John le Carré's SILVERVIEW

Even Proctor was impressed by the homespun nature of these exchanges, given the scale of things to be ironed out, but he had been long enough in the job to know that momentous happenings had a way of acting themselves out on small stages.

Is there anything more wistful, more beautifully sad than sitting down to read a writer's last published novel? Yes, yes there is, and it's reading that writer's posthumously published novel, which I finally had to do even though I'm cheating a bit because I still haven't read all of the rest of John le Carré, but I decided for once to at least try and be in sync with the man's true fans.

And this is the right year for me to read Silverview, because this is also the year that I discovered the pleasures of literature from the Balkans, especially the work of Selvedin Avdic, whose work is intimately concerned with the aftermath of the brutal and horrifying conflicts that took place there mostly in the 1990s but are still being felt to this day, as his horror novel Seven Terrors vividly showed me.

Silverview isn't set there or then, but its central concern is very much concerned with that place and time, specifically a multi-ethnic village a British intelligence agent came to cherish for its peacefulness amidst the horrors, what happened to it and to the family he all but adopted, and how that affected him, his own family in Great Britain (especially his marriage, the small stage upon which these big events first take place), and his Service afterwards. Our man this time is one Edward (or Edvard) Avon, son of a devout Polish Catholic who was an eager collaborator with the Nazis; in Avon's adulthood he attached himself as passionately to socialism/communism as his father had (at least claimed to be) to the Church until he became disillusioned with that cause and adopted another: the would be do-gooding of the western world, eventually in the form of British Intelligence.

Not that we know this for a while, because this is a John le Carré novel and we're going to get to know the other people in his life first, chiefly a youngish man who made a lot of money as a trader in London, became disillusioned by it, and decided to move to an East Anglian village and open a bookshop even though he turns out not to know very much about books. Julian is the kind of guy a lot of us enjoy disliking, in other words; born to the right-ish parents, raised to be a certain kind of successful, successful at what he was supposed to succeed at, and now just blithely assuming he'll succeed at something new with all the confidence that only having enough money to be able to afford to lose a lot of it without pain can give a guy. But of course, if it weren't for guys like him, a lot of little villages out there would never have book stores, or record stores, or groovy little coffee shops that aren't owned by behemoth corporations that over-roast their product and force everybody to adopt faux-Italian vocabularies for just so we can order a damned cup o'joe.

We still don't really have to like these guys, though.

But Edward Avon does, right away, for reasons that aren't clear until much later in the book. Avon is now living in that same East Anglian village and wins our hearts immediately for insisting that if Julian is going to run a bookshop in East Anglia, he had better already know W.G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn by heart. Which was just what I was thinking as I sank into Julian's story!

Then enter one Stewart Proctor, holder of one of those ambiguous positions within the secret service in which he commands a lot of resources and personal loyalty but seems still to have to answer to a lot of shadowy figures behind the scenes. We don't know why he's in this story for a good long time (relative, of course, to the fact that this is not a big, hefty doorstop of a novel) except that it has something to do with Edward, or with his wife, Deborah (a spy's spy in her own right) or maybe just their daughter, Lily? He circles around this story like a rather kind-looking shark until suddenly he strikes and fills the waters with, not blood but maybe adrenaline? For all that everybody in this story except for Julian and Lily are on the far side of age 60 if not 70, as if this is le Carré's version of All Passion Spent. But with, you know, spies.

And the odd terrifying lawyer, which I was already picturing being played someday by Janet McTeer, who once played Vita Sackville-West (author of All Passion Spent) in a TV movie. Rawr.

The novel is accompanied by a fond note from le Carré's son, who writes under the name of  Nick Harkaway, who describes the not-as-difficult-as-he'd-feared task of getting Silverview ready for publication in terms of wondering whether he dared "put eyebrows on this Mona Lisa" and for those who might raise their own eyebrows at the implied comparison, yes, this is a Mona Lisa. It is a masterful work from an artist very much in command of his powers and a lucky last gift to his fans. I wanted the experience of reading it to last a while but of course I read it in a day and a half, and now must return it to the library because lots of other people are waiting.

Ah, me.

G.K. Chesterton's THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY

Mention Gilbert Keith Chesterton to most people nowadays, and they'll probably know him as the author of the Father Brown mysteries and not much else (unless you're mentioning him to Roman Catholics, who might know him for a lot of excellent apologetics for their faith). Unless that person was me, for I have mostly thought of him as that guy who wrote that epic poem about "the last knight of Europe" and the Battle of Lepanto, and I'd have said, "oh, he wrote prose, too?"

So he's kind of like the elephant encountered by all of those blind men who could never agree on what kind of creature they were meant to describe, which is of course hilarious because G.K. Chesterton was himself a pretty large and imposing figure of a man, much like the enigmatic driving force of The Man Who was Thursday, a fantastic allegorical thriller/detective story that (REMEMBER THE VERY BLOG DESCRIPTION TEXT ABOVE SAYS "WARE SPOILERS" SO, YOU KNOW, NO BITCHING) pits a small army of secret policemen against another small army of not-so-secret anarchists, only to eventually lob a bomb of a revelation into the reader's lap that there's actually just the one small army, yuck yuck yuck.

I say yuck yuck yuck as if to mock the story's attempts at humor, but those attempts are actually quite successful. Each plot twist and reveal is skillfully done even as the broad slapstick silliness of each ramps up the broad slapstick silliness of the whole. But where humor usually relieves tension in a scene or story, Chesterton's humor, here, actually manages to make the tension "worse" -- scare quotes here because the worsening of the tension is just so damned enjoyable, whether the reader has yet figured out the final punchline of the joke or not.

I suspect that nowadays, most readers will have anticipated that punchline by at least halfway, if not a quarter of the way, through the story, but as I often maintain (especially when people complain about spoilers), a story that relies solely on surprise for its ultimate effectiveness is not really much of a story. Citizen Kane is still enjoyable if you first heard the secret of Rosebud decades before you actually got to see the film; ditto The Man Who Was Thursday if you've figured out who Sunday "really" is early in the reading.

I put "really" in scare quotes because, of course, Sunday (the characters' names are all their day-of-the-week code names within the anarchist society, the governing board of which meets in glorious public view the better to make the public and the police assume they're just a bunch of ridiculous dilettantes) has an allegorical identity quite beyond his dual role within the world of the story, though both within and without the story, he is the puppetmaster, and seeing him as that and no more is just fine. Seeing him as God, as some chose to do, has about as much impact on the enjoyability of the work as seeing Aslan as Jesus does for the Chronicles of Narnia. Well, aren't you clever.

Regardless of whether one is the kind of reader who seeks to decode literature, who, I suspect, might not like this work quite as much as the kind of reader who is happy to enjoy a surface narrative and maybe idly speculate a little about its Deeper Significance does, The Man Who Was Thursday has quite a lot to offer, quite apart from the slapstick humor of its plot twists and reveals. There are some exquisitely intense scenes when the protagonist provocateur might be about to have his cover blown; there are some genuinely thrilling chase scenes that, as I said before, are even more exciting because they are also funny as hell.

It's a classic for a reason.

Patrick O'Brian's THE SURGEON'S MATE

The Surgeon's Mate is one of the cleverer titles for an Aubrey/Maturin novel, suggesting that it does that Dr. Maturin is at last going to get some help in keeping Captain Aubrey's crew healthy; larger commands like those Aubrey is entitled to these days not only get to bring along a surgeon but also a surgeon's mate, but that's not even sort of what is going on here.

The title refers to Maturin's lady-love, Diana Villiers, who has at last agreed to marry him as a means to recover her British citizenship after having run away with a rich American several novels ago -- a move she came to regret by the time The Fortune of War brought Aubrey and Maturin to America. Partly with her help, our duo escaped from the clutches of her lover (who turned out to be a major American spy-master) after having killed some important French spies, and made off with some of the lover's very important personal papers to boot.

It's a strange courtship these two have had, and by the time Maturin has found Villiers again, in America, he's mostly out of love with her; she has taken up tobacco smoking and bourbon drinking and a bit of a colonial accent, but she's still a looker and a pretty cool chick, so he's not completely off her, and good thing, because in The Surgeon's Mate it's her turn to save his bacon. Well, sort of. She believes she has done so, and is going to be allowed to believe it, because if the real story of how Stephen escapes France (where he and Aubrey are taken prisoner after their sloop wrecks after assisting in a chase after a mission in the Baltic involving Catalan freedom fighters and a Swedish island battery and other complicated stuff) ever became common knowledge, he would no longer be able to deny being the George Smiley of the Napoleonic wars.

This is not my favorite Aubrey/Maturin by a long shot, choppy and sort of all over the place, but it's still good fun.

John le Carre's A MURDER OF QUALITY

Quite possibly my favorite George Orwell essay is "Such, Such Were the Joys" in which our man Eric Blair recalls his days as a sort of charity case at a posh English boarding school that thought it was even posher than it actually was. He was miserable there, of course; one can see the beginnings of the great man whose every work is in some way or another a crie de couer against the banal (and not so banal) evils of collectivism. It's also, because Orwell was a prose stylist and a storyteller so close to perfect as makes no odds, a fascinating read, descriptive and honest and sort of bleakly lovely. His Crossgates was a place one survived, rather than graduated from.

It's hard, then, for someone like me, so in love with that essay, not to keep thinking of it as our man George Smiley, ex-intelligence man whose life is still very much shaped by his experiences plying his then still unofficial trade during World War II, finds himself in the role of cozy mystery detective again as he comes to a posh English boarding school, Carnes, to help figure out who killed a schoolmaster's wife in a bloody, gruesome and bizarre fashion. I always thought Bingo and Sim had more going on than poor little Eric Blair realized, don't you know, and I feel the little boy who would be come my hero sort of peeking around corners and watching Smiley at work throughout the book.* I wish he could have seen someone like Smiley, at any rate, to see that not all grown-ups are perfidious jerks. But of course, he wouldn't have grown up to be the hero he was if he'd had an easy, trusting childhood, would he?

But that's neither here nor there. Except in that it takes place at an English public school (like so many other novels and plays and films and whatnot, hmm? But as Orwell observed, for many people, their school days were the most eventful and dramatic and interesting of all their days. Poor benighted souls, they, hmm?) at which Secrets Are Being Kept. But of course, where in Orwell's essay, those secrets are largely socio-economic and class-based, in A Murder of Quality, well, there are elements of socio-economic and class struggle there, too, no doubt, and these elements are thwarting the murder investigation in true Town vs. Gown fashion, but... this is Smiley, dammit. Smiley! Come on, bust out the spy stuff!

News flash: there isn't much spy stuff, except in Smiley's back story and insomuch as it has formed his character as a careful thinker and observer and analyst -- who has a tremendous loyalty to his circle of colleagues from the War. One of whom edits and writes an advice column for a journal, and who received an alarming letter from the murder victim just before her death, a letter that may be a Giant Freaking Clue or an equally Giant Red Herring. And since the victim is very much Gown and the police are very much Town, the investigation could use someone like George, sometime academic, mild-mannered, unpretentious but trustworthy and obviously intelligent, to cut through the bulldung and figure out what happened.

Look, murder mysteries really aren't my thing. I always get a little depressed about how a person can be and usually is regarded as Only Interesting After She's Dead and only because someone Did A Bad Thing by killing her (or him). And yes, I know, a life only really takes shape when it's complete, i.e. over, and all that, but mostly I like watching lives in progress, decisions being made, actions taken or not taken, conversations had or suppressed, etc. There is plenty of this in a murder mystery, of course, but it's generally on the part of the detective, to whom the victim is usually a stranger; the detective is not, therefore, showing us the victim/stranger so much as leading us through a careful examination of the hole she has left and who might have wanted to make that hole happen. We're not really interested in the victim, but in the detective; the victim is just a means to the detective's end. See? Depressing. But lots of people like that stuff, and they're free to. It's just not usually for me.

But every once in a while, I like to take a look at a genre that I usually avoid, just to make sure that I'm avoiding it for good reasons and not just out of habit or of intellectual (or pretend anti-intellectual) posturing. And sometimes I do find that I've been unfair; witness my great enjoyment of Louis L'Amour's Sackett novels, "frontier tales" which, while not precisely westerns, are still more like westerns than most other kinds of stories, and thus are generally chucked into my mental "avoid" bin. I'm terribly, terribly glad I grew up to give those another chance.**

And so, A Murder of Quality, which basically seduced me into reading a straight up mystery novel, just out of love for its hero. Tsk tsk, Mr. le Carre. Now my guard is up, you!

That being said, there's still a lot to recommend this novel. As one could expect from a novel taking place largely at an upper-class school, there are a lot of moments in which the class-consciousness of certain elements of the community gets wickedly skewered. The best bits of these happen whenever a minor character, a teacher's wife named Shane, speaks, to wit:

"I'm never quite sure about funerals, are you? I have a suspicion that they are largely a lower-class recreation; cherry brandy and seed cake in the parlor."

And:

"Baptists are the people who don't like private pews, aren't they?"

Oh, is she ever quotable, is Mrs. Shane Hecht. And everything that comes out of her mouth will make you want to slap her.

Strangely enough, Shane is not the murder victim, or really anyone of any importance at all, except as a mouthpiece for the gentry, struggling to reassert their dominance over English life after the great social leveling of two world wars and not coming off well at all. No apologia for the ruling class, here (another quality, one might say, that this book shares a bit with Orwell's work, no?)! No, the murder victim is another teacher's wife, who comes off as a bit of a paragon of humility and independent thought for most of the novel, until [REDACTED] is discovered.

Through it all, Smiley is Smiley. Utterly forgettable, unprepossessing, mild, hard even to notice, but with a mind tuned by years of unglamorous spy work for uncovering secrets that makes him a perfect amateur detective. We only occasionally get a hint of what he's thinking, which I appreciate, not being a fan of the omni-omniscient narrator who knows all characters' thoughts anyway. Even when a nasty so-and-so like Shane teases him about his "unfortunate" marriage to a woman far above his social station (and who just happened to have grown up in the neighborhood of the Posh School in Question), he keeps his cool and just calmly lets her think she's gotten the better of him. She can sneer all she wants; in the end she has to keep being nasty old Shane Hecht (who, now that I think of it, reminds me rather a lot of Bingo from "Such, Such Were the Joys") and Smiley gets to keep being Smiley, knower of things he doesn't tell, friend of people of actual quality versus upper-crust Quality.

I know with whom I'd choose to pass an evening, at any rate.

*This is of course odd because Orwell/Blair was a little student many, many years before the period in which this novel is set, but those English Public Schools do have a sort of timeless quality to them, don't they? One would almost think it an effect for which they strive deliberately!

**I still avoid romance novels, though. Like the plague. Unless they're written by close and dear friends to whom I can't say no and find entertaining no matter what they're doing.

100 Books #101 - Justin Robinson's MR. BLANK

Was Tobias Knight your favorite character in Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson's fiction, or did you at least wonder what it would be like to be him?

Did you dig X-Files but think it was kind of cheap that Mulder & Scully only had to deal with one freakshow at a time? And too much FBI red tape?

Do conspiracy theories make you horny, baby?

Then, brother, have I got the novel for you.

The title character in Mr. Blank makes Tobias Knight, quintuple agent, look like a monogamous pansy. As he tells us in the novel's exquisitely perfect opening sentence, "Every conspiracy needs a guy like me." The sad bit is, as he goes on to explain, he's that guy for every single conspiracy. And there's only so much of him to go around. So, he has established more false identities than any sane person could keep track of, each with its own email address, cell phone and contract, and contact within a secret organization; the Masons know him by one name, the Satanists by another, etc. Across conspiracies, though, he is at core the same guy: the go-to guy, a low-level initiate/enthusiast who is willing to be the gopher, delivery guy, purchasing agent, evidence hider, witness confuser, whatever dumb little task you need today, Worshipful Sir or Ma'am or Thingie.

The premise could work with any number of plots (har har). The temptation that could waylay it being just to watch him in action, which could be fun as the quotidian-for-him early pages establish; his to-do list (or lists, one for each identity/role) are quite entertaining. I was especially amused by bits like this one: "Commercial candy is allowed to have up to five rat droppings per ounce by law. What they don't say is what kind of rat droppings or whose job it is to put them there."

You get the idea.

So this could have turned into the kind of sprawling hot mess that the Illuminatus! Trilogy (clearly its primary inspiration) was, but Robinson was more interested in producing a piece of quality genre fiction/entertainment than in imparting his mystic-comic wisdom to us in a gigantic parable. I think. At any rate, he found a plot that worked, the good old "someone is trying to kill me and this stacked redhead I just happened to meet along the way" that's straight out of mid-century crime noir. Hey, why mess with perfection?

And this book is so close to genre-mashing perfection that it's almost painful to contemplate how it also kind of bothered me: there's a major sub-plot involving female body-image politics that I didn't quite like, pitting one conspiracy of Rubenesque, curvy women (the stacked redhead and her fuller-figured overladies, whom Mr. Blank refers to as "hippos" and worse) against another of stick-thin model-pushers (though bonus points for the neologism "ascetorexics"). Mr. Blank more or less comes down on the side of the former, mostly due to the presence at his side of their prettiest and smartest (Mina, whom he wants to "paint on the side of a bomber"), so I guess there's that, but still, focusing on that one characteristic of a woman -- her body, her shape -- still counts as objectification, whether you're turned on by it or not, guys. Ew.

If that kind of thing doesn't bother you*, or if it does but you're able to square your shoulders and march on and get past it and focus on all the good stuff, this is quite an enjoyable read. Fnord.

*And usually I'm of this camp, able to dismiss the odd quip about a female character's appearance or a gay character's clothing or whatever as just something that is missing the mark with me but that the author felt necessary to include to appeal to other readers. But here, it is very much front and center, with Mr. Blank all but smacking his lips over Mina on almost every page. What saves it is that she notices this, calls him on it, and occasionally delivers the kind of reprimand that leaves a mark. So that brings up a question for me that I'm not sure I have the answer to: does the presence of a strong and self-determined female character who refuses to be a sidekick justify or compensate adequately for the author's over-the-top rubbing of my readerly nose in all of this body-image crap? Like I said, I don't have an answer, so my annoyance is only mostly assuaged by the fact that everything else in this book was over-the-top awesome.

100 Books #90 - John le Carre's CALL FOR THE DEAD

As I begin the last quarter of a year in which I have spent a lot of time slogging through a lot of big, bloated genre novels and their big, bloated sequels, there is something tonic and refreshing about a short, tightly plotted mid-20th century number like this one that very likely renders my enjoyment entirely out of proportion to the actual book's quality.

But perhaps not.

George Smiley has become an iconic character, at least in my little corner of the world, even without my ever having encountered him directly and consciously before now.* Tom Ripley was much the same for me, until my fangirl passion for Wim Wenders and Bruno Ganz led me to discover The American Friend, which featured Dennis Hopper as Ripley, a Ripley to which no other performance shall ever measure up, and I proceeded to gobble up all of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels in quick succession, to rush to acquire them in collectible hardcover, the better to gloat over them in my barrister bookcase...

I suspect I'll be doing the same with John le Carre, too.

Call for the Dead spends a lot of its time sort of slyly masquerading as a cozy mystery, with Smiley, ordinarily an operative for the British Secret Service in a very low key sort of way, filling the amateur detective role. A Foreign Office employee whom Smiley interviewed pro forma after an anonymous letter had identified the man as a former Communist has overreacted to said interview and killed himself in a fit of despair -- or has he? As the mystery unravels and a trail of bodies is found, a dashing and charismatic frenemy from Smiley's past surfaces. Watching Smiley sort all of this out in his methodical, thoughtful, occultly brilliant way is a genuine pleasure; so is watching his friends, one in the police and one fellow spy.

But it is the grieving widow who steals the show, as such. Elsa Feenan, Holocaust survivor, pragmatist, broken yet still strong, is a riveting figure from her first scene with Smiley, in which she effortlessly teases out his own anxieties about what he does and how he does it:

"It's like the State and the People. The state is a dream too, a symbol of nothing at all, an emptiness, a mind without a body, a game played with clouds in the sky. But States make war, don't they, and imprison people. To dream in doctrines -- how tidy! My husband and I have both been tidied now, haven't we?"

This coming just pages after a summary of Smiley's career -- which started out in the days when the spy trade barely was one, was just a loose affiliation of smart and careful people who had the wisdom to see that action on the front of a war cannot be the only action, and continued, perhaps a bit uncomfortably, into the age of professionalization and bureaucracy -- is devastating. And that scene is hardly her only bravura performance. I find myself wishing le Carre had written a series of Elsa Feenan novels in addition to, if not instead of, the Smiley ones.

But that's how good chronicles should go, isn't it? We'd tire quickly of a series in which Our Hero/point of view character is relentlessly and only what our attention is drawn to; he or she must have foes and foils, must encounter other equally interesting (if not more interesting) characters in his adventures. And by this reckoning, these Smiley novels are quickly going to become compulsive reading favorites right up there with Ripley novels, and Sharpe novels, and Aubrey/Maturin novels, and Miriam Black novels.

Hooray!

*I saw snatches of some film adaptations of Smiley novels when I was still a kid at home with my parents, but only sort of paid attention to them. Oh look, Obi-Wan is playing some sort of spy chap. Yawn. Small smile for Mom, who is enjoying the film, back to the pages of whatever Michael Moorcock or Jack Chalker or Piers Anthony mega-series had my real attention at the time. Ah, teenagers.