very entertaining read. He is a very skillful writer, an arranger of complex plots, an inventor of all manner of interesting characters, a writer of snappy descriptions and pithy dialogue. It’s a very good book. Just not as good as the others.

Jack Tagger

Jack Tagger Junior is a journalist (p.20). He works for the Union-Register newspaper. He’s 46 (p.39) and will turn 47 in a week (p.200). He’s worked for a number of papers in his time, and came to the Union-Register to work on the news desk. But then the Union-Register was sold by its owner, Macarthur Polk, to the Maggad-Feist Publishing Group for $47 million (p.69), and in the press conference to announce the deal, Tagger was foolish enough to insult the new CEO, smooth yuppie Race Maggad III (‘a money-grubbing yupster twit,’ p.214), on the record, in front of numerous TV cameras (p.70).

He didn’t get fired, Maggad was too canny of public relations to cause a fuss. Instead Jack was relegated to the obituary department, stripped of all investigative powers and reduced to churning out an obituary a day, under the watchful eye of the relatively inexperienced editor, Emma Cole (p.235), aged just 27, who he despises for her callow youth. (It is, as soon as you process this, almost inevitable that they end up having an affair.)

One of the quirks Hiaasen gives Tagger is that he is obsessed with the ages the famous have died at. Whoever he meets, he asks their age and instantly knows the names of the great and the good who died at that age: Bob Marley and F. Scott Fitzgerald (dead aged 44), Franz Kafka and Edgar Allen Poe (40) and, from his own age group, George Orwell, John F. Kennedy and Oscar Wilde, all died aged 46 (p.222).

Over and above this oddity, Hiaasen gives Jack a neurosis about the age his birth father died at, which he doesn’t know because his dad walked out on him and his mum when he was 3. Jack endlessly bugs his mom to know what age his dad died (p.88) and his stepfather died (p.151). He has a morbid obsession that he’s fated to die at the same age.

When you write this obsession out in black and white you can see how contrived it is, but it is made into a massive part of Jack’s character. His ex, Anne Candilla, says part of the reason she left him was because of his endless monologues about age, because of his uneasy the dreams, the midnight monologues, the actuarial charts of people’s life expectancies taped to the fridge (p.223).

Jack has a recurring nightmare of his dad turning up looking like he did in an old photo and the exact same age as Jack now, and then Jack sees himself chasing his dad across a golf course, tackling him to the ground and his dad suddenly being dead and rotting before his eyes. This recurring dream which used to wake him up sweating next to ex-girlfriend Anne, is described on pages 348 to 349.

Jack is not, in other words, a bland and neutral narrator, he is quite a fruit loop himself.

I’m not the most reliable authority on who’s normal and who’s well adjusted. (p.244)

The obsession with the dead helps explain why the last woman he slept with was Karen Penski, mainly because she has a job in the local morgue and overflows with details and anecdotes about the dead, in which Tagger is morbidly interested.

The mysterious death of James Bradley Stomarti

Unlike its lead character, the setup of the novel is fairly straightforward. One day Tagger is commissioned to write the obituary of James Bradley Stomarti, who found fame as the songwriter and singer with the ‘legendary’ rock group ‘Jimmy Stoma and the Slut Puppies’.

Stomarti has just drowned on a scuba dive in the Bahamas, so Tagger digs up the address of his widow, ‘Cleo Rio‘, phones to make an interview, drives over to her condo to interview her, she cries, gives a description of the tragic dive (she was sunning herself on the boat, Jimmy went down with his best friend and band keyboardist, Jay Burns, the pair got separated, Jimmy must have gotten confused and his air run out). And Cleo is the main source of the quotes Tagger then uses for the long, competent obituary which he then writes and is published next day in his newspaper, the Union-Register.

But slowly details crop up which indicate all is not as simple as it seems. The dead man’s sister, Janet Thrush, laughs down the phone when he describes his trip to Cleo, as if the whole thing was a setup. Some backing singers he meets when he attends Stomarti’s funeral tell him Jimmy was working on an album when he died, directly contradicting his widow’s claim that he had severed all ties with the music industry (p.75). A few days later national papers publish obituaries of the singer and the description Cleo gives of the fatal dive are significantly different from what she told Tagger.

The sister, Janet, invites Tagger out to the crematorium to look at Jimmy’s embalmed body ahead of the funeral service and they take the opportunity to unbutton his shirt and discover to their surprise that the body bears no marks of an autopsy (p.46). Why not?

So, it is a murder mystery, with the first-person narrator stumbling into a situation which is much more complex and shady than it first appears and uncovering various dirty secrets. In other words, it is one of Raymond Chandler’s countless descendants.

In the course of his investigations Tagger meets:

As you might expect, sooner or later someone breaks into Jack’s apartment, that always happens in novels, movies, TV programmes like this. He and the masked intruder have an epic fight, rolling round on the floor till Jack grabs the three-foot iguana lizard he keeps in his freezer and so is hard as a rock (obviously, this has its own little backstory) and whacks the (masked) burglar with it, who staggers to his feet and runs off, but not before swiping Tagger’s laptop.

The fight means that Jack appears throughout the rest of the narrative with a ripe collection of cuts and bruises on his face and legs. The narrators of all thrillers since Raymond Chandler are required to be beaten up and appear next morning to their womenfolk who gasp, ‘Jack, you look awful! What happened?’ which is the hero’s cue to play the whole thing down in a bluff, manly way. ‘Shucks, honey, just guy stuff, you wouldn’t understand.’ All these clichés of the genre are present and correct in this novel.

Hiaasen knows he’s channeling Raymond Chandler (just like William Gibson knows he’s channeling James Bond in his novels) so much so that even the characters realise they’re in a Chandler novel. At one point Jack’s friend, Juan, tells him to ‘quit playing [Philip] Marlow’ (p.199) i.e. Raymond Chandler’s famous private eye.

This plot synopsis takes us up to a little over a third the way through this 30-chapter, 400-page-long book. As you can imagine, there continues to be a steady drip-drip of clues throughout the book, but there are also two big recurring themes.

The newspaper business

One is a number of descriptions of the offices of a modern newspaper, at various hours of day and night and over the weekend, about the hard realities of modern newspapers, how they are being gutted by corporate owners more interested in advertising revenue than journalism, and yet what an important social function journalism performs (pages 186, 267, 300, 328, 410, 416).

Obviously these atmospheric descriptions are based on Hiaasen’s own first-hand experience as an award-winning journalist and they are interesting bits of social history or sociological observation in their own right. But they are also an important part of the storyline about the newspaper’s owner handing Tagger a controlling interest in its future (see below). Out of this storyline spin numerous thoughts and reflections about the role and current state of newspaper journalism (as of 2002).

The big snore: rock music in 50-something men’s fiction

The second theme is rock music, not surprisingly as the suspected murder victim is a rock musician.

As anyone who’s read my reviews of William Gibson knows, I went right off his novels as they became increasingly obsessed with crappy-sounding fictional rock bands and the worlds of contemporary fashion and advertising. The older Gibson got, the more he got addicted to making references to Jimi Hendrix and the Doors, managing to turn himself from a really cool pioneer of cyberpunk into an old dad droning on about the Doors and the Rolling Stones.

Well, same here. Hiaasen was turning 50 as this book was published and it displays all the symptoms of Dad Rock. His hero, Jack, still adulates the Rolling Stones as if it’s 1972 not 2002. He admires the district attorney because he’s got a photo of the Stones on his wall signed by Keith Richards (p.310). He has an argument with a woman he’s just stripped to have sex with because he wants to hear the Stones track ‘Ventilator Blues’ off Exile on Main Street (1972) while they have sex and she really doesn’t want to (p.251).

I put a Stones record on the stereo because you can’t go wrong with the Stones. (p.63)

Oh yes you can. By the 1980s and certainly by the 1990s the Rolling Stones were the soundtrack of choice for bankers and oligarchs, driving round in their Porsches, twanging their red braces, blagging $1,000 a seat corporate boxes at stadium concerts, and somehow managing to persuade themselves they were still ‘street fighting men’.

On page 74, when Hiaasen starts describing the different members of his fictional band, the Slut Puppies. When he came to ‘the band’s notoriously moody lead guitarist, Peter P. Proust’, who was stabbed to death a few years earlier, it felt almost identical to the half dozen times I read in William Gibson’s tediously flashy, corporate ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, about the ‘legendary’ rock band The Curfew (which features in all three of those novels) whose ‘legendary’ bassist, Jimmy Carlyle, died of a fatal heroin overdose.

The way these fictional bands consist of the super-traditional fourpiece, and the way one of these four has died an untimely end, is identical in both novels. And both writers were writing about traditional four-piece rock bands in the 2000s, as if rap, rave, drum and bass, hip hop, techno, trance, garage and grunge and grime had never happened. These are the kind of people who iron their jeans, fret about their pensions… but still think they are in some way ‘streetfighting men’.

It’s in this rather tiresome spirit that the title of the book, Basket Case, is itself one of the ‘tracks’ of Jimmy and the Slut Puppies’ hit album, Floating Hospice (p.347).

Music references litter to the book, including mention of Little Richard, Billy Preston, Led Zeppelin and Bob Seger (p.207), James Taylor (p.261), Derek and the Dominoes (p.345), Neil Young (p.380) and Paul McCartney (p.391). Jack’s laptop (which gets stolen) has a Grateful Dead decal on it (p.271), Jack gives his district attorney contact tickets to a Bruce Springsteen gig (p.311).

You could argue that these are all the interests of a fictional character. a) Same difference. Still feels very Dad Rock (or, by now, in 2021, Grandad Rock). b) all Hiaasen’s other heroes have the same taste, popping a Neil Young of Creedance Clearwater Revival song on their record decks as if the past 50 years of music never happened.

The rest of the plot (spoilers)

Jack follows the man he saw at Cleo Rio’s apartment to a nightclub (named Jizz; Hiaasen likes taking the mickey out of nightclubs; the one in Sick Puppy is named Pubes).

Jack approaches him as a journalist and gets his name, Loréal, and the fact that he’s a record producer, claiming to be producing Cleo’s album although, when Jack does some research, he discovers he’s never produced an album in his life.

After being beaten up by the guy who broke into his apartment, Jack makes it round to Emma’s apartment and she puts him up on the sofa, applies ice to his cuts and bruises and, to both their surprise, gives him a soft kiss goodnight. Ah. Shagging on the horizon.

He and Emma then learn that Guy Burns, who he had the fight on the boat with, has been found dead, apparently so drugged up that he laid down behind a garbage truck which promptly rolled over his head. Hmm. It’s possible, but Emma and Jack think it sounds suspicious.

Next day, Jack calls in on young gutter-mouthed Carla and is gutted to hear that her mother (his former lover, Anne) is about to marry a British spy novelist named Derek Grenoble. (Is this some obscure joke about John le Carré? Is it a sly reference to the fact that le Carré’s most famous character, Smiley, is separated from a wife named Anne, for whom he still carries a torch?)

Back in the newspaper office, Tagger has an aggressive confrontation with Race Maggad III, reprising the argument which got him relegated to the obituaries desk.

Jack takes Emma to the Rio Rio boat, now sealed off by police tape following Guy Burns’s death, but they climbed through that and gave the boat a thorough search. Hidden in the fake bottom of an oxygen diving cylinder they discover a portable hard drive. So we all now come round to suspecting that the burglars are after the hard drive.

What is on the hard drive?

My guess is it’s the tapes of James Stomarti’s final album and his ‘wife’, Cleo Rio a) had him bumped off and b) now wants the tapes and has hired goons to get hold of them. Her motive is simple: to dub her voice over Jimmy’s tapes and claim they’re all hers and be a big star and make lots of money. That’s my theory as of half way through the book.

When Tagger takes Emma to meet Janet Thrush he is upset to discover her front door has been forced open and the studio room where she strips for pervey webcammers has been completely trashed. She is nowhere to be seen and there’s a pool of dried blood on the front carpet. They call 911 then leave quickly, but both are traumatised.

Tagger meets with Polk’s lawyer, Charles Chickle (p.229) who confirms what Polk told him in the hospital, namely that he hates Race Maggad III even worse than Tagger does and, having heard that Tagger publicly insulted him, has decided to make Tagger administrator of the shares he still owns in the Register’s parent company. Tagger’s sole job will be not to sell them to Maggad but to stymie everything the Maggad-run board proposes, and to generally piss Maggad off for the rest of his life. For this task, he will be paid $100,000 a year. Tagger is amazed at the offer.

Juan takes Tagger to meet a young 12-year-old black kid computer whizzkid named Dominic Dominguez who opens up the hard drive and, lo and behold, it is music, it’s a whole load of studio recordings, each instrument with a separate track, some of them final mixes, some still being assembled (chapter 12).

Emma Cole drops by with her toothbrush. She’s decided she wants sex. What a woman wants, a woman gets. So they have sex. In fact they have sex three times through the course of the evening and early hours. Life is great in novels. They are now an investigative team and an item.

Next thing we know Jack’n’Emma learn that the Slut Puppies bassist, Tito Negraponte has been shot, though not fatally, at his Los Angeles home.

‘Somebody’s killing off the Slut Puppies!’ (p.281)

Emma gets funds for Jack to fly to Los Angeles to interview Tito in his hospital bed, tells him everything he knows, and in return Tito, stoned on painkillers, confirms Jack’s hunch that it’s Cleo behind everything. She wants one particular track off the album, Shipwrecked Heart, which she’s going to put her vocals on and issue as a single. And she needs to get the master tapes a) to learn the song b) to remix it c) to make sure no-one else has it or can release it to prove she’s ripping off her dead husband.

That, in a nutshell, is the motor for the plot.

Jack breaks back into Janet’s house and cuts a swatch from the blood-stained carpet and swipes a used tampax from the bin, takes them to a forensics guy who owes him a favour and who rings back a few days later with the result. Yes, the blood on the carpet matches the blood on the tampon. It’s Janet’s blood. Jack is crushed. He didn’t have any designs on her but he really liked her. Now looks like she’s been murdered.

But then someone calls the cops on a bad line claiming to be Janet and that the wreckage was caused by an ex-boyfriend who went postal. Jack fears it’s a fake call and the reader is left to stew for 30 or 40 pages, fearing, like Jack, that nice Janet has been wasted.

And this causes deliberate confusion when Jerry, Cleo Rio’s hitman, phones up and tells Jack they’ve got her and want to do an exchange, to exchange her for the hard drive. Jack’s obsession with Janet means it takes stupid Jack a score of pages to realise that who ‘they’ have kidnapped is not Janet but Emma!!

Meanwhile Janet has not been murdered. Turns out she had rung and left messages on Jack’s answer-machine a couple of times stating that it was her who called the cops and the story is true: a jealous boyfriend really did trash her place and hit her. She ran off and is staying with friends in the south, bit bruised but basically OK. But Jack didn’t pick up these answerphone messages till a lot later.

Meanwhile – the bad guys have got Emma and they contact Jack with the details of how to get her back.

He is told to take a call at a payphone at the end of a pier by the sea (where Jack gets chatting to a 92-year-old who’s out there fishing and explains his strategy for avoiding death!).

The pier-end call tells him to go that evening to the nightclub named ‘Jizz’ (which keeps being the setting for meetings throughout the novel).

Here Jack meets with Cleo, Jerry and Loréal, is typically aggressive and insulting, is slapped upside his head a few times, but makes every effort to a) make it clear Janet knows nothing and is not a danger to the bad guys, b) emphasise that quite a few people know the truth including Tito, the backing singers and so on, and will put pieces together if he goes missing. So they oughtn’t to bump him off.

But he promises to bring the hard drive wherever they want and they part.

That night Jack can’t sleep, stays up all night tinkering with an old guitar he played in college, drags his ass to work the next day. The bad guys eventually call and give Jack a long set of instructions for hiring a boat, a GPS system and meeting them smack bang in the middle of the huge Lake Okeechobee.

Juan calls by his desk and Jack tells him the terrible news (Emma has been kidnapped by the guys he’s been investigating; he’s got to hand over the hard drive in exchange for her; he’s been told to do so in the middle of Lake Okeechobee) so Juan says he’ll come along and help out.

Then there’s a kicker. Just as he’s about to leave, the Managing Editor of the paper, Abkazion, comes up to him, tells him old man Polk just passed away this morning. Magad wants Jack to write the obituary, Polk wanted Jack to write the obituary, Abkazion now demands that he write the obituary, and Jack knows the offer of the job as Polk’s executor and manager of the decisive shares, along with the $100,000 salary are dependent on him writing the obituary, that evening, to make the next day’s front page (p.355).

But he can’t. He has to drive to Lake Okeechobee and save Emma. Right away. And he can’t tell Abkazion the real reason or it will endanger Emma’s life.

Abkazion rants and raves and then is dumbstruck when Jack doesn’t relent. Jack gathers up all his notes and dumps them on the desk of timid Evan, a lowly intern, who’s helped out with a few other details of the plot. ‘This is your big change, kid,’ Jack tells Evan, like Harrison Ford in a movie, then runs off.

Jack and Juan do the 3 hour drive up to Lake Okeechobee at record speed (listening, inevitably, to the Rolling Stones), hire a boat from a sceptical rental guy (from Ernie Bo Tump’s Bass Camp), use the GPS to motor out into the dead middle of the lake, and then wait around being bitten by mosquitoes. It is night-time, it is pitch black.

They hear the enormous whacking sound of a huge airboat. Soon it comes within sight of Jack and Juan, steered by Jerry while Loréal minds Emma who has a sack over head sitting passively in a chair. It’s important to understand what an airboat is in order to follow what happens next.

An airboat (Credit: Wikipedia)

From the description it sounds like a bigger version of the above. What follows is: Jerry demands the hard drive; Jack says, ‘Not till you throw away your gun’ and holds the hard drive over the side of their hire boat and starts counting down. Reluctantly Jerry tosses his gun which Jack hears splash in the lake. Jack insists they hand Emma down into the hire boat. Once she’s safe he throws the hard drive up at Jerry and Juan hits the motor and they speed off.

However, the bad guys’ airboat can go many times faster than them and their outboard is clogging up with weeds bringing them almost to a standstill, certainly unable to escape. They hear the airboat approaching from the side as if to ram over their boat, aiming to smash it to matchsticks.

Juan advises everyone to jump off but Jack stands up in the stern, ramrod straight and fires off every bullet in the little .38 handgun he was loaned by Carla last time he saw her. It’s unlikely the bullets hit anyone but it’s enough to scare Jerry into taking evasive action. They hear a great swash as the airboat passes close to them, but then… a crash and a scream!

Once they’ve got the outboard working again, our guys putter over towards the noise to discover the cause of the crash and scream. What happened is the airboat, in making its abrupt swerve to avoid Jack’s shooting, hit reeds, ground to a halt and upended.

Juan and Jack use the little spotlight fixed to the hire boat to make out that Jerry was thrown backwards and, when the airboat upended, the huge spinning propeller which drives these things cut his head off, which went flying with a splash into the lake. Loréal managed to keep his place at the front of the boat but his long stylish ponytail dangled down into the fast-moving propeller, got tangled round it, dragging him down down down until the machine’s torque ripped his scalp off. Yuk.

Our guys size all this up, then turn and putter calmly back south, back to the boat hire place and their car, and slowly carefully drive traumatised Emma back to safety.

Epilogue

They make it back to Jack’s apartment in the early hours. Emma sleeps like a log then rises and cooks Jack a lumberjack breakfast. Over brekkie they check out that morning’s edition of the Union-Register and Jack is astonished to find that the Polk obituary did get written in the end, is front page and, most surprising of all, appears under his byline, even though obviously written by young Evan.

He and Emma feel bad about this because of their journalistic scruples, but I hardly think the reader gives a monkey’s. Anyway, they ring up Evan and he sheepishly admits that, given the Big Opportunity, he froze with fear and it was the seasoned editor, Abkazion, who knocked it out in 20 minutes. Their consciences are absolved.

By the way, a running thread has been that his ex is not only marrying this cheap spy novelist, Derek Grenoble, but is doing so on Jack’s birthday. Now cheeky young Carla phones up to tell them what a lame pukefest the wedding was, featuring a terrible 3-page poem which Derek wrote Anne.

And Jack gets a birthday card from his mother which finally includes the obituary of his dad who a) died aged 46 – it is Jack’s birthday, he is 47, so he has outlived the jinx – and b) the obituary describes him as a penniless waterfront entertainer who made tips from crowds by being able to juggle anything, even pets, and died after drunkenly climbing up a tree to retrieve a raccoon and falling to his death when a branch broke. So not some big shot mystery man; a drunk street entertainer. Oh well.

Next day Jack meets up with Janet, who has rung him to tell him she’s back, for muffins and coffee.

She confirms that, on the night of her disappearance, she was getting changed into her SWAT outfit when the front door was broken open and two dudes started ransacking the place. Jack identifies them from her description as Jerry and Loréal. Janet got mad and burst into the hall in full SWAT outfit brandishing a (plastic) semi-automatic, which was enough to make them run out. Then she ran in the other direction and caught a cab to a friend’s house. As to the blood on the carpet, they guys had trashed her big studio lights and she trod on some glass. Bled like a hippo. Otherwise unharmed. Ah.

Not only that. Janet then leads Emma and Jack to the grave of a certain Eugene Marvin Brandt. Who? Why? She explains.

She reveals that this guy’s corpse was in the crematorium viewing room at the same time as Jimmy’s and, when everyone had left, she switched the tags. That is: Eugene got cremated while Jimmy now lies buried in this plot under Brandt’s headstone.

Jack is delighted. Now a proper autopsy can be performed! Jack sends the state prosecutor an anonymous message with the result that Jimmy’s body is dug up and the forensic scientists show his stomach was full of now fewer than 20 Benelyn tablets which Cleo Rio had crushed up and mixed into his clam chowder just before he made the fatal dive. Jimmy would have passed out and drowned.

There’s enough evidence for the prosecutor to charge Cleo with murder, to bring in various witnesses who’d seen the couple bitterly arguing, to give as motive the fact that she wanted to steal his best song to further her own career. After a three-week trial, Cleo is convicted and sentenced to 20 years.

Then Jack has a very satisfying meeting with Race Maggad III in his new role as trustee of Polk Macarthur’s shares in Maggad-Feist publishing. Jack tells a furious Maggad he will sell back Polk’s shares in Maggad-Feist on one condition – that they sell the Union-Register to Polk’s widow, the tough nurse who tended him in his last days, Ellen who he knows will look after and protect it.

Maggad is eventually forced to do this, and Ellen becomes the paper’s first female publisher., Her first act is to hire a load of news reporters and restore the paper to its former reporting strength. Given the careful explanations Hiaasen has given us throughout the novel about the financial pressures undermining old-style reporting and newspapers, this is in many ways the book’s real happy ending.

The final scene shows Jack taking Emma out to the pier where he took the goons’ phone call what seems like months ago, and they bump into old Ike the fisherman, the guy Jack chatted to while waiting for the bad guys’ phone call and who proudly tells them he’s just turned 93.

As they turn to go Ike catches a huge tarpon, nearly getting dragged over the safety rail and into the sea, till Jack and Emma grab hold of him. Jack can’t help thinking what his obituary would say and so the book ends with the two subjects closest to Hiaasen’s heart, fishing and journalism.

Thoughts

It has breadth, doesn’t it? Like all Hiaasen’s novels it ramifies out to feature about 20 named characters, many of whom have their own backstories described in some detail. And the first-person narrator is fleshed out with his obsession about dates, his love of newspapers, his oddities (the iguana in his deep freeze), his loving relationship with his mother who used to take him fishing as a boy, his still carrying a torch for the lovely Anne, and so on.

All the usual elements are here and neatly assembled into a cleverly constructed plot. But… for the reasons explained at the start, it lacks the ability to move at speed between characters which is a key aspect of Hiaasen’s novels, and the quirks and oddities Hiaasen ladles onto Jack don’t really compensate for the lack of real psychological depth.

One liners

‘Derek is a good guy. He’s fun, he’s affectionate, he doesn’t take life so damn seriously…’
‘You’ve just described a beagle, not a husband.’ (p.221)

‘Maybe I hit ’em with a shot.’
‘Right, Jack. And maybe one day hamsters will sing opera.’ (p.372)

Credit

Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen was published by Macmillan in 2001. All references are to the 2002 Pan paperback edition.

Carl Hiaasen reviews

Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard (2000)

‘Madness – that’s all they have, after working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week. Going mad is their only way of staying sane.’ (Frank Halder to Paul Sinclair)

You can tell late-period Ballard novels by their sheer size – Super-Cannes is a whopping 392 pages long, in the shiny Flamingo paperback edition I own.

The swimming pool had calmed.

The book is on the same topic and has much the same structure as its predecessor, Cocaine Night, but is, at least to begin with, noticeably more believable and enjoyable.

I circled the artificial lakes, with their eerily calm surfaces…

The plot – 1

First the plot: As with its predecessor, we’re among an élite of the well-educated, prosperous, professional middle-classes again. And abroad again: in the Costa del Sol for Cocaine Nights, the South of France for Super-Cannes.

At Eden-Olympia the medical staff were calm and unrushed…

And Super-Cannes is, like Cocaine Nights, told by a first-person narrator, in this case Paul Sinclair (how does Ballard manage to come up with such boring names for his protagonists?).

Trying to calm her, I took the phone from her surprisingly soft hand…

Paul is a pilot of small planes and editor of a couple of aviation magazines. He was injured in a flying accident nine months earlier and his knee refuses to heal properly. As the novel opens it is still in an uncomfortable brace.

Calming myself, I stared down at the dappled floor…

His new young wife, Jane, has taken up a post at the newish Eden-Olympia complex, part of the European Silicon Valley being built north-west of Cannes (in the south of France), a self-contained luxury business park which contains the European headquarters of major European banks and car manufacturers, along with exquisitely manicured villas, a world of tennis courts and swimming pools, luxury homes where all these busy executives spend the little time left over when they’re not at their offices.

Jane sat calmly in her white coat, dwarfed by a black leather chair contoured like an astronaut’s couch…

The story opens with even more doctors than usual for a Ballard story (if I had a pound for every Ballard protagonist who is a doctor): Paul’s wife, Jane, is a doctor and is replacing the previous doctor working in the Eden-Olympia clinic, Dr Greenwood, and they’re met on arrival at the park by its head psychiatrist, Dr Wilder Penrose, who plays a pivotal role in the story.

Sitting by the open doors of the limousines, they were almost Roman in their steely-eyed calm…

The similarities to Cocaine Nights are obvious from the start: just like Estrella da Mar in that novel, Eden-Olympia looks, on the surface, to be a perfectly organised, self-contained, respectable and hard-working bourgeois paradise, located in an idyllic setting on the Mediterranean, and yet… it has a dark side! Oooh, yes, I know… who would have imagined!

Halder gave up his attempt to calm me…

The two books share the same basic structure in the sense that a 1. mass murder 2. triggers a visit from 3. an outsider who proceeds to 4. investigate deeper and deeper into this self-enclosed sub-culture’s 5. murky depths, and 6. finds himself becoming changed and depraved by it.

Calmly, I said: ‘You’ve had a bump. Cutting corners too fast?’

In Cocaine Nights it was the arson attack on one of the ex-pat community’s luxury villas in which five leading figures burned to death which led to the narrator’s brother being arrested for the crime (because of the strong evidence against him), and prompts the protagonist to fly out to the beach resort to investigate…

Her fingers moved towards a salt sachet, stopped and calmed themselves by eviscerating the stub of her cigarette…

In this book, Jane’s predecessor as doctor at the business park’s clinic, Dr Greenwood, ‘went postal’, went on the rampage with a rifle, locking three chauffeurs hostage in his garage, before going to the business district and cold-bloodedly assassinating seven managing directors and top executives, before returning to his villa and executing the three ‘hostages’ in his garage.

Or did he? [Cue spooky made-for-TV thriller music]

The first person narrator, Paul Sinclair, is disconcerted to discover that he and his wife have been allotted the very same villa Greenwood lived in, and where the hostages were kept and then shot dead – though he is assured the house has been deep-cleaned and, in the case of the garage, rebuilt.

I imagined her lying awake at night, in this electrified but nerveless world, thinking that if only she had forgone her holiday she might have reached out to Greenwood and calmed his dream of death…

Except that Paul finds some evidence overlooked by the police, three bullets in and around the swimming pool which conflict with the official version of events. And, with his wife quickly drawn into the austere work culture of this dream executive-class business park, Paul finds himself with plenty of time on his hands to hobble round the manicured woodland, and explore the office blocks, and to start to make appointments to interview people involved in ‘the tragic events’, including, for example, the three widows of the hostages supposedly shot in cold blood.

He calmed himself, trying to steady his pulse…

Thus, on one level, the book amounts to a long investigation, as Paul slowly increases elements of the chain of events which are at odds with the official story put out by the business park’s press and PR people, and is given (pretty heavy-handed) clues from various officials – from Wilder Penrose the psychologist to Frank Halder, a senior security guard, who takes a strange watchful interest in Paul’s well-being.

‘He helps me park my car, and hangs around the clinic with those calm eyes. He’s waiting for something to happen.’

Slowly pretty much the same picture emerges as in Cocaine Nights, which is that the pampered, bored, professional bourgeoisie need livening up, need excitement – and that this takes the form of random crime, drug dealing, BDSM sex and so on. The usual suspects, then. The characters don’t really hide this, it is mentioned right from the start thus killing off any sense of suspense.

‘I like to stir things up, keep the adrenalin flowing. The more they hate you, the more they stay on their toes.’ (Wilder in chapter 1)

The posh neighbours, Simone and Alain Delage, don’t mind parading round in the nude. Pretty soon they are coming over to Jane and Paul’s to smoke dope and watch porn movies. Paul sees plastic sachets of white powder in various offices and in still photos of the crime scenes and he, and we, are quick to suspect they contain cocaine or heroin.

Halder raised a hand to calm me…

On one of his forays into Cannes proper, Paul stays on into the evening and watches the streets bloom with prostitutes and their terrifying East European pimps. He’s particularly struck, attracted and appalled at the same time by the vision of an 11-year-old girl wearing inappropriate make-up and sexualised clothes and finds himself approaching her pimp and asking how much she is with a view to ‘saving’ her. At least that’s what he tells himself.

Halder pinched his nose, and calmed his fluttering nostrils…

In the event he doesn’t get far with the transaction because a squad of three Range Rovers screech onto the scene, out of which leap a bunch of men in tight black leather jackets wielding baseball bats who proceed to beat the crap out of the little crowd of pimps. The leatherjackets beat the East Europeans and Arabs to the floor, smashing their teeth and smashing in the windscreens of their cars. Paul himself receives a hefty whack over the back before he’s pulled into a doorway by a figure he realises is the park security guy, Halder, a figure who slowly develops into his guardian angel. Paul is to discover that these are regular outings by the more psychopathically-minded senior executives at the business park and are jocularly referred to as ratissages.

He opened his envelope of photographs, waiting for me to calm myself.

Thus it comes as little surprise to the savvy reader when, once the mayhem is over, some of the leather-jacketed vigilantes remove their balaclavas and are revealed as the head of security at Eden-Olympia and several of its younger chief executives. Do they do it out of morality, policing Cannes’ underworld? Paul asks Halder. ‘No,’ Halder replies. ‘For kicks.’

Later, when Paul mentions why he got caught up in the vigilante attack to Penrose, the latter quizzes him about his interest in the 11-year-old girl and then goes on to be as plain as can be about the worldview which underpins the book:

‘Sordid. What can one say? Tragic for the child, but sexual pathology is such an energizing force. People know that, and will stoop to any depravity that excites them.’

So before we’re half way through the book we are fully informed that the business park full of hard-working European professionals is also a hotbed of drugs, kinky sex and violent vigilante squads, and we know at least one of them went off the deep end and went on a killing spree.

‘Some people say she tried to calm him down.’ ‘Brave woman.’

So there’s little surprise about the story. There’s not much place for it to go if we’ve established before we’re even half way through, that the main character is at least partly attracted to the idea of child sex, that the business park’s resident psychiatrist more than half sympathises with him and finds an attitude like that perfectly natural.

He composed himself, waiting for the muscles of his face to calm themselves…

Savvy and grip

Still, what makes Super-Cannes feel significantly better than the previous three or four novels is the savviness of the narrator.

He thrust the envelope of photographs through the open window, his face fully calm for the first time that day.

Rushing to Paradise is an unsatisfactory book because, although the plot has a certain plausibility (oddball environmentalists left on a remote Pacific atoll forget their eco crusade and descend into Lord of the Flies psychosis) the central character whose eyes we see it all through, 16-year Neil Dempsey, is very slow on the uptake. Slow and dim. It takes him ages to cotton on to things the savvy reader has spotted hundreds of pages earlier, such as that the leader of the eco-warriors is a psychopath. The reader is way ahead of the characters, which makes for a frustrating read.

She spoke calmly, her face only a few inches from mine, and I could smell the sweet Turkish tobacco on her breath.

A bald summery of Cocaine Nights also makes it seem groovy (man arrives at self-contained ex-pat community on the Costa del Sol to discover its cheerful bourgeois daytime life conceals a jungle of dark-side activities such as hard drugs, wifeswapping, BDSM and, at its extreme, murder). It’s a good idea but, again, lacks suspense because the reader is way ahead of the plodding narrator.

‘Forget it.’ I tried to calm her. ‘They’ve gone.’

Grip No, if you’re going to write in the thriller genre (which Ballard seems to have decided to do in his last books) you need to demonstrate the quality that one of its founding fathers, Henry Rider Haggard, called ‘grip’.

In romance ‘grip’ is almost everything. Whatever its faults, if a book has ‘grip’, these may be forgiven. (The Days of My Life by Henry Rider Haggard, 1912)

By ‘grip’ Haggard means that the reader’s imagination is so gripped, so thrilled and excited that you can’t stop turning the pages.

The last book I read which had ‘grip’ in the way Haggard describes was Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, a few years ago. I was on a weekend break and picked it up in the hotel library. I planned to get up the next morning in time to a) go for a swim in order to b) enjoy the massive hotel breakfast before c) going to visit a nearby castle. But all my plans were wrecked because I found myself literally unable to put Mutant 59 down. I knew it was pulpy rubbish and at midnight, and 2 and 3 o’clock I tried to mark the page and turn the light off, telling myself I’d finish it tomorrow – but each time ended up picking it up again to read ‘just one more chapter’, and the next thing I knew dawn was coming up. That’s grip.

Alarmed, Frances held my wrist. ‘Calm down. You’re safe here.’

So Cocaine Nights is clever: its basic plot proposes a sociological theory about human nature and culture (humans need excitement and their society must find some way of providing that or they’ll engineer their own wayward forms).

Penrose tried to calm me…

It is carefully plotted, contains a number of vivid scenes, and is written in Ballard’s artful style which combines incisive descriptions with a careful deployment of his key terms and phrases (characters are constantly unsettled, need calming, sooner or later become ‘demented’ or ‘deranged’; have their ‘reasons’ and their ‘motives’ which the narrator always struggles to figure out; the narrator never notices, guess or intuits, he always ‘senses’: thus Ballard artfully creates a claustrophobic world by the almost incantatory repetition of the same words, same attitudes, same situations, etc).

‘Jane…’ I stepped through the clutter of unpaired shoes that she was rooting from the cupboard, placed my hands under her arms and lifted her to her feet, surprised by how much weight she had lost. ‘Calm down…’

But I found Cocaine Nights a struggle because it was so obvious what was going on, and when the ‘revelation’ came I thought, ‘oh, OK, that’s clever’ and went to sleep.

I wanted to calm her, and took away her cigarettes.

Part of the reason for this is that the narrator is depicted as implausibly naive, in order that he can then be ‘shocked’ when he discovers some of the prim bourgeois types he’s introduced to take drugs or have rough sex.

Frances had calmed herself, and waited for me to reply.

Shocked? That’s standard behaviour in a Ballard novel. That’s what we come to a Ballard novel expecting.

So part of the reason Super-Cannes is distinctly better than Cocaine Nights – even though it has a similar structure and is putting forward much the same view of human nature – is that the central character is that much more sophisticated and savvy.

As we took the lift to the basement garage she touched the dinner jacket, trying to calm a fleeting ghost.

Paul Sinclair is funny. His wife, Jane, is funny. Thus he or she can engage in banter that is genuinely funny. Super-Cannes is a better book despite the fact that the plot structure and worldview are almost identical to its predecessor, largely because the narrator is more sympathetic.

‘Frances, relax…’ I moved her edgy hand from the gear lever, trying to calm her.

Some of the exchanges with Wilder made me smile and, as I did so, I realised that’s a quality you rarely associate with Ballard – humour. Here are Paul and Jane in their car, just as they arrive at Eden-Olympia and the psychiatrist Penrose has gotten into the car and is guiding them through the quiet avenues to their villa.

We were driving along the shore of a large ornamental lake, an ellipse of glassy water that reflected the nearby mountains and reminded me of Lake Geneva with its old League of Nations headquarters, another attempt to blueprint a kingdom of saints. Apartment houses lined the waterfront, synchronized brises-soleils shielding the balconies. Jane slowed the car, and searched the windows for a single off-duty resident.
‘A fifth of the workforce live on-site,’ Penrose told us. ‘Middle and junior management in apartments and townhouses, senior people in the residential estate where you’re going. The parkland buffers the impact of all the steel and concrete. People like the facilities yachting and water-skiing, tennis and basketball, those body-building things that obsess the French.’
‘And you?’ Jane queried.
‘Well…’ Penrose pressed his large hands against the roof, and lazily flexed his shoulders. ‘I prefer to exercise the mind. Jane, are you keen on sport?’
‘Not me.’
‘Squash, aerobics, roller-blading?’
‘The wrong kind of sweat.’
‘Bridge? There are keen amateurs here you could make an income off.’
‘Sorry. Better things to do.’
‘Interesting…’ Penrose leaned forward, so close to Jane that he seemed to be sniffing her neck. ‘Tell me more.’
‘You know…’ Straight-faced, Jane explained: ‘Wife-swapping, the latest designer amphetamines, kiddy porn. What else do we like, Paul?’
Penrose slumped back, chuckling good-humouredly.

A rare burst of genuine comedy in Ballard. And a moment’s reflection suggests why: it’s because humour, to some extent, relies on the unexpected. A good punchline reveals a hidden connection or punning misinterpretation you hadn’t seen, and the sudden short circuit makes you laugh.

Careful to remain calm, and glad of the day’s first injection, I returned the sergeant’s salute…

Pondering this made me realise that there is little or no humour in Ballard because, in a way, everything in his stories is totally predictable and expected. In pretty much all his novels and short stories the characters do one and the same thing, which is go downhill – from an initial position of pukka British correctness they descend by carefully calibrated steps into mania and psychosis.

Frances gripped the steering wheel as if to brace herself before a collision. Trying to calm her, I moved her hands to her lap…

Arguably High Rise is the epitome of this narrative arc because it pushes the classic Ballard narrative of decline and fall to genuinely gruesome depths, into final scenes where it is revealed that some of the characters have resorted to cannibalism, which did come as a surprise.

The release of this long-repressed material seemed to calm her, rage diffused into the cooling waters of truth.

This is one of the reasons Rushing to Paradise is disappointing, because the characters follow exactly the same downward spiral as in all the other novels, but the descent only gets as far as the vengeful women hunting Neil through the tropical rainforest in scenes which, far from taking us into new levels of late 20th-century psychosis, ought to remind any reader of Lord of the Flies. I.e. instead of going forward, the novel, in the end, takes the reader (surprisingly) backward to a conclusion about human nature first made (much more powerfully) in the 1950s. That’s not prophecy: in a twisted kind of way, it’s almost nostalgia.

Her moment of panic had passed, and she spoke calmly.

Anyway, in a sentence, Super-Cannes is the best of these later novels because the narrator is as funny and savvy as the reader. And these moments of banter with the resident shrink, Dr Wilder Penrose, are indicative of a kind of confidence which the book exudes overall. It’s not perfect as a thriller, but I actively wanted to get back to reading it, whereas I had to more or less force myself to read Rushing To Paradise which is brilliantly written but whose plot I found a predictable chore.

I wrenched myself from him, and raised a fist to strike his face, but he clamped his hand over my mouth, trying to calm me. ‘Mr Sinclair… take it easy. I’m with you.’

The plot – 2

The tour of the murder scene Running Wild, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes are all set in gated communities of upper-middle-class professionals which go badly off the rails and become the scenes of massacres. Each of them features a tour of the crime scene, in the company of a police or security guard, which allows Ballard to describe the gruesome and sadistic killings with lipsmacking precision. Thus the nervy black security guard, Halder, takes Paul on an extended recreation of the route taken by Dr Greenwood as he went on his killing spree.

I pulled away from them and leaned against the roof of the Mercedes. Calmly, I said: ‘I’m glad I came. What exactly is going on?’

The Big Speech explaining everything In the second half Paul – with breath-taking naivety – decides he’ll go meet and share with the business park psychiatrist, Dr Wilder Penrose, what he’s discovered so far, and the scenes he’s witnessed, specifically the gangs of leatherjacketed vigilantes who let off steam by beating up pimps and low-level crims in the backstreets of Cannes.

Only to discover that, of course, Wilder knows all about it. In fact Wilder is given a BIG SPEECH in which he explains the secret of life at the business park. He explains that the park managers slowly realised that these busy executives were working themselves to death and coming down with all kinds of psychosomatic ailments. They needed some RELEASE. What started as tentative suggestions that they try transgressive behaviours (the usual checklist of banned drugs, BDSM sex, combined with violent forays into the rougher parts of Cannes where they beat the crap out of East European pimps and Arab immigrants) turned out to be spectacularly successful at curing the busy executives’ many psychosomatic illnesses, boosting their immune systems and, above all, improving their decision-making and managerial effectiveness. Boosting profits. Thus every level of Eden-Olympia has been drawn into turning a blind eye to, or actively encouraging, the violence and decadent behaviour of the most aggressive executives.

She peered at me over her sunglasses, unsettled by my restless and eager manner.

The whole conception that our ‘innocent’ hero confronts the mastermind behind a wicked plan, who then proceeds to give an extended explanation of what is really going on, and how the hero ought to ‘join us’, comes straight out of a James Bond movie or any number of other tuppenny thrillers.

The victim turns out to be as bad as the baddies Similarly, just as we slowly learned that Frank, who’s been locked up for the arson attack in Cocaine Nights, is not as innocent as his brother thinks, in fact by the end we learn that he is deeply implicated in all the criminal activities at Estrella de Mar; so we now slowly learn that the Dr Greenwood who went nuts and went on the shooting spree that triggers the start of Super-Cannes, was himself deeply implicated in some very unsavoury behaviour. He was a volunteer at a clinic for immigrant children in a poor part of Cannes which sounds noble enough, he has thirty or more copies of Alice Through The Looking Glass in his spare bedroom which – apparently -he read to them;, but slowly the truth emerges that he took these vulnerable children back to his villa in Eden-Olympia for sex. The other doctor in the clinic, who he shot? She helped round up likely child sex victims from the slums of Cannes. They were both in it together.

The hero’s wife becomes involved Paul has realised from quite early on that his wife Jane is perfectly suited to the park. She loves working long hours. He has previously told us that she’s always been a rebel, a loose cannon, previously a punk and into drugs, she did a medical degree to piss her parents off, and was insubordinate to the male medical hierarchy. As the months go by Paul realises she only married him on an impulsive whim, and also begins to realise their marriage is ending at Eden-Olympia.

Jane becomes notable for two things:

1. She starts to have a lesbian affair with the Belgian woman who lives opposite and often traipses around naked on her balcony, Simone Delage, late-night sex with marijuana. Which turns into a threesome with the husband, Alain.

2. Paul’s knee continues to play him up and Jane takes to prescribing him painkillers, so much so that he wanders round in a daze and finds himself going along with the increasingly outrageous behaviour he sees around him. Eventually he stops taking the painkillers Jane is mixing for him, and has them analysed in a lab and discovers they contain a very strong tranquiliser used on mental patients. I.e. Jane has gone over to Eden-Olympia and is doping him.

The party at the Villa Grimaldi How far they have both fallen becomes clear on the night of a swanky party at the Villa Grimaldi overlooking Cannes attended by lots of swells from the Cannes Film Festival. After some satire about the film world, a complex little sequence of events follows. Greenwood had shot dead the park’s previous head of security. He had been replaced by a big boorish drunk, Pascal Zander. Paul learns that on one of the many evenings when he’s in Cannes late, Zander had been at his house and had come on very strong to his wife Jane. When Paul arrived home that night it was to find Jane in bed with a bruised mouth and face where Zander hit her.

Now, at this party, Paul goes in search of Zander and nearly has a fight with him,. He’s dragged away to her car by his lover Frances Baring (Paul has started an affair with this nervy woman who works in Eden-Olympia’s personnel department and had herself had an affair with Dr Greenwood). They leave the party a few moments later and slowly become aware that they’re being followed by an Audi. But then Paul realises that the Audi is itself being chased by two huge BMW limousines. He and Frances duck into a side street to let the other cars overtake them, then pull out again and watch the chase become more intense, like a scene from Crash. Eventually the big BMWs railroad the Audi into crashing through a roadside barrier and flying down onto the beach below, landing on its roof upside down on the edge of the surf.

Paul and Frances park up and Paul goes down onto the beach where he discovers the driver – who is dead – is Pascal Zander. He was a loose cannon, he had been finding out too much about the illegal activities at Eden-Olympia and so the leatherjackets killed him.

But here’s the thing. Paul walks up from the beach to the limos, opens the door and discovers… his wife Jane cowering in the back seat, stoned off her face. Next morning he describes all this to her and she point blank rejects it. She has been told Zander died in a freak car accident, that she went down to the beach to verify the body – neither of which is true. But she believes it. Paul grasps the extent to which she really has been sucked into Eden-Olympia’s dark underbelly.

She had relaxed a little, no longer unsettled by my presence,

Racism And just a note that this is the first Ballard novel I can remember where the issue of race is mentioned. Frank Halder, who guards Paul and intervenes at key moments to rescue him, is black and resentful of the way he is made to feel it by the powers-that-be at the park. Paul witnesses half a dozen violent outings or ratissages carried out by the leatherjackets, and it is obvious that they target Arab immigrants. Early on he witnesses some park security guards severely beating a harmless Arab street vendor. There’s a strong element of racism in the fact that Pascal Zander, the admittedly fat, sweaty, creepy drunk who takes over as head of park security, is eventually hounded to his death, partly because he was trying to blackmail the leading organisers of the park’s criminal activities, but just as much because he was an Arab.

This element of race-awareness is new in Ballard, and permeates the entire novel, and is part of the justification for characters making rather wild comparisons with Hitler and the Nazis (both mentioned twice in the text), which lead up to the preposterous idea that European business parks might be the breeding ground for the next fascist leaders (see below).

A lot more happens but it closely follows the same broad trajectory as Cocaine Nights, namely Paul finds himself drawn more and more into Eden-Olympia’s dark underbelly, but not in a good way. There are two more key elements:

Paul’s presence in Eden-Olympia is an experiment Between Wilder Penrose and the security man, Halder, Paul realises that the park authorities housed Paul and Jane in Dr Greenwood’s old villa as an experiment. They wanted to understand what made Greenwood snap. Why? Out of more than scientific interest. As the novel approaches its climax we learn that a second, far more extensive business park is being planned and laid-out close to the original Eden-Olympia. 20,000 people will end up living here, and Penrose and his clique will be wanting to extend their experiments in psychopathy to the new inhabitants. Therefore it’s vital they understand what factors drove Greenwood off the rails. And thus Paul realises he is the lab rat in an experiment; they are trying to recreate the circumstances which led to Greenwood snapping, so they can prevent it happening in the future. That’s why Penrose approved Paul’s ambiguous interest in the 11-year-old sex worker in the back streets of Cannes; he was excited that Paul really did seem to be going down the same track of paedophile exploitation which eventually led Greenwood to such a pitch of self-loathing that he set out on his killing spree which, Paul now realises, was designed to expose what was really going on at the park to the world at large.

They murder Paul’s lover, Frances Baring The key trigger point comes when he drives out to his lover Frances’s apartment and discovers she has been beaten to death by the leatherjackets. At that point something in him snaps, and he realises he is going to have to repeat Greenwood’s modus operandi. He acquires guns and ammunition from the brother of one of the chauffeur-hostages who was killed in the Greenwood massacre, and gets Halder’s co-operation. Halder gives him his gun and then promises to take Jane, stoned off her box, to the British consul in Marseilles and then packed on a plane back to London.

And the novel ends early in the morning as Paul psychs himself up to go and finish what Greenwood began, to kill all the senior personnel at the park starting with Penrose. Just as Charles Prentice turns into his predecessor, his transgressive brother, in Cocaine Nights, so Paul Sinclair turns into his predecessor, Dr Greenwood, on the last page of Super-Cannes.

I loaded the shotgun, and then stowed it under the rear seat. By the time I reached Eden-Olympia my targets would still be asleep. I would start with Alain and Simone Delage, drowsy after their late night in the Rue Valentin. Jane had told me that Simone kept a small chromium pistol in her bedside table, so she would be the first. I would kill her while she slept, using Halder’s handgun, and avoid having to stare back into her accusing eyes. Then I would shoot Alain as he sat up, drenched in his wife’s blood, moustache bristling while he reached for his glasses, unable to comprehend the administrative blunder that had led to his own death. The Delages slept with their air-conditioning on, and no one would hear the shots through the sealed windows.

Wilder Penrose would be next, ordered from his bed at gunpoint and brought down to the bare white room where he had set out his manifesto. He would be amiable, devious and concerned for me to the end, trying to win me with his brotherly charm while unsettling my eyes with the sight of his raw fingernails. I admired him for his hold over me, but I would shoot him down in front of the shattered mirror, one more door to the Alice world now closed for ever.

Destivelle and Kalman would follow, and the last would be Dmitri Golyadkin, asleep in his bunk in the security building. I would reach the TV centre in time for a newsflash on the early-afternoon news, but whatever happened I knew that Eden-Olympia would lead the bulletins. This time there would be questions as well as answers… I drove on, thinking of Jane and Frances Baring and Wilder Penrose, ready to finish the task that David Greenwood had begun.

In both cases I think the reader is meant to be shocked and horrified by this last-page revelation, and that we are meant to have shared the hero’s descent into psychosis. But, I’m afraid to say, in both instances I saw it coming a mile off and felt the endings were cheesy and predictable.

Ballard’s bogus futurology

‘The future is going to be like a suburb of Stuttgart.’ (Paul Sinclair to Frank Halder)

Only it isn’t, is it? It’s going to be a world of sprawling slums without clean water or enough food, in an overheating world subject to more and more extreme weather events and characterised by the extinction of species, the destruction of entire eco-systems, and increasingly desperate mass migrations of people.

The future is emphatically not going to be a sanitised business park full of trim, fit chief executives of Siemens and BMW who are so bored they indulge in heavy drugs and kinky sex with a bit of vigilante work against foreign pimps thrown in on the side.

You could only possibly believe that this is a useful idea of the future if you live in an upper-middle-class professional bubble, or have the poor grasp on reality of a literary critic or a university-bound academic, both groups which tend to mix with unrepresentative, well-educated, young cosmopolitan progressives.

But the London I live in is now 45% white i.e. the majority of modern Londoners in the London I live in come from an amazing range of non-caucasian ethnic groups.

At the 2011 census, London had a population of 8,173,941. Of this number 44.9% were White British. 37% of the population were born outside the UK, including 24.5% born outside of Europe

In my borough there are high-profile Somali and Brazilian communities, plus a whole range of African and Caribbean nationalities, alongside the usual groundswell of hard-working Polish labourers. Every day I’m amazed at the number of dirty, exhausted-looking Chinese labourers on my train home, and I don’t understand why most of the people having loud mobile phone conversations on my commuter train are Spanish.

So the future I’m already living in is one where huge mongrel populations from all over the world inhabit sprawling cities and live in a sort of surly indifference alongside each other, none of them speak what was once the native language, most scratching a living on zero hour jobs, as Uber drivers or riding Deliveroo scooters, work long hours labouring on building sites or as cleaners or who knows what activities in the black economy.

Towards the end of the book Paul’s lover, nervy Frances Baring, wails that ‘they’re’ coming to get us, the business parks are expanding in all directions, that one day a new Hitler or Pol Pot will emerge from them.

‘Their moral perception of evil was so eroded that it failed to warn them of danger. Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.’

That just struck me as preposterous. For a start, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot didn’t emerge from any desert, they were both well-educated revolutionaries and both had experience of front line combat. They emerged from armies. For seconds, the worrying populist leaders we now have did not emerge from a business environment but from repressive state/party apparatuses, I’m thinking of Xi Jinping of China (lifelong Communist Party functionary) and Vladimir Putin of Russia (former KGB official), Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (lifelong politician) and Jair Messias Bolsonaro (graduate of military academy and the army before becoming a professional politician). The notable exception to this rule is Donald Trump, who doesn’t have military or political experience, who does indeed come from a business background, but is assuredly not one of the tightly-wrapped, quiet and efficient, but secretly psychotic, types Ballard is describing in this novel.

‘Wilder Penrose and Delage have to be stopped, along with their lunatic scheme. Not because it’s crazy, but because it’s going to work. The whole world will soon be a business-park colony, run by a lot of tight-lipped men who pretend to be weekend psychos.’

That’s just melodramatic tripe.

They are entertaining, written with real style and inventiveness and full of hundreds of brilliantly perceived details – but Ballard’s three novels about über-privileged, gated communities full of entirely white, upper-middle-class professional types – Running Wild, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes – degenerating into sadism and savagery might as well be messages from the moon for all the relevance they have to my life and the life of my times.

Books & Boots

All posts tagged first-person narrator

Lustrum by Robert Harris (2009)

Tiro the narrator

Two parts

Part one – Consul

Part two – Pater Patriae

Power

Ancient and modern

A checklist of references

Realistic in two ways

1. Sensual

2. Socio-political

3. Drama

The reassuring familiarity of thriller tropes

Portraits of Rome

Terentia

Tricks of oratory

Finally

Catullus

Credit

The Cicero trilogy

Robert Harris reviews

Roman reviews

Share this:

Like this:

Basket Case by Carl Hiaasen (2002)

The pros and cons of a first person narrator

Jack Tagger

The mysterious death of James Bradley Stomarti

The newspaper business

The big snore: rock music in 50-something men’s fiction

The rest of the plot (spoilers)

Epilogue

Thoughts

One liners

Credit

Carl Hiaasen reviews

Share this:

Like this:

Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard (2000)

The plot – 1

Savvy and grip

The plot – 2

Ballard’s bogus futurology

Related links

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

Short story collections

Share this:

Like this:

Follow

Topics

Categories