All posts tagged Len Deighton

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton (1969)

The human body is one of the dirtiest things in the known universe (p.116)

Michael Crichton

I’ve no idea what Crichton was like as a man but I admire his phenomenal success as a writer of popular techno-thrillers. If you’re going to entertain, then you might as well do it as effectively as possible. Ever since I learned about it years ago, I’ve been impressed by what will probably be a unique feat that no-one will ever match, namely that in 1994 Crichton was, simultaneously, the writer of America’s number one movie, Jurassic Park, was the creator and producer of America’s number one TV show, ER, and had a book at number one in the bestseller list, Disclosure.

What an amazing achievement and indicator of the practical skills of a man who was not only an author and scriptwriter, but who produced and directed movies himself, as well as creating and exec producing hit TV series.

The Andromeda Strain

Right back at the start of his career, young Michael (born 1942), was 26 when he published this, the first novel to appear under his own name (a few had appeared under pseudonyms). It announces a major talent, not so much in the plot – space probe returns to earth carrying a deadly virus is the same as, say, The Quatermass Experiment – but in the thoroughness and the verisimilitude of the scientific and administrative framework he presents the story in.

The story begins by describing the arrival of a two-man recovery team (Lieutenant Shawn and Private Lewis Crane) to retrieve a space probe which has crash landed on the small town of Piedmont in Arizona (population 48). They’re in the middle of doing so when their radio message back to base is dramatically cut short. Alerts are transmitted up the chain of command until five scientists who have been kept on standby for just such an emergency are each visited at home in the middle of the night by dark-suited security officials, asked to accompany them immediately in unmarked cars to military airports and flown to the top secret biohazard unit in the Nevada desert which has been painstakingly constructed for just such an emergency, under the codename Project Wildfire.

The scientists are:

Dr. Jeremy Stone: Professor and chair of the bacteriology department at Stanford University, fictitiously the winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Dr. Charles Burton, 54 (p.61) Professor of Pathology at the Baylor College of Medicine, ‘nervous, jumpy, petulant’, nicknamed the Stumbler (p.54)
Dr. Peter Leavitt ‘superb clinical bacteriologist’ (p.59) who suffers from epilepsy, ‘an irritating, grumbling, heavyset man’ (p.54)
Dr. Mark Hall, surgeon
Professor Christian Kirke, who never makes an appearance because he’s in hospital for appendicitis

The plot then follows the scientists’ race against time to identify the weird extra-terrestrial virus and try to find a cure. The breakneck plot builds up to a climax when there’s a breach in biosecurity at the Wildfire centre with the result so that the virus gets loose among our heroes, and there’s a race against time to prevent its spread… with a novel twist at the very end.

So much for the thrilling plot, but what really distinguishes the text, and makes Crichton’s debut stand out, is the enormous amount of scientific, technical and administrative content.

Organisations

For example, the book is packed with dense and authoritative-sounding explanations of the umpteen different branches of the US military, space agency and security services which were involved in the research, commissioning, financing and building of the biohazard centre, including:

Vandenberg Scoop Mission Control
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration
the Wildfire facility is built by the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics
the Army Medical Corps, Chemical and Biological Warfare Division
the Senate Preparedness Subcommittee
the Goddard Spaceflight Centre
the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee

Official documentation

Lots of pages of the text consist of ‘copies’ or apparent photostats of official documents, procedures, maps, computer projections and so on, for example a photocopy of the original letter written by concerned scientists to the President of the United States suggesting the creation of a quarantined biohazard centre. It was here, right back at the start of the project, that the scientists included the controversial suggestion of having a small thermonuclear device onsite, which could be detonated if the infection gets out of control (under Directive 7-12, codename Cautery).

In fact soon after Stone and Burton have investigated the town (wearing tip-top latest biohazard suits) and discover an old man still alive and a screaming baby and retrieve them into a helicopter and take them back to the Wildfire centre, Piedmont is itself destroyed by a small nuclear weapon (p.114).

Scientific references

Then, complementing the detailed descriptions of security organisations there is the science itself. It includes references to:

a fictional study by J.J. Merrick an English biophysicist on the likelihood of extra-terrestrial life and the probability of it being single-cell life
a study by the Hudson Institute on the likely outcome of various scenarios around an alien infection outbreak and the impact of detonating a nuclear weapon to obliterate it (p.87)
a two-page study complete with statistical analysis, of the Odd Man Out Hypothesis
a study by Rudolph Karp who established there are life forms on meteors and asteroids (p.130)
the Vector Three report which identified three possible sources for extra-terrestrial bacteria
the Messenger Theory of John R. Samuels i.e. that an intelligent civilisation on another planet might choose to communicate not by sending radio or TV signals but sending out tough microforms of life which can recombine if they ever arrive somewhere inhabitable (p.228)
a 274-page report on Project Wildfire, highlights of which Dr Hall has to read; through to detailed descriptions of American military research into chemical and biological weaponry, with lists of the major research universities involved and some of the papers produced on the subject:

Few Americans, Stone knew, were aware of the magnitude of the US research into chemical and biological warfare.

History of the science into the 1960s

Crichton spends time giving us some background on the development of science up till the 1960s: in particular how before, during and after the war, most expensive research focused on physics, in particular nuclear physics. But how, with the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, biology had exploded as a field of interest.

He gives us digressions on the nature of biology itself – ‘the only science which cannot define its subject matter’ because there is no agreed definition of LIFE. On the types of animals used in bio experiments – rats, monkeys, pigs – (p.146) or the large range of growth media used in laboratories (p.163). And an explanation for laymen of the symbiotic relationship between humans and the billions of bacteria we host, which leads on to a detailed explanation of the drawbacks which would occur if a wonderdrug were discovered which killed off all bacteria and viruses. In fact Crichton goes to the trouble of inventing a wonderdrug, Kalocin, for the purpose of the book which does just that – kills off all bacteria, viruses, fungi etc which inhabit the human body with the result that… all the human patients died (p.266). We need the bacteria which infest our bodies.

Man lives in a sea of bacteria (p.167)

Hard technology

And then there is the technology, which includes (obviously) the rocket technology used to launch the ill-fated space probe; NASA’s network of monitoring stations around the earth; and the technology used within the Wildfire biohazard installation, including state of the art sterilisation processes, spectrometers, amino-acid analysers, the microtome, the X-ray crystallographer, the electron microscope (a BVJ model JJ-42), Fourier electron-density scans and so on. He gives an explanation of why an electron microscope is better than a light one, as explained by one of its inventors (p.255).

Computers

Then there are computer diagnostics and computers in general. Crichton patiently explains to the 1969 reader that computers are capable of doing many tasks much faster than people! I’m always struck to be reminded just how long computers have been around and enthusiasts have been promising that they will change the world.

Commission of enquiry

All of this heavily factual material is organised as if in a report written up after the crisis was over and as the result of an inquiry into how it was handled. Thus the narrative itself contains mention of where the team made crucial mistakes.

It is a peculiarity of the Wildfire team that, despite the individual brilliance of the team members, the group grossly misjudged their information at several points. (p.243)
This was a most unfortunate decision, for had they examined the [growth] media, they would have seen that their thinking had already gone astray, and that they were on the wrong track. (p.250)

Scientific results

And the text includes numerous scientific illustrations, for example computer readouts of autopsies, chemical analyses of blood, a scanner printout from a ‘photoelectric eye’ that examined the growth media, an early sketch of the hexagonal structure of the Andromeda Strain, electron-density mapping of a sample of the strain – all carefully credited to Project Wildfire, as in a scientific paper.

The text is followed by four pages of finely printed references, mixing up genuine studies of extra-terrestrial life and biology with papers by the fictional characters in the novel.

Bureaucratic tone set in the preface

This approach, the pose that the entire text is an after-the-fact report, starts in the author’s preface, usually a place where the author is candid with the reader, but in this case Crichton presents himself as an investigator into the events surrounding the breakout, and gives copious thanks to numerous military officials who are entirely fictitious and are clearly part of the fictional cast, as if they were real figures.

The effect is partly to give the text verisimilitude but also allows him to do the standard thriller strategy of anticipating mistakes and accidents and disasters to come without going into detail and so making you impatient to read the full story itself.

Same happens when he describes the experiments the scientists carry out in the Wildfire lab and highlights their mistakes with phrases like ‘Only later would it become clear that…’ or ‘That was his first mistake…’, ‘It would be forty eight hours until he realised his error…’ (p.173)

Taken together, it’s all these tactics which give the novel its authoritative air and which, in turn makes the biological crisis all the more scary, and then the security breach at the centre all the more nailbiting.

Plot summary

By the end you realise that without all the images and diagrams and facts and figures in report format, and without the digressions about biology and computers, the book would have been significantly shorter, and the simpleness of the story much more apparent. Here is a barebones plot summary:

a space probe infected with alien life form crash lands near small town in Arizona, Piedmont
almost everyone in town dies almost immediately with weird symptoms, namely their blood congeals to powder
except two survivors, an old man and a screaming baby
they’re brought to a brand new hi-tech biohazard facility named after the project Wildfire where – after a thorough history of the thinking behind the centre, how it was researched, signed off, designed and built – the four scientists central to the story run a series of tests whose results are discussed at length, and engage in high-level speculations about the origin and form of the entity
there are several apparently unrelated incidents, mainly the crash of an air force jet which was flying high through airspace over Piedmont; crash investigators confirm the pilot’s last message which claimed that all the plane’s rubber hosing and casing was turning to powder
meanwhile the scientists have established that the Andromeda Strain, as it’s been named, consists of perfectly hexagonal crystals which replicate with amazing speed, and feed off pure energy, leaving no waste products
one of the scientists, the doctor, finally puts all the pieces of the jigsaw together and realises that the baby and the old man didn’t die because their blood PHs were abnormal, the old man because he was a diabetic, the baby because its continual crying acidated its blood – the Andromeda Strain only replicates within a narrow PH band
at just this moment the alarm goes off inside the bio centre indicating a seal has been broken sealing off the containment area, triggering the alarm and the countdown
countdown? yes, because throughout the novel we’ve been told that the Wildfire station has at its heart a thermonuclear device which will automatically detonate if there is a security leak – now the alarm bells go off, the red lights start flashing, all the big metal security doors slam shut and a nice lady’s voice starts counting down; they have three minutes before the bomb detonates!!
the thing is, it’s only been in the last hour or so that the scientists have realised that the strain feeds off pure light or energy – in other words, a nuclear explosion, far from wiping the virus out, will cause it to replicate a trillion-fold and spread all over America!!!
now, there is a failsafe, the nuclear countdown can be halted: the biohazard centre is dotted with light switch-sized sockets into which a metal key must be inserted to countermand the nuclear countdown, BUT the security doors clanging shut have sealed Dr Stone and Dr Hall off from any of these units – oops
which leads to the most famous passage in the book, and the movie based on it, when Dr Hall has to make his way through air ducts into the central circular core of the installation and climb up it to the next level, despite the fact that, given the security breach a) the central core is flooding with poison gas and b) remote control darts fire poisoned arrows at anything moving i.e. him
these last few pages are grippingly described as Hall tries to climb the ladder up inside the central shaft, despite becoming woozier and woozier, poisoned by the gas and hit by the poisoned darts, till he crashes through the door into the level above and staggers, almost unconscious to the nearest security point, inserts the key and turns it, then blacks out!!

Payoff

The virus mutates into a harmless form. Wind carries air from the now-leaking bio-hazard lab over Los Angeles but nothing at all happens. Lead scientist Stone speculates that a) it has mutated to a non-fatal form, as indicated by the way it had started eating rubber and plastic instead of human blood, and b) disliking oxygen rich environments (which earlier tests had established), it is likely to migrate upwards out of the atmosphere.

And that is the explanation for the brief two-page epilogue in which we learn that a recent manned space flight (Andros V) crash-lands killing all the crew. In an interview with journalists, the head of the program reveals the crash had something do with the failure of plastic safety shields. The journalists don’t know it, but we the readers know that this is proof that the Andromeda Strain has indeed gravitated away from the unfriendly oxygen-rich atmosphere of earth up to the troposphere – and the book ends with the threat that it might, possibly, remain there for ever, preventing the passage through it of any machines which contain rubber or plastic…

The IPCRESS connection

It’s fascinating to learn from Wikipedia that Crichton was heavily indebted to Len Deighton’s debut novel T he IPCRESS File which was published in 1962 and which Crichton read on a visit to Britain.

The Deighton novel is also written in the style of an official report and recreates the often dull bureaucratic paperwork surrounding spying; the title itself indicates that the entire thing should be read as an official report.

Same with Andromeda which, on the pre-text pages, carries instructions as for an official file, which state: ‘THIS FILE IS CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET‘ and that the ‘receiver’ of the file must first show his identity card to the courier.

All great boyish fun. I wonder if Crichton ever told Deighton about his indebtedness to him. I wonder what Deighton made of it.

Crystals

It’s interesting that the Andromeda Strain of virus turns out to be a perfect crystal and that one of the scientists is known for printing papers speculating that life on earth began as crystals (p.226). Because this is a genuine theory and is well expressed in the 1985 book, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life by A.G. Cairns-Smith (1985), which I read and reviewed not too long ago.

Review of Seven Clues to the Origin of Life by A.G. Cairns-Smith (1985)

The movie

In 1971 The Andromeda Strain was made into a movie directed by Robert Wise and starring Arthur Hill as Stone, James Olson as Hall, Kate Reid as Leavitt (changed to a female character, Ruth Leavitt), and David Wayne as Dutton (Burton in the novel). A lot of its appeal is due to the fact it was low budget and not dominated by well-known Hollywood names, lending it an extra soupcon of credibility. I saw it as a kid and loved it.

Credit

The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton was published Knopf in American in 1969. All references are to the 1993 Arrow paperback edition.

Absolute Friends by John le Carré (2004)

‘Everyone in Berlin knows Sasha.’ (p.58)

For three quarters of its length this is the best, the most compelling, gripping and psychologically rewarding le Carré novel for years: for excitement and plausibility I would recommend this one over all its predecessors as far back as A Perfect Spy. It is a return to the full-blown world of Cold War spying, but now continued on into the more uncertain, violent and scary post-9/11 world and also, for the first time in his fiction, gives a real sense of age and frailty and remorse.

Then bizarrely, right at the end, the narrative turns into a rant against George Bush, Tony Blair and the US invasion of Iraq, our heroes get assassinated by the wicked, imperialist Americans and the whole thing is covered up in a finale that’s reminiscent of 1970s conspiracy thrillers, only without the wit or style.

Absolute Friends

Absolute Friends feels like yet another channeling of le Carré’s own life story. Like the author, the main protagonist Ted Mundy is brought up by a braggart father – this version is a British Army Major who stays on into post-Independence Pakistan, all bristling patriotism and military lingo, his mother having died in childbirth. When his father is cashiered from the Army in the 1950s, young Ted returns with him to grey, rainy England and, like the young JLC, is packed off to a succession of boarding schools which he hates, before – exactly like JLC – discovering a liking for German language and literature and so going abroad to study, in this fictional instance, to Berlin (le Carré went to study in Basel in Switzerland).

As with A Perfect Spy, the closer le Carré is to his own life, the more grounded the text and the language feel. Granted the entire childhood in Pakistan, the food and Muslim prayers and Urdu words for things, are not directly autobiographical but the product of research – nonetheless, the character’s feelings of being puzzled, isolated, seeking escape from a childhood world which is both smothering and the only support he knows, are powerfully conveyed and give the novel more psychological conviction than its four or five predecessors.

The plot

At Oxford Ted had taken a lover (le Carré heroes are never short of women, they luxuriate in an atmosphere of sustained sensuality – the ease with which Jonathan Roper or Oliver Single or Andrew Osnard or Ted Mundy attract and bed posh totty is one of the defining characteristics of these books).

Strident young Ilse introduces him to sex and radical politics, packing him off to Berlin with a letter of introduction to the city’s top student radical, Sasha (we never learn his last name).

‘Everyone in Berlin knows Sasha.’ (p.58)

Here we come to one of le Carré’s most irritating mannerisms – the way so many of his protagonists are in awe of super-famous, notorious, legendary figures. Thus everyone in Berlin knows Sasah, just as everyone in Panama knew Harry Pendel, everyone in the City knew ‘Tiger’ Single, and so on and so on.

Sasha is a small, intense, broken-looking chap but, again, like all le Carré leading men, the smirking ‘conqueror’ of numberless women – as well as being the much-admired brains behind radical student politics in the seething Berlin of 1969.

It’s rather a relief that, for the first time in five or six novels, the books features scenes which don’t involve chaps from Eton and Winchester pointing out to each other how legendary and/or what total rotters each other are, in that insufferably self-congratulatory public school way.

Indeed, the scenes set among the free love and ‘smash the system’ radical students of late 1960s Berlin felt powerful and persuasive – helped no end by being set among foreigners who don’t end each sentence ‘old boy’, and therefore sound like normal people, not the self-regarding ‘legends’ of Eton or Harrow or Shrewsbury who populate his other post-1990s novels.

Ted enjoys free sex with, inevitably, the most beautiful and aloof of the many beautiful young women in the squat. All women in le Carré novels are young and beautiful and carefree, personally I find this thread rather creepy.

They go sticking up posters calling for the workers to overthrow the system etc, and then there’s a big demonstration in which 6-foot-tall Ted a) rescues Sasha from a beating by the police b) is himself arrested, soundly beaten, handed over to the British Consulate and deported.

Time passes during which Ted does not resume his degree at Oxford but tries various life experiments and the narrative gives a good sense of the confidence and open horizons so many people experienced in the early 1970s.

Ted teaches at schools (inevitably he has affair with one of the other master’s wives), lives for a while in the stoned writer’s colony in Taos, USA (obviously has an affair with a painter’s wife), tries his hand as a radio reporter and newspaper journalist, before drifting back to London and getting a homely little job at the British Council.

He also lowers his sexual sights from artists and free spirits and falls in love with a practical young woman, Kate, teacher in a local state school (that is, not a fee-paying boarding school – crikey, there are a few around, apparently) who also happens to be an activist in the local Labour Party.

In his new British Council role Ted is tasked with accompanying a youth theatre group across north Europe and then around the Eastern bloc countries. This meandering account all leads up to the seismic moment when Ted is hailed by Sasha backstage in an Eastern European capital. Yes, Sasha, Sasha from the old days in the Berlin commune!

Quickly Sasha makes a rendezvous with Ted at which he tells the incredulous Englishman what’s happened to him in the decade since the glory years in Berlin. Briefly, he was lured by radical colleagues to cross the Wall into the East where he was at first interrogated and grilled in the notorious ‘White Hotel’ interrogation centre, and then, finally, rehabilitated, on condition that he became a lowly employee of the State Security Police, the Stasi.

Now, by the time of this backstage meeting with Ted, Sasha has become completely disillusioned with life in the East, whose authorities he dismisses as ‘red fascists’. He has begun copying incriminating documents and building up an archive of the State’s criminality against the long-awaited day, far in the future, when the communist regime will collapse. And then he was amazed to see his old friend Ted’s name on the manifest of a travelling theatre group. And hence this meeting…

Sasha tells Ted he wants to spy for the West. He has access to files and documents and information all of which he will give to the West, for nothing, just out of anger and hatred of the regime. Ted doesn’t know what to think, and has the latest of many out-of-body experiences he has throughout the novel whenever he finds himself out of his depth. However, Sasha stipulates that he will only hand these goodies over to Ted, in person, no-one else. To manage this, Sasha explains, to cement their bond, Ted must offer himself as a spy to his Stasi masters. This will provide the perfect excuse for their meetings.

Ted becomes a spy

Sasha even explains to Ted who to get in touch with when he gets back to the West, a drawling, upper-class Intelligence officer in West Berlin, Nicholas Amory, who becomes his case officer. Ted now undergoes training in a) how to collect Sasha’s information b) how to present himself as a candidate for recruitment by the Stasi, not being too earnest, playing hard to get, then ultimately giving in and agreeing to become a double agent.

This central part of the novel is familiar territory for le Carré, but fascinating nonetheless. His classic spy novels from the 1960s and 70s emphasised the human cost of the trade and this is no different. Ted has married Kate and they have a young son, Jake, but all of them find it wearing to cope with Ted’s more and more frequent trips to Eastern Europe, ostensibly attending conferences promoting British Culture, but in every instance a) pretending to the Stasi that he has vital espionage material to feed Sasha b) in fact collecting and transporting back Sasha’s top secret information to his British handlers.

The narrative makes a deal out of the multiple versions of himself Ted has to navigate: Mundy One, his ‘true self’, Mundy Two the British spy, Mundy Three the pretend Stasi spy. Throw in playing the roles of good father and dutiful husband, and you have a very confused public schoolboy, who wishes he could just go and play cricket. I found the narrative’s portrayal of this slightly hallucinatory sense of managing multiple selves very convincing.

Amidst all the spying Ted is introduced by Amory to a tall, shaggy, comfortable American, who interviews him in depth over a number of days, and who he grows to like, one Orville J. Rourke (‘call me Jay’), whose dear old mother, like Ted’s, is of Irish descent.

Then, one day, Jay disappears, without a goodbye or anything. Amory explains to Ted that he has just been vetted by ‘the cousins’ (i.e. the CIA) and passed clean. Good for him.

Over the years Ted and Kate drift apart. She finds herself promoted within the Labour Party and put forward as the PLP candidate for her home town of Doncaster, which requires her to move up there, along with Jake. Because of his work Ted remains in London, and is often abroad anyway. The inevitable happens and, some years later, they have a summit meeting where Kate announces she’s leaving him, for a shadowy man in the background, Philip, something to do with the shiny New Labour Project.

(Le Carré, who gives every sign of loathing Tony Blair, is heavily sarcastic about Kate and her steady rise in the New Labour hierarchy).

What rings most true from these sequences is Ted’s heartfelt sorrow at missing out on his son’s childhood, sadly meeting up with the teenage Jake and realising he is a stranger to him.

Then one day they all find themselves watching on TV the Berlin Wall being hammered to the ground, while the East German police look on in bemusement. Ted has a moment of concern for his friend Sasha, liable to be lynched by the mob in the anti-Stasi reprisals; and then panic for himself, as he realises his own Stasi file, proclaiming him a communist spy, might be published. But it doesn’t happen…

The present

All le Carré’s post-Cold War novels start in media res, i.e. in the middle of the complete sequence of events they describe. After establishing the situation in ‘the present’, they then go back to explain the often long and convoluted backstories which led up to this moment. Thus Absolute Friends opens soon after the Allied invasion of Iraq (March to May 2003) to find Ted adrift in Europe again and explains everything I’ve just summarised in a flashback.

Having lost his family in England around the same time the Cold War ended and his career as a spy came to an abrupt end, Ted has returned to Germany and set up a school for teaching English to corporate executives.

So as ‘the present’ of the novel opens, this school has shut down, bankrupted by the (possibly) criminal activities of Ted’s business partner Egon, and Ted has drifted down to Munich, where he has fluked a job as an English-speaking tour guide to one of the castles of mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, giving chummy, unfunny lectures to bemused tourists.

He has also fallen in love with a poor Muslim immigrant, Zara, who approached him one night in a bar offering to prostitute herself. The decent public schoolboy and soldier’s son in him turns this down and insists on buying her a nutritious dinner. She explains that she is the victim of an arranged marriage made back in Pakistan to a man who turned out to be a crook and wife beater, and who smashed out her front teeth among other assaults, before being arrested and sent to prison. Now she prostitutes herself to support her proud little son, Mustafa.

Ever one for a lost cause (and leaking a fair bit of sentimentality), Ted becomes Zara’s protector, paying for proper food, buying the suspicious Mustafa toys, behaving honourably for he is, like so many le Carré characters, at heart a jolly decent chap, an honourable schoolboy.

And now we realise the reason why le Carré had his protagonist born and raised in Pakistan. It makes him sympathetic to Muslim culture, it makes him ready to be taken along by Zara and Mustafa to their impoverished mosque in the backstreets of Munich, it contributes to his anger at the short-sighted stupidity of the Allies for invading Iraq on a trumped-up pretext.

But despite the naked contrivance of all this, the actual descriptions of Ted’s childhood in dusty Pakistan, of playing with the native children and the sweet memories which elude him in later life, are genuinely moving.

Above all, it is a relief not to be among the braying diplomats and their bitchy wives who have dominated JLC’s past few novels. It feels a little bit like actual modern life, in its poverty and anxiety and multi-cultural confusion. And it feels like an achievement for le Carré to have reached beyond the bubble of his age and class and grasped that.

The counter-university

And so all this brings us to the final act. Out of the blue Ted gets a letter from his old comrade in arms, Sasha, who makes his third great interference in Ted’s life. This time, when they meet, Sasha introduces him to a mad new scheme: there is a secretive billionaire who is so incensed at the West’s invasion of Iraq, and by the stranglehold the new, more virulent military-industrial complex is exerting over all aspects of Western media, culture and education, that he has a magic plan at hand – he wants to set up a Counter-University, which will provide a safe space for voices speaking out against the Complex, where alternative discourses and theories can flourish.

Sasha drives Ted out to an aircraft-hanger sized barn in the countryside outside Munich, where they transfer to a 4-by-4 driven by a stern female operative, and then up hill and through a maze of forests and valleys to a remote mansion.

It is like a James Bond lair, immaculate and clean in every detail, and Sasha leaves Ted to be processed by several sets of slick young receptionists and security guards before being admitted to the vast room of Mr Big, who turns out to be a tracksuited, twinkly old man of 70, who gives his name as Dimitri and delivers a long monologue about the evils of the US military-industrial complex. He outlines his plans to set up the Counter-University and even produces a reading list of the kinds of books they should be teaching, a list which could come straight from the pages of the Guardian:

Naomi Klein
Arundhati Roy
George Monbiot
Mark Curtis
John Pilger
Noam Chomsky
Joseph Stiglitz
Susan George

I’ve read articles or books by all of these authors and even attended lectures by some of them (Klein, Stiglitz). I am broadly sympathetic to their views, but I found le Carré’s decision to promote their views via the mouth of a wizened, old James Bond-style villain, bizarre.

‘I am speaking of something even more important to the development of western society than the ballot box. I am speaking of the deliberate corruption of young minds at their most formative stage. Of the lies that are forced on them from the cradle onwards by corporate or State manipulation, if there’s a difference any more between the two which I begin to doubt. I am speaking of the encroachment of corporate power on every university campus in the first, second and third worlds. I am speaking of educational colonisation by means of corporate investment at faculty level, conditional upon the observation of untrue nostrums that are advantageous to the corporate investor, and deleterious for the poor fuck of a student.’ (p.276)

In the fiction, Ted is driven back to his flat where he agrees the whole deal with Sasha. However, Ted is not that naive and the next night hops into a car and drives back out to the aircraft hanger, only to find it full of farm equipment, and then continues up to the James Bond mansion in the forest, only to find it stripped and bare. Spooky!

Stumbling back through the woods he is aggressively captured by a large force of armed and trigger-happy Austrian security police, stripped, hooded, bundled into a jeep and interrogated before it all comes to a halt with the reappearance of Jay, the CIA man from years before.

Jay reveals to Ted that they have their eyes on Dimitri and have traced his money back to Riyadh. The Saudis. Muslims, Ted. Has it crossed Ted’s mind that Dimitri might not be a peace-loving philanthropist but part of the new web of anti-Western terrorists spreading around the world?

Ted is cleaned up and dropped home where he is paid another visit by his old MI6 minder Nick Amory. For the first time since Ted’s known him, Nick is himself at a loss and puzzled. He reveals MI6’s uncertainty about Dimitri’s background and motives: is it to found a grand new liberal university in the venerable university city of Heidelberg? Or is that the facade for some evil ‘spectacular’ like blowing the city up?

And Nick tells Ted that Jay is no longer with ‘the Company’ i.e. the CIA: he’s been a freelancer, advising big US corporations for four years or more. So whose interests does he have at heart? Ted is right to feel confused, and the reader along with him. Thirty pages from the end Ted loads Zara and Mustafa onto a plane back to Turkey, to attend her sister’s wedding, glad to have them out of the way of whatever happens next.

The big shoot-out

What happens next is Ted drives to the big, empty school building where he’s made an appointment to meet Sasha. Sasha is late. After a few drinks, Ted takes a jemmy and opens the crates of books which have started arriving as preparation for the big new university and are piled up in the big main hall.

Sure enough, he finds lots of books on philosophy etc, but then… some on how to make home-made bombs, tips on arson, and then some crates full of hand grenades and guns. Oh. OK. In a very cinematic moment he sits back in the armchair in the big unlit atrium of the schoolhouse staring at the pile of cracked-open crates in utter silence, wondering what the hell he’s got himself into.

Then he hears the moan of a motor car, a screech of brakes and all hell breaks loose – the doors and windows are smashed in by black-clad US Special Forces firing machine guns in all directions and letting off small explosions. Ted runs to the stairs and stumbles up them despite being hit in the leg and shoulder. He makes it up to the attic where he swings open the skylight, looking down into the road in time to see Sasha being shot to pieces outside. At which point half a dozen SWAT troops burst into the attic followed by a balaclava-ed, tall, shaggy guy with a smooth Boston accent – God, it’s Jay! – who takes careful aim with a sniper’s rifle and shoots Ted through the head.

The cover-up

Exactly as in The Constant Gardener a) the hero is killed by the forces of evil b) le Carré embarks on an elaborate explanation of how a completely fictional cover story is manufactured by the State and media c) one good man speaks out in a bid to tell the truth but is stifled.

So official sources give out that US forces only just managed to prevent a major terrorist atrocity right in the heart of Germany. Huge stockpiles of ammunition and guides to terrorism were seized and two of the hardened terrorists shot dead but not before an intense firefight. Ted’s life is completely rewritten to make him look like an embittered loser who has turned to Islamic radicalism (even marrying one of them, godammit!) while Sasha is characterised as a former Stasi spy and failed radical. So much for the cover-up.

We go on to learn that Dimitri was a conman and actor hired to deceive both Sasha and Ted, who has taken a big payoff and retired to the States. We learn that Zara was arrested on arrival in Ankara and is being tortured until she corroborates the official story. We learn that a high-ranking British official published a ‘true’ account of Mundy’s life on an anonymous website (this would be Nick Amory), an account which was comprehensively rubbished by the powers-that-be and gullible journalists who, in le Carré’s view, are always easily impressed by the glamorous world of ‘intelligence’.

And the motive behind this elaborate and murderous scam? Germany had refused to join the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ which invaded Iraq. This entire incident and the deaths of Sasha and Ted were engineered to terrify German public opinion, helped along by paid articles from America-friendly journalists, designed to bring pressure to bear on the German Chancellor to fall into line with US foreign policy, with the American military-industrial hyperpower which, in le Carré’s view, has gone mad, and is undermining the whole world.

A spot of biography

Le Carré’s father, on the evidence of his own interviews and the recent biography of him, was a world class con-man, who gathered round him gangs of collaborators and conspirators who all agreed with the Chief and supported his mad schemes. Within this small world, tightly knit together by its secrets and conspiracies, to the growing boy John all the adult characters around him seemed larger than life figures, with superhuman qualities.

This sense of a small, claustrophobic world in which everyone is a legend to everyone else is one of the hallmarks of le Carré’s fiction. A Perfect Spy is a great novel because it has the force of a barely fictionalised recap of le Carré’s odd childhood. The same sense of a magic circle of large-than-life characters is strongly felt in Single & Single where the legendary ‘Tiger’ Single lords it over his gang, and also in The Night Manager where ‘the worst man in the world’, Richard Roper, lords it over another close-knit bunch of cronies.

The narrator of le Carré’s fictions is always an interloper into these secret worlds, an outsider, attracted and repulsed by their phony charisma, who ends up overturning them. Thus Tiger’s son, Oliver, betrays his father, and Roper’s protégé Jonathan Pine, betrays his slick arms dealer chief.

As part of his odd childhood, young le Carré was packed off to a series of boarding schools where he encountered another self-enclosed, self-regarding world full of ‘legendary’ masters and ‘fabled’ young stars of the cricket pitch or concert hall or whatever.

From which he progressed to Oxford University, also notorious for promoting its members, either undergraduate or faculty, to mythical status.

And then, after a spell of teaching at Eton (another institution not shy of turning its masters and pupils into legends) on to the Intelligence Service, another inward-looking organisation, also not slow to lionise its leading lights, such as good old Kim Philby, solid chap.

This background of a whole series of cliqueish little worlds full of people telling each other how terrific they are, I think, explains the often smothering cliqueyness of much of le Carré’s fiction, which consistently concerns itself with small groups of figures who all regard each other as legends and stars.

The Constant Gardener is ostensibly about criminality in the worldwide pharmaceutical industry and takes the hero (the Old Etonian Justin Quayle) from Africa to Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and back in his quest for the truth. But in his mind he never leaves – and the narrative never really shakes free from – the small number of People Like Us in the Nairobi High Commission where we first meet him, their secrets and lies, all conveyed in dialogue dripping with the privileged slang and superior attitude of their gilded circle.

Use of the word ‘our’ in the fiction of John le Carré

Thus, in these later novels, all too many of the characters are ‘legendary’ and ‘fabled’, larger-than-life super-characters who simply everyone knows, darling. This verbal habit is like a chummy arm round the shoulder of the reader pushing you to buy into these cliquey circles, an over-familiar embrace which le Carré’s many fans eagerly welcome or don’t notice, but which this reader, for one, coldly resists.

It also explains why le Carré has a funny relationship with the word ‘our’. ‘Our’ is a ‘possessive determiner’ (according to linguistics) which, when used factually, simply conveys that something belongs to two or more people, one of whom is me. Our car, our house, our country.

But in le Carré’s hands it is used in a number of ways to compel the reader into the myth-making world of his ‘legendary’ characters, to pressure the reader into seeing things his, and their, way, to acquiescing in their overblown heroic status and the generally bombastic mind-set which surrounds them.

Thus JLC characters are regularly over-sold as ‘our’ hero this, ‘our very own’, ‘our dear old’ so and so. I noticed it prominently throughout this text:

… our own dear Neville Chamberlain… our beloved British monarchy… Ted Mundy, our Hyde Park Corner orator… our poor King Ludwig… our recently appointed misanthrope…

It is part of the general tone of smothering, over-familiar, hugger-muggerness, the sense that you are being jostled and coerced into a gang of upper-class twits who you would normally cross the road to avoid, which can make reading his novels feel more like an endurance test than a pleasure.

He uses the word ‘our’ to do a number of things:

1. To be vastly patronising – ‘… the photograph of our dear old queen…’ (p.148) conveys a sense that ordinary people like the Queen but you and I, dear boy, ha ha, we are so much more sophisticated and worldly wise, eh.

2. Appropriating historical or eminent figures to our cause or discourse, while simultaneously looking down on them – ‘our poor King Ludwig..’ (p.18)

3. To pour scorn and derision on political leaders – ‘Bush and Blair, our two great war leaders…’

4. To show how superior one is to history by mocking it – ‘When our Dear Führer came to power..’ (p.75) ‘… our dear Führer’s old Olympic stadium..’ (p.147) ‘our gallant British forces liberating the imperilled Suez Canal..’ (p.255)

5. To conceal anger beneath mockery – ‘As a young woman she [Sasha’s mother] was of course repeatedly raped by our victorious Russian liberators’ (p.78) Referring to the Stasi interrogation centre in East Germany as ‘… our White Hotel in East Prussia..’ (p.189)

6. To puff up his characters in that mock heroic, facetiously superior upper class drawl – ‘our very own hero of the hour’; one of the teenage actors is described as ‘Lexham, our Jamaican Macbeth…’ (p.136)

7. Loftily mocking the act of communication – ‘… for the benefit of our British and American readers…’ (p.86)

8. Normal, standard use of ‘our’, striking for its rarity – ‘Our targets for tonight are…’ (p.84) ‘our fellow activists..’ (p.90)

9. ‘Our’ as a dialect usage of working class people – Kate’s working class, northern father always refers to her as ‘our Kate’ (p.204)

10. Most of all for a self-mocking exaggeration of his own characters, as if the whole novel is a witty in-joke among public school People Like Us:

Ulrike our moral angel, our leading leftist, high priestess of the Alternative Life… (p.83)
Sasha our charismatic orator, our coming man for the leader’s throne, our Quasimodo of the social genesis of knowledge… (p.90)
Sasha our charismatic Socrates.. (p.119)
Sasha the great double agent (p.264)

This kind of pompous, overblown, superior, knowing mockery stands in for analysis throughout the book. What underlies all its forms is the breezily arrogant superiority of the true public school article, the upper-class disdain for the ordinary view, for normal phrasing, for anything which isn’t detached and ironised.

Cartoon characterisation

Something similar is going on with the tendency not just to name a character, but repeatedly to blow him up to mock-heroic proportions. We see and hear a lot of Ted’s thoughts and actions, but the narrator also overblows and mocks him in a series of comic, third-person cartoons as if he was a cardboard cutout of a human being:

First thing in the morning the chaste English boarding-school boy and as yet unbruised recruit to the cause of world liberation springs forth from his field bed… (p.71)
The good soldier is not fazed… The aspiring novelist likes to spread his notebook… (p.72)
‘Ted Mundy, life’s eternal apprentice…’ (p.100)
‘The former head prefect and cricketing hero signs up with a rural preparatory school…’ (p.106)

Why describe a character’s emotions when you can big him up with bombastic, if self-mocking, grandiosity? This mockery owes more to P.G. Wodehouse than the thriller tradition.

Endless comparisons to boarding school

So many English public school-educated writers seem never to escape their childhood, with the result that almost everything around them reminds them of their dear old alma mater:

Teddy tends to announce himself ‘in his best head prefect voice.’ (p.63)
Life in Berlin begins ‘for the chaste English boarding-school boy.’ (p.71)
Those students who don’t leave the squat in summer are ‘like uncollected children in a boarding school.’ (p.73)
When Ted meets his MI6 controller, his first thought is ‘whether Amory is one of the prefects who beat him in the washroom.’ (p.97)
As he starts his career as a spy, Ted is so scared ‘it’s like opening the bowling for the public schools at Lords every time…’ (p.225)
‘To Mundy they look more like cricket umpires than removal men.’ (p.331)
When he puts her on the plane to Turkey, Zara clings so tight to Mundy, that ‘he imagines she is his daughter and he is sending her off to boarding school against her will.’ (p.345)

Is that really the most powerful comparison the text can think up for a terrified woman clinging to her only security in the world? This continual drawing of the wider world back into the bubble of upper-class English public school experiences, slang and attitudes, has a reductive effect on the imagination. Although the narrative travels widely across Europe and tells you it is taking in the world-spanning implications of the American military-industrial complex, it is fighting a losing battle against the narrowing impact of the le Carré’s relentlessly public school and cricket mindset.

The big issue

Belatedly, I realised that most of JLC’s post-Cold War novels gravitate around a Big Geopolitical ‘Issue’. (It reminds me a little of Charles Dickens’s early plan to write a novel about each of the vices, starting with Hypocrisy in Martin Chuzzlewit and then Pride in Dombey and Son, before he quietly dropped his plan.) Thus each of the novels deals with a Big Topic:

The Night Manager – the international arms trade
Our Game – not clear
The Tailor of Panama – US intervention in Latin America
Single & Single – City institutions laundering money for the wicked (Georgian drug suppliers)
The Constant Gardener – multinational pharmaceuticals resorting to conspiracy and murder to protect their profits
Absolute Friends – untamed aggression of global hyperpower (America) run riot

The big issue which this long fiction leads up to is the alleged stranglehold on Western culture, education and media exercised by a new, all-pervading and toxic American military-industrial complex.

‘If you tell a big lie long enough everyone will believe it,’ le Carré has Sasha yell at Ted – ‘and then anybody who speaks out against it can be labelled mad.’

Dimitri has a long speech about the evil of Bush and Blair, the wickedness of their war, the stifling of free speech. Ted nods his acquiescence.

Does it matter that a thriller contains or ends on some kind of political message? Not necessarily, no.

Len Deighton’s Bernard Samson novels contain references throughout to the wickedness of the East German state, without denting the novels’ plausibility because the thought is integrated into the narrative.

Similarly, Robert Harris’ terrifying bestseller Fatherland contains harrowing indictments of the Nazi régime, but the indictment is wholly integrated into the plot, and the seamlessness of that integration is a large part of the reason it is so satisfying as a novel.

Martin Cruz Smith’s novels manage to be very exciting but at the same time to shed fascinating light on the repressive nature of the countries and systems he is depicting (Russia, Cuba).

Even a comedy like Tom Sharpe’s Wilt On High can end on a page-long diatribe against the madness of nuclear weapons and not be damaged by it because it arises naturally out of the plot (and is all the more effective because Sharpe and his character Wilt are, on the whole, right wing and ridicule lefty politics so their anger is all the more impactful).

But it fails in this novel because it is simply so unsubtle. If JLC was already angry at the lies and hypocrisies of ‘our masters’ in the 1990s, he goes bananas after the invasion of Iraq. Just before this novel was published he wrote an opinion piece in the Times newspaper, The United States of America Has Gone Mad (link below) which I found embarrassing in its strident simple-mindedness.

If I was Arundhati, George, Naomi and all the rest, I would be flattered to be namechecked in a John le Carré novel, but also embarrassed at the guileless shoutiness of the context.

At key moments, and their central points, all these books lack analytical intelligence. Emotional depth? Often. Colourful ability with language? Yes (if much given to bombast and exaggeration). Cunning plotlines? Certainly. The artful creation of multi-levelled timeframes? Emphatically yes.

But when a character has to explain the exact geopolitical crux, the issue firing the whole narrative, the great wrong which must be understood – time and again JLC gives the speech to a drunk, bombastic, over-the-top or imbecile character: to the moronic Larry Pettifer in Our Game, to the oafish Jonah in Tailor of Panama, to the ridiculously implausible ‘Dimitri’ in Absolute Friends.

It is revealing that the first two characters are bigged up to ‘legendary’ status – ‘the one and only, the irrepressible, the immortal Jonah’ – because in these crux scenes le Carré doesn’t analyse (let alone dramatise): he creates a loud, shouty character and effectively says, ‘Look everybody – this guy is really famous and really clever and he thinks it’s a bad thing, so you should, too.’

It’s also dismayingly characteristic that these Voices of Truth swear a lot as if swearing guarantees the truth o what’s being sworn about:

‘I am talking world domination by the Yellow Man, and the end of fucking civilisation as we know it, even in the fucking Emerald Isle…’ (Jonah, Tailor of Panama, p.290)

‘West’s compassioned out, Timbo,’ he announces to the ceiling, not bothering to stifle a huge yawn. ‘Running on empty. Fuck us.’ (Larry, Our Game, p.138)

Instead of subtle and understated analysis, le Carré has the key explanations of the big theme of each of his post-Cold War novels delivered by over-hyped, swearing drunks.

What’s ultimately so dismaying and demoralising isn’t what le Carré is saying, it’s its complete unoriginality: when you read the long speeches the characters are given telling you that the invasion of Iraq wasn’t justified, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that the Bush presidency was electorally invalid, that Tony Blair shamelessly sucked up to George Dubya for nothing, that the hysteria around the War on Terror was cranked up by the corporate-owned media in order to boost the profits of the arms industry, and so on – who among le Carré’s liberal readership is going to disagree with any of this?

Like all his readers I know al this already because I read about it in the papers all the time. I just don’t care very much because:

a) There is nothing I can do about it.
b) It is the way of the world. Which war in the past 150 years wasn’t good for the arms industry? Which British Prime Minister of the last sixty years hasn’t sucked up to an over-mighty America?
c) That was then. Things have moved on a lot since 2004.

Either le Carré’s arguments should be made much more forensically, analytically, dispassionately, and zero in on precise wrong-doings; or they should be woven much more cannily into the narrative (à la Robert Harris’s much more canny novels). But they do neither and feel too simple minded to be effective, too bolted onto the main plot to have as much dramatic impact as they should.

The combined effect, in this novel especially, is to make le Carré’s views look childish and shallow.

My little pony

I have a bet with my son that every post-Cold War le Carré novel will contain a reference to a private school character having a little pony. In his previous three novels key characters have shared memories of their first ponies or of competing in the local gymkhana (Oliver in Single & Single, posh totty Francesca in The Tailor of Panama, Quayle finds a photo of Tessa’s first pony in The Constant Gardener).

Disappointingly, the main character in Absolute Friends does not have a my-little-pony memory but… the receptionist at the Bedford Square house where Ted goes to see his back-up team during his spying days, is ‘a jolly girl called Laura with freckles and a pony club smile’ (p.210).

So I’m still just about winning my bet. I just need there to be a pony reference in his last four novels and I win a pound.

Credit

Absolute Friends by John le Carré was published in 2004 by Hodder and Stoughton. All page references are to the 2004 Coronet paperback edition.

Reviews of John Le Carré’s novels

1961 Call for the Dead – Introducing George Smiley. Intelligence employee Samuel Fennan is found dead beside a suicide note. With the help of a CID man, Mendel, and the trusty Peter Guillam, Smiley unravels the truth behind his death, namely he was murdered by an East German spy ring, headed by Mundt.
1962 A Murder of Quality – Smiley investigates the murder of a teacher’s wife at an ancient public school in the West Country, incidentally the seat of the father of his errant wife, Lady Ann. No espionage involved, a straight murder mystery in the style of Morse or a thousand other detective stories.
1963 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – Extraordinarily brilliant account of a British agent, Alec Leamas, who pretends to be a defector in order to give disinformation to East German intelligence, told with complete plausibility and precision.
1965 The Looking Glass War – A peculiar, downbeat and depressing spy story about a Polish émigré soldier who is recruited by a ramshackle part of British intelligence, given incompetent training, useless equipment, and sent over the border into East Germany to his pointless death. Smiley makes peripheral appearances trying to prevent the operation and then clear up the mess.
1968 A Small Town in Germany – Political intrigue set in Bonn during the rise of a (fictional) right-wing populist movement. Overblown.
1971 The Naïve and Sentimental Lover – His one attempt at a ‘serious’ novel and, allegedly. his worst book.
1974 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – His most famous book. Smiley meticulously tracks down the Soviet mole at the heart of the ‘Circus’ ie MI6.
1977 The Honourable Schoolboy – Jerry Westerby is the part-time agent instructed to follow a trail of money from the KGB in Hong Kong, which involves intrigue at various locations in the Far East. It is done on Smiley’s orders but the latter barely appears.
1979 Smiley’s People – The assassination of a European émigré in Hampstead leads via a convoluted series of encounters, to the defection of Karla, Smiley’s opposite number in the KGB.
1983 The Little Drummer Girl – A long and brilliant meditation on the Arab-Israeli conflict, embodied by Charlie, the posh young English actress recruited by Israeli intelligence and trained to ‘allow’ herself to then be recruited by Arab terrorists, thus becoming a double agent.
1986 A Perfect Spy – Long flashback over the career of Magnus Pym, diplomat and spy, which brilliantly describes his boyhood with his chancer father, and the long tortuous route by which he became a traitor.
1989 The Russia House – Barley Blair is a drunk publisher who a Russian woman approaches at a book fair in Moscow to courier secrets to the West. He is ‘recruited’ and sent back to get more, which is when things begin to go wrong.
1990 The Secret Pilgrim – A series of vivid short stories describing episodes in the life of ‘old Ned’, a senior British Intelligence officer now in charge of trainees at the Service’s base at Sarratt in Buckinghamshire. When he asks George Smiley to come and lecture the young chaps and chapesses, it prompts a flood of reminiscence about the Cold War and some references to how abruptly and completely their world has changed with the collapse of Russian communism.
1993 The Night Manager – Jonathan Pine is recruited by British Intelligence to infiltrate the circle of British arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper – described with characteristic hyperbole as ‘the worst man in the world’ – after first laboriously acquiring a persuasive back story as a crook. Once inside the circle, Pine disobeys orders by (inevitably) falling in love with Roper’s stunning girlfriend, but the whole mission is endangered by dark forces within British Intelligence itself, which turn out to be in cahoots with Roper.
1995 Our Game – Incredibly posh, retired Intelligence agent, Tim Cranmer, discovers that the agent he ran for decades – the legendary Larry Pettifer who he knew at Winchester public school, then Oxford and personally recruited into the Service – has latterly been conspiring with a former Soviet agent to embezzle the Russian authorities out of tens of millions of pounds, diverting it to buy arms for independence fighters in the tiny republic of Ingushetia – and that Larry has also seduced his girlfriend, Emma – in a claustrophobic and over-written psychodrama about these three expensively-educated but eminently dislikeable upper-class twits.
1996 The Tailor of Panama – Old Etonian conman Andrew Osnard flukes a job in British Intelligence and is posted to Panama where he latches onto the half-Jewish owner of a ‘traditional’ English gentlemen’s tailor’s, the legendary Harry Pendel, and between them they concoct a fictional network of spies based in a fictional revolutionary movement, so they can embezzle the money London sends them to support it. Described as a comedy, the book has a few moments of humour, but is mostly grimly cynical about the corrupt workings of British government, British intelligence, British diplomats and of the super-cynical British media mogul who, it turns out, is behind an elaborate conspiracy to provoke a gruesomely violent American invasion of Panama, leaving you feeling sick and jaundiced with a sick and jaundiced world.
1999 Single & Single – Public schoolboy Oliver Single joins the law-cum-investment firm of his father, the legendary ‘Tiger’ Single, to discover it is little more than a money-laundering front for international crooks, specifically ‘the Orlov brothers’ from Georgia. He informs on his father to the authorities and disappears into a witness protection programme. The novel opens several years later with the murder of one of the firm’s senior lawyers by the Russian ‘clients’, which prompts Single & Single to go into meltdown, Tiger to disappear, and Oliver to come out of hiding and embark on a desperate quest to track down his estranged father.
2001 The Constant Gardener – Astonishingly posh diplomat’s wife, Tessa Quayle, discovers a big pharmaceutical company is illegally trialling a new drug in Kenya, with disastrous results among its poor and powerless patients. She embarks on a furious campaign to expose this wickedness and is murdered by contract killers. The novel combines flashbacks explaining the events leading up to her murder, with her Old Etonian husband’s prolonged quest to discover the truth about her death.
2003 Absolute Friends – Former public school head prefect and champion fast bowler Ted Mundy befriends the radical leader Sasha in the radical Berlin of the late 1960s. Years later he is approached by Sasha, now living in East Germany, who says he wants to spy for the West, and thus begins Ted’s career in espionage. This in turn comes to a grinding halt with the fall of the Berlin Wall. A decade later, Sasha contacts Ted again and unwittingly lures him into a Machiavellian American sting operation, whereby their entire previous careers are turned against them to make them look like dangerous ‘terrorists’, a set-up which climaxes with them being shot down like dogs. First ‘historic’ part good – second part overblown anti-Americanism.
2006 The Mission Song – Ex-public school boy Bruno ‘Salvo’ Salvador, a half-Congolese translator, is invited by British intelligence to lend his knowledge of arcane African languages and dialects to an unofficial meeting of three leaders of Congo’s warring factions. These have been brought together by a British ‘syndicate’, ostensibly in the name of negotiating peace, but who are actually planning to engineer a coup and impose a compliant leader who will allow his Western backers to plunder the country’s mineral resources. When Salvo learns this he sets out on a quixotic mission to reveal the ‘truth’.
2008 A Most Wanted Man – Posh Hamburg-based British banker Tommy Brue and posh refugee lawyer Annabel Richter find themselves involved in a conspiracy by German security services to frame an apparently innocent Muslim refugee and, along with him, the moderate organiser of Muslim charities, as ‘terrorists’. But this dubious German plan is itself trumped by the CIA who betray all the characters in the book, violently kidnap the two Muslims, and take them away for indefinite incarceration and torture.
2010 Our Kind of Traitor – An Oxford don and his barrister girlfriend on holiday in Antigua get involved with a Russian mafiosi who wants to ‘defect’ to the British, exposing ‘corruption in high places’ – and end up playing crucial roles in the mission to rescue him and his family which, however, does not go according to plan.
2013 A Delicate Truth – British civil servant Toby Bell uncovers evidence that his Minister helped arrange an extraordinary rendition, involving US mercenaries, British soldiers and a Foreign Office observer, supposedly to capture a high value terrorist on Gibraltar except there was no terrorist. Instead a Muslim woman and her baby were shot to ribbons. Three years later, the retired FO man, Sir Christopher (‘Kit’) Probyn is approached out of the blue by one of the British soldiers who’s been haunted by the debacle, and this triggers a joint attempt by him and Toby to present the evidence to their superiors, to confront the architect of the fiasco, and then to inform the Press – in all of which they miserably fail.

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by Simon on March 14, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel, Thriller

Tagged 2004, 9/11, A Perfect Spy, Absolute Friends, America, American foreign policy, American military-industrial complex, Andrew Osnard, Arundhati Roy, Basel, Berlin, Bernard Samson, Blair, boarding school, British Council, Bush, Charles Dickens, CIA, class system, Cold War, Communism, conspiracy thriller, Counter-University, cricket, Dimitri, Dombey and Son, Doncaster, East Germany, English boarding school, espionage, Eton, Fatherland, fiction, George Bush, George Dubya, George Monbiot, Harrow, Heidelberg, imperialism, invasion of Iraq, Iraq, Islam, James Bond, Jay, John Le Carre, John Pilger, Jonathan Roper, Joseph Stiglitz, Justin Quayle, Kim Philby, King Ludwig of Bavaria, Labour Party, Larry Pettifer, le Carré, Len Deighton, Mark Curtis, Martin Chuzzlewit, Martin Cruz Smith, MI6, money laundering, Munich, Muslim, Mustafa, Nairobi High Commission, Naomi Klein, narrative, Nicholas Amory, Nick Amory, Noam Chomsky, novel, Oliver Single, Orville J. Rourke, Oxford, Oxford University, P.G. Wodehouse, Pakistan, public school, Richard Roper, Riyadh, Robert Harris, Sasha, Saudi Arabia, Shrewsbury, Single & Single, spy fiction, Stasi, state manipulation, student radicalism, Susan George, SWAT team, Switzerland, Ted Mundy, terrorism, The Constant Gardener, The Night Manager, The Times newspaper, The United States of America Has Gone Mad, the West, thriller, Tiger Single, Tom Sharpe, Tony Blair, upper class, Urdu, war on terror, Winchester, Zara

Posted by Simon on March 14, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/03/14/absolute-friends-john-le-carre/

Charity by Len Deighton (1996)

‘You don’t like any of your old friends these days, Bernie. What’s happened to you? Why are you so caustic? Why so suspicious of everything and everyone?’
‘Am I? Well I’m not the only one afflicted with that,’ I said. ‘There is an epidemic of suspicion and distrust. It’s contagious. We are all in its grip: you, me, Fiona, Gloria and the whole Department…’ (p.183)

This is the tenth and final novel in Deighton’s series about 40-something SIS agent, Bernard Samson, his wife and family and the small group of friends and colleagues who have shared his trials and tribulations for the previous nine novels and the 10 or so years they cover (1977 to 1988).

As usual for the series, the story is told in a straightforward chronological way by Bernard himself in a first-person narrative, very much from his (limited) point of view, and in his own dry, sardonic voice. It’s divided into roughly three subject areas: straightforward espionage or spy episodes; family matters; office politics.

Spy stories

The novel opens dramatically with Bernard accompanying a very ill colleague, Jim Prettyman, back from Moscow on the Moscow-to-Paris train, along with a qualified nurse. Bernard notices the nurse fondling a pretty brooch and asks to have a look; she says Prettyman gave it to her and Bernard recognises it as having belonged to his dead sister-in-law, Tessa.

As the train trundles over the shabby, frozen border into Poland, Bernard is taken aside by Polish Security Police for questioning, and mournfully watches the train pull off without him. For the next week he is kept in an unheated cell in a fortress-cum-barracks and intensively questioned about his role in the abduction of George Kosinski and the related shooting of Polish security agents. These events had formed the dramatic climax of the previous book, Hope and Bernard is guilty as hell of everything they accuse him of, but sticks to his cover story that he is a German businessman. Although he is quite badly beaten up, he knows it is nothing compared to what they could do and sure enough, after a week, he is driven back to the station and placed on the next Moscow to Paris express. They know he knows they know he did it; but someone somewhere has ordered his release. Why was he arrested? Why was he released? It is never explained. It is an example of the puzzling randomness of the way things work in the Communist bloc…

Family matters

The Samson books are as much about families as about spying. The central event of the entire series was the revelation that Bernard’s wife, clever Oxford-educated Fiona, was a double agent working for the KGB and her hurried flight to the East, with Bernard close on her tail. This fills the first three books. In the second trilogy Bernard slowly realises Fiona has in fact been working for us all along and, after her absence of three years working as a double agent in the East, Bernard plays a big part in helping her escape back to the West.

But a) during the escape Fiona’s sister, Tessa, is shot dead b) during her long absence Bernard has fallen in love with an SIS colleague half his age, Gloria Kent. Although Fiona’s mission was part of long-term plans to undermine the East German government by supporting dissident civil society groups, it is also, on another level, a story about a man whose wife betrays and deserts him. Thus the domestic and emotional impact of Fiona’s desertion, not only on Samson but on his children, her sister and brother-in-law and on her father, are all described at length and repeatedly, in long conversations, at lunches, drinks or dinners.

In fact, the novels contain hundreds of pages which are devoted to the dinner parties and drinks parties and Sunday lunches at Fiona and Bernard’s house or George and Tessa Kosinski’s flat, or at Dicky Cruyer’s place or at Leith Hill in Fiona’s father’s luxury pile, or out in the Cotswolds at the rambling old farmhouse, Whitelands, belonging to the Department’s creepy eminence grise, Silas Gaunt.

A lot of narrative time is spent admiring the fixtures and fittings of various abodes, complimenting the wine and the cooking, being shown holiday snaps or latest additions to collections of swords or antique cars or oil paintings or vintage wine. A LOT of time is spent discussing how Bernard’s two children, Billy and Sally, are getting on at their prep school, with their private tutors in French and Maths, in the school soccer team, what presents they’re being bought for Christmas or their birthdays, and so on.

And this cosy, companionable family-ness, its domesticity, is one of the appeals of the series. It extends beyond England to Germany where so much of the action is set, to the run-down hotel in Berlin kept by old Tante Lisl, where Bernard grew up as a boy and where the shabby attic room is always kept for him; it includes his chats, sometimes about work, sometimes about family matters, with his oldest school-friend, shady businessman and sometime Department contractor Werner Volkmann, and his trouble with women (his two wives, Ingrid or Zena).

Also there are endless repeats of the scene in the office of Frank Harrington, long-time Head of the Berlin Office of the SIS, who plays with his smelly old pipe or shuffles his collection of vintage jazz records, while Bernard tells him yet another far-fetched interpretation of the latest perplexing plot twists. Here’s Frank fiddling with his beloved Dunhill pipe, accompanied by a dash of Deightonian humour:

He was smoking happily now, poking at his pipe bowl with the blade of a penknife, and attending to every strand of burning tobacco with all the loving care of a locomotive engineer. Or a dedicated arsonist. (p.171)

Office politics

The third element is the endless jockeying for position, promotion and office which goes on inside ‘the Department’. On an almost continual basis the entire cast of characters can, at the drop of a hat, start speculating about who will replace the gaga old Director-General, who will get the Deputy DG job, is Fiona in with a chance? Will it be Bernard’s slick superficial boss, Dicky Cruyer? Or will he be blocked by the much smarter but older American, Bret Rensselaer? And so on.

Since both Fiona (once she’s returned) and even Samson, are qualified, in their different ways, for promotion, many of their conversations (once she’s returned to the West) move easily between discussion of family affairs, into details of various spy operations – especially as the central plot rotates about Bernard’s wife and then, after her escape, about the true fate of his sister-in-law, Tessa – and both bleed into the office politics, as the success or failure of various plans and operations boosts or hinders the key players’ various hopes for advancement and promotion.

Each of the novels contains a canny mix of these three threads which are each, in their different ways, equally absorbing though, for me, the distinctive feature of the entire series, is the time and attention paid to domestic arrangements. You don’t catch James Bond fussing about what’s for dinner tonight or who’s going to buy little Billy’s birthday present.

The plot

After being released by the Poles (why was he arrested and beaten, why was he released?) the scene cuts to Bernard (still rather bruised) and Fiona staying at her father’s luxury pile near Leith Hill, Surrey. It is just into the new year of 1988 (the previous novel, Hope ended on Christmas Eve 1987) so only a few weeks after Bernard had virtually kidnapped his brother-in-law (revealed as being a spy for the Polish secret police) out of Poland and smuggled him back to the UK to be interrogated and maybe charged with treason. At the end of the previous novel we had also seen Gloria and Bernard going to bed in what seemed to crystallise his choice of her over his wife, Fiona. Which makes this scene where he is docilely accompanying his wife to his father-in-law’s house a little puzzling. Bernard is seriously confused about which of these two beautiful women he really loves…

At Leith Hill the father-in-law, David Kimber-Hutchinson, holds a big dinner party where the guests discuss political developments of 1987-8 ie Chancellor Kohl inviting Honecker to the West, along with the political and economic situation in the East. Later, Fiona explains in some detail to Bernard the way money is being channeled into East Germany in numerous sophisticated attempts to undermine the regime. (These kind of geopolitical discussions are relatively rare in the books: when they occur it is pretty obviously to provide the rationale for the entire plot ie that Fiona ‘defected’ in order to establish contact with civil society groups in the East who could destabilise the regime, and that that plot is working. Ie they exist to justify all the time and effort spent on the Fiona Plot.)

To his astonishment, Fiona’s father broaches the ludicrous suggestion that George tried to kill him; he had a headache in Poland and George gave him some local headache tablets which David kept and then, back in England, fed to the family cat who promptly died. Bernard listens respectfully, thinking what a melodramatic old queen his father-in-law is. David goes on to explain his presence in a photo of George in Warsaw that so startled Bernard in the previous novel, when he was shown it, as simply being a result of having been invited out there to help George locate Tess, Fiona’s sister. (For a while this photo had been a loose thread, leaving us wondering whether the father-in-law was involved some scam, as almost everyone else in the family has been. But no. Shame, actually…)

Bernard is confirmed as deputy to Frank Harrington, Head of the Berlin Office. Frank knew Bernard’s dad and promised to look after young Bernie, so they’ve always had a close nephew-and-uncle relationship, with Bernard amused by Frank’s endless fussing with his pipe, his string of unsuitable affairs, and his canny way of avoiding trouble.

Bernard drives out to Whitelands, Silas Gaunt’s rambling farmhouse in the Cotswolds. Here he discovers Gaunt is packing up and moving into sheltered accommodation as he has recently been diagnosed as too ill to keep up the house. Bernard makes sympathetic noises but extracts from Silas a reluctant confession that he knew about the cock-up over Tessa’s shooting; but Silas insists he had out-sourced the whole thing to the Americans, it was their decision to hire Thurkettle, nothing to do with us, old chap etc. He provides the familiar rationalisation that we had to make the opposition think Fiona was dead, at whatever cost, otherwise they would immediately have changed all their codes and procedures and ‘Fiona’s years of courage and jeopardy would have been in vain.’ (p.82)

Bernard meets ‘the Swede’ downstairs in a second-hand bookshop in Charing Cross Road. The Swede is in fact a former Luftwaffe pilot (his back story is given with typical Deightonian thoroughness and historical detail on pages 90 and 91). We met him in the previous novel when he flew in to Poland and picked up Bernard and his brother-in-law George at the book’s exciting climax.

a) The Swede reveals he was on standby to fly Jim Prettyman out of Germany on the night of the famous Tessa shooting. He had been commissioned to bring in a secret box file, though Prettyman never turned up to collect it. b) Bernard asks him if he can do a mission for him, Bernard. The Swede guesses what it is. Bernard wants to kidnap his two children from the care of his smothering, smug father-in-law, collect dishy young Gloria and have the Swede fly them to Ireland, where Bernard will arrange flights on to South America, somewhere with no extradition treaty. The Swede says it is a bonkers idea but he’ll do it. The whole mad scheme shows us that, despite performing his spousal duties with Fiona, his heart is still with Gloria…

Bernard is panicked to receive a phone call from his son’s school saying his son’s school bus has overturned and there are some injuries. (In the previous novel a character had pointed out that the KGB always take revenge on those who betrayed them, giving the example of a double agent who was given a new identity in the States, but whose family the KGB tracked down and assassinated one by one. What if the same happens to Fiona, because of her super betrayal? Once this worry has been planted, it allows Deighton to scare us with of happenings like this, which make us think maybe the novel will be ‘about’ the KGB’s revenge.)

In the event his son Billy hadn’t even been on the bus. Bernard had driven down there with Gloria, who’d given him the message at work, and this gives her an opportunity to tell him a few home truths: that he doesn’t know his children any more, they’ve grown away from him; for her to pour scorn on his ludicrous proposal to run off with the kids; and they end the journey back to London with a blazing row. Hmm. His plan of starting a new life with her and the kids not going so well, then. As he gets out of her car he leans down to apologise but Gloria, very angry, drives off…

Next day Bernard drives to Berwick House where George Kosinski – Bernard’s brother-in-law who he had revealed to be a spy in the previous novel – is being kept and interrogated. The interrogation is getting nowhere and Bernard has been ordered down there to have a go himself. But a) he finds George feeling cocky enough to turn the tables and threaten Bernard, saying he has enough evidence to prove that Bernard wanted Tessa killed, which b) makes Bernard so angry he grabs George and shouts in his face. It also makes him realise, on the journey home, that George is small fry; he may have reported tittle-tattle back to the Polish security services but he wasn’t a planner or a doer. MI5, who are holding him, will probably release him on condition he scuttles back to Zurich and keeps stumm.

On the way back Bernard and his Special Branch driver stop at a pub for a drink. In the loos Bernard is attacked by two heavies and, because he happens to have a gun on him, first uses it to hit them hard in the face and arm, then steps back, brandishing it, to stop the fight. They say it wasn’t him, it’s the Swede they’re after. Bernard sends them packing and gives his Special Branch bodyguard, still sitting happily at the bar, a flea in the ear for completely failing to help him.

Later that night, at home with Fiona after discussing George’s likely fate, there’s a call and Bernard is summoned to jump into a waiting car and taken to a derelict house in south London. Here, in the garage, he finds the body of the Swede, dead, with his skull crudely staved in by a hammer. There is some colourful description of the Special Branch and MI5 officers attending, namely one ‘Squeaky’ King and the fractious relationship between ‘Five’ and the Department. No indication who murdered the Swede, and Bernard doesn’t know why anyone should. There goes his scheme of flying to Ireland. Gloria is angry with him and the Swede is dead…

Bernard is then summoned to a meeting with Bret Rensselaer (now acting Deputy Director-General), Dicky Cruyer, Head of Ops, and the D-G himself, fussing over his ancient Labrador and, in a running gag, never able to remember Bernard’s name, this time calling him Simson. But beyond the jokes they reveal they knew the Swede was going to be killed. It was done by a hitman from Dresden. They had to let it go ahead otherwise it would have blown the agent who informed them. Bernard is appalled. The reader is appalled.

Back in Berlin, Bernard is visited by Cindy Prettyman, Jim’s first wife. In an earlier novel she had been fairly innocent and inoffensive. Here she has been transformed into a harridan who swears at Bernard a lot and wants him to get rid of the security box her ex-husband dumped in her office and asked her to look after last year, at the time of the Tessa Fiasco. Bernard is left wondering: was Cindy involved in the murder? What is the significance of this security box? Has it got money in it, the payoff for Thurkettle, something valuable to Prettyman?

Once again in Frank’s office Bernard watches the old man tap the window and look out at the snow while Bernard tells him what he’s been doing for Dicky. There’s a fuss about some old uranium mines over in the East. It’s coming in a bit late in the story, but could this be what the novel’s ‘about’? Could there be a surprise twist where it all turns out to be about getting our hands on commie uranium or preventing them using it to make nuclear weapons?

Bernard meets Werner at the derelict Tegel airport on the edge of West Berlin to review the story so far. To his surprise he finds Werner going back over the night of the shooting and asking Bernard how he’s so certain of his memories: maybe, in all the confusion, he shot Tessa? What? It feels like every possible logical combination is being wrung from this one tragic event, which happened four whole books ago. The reader is becoming a bit impatient.

Bernard motors out to meet Jim Prettyman. Years ago Jim, his wife Cindy, Fiona and Bernard were friends, playing pool in a bar near the office. But Jim was into statistics and his skills got him a job in the States where he changed his name to Jay and got married to a new wife, Tabby, with useful State Department connections (divorcing the now-embittered Cindy). Now he’s terminally ill and Tabby’s looking after him in a house near Heathrow.

In his sick room there is a big confrontation scene where Bernard and Jim exchange conflicting versions of what happened the night Tessa died. Prettyman agrees that Thurkettle, the ex-CIA man, was hired by Silas Gaunt to do the hit. He even claims he arranged a meeting between Silas – who he describes as completely crazy – and Thurkettle in London the preceding week. That night it was Thurkettle who shot Tessa, cut off her head and switched it for the head containing dental work replicating Fiona’s, in order to fool the KGB, and then set fire to the car – this was all Gaunt’s plan, but Jim (like the reader) thinks it was pretty stupid – a car fire wouldn’t burn a body sufficiently to hide its essential features; they might just notice her head had been mysteriously cut off.

But Jim denies killing Thurkettle, saying he arrived at the meeting spot primed to pay him to find him already dead. The plan had been to take Thurkettle on to a plane and fly him back to England but when he found a corpse, he rifled its pockets, found the brooch (the brooch he later gave the nurse in chapter one) among other things, and left. Bernard goes off wondering how much of this is true.

— For the reader the point is that Bernard now more or less knows the truth of what happened. He doesn’t seem particularly upset about it and, because we readers learned all this three books ago, it doesn’t come as much surprise to us either. As we enter the last 75 pages of the entire series, I wondered whether there was going to be some final Twist and Surprise that would make us sit up and gasp.

Chapter 10 An Autobahn exit. The German Democratic Republic Bernard and Werner drive along the Autobahn to the exit where Prettyman told him he rendevoused with Thurkettle on the Fateful Night. They find two East German farmers working in a field and who, with a little Western money, remember the camper van being parked there for a few days on the night. When they’re shown to the exact spot, Bernard and Werner find the remains of a motorbike concealed in a ditch and then, a bit further along, Thurkettle’s corpse, rotted and eaten away. Bernard locates the bullet holes in Thurkettle’s coat and then the gun Thurkettle was shot with. Beneath the corpse is a bag of dollars, Thurkettle’s payment for the hit. Yes: all the evidence is here confirming the story he’s pieced together.

Werner hurries him along and back into the car – it is strictly illegal to drive off the Autobahn in the East, and being found in possession of a gun and corpse! They’d be locked away forever. As they drive back into the West in a sleet storm Bernard puts his last question to Werner: Was it him who supplied Prettyman with the gun he used to shoot Thurkettle? Werner refuses to answer in such a way that Bernard knows he’s correct.

Pretty much the whole secret is out now. Tessa is dead; she was killed by an ex-CIA hitman on orders from SIS high-ups, notably creepy Silas Gaunt; Prettyman was the middle man who organised logistics then shot Thurkettle to assure his silence (why? Thurkettle was a pro; he’d have kept stumm anyway); Werner played a small part in supplying the gun. ‘Well done, Bernard,’ says Werner. ‘You’ve pieced it all together with superhuman skill; now let it lie.’ But he can’t, of course.

Chapter 11 The SIS offices, Berlin Bret and Dicky and Gloria have flown into Berlin for a security conference. First of all Bernard accepts a report from a local officer, Larry Bowers, that proves the East German uranium mine we heard about earlier has only a minimum staff and is barely being kept open: so the novel is not going to turn out to be about that, after all. Shame, really.

— Most of this chapter is devoted to a big party Werner hosts at his new grand house out by the Wannsee. It is a really massive fancy-dress party with the theme of ‘gold’, featuring lots of diplomats, local businessmen and politicians, movers and shakers, with a live band playing 1930s dance tunes and a massive buffet feast. Bret and Dicky and Frank and Gloria and Werner and Zena are all there.

In the middle of the festivities Cindy Prettyman (who we’d learned earlier was staying with Werner) comes down the stairs, wearing only a slip, her hair dishevelled, distraught and brandishing a pistol. Bernard and Werner go slowly up the stairs towards her as she threatens first one then the other. She accuses them both of stealing the security box from her office, the security box she’d mentioned earlier to Bernard and was trying to either get rid of or possibly use as some kind of blackmail threat. Either way, it’s gone now and she is very cross about it.

Werner makes a move towards her and she shoots, winging him in the head. Bernard flings a glass at her but is beaten to it by an Army redcap who rugby tackles her, all of them falling to the bottom of the grand stairs in a big pile. Frank Harrington steps forward from the band podium to thank the Volkmanns for a novel and imaginative charade, ha ha ha, trying to present it all as a weird party entertainment, and while the spotlight is on him speaking soothing words, the bodies are swiftly cleared away.

A lot later that night Bernard is allowed into his hospital room to see Werner, who was more injured by the fall down the stairs than the shot. He admits Cindy was right to be cross; he, Werner, broke into her office earlier that day and stole the damn security box. Cindy had come to think it was valuable and the Department would either a) pay for it or b) it would be some kind of lever to help her get back into contact with her estranged husband. Now she’ll be charged with attempted murder.

Arriving back at Tante Lisl’s hotel, Bernard is handed a telegram from Prettyman’s second wife, Tabby. Jim has passed away, but before he did so he asked her to send him the message that Bernard had guessed everything correctly, that Prettyman did everything Bernard accused him of. Bernard is still not sure whether he is doing a last piece of lying to cover someone else…

Chapter 12 The SIS Residence, Berlin Bret Rensselaer chairs a meeting of Bernard, Frank and Dicky. With little preamble they go into discussing the events of the Fateful Night and integrating Bernard’s findings into what they already knew. The only new thing is that Bret is determined to blame Silas for everything; Silas became unhinged; Silas thought the Service should go beyond its traditional intelligence-gathering role into positive action, violent action if necessary. It was Silas who wanted to protect Fiona’s work by making the KGB think Fiona was dead. It was Silas who cooked up the whole cockamamie plan to make sure Thurkettle murdered Tessa, cut off her head etc, burned the car with her body in it, then motored off to meet his contact, Prettyman, who proceeded to execute him. Blame Silas. — Is that it? Is that the pay-off to the last three novels, and to the entire series?

And the security box which Werner stole from Cindy’s office? Bret says Frank’s handyman is even at this moment sawing it open in the workshop. What! No! shouts Bernard and hares off down the backstairs of Frank’s rambling house (banging into the Director-General himself who is in a secret passage listening to the meeting with headphones) running down the stairs, out into the garden, along to the workshop, seizing the handyman just as he begins drilling to the box, and pushing them both out, away and down onto the frozen ground as the workshop explodes. It was a bomb.

Bernard had suspected for some time this was the significance of the mysterious box file which had been one of the numerous threads in the novel: it was the way the Swede had confirmed it was on his plane, the one which was meant to carry Prettyman away from the Tessa Murder, which gave Bernard the clue. Thus Tessa would have been killed by Thurkettle. Thurkettle killed by Prettyman. Then Prettyman and the Swede blown up in mid-air as soon as they opened the box.

For this reader there are still a few loose ends, loose ends which could only be tied up by going back and reading the relevant section of Spy Sinker again which, to be honest, I can’t be bothered to do. Tessa’s dead. It was a dodgy plot. Palming it off on Silas just about explains it away. After a certain point – this point – I’ve stopped caring about the details.

With all the main strands of the spy plot finally resolved, there’s family life and office politics to tie up: Bret tells Bernard he has proposed to Gloria and she said Yes. (This is, to be honest, completely unbelievable. Bret, as Bernard points out, is old enough to be Gloria’s grandfather.)

Bret reminds Bernard of the personal debt Bret owes him; in one of the earlier novels Bret was suspected of himself being a mole and made his way to Berlin to the only man he knew he could trust, Bernard. Now he’ll repay the debt. Bernard will finally get a full-time contract with a pension and all the perks; Bret will do what he can to see Bernard is eventually made Head of the Berlin Office when Frank Harrington retires (which will be soon), a post which everyone has always felt he should have.

And Bret (like the fairy godmother in a nursery story) gives Bernard a third piece of news/wish come true: he gives him a long letter Fiona wrote during her recuperation which eloquently states how much she loves Bernard, that he is kinder and more sensitive than everyone realises etc. Bret explains that Fiona is only burying herself in her work because she feels rejected by Bernard. ‘Go tell her how you really feel, you schmuck.’ And so the novel ends with a decisive closing of the entire Gloria love affair and the promise of reconciliation with his beautiful, high-flying and loving wife, Fiona.

Thus the three strands – espionage, family matters and office politics – are all neatly wound up and dovetailed, with the espionage – nominally the subject of the whole series – here, as everywhere else, feeling like it’s actually the least important of the three.

Anti-climax

It is hard to resist a sense of anti-climax: endings are always difficult; it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. Unlikely though it sounds, basing the three books of the first trilogy around the notion of a married spy discovering that his spouse is a double agent, does work and is gripping and interesting. Similarly, the first two novels of the second trilogy successfully plant the seed and then craftily reveal the fact that Fiona is a triple agent, pretending to work for ‘them’ but really working for ‘us’. Very clever.

But the murder of Tessa in the rainswept Autobahn roadworks on that fateful night is not, I think, an interesting enough subject to sustain this last trilogy. The second instalment, Hope, is the best of the three because it takes us to an entirely new location, Poland, which Deighton describes with trademark historical, cultural, linguistic and geographical thoroughness. And because for most of it the subject is not ‘Who killed Tessa?’ but ‘Where is George?’, which was a welcome new theme.

But this final novel is solely about ‘Who killed Tessa?’ and the crucial flaw is that in novel six – Spy Sinker – Deighton told us. We know who killed her and why. It wasn’t very convincing then and it has become even less convincing as we’ve read on. Spy Sinker is a powerful novel and works in an interesting way because it sheds wholly new light on the five books that preceded it, undermining all the previous narratives, recasting everything we and the narrator thought had happened, and that was a bold and really effective stroke.

But, unless something stunningly new was to be revealed, it also meant the succeeding trilogy couldn’t show us anything new. And, despite a few red herrings and false trails, Charity indeed adds almost nothing to what we knew before, throwing in a few new characters (the Swede, Prettyman’s involvement) but leaving the outline of the story exactly as we already knew it.

Weakest of all is the way Deighton ends up pinning the blame on Silas Gaunt, presented as a Machiavellian super-brain in the previous novels, who is now suddenly described as unbalanced, bonkers, who crossed the line, who went too far, and who we now see being packed off to sheltered accommodation for the mentally ill. It was all Silas’s fault. Oh. OK. So there are no twists, turns or surprises at all. It is hard to avoid a sense of anti-climax.

Charity

The religious connotations of the titles – faith, hope and charity – are almost completely ignored. Deighton is not, thank God, Graham Greene, with his reams of doggerel theology. The word faith is mentioned a few times in Faith – Bret gives Bernard a Bible to use as a code book for a handful of ‘secret’ messages he sends him. I don’t think hope is mentioned at all in Hope; if it was George Kosinski’s hope of finding his wife Tessa, alive, it is cruelly dashed.

And, in the kind of dry joke which takes us right back to the start of the Deighton’s career, reminding us of the sly jokiness of the Ipcress novels – it turns out that Charity has no profound symbolic or moral meaning at all. Charity is the name of the half-senile Director-General’s raddled black Labrador.

Charity is a knackered old beast which slobbers and drools and is on its last legs.

Len Deighton’s novels

1962 The IPCRESS File Through the thickets of bureaucracy and confusing misinformation which surround him, an unnamed British intelligence agent discovers that his boss, Dalby, is in cahoots with a racketeer who kidnaps and brainwashes British scientists.
1963 Horse Under Water Perplexing plot which is initially about diving into a wrecked U-boat off the Portuguese coast for Nazi counterfeit money, then changes into the exposure of an illegal heroin manufacturing operation, then touches on a top secret technology which can change ice to water instantly (ie useful for firing missiles from submarines under Arctic ice) and finally turns out to be about a list – the Weiss List – of powerful British people who offered to help run a Nazi government when the Germans invaded, and who are now being blackmailed. After numerous adventures, the Unnamed Narrator retrieves the list and consigns it to the Intelligence archive.
1964 Funeral in Berlin The Unnamed Narrator is in charge of smuggling a Russian scientist through the Berlin Wall, all managed by a Berlin middle-man Johnnie Vulkan who turns out to be a crook only interested in getting fake identity papers to claim the fortune of a long-dead concentration camp victim. The Russians double-cross the British by not smuggling the scientist; Vulkan double-crosses the British by selling the (non-existent) scientist on to Israeli Intelligence; the Narrator double-crosses the Israelis by giving them the corpse of Vulkan (who he has killed) instead of the scientist; and is himself almost double-crossed by a Home Office official who tries to assassinate him in the closing scenes, in order to retrieve the valuable documents. But our Teflon hero survives and laughs it all off with his boss.
1966 Billion-Dollar Brain The Unnamed Narrator is recruited into a potty organisation funded by an American billionaire, General Midwinter, and dedicated to overthrowing the Soviet Union. A character from Funeral In Berlin, Harvey Newbegin, inducts him into the organisation and shows him the Brain, the vast computer which is running everything, before absconding with loot and information, and then meeting a sticky end in Leningrad.
1967 An Expensive Place to Die A new departure, abandoning all the characters and much of the style of the first four novels for a more straightforward account of a secret agent in Paris who gets involved with a Monsieur Datt and his clinic-cum-brothel. After many diversions, including an induced LSD trip, he is ordered to hand over US nuclear secrets to a Chinese scientist, with a view to emphasising to the Chinese just how destructive a nuclear war would be and therefore discouraging them from even contemplating one.
1968 Only When I Larf Another departure, this is a comedy following the adventures of three con artists, Silas, Bob and Liz and their shifting, larky relationships as they manage (or fail) to pull off large-scale stings in New York, London and the Middle East.
1970 Bomber A drastic change of direction for Deighton, dropping spies and comedy to focus on 24 hours in the lives of British and German airmen, soldiers and civilians involved in a massive bombing raid on the Ruhr valley. 550 pages, enormous cast, documentary prose, terrifying death and destruction – a really devastating indictment of the horrors of war.
1971 Declarations of War Thirteen short stories, all about wars, mainly the first and second world wars, with a few detours to Vietnam, the American Civil war and Hannibal crossing the Alps. Three or four genuinely powerful ones.
1972 Close-Up Odd departure into Jackie Collins territory describing the trials and tribulations of fictional movie star Marshall Stone as he betrays his wife and early lovers to ‘make it’ in tinseltown, and the plight he currently finds himself in: embroiled in a loss-making production and under pressure from the scheming studio head to sign a lucrative but career-threatening TV deal.
1974 Spy Story The Unnamed Narrator of the Ipcress spy novels returns, in much tamer prose, to describe how, after escaping from the ‘Service’ to a steady job in a MoD war games unit, he is dragged back into ‘active service’ via a conspiracy of rogue right-wingers to help a Soviet Admiral defect. Our man nearly gets shot by the right-wingers and killed by Russians in the Arctic, before realising the whole thing was an elaborate scam by his old boss, Dawlish, and his new boss, the American marine General Schlegel, to scupper German reunification talks.
1975 Yesterday’s Spy Another first-person spy story wherein a different agent – though also working for the American Colonel Schlegel, introduced in Spy Story – is persuaded to spy on Steve Champion, the man who ran a successful spy ring in Nazi-occupied France, who recruited him to the agency and who saved his life back during the war. Via old contacts the narrator realises Champion is active again, but working for Arabs who are planning some kind of attack on Israel and which the narrator must foil.
1976 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (aka Catch a Falling Spy) The narrator and his CIA partner manage the defection of a Soviet scientist, only for a string of murder attempts and investigations to reveal that a senior US official they know is in fact a KGB agent, leading to a messy shootout at Washington airport, and then to an unlikely showdown in the Algerian desert.
1977 Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain Abandoning fiction altogether, Deighton published this comprehensive, in-depth and compelling history, lavishly illustrated with photos and technical diagrams of the famous planes involved.
1978 SS-GB A storming return to fiction with a gripping alternative history thriller in which the Germans succeeded in invading and conquering England in 1941. We follow a senior detective at Scotland Yard, Douglas Archer, living in defeated dingy London, coping with his new Nazi superiors, and solving a murder mystery which unravels to reveal not one but several enormous conspiracies.
1979 Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk Another factual history of WWII: Deighton moves quickly over Hitler’s rise to power and the diplomatic bullying of the 1930s, to arrive at the core of the book: an analysis of the precise meaning of ‘Blitzkrieg’, complete with detailed notes on all the weapons, tanks, artillery and hardware involved, as well as the evolution of German strategic thinking; and then its application in the crucial battle for the river Meuse which determined the May 1940 Battle for France.
1980 Battle of Britain
1981 XPD SIS agent Boyd Stuart is one of about 20 characters caught up in the quest for the ‘Hitler Minutes’, records of a top secret meeting between Hitler and Churchill in May 1940 in which the latter was (shockingly) on the verge of capitulating, and which were ‘liberated’ by US soldiers, along with a load of Nazi gold, at the very end of the war. Convoluted, intermittently fascinating and sometimes moving, but not very gripping.
1982 Goodbye, Mickey Mouse Six months in the life of the 220th Fighter Group, an American Air Force group flying Mustangs in support of heavy bombers, based in East Anglia, from winter 1943 through spring 1944, as we get to know 20 or so officers and men, as well as the two women at the centre of the two ill-fated love affairs which dominate the story.
1983 Berlin Game First of the Bernard Samson spy novels in which this forty-something British Intelligence agent uses his detailed knowledge of Berlin and its spy networks to ascertain who is the high-level mole within his Department. With devastating consequences.
1984 Mexico Set Second of the first Bernard Samson trilogy (there are three trilogies ie 9 Samson books), in which our hero manages the defection of KGB agent Erich Stinnes from Mexico City, despite KGB attempts to frame him for the murder of one of his own operatives and a German businessman. All that is designed to make Bernard defect East and were probably masterminded by his traitor wife, Fiona.
1985 London Match Third of the first Bernard Samson spy trilogy in which a series of clues – not least information from the defector Erich Stinnes who was the central figure of the previous novel – suggest to Samson that there is another KGB mole in the Department – and all the evidence points towards smooth-talking American, Bret Rensselaer.
1987 Winter An epic (ie very long and dense) fictionalised account of German history from 1900 to 1945, focusing on the two Winter brothers, Peter and Paul, along with a large supporting cast of wives, friends, colleagues and enemies, following their fortunes through the Great War, the Weimar years, the rise of Hitler and on into the ruinous Second World War. It provides vital background information about nearly all of the characters who appear in the Bernard Samson novels, so is really part of that series.
1988 Spy Hook First of the second trilogy of Bernard Samson spy novels in which Bernie slowly uncovers what he thinks is a secret slush fund of millions run by his defector wife with Bret Rensaeller (thought to be dead, but who turns up recuperating in a California ranch). The plot involves reacquaintance with familiar characters like Werner Volkmann, Frau Lisl (and her sister), old Frank Harrington, tricky Dicky Cruyer, Bernie’s 23-year-old girlfriend Gloria Kent, and so on.
1989 Spy Line Through a typically tangled web of incidents and conversations Samson’s suspicions are confirmed: his wife is a double agent, she has been working for us all along, she only pretended to defect to the East. After numerous encounters with various old friends of his father and retired agents, Samson finds himself swept up in the brutal, bloody plan to secure Fiona’s escape from the East.
1990 Spy Sinker In the third of the second trilogy of Samson novels, Deighton switches from a first-person narrative by Samson himself, to an objective third-person narrator and systematically retells the entire sequence of events portrayed in the previous five Samson novels from an external point of view, shedding new and sometimes devastating light on almost everything we’ve read. The final impression is of a harrowing world where everyone is deceiving everyone else, on multiple levels.
1991 MAMista A complete departure from the Cold War and even from Europe. Australian doctor and ex-Vietnam War veteran Ralph Lucas finds himself caught up with Marxist guerrillas fighting the ruling government in the (fictional) South American country of Spanish Guiana and, after various violent escapades, inveigled into joining the long, gruelling and futile trek through the nightmareish jungle which dominates the second half of the novel.
1992 City of Gold A complex web of storylines set in wartime Cairo, as the city is threatened by Rommel’s advancing Afrika Korps forces in 1942. We meet crooks, gangsters, spies, émigrés, soldiers, detectives, nurses, deserters and heroes as they get caught up in gun smuggling, black marketeering and much more, in trying to track down the elusive ‘Rommel spy’ and, oh yes, fighting the Germans.
1993 Violent Ward Very entertaining, boisterous first-person narrative by Los Angeles shyster lawyer Mickey Murphy who gets bought out by his biggest client, menacing billionaire Zach Petrovitch, only to find himself caught up in Big Pete’s complex criminal activities and turbulent personal life. The novel comes to a climax against the violent backdrop of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in April 1992.
1993 Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II
1994 Faith Return to Bernard Samson, the 40-something SIS agent, and the world of his friends and family, familiar to us from the previous six Samson novels. Most of the characters (and readers) are still reeling from the bloody shootout when his wife returned from her undercover mission to East Germany at the climax of the previous novel. This book re-acquaints us with all the well-loved characters from the previous stories, in a plot ostensibly about smuggling a KGB colonel out from the East, but is really about who knows the truth – and who is trying to cover up – the real cause of the Fiona-escape debacle.
1995 Hope 40-something SIS agent Bernard Samson continues trying to get to the bottom of the death of his sister-in-law, Tessa Kosinski and is soon on the trail of her husband, George, who has gone missing back in his native Poland.
1996 Charity Ninth and final Bernard Samson novel in which it takes Bernard 300 pages to piece together the mystery which we readers learned all about in the sixth novel of the series, ie that the plot to murder Fiona’s sister, Tessa, was concocted by Silas Gaunt. Silas commissioned Jim Prettyman to be the middle-man and instructed him to murder the actual assassin, Thurkettle. Now that is is openly acknowledged by the Department’s senior staff, the most striking thing about the whole event – its sheer amateurish cack-handedness – is dismissed by one and all as being due to Gaunt’s (conveniently sudden) mental illness. As for family affairs: It is Bret who ends up marrying Bernard’s one-time lover, the glamorous Gloria; Bernard is finally promised the job of running the Berlin Office, which everyone has always said he should have: and the novel ends with a promise of reconciliation with his beautiful, high-flying and loving wife, Fiona.

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by Simon on January 16, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel, Spy novel, Thriller

Posted by Simon on January 16, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/16/charity-len-deighton/

Hope by Len Deighton (1995)

‘There are more important things in life than money, Bernard,’ she said.
‘Prove it,’ I told her. (p.301)

This is a cracking book: by turns complex, puzzling, full of pungent local colour, humorous and touching.

Spying as soap opera / Espionage as sitcom

From the previous seven novels about the 40-something MI6 agent, Bernard Samson, his wife and kids and father-in-law and sister- and brother-in-law, and old friends in Berlin and the gang of eccentrics who (apparently) populate the European Department of MI6, we have become as familiar with the cast of these novels as with the characters in a favourite soap opera or sitcom.

In the first trilogy Samson realised his wife was a Soviet double agent, and the set climaxed with her bolting to East Germany. In shock he takes comfort in a new relationship with glamorous young Gloria, who also works at the Department. In the second trilogy Samson slowly realised that his wife was, after all, a triple agent, only pretending to work for the KGB while all along the plan was for her to ‘defect’, infiltrate the East German set-up at a high-level, report back solid gold intelligence and foment insurrection among East Germany’s churches and civil society.

This second trilogy climaxed with Fiona’s escape from the East once her mission was up – but the escape was badly bungled. In a rainswept layby on an Autobahn between East and West there is a very messy shootout in which several KGB agents were shot dead as well as Fiona’s own sister, Tessa, there, apparently by chance having clambered into Bernard’s pickup van drunk from a party. Samson does some of the shooting and they both witness Tessa being mown down before he sweeps Fiona into the pickup van, drives into the West, loads her into a waiting plane and they both fly out to California to recuperate and be debriefed at the luxury home of American MI6 agent, Bret Rensselaer.

The second trilogy added the twist that the third novel in the series was the first not to be told in the warm first-person persona of Samson, but narrated by a detached third-person narrator. This objective version of events takes us all the way back to 1977 to show the genesis and slow incubation of the Fiona Plan, codenamed Operation Sinker (hence the titles of the second trilogy, Spy Hook, Spy Line and Spy Sinker) seeing things mainly from Fiona’s point of view and showing how the plan was conceived by Bret and signed off by the doddery old Director-General and the wily éminence grise of the Department, old Silas Gaunt.

The impact of this sixth book, Spy Sinker, is devastating to the reader of the series, upsetting loads of our preconceptions. It shows Samson as a rather pitiful patsy, wholly unaware of the conspiracies going on around him, unaware that his wife is a double agent, let alone a triple agent, something almost everyone else knows about, even his best friend, Werner Volkmann. Most upsetting is the way the death of Fiona’s sister, Tessa, at the ill-fated shootout, is revealed to have been not a ghastly accident, but part of a horrible plan to try and convince the KGB that Tessa’s badly-burned body is really Fiona’s, so the Stasi/KGB will think that Fiona didn’t succeed in defecting and will carry on using the old codes and security protocols for a bit longer. The story is given out that Fiona was killed and that Bernard has run off with her sister Tessa.

This seemed, when I read it, grotesquely improbable and needlessly violent. It also seemed fundamentally stupid because sooner or later Fiona would resurface, the other side would know they’d been fooled – and Bernard would, presumably, eventually return to London, and everyone who’s been told the cover story of his elopement with Tessa would realise they’d been lied to and want to know by who and why. It seemed cack-handed, solved nothing and created untold problems for the callous nitwits who conceived it.

Deighton’s Secret Intelligence Service

In fact Deighton’s entire depiction of the SIS is very odd. It reads more like the staff room at Hogwarts or the Addams Family. At the top is the Director-General of the SIS, Sir Henry Clevemore, who is portrayed as a senile headmaster, cloistered in an incredibly cluttered, dingy office, littered with ancient books and forgotten paperwork, refusing to use a computer or allow his staff to, and accompanied by a filthy ancient Labrador who slobbers and growls under his desk (and which at one point bites Dicky, drawing blood).

The power behind the throne is Silas Gaunt, a canny old posh man who lives in a decaying mansion in the Cotswolds where the other characters regularly go for bracing country weekends, gossip and off-the-record briefings. He comes on as an uncle figure for Samson but in Spy Sinker we learn that he lied his head off to Samson for years about the Fiona Plan of which he was a prime mover.

Dicky Cruyer is the preposterously dim, flashy desk jockey who has manoeuvred his way to becoming Head of Operations, then Controller of Europe. Samson does nothing but take the mickey out of him, laughing at his ludicrous outfits (faded jeans and cowboy boots!), his taste in music (Elvis Presley played on a tinny cassette player) and his steady stream of tawdry affairs with younger women which are driving his sweet if pretentious wife, Daphne, to drink.

Off to one side is the ageing American, Bret Rensselaer, who was head of an Economics Unit in the early books but found his empire being sidelined, before being suspected of himself being a double agent, and then badly wounded in a shootout in Berlin. He disappeared off to the States, at first thought dead, then we are told he is recuperating. First of all, what the devil is a Yank doing in the SIS? Don’t they have their own intelligence services? Can’t we staff our own secret service? Number two, what is going on when, at the end of Faith, it is revealed that Bret – old, white-haired, wounded and you’d have thought, well past it – turns up and we learn he is moving back into the London office as temporary Deputy Director-General. This is funny insofar as it scuppers Dicky’s scheming for promotion. But surely the antics of all of these grotesques is some kind of comedy or satire?

For is the SIS really like this? Was it really like this in 1987, at the end of the Cold War? I can’t believe it. I’ve worked in UK government IT for some years, and the whole point about a bureaucracy is that it has hundreds, if not thousands of people, all drafting memos, reports and proposals and then having hundreds of meetings to discuss them. a) Deighton’s portrayal of the Department makes it sound as if there are only four or five notable people in it, and b) they spend all their time discussing each other and Samson’s private life and c) it makes these senior personnel sound like characters from a freak show. It chimes with neither le Carré’s sober depiction of cunningly scheming public schoolmen nor Frederick Forsyth’s depiction of super-slick modern professionals.

Thus the scenes featuring any of these characters, even when they’re discussing grown-up spy stuff, feel essentially comic in conception, with a cartoonish unreality. This, along with Samson’s steady stream of sarcastic but essentially affectionate commentary on them and his family and job, explain the friendly, sitcom feel of the books. They’re so quick and enjoyable to read that the occasional interruptions of some kind of violence – stabbings or shootouts – come as unexpected shocks, as if someone got shot dead in an episode of Friends.

Faith

In the first of this third and final trilogy, Bernard and Fiona return to London and resume their working and domestic lives almost as if nothing had happened. Tessa’s husband, George, has left the country for tax exile in Switzerland, letting them move into his luxury flat in Mayfair. They both go back to work in the MI6 building and are soon gossiping about the ups and downs in the bureaucracy which really boils down to how their boss, Dicky Cruyer, is faring in his schemes to become Deputy Director General. Both of them have to deal with the presence of Gloria, the gorgeous young woman half Samson’s age, who he took up with after Fiona’s ‘defection’ and now is struggling to drop and forget; a struggle made impossible by the fact that she, too, works for the Department, in the same building, even on the same floor.

The novel is ostensibly concerned with arranging the defection of a KGB colonel, code-named VERDI, who’s been instrumental in migrating all the KGB’s data to a new computer system and so would be able to provide a gold mine of information. After several hundred pages of false trails and dead ends, VERDI is successfully transported across the Wall and to freedom in the West. Samson and his long-time German buddy Werner Volkmann are given the job of protecting him and beginning his debriefing when, not unexpectedly, VERDI is assassinated by a sniper.

He is bumped off immediately after he’s told Bernard and Werner a completely different version of the Fiona shootout than the one we read in Spy Sinker, namely that Tessa was never killed, it was a woman KGB officer that was following Fiona who was shot, Tessa was in fact captured by the East German secret service and is currently being held in prison.

Really? But before anyone can interrogate VERDI further, bang! he’s shot dead by an assassin. Was he a plant? Was his sole function to sow the seed of an alternative narrative of Fiona’s escape and Tessa’s death? Who would benefit from such a thing? Well, Silas and Bret and the higher-ups in the Department who conceived the wicked plan to kill Tessa to facilitate her sister’s escape would be off the hook if this version is believed; and anything bad which subsequently happens to Tessa could be conveniently blamed on the KGB or Stasi.

Having been shown in Spy Sinker how completely ignorant Samson is of every important thing that was going on around him, it’s impossible to read his analysis of events with any confidence. No doubt that’s the aim, to create the dramatic irony that we the readers now know more about things than the narrator: in fact at one point there is an immense moment of dramatic irony, when Samson moans about why he always knows far more about what’s going on than anyone else:

What was wrong with me? I never made sufficient allowance for the slowness of people like Rupert, Dicky and Bret and the rest of them. They never understood what was really happening. (p.279)

As we now sadly know, nothing could be further from the truth, Bernard is completely deluded. And yet for all that we know this, the warmth of Samson’s narrating voice and the humour of the oddball cast of characters tend to outweigh the intended ironic situation. I find the comic scenes and dialogue more immediately engaging than the multiple levels of intrigue which may, or may not, be playing out. Even when I don’t fully understand what’s going on, I enjoy the voice.

Hope

Once again, according to Deighton the main focus of MI6 in the year 1987, as Gorbachev promoted perestroika and glasnost, as the Baltic republics became restive, as the Poles demonstrated in favour of Solidarity – was investigating the family affairs of Bernard Samson, namely trying to get to the bottom of the puzzle, Who Killed Tessa?

This novel, part two of the final trilogy, circles around the attempts by Tessa’s husband, George Kosinski, to get to the bottom of her death.

Chapters

1 Mayfair, October 1987 Opens dramatically with a man ringing the doorbell of the flat Bernard and Fiona have inherited from her dead sister, Tessa. Bernard answers and the man stumbles inside, badly stabbed and bleeding. Moments later Bernard’s brother-in-law George Kosinski arrives to take charge: the man is one of his more dodgy employees. George apologises, and takes him off to his car. The real purpose of this event is to establish George as the focal point of the novel. –At the office Bernard meets with his reliably flashy and superficial boss, Dicky Cruyer, and finds himself invited to fly with him to visit George at his lakefront house near Zurich. Why? George is reported to have been visited by some known Stasi goons. –Fiona and Bernard wake up on the night of the Great Storm, 15 October, finding themselves estranged and full of unspoken thoughts: maybe the storm is a symbol of their marriage. –In Zurich, at the house, Dicky is cavalier with the housekeeper and authorities but canny Bernard manages to wangle out of the housekeeper and some contacts that George appears to have smuggled himself back to his homeland, Poland. But not before George went to a jewellers with a ring. It is Tessa’s engagement ring. Dicky jumps to the conclusion: so the Stasi men came here with Tessa’s ring? What are they up to, Bernard?

2 Warsaw To find out Bernard and Dicky fly to Warsaw. Berlin dominated the first set of books. Here Deighton does an equally thorough job of describing Warsaw in the early snows of winter, the geography, the history, the sights and sounds and smells. An old contact of Samson’s, Sarah, comes to his hotel room to deliver some goods promised by her husband, Boris. There’s talk she prostitutes herself and that he beats her; she certainly has bad bruises. The package was meant to contain a gun but instead has two heavy tyre levels and some garrotting wire. Warsaw can be a tough town. –This is proved when they go to the notorious Rozyckiego market, looking to find a sniff of George. Instead they are picked up by two thugs pretending to be secret police who escort them not to a station, but to a squalid hovel above a pawn shop and into a room which is obviously an execution room. Here, in the split second as they lock the door, Bernard hits first one then the other with the silly umbrella Dicky’s been taking the mickey out of. He breaks the first one’s arm and just managed to smash the other one’s jaw as he’s raising his pistol. Bernard hits them some more, then kicks them for good measure. Inside the umbrella he had packed the tyre levers. Taking the goons’ guns, they scarper.

3 Masuria, Poland The market trip had paid off. Just before they were set on, one of Bernard’s contacts told him that George had been seen and is known to have set off for his family mansion in the country. Dicky and Samson hire a crappy East European car and drive along terrible roads into the snow-bound desolate countryside. They pass vast Russian barracks and get through two scary roadblocks before arriving at one peopled by a militia. I wondered if there was going to be a firefight, but they eventually agree to escort our boys up a windy track into the middle of nowhere where they reach the Kosinski mansion, situated by a lake. Here they are welcomed by a real Addams Family crew, skinny Uncle Nico who has been writing a book about Poland’s national saint for thirty years, his deaf wife Aunt Mary, the gaunt ancient (male) secretary, Karol, and the master of the house, the flamboyant actor and writer and self-proclaimed legend, Stefan Kosinski, brother of our George.

4 The Kosinski Mansion, Masuria, Poland We really get to marinade in the weird atmosphere of this shabby, rundown mansion in the middle of nowhere in the middle of high snowdrifts, with its silent children and invisible servants. At one point locals come to say they’ve found a body. Stefan takes Dicky and Samson to the place, a grave where just a leg has been found, mutilated, its big toe and other bits chewed off and what is undoubtedly one of George’s smart London shoes nearby. They are turfed out of the mansion while the local priest holds an exorcism. Bernard insists they sneak back in and they see it is another charade, his servants are in fact sounding for hidden secret police microphones, the whole thing put on by Stefan who melodramatises himself and the house in order to maintain kudos with the locals and with his devoted followers among the intelligentsia. Unsurprisingly, Bernard has come to the conclusion he is a prancing fraud. He also thinks the leg has got nothing to do with George. He and Dicky leave before the real snow hits and they get marooned in this madhouse.

5 Kent, England A short detour while Bernard goes to visit retired SIS man Harry Strang at his Kent home. Harry was a veteran of Spanish-speaking countries going back as far as Franco, with the scars to prove it. Just before retirement he was assistant to the Deputy Director-General. Bernard pushes him about the events of the fateful night: who ordered the ambulance; who made all the arrangements; who booked the RAF plane on standby? All that took lots of co-ordination. Harry is taciturn and tries to blow Bernard off with his poor memory, his dim recollection, not sure, can’t remember.

6 Mayfair, London Long conversation in their flat between Fiona and Bernard. He rubbishes the idea that it was George’s leg. He says George was whisked off to Poland by professionals; he’s in league with someone. Conversation moves on to the method Fiona was paid by during her double and triple agent period, by a fund set up by Bret and administered by one Jim Prettyman. And then onto office gossip and promotion possibilities: Bernard is on a five-year fixed-term contract which can be terminated at any time, with no pension or other perks. Fiona says Dicky wants to appoint Bernard as deputy in the Berlin Field Unit, the job he should always have had because of his Berlin childhood and flawless German. Is this a trick to get rid of him from London? Why is Fiona taking Dicky’s side, is it because she also wants him to change focus and out of the way, or does she think it is a genuine opportunity? Bernard, for his part, immediately grasps that, if he owes the job to Dicky, he will become Dicky’s creature and forced to spy on the present Head of the Berlin Office, Frank Harrington, his dad’s old friend. The books are full of long discussions of who’s up, who’s down, what various promotions mean or don’t mean, the office politics entangled with operational plans, with the lies and betrayal going on ‘out there’.

7 Fletcher House (SIS Annexe) London Gloria comes to visit Bernard in his shabby little room in an annexe building off Tottenham Court Road. She is explaining how devastated she is by the end of their relationship when Dicky arrives and gloatingly takes the mickey out of the ‘two love-birds’. The conversation is interrupted by the unexpected delivery of a package for Bernard which, when opened, turns out to be a medical jar containing preserving fluid and a human hand, one finger bearing a signet ring like George Kosinski’s. Dicky insists this is proof George is dead, Bernard is sceptical. While they’re arguing a bearded man who had been prowling the corridor outside the room unexpectedly runs into the room, grabs the jar and nips off down the corridor. While Bernard hesitates, Dicky pulls out a massive revolver and goes haring off after him, letting off pot shots. As Bernard catches up with them he sees Dicky let off a shot which sends the man sprawling and the jar flying to shatter against the wall, but the man must be wearing a bullet-proof jacket for he gets up, bursts through the emergency doors and into a waiting car which speeds off.

8 SIS Offices, Berlin Cut to Bernard in Berlin, in the house of the Head of the SIS Field Unit Frank Harrington, where he has, apparently, accepted the post as Frank’s number two. They review the man running off with the hand incident. Bernard insists they wanted us to see the hand long enough to confirm Dicky’s theory that George is dead, but not long enough to send it to a lab and get it analysed and discover it isn’t George’s hand. Was he Stasi? Yes, same as one of the four guys who visited George in Zurich. Frank tells him the latest news, that one of their networks in the East, DELIUS, has gone silent: it’s the same one Bernard used in the previous novel after he shot at the car following him after discovering VERDI’s dead body, the same pastor who protected him and young Robin in that episode fro the previous novel, Faith. As soon as Frank has departed to fly back to London on a family visit, Bernard requisitions a motorbike and crosses the border on a forged passport, swaps the bike for a car and drives to Allenstein bei Magdeburg. Here he first visits the wretched home of Theo Forster, a sick man who works in the local bicycle factory and who Bernard was at school with back in Berlin (as he was at school with so many of the novels’ characters). Theo explains that the pastor has been causing trouble but they’ll be able to deal with him. Bernard drives off to confront the pastor who initially recalls Fiona’s good work for them, encouraging the churches. But under bullying and provocation from Bernard, goes on to reveal himself to be a Stasi agent. But Bernard pushes him further, into an ambiguous psychological space where he proposes the pastor become a double agent working for us. As Bernard leaves, the pastor gets into his car as if to follow him but the car explodes dramatically. It was booby-trapped. Why? By Theo and the network? That was suicidal of them. Bernard drives like a maniac to the safe house, swaps the car for his motorbike and has crossed the border an hour later. — Next day Frank’s efficient secretary, Lida, begins bringing in radio intercepts of the DELIUS network being ‘rolled up’ ie arrested one by one. — Depressed Bernard goes to an all-night bar near the Witzleben S-Bahn. Here Theo’s devout communist son, Bruno, finds and confronts him. He is allowed out of the East because he is a Marxist zealot and so allowed to work on the overland railway which crosses the border. He rails at Bernard for bullying his father into joining the opposition and his stupid ‘network’ and now he’ll die in a labour camp. He throws at Bernard the parting gift Theo asked his son to give him, a Nazi medal, which Bernard collected as a boy and Theo knows he loves.

9 Hennig Hotel, West Berlin Bernard recovers from the Bruno encounter by chatting with ancient Aunt Lisl in her hotel. This is where Bernard’s dad based himself immediately after the war and where he has his earliest memories. (Liesl’s childhood and young adulthood, marriage and mature life are one among many lives described in the one-off epic background to the series, Winter). Bernard goes into the ballroom where Werner is decorating the Christmas tree. Werner steels himself and tells Bernard that he, Werner, was Fiona’s case officer during her period in the East. Not only that: Werner tells Bernard that Fiona had an affair before and during her mission, with a Canadian doctor who was himself a communist spy set to monitor her. Bernard is left reeling from ‘the knife-thrust of my wife’s betrayal’. His whole world is turned upside down. Again.

Throughout the book thus far we have seen him repressing his feelings for Gloria, being standoffish, insisting on being professional, avoiding even a polite peck on the cheek – all in the name of trying to stay faithful to Fiona, to re-orient his feelings towards her and a happy family life, despite the lies she told him and the hell she put him through, and despite the continual bickering or misunderstandings in their conversations. But now – now maybe he should follow his heart and express his feelings for Gloria…

10 Hennig Hotel, West Berlin Fiona wakes Bernard with a phone call from London, asking if it’s alright if Daddy takes the kids on a jamboree holiday to the Caribbean? ‘And if I go, too’? Bernard grits his teeth and agrees. Christmas alone in Berlin brooding on the news that his wife betrayed him. In every sense. Wonderful. The next morning he has a very thick head and feels dizzy. When he tries to get up he gets as far as dressing but, on the narrow attic landing, has a dizzy spell and ends up falling down the stairs. He regains consciousness to find Werner has called an Army doctor who now gives him a powerful sedative.

11 West Berlin After a day or so recovering Bernard manages to get up, shower and shave and make his way to the glamorous hotel where he knows Bret Rensselaer has come to stay along with Gloria. (It feels like a tiny, tiny, tiny world of the same half-dozen characters endlessly circulating and bumping into each other). After the usual expressions of how difficult she finds it to be working alongside him and Fiona (and while Bernard resists his longing to reach out and kiss her), Gloria tells him the latest speculation about when the D-G will retire and who will replace him (will it be Dicky or Fiona? probably not Dicky because Bret will try to block it) and so on. More usefully, she goes on to tell him signals section have intercepted lots of traffic between the Stasi and Warsaw about delivery of a package: could it be Tessa’s body? At which point Gloria walks through into the bedroom where the maids have been working and shrieks in horror: there in the bed is a bloodless corpse! Bernard realises it’s young Robin. Before Bernard took to his bed, he remembers now Lida saying something about Robin checking out the Unit’s motorbike and probably following Bernard’s trail to Alleinstein and the assassinated parson-cum-spy. The fool! The Stasi were, as he feared, waiting for him. Bernard has Lida call in an explosives and disposal team from the British Army (it turns out to include the same fix-it doctor who injected him in the previous chapter). Gloria and Bernard fly back to London on the next Army plane, and Bernard is met at the airfield and driven to a midnight meeting at Dicky Cruyer’s house. Here he finds Bret and a new character, Rupert Copper, our man in the Warsaw embassy. Our Warsaw people have spotted George. Turns out the Kosinski family have some kind of guest accommodation not far from the main mansion: George must have been hiding out there. The meeting ponders the possible meanings and discuss the Big Question: Is Tessa alive or not, while Bernard realises he’s the schmuck who’s going to be sent back to Poland to find his damn brother-in-law. Bret, the smart one, asks Bernard why the Stasi and Poland’s secret police, the Bezpieca, are helping George? Are they, replies Bernard. Maybe George has bought influence at every level; he is loaded, after all. And he is obsessed with being reunited with Tessa. Or maybe, says Bret, they are trying to turn him so they can use him against us? — Rupert gives him a lift back to the Mayfair flat and fills Bernard in a bit: Does he realise the story of his wife’s defection, her violent rescue and the Tessa affair, are the talk of the entire organisation? Does he realise he is in over his head? Does he realise that if he dropped dead tomorrow nobody would be very sorry? Bernard asks Rupert why he thinks George has gone to such trouble to whisk himself away from Zurich and then fake his own death? Doesn’t Rupert realise it’s because he’s scared that we – MI6, the SIS, the good guys – are out to kill him? In a concession, Rupert shows Bernard the photos his men took of George in the Warsaw market. Bernard is staggered but manages to hide it; for in the photos he sees, next to the blurry shape of what might or might not be George, the image of Fiona’s dad, his poncy old father-in-law!

12 Warsaw Rupert and Bret are picked up from the windswept freezing Vilnius Station by two tough guys in an old ambulance. Someone has been in contact to say they have information about George Kosinski. During the drive they’re not sure if they’re going to be gassed or shot at any moment, but after 25 nerve-racking moments they arrive at a large maternity hospital and are shown into the office of the podgy, auburn-haired blue-eyed Director, Dr Urban. He says the entire mystery is simple: Tessa is pregnant; she is being moved from Berlin to Warsaw to be reunited with her loving husband. George has taken Polish citizenship and Tessa will too. So their baby will be entirely Polish. Rupert in his naivete becomes quite cross, pointing out that by making the child Polish it will never be able to escape or travel and thus will keep its parents safely trapped here forever. Dr Urban doesn’t deny it, stands to signify the interview is over, and puts on his brown military jacket. Like everyone in a position of power in Poland, he is an Army placeman. — For a second time Rupert gives Bernard a lift, this time back to the seedy friend’s apartment he’s staying in, initially speculating about whether Tessa is alive, what George’s real motives are, and so on, before Bernard persuades him to delay making his report until Bernard can ‘confirm or deny it’; upsetting a good pen-pushing Embassy man like Rupert. Parked outside the flat, Rupert says he was instructed to give Bernard the following: and opens a bag containing rolls of local currency, dollars, pounds, a pistol and a sub-machinegun. Aha. That kind of ‘confirming or denying’. Bernard’s last words are, ‘Alert the Swede’. The Swede?

13 Masuria, Poland The final chapter is quick and violent. Bernard is talking to George. Doesn’t say where so we assume it’s the holiday home near the Mansion, which had been mentioned earlier, the ground around buried in metres of snow. Bernard is relentlessly interrogating George. He says he loved Tessa. He says he’s always been a Polish patriot. He says he’s a devout Catholic. He tells a long story of remembering where he was when he heard a Polish cardinal had been made Pope. And so when the Bezpieca first approached him he thought he’d be helping his country. All they wanted was gossip from the parties he attended and people he met. It wasn’t really spying. Now Bernard is telling him that Tessa is not pregnant and on her way to be with him, she’s not alive – she is dead. He’s saying the the Bezpieca lied to him, have used him. — Bernard controls his anger and explains that they will leave by plane that night: is he coming or not? — That night they drive in Bernard’s rented Fiat to the area of the Wolfschanze, the vast compound of bunkers, roads, checkpoints, railway line and airstrip built as Hitler’s forward command post during the invasion of Russia. They are followed by four figures in a battered old Volvo. Bernard tells George the plan: when he stops the car, George is to scrabble free and run off into the snow shouting as if for help. This is what happens. As the four followers get out of their car and pause wondering what’s going on, Bernard sets fire to the Fiat and, as it explodes, runs towards the Bezpieca men firing the machine gun. At least one falls and the others scatter as George runs back towards him and they both jump into the Volvo and drive on along the old runway by the lake, just as they hear the sound of airplane engines overhead. It is The Swede, a freelance pilot, one of the Department’s most reliable contractors. Bernard parks the Volvo at the other end of the runway and sets it, too alight. The Swede brings the plane down on the runway mapped out between the two burning cars, taxis to walking pace and Bernard stuffs George into the plane, which turns and begins its take-off as they hear the bullets of the surviving Bezpieca men bounce off the fuselage. — In the plane George complains about the violence, ‘Did you have to shoot those men?’ etc, until Bernard explodes in rage: ‘Yes I did, because those are the men who beat up protestors, run the prisons and the labour camps and have repressed this nation for 45 years. Those are the men you’ve been helping, you scumbag.’ Bernard has to restrain himself from throwing George out of the plane into the Baltic. — When they arrive at the little Swedish airfield, an Embassy official and doctor are waiting to take custody of George. He is under arrest. He will be interrogated and probably tried for treason. And Gloria is there. She claims under orders from her boss, Bret. The Embassy car sweeps off leaving them alone on the chilly airfield apart from the Embassy’s official Lear jet. It’s there in case George or Bernard had been injured and needed to be flown back to an English hospital. Now it is sitting there vacant. Bernard lets off steam to Gloria: Tessa is dead. The nonsense with the leg and the hand were to persuade London that George, also, was dead. He was just worried the truth about his spying would get out, and he genuinely believed the lies the Bezpieca told him. God knows how long he’s been betraying his country, feeding back to his communist paymasters the titbits he picked up from Bernard and Fiona and all the other SIS people he hobnobbed with.

You need a drink, says Gloria, and it’s freezing, let’s get aboard the plane. Oh isn’t it warm. And look at the galley, good food. And the bar. And through here, the beds! The big soft beds.

‘Goodness,’ said Gloria, looking at me and smiling demurely. (p.305)

Like so many comedies, from Shakespeare to James Bond, this one ends with a heterosexual bang, as the male lead and the female lead bring closure to the story with an act of union and completion.

Spy fiction and the fall of the wall

It’s worth pointing out that these had become historical fictions even as they were published. The third of the second trilogy, Spy Sinker, published in 1990, must have been completed over the period when the Berlin Wall came down – November 1989, and I’ve remarked that Deighton showed admirable ingenuity in making the true-life participation of the East German churches in the fall of the regime into one of the central planks of his story.

But he was then faced with the same problem all other spy novelists faced (le Carré, Forsyth, Cruz Smith to name just the ones I’ve been reading): whether to move with the times and set their adventures in the post-Soviet world, or whether to cling to the (fictional) certainties of the Cold War.

We’ve seen that after a farewell to the Cold War and to his legendary spy, George Smiley (in The Secret Pilgrim, 1990) le Carré moved with impressive alacrity into the New World Order, where he found a sufficiency of baddies in international drug smuggling and gun-running.

Forsyth similarly packaged up all his Cold War yarns into a retrospective collection (The Deceiver, 1991) before moving on to new subject matter, to novels about the Gulf War (The Fist of God) and the corruption of post-Soviet Russia (Icon).

Deighton, however, was working in a different situation. He knew he had to complete the story – and the umpteen plotlines – left hanging at the end of the previous trilogy. Maybe he had mapped out the complete storyline before 1990. And certainly, the way he’d set most of the action in the late 1980s, but with room to spare before the collapse of communism, gave him to the room to complete the entire story well before the actual collapse began in 1989.

Hence the importance of emphasising the datelines: summer 1987 is when Fiona and Bernard return from R&R in California to start Faith; October 1987 is where Hope begins and carries on to Christmas Eve 1987. Plenty of time to wind up the whole affair and be home in time for tea.

Credit

Hope by Len Deighton was published by Harper Collins in 1995. All quotes and page references are from the 1996 Harper Collins paperback edition.

Len Deighton’s novels

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by Simon on January 14, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel, Spy novel, Thriller

Tagged 1995, Bernard Samson, Bret Rensselaer, Dicky Cruyer, Fiona Samson, George Kosinski, Hope, Len Deighton, Poland, Silas Gaunt, Tessa Kosinski, Warsaw

Posted by Simon on January 14, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/hope-len-deighton/

Faith by Len Deighton (1994)

‘If there’s one thing I pride myself on, it’s being able to sort out complicated technical material so it can be understood by the layman.’
‘Yes, you have a mechanical mind, Dicky, I said.
‘So why don’t you wind it up this week? Yes, I’ve heard that joke, Bernard. It’s time you got some new ones.’
Naughty Bernard: no coffee for you today! (p.275)

Recapping the Bernard Samson novels

Deighton is happier in his first-person narratives. This book’s predecessor, Violent Ward, also a first-person narrative, was warm and funny, unlike the two before that, MAMista and City of Gold, which felt hard-hearted, cold and cruel.

This is the first of the third and final trilogy of novels starring 40-something British intelligence officer Bernard Samson and it is, as most of its predecessors in the series, told in the warm, friendly, ironic tones of Bernard himself.

Bernard lives in London and works for MI6. In the first trilogy (Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match) his gorgeous, clever wife Fiona was exposed as a high-level ‘mole’ in the Department and forced to flee in a hurry to East Berlin. He is understandably upset she has lied to him for so long and finds himself falling for a new, rather gorgeous young Department employee, Gloria.

In the first two novels of the second set (Spy Hook, Spy Line) Bernard began to suspect – and then had it abundantly confirmed – that Fiona was in fact a triple agent and had been working for us all along. Her defection, and all her ‘spying’ against us before it, had been stage-managed solely to allow her to go East posing as a hero of Socialism, adopt a high-level KGB role in East Berlin, and then spy for us. Although this revelation explains lots of things which have been puzzling Bernard, it in some ways makes her deceit and betrayal even worse. In the second trilogy young Gloria moves in with him and becomes a new mother to his two young children, Billy and Sally.

Eventually, after several hard draining years in East Berlin, Fiona’s mission there is concluded and the Department arranges for her return. But the rainswept night of her final escape back from the East to our side turns into a bloodbath: Samson and Fiona manage to escape but the young agent accompanying Bernard – and Fiona’s sister, Tessa, who had drunkenly tagged along for the ride – are shot dead in a confused shootout, as are the East German agent Stinnes and another bystander, Harry Kennedy.

After Bernard and Fiona have fled the scene, the ex-CIA psychopath-cum-hitman Thurkettle who, unknown to both of them, has been masterminding this carnage, burns Tessa’s body in one of the cars left at the scene, and throws the bodies of British agent, Stinnes and Harry into a deep ditch – part of the roadworks where the whole shambles took place – where they will be covered with concrete and never found. He then motorcycles off to meet the middle-man who is due to give him his money – only to be himself assassinated and his body hidden. The whole sequence is shockingly brutal and cynical.

Still reeling from this bloodbath, the reader progresses to the third book of this second trilogy, Spy Sinker, which abruptly departs the storyline altogether and a) is told in the third person b) goes all the way back to 1977 to recap the events which led to Fiona’s ‘defection’. In line with my theory about Deighton’s points of view, this third-person narrative is much more detached and harder-hearted than the previous five, warm and chatty first-person narratives. It reveals that just about everyone in his life has lied to and betrayed Samson, who emerges as an unwitting pawn in numerous scams and stratagems, and paints a very unpleasant picture of human nature.

Among many other revelations is that it was the head of the Department himself, the D-G, and nice old Silas Gaunt, who cooked up the plan to smuggle Fiona back out of the East and conceived the idea of murdering her sister, Tessa, in order to sever her head and replace it with a model of Fiona’s head containing a set of teeth which perfectly match Fiona’s (!) The intention is to make the East German security police, the Stasi, think their defector boss, Fiona, really had died in a tragic car smash and burn-out. They will thus be lulled into a false sense of security and carry on using the same codes etc, while our chaps debrief Fiona in a safe house in California, and so we can go on tapping the Ossies for a bit longer.

For this end, apparently, Fiona’s own sister was deliberately murdered, decapitated and burned. Call me old-fashioned, but the horror, the cruelty, as well as the stupidity and callousness of such a plan burned out of me all sympathy for the MI6 depicted in these pages. And the charming, humorous banter of the earlier books, Bernard’s droll first-person commentary on his bosses and colleagues in ‘the Department’, was irreparably undermined.

Damaged mood

So when we open this novel, the first in the third and final trilogy, to find Bernard’s narration picking up the story in late 1987 – cheerfully telling us he and Fiona have more or less recovered after a long period of recuperation and debriefing in California – and are now back in London, and back at work together – the reader cannot read his breezy tones in the same way as before. We now know his point of view is limited and plain wrong about numerous key issues. We know he is the victim of a terrible conspiracy. Moreover:

a) Even a reasonably gullible reader like me cannot really believe that a woman can see her own sister shot dead in front of her (some of Tessa’s blood spattered onto Fiona’s coat and face), know it’s partly her fault, and then soon be completely back in the swing of the old job, fussing about the furniture and the trivia of office politics. It doesn’t hang properly. She would be devastated.

b) We, the readers, are nervously aware that, sooner or later, the secret of what happened to Fiona’s sister will come out – and the consequences will be terrible for everyone, including us.

The Bernard Samson universe

It’s a longish book, 360 pages, but it flies by. For some reason Deighton seems at home in this story and his prose is warm and relaxed. It’s tempting to say that the cocky young narrator of the Ipcress novels has grown up, has a wife and kids, but still has the same dry sardonic attitude towards his bosses or his pompous old father-in-law, here showing off about his expensive new artist’s ‘studio’:

‘It’s a place I come when I have to think,’ said David
‘Do you spend much time here?’ I asked.
Fiona glared at me but it went right over David’s head. (p.170)

Bernard and Fiona have been left a swish, Mayfair apartment in Tessa’s will, her husband – George Kosinski, Bernard’s brother-in-law – having moved to Switzerland for tax reasons. They are reunited with their children who, during their sojourn in California, have been looked after by Fiona’s pompous but wealthy father down in Leith Hill, Surrey. And they immediately go back to work full-time, getting reinvolved in Departmental politics, notably lots of fussing about whether their boss, Dicky Cruyer, will get promoted from Head of Ops to Deputy DG of the ‘Department’, and fretting about which office the newly-promoted Fiona will get, and so on. When I was off work with stress, I was only allowed back in stages, initially working part-time, given careful increments of work to re-adapt, monitored and subject to weekly meetings with HR to make sure I could cope. None of that here. Everything is back to ‘normal’ in one leap.

For example, Dicky hosts an excruciatingly embarrassing dinner party where his wife, fed up of all his affairs, is drunk and sarcastic in front of the usual characters – Bernard, Fiona, Gloria, Bret. There is a similarly fraught social Sunday at the father-in-law’s, attended by old Silas Gaunt, the shaggy, overweight, retired but still very influential eminence grise of the Service who we know, but Bernard doesn’t, conceived and carried out the entire Operation Sinker to send Fiona to the East and the blood-curdling plan to bring her back.

Early on Bernard flies back to Berlin where he stays with old Tante Lisl who we last saw wheelchair-bound but who’s had hip replacements and is noticeably more mobile and sprightly. He visits the elderly Frank Harrington, head of the Berlin Field Unit, friend of Bernard’s dad, still hankering after a move back to London and a ‘gong’. Then he hitchhikes down to Zurich to visit his best friend from his Berlin childhood, Werner Volkmann, who has left Lisl’s niece, Ingrid, to take up again with his youthful, go-getting but deeply untrustworthy girlfriend, Zena.

In other words, the old gang’s all here. The plot feels mostly concerned with taking Bernard to all his familiar places and touching base with all the faces we’ve gotten to know so well from the previous six novels, so that we can sink back into the warm comfort zone of the Bernard Samson soap opera.

There is a plot about spies and stuff but really, rather than a spy story which shows us some of the agents’ private lives, these novels feel more like a soap opera about a circle of middle-class people, with homes in Mayfair and the Home Counties, who have Sunday lunches, dinner parties, evenings in cooking and moaning about the office – and ever so occasionally, go off and do some dodgy dealing behind the Iron Curtain. All swathed in, delivered with, Samson (and Deighton)’s trademark dry humour.

As I said it, a movement in the next row of machines revealed the inquisitive and unfriendly eyes of a man named Morgan peeping over the top of the bull-pen. Morgan was a malevolent denizen of the top floor who was working on a PhD in gossip. (p.134)

Gloria

And threaded throughout the book is the domestic difficulty Samson has with the fact that, not only did he shack up with the gorgeous Gloria after Fiona ‘betrayed’ and ‘abandoned’ him, and end up falling seriously in love with her; but that, now Fiona is back, both women are working for the same Department, in the same building, on the same floor. Samson has painful conversations with Fiona, who can’t forgive him for ‘betraying’ her with another woman (er, hang on); and even more painful conversations with Gloria, who can’t bear it that she’s suddenly been shut out of his life.

The Gloria-Fiona thread is another way in which the novels feel more like a soap opera, with lots of tearful accusations and bitter recriminations etc, than a straight spy thriller.

(And there is a Gloria sub-sub-plotline: She refers now and then to her father, who was an émigré from Hungary, came to London as a trained dentist and ended up as a contractor to the Department, for example doing dental work on deep undercover field agents so their teeth looked like they’d had bad Eastern Bloc dental work. She mentions here and there that, while Samson was recuperating in the States, her father’s contract with the Department was terminated, very aggressively; officers came and removed all of his dental equipment. Thus rendered unemployed he has taken up the offer of a job back in Hungary, even though it is still communist and he might be running some risks for ever having left. –Now we know something neither Bernard or Gloria know, which is that the key to the whole swap-Tessa’s-body-for-Fiona’s plan was to supply Tessa’s corpse with a young woman’s head (burned beyond recognition) which contained teeth identical to Fiona’s – and, I don’t think it was 100% confirmed, but the strong presumption in the earlier novels is that it was Gloria’s father who supplied the head with the fake dental work ie he was a crucial element in the conspiracy and this explains, to the alert reader, why he has been shut down and shuffled off abroad. Where, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if something bad does happen to him as Gloria frets to Bernard in their one or two conversations on the subject.)

The plot

Collecting VERDI

Samson is asked to go over the Wall to visit a senior KGB man who might want to defect, code name VERDI. So he goes across the Wall and is driven to the rendezvous by a callow new agent, Robin. When they arrive at the spooky silent house in an East German village the guy they’re due to meet is dead in an armchair, his head blown off. As they leave, they are tailed by a car, so Samson stops on a deserted country road, gets out in an initially friendly way but then shoots at the car, hitting one of ‘their’ men, before jumping back into his own and screeching off.

The Delius network

Samson and Robin drive to a friendly church, the base of one of the many ‘networks’ we ran over in the East (this one code-named Delius). They are welcomed and sheltered by the pastor and this enables Deighton to expand on, or refresh our memories about, the Fiona-defecting plotline. To recap: Bret Rensselaer had identified a decade earlier that the East German churches might form a perfect channel of resistance to the communist regime. So Fiona was chosen to volunteer to spy for the KGB to build up a cover here in the West, before ‘defecting’ to the East, where she could take up her double agent role. There, from her senior position in East German intelligence, she began her real work for us, networking with German churches and encouraging them to speak out against the regime.

Fiona’s mission

You can see what Deighton is doing here, tying his heroine to actual developments in the real world, for the East German churches genuinely were among the focal points for growing resistance to the régime in the late 1980s. But, also in the real world, all the unrest – from churches to other civic groups, intellectuals and opposition parties – was only allowable because of the example of perestroika set by Gorbachev in Russia. It was Gorbachev lifting the lid which led to the collapse of the Eastern bloc, not the subversive activities of nice, public-school-educated English ladies. Deighton’s sleight of hand works… up to a point.

On a practical point: wouldn’t Fiona’s KGB bosses have noticed her anti-KGB activities? Just a little? Wouldn’t she have been very closely monitored indeed, followed every hour of the day, by her touchy new employers? She probably couldn’t go to the loo without them knowing: how, then, could she possibly have arranged meetings with all the leading subversive forces in the country and given them support, money, advice, without the KGB knowing a thing about it, in fact all about it? — Best to put the implausibility of the whole plotline to one side, and enjoy the show.

Rendezvous with Werner

After getting safely back to the West, Samson hitchhikes down to Zurich to see his old mate, Werner Volkmann. For some reason, on the way he has a punishing fight with the trucker who picks him up, leaving him uncertain whether it was an assassination attempt or just a psycho trucker. And the lift after that is with a police inspector who menacingly warns Samson that he better not cause any trouble or get arrested, or else he will have a hard time in the cells. Maybe these two encounters are to establish the tough, manly world of the thriller, the ‘real’ world of crime and law enforcement, of beatings-up on dark rainy nights, which we are meant to be in…

In Zurich there’s some business about safe houses, and having to contact Werner via secretive émigrés and the like, all enjoyable spy hokum, which gives way quickly to the two old buddies meeting up and having long chats about women and life. Werner has been sidelined by London, again (even though we know Werner was Fiona’s case officer, or official liaison channel with London, through her years in the East and so was, at one point, central to the biggest operation in MI6’s history). It feels like that has been quietly forgotten in order to restore the buddies-against-authority vibe Samson and Werner had in the earlier books. Much of the plot has a strong sense of déjà vu, not in the details, just in the feel and recurring situations. In fact more than once Samson himself comments on it, saying he feels like he’s been at this dinner party, or had this conversation with Frank, before. And he has. But the reader doesn’t mind because it’s all done with good humour and intelligence. We like these dinner parties. We like these clever conversations.

Dicky Cruyer’s plan

It transpires that Dicky Cruyer wants to make his name and secure promotion by smuggling VERDI out of the East. VERDI is something to do with the KGB’s vast new computer database and so would be able to tell us all their secrets. However, he was also involved in the investigation into Fiona / Tessa’s death. Samson keeps telling people, especially Werner, that deep down Fiona is traumatised and will never be the same. (That’s what Deighton has to have him say to give the novel some kind of psychological plausibility, but it doesn’t actually show it much. In all the conversations at home, in the office, dinners at home, meeting the kids, dinner parties out and Sunday lunches at her father’s, Fiona comes over as an absolutely normal, pukkah, upper-middle-class gel without a shadow of trauma. Deighton tells but doesn’t show her alleged unravelling.)

Meanwhile, we learn that Fiona hired an American ex-agent and freelance snoop, Timmerman, to go looking for Tessa out East. And late on in the novel we discover it was his body that Samson found at the rendezvous, not VERDI’s. Was Timmerman murdered because he had discovered too much? What does ‘too much’ actually mean? Remember, Samson himself doesn’t know anything about the conspiracy to murder Tessa and try and con the other side that her body was Fiona’s. (Most of this novel seems to be about the way various different characters either know this murderous truth and are probably hiding it (Rennsaeler? Frank Hutchinson? The DG?) or are blissfully ignorant of it and groping to find out (Fiona, Tessa’s husband George, and Samson himself)).

VERDI’s version

Eventually VERDI ie Andrey Fedosov is successfully smuggled out of the East and Samson and Werner are charged with looking after him, though Samson is very unhappy that it has to be in a Departmental flat in Marylebone instead of the big country estate surrounded by CCTV and security guards which they usually employ for the purpose. The latter, Dicky tells him, is being refurbished due to ‘asbestos in the roof’.

In one of his first presentations to our boys, Fedosov tells Werner and Samson that Tessa was never killed! At the confused shootout by the Autobahn in the rain, it was the KGB woman officer charged with getting Fiona back and despatched to intercept her as soon as the KGB knew she’d done a bunk, it was this KGB woman who was shot! What? And that the drunk Tessa we saw climbing into Samson’s transit van as he left a hotel party to collect Fiona, and who we saw shot in the confused handover, was not shot at all but seized by the opposition in all the confusion and taken to a Stasi interrogation centre. What? This is completely against all the versions of events we’d previously read. Can it possibly be true?

Either Deighton is giving himself an ‘out’, a way of providing the happy end to the Tessa affair that we softer-hearted readers would like to see pulled out of a hat. Or, more true to thriller conventions, Fedosov has been allowed to defect and to tell this story in order to put Samson off the grisly reality which Spy Sinker seemed to describe: that Tessa was deliberately murdered on the orders of people in his own Department. This way it looks like the woman killed was a baddy and Tessa is alive: this gets the Department higher-ups off the hook and, hopefully, will ease Fiona’s guilt. Then if Tessa proves irrecoverable or her body turns up, it can conveniently be blamed on the evil KGB instead of our own bad guys.

A family affair

And so, despite cursory nods in the direction of glasnost and the vast social and political changes affecting the world in 1987, the plot has turned into an entirely family affair. Again. Maybe the whole trilogy will circle round the question: Who killed Tessa? Was she actually killed at all? Will Fiona’s investigations uncover the truth? Will the bad guys in the Department manage to keep the real events a secret? Will Samson get to the bottom of things or will he continue to be the patsy for much larger, much cleverer forces, that he was revealed to be in Spy Sinker?

Having told his version of the Tessa affair with a big smile on his face, Fedosov settles back into an armchair in the safe house, and is promptly shot through the heart by a long range sniper bullet. Werner and Samson throw themselves to the floor and crawl across to check but… yep, he was killed instantly. It’s almost as if someone wanted him to come West, tell his fiction about Tessa and then… bang!

The novel ends with Werner and Samson awaiting being called into the official enquiry into why and how they let Fedosov be assassinated. There’s another strong sense of déjà vu as, once again, Samson and his pal are in the doghouse – but also a familiar feeling that the entire trilogy will be about unravelling just one ‘secret’, as the previous trilogies – despite all the local colour – boiled down to one question: Is Fiona really a Russian spy?

Will Deighton manage to pull it off, to supply enough twists and turns to keep us reading, and yet deliver an outcome which is both unexpected and emotionally satisfying? The only way to find out is to read on, which is what makes this, like all the novels in the series, so fiendishly complex, entertaining and compelling.

Credit

Faith by Len Deighton was published by Harper Collins 1994. All quotes and page references from the 1995 HarperCollins paperback edition.

Len Deighton’s novels

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by Simon on January 13, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Spy novel, Thriller

Tagged 1994, Andrey Fedosov, Berlin, Berlin Wall, Bernard Samson, Communism, Dicky Cruyer, Faith, Fiona Samson, Germany, Len Deighton, Tante Lisl, VERDI, Werner Volkmann

Posted by Simon on January 13, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/13/faith-len-deighton/

Violent Ward by Len Deighton (1993)

I had a bad feeling about this one – books set in America by British writers are often duff – but this is Deighton’s most enjoyable novel for years.

Mickey Murphy

It’s a first-person narrative in the voice of Mickey Murphy, a street-wise, fast-talking, unscrupulous Los Angeles lawyer. Inevitably, he’s divorced – the novel opens with him cowering under his desk yelling at his secretary, the sternly German Miss Huth, to call the fire brigade because his shouty ex-wife, Betty, is on the balcony outside threatening to jump . He’s also sadly alienated from his grown-up son, Danny, who is a lazy slob, allegedly studying at USC (which Mickey nicknames the ‘University for Spoilt Children’) and shacked up with a difficult, rude girlfriend, Robyna.

The plot features numerous incidents and encounters with wives, ex-wives, girlfriends, fading Hollywood stars and agents, classic car collectors, hoodlums, and hit-men, in a wide selection of bars, dives, hotel lobbies, Beverley Hills mansions, private airfields and up in the exclusive ski resort of Aspen. Deighton shows, or shows off, an impressive familiarity with the street layout of LA, his narrator sharing in-depth knowledge of which freeway to take at which hour of the day, along with short cuts and alternative routes, as well as a breezy familiarity with US law, police procedure, TV shows, fast food menus and so on.

Plots where Los Angeles lowlife and Hollywood glitz meet are not exactly a neglected subject, in fact it may be the most over-done subject in the English-speaking world, if you add to the tens of thousands of novels on the subject, all the movies about movies, and the hundreds of thousands of TV shows about California detectives.

Nonetheless, for me, it worked. It’s the first Deighton for some time that I read with pure pleasure, gripped by the plot, loving Murphy’s wise-cracking jaded tone of voice, laughing at the jokes. Its 360 pages flew by. It’s a great airport or poolside read.

The plot

The novel opens as Murphy’s struggling law practice is bought up by one of his clients, Californian zillionaire Zachary Petrovitch. (Murphy has the standard shabby lawyer’s office downtown, opposite dingy takeaways and flop houses, his secretary is a no-nonsense German immigrant, his two partners are Koreans, one of whom (Korea Charlie) was shot dead by a client at a party celebrating getting off a murder charge, so there’s only one left, Billy Kim.)

Murphy is chuffed to be taken over by his biggest client, chuffed to be invited to Petrovitch’s star-studded parties, flattered to be invited out to his luxury house in the skiing-resort-of-the-stars, Aspen. And emotionally moved to meet up again with the love of his life, Ingrid, who was his sweetheart when they were both kids back at Junior High, even though she is now married to Mr High and Mighty Petrovitch.

In a series of scenes Ingrid slowly conveys to Mickey how unhappy she is, her worries that Petrovitch might be planning to kill her, her paranoia that, although she is ordered to sign lots of documents about new companies being created in South America, she never understands them, and has begun to have dark suspicions that, having set them up, she will then be disposed of.

Things move towards several mini crises: first of all Ingrid asks Mickey to find a friend of hers who’s disappeared, a guy who was on the board of various charities with her. He owns a distinctive classic car, a Packard Darrin. This makes it relatively easy for Mickey to track down the man, who’s been using various aliases, including Pinter, Panter and Pindero. Pindero is drunk when Mickey arrives at his hilltop hideout and drunkenly tells Mickey he’s a hitman who Ingrid has hired to bump off Petrovitch. He himself has a strongman protecting the house, a couple of Dobermans and a mini firing range. Hmm. Is he showing off or does he mean it?

A few days later Mickey returns to the house, finding no guard, no dogs, everything spooky and empty. This is a good atmospheric scene, as Mickey goes from room to room in the darkness and silence, convinced something is wrong but unable to put his finger on it. Until he opens the freezer and Pindero’s folded-up corpse tumbles out. Aha.

In a second eerie scene, Mickey’s just getting into bed after a hard day when he gets a call from Ingrid. She is down at the Malibu pier, can he come and collect her. When he does so she reveals she’s naked under her raincoat, having stripped off all her clothes in readiness to jump in the sea and commit suicide. But she couldn’t bring herself to. Mickey drives her to his place and is running a hot bath, listening to her fears for her life, when Petrovitch’s hatchet man, Goldie Arnez, rings up. They know Ingrid’s there. They’ll be round directly. Mickey gives her pyjamas to wear as he sees her to Petrovitch’s enormous limo. Petrovitch welcomes her back blank-faced. What the devil is going on? Is Ingrid so unhappy she wants to kill herself? Is Petrovitch really planning to kill her? Why does she go back to him so tamely?

Sub-plots

Throughout the novel there are plenty of other sub-plots bubbling away to keep Mickey and the reader puzzled and distracted.

Budd Byron One concerns a fading though still handsome Hollywood actor, Budd Byron, who Mickey socialises with, attends a barbeque at his stunning hilltop pad, and, against his better judgement, helps supply with a $300 handgun. He also was at school with Ingrid and Mickey.

The Rainbow’s End shelter for homeless men In another strand, Mickey is obliged to return the many favours he owes his Korean partner, Billy Kim, by managing the shipment of a corpse from a downtown shelter for homeless men, run by the sinister pastor, ‘Rainbow’ Stojil. Only once he’s committed does Mickey realise this is some kind of scam, the corpse in question bearing an uncanny resemblance to another of his clients, Sir Jeremy Westcliffe, a titled Brit who’s involved in countless shady deals via his alcoholic Brit lawyer, Vic Crichton. Since the death certificate gives the stiff’s name as Jeremy Westcliffe, Mickey deduces Sir J is disappearing and will reappear under a new identity somewhere. Ho hum. That’s show business.

Vic Crichton keeps turning up at inappropriate moments making awkward comments. There’s some broad comedy when he introduces everyone to his gorgeous, dolly bird wife at one of Petrovitch’s glamorous parties, only for Vic’s actual wife to phone Mickey later that night; she’s flown in from London to surprise him; yes, she probably will surprise him in bed with his mistress.

On a more serious note, Vic is involved with his partner in the scam around Sir Jeremy’s fake corpse. Not that that interrupts Sir Jeremy’s ongoing business deals with Petrovitch, for which Vic is the middle-man and gofer. These seem to involve the creation of a specific kind of legal entity which can be signed over to ’empty bearers’ in the US, but then collected and re-owned in South America. The owners of numerous Petrovitch corporations would legally cease their ownership of them – then reclaim them in Peru. (Peru? Yes, because Peru has no extradition treaty with the US.)

This dodgy procedure means the owners will owe no tax in the country of origin (the US), although Mickey is at pains to point out it involves risk at the point of ‘re-owning’. Someone else could establish right to the deeds before the intended owners – if, that is, anyone else knew about them.

Vic disconcerts Mickey by telling him point blank this is why Petrovitch has bought Mickey’s law practice; not because he’s old pals with Ingrid; not because of his stunning legal acumen; but because he can be bumped off and his rackety office torched in an arson attack, destroying all records of the dodgy transactions, once they’re carried through.

Petrovitch’s point of view

As the book enters the final straights, Petrovitch calls Mickey in for a Grand Audience. Mickey’s sarcastic wise-guy manner rises to the occasion of describing ‘Big Pete’s millionaire mansion, stuffed full of display cases showing genuine antique pots and coins and heavy classical paintings of ancient Rome,

‘Get Mickey a cup of coffee, will you, Goldie?’ As Goldie disappeared into the study room, Petrovitch sat down and stretched out his long thin legs to admire his patent leather Gucci loafers. Above his head, Marcus Aurelius was expelling the Germans from the Danube provinces; the river was very blue, the way Johann Strauss liked his Danube. (p.312)

Petrovitch assures him he knows Ingrid is unbalanced. He, with Goldie nodding by his side, claim that far from him wanting to bump off Ingrid, Ingrid hired Pindero to bump him off. ‘Happy marriage, is it?’ Mickey asks. ‘We know you visited Pindaro,’ Petrovitch says, with menace in his voice: ‘Were you acting as go-between for Ingrid? Were you part of the conspiracy to murder me?’ Er, no, Mickey replies. Emphatically.

The Rodney King riots

Trundling along in the background has been the protracted, true life court case surrounding the beating of black taxi driver by white police officers on 3 March 1991, which was caught on video. On April 29, 1992, the mostly white jury acquitted the police officers who had been brought to trial for the beating. the acquittal led to the 1991 Los Angeles riots, an explosion of violence, arson and looting which required the police, the U.S. Army, Marines and National Guard to restore order by which time the riots had caused 53 deaths, 2,383 injuries, more than 7,000 fires, damage to 3,100 businesses, and nearly $1 billion in financial losses.

The climax of the novel is timed to coincide with the riots. Mickey has made an appointment to meet Ingrid, Petrovitch and Vic Crichton on that very afternoon. As he drives to it he notices gangs of people rampaging in the streets, then he’s attacked in his car while stopped at lights. Parking in the underground car park he’s met by his neighbours toting revolvers and even a machine gun. In his office he finds Miss Huth in hysterics and Budd Byron pacing up and down brandishing his newly-acquired Browning pistol.

They watch the chaos spread in the streets and blocks outside and via the live TV news footage from the numerous media helicopters which swarm over the city. It is against this backdrop of riot and mayhem, that a helicopter arrives carrying the unexpected pairing of little Vic Crichton and smartly dressed Ingrid. Mickey rushes out to them carrying the documents they need to sign, having persuaded Vic to replace the bearer bonds with powers of attorney for him and Ingrid. They sign in a flustered hurry,but in the middle of this chaos another plot strand comes to a climax.

For Budd Byron comes running over waving his hand-gun. He asks Ingrid to get out of the helicopter. He loves her and, as they’d planned, he’s got everything arranged to take her away from all this to a new life. Mickey realises he was expecting Petrovitch to be in the chopper and was fully prepared to murder him. But Ingrid cruelly rejects him, says she was mentally unwell when she seduced him, now she is better and is reconciled with her fabulous husband. As the chopper lifts off and moves forward Budd chases it shooting his gun, emptying the magazine. I was braced for the chopper to crash and burn, killing Mickey’s childhood sweetheart, in the kind of cold-hearted, sudden death you get used to when reading Deighton – like the horrible death of Inez Cassidy in MAMista or the eviscerating of that nice Harry Wechsler in City of Gold. Fortunately Budd’s shots all go wide and the chopper flies off over the smoke-filed skies of the riot-torn city.

Mickey retreats to his office with the signed documents and watches more riot footage, before his secretary decides it’s safe to head off home and Mickey drives cautiously across town to his son, Danny’s, pad. Here he finds his ex-wife Betty, comforting their son. And, in an unusually heart-warming sequence, Mickey ends up sleeping with his wife and being at least partly reconciled to her. Aaaah. Partly because, amid the general mayhem, his wife seems to have reinvented herself as a Hollywood producer, seems to be putting together a package with good old Budd Byron, and is talking about getting a job on the set or in production for their lazy son. It’s a crazy town.

The reveal

Only in the last few pages of the novel do we finally understand everything that’s been going on. Petrovitch phones to make an appointment and flies in in his chopper, accompanied by his bulldog, Arnie. Mickey jumps into the passenger seat and explains: He has put together lots of the evidence – fake dead bodies, dummy death certificates, new identities, both Budd and Pindosa being seduced or paid by Ingrid to threaten or actually harm Petrovitch. But it was only when Ingrid showed up with Vic Crichton that he was sure they were in a conspiracy together. Their plan was to de-own shares in almost all Petrovitch’s companies, convert them into ‘bearable bonds’ (which appear to be a kind of share which has no named owner), then fly to Lima ahead of Petrovitch and, in that different country and legal jurisdiction, use the new identities they’d been creating with the help of Rainbow Stiloj to claim the bearerless shares, thus legally owning Petrovitch’s entire empire. ‘And you knew all this and let them get away with it?’ asks Petrovitch, with just a teeny hint of menace in his voice.

‘No,’ replies Mickey. He explains to Petrovitch that he persuaded Vic that leaving the ownerless shares to exist unclaimed, in legal limbo, until he and Zach arrived in Lima to claim them, was too risky. So Vic bought Mickey’s suggestion of having power of attorney over the shares and, in the panic of the helicopter-among-the-riots, Mickey got Vic and Ingrid to sign a power of attorney which would allow them to manage the shares in the ownerless interim. They certainly will fly to Lima under the new identities provided by Rainbow Stiloj and discover – that a power of attorney is only valid in the names signed on the form. Ingrid and Vic will arrive under new identities with new passports and discover – that their powers of attorney documents are invalid because they were drawn up and signed in their old (real) identities, and that they are powerless to claim the shares. Result: Petrovitch can fly down there at his leisure to claim ownership – and do what he thinks fit with the two absconders, if he can find them.

Petrovitch eyes Mickey coldly. ‘Looks like you were the only one who knew what was going on all along, Mickey. You’re a smart guy. You’re coming to Peru with me.’

Conclusion

And so it ends with Mickey the hero of the moment. The narrative foregrounds Mickey’s tough guy attitude, his street smarts and cynicism about Californian life and the Hollywood merry-go-round, but not very far below the surface beats a heart of gold.

Mickey’s voice is street-wise, snappy, convincingly American and often very funny. Although Deighton is venturing into territory done to death by the great Raymond Chandler and a thousand – ten thousand – imitators, I think it works. Deighton pulls it off. Violent Ward is as sharp and funny as his 1968 comedy, Only When I Larf, should have been and wasn’t quite. It is one of the most entertaining novels I’ve read in ages.

Len Deighton’s novels

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by Simon on January 12, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel

Tagged 1993, Betty Murphy, Billy Kim, Goldie Arnez, Ingrid Petrovitch, Korea Charlie, Len Deighton, Mickey Murphy, Vic Crichton, Violent Ward, Zachary Petrovitch

Posted by Simon on January 12, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/12/violent-ward-len-deighton/

City of Gold by Len Deighton (1992)

Part one – Plot summary

Cairo during the war

Because of the chameleon on the book cover I thought this might be another novel set in South America, the setting of MAMista, but in fact this one is set in wartime Cairo – apparently known back then as the ‘city of gold’ – in January 1942, as Rommel and Montgomery push each other’s armies back and forth across North Africa.

The novel opens with Army Special Investigator, Major Albert Cutler accompanying a soldier, Jimmy Ross (accused of killing a superior officer under fire) back to Cairo by train to stand trial. Cutler has a heart attack giving Ross a golden opportunity to swap clothes, identity cards and so on, and arrive in Cairo masquerading as the special investigator. A confident actor, he hands over Cutler’s body to the officer meeting him at the station, Captain Marker, claiming it is Ross’s. From that point onwards Ross-as-Cutler is on tenterhooks, scared that at any moment his impersonation of the investigator will be discovered by the soldiers surrounding him. Captain Marker escorts him to the Army’s main barracks at Bab el-Hadid, where he is assigned rooms, introduced to his staff, and then shown around town by Marker, who is puzzled as to why he seems so nervous.

By this route we enter the lives of a circle of people living in the Cairo at this moment in history. Peggy West, a good-looking, 30-year-old senior nurse, who lost her only child to illness and whose husband, Karl, has been away on active service in Iraq for eighteen long months. We see her supervising her sometimes difficult or emotional nurses at the Base Hospital, often overcome by the sight of so many dying and mutilated young men.

Peggy relies on money from the slippery Solomon Marx, who lives on a houseboat on the Nile, and who we see talking with his partner, Yigal, in a conversation which seems to reveal that they’re working for the Jewish independence forces in occupied Palestine. Solomon asks Peggy to keep and eye on Prince Piotr Nikoleiovitch Tikhmeibrazoff, a large, imposing Russian émigré who rents the entire top floor at the Hotel Magnifico. Its Italian owner, Lucio wants him out so she can rent the individual rooms at much greater profit to the hordes of Allied officers swarming into the city and looking for stylish bolt-holes. Everybody gossips that the Prince is Rommel’s spy in the city – it is well known that Rommel is getting verbatim reports of British troop deployments from a well-placed spy. But the Prince rises above it all, continuing to host his stylish parties, one of which Ross is taken to by the only woman on his staff at the barracks, the phenomenally posh Alice Stanhope. Alice’s mother, also living in Cairo, knows absolutely everyone dahling.

Meanwhile, in the Lady Fitzherbert brothel in the notorious El Birkeh district of the city, we see two partners in crime, Sergeants Percy and Smith, not their real names, who have booked a room to share the money from their latest deals. But Smith is getting cold feet: the Army appointed a new auditor at his stores who is bound to find out that he’s been embezzling them on a grand scale. As he whines and wails, Deighton surprises us by having Percy move forward, place his hand over his mouth and stab him through the heart with an oriental dagger. A young Arab serving girl looks on while this happens, then goes to fetch towels and cloth to clear up the mess.

All this takes place in the first 60 or so pages of this 320-page novel to set the scene, the location, the atmosphere, to establish quite a large cast of characters, all with secrets or agendas or plans afoot, which the remaining 250 pages will bring to light and work through. I’ve been to Cairo; the city is fairly well evoked, but the dominant impression from these early pages is Deighton’s humourlessness and the flat, blank, factual, heartless way he describes violence and death.

Stereotypes and clichés

So the plus sides are: large cast of characters, intriguing setting, interesting plot arcs, Deighton’s in-depth knowledge of military history, strategy and hardware, and his taut clipped sentences.

Unfortunately, these strengths are related to a number of weaknesses. Many characters, yes, but too many of them are stereotypes, too many of them are famous for x, or a classic example of y, or a stock type of z.

She recognised it as one of Darymple’s stories. His skill as a storyteller was renowned throughout the clubs and bars of Cairo. (p.51)

Jeannie MacGregor’s grand-father had lived in a castle, and through him Jeannie claimed to be a direct descendant of Rob Roy, the famous Scots outlaw. (p.61)

Sayed was a handsome young man. His light-coloured skin and clear blue eyes were said in Cairo to be the legacy of Circassian concubines, women renowned for their beauty. (p.64)

‘I met an old chum in Shepheard’s bar last week. Toby Wallingford, RNVR, a very good pal. I thrashed him countless times at school; he says he still has the scars.’ (p.68)

‘Cleo’s club. Just about every crook and black-marketeer in Cairo visits this place at some time or other.’ (p.75)

‘They call him Zooly; he’s one of the richest men in this town. If you want a tank, or a virgin, or your enemy murdered, he’ll fix it for you – at a price.’ (p.75)

Short clipped sentences, yes, but this means the characters’ feelings or psychology are generally conveyed with crushing bluntness and obviousness. Deighton proved himself a brilliant popular historian with Blitzkrieg and Fighter. His thumbnail sketches of key figures in those histories, eg the tank commander Guderian or Wing Commander ‘Bomber’ Harris are more interesting and thorough than you might expect in a history. But they are nowhere near subtle or nuanced enough to appear in a novel, the form most concerned with psychological development and insight.

You could say that, as novelists go, Deighton is a very good military historian – a writer who is much more at home with the technical specifications of a Messerchmitt 109E or a brisk explanation of Rommel’s attack formation at El Alamein, than with the foibles of the human heart. Again and again you read sentences that might have come from a Mills & Boon novelette, especially when he’s dealing with his female characters. The issue of Peggy West having lost a young baby, thus making her forlorn, seems like something out of Catherine Cookson.

Had the baby lived, everything might have gone differently. (p.56)

It was a glorious smile, the sort of smile that a woman saves for the man she adores. Was it possible that she could fall in love with a man she’d only just met? The answer was yes. (p.97)

She wondered if this man would ever realise that she was desperately in love with him. Everyone who had seen her with him in the last few days seemed to guess. No matter how hard she tried, Alice could not keep it a secret from anyone except from him. (p.100)

She was beautiful, yet shy. She was eternally reticent, yet she knew so much. What a wicked twist of fate that he’d met her at a time like this. (p.98)

Yes, what a wicked, wicked twist of fate.

The plot(s)

Wallingford’s criminal gang

The 20 or so characters intertwine and interact. We have been introduced several times to a Lieutenant Commander Toby Wallingford, a posh boy who went to the same public school as some of the other officers, namely Captain Darymple. Wallingford gives out to his officer colleagues that he’s part of a hush-hush secret unit, often deployed to the front on high risk missions. Now we learn he is in fact a deserter who has set up a smuggling operation. Key to it is Percy, in fact a German deserter, the man we saw murder Smith in one of the opening scenes. Percy knows the position of various German and Italian arms dumps which were abandoned in the last retreat. Thus he is able to navigate Wallingford’s crew of criminals in lorries through the front line on what Wallingford tells everyone are hush-hush missions, to load up the guns and ammo, and drive them back to Cairo to flog on the black market.

One aspect of Wallingford’s operations is to kindly arrange a loan for his superior, Captain Darymple, who is always in debt. Wallingford drives him to a dingy Arab house, where Darymple signs a loan agreement with the cunning old Egyptian ‘banker’ and businessman, Mahmoud. Inevitably, within days, Mahmoud is calling for the short term to be repaid with interest, Darymple is begging Wallingford to help him, and Wallingford is kindly offering to intercede if Darymple will just sign a few forms and arrange the transit of some, er, goods. In other words, he co-opts Darymple into becoming an accessory to his black market organisation.

Another and persisting element is the existence of a massive arms dump, packed with Italian Beretta machines guns, at a place in no man’s land between the armies called Al Jaghbub. Wallingford’s plan is simple: to go and collect them and transport them back to Cairo and sell to Solomon. However, various things go wrong. For a start, we are introduced to a gung-ho American journalist, Harry Wechsler, and his Irish fixer, Chips O’Riley, who somehow get wind of the secret, and undertake a perilous drive out into the desert. Turns out British Army investigators are also there, question Wechsler, then order him to push off. The authorities decide to leave the guns where they are but spike them. Aware they’ve been found, but not of the decision to sabotage them, Wallingford tells Percy he’ll go ahead and sell them to Solomon Marx’s Jewish organisation, but they’ll have to collect them themselves.

Sayed el-Shazli

In a separate strand, Peggy West and Alice take an Army lorry and follow Sayed el-Shazli, a young well-connected Egyptian who’s part of the Prince’s circle, out onto the perilous Western road and then off to an out-of-the-way native village. Ross-as-Cutler had ordered Alice to tail him, thinking it would be a safe assignment around Cairo bars. Alice parks the lorry, tells Peggy to guard it, and walks into the village unaccompanied, ignored by the sullen villagers. Suddenly she realises she’s being followed and the Arab man moves closer then speaks to her. The atmosphere becomes sinister, as she is accompanied to the big house of the village where she finds Sayed and a fat, rich old pasha who proceeds to read her fortune as she sips the tea, becomes woozy and then passes out. I thought something bad might happen to her, but it turns out to be simple heatstroke. Sayed’s people look after her, and then return her to Peggy’s care.

King Farouk

On a higher political and diplomatic level, we see through the eyes of nervous Jimmy Ross the political crisis which flares up when the British diplomats (foolishly, in the opinion of the Army) force young King Farouk to change his government. The crisis atmosphere comes about because it seems as if the King will refuse, in which case the British will force him to abdicate. This is all told from the point of view of Ross who appears in the square in front of the palace at night, the whole city in an atmosphere of great tension, the soldiers on duty who Ross talks to uncertain what is going on. Eventually, in the early hours, Farouk concedes, changes government and remains king. The senior officers, brigadiers and the like that Ross talks to, think it’s all the fault of the damn fool diplomats, that the Army has enough on its plate fighting Rommel out West without having to worry about riots and insurrection back in Cairo.

Sayed’s humiliation

Prince Piotr takes his friends (Sayed, Peggy, Alice, Wallingford, Darymple) to one of Cairo’s swankiest restaurants to celebrate his birthday, partly because he knows the tubby 22-year-old King Farouk will be there (nickname: ‘fatty Farouk’) and he’ll be able to show off his acquaintanceship with him. The king grandly enters with his entourage, emphatically countering the rumours surrounding his abdication and the knife-edge political situation of just a few days before. Alice, Peggy and the other bien-pensant liberals are favourably inclined to him. Half way through the evening he sends over an equerry who conveys very polite birthday felicitations to Prince Piotr, compliments to the ladies, and then addresses Zeinab, the beautiful sister of Sayed: the king requests the honour of a dance. A private dance. At his palace. Leaving in fifteen minutes.

Stricken, tense, muttered conversations ensue, in which the Prince explains that neither Sayed nor Zeinab can refuse this ‘honour’; if they do Sayed will wake up dead at the bottom of the Nile. The Western women are outraged, and suddenly not so fond of the good-looking young king who now makes his exit, returning to the palace to prepare himself for his ‘dance’ with Zeinab. And then she goes mournfully, to be accompanied away by an equerry, in reality a glorified pimp for the fornicating king.

This proves an important turning point in one of the numerous plot strands, because Sayed is so embittered by this public and personal humiliation that he reveals to Alice, then Ross, that he is a member of the illegal Free Officers revolutionary organisation, working to overthrow British rule and establish a free monarchy. Not any more. Now he agrees to spy on it for the British. Alice fixes up a meeting with her boss Ross (all the time masquerading as the dead Special Investigator, Bert Cutler, and increasingly feeling relaxed and comfortable in the role) who conducts a fraught conversation which ends with him producing a blank piece of paper. ‘Write their names’, he says, knowing that once Sayed has crossed that Rubicon, and betrayed his colleagues, there will be no going back.

The tense psychology of spying, interrogation, betrayal, the links between individual behaviour and the broader political scene, descriptions of a lorry driven by nervous criminals making its way through a minefield in the Western desert – all of this is powerfully and persuasively done. It’s the softer, social sides of life, cocktail party chatter, and especially anything to do with women, their thoughts as they try on outfits for the party, their feelings and emotions, and especially his descriptions of falling in love or being in love, where Deighton is at his weakest.

The Jewish plotline

Ross/Cutler’s relationship with his boss, an unpredictable brigadier, is reminiscent of the Ipcress novels and the narrator’s insubordinate opinion of his superiors. There is a hilarious scene two-thirds of the way through where Ross has to listen to his boss banging on about the Jews, about the origin of Christianity, and about Jewish freedom fighters in Palestine. But the Jewish thread is compounded a few pages later when Captain Marker reports to Ross that the American journalist, Wechsler, has posted a long detailed piece to US newspapers explaining how the British used Jewish spies in the Levant from as early as 1940, on a promise to help them secure independence / fight the Arabs. Now the British are reneging on that promise, various underground Jewish organisations are finding ways to secure Axis munitions left in dumps in no man’s land.

These revelations put into context the activities of Solomon Marx and his colleague, who we met early on; they are one of these teams securing arms for the Jewish homeland. It explains the activities of Peggy West, who in a low-level way collects a stipend from Marx for spying for him. It puts in context Wallingford’s plan to flog the Italian machine guns at Al Jaghbub to Solomon which, we now realise, will be passed on to the Haganah or other Jewish militias in Palestine. It explains why the brigadier wants to set up a new unit to monitor Religious Subversives, namely whatever Jewish organisations they can locate. It explains why Captain Marker is riveted to discover, after extensive investigation, that Peggy West’s missing husband, Karl, is in fact a Haganah operative, with a long record of criminal convictions and two escapes from captivity. And explains why Marker decides to help Peggy’s long-expressed wish to find her missing husband; if they trail her, and she finds him, they can arrest him.

The Italian guns

Marker informs Ross that there’s been an incident at the Italian arms dump. Some Arabs turned up and insisted they had authorisation to remove them. The brigadier’s men were a bit trigger happy and the incident degenerated into a shootout in which eight Arabs were killed. So we have this information as we watch Solomon and Yigal drive to an appointment with Mahmoud. Wallingford had sub-contracted collecting the arms to Mahmoud, whose men are the ones who’ve been killed. The interview is tense because Mahmoud is convinced Solomon is in league with the British and partly responsible for the deaths, whereas Solomon doesn’t even understand what’s happened. On leaving the house Solomon and Yigal are arrested by British Army cops who Mahmoud has tipped off in revenge.

The Desert War

The scene then shifts for the last forty pages or so to a forward base in the desert. Captain Darymple has managed to arrange a transfer here, back to his old armoured car brigade, and away from Cairo where he learns there is now a contract out on him for non-repayment of Mahmoud’s debt. Here, by coincidence arrives Wallingford, along with Percy and a gang of his criminals. They are planning to go forward to steal more munitions from the desert. At the same time, Ross-as-Cutler arrives to seek help from the commanding officer. And also here is the ubiquitous Harry Wechsler and his gofer, Chips, wanting to see some real action for a change.

All these strands come together when the Germans make their presence felt and threaten to attack. The entire unit is ordered to withdraw, lorries, armoured cars and all. Their commanding officer, nickname Thunder, is just admiring the size and power of Wechsler’s V-8-powered lorry when it runs over a mine, exploding, killing Chips outright, fatally crushing Wechsler behind the engine block, burning and crippling all the passengers. The medic helps out as best he can before the rest of the convoy continues on to their main base.

Here, there are dramatic scenes as the commander in chief, Anderson, lets Wallingford know in no uncertain terms that he knows that Walingford and most of his men are deserters and criminals: they’ll be given guns to fight against the advancing Germans, but no forgiveness or amnesty, and all he can offer them is a decent burial.

The entire Wallingford gang plotline is over in a stroke. As part of this round-up Ross-as-Cutler goes to arrest Percy who he suspects (correctly) of being German. But Percy makes a break for it and runs off, scrambling up the nearest sand dune. Ross chases him, up sand dunes then down into a dry, hard, creviced valley bottom, all the time coming under fire from the German positions which are less than a kilometre away. Finally he rugby tackles him and starts violently beating him. An armoured car arrives, German rifle bullets pinging off it, sent by the commanding officer, and Ross pushes Percy into it and it returns them to the base. Here Ross interrogates Percy and finally cracks the ‘Rommel’s spy’ case which has hung over the whole novel.

The spy isn’t Percy, who is simply the low-level crook and black marketeer we’ve been led to believe. But before he deserted, Percy worked on Rommel’s signals unit, and here he had access to the signals being sent by the spy. So he is able to tell Ross that the information is being sent by an Axis spy within the US embassy in Cairo, the Americans being given privileged access to all British troop movements and strategy. Aha.

In the last page of this section, Ross has himself handcuffed to Percy, as they prepare for the final German assault, and tells him one of the commander’s staff has orders to shoot them both if the compound is over-run (to prevent knowledge that they know about the master spy, from being revealed to the enemy).

Tying up the threads

The setting cuts away to Cairo.

1. Alice is informed that Ross is alive. Just. He and the survivors of the unit were found some days after the Germans attacked and wiped them out. Almost all of them were dead, in fact the patrol thought Ross was dead, with badly burnt legs and exposure. But he was alive, still handcuffed to the dead Percy. She rushes to be by his side, convinced now that she loves him.

2. Ross is recovering in bed when visited by his ever-efficient adjutant in Special Investigations, Ponsonby. Unfortunately, when he was brought in he was so delirious that he gave his true name (Ross) to his rescuers, was tagged as such all the way to the hospital, where questions started to be asked. Ooops. They know he is Corporal Jimmy Ross; they know he was only masquerading as Major Cutler.

But Ponsonby has carried on being loyal to him and, it is implied, the brigadier has turned a blind eye while Ponsonby worked bureaucratic wonders. Ross has been declared dead some months ago, his death certificate associated with Cutler’s corpse from the train. But now ‘Cutler’ has also been declared dead, thus neatly solving the problem from an administrative point of view: for if the truth ever came out, that Ross had managed to fool all those people, including his superior, for so many months, everyone involved would look a complete ass. Better that ‘Cutler’ dies, and dies a hero, in the desert, giving his life fighting the Hun. And to those in the know, making the breakthrough with the Rommel spy case.

Ross will be given a completely new identity and packed off out east somewhere, India, Burma. Ross is briefly miffed that he won’t get any recognition for unmasking Rommel’s spy, but then is grateful to be free. Well, still in the army… Alice arrives full of love. Presumably their romance will blossom…

3. Peggy West arrives at Solomon’s houseboat after dark. She finds him badly wounded, sitting in the dark. He and Yigal were ambushed by Mahmoud’s men. Yigal is dead. A felucca of his people, the Jewish underground, is coming to rescue them. While they wait Peggy tries to clean and bind his wound. Solomon tells her that her husband, Karl, is dead. Maybe he only ever wanted the British passport. In a last gesture Solomon tells Peggy he’s giving her the houseboat. Its name is City of Gold.

Peggy helps Solomon into the felucca which starts up an outboard and putters away in the dark night. Moments later soldiers arrive led by Captain Marker. He was the officer who met Ross-Cutler all those months earlier on his arrival in Cairo station. During the ‘trouble with Jews’ conversations he had mentioned to Ross that he was himself Jewish. Now we, Peggy and his own soldiers strongly suspect he has timed his ‘arrest’ of Solomon just too late to actually capture him. And, after his men have searched the houseboat and found nothing, he sends them away, and settles down for a drink with Peggy. She is realising she has no husband, no ties, a new property (the houseboat) maybe she can stretch her wings and live a free life for the first time. Marker finds her especially attractive and they flirt. Maybe their story, too, will have a happy ending.

Conclusion

The last 100 pages or so really pick up pace and intensity, Deighton’s clipped style well-suited to situations of men deceiving, double crossing and manipulating each other, to the edginess of combat situations, to moments of violence and physical action – like the lorry blown up by a mine and its grisly aftermath, or Ross’s desperate pursuit of Percy across the sand dunes under enemy fire.

It is the intensity of these closing scenes which stays in the memory and persuades you this was a good thriller, helping you to forget the first two hundred pages of social chit-chat, party conversation and attempts to convey a feminine perspective on emotions and feelings, which are a lot less convincing.

El Alamein

Throughout the book, there has been a continuous chorus of characters speculating about whether and when Rommel will reach Cairo, and the more thoughtful of them predicting that, if he does, the entire Middle East will fall to the Germans, who will then be able to push north and reinforce their forces fighting in Russia and, ultimately, win the war. (Deighton is, of course, no stranger to counter-factual speculation as one of his most successful novels, SS-GB, describes what England would feel like after the Nazis had in fact invaded and conquered us.) The speculation is in part fuelled by rumours that Rommel knows everything the British Army is planning to do before it does it, and therefore to win victory after victory. Therefore, the discovery by Ross that the enemy is getting their information from sources inside the US Embassy is absolutely vital.

Deighton tops and tails the narrative with quotes from a history of codebreaking which confirm that Rommel’s victories were in part based on these intelligence tip-offs – and that they abruptly stopped in the summer of 1942, therefore leaving him, for the first time, blind about British intentions.

A few months after the narrative ends, in October 1942, there took place the decisive battle of the Desert War, and one of the great battles of the entire war – the battle of El Alamein. Deighton has seeded clues about it by having characters refer to stopovers there, for Alamein was just an insignificant train stop in the desert until this historic event made its name famous. It was here that the British decisively beat Rommel and pushed his Afrika Corps into retreat. The very last lines quote Churchill as saying that, before El Alamein we never had a victory; but after El Alamein, we never had a defeat.

This places Jimmy Ross’s behaviour in impersonating a Special Investigator so thoroughly that he begins to solve his cases, and in particular his heroic chasing of the German deserter Percy across desert dunes under enemy fire, and, back at the base, his beating out of Percy the truth about the sources of Rommel’s intelligence – in a completely new light. In case it wasn’t obvious, Deighton is implying that Ross played a decisive role in winning the war. It is an example of Deighton’s super-dry humour that this entire novel makes a stroppy criminal corporal from Glasgow turn out to be a figure of world historical importance.

Part Two – First and third person narrators

If my summary of City of Gold seems a bit chaotic, if it’s hard to grasp who the lead characters are, I think this is a strategy or effect which Deighton deliberately seeks. In all his third-person novels characters are killed off almost on a whim because most of those novels, especially the ones about war (Bomber, Goodbye Mickey Mouse, SSGB) seek to depict the horrifying arbitrariness of accidents, pain and death.

In most of Deighton’s fiction – rather like in ‘real life’ – you are deliberately kept guessing which characters are ‘important’ and which ones are going to die horribly grisly deaths. As in ‘real life’, there’s a large cast and wildly unpredictable things happen ie the heart attack in the first chapter of City of Gold or Wechsler, who I was just getting to like, being killed in the blown-up lorry. In his 3rd-person narratives, it is as if Deighton is trying to teach his readers a lesson about how bloody awful life is.

This is one of the things which makes the first-person narratives so different from the third-person ones. In the third-person narratives, the narrator is rather formal and anything can happen, horrible unpredictable things can happen at any moment. It is a tense experience reading them, and often upsetting.

By contrast, the first-person narratives eg the Ipcress novels, the first-person Bernard Samson narratives or a novel like Violent Ward, feel warmer and funnier for several reasons, but a main one is because you are on the solid ground of knowing that at least the narrator himself is not going to be blown up in a lorry, cut down in a jungle ambush, vapourised by ack ack fire, or any of the numerous other fates awaiting characters in the 3rd-person texts.

Deighton is happier in the first-person narratives, and so is the reader.

City of Gold Dramatis personae

THE BRITISH ARMY

Major Albert Cutler – Army Special Investigator, recruited from Glasgow police force, accompanying Corporal Jimmy Ross in handcuffs back to Cairo for trial for assaulting an officer under fire, when he has a heart attack and dies.

Corporal Jimmy Ross, also from Scotland, is travelling in custody of Major Cutler until the latter has a heart attack, whereupon Jimmy gets the keys to the handcuffs, frees himself and swaps clothes and identity cards with Cutler. When the train arrives in Cairo Ross confidently adopts Cutler’s identity, handing over the body to Captain Marker and being escorted to his new offices in the huge Bab el-Hadid barracks. He was hoping he could do a runner and disappear into the Cairo crowds but now finds himself trapped in his new identity. But after a nervous few days he discovers that everyone accords an Army Special Investigator lots of respect, he discovers he likes ordering around other officers, having a slavish assistant (Sergeant Ponsonby) and very much likes the only woman on his staff, the stunning Alice Stanhope. He finds excuses to be near her, and gives in to her requests to actually do something instead of hanging round looking decorative. Thus he lets her follow Sayed, the personable, western-educated young Egyptian who is part of their social circle, a simple request which becomes complicated when she finds herself driving out to an isolated village and then surrounded by threatening armed men… In the event it is Sayed’s home village and she is perfectly safe. Through various encounters, at work and at the various cocktails parties described in the first half of the novel, we watch her and
Ross fall in love. As the months go by he begins to use his powers to seriously track down Rommel’s spy who everyone is talking about. This eventually leads him to the Western Desert where he tracks down Percy, the German deserter who is part of Major Wallingford’s criminal gang, and beats the truth out of him, before himself being badly wounded in a German attack on the Allied base. Badly burned and half dead, Ross is recovered after the battle is over, and brought back to hospital in Cairo.

Sergeant Ponsonby – ever efficient adjutant, always ready with his disgusting tea made with cloying evaporated milk, always ready with the correct file and always shifting responsibility for dodgy tasks, missions and reports onto other units so as to keep his boss squeaky clean. He carries on being super efficient even after, right at the end of the novel, it is revealed that Ross has been impersonating Cutler all along. Ponsonby manages all the paperwork so that Ross can remain free (although in the Army), assume a new identity, and start a new career out East.

The brigadier – Ross-Cutler’s superior at the Bab el-Hadid barracks. He is eccentric and unpredictable – as demonstrated in a long and very funny scene in the last third of the novel, when he prattles on about Jewish conspiracies and links it somehow to the founding of Christianity by that rascal, St Paul.

Captain Lionel Marker – Ross’s number one, the upright, punctilious officer who meets Ross at Cairo station and is taken in by him from the start, who escorts him around Cairo, introducing him to its criminal and ethnic communities, as well as to the polite society of various bars and hotels and into the elite social circle gather round Prince Piotr. When the issue of Jewish spies securing arms for the Jewish forces in Occupied Palestine rears its head, Marker points out to his boss, Ross, that he, Marker, is Jewish. This doesn’t bother Ross one way or the other, but it may explain the slight undercurrent when Marker, early on in the novel, is tasked with searching Solomon Marx’s houseboat, along with all the other houseboats moored along the Nile, for guns or other smuggled goods. At the very end of the novel, he definitely arrives to carry out another search of The City of Gold just after Solomon has left. Moreover, we know that Peggy West was married to a Jew and considers herself part Jewish. This may or may not explain the mild flirtation that Marker feels relaxed enough to begin with Peggy right at the end of the novel.

Captain Robin Darymple (page 50) – dashing public school chap who knew Wallingford at school and finds himself blackmailed, via his gambling debts, into getting involved in Wallingford’s shady schemes.

Lieutenant Commander Wallingford RNVR (page 76) Public school chap who happens to have deserted his unit and uses his public school connections (with, among others, Darymple) to maintain the fiction that he is commander of a hush-hush secret unit tasked with carrying our daring raids out behind enemy lines. Giving himself a naval rank was a smart move, since naval records are stored in Alexandria and difficult for Cairo Army intelligence to access. Wallingford is actually running a black market racket with a bunch of other deserters and Sergeant Percy, masquerading as a South African, in fact a deserter from the German Army.

Mogg and Powell, two deserters who are part of Wallingford’s gang.

Sergeant Percy is a German deserter. His unit was completely decimated in an Allied advance and so he walked East into our arms but managed to escape capture, dressing in British Army gear, pretending to be a South African and finding his way into ‘Major’ Wallingford’s criminal gang of black marketeers. He becomes an invaluable source for the location of various ammo dumps which he leads Wallingford’s gang to in the desert, which they can load up, drive back to Cairo and sell. Nonetheless, he has an uneasy relationship with Wallingford, having announced that it will soon be time for him to leave the gang, and I spent some time wondering whether this would lead to a fight, shootout or brutal stabbing, as in the early brothel scene. Instead, the entire Wallingford storyline comes to an abrupt end when they are revealed for the crooks they are in a British forward base which is then attacked by the Germans. We hear nothing more of Wallingford and can assume, as Ponsonby says in the hospital much later, that he like everyone else in the base was killed. But not before Ross, who is also there, chases Percy, captures him and beats the truth out of him about Rommel’s spy being a senior official in the US Embassy in Cairo. When the rescuing troops reach the destroyed base they find the badly injured and unconscious Ross still handcuffed to Percy, who is dead.

Lieutenant Andy Anderson (page 54) A blunt-spoken Yorkshireman who’s risen from sergeant in 12 months of hard fighting, and now commands the unit out in the desert where the novel reaches its climax: where Harry Wechsler and his gofer Chips, Jimmy Ross, and Wallingford and his black market team, all find themselves as the Germans launch an attack.

THE WOMEN

Alice Stanhope (page 46) Phenomenally posh and very attractive daughter of the woman who knows everyone, who has got her a job in the British Army investigations department, where she comes under Ross-Cutler’s authority, on the condition she doesn’t actually do any dangerous work, preferably no work at all. She chafes at these restrictions and so Ross, who is badly smitten by her beauty and grace, first makes her his personal assistant, then gives in and gives her some elementary trailing to do. A lot later, at the end of the novel, she is in agonies waiting to find out what happened to the forward unit she knows Ross was off to visit and whether he’s still alive. As soon as she knows he is, she runs off to visit him, in what promises to blossom into a wartime romance.

Peggy West (page 30) A good-looking, 30-year-old senior nurse. She married a Jewish man, Karl, in the 1930s and came to Egypt looking for adventure. Karl was despatched to Iraq on a five-year contract protecting oil wells, and she hasn’t seen for 18 months. We meet her as she collects a small stipend from Solomon al-Masri, which the latter claims comes from Karl. Deighton spends a lot of time describing her background, her parents’ hopes for her, the difficulties in her married life, but she doesn’t come alive for me as a character. She becomes a sort of chaperone figure to Alice Stanhope through the middle of the book. Near the end she visits the City of Gold houseboat to find Solomon Marx badly wounded in a shootout with Mahmoud’s men. She helps him leave, during which he hands over ownership of the houseboat to her, so that she greets Captain Marker, who arrives to search the houseboat, as its new owner, with a heady sense of freedom and the strong hint that they might be about to become an item.

Karl West – A Jew who marries Peggy and then disappears off to Iraq, allegedly on a five year oil contract. Solomon al-Masri claims to receive money from Karl which he forwards to Peggy but Peggy wonders if it’s just a way of getting her to spy for Solomon. Near the end of the novel, Captain Marker’s investigations show him that Karl is in fact a crook with a long criminal record, some of it connected to the Haganah and Stern Gangs in Palestine. He also discovers that Karl is dead.

Jeannie MacGregor (page 61) One of the nurses under Peggy West’s command.

THE JEWS

Solomon al-Masri, real name Solomon Marx (page 30) Lives on a houseboat on the Nile, which he has named The City of Gold. He and his partner, Yigal, are working for Jewish independence forces in occupied Palestine, sourcing information about the British, the Germans, the Arabs, where they can, and arranging the purchase and shipment of arms to the Jewish militias in Palestine. Wallingford, the black marketeer, over various scenes, tries to arrange the sale of Italian machine guns from an arms dump in the desert to Solomon. When Wallingford refuses to deliver them in person (knowing the British Army have seized them) Solomon in good faith commissions Mahmoud and his men to do it. But they are shot and eight killed by the Brits, making Mahmoud think it was a trap. Which explains why, when Solomon and Yizgal motor over to Mahmoud’s house, tucked away down Cairo’s narrow medieval streets, they are greeted very coldly and emerge from a puzzling meeting to be arrested by the British police who have been tipped off by Mahmoud. At the end of the novel Peggy West finds Mahmoud slumped in his unlit houseboat, late at night, having been badly wounded in an assassination attempt by Mahmoud’s men. A felucca of his people arrive and unload the badly wounded man who, in parting gesture, gifts Peggy the houseboat and reveals what she’s suspected – her husband is long dead. She is a free woman.

Yigal Arad (page 40) Palestinian born Jew and Solomon’s partner in their mission to get information and guns for their Jewish masters in Palestine.

THE ARABS

Mahmoud is a cunning old Egyptian ‘banker’ and businessman. We seem him in league with Major’ Wallingford, lending Datymple money solely to snare him in Wallingford’s schemes. We also learn that Solomon sub-contracted collecting the Italian Beretta machine guns from the oasis to Mahmoud for an appreciable sum. What Solomon didn’t realise is that the British Army had already found and claimed the cache. Therefore when Mahmoud’s men arrive to collect it they find themselves stopped, questioned and then fired upon by the Brits. Eight men die. Which explains why he greets Solomon and Yigal very coldly when they go to exchange payment, why he tips off the British police to arrest them both and then, at the end of the novel, is responsible for an assassination attempt on Solomon.

Sayed el-Shazli (page 64) Personable young westernised Egyptian who lives in the same hotel as Prince Piotr and so has become part of his social circle. He’s a student at the American University and an Egyptian Army reserve officer, but also active in a secret organisation of Egyptian Army officers who are planning to overthrow British rule and establish King Farouk on the throne of an independent Egypt. But after the King arrogantly commands his sister to attend him at his palace for a royal rogering, the bitterly humiliated Sayed agrees to become a spy on his independence organisation for the British.

Zeinab el-Shazli (page 64) Stunningly beautiful sister of Sayed. Her main function is to be propositioned by King Farouk’s staff in a stylish nightclub and, since she can’t refuse, going off with them, much to the anger of the white ladies present.

King Farouk Nicknamed ‘Fatty Farouk’, The 22-year-old king chafes at British rule over his country, nominally a free independent nation. But meanwhile he has time and money to live a sumptuous lifestyle and, as the Zeinab storyline shows, commandeer women for his pleasure.

THE ÉMIGRÉS

Prince Piotr Nikoleiovitch Tikhmeibrazoff (page 65) Large, tall, imposing Russian émigré who rents a whole floor at the Hotel Magnifico. He was abroad when his father died and he inherited vast estates, and when the Revolution broke out and he lost them all. He claims a general’s rank on doubtful grounds, lives magnificently and is widely – and incorrectly – thought to be Rommel’s spy in the city.

Lucia Magnifico (page 50) Daughter of Signor Mario Magnifico who founded the hotel of the same name in Cairo, where Prince Piotr now occupies an entire floor.

Harry Wechsler – Gung-ho American journalist, not particularly friendly to the Brits, pointing out that the US is now funding their war effort while the Brits are managing to lose everywhere. He is shrewd enough to figure out there’s some kind of scam surrounding arms dumps in the desert, and writes a long op-ed piece which gets published in American newspapers, explaining how the Brits gratefully used Jewish intelligence resources in Palestine and the wider Middle East at the start of the war, and promised help with the creation of a Jewish homeland. Now the Brits are trying to wriggle out of their promises, with the result that the Jewish organisations are engaged in securing arms from any source possible, preparing for the upcoming war with the Arabs, and this includes using agents like Solomon to secure abandoned weaponry. He’s following up on this story at a forward unit in the desert which comes under German attack. Leading a convoy of armoured cars and lorries, at the wheel of his own V 8-powered lorry, Wechsler runs over a German mine. Chips is killed instantly and Wechsler loses his legs and is impaled by various bits of the engine. He survives long enough to experience unbearable pain, before being given an overdose of morphine by the unit’s unqualified medical officer.

Chips O’Riley – Irish soldier, journalist who’s found a niche as a fixer and gofer and attaches himself to Wechsler. Has some witty repartee before being killed instantly in the lorry blown up by a mine.

Credit

City of Gold published by Pluriform Publishing in 1992. All page references are to the 1993 Arrow paperback edition.

Len Deighton’s novels

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by Simon on January 11, 2016 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel, Spy novel, Thriller, War

Tagged 1992, Albert Cutler, Cairo, City of Gold, Jimmy Ross, Len Deighton, Lionel Marker, Peggy West, Rommel, Solomon Marx, Toby Wallingford, World War II

Posted by Simon on January 11, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/city-of-gold-len-deighton/

MAMista by Len Deighton (1991)

In The Night Manager we saw how John le Carré reacted to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War – the subjects which had provided his fictional bread and butter for nearly thirty years. He reacted by moving the same organisation – British Intelligence – and the same kind of plot motifs – the traitor within – seamlessly into the world of international arms smuggling.

The Samson novels

From 1983 Len Deighton had been engaged on an epic series of novels, the Samson series, which were based around the Cold War conflict, specifically the espionage war against the communist regime and agents of East Germany.

With one bound this, his first post-Berlin Wall novel, flies completely free of that entire world. It is set a hemisphere away, in the fictional South American country of Spanish Guiana. This is ruled by the moderately repressive regime of General Benz, but is plagued by the usual social problems e.g. poverty and squalor, and the discrepancy between the small, urban, middle class and the large number of illiterate peasants who work the land. The political landscape is filled with liberal politicians, communist intellectuals and Marxist guerrillas.

In the opening chapters we meet three central characters.

Angel Paz is a twenty-year-old explosives expert, a Latino based in America, sent to a good college and recommended by his father to a job with his mobster Uncle Arturo. Instead of taking the job, Paz takes his allowance and redirects the plane ticket to Spanish Guiana with a young man’s idealism and fervour to fight for a cause he believes in. Inevitably, he is swiftly disillusioned by the poverty and misery of the country, the ignorance of the peasants, and the squalid nature of the ‘struggle’ he gets involved in.

Coming from a completely different place is middle-aged Australian doctor Ralph Lucas. He left his comfortable farming family to serve in Vietnam as a combat doctor, where he saw bad things, before moving on to London and becoming involved in various charities. We see him in the board meeting of one of these which, among many other good works, is suggesting sending medical supplies to communities affected by the guerrilla fighting in the south of Spanish Guiana i.e. away from the urban centres in the north. Lucas finds himself manoeuvred at the meeting into going to the territory himself to assess the situation, but reassures his sister he’ll only be gone a few weeks.

In an early scene Paz is met off the boat into the Spanish Guiana capital, Tepolo, by Inez Cassidy, the improbably good-looking ‘press officer’ for the MAMista guerrillas. Her presence is tolerated in the capital because it suits the regime to have a conduit to communicate with the guerrillas through, and it demonstrates Benz’s liberal tolerance to foreign officials i.e. from the United States. Inez takes Paz to a safe house kept by a man named Chori, where Paz uses his skills to create a bomb which they then break into the Ministry of Pensions and plant, attached to a timer.

Fictional presidents

To my surprise and dismay these scenes are intercut with scenes set in the West Wing of the White House, where we meet John Curl, National Security Adviser to the President of the USA, described here as a tall, noble, intelligent decisive man.

I wonder if it could be a reliable yardstick that a novel is going to be rubbish if it includes a fictional US President. The Golden Gate by Alistair MacLean, featuring the kidnap of a rugged intelligent US President, is one of his worst novels. The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth is completely unbelievable at every level, but especially hindered by the improbably perfect characterisation of the tall, noble, intelligent, decisive US President.

In reality the world has enjoyed the presidenciesof Ronald Reagan 1981 to 1989, George Bush 1989 to 1993, Bill Clinton 1993 to 2001, George W Bush 2001 to 2009, Barack Obama 2009 and counting. The gap between the fictional presidents of thriller writers – tall, rugged, extremely intelligent, tough but sensitive, decisive but caring – and the reality of Reagan, Bush, Clinton et al, is just too wide not to be ludicrous. And so renders any fiction depicting this kind of heroic, noble US President immediately vulnerable to ridicule.

Americans in Spanish Guiana

Anyway, the scenes between Curl and the Prez are to show that there’s a little US geological survey in the south of the Spanish Guiana and they’ve discovered the right conditions for oil. Curl has a plan to use this to sort out several problems: although the Americans aren’t fond of Benz (who they know turns a blind eye to the flourishing cocaine trade) they are equally unwilling to help the MAMista guerrillas.

But Curl may be able to act through a proxy: he arranges to bump into the head of a major oil firm, Steve Steinbeck, at his gym. Here, Curl puts to Steinbeck the possibility of having tax breaks and government help to develop and exploit the oil. In exchange, the oil company can take responsibility for security i.e. buy millions of dollars worth of guns and armaments, trucks and armoured personnel carriers.

Now it just so happens that the opening scenes describe the TV news showing pictures of protests and marches against the closing of large sections of the arms industry in California. Thus the Guiana deal could square several circles by:

supporting a US oil company
to provide an alternative source of oil to the ever-flaky Middle East
with government subsidies
which are actually funneled back to arms companies in California
new contracts which the President can announce in his upcoming trip to California
thus boosting his popularity

Ralph Lucas

Lucas flies into Guiana and is met by Inez Cassidy the day after the bomb went off in the Ministry, apparently injuring passersby. She takes him to the same squalid safe house where Paz is staying and they take an instant dislike to each other, which is a shame because the novel is going to be about how all three are thrown together.

This odd trio are invited to a reception at the American embassy, which is unexpectedly raided by Benz’s Federalista cops. Everyone is thrown into prison but because Lucas had wisely gone along with the arrest, he gets a blanket overnight in the cell with a straw mattress. Because Paz resists, like the young firebrand he is, he is beaten up, has his scalp shaved and thrown into a concrete cell with no bed blanket, bucket or anything. The next morning they are hauled up to be interrogated by chief of police, Cisnero, who eventually lets them go.

With the guerrillas

Inez, Paz and Lucas fly south in a dodgy propeller plane to a ‘secret’ airfield. Here they are met by dishevelled remnants of the MAMistas. Along the way we’ve learned that one of the key political figures in Guiana is Dr Guizot, capable of rallying the urban middle class behind the Revolution. A large number – several hundred – MAMistas took part in an attack on a convoy transporting Guizot between prisons. Unfortunately, the Army had been tipped off and massacred the guerrillas – of the several hundred, only thirty or so escaped – and it is these battle-worn troops who now arrive at the shack by the airstrip where Inez, Paz and Lucas are hiding out, led by their middle-aged peasant ‘general’, Ramón. Oh, and Dr Guizot was killed in the raid, so it was all for nothing and they have lost one of their main political allies.

Through Paz, Inez and Lucas we are now introduced to the MAMista guerillas, getting to know the wily Ramón, seeing them in their true poverty, beginning to get a feel for the implacable jungle, its heat and humidity, the insects and leeches. From now to the end of the novel scenes in the jungle with the bickering guerrillas are interspersed with scenes in the White House, contrasting events on the ground with the way they are reported to – and manipulated by – Curl and the American administration.

Bungled raid

The next thing that happens is the guerrillas raid the US geographical station: the guerrillas want its vehicles and fuel. Lucas finds himself dragged into a combat role when he is chosen to drive a decoy jeep into the compound – which is heavily defended from watchtowers with guards. Lucas drives in OK and walks to the main office where he meets the white paleographer, Charrington, and his sidekick, a big black guy named Singer. Things start to go wrong when we watch Inez use a rifle with scope to take out the two Indians in the watchtowers. Immediately two or three vehicles full of armed guerrillas screech through the open gates and the guerrillas deploy throughout the camp. Lucas realises Ramón lied to him when he said they’d rely on Lucas’s negotiating skills. In reality it’s an armed raid and Ramón’s deputy puts a gun to Charrington’s head. The latter sensibly hands over the keys to vehicles but Ramón decides they must take Charrington and Singer hostage.

A terrible accident happens as they’re leaving: Charrington yells at his wife that he’ll be OK and be back in a few days, but she insists on running down towards the departing vehicles and past the generator building, which is a bad idea, because Paz has primed the generator with lots of explosive and, just as she runs past, it explodes, throwing her wrecked, instantly dead body fifty yards against the perimeter fence. Which Charrington sees and so does his little boy who has been running after her.

Rosario

The guerrillas drive for a day or so to the nearest settlement, the typically slummy impoverished town of Rosario where the different characters respond in different ways to the US geographical survey raid debacle. Paz is angry and defensive; Inez is upset; Lucas seems to be entirely emotionless: I think the idea is that he was completely emotionally cauterised in Vietnam and has never recovered an emotional life. He is eating when news is brought that Charrington has tried to commit suicide by smashing up his glasses and eating the broken glass. We watch Lucas tend to him in his last agonies: what a terrible way to go.

The novel is written in deadpan sentences which are extremely effective at conveying atmosphere. Thus a day or two later I still remember details of the description of Rosario, especially the townspeople’s surly dislike of the guerrillas. Nervously they put on a feast for them, bringing out their best food and wine simply to avoid the guerrillas stealing it anyway. Reluctantly they let the MAMistas put up revolutionary posters around the town. Next day, as their trucks drive off we see the townspeople systematically taking them down, worried what the opposing Federalistas will do when they arrive.

Winter camp

Finally the convoy of trucks with Ramón, Paz, Inez and Lucas arrives at the so-called winter camp. The idea was this was to be the launching point for an attack on the more urbanised north, which never in fact came. The violencia has been going on at least five years, but seems completely bogged down and Lucas now discovers why. Thousands of guerrillas are living in this makeshift camp, partly based around an abandoned matchworks by the vast river, a tributary of the Amazon. Here hundreds of the men, volunteers from the soft north, are falling ill to all sorts of jungle ailments, fungus, bronchitis and throat diseases, cuts and scratches becoming infected and gangrenous. Lucas sets about a wholesale reform of healthcare, burning down the old ‘hospital’, building a new one from scratch, reviewing all the men and recommending a healthier diet, administering what antibiotics he has and painkillers and overseeing at least one death a day. He even reforms the diet, cancelling the tinned rations and insisting on fresh stew made from whatever ingredients can be caught or picked in the jungle, plus fresh vegetables.

Nonetheless, it is clear that the guerrillas are being defeated by illness, disease, bad health, by the jungle: they will never make any ‘revolution’.

Frente

It is in this context that Ramón travels to a safe house in the north (in fact one of the houses of the Minister of Agriculture) who has loaned it in a deal guaranteeing the safety of his own lands to the south from guerrilla attack. Here he meets the leaders of the other left leaning forces in the country: Big Jorge, who has risen to represent the coffee growers, a large rural constituency, and Dr Marti, a bespectacled intellectual who represents the urban intellectuals, the students and bourgeois communists.

It is an interesting meeting as Deighton explains each side’s constituencies, who they represent and what they are bargaining for. Ramón tells them all the key figure of Dr Guizot is alive and has sent him with instructions (despite the fact we saw him burying Guizot’s bullet-riddled body in the jungle earlier). Ramón is hoping to persuade the other two to launch attacks of their own, in order to present a united front against Benz’s regime but, we slowly realise, neither is willing to do that. Big Jorge’s coffee farmers have, in recent years, taken to cocaine farming and are now making big money which relies on the current regime being in power and giving them large bribes. I.e. they have less and less interest in overthrowing anything; all they want is to field a militia force to defend their areas, against either MAMistas or Federalistas. Dr Marti for his part, is a comfortable old man: his students may stage sit-ins and protests but aren’t enough by themselves to overturn the majority in the urban centres which are prosperous under the Benz regime.

There is a gruesome moment: the rough old revolutionary, Chori, whose stinking boarding house our heroes assembled in at the start, was never released from his prison cells, unlike the foreigners Lucas and Paz. He – and then his father – were beaten and tortured until he reveals the location of this secret high-level summit. His torturers fly north until they are circling the minister’s house where the assembled guerrillas and leaders are alarmed but remain concealed. Convinced he has lied to them, the Benz regime torturers throw Chori’s body out of the circling plane. It falls a long way and is not a pretty sight when it lands.

There are a lot of not pretty sights in the novel. It is not a book for the squeamish. Deighton has a very disconcerting way of describing devastating injuries, murders, explosions, shootings, dismemberments in flat factual prose, leaving the reader reeling. This shock tactic was at the heart of Bomber, his upsetting epic novel about a bombing raid on Germany during World War II. Countless people die in all sorts of brutal, horrifying ways. This novel has a similarly cold-hearted and brutal impact.

Trek through the jungle

Ramón returns to the winter camp, thoroughly disillusioned and makes a decision. He has discovered that Singer, the black guy they took hostage at the US base, is in fact a CIA agent. He tells Paz and Lucas and his closest associates the CIA have a million dollar reward for Singer’s return and they must take him north, smuggle him into the city, get the money. It is a long long way north across trackless, pathless, roadless jungle. Even to me it seems like a hopeless futile task.

Thus begins the last third of the novel which is a long agonising description of the degeneration of the mission into collapse and failure. To summarise 100 pages or so: the thirty or so men who set off, led by the totally inexperienced Paz, attended by Lucas, accompanied by Inez, carrying Singer the valuable hostage, encounter the full range of jungle obstacles, having to hack their way through bamboo, wade through streams, fall into swamps, all the time being bitten by mosquitoes and clamped onto by leeches, all beneath almost non-stop torrential rain. Within days the pace has slowed right down and men are falling ill, dysentery appears along with other ailments.

The first really big challenge is crossing a massive river they come to which blocks their way to the mountains in the north. There is a horrible scene where a keen but weak young soldier volunteers and has nylon rope tied to his body so he can swim across and establish a line. He’s two thirds of the way across and in a fair way to drowning when a patrol boat appears out of nowhere and reduces his body to bloody hunks of meat with a rapid fire machine gun. Did I mention the book is bloody and violent? The guerrillas reply by chucking grenades into the boat, which eviscerate and cook its inhabitants. Another patrol boat was approaching from the south and, when the firing from the first one began, Lucas is able to open up with a rifle and shoot dead all four men in it. They use this boat to ferry men and supplies across the river.

The mountains

After the river come the mountains. They are staggering up the slopes, hacking through jungle or burned and sunstroked by the blistering sun, when Singer and Lucas realise they are being followed. A lot of these hundred pages are devoted to the shifting relationships between Paz the cocky leader who is slowly worn down, Lucas who is solid and dependable as doctor but has hardly any medicines and is cold-hearted, and Singer the black CIA agent who sings old Negro spirituals and generally mocks the revolutionaries’ stupid aspirations and uselessness at fieldcraft. But all three realise they’re being followed. And then that there are signs the trail has been used before: maybe there’s a force in front of them?

Down the other side of the mountains they go, in a state of high alert and into a wide swampy area. Here there is a sudden and unexpected firefight which draws the novel to a close. In one of the West Wing scenes, Curl had got the President to approve sending a warship to the coast of Guiana to extract the missing CIA agent. Unbeknown to Paz, Lucas and Inez, Ramón had been doing a deal with Singer and, via him, the Administration: having despaired of support from Jorge or Marti, and realising his army is dying, Ramón has agreed to a deal to allow US oil drilling to go ahead and take a cut of the profits in order to ensure safe transport of the oil from the south to the coast.

Deighton does a convincing job of describing the geopolitics or political machinations of the various players. Cutting the guerrillas in on the deal effectively puts them on the US payroll and draws their teeth. Eventually, on another level of complexity, it is revealed that Curl is planning to use the oil company to defoliate the cocaine growing areas on a big scale and arm or support the Marxist guerrillas in moving in on Big Jorge’s drug growers. The by-now-tamed MAMistas would be subsidised to grow coffee. So Curl gets: a new oil source for the US; Marxist guerrillas tamed; a major source of cocaine neutralised. Singer explains all this to Lucas, as well as the fall-back plan: if Ramón reneges on the deal the oil company can turn the large amount of arms, ammunition, trucks and APCs over to General Benz’s army to take on and destroy the guerrillas. All the angles have been smoothly calculated.

Firefight and farce

Suddenly shooting breaks out. Deighton gives a description of the fighting from both points of view. One minute the guerrillas are hacking through jungle the next machine guns and grenades are going off. The attackers are the group of American troops led by a West Point CIA graduate who had been helicoptered in to snatch Singer. Deighton has written a number of highly praised histories of World War Two, and has a deep knowledge of battles. This firefight is complete confusion. Both sides think they are being ambushed when in fact they have simply blundered into each other. The result is bloody brutal chaos. Half a dozen guerrillas are horribly killed, skulls split open, vaporised brains spraying their neighbours, arms shot off, guts spewing everywhere. Both sides break off, running into the jungle, and soon are not only not in contact but couldn’t even find their ways back to the battlefield if they wanted to.

Lucas stays with several men who die horribly in agony. Inez has been wounded by some small piece of shrapnel which has entered her body doing Lucas can’t tell how much damage. Santos, Paz’s number two, has his arm shot off and dies in stages. Once clear of the fight they regroup in the jungle but Paz volunteers to go back and fetch some of the panniers full of medical supplies. He never returns. He never returns because he blunders into the area where the American forces are recovering. They knock him out, but not before hearing him speaking in fluent American. The head of the CIA snatch squad is therefore convinced that this healthy looking young dude, speaking American, wearing a baseball cap and shades, must be the CIA agent he was sent to recover. He and his men carry the unconscious Paz to a clearing where they are recovered by their helicopter which flies them out of the forest to the coast and out to the waiting US warship.

The guerrillas continue struggling through the jungle, now with wounded men who slowly die, the rest decimated by disease. Singer is incapacitated with dysentery and is tied to a pole and carried. Lucas realises Inez is dying. On a desperate last stage, Lucas tells Singer to carry on without them, they’ll catch him up. An hour later Singer hears two shots and knows Lucas has shot dead Inez and killed himself. Some days later the last surviving guerrillas come across tracks and then a half-skinned dear. They collapse. Shyly the local pygmies who they’d disturbed return and lead them along more tracks to their village where they are greeted by a ravaged white man. In the latest in what is beginning to feel like an endless line of images of futility, he turns out to be an Austrian missionary who came to the area decades earlier, lost his faith but stayed on. He was hoping the new arrivals might be Europeans he could talk to. But the handful of surviving guerrillas are all too sick to go any further and the black man they’ve been carrying on a pole has been dead for days.

Last twists of the knife

Paz wakes up in hospital in Los Angeles. He is keeping silent through the medical treatment which is restoring his health, knowing that any minute the powers that be will realise he is not the real Singer. But he needn’t worry. At the start of the novel we saw Paz taking money and a plane ticket from his mobster uncle Arturo. Now Arturo visits him in hospital and, with an accomplice, performs a mafia-style execution, injecting Paz with poison.

Now all the main characters have died horribly and futilely, the final scene is the arrival of the US President in California to announce the big new arms contracts which will save the industry in California and revive his popularity levels, all as Curl had planned. To be honest, I couldn’t work out whether the death of Singer, the CIA man, was meant to undercut this final scene, by suggesting the deal with the guerrillas would now fall through and everything he’s about to announce to the press will fail to happen. (I don’t think so because, although Singer might be dead, it would be easy enough to send another envoy to Ramón and reconfirm the deal i.e. a cut of the oil profits to suspend the ‘revolution’.) Or whether it is schoolboy irony that the President’s shiny announcements to the press ignore and belie the terrible tragedies we’ve seen happening ‘on the ground’ i.e. everyone dying.

Either way, like Bomber, the entire novel, by the end, feels as if it has been a vast exercise in deeply depressed and depressing futility.

Comments

Deighton’s earliest novels are notable for their witty tricksiness which extended to including spy information packs and handy spy equipment in the hardback editions of the first spy novels. This fondness for game-playing extended to the playful titles of the Bernard Samson – Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match.

In this novel, thirty years into his writing career, it feels as if Deighton has completely jettisoned all attempts at humour and playfulness. The story is told in straightforward linear fashion: one damn thing happens after another. In The Night Manager le Carré used flashbacks to attempt to create character, albeit in a rather obvious way. Deighton by contrast is tight-lipped. Things happen. And when he does go beyond description and plot you can maybe see why…

For although he can create a gripping scenario and storyline, Deighton is clearly uncomfortable investigating the human or psychological side of it. When the narrator does comment on his characters, his remarks are surprisingly superficial, disconcertingly so. It’s as if a mature man wrote the story and then got his 12-year-old son to interpret it. Here are some examples:

Ramon was the mystery man that chaos and revolution always attracted. (p.198)

When the violencia came Big Jorge solved his problems in the way that so many other men had solved their problems before him: he marched off to war. (p.198)

[Lucas] considered [Ramón] a patient, and extended to him that paternalistic superiority that is a part of the physician’s role. (p.216)

The activities the characters engage in, the gruelling, crucifying torment of the jungle trek which Paz, Lucas, Inez and Singer undergo, are mercilessly described with clarity and vigour. But when they are thinking about each other, when the narrator describes their feelings or motivation, the results are surprisingly simple-minded, almost like a fairy story or children’s story, an effect emphasised by the very simplicity of sentence structure which, in the descriptive passages, is Deighton’s strength.

Within Paz, there had built up an enormous anger. As he saw it, he’d tried to befriend Lucas and Singer but his overtures had been rebuffed. He resolved to be avenged on them at the first chance he had. But from now on he would try to conceal his feelings; he would be as deceitful as they were. (p.280)

It was Angel Paz who began to sing. Where he found the energy was hard to say but he took the responsibility of command very seriously. He recognised that morale needed help. (p.285)

Hundreds of passages like this expose the ‘underdevelopment’, shall we call it, of the psychological aspects of Deighton’s novels and make it clear why genre fiction like this, well written and entertaining though it may be, doesn’t make the grade as ‘literature’, a key element of which is a sophisticated or convincing depiction of human psychology. The psychology on display here is as elementary as necessary to keep the brutal plot rolling along.

Complicated, cruel, cold-hearted, violent and political plotlines – Yes.

Psychology, characterisation, much sign of warmth or humanity – No.

Len Deighton’s novels

1962 The IPCRESS File Through the thickets of bureaucracy and confusing misinformation which surround him, an unnamed British intelligence agent discovers that his boss, Dalby, is in cahoots with a racketeer who kidnaps and brainwashes British scientists.
1963 Horse Under Water Perplexing plot which is initially about diving into a wrecked U-boat off the Portuguese coast for Nazi counterfeit money, then changes into the exposure of an illegal heroin manufacturing operation, then touches on a top secret technology which can change ice to water instantly (i.e. useful for firing missiles from submarines under Arctic ice) and finally turns out to be about a list – the Weiss List – of powerful British people who offered to help run a Nazi government when the Germans invaded, and who are now being blackmailed. After numerous adventures, the Unnamed Narrator retrieves the list and consigns it to the Intelligence archive.
1964 Funeral in Berlin The Unnamed Narrator is in charge of smuggling a Russian scientist through the Berlin Wall, all managed by a Berlin middle-man Johnnie Vulkan who turns out to be a crook only interested in getting fake identity papers to claim the fortune of a long-dead concentration camp victim. The Russians double-cross the British by not smuggling the scientist; Vulkan double-crosses the British by selling the (non-existent) scientist on to Israeli Intelligence; the Narrator double-crosses the Israelis by giving them the corpse of Vulkan (who he has killed) instead of the scientist; and is himself almost double-crossed by a Home Office official who tries to assassinate him in the closing scenes, in order to retrieve the valuable documents. But our Teflon hero survives and laughs it all off with his boss.
1966 Billion-Dollar Brain The Unnamed Narrator is recruited into a potty organisation funded by an American billionaire, General Midwinter, and dedicated to overthrowing the Soviet Union. A character from Funeral In Berlin, Harvey Newbegin, inducts him into the organisation and shows him the Brain, the vast computer which is running everything, before absconding with loot and information, and then meeting a sticky end in Leningrad.
1967 An Expensive Place to Die A new departure, abandoning all the characters and much of the style of the first four novels for a more straightforward account of a secret agent in Paris who gets involved with a Monsieur Datt and his clinic-cum-brothel. After many diversions, including an induced LSD trip, he is ordered to hand over US nuclear secrets to a Chinese scientist, with a view to emphasising to the Chinese just how destructive a nuclear war would be and therefore discouraging them from even contemplating one.
1968 Only When I Larf Another departure, this is a comedy following the adventures of three con artists, Silas, Bob and Liz and their shifting, larky relationships as they manage (or fail) to pull off large-scale stings in New York, London and the Middle East.
1970 Bomber A drastic change of direction for Deighton, dropping spies and comedy to focus on 24 hours in the lives of British and German airmen, soldiers and civilians involved in a massive bombing raid on the Ruhr valley. 550 pages, enormous cast, documentary prose, terrifying death and destruction – a really devastating indictment of the horrors of war.
1971 Declarations of War Thirteen short stories, all about wars, mainly the first and second world wars, with a few detours to Vietnam, the American Civil war and Hannibal crossing the Alps. Three or four genuinely powerful ones.
1972 Close-Up Odd departure into Jackie Collins territory describing the trials and tribulations of fictional movie star Marshall Stone as he betrays his wife and early lovers to ‘make it’ in tinseltown, and the plight he currently finds himself in: embroiled in a loss-making production and under pressure from the scheming studio head to sign a lucrative but career-threatening TV deal.
1974 Spy Story The Unnamed Narrator of the Ipcress spy novels returns, in much tamer prose, to describe how, after escaping from the ‘Service’ to a steady job in a MoD war games unit, he is dragged back into ‘active service’ via a conspiracy of rogue right-wingers to help a Soviet Admiral defect. Our man nearly gets shot by the right-wingers and killed by Russians in the Arctic, before realising the whole thing was an elaborate scam by his old boss, Dawlish, and his new boss, the American marine General Schlegel, to scupper German reunification talks.
1975 Yesterday’s Spy Another first-person spy story wherein a different agent – though also working for the American Colonel Schlegel, introduced in Spy Story – is persuaded to spy on Steve Champion, the man who ran a successful spy ring in Nazi-occupied France, who recruited him to the agency and who saved his life back during the war. Via old contacts the narrator realises Champion is active again, but working for Arabs who are planning some kind of attack on Israel and which the narrator must foil.
1976 Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (aka Catch a Falling Spy) The narrator and his CIA partner manage the defection of a Soviet scientist, only for a string of murder attempts and investigations to reveal that a senior US official they know is in fact a KGB agent, leading to a messy shootout at Washington airport, and then to an unlikely showdown in the Algerian desert.
1977 Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain Abandoning fiction altogether, Deighton published this comprehensive, in-depth and compelling history, lavishly illustrated with photos and technical diagrams of the famous planes involved.
1978 SS-GB A storming return to fiction with a gripping alternative history thriller in which the Germans succeeded in invading and conquering England in 1941. We follow a senior detective at Scotland Yard, Douglas Archer, living in defeated dingy London, coping with his new Nazi superiors, and solving a murder mystery which unravels to reveal not one but several enormous conspiracies.
1979 Blitzkrieg: From the Rise of Hitler to the Fall of Dunkirk Another factual history of WWII: Deighton moves quickly over Hitler’s rise to power and the diplomatic bullying of the 1930s, to arrive at the core of the book: an analysis of the precise meaning of ‘Blitzkrieg’, complete with detailed notes on all the weapons, tanks, artillery and hardware involved, as well as the evolution of German strategic thinking; and then its application in the crucial battle for the river Meuse which determined the May 1940 Battle for France.
1980 Battle of Britain
1981 XPD SIS agent Boyd Stuart is one of about 20 characters caught up in the quest for the ‘Hitler Minutes’, records of a top secret meeting between Hitler and Churchill in May 1940 in which the latter was (shockingly) on the verge of capitulating, and which were ‘liberated’ by US soldiers, along with a load of Nazi gold, at the very end of the war. Convoluted, intermittently fascinating and sometimes moving, but not very gripping.
1982 Goodbye, Mickey Mouse Six months in the life of the 220th Fighter Group, an American Air Force group flying Mustangs in support of heavy bombers, based in East Anglia, from winter 1943 through spring 1944, as we get to know 20 or so officers and men, as well as the two women at the centre of the two ill-fated love affairs which dominate the story.
1983 Berlin Game First of the Bernard Samson spy novels in which this forty-something British Intelligence agent uses his detailed knowledge of Berlin and its spy networks to ascertain who is the high-level mole within his Department. With devastating consequences.
1984 Mexico Set Second of the first Bernard Samson trilogy (there are three trilogies i.e. 9 Samson books), in which our hero manages the defection of KGB agent Erich Stinnes from Mexico City, despite KGB attempts to frame him for the murder of one of his own operatives and a German businessman. All that is designed to make Bernard defect East and were probably masterminded by his traitor wife, Fiona.
1985 London Match Third of the first Bernard Samson spy trilogy in which a series of clues – not least information from the defector Erich Stinnes who was the central figure of the previous novel – suggest to Samson that there is another KGB mole in the Department – and all the evidence points towards smooth-talking American, Bret Rensselaer.
1987 Winter An epic (i.e. very long and dense) fictionalised account of German history from 1900 to 1945, focusing on the two Winter brothers, Peter and Paul, along with a large supporting cast of wives, friends, colleagues and enemies, following their fortunes through the Great War, the Weimar years, the rise of Hitler and on into the ruinous Second World War. It provides vital background information about nearly all of the characters who appear in the Bernard Samson novels, so is really part of that series.
1988 Spy Hook First of the second trilogy of Bernard Samson spy novels in which Bernie slowly uncovers what he thinks is a secret slush fund of millions run by his defector wife with Bret Rensaeller (thought to be dead, but who turns up recuperating in a California ranch). The plot involves reacquaintance with familiar characters like Werner Volkmann, Frau Lisl (and her sister), old Frank Harrington, tricky Dicky Cruyer, Bernie’s 23-year-old girlfriend Gloria Kent, and so on.
1989 Spy Line Through a typically tangled web of incidents and conversations Samson’s suspicions are confirmed: his wife is a double agent, she has been working for us all along, she only pretended to defect to the East. After numerous encounters with various old friends of his father and retired agents, Samson finds himself swept up in the brutal, bloody plan to secure Fiona’s escape from the East.
1990 Spy Sinker In the third of the second trilogy of Samson novels, Deighton switches from a first-person narrative by Samson himself, to an objective third-person narrator and systematically retells the entire sequence of events portrayed in the previous five Samson novels from an external point of view, shedding new and sometimes devastating light on almost everything we’ve read. The final impression is of a harrowing world where everyone is deceiving everyone else, on multiple levels.
1991 MAMista A complete departure from the Cold War and even from Europe. Australian doctor and ex-Vietnam War veteran Ralph Lucas finds himself caught up with Marxist guerrillas fighting the ruling government in the (fictional) South American country of Spanish Guiana and, after various violent escapades, inveigled into joining the long, gruelling and futile trek through the nightmarish jungle which dominates the second half of the novel.
1992 City of Gold A complex web of storylines set in wartime Cairo, as the city is threatened by Rommel’s advancing Afrika Korps forces in 1942. We meet crooks, gangsters, spies, émigrés, soldiers, detectives, nurses, deserters and heroes as they get caught up in gun smuggling, black marketeering and much more, in trying to track down the elusive ‘Rommel spy’ and, oh yes, fighting the Germans.
1993 Violent Ward Very entertaining, boisterous first-person narrative by Los Angeles shyster lawyer Mickey Murphy who gets bought out by his biggest client, menacing billionaire Zach Petrovitch, only to find himself caught up in Big Pete’s complex criminal activities and turbulent personal life. The novel comes to a climax against the violent backdrop of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in April 1992.
1993 Blood, Tears and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II
1994 Faith Return to Bernard Samson, the 40-something SIS agent, and the world of his friends and family, familiar to us from the previous six Samson novels. Most of the characters (and readers) are still reeling from the bloody shootout when his wife returned from her undercover mission to East Germany at the climax of the previous novel. This book re-acquaints us with all the well-loved characters from the previous stories, in a plot ostensibly about smuggling a KGB colonel out from the East, but is really about who knows the truth – and who is trying to cover up – the real cause of the Fiona-escape debacle.
1995 Hope 40-something SIS agent Bernard Samson continues trying to get to the bottom of the death of his sister-in-law, Tessa Kosinski and is soon on the trail of her husband, George, who has gone missing back in his native Poland.
1996 Charity Ninth and final Bernard Samson novel in which it takes Bernard 300 pages to piece together the mystery which we readers learned all about in the sixth novel of the series, i.e. that the plot to murder Fiona’s sister, Tessa, was concocted by Silas Gaunt. Silas commissioned Jim Prettyman to be the middle-man and instructed him to murder the actual assassin, Thurkettle. Now that this is openly acknowledged by the Department’s senior staff, the most striking thing about the whole event – its sheer amateurish cack-handedness – is dismissed by one and all as being due to Gaunt’s (conveniently sudden) mental illness. As for family affairs: It is Bret who ends up marrying Bernard’s one-time lover, the glamorous Gloria; Bernard is finally promised the job of running the Berlin Office, which everyone has always said he should have: and the novel ends with a promise of reconciliation with his beautiful, high-flying and loving wife, Fiona.

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by Simon on December 28, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Books, Novel, Thriller

Tagged 1991, Angel Paz, guerrilla, Inez Cassidy, jungle, Len Deighton, MAMista, Ralph Lucas, South America

Posted by Simon on December 28, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/12/28/mamista-len-deighton/

Spy Sinker by Len Deighton (1990)

This the third and final novel in the second trilogy of books about 40-something British intelligence officer Bernard Samson.

In the first trilogy (Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match) his gorgeous, clever wife Fiona was exposed as a high-level ‘mole’ in the Department and forced to flee in a hurry to East Berlin.

In the first two novels of this set Bernard began to suspect – and then had it abundantly confirmed – that Fiona was in fact a double agent and had been working for us all along.

But the rainswept night of her final escape back from East Berlin to our side turned into a bloodbath: Samson and Fiona manage to escape but the agent accompanying Bernard – and Fiona’s sister, Tessa – are shot dead, as are the East German agent Stinnes and another man, Harry Kennedy.

The ex-CIA hitman masterminding this carnage burns Tessa’s body in the car, and throws the British agent, Stinnes and Harry into a deep ditch – part of the roadworks where the whole shambles took place – and where they will be covered with concrete and never found… Leaving the reader in shock.

What next?

Up until this bloody shootout the main appeal for me of the Samson stories was the generally light, mocking tone of the first person narrative and the relaxed, almost sitcom, feel to Samson’s generally humdrum round of work, meetings, files and reports, and his similarly mundane domestic life, hanging with his kids, with the girlfriend Gloria he took up with after his wife defected, and the numerous drinks parties and dinner parties where we meet and remeet the cast of recurring characters who populate the novels in an almost Dickensian teeming.

I found this social scene far more convincing and solidly imagined than the often far-fetched and abruptly violent elements of the ‘spy stories’. Especially as the spy stories boil down to such a simple narrative arc:

Fiona defects (Berlin Game)
Interlude while a KGB officer we thought was defecting, Erich Stinnes, turned out to be a spy so we sent him back (Mexico Set, London Match)
But Fiona isn’t a traitor after all, but a triple agent (Spy Hook, Spy Line).

In the last few pages of Spy Line we see Bernard and Fiona flown to Bret Rensselaer’s luxury safe house in California for Fiona to be debriefed at length. The Department has accounted for Fiona’s disappearance by making it look as if she died in the car conflagration (though I still don’t understand why the opposition are going to believe the car burst into flames; specially since it was a night of heavy rain).

But she saw her sister murdered in front of her and realises that was done to protect her. How can she avoid having a massive nervous breakdown? How can she ever go back to her ‘normal’ life? And the Department has put word out that Bernard has run off with Tessa, to explain their joint disappearance. How can that ever let Bernard return to London, where his mere presence will expose the falsehood? I really like the character of George Kosinski, the rough-and-ready East End used car salesman Tessa was married to. He will be devastated Tessa has run off with Bernard.

How can any of these people return to their happy-go-lucky lives or the novels return to their amiable, chatty tone?

Third person narrator

Deighton deftly sidesteps all the problems he had created for himself with the biggest surprise of the series so far – by switching narrative voice to a third person narrator, and by leaving our heroes’ present dilemma altogether to travel back in time and recap the entire narrative of the previous five novels from other people’s points of view! It is a bold and sometimes bewildering move because the net effect is to undermine and question everything we thought we knew.

So Spy Sinker commences back in September 1977, before the start of the first novel – Berlin Game – with the story of Fiona’s recruitment and the hatching of the plan to make her a double agent, showing the earliest genesis of the plan in conversations between Bret Rensselaer – whose idea it is – and the Director General, Sir Henry Clevemore – who is persuaded to sanction it. Both know she’s married to Samson and both agree to keep Samson completely in the dark whatever happens.

Thus we realise almost everything Samson tells us in the first person narratives of the previous five books has been flawed, half-informed, and often completely wrong. We, the reader, have been ‘had’ just as much as Samson.

Seeing Samson’s world from the outside, and having events we’ve seen through his eyes retold by an omniscient narrator, is a revelation – or a series of revelations. The dominant effect is to show how thoroughly deceived and lied to he’s been by absolutely everyone: by his wife, his colleague Bret Rensselaer, his old friend Silas Gaunt and by the Director General of the Department – they were all in on the deception and kept it from him for five years.

At the end, and particularly bitterly, even his closest and oldest friend Werner Volkmann is let in on the secret and keeps it from him.

Same scenes, drastically different perspectives

Incident after incident from the earlier novels is retold showing us what really happened. To give a small selection:

When he was hijacked by a black nurse in Mexico Set in order to pick up Fiona, it turns out it wasn’t Fiona but an agent impersonating her in an operation set up by Moscow thug Moskvar. He wanted to provoke Samson into pursuing the black agent back to the Department safe house in Bosham, where they would capture, torture and then murder him. Samson, as intended (and as he tells us) believes the impersonator is his wife (improbably) but then sends a junior operative to track down the black woman, and it is he who is tortured and murdered. The failure of his plan badly damaging Moskvar’s reputation back in the East.
The whole plotline which dominated the end of Spy Hook – the Department’s growing suspicion that Bret Rensselaer is a double agent – created and fostered by the two-timing KGB defector Erich Stinnes — we see this from the East Berlin point of view, how the KGB plan it and plant suspicion of Bret via his handling of the Stinnes defection. Which eventually leads to a commission of enquiry in which Stinnes bluntly incriminates Bret. Their case is helped by the fiasco in the laundrette in Hampstead where Bret had insisted on being in the field with Samson when the KGB men turning up to collect some money turn nasty with shotguns: Bernard is forced to shoot them both. [As so often with outbreaks of violence in Deighton, despite having read two different accounts of it, I still don’t understand why Bret and Samson were waiting with money to pay KGB agents and have no idea why the latter started the violence.] But this and other incidents are all a backdrop to Bret suddenly fleeing in a panic to Berlin which is the point, in Spy Hook, where we saw him – from Bernard’s point of view – abruptly turning up on the latter’s doorstep.
At the end of London Match there is a prolonged shootout in the streets of Berlin following the hostage exchange of Samson’s friend Werner Volkmann for the ‘defector’ Stinnes, in which the brutal Moskvin is forced to flee through the streets, exchanging gunfire with the following agents until shot by his own side, not before shooting and badly wounding Bret. (As with the laundrette scene, I still don’t really understand why his own side wanted to kill Moskvin, even after two explanations, in London Match and here. Like the other bursts of violence, it seems illogical, unnecessary and amateurishly done.)
Bret, severely wounded in Berlin, is flown to the luxury ranch in California which – we now learn from this book – he uses as a base to continue receiving information from Fiona, cleanse it and pass it onto the CIA.
To my astonishment, Fiona recruits Werner Volkmann, just before his exchange the exchange back to the West, to become a direct conduit between her and the DG Sir Henry. a) It seems immensely risky to hire a non-employee of the Department for such an incriminating role b) so Werner is let in on the secret that Fiona is a double agent and keeps it from his best friend, Bernard, for the next 4 years!
At various points we watch old Silas Gaunt and the DG of the Department callously making plans which toy with other peoples’ lives and it is upsetting the way they tinker with telling Samson Fiona still loves him and is loyal to her country and him, before deciding not to, and leaving his life in ruins. Possibly all this is permissible for the importance of the mission they’ve given her. But they cross a line when, towards the end, we watch them orchestrating Fiona’s escape back to the West and deliberately acquiescing in murder.
- It is Silas who hires an ex-CIA hitman, Thurkettle (who Samson had run across in Spy Line) and makes him the murdering orchestrator of the bloodbath. In a manouevre which I didn’t understand it is arranged for Fiona to be at the rendezvous at the motorway works with Erich Stinnes – now, very implausibly, caught up in drug smuggling.
- Thurkettle will arrange the meeting for the now-drug-running Stinnes to hand over a consignment of heroin. But I have no idea why Fiona, Stinnes’ boss, would be with him on what sounds like a criminal act. I have no idea why Fiona couldn’t just get in a car and drive down the Autobahn into West Germany then be spirited away. The reason given is that, if the KGB think she is dead, they will leave their security setups as they are, allowing us to exploit Fiona’s inside information for a while longer; if they knew she’d defected back they’d change all their arrangements. But is this intelligence really worth the murder of Fiona’s sister, Tessa – which is what it leads to? For Thurkettle goes to great lengths to arrange for a body like Fiona’s to be found burned to a crisp in a burned out car, and whose body will that be – her sister’s.
- And I still don’t understand what the KGB are to meant to make of all this: why was the car ever meant to have caught fire? It’s parked stationary off the motorway so it’s not in a crash. Is this the best British Intelligence can come up with?
- A ghoulish element is introduced because Tessa’s head must be sawn off so that her skull can be replaced with another skull with Fiona’s dental work to persuade the KGB it really is her. But won’t their forensic scientists notice that this corpse has had its head sawed off? Might they wonder why the corpse of their former East Berlin chief is found with its head cut off in a car parked by the side of a motorway which has burst into flames for no good reason?
  - It just seems like a rubbish plan, too random, contrived and unnecessarily complicated
  - I just don’t believe the two old Etonians, Silas and Sir Henry, can calmly sit drinking whisky and smoking cigars in their nice country house and planning the murder of an innocent woman, one they’ve met socially several times. I don’t believe it.

Another big shocker in the first half of the book is the discovery that, for some time before she defected, Fiona was having an affair with a Canadian psychiatrist, a sustained sexual infidelity to her husband. This completely changes the framework of the preceding five novels. Fiona’s betrayal of Samson is even more personal than we’d thought. He’s called Harry Kennedy and, like all Deighton characters who do so, he falls almost immediately into a trance-like and perfect epitome of ‘love’: ‘I love you darling.’ ‘I know, darling.’

[All Deighton characters fall in love the same way and then talk in the same lovey-dovey way: Fiona and Harry’s love talk sounds just like Bernard and Gloria’s and just like Jamie Farebrother and Victoria’s in Goodbye, Mickey Mouse.]

In a further revelation, towards the end of the novel Fiona, the DG and Bret back in London (and we the reader) discover that her Canadian lover in fact comes from a Ukrainian family, was a member of the Communist Party at university and has done bits of small work for the KGB in the past – a discovery which stuns and amazes Fiona, leaving her feeling even more paranoid and lonely in her isolated double role in the terrifying East. Was Harry set to spy on her? Is he a glorified minder? Yes. Is there anyone she can trust? No.

Lowering

The net effect is, I think, depressing. Samson who in the first five books is the virile, confident and amusing narrator – is now revealed as entirely fallible, misled about everything. This applies not only in his immediate life but the book also refers to the events at the end of World War Two in which his father’s career in the SIS was tarnished, and shows how unfair that accusation was (specifically, the killing of the two Winter brothers which concludes Deighton’s epic novel, Winter, which provides historical background to the Samson books). Thus Deighton makes the trail of doubt and deceit goes back indefinitely into the past…

Depressing because Samson is partly a symbol of all of us. Fictions, novels, give us the entirely spurious impression we understand what is going on in the world. Fictional characters’ lives are laid out in generally schematic ways, as they interact with a small and manageable number of people in sequences of events known as ‘plots’ which have a convenient beginning, middle and end.

That’s why the first five Samson novels are so reassuring and warm (despite the occasional outbursts of violence each one contains). The amused tone of the ever-confident Samson is buoyant, reassuring company. But this sixth novel systematically devastates our understanding of what went before, making us realise we’ve understood almost nothing. And along with the events it undermines, go the warmth and security the other books had created. This book destroys those feelings. We are alone on a darkling plain.

Skipping

Deighton speeds up the overview in the last 100 pages. An author who normally takes ten pages to describe two people chatting over a drink or in a bedroom or on a country walk, suddenly skips big sections of time. As when he begins to show us the investigation committee set up to review Bret’s management of Stinnes’ defection in great detail, showing the members arriving at the safe house in the country where Stinnes is being kept, describing each of the men sitting round the table, and beginning with verbatim accounts of what is being said, as if this scene alone will, characteristically, take another ten pages… But then – it is almost as if Deighton is bored with his own thoroughness – the text suddenly reverts to a high-level summary:

When Bret faced the wall of opposition which Moskvin and Stinnes had between them constructed brick by brick, he did something that neither of the Russians had provided for. Rensselaer went to Berlin and pleaded for the aid of Bernard Samson. (p.321)

In the last 100 pages there are several occasions when the narrative tires of its own detail and simply jumps mid-paragraph to a completely new scene. Some sections repeat or introduce characters we already know. Overall the text gives the impression of having been written at different times – maybe the objective scenes were written at the same time that Samson’s point of view was being written for the earlier novels – and not fully integrated into a seamless whole.

It is very bitty, jumping between the key scenes of the earlier novels, relying on our memory of them to give the narrative coherence.

Undermining the East German economy

In the scene early in the novel, set in 1978, when Bret suggests his plan of creating a triple agent to fool the East Germans – a plan they eventually name Operation Sinker, hence the title of the novel and, by extension, of all three novels in the sequence – it is explained how Fiona’s infiltration is designed to undermine the East German state in two ways:

to identify key engineers, scientists and intellectuals who can be enticed to the West creating a ‘brain drain’
to identify opposition groups, dissidents from left or right, church and human rights organisations and so on, which the West can tacitly support and thus undermine the communist regime

The DG and Bret are seen speculating wildly that if the operation succeeds, they’ll have the Berlin Wall crashing down in ten years time, by, ooh, say, 1990.

Now, as we all know, Soviet domination of Eastern Europe did crumble in the second half of 1989 and the Wall was knocked through in November of that year (even if it didn’t begin to be formally demolished till June 1990). This novel was published in 1990 by which time not only was the Wall down, but we knew how it came about – the final collapse of the Soviet model of the Command Economy under Gorbachev whose efforts at selective loosening of the reins of state control (perestroika) only hastened its decay, along with the rapid growth of civic groups opposing the regime (given more freedom of expression under glasnost) – including dissidents and especially groups based in churches. Then the final straw of Hungary’s decision to open its borders and allow free passage for any East European citizen to the West, which at a stroke made the Wall redundant.

I would dearly love to know whether Deighton had conceived Fiona’s mission in terms which so closely predicted the actual course of events right from the start and before the first novel in the series was published in 1983 when everyone thought Soviet domination, the Wall and all the rest of it would last indefinitely? Or was the alignment to historical fact, and the timescale, only introduced after all this came to pass? Was Len a prophet predicting the future – or a dab hand at cutting and pasting actual events into a long-pondered narrative?

Len Deighton’s novels

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by Simon on September 18, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Spy novel, Thriller

Tagged 1990, Bernard Samson, Bret Rensselaer, Erich Stinnes, Fiona Samson, Harry Strang, Henry Tiptree, Hubert Renn, Ladbrook, Len Deighton, Pavel Moskvin, Silas Gaunt, Sir Percy Babcock, Spy Sinker, Thurkettle, Werner Volkmann

Posted by Simon on September 18, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/09/18/spy-sinker-len-deighton/

Spy Line by Len Deighton (1990)

This is the second novel in the second trilogy about 40-something British intelligence agent, Bernard Samson. At the end of its predecessor he was on the run in Berlin, an arrest warrant issued by his own side for treason, presumably because he had been investigating (and publicising) a top secret slush fund which his wife – Fiona, who we saw defecting to the Russians in the first trilogy – helped set up and administer.

Summary

To cut a long story short, in this novel we find out that his wife is what he had come to suspect, a triple agent – working for British Intelligence for ten years, while all along pretending to be a KGB spy and sending the Russkies important information, then (at the climax of the first novel) pretending to be forced to flee after her own husband ‘outed’ her as the senior ‘mole’ in the Department – but secretly continuing to work for us from the senior position she is given in the KGB’s East Berlin office.

The Plot

Deighton is much more attracted to cosy domesticity than life on the edge. It’s a little disappointing that his ‘life on the run’ amounts to simply holing up in a dirty squat in a rundown part of Berlin for a week or two. There’s a colourfully seedy scene of Samson sitting drinking with Rudolf Kleindorf, ageing owner of a dance and strip club where old lags come to exchange gossip and information. And we accompany him back to his dirty, noisy squat. But we and Bernie have barely experienced the lowlife for more than a few pages before the head of Berlin Office, Frank Harrington, sends a man to fetch him to witness an interrogation. Oh. They knew where he is all along.

Rather puzzlingly, Samson goes along to watch this interrogation, the questioning of an East German operative. The only bit of interest being when he indicates a photo of Erich Stinnes (a KGB agent who featured largely in the first trilogy) and makes a throwaway reference to seeing him using a ‘white powder’. Drugs? More to the point, security is so lax that Samson overhears a remark which makes it clear this isn’t a defector but an ongoing agent who is about to be sent back to the East. Why did Frank invite him to watch this? Were a few snippets of information mentioned in the session somehow important? Who to?

Teacher

The Department employee who took him there – Teacher – drives him back to his own apartment to meet his wife and have lunch. Much more energy goes into describing the Teachers’ apartment and his wife, Clemmie’s, unhappiness at the coldness of Berlin and the rudeness of Berliners, than did painting Samson’s life in hiding. Domesticity and marital relations, soft furnishings and food are more persuasively described than jeopardy. (Later, we learn from one of the countless gossipy conversations Samson spends the book having, that Clemmie has run off with an American record producer who was passing through Berlin.)

His old mate Werner says, ‘This is silly, why don’t you come back and stay at Tante Lisl’s boarding house?’ and so Bernie moves back into his old room at the top of the building and sees for himself the ‘improvements’ Werner is making to the old place. And realises that Werner has fallen in love with Lisl’s rather stern niece, Ingrid, daughter of her sister Inge. (We learned a lot about the backstories of these two ladies in Deighton’s epic novel about Germany 1900 to 1945, Winter). Zena, Werner’s tough, young, self-centred wife, appears to have flown the coop.

Rehabilitation

Soon enough Head of Berlin Office Frank Harrington drops by and says London Central have made Samson an offer: sign all the official secrets stuff and resign: he can work out his notice in a menial job but retire on a full pension. They’ve never trusted you, Frank explains, since your wife was exposed as a KGB spy.

But Bernard refuses; resigning would admit some degree of guilt and collusion. ‘Well, go back anyway, the charges have been dropped,’ Frank says. Just like that. On the run, hiding out — oh you can go back now. It’s all very anti-climactic. No chases, no shootouts, no tension. Samson flies back to London, is reunited with his girlfriend, Gloria, and his kids, Sally and Billy, then goes back to the office where everyone treats him as if nothing had happened at all. Bit puzzling.

He’s called into the office of a previously unmentioned character, the Deputy Controller of Europe who turns out to be a tough, balding Australian, Gus Stowe. In the usual roundabout, tortuous way these conversations take place, Bernard realises he’s being sent on a hush-hush mission to Vienna, code name Fledermaus.

Stamps in Salzberg

He flies to Vienna and then on to Salzburg where, amid all the Mozart kitsch, he meets his contact, Otto Hoffmann, who turns out to be a stamp collector attending a big five-day philatelic auction. There is a lot – an awful lot – of detail about stamp collecting. (There is a lot of detail about stamps sent from Zeppelins before the war, which may or may not be a reference to the involvement of the Winter family with zeppelins, as described in Winter.) Bernard is given money and told to bid for one particular lot, an envelope with rare stamps on it.

In the actual auction, Samson is surprised when someone else bids getting on for double the price he was instructed to offer and wins the envelope. Samson tracks down the American collector who made the successful bid, Bart Johnson, and they both go to the cashier where you pay and collect your item, only to find someone else claims to have paid more and made off with it. Johnson is furious. Samson tags along with him out of curiosity (what’s going on?) and they go back to the hotel where they’re both staying and make a date to meet for drinks and dinner. Bernard is back in his room freshening up when he hears a (small) explosion, runs along the hall and finds Johnson has been the victim of a particularly nasty type of bomb, planted in the hotel electric shaver. It has blown his hand and face off. As other guests come pouring in, Samson makes good his escape wondering (like the reader) what the hell is going on.

The man who had given him the instructions about bidding for the envelope had also given him instructions about who to take it to in Vienna, one Baron Staiger. Bernard flies to Vienna, takes a cab the scheduled apartment and walks up to meet Baron Staiger who turns out to be – no other than Otto Hoffmann.

In another of the surreal scenes which litter these novels, Staiger is holding a super-refined party for Vienna’s upper crust in which Bernard feels very out of place, and which climaxes with the arrival of the triumphant soprano from the nearby opera house. Only when the party is quite over does Staiger talk to Bernard and declares himself pretty relaxed about the loss of the envelope – because he has it right here in his pocket! He had heard the Americans were going to bid for it so he was the other, mystery, bidder on the phone who drove the price way beyond Bernard’s limit, and ducked in to claim it before Johnson made it to the claims desk.

Staiger opens the envelope and it contains Czech security passes for himself and Bernard. Why, the reader asks, was this ridiculous charade necessary, except to pad the novel out with colourful scenes in Salzburg, a surreal stamp collecting convention, and the utterly unnecessary murder of an American?

Into Czechoslovakia

Next day Staiger drives Bernard across the border into Czecholsovakia (lots of local description, lots of Deighton-esque history of the Sudetenland under the Nazis and then under Stalin) accompanied by a Czech security car and then up to a mountain cabin which is crawling with security men, guns and ferocious guard dogs, before depositing Bernard outside a farmhouse.

Bernard goes in to find his wife Fiona who proceeds to confirm all his suspicions: she is a triple agent, she is so sorry for all the deceit and worry but they couldn’t tell him, her life depended on him acting genuinely outraged (the KGB have been tailing and watching his reactions to her desertion), and now she is coming back, in just a few weeks she’ll be back in the UK: ‘Oh I do love you darling,’ ‘and I love you, darling’.

This is even more surreal than the stamp collecting convention. If she’s such a professional, if this is the climax of 10 years of planning, why oh why is she risking it all for a rushed sentimental meeting with her husband? In full sight of about twenty Czech security police who will report every centimetre to their KGB bosses? Isn’t the room bugged? Won’t they guess what she’s doing? Did this clandestine meeting really require all the rigmarole of the stamp collecting convention and bidding? Why doesn’t she simply complete her mission and arrive back in London safe and sound, without the exploding stamp collectors and high risk tryst?

Gratifying though it is to have Bernard’s (and our) suspicions confirmed, this whole scene blows an enormous hole in the novel’s credibility. The one thing she asks him to do is get back from her sister, Tessa, the expensive fur coat her father bought her. The reader immediately thinks it must contain some microfilm or equally precious artifact.

Part two

Staiger drives Bernie safely back to Vienna and he flies back to London, to the embrace off his girlfriend Gloria, and the children, but inside is in complete turmoil. He tells no one about seeing his wife.

Instead the next 30 pages or so describe Bernard and Gloria attending a carefully choreographed dinner party at his boss, Dicky Cruyer’s house, complete with detailed description of every course of the meal and Dicky’s difficulties ‘carving’ the enormous poached salmon which is the opening course. It’s in this chatty, gossipy, homely surrounding that, as so often, a number of the guests (who are all ‘in the business’) discuss recent events and broach new ventures. Thus Samson finds himself asked to help the CIA in the form of Posh Harry, the Hawaiian fixer we met in the first trilogy and who played a central role in the odd Californian excursion in Spy Hook.

Parties

No sooner is this dinner, complete with cigars and port for the men, more or less over than Gloria begs Samson to be allowed to go on to a party his brother-in-law George Kosinski (the used car salesman) and wife Tessa, are going to. Very swanky place in Pimlico and a swanky party hosted by a German prince, known to all and sundry as Joppi.

Later, driving Bernard home, his brother-in-law confides that he thinks Tessa is on drugs: did he notice the slightly hysterical atmosphere at the party? People were taking drugs upstairs. And did he notice the sinister guy with a beard fringing his chin? Tessa’s been getting friendly with him; George thinks he’s a dealer and is selling her the stuff.

Rolf Mauser

The next day Samson meets Rolf Mauser, yet another ageing survivor of the war, who tells him Kleindorf, the nightclub owner we met in the first chapter, is dead. He was smuggling drugs. The official cause of death is suicide by overdose but Mauser has information one of his dancers injected him with raw heroin. Mauser explains the raw heroin arrives in East Berlin, then is smuggled West to be refined, before being smuggled back again for sale.

So is the novel about drug smuggling between East and West Berlin?

Thurkettle

Samson goes for the boozy lunch with Posh Harry that was arranged at Dicky Cruyer’s party but, on returning, begins to be questioned and then interrogated by Harry’s boss, John Brody. Turns out Johnson, the American stamp enthusiast in Salzberg, was a CIA man tasked with bringing in another ex-Company man, one Thurkettle, a hardened murderer and hit man who has gone rogue. Almost certainly it was Thurkettle who murdered Johnson. The Americans are suspicious of Samson’s involvement. He realises the description of Thurkettle fits the man George thinks is peddling drugs to Tessa.

Silas Gaunt

Next Samson motors out to the Cotswolds, to the country house of long-retired old Silas Gaunt, who, like so many of the characters, knew his father. In a refreshing bit of plain speaking the ailing Gaunt – warned by his doctor he is at death’s door – confirms all Samson’s suspicions: Fiona is a triple agent; she was recruited at Oxford; only old Gaunt, the doddery DG and Samson know the truth. If they all died, Fiona would be trapped. Gaunt makes Samson witness him signing a long document which he says is a detailed account of Fiona’s case which will exonerate her.

Over the next few days Samson has to process this devastating information. So his wife is a heroic agent, good. But she hid it all from him for ten years, and deserted him and his children without a qualm. Did he ever really know her? Could he ever trust her again? What are his feelings for her and how does effect his feelings for young Gloria, who is making such an effort to be a good lover and surrogate mother to his two children?

A few days later his boss, Dicky Cruyer, orders Samson to accompany him on a trip to Berlin. Dicky is actually hoping to make it a dirty weekend with Tessa, and Samson is cross at being pulled in as some kind of accomplice, but the jaunt is justified by meetings with Frank. After the usual lengthy chat, reminiscence, drinks and cigars, Frank eventually comes out and tells Samson he is being instructed to drive a van which is going to pick up an agent from the other side, accompanied by the young desk officer Teacher who we met early in the novel. If there is a problem, Teacher has instructions to kill the agent rather than let him fall into the hands of the opposition.

The reader begins to have a bad feeling the agent will be Fiona and that something will go wrong and he will have to shoot her…

Finale

The novel does climax in a bloody mess. Werner, his old friend, organises a big fancy dress party for the opening of the new, repainted Tante Lisl guesthouse. 150 guests are fired up and dancing as a fierce thunderstorm breaks outside. In the middle of the noise, Teacher comes looking for Samson: he’s received the signal – they must go to the rendezvous. The only catch is Teacher has come to the party in a joke gorilla costume and no-one has a suit for him to change into; in fact, he almost comes to blows with Werner trying to nick one of the latter’s suits, and is eventually forced, very unhappily, to drive on this important mission wearing his gorilla costume. And, at the last minute, Tessa, in a flighty yellow dress and stoned out of her mind, insists on climbing into the back of the van and no-one can persuade her out.

Shootout

Teacher, Samson and Tessa drive slowly in the transit van in the thundering rain along the West-heading Autobahn looking out for a parked car. Eventually they see lights and a darkened car parked by a load of giant earth-moving machines in an area roped off for repairs. It is pitch black and pouring down with rain. Teacher gets out and is moving towards the car when lights go on, there are shots, Teacher hits the car a few times before being himself shot down. Tessa comes floating out the back of the van and waltzes towards the German car when she is shot twice with a shotgun which tears her apart, blood pouring over her dress. Another woman’s voice shrieks, it is Fiona. In the drenching rain and darkness and confusion Samson has made it up onto the tracks of a giant digger and uses its raised shovel to steady his aim as he shoots and kills the two East German men. One of them is Erich Stinnes; Samson shoots him in the neck and watches a great spurt of blood shoot up against the motorway lights.

But there was a third man, now hidden, who had used a silencer. Samson stands stock still in the pouring rain waiting for something to happen. The man shouts over to Samson in an American voice. It is Thurkettle the assassin. Samson shouts to Fiona to move from the East German car to the van and start the engine. When she’s done so, he makes a run for the other van door. There are no shots. They’re being allowed to escape. They pull away from the scene of the shootout and Fiona drives through the rain and into West Germany in silence, her knuckles white against the wheel. In the rear view mirror they see a great gout of flame and hear an explosion: the East German car has been blown up along with all the evidence. Thurkettle has stage managed the whole thing…

Soldiers greet them at the checkpoint. Fiona is sedated, and they are loaded aboard a plane headed for America.

Aftermath

The novel ends with Samson and Fiona holed up in the luxury safe house-cum-prison on the California coast which we first saw in the previous novel. It is owned by millionairess Mrs O’Raffety, and the base where Bret Rensselaer is undergoing his long, painful rehabilitation after being shot at the climax of London Match. Turns out the whole thing – the Fiona defection – was his scheme and now it falls to him, as her case officer, to debriefing her. Days, weeks, and months go by. They are both trapped. Samson gloomily realises they might be there for years.

Samson learns the story being put about is that he has run off with Tessa. This explains their joint disappearance. Fiona slowly thaws out and talks to him. He tells her he thinks Tessa’s drug addiction was fostered as part of the plan. Tessa was lured to Berlin by a combination of Dicky and Thurkettle (who Samson is now certain he saw at Joppi’s party and who George warned him about), and encouraged to get into the van. Then she was deliberately murdered, so that her body would be found in the burnt-out car, and the enemy think it was Fiona.

Can the Department have done that? Murdered one sister to save the other? Bernard and Fiona huddle under blankets one cold Californian night looking out past the security fence into the darkness of the ocean with no hope.

This is a decisive shift in the tone of these novels. Whatever happens now, the murder of her sister will cast a long shadow over Fiona’s mental health, their marriage and numerous other characters. Will they ever be able to get back to England, their children and a normal married life? It seems impossible.

Atmosphere of old

I was too old for rough stuff: too old, too involved, too married, too soft. (p.37)
I was too old to get angry twice in one day. (p.219)

So many of the characters are old old old:

Tante Lisl and her sister Inge, into their 80s
Frank Harrington past retirement age in his middle 60s. ‘Frank was too old to be involved with Operations. Too old, too squeamish, too weary, too good-hearted.’ (p.271) ‘Frank was past retirement, soon he would be gone.’ (p.272)
John ‘Lange’ Koby in his seventies (p.44)
local fixer Kleindorf in his 70s
harsh old Wehrmacht officer Rolf Mauser in his 70s
Bart Johnson looks in his 60s
London CIA man John Brody, ‘He was old, a bald man with circular gold-rimmed glasses…’ (p.209)
Silas Gaunt, long since retired colleague of his father’s, ‘… was old and becoming more exasperating every time I saw him…’ (p.221) ‘… now he was old and he’d withdrawn into his own concerns with ageing, sickness and death.’ (p.224)
‘Some people – including me – had said that Bret Rensselaer was too old ever to become a full-time Departmental employee again.’ (p.301)
‘Mrs O’Raffety, the artistic old lady who owned the place…’ (p.303)

It is the central aspect of Samson’s character, indeed the main premise of the whole series, that Samson is the son of a man who was at the heart of British Intelligence in Berlin immediately after the war, and grew up among his father’s friends and colleagues, who provide the novel with its sense of breadth and historical depth.

But it inevitably means that, by the later 1980s, a lot of these characters are due to die off and with them will go the emotional background, the memories of his Berlin childhood and everything which makes Bernard Samson such a unique character.

Soon – very soon – Silas and Whitelands and all they meant would have vanished from my life. My mother was old and sick. Soon Lisl would be gone, and the hotel would be unrecognisable. When that happened I would no longer have any connections with the times that meant so much to me. (p.239)

Insofar as he is the nexus of all these relationships, a product of this history, Samson’s character – and the worldview of the novels which relies so heavily on the long shadow of world war two – has a limited shelf-life.

Len Deighton’s novels

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by Simon on September 14, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Novel, Spy novel, Thriller

Posted by Simon on September 14, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/09/14/spy-line-len-deighton/

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All posts tagged Len Deighton

Michael Crichton

The Andromeda Strain

Organisations

Official documentation

Scientific references

History of the science into the 1960s

Hard technology

Computers

Commission of enquiry

Scientific results

Bureaucratic tone set in the preface

Plot summary

Payoff

The IPCRESS connection

Crystals

The movie

Credit

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Absolute Friends

The plot

Ted becomes a spy

The present

The counter-university

The big shoot-out

The cover-up

A spot of biography

Use of the word ‘our’ in the fiction of John le Carré

Cartoon characterisation

Endless comparisons to boarding school

The big issue

My little pony

Credit

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Reviews of John Le Carré’s novels

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Spy stories

Family matters

Office politics

The plot

Anti-climax

Charity

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Len Deighton’s novels

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Spying as soap opera / Espionage as sitcom

Deighton’s Secret Intelligence Service

Faith

Hope

Chapters

Spy fiction and the fall of the wall

Credit

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Len Deighton’s novels

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Recapping the Bernard Samson novels

Damaged mood

The Bernard Samson universe

Gloria

The plot

Collecting VERDI

The Delius network

Fiona’s mission

Rendezvous with Werner

Dicky Cruyer’s plan

VERDI’s version

A family affair

Credit

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Len Deighton’s novels

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Mickey Murphy

The plot

Sub-plots