All posts tagged Mercier

Mercier and Camier by Samuel Beckett (1946)

‘What are you musing on, Mercier?’
‘On the horror of existence, confusedly,’ said Mercier.
‘What about a drink?’ said Camier.

After writing a series of experimental texts in English during the 1930s, Mercier et Camier was Beckett’s first attempt at an extended prose piece in French. He wrote it in 1946, while he was living in France after the end of the Second World War. It comes between Watt, which Beckett wrote in the last few years of the war, and directly before the three huge experimental ‘novels’ or texts which became known as The Beckett Trilogy – Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953).

Watt was long, experimental and – ultimately, for its author – unsatisfactory; who knows how to describe what it is for its readers.

Mercier and Camier is a lot shorter but Beckett found it even more unsatisfactory, which is why he refused to publish it in its original French until 1970. It only appeared in English in 1974, in Beckett’s own translation, in which he took the opportunity to make substantial alterations to the original text and to ‘reshape’ it from French to English. That’s the translation I read.

Structure

The Calder and Boyar edition I read is just 123 pages long. It is divided into eight chapters and every pair of chapters is followed by a ‘summary of two preceding chapters’ as in a school textbook.

The prose is lucid but highly mannered. A lot of it is similar to Murphy and Watt, not in style but in that it is writing about writing, writing whose main energy comes from taking the mickey out of traditional writing, that plays with the style of official reports, mixes in everyday phrases or clichés, and so on. It is not very interested in describing the world ‘out there’ but has made a nice safe warm space inside the head, playing with phrases. The general idea is that Mercier and Camier are a pair of vagabonds who intend to leave the city on a journey and Beckett introduces it thus:

Physically it was fairly easy going, without seas or frontiers to be crossed, through regions untormented on the whole, if desolate in parts. Mercier and Camier did not remove from home, they had that great good fortune. They did not have to face, with greater or less success, outlandish ways, tongues, laws, skies, foods, in surroundings little resembling those to which first childhood, then boyhood, then manhood had inured them. The weather, though often inclement (but they knew no better), never exceeded the limits of the temperate, that is to say of what could still be borne, without danger if not without discomfort, by the average native fittingly clad and shod. With regard to money, if it did not run to first class transport or the palatial hotel, still there was enough to keep them going, to and fro, without recourse to alms. It may be said therefore that in this respect too they were fortunate, up to a point. They had to struggle, but less than many must, less perhaps than most of those who venture forth, driven by a need now clear and now obscure.

‘Physically it was fairly easy going… The weather never exceeded the limits of the temperate… With regard to money…’ These sound like phrases from an official report, as does ‘It may be aid that…’

The style goes on to change and pull in other registers and mannerisms, playing with various learned tropes and techniques, but it is more often than not more interested in writing, in the possibilities of types and styles of writing, than in depicting any kind of ‘reality’.

Similarly, the dialogue is more often than not about the dialogue – characters speak about the act of speaking ‘did you say that?’ ‘did i say what?’ ‘did you say what you just said?’ ‘i don’t know, did i just say something?’ – played for laughs, played as a solemn game indicating the difficulties of even the most basic communication, rather than the kind of dialogue you find in most ‘normal’ novels.

More than anything else, unlike the monolithic solid blocks of prose found in The Beckett Trilogy, the pages look like a normal novel, divided up into short, sensible paragraphs which flag up new bits of dialogue or action or description in the traditional manner.

The shortness of the text, the use of short chapters, the breathing space provided by the end of chapter summaries, and the layout of the individual pages, all make Mercier and Camier feel like the most readable novel-style book Beckett ever wrote.

Repetition, absurdity and comedy

We are in an unnamed city. Mercier and Camier meet at their rendezvous point, though not before some misunderstanding. Mercier is first to arrive but gets bored waiting so goes for a stroll. Camier arrives ten minutes later so he goes for a stroll a few minutes before Camier gets back. Camier gets bored waiting then goes for a stroll just a few minutes before Mercier returns to the rendezvous point, hangs about a bit then goes for a stroll, and a few minutes later Camier returns to the rendezvous point, and tuts about where his friend can be, before going off for a stroll.. Repetition is at the core of Beckett’s technique, repetitions with slight variations which quickly build up into monstrous tables of permutations, as we have just seen in the numerous examples given in Watt. Beckett invests sufficient energy in this obsessive schedule of mistimed arrivals that he bothers to give us a table describing it.

In the introduction to Watt, Beckett scholar Chris Ackerley says Beckett is satirising the philosopher René Descartes’ notion that a comprehensive enumeration of what philosophers called the ‘accidents’ of a thing will eventually give you ‘understanding’ of the thing, whereas Beckett’s satirical deployment of this technique is designed to prove that the more you enumerate something, the further you in fact become from understanding it, you just become more bewildered.

In this format, this kind of mathematical precision which can be converted into a timetable is obviously a kind of satire on the timetabled way most of us live our lives, with mobile phones and meeting-reminding programs converting the endless flux of reality into bite-sized five-minute chunks.

But there is also something very powerful and uncanny about repetition. Repeat a word numerous times and it quickly starts to lose meaning and become absurd. Repeat a precise action numerous times and the same. It is as if repetition takes us out of the everyday. Transcendental meditators are instructed to repeat their mantra thousands of times to take them into an other-worldly state. Closer to Beckett’s Ireland, Roman Catholics have series of prayers to repeat as penances or on numerous other formalised occasions.

Repetition of drills with weapons make soldiers proficient, repetitive exercise improves athletes’ performance, makes difficult moves automatic, practice makes perfect. All this is true of the physical world. But in the world of language, repetition doesn’t make perfect or battle ready or match fit. Something different happens.

In Beckett’s hands, repetition can become obsessively patterned – as in the timetable of Mercier and Camier missing each other described above – in which case it reduces humans to automata, like buses meeting or missing a schedule, or the figures which come out of cuckoo clocks on the hour.

Or it can be funny, like two gentlemen bowing and taking their hats off to each other in an indefinite cycle of politeness.

Or it can open the door into Absurdity – highlighting the pointlessness of doing the same things or saying the same things over and over and nothing ever changing.

It is in this respect that Mercier and Camier anticipates Waiting For Godot, in that it is a text interested in repetition and a kind of formal patterning of actions and dialogue, but – crucially – enacted by two protagonists.

In the most intense moments (I say moments, in fact reading them takes hours) of The Beckett Trilogy what you have is one voice giving a running, stream-of-consciousness account of its bewilderment and misery and sense of utter crushing futility – which is what makes reading them, especially The Unnameable such a gruelling experience.

But when you have two characters, even if they’re predisposed to be miserable and depressed, for a man of Beckett’s sly humour, the temptation is to poke fun at his own seriousness, the temptation is to have one character deliver a long speech about the meaninglessness of existence… and then have the other character point out he’s sitting on his hat. Or his shoelaces have come undone, he might trip and do himself a mischief etc. Thus:

‘What are you musing on, Mercier?’
‘On the horror of existence, confusedly,’ said Mercier.
‘What about a drink?’ said Camier.

In other words, just the decision to have two characters opens up the possibility of counterpointing the misery of The Unnameable with a world of slapstick, pratfalls and bathos. And it’s in this respect that Mercier and Camier feels like a dry run for Waiting For Godot.

Aspects of style

Having finally met up, Mercier and Camier embrace just as the heavens open and it starts to tip down. They run into a shelter, still embracing.

Obscenity

Still embracing? Two dogs run into the shelter and start copulating furiously, making Mercier and Camier realise they they also are still embracing. Are they gay? Or straight friends caught in an embarrassingly inappropriate moment? Is Beckett pulling the reader’s leg or tweaking the censor’s nose?

The pair continue to regard the copulating dogs, Camier wonders why they’re still plugged together and Mercier gives a wearied / cynical explanation:

What would you? said Mercier. The ecstasy is past, they yearn to part, to go and piss against a post or eat a morsel of shit, but cannot. So they turn their backs on each other. You’d do as much, if you were they.

A moment later Camier asks if they can sit down as he feels ‘all sucked off’. That is not a usual expression for ‘tired’, it is easier to interpret as a sexual expression. Later the ranger tells the dogs to bugger off. Mercier remarks that the ranger was a hero in the mud of flanders during the Great War while he and Camier were ‘high and dry, masturbating full pelt without fear of interruption…’ In chapter two Mercier says ‘fuck thee’. In chapter 4 Camier mildly remarks: ‘Cunts we may be…’ In chapter 6 Mercier remembers his wife, not very fondly, Toffana, making love to whom was ‘like fucking a quag’.

So why is Beckett dwelling on piss, shit and blowjobs, masturbation, buggery fucks and cunts?

Is it another way of ridiculing the high-mindedness of the Rationalist tradition in Western philosophy (as the satires on Descartes’ method are in Watt?) Or a poke in the eye for anyone who thinks human existence is noble and spiritual? Or was it in the spirit of many other mid-century literary rebels who thought writing ‘shit’ and ‘piss’ was a blow against the Establishment / capitalist system / patriarchy?

Beckett prefers ideas and categories to description

The sounds of the city intrude:

On all hands already the workers were at it again, the air waxed loud with cries of pleasure and pain and with the urbaner notes of those for whom life had exhausted its surprises, as well on the minus side as on the plus. Things too were getting ponderously under way. It was in vain the rain poured down, the whole business was starting again with apparently no less ardour than if the sky had been a cloudless blue.

Dickens or Balzac or maybe E.M. Foster or Virginia Woolf would have given us a world of detail, listing occupations and activities of the city coming to life. In his compendious Modernist classic, Berlin Alexanderplatz, the German novelist, Alfred Döblin, used a blitz of collages and quotes from newspapers, adverts and billboards to convey the over-abundant sensual stimulation of the modern city.

But Beckett’s description is a good example of the way he isn’t at all interested in that notion of urban life and colour – his imagination always generalises, moves to the philosophical categories and ideas underlying any situation, and then plays with these and the language they’re cast in. Ignores the sensuous specific for the ideas and possibilities latent in the language of ideas. It’s this which makes so much of his writing seem grey and abstract – because it is.

Dialogue as experiments with the idea of dialogue

Similarly, the dialogue barely refers to events or things, or only the bare minimum required to make sense. Most of the dialogue is about the nature of dialogue, it is playing with the notion of dialogue and what is concealed or implied in it.

No big ideas, no Freudian sub-texts or subtle implications, it isn’t that purposive. Beckett is just tinkering with fragments of dialogue, arranging and re-arranging them at angles to each other, to see what happens, to see what effects are created. It is like cubism. Picasso and Braque in their cubist paintings depicted really banal everyday objects – tables with newspapers, a bottle of wine and some apples on it. The revolution wasn’t in the subject matter which was as banal as can be. It was in the radical experiment of seeing the same thing from different angles.

So just as cubism takes everyday subject matter and subjects it to multiple perspectives and styles, so Beckett’s dialogue takes mundane chatter and subjects it to multiple perspectives and styles. That, I think, is the spirit to approach lots of the dialogue in Beckett. It is, at best, tangential or inconsequential, random, but it also plays with registers or tones. Characters speak to each other in the style of official reports or philosophical textbooks, the exact opposite of the casual slang or jokey tone most people use in conversations:

We shall never know, said Camier, at what hour we arranged to meet today, so let us drop the subject.
In all this confusion one thing alone is sure, said Mercier, and that is that we met at ten to ten, at the same time as the hands, or rather a moment later.
There is that to be thankful for, said Camier.
The rain had not yet begun, said Mercier.
The morning fervour was intact, said Camier.
Don’t lose our agenda, said Mercier.

So it is a kind of verbal satirical cubism. And once you adapt to its arch stylisation, it can become very funny.

Who owns them dogs? said the ranger.
I don’t see how we can stay, said Camier.
Can it I wonder be the fillip we needed, to get us moving? said Mercier.

And one reason this novel feels so pacey, so unlike the concrete blocks of the Trilogy is because so much of it consists of this slightly surreal, slightly deranged, stylised and often very funny dialogue.

What is more, said Mercier, we have still thought to take, before it is too late.
Thought to take? said Camier.
Those were my words, said Mercier.
I thought all thought was taken, said Camier, and all in order.
All is not, said Mercier.

Tramps discussing Descartes, with half an eye on Laurel and Hardy:

Is thought now taken, said Camier, and all in order?
No, said Mercier.
Will all ever be? said Camier.
I believe so, said Mercier, yes, I believe, not firmly, no, but I believe, yes, the day is coming when all will be in order, at last.
That will be delightful, said Camier.
Let us hope so, said Mercier

The plot

Chapter 1

They are in the Place Satin-Ruth which is dominated by an ancient copper beech, on which a French Field Marshall several centuries earlier had once pinned a label. They are sheltering from the rain in a shelter. A ‘ranger’ sticks his head in and asks if this is their bicycle. They discuss, in their oblique pseudo-philosophical way, the journey ahead. Rather magically night begins to fall. They must have spent the entire day there. They enumerate their belongings (the sack, the umbrella, the raincoat), exit the shelter, pick up the bicycle and push it away, under the watchful eyes of the ranger, who curses them on their way.

Chapter 2

The pair push their bicycle through the busy urban throng.

I’m cold, said Camier.
It was indeed cold.
It is indeed cold, said Mercier

They repair to a pub. Landlord says no bikes so they chain theirs to the railings. Drink for some time and discuss their situation. Decide to press on, go outside, pick up the bike, resume their walk. At a crossroads don’t know which way to go so let the umbrella decide by letting it fall. It points to the left. They see a man in a frock coat walking ahead of them.They both hear the sound of a mixed choir. Then it dawns on them to actually use the umbrella against the pouring rain, but neither of them can get it open, Mercier smashes it to the ground and says ‘fuck thee’ to Camier.

They arrive at Helen’s and notice the grand carpet and the white cockatoo. Helen suddenly appears in the text, with no introduction or explanation, offering them the couch or the bed. Mercier says he will sleep with none. Then:

A nice little suck-off, said Camier, not too prolonged, by all means, but nothing more.
Terminated, said Helen, the nice little suck-offs but nothing more.

Does this mean Helen is a sex worker, and Camier is agreeing to a nice blowjob. By ‘terminated’ does Helen mean she is agreeing to the deal i.e. payment for two blowjobs ‘but nothing more’ i.e. no penetration.

One paragraph later they are ‘back in the street’, the entire night having, apparently, passed. They’re a little way down the road from Helen’s when the pouring rain makes them take shelter in an archway. They realise they’ve mislaid the sack. They enumerate what was in it. Enumerating things is one of Beckett’s most basic techniques.

Camier realises he is hungry and steps out from the archway to go to a shop. Mercier is stricken with anxiety and begs him to come back. Camier relents for a moment but then steps boldly out in the rain to find sustenance.

In his absence Mercier looks up to see a little boy and a little girl standing in the rain, who call him Papa! He shouts ‘fuck off out of here!’ at them and chases them away.

Camier returns and places a cream horn in Mercier’s hand. Mercier squeezes it uncomprehendingly till the cream spills out, and then doubles over in misery, weeping, says he’ll start crawling (as so many Beckett characters end up doing, sooner or later).

Mercier’s mood of misery and futility is interrupted by the sound of a screech of brakes and a crash. They run out into the street and see a fat woman who’s been run over, is lying amid the wreckage of her skirts, with blood flowing. Soon a crowd blocks their view (as crowds are always attracted to car accidents, as described in J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash).

Pepped up by this sight, Mercier feels like a new man, and they resume their journey.

The text is then punctuated by one of the summaries of the content so far. I’ll give the summary of chapter 1.

Summary of two preceding chapters
I
Outset.
Meeting of Mercier and Camier.
Saint Ruth Square.
The beech.
The rain.
The shelter.
The dogs.
Distress of Camier.
The ranger.
The bicycle.
Words with the ranger.
Mercier and Camier confer.
Results of this conference.
Bright too late.
The bell.
Mercier and Camier set out.

Chapter 3

Opens with a macabre first-person account by a narrator who says his parents died in a train crash when he was soon after he was 13 and he was placed with farmers who made him work hard at all sorts of manual tasks, but he turned out – gruesomely – to excel, from the age of 15, at ‘the slaughter of little lambs, calves, kids and porklings and the emasculation of little bullocks, rams, billy goats and piglets’, and smothering geese. At the age of 19 or 20, having got a milkmaid pregnant, he ran away, after setting fire to the barns, granaries and stables. That was 50 years ago (i.e. like so many Beckett narrators, he is now ancient and decrepit).

Only then, at the end of this monologue do we realise that the absence of speech marks Beckett’s deploys throughout the book has, in this instance, fooled us. This isn’t first-person narration, it is the monologue of an old codger in the compartment of the train Mercier and Camier are on. It is a sly, humorous sleight of hand.

The train stops but Mercier and Camier are too slow to get off and relieve themselves of the old man’s company and so, as the train starts up again, so does his monologue, this time a feverish garble which seems to be about whoring and womanising. The train stops at another stop and he gets off, now identified as Mr Madden, ‘He wore gaiters, a yellow block-hat and a rusty frock-coat reaching down to his knees.’ The comic dialogue between our hapless duo resumes. Mercier complains that Camier has booked them onto the stopping train, the slow train south of our Dublin (which was known in those days as the slow and easy):

I knew it, said Mercier. I’ve been shamefully abused. I’d throw myself out of the window if I wasn’t afraid I might sprain my ankle.

Camier says they’ll get down at the next stop and next thing they are in the little settlement surrounding the next station without any description of the train having stopped or them having alighted. The text is full of continual sly jokes like that, or casual underminings of the conventions of fiction. Elsewhere he undermines his own sentences even as he writes them:

It’s … snug, said the man, there is no other word. Patrick! he cried. But there was another word, for he added, in a tone of tentative complicity, whatever that sounds like, It’s … gemütlich.

The narrator uses a description and immediately wonders what the description can mean. The man speaking is an inn-keeper, greeting our travellers, while yelling over his shoulder for Patrick, presumably a servant. Mercier says that he has seen this man in his dreams. A page later we learn he is named Mr Gall, which reminds us of the Mr Gall the piano tuner who prompted a crisis of epistemology in Watt in the eponymous novel.

It is fair day. The farmers have brought their goods and animals to market. The beasts are stuffed in their pens. The narrator describes the farmers as grasping their ‘pricks through the stuff of their pockets’. Mercier summons the manager, they ask for several items off the menu which are all sold out. Camier says his friend Mercier is ‘out on his feet’, is it alright if they take a room for a rest, the manager agrees and our couple go upstairs.

One of the farmers comes over, is greeted by the manager as Mr Graves (which reminds us of Mr Graves the gardener in Watt) and comments the departed pair are ‘a nice pair’ and asks Mr Gall where he got used to such. Is the implication (once again) they Mercier and Camier are gay, and the farmer and manager think they’ve gone upstairs for sex?

Mr Gall appears to change his name and becomes Mr Gast, as the farmers depart and he is suddenly looking out onto a little medieval square, as if in a science fiction or horror story. The barman comes up and describes our pair as: ‘the long hank with the beard [and] the little fat one…’

Mr Gast pops out to find out what’s become of the absent Patrick, and is back a moment later, telling the barman he (Patrick) has died. His penultimate words were for a pint. Mr Gast calls for Teresa who is, fortunately, still alive and she comes out of the loo, a buxom wench carrying a big tray.

A rough tough man enters the bar in his hobnail boots, it is Mr Conaire, explains he’s escaped what he calls ‘the core of the metropolitan gas-chamber’, glimpses buxom Teresa, glances at the barkeeper, who is now named George. Mr Conaire asks the way to the ‘convenience’ and manages to brush against Teresa’s buxomness. Mr Gast has another vision, the present disappears as he sees a distant vista, a desolate moor with a single winding track and a solitary figure…

Mr Conaire reappears from the convenience having had a difficult time of it. Maybe he has constipation. He flirts more with Teresa then says he has an appointment to meet F.X. Camier, private investigator, and gives a description of Camier – ‘Small and fat… red face, scant hair, four chins, protruding paunch, bandy legs, beady pig eyes’ – which George complements with a description of Mercier – ‘A big bony hank with a beard… hardly able to stand, wicked expression’.

George goes up to their room to get them, but discovers Mercier and Camier asleep  and snoring, hand in hand on the floor of the hotel room.

Chapter 4

Our heroes are in the open countryside, not a house in sight, on a bank overlooking a wide field, inhabited only by a goat. But it isn’t a Shakespeare paradise, it is a wintry, cold and gloomy, damp Irish field, the sun is ‘a raw pale blotch’ in the cloudy sky. Camier complains he can feel the cold creeping up his crack. Mercier shares his method of keeping happy, which is to focus on parts of the body which do not hurt.

What shall they do? Camier suggests they need to go back into the town to find the sack, the sack they seem to have misplaced after they left Helen’s place. But maybe the sack itself isn’t the cause or the reason for their sense of want. The sack itself will not supply the truth. Maybe it is some aspect of the sack, as of the bicycle or the umbrella. Camier is disquisiting further on the nature of when Mercier interrupts him to tell him about the dream he had last night, in which his grandmother was carrying her own breasts by their nipples.

Camier loses his temper. Have they not made a solemn vow, ‘No dreams or quotes at any price.’ Camier is dispatched to get provisions from the town, swaggering there on his stumpy legs, while Mercier is left to decide in which direction to collapse.

The text cuts with no explanation to Camier being at the bar in the pub ordering a round of five sandwiches off George and introducing himself to Conaire. Mr Conaire shares a very Beckettian vision of entropy:

Yesterday cakes, today sandwiches, tomorrow crusts and Thursday stones.

We discover he spent the entire previous evening waiting for Camier to appear and fell asleep on a couch. When he woke up in the morning our couple had moved on. Camier is sublimely indifferent and leaves with his sandwiches. Mr Conaire goes for a crap. Mr Gast is absent, picking snowdrops for Patrick’s sheaf. Teresa also is absent.

Back with Mercier, Camier feeds him a sandwich but Mercier throws up. They stagger to their feet and realise they have to press on. Somewhere. For some reason. There’s a page or two of debate about whether to leave the tattered old raincoat where it is, which they do, then lament that they have. They totter back towards the railway station.

Summary of chapters 3 and 4

Chapter 5

They arrive back at the town on Sunday night. Knowing no better, they make their way to Helen’s who lets them stay and presents them with the umbrella, restored to full function. They appear to spend the evening making love, or entwining their naked bodies. So they are gay. Next afternoon they set off for their destination (we are not told what that is), and stop into a pub to wait for dark. And discuss at length and come to Great Conclusions:

1. The lack of money is an evil. But it can turn to a good.
2. What is lost is lost.
3. The bicycle is a great good. But it can turn nasty, if ill employed.
4. There is food for thought in being down and out.
5. There are two needs: the need you have and the need to have it.
6. Intuition leads to many a folly.
7. That which the soul spews forth is never lost.
8. Pockets daily emptier of their last resources are enough to break the stoutest resolution.
9. The male trouser has got stuck in a rut, particularly the fly which should be transferred to the crotch and designed to open trapwise, permitting the testes, regardless of the whole sordid business of micturition, to take the air unobserved. The drawers should of course be transfigured in consequence.
10. Contrary to a prevalent opinion, there are places in nature from which God would appear to be absent.
11. What would one do without women? Explore other channels.
12. Soul: another four-letter word.
13. What can be said of life not already said? Many things. That its arse is a rotten shot, for example.

Beckett loves a list. Our heroes decide to postpone decisive action till the following day and return to Helen’s place to kip. Next morning they set out bravely, not forgetting the umbrella. In fact it’s more like a parasol. Mercier tells Camier he bought it at Khan’s, which appears to be a pawnshop. Camier says it appears to have been manufactured in 1900, the year of the siege of Ladysmith during the Boer War. Camier gives such a vivid description of the siege, that they might have been there as young men.

Now both try and fail to open the wretched thing. Camier disappears back up the stairs (presumably of Helen’s place). Mercier takes advantage of his absence to walk on and enters a Joycean stream of consciousness phantasmagoria of thoughts and impressions about time and passersby. His path crosses an old man, he sees a man guiding a donkey, and urchins playing at marbles in the street, he rattles chains with his big stick, as he staggers senilely on.

Chapter 6

Evening of the same day. Camier is in a pub. Another pub. It is packed with dockers and sailors, a fug or smoke and beer fumes. He closes his eyes and spends two pages imagining Mercier arriving. When he opens them, Mercier has arrived, causing a momentary lull in the male fug of conversation.

They enter an obscure and highly stylised conversation. Where is the umbrella? When Camier was helping Helen, his hand slipped – he explains, as if that explains anything. Is it a sexual reference. Meanwhile the bicycle they left chained to the railings has, with Beckettian entropy, disintegrated, having lost wheels, saddle, bell and carrier, though not, intriguingly, its pump.

They set off into the dark night, supporting each other, though neither knows whither or why. They struggle to speak, Camier wants to ask questions but Mercier explains he has used up all his answers. What happened to the sack? They go into a narrow alleyway. Neither of them can remember how to describe walking. It becomes more than ever like Godot.

Where are we going? said Camier.
Shall I never shake you off? said Mercier.
Do you not know where we are going? said Camier.
What does it matter, said Mercier, where we are going? We are going, that’s enough.
No need to shout, said Camier.

Even the fresh line for each bit of dialogue looks like a play. They end up walking back and forth along this dark alleyway wondering where they’re going, and why, and why in each other’s company. They smell kips which appears to mean the perfume from a brothel. They ask a policeman if there’s a brothel and when he says they should be ashamed at their age, says it’s all they’ve got left. That and masturbation. So are they solidly heterosexual?

The officer arrests them and turns up Camier’s arm and smacks him. He’s about to blow his whistle when Mercier kicks him in the balls and the officer releases Camier, falling to the ground. This gets extremely unpleasant, for Camier seizes the officer’s truncheon and starts beating him round the head, they pull his cape over his head and beat some more, the impression of the head being of a boiled egg without it shell. Seems they’ve murdered him. They run along the alley into a square, across it and into a narrow street, and decide it is best to go back to Helen’s place.

Summary of chapters 5 and 6

Chapter 7

Descriptive passage of open moorland, heather, mountains looming, lights of city in distance, lights of harbour reflected in the sea. Presumably the countryside surrounding Beckett’s family home in Foxrock. Lucky bugger.

Mercier and Camier are making their way across this wild landscape. They have cut themselves cudgels to clear the undergrowth. They spy a wooden cross of a nationalist’s grave and head towards it but lose their thread. Start wondering if there are worms in turf. Feel something spectral is surrounding them.

Night is coming. It gets dark. They do not think they can walk any further (‘if you can call it walking’). They cannot see each other. They totter. They fall in the dark, in the bog, and help each other get up. Eventually. They finally make it to some ruins they’d spied, and collapse. And ‘their hands were freed to go about their old business’. Is that masturbation? And the text mentions their ‘customary cleavings’. Gay sex?

The narrator says the text could end here, frankly. But there is no end. There are never endings.

Here would be the place to make an end. After all it is the end. But there is still day, day after day, afterlife all life long, the dust of all that is dead and buried rising, eddying, settling, burying again. So let him wake, Mercier, Camier…

This is the utterly exhausted, bleak voice of the Beckett Trilogy. They waken separately, stumble out the ruins, each thinking the other has abandoned him, barely able to see in the dark, indistinguishable footfalls, they are heading back to town, of course, because that is what they do as soon as they have left town, their endless itinerary. They come to a fork in the road, Camier takes one road but when Mercier comes up to the fork, he cannot see his compadre and so takes the other. The text has ceased to be light and funny. It is weighed down with the full concrete futility of the books to come.

Such roughly must have been the course of events. The earth dragged on into the light, the brief interminable light.

Chapter 8

‘That’s it’, the text sinks into Beckett despair at the exhausting business of getting up, washing, dressing and all the rest of it, God, the endless waiting for death, dragging on, the dead and unburied with the dying, and the pathetic illusion of life (and so on and so on).

Camier leaves a house. He is an old frail man now, unable to walk without a stick, head on his chest. He is in some street when a heavy hand falls on his shoulder. A big man says he knows him, watched his mother change his diapers, introduces himself as Watt, and says he wishes to introduce him to a Mr Mercier, standing just along the pavement. Watt, says Camier. I knew a fellow named Murphy, died in mysterious circumstances.

Watt takes the two men imperiously by the arms and half drags them along the pavement, they are walking into the sunset (!) – until a police officer blocks their way. Watt defies the police officer, grabs the pair round the waist and hauls them further along the pavement. They collapse into a bar (as men so often do in these stories).

Watt orders whiskey all round. In an obscure roundabout way Mercier and Camier warm up and begin to regard each other in the old friendly way. Suddenly Watt bangs the table loudly and shouts, ‘Bugger life!’ The landlord comes over and angrily tells them to leave. Mercier and Camier go into a perfectly co-ordinated and comic turn, claiming that poor Watt has just lost his darling baby, his wife is at home in paroxysms of grief, they have brought Watt out to console him, could they just have another round and everything will be alright, honest your honour!

They call Watt daddy (despite being decrepitly old themselves). This last section contains a number of mocking anti-religious references, for example, the narrator tells us most of the pub’s clientele are butchers who have been made mild by the blood of the lambs. Ha ha. This undergraduate wit is common in Joyce and, alas, lives on in Beckett, lowering the tone or, more precisely, thinning the texture. Like the fondness for including swearwords in the story. Alright, but… it lets the reader off the hook. It stops being demanding. Swearwords are as easy-to-read, as assimilable as the sentimental clichés he so mocks. They’re just another type of cliché.

The landlord backs down and serves them their second round of drinks. Mercier goes to the window and looks out. The colours of heaven were not quite spent. He resumes his seat and Camier has begun to reminisce about what he remembers of their travels (the goat in the field, Mr Madden who gave the intense soliloquy about being a beast-slaughterer at the start of chapter 3) when Watt starts from his apparent sleep, seizes Camier’s stick and brings it crashing down on the table next to them, at which sits a man with side whiskers quietly reading his paper and sipping his pint. The stick breaks, the table top shatters, the man falls backwards in his chair (still holding his newspaper). Watt flings the shattered stick behind the bar where it brings down a number of glasses and bottles, then bawls:

‘Fuck life!’

Mercier and Camier bolt for the door. From just outside they listen to the uproar within. They both hear someone in the pub shout ‘Up Quin!’ Only those of us who have read the notes for Beckett’s novel, Watt, know that in its early drafts the protagonist was called Quin. Sol that’s quite an obscure reference there, Sam.

Mercier invites Camier for a last pint at another pub. Camier says no but ends up walking with him part of the way home. They reminisce in a fragmentary way about their adventures. Mercier starts crying. The houses grow more sparse. Suddenly space gapes and the earth vanishes but… all it means is they’ve climbed a small, picturesque bridge over the canal. It is gently raining.

High above the horizon the clouds were fraying out in long black strands, fine as weepers’ tresses. Nature at her most thoughtful.

It’s one of those rare moments when Beckett displays an old-fashioned notion of poetic sensibility. They sit on a bench, two old men. Mercier tells Camier to look north, beyond the stars. He seems to be pointing out… stars… flowers…? Camier refers to them as the Blessed Isles? This is obscure. Then, with characteristic bathos, he points out the grim pile of the hospital for skin diseases.

Camier goes to the edge of the canal. I think it is implied he is having a pee. Then returns to the bench. Mercier reminds Camier of the parrot at Helen’s. He has a feeling the parrot is dead. Camier says it’s time to go. Says, Goodbye Mercier. Alone, Mercier watches ‘the sky go out’ and hears all the little sounds which have been hidden from him by the long day.

… human murmurs for example, and the rain on the water.

So this final passage is unexpectedly poignant. 1. This thread of (possibly sentimental) feeling, along with 2. the shortness of the book 3. its conventional division into chapters and into paragraphs of clearly signposted action and snappy dialogue, and 4. the humour of much of the exchanges – yes, Mercier and Camier is definitely Beckett’s most accessible novel.

Related links

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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Posted by Simon on November 4, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/11/04/mercier-and-camier-samuel-beckett/

The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst (2008)

Furst has written 14 spy novels set in or around Eastern Europe in the late 1930s when the clouds of war were gathering over the continent. The last seven or so have appeared at nice regular two-year intervals, conform to a nice predictable formula and his readers can look forward to the usual predictable pleasures.

Hero There’ll be a central male protagonist – as the novels have gone by these have tended to become steadily posher, so this one is Jean-François Mercier de Boutillon, 46, whose ancient family long ago lost their noble title and vast lands, and so is now plain Colonel Mercier. Mercier fought and was wounded in the Great War, and then in the 1920 Russian invasion of Poland, alongside the rather better-known de Gaulle. He was given a medal by the Polish government and partly because of that has ended up serving as French military attaché in Warsaw. He is tall, dark and handsome, walks with a slight limp from a war wound, because of which he sometimes uses an elegant silver-topped cane – but he nurses a secret sorrow: his beautiful wife, Annemarie, died suddenly three years earlier of influenza (p.55). Luckily his height, good looks, aristocratic bearing and independent means have kept in a regular supply of young lovelies to console him. His daughter, Gabrielle, thinks he is irresistible (p.190).

Sex The male protagonist usually has an easygoing way with women and enjoys soft porn sex with at least one round-bottomed young lady during the course of the book. For example, after a tennis match at the country house of Polish aristocrat Prince Kazimierz, Mercier is in the shower when the door to the bathroom opens and the lovely Princess Antoniwa enters, lets her robe slip to the floor, before stepping into the steamy shower to join him. You can almost hear Je t’aime playing on the movie soundtrack as they enjoy literally steamy sex. Later, we are treated to a description of his initiation into the joys of mutual masturbation by an older cousin, Albertine, when he was a teenager (pp.121-124).

High society Prince Kazimierz. Princess Antoniwa. Country houses. Mercier’s own upbringing at boarding school, the huge family apartment in the snobby 7th arrondissement of Paris. Part of Mercier’s job is to attend cocktail parties given by the various embassies, meeting and remeeting the beau monde of Warsaw. ‘Daaahling, have another one of these simply delicious canapés.’

Espionage One of Mercier’s jobs is managing ‘agents’. The one who features in this book is a shabby German businessman, Edvard Uhl, who works in the giant Krupps arms manufacturers. He was picked up by one of Mercier’s ‘honey trap’ woman agents, and has now been blackmailed / seduced into travelling once a month to Warsaw where he a) has hot, giggling rumpy-pumpy with the supposed ‘Countess Sczelenska’ (real name Hana Musser, a half-Czech, half-German refugee from the ‘fulminous Nazi politics’ of the Sudetenland), and b) the following day meets Mercier to hand over blueprints and diagrams about German tanks, and receive a packet of collars in return. But Uhl is getting increasingly nervous…

Paris Furst has acknowledged his debt to Eric Ambler who wrote half a dozen spy thrillers set in Eastern Europe, actually during the last years of the 1930s, with brilliantly atmospheric evocations of Eastern and MittelEuropa. Following the master, his stories are set outside the Anglophone comfort zone of Britain or the USA, instead among the capital cities and fog-shrouded landscapes of Hungary, Turkey, Serbia, Romania or, in this case, Warsaw.

However, although the adventures often take place in remote parts of Eastern Europe, the texts’ centre of gravity is nearly always the European city Furst which lived in for years and where his heart obviously belongs – lovers’ Paris, the Paris where French movie producer Jean Casson, Hungarian exile Nicholas Morath, Russian émigré Ilya Serebin, and Italian foreign correspondent Carlo Weisz (the heroes of his previous novels) all have apartments regularly adorned by nubile young ladies, and where they depart from for foreign adventures before gratefully returning in various states of disrepair. Paris is the meta-location of these novels, thus Mercier feels ‘the Parisian mystique take hold of his heart: a sudden nameless ecstasy in the damp air’, as soon as he is back there (p.119).

Datestamps As usual the novel is divided into a handful of long parts or acts – in this case, four – each made up of numerous much shorter sections, often marked with a date stamp to give a sense of the urgent passage of time, of the ominous forward momentum of events. The earliest is 17 October 1937, the last one 9 May 1938.

1. Hotel Europejski

It is autumn 1937. Herr Uhl, happily married with kids, makes excuses to visit the factory down on the Polish border once a month but in fact pops over to Warsaw, checks into the Hotel Europejski and has championship sex with the plump, big-bottomed ‘Countess Sczelenska’. Colonel Mercia is French military attaché to Warsaw. We meet him playing tennis with the cream of Warsaw’s cosmopolitan high society at the rich country mansion of Prince Kazimierz.

Mercier is the ‘control’ of Herr Uhl, meets him in a seedy café in a working class quarter, pays him money, takes diagrams of German tank technology. Later Mercier packs night wear and a revolver and is driven by Marek, the loyal Polish chauffeur, down to Katowice on the German border where he and Marek crawl at night through the various lines of barbed wire, before a searchlight goes on and they have to shoot their way out and back to the Polish side. The tank traps which used to feature in these defences have been filled in: Why? To make them easier for tanks to cross. Why? When? Puzzling.

Uhl gets panicky on the train back into Germany and becomes convinced ‘they’ ie the Gestapo, are waiting for him at passport control. He dodges out of the queue waiting to hand over their passports, nips back under the train to steps down to the river and walks back to the previous station. But this suspicious activity was noticed and reported, a report which eventually percolates up to Sturmbannführer (Major) August Voss in local Sicherheitsdienst (SD) headquarters at Glogau. It takes them a while but his operatives eventually match the description of a pot-bellied businessman with a big knobby nose who behaved suspiciously with Uhl.

Thus, after Mercier’s next rendezvous with Uhl a month later, Mercier, leaving the rendezvous cafe separately, accidentally sees Uhl being forcefully chatted up by a stunning blonde and tails the pair back to a rent-by-the-hour hotel in the red light district. But when the blonde comes running downstairs ten minutes later, and is followed by a big goon carrying a package wrapped in bedsheets, Mercier intervenes, there’s a fight, the Krauts make off in a getaway car and Mercier unwraps the roped-up bedsheets to discover Uhl inside, almost dead. Not quite. He is spirited away to hospital.

In a different plotline – Mercier is invited to a diplomatic reception given to entertain businessmen from the French company Renault, who are trying to sell the Polish government armaments. His regular consort drops out and at suggests a replacement, the girlfriend of a Russian émigré writer (Maxim Mostov), the young and lovely Anna Szarbek, who works for the League of Nations as a lawyer. Guess what happens, go on, guess. Yes, they fall in love and thus begins a passionate love affair set against the looming threat of war!

Among Mercier’s routine chores are regular meetings with his opposite number, Colonel Anton Vyborg, who we’ve already met in Furst’s novels Dark Star and The Polish Officer, both set a few years later, after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939. In one meeting Mercier admires a map which Vyborg casually mentions was drawn up by Captain de Milja of the Geographical Section (p.222). Alert readers will remember that this same de Milja is the Polish Officer in the novel of the same name. If the reader had read either of those novels he would have a strong sense of the doom which all these characters are heading towards…

Mercier is reprimanded by the Ambassador for the diplomatic embarrassment of ‘the Uhl Affair’, and is recalled to Paris to explain.

2. On Raven Hill

Paris, where almost all Furst’s novels start and end. Mercier returns to the huge apartment in the 7th arrondissement and bumps into cousin Albertine, the one who initiated him into the joys of sex when he was an innocent 14-year-old. Now she is formal, polite, friendly – but with a teasing hint of flirtation…

Mercier has a formal interview with Colonel Bruner who reprimands him for causing a scene and losing an agent. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Sturmbannführer August Voss has his ear bitten off by his boss about the cack-handed fiasco with Uhl. Infuriated Voss had had one of his thugs identify who it was who interfered in the street, i.e. he has got Mercier in his sights.

In every single one of Furst’s novels he mentions the fictional Brasserie Heininger, the supposedly upmarket, must-be-seen-at Paris nightclub and restaurant. In Night Soldiers it was the scene of an exciting and thrilling shootout, when the Bulgarian head waiter was assassinated for interfering in politics by assassins who then shot the place up and the owners left one mirror, cracked by a bullet hole, in place as a memento, the table beneath it, table 14, quickly becoming the most fashionable one to dine at.

But whereas in Night Soldiers the actual event was part of a genuinely gripping narrative about the criminal and espionage underworld of Paris, repetition of this story has made it boring and banal, and it is now getting irritating (p.137). Mercier is taken to the Brasserie for lunch by Aristide de Beauvilliers, the intellectual on the French High Council for War who, of course, insists on sitting at the famous table and telling him the story of the bullet hole – yawn.

Mercier reports that Uhl was due to go watch German tank manoeuvres at a place called Schramberg. He’s been reading the German General Guderian’s book about tank tactics, Achtung – Panzer! He’s come to the conclusion that the Germans will attack through Belgium, north of France’s supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line. De Beauvilliers agrees but explains that the French Army is in the grip of old men who think they’re infallible. Pétain, hero of Verdun, has ridiculed the Ardennes theory, so it is squashed. Meanwhile, French politicians are so polarised that no decisions, no funding for the Army, is forthcoming. We readers know all this means France will be conquered in a matter of weeks by Hitler’s Blitzkrieg in June 1940.

Mercier returns to Warsaw. He attends another reception where he is anxious to see whether Anna Szarbek will attend. She does. His heart soars. Walking her back to her apartment they are caught in a sudden snowstorm and duck into a cinema where they end up snogging. He sees her to her door where she is charmingly shy and conflicted about whether they should see each other again. Women, huh?

In action mode, Mercier slips into civilian clothes, flies to Switzerland, is briefed by a useful fellow official at the French consulate there, given a pistol, maps, compass and then driven by a reliable local, Stefan, across the border to Schramberg. He makes his own way out to the test zone, hides and then observes the German tank manoeuvres for himself.

3. The Black Front

Mercier celebrates Christmas and New Year at his estate back in southern France. The loyal family retainers. The loyal hunting dogs. Mass at the local church with the surviving relations, including an irritating right-wing uncle. Then, gratefully, back to Warsaw. Mercier sends his report of the German tank manoeuvres to Paris. De Beauvilliers hints that it will be ignored by the foolish high command.

Mercier receives a clandestine plea from the two Russian diplomats who he’s always meeting at receptions, a Jewish couple, Viktor and Malka Rozen. They have been ordered back to Moscow. They know they will be interrogated and shot. They wish to defect. He checks with his superiors, then makes an appointment to meet them, but they don’t show.

In Paris Madame Dupin had told him about a League of Nations conference to do with laws surrounding national minorities and refugees. He immediately wonders whether Anna will be going and, if so, she will be free from the clutches of the Russian boyfriend. He arranges with his bosses to go, impatiently and excitedly boards the train and – lo and behold! – she is on it and – quelle surprise! – they are soon in her overnight compartment where he quickly finds out she has ‘small breasts in a lacy black bra’ (p.216) among other discoveries.

Back in Warsaw, Mercier returns to routine work: a letter from Uhl, now recovered, saying he is being sent to safety in Quebec, with a new identity and job. Meetings. Colonel Vyborg invites him to a private meeting and tells him he is under surveillance by people attached to the German embassy. Neither of them know they are thugs hired by Sturmbannführer Voss, the angry man humiliated in the Uhl fiasco.

One night there is a frantic beating at the door and it is Madame Rozen. This sparks the most exciting passage in the novel as she has fled the embassy, but her husband twisted an ankle and is in a park up the road. It is midnight. Mercier packs his Browning pistol and makes his way through the deserted streets, making the reader as tense as he is. He finds Rozen, becoming incoherent with the freezing cold, and supports him all the way back to his apartment, with one interruption. An angry man steps out to confront them but Mercier waves his gun and the man strolls away. From the description, the reader suspects it is Voss not anybody from the NKVD who might be tailing the Rozens.

Mercier calls the embassy and his people put in place a successful operation to exfiltrate the two Russians, his boss Jourdain, the embassy chauffeur Marek, a motorcycle guard, they drive out to a remote airfield where a plane arrives bearing Colonel Bruner, Mercier’s boss, all the way from Paris. The Rozens climb into it and it departs. Panic over. Mercier returns to his apartment for a well-earned kip.

Next night he entertains Anna to dinner and Furstian sex. She has moved out of the apartment she shared with the Russian writer. They are now definitely an item.

At a diplomatic dinner given by the Portuguese embassy, Mercier is surprised to find himself in conversation with the courtly old Dr Lapp, a German businessman assumed to have some part in the Abwehr or German intelligence. Very slyly he indicates that he is a true German patriot and not so keen on the present regime. Shall we meet again, somewhere more private? Mercier repeats the conversation to his boss who points out that he’s becoming quite the spymaster. It was the incident of saving Uhl from being abducted by the Germans; everybody heard about it and everybody deduced his role.

4. A Shadow of War

March 1938. Mercier, in his capacity as military attaché, goes on a typically boring trip to a Polish arms, armoured car and light tank factory, the Ursus Tractor Company in the suburb of Wola. Mercier leaves the factory after a long, exhaustive tour but his faithful driver Marek is not waiting as they’d arranged. Instead, out of the shadows emerge three menacing figures who, before, he can react, surround Mercier and start beating him up, whipping him with a horsewhip, punching and kicking to the ground. It’s looking bad for our hero when a shot rings out and the bad guys desist the beating and run off. The gun was fired by Marek the driver who comes running up to his boss and helps him to his feet. He describes how he’d parked a few streets away and had himself been approached by a thug who drew a gun. Being the sturdy dependable type he is, Marek simply shot this figure.

The reader knows the three assailants are Major Voss and two of his SD thug pals. Voss is very angry at Mercier for interfering in the abduction of Uhl, and blames him for his recent transfer to a small provincial town, Schweinfurt. This demotion was the last straw had determined him to travel to Warsaw with two drinking buddies and ugly bullies from the SD – Meino and Willi – fired up by fantasies of kidnapping Mercier and torturing him, maybe in front of his pretty girlfriend. They were met off the train and driven around by local German thug, Winckelmann, and this is the man who approached Marke threateningly and who Marek shot dead.

Safely back in the centre of town, Mercier is tended by Anna. A few days later he has the planned meeting with Dr Lapp. Mercier passes on the message he has been given by his bosses that Dr Lapp should travel to Paris and phone the number he hands him. He’ll be met by the sophisticated de Beauvilliers and discussion about recruiting him will proceed from there. But Mercier has his own agenda. Running like an unobtrusive thread has been gossip and speculation about a shadowy organisation that opposes the Nazis from within, in fact which originated within the Nazi party itself. Initially, there was a genuinely socialist wing of the party, which wanted to do away with big industrialists, redistribute wealth to the workers and so on. But Hitler needed rich backers and so, in the Night of The Long Knives in July 1934, he had most of the leaders of the Sturmabteilung (SA) murdered.

But some survived and went underground in what is rumoured to call itself the Black Front. Now Mercier asks Lapp about a name he has heard, a Halbach. Lapp is reluctant to speak, but eventually says, yes it still exists, in feeble shape. Halbach lives under a pseudonym in a Czech border town, writing anti-Nazi pamphlets.

Mercier plans what will be the final sequence in the novel. He gets funds from de Beauvilliers, and maps, and takes local trains to the little town where he confronts Halbach, saying he knows his real identity but – relax! don’t panic! – is offering him the chance for a new, faked Swiss identity, to escape before the Gestapo find him. He just needs his help tracking down another Black Front colleague, known as Hans Köhler. Halbach tells him that Köhler’s real name is Johannes Elter.

Mercier takes Halbach to Prague to get a new passport and identity, buys a decent second-hand car and drives the pair of them across the border, on a tense car journey all the way to Berlin, where Elter lives. They stay overnight in a rough brothel, visited by drunk SS men. Next day Mercier drives Halbach to the converted church where he knows he is part of a model railway club (!). Elter is shocked to see his old comrade. In private, Halbach explains that the Gestapo are moving in but that he, Halbach, has found a sponsor who can guarantee safety. All he must do is bring all the secret documents he can get his hands on from office I.N.6, the section of Military Intelligence dedicated to making plans against France, to a certain hotel the next day.

It’s a lot for Elter to take in but he handles Halbach’s passport, is shown the money, and promises to be at the bar the next evening. Halbach returns to Merciers car and they drive north for three hours to the port of Rostock where Halbach catches the ferry to Denmark, to be a free man, his job done. Mercier returns and checks into the grand hotel where, the next evening, exactly on time, Elter appears with a heavy briefcase. Mercier takes him up to his bedroom, hands him passport and cash. The pair stand in the darkened room. For a moment I thought the door was about to burst open and the Gestapo rush in but in fact Elter hesitantly says that, if there’s more money, he’s prepared to do this some more. Mercier, momentarily wrong-footed, quickly agrees. They part.

Mercier examines his haul. 73 documents ranging from the trivial to maps of the Ardennes with attack routes sketched. Next day he flies from Tempelhof airport to Le Bourget with the docs in a fake bottomed briefcase, and by taxi to the French High Command. Waits several days. When he is called in for an interview, his colleague de Beauvilliers offers him a job with his small intelligence unit in Paris. But his boss, Colonel Bruner, genial and pleased, congratulates him, confirms his promotion to colonel and then floats the theory that maybe the whole thing was a set-up: Halbach an imposter, Elter a fake, the documents a deliberate decoy, part of a canny plan to deceive the French.

Disgusted Mercier catches a cab back to the family apartment where cousin Albertine is getting drunk with Anna who he’s brought along for the trip.

The novel ends with a short paragraph explaining how, 24 months later, General Guderian did invade France through the ‘impenetrable’ Ardennes, to the north of the supposedly ‘impregnable’ Maginot Line, leading France to capitulate within weeks and establish the pro-Nazi Vichy regime.

Dramatis personae

Listing them makes you realise just how many interesting and credible characters Furst creates in each of his novels. The sheer number, and the complex ways they overlap and interact, feed into the larger webs and networks of characters which recur across the novels, themselves symbolic or embodying the complex web of diplomatic, espionage and intelligence manoeuvring across pre-war Europe.

  • Lieutenant-Colonel Jean-François Mercier de Boutillon, French military attaché to Warsaw.
  • Annemarie, his fragrant wife, who died three years earlier.
  • Gabrielle, lovely daughter number one.
  • Béatrice, daughter number two, living in Cairo.
  • Albertine, cousin who initiated him into the joy of sex.
  • Prince Kazimierz, member of Polish aristocracy.
  • the lovely Princess Antoniwa, ditto.
  • Edvard Uhl, businessman and industrial spy for Mercier.
  • ‘Countess Sczelenska’, real name Hana Musser, refugee from the Sudetenland, honey trap mistress of Uhl.
  • Sturmbannführer (Major) August Voss, permanently angry head of the SD in Glogau, who is handed the report about the suspicious behaviour of Uhl on the train back into Germany, whose agents track him down and are about to abduct him from a Warsaw hotel when Mercier intervenes to rescue Uhl – leading to Voss being reprimanded – which leads to his vendetta against with Mercier.
  • Winckelmann, one of his thugs in Warsaw.
  • Meino and Willi, thuggish SD friends Voss travels to Warsaw with to beat up Mercier.
  • Marek, Mercier’s loyal embassy driver.
  • Wlada, Mercier’s skinny nervous housekeeper at his Warsaw apartment.
  • Anna Szarbek, lawyer for the League of Nations, who Mercier falls in love with.
  • Maxim Mostov, Russian émigré writer and journalist, who is upset when Anna leaves him for Mercier, and then is exposed, along with many others, by the intelligence handed over by the Rozens (see below) as a spy, and so deported from Poland back to the USSR.
  • Colonel Anton Vyborg, Mercier’s opposite number in the Polish military, with whom he has regular meetings, Vyborg featured in Furst’s earlier novels, Dark Star and The Polish Officer.
  • Captain de Milja of the Geographical Section of Polish Intelligence, mentioned in an off-hand reference by Vyborg, he was the lead figure in Furst’s earlier novel, The Polish Officer.
  • Jourdain, Mercier’s colleague at the French embassy in Poland.
  • The French ambassador to Poland.
  • Colonel Bruner, Mercier’s superior at the Quai d’Orsay back in Paris.
  • Madame Dupin, assistant director of Protocol.
  • de Beauvilliers, the 60-year-old intellectual on the French High Council for War, politely dismissive of the current French Army leadership under the hero of the Great War, old General Pétain.
  • Viktor and Malka Rozen, two Jewish Russian agents in Warsaw who Mercier helps to escape when their own government turns against them.
  • Colonel de Gaulle, Mercier’s contemporary at the St Cyr military college, and with whom he shared adventures as French representative to the army of General Pilsudski during the Russo-Polish war of 1920.
  • General Guderian, theorist of tank-led Blitzkrieg.
  • Stefan, drives Mercier from the French embassy in Switzerland across the German border to Schramberg, where Mercier observes Wehrmacht tank manoeuvres in the snow.
  • Dr Lapp, a German businessman who looks like Buster Keaton, is assumed to have some part in the Abwehr or German intelligence, who approaches Mercier at a diplomatic dinner, apparently offering to hand over intelligence.
  • Halbach, member of the underground anti-Nazi movement, the Black Front.
  • Elter, fellow member of the Black Front who Halbach persuades to smuggle documents out of the French section of German High Command headquarters in Berlin.

Credit

The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst was published in 2008 by Weidenfeld and Nicholson. All quotes and references are to the 2009 Phoenix paperback edition.

BBC mini-series

The Spies of Warsaw was adapted by the BBC into a two-part mini-series for TV, snappily retitled Spies of Warsaw and starring a post-Dr Who David Tennant as the dashing Colonel Mercier.

 Related links

The Night Soldiers novels

1988 Night Soldiers –  An epic narrative which starts with a cohort of recruits to the NKVD spy school of 1934 and then follows their fortunes across Europe, to the Spain of the Civil War, to Paris, to Prague and Switzerland, to the gulags of Siberia and the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, in a Europe beset by espionage, conspiracy, treachery and murder.
1991 Dark Star – The story of Russian Jew André Szara, foreign correspondent for Pravda, who finds himself recruited into the NKVD and entering a maze of conspiracies, based in Paris but taking him to Prague, Berlin and onto Poland – in the early parts of which he struggles to survive in the shark-infested world of espionage, to conduct a love affair with a young German woman, and to help organise a network smuggling German Jews to Palestine; then later, as Poland is invaded by Nazi Germany, finds himself on the run across Europe. (390 pages)
1995 The Polish Officer – A long, exhausting chronicle of the many adventures of Captain Alexander de Milja, Polish intelligence officer who carries out assignments in Nazi-occupied Poland and then Nazi-occupied Paris and then, finally, in freezing wintertime Poland during the German attack on Russia.
1996 The World at Night – A year in the life of French movie producer Jean Casson, commencing on the day the Germans invade in June 1940, following his ineffectual mobilisation into a film unit which almost immediately falls back from the front line, his flight, and return to normality in occupied Paris where he finds himself unwittingly caught between the conflicting claims of the Resistance, British Intelligence and the Gestapo. (304 pages)
1999 Red Gold – Sequel to the World At Night, continuing the adventures of ex-film producer Jean Casson in the underworld of occupied Paris and in various Resistance missions across France. (284 pages)
2000 Kingdom of Shadows – Hungarian exile in Paris, Nicholas Morath, undertakes various undercover missions to Eastern Europe at the bidding of his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, a kind of freelance espionage controller in the Hungarian Legation. Once more there is championship sex, fine restaurants and dinner parties in the civilised West, set against shootouts in forests, beatings by the Romanian police, and fire-fights with Sudeten Germans, in the murky East.
2003 Blood of Victory – Russian émigré writer, Ilya Serebin, gets recruited into a conspiracy to prevent the Nazis getting their hands on Romania’s oil, though it takes a while to realise who’s running the plot – Count Polanyi – and on whose behalf – Britain’s – and what it will consist of – sinking tugs carrying huge turbines at a shallow stretch of the river Danube, thus blocking it to oil traffic. (298 pages)
2004 Dark Voyage – In fact numerous voyages made by the tramp steamer Noordendam and its captain Eric DeHaan, after it is co-opted to carry out covert missions for the Allied cause, covering a period from 30 April to 23 June 1941. Atmospheric and evocative, the best of the last three or four. (309 pages)
2006 The Foreign Correspondent – The adventures of Carlo Weisz, an Italian exile from Mussolini living in Paris in 1938 and 1939, as Europe heads towards war. He is a journalist working for Reuters and co-editor of an anti-fascist freesheet, Liberazione, and we see him return from Civil War Spain, resume his love affair with a beautiful German countess in Nazi Berlin, and back in Paris juggle conflicting requests from the French Sûreté and British Secret Intelligence Service, while dodging threats from Mussolini’s secret police.
2008 The Spies of Warsaw The adventures of Jean Mercier, French military attaché in Warsaw between autumn 1937 and spring 1938, during which he has an affair with sexy young Anna Szarbek, helps two Russian defectors flee to France, is nearly murdered by German agents and, finally, though daring initiative secures priceless documents indicating german plans to invade France through the Ardennes – which his criminally obtuse superiors in the French High Command choose to ignore!
2010 Spies of the Balkans
2012 Mission to Paris
2014 Midnight in Europe
2016 A Hero in France

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by Simon on July 29, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Books, Novel, Second World War, Spy novel, Thriller, War
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Posted by Simon on July 29, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/the-spies-of-warsaw-alan-furst/

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