The Good Reader

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.