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Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (1930)

At Archie Schwert’s party the fifteenth Marquess of Vanburgh, Earl Vanburgh de Brendon, Baron Brendon, Lord of the Five Isles and Hereditary Grand Falconer to the Kingdom of Connaught, said to the eighth Earl of Balcairn, Viscount Erdinge, Baron Cairn of Balcairn, Red Knight of Lancaster, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Chenonceaux Herald to the Duchy of Aquitaine, ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Isn’t this a repulsive party? What are you going to say about it?’ for they were both of them, as it happened, gossip writers for the daily papers.

I tend to prefer older novels to contemporary novels and poetry because they are more unexpected, diverting, free from our narrow and oppressive modern morality and better written. Go any distance into the past and the characters will have better manners and the narrator write a more grammatically correct English than you get nowadays. There will also be old phrases which I dimly remember from my youth which have now vanished, swamped by all-conquering Americanisms. And, sometimes, you just get scenes which are odder and more unexpected than earnest, issue-led modern fiction can allow itself. Thus, at the opening of Evelyn Waugh’s beautifully written, impeccably well mannered, but ultimately devastating 1932 novel, Vile Bodies, we read:

High above his head swung Mrs Melrose Ape’s travel-worn Packard car, bearing the dust of three continents, against the darkening sky, and up the companion-way at the head of her angels strode Mrs Melrose Ape, the woman evangelist.

Not the kind of sentence you read every day.

Crossing the Channel

Vile Bodies opens on a cross-channel ferry packed with an assortment of Waugh-esque eccentrics, including a seen-it-all-before Jesuit priest, Father Rothschild, a loud and brash American woman evangelist, Mrs Melrose Ape, and her flock of young followers; some members of the fashionable ‘Bright Young People’ aka ‘the Younger Set’ (Miles Malpractice, ‘brother of Lord Throbbing’, and the toothsome Agatha Runcible, ‘Viola Chasm’s daughter’); two tittering old ladies named Lady Throbbing and Mrs Blackwater; the recently ousted Prime Minister, The Right Honourable Walter Outrage, M.P.; and a hopeful young novelist Adam Fenwick-Symes, who has been writing a novel in Paris.

Although there are passages of narrative description what becomes quickly obvious is that Waugh is experimenting with the novel form in a number of ways. One is by presenting short snatches of conversation and dialogue between a lot of groups of characters briskly intercut. No narratorial voice gives a setting or description, there is only the barest indication who’s talking, sometimes no indication at all. You’re meant to recognise the speakers by the style and content of what they say. It’s like the portmanteau movies of the 1970s, like a Robert Altman movie, briskly cutting between short scenes of busy dialogue.

The book as a whole is a concerted satire on the generation of ‘Bright Young Things’, the privileged young British aristocrats and upper-middle-class public schoolboys who were adolescents during the Great War and who graduated from Oxford or Cambridge in the early 1920s, throwing themselves into a lifestyle of wild abandon and endless partying in the rich man’s quarter of London, Mayfair.

As you might expect, we not only get accounts of their activities, but the point of view of their disapproving elders and betters. Here’s the former Prime Minister, who we often find in conclave with Lord Metroland and Father Rothschild:

‘They had a chance after the war that no generation has ever had. There was a whole civilization to be saved and remade — and all they seem to do is to play the fool. Mind you, I’m all in favour of them having a fling. I dare say that Victorian ideas were a bit strait-laced. Saving your cloth, Rothschild, it’s only human nature to run a bit loose when one’s young. But there’s something wanton about these young people to-day.’

The younger generation’s frivolity is exemplified in the way Adam’s engagement with his fiancée, Nina Blount, is on again, off again, on again, their breaking up and making up punctuating the novel right till the end, in a running gag.

To start it off, Adam telephones Nina to tell her that the customs officials at Dover confiscated his novel and burned it for obscenity. She is sad but has to dash off to a party. In London he checks into the eccentric Shepheards Hotel (note the posh spelling), Dover Street, run by the blithely forgetful owner, Lottie Crump, who can never remember anyone’s name (‘”‘You all know Lord Thingummy, don’t you?’ said Lottie”). Lottie was, apparently, based, as Waugh tells us in his preface, on ‘Mrs Rosa Lewis and her Cavendish Hotel’.

Here Adam discovers the posh and eccentric clientele, including the ex-king of Ruritania (my favourite), assembled in the bar (the parlour) and wins a thousand pounds on a silly bet with a fellow guest. So he rushes to phone up Nina to tell her their wedding is back on again. She is happy but has to rush off to a party, as she always does.

Adam goes back to the group of guests, all getting drunk, and an older chap who calls himself ‘the Major’ offers the advice that the best way to invest his money is bet on a horse. In fact, he knows a dead cert, Indian Runner, running in the forthcoming November Handicap at twenty to one. So Adam drunkenly hands over his newly-won thousand pounds to the Major to put on this horse. The reader little suspects that this, also, will become a running gag for the rest of the book.

Then Adam stumbles back to the phone in the hallway and rings up Nina to ask her about this horse. It is a comic premise of the novel that the world it portrays is minuscule and everybody knows everybody else, so it comes as no surprise that Nina just happens to know the horse’s posh owner and tells him it’s an absolute dog and will never win anything. When Adam explains that he’s just handed over his £1,000 to a Major to bet on it, Nina says well, that was foolish but she must dash for dinner and rings off. As usual.

Phone dialogue

A propos Adam and Nina’s conversations, Waugh prided himself that this was the first novel to include extended passages of dialogue carried out on the phone. Something about the phone medium offers the opportunity to make the characters sound even more clipped, superficial and silly than face-to-face conversation would:

‘Oh, I say. Nina, there’s one thing – I don’t think I shall be able to marry you after all.’
‘Oh, Adam, you are a bore. Why not?’
‘They burnt my book.’
‘Beasts. Who did?’

Beasts and beastly. Dreadful bores. Ghastly fellows. I say, old chap. That would be divine, darling. Everyone speaks like that, and focusing on the dialogue brings this out.

Gossip columns and the press

Vile Bodies is wall to wall posh. That was its selling point. Waugh tells us that the ‘Bright Young People’ were a feature in the popular press of the time, as the characters in Made In Chelsea or Love Island might be in ours. Hmm maybe the comparison with a TV show is not quite right. After all, the characters appear in the gossip columns of the papers and some of the characters are themselves part of the set who make a career on the side writing about their friends.

When I was younger there were gossip columns by Taki in the Spectator and Nigel Dempster in the Express and Daily Mail. I imagine the same kind of thing persists today. Obviously people like to read about the goings-on of the rich and privileged with a mixture of mockery and jealousy. That’s very much the mix Waugh was catering to. He’s well aware of it. He overtly describes the ‘kind of vicarious inquisitiveness into the lives of others’ which gossip columns in all ages satisfy.

But over and above the permanent interest in the comings and goings of the very rich, the subject of the dissolute younger generation just happened to be in the news at the time and so Waugh’s novel happened to be addressing a hot topic at just the right moment. He was instantly proclaimed the ‘voice’ of that generation and Vile Bodies was picked up and reviewed, and articles and profiles and interviews were spun off it, and it sold like hot cakes. His reputation was made.

Interesting that right from the start of his writing career, it was deeply involved in the press, in the media. Vile Bodies is, on one level, about the rivalry between two gossip columnists for popular newspapers, and feature scenes in newsrooms and even with the editor of the main paper. Two of his books from the mid-30s describe how he was hired by a newspaper as a temporary foreign correspondent, the two factual books, Remote People and Waugh in Abyssinia. And he used the experiences and material from both books as material for his satirical masterpiece about the press, Scoop (1938). If we look back at Decline and Fall with this in mind, we notice that a number of key moments in that book are caused by newspaper reports, and that many of the events are picked up and reported by and mediated by the Press.

Waugh’s 1930s novels are famous for their bright and often heartlessly comic depiction of the very highest of London high society, but it’s worth pointing out how the topic of the Press runs through all of them, and the extent to which his characters perform their roles and are aware of themselves as performers (see below).

Bright Young People

Anyway, back to Vile Bodies, it is a masterpiece of deliberately brittle superficial satire, the text’s fragmentation into snippets of speech enacting the snippets of apparently random, inconsequent conversation overheard at a party, the world it comes from being one of endless parties, endless frivolity, which he captures quite brilliantly.

‘Who’s that awful-looking woman? I’m sure she’s famous in some way. It’s not Mrs Melrose Ape, is it? I heard she was coming.’
‘Who?’
‘That one. Making up to Nina.’
‘Good lord, no. She’s no one. Mrs Panrast she’s called now.’
‘She seems to know you.’
‘Yes, I’ve known her all my life. As a matter of fact, she’s my mother.’
‘My dear, how too shaming.’

It’s a set, a group, a clique. They all know each other and many are related, couples, parents, children, aunts, cousins. Waugh’s novels themselves partake of this cliqueyness by featuring quite a few recurring characters. Figures we first met in the previous novel, Decline and Fall, include Lord Circumference and Miles Malpractice, little David Lennox the fashionable society photographer. Lord Vanbrugh the gossip columnist is presumably the son of the Lady Vanbrugh who appeared in D&F and Margot Maltravers, formerly Mrs Beste-Chetwynde who was a central character in the same novel, also makes an appearance under her new name, Lady Metroland, hosting a fashionable party. (She confirms her identity by whispering to a couple of Mrs Ape’s angels that she can get them a job in South America if she wishes, the reader of the previous novel knowing this would be at one of Lady M’s string of brothels there). And quite a few of these characters go on to appear in Waugh’s later novels. The effect is to create a comically complete ‘alternative’ version of English high society, with its narrow interconnectedness.

Thus we know from Decline and Fall that Lord Metroland married Margot Beste-Chetwynde. She was heiress to the Pastmaster title. Therefore her son, Peter Beste-Chetwynde, in time becomes Lord Pastmaster. Margot caused a great stir in Decline and Fall by going out with a stylish young black man. Here in Vile Bodies there is a sweet symmetry in discovering that her son is going out with a beautiful black woman. Hence Lord Metroland’s grumpy remark:

‘Anyhow,’ said Lord Metroland, ‘I don’t see how all that explains why my stepson should drink like a fish and go about everywhere with a negress.’
‘My dear, how rich you sound.’
‘I feel my full income when that young man is mentioned.’

Sociolect

The snobbery is enacted in the vocabulary of the text. Various social distinctions are, of course, directly indicated by possession of a title or one’s family. But also, of course, by how one speaks. Obviously there’s the question of accent, the way the upper class distinguish themselves from the middle and lower classes. But it’s also a specific vocabulary which marks one off as a member of the chosen, its sociolect – not only its slang but a very precise choice of key words which mark off a group, signal to other members one’s membership of the group and of course, signal to everyone else their very definite exclusion. Thus:

Divine Mrs Mouse thinks a party should be described as lovely. When her daughter describes the party she’s just been to as divine her mother tut tuts because that single word betokens the class above theirs, indicates that her daughter is getting above her station.

‘It was just too divine,’ said the youngest Miss Brown.
‘It was what, Jane?’

Because it is a word very much associated with the hardest core of the upper classiest of the Bright Young Things, represented in this book by the wild and heedless party animal, Miss Agatha Runcible.

Miss Runcible said that she had heard of a divine night club near Leicester Square somewhere where you could get a drink at any hour of the night.

Bogus This is another word much in vogue to mean simply ‘bad’ with the obvious overtone of fake:

‘Oh, dear,’ she said, ‘this really is all too bogus.’
Miss Runcible said that kippers were not very drunk-making and that the whole club seemed bogus to her.

In fact their use of ‘bogus’ is cited by Father Rothschild as one of the things he notices about the younger generation. He takes a positive view of it, suggesting to his buddies Mr Outrage and Lord Metroland that the young actually have very strict morals and find the post-war culture they’ve inherited broken and shallow and deceitful. (In this way ‘bogus’ for the 1920s was similar to what ‘phoney’ was to be for Americans in the 1950s as popularised by Catcher In The Rye, ‘square’ was for hippies, and ‘gay’ is for modern schoolchildren).

Too ‘Too’ is an adverb of degree, indicating excess. Most of us use it in front of adjectives as a statement of fact, for example ‘This tea is too hot’. But the upper classes use it as one among many forms of exaggeration, indicating the simply superlative nature of their experiences, their lives and their darling selves. Used like this, ‘too’ doesn’t convey factual information but is a class marker; in fact its very factual emptiness, its semantic redundancy, highlights its role as a marker of membership:

‘I think it’s quite too sweet of you…’
‘Isn’t this too amusing?’
‘Isn’t that just too bad of Vanburgh?’

‘It was just too divine’ contains a double superlative, the adverb ‘too’ but also the adjective ‘divine’ itself, which is obviously being used with frivolous exaggeration. The party was divine. You are divine. I am divine. We are divine.

Such and so Grammatically ‘such’ is a determiner and ‘so’ is an adverb. So ‘so’ should be used in front of an adjective, ‘such’ in front of a noun phrase. In this narrow society, they are both used in much the same way as ‘too’, to emphasise that everything a speaker is talking about is the absolute tip top. After listening to someone telling us they had such a good time at such a wonderful party and spoke to such a lovely man, and so on, we quickly get the picture that the speaker lives a very superior life. To get the full effect it needs to be emphasised:

‘Such a nice stamp of man.’
‘It seems such a waste.’
‘Such nice people.’
‘Such a nice bright girl.’

There’s an element of risk in talking like this. Only a certain kind of person can carry it off. Trying it on among people who don’t buy into the entire elite idea, or among the real elite who know that you are not a member, risks ridicule.

So talking like this is a kind of taunt – I can get away with this ridiculous way of speaking but you can’t. The epitome of this verbal bravado is Miss Runcible, whose every word is littered with mannered vocabulary and superlatives, flaunting her superlative specialness, daring anyone else to compete.

Simply Paradoxically, for a very self-conscious elite, the pose is one of almost idiotic simplicity. Consider Bertie Wooster. His idiocy underpins his membership of the toff class. He is too stupid to do anything practical like have a job and his upper class idiocy is a loud indicator that he doesn’t need a job, but lives a life of privilege. Well one indicator of this attitude is use of the word simply.

‘I simply do not understand what has happened’
‘Nina, do you ever feel that things simply can’t go on much longer?’
‘Now they’re simply thrilled to the marrow about it .’
‘She’d simply loathe it, darling.’
‘Of course, they’re simply not gentlemen, either of them.’

Darling Preferably drawled, a usage only the very confident and suave can get away with.

‘Darling, am I going to be seduced?’
‘I’m afraid you are. Do you mind terribly?’
‘Not as much as all that,’ said Nina, and added in Cockney, ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’

Terribly Another denoter of frivolous giddy poshness, since the time of Oscar Wilde at least, via Saki and Noel Coward. Terribly and frightfully.

‘No, really, I think that’s frightfully nice of you. Look, here’s the money. Have a drink, won’t you?’
‘I say, you must be frightfully brainy.’

-making Many of these elements have survived the past 90 years, they continued into the equally frivolous Swinging Sixties and on into our own times, though often mocked, as in the TV series Absolutely Fabulous (1992 to 1996). A locution which is a bit more specific to this generation, or certainly to this book, is creating phrases by adding ‘-making’ to the end of an adjective. Thus:

‘Too, too sick-making,’ said Miss Runcible.
‘As soon as I get to London I shall ring up every Cabinet Minister and all the newspapers and give them all the most shy-making details.’
Miss Runcible said that kippers were not very drunk-making and that the whole club seemed bogus to her.
‘Wouldn’t they be rather ill-making?’
‘Very better-making,’ said Miss Runcible with approval as she ate her haddock.

The usage occurs precisely 13 times in the novel, mostly associated with the most daring character, fearless Miss Runcible, and Waugh pushes it to a ludicrous extreme when he has her say:

‘Goodness, how too stiff-scaring….’ (p.174)

This locution made enough of an impression that Waugh singled it out in his preface to the 1964 edition of the novel for being widely commented on, and even taken up by a drama critic who included it in various reviews: ‘”Too sick-making”, as Mr Waugh would say.’ Did people actually say it, or was it a very felicitous invention?

Cockney

In my review of Decline and Fall I noted how much Waugh liked describing Cockney or working class characters and revelled in writing their dialogue. Same here. Thus a taxi driver tells Adam:

‘Long way from here Doubting ‘All is. Cost you fifteen bob…If you’re a commercial, I can tell you straight it ain’t no use going to ‘im.’

This turns out not to be a personal foible of Waugh’s. In Vile Bodies we learn that mimicking Cockney accents was highly fashionable among the creme de la creme of the Bright Young Things.

‘Go away, hog’s rump,’ said Adam, in Cockney,
‘Pretty as a picture,’ said Archie, in Cockney, passing with a bottle of champagne in his hand.
‘Look,’ said Adam, producing the cheque. ‘Whatcher think of that?’ he added in Cockney.
‘Good morning, all,’ she said in Cockney.

At university I knew very posh public schoolboys who had a cult of suddenly dropping into very thick Jamaican patois which they copied from hard-core reggae music (the extreme Jamaican pronunciation of ‘nay-shun’ kept recurring). Same kind of thing here – upper class types signalling their mockery and frivolity by mimicking the accents of the people about as far away from them on the social spectrum as possible.

Alcohol

Everyone’s either drunk, getting drunk or hungover. Their catchphrase is ‘Let’s have a drink’.

‘How about a little drink?’ said Lottie.

The American critic Edmund Wilson made the same comment about the literary types he knew in 1920s New York, and in general about ‘the Roaring Twenties’, ‘the Jazz Era’. Everyone drank like fish.

They went down the hill feeling buoyant and detached (as one should if one drinks a great deal before luncheon). (p.173)

Everyone was nursing a hangover. Everyone needed one for the road or a pick-me-up the next morning, or a few drinks before lunch, and during lunch, and mid-afternoon, and something to whet the whistle before dinner, and then onto a club for drinks and so on into the early hours. At luncheon with Nina’s father:

First they drank sherry, then claret, then port.

It goes without saying that these chaps and chapesses are not drinking beer or lager. Champagne is the unimpeachable, uncritisable, eternal choice for toffs and all occasions.

(Unless specified in detail, all drinks are champagne in Lottie’s parlour.)
Archie Schwert, as he passed, champagne bottle in hand, paused to say, ‘How are you, Mary darling?’
Adam hurried out into the hall as another bottle of champagne popped festively in the parlour.

Drinking heavily and one more for the road and still partying at dawn are fine if you’re in your 20s (and well off and good looking). Give it 40 years and you end up looking and talking like the Major in Fawlty Towers as so many of these bright young things eventually did.

Ballard Berkeley as Major Gowen in Fawlty Towers

The extended scene at the motor races (Chapter Ten) contains a very funny description of four posh people becoming very drunk. Their progressive inebriation is conveyed entirely via their speech patterns, which become steadily more clipped and the subject matter steadily more absurd, so that when a race steward comes round to enquire where the driver of the car they’re supporting has gone to (his arm was hurt in an accident so he’s pulled into the pits and his car is empty) they immediately reply that he’s been murdered. When the steward asks if there’s a replacement driver, they immediately reply, straight faced, that he’s been murdered too.

‘Driver’s just been murdered,’ said Archie. ‘Spanner under the railway bridge. Marino.’
‘Well, are you going to scratch? Who’s spare driver?’
‘I don’t know. Do you, Adam? I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if they hadn’t murdered the spare driver, too.’

Since they each drink a bottle of champagne before lunch, the three posh friends start to come down at teatime and Waugh is as good on incipient hangovers as on inebriation.

The effect of their drinks had now entered on that secondary stage, vividly described in temperance handbooks, when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay. (p.177)

Politics

The satirical point of view extends up into political circles, one of the jokes being that several of the most extreme and disreputably hedonistic of the Bright Young People are, with a certain inevitability, the sons and daughter of the leaders of the main parties and, since one or other of them is in power at any given moment, children of the Prime Minister.

In fact the mockery extends to the novel’s cheerfully satirical notion that the British government falls roughly every week. In the opening chapter we meet the Prime Minister who’s just been ousted, Outrage, and in the same chapter the supremely modish Miss Runcible. Only slowly does it become clear that she is, with a certain inevitability, the daughter of the current Prime Minister (Sir James Brown).

Half way through the book this Prime Minister is ousted because of stories about the wild party held at Number 10 which climaxed with his half-naked daughter, dressed as a Hawaiian dancer, stumbling drunkenly out the front steps of Number 10 and straight into the aim of numerous press photographers and journalists. Disreputable parties held by Tory toffs at Number 10? Well, it seems that in this, as so many other aspects of British life, nothing has really changed since the 1930s.

Moments of darkness

The best comedy, literary comedy as opposed to gag fests, hints at darker undertones. Shakespeare’s comedies tread, briefly, close to genuine cruelty or torment as, for example, in the hounding of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Comedy generally is an unstable genre. For a generation or more we’ve had the comedy of cruelty or humiliation or embarrassment. I find a lot of modern comedy, such as The Office too embarrassing and depressing to watch.

Waugh’s comedy goes to extremes. It often includes incidents of complete tragedy which are played for laughs, or flicker briefly in the frivolous narrative as peripheral details, which are glossed over with comic nonchalance but which, if you pause to focus on them, are very dark.

It’s there in Decline and Fall when little Lord Tangent has his foot grazed by a shot from the starting gun at school sports day, the wound gets infected and he has to have the foot amputated. A lot later we learn, in a throwaway remark, that he has died.

Flossie’s death

Something similar happens here when a young woman, Florence or Flossie Ducane, involved in a drunken party in the room of one of the posh guests at the posh Shepheard’s Hotel attempts to swing from a chandelier which snaps and she falls to the floor and breaks her neck. Adam sees a brief report about it in the newspaper:

‘Tragedy in West-End Hotel.
‘The death occurred early this morning at a private hotel in Dover Street of Miss Florence Ducane, described as being of independent means, following an accident in which Miss Ducane fell from a chandelier which she was attempting to mend.‘

1. All kinds of things are going on here. One is the way moments of real tragedy provide a foil for the gay abandon of most of the characters. Each of these momentary tragedies is a tiny, flickering memento of the vast disaster of the First World War which looms over the entire decade like a smothering nightmare – all those dead husbands and brothers and fathers who everyone rushes round brightly ignoring.

(There’s a famous moment in the story, when Adam is hurrying to Marylebone station to catch a train out to the country pile of Nina’s father [Doubting Hall, Aylesbury], when the clock strikes 11 and everyone all over London, all over the country is still and quiet for 2 minutes because it is Remembrance Sunday. Then the 2 minutes are up and everybody’s hurly burly of life resumes. When I was young I read the handful of sentences which describe it as an indictment of the shallowness of Adam and the world, barely managing their perfunctory 2 minutes’ tribute. Now I see it as a momentary insight into the darkness which underlies everything, which threatens all values.)

2. On another level, the way Adam reads about Flossie’s death in a newspaper epitomises the way all the characters read about their own lives in the press; their lives are mediated by the media, written up and dramatised like performances. They read out to each other the gossip column reports about their behaviour at the latest party like actors reading reviews of their performances, and then, in turn, give their opinions on the columnists/critics’s writing up, creating a closed circle of mutual admiration and/or criticism.

3. On another, more obviously comic, level, what you could call the PR level, Adam smiles quietly to himself at how well the owner of the Shepheard’s Hotel, Lottie Crump, handled the police and journalists who turned up to cover Flossie’s death, smooth-talking them, offering them all champagne, and so managing to steer them all away from the fact that the host of the party where the death occurred was a venerable American judge, Judge Skimp. His name has been very successfully kept out of the papers. Respect for Lottie.

Simon Balcairn’s suicide

Then there’s another death, much more elaborately explained and described. Simon, Earl of Balcairn, has his career as a leading gossip columnist (writing the ‘Chatterbox’ column in the Daily Excess) ruined after he is boycotted by Margot Metroland and blacklisted from the London society through whom he makes his living. He gets Adam to phone Margot and plead to be admitted to her latest party, one she is giving for the fashionable American evangelist, Mrs Ape, but she obstinately refuses. He even dresses up in disguise with a thick black beard and gatecrashes, but is detected and thrown out.

Convinced that his career, and so his life is over, Simon phones in one last great story to his newspaper, the Daily Excess, a completely fictitious account of Margot’s party in which he makes up uproarious scenes of half London’s high society falling to their knees amid paroxysms of religious guilt and renunciation (all completely fictitious) – then, for the first time completely happy with his work, lays down with his head in his gas oven, turns on the gas, inhales deeply, and dies. It is, and is meant to be, bleak.

This feel for the darkness which underlies the giddy social whirl, and the complicated psychological effect which is produced by cleverly counterpointing the two tones, becomes more evident in Waugh’s subsequent novels, Black Mischief (1932) and A Handful of Dust (1934). In this novel he describes it as

that black misanthropy…which waits alike on gossip writer and novelist…

And it appears more and more as the novel progresses, like water seeping through the cracks in a dam. Nina starts the novel as the model of a social butterfly, utterly empty-headed and optimistic. After she and Adam have a dirty night in Arundel i.e. sex i.e. she loses her virginity, she ceases being so much fun. She finds the parties less fun. She starts to squabble with Adam. About half way through the novel she is, uncoincidentally, the peg for an extended passage which sounds a note of disgust at the book’s own subject matter (which is where, incidentally, the title comes from):

‘Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties.’
(…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris–all that succession and repetition of massed humanity…. Those vile bodies…)

Waugh cannily sprinkles among the witty dialogue and endless parties a slowly mounting note of disgust and revulsion.

Comedy is adults behaving like children

From the moment of her deflowering Nina grows steadily more serious, almost depressed. You realise it’s because, in having sex, she’s become an adult. Things aren’t quite so much bright innocent fun any more. At which point I realised that the appeal of the Bright Young Things is, in part, because they behave like children, drunk and dancing and singing (OK, so the drinking is not exactly like young children) but at its core their behaviour is childish, persistently innocent and naive.

The Bright Young People came popping all together, out of some one’s electric brougham like a litter of pigs, and ran squealing up the steps.

Much comedy is based on adults behaving like children. It’s a very reliable way of getting a comic effect in all kinds of works and movies and TV shows. It occurs throughout this book. There’s a funny example when, at Margot Metroland’s party, the ageing ex-Prime Minister, Mr Outrage, gets caught up in the exposure of Simon Balcairn infiltrating the party in disguise but, because of the obscure way the thing is revealed with a variety of pseudonyms and disguises, the PM becomes increasingly confused, like a child among adults and he is reduced to childishly begging someone to explain to him what is going on. The comic effect is then extended when he is made to confess he experiences the same bewildering sense of being out of his depth even in his own cabinet meetings.

‘I simply do not understand what has happened…. Where are those detectives?… Will no one explain?… You treat me like a child,’ he said. It was all like one of those Cabinet meetings, when they all talked about something he didn’t understand and paid no attention to him.

Mr Chatterbox

Balcairn’s suicide creates a vacancy for a new ‘Mr Chatterbox’ and Adam happens to be dining in the same restaurant (Espinosa’s, the second-best restaurant in London) as the features editor of the Daily Excess, they get into conversation and so, with the casualness so typical of every aspect of these people’s lives, he is offered the job on the spot. ‘Ten pounds a week and expenses.’

Adam’s (brief) time as a gossip columnist turns into a comic tour de force. Just about everyone Simon mentioned in his last great fictitious account of Margot’s party (mentioned above) sues the Daily Excess (’62 writs for libel’!) with the result that the proprietor, Lord Monomark, draws up a list of them all and commands that none of them must ever, ever be mentioned in the paper again. This presents Adam with a potentially ruinous problem because the list includes ‘everyone who is anyone’ and so, on the face of it, makes his job as gossip columnist to London’s high society impossible.

He comes up with two solutions, the first fairly funny, the second one hilarious. The first one is to report the doings of C-listers, remote cousins and distant relatives of the great and good, who are often ailing and hard done by. The column’s readers:

learned of the engagement of the younger sister of the Bishop of Chertsey and of a dinner party given in Elm Park Gardens by the widow of a High Commissioner to some of the friends she had made in their colony. There were details of the blameless home life of women novelists, photographed with their spaniels before rose-covered cottages; stories of undergraduate ‘rags’ and regimental reunion dinners; anecdotes from Harley Street and the Inns of Court; snaps and snippets about cocktail parties given in basement flats by spotty announcers at the B.B.C., of tea dances in Gloucester Terrace and jokes made at High Table by dons.

This has the unexpected benefit of creating new fans of the column who identify with the ailments or afflictions of these ‘resolute non-entities’.

The second and more radical solution is simply to make it up. Like a novelist, Adam creates a new set of entirely fictional high society characters. He invents an avant-garde sculptor called Provna, giving him such a convincing back story that actual works by Provna start to appear on the market, and go for good prices at auction. He invents a popular young attaché at the Italian Embassy called Count Cincinnati, a dab hand at the cello. He invents Captain Angus Stuart-Kerr the famous big game hunter and sensational ballroom dancer.

Immediately his great rival gossip columnist, Vanbrugh, starts featuring the same (utterly fictional characters) in his column, and then other characters begin to mention them in conversation (‘Saw old Stuart-Kerr at Margot’s the other day. Lovely chap’) and so on. This is funny because it indicates how people are so desperate to be in the swim and au courant that they will lie to themselves about who they’ve seen or talked to. It indicates the utter superficiality of the world they inhabit which can be interpreted, moralistically, as a bad thing; but can also be seen as a fun and creative thing: why not make up the society you live in, if the real world is one of poverty and war?

But Adam’s masterpiece is the divinely slim and attractive Mrs Imogen Quest, the acme of social desirability, to whom he attributes the height of social standing. She becomes so wildly popular that eventually the owner of the Daily Excess, Lord Monomark, sends down a message saying he would love to meet this paragon. At which point, in a mild panic, Adam quickly writes a column announcing the unfortunate news that Mrs Quest had sailed to Jamaica, date of return unknown.

You get the idea. Not rocket science, but genuinely funny, inventive, amusing.

Father Rothschild as moral centre

Adam and Nina are invited to a bright young party held in a dirigible i.e. airship.

On the same night their more staid parents, politicians and grandees attend a much more traditional party for the older generation at Anchorage House. The main feature of this is the Jesuit Father Rothschild sharing with Mr Outrage and Lord Metroland a surprisingly mild, insightful and sympathetic view of the behaviour of the young generation. They have come into a world robbed of its meaning by the war, a world where the old values have been undermined and destroyed and yet nothing new has replaced them. A decade of financial and political crises ending up in a great crash. No wonder they make a point of not caring about anything. Genuinely caring about someone or something only risks being hurt. Hence the vehemence of the display of aloofness, nonchalance, insouciance, darling this and divine that and frightfully the other, and refusing point blank to ever be serious about anything.

In fact, Father Rothschild is given an almost apocalyptic speech:

‘Wars don’t start nowadays because people want them. We long for peace, and fill our newspapers with conferences about disarmament and arbitration, but there is a radical instability in our whole world-order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions.’

And this was written a few years before Hitler even came to power. Everyone knew it. Everyone sensed it. The coming collapse. The bright young things are laughing in the dark.

A touch of Auden

W.H. Auden often gets the credit for introducing industrial landscapes and landscapes blighted by the Great Depression into 1930s poetry, but it’s interesting to notice Waugh doing it here in prose. In a plane flying to the South of France, Nina looks down through the window:

Nina looked down and saw inclined at an odd angle a horizon of straggling red suburb; arterial roads dotted with little cars; factories, some of them working, others empty and decaying; a disused canal; some distant hills sown with bungalows; wireless masts and overhead power cables; men and women were indiscernible except as tiny spots; they were marrying and shopping and making money and having children.

One episode in the sad and dreary strand of English poetry and prose through the middle half of the twentieth century, E.M. Foster’s lament for the cancerous growth of London in the Edwardian era, D.H. Lawrence’s horrified descriptions of the mining country, John Betjeman’s comic disgust at light industrial towns like Slough, Philip Larkin’s sad descriptions of windswept shopping centres. But during the 1930s it had an extra, apocalyptic tone because of the sense of deep economic and social crisis.

Other scenes

The movie

Adam goes back to visit Nina’s father for a second time to try and borrow money, but is amazed to walk into the surreal scene of a historical drama being filmed at her father’s decaying country house (Doubting Hall, set in extensive grounds) by a dubious film company The Wonderfilm Company of Great Britain, run by an obvious shyster, a Mr Isaacs. (Worth noting, maybe, that Waugh has the leading lady of the movie, use what would nowadays be an unacceptable antisemitic epithet. Waugh himself has some of his characters, on very rare occasions, disparage Jews, but then they disparage the middle classes, politicians, the authorities and lots of other groups. Their stock in trade is amused contempt for everyone not a member of their social circle. Waugh comes nowhere near the shocking antisemitism which blackens Saki’s short stories and novels.)

Isaac is such a shyster he offers to sell Adam the complete movie, all the rushes and part-edited work for a bargain £500. Adam recognises a crook when he sees one. But his prospective father-in-law doesn’t, and it’s a comic thread that, towards the end of the novel, old Colonel Blount has bought the stock off Isaacs and forces his reluctant neighbour, the Rector of his church, to stage an elaborate and disastrous showing of what is obviously a terrible film.

(It is maybe worth noting that Waugh had himself tried his hand at making a film, with some chums from Oxford soon after he left the university, in 1922. It was a version of The Scarlet Woman and shot partly in the gardens at Underhill, his parents’ house in Hampstead.)

The motor race and Agatha

Adam, Agatha Runcible, Miles Malpractice and Archie Schwert pile into Archie’s car for a long drive to some remote provincial town to watch a motorcar race which a friend of Miles’ is competing in. It’s mildly comic that all the good hotels are packed to overflowing so they end up staying in a very rough boarding house, sharing rooms with bed which are alive with fleas. Early next morning they do a bunk.

The car race is described at surprising length, with various comic details (in the pits Agatha keeps lighting up a cigarette, being told to put it out by a steward, and chucking it perilously close to the open cans of petrol; this is very cinematic in the style of Charlie Chaplin).

There is a supremely comic scene where Miles’s friend brings his car into the pits and goes off to see a medic – one of the competitors threw a spanner out his car which hit our driver in the arm. A race steward appears and asks if there’s a replacement driver for the car. Now, in order to smuggle his pals into the pits in the first place, Miles’ friend had handed them each a white armband with random job titles on, such as Mechanic. The one given to Agatha just happened to read SPARE DRIVER so now, drunk as a lord, she points to it and declares: ‘I’m spare driver. It’s on my arm.’ The race steward takes down her name and she drunkenly gets into the racing car (she’s never driven a car before) her friends ask if that’s quite wise, to drive plastered, but she replies: ‘I’m spare driver. It’s on my arm’ and roars off down the course.

There then follow a sequence of comic announcements over the race tannoy as it is announced that Miss Runcible’s car (‘No 13, the English Plunket-Bowse’) has a) finished one lap in record time b) been disqualified for the record as it is now known she veered off the road and took a short cut c) has left the race altogether, taking a left instead of a right turn at a hairpin corner and last seen shooting off across country.

Our three buddies repair to the drinks tent where they carry on getting drunk. When ‘the drunk major’ turns up, promising to pay Adam the £35,000 that he owes him thanks to the bet he promised to make on a racehorse, they each have a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

Eventually it is reported that the car has been spotted in a large village fifteen miles away, town where it has crashed into the big stone market cross (‘ (doing irreparable damage to a monument already scheduled for preservation by the Office of Works)’).

Our threesome hire a taxi to take them there and witness the car wreck, mangled against the stone post and still smoking. Villagers report that a woman was seen exiting the car and stumbling towards the railway station. They make their way to the railway station and the ticket seller tells them he sold a ticket to London to a confused young woman.

(It may be worth noting that this entire chapter, with its extended and detailed description of competitive car racing, was almost certainly based on a real visit to a car race Waugh made, to support his pal David Plunket Greene. The real life race, which took place in 1929, is described, with evocative contemporary photos, in this excellent blog.)

Agatha’s end

To cut a long story short, after interruptions from other strands, we learn that Agatha sustained serious enough injuries in her car smash to be sent to hospital. But that’s not the worst of it. She had concussion and has periodic delusions, so she is referred on to ‘the Wimpole Street nursing home’. Here, in Waugh’s telegraphic style, we are given impressionistic snippets into her nightmares in which she is driving always faster, faster! and the comforting voice of her nurse trying to calm her as she injects her with a tranquiliser.

There’s a final scene in this strand where several of her pals pop round to visit her, bringing flowers but also a little drinky-wink, then some other appear and before you know it there’s a full scale party going on in her room, someone brings a gramophone, they all dance to the latest jazz tune. They even bribe the staid nurse with a few drinks and things are getting rowdy when, inevitably, the stern matron arrives and kicks them all out. Carry on Bright Young Things.

But, long story short, the excitement exacerbates Agatha’s shredded nerves and, towards the end of the narrative, we learn in a typically throwaway comment from one the characters, that Agatha died. Adam:

‘Did I tell you I went to Agatha’s funeral? There was practically no one there except the Chasms and some aunts. I went with Van, rather tight, and got stared at. I think they felt I was partly responsible for the accident…’

The fizzy bubbles mood of the opening half of the novel feels well and truly burst by this stage. Characters carry on partying and behaving like children but it feels like the moral and psychological wreckage is mounting up like a cliff teetering over them all.

Nina’s infidelities

The on again, off again relationship between Nina and Adam comes to a head when she declares she’s in love with a newcomer in their social circle, a man who speaks in even more outrageous posh boy phrases than anyone else. In fact, she casually informs Adam, she and Ginger got married this morning. Oh.

But this is where it gets interesting because Nina is such an airhead that she can’t really decide, she can’t make up her mind between Adam and Ginger. She goes off on a jolly honeymoon to the Med with him, but doesn’t like it one bit, he’s off playing golf most of the day. If you recall, Adam and Nina had had sex, at the hotel in Arundel, so there’s a more than emotional bond between them. Anyway, long and the short of it is she agrees to see him, to come and stay with him and, in effect, to start an affair with him as soon as she gets back to London.

It is all done for laughs but Waugh doesn’t need to draw the moral, to go on about psychological consequences, to editorialise or point out the moral implications for Nina and her set. All of this is conspicuous by its absence. It is left entirely to the reader to draw their own conclusions. Waugh’s text has the chrome-covered sleekness of an Art Deco statuette, slender, stylish, quick, slickly up to date.

He is the English F. Scott Fitzgerald, giving a highly stylised depiction of a generation in headlong pursuit of fun, drinks, drinks and more drinks, endless parties, with the shadow of the coming psychological crash looming closer and closer over his narratives.

The completely unexpected ending

The cinema show

Comedy of a sort continues up to the end, with the scene I mentioned before, of gaga old Colonel Blount, accompanied by Nina and Adam who are staying with him for Christmas, insisting on taking his cinematographic equipment round to the much put-upon local Rector, spending an age setting it up, and then blowing his entire household fuses in showing the terrible rubbish film which the director Isaacs has flogged to him.

It is a great comic scene if, to my mind, no longer as laugh out loud funny as the early scenes, because my imagination has been tainted by a silly death (Flossie), a suicide (Simon Balcairn), the nervous breakdown and death of pretty much the leading figure int he narrative (Agatha).

Anyway, after the power cut, the Colonel, Adam and Nina motor back to Doubting Hall for Christmas dinner and are in the middle of boozy toasts when the Rector phones them with the terrible news. War has broken out. War?

The last world war

In an extraordinary leap in subject matter and style, a startling break with everything which went before it, the very last scene discovers Adam, dressed as a soldier, amid a vast landscape of complete destruction, a barbed wire and mud nightmare derived from the grimmest accounts of the Great War and stretching for as far as the eye can see in every direction. It is the new war, the final war, the war Father Rothschild warned against, the war they all knew was coming and which, in a way, justified their heartless frivolity. Nothing matters. Jobs don’t matter, relationships don’t matter, sobriety or drunkenness, wild gambling, fidelity or infidelity, nothing matters, because they know in their guts that everything, everything, will be swept away.

Waugh’s humour continues till the end, but it is now a grim, bleak humour. For floundering across the mud landscape towards Adam comes a gas-masked figure. For a moment it looks as if they will attack each other, the unknown figure wielding a flame thrower, Adam reaching for one of the new Huxdane-Halley bomb (for the dissemination of leprosy germs) he keeps in his belt. God. Germ warfare. The utter ruined bottom of the pit of a bankrupt civilisation.

Only at the last minute do they realise they’re both British and then, when they take their masks off, Adam recognises the notorious Major, the elusive figure who took his money off him at Shepheard’s all those months (or is it years) ago, to bet on a horse, who he briefly met at the motor racing meet, and now gets talking to him, in that upper class way, as if nothing had happened at all.

‘You’re English, are you?’ he said. ‘Can’t see a thing. Broken my damned monocle.’

Now the Major invites him into the sanctuary of his ruined Daimler car, sunk past its axles in mud.

‘My car’s broken down somewhere over there. My driver went out to try and find someone to help and got lost, and I went out to look for him, and now I’ve lost the car too. Damn difficult country to find one’s way about in. No landmarks…’

It is the landscape of Samuel Beckett’s post-war plays, an unending landscape of utter devastation, dotted with wrecks of abandoned machinery and only a handful of survivors.

Once they’ve clambered into the car’s, the Major opens a bottle of champagne (what else?) and reveals a dishevelled girl wrapped in a great coat, ‘woebegone fragment of womanhood’. On closer examination this turns out to be one of Mrs Apes’ young girls, the laughably named Chastity. When quizzed, Chastity ends the narrative with a page-long account of her trials. It turns out that Margot Metroland did manage to persuade her to leave Mrs Ape’s religious troupe and go and work in one of her South American bordellos –so this fills in the details of the 3 or 4 girls we met during Decline and Fall who were being dispatched to the same fate.

Only with the outbreak of war, she returned to Europe and now presents in a breathless paragraph the story of her employment at a variety of brothels, being forced into service with a variety of conquering or retreating troops of all nations. The Major opens another bottle of champagne and starts chatting her up. Adam watches the girl start flirtatiously playing with his medals as he drifts into an exhausted sleep.

So, Waugh is pretty obviously saying, all of Western civilisation comes down to this: a shallow adulterer, a philandering old swindler, and a well-worn prostitute, holed up in a ruined car in a vast landscape of waste and destruction.

Aftershocks

Vile Bodies is marketed as a great comic novel and it is, and is often very funny, but as my summary suggests, it left me reeling and taking a while to absorb its psychological shocks. The deaths of Flossie, Simon and Agatha, and Nina’s slow metamorphosis into a thoughtless adulterer, all steadily darken the mood, but nothing whatsoever prepares you for the last chapter, which is surely one of the most apocalyptic scenes in the literary canon.

I had various conflicting responses to it, and still do, but the one I’m going to write down takes a negative view.

Possibly, when I was young and impressionable and first read this book, I took this devastating finale to be an indictment of the hollowness of the entire lifestyle depicted in the previous 200 pages. Subject to teenage moodswings which included the blackest despair, I took this extreme vision of the complete annihilation of western civilisation at face value and thought it was a fitting conclusion to a novel which, from one point of view, is ‘about’ the collapse of traditional values (restraint, dignity, sexual morality).

But I’m older now, and now I think it represents an artistic copout. It is so extreme that it ruins the relative lightness of the previous narrative. All the light touches which preceded it are swamped by this huge sea of mud.

And it’s disappointing in not being very clever. Up to this point any reader must be impressed, even if they don’t sympathise with the posh characters, by the style and wit with which Waugh writes, at the fecundity of his imagination, and the countless little imaginative touches and verbal precision with which he conveys his beautifully brittle scenarios.

And then this. Subtle it is not. It feels like a letdown, it feels like a copout. It’s not a clever way to end a noel which had, hitherto, impressed with its style and cleverness. It feels like a suburban, teenage Goth ending. It’s not much above the junior school essay level of writing ‘and then I woke up and it was all a dream’.

A more mature novel might have ended with the funeral of Agatha Runcible and recorded, in his precise, malicious way, the scattered conversations among the usual characters, momentarily brought down to earth and forced to confront real feelings, before swiftly offering each other and drink and popping the champagne. In this scenario the Major might have turned up as a fleeting character Adam still can’t get to meet, Nina unfaithful thoughts could have been skewered, Margot Metroland’s society dominance reasserted despite heartbreak over her dead daughter, Lord Monomark appointing yet another bright young thing as Mr Chatterbox, the ousted Prime Minister Mr Outrage still utterly confused by what’s going on, and maybe a last word given to sage and restrained Father Rothschild. That’s what I’d have preferred.

Instead Waugh chose to go full Apocalypse Now on the narrative and I think it was a mistake – an artistic error which became more evident as the years passed and the world headed into a second war, which he was to record much more chastely, precisely, and therefore more movingly, in the brilliant Sword of Honour trilogy.

Credit

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh was published in 1930 by Chapman and Hall. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on December 6, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Novel, War

Tagged Absolutely Fabulous, Adam Fenwick-Symes, adultery, Agatha Runcible, alcoholism, Anchorage House, antisemitism, Archie Schwert, Art Deco, Ballard Berkeley, Bertie Wooster, Bright Young People, Captain Angus Stuart-Kerr, Catcher In The Rye, champagne, Cockney, Colonel Blount, comedy, Count Cincinnati, D.H. Lawrence, Daily Excess, Daily Express, Daily Mail, David Lennox, David Plunket Greene, decline and fall, despair, Doubting Hall, Earl of Balcairn, Edmund Wilson, England, Evelyn Waugh, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Father Rothschild, Father Rothschild SJ, Fawlty Towers, First World War, Florence Ducane, Flossie Ducane, futility, germ warfare, gossip column, Great Depression, Great War, High Society, infidelity, Jamaican, Jazz Era, John Betjeman, journalism, Judge Skimp, king of Ruritania, Lady Metroland, Lady Throbbing, London, Lord Circumference, Lord Metroland, Lord Monomark, Lord Pastmaster, Lord Throbbing, Lottie Crump, Made In Chelsea, Major Gowen, Margot Beste-Chetwynde, Mayfair, Miles Malpractice, Misanthropy, Miss Agatha Runcible, motor racing, Mr Chatterbox, Mr Isaacs, Mrs Beste-Chetwynde, Mrs Blackwater, Mrs Imogen Quest, Mrs Melrose Ape, Mrs Rosa Lewis, nervous breakdown, Nigel Dempster, Nina Blount, Noel Coward, Oscar Wilde, Peter Beste-Chetwyne, Philip Larkin, Plunket-Bowse, Politics, Provna, Remote People, Roaring Twenties, Robert Altman, Saki, Samuel Beckett, satire, Shepheards Hotel, Simon Balcairn, Sir James Brown, sociolect, Spectator, suicide, Taki, the Major, The Press, The Wonderfilm Company of Great Britain, the Younger Set, Twelfth Night, Vile Bodies, Viola Chasm, W.H. Auden, Walter Outrage, war, Waugh in Abyssinia

Posted by Simon on December 6, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/12/06/vile-bodies-evelyn-waugh/

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming (1963)

Royale-les-Eaux

The opening chapters are rather downbeat, casting a more sombre mood than we’ve been used to. The narrative skips the adventure recounted in The Spy Who Loves Me altogether and refers back to the events of the previous-but-one novel, Thunderball, ie the attempt by the fiendish Ernst Stavro Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation to blackmail the West with the threat of detonating two stolen atomic bombs.

Bond is fed up because he has spent a year tasked with tracking down Blofeld in so-called ‘Operation Bedlam’, and has got precisely nowhere. In fact the novel opens with Bond cruising through northern France in his beloved Bentley, mentally composing the umpteenth version of a letter resigning from the Secret Service. He is woken from this gloom when a sports car tears past him, driven by a sexy young lady. He follows her into the next village along the road, and then spots her again at the French coastal gambling resort of Royale-les-Eaux (setting of the very first Bond novel, Casino Royale).

Here, in an uncanny repetition of the central gambling scene in that first novel, Bond once again plays baccarat, initially winning, and then gallantly comes to the rescue of the girl when she gambles rashly and loses – paying her debt for her. (A casino employee tells Bond she is La Comtessa Teresa di Vicenzo, p.20). This leads, rather inevitably to chatting her up in the bar – ‘no one calls me Teresa, call me Tracy’ – and then rapidly to her bedroom, where she rather violently asks him to shut up and take her roughly, hard, but afterwards bursts into inconsolable sobbing.

Bond realises she is deeply depressed and her wanton behaviour reflects a deep unhappiness. Having tried, and failed, to comfort her, Bond – in a telling phrase – pads back down to the hotel corridor to his room, ‘feeling, for the first time in his life, totally inadequate’ (p.40).

Flashback All the above is told in a flashback, a technique Fleming has got into the habit of using extensively. The actual text opens with Bond spying on the girl at the end of a day sunbathing at the beach, and then following her out across the sand to the water’s edge where he suspects she is going to drown herself. Instead, two goons come up behind him with guns and an inflatable dinghy comes powering into the shallows, and Bond and the girl are forced into it.

All the events outlined above are Bond’s remembrance flashing back from the ‘now’ which is his kidnap and transport in the dinghy..

So who are the goons? Are they SPECTRE? Was the girl bait in a trap? Is he going to be tortured and executed? The boat speeds round to the harbour, docks and Bond is forced at gunpoint into the presence of a short, powerful man who announces that his name is Marc-Ange Draco and he is the head of the Union Corse, the notorious Corsican mafia (p.46).

No, he isn’t going to be harmed – instead, Marc-Ange surprises him by explaining that the girl Bond has been ‘seeing’, Tracy, is his Marc-Ange’s. Her mother was an English governess who Marc-Ange married and swept off into the mountains of Corsica – but Tracy grew up to be a troubled, wayward young woman, who hid her depression by moving in the European Fast Set, eventually marrying a worthless Italian playboy (hence her title, p.54).

The marriage didn’t prosper but when Tracy fell pregnant Marc-Ange hoped it would improve her humour and she indeed loved the resulting baby. But then the baby died of spinal meningitis (p.54) and Tracy made the first of a series of suicide attempts.

Now, in just a few days of their affair, Marc-Ange has noticed that Tracy’s mood has improved and so he has made checks into Bond’s background. Now, Marc-Ange announces that he will pay Bond £1 million to marry Tracy. Bond is flabbergasted, impressed, taken aback. but he knows himself – he is a rolling stone, he doesn’t want to be tied down. Bond turns down the offer but promises to continue the affair and be gentle with Tracy: it’s the best he can offer. But, thinking about work and his frustrated quest, Bond does ask for one thing: does Marc-Ange’s organisation know the whereabouts of a certain Blofeld? The Corsican makes a phone call and establishes that, yes, this Blofeld is somewhere in Switzerland. Aha.

Although this opening is predominantly about the men in Tracy’s life discussing her situation and fate (and so is easily criticised as sexist) nonetheless, it is another long sequence all about a woman, about her life and psychology, about the care and concern she prompts in those who love her. Not something commonly associated with Bond.

The College of Arms

Two months later Bond is back in London, keeping in touch with Tracy by phone, but being briefed by M. Extraordinarily – improbably – London’s College of Arms has been contacted by a man named Blofeld who has asked them to confirm him in what he claims is his ancestral title of the Comte Balthazar de Bleuville. There is some gentle and enjoyable social comedy as Bond reluctantly visits the College and meets the scholarly and obtuse experts there, the main one (Griffon Or – they all have heraldic noms de guerre) mistakenly thinking he’s visiting about his own heritage, and insists on telling Bond (and the reader) a lot about the Bond family (and title) before Bond manages to communicate that he’s come about Blofeld!

At which point Bond is handed over to a younger, more switched-on scholar – Sable Basilisk (p.75) who he consults about the Secret Service plan. Basilisk confirms the queries from Blofeld and confides that no force is as strong as snobbery; once bitten, people will do almost anything to prove they’ve got noble ancestry. This Blofeld fellow is totally hooked.

Would it be possible for Bond to adopt the identity of a heraldic expert and be sent as the official representative of the College out to Blofeld’s address in Switzerland? Yes, the man replies: they can rig him up with the false identity of one Sir Hilary Bray, and it will only take a few days’ mugging up of heraldry books to know enough about the subject to out-bluff anyone.

Switzerland

Bond briefs M, puts the finishing touches to his fake identity and flies to Switzerland as Sir Hilary, where he is met by representatives of Blofeld and driven to a remote Alpine resort, then by cable car up to a swish, modern skiing complex atop the Alp named Piz Gloria, near Pontresina in the Engadine (p.104).

NB Once again, there has been absolutely no detection involved in the novel. MI6 monitor communications coming in and out of Britain and so simply picked up the name Blofeld in his correspondence with the College of Arms. The baddy is a) known already and b) his whereabouts simply revealed. The narrative isn’t interested in crime thriller/Holmes-style detection – it instead focuses on the suspense of wondering when the (inevitable) big Confrontation / Shootout, which we all know will happen, will actually occur.

Bond is met by a squat venomous matron, Irma Bunt, taken up in the ski lift to the mountain-top complex, shown around and to his room. Along the way he identifies a dozen or so goons who are obviously SMERSH professionals. Bond finds it a strain keeping up the masquerade of being a posh heraldry scholar, especially when he is introduced to the ten stunningly good-looking young women who are sharing the base with him, ‘the girls’. To his surprise, he is told that they are all taking part in pioneering scientific work which the ‘Count’ is conducting, to help each of them overcome terrible allergies.

Over the course of a few days Bond (inevitably) gets chatty, then flirty with the women, and ends up going to bed with Ruby. He discovers she used to have a severe phobia of chickens, which was inconvenient because her family run a massive chicken farm. Sleeping in her bedroom Bond is surprised to hear a hypnotic tape start at midnight which lulls her to sleep and then – lullingly tells her that she loves chickens, she’s never happy unless she’s among chickens, and so on. Bond realises the ‘cure’ is a form of hypnotherapy, which is being applied to all the girls and their strange phobias.

Meanwhile he has the long-awaited interview with ‘Blofeld’ but is disconcerted to find a man significantly at odds with the reports of his appearance (Bond, of course, never met him in person in Thunderball). Where Blofeld was reported as immensely fat (20 stone), this Blofeld is lighter, taller and has no earlobes and also wears green (?) contact lenses (p.132).

So the narrative spends quite a few chapters slowly revealing details of the hypnotherapy, slowly revealing that each of the girls has a different phobia or allergy, each of them based on a different agricultural product (chicken, potatoes, beef cows and so on). Bond spends quiet days pretending to work studiously in his (bugged) room, poring over his books of genealogy, in the evenings enjoying the hearty meals and company of the giggling girls, having several interviews with Blofeld posing as Sir Hilary Bray, all the time trying to decide if this really is the Blofeld and what the devil he’s up to.

Two disconcerting incidents disturb the quiet flow of these days. Early on he is in his room when he hears a blood-curdling scream. Later, in the dining room, the girls are all gossiping that one of the ‘helps’ (a ‘Yugo’ named Bertil) tried to molest one of the girls; and Frau Bunt confirms the self-same man has had a terrible ‘accident’, slipping and falling down the mile-long iced bobsleigh run (unable to stop and travelling at speeds of over 60 mph, he will have been scoured and flayed to death by the ribbon-sharp ice walls.)

Secondly, Bond is at a particularly dicey moment in one of his interviews with Blofeld – a moment when Blofeld is apparently on the verge of bribing Sir Hilary – when two of the goons burst into the office and throw a blood-strewn figure down in front of him. To Bond’s horror, he realises it is the number 2 of Zurich Section, a man he knows is called Campbell (p.178).

The goons say he was caught snooping around the complex and Bond’s heart stops when the dazed, beaten-up Campbell recognises him and calls him by name – ‘James, help me, tell them I work from Universal Exports’ etc. Blofeld tells the goons to drag Campbell off to the Pressure Room where he will no doubt be tortured and then turns his green contact lenses on Bond. Bond bluffs confidently, ‘never saw the chap before in my life’ etc, but he knows it’s only a question of time till Blofeld’s men break Campbell who will blow Bond’s cover definitively.

Blofeld abruptly ends the interview and from that moment Bond is tensely planning his escape. He sidles into the ski locker room noting which pair would fit him (p.191), secretes a pair of goggles, steals the biggest pair of the girls’ gloves and so on. While poking around he opens a door into what appears to be a laboratory, illuminated by a dim red light, with sinister white-coated men moving about in it.

After a tense dinner with the girls who have obviously been told not to fraternise with him, Bond withdraws to his room, goes about his usual ablutions, and then pretends to fall asleep for the benefit of any hidden cameras or microphones.

Escape from the mountain

He gives it half an hour then gets up, dresses in his warmest gear, takes goggles, gloves, boots along to the ski room where he knocks out a guard (p.197). The phone rings (as in the corniest movie), Bond answers it in German and is told by the Head Goon that they are coming to arrest den Engländer in ten minutes. Ten minutes head start! Bond feverishly straps on boots, skis, grabs some sticks, exits the door onto the snow, locks it and throws away the key, then heads off as fast as he can down the piste.

There follows the only ski chase in the novels, although it was to become a common motif in the movies. Because it focuses on Bond’s consciousness as he tries to figure out the best way down the mountain, as he becomes aware that the ski lift is chasing him, as he cringes as bright flares are shot into the sky above him to make him an easy target – we don’t get descriptions of the pursuing forces, unlike the movies which dwell on pursuers as well as pursued. Bond has to guess what is going on behind him.

The chase ends as Bond deliberately skis out into a black run deep in new-fallen snow and deliberately triggers an avalanche. He then skis full tilt ahead of it, through a gap in a break of trees, through the narrow passage and then skis round into the protection of the woods. He and we are not absolutely sure but it seems like the pursuing skiers were swept away. As he continues downhill he gets to a road where he flies over and skewers with his ski stick a baddy who was shooting at him next to a car; Blofeld has obviously phoned his men in the valley.

In the same sequence he has seen a train steaming along the railway parallel to the road and realises he’s going to just about squeeze in front of it. The train has a snow clearing fan-rotivator fixed at the front to chew up fallen snow and spurt it out of the way. Bond whistles past it by a hair’s breadth but hears a terrible scream and then is pelted with red snow and clumps of hair and flesh from the goon pursuing him who was not so lucky (p.211).

Tracy to the rescue

Exhausted, dripping with sweat, body aching from the physical endurance test he’s just undergone (‘a grey-faced, lunging automaton’, p.212), Bond staggers on into the village at the foot of the mountain to discover it’s in the middle of a fiesta, with people everywhere drinking, wearing funny costumes, partying, congregating round a funfair and ice rink area.

Bond staggers up to the rink, not looking much the worse for wear than many other revellers, buys a ticket to the rink, gets a festival mask to wear and is staggeringly joining in some conga dancing, when up to him skates the fresh-faced, happy figure of Tracy, his beloved!

He knew she was in Italy but even so, this is a breath-taking coincidence. She immediately takes command of him, helping him towards her nifty Lancia sports car, both of them realising a crew of goons are watching out for him from a black Mercedes. As they hustle the last yards to her car, they realise the baddies have spotted them and are jumping into their car to give chase.

Cue a car chase along slippery, zig-zagging Alpine roads with the baddy car slowly accelerating and firing shots at them whenever there’s a straight line of fire, until Tracy and Bond hurtle round a corner to see a big Warning notice directing people away from a bridge which is being repaired. Bond jumps out and reverses the direction of the signs, so that the Sedan, hurtling round the corner seconds later, takes the wrong turn and goes flying over a cliff wheeeeee smashing and rebounding and crashing to the rocks below. Bond rejoins Tracy in her car and passes out before she’s even got going again.

A proposal of marriage

A few hours later they are in grey Zurich airport at dawn. Bond firms up his tickets for a flight back to London, then goes goes to sit with Tracy. She has tended his wounds and now is concerned at his wrecked state, at his health, his future. Suddenly Bond realises this is what he wants more than anything else in the world: the love of a good woman. And as he lets himself feel his love for Tracy flood through him, it dawns on him that he also needs to love. To his own surprise he asks her to marry him, and she accepts (p.231). Suddenly they are gleeful as children, and set about making plans to be married at the British Embassy in Munich. He has to fly back to London to sort out business; she will drive to Munich, sort out hotels and practicalities.

The conspiracy unmasked

Cut to later that day in London, where Bond has submitted his report to M who has called in some experts from the Ministry of Agriculture, the smartly dressed, beady-eyed Mr Franklin (p.248, it is Christmas Day but no-one is observing the niceties).

In between sleeping with her, Bond had extracted from Ruby a list of the names of the other girls who were receiving the hypnotherapy at Blofeld’s base, and got Ruby to indicate roughly where in the UK they lived (p.186).

The Agriculture expert examines the list, then points out that each of the girls lives in the main production region for the product they claimed to have a phobia of – ie one each to the country’s main areas of potato, chicken, beef production, and so on.

Now it just so happens (very conveniently for the plot) that one of the girls had already left Blofeld’s headquarters and returned to the turkey-producing region of East Anglia a few weeks earlier, and within weeks there had been the most severe outbreak of turkey blight in Britain’s history.

So the team in M’s office hypothesise that the girls are not only being hypnotised to overcome their phobias, but are being issued with germ warfare sprays or aerosols which they are being told to release at trade fairs and sales rooms ‘to boost and improve the nation’s stock’. Except the sprays infect the livestock or crops with virulent diseases: Blofeld’s fiendish plan is to decimate Britain’s agricultural sector and bring the nation to its knees.

Bond is ordered to travel back to Switzerland and foil this dastardly plot. He phones Tracy to tell her he has a bit of business to look after, but will join her in Munich in a few days time.

In Marseilles with Marc-Ange

First stop on the mission to capture Blofeld is Marseilles, the base of Tracy’s father, Marc-Ange Draco. Bond has an entertaining taxi ride from one of Marc-Ange’s tough Marseillais, along with some interesting travelogue description of France’s toughest city, and arrives at Marc-Ange’s base in a dockside warehouse to ask him a favour.

Marc-Ange is thrilled to bits that Bond is actually going to marry his daughter, as he wanted all along. So Bond takes advantage to ask him for a wedding present: will he and his organisation help him organise a raid on Blofeld’s mountain-top retreat? Marc-Ange willingly says yes and the men get down to careful planning, along with several of Marc-Ange’s lieutenants.

Shootout on a hilltop

Marc-Ange is given an interesting speech about how irritating the political situation is in France (1962-63) with the country tearing itself apart over whether to give its African colony, Algeria, independence. The conflict has led to the emergence of a far-right military organisation, the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS), devoted to keeping the colony French, whose most notorious action was an attempt to assassinate the French president, Charles de Gaulle, in August 1962. (This historical incident forms the opening scene of Frederick Forsyth’s superb thriller, The Day of The Jackal.) Marc-Ange complains to Bond that the criminal activities of the OSS – and the counter-measures of the special French security agency set up to combat them – have made for peace-loving criminals like himself and his Union Corse much harder (p.285).

Marc-Ange Draco is a humorous, winning character, one of Fleming’s best.

Turns out a renegade OAS General Salan has a helicopter at his remote chateau near Strasbourg and owes Marc-Ange a few favours. So he, his top men and Bond drive there, clamber into the helicopter (recently repainted with innocuous civilian markings) and fly south to Blofeld’s alpine headquarters.

Blofeld’s HQ issues various radio warnings but the chopper lands anyway and Marc-Ange’s men emerge to a stand-off with Blofeld’s tough goons. Two things happen: Bond notices a figure making a break from the back of the building and running towards the ski and bobsleigh shed – must be Blofeld – so Bond himself breaks into a sprint towards him. This sudden movement, plus some of the goons recognising Bond, prompts them to draw their weapons, Marc-Ange’s men to do ditto, and a massive firefight breaks out.

Bond sees Blofeld pull out a ‘skeleton’ one-man bobsleigh and throw himself into the run. He dashes into the shed, ransacking equipment out of the way till he finds another single bobsleigh, also throws it into the run, and there follows a typically detailed and hair-raising description of Bond hurtling down the run at terrifying speed, vainly trying to slow himself with the tips of his boots, finding himself thrown against the icy walls on curves which instantly rip off his protecting coat and flay the skin of his elbows. Still he is gaining on Blofeld and risks a few experimental shots from his pistol when he notices Blofeld throw a small object into the run. With horror he realises it’s a hand grenade, tries and fails to slow the sleigh, then the grenade explodes and throws him and sleigh out of the groove and into the adjacent snow.

Slowly he comes round, realises he has a cut head and a few other bruises but is basically OK. Back onto the badly mangled sleigh he climbs, which limps, grinding its bent runners on the ice, down the run to the bottom. As he descends Bond hears explosions from the mountain top and, as he finally arrives at the ski lift station at the bottom of the mountain, looks up to see Blofeld’s HQ on fire, and then Marc-Ange’s helicopter flying over him and away to safety. Mission accomplished.

Fire engines and police start to arrive and Bond pretends to be an innocent bystander who’s been injured by the broken cable of the chairlift whiplashing across him. The engine gives him a lift to the nearest station and he catches a train north into Germany.

Marriage in Munich

There are numerous pages of the kind of comfy domestic scene which Fleming does unexpectedly well. There are, for example, humorous scenes with Bond pretending to be exasperated at the amount of fuss Tracy is making about getting married; and then a comedy cruise with a Munich taxi driver to choose a wedding and engagement ring, during which spy and taxi driver become good friends (the latter admitting he was a Luftwaffe pilot in the war, and proud of it!) before they repair to a bar for Bond’s last drinking session of singledom.

The wedding itself is described with similar good humour, the British consul enthusiastically throwing confetti at the newly-wed couple which completely misses and goes all over the stocky, swarthy mafia father-in-law, Marc-Ange Draco.

They jump into Tracy’s Lancia, festooned with ribbons and balloons and motor off down Germany’s excellent Autobahns towards the village they’ve selected for their honeymoon. A few pages describing the scenery and their pleasant motoring lull the reader into a false sense of security – but when Bond waves past the flashy, red Maserati that’s been following them from a distance, when there is a sudden hail of bullets, the windscreen explodes and the car goes careering off the road into trees, crashing and Bond just has time to realise the Maserati contained Blofeld and Bunt – before he blacks out.

When he comes to, Bond sees Tracy dead, slumped forward against the steering wheel, the blood beginning to spread down her shoulders, shot by the occupants of the Maserati. A German motorcycle cop appears by the car, looking appalled at the scene of bloodshed. ‘What happened?’ he asks. It’s alright Bond replies, cuddling his murdered wife in his arms. ‘We have all the time in the world.’

I read these lines on a south-bound train on the Victoria line and confess they brought a tear to my eye. The contrast between the ten or 15 pages of whimsy and humour leading up to the wedding are smashed so brutally, and so quickly. And the poignancy of the ending, and Bond’s final stoic despairing phrase… The pacing and control which produce the emotional punch show what a very good writer Fleming was.

Biological warfare

It is interesting that this is a new enough idea for the scene in M’s office on Christmas Day to feature a detailed explanation by the man from the Ministry of Agriculture – explaining the nature and impact of Biological Warfare (chapter 22).

Marriage / all the time in the world

Bond intended to marry Vesper Lynd in the very first book of the series, until she revealed herself as a Russian double agent and killed herself. The thought has occurred to him with respect to several other girls, but this is the only time he goes through with it.

In the last few books I’d begun to notice that the phrase ‘all the time in the world’ seems to crop up at least once, like a slender thread or leitmotif. Now, here at the end of OHMSS, it is used no fewer than three times – the first two times reflecting humorous confidence:

‘Drinks,’ said Bond firmly. ‘We’ve got all the time in the world to talk about love.’ (p.314)

‘No,’ said Bond. ‘Let him go. We’ve got all the time in the world.’ (p.324)

– which makes its repetition as the book’s final, bleak, tear-filled line all the more affecting.

‘It’s all right,’ he said in a clear voice as if explaining something to a child. ‘It’s quite all right. She’s having a rest. We’ll be going on soon. There’s no hurry. You see – ‘ Bond’s head sank against hers and he whispered into her hair – ‘you see, we’ve got all the time in the world.’ (p.325)

Male bonding

No sign of Felix Leiter for once. Instead Bond has a ‘bromance’ with Tracy’s father, Marc-Ange. Just like Darko Kerim in From Russia With Love, Bond warms to the older man’s vitality, the spirit of life which is in him – his capableness, his confidence, his honesty and frankness, his dry sense of humour, his vibrant animal spirits.

[Bond] had developed much love, and total respect, for this man. He couldn’t say why. It was partly animal magnetism and partly that Marc-Ange had opened his heart to Bond, so completely trusted him with his own innermost secrets. (p.279)

Bond lost his father when he was young (as did Fleming). The sense of attraction to an older, mature and confident man after his own heart, the depth of the bond Bond makes with these men, convinces because it taps into something deep in Fleming’s own psyche, and inspires writing which conveys real feeling.

Bond biographical details

We learn that Bond’s mother was Swiss, his father Scottish, from the Highlands, near Glencoe (p.71). Loelia Ponsonby, Bond’s secretary for all the preceding books, has finally moved on, marrying a boring conventional man who works at the Baltic Exchange. She’s been replaced by ex-WREN Mary Goodnight, ‘a honey’ with the vital statistics 37-22-35. A £5 sweepstake has been organised by the male members of the office on who will bed her first with Bond equal favourite with 006, an ex-Royal Marine (p.68). (We’d heard of a 008 and 011 as long ago as the first book; this is the first mention of 006.)

He is driving his favourite car, not the DB III of Goldfinger, but a Continental Bentley, ‘the R type chassis with the big 6 engine and a 13:40 back-axle ratio’ (p.12).

Bond dislikes, in fact ‘abhors’, shoelaces (p.21). He has a new piece of equipment, a Syncraphone, an early version of the bleeper, which works within a ten-mile radius of the office (p.67).

At the Royal College of Heralds Bond is told he may be very remotely descended from a Baronet in the 17th century and remotely connected to the founder of Bond Street. The old family motto was ‘The world is not enough’ which, of course, was used as the title of the 19th Bond movie, starring Pierce Brosnan.

Credit

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming was published in April 1963 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 2002 Penguin paperback edition.

Other thrillers from 1963

The Golden Keel by Desmond Bagley
Horse Under Water by Len Deighton
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré
The Most Dangerous Game by Gavin Lyall
Ice Station Zebra by Alistair MacLean
1963 saw the first appearance of the sexy woman special agent, Modesty Blaise, as a comic strip in the London Evening Standard.

The Bond novels

1953 Casino Royale Bond takes on Russian spy Le Chiffre at baccarat then is gutted to find the beautiful assistant sent by London to help him and who he falls in love with – Vesper Lynd – is herself a Russian double agent.
1954 Live and Let Die Bond is dispatched to find and defeat Mr Big, legendary king of America’s black underworld, who uses Voodoo beliefs to terrify his subordinates, and who is smuggling 17th century pirate treasure from an island off Jamaica to Florida and then on to New York, in fact to finance Soviet spying, for Mr Big is a SMERSH agent. Along the way Bond meets, falls in love with, and saves, the beautiful clairvoyant, Solitaire.
1955 Moonraker An innocent invitation to join M at his club and see whether the famous Sir Hugo Drax really is cheating at cards leads Bond to discover that Drax is in fact a fanatical Nazi determined on taking revenge for the Fatherland by targeting an atom-bomb-tipped missile – the Moonraker – at London.
1956 Diamonds Are Forever Bond’s mission is to trace the route of a diamond smuggling ‘pipeline’, which starts in Africa, comes to London and then to follow it on to New York, and further to the mob-controlled gambling town of Las Vegas, where he wipes out the gang, all the while falling in love with the delectable Tiffany Case.
1957 From Russia, with Love Bond is lured to Istanbul by the promise of a beautiful Russian agent who says she’ll defect and bring along one of the Soviets’ precious Spektor coding machines, but only for Bond in person. The whole thing is an improbable trap concocted by head of SMERSH’S execution department, Rosa Klebb, to not only kill Bond but humiliate him and the Service in a sex-and-murder scandal.
1958 Dr. No Bond is dispatched to Jamaica (again) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the station head, which leads him to meet up with the fisherman Quarrel (again), do a week’s rigorous training (again) and set off for a mysterious island (Crab Key this time) where he meets the ravishing Honeychile Rider and the villainous Chinaman, Dr No, who sends him through a gruelling tunnel of pain which Bond barely survives, before killing No and triumphantly rescuing the girl.
1959 Goldfinger M tasks Bond with finding out more about Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. Bond confirms the Goldfinger is smuggling large amounts of gold out of the UK in his vintage Rolls Royce, to his factory in Switzerland, but then stumbles on a much larger conspiracy to steal the gold from the US Reserve at Fort Knox. Which, of course, Bond foils.
1960 For Your Eyes Only (short stories) Four stories which started life as treatments for a projected US TV series of Bond adventures and so feature exotic settings (Paris, Vermont, the Seychelles, Venice), ogre-ish villains, shootouts and assassinations and scantily-clad women – but the standout story is Quantum of Solace, a conscious homage to the older storytelling style of Somerset Maugham, in which there are none of the above, and which shows what Fleming could do if he gave himself the chance.
1961 Thunderball Introducing Ernst Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation who have dreamed up a scheme to hijack an RAF plane carrying two atomic bombs, scuttle it in the Caribbean, then blackmail Western governments into coughing up $100,000,000 or get blown up. The full force of every Western security service is thrown into the hunt, but M has a hunch the missing plane headed south towards the Bahamas, so it’s there that he sends his best man, Bond, to hook up with his old pal Felix Leiter, and they are soon on the trail of SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo and his beautiful mistress, Domino.
1962 The Spy Who Loved Me An extraordinary experiment: an account of a Bond adventure told from the point of view of the Bond girl in it, Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel, which opens with a long sequence devoted entirely to her childhood in Canada and young womanhood in London, before armed hoodlums burst into the motel where she’s working on her own, and then she is rescued by her knight in shining armour, Mr B himself.
1963 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Back to third-person narrative, and Bond poses as a heraldry expert to penetrate Blofeld’s headquarters on a remote Alpine mountain top, where the swine is carrying out a fiendish plan to use germ warfare to decimate Britain’s agriculture sector. Bond smashes Blofeld’s set-up with the help of the head of the Corsican mafia, Marc-Ange Draco, whose wayward daughter, Tracy, he has fallen in love with, and in fact goes on to marry – making her the one great love of his life – before she is cruelly shot dead by Blofeld, who along with the vile Irma Bunt had managed to escape the destruction of his base.
1964 You Only Live Twice Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits. Tiger agrees on condition that Bond undertakes a freelance job for him, and eliminates a troublesome ‘Dr Shatterhand’ who has created a gruesome ‘Garden of Death’ at a remote spot on the Japanese coast. When Bond realises that ‘Shatterhand’ is none other than Blofeld, murderer of his wife, he accepts the mission with gusto.
1965 The Man With The Golden Gun Brainwashed by the KGB, Bond returns from Japan to make an attempt on M’s life. When it fails he is subjected to intense shock therapy at ‘The Park’ before returning fit for duty and being dispatched to the Caribbean to ‘eliminate’ a professional assassin, Scaramanga, who has killed half a dozen of our agents as well as being at the centre of a network of criminal and political subversion. The novel is set in Bond and Fleming’s old stomping ground, Jamaica, where he is helped by his old buddy, Felix Leiter, and his old secretary, Mary Goodnight, and the story hurtles to the old conclusion – Bond is bettered and bruised within inches of his life – but defeats the baddie and ends the book with a merry quip on his lips.
1966 Octopussy Three short stories in which Bond uses the auction of a valuable Fabergé egg to reveal the identity of the Russians’ spy master in London; shoots a Russian sniper before she can kill one of our agents escaping from East Berlin; and confronts a former Security Service officer who has been eaten up with guilt for a wartime murder of what turns out to be Bond’s pre-war ski instructor. This last short story, Octopussy, may be his best.

The Satan Bug by Alistair MacLean (1962)

In the pale wash of light from the lamp I still held in one hand, we all stared at each other, one half of our senses and minds outgoing and screwed up to the highest pitch of intensity and perception to detect the first signs of death in another, the other half turned inwards to detect the first signs in themselves.

‘Ian Stuart’

Although MacLean was phenomenally successful in terms of book sales he was irked by the critics who lined up to denigrate his prose style, the clunkier bits of plot, the melodrama etc. One criticism was that readers were just buying books with his bestselling name on them so, as an experiment, MacLean wrote two novels under the pen name Ian Stuart (his brother was called Ian), namely The Dark Crusader and this one. They didn’t sell as well as his named ones. Not sure if it was a conclusive experiment either way… In fact, this one is a bit different from the others: it takes a lot longer for the by-your-throat, panic-stricken tension to kick in, but without documentary evidence (letter, biography) it’s impossible to say whether that was a deliberate part of the test or just the way this story was always going to go…

Maimed hero

Pierre Cavell is the maimed hero, left leg crushed by a tank at Caen, exploding gas canister scarring his face, permanently damaging his left eye. As such attracted the beautiful Mary who looks after waifs and strays and she marries him. After the War has various jobs in security, getting kicked out of all of them for insubordination. This all establishes his credentials as a tough, non-nonsense he-man. The novel opens with him in the pokey office of his unsuccessful private detective agency, been open three weeks and had precisely no clients. Hard not to hear Raymond Chandler and the eternally down-on-his-luck Philip Marlowe in this scene. But his visitors that morning quickly establish the plot: the top secret germ warfare research institute at Mordon in Wiltshire has been broken into, scientists murdered, something stolen. Just so happens Cavell was head of security there till a few weeks before so is Number One Suspect until he clears himself, whereupon he becomes Number One Help to his visitors from Special Branch.

Married

Unlike the other novels, the hero doesn’t fall in love with the only nubile women in the cast in the course of the book; he’s already married. His references to his wife and the scenes where she helps him question various employees of the laboratory, in their homes with their doting family members around them, are calm and domestic and wildly at odds with the actual plot, which is that a madman has stolen a doomsday virus, an infectious virus so powerful it could wipe out all life on earth.

Cosy

This contrast, the discrepancy between the extremity of the science fiction plot and the cups of tea with Dr Hartnell’s nice old mother, reminds me of John Wyndham’s sci-fi novels in which decent English middle class people have to cope with the end of the world. Brian Aldiss famously described them as Wyndham’s ‘cosy catastrophes’ and that term could be applied to the first half of this novel. Reinforced when we learn his wife, the fragrant Mary, is also the only daughter of his Boss, Head of Intelligence, The General.

The volta

About a third of the way into the book, there is the twist or revelation scene common to most MacLean novels, where Cavell goes to meet the head of MI6 and it is revealed that he wasn’t booted out of Mordon for insubordination but all that was part of an elaborate plan or ruse, along with planting other agents at the Institute, because the security forces had been tipped off that something fishy was going on there for a while. From this point onwards there are a succession of exposes revealing that it is not the Communist conspiracy all the characters had thought it; not the threats of an end-of-the-world madman, and so on.

A robbery, not a plight

Unusually for MacLean, you are not plunged into a panic-stricken situation early on. The first half of the novel is essentially about a burglary – someone got into Mordon, killed two staff and stole the virus – and the sedateness with which Cavell investigates this along with Special Branch and then reports it to his Boss in London is more like an Agatha Christie novel than an echt MacLean: not at all like Eight Bells opening with a gun pointing at the hero, or Night which opens in the howling Arctic storm, or Fear which almost immediately becomes a high-speed car chase. In fact, the Christie-style comparison holds for a surprisingly long time because the first three-quarters of the book consist of Cavell trying to figure out which of the eight or so possible suspects is his man. There’s a brief interlude where he’s kidnapped and imprisoned in the cellar of an abandoned house but, as soon as he’s released and makes it back to the police, the text goes back to being an elimination game, with Christie-style red herrings eg was the scientist with massive debts being blackmailed into stealing the viruses? or is the one with the suspiciously luxurious house and lifestyle being paid by the Communists to steal secrets? etc. I think this is the flaw in the book which makes it significantly less successful than all the others I’ve read: the theme, the impact of germ warfare, and the existence of a virus which could kill all life on earth, is not matched by the treatment, ie several bumbling policeman interviewing people in their nice Wiltshire village, and a standard MacLean solo hero getting beaten unconscious, broken ribs, mangled hands, smashed-up face – who works it all out and saves the day in an, admittedly gripping, twenty-page finale in a blacked-out, evacuated central London. It just isn’t believable that, with the entire resources of NATO at their disposal, the British and other governments let everything depend on one beaten-up maverick. And at the end there is a final twist and revelation which, instead of upping the ante, lowers the tone, and makes the entire plot seem rather banal. For once, the movie version is better – it can’t convey the swift, pressurised calculations and gambles of the hero, the core of all these MacLean texts – but it does capture the real terror, the nerve-tingling horror of the notion of germ warfare and it does – significantly- drop the novel’s final, ill-advised plot twist.

Repetition

Several articles inform me that MacLean’s later novels became repetitive in character name, plot, even down to individual sentences. I rather like the idea that he gave up thinking up new names for the love interest and just called them all Mary. I think that would contribute positively to the sense of the formulaicness of the texts; after all everyone likes Homer repeating his epic epithets. Anyway, I spotted it happening here:

I fell heavily through the doorway on to the concrete passageway outside. If there was anyone waiting out there with the hopeful intention of clobbering me, he’d never have a better chance. No one clobbered me because there was no one waiting there to clobber me. (The Satan Bug Chapter 8)

I prised open the hatch cover. Nobody shot me. Nobody shot me because there was nobody there to shoot me. (The Dark Crusader Chapter 2)

These are the two novels he published under the Ian Stuart pseudonym and both in 1962. Good bet he was writing them simultaneously, and explains why phrases from one drifted into the other.

The beaten and battered hero

This is in the first half of the book. Cavell gets more of a beating later, as all MacLean heroes do, part of the formula and part of the masochistic pleasure men take in their fantasies.

It took ten minutes to saw through the PVC binding my wrists. I could have done it in far less time but as, with my hands tied behind my back, I couldn’t see what I was doing, I had to go easy: I could have sawn through an artery or a tendon just as easily as through a wire and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. My hands were as lifeless as that. They looked pretty lifeless too, when I’d severed the last PVC strand and brought them round to the front for examination, swollen to a size half as much again as normal with smooth, bluish-purple distended skin and the blood swelling slowly from the torn skin on the inside of both wrists and most of my fingers. I hoped that the dark flaking rust on the blade of the hacksaw wasn’t going to give me blood poisoning…

I pulled up my shirt to have a look at the right-hand side of my chest and just as quickly and roughly stuffed the shirt back under the waistband of my trousers. A prolonged inspection would only have made me feel twice as ill as I was already: in the few clear patches in the thick crust of blood that covered almost all of the side of my body the grotesquely swelling bruises were already turning all the kaleidoscopic colours of the rainbow…

It took me over an hour to cover the two miles to Netley… and finally I reached the main road where I sank down, half-kneeling, half-lying in a ditch behind the screen of some bushes. I felt like a water-logged doll coming apart at the seams. I was so exhausted that even my chest didn’t seem to be hurting any more. I was bone-chilled as a mortuary slab and shaking like a marionette in the hands of a frenzied puppeteer, I was growing old. (Ch 8)

The death penalty

Many things date these books, which are over 50 years old now. The entire Cold War/nuclear standoff background is now dead and gone, ancient history to my kids. Another aspect which is mentioned in many of them is judicial execution by hanging, reminding me that the death penalty for murder was suspended in 1965 and abolished in 1969. But in MacLean’s early novels it is still a very real risk that all the baddies take and a threat which can be used against them.

If this madman wipes out part of the country the nation will demand revenge. They’ll demand a scapegoat and public pressure will be so terrific that they’ll get their scapegoat. Surely you’re not so stupid as not to see that? Surely you’re not so stupid that you can’t visualise your wife Jane with the hangman’s knot under her chin as the executioner opens the trap-door. The fall, the jolt, the snapping of the vertebrae, the momentary reflex kicking of the feet – can you see your wife, Hartnell? Can you see what you are going to do to her? She is young to die. And death by hanging is a terrible death – and it’s still the prescribed penalty for a guilty accessory to murder for gain. (Ch 9)

Old cars

Because the psychological impact of the text – especially in the gripping final thirty-page chase and fight in an empty London railway station – is so intense, it feels modern. But it isn’t. Something that’s really brought home when you look at the cars mentioned in the book:

And in the Wiltshire town of Alfringham, home of the fictional germ warfare research institute, there is just one set of traffic lights and it is hand operated by a white-caped traffic policeman. In fact this story belongs – technologically, culturally, psychologically – to another world.

The first 22 Alistair MacLean novels

Third person narrator

1955 HMS Ulysses – war story about a doomed Arctic convoy.
1957 The Guns of Navarone – war story about commandos who blow up superguns on a Greek island.
1957 South by Java Head – a motley crew of soldiers, sailors, nurses and civilians endure a series of terrible ordeals in their bid to escape the pursuing Japanese forces.
1959 The Last Frontier – secret agent Michael Reynolds rescues a British scientist from communists in Hungary.

First person narrator – the classic novels

1959 Night Without End – Arctic scientist Mason saves plane crash survivors from baddies who have stolen a secret missile guidance system.
1961 Fear is the Key – government agent John Talbot defeats a gang seeking treasure in a crashed plane off Florida.
1961 The Dark Crusader – counter-espionage agent John Bentall defeats a gang who plan to hold the world to ransom with a new intercontinental missile.
1962 The Golden Rendezvous – first officer John Carter defeats a gang who hijack his ship with a nuclear weapon.
1962 The Satan Bug – agent Pierre Cavell defeats an attempt to blackmail the government using a new supervirus.
1963 Ice Station Zebra – MI6 agent Dr John Carpenter defeats spies who have secured Russian satellite photos of US missile bases, destroyed the Arctic research base of the title and nearly sink the nuclear sub sent to rescue them.

Third phase

1966 When Eight Bells Toll – British Treasury secret agent Philip Calvert defeats a gang who have been hijacking ships carrying bullion off the Scottish coast.
1967 Where Eagles Dare
1968 Force 10 From Navarone The three heroes from Guns of Navarone parachute into Yugoslavia to blow up a dam and destroy two German armoured divisions.
1969 Puppet on a Chain – Interpol agent Paul Sherman battles a grotesquely sadistic heroin-smuggling gang in Amsterdam.
1970 Caravan to Vaccarès – British agent Neil Bowman foils a gang of gypsies who are smuggling Russian nuclear scientists via the south of France to China.
1971 Bear Island – Doctor Marlowe deals with a spate of murders aboard a ship full of movie stars and crew heading into the Arctic Circle.

Bad

1973 The Way to Dusty Death – World number one racing driver Johnny Harlow acts drunk and disgraced in order to foil a gang of heroin smugglers and kidnappers.
1974 Breakheart Pass – The Wild West, 1873. Government agent John Deakin poses as a wanted criminal in order to foil a gang smuggling guns to Injuns in the Rockies and planning to steal government gold in return.
1975 Circus – The CIA ask trapeze genius Bruno Wildermann to travel to an unnamed East European country, along with his circus, and use his skills to break into a secret weapons laboratory.
1976 The Golden Gate – FBI agent Paul Revson is with the President’s convoy when it is hijacked on the Golden Gate bridge by a sophisticated gang of crooks who demand an outrageous ransom. Only he – and the doughty doctor he recruits and the pretty woman journalist -can save the President!
1977 – Seawitch – Oil executives hire an unhinged oil engineer, Cronkite, to wreak havoc on the oil rig of their rival, Lord Worth, who is saved by his beautiful daughter’s boyfriend, an ex-cop and superhero.
1977 – Goodbye California – Deranged muslim fanatic, Morro, kidnaps nuclear physicists and technicians in order to build atomic bombs which he detonates a) in the desert b) off coastal California, in order to demand a huge ransom. Luckily, he has also irritated maverick California cop, Ryder – by kidnapping his wife – so Ryder tracks him down, disarms his gang and kills him.

Books & Boots

All posts tagged germ warfare

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (1930)

Crossing the Channel

Phone dialogue

Gossip columns and the press

Bright Young People

Sociolect

Cockney

Alcohol

Politics

Moments of darkness

Flossie’s death

Simon Balcairn’s suicide

Comedy is adults behaving like children

Mr Chatterbox

Father Rothschild as moral centre

A touch of Auden

Other scenes

The movie

The motor race and Agatha

Agatha’s end

Nina’s infidelities

The completely unexpected ending

The cinema show

The last world war

Aftershocks

Credit

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Evelyn Waugh reviews

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On Her Majesty’s Secret Service by Ian Fleming (1963)

Royale-les-Eaux

The College of Arms

Switzerland

Escape from the mountain

Tracy to the rescue

A proposal of marriage

The conspiracy unmasked

In Marseilles with Marc-Ange

Shootout on a hilltop

Marriage in Munich

Biological warfare

Marriage / all the time in the world

Male bonding

Bond biographical details

Credit

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Other thrillers from 1963

The Bond novels

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The Satan Bug by Alistair MacLean (1962)

‘Ian Stuart’

Maimed hero

Married

Cosy

The volta

A robbery, not a plight

Repetition

The beaten and battered hero

The death penalty

Old cars

Related links

The first 22 Alistair MacLean novels

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