/*------------------------- TEX via MathJax */ /* --------------------------*/ if i thought you were listening, i'd never say a word

Friday, 11 July 2025

Spy Novels: Deighton, Le Carre, Rimington, Brookes

James Bond was, in a phrase at the time, the man all men wanted to be and all women wanted to have. I have fond memories of a small book that described how to be Bond, based on what could be gleaned from the novels. It covered everything from weapons and cars to breakfast, and I learned to cook scrambled eggs because of it. James Bond is not a spy. Spies gather information. James Bond blows s**t up. He is a special forces operative, based on idealised versions of some of the men and women in the Special Operations Executive in WW2.

Bond is the forerunner of Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher. Simon Templar, created in the 1930's by Leslie Charteris, may have been a forerunner. Templar was in turn more suave and volatile than that ultimate man's man Richard Hannay from the 1910's. Stella Rimington, who should know something about spies, has a number of novels featuring Liz Carlyle which are really thriller-procedurals, and I was prompted to over-think all this by Adam Brookes' Spy Games and Stella Rimington's At Risk recently. 


Both are cracking good reads, but neither is a spy novel.  The English-language spy novel came from two seeds: Len Deighton's 1962 The IPCRESS File


and John Le Carre's 1963 The Spy Who Came In From The Cold


Neither Harry Palmer (Deighton) nor Alex Leamas (Le Carre) are anything like Bond. Leamas is a washed-up, cynical operator, and Palmer is working off a prison sentence for black marketeering while in the Army. The organisations they work for are not well-equipped military operations, but fumbling bureaucracies run by barely competent ex-public schoolboys playing little one-upmanship games. Their Russian counterparts are, by contrast, ruthless and endlessly efficient and effective, yet still the bumbling Brits win, more by the native wit of the hero than anything else. It's a vision of the UK at the time: a country ruined by war, run by amateurs, and surviving on the maverick talent of a few individuals. 

Deighton says he did not intend to create an anti-hero - though casting Michael Caine decided otherwise - and none of his central characters are intended to be role models. George Smiley is a cuckold with a taste for antique books and seemingly no other pleasures, someone to avoid being at all costs.

By the 1990's both Le Carre and Deighton were writing slightly different books: less angst about the ideas of loyalty, patriotism and betrayal, more about business-like deception, double-dealing and plot twists. Who could blame either? Their earlier themes were pretty intense, and also of the time.

In the dim reaches of my memory is a remark by General Norman Schwarzkopf to the effect that the 1960's and 70's saw the US Armed Army at its lowest morale and readiness, full of "embittered drunks", and his story is of how his generation of general officers brought it back to a decent condition. My guess is that much the same could be said of many of the institutions of the West, from the intelligence organisations, through the universities, to many private-sector companies. The socio-economic circumstances that made the disillusioned spies of Deighton and Le Carre passed - the recovery started in the 1980's, as did the polarisation of Western countries into their public (left-wing) and private (non-political) sectors - and the spy novel faded away

Sales figures alone mean we must acknowledge the slapstick comedy of Slow Horses, which is a Le Carre tribute: barely competent people saving the world despite themselves, lead by an irascible outcast. The intelligence organisations - now called Five and Six (which is awful insider slang even if it is real) - are efficient and the technology works - except when the plot requires it to fail. Some of the staff may be pompous, creepy or miss something important, but they are only dodgy if it serves the plot, and then only in the way criminals are: they have broken a law, a technicality, not a fundamental bond of trust in their soul with their society. Le Carre's Bill Hayden was a bisexual philanderer and a traitor - to Le Carre the bixsexuality is a single remark at the end of the story, to a post-80's writer it would be a feature of story. There are women in central roles, with varying degrees of sass and snappy put-downs for any man who isn't their boss who dares patronise or ignore them. Rimington's Liz Carlyle is works too hard, is a terrible housekeeper, but a good bureaucrat, going along to get along. Adam Brookes' lady spies are keenly aware of status and fight for theirs.

There is and has been a continuing campaign of treachery and treason in all Western countries since the 1980's, the trahison des clercs whose values have departed too far from those of the ordinary working man and woman, who regard taxpayers as mere economic fodder for their projects, and voters as sheep to be manipulated as needed. Sadly, Five and Six do not work for the taxpayer and the voter and the NHS patient... they work for the traitors.

I'm too old and too slow to turn that into some kind of spy story. Maybe one of you young whipper-snappers might give it a shot?

Friday, 4 July 2025

150 Piccadilly ... aka...

 


Once the temperature goes over 80F or so, I go into survival mode. I can't really think ahead too far. And when I do try to visit my osteo in Marylebone, the signals at Gunnersbury fail and we are all tipped out onto the Chiswick High Road. Gunnersbury is in the middle of transport nowhere. I re-scheduled and went home. This has nothing to do with the Ritz.

Friday, 27 June 2025

When We Were Dreaming - Clement Meyers

Robert McKee's criticism of Betty Blue was that it had no story: it was two hours of watching someone fall deeper into a violent madness that we knew she had in the first five minutes of the film. Its director understood his audience: there's a type of twenty-something woman who laps this stuff up. Along with vampire movies and anything else with Beatrice Dalle covered in blood. (Just as, I suspect, there's a type of man who laps up anything with St Isabelle - awkward shuffle.) McKee's point still holds - there's no character development, no situation-complication-resolution, no Heroes Journey. The same can be said for Morvern Caller: we know she's a dissociated psychopath within ten minutes, and she doesn't change throughout all the weird little adventures she has. It's a mood piece, one of those films we watch because the lead actress is fascinating (cf every Andrea Arnold or Jean-Luc Godard movie ever). Films can get away with being story-free if they are visually arresting, the soundtrack is cool as heck, and the cast fascinate us.

Novels can't do any of those things. NO soundtrack, no luscious setting and photography, no Samantha Morton / Anna Karina / Norah Jones to be fascinating. Just those darn words on the page. A novel needs a story: a series of events that change the thoughts, feelings and circumstances of the lead characters in a way that makes the end of the novel feel satisfying. Novels without this are called picaresque, and are interesting partly because of the adventures but mostly because of the portrayals of the society and people with whom the picaro deals. A good picaresque novel will have brushes with the law, the military, high life, and give us a sense of how the low life works. It will have a picaro who fascinates, amuses and educates us, and who has a reasonably complex character. Otherwise it's just a long sequence of drinking and fights.

Clement Meyer's When We Were Dreaming, published by the Deptford-based Fitzcaraldo Editions, is 597 pages of drinking and fights. It's an account of the lives of low-level teenage delinquents in one rough district of Leipzig after the Wall came down, who are in awe of the gangs in the "red light district" which may as well be on Mars. The narrative is a mess. At one point Danny, the central character, does four weeks in a juvenile detention centre, amongst other things, for trespassing, but the only trespassing we're told he does is a good few chapters later when he runs an illegal club with others in the gang. It has its moments, but by about page 250, I was starting to want something to happen, but instead Danny goes to a brothel and gets drunk.

At 597 pages, with so many minor details and no overall direction, it feels like speed-writing. Not the shorthand they used to teach, but what happens when the writer takes one too many Adderall and lets fly. I have no idea if that's what happened, but it feels a lot like it. Whichever, Meyer's editor should have sat him down and asked him to take 350 pages out, and put the rest into a tighter linear narrative.

There are some books that when I read them, I can wander round a bookshop and choose the next books I'm going to read. There are other books that put me off making those choices. As if I have to grind through this one before I can choose another. That is usually a sign that I'm not enjoying reading it. A movie ends after a couple of hours, but a damn novel can go on for a long time if I'm not really enjoying it.

I tried to read it so you don't have to.

Thank me later.

Friday, 20 June 2025

Ferdinand Ries, and Announcement

I have been blogging since April 2009. Over sixteen years. I started it with the intention of writing about the things I was doing and the things I needed to vent about at the time.

As the title suggests, it was never my intention that anyone should actually read anything I wrote. The point of venting is to say it, not start a discussion about it. I've only ever seen a handful of blogs with extensive comments sections, and those were functioning as a kind of forum where the moderator / blogger set that day's subject.

I've been trying to follow a two-a-week schedule for most of the time. Regular readers will have noticed the occasional lapses, followed by bursts of catch-up posting. This is often caused by my falling into the rabbit-hole of a multiple-post long-form essay. I'm not going to do those anymore, and I'm going to switch to once-a-week, and something simple. With the occasional bit of personal trivia.

When I was working, the insanities of the time affected me, if only slightly, and I had to make some kind of sense of what was happening. Now I'm not working, I don't have to, but it's a habit I haven't shaken yet, and I've been feeling it's a waste of time and energy. The Sophons arrived in the mid-1990's and have been messing with our politics and culture ever since, and so much of it is second-rate trend following that it's not worth the effort.

As opposed to the music of Ferdinand Ries, who started as a young virtuoso and a pupil of Beethoven, who said of him "he copies me too much", conducted the first performance of the Master's Ninth Symphony and wrote lot of perfectly pleasant music during a long and seemingly well-lived life.

I streamed quite a bit via Qobuz, and then took the plunge, getting a couple of CDs from Foyles: a volume of string quartets and the flute quartets.



Warmly recommended.

Friday, 13 June 2025

Spider's Web

 


On a rare afternoon when I could take the pollen. And then not for long.

Tuesday, 10 June 2025

Friday, 6 June 2025

Junk News Redux

(h/t Martin Howard)

I mentioned a book called We know what you want by Martin Howard. It has vanished from long tail, which is kinda of a shame, because it's a good reference for shady consumer marketing tricks circa mid-2010's. (There's a prolific children's author with the same name who started writing about the same time as the book was published, but I can't be sure it's the same man.)

This list is an extract from that book. It's twenty years ago. I've changed some of the examples...

Brand Name News - Britney Spears, Brad Pitt, Madonna, Taylor Swift, Greta Thunberg 
Sex News - Anything Trans, LBGTQ+, MeToo scandals... 
Yo Yo News - the Stock Market is up or down; the crime rate is up or down; unemployment is worse than it has been since the last time it was this bad; inflation is up or down; interest rates are up or down. Show Biz News - say no more 
Fashion News - say no more 
Craze News - the latest internet thing, the latest drugs, the latest diets, the latest serial killer...
Anniversary News - hey, it's fifty years since the opening of a packet of Corn Flakes... 
Sports News - Football manager sacked / hired; players traded; heavily sponsored sports star loses to unknown... 
Political News - Minister will say this later today; Minister visits somewhere outside Westminster; NHS needs more money 
To which I would add...
Freak Show News - look at what these weirdos are doing
Hype News - Climate Change; charity releases report saying things are getting worse (please donate); this year's Tech Thing that will take all our jobs; new drug will cure old disease...
Business News - company makes or loses money; man or woman in a suit gets a promotion; Mega Corp buys Smallfry plc; Mega Corps trade bits of each otehr to each other; senior manager does something stupid and steps down
Prognostication News - the future will be worse / better if this or that trend continues

Nothing has changed. Except the names.

Nothing.

If anything, it's got worse.

Take a look at your newspaper, or (shudder!) mainstream TV. How much of it is Fake News? How much is a de facto PR piece for some cause or person. v What is real news? I think it has to affect our lives in some immediate way. The recluse has no news, except the weather report. When the UK had an Empire, with military bases everywhere, and people had relatives working in businesses and farms all over the world, world news was local news. Not so now, when, with or without invitations, the world comes to us, bringing its disputes with it.

What I want to see in a newspaper, or equivalent source, is:

War, disease, famine and disaster (anywhere in the world) 
Workers vs Management (anywhere in the world) 
The Budget (in the UK) 
Corruption (in the UK) 
Government Waste (in the UK) 
Actions by the Establishment against the interests of the working man and woman in the UK (crazy legal judgements, outsourcing of jobs, etc) 
Starts, progress and opening of major infrastructure projects (anywhere in the world) 
Harvest conditions (anywhere in the world)

Which will do for a start.