On Richard Adams’s Traveller

Wednesday was the 160th anniversary of Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. Yesterday was the anniversary of Lee’s General Order No. 9, his farewell to his army. To commemorate these events, one of the Civil War history Instagram accounts that I follow shared Soldier’s Tribute, a painting of Lee’s farewell to his troops by the incomparable Don Troiani. 

The painting shows Lee, mounted, surrounded by his exhausted men who reach out to him, as they so often did, for succor. Lee turns to his right to shake the hands of his soldiers; in his left he loosely holds Traveller’s reins. If Lee is still, already statuesque, Traveller, his head pulled slightly back, shows subtle movement, either slowly edging through the gathering crowd or coming finally to rest in the face of it. If Lee is calm and resigned, Traveller’s eyes show, if not anxiety, puzzlement.

Seeing Traveller in that painting, especially with the subtle motion and emotion with which Troiani always packs his work, brought Richard Adams’s novel Traveller to mind again. It’s an unusual book, even for the author of Watership Down, and in it Adams does something remarkable.

The novel is narrated by Traveller, in the first person, in thick phonetically-rendered dialect. It can be hard to understand at first, and the danger of such narration is that it will come across as silly. But you get used to it, and the “accent” of Traveller’s speech is never used to mock him. Traveller has a distinctive voice, and Adams, an Englishman, captures the tone and style of Southern yarn-spinning with remarkable accuracy.

That’s one area in which such a book could have misstopped but didn’t. There’s also a running gag of sorts in that Traveller, a simple animal unquestioningly loyal to his master, always interprets every event in the most optimistic way possible. At first it’s ha-ha funny and we chuckle in amused sympathy, but gradually, as the novel nears its end, this use of irony creates a profound sense of pathos. Traveller ends the novel thinking he and Lee won, that Lee is leaving Appomattox not downcast and defeated but relieved at having forced “the blue men” into submission, and instead of a punchline it’s powerfully moving.

I don't know of any other novel quite like it. Dramatic irony is so often used for reasons other than pity.

It also achieves its most powerful effects if you know the Civil War and the Eastern Theatre and its colorful cast of characters—well-known generals like Jackson, Longstreet, Hill (AP and DH), and Stuart as well as more obscure figures like Prussian cavalryman Heros von Borcke—and even their horses well. Jackson’s horse Little Sorrel, in particular, a pensive horse full of dark forebodings, is an especially powerful presence. I have to wonder what someone ignorant of all that would make of it. The animal characters are so well-drawn and memorable and their skewed understandings of the human world so well conveyed that I imagine even someone with only passing knowledge of the Civil War would get it, but I can’t be sure.

Regardless, Traveller is criminally underappreciated. Its concept sounds like a cute gimmick and I’m sure a lot of people have written it off as kitsch or a mere curiosity as a result. But as I’ve written here before, it’s artfully done, a marvelous, inventive angle on a familiar story. And the goal of retelling a familiar story, as I often tell me students when approaching a subject they might actually already know about, should be to make it strange again. Check it out.

You can view Soldier’s Tribute with some extensive explanatory notes at Don Troiani’s Facebook page here. The dust jacket art of my first-edition hardback of Traveller is Summer, one of four memorial murals by Charles Hoffbauer at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond. And if you’re ever in Lexington, VA, visit Traveller’s grave right outside the crypt of Lee Chapel, where his master is entombed.

The Levanter

Among his many skills, Eric Ambler excelled at two of the basic varieties of thriller: the breakneck and the slow burn. In one, the pace picks up quickly and puts the characters through an unrelenting series of escalating obstacles. In the other, a single obstacle may steadily build in threat and intensity until a final catastrophe. Both rely on a mastery of pacing. Ambler had it, and The Levanter offers a good example of the latter, the slow burn.

A later work in Ambler’s long career, The Levanter takes place over about two months in 1970. Three different characters narrate portions of the story: Lewis Prescott, an American reporter who has stumbled into the events after the fact; Teresa Malandra, the secretary and mistress of an English industrialist; and Michael Howell, the industrialist himself, third-generation heir of Agence Howell, a manufacturing and shipping firm with connections all over the Mediterranean and Middle East.

When the story begins, Howell has successfully navigated several of the perils of decolonization in Syria, working with the emerging socialist government to avoid losing his family’s business to various nationalization schemes. This involves working closely with corrupt government officials, including Syrian military intelligence and a government go-between with connections to Second-World powers: Maoist China, East Germany, the Soviet Union.

Busy enough keeping the family business afloat and its reputation untarnished following a series of failed production schemes imposed by the government, Howell is surprised to discover, thanks to Teresa, large unexplained orders of chemicals buried in the company accounts. With government pressure and hostility building, he decides to investigate the moment he finds out. This means a late night trip with Teresa to one of the plants dedicated to producing consumer batteries.

Howell finds the factory, which is supposed to be closed, open, brightly lit, and with teams of men working on producing fulminate of mercury—explosives. Armed men accost him and Teresa, and when the night watchman arrives he reveals himself as Salah Ghaled, the notorious leader of a hardline Palestinian terrorist organization too extreme even for Arafat and the PLO.

Ghaled and his men need Howell alive. His men are making detonators for bombs and trying to get incomplete Soviet rockets into a usable condition. Howell will be useful for them. Ghaled forces him and Teresa to swear their allegiance to his organization and to sign confessions of complicity in the murder of a former member—an internal hit Ghaled publicly blames on the Israelis. He then has Howell order the manufacture of missing parts and arrange shipping aboard a company cargo ship. Thrust deeper into Ghaled’s plot, little by little Howell pieces together what Ghaled is planning.

On Herzl Day, an upcoming Israeli national holiday, Ghaled aims to detonate dozens of remotely armed bombs hidden in Tel Aviv. Hence the detonators. He plans to coordinate the bombing with his rockets, launched from offshore and aimed at the coast, a strip of popular beach lined with hotels, restaurants, and homes. The Agence Howell ship will carry him on to Egypt the same day, where he will hold a press conference claiming responsibility and making the usual Palestinian talking points. Howell is horrified.

He also realizes that, since not only Ghaled but other key members of his organization all got jobs at Agence Howell through government influence, his government contacts are in on the plot. He cannot turn to the authorities. In desperation he uses a business trip to inform Israeli intelligence, but his contact is skeptical and offers little help unless Howell can provide more information than he has. If Ghaled is to be stopped, it may be up to Howell himself.

The other Ambler slow-burn thriller that The Levanter resembles most is Cause for Alarm, in which an English engineer working in Mussolini’s Italy just before the outbreak of World War II slowly uncovers sinister goings-on within the tidy order of his factory. In both novels, Ambler puts a lot of effort into making the industrial and commercial setting feel believable well before introducing espionage and terrorism. There’s a lot of looking through ledgers and blueprints, making sure products are up to spec, and arranging shipping and payments. This would be dull in any other writer’s hands. Ambler, through a careful, steady drip of foreshadowing and underestimated threats, instead uses such workaday details to build suspense.

Where The Levanter bests Cause for Alarm, though, is in its use of setting. Ambler exceled at evoking the real-life cosmopolitan, polyglot worlds of international crossroads, from the Aegean and the Balkans in The Mask of Dimitrios to postwar Malaysia and Indonesia in Passage of Arms. The Levanter, with ties to both the Cold War and the unending multidirectional conflicts of the Middle East, is no exception. Ghaled, one of Ambler’s most vivid and believable villains, is a European-educated Palestinian Islamist who is as resentful toward the PLO, the Baathists, and the Jordanian monarchy as he is hostile toward Israel. His education and Marxist ideology are European and his weapons Russian, Chinese, and East German. The Agence Howell has dealings all over the Eastern Mediterranean and its ships and factories have multiethnic crews and captains. Teresa is Italian and Howell himself, despite his seemingly English name and business sense, is mostly Armenian and Cypriot. He and Ghaled are, in dramatically different senses, both men without a country, the one a businessman and the other a zealot.

In addition to a realistic and authentically complicated setting, The Levanter is also cleverly written. I mentioned above that it is narrated by Howell, Teresa, and Prescott, an American reporter who otherwise plays no role in the events of the story. The muddle of Howell’s predicament, the leverage Ghaled and the Syrian government use against him, and the outcome of the story lead to media controversy, a controversy fully exploited by Palestinian activists. The novel is Howell’s attempt, with Prescott’s encouragement, to set the record straight. His testy, finger-wagging narration proves both fun to read and disturbing—how would I, or any of us, were we forced into a bind like this, ever hope to exonerate ourselves?

The Levanter is not Ambler’s best or most exciting thriller, but it is one of his most involving and, above all, one of the most plausible. The overwhelming feeling it imparts throughout is that if something like this were to happen, this is exactly how it would happen. Its emphasis is not on action and gadgetry, though both play a role, but on cunning, desperation, bloodlust, and the weakness of human nature. Though set in 1970, the world it takes place in and the characters who people it still feel recognizable and all too real.

Len Deighton on writing to entertain

Apropos of my thoughts on the false divide between literary and genre fiction last week, here’s a great 1977 interview with Len Deighton that I happened across over the weekend. This interview takes place after the success of The IPCRESS File and its sequels as well as Bomber and Fighter but before the Bernie Samson novels I’ve recently mentioned here.

Asked whether or not his heroes are not less concerned with thoughts than with actions, Deighton replies:

Well, I think that’s true, and I think that people who write the sort of books I write are essentially in the entertainment business, and they will be judged according to how successful they are at entertaining the reader, and anything else that they want to do has to be done in a way that is subordinate to the main task of entertaining the reader. And I think that the sort of books I write are essentially action books, that people move, that they do think but that they don’t spend too many pages in thinking if you sell many and there has to be pace with it.

The literary-genre divide is nothing new, of course, as interviewer Melvyn Bragg’s followup question makes clear: “When you say ‘I’m in the entertainment business,’ you’re separating yourself from people you’d call ‘novelists,’ is that…?” Deighton:

Well, depends how you use the word novel. I mean, I think novelists at one time were people who wrote the sort of books that Victorian housemaids took to bed at night and read. Well, I’d be very happy to be identified as a novelist in that context. But I’m afraid that the way that the word is used nowadays, to mean profound and philosophical, well now I wouldn’t want to frighten anyone away from a good read by attaching a label like that to anything that I do.

Deighton gently but firmly disputes not the status of his own books but the artificiality and pretention built up around what it means to be a “novelist.” His happiness to align with the books that entertained even the lowly (Deighton’s parents both worked in service), the sort defended by Chesterton in “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” is of a piece with his insistence that messaging, argument, and “anything else” a writer might “want to do” with a book must come after entertaining the reader.

Proper priorities, I think.

I’m struck in this interview by Deighton’s confidence in sticking up for himself as an entertainer. Perhaps it’s born of his background. The posh and well-connected Ian Fleming, by comparison, right from the publication of his first Bond novel adopted a defensive crouch about his writing. This posture comes through in his 1963 essay “How to Write a Thriller.” A sample:

I am not “involved.” My books are not “engaged.” I have no message for suffering humanity and, though I was bullied at school and lost my virginity like so many of us used to do in the old days, I have never been tempted to foist these and other harrowing personal experiences on the public. My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds.

Despite including some good advice, Fleming severely undersells himself throughout this essay. But read on for a story Fleming tells about a conversation with a young relative writing self-consciously literary novels, and note the way in which Fleming defines himself as “a writer” rather than “an author,” a difference only of connotation, and asserts that his only goal is “to get the reader to turn over the page.”

Both Fleming and Deighton aim to avoid pretention; both simply want to tell stories. Both ended up doing much more. Again—proper priorities.

Deighton, who is still with us at age 96, by the way, is always great in the old interviews I’ve been able to turn up on YouTube. (Here’s another one from 1983 that’s quite good albeit not as in-depth.) His interview style—open, straightforward, down-to-earth, making no fuss and creating no Oz-the-Great-and-Powerful mystery around his trade—reminds me of Elmore Leonard. Both are always refreshing to listen to. Check out the interview quoted above and give one of Deighton’s books a try if you haven’t yet.

A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice

I’m excited to have a review of Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s three historical horror novels—A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice—published online at Catholic World Report this weekend. These books concern Fr Thomas Edmund Gilroy, OP, a Dominican vampire hunter, and the various scrapes he gets into with vampires, werewolves, and, most recently, leprechauns—and worse. A sample from my review:

Those who enjoy Gothic atmosphere—gaslit streets, full moons, windswept moorlands, big dark houses, old families with terrible secrets—will find something to love in all three novels. Nicholson creates and maintains palpably tense and moody settings, and the mysteries at the heart of each story unfold with maximum dread and suspense. That the stories take place in painstakingly realized historical periods provides yet another pleasure.

But the stories prove especially powerful because of the well-drawn, lifelike, and likable characters with which Nicholson has peopled them. Father Thomas Edmund, the only character to recur in all three books, is the best example, but each has a strong cast, all of whom have their own goals and worldviews, all of which clash and compete. This is compelling in all three novels, not only because pitting rival philosophies against each other works so well in horror fiction but because Nicholson has the rare gift of being able to make goodness attractive.

I’ve mentioned Eleanor’s novels here on the blog several times before, including here and here, and A Bloody Habit was my favorite fictional read of the year in 2019. They’re a lot of fun and counterbalance their unromanticized depiction of sin and evil with an appealing and theologically sound vision of the good. Give my review a read and check these fine novels books out!

Literary vs genre fiction, craft vs content

Item: This week at The Spectator, novelist Sean Thomas bids “Good riddance to literary fiction,” arguing that “it was a silly, self-defeating genre in the first place, putting posh books in a posh ghetto, walling itself off from everyday readers.” Readers want stories, not beautiful but aimless style.

Item: This week 372 Pages We’ll Never Get Back announced their next read, Colleen Hoover’s BookTok bestseller Ugly Love. In discussing their choice, Mike and Conor brought up this passage from a Texas Monthly article on Hoover’s success and recent writer’s block:

Hoover is often approached by readers who tell her that her books are the first they’ve finished in years, but her success has puzzled some fellow authors. “A lot of writers will read my books, and they’re like, ‘Why is this so popular?’ ” she says. “I don’t want to use big words. I don’t want to use flowery language. I hate description. Hate it. I’m a very ADD reader. I have ADD in my real life. And if I have to read more than two paragraphs without dialogue, I will skip it.”

That Spectator column celebrating the near-irrelevance of literary novels is odd and frustrating, not only because the magnificent work of popular art that awakened Thomas to the pointlessness of literary fiction was, ludicrously, The Da Vinci Code, but because the image he sets up of literary fiction is a straw man. Gorgeously written, navel-gazing novels on Important Themes in which nothing actually happens? This describes a recognizable prententious award-bait type but is not characteristic of all literary fiction. Certainly not the kind that has lasted.

But I agree entirely with Thomas at one point: stories are what matter. This is why, to me, the division of fiction into literary and genre fiction has always felt uncomfortable if not downright false. Good fiction is good fiction, as far as I’m concerned, and so my interest has steadily drifted toward care and craftsmanship and a compelling story wherever you may find it.

So I’d rather read a good literary novel than The Da Vinci Code, not because the latter is low-brow or too popular, but because it’s abominably written. And by the same token, I’d rather read a good crime or sci-fi novel than self-absorbed high-brow bilge—anything by the Bloomsbury group, for example, the prototype of what Thomas is condemning in his Spectator piece. What traditionally separates Evelyn Waugh from John Wyndham or Graham Greene from Ian Fleming is reputation, which is fickle and easy to manipulate. What these all have in common is that they’re excellent writers, which is all that should matter.

The real dividing line in modern fiction runs between stories and content, between craft and indiscriminate consumption, between good stories told well, with the mastery of all available creative tools, and mere utilitarian delivery systems for specific kinds of (increasingly pornographic) audience-demanded stimulation. As Mike, baffled, spoofed Hoover’s explanation of her approach, “You know, this whole writing thing—I’m not a fan of the prose, or…”

If the words don’t matter, you’re not writing.

My guess is that rumors of the death of literary fiction, like Mark Twain’s, will turn out to be greatly exaggerated. What will die will be pretension—MFA-in-crowd stories of the kind mocked by Thomas in his column. What will survive—what must survive—are good stories told with care in any genre. Only that will outlast fads and keep imaginations rather than appetites alive.

A dialogue tag oddity

I’ve mentioned before that reading out loud is part of the bedtime routine for me and my wife. We’ve enjoyed this as long as we’ve been married, and have read dozens of books by now. Very few of the books we’ve chosen have been stinkers, but reading aloud does have a way of spotlighting authorial quirks or tics even in the good ones. One area where tics most frequently appear is in dialogue tags.

I’ve written here about dialogue tags a few times in the last few months (see here, for example). Again, I believe strongly in Elmore Leonard’s rule of never using a verb other than said for dialogue, though I—following Leonard himself—allow for a lot of flexibility. I’ve read two novels recently, Hill 112, by Adrian Goldsworthy and The Anubis Gates, by Tim Powers, that approach ascribing dialogue in plenty of other ways without calling attention to themselves.

That said, reading aloud before bedtime has only entrenched my opinion that a simple “he said” or “she said” is best.

This has been on my mind because of our recent bedtime reading: Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain. Alexander is a good and imaginative writer and these books have been favorites for a long time, but in reading them aloud I grew increasingly exasperated with a pattern in his dialogue. See if you can spot it:

As he made to leave the chamber, however, Doli took him by the arm. “Gwystyl,” said the dwarf severely, “you have a skulking, sneaking look in your eyes. You might hoodwink my friends. But don’t forget you're also dealing with one of the Fair Folk. I have a feeling,” Doli added, tightening his grip, “you’re far too anxious to see us gone. I’m beginning to wonder, if I squeezed you a little, what more might come out.”

“It’s not that we're starving,” Eilonwy said. “Gurgi did remember to bring along the wallet of food. Yes, and that was a gift from Gwydion, too, so he had every right to take it. It’s certainly a magical wallet,” she went on; “it never seems to get empty. The food is really quite nourishing, I’m sure, and wonderful to have when you need it. But the truth of the matter is, it’s rather tasteless. That’s often the trouble with magical things. They’re never quite what you'd expect.”

“We have a lovely view of the fens from the hilltop,” Orwen put in with such enthusiasm that her necklace bounced and rattled. “You must come and enjoy it. Indeed, you’re perfectly welcome to stay as long as you want,” she added eagerly. “Now that little Dallben’s gone, and found himself a beard, too, the place isn’t half as cheery as it used to be. We wouldn’t change you into a toad-unless you insisted on it.”

“I don’t mean that,” Taran said. “What I believe,” he added thoughtfully, “is that Adaon understood these things anyway. Even with his clasp, there is much I do not understand. All I know is that I feel differently somehow. I can see things I never saw before—or smell or taste them. I can't say exactly what it is. It’s strange, and awesome in a way. And very beautiful sometimes. There are things that I know…” Taran shook his head. “And I don't even know how I know them.”

“I think you see many things,” Taran replied quietly, “many things which you tell no one. It has long been in my mind,” he went on, with much hesitation, “and now more than ever-the dream you had, the last night in Caer Dallben. You saw Ellidyr and King Morgant; to me, you foretold I would grieve. But what did you dream of yourself?”

“Go on,” Gwystyl said, “put him on your shoulder. That’s what he wants. For the matter of that, you shall have him as a gift, with the thanks of the Fair Folk. For you have done us a service, too. We were uneasy with the Crochan knocking about here and there; one never knew what would happen. Yes, yes, pick him up,” Gwystyl added with a melancholy sigh. “He’s taken quite a fancy to you. It’s just as well. I'm simply not up to keeping crows any more, not up to it at all.”

Alexander’s characters are always going on and adding and continuing, which we already know because they are still talking. A few of these, especially the last two above, hint at stage directions Alexander is trying to give his characters—sighing, hesitating—but this would work better broken out of the flow of dialogue and directly described, which would also give the narration, the characters and action, and the reader’s imagination space to breath. Look at how much better the simple “Taran shook his head” works near the end of the fourth example.

But this habit of breaking into the dialogue for these secondary tags is not only awkward and unnecessary, it’s annoying to read aloud. If dialogue tags should be as close to invisible as possible, annoying the reader may be worse than a lot of clumsy, highly noticeable Tom Swifty adverbs.

I selected these at random from the second book, The Black Cauldron. We’re several chapters into the fourth book, Taran Wanderer, and these interrupting tags are much less common than in the first couple volumes of the series. Someone must have had a talk with Alexander sometime around The Castle of Llyr. The books, already very good—The Black Cauldron and The High King won Newbery honors and a Newbery Medal back when that meant something!—are better for it, and I, as my wife’s reader, am grateful.

Gabriel’s Moon

Gabriel Dax has two problems. The first is that, after a childhood incident in which his nightlight apparently burned down the family home, killing his mother, he cannot sleep. He drinks and medicates but these stopgap solutions bring their own problems. The second problem is that MI6 is after him. They want him to do a job. And then another.

Gabriel’s Moon, a new spy thriller from William Boyd, begins in 1960, as English travel writer Dax gets a scoop. He’s researching his next book and has stopped in the newly independent Congo, where he is approached by an old college friend with the offer of an exclusive interview with Patrice Lumumba, the controversial president. Gabriel accepts, has a pleasant chat with Lumumba, who insinuates that somebody—he names three men unknown to Dax—is out to kill him. Gabriel packs up his tape recorder and his notes, flies home, and thinks little of it.

Then, as Dax tries to get his interview into publishable form for a magazine, the magazine kills the project. Old news, his editor tells him. Lumumba has been overthrown and imprisoned. Dax should move on.

Not long after, Dax is approached by Faith Green. He recognizes her as a woman who had been reading one of his books on the flight back from Congo, and is flattered. Only gradually does he realize that she’s an intelligence agent. She’s trying to root out a “termite,” a Soviet agent in the service, and has something small for him to do. She has approached him because his older brother, a functionary in the Foreign Office, has used him as a private courier before, and this job will not be much different—fly to Spain, meet an aging modernist painter, purchase a sketch, return it to England.

Simple enough, but one job leads to another and Dax finds himself thrust deeper and deeper into espionage work. He makes new contacts—a veteran diplomat, the editor of a radical leftwing journal, an American who makes dark threats—suspects his house is being searched while he travels, and learns from Faith that Lumumba has been assassinated. This she lets slip long before the press makes it public. Who are these people? How do they know what they know? What are they using him for? And why does everyone want the tapes of his interview with Lumumba?

And on top of all this lie Dax’s personal struggles: his slumming relationship with a Cockney waitress, his psychoanalysis sessions, his personal investigation into the fire that claimed his mother, and his slowly dawning attraction to Faith, his handler.

This might sound like a whole lot of novel, all brooding interiority and intricate, cynical conniving, but the book comes in at just over 260 pages. As I mentioned several weeks ago, the review that brought this book to my attention compared it favorably to the best of John Buchan. That is certainly true in terms of pacing and structure. Gabriel’s Moon develops its many interwoven strands of story—Congo, MI6, Dax’s past, Dax’s personal life, Dax’s anxieties—with great subtlety and an effortlessly brisk pace. The story engages the reader from the opening pages and never lets up. It’s rich and complex but neither sluggish nor over-engineered. It’s masterfully done.

But the classic thriller author that Gabriel’s Moon reminded me of even more than Buchan was Eric Ambler. Both were masters of plotting and pacing, but where Buchan’s heroes were often principled adventurers who, if not seeking it out, embraced danger when a threat arose, Ambler’s were ordinary men of no great distinction who stumbled into danger. Already unwilling participants in whatever nefarious activities they uncover, they are often manipulated by more canny parties and bridle at being used, making foolish mistakes as a result. Gabriel Dax fits the Ambler mold perfectly.

The result, a Cold War novel with Buchanesque pacing and suspense and Ambleresque characters, evokes a feeling of paranoia better than any other spy thriller I’ve read. Alongside Dax, the reader feels Faith’s hooks sinking in deeper, dragging him further and faster into the world of espionage than he expected. Who is a friend? Who an enemy? Dax comes to suspect everything.

The only previous William Boyd novel I’ve read is Solo, a James Bond novel taking place in the late 1960s, after The Man With the Golden Gun. I don’t remember caring for it but I’m going to take another look at it soon, and I plan to check out Boyd’s other spy novels. In an interview about Gabriel’s Moon Boyd said that he intends to write two more Gabriel Dax books, rounding this story out into a trilogy. I look forward to those, and in the meantime can recommend Gabriel’s Moon highly to anyone who likes both a fast-paced globetrotting spy yarn and good character drama.

Notes on the history of spy thrillers

This week, courtesy of Micah Mattix’s Prufrock Substack, I discovered Alexander Larman’s review of Gabriel’s Moon, a new spy thriller from William Boyd. Larman has become one of my favorite critics and is always insightful, as in the first two paragraphs here, where he offers a very short précis of the history of the spy thriller and the pivotal place of John le Carré in that history:

Roughly up until the heyday of John le Carré, the British spy novel tended to follow an approved pattern. A well-educated but bored man, somewhere between youth and middle age, would find himself caught up in an international conspiracy that would involve some, or all, of the following: duplicitous intelligence officers, untrustworthy foreign powers, a very great consumption of expensive food and wine, a MacGuffin that everyone wants to lay their hands on, and, last but not least, a love interest whose loyalties remain ambiguous right up until the final page.

Accurate, both specifically and generally. The boredom Larman notes, for example, is present in characters as different as Richard Hannay and James Bond, but for different reasons. The tone of the thriller changed between Buchan and Fleming even if some of the trappings remained, appropriately, unruffled. Larman continues:

Le Carré removed pretty much all of these elements, minus the mass duplicity and, in doing so, made the spy novel more intellectually respectable but (whisper it) just a tiny bit boring. If I was given the chance to read a rip-roaring page-turner in the vein of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps or Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male over Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or its ilk, I should take it without hesitation.

This is a paragraph calculated to get my attention, The Thirty-Nine Steps being the old favorite that started the whole John Buchan June thing here on the blog and Rogue Male being one of the best pure thrillers I’ve read in the last several years. As much as I like le Carré—something I’ve been chatting with a couple of y’all about for a while—I have to agree.

The result of le Carré’s transformation of the genre? Larman:

But most contemporary espionage fiction follows in the le Carré vein, alas, rather than the Ian Fleming mold. Carefully worked-out social criticism is plentiful, genuine thrills, and intrigue either meanly rationed or nonexistent.

Larman is pointing to the two main thematic components of the spy thriller: moral or at least intellectual weight, and action. Prior to le Carré, these were typically joined in the spy thriller. As the late great Sir John Keegan noted of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Buchan’s thrillers in particular had, in addition to chases, danger, and wild hair’s-breadth escapes, “moral atmosphere.” As different as all of them are from each other, Buchan, Ambler, Household, and Fleming all had some measure of both. The drama gave the action weight and the action sold the book.

Le Carré bifurcated these, aiming for subtle and intensely introspective, chilly, cerebral drama. An Ambler or Fleming hero sweats when he faces capture and torture; a le Carré character—one hesitates to call them “heroes”—sweats when he has a terrible epiphany while looking through old files.

As Larman notes, le Carré’s astounding skill and success at this means it has become the model ever since, with “serious” spy novels almost always adhering to the introspective dramatic mode. Action continued to flourish in pulps before eventually taking on a highly technical, suspense-oriented character in writers like Frederick Forsyth and—the god of this kind of thriller—Tom Clancy.

So the spy thriller today is apt to be all dingy rented rooms, cynicism, and (usually left-wing) social criticism or all gear, gadgets, technical specs, and three-page chapters that begin with military time. (Occasionally you get writers who do both, with mixed success. Mick Herron, whose Slough House books are great favorites of mine for their wit, pacing, and suspense, recently published a turgid, commentary-heavy parallel novel burdened with smothering introspection. I’ve kept all the Slough House books to reread later but that one went straight to the used book store.)

But it need not be this way. Buchan, Ambler, and Fleming are still good models, and I was glad to learn from Larman that Gabriel’s Moon “is most definitely a spy novel of the Buchan-esque school,” balancing character drama and a fast pace. I’m looking forward to it. I picked up a copy Wednesday night and start it today. Here’s hoping it’s part of a reunification of the two halves of the spy thriller that, though they can succeed alone, work wonderfully together.

Eight Hours from England

Anthony Quayle (1913-89) in Albania during World War II

If you grew up, as I did, on classic war movies, you might not know the name Anthony Quayle but you’ll probably know his face. Quayle appeared in many of the great war films of the 1950s and 60s, including Lawrence of Arabia and The Guns of Navarone, often playing earnest, well-intentioned officers frustrated by ugly reality. That is certainly the case in the two films I named, and to judge from Quayle’s 1945 war novel Eight Hours from England, which was based on his experiences with the Special Operations Executive in Albania, he didn’t have to strain his imagination to portray those characters.

Eight Hours from England covers a few months in the winter of 1943-44. Major John Overton, a decent man with several years of experience in the war, has returned to England on leave. The homefront bores him, and his unrequited love for Ann, the woman he has hoped for years to marry, convinces him to accept an offer of a new mission on a whim. He bids Ann good bye, struggling to express his yearning for her, and leaves.

His trip east is long and frustrating. He arrives in more than one staging area unannounced and has to wait for orders. When he is finally redirected to Albania, which was not the mission he initially agreed to, he goes along with it, a knight errant ready for any quest.

He arrives in Albania by boat in the middle of the night, wide-eyed and eager to get to work. The officer he is replacing has become standoffish, hiding in a cave and refusing to have anything to do with the Albanian guerrillas he was sent to help. Overton determines to make a better job of it. With a handful of other British commandos, a few American intelligence officers, and an Italian officer who, his country having lost and swapped sides following Mussolini’s ouster, is committed to helping the Allies, Overton sets out to connect with the locals as well as the two groups fighting both the Germans and each other: the Balli and the Partisans.

The Partisans are Communist guerrillas backed by the Soviets, and claim to have both huge numbers and an insatiable need for materiel—weapons, ammunition, clothing, food, medicine, even blankets. They also regularly attack the anti-Communist civilians. The Balli, on the other hand, are the local anti-Communist resistance who have made the grave mistake of partnering with the Germans in order to eradicate the Partisans.

Acting as a go-between, hiking back and forth across the mountains trying both to liaise with the locals—who care more about finding pretexts to demand British cash than anything else—and to convince the Balli and the Partisans to cooperate, Overton finds his earnestness fading. The Albanians, whom he regarded as colorful potential allies when he landed, come to look more and more thuggish and untrustworthy. His work grinds him down physically and mentally, especially after he receives word by radio of a major British operation in the Balkans that needs all the local help he can organize. And, lurking in the background, busy but hidden from view, are the Germans.

The impossibly rugged terrain, the remoteness from home and people making the decisions, the backwater hit-and-run fighting, the betrayals by local “allies,” the seeming fruitlessness of one’s efforts, and the bloody small-minded rivalries among the locals, whose backward customs and moneygrubbing pettiness and simple thievery Overton gradually grows fed up with—I have to wonder how much Eight Hours from England would resonate with veterans of Afghanistan.

This is an unusual war novel in that it is not action-oriented. Quayle’s story is a drama of logistics, organization, and diplomacy. The Germans appear only occasionally and at great distance, visible as lines of trucks on the other side of a valley or as gray dots setting up heavy weapons far below, but their threat is omnipresent. False alarms send Overton and his group scrambling to fallback positions and hideouts more than once. And the difficulty of communication—with headquarters, with each other—as well as bringing in supplies is clear. To charge their radio batteries they need petrol; to get petrol they must bring it in by boat; to request it on the next boat, they need the radio; and when it arrives they have to keep the Albanians from stealing it. Eight Hours from England is a novel of what goes on behind the scenes of special operations, and of just how unbearably frustrating and exhausting war can be even when—perhaps especially when—there is no fighting.

Quayle conveys all of this beautifully, with vivid descriptions of the people and landscapes. (The actual landscapes, by the way. The locations Quayle names are all real. Here’s the base where he entered and left Albania. Some of his equipment is still there.) Quayle captures the impossibility of Overton’s situation and makes the reader feel it, as well as making it clear that, whatever the outcome of the war of the Allies against the Axis, Albania will not enjoy a simple happy ending.

I read Eight Hours from England in the recent paperback edition published by the Imperial War Museum as part of its Wartime Classics series. There are sixteen books in the series and I already have several more lined up for this year. Eight Hours from England was a good place to start. Strongly and imaginatively written, it brings the reader into a complicated, often overlooked side of World War II and dramatizes it brilliantly.

The Flying Inn

When I began this monthlong celebration of Chesterton’s fiction with his first novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, I noted that the novel balances his storytelling capabilities and his love of ideas in combat perfectly, unlike some of his other fiction in which the ideas drown the narrative. Today Chestertober enters its final week with a museum-quality example of a Chesterton story overpowered by its ideas, the 1914 satire The Flying Inn.

Set in the near future, The Flying Inn begins with a peace settlement between Britain and her allies and the Ottoman Empire at the end of a long war. Though presented as a treaty among equals, it soon becomes clear that the Turks have had the better of the agreement, as the treaty obligates the British to abide by Muslim religious laws—specifically the prohibition of alcohol. The British signatory to the treaty, Lord Ivywood, a cold and unimaginative bureaucratic tyrant, immediately enacts the ban through roundabout legislation related to inns and pubs. Another signatory, the Irish naval hero Patrick Dalroy, resigns in protest and returns to Britain disillusioned but not defeated.

Ivywood and his cronies’ method is to ban not alcohol itself, but to require a public sign—as for a pub or inn—to be displayed outside any establishment serving alcohol. They then eliminate all the inn signs in Britain.

All but one—the sign of The Old Ship. This is an inn run by Humphrey Pump, an old friend of Dalroy’s, and when the ban goes into effect Dalroy, enraged, pries up the sign, takes a wheel of cheese and the one remaining cask of rum in The Old Ship, and hits the road. If the law says you can only serve alcohol wherever there’s an inn sign, Dalroy ensures there will always be both.

While Dalroy and “Hump” travel the countryside between the fictional beach town of Pebbleswick and London, an Islamic “Prophet of the Moon” named Misysra Ammon goes to work on the people, attempting to convince them of the rightness of prohibition and the cultural and historical superiority of Islam. The people, including the object of Ivywood’s intentions, Lady Joan Brett, mostly giggle, but Misysra finds a better reception among the elite, who need little encouragement to indulge their power-hungry vanity, their oikophobia, and their superficial love of the foreign.

The bulk of The Flying Inn is an old-fashioned picaresque, with Dalroy and Hump falling into slapstick scrapes involving pro-Prohibition rallies, vegetarian banquets, diet cranks, modern art, and a poet who has a conversion experience. Everywhere they go, Dalroy plants his sign, Hump starts pouring, and a grateful crowd gathers—to the befuddlement and humiliation of some establishment figure who tries to stop it.

Ivywood, in multiple attempts to crush Dalroy, fiddles with the law, amending it to enforce prohibition through legal nitpicking. Dalroy outmaneuvers him every time, and between his growing folk-hero status and popular outrage at the treaty that has visited an unwanted theocracy upon England, public opinion turns on Ivywood. The thrilling climactic action, with a mob of ordinary people marching on Ivywood’s stately country house—which, imperceptibly, has come to resemble a Turkish palace complete with harem—is a great revolt against the remote, all-powerful, but incompetent tyranny. The people, thirsting, finally call it to account.

The Flying Inn has an arresting hook—Islamic law imposed on Britain!—but while that has generated some comment and notoriety a hundred years after the fact online, it is not really Chesterton’s point. Neither is the alcohol at the center of the story, which misled the novel’s first batch of critics. If The Napoleon of Notting Hill is a hymn to the local, The Flying Inn is a populist anthem—in the best sense of a tribute to the people and a condemnation of those who would presume to rule them.

Chesterton’s target, the aloof, bloodless, but cruel Lord Ivywood, won’t confront Dalroy but tries to work behind the scenes, slipping in new regulations here and ratcheting up his program of reform there, all without consulting the object of his schemes—the people. He is a stand-in for all the soft despots of modern progressive bureaucracy who treat the public as raw material to be shaped and nudged into compliance with a revolutionary vision, for their own good.

The abuses of know-it-alls in high places was a topic Chesterton returned to again and again, perhaps most ferociously in Eugenics and Other Evils. In the Eugenics movement, Chesterton saw an elite who, like Lord Ivywood prohibiting alcohol, strove to deprive ordinary people of one of their only joys in life—the gift of children. Their pursuit of some external ideal—the purity of Islam for Lord Ivywood, the purity of genetic hygiene for the Eugenicists—ends up destroying the little things that give life meaning.

And as with so many such despots, his chief targets are the simple good things that even the poor can enjoy. Ivywood sees an inn and thinks only of the alcohol, which he must prohibit in order to “help” and reform the people, but does not think of the networks of friends who gather there or the relief they feel to enjoy a drink with each other after work. In The Flying Inn, not only Lord Ivywood but all the other cranks in the book have made similar errors of priority. (Reading about Peaceways, the milk-drinking colony, or Lord Ivywood’s hypocritical vegetarian party, one thinks of Orwell’s critique of the diet obsessive as someone “willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase.”) It is Dalroy, the outlaw, who actually helps the people, not by providing alcohol but the occasion and excuse for community.

The Flying Inn has something important to say, one of Chesterton’s most enduring messages. But it does not work very well as a novel. Though filled with amusing episodes, fun takedowns of everything from modern art to the experts who can explain away anything, and a handful of colorful characters, it has a ragged, discursive structure and little forward momentum—a fact underscored by my rereading The Man Who Was Thursday for next week, a book that starts fast and never lets up. Lady Joan has little to do throughout, Misysra the prophet flits aimlessly in and out of the story, and many of the other characters are flat stand-ins for the movements and isms Chesterton wishes to critique. In The Flying Inn, the ideas are foremost, the story a distant second. Enjoy it though I did, of the novels by Chesterton that I’ve read, it is the weakest.

That said, it is still worth reading as a critique of managerial progressivism, of an elite that seeks to shield itself from accountability while manipulating the public, and the very notion of the nanny state. And, in Lord Ivywood, Chesterton has created one of his best villains, a prototype of all the tyrants of CS Lewis’s own near-future dystopia That Hideous Strength, who similarly cloak their control-freak inhumanity in gentleness and advancement, and all the smothering tyrants of our own time.

One wonders who our Dalroys will turn out to be, and whether our culture as it stands today is even capable of producing one among its legions of Ivywoods.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

After a slight delay, I’m pleased to introduce a new project that may or may not become an annual event on the blog. I’m calling it Chestertober, a dedication of the month of Halloween to the work of GK Chesterton, the prophet of the kind of madcap but meaningful topsy-turvydom that Halloween at its best embodies. For this inaugural Chestertober I wanted to look at some of Chesterton’s novels, and I figured I would start with Chesterton’s first: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, published in 1904.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill begins in 1984. A king still rules England, but only as a formality—he is selected at random from among the citizens. Real power is exercised by the bland professional functionaries of a smooth, efficient, and utterly joyless technocratic state, a state that has gradually absorbed and homogenized the entire world.

The last holdout, Nicaragua, has recently fallen, and in the novel’s opening chapter a group of London bureaucrats encounter the deposed Nicaraguan president wandering the city alone. They witness him cutting up a poster to make ribbons with the national colors of his country and, failing to find any red paper, he soaks some paper in his own blood and pins it to the breast of his uniform jacket. The government functionaries treat the former president to lunch at a café, where he makes his pitiful case to them before they go their separate ways. Most of them revile his backward, tragic attachment to his former country. One, a small, wide-eyed man named Auberon Quin, is intrigued. They find out later that, after this encounter, the president died of heartbreak, alone.

Not long after, to the surprise of his unimaginative bureaucratic friends, the eccentric Auberon receives word that he has been selected as the next King of England.

Auberon, a prototype of hipster irony, thinks this is a grand joke. He underscores the absurdity of his own position by reinstating medieval titles, honors, and customs, requiring strict court etiquette and elaborate costume, and issuing a charter to all the neighborhoods of London granting them specific rights and duties under him as their sovereign. Heraldry and courtesy make a comeback. The bureaucratic types bridle at the uncomfortable robes and chains of office that King Auberon insists upon, but beyond the superficial trappings of pennants and coats of arms and sumptuary codes business continues pretty much as usual. No one, least of all Auberon, takes any of this very seriously.

No one until a young man from Pump Street, Notting Hill named Adam Wayne. Having been a child when Auberon ascended the throne and surprised and annoyed everyone with his charter and reforms, Wayne grows up in the world Auberon created and sees it with utter sincerity. The red and gold of Notting Hill’s coat of arms is dear to him, and he does not find the idea of Notting Hill as a place with cherished customs and a distinct identity born of the people who share life there a joke.

So when the bureaucrats propose a massive new highway project that will obliterate Pump Street, Wayne, as Provost of Notting Hill, begs audience of King Auberon and appeals to him to spare his neighborhood. And he is shocked to discover that Auberon only thinks him amusing and that, to the bureaucrats who actually make the decisions, Pump Street is mere raw material for their projects. The road will go through. Defending Notting Hill is up to Adam Wayne.

And so a war begins. After raising a few hundred men from some of the other London boroughs under Auberon’s charter, the bureaucrats, chief among them a cold-blooded calculator named Barker, launch an invasion of Notting Hill meant to crush Wayne’s resistance movement and force compliance with the road project. Wayne’s men, knowing the neighborhood and its streets and byways, allow the army to penetrate to Portobello Road and then turn out the streetlamps. Most of Barker’s army is lost and the survivors are driven back to Auberon in humiliating defeat.

The war escalates, with larger and larger forces brought against Wayne and his neighborhood army and Wayne resorting to more and more desperate stratagems to defend Notting Hill, like building barricades out of stolen hansom cabs—thus protecting his streets and depriving the enemy of mobility. Finally, like a besieged medieval lord on the verge of defeat, Wayne sallies forth from Notting Hill, striking south into Kensington before apparently being halted and surrounded at the local waterworks. Barker is delighted, thinking Wayne finally defeated, but then Wayne issues an ultimatum—surrender and guarantee Notting Hill’s rights under the charter or Wayne will empty the reservoir and flood London.

This is not the end—there is a coda in which the war is renewed and finally ended ten years later, with Auberon abdicating to fight on Wayne’s side against the forces of Barker and the rest of the technocratic state—but this is a good place to leave off. Without giving anything away, the final chapter, a dialogue among the wounded through the long night after the last battle, is among the most moving scenes in Chesterton’s fiction.

Chesterton was only thirty when The Napoleon of Notting Hill was published, and it is remarkable for a first novel for its control, its imaginative world, and its thematic richness. Its characters, as heightened as any in Chesterton’s fiction, nevertheless feel like real, recognizable people, not mere avatars for the isms Chesterton wishes to pit against each other. Quin and Wayne are the highlights, but the many side characters, especially the quietly villainous Barker, contribute to the teeming, energetic feel of the book. And while not having the breakneck plotting of his fictional masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday, it is more tightly and briskly paced than some of his more meandering later novels. In some of those the ideas threaten to overwhelm the the story, but The Napoleon of Notting Hill feels always like a marvelous fable first.

And what is the point of this fable? The Napoleon of Notting Hill is Chesterton’s anthem to localism. Pump Street, with its handful of shabby shops, is an irrational place to love, but Wayne loves it not out of some rational, material conclusion. That’s the way Barker’s type thinks. For these deracinated globalists, all places everywhere are fundamentally interchangeable and attachment to home is a risible relic, especially in the face of Progress. All their studies and statistics show that the road through Notting Hill will be a quantifiable improvement, and so the people must bow to the greater good.

No, Wayne loves Pump Street not because it is perfect or beautiful or scientifically useful to do so, but because it is home. The heraldic trappings and ceremony only allow him to act out his love in visible ways. The love is already there; the ritual deepens it by giving it shape.

And so The Napoleon of Notting Hill arrays sincerity on one side against detached irony and chilly pragmatism on the other. It is easy to imagine it taking place today, especially given the way the clique at the top scoff at Wayne and the terrifying speed with which Barker and the bureaucrats, in their assurance of progressive righteousness, move from disdain to brutal violence. What is heartening in the novel’s tragic, almost Arthurian ending is that Auberon allows himself, at last, to be won over by Wayne. What had started as a joke at everyone’s expense transforms him, suggesting that even the ironic still have hope since they still have a sense of humor.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill may not be the most famous of Chesterton’s novels but it is deservedly well-remembered. It has all the best qualities of his later fiction and few of their faults, but most importantly it is a fun, rollicking adventure in a strange near-future Edwardian dystopia. Wayne’s defense of Notting Hill is genuinely thrilling in places, and I’ve read several times that this novel has been a favorite of urban guerrillas like Michael Collins. But in addition to its fun and odd story, it presents a compelling vision of the goodness of place and the ever-present need to protect hearth and home, to defend the small in the face of Leviathan.

Poe and Wolfe

Building off of my post about modern Frogpondians yesterday, at the same time that I started studying Poe’s life more deeply—especially his letters and criticism—I also read more of the late great Tom Wolfe’s journalistic monographs. These include From Bauhaus to Our House, a takedown of modern architecture; The Painted Word, a similar treatment of modern art; and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a brilliant pair of essays about high-minded leftwing activism and its distance from grungy reality.

With all of these assorted things floating around in my mind I realized one day that Poe and Wolfe took a similar glee in identifying and attacking cliques. Both objected to the self-identified, self-satisfied, and self-righteous cognoscenti who have found a way to dominate a particular field and enforce an orthodoxy, all while feathering their nests and basking in a success lauded primarily by its members, whom they treat as the only people that count. Poe had Longfellow and Emerson, Wolfe had Mailer, Updike, and Irving. And Leonard Bernstein. And Le Corbusier. And…

And once I noticed this similarity, I noticed others. I’ve kicked this idea around with a few of y’all in conversation, but wanted to get some of this down in writing. Consider the following notes toward a comparative study of Poe and Wolfe:

• Both were Southerners

• Both were Virginians specifically—Wolfe by birth, Poe by rearing and explicit self-identification

• Both worked primarily in big northeastern cities

• Both were accounted personally charming and gentlemanly despite their acid literary criticism

• Both worked in journalism and fiction—Poe considering himself a poet who worked for magazines to (barely) make ends meet while Wolfe was a successful journalist who moved into fiction mid-career

• Both, in rejecting and attacking the dominant literary cliques, made themselves political outsiders, though neither was particularly interested in politics except as an epiphenomenon of something more important

• Both had an intense concern for authenticity in fiction

• Both developed immediately identifiable styles intended to convey something more truthful than the dominant style at the time

• Both were mocked for their style

I’ve returned to this and thought about it a lot, especially since realizing that the similarities are not just biographical but thematic.

The regional dimension, especially in Poe’s case, is too easily overlooked, but I think it’s fundamental to understanding both men. Back in the spring I watched Radical Wolfe, an excellent recent documentary on Wolfe’s life and career that I meant to review here but never found the time to. I recommend it. It doesn’t cover Wolfe’s youth and education in detail, but the sense of Wolfe as a Southerner amused by the unquestioned pretensions of the Yankees in the society he was forced to keep from Yale onwards comes through clearly. It certainly resonated with me.

And now, after mentally connecting Wolfe with Poe, I have to wonder whether the man in black, whom we are so used to imagining with a far-off gaze and a tired frown, used to wander the streets of New York and Philadelphia with a small, wry smile on his face the way the man in white did.

Speaking of Wolfe, Joel Miller recently posted about the delicate art of book cover design, beginning with the recent news that Picador is reprinting thirteen of Wolfe’s books with new matching covers. I’m not crazy about the cover art, personally, but my Wolfe shelf is a jumble of different trim sizes and if I can someday tidy that up and Wolfe can experience a much-deserved posthumous resurgence, all the better.