John le Carré – Call for the Dead

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Book Review, Call for the Dead, Espionage, John le Carré, Spy thriller, The Cold War

The Freezing Fog of the Cold War : George Smiley 1

Despite being fascinated by espionage – the hidden stuff of it, and the psychology of those who do it, rather than the glitzy Bond aspects – I have somehow never read le Carré, nor seen or heard the TV or radio adaptations of his books.

This, then his first book, is my first outing too with George Smiley, loner, a quiet man, with a private life full of some sorrow, as his rather glamorous, society wife, an unlikely match, has done the more expected thing and run off with a glamour playboy.

Set in the late 50’s/early 60’s, as the Cold War was getting close to freeze point, this is as much a murder mystery as a spy thriller. Smiley recently interrogated a Foreign Office official who had come under the radar of possibly passing information to East Germany. He had been pretty certain that the man, Fennan, was in the clear, and had given him understanding that this would be his conclusion. The interview, an informal one, ended amicably on both sides. Except that Fennan then killed himself, and, even more curiously, posted a letter to Smiley on the same evening requesting a meeting.

The familiar face of George Smiley: Sir Alec Guinness in dry and wintry mode

I found this an interesting and atmospheric read, melancholy, cerebral and with nice and understated humour and a good evocation of time and place, as the following section shows. Smiley has gone to the dead man’s Surrey home, there to try and make sense of events, which do not quite seem to add up :

Merridale Lane is one of those corners of Surrey where the inhabitants wage a remorseless battle against the stigma of suburbia. Trees, fertilized and cajoled into being in every front garden half obscure the poky ‘Character dwellings’ which crouch behind them. The rusticity of the environment is enhanced by the wooden owls that keep guard over the names of houses, and by crumbling dwarves indefatigably posed over goldfish ponds. The inhabitants of Merridale Lane do not paint their dwarves, suspecting this to be a suburban vice

There are some interesting relationships which are clearly quite strong ones, but hidden behind an understated English reserve. Aiding Smiley in his investigations are a couple of professional colleagues, Mendel and Guillam, both of whom go the distance in what is after all, a dangerous pursuit – the hunting down of those who are prepared to kill in the service of a theory and philosophy. There is a subtext of masculine friendships, strong, clearly, but the emotional connections are not spoken about: this is stiff upper lip land, in time and in place. ‘Feeling’ language belongs to Fennan’s widow, Elsa, a German refugee, survivor of the war :

it’s an old illness you suffer from, Mr Smiley………..and I have seen many victims of it. The mind becomes separated from the body; it thinks without reality, rules a paper kingdom and devises without emotion the ruin of its paper victims. But sometimes the division between your world and ours is incomplete; the files grow heads and arms and legs, and that’s a terrible moment, isn’t it. The names have families as well as records, and human motives to explain the sad little dossiers and their make-believe sins….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

There are obviously a lot of wheels within wheels plots to be unravelled, and the reader is in that rather enjoyable place where almost everyone might come under some kind of suspicion. Histories – both personal and the history of conflicts between states and ideologies are under investigation.

James Mason in Sidney Lumet’s The Deadly Affair

This was filmed as ‘The Deadly Affair, directed by Sidney Lumet, and starring James Mason, Simone Signoret and Maximilian Schell, it presumably takes some liberties, not least of which is the renaming of George Smiley as Dobbs

Call for the Dead Amazon UK
Call for the Dead Amazon UK

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Helen Dunmore – Exposure

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Book Review, Espionage, Exposure, Helen Dunmore, The Cold War

Trust, love, loyalty and betrayal in a very Cold War indeed

Helen Dunmore’s magnificent novel of espionage, set in England in the early 60s, deep in the Cold War, captivated from its first sombre, reflective sentences in the prologue, right up to the final arresting image.

Simon Callington is a very ordinary man, bright, but never brilliant, he went to Cambridge, and ended up working in an administrative capacity at the Admirality. However, he does have some secrets and inconsistencies in his past. Firstly, he does not reflect the arrogance of his elitist background. He does his work conscientiously, but work is not what matters most – that space is occupied by his German born wife, Lily and his three young children Paul, Sally and Bridget

Callington, with no malice aforethought, becomes embroiled within an espionage ring, purely out of a misplaced loyalty to an old friend, and an accident. Callington, as the reader knows, is not a spy, and the kind of subterfuge needed for espionage is alien to him. Nevertheless, as he gets caught up in events, he, his wife, and even his children, are forced to learn to dissemble. The hunted has to learn to think as the hunter does.

The central character of this book is Simon’s wife, Lily. Lily and her mother Elsa came to England shortly before the war, and, as German Jews, needed to learn to remake themselves in order to blend in. Both Lily and Simon have a certain reserve about them, through circumstance; their loyalty to each other, even though each has secrets from the other, is unshakeable.

There are some definite parallels in this story with a well-loved children’s book – E.E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children – 3 children, two girls and one boy, a disappeared father, a relocation from London to an out of the way place, a mystery, and, of course, the role of the railway itself. For me, one of the most poignant themes in the book concerns the loss of childish innocence, and the need to begin thinking, early, with an adult awareness, in order to protect your family. This was the inheritance Lily had had to learn in her own childhood, because of politics, and war, and this is learned again, because of politics, and a different kind of war, by Paul, Sally and Bridget.

Dunmore’s novel has a fine feel for period; this is the very early 60s, and a few short years before the explosion of ‘the sixties’ which began to shake up a society and usher in radical change. Although one could say that on the surface characters correspond to some broad types, Dunmore’s characters are far from cliché – nuanced and individual they can surprise themselves as much as they surprise the reader.

As the end of the novel neared, remembering the prologue did predict the outcome, and I think this was an excellent choice, in structuring the novel. There were certain questions which were left for the reader, the right ones, but this story also absolutely needed the ending it got.

Every character in this book was well drawn and all were more or less like icebergs – whatever you saw, there were hidden depths and surprising delicacies, nuances and understandings going on. There were also odd little throwaways which sent the reader away with some questions (good ones) without firmly spelling things out. An excellent read – and also, I think, with a lot of potential for discussion by book groups

It isn’t what you know or don’t know: it’s what you allow yourself to know….It turns out that I knew everything. All the facts were in my head and always had been. I ignored them, because it was easier. I didn’t want to make connections. I’ve begun to understand that I’ve been half-asleep all my life, and now I’m waking up

I received this as an ARC from the publishers, Hutchinson/Cornerstone Digital, via NetGalley, and recommend it, without any reservations

It will be published on January 28th in both digital and wood book form in the UK, but it looks as if Stateside readers will only be able to get it digi or Audible on that date (or order from the UK) as the hardback looks not to be published till May.

Exposure Amazon UK
Exposure Amazon USA

Simon Mawer – Tightrope

Tags

Book Review, Simon Mawer, The Cold War, Tightrope

From falling to balancing on an ever finer wire

When I finished Mawer’s last book, The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, I felt shocked and almost a little bemused by the abrupt ending – though I also reflected that I had no idea what other ending might have been suitable. And I also found it a plus in that book that not every thread had been explained, not every character really revealed and understood.

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky was a fictional story, with an initial inspiration coming from the fact that during the Second World War, 39 women had been recruited as agents from England by SOE (Special Operations Executive) to be parachuted into occupied France, to work with the Resistance. What kind of people were these incredibly brave, but also, perhaps unusually addicted to the adrenaline rush, women? Mawer’s book centres on Marian Sutro, a naïve and adventurous young English woman with a Swiss French mother, brought up bilingual, recruited as an SOE agent, eagerly learning the arts of duplicity, subterfuge, living dangerously. Despite all the undoubted danger Sutro is also, in one sense, living free – escaping convention, escaping her family, her past, her history, inventing new identities – and living with a mission, making a difference.

When I realised that Mawer’s new book, Tightrope, would continue Sutro’s story, but would bring her into the period of the cold war, everything fell into place. And I had even more admiration for Mawer, because nothing about the first book, despite the advantage, now, of hindsight, screamed ‘sequel’. Sometimes books with sequels planned are highly unsatisfying BECAUSE they seem structured for book 2.

Tightrope is quite an uncomfortable book in many ways. How does someone who has lived in such an extraordinary way, with preternaturally sharpened senses, prepared to kill, prepared to lie, cheat, use sex casually and ruthlessly to relieve an overwhelming itch or as another tool of manipulation, then manage to live, after the war, back in suburbia, in a more narrowly confined way? That is Mawer’s exploration, and Sutro’s challenging journey.

Mawer gives us a world with a character who is always going to be, a naturally unreliable narrator. Actually, the reader can probably be a lot more sure of Sutro than anyone else within the book can be!

Did I believe the story she told me? I really don’t know. It is perfectly possible to believe two contradictory things at one and the same time – that is one of the brilliant faculties of the human mind. Without it we’d have no war and no religion and precious little else that separates us from the other species.

As a cavil, I wasn’t completely sure about some of Sutro’s sexual encounters, and at times, I was very aware that the writer was male, and wondered how differently a female writer might have explored writing a woman who uses sex without intimacy, in part because of the professional need to hide vulnerability, – which of course includes becoming emotionally intimate – and who also uses sex as an escape from some of the horrors of her past experiences, and as an escape from the humdrum. It wasn’t the fact of Sutro’s sexuality which I was ‘unsure’ about, or even her degree of distance, but (perhaps inevitably) I was aware of the gender of the writer. The sex scenes take place in many ways quite clinically, from the outside, and were where I could not quite engage with the inner world of what Sutro was feeling – I think a female writer may have given a little more insight into Sutro’s emotional responses here.

Nonetheless, I found this a completely absorbing, dislocating, sometimes frightening book. The structure is clever, we learn her story backwards and forwards, and it is partly narrated by Sam Wareham, who initially meets Marian when she is 24 and he is 12. Sam is the son of a family friend, and as the story proceeds into the 50s, and he becomes a young man, from time to time his story connects with Marian. The edgy, shifting politics, as the countries who were Allies during the war shift, split, and take up new positions relative to each other, and the very real spectre of a nuclear arms race gallops apace, from the first horrific atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the race for a thermonuclear device, the hydrogen bomb. Sutro is still at the heart of all this, as her brother, and also the man she first fell in love with, as a sheltered teenager before the war, both became physicists, working on nuclear fission and fusion.

The Official CTBTO Photostream “Ivy Mike” detonation, Wiki Commons

On the desert island, the device called Ivy Mike detonated. A double flash, the flash of the primary followed microseconds later by the flash of the secondary. The primary was a plutonium bomb of the Nagasaki type, releasing a storm of X-rays that flowed down into the secondary and impacted upon the hydrogen atoms in the vacuum flask so fiercely that they fused into helium and, for a fragment of time, into all the atoms of creation and a few more besides……..The island on which the device had been constructed vanished entirely. The thermonuclear age had begun.

I was left with perhaps a clearer understanding of why some ‘real’ individuals may have acted in certain ways which seemed incomprehensible or motivated solely by motives of personal gain or a kind of emotional pathology. Without preaching, or indeed special pleading, Mawer makes the reader examine the moral maze of the times.

And, for what it’s worth, the ending of this book is wonderfully satisfying. Mawer brings in, in both books, the idea of a rather fiendish chess game variant, where you only see your own pieces on your own board, and can’t see the moves your opponent is playing – this becomes a kind of metaphor for Marian, as she begins to be drawn into still deadly games in a world ostensibly at peace. And, yes, Mawer too is playing that game, and the end, where he finally shows us the board with all its pieces, the game across two books, is brilliant, and I laughed in delight and admiration.

I received this as an ARC from the publishers, Little Brown, via Netgalley. UK publication is on June 4th, but ALAS Statesiders, I’ve had an email from the publishers to say you will have to wait until November 3rd. Isn’t that CRUEL. I suggest booking a holiday next month in the UK and making the nearest decent bookshop a first item on your tour. Otherwise, i suppose there is ordering from the UK, or calling in favours from your UK resident family or friends

Tightrope Amazon UK
Tightrope Amazon USA

Ellen Feldman – The Unwitting

Tags

Book Review, Ellen Feldman, McCarthy, Novels about America, The Cold War, The Kennedys, The Unwitting

Politics, like love, can be a dirty game

Ellen Feldman’s tautly written, reflective book set in post-war America is a splendid, page-turning book, exploring the territory of the Cold War, rife with darkness and suspicion from both sides of the ideological divide, as seen through the prism of one marriage.

Nell and Charlie Benjamin, at the start of this novel, set on the day of Kennedy’s assassination, are a couple who have it all. She is a journalist, he is the publisher of a respected liberal left leaning magazine. Both of them have secrets. Some of these are in the field of their personal relationship, some of them are where individual and state connect, particularly at a time when there were real battles for hearts and minds going on between ideologies which were carving up the world.

Both America and Russia at that time were claiming some sort of higher moral ground; both had far less moral ways of seeking to exert control.

Feldman expertly weaves her way through a period in American history from 1948 to 1971, exploring attitudes to race, sexual politics, and lifting the lid on the difference the myth and the reality between public face and behind closed doors.

Singer Moses LaMarr singing spirituals to children in Gorky Park, Leningrad, Russia in December 1955 – American Theatre Troupe Production of Porgy and Bess, tour to Moscow and Leningrad,

Just when the central character, Nell, has a handle on ‘what is right’…she gets presented with nuance and ambiguity again and again.

This is a pacy, fascinating read, heroes have feet of clay, the corrupt have surprising integrity. The reader, like the central character, is forced to interpret and reinterpret a life and events, backwards. What happens now, what we know now, may force us to reinterpret what we thought we knew then.

This is a book full of absolutely believable twists and turns. Nell and Charlie are fictional, but the stage on which Feldman sets them, and the manipulations that went on to control that stage, were not

I was past the point in life when I believed people were of a piece. I had learned to live with ambiguity. If you can’t you have no business falling in love

The title of the book refers to unwitting, because unknowing, collusion in what goes on; however, the unwitting might have asked the questions which were staring them in the face. Sometimes innocence looks like an unwillingness to face the unpalatable

This is in some ways, a difficult book to review, because to explain much of the ‘about’ is to spoil the reader’s own journey.

I recommend this very highly, and will read more of Feldman’s work

The book reminded me, in some ways, of Sebastian Faulks’ similar time-set On Green Dolphin Street, but also, a more recent, factual read, the excellent A Spy Among Friends, Ben MacIntyre’s account of post-war politics amidst the cold war, and how Britain, America and Russia accommodated themselves, losing and gaining power and ideological empire

I received this as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK

The Unwitting Amazon UK
The Unwitting Amazon USA

Ben Macintyre – A Spy Among Friends

Tags

A Spy Among Friends, Ben Macintyre, Book Review, Espionage, Kim Philby, The Cambridge Five, The Cold War, The Secret Service

The endless fascination of espionage………

I am not quite sure why spies, and spying, should be so very fascinating to most of us, but the success of books, films and TV programmes about spying show that it is!

For myself, there is something about the mask which we all wear, becoming something far less penetrable and obvious than most of our masks are to those around us who observe us. Although no-one can ever really know another, most of us are much more transparent in what we really are feeling/thinking than we believe. Most of us think we are safe behind our various masks, but the ability to ‘read’ the other is as much an evolutionary advantage as the ability to be a trickster is.

Spies though, a whole life lived hidden, take this to a different space, and the idea of never being really seen by another, truly, is as awful as the idea of having no-where to hide one’s psychic bruises from everyone’s gaze.

This is an excellent, readable account of Kim Philby’s life, and indeed of the whole culture of espionage from the lead-up to the Second World War, through the war years, and then into the period of the Cold War, when Russia, not Germany, was seen as the enemy by the West, and particularly by the UK and America. Author and journalist Ben Macintyre is clearly fascinated by the subject of espionage as he has written several other factual books on this topic. His research is extensive, and this particular book has a revealing postscript by John le Carre, who of course also worked in the Secret Service.

Macintyre starts his book with that very well known, and also in some ways, given the time of its writing, (1938) that very shocking statement by the novelist E.M.Forster:

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friends, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country

What in the end the Forster quote implies is that ‘country’ like ideology itself, can, taken to an extreme, lead to the devaluing of an individual life. The ism elevated above the humans who live within the ism, or believe the ism. Fidelity to the ism (nationalism, specific faith or political ideology ism) can lead to the terrible things that happen when not just the other person’s ism, but indeed, the person themselves, becomes expendable for the sake of devotion to MY ism.

The fascinating dichotomy in this book however, became the clash between the ‘club’ – an upper class, public school, Oxbridge educated elite – a friendship of same background, bonded together with heavy drinking, those who were loyal to those friends, and would never betray their friends, and those, like Philby, whose loyalty was to the country of ideology. There was an extremity in both positions. Philby was willing to betray and sacrifice individual lives as he played his game of double bluff, ostensibly high up in MI6, whilst in reality, serving the KGB. But the intelligence agencies, both in the UK and at that stage, in the States, had high up individuals who were unable to comprehend that a man of ‘our class’ could possibly be a traitor to his class, or to the politics of his class, or to his country.

Kim Philby was above suspicion for so long, not just because he was so clearly ‘one of us’ with absolutely the ‘right background’, but because he was possessed of fatal (for others) charm. If you look at the real derivation of the word – a charm is a piece of magic, an enchantment, a spell, something thought to possess occult power. Kim Philby’s charm clearly DID ‘subdue by secret influence’. As Macintyre explains

Beneath Philby’s golden charm lay a thick substratum of conceit; the charmer invites you into his world, though never too far and only on his terms

By all accounts, Philby, in that markedly English upper-class way, did not ever discuss real things – emotions, political beliefs – repeatedly, colleagues talk about him as good fun, ironic, witty – and sometimes these skilful tools can be absolutely used to parry away real intimacy,

What shocks also is what an incredibly heavy drinking culture the worlds of MI6 and the CIA were. It seems as if most of the high up personnel must either have been drunk or nursing hangovers most of the time!.

Alcohol was so much a part of the culture of MI6 in those days that a non-drinker in the ranks could look like a subversive or worse

The other fact which struck me is how young, how very young, some of these major players were at the time when they were rising to extraordinary positions of power and responsibility – men in their mid-twenties.

I was also quite fascinated to discover how much the class war was played out in this country between MI6 (that public school educated, upper class often aristocratic privileged elite) and the middle or working class background of MI5. And of the rivalry and distrust between them. This was mirrored in the setting up of similar agencies in the States, between the CIA and the FBI

The story of Philby’s eventual ‘outing’ after decades of successfully living the lie, and of how and why (possibly) he did not end up, like some lower placed double agents, tried and imprisoned, but escaped to Moscow to live out his days, is cogently argued. Some less highly placed double agents, whose ‘betrayals’ cost fewer agent’s lives lost, fewer state secrets betrayed, were imprisoned for many years – John Verrall, for example. Philby, like Burgess and Maclean, were able to flee the country – in the case of Burgess and Maclean this was engineered by Philby, in the case of Philby, it wasn’t another agent, but, but ……….you’ll have to read this excellent book!

A received this as a review copy from the publishers, via Netgalley

A Spy Among Friends Amazon UK
A Spy Among Friends Amazon USA