Category: Fiction

N or M? Agatha Christie’s wartime spy story

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Agatha Christie did not only write whodunnits; from time to time she dabbled in the spy story. I think N or M? is by far the most effective of those. It sees the return of her married couple sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. In the summer of 1940, with invasion looming, they are enlisted to winkle out German spies in a quiet south coast seaside town. Or rather, Tommy is enlisted and Tuppence very cleverly gets herself into the game.

It was published during the war in 1941 and it’s intriguing to read a story of this sort written in the heat of the moment when invasion was still a real possibility. This is not a completely realistic novel, but it does reveal some of the atmosphere and attitudes of the time.   

I suppose this is what would today be called a comedy thriller, because as well as the air of suspicion and menace, where anybody might be someone other than who they seem to be, there is a good deal of humour running through the story.

The couples’ children are rather sorry for their middle-aged parents and their desire to find active roles in the war effort. They remain convinced, almost to the end, by the cover story that Tommy is a sort of filing clerk and Tuppence is visiting an elderly sick aunt.

In fact, both the elder Beresfords have put themselves back in harm’s way, by going undercover at Sans Souci, the guest house in Leahampton which the secret service is convinced is the centre of an enemy spy network, with its male and female leaders, codenamed N and M.

Playing roles themselves, both  are only too aware of how the other guests conform almost too perfectly to stock “types”. There is the young mother with her toddler, the young German refugee, the large, elderly Irish woman, the retired gent fussy over his health with his wife whose only purpose in life sems to be to minister to his needs, the retired army man; and so on. Which of them are spies?

Both Beresfords use spy tradecraft. Tuppence puts an eyelash in the fold of a letter she leaves out on view, and checks the paper with fingerprint powder later. The couple’s contact is a man who appears to be fishing at the end from the pier.  

It’s interesting that in a novel that mentions codebreaking work and features a personal code used between Tommy and Tuppence, there should be a character called Major Bletchley. Questioned by MI5 about this, Christie claimed that she had once been on a train for a long time as it waited at Bletchley station.

The novel has quite a resemblance to the final chapters of The Thirty-Nine Steps, with the seaside house making a convenient location for boat landings and signalling out to sea. The vision of the upper echelons of the armed forces and government being riddled with spies and nazi sympathisers also owes something to Buchan. Indeed, it is the uncertainty about who to trust that leads to the Beresfords becoming involved. Having been out of the intelligence game for so long, they are not known to the enemy spies.

The pace picks up towards the end with chases over the downs and a bewildering series of revelations as to who is and isn’t a traitor.

There’s a good deal of sympathy here for German refugees, and a grudging respect for enemy spies who risk their lives, as opposed to traitors who sell their own country out. Tommy and Tuppence were involved in this sort of thing in the last war and remember Edith Cavell, the British nurse shot by the Germans for spying, and her statement “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness for anyone”.

Tuppence recognises that although people are encouraged to hate the German people as a whole, that doesn’t mean that she does not sympathise with the feelings of individual Germans caught up, like the British, in this awful situation. This applies particularly to the mothers of those involved in the war, and indeed maternal feeling is one of the main clues leading to the eventual solution.     

Christie offers an interesting explanation of how the Nazis plan to take over Britain, not by an armed invasion, but by an internal coup of British nazi sympathisers. The appeal of nazism is to “pride and a desire for personal glory”. It is “the cult of Lucifer”. As always with Christie, there is a firm basis in Christian morality. After all, the title is taken from the Book of Common Prayer.

The Duel by Joseph Conrad

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It really has turned into the summer of Conrad for me, as anyone who has read some of my earlier posts will know. I have greatly enjoyed re-discovering his writing. This one is another old friend, that I first read many years ago.

The Duel is one of Conrad’s novella-length works. It was first published in 1908 and is based on a real-life story of two officers in Napoleon’s army who fought a series of duels with each other over a period of many years.

In Conrad’s story, this mutual antagonism begins over a trivial incident when D’Hubert and Feraud are young lieutenants, and goes on for years, with the origin of the quarrel long since forgotten. Outsiders believe there must be some terrible enmity between them, that perhaps they fell out over a woman. It only ends when both men are retired generals.

This covers a longer period of time and is also told in a more conventional manner than many Conrad works. It is a linear narrative with none of the time shifts for which he is famous. It is mostly seen from the point of view of one character, D’Hubert.

It’s plain from the opening sentence that Conrad intended this to be rather more than just the story of the two main characters. “Napoleon the First, whose career had the quality of a dual against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army.”

The tale of the long association of these two men becomes nothing less than the story of the rise and fall of Napoleon’s France, a picture of the era, its politics and its military attitudes. The two men “pursued their private contest through the years of universal carnage”.

These two soldiers fight campaigns all over Europe, and experience the harshness and brutality of the retreat from Moscow, described here in detail. Yet there is a sense in which their relationship as opponents somehow benefits them. The code of honour says that a duel can only be fought between those of the same rank, so as one of them climbs the ladder of promotion the other is inspired to follow him.

The defeat of Napoleon brings great changes. The plight of the cashiered ex-soldiers, the “living wreckage of Napoleonic tempest” who now languish on inadequate pensions is quite poignant. Feraud does not know what to do: “No longer in the army! He felt suddenly a stranger to the earth like a disembodied spirit. It was impossible to exist.”

But D’Hubert seems to regret this changed state of affairs, too. “He felt an irrational tenderness toward his old adversary, and appreciated emotionally the murderous absurdity their encounter had introduced into his life. It was like an additional pinch of spice in a hot dish.”

By the end the reader may think that this strange relationship was the most important of their lives to both men. Is than an echo here of that other Conrad “double” story, The Secret Sharer?

This story was originally called The Duel, but was later also published as The Point of Honour. The 1977 film adaptation used the title The Duellists. It is a very fine film, Ridley Scott’s first as director, with marvellous photography of the French countryside.

 

Victory by Joseph Conrad

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Victory was one of Joseph Conrad’s later works, published in 1915. I can’t pretend to fully understand this complex novel. It’s not the easiest read, and yet it fascinates me for several reasons and I’ve read it more than once.

There is the resemblance to Shakespeare’s Tempest for one, although by the end the stage is littered with bodies more like Hamlet. Indeed, we might see the main character as a rather Hamlet-like figure.

The story is really fairly straightforward, but the telling of it is not, with the time shifts and changes of point of view characteristic of Conrad.

As so often with this writer, the title is ambiguous and possibly ironic; readers must decide for themselves who the winner is.

We are in Conrad’s familiar territory of the Malay Archipeligo. Axel Heyst has withdrawn from the world to live alone on the island of Samburan. His outlook on life has been influenced by his philosopher father. Heyst has drifted through life, believing that the only way to avoid doing harm is to avoid taking any action at all: “The world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance; but I think here we can safely defy the fates.”

The world bites back in the form of three of the nastiest villains in literature, who come to Heyst’s island intending to relieve him of the fortune that they believe he has hidden there.

This has been brought about by two actions of Heyst’s that were well-intentioned. He rescued Morrison from financial ruin and became his business partner. Morrison, however, died on a visit back to England. Then, when visiting the hotel on a neighbouring island owned by Schomberg, Heyst rescued a young woman, Alma, from a life of near-slavery as a member of a travelling orchestra, and took her to live with him on the island.

Schomberg coveted Alma for himself, so he now dislikes Heyst intensely. He is in any case, a gossip and teller of tales, who has been spreading the story that Heyst murdered Morrison and stole his money. The nefarious trio of Mr Jones, Martin Ricardo and Pedro turn up at his hotel and thoroughly frighten him, so he persuades them that Heyst is sitting on a fortune to get rid of them.

The world bites back in the form of three of the nastiest villains in literature, who come to Heyst’s island intending to relieve him of the fortune that they believe he has hidden there.

This has been brought about by two actions of Heyst’s that were well-intentioned. He rescued Morrison from financial ruin and became his business partner. Morrison, however, died on a visit back to England. Then, when visiting the hotel on a neighbouring island owned by Schomberg, Heyst rescued a young woman, Alma, from a life of near-slavery as a member of a travelling orchestra, and took her to live with him on the island.

Schomberg coveted Alma for himself, so he now dislikes Heyst intensely. He is in any case, a gossip and teller of tales, who has been spreading the story that Heyst murdered Morrison and stole his money. The nefarious trio of Mr Jones, Martin Ricardo and Pedro turn up at his hotel and thoroughly frighten him, so he persuades them that Heyst is sitting on a fortune to get rid of them.

When they arrive on the island, Heyst’s position is complicated by the fact that his Chinese housekeeper, Wang vanishes to the far side of the island, taking Heyst’s gun with him.

The stage is now set for the drama of the later part of the novel, which takes place in an intense, dreamlike atmosphere, under the shadow of the nearby live volcano sputtering on the horizon.

It is the trio of villains who make this novel so compelling. The “gentleman” Mr Jones, is tall and emaciated, with a face like a skull and a hollow voice. He is subject to strange depressive fits and bears more than a passing resemblance to Mr Kurtz from Heart of Darkness. His henchman is Martin Ricardo, repeatedly described as catlike, an unrestrained killer, with a knife concealed under the leg of his trousers. The third is Pedro, a hardly human, Caliban-like figure, treated like an animal by the other two. Heyst says: “Here they are before you, evil intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm. The brute force is at the back.”

For me, Ricardo is the most interesting and vital character in the book. His twisted mind and the strange relationship that he has with Mr Jones feels quite modern. Jones hates women and it is Ricardo’s longing for Alma that causes them to fall out. This aspect of the novel anticipates the later psychological crime fiction of writers such as Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.

Indeed, Greene used Heyst’s words from Victory as the epigraph to his 1978 cold war spy story, The Human Factor. “I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered his soul.”

Read now, Victory feels like the inspiration for a lot of later writing and one of Conrad’s most influential works.

The Secret Trilogy by John Gardner

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John Gardner is mainly remembered today for his series of James Bond continuation novels, published between 1981 and 1996, but he wrote many other espionage stories. The Railton family saga is a trilogy of long novels. They are The Secret Generations (1985), The Secret Houses (1988) and The Secret Families (1989). The family trade of the British Railtons and the American Farthings, to whom they are linked by marriage, is intelligence work.

On the back of the first volume there is a quote from Len Deighton, who says that this is the first book to combine a family saga with the history of British intelligence. This is interesting, because Deighton’s Berlin Game had been published in 1983, and was the first volume in his long sequence of novels involving Bernard Samson, which covers fairly similar territory. Who had the idea first? It may well be that Gardner was influenced not so much by Deighton as by Douglas Reeman. Badge of Glory by Reeman was published in 1982 and was the first in his sequence of Blackwood family novels, a family who all served in the Royal Marines. Gardner himself was an ex-marine.

The first volume makes more of the historical angle than the later ones do. Starting before the first world war, we see the origins of what became MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. The complex plot involves German spies in England and Ireland, as well as British spies in Germany, during the naval arms race of this time. In his London house, Giles Railton, the patriarch, has a den, from which he oversees the operations of his espionage network. There is a cabinet containing his huge collection of model soldiers from all eras, with which he replays the great battles of history. His son Caspar is badly wounded in the war. By the end we have learnt that not all the Railtons are loyal to Britain. Giles is revealed to have become a convert to communism, out of guilt at the advantages of the class he was born into. A postscript set in 1935 reveals that his son Ramillies, who went missing in Germany in the war, has become a Russian KGB officer.

The second volume moves forward in time and is set in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It is largely concerned with a retrospective investigation into the betrayal and rounding-up of a French resistance group during the second world war. This has some resemblance to the Klaus Barbie affair, although he is not mentioned by name. Caspar’s role in all this now comes into question. His nephew Donald Railton, known as Naldo, becomes a leading character. There is a lot of action on the streets of  early cold war Berlin, convincingly rendered.

We get the “origin story” of Herbie Kruger, who had already featured in another series of books by Gardner. Here, he is a streetwise young Berliner and keen student of English who is recruited by British intelligence. He is devoted to the works of Gustav Mahler. He is a significant character in the third book, too, by which time he has risen through the ranks and is based in London. We suspect that his colourful, not quite correct use of English might be a deliberate ruse to wind up his superiors.

The third volume, which starts in 1964, is perhaps the best. Caspar is now dead, but his connection to the Russian double agent known as “Alex” is under investigation, so once more Naldo must find out if his uncle was a traitor. Anthony Blunt features here, and “Alex” is the code name of the real-life Russian double agent Oleg Penkovsky.

If the first world war spy games of the first volume inevitably recall John Buchan and Somerset Maugham, the two later volumes read a bit like a slightly less realistic version of John Le Carré. It has to be said that Gardner did not really leave his own distinctive stamp on the genre. He was though a highly professional and competent thriller writer, with a polished prose style, a fertile imagination and a knack of fitting his plots to real world events. This was what made him such an inspired choice to step into Ian Fleming’s footsteps.

He had a knack for coming up with good “alternative history” ideas. Here, the Kennedy assassination is cleverly connected to the American role in the fall of the Vietnamese government, prior to the war there. In the first volume, he offers a quite plausible explanation as to why people with all the advantages, such as the Railtons, might have become traitors.

And the Railtons do have all the advantages. They are a landed family of long standing. Their connection with the world of spying goes way back. “They’re mentioned in the bloody history books. One of them was a go-between for Anthony Standen, Walsingham’s agent. Sixteenth-century stuff.”  They all share a fondness for quoting from Shakespeare.

By this third volume, the Railtons have begun to be disillusioned with the secret world. “Why do we do it, Naldo asked himself now. . .then was shocked to realise he was repeating one of his father’s comments on the trade. ’God knows why we do it. The politicians treat us like dirt; the military have trouble in believing us; the general public think of us as superannuated adventurers, while the novelists make a killing from presenting us as candyfloss killers’.”

His colleague Gus Keane is much clearer about his motives. “Ok, why do we do it? Because we believe in freedom of thought, of speech and of movement. Here we can criticise the government in public; here we can read what we like and more or less print and say what we like. Try doing that in a totalitarian state – Communist or Fascist.”

But for Naldo: “Everything my family has ever done has been devious. . . This whole bloody country makes you like that, and when we all become a sort of United States of Europe, we’ll be more devious than ever.”

The book ends in 1989 with the revelation that an IRA plot to attack the handover of Hong Kong to the Chinese has been foiled, bringing the whole story full circle.

Fragile reputations

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Some years ago, I bought a book by Eric Ambler in a secondhand bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. It was an American paperback and at the counter, the proprietor smiled approvingly and said “hard to get hold of these days, Ambler”.  He seemed to be a forgotten figure then, out of print and out of favour.

How times change. In 2009, Penguin started to re-issue his novels, the 1930s ones on which his reputation rests. Ambler went on writing into the 1970s, but none of his later books really made the same impact as the earlier ones. The covers featured black and white photos at first, but these were soon replaced with images that resembled the colourful travel posters of the inter-war years.

Ambler’s stories of a troubled Europe on the brink of war seemed to resonate again in the world of mass migration, Putin and Trump. They felt strangely contemporary as the world started to look less secure and settled than it had done. The passage of time brought them back into circulation and today you can read many favourable comments online. If anything, he has gone from being underrated to slightly overrated.

Compare this with the case of Angus Wilson. Angus who, you may ask. He wrote basically realistic novels of English social life with a touch of mordant humour. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was a big figure in the world of serious fiction, up there with Kingsley Amis and William Golding. He taught at the then new University of East Anglia, setting up the creative writing course there. By the 1970s though, his reputation was in decline.

A TV adaption of Anglo Saxon Attitudes, perhaps his best book, got his novels back into print, but they soon disappeared again. If he was remembered at all, it was as an awful warning of the fragility of a seemingly secure literary reputation. There was an idea that his name had been erased in some way by the rising popularity of the younger novelist, A N Wilson.

Can this be true? J G Farrell had the same initials as J G Ballard, yet no-one ever seemed to confuse them. Farrell died in 1979, and his three major novels of the decline of the British Empire have never been out of print. His reputation has grown steadily and The Singapore Grip is due on TV soon.

Perhaps it’s to do with a kind of clarity about what sort of books a writer’s works are, what we might call marketability, I suppose, that feeling that we know what we are in for. For example, if you were recommending Ambler to a friend, you could say something along the lines of “Graham Greeneish, film noirish, early spy fiction, the English Dashiell Hammett” and your friend might have an idea what to expect.

It’s rather more difficult to sum up the fiction of Angus Wilson in this way. and also difficult to imagine what changes in the world could create new interest in his writing.

It’s a tricky business, trying to second guess the ruthless test of time. When the biography of William Golding came out in 2009, the publishers felt the need to subtitle it “the man who wrote Lord of the Flies”. I would have thought that was a fact known to anyone who went to school in the UK after the year 1960, but perhaps not.

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff

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The Eagle of the Ninth was a favourite book of mine when I was younger. It was fascinating to re-visit it. Published in 1956, it was aimed at young people, but the only way in which it is a children’s book is that the violence and sex are toned down. The style of writing is enjoyably straightforward, for adults or children, and there is a strong sense of the British landscape. There is no feeling that the author is condescending to a youthful readership.

Set in Roman Britain, or at least the Britain that Rome is trying to subdue, “a place where two worlds met without mingling”, the story concerns the search for the missing standard of the ninth legion, the eagle of the title. The legion marched north of Hadrian’s wall and was never heard of again. Were they defeated in battle by the British and all killed, or did they revolt against their officers?

The young hero, Marcus, invalided out of the Roman army, volunteers to go north with his British companion, Esca, to find out what happened to the legion, and its commander, his father. It is both a personal quest and an official mission.

This book is a very good example of the way in which imaginative writing can bring the past to life in a way that factual history books cannot. There is a powerful sense of what a less-populated Britain was like: “On they went, following the road that now ran out on a causeway between sodden marsh and empty sky, now plunged into deep boar-hunted forest, or lifted over bleak uplands where nothing grew save furze and thorn-scrub.”

When Marcus and his uncle Aquila play a game of draughts by the light of an oil lamp, in what is modern-day Silchester, the reader has a clear impression of the room in the villa as an island of warmth and peace in the darkness of this wild country where “the wind moaned through the desolate woods, the skies wept. . .”

There is a touch of something supernatural about the fate of the legion. Esca saw them marching, and recalls: “But the mist was creeping down from the high moors, and the legion marched into it , straight into it, and it licked them up and flowed together behind them, and they were gone as though they had marched from one world into another.” There is also what we might now call folk horror, with the missing Roman eagle finally being discovered as an object in a pagan ritual.

Marcus has a dream, in which he sees the Roman column marching northwards. In a chilling moment, he realises there are no faces under the metal helmets. Reading now, this sent a tingle up my spine, and at the same time I remembered how exactly the same thing had happened the first time I read it long ago.

Books stay the same but we change and that is part of the fascination of re-reading. Marcus’ shattered leg destroys his hopes of a military career. In the end he is partially cured. He can get around, but with a limp, and is not fit enough to go back to the army. He has to settle for what he has got. As a teenager bursting with health, I did not notice the disability theme here, but I do now.

I am not usually keen on biographical interpretations of fiction, but in this case, it is fascinating to know that Rosemary Sutcliff suffered grave ill-health, spending much of her life in a wheelchair. The vivid action scenes were created purely from her imagination. I don’t think she had ever actually been able to ride a horse, for example.

I have seen it suggested that she is one of the only authors to have been directly influenced by Rudyard Kipling. I think that’s unfair on Kipling, because his influence was so all-pervasive that it can hardly be seen now. For example, where would the modern spy story be without Kim?

Nevertheless, The Eagle of the Ninth does partly derive from three particular stories of his. These are “On the Great Wall” and “A Centurion of the Thirtieth” from Puck of Pook’s Hill and the Indian army story “The Lost Legion”.

There are also several “lost legion” stories from the first world war, about units that seemingly disappeared on the battlefield, that may be an influence. The anecdote about the ghostly legion seen in York to this day is in there somewhere, too.

Perhaps we should see The Eagle of the Ninth as belonging to the post-war period when it was first published, with its disabled young officer hero, missing father, and missing soldiers.

In the end, despite the weather, Marcus decides to stay on and make his life in Britain. It’s clear that we are meant to see him as our common ancestor. This glimpse into the past sees us as the modern descendants of the Romans, but also as the inheritors of something older and stranger.

 

The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad

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Conrad outlined his artistic intention in an early essay. “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see.” He certainly succeeds in that aim in his short 1916 novel The Shadow Line.

I wrote in an earlier post how I had been re-visiting Conrad’s works, and that he seemed to be the perfect writer for current circumstances and my present mood. Strangely enough, I had forgotten the illness theme in The Shadow Line.

The unnamed narrator leaves a secure berth, almost on a whim. He is then approached to take command of a ship whose captain has died suddenly. The prize of command has fallen to him as if by accident. It appears, though, that there was something strange about the late captain.

The crew start to fall ill, and our narrator assumes that the sickness will stop once the ship puts out to sea, yet more and more of the crew succumb to the fever. Different crew members are affected in different ways.

The weather does not follow any previously known pattern and the wind refuses to blow. The only sailor apart from the captain not to fall ill has a heart problem, restricting his capacity for physical exertion. These two must save the situation.

They are becalmed; time seems to slow down and then stop altogether: “. . .my command seemed to stand as motionless as a model ship set on the gleams and shadows of polished marble.” Has the previous captain exerted some kind of supernatural influence, so that they will all die, leaving a ghost ship? There are echoes of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner here. This first voyage as captain has turned into a nightmare.

There are descriptive passages of such vividness that I had to read them again: “Here and there in the distance, above the crowded mob of low, brown roof ridges, towered great piles of masonry, king’s palace, temples, gorgeous and dilapidated, crumbling under the vertical sunlight, tremendous, overpowering, almost palpable…”

There is an astonishing scene when the night turns to an inky blackness just before the rain comes, and the sailors have to feel their way around the ship: “The impenetrable blackness beset the ship so close that it seemed that by thrusting one’s hand over the side one could touch some unearthly substance.”

There is also a good deal here about the hidden motives of human behaviour. The odd reasons that some of the characters have for behaving as they do are gradually revealed. The shadow line itself is the line between youth and experience, we are told, but is it something more as well?

I feel that I cannot do justice to the depth and complexity of Conrad’s writing in a short piece like this. That’s not to say it’s a difficult read, though. I found it unputdownable and read it in a single sitting, despite having read it at least once before.

I think it’s a pity that so many people encounter Conrad’s writing first through Heart of Darkness, perhaps on an academic course. It’s not his easiest or most accessible work.

Knowing something of Conrad’s biography and the fact that English was actually his third language, you might think that the plainer style of the later works was a consequence of his becoming more familiar with the language.

Yet the short story An Outpost of Progress, the other fiction that came out of Conrad’s time in the Belgian Congo, was published in 1898, before Heart of Darkness and is written in a much more direct style. It’s certainly a good place to start with this extraordinary writer.

Unknown Assailant by Patrick Hamilton (#Gorse 3)

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Unknown Assailant (1955) is much shorter than Patrick Hamilton’s other two Gorse books, only some hundred pages in all. It is now 1930 and Gorse is masquerading as “The Honourable Gerald Claridge”. His plan this time is to defraud barmaid Ivy Barton of her savings, as well as relieving her father of a considerable sum of money by persuading him to invest in a musical play. No one is more aware than Gorse of how posing as a theatrical “insider” can awe and dazzle the gullible.

It is a bit like the outline of a story that was not quite finished. It lacks detail. For example we are never told quite how Gorse met Ivy or why he considered her a suitable victim. There are few of the long dialogue scenes that we find in the previous novel and not as much humour (although the scene where Gorse, as Claridge, and Mr Barton call each other “sir” is amusing). We are told about the hostile letters Mr Barton writes but they are not reproduced.

Despite these flaws it is an essential read for admirers of the first two books and contains much of interest. It is the simple-minded Ivy who comes closest to seeing what Gorse is up to and thwarting his plans.

Towards the end of Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, Hamilton had compared Gorse to an artist. He suggested that the ease of his success with Mrs Plumleigh-Bruce led Gorse to make the mistake of thinking that there were many other and richer women waiting to be defrauded in the same way. “. . Gorse was one who had to pay for the precocity of his youth in the most distasteful coin of premature middle age”.

Do I detect a sense of Gorse as a self-portrait of Hamilton on some level here? After all, Hamilton hit the jackpot early on in his writing career, with the success of his stage plays Rope and Gaslight, but never quite reached those heights of public acclaim again. Gorse is, after all, the same age that Hamilton would have been at the time the novel is set.

There are references throughout that novel to Gorse’s future. Near the beginning, Hamilton compares Gorse to several notorious English murderers. Although it is not stated directly, the implication is to become a nationally famous killer, ending up being executed. The name “Gorse” suggests that Hamilton may have modelled him on Neville Heath. Gorse’s later military impersonation may also refer to Heath, who did something similar.

Here, that idea is taken further by introducing quotations from two future biographers of Gorse. One of them refers to “his life-long habit of writing filthy anonymous letters and abandoning women with entirely gratuitous cruelty”. The other cites the Gorse cases from the earlier novels, as well as “The Haywards Heath dentist” and “The Rugby watchmaker”, for which Hamilton did not provide any further details.

By the time Hamilton wrote Unknown Assailant, his powers as a writer were on the wane, as a lifetime of excessive drinking caught up with him. It was to be his last published novel and there’s a sense that Gorse’s decline mirrors his own.

It’s as if Hamilton had realised that writing about a serial criminal would involve telling the same story over again. Gorse uses his car in the fraud against Ivy, simply because that is what he always had done, and it goes badly wrong for him.

There was obviously at least one more book about Gorse to be written but sadly Hamilton did not live to take Gorse into this imagined future. He died in 1962.

If you like the Gorse novels you might be interested in Patrick Hamilton’s radio play, Money with Menaces.

 

 

A Month in the Country by J L Carr

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J L Carr (1912–1994) was definitely not part of the London literary world. In 1967, he retired early from his job as a primary school headteacher and devoted the rest of his life to writing novels, and self-publishing small volumes from his home in Kettering, Northamptonshire.

His 1980 novel A Month in the Country was the nearest he came to mainstream success. It was nominated for the Booker prize and successfully filmed.

It’s an unusual novel by an unusual man. Carr manages to pack more into one hundred or so pages than many novels of twice or three times the length. There are a couple of references to that master of short, intense fiction, Joseph Conrad. It starts quietly but gains in emotional intensity as it proceeds to an ending that may make the reader reflect on their own life.

Set in 1920, it is the story of first world war veteran Tom Birkin’s stay in the Yorkshire village of Oxgodby. He has been hired to restore a fresco in the local church, long hidden under whitewash and the grime of centuries. In the next field, another ex-soldier, Moon, is working on an archaeological enquiry. Both men are damaged by their war experiences.

Birkin is the narrator and we only gradually realise just how damaged he is, both by the war and the problems in his marriage. We also slowly come to realise that he is looking back at the events he describes, and that they are in a distant past. For example, he laments the decline of the local dialect “because of comprehensive schools and the BBC”.

The conversation with Moon about growing old takes on significance as we realise that Birkin must be narrating this in the present day, where he is now quite elderly.

The novel is a portrait of life in the village at that time, with its division between Chapel and Church, as well as Londoner Birkin’s personal story of his stay in the north.

What is unusual is that the golden, long-lost summer is taking place after the great war and not before it. The timeless rhythms of rural life, and Birkin’s acceptance by the people in the village, are restorative for his troubled soul and the novel becomes, among other things, the story of his recovery.

There is a lot more here, though. The vicar’s wife asks Birkin if he believes in hell. Is hell the mediaeval furnace of demons that is revealed on the church wall? Or is it in this life, in the pain of a loveless marriage and the muddy carnage of Passchendaele? The novel rather confirms my mother’s view that the long decline of Christian belief in Britain started with the first world war. That war cast a long shadow.

The preoccupations here are the timeless ones of English poetry: memory, the passage of time, missed opportunity and the fleeting nature of human experience. Looking back, Birkin realises that his pastoral idyll was taking place at the very end of the horse era. A way of life was coming to a close, yet no-one knew it.

Underlying the romanticism is a hard-headed realism: “If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvellous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.”

 

 

What should I read during the lockdown?

The Good ReaderLeave a comment

I’ve seen a lot of articles lately, both in print and online, as to what we might read during the lockdown.  A lot of self-improving advice of the “now is the time to tackle Ulysses or In Search of Lost Time” sort. But then I have also seen quite a lot of people saying that, when it all started, they found their concentration affected, particularly when it came to fiction. I had that problem myself. It was as if the events going on in the real world made it impossible to live in an imaginary one.

What could possibly be the right sort of thing to read in these strange times that seem to create such an odd state of mind, I kept asking myself. Should I go for humour and escapism or no-holds-barred realism? In the end I decided I was over-thinking the whole question and stopped agonising about it. I would carry on with my unread pile, as usual. When that was done, I would pick an old favourite off the shelf and just see how I got on.

The unread pile was down to two. First was John Gardner’s James Bond continuation novel, Death is Forever, hugely enjoyable, expertly crafted escapism. Next up was Henry Williamson, and It Was The Nightingale, escapism of a different sort, into the rural North Devon of the 1920s.

Now it was time to look at the shelf. After several false starts, I settled on the Gorse Trilogy by Patrick Hamilton. I have written about these novels in more detail elsewhere. The combination of mordant humour and insights into the darker aspects of human nature seemed to hit exactly the right spot.

Around this time I heard a very interesting podcast on the subject of reading, with American academic Alan Jacobs. His basic idea is “reading by Whim” (note the upper case “W”), which comes from the American poet Randall Jarrell.

Reading should not be about laboriously working one’s way through a list of “great books”. It is not a box-ticking exercise. If one talks about “getting through” a book, one is in fact talking about wanting to have read the book, possibly to impress other people.

An alternative method of finding good books is to read the books that the authors you like had read themselves. This will eventually lead you back to the “great books”, but in a way that means more to you.

He also addressed the vexed question of whether or not you should finish a book if you are not getting much from it. It’s ok not to finish. It probably means that you are simply not the right reader for that book. (That made me feel much better about my inability to finish The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, despite having tried three times!) I think you could summarise this approach to reading as “one thing leads to another”.

I realised that in my own reading, one thing had been leading to another without my noticing it. The 1920s setting of Henry Williamson had perhaps reminded me of Patrick Hamilton’s rather different view of that same era.

I found myself drawn to a volume of Joseph Conrad’s short stories. Perhaps he popped back into my mind because his death is mentioned by Henry Williamson. Whatever it was that brought me to them, I have to say there is something about the mood and feel of these stories by Conrad that perfectly suits my current state of mind.

The life and death struggle with the ship that is first leaking, then burning in Youth; the decline into madness and death of the two lazy and incompetent traders in An Outpost of Progress; the plight of the central European emigrant, washed up on the beach in Kent to become an alien in a strange land in Amy Foster.

I have read Conrad all my life, but it’s as if I never truly understood what he was trying to tell us until now.

I think I have answered my own question. Conrad’s tales of the extremes of human experience in an indifferent world seem just right for where we find ourselves at the moment.