Perhaps a Flashman TV series could have the elderly Flashman as the narrator, sitting in a gentleman's club telling his heroic tales. Most of the episodes are shown as flashbacks (Flashmanbacks? ). Sometimes we hear Flashman narrate his glorious adventures whe we see what "really"" happened on the screen?
the Spy Who Came in from the Cold
this is a tightly structured tragedy, with our hero Alec Leamas dutifully serving his country only to find he is the one being played through levels within levels of deception. It all builds up to an inevitable punch on the last page that really hurts when it comes, yet has been foreshadowed plainly since the beginning of the story. It's just that as a reader I want to trust the good guys, and probably you do too, that's why it works.
There is some nice narrative sleight-of-hand, we watch Leamas reinvent his identity before he returns to East Germany, yet are not told what he is doing, so as far as we know he is indeed an unsympathetic selfdestructive character. Theres is no internal monolog or exposition to tell us different. If we cant trust our protagonist to be who he seems, why should we trust the supporting characters he works for?
The Looking Glass War
This is more of a satire, a bit like some of Graham Greene's stuff. There is a leftover espionage department from WWII, old guys wallowing in nostalgia, and the Circus would like to be rid of them, though that motive is only ever shown to us in hints. We see it all from the point of view of these nostalgic old guys, going back into action one more time, clueless as to why their phony passports are getting cancelled or why they are being given heavy out of date radio equipment.
The bit where their agent finally crosses the border is very scary, a sudden change of tone where the old guys fantasy world suddenly becomes real for one sucker, while they continue to pat themselves on the back on the safe side of the border.
Smiley and Control are only seen in brief glimpses in both books. Although Smiley was a normal protagonist in Call for the Dead, in these next few books he is a largely unseen assistant puppetmaster. He is the nice one, he seems to actually care for these people being manipulated. Control is his boss, and he's the real cynic, coldly making the choices that doom countrymen who trust him, so as to succeed in a larger game which is not part of the story being told.
Perhaps a Flashman TV series could have the elderly Flashman as the narrator, sitting in a gentleman's club telling his heroic tales. Most of the episodes are shown as flashbacks (Flashmanbacks? ). Sometimes we hear Flashman narrate his glorious adventures whe we see what "really"" happened on the screen?
yes I think that would work.
This conceit of the "packets" posthumously discovered by the "editor" works in prose, it's a variation of old narrative structure called the "epistolary novel"
such a narrative device would look stuffy onscreen, but your idea of a blowhard telling tall tales in his Gentlemens Club would be much more visual. The actor playing Flashman would have to be a real charmer anyway, annoying yet compelling nonetheless, everybody in the club (and watching along at home) would want to hear his neverending sagas of selfglorification despite not particularly liking him.
It's taken me most of a lifetime to find a copy of this book!
Amis mentions Bulldog Drummond as an influence on Fleming in his Dossier, and I remember he was not complimetary. Most latterday commentators focus on the xenophobia, without telling us anything else about the story.
This book should sit on the spy-lit fan's shelf alongside John Buchan's Richard Hannay novels, and Leslie Charteris' The Saint. But whereas the 39 Steps gets filed under literature, and random volumes of The Saint are not hard to find, I've never actually come across a Bulldog Drummond before. My bookshop had it filed under D, as if Drummond was the author and "Sapper" the title.
This is fun stuff, an easy entertaining read. Fighting spies is good sport, and everybody has a good laugh as the evil foreigners meet their fate at the hands of the very unofficial Drummond.
The story: Drummond is a young vet of WWI, now sitting round London bored, so he places an ad in the paper looking for adventure, and quickly becomes entangled in a scheme to provoke a Communist Revolution in Britain, to the advantage of the plots' sponsors: Industrial interests in Germany and the United States (i.e Communism is itself a Capitalists' conspiracy).
His rapport with ladyfriend Phyllis Benton is very similar to Simon Templar's with Patricia Holm. Benton calls Drummond "boy" as they laugh about their fun plans to fight dangerous spies, just as Holm addresses Templar. But Drummond and Benton came first.
His rapport with the evil mastermind Carl Peterson is exactly like that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer tried to match wits with Elaine's psychiatrist the Svenjolly. Or perhaps more familiarly, James Bond and Dr No debating fine wines and the philosophy of power over a nice dinner. Then following the oh so polite chit-chat he breaks a few bones.
Apparantly there were nine sequels, then another writer continued the series after Sapper's death.
I'm going to review a book that hasn't been translated into English or any other language as far as I know. But it will be translated to several languages for sure and hopefully English too. I guess the title will be "When the land darkens", but who knows? The author has published one viking-themed novel earlier (With really good reviews) and one novel for children. I worked at the same office as the author for two years and we are friends. He likes to to write while hiking or skiing, since nature gives him solitude and inspiration.
From the publisher:
The year is 1293. Arnar Vilhjálmsson, a young boy, is rowing out on his first walrus hunt. After the hunt, a girl stands before him. She looks down at the beast he has slain, her eyes full of defiance, and her words full of scorn. Then she turns and runs away from him, without looking back. Her name is Eir.
In the Norsemen’s Western Settlement, on Greenland, a sense of unease has been creeping in. The walrus that gave the settlers their wealth have been retreating. The ships that used to sail from Norway and Iceland to trade there have become few and far between. The Greenlanders’ own vessels are rotting. The people are wondering: is this the end?
Arnar dreams of one day building his own ship and sailing towards the lands further west, seeking timber, iron and hope for the future. Eir is part of that dream. In this quest for a future, Arnar is even willing to defy his own chieftain, gods, and the laws of men.
"Når landet mørknar" takes place in Greenland at the end of the thirtheenth century in the Norse colony there. The culture is in decline and during the next two hundred years the Norse colony mysteriously vanishes completely. At the time of the novel some of the people living in the farms in the inland valleys still worshiped Odin and Thor, but the majority are Christian. The protagonist is the young farmer Arnar who is in love with the Christian girl Eir in a sort of Romeo and Juliet situation. The novel is writen from several points of view, including that of animals. When was the last time you read a chapter written from the POW of a walrus? It works surprisingly well and the book is written in a style that both lyrical and brutal. I hope they find first-rate translators. Sidenote: There are two written forms of Norwegian: Bokmål is used by the majority and is influenced by Danish and the dialects urban areas, especially around Oslo. Nynorsk is influenced by the many dialects and old Norse. Tore uses a conservative version of Nynorsk. Other than Icelandic this is the closest you can get to Old Norse today.
The reviews are among the best for any novel this year and it's one out of four nominees for the major litterary award in Norway. If you like good litterature and have an interest in vikings, keep an eye out for the name Tore Kvæven in the bookstores.
Palace of Treason by Jason Matthews (second book in the Red Sparrow trillogy)
The trillogy about Dominika Egorova of the Russian SVR and Nate Nash from the CIA. I won't say much more about them and the relationship between them because some might not have read the first book in the trillogy. What I can say is that Dominika is a graduate of the SVR Sparrow School where agents learn to manipulate people emotionally and sexually. She is born with the ability to see people's emotions in colours and in The Palace of Trason she can also see and hear the "ghosts" of people close to her who dies. Strangely, I think it this works. In every Chapter some meal is mentioned and the recipe is at the end of the chapter. It's a nice feature, but sometimes it gets too convoluted and unnatural.
The author is a former CIA agent and the plot and spycraft is very impressive. Unlike John le Carre, another ex- agent who uses his experience in his novels, there is hardly any grey areas here. Doninika and Nash are good and heroic and their adversaries are plain evil. Even Fleming was less simplistic at times. Vladimir Putin was in the first book too, but then we barely saw him and only in situations one could reasonably assume how he would act. Now he is more involved in the plot and we meet him in private situations and the author tries to get inside his head. You may like or dislike this side of the book, but I think most will agree it's problematic. But the writing is good, the plot is convincing and exiting, the characters are interesting and The Palace of Trason is a very noteworthy book in the spy genere.
A Small Town in Germany
John le Carre
The first one without Smiley or the Circus lurking in the background.
An investigation into a defector from the British embassy in Bonn. The defector is never actually seen, but we are told his story from the point of view of many different acquaintances who work in the embassy, Rashomon style. The various character's stories amount to a satire of Embassy life, in which polite diplomacy outweighs right and wrong, and the reality of a defector is an embarrassment that disrupts the pleasantries of the dinner party circuit.
The book was published 1968, against the backdrop of real world student protests and Britain's attempts to enter the Common Market (which alone makes it a bit odd to read in these Brexit-y times). Some reviews suggest it is meant to take place in the then-near future, as a populist political party rising in Germany deliberately aggravates grievances against Britain and may portend a return to fascism.
As with a couple of his other novels, the last chapter suddenly turns into something much more horrific before suddenly coming to an end. I like the way le Carre tells a small scale story in the foreground of his books, while something much more sinister is going on in the background, unappreciated by the protagonists until the last page.
Jo Nesbø's next novel in the Harry Hole series will be in bookstores on Thursday. The English title will probably be "Knife" and I'm really looking forward to reading it
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 27,924Chief of Staff
Jo Nesbø's next novel in the Harry Hole series will be in bookstores on Thursday. The English title will probably be "Knife" and I'm really looking forward to reading it
I’ll be buying it at some point...hope it’s an improvement on his last...
Marvel Epic Collection: Thor the God of Thunder
by Stan Lee Jack Kirby and others
a nice big fat trade paperback compiling all the earliest Thor and Tales of Asgard stories from Journey Into Mystery 83 (Aug 1962) through 109 (Oct 1964)
the answer to the age-old question "when does Thor get good?" lies within! the Mighty Thor was originally created by Lee and Kirby in the same concentrated burst of activity following Fantastic Four 1 that also quickly gave us SpiderMan, the Hulk, Iron Man, the X-Men and all those other characters the whole world now knows so well.
I suspect the character was mostly Kirby's idea, as he had featured characters named Thor as oneshot villains in various comics over the decades, and in the early 1940s drawn a strip called Mercury or Hurricane, featuring a pantheon of Greek gods.
In his earliest appearances Thor is basically the old Captain Marvel/Billy Batson/Shazam concept, with lame Doctor Don Blake trading places with the God of Thunder each time he strikes his walking stick, yet sharing a conciousness. These earliest stories follow a very generic structure, of fighting costumed bank robbers and worrying Nurse Jane Foster will find out his secret identity. Eventually Thor would become all-Asgard all the time, and the vehicle for Kirby to express his wildest visual and conceptual imagination, but it took a couple of years to get there.
Kirby only drew the earliest appearances here, including the debut of Loki in the third story, then left to concentrate on other responsibilities. Most of the early stories are drawn by Al Hartley (better known for romance comics), Joe Sinnott (who would ink Kirby's pencils in the best Fantastic Four stories), and Iron Man's Don Heck. None of them have Kirby's imagination and I doubt they co-plotted the story concepts way Kirby would do. Worse, the stories themselves are scripted not by Stan, but by his brother Larry Lieber. So in the first two years, it was second tier talent creating Thor, which is why it is so generic and not the Thor we know.
In Journey into Mystery 97 (oct 1963) Lee and Kirby intoroduce the backup feature Tales of Asgard, which is where things start getting interesting. The backup is always five pages, four huge panels to a page, to showcase Kirby's wild artwork, telling actual episodes of Norse mythology, explorations of neighbouring realms, fleshing out the evergrowing cast of Asgardians and revealing Thor and Loki's backstories.
The main stories remain generic imitation Superman plots for a few more issues, til Journey into Mystery 101 (feb 1964), where Lee and Kirby return for good. Instantly the earthbased presentday adventures of Thor become weird and unpredictable, incorporating the new concepts from the backup series, and taking on more epic tone.
(Probably by no coincidence, Lee and Kirby's return is the same month as the first issue of the Avengers, which of course also featured Thor.)
This volume ends just a few issues after that point, just as it is finally starting to get good. I know the Earth-based stories and boring old Jane Foster disappear entirely two years later, in Thor 136 (jan 1967), so it is a gradual evolution in storytelling. It just kept getting more and more cosmic after that until Kirby finally left the title, and Marvel, after Thor 179 (aug 1970).
check out Mike's Newsstand, one of my favourite websites, where you can query the database to see the cover of every comic published any month since 1933, or every issue of a series. Here are all the covers of every issue of Journey into Mystery/Thor.
The Honourable SchoolBoy
John leCarre
the first of two sequels to Tinker Tailor ..., collectively known as the Karla Trilogy
le Carre must have gotten especially good reviews for Tinker Tailor, because he's really over-writing here. The first hundred pages introduce various mostly irrelevant characters very slowly, all from highly unreliable second or third hand points of view ... the first chapter even ends with our narrator announcing he has introduced his Greek chorus (a gang of hard-drinking journalists), and a hundred pages in a literary agent character is debating the merits of Greene, Maughm, and Conrad (all literary novelists who happened to write spy stories) before slamming the Hemingway approach to telling a story.
and except for two significant paragraphs, whenever we see Smiley it is through the eyes of Peter Guillam, who makes the Nigel Bruce version of Watson look perceptive.
That all said, this book is massive, and three hundred pages in, when the narrative finally settles on the title character's trek through Hong Kong and South East Asia, le Carre drops the tricky PoV stuff and we get two hundred pages of exotic globetrotting action adventure and excitement unlike we've ever seen from leCarre before. Didn't actually know he had it in him!
good stuff, those last two hundred pages, and it leads to another cryptic ambiguous ending where whatever was really going on has only been hinted at, while the little people lick their wounds in confusion.
The Honourable SchoolBoy
John leCarre
the first of two sequels to Tinker Tailor ..., collectively known as the Karla Trilogy
le Carre must have gotten especially good reviews for Tinker Tailor, because he's really over-writing here. The first hundred pages introduce various mostly irrelevant characters very slowly, all from highly unreliable second or third hand points of view ... the first chapter even ends with our narrator announcing he has introduced his Greek chorus (a gang of hard-drinking journalists), and a hundred pages in a literary agent character is debating the merits of Greene, Maughm, and Conrad (all literary novelists who happened to write spy stories) before slamming the Hemingway approach to telling a story.
and except for two significant paragraphs, whenever we see Smiley it is through the eyes of Peter Guillam, who makes the Nigel Bruce version of Watson look perceptive.
That all said, this book is massive, and three hundred pages in, when the narrative finally settles on the title character's trek through Hong Kong and South East Asia, le Carre drops the tricky PoV stuff and we get two hundred pages of exotic globetrotting action adventure and excitement unlike we've ever seen from leCarre before. Didn't actually know he had it in him!
good stuff, those last two hundred pages, and it leads to another cryptic ambiguous ending where whatever was really going on has only been hinted at, while the little people lick their wounds in confusion.
My all-time favorite writer. No, not you Potts -- Le Carre!
Very fair review, although I liked the whole journey a bit more than you did. Westerby is the classic Le Carre sad sack -- jaded, resentful, but with just enough left in him to care. I'll be interested in your review of Smiley's People, assuming you intend to read it (or may have already done so).
I re-read "Soldier Spy" by "Tom Marcus" during my holiday.
It still comes off as a self aggrandizing story told by some toothless yob in a track suit, you know the type "... then dat guy pulled a knoif, but I couldnna let 'im scare me 'cause then I woulda been inna piss..."
Some of it I find credible, a lot of it plausible, but all the parts about "him" being the "best there ever was" and UK intel services "being the best out there" as well as his disparaging remarks about UK law enforcement.... that all reads a little bit too "Tom Clancy-ish" all that was left out was a MSgt "who could teach manners to the meanest NFL linebackers out there".... 8-)
"I mean, she almost kills bond...with her ass."
-Mr Arlington Beech
My all-time favorite writer. No, not you Potts -- Le Carre!
Very fair review, although I liked the whole journey a bit more than you did. Westerby is the classic Le Carre sad sack -- jaded, resentful, but with just enough left in him to care. I'll be interested in your review of Smiley's People, assuming you intend to read it (or may have already done so).
oh I liked it plenty.
I've read most of his early books over the last little while, and gotten to appreciate the tricks he uses to tell his story in a roundabout way. And that approach probably is more appropriate to a spy story, where so little us actually known by the people who're paid to know whats what.
But I did notice in this one he was really working that roundabout storytelling, and when I got to those two passages when he seemed to be congratulating himself for his own technique I did say out loud "oh get on with it!"
anyway our Fleming books average two hundred pages, so since leCarre does give us two hundred pages of straightforward adventure in SouthEast Asia at the end, the rest is bonus.
I do have Smiley's People lined up next, in fact everything up to A Perfect Spy is currently sitting on my bookshelf and I will probably keep going after that.
I've finished "Knife" the latest Harry Hole novel from Jo Nesbö. Nesbö is a masterful crime novel writer and I actually think he would be a good bond continuation novel writer if given the chance. I'm not going to say too much about "Knife". Harry is far from as well-adjusted and happy as he was in "Police" and that makes me happy. Not because I'm a sadist (I think I would like the novel even if I wasn't one :v ) but because Harry Hole works better as a character when he's fighting with his demons. A very good crime novel
Finally made it to the end of the Flashman adventures! sad day. I'd been pacing myself because they were so good and wanted to keep something to look forwards to, but that's it I've now read all twelve.
Has anybody ever compiled a list of Flashman's Unseen Missions? He mentions dozens in passing every book. I think in the earliest books, he would mention events that Fraser would later return to as the subject of future books, and in the later books he is mostly referring to adventures we've already seen. But there's still completely untold tales he references even in the last books.
And there's a few long unexplained gaps in his biography. In this one, in one of the footnotes Fraser even "hypothesises" Flashman's movements during the long gap following the most recent (internally chronological) adventure. I don't think Fraser would have felt the need to do this in his earlier novels, he'd just leave that to be explored later. So I suspect he knew he'd be writing no more and would never have another chance to fill in the gaps?
I do have a copy of the Pyrates in my to-read pile. I was attracted by the sexy cover. So there's that to look forward to.
A bookstore near me has Fraser's Hollywood History of the World: from One Million BC to Apocalypse Now. Has anybody read this? The idea of history as mis-told by pop culture appeals to me, as that's what future generations will be trusting to get their information from.
...I'll be interested in your review of Smiley's People...
ha! after me kvetching about the overcomplicated PoV stuff in the previous book, you knew what I'd find!
This book is told almost entirely through the eyes of George Smiley!
I guess its title derives from it being basically a series of interrogations, as Smiley inches his way towards his archenemy Karla.
The first half of the book takes the form of a murder mystery, much like when Smiley was first introduced in Call for the Dead.
The trickiest bit of narrative technique comes in the middle, just as Smiley figures out whats going on. Sort of a set of nested flashbacks, as one character remembers another who in turn once described a memory of someone else who might actually have met Karla and even hinted that Karla may have a secret of his own.
Then Smiley himself goes on a field mission, to the redlight district of Hamburg, and finally to Geneva. I felt rather scared for our pudgy hero in some of these scenes.
It all ends surprisingly conclusively for a le Carre novel, at least at first glance.
the final scene is a mirror image of the opening of the "the Spy Who Came in from the Cold"
so its resolving more than just the storyline begun in Tinker Tailor
but...
1) after 300 pages of interrogations, we don't actually see Smiley so much as speak to Karla. le Carre leaves us at the cusp of that moment. Yet Smiley's entire life's work was a type of conversation with his alter-ego, what can these two men possibly have to say face-to-face that hasnt already been said?
2) its impossible to believe an evil genius like Karla could be persuaded to surrender. He must be up to something, Smiley must be being played even as his colleagues congratulate him on his success. This implication is left to our imaginations, but becomes hard to deny the more I dwell on plot points and the ending.
I see le Carre has a new book out. I wonder is it safe to leap ahead and read that one? or are his recent books still intertwined with recurring characters and story arcs?
Great review, CP. After what I considered the brilliant TTSS and the almost-brilliant THS, I could only imagine the Karla Trilogy's conclusion would be anticlimactic, and so I approached it with great trepidation. Imagine my surprise to find it an absolute crackerjack. The story just flew by, and I loved being in Smiley's head almost exclusively. Even though I didn't have the same reaction you articulate in your second spoiler, neither can I really argue against it. I did love Smiley's muted reaction to his triumph in a struggle he had dedicated much of his professional life to and could never really was winnable. Classic George, and classic Le Carré.
I think that of the 10 (or thereabouts) John Le Carré novels that I have read, it was probably Smiley's People that I found most gripping, and I certainly didn't expect that. It is even more surprising considering that it was the only time that I had watched a screen adaptation of the novel before reading the book, so I knew the plot of the story and yet I still found it a really exciting read.
I see that Smiley and Guillame each appear in two later novels, reminiscing about their classic adventures. So I guess if something went wrong after the final page of Smiley's People, we would have heard about it. Smiley's People doesn't really reference the Honourable Schoolboy much, mostly building directly from events in Tinker Tailor.... But it does clarify the ending of ...Schoolboy, turns out Guillame was right to be paranoid.
Thinking more about the title:
Smiley doesn't seem to do normal healthy relationships with fellow humans, as repeatedly evidenced by his disfunctional marriage. But this interrogating he does, politely yet relentlessly ripping the truth out of the various characters he meets, that seems to be how he relates to people. He does that with several of his former professional colleagues in this book, people that a normal human would consider friends, and they comment on it.
It's part of why the long painful interrogation of Connie Sachs is so central and rather disturbing.
also: imagine if Bond had to abandon his Aston mid-adventure because gypsy urchins had vandalised it. I think le Carre was having a laugh at his hero in that scene.
and in other spy-fiction, Archie as the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E.
Archie Andrews that is!
a recent paperback from Archie Comics, compiling a run of stories from the mid60s, in which Archie and his gang are secret agents!
Originally published in Life with Archie45 through 63 (Jan 66-July 67), around the same time as the better known Archie-as-superhero Pureheart the Powerful stories.
R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. stands for Really Impressive Vast Enterprise for Routing Dangerous Adversaries, Louts, Etc, but the actual organisation they work for is called P.O.P. (Protect our Planet), named after Pop Tate, whose soda shop is their secret headquarters.
Their opposing organizaion is C.R.U.S.H., whose acronym is never explained. And the P.O.P.agents names are correctly spelled A.R.C.H.I.E., J.U.G.H.E.A.D., etc, and these acronyms are not explained either.
In the first missions, V.E.R.O.N.I.C.A. and R.E.G.G.I.E. are members of C.R.U.S.H., but inexplicably about four missions in they too become part of P.O.P. In agent V.E.R.O.N.I.C.A.'s case, she is sporting a mod bob hairstyle and dressing in sleek Diana Rigg style costumes, which the more modest girl-next-door agent B.E.T.T.Y. tends not to do. Also, many of the plots revolve around Mr Lodge's factory, which now produces secret weapons technology such as invisible bombs.
But it is Agent B.E.T.T.Y. who gets her own spinoff series the Girl from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E.
The villains are all costumed supervillain types, with gimmicky superpowers, the same as Pureheart the Powerful would be fighting, but in this context mostly motivated to steal top secret technology from Mr Lodge's factory.
And, A.R.C.H.I.E.'s jalopy is now tricked out with outrageous gadgets our Q department never thought of.
Bios tell me Dieghton was a graphic artist before becoming an author. Which makes sense, as he gives us a series of striking visual images but leaves it up to us readers to interpret their meaning and assemble them into a narrative.
The first half especially he gives us our Plot in random isolated fragments.
The conventional spythriller plot fragments come in between much more interesting dialogs, as our nameless protagonist makes smart-ass remarks to his superiors and complains constantly about expenses owing and backpay even as he is transferred and promoted to much better job. Mostly its all about class resentments, as everybody else is posh and born to power and our nameless protagonist never misses an opportunity to remind them.
Partway through there's a change of scene to a Pacific atoll where there's a neutron bomb test scheduled, and the episodic storytelling is replaced by something resembling a conventional plot. And something bad does happen, but I'm not sure its anything to actually do with the bomb or just an excuse to entrap our nameless protagonist. The plot flows more continuously from this point, but it's still a sequence of confusing images that may or may not add up.
Novel ends with two chapters of exposition, where our nameless protagonist explains to his sexy assistant all the fine details of the plot that were only ever hinted at in glimpses the first time round. Sounds like there was an exciting spy story going on in between all the smart-ass exchanges about backpay! (ironic the sexy assistant has to ask what the plot was all about, since during the Pacific atoll scenes she demonstrated she was a smarter more competent spy than her boss.)
I'm also not convinced our nameless protagonist did anything to solve the case or catch the baddies. Seems like he was being played for a patsy by all sides, and other characters were doing all the important work in between the paragraphs we got to read
Lots of food snobbery here, and coffee snobbery decades before that was fashionable. And everybody reads fine literature. Our nameless protagonist may give attitude to all the toffs he has to work for, but he seems desperate to prove he's better than he is with all his ostentatious fine tastes.
But I gather Deighton also writes cookbooks when he's not writing spynovels, so thatd explain the big lobster and champagne finale too.
More coherent than the first book, at least this time everything we are told is relevant to the espionage plot. Deighton still conceals much important information, but what he reveals and what he hides seems more deliberate this time, and there are at least three incorrect explanations as to why everybody is so interested in the sunken submarine until all is revealed in the end.
Deighton's descriptions of the Algarve are detailed and tactile, he really has a sense of place. The first book had long passages of very specific London geography, and I gather his descriptions of Berlin in later books are just as good.
Did Saltzman not adapt this one maybe because all the diving content was too similar to Thunderball?
I'm not reading this book at the moment, but "Snøsøsteren" ("The snow sister") by Maja Lunde was a huge success when it was published last year. I know it's published in 26 languages and Hollywood has bought the rights and are devoloping the film. It's a novel for children and it has 24 chapters, making it perfect as a litterary Christmas calendar. It's about ten year old Julian who looks forward to Christmas, but he also thinks about his older sister who he recently lost. To quote a reviewer: "The snow sister" is a beautiful book, full of moods, emotions and wisdom.
Already last year the novel was a big success internationally and it's probably translated to your language too by now. Maja Lunde has already had big international succuess with a novel for adults: "The history of bees"
The illustrations in "The snow sister" are incredibly beautiful too!
Comments
the Spy Who Came in from the Cold
this is a tightly structured tragedy, with our hero Alec Leamas dutifully serving his country only to find he is the one being played through levels within levels of deception. It all builds up to an inevitable punch on the last page that really hurts when it comes, yet has been foreshadowed plainly since the beginning of the story. It's just that as a reader I want to trust the good guys, and probably you do too, that's why it works.
There is some nice narrative sleight-of-hand, we watch Leamas reinvent his identity before he returns to East Germany, yet are not told what he is doing, so as far as we know he is indeed an unsympathetic selfdestructive character. Theres is no internal monolog or exposition to tell us different. If we cant trust our protagonist to be who he seems, why should we trust the supporting characters he works for?
The Looking Glass War
This is more of a satire, a bit like some of Graham Greene's stuff. There is a leftover espionage department from WWII, old guys wallowing in nostalgia, and the Circus would like to be rid of them, though that motive is only ever shown to us in hints. We see it all from the point of view of these nostalgic old guys, going back into action one more time, clueless as to why their phony passports are getting cancelled or why they are being given heavy out of date radio equipment.
The bit where their agent finally crosses the border is very scary, a sudden change of tone where the old guys fantasy world suddenly becomes real for one sucker, while they continue to pat themselves on the back on the safe side of the border.
Smiley and Control are only seen in brief glimpses in both books. Although Smiley was a normal protagonist in Call for the Dead, in these next few books he is a largely unseen assistant puppetmaster. He is the nice one, he seems to actually care for these people being manipulated. Control is his boss, and he's the real cynic, coldly making the choices that doom countrymen who trust him, so as to succeed in a larger game which is not part of the story being told.
This conceit of the "packets" posthumously discovered by the "editor" works in prose, it's a variation of old narrative structure called the "epistolary novel"
such a narrative device would look stuffy onscreen, but your idea of a blowhard telling tall tales in his Gentlemens Club would be much more visual. The actor playing Flashman would have to be a real charmer anyway, annoying yet compelling nonetheless, everybody in the club (and watching along at home) would want to hear his neverending sagas of selfglorification despite not particularly liking him.
by Sapper (H. C. McNeile), 1920
It's taken me most of a lifetime to find a copy of this book!
Amis mentions Bulldog Drummond as an influence on Fleming in his Dossier, and I remember he was not complimetary. Most latterday commentators focus on the xenophobia, without telling us anything else about the story.
This book should sit on the spy-lit fan's shelf alongside John Buchan's Richard Hannay novels, and Leslie Charteris' The Saint. But whereas the 39 Steps gets filed under literature, and random volumes of The Saint are not hard to find, I've never actually come across a Bulldog Drummond before. My bookshop had it filed under D, as if Drummond was the author and "Sapper" the title.
This is fun stuff, an easy entertaining read. Fighting spies is good sport, and everybody has a good laugh as the evil foreigners meet their fate at the hands of the very unofficial Drummond.
The story: Drummond is a young vet of WWI, now sitting round London bored, so he places an ad in the paper looking for adventure, and quickly becomes entangled in a scheme to provoke a Communist Revolution in Britain, to the advantage of the plots' sponsors: Industrial interests in Germany and the United States (i.e Communism is itself a Capitalists' conspiracy).
His rapport with ladyfriend Phyllis Benton is very similar to Simon Templar's with Patricia Holm. Benton calls Drummond "boy" as they laugh about their fun plans to fight dangerous spies, just as Holm addresses Templar. But Drummond and Benton came first.
His rapport with the evil mastermind Carl Peterson is exactly like that episode of Seinfeld where Kramer tried to match wits with Elaine's psychiatrist the Svenjolly. Or perhaps more familiarly, James Bond and Dr No debating fine wines and the philosophy of power over a nice dinner. Then following the oh so polite chit-chat he breaks a few bones.
Apparantly there were nine sequels, then another writer continued the series after Sapper's death.
I'm going to review a book that hasn't been translated into English or any other language as far as I know. But it will be translated to several languages for sure and hopefully English too. I guess the title will be "When the land darkens", but who knows? The author has published one viking-themed novel earlier (With really good reviews) and one novel for children. I worked at the same office as the author for two years and we are friends. He likes to to write while hiking or skiing, since nature gives him solitude and inspiration.
From the publisher:
The year is 1293. Arnar Vilhjálmsson, a young boy, is rowing out on his first walrus hunt. After the hunt, a girl stands before him. She looks down at the beast he has slain, her eyes full of defiance, and her words full of scorn. Then she turns and runs away from him, without looking back. Her name is Eir.
In the Norsemen’s Western Settlement, on Greenland, a sense of unease has been creeping in. The walrus that gave the settlers their wealth have been retreating. The ships that used to sail from Norway and Iceland to trade there have become few and far between. The Greenlanders’ own vessels are rotting. The people are wondering: is this the end?
Arnar dreams of one day building his own ship and sailing towards the lands further west, seeking timber, iron and hope for the future. Eir is part of that dream. In this quest for a future, Arnar is even willing to defy his own chieftain, gods, and the laws of men.
"Når landet mørknar" takes place in Greenland at the end of the thirtheenth century in the Norse colony there. The culture is in decline and during the next two hundred years the Norse colony mysteriously vanishes completely. At the time of the novel some of the people living in the farms in the inland valleys still worshiped Odin and Thor, but the majority are Christian. The protagonist is the young farmer Arnar who is in love with the Christian girl Eir in a sort of Romeo and Juliet situation. The novel is writen from several points of view, including that of animals. When was the last time you read a chapter written from the POW of a walrus? It works surprisingly well and the book is written in a style that both lyrical and brutal. I hope they find first-rate translators. Sidenote: There are two written forms of Norwegian: Bokmål is used by the majority and is influenced by Danish and the dialects urban areas, especially around Oslo. Nynorsk is influenced by the many dialects and old Norse. Tore uses a conservative version of Nynorsk. Other than Icelandic this is the closest you can get to Old Norse today.
The reviews are among the best for any novel this year and it's one out of four nominees for the major litterary award in Norway. If you like good litterature and have an interest in vikings, keep an eye out for the name Tore Kvæven in the bookstores.
The trillogy about Dominika Egorova of the Russian SVR and Nate Nash from the CIA. I won't say much more about them and the relationship between them because some might not have read the first book in the trillogy. What I can say is that Dominika is a graduate of the SVR Sparrow School where agents learn to manipulate people emotionally and sexually. She is born with the ability to see people's emotions in colours and in The Palace of Trason she can also see and hear the "ghosts" of people close to her who dies. Strangely, I think it this works. In every Chapter some meal is mentioned and the recipe is at the end of the chapter. It's a nice feature, but sometimes it gets too convoluted and unnatural.
The author is a former CIA agent and the plot and spycraft is very impressive. Unlike John le Carre, another ex- agent who uses his experience in his novels, there is hardly any grey areas here. Doninika and Nash are good and heroic and their adversaries are plain evil. Even Fleming was less simplistic at times. Vladimir Putin was in the first book too, but then we barely saw him and only in situations one could reasonably assume how he would act. Now he is more involved in the plot and we meet him in private situations and the author tries to get inside his head. You may like or dislike this side of the book, but I think most will agree it's problematic. But the writing is good, the plot is convincing and exiting, the characters are interesting and The Palace of Trason is a very noteworthy book in the spy genere.
John le Carre
The first one without Smiley or the Circus lurking in the background.
An investigation into a defector from the British embassy in Bonn. The defector is never actually seen, but we are told his story from the point of view of many different acquaintances who work in the embassy, Rashomon style. The various character's stories amount to a satire of Embassy life, in which polite diplomacy outweighs right and wrong, and the reality of a defector is an embarrassment that disrupts the pleasantries of the dinner party circuit.
The book was published 1968, against the backdrop of real world student protests and Britain's attempts to enter the Common Market (which alone makes it a bit odd to read in these Brexit-y times). Some reviews suggest it is meant to take place in the then-near future, as a populist political party rising in Germany deliberately aggravates grievances against Britain and may portend a return to fascism.
As with a couple of his other novels, the last chapter suddenly turns into something much more horrific before suddenly coming to an end. I like the way le Carre tells a small scale story in the foreground of his books, while something much more sinister is going on in the background, unappreciated by the protagonists until the last page.
James Bond- Licence To Kill
I’ll be buying it at some point...hope it’s an improvement on his last...
Read the blurb for it the other day...sounded promising....
by Stan Lee Jack Kirby and others
a nice big fat trade paperback compiling all the earliest Thor and Tales of Asgard stories from Journey Into Mystery 83 (Aug 1962) through 109 (Oct 1964)
the answer to the age-old question "when does Thor get good?" lies within!
the Mighty Thor was originally created by Lee and Kirby in the same concentrated burst of activity following Fantastic Four 1 that also quickly gave us SpiderMan, the Hulk, Iron Man, the X-Men and all those other characters the whole world now knows so well.
I suspect the character was mostly Kirby's idea, as he had featured characters named Thor as oneshot villains in various comics over the decades, and in the early 1940s drawn a strip called Mercury or Hurricane, featuring a pantheon of Greek gods.
In his earliest appearances Thor is basically the old Captain Marvel/Billy Batson/Shazam concept, with lame Doctor Don Blake trading places with the God of Thunder each time he strikes his walking stick, yet sharing a conciousness. These earliest stories follow a very generic structure, of fighting costumed bank robbers and worrying Nurse Jane Foster will find out his secret identity.
Eventually Thor would become all-Asgard all the time, and the vehicle for Kirby to express his wildest visual and conceptual imagination, but it took a couple of years to get there.
Kirby only drew the earliest appearances here, including the debut of Loki in the third story, then left to concentrate on other responsibilities. Most of the early stories are drawn by Al Hartley (better known for romance comics), Joe Sinnott (who would ink Kirby's pencils in the best Fantastic Four stories), and Iron Man's Don Heck. None of them have Kirby's imagination and I doubt they co-plotted the story concepts way Kirby would do. Worse, the stories themselves are scripted not by Stan, but by his brother Larry Lieber. So in the first two years, it was second tier talent creating Thor, which is why it is so generic and not the Thor we know.
In Journey into Mystery 97 (oct 1963) Lee and Kirby intoroduce the backup feature Tales of Asgard, which is where things start getting interesting. The backup is always five pages, four huge panels to a page, to showcase Kirby's wild artwork, telling actual episodes of Norse mythology, explorations of neighbouring realms, fleshing out the evergrowing cast of Asgardians and revealing Thor and Loki's backstories.
The main stories remain generic imitation Superman plots for a few more issues, til Journey into Mystery 101 (feb 1964), where Lee and Kirby return for good. Instantly the earthbased presentday adventures of Thor become weird and unpredictable, incorporating the new concepts from the backup series, and taking on more epic tone.
(Probably by no coincidence, Lee and Kirby's return is the same month as the first issue of the Avengers, which of course also featured Thor.)
This volume ends just a few issues after that point, just as it is finally starting to get good. I know the Earth-based stories and boring old Jane Foster disappear entirely two years later, in Thor 136 (jan 1967), so it is a gradual evolution in storytelling. It just kept getting more and more cosmic after that until Kirby finally left the title, and Marvel, after Thor 179 (aug 1970).
check out Mike's Newsstand, one of my favourite websites, where you can query the database to see the cover of every comic published any month since 1933, or every issue of a series. Here are all the covers of every issue of Journey into Mystery/Thor.
John leCarre
the first of two sequels to Tinker Tailor ..., collectively known as the Karla Trilogy
le Carre must have gotten especially good reviews for Tinker Tailor, because he's really over-writing here. The first hundred pages introduce various mostly irrelevant characters very slowly, all from highly unreliable second or third hand points of view ... the first chapter even ends with our narrator announcing he has introduced his Greek chorus (a gang of hard-drinking journalists), and a hundred pages in a literary agent character is debating the merits of Greene, Maughm, and Conrad (all literary novelists who happened to write spy stories) before slamming the Hemingway approach to telling a story.
and except for two significant paragraphs, whenever we see Smiley it is through the eyes of Peter Guillam, who makes the Nigel Bruce version of Watson look perceptive.
That all said, this book is massive, and three hundred pages in, when the narrative finally settles on the title character's trek through Hong Kong and South East Asia, le Carre drops the tricky PoV stuff and we get two hundred pages of exotic globetrotting action adventure and excitement unlike we've ever seen from leCarre before. Didn't actually know he had it in him!
good stuff, those last two hundred pages, and it leads to another cryptic ambiguous ending where whatever was really going on has only been hinted at, while the little people lick their wounds in confusion.
Very fair review, although I liked the whole journey a bit more than you did. Westerby is the classic Le Carre sad sack -- jaded, resentful, but with just enough left in him to care. I'll be interested in your review of Smiley's People, assuming you intend to read it (or may have already done so).
It still comes off as a self aggrandizing story told by some toothless yob in a track suit, you know the type "... then dat guy pulled a knoif, but I couldnna let 'im scare me 'cause then I woulda been inna piss..."
Some of it I find credible, a lot of it plausible, but all the parts about "him" being the "best there ever was" and UK intel services "being the best out there" as well as his disparaging remarks about UK law enforcement.... that all reads a little bit too "Tom Clancy-ish" all that was left out was a MSgt "who could teach manners to the meanest NFL linebackers out there".... 8-)
-Mr Arlington Beech
A book about the serial killer Fritz Honka -{
https://www.instagram.com/wearitlikebond/
I've read most of his early books over the last little while, and gotten to appreciate the tricks he uses to tell his story in a roundabout way. And that approach probably is more appropriate to a spy story, where so little us actually known by the people who're paid to know whats what.
But I did notice in this one he was really working that roundabout storytelling, and when I got to those two passages when he seemed to be congratulating himself for his own technique I did say out loud "oh get on with it!"
anyway our Fleming books average two hundred pages, so since leCarre does give us two hundred pages of straightforward adventure in SouthEast Asia at the end, the rest is bonus.
I do have Smiley's People lined up next, in fact everything up to A Perfect Spy is currently sitting on my bookshelf and I will probably keep going after that.
Finally made it to the end of the Flashman adventures! sad day. I'd been pacing myself because they were so good and wanted to keep something to look forwards to, but that's it I've now read all twelve.
Has anybody ever compiled a list of Flashman's Unseen Missions? He mentions dozens in passing every book. I think in the earliest books, he would mention events that Fraser would later return to as the subject of future books, and in the later books he is mostly referring to adventures we've already seen. But there's still completely untold tales he references even in the last books.
And there's a few long unexplained gaps in his biography. In this one, in one of the footnotes Fraser even "hypothesises" Flashman's movements during the long gap following the most recent (internally chronological) adventure. I don't think Fraser would have felt the need to do this in his earlier novels, he'd just leave that to be explored later. So I suspect he knew he'd be writing no more and would never have another chance to fill in the gaps?
I do have a copy of the Pyrates in my to-read pile. I was attracted by the sexy cover. So there's that to look forward to.
A bookstore near me has Fraser's Hollywood History of the World: from One Million BC to Apocalypse Now. Has anybody read this? The idea of history as mis-told by pop culture appeals to me, as that's what future generations will be trusting to get their information from.
This book is told almost entirely through the eyes of George Smiley!
I guess its title derives from it being basically a series of interrogations, as Smiley inches his way towards his archenemy Karla.
The first half of the book takes the form of a murder mystery, much like when Smiley was first introduced in Call for the Dead.
The trickiest bit of narrative technique comes in the middle, just as Smiley figures out whats going on. Sort of a set of nested flashbacks, as one character remembers another who in turn once described a memory of someone else who might actually have met Karla and even hinted that Karla may have a secret of his own.
Then Smiley himself goes on a field mission, to the redlight district of Hamburg, and finally to Geneva. I felt rather scared for our pudgy hero in some of these scenes.
It all ends surprisingly conclusively for a le Carre novel, at least at first glance.
but...
2) its impossible to believe an evil genius like Karla could be persuaded to surrender. He must be up to something, Smiley must be being played even as his colleagues congratulate him on his success. This implication is left to our imaginations, but becomes hard to deny the more I dwell on plot points and the ending.
Smiley's People doesn't really reference the Honourable Schoolboy much, mostly building directly from events in Tinker Tailor.... But it does clarify the ending of ...Schoolboy, turns out Guillame was right to be paranoid.
Thinking more about the title:
Smiley doesn't seem to do normal healthy relationships with fellow humans, as repeatedly evidenced by his disfunctional marriage. But this interrogating he does, politely yet relentlessly ripping the truth out of the various characters he meets, that seems to be how he relates to people. He does that with several of his former professional colleagues in this book, people that a normal human would consider friends, and they comment on it.
It's part of why the long painful interrogation of Connie Sachs is so central and rather disturbing.
also: imagine if Bond had to abandon his Aston mid-adventure because gypsy urchins had vandalised it. I think le Carre was having a laugh at his hero in that scene.
Archie as the Man from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E.
Archie Andrews that is!
a recent paperback from Archie Comics, compiling a run of stories from the mid60s, in which Archie and his gang are secret agents!
Originally published in Life with Archie 45 through 63 (Jan 66-July 67), around the same time as the better known Archie-as-superhero Pureheart the Powerful stories.
R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E. stands for Really Impressive Vast Enterprise for Routing Dangerous Adversaries, Louts, Etc, but the actual organisation they work for is called P.O.P. (Protect our Planet), named after Pop Tate, whose soda shop is their secret headquarters.
Their opposing organizaion is C.R.U.S.H., whose acronym is never explained. And the P.O.P.agents names are correctly spelled A.R.C.H.I.E., J.U.G.H.E.A.D., etc, and these acronyms are not explained either.
In the first missions, V.E.R.O.N.I.C.A. and R.E.G.G.I.E. are members of C.R.U.S.H., but inexplicably about four missions in they too become part of P.O.P. In agent V.E.R.O.N.I.C.A.'s case, she is sporting a mod bob hairstyle and dressing in sleek Diana Rigg style costumes, which the more modest girl-next-door agent B.E.T.T.Y. tends not to do. Also, many of the plots revolve around Mr Lodge's factory, which now produces secret weapons technology such as invisible bombs.
But it is Agent B.E.T.T.Y. who gets her own spinoff series the Girl from R.I.V.E.R.D.A.L.E.
The villains are all costumed supervillain types, with gimmicky superpowers, the same as Pureheart the Powerful would be fighting, but in this context mostly motivated to steal top secret technology from Mr Lodge's factory.
And, A.R.C.H.I.E.'s jalopy is now tricked out with outrageous gadgets our Q department never thought of.
Maybe not quite so good as Nick Fury Agent of SHIELD, or Wally Wood's THUNDER Agents, but easier to read than le Carre.
Len Deighton
Bios tell me Dieghton was a graphic artist before becoming an author. Which makes sense, as he gives us a series of striking visual images but leaves it up to us readers to interpret their meaning and assemble them into a narrative.
The first half especially he gives us our Plot in random isolated fragments.
The conventional spythriller plot fragments come in between much more interesting dialogs, as our nameless protagonist makes smart-ass remarks to his superiors and complains constantly about expenses owing and backpay even as he is transferred and promoted to much better job. Mostly its all about class resentments, as everybody else is posh and born to power and our nameless protagonist never misses an opportunity to remind them.
Partway through there's a change of scene to a Pacific atoll where there's a neutron bomb test scheduled, and the episodic storytelling is replaced by something resembling a conventional plot. And something bad does happen, but I'm not sure its anything to actually do with the bomb or just an excuse to entrap our nameless protagonist. The plot flows more continuously from this point, but it's still a sequence of confusing images that may or may not add up.
Novel ends with two chapters of exposition, where our nameless protagonist explains to his sexy assistant all the fine details of the plot that were only ever hinted at in glimpses the first time round. Sounds like there was an exciting spy story going on in between all the smart-ass exchanges about backpay! (ironic the sexy assistant has to ask what the plot was all about, since during the Pacific atoll scenes she demonstrated she was a smarter more competent spy than her boss.)
Lots of food snobbery here, and coffee snobbery decades before that was fashionable. And everybody reads fine literature. Our nameless protagonist may give attitude to all the toffs he has to work for, but he seems desperate to prove he's better than he is with all his ostentatious fine tastes.
But I gather Deighton also writes cookbooks when he's not writing spynovels, so thatd explain the big lobster and champagne finale too.
Len Deighton
More coherent than the first book, at least this time everything we are told is relevant to the espionage plot. Deighton still conceals much important information, but what he reveals and what he hides seems more deliberate this time, and there are at least three incorrect explanations as to why everybody is so interested in the sunken submarine until all is revealed in the end.
Deighton's descriptions of the Algarve are detailed and tactile, he really has a sense of place. The first book had long passages of very specific London geography, and I gather his descriptions of Berlin in later books are just as good.
Did Saltzman not adapt this one maybe because all the diving content was too similar to Thunderball?
I'm not reading this book at the moment, but "Snøsøsteren" ("The snow sister") by Maja Lunde was a huge success when it was published last year. I know it's published in 26 languages and Hollywood has bought the rights and are devoloping the film. It's a novel for children and it has 24 chapters, making it perfect as a litterary Christmas calendar. It's about ten year old Julian who looks forward to Christmas, but he also thinks about his older sister who he recently lost. To quote a reviewer: "The snow sister" is a beautiful book, full of moods, emotions and wisdom.
Already last year the novel was a big success internationally and it's probably translated to your language too by now. Maja Lunde has already had big international succuess with a novel for adults: "The history of bees"
The illustrations in "The snow sister" are incredibly beautiful too!