Tim Binding’s 2005 novel, Man Overboard, is the story of the World War 2 frogman, Commander Lionel Crabb, who disappeared, presumed drowned, during a mission to spy on a Russian cruiser in Portsmouth harbour in 1956.
The unauthorised dive caused a political furore at the time, as the Russian ship was carrying Kruschev on an official visit to the UK. There has been much speculation over the years as to what really happened. A headless and handless corpse that washed up some months later in Chichester harbour was identified by the Coroner and buried as Crabb, but his widow insisted that it couldn’t have been him.
It’s been suggested that he was killed by the Russians, or captured and brainwashed by them. This fictionalised account of his life offers an alternative solution to the enduring mystery, which is unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved in our lifetime, as the relevant documents are not due to be made public for many years.
Crabb himself is the narrator of a comparatively short book, written in an intense and poetic prose, with suitably watery imagery. There is an awful lot packed into its 244 pages. Without giving too much away, Crabb looks back in old age from a sanatorium somewhere behind the iron curtain. He did not die beneath the murky, cold waters of Portsmouth harbour.
We get a clear picture of the sort of man Crabb is: Conservative, patriotic, royalist, religious and fatalistic. Yet he is a strange, dual personality, who needs to belong and yet somehow be an outsider at the same time. He is not one of those who believed in a better world to come after the war. It is the revelation of the Katyn forest killings that makes him realise the true nature of Russian communism.
He finds himself out of sympathy with what post-war England has become (“a land of buff-coloured envelopes”), but then he was always something of a square peg in a round hole. Although he didn’t know it, he was a man searching for something. He found his element, in every sense, when he first dived under the water in Gibraltar harbour. On your first dive, you feel as though you “have walked through a magic mirror or travelled in time”, as he puts it.
There is a touch of the visionary about him, but he undercuts his musings with a curt “lot of rot, probably”. His clipped, slightly old-fashioned language with its colourful slang seems completely appropriate for a man of his generation.
In Italy, clearing mines from the canals of Venice, he finds the catholic church and almost marries an Italian girl, but shies away at the last moment. His hesitant relations with women are something of a recurring problem. He is not gay, but oddly reticent about sex, prudish about lower-deck language. He finally seems to have found the right woman, who enjoys the pub and club life of London as much as he does, when circumstances, or rather Crabb’s patriotic devotion to duty, force them apart.
Many historical figures walk through the pages of this novel, such as Kruschev and Yuri Gagarin. Several names are familiar from spy scandals of the period; Anthony Blunt pops up from time to time and towards the end, Greville Wynne, businessman and part-time agent appears. Gordon Lonsdale and Peter Kroger, members of the Portland Spy Ring, are skilfully woven into the story. Sidney Knowles, Crabb’s wartime diving partner appears under his own name. However, Nicholas Elliott, who we now know to have been Crabb’s MI6 handler, is turned into the completely fictional “Smithy”, for reasons that become clear by the end.
There is no author’s note, so it is not clear what sources Tim Binding may have used to create his portrait of Crabb. I found myself wondering if he himself has underwater experience. Crabb does allude to the feature film that was made, The Silent Enemy, and also the biography by Marshall Pugh, both of which appeared after his presumed death.
Crabb’s wartime exploits in Gibraltar, the underwater battle with the Italian frogmen, are generally considered to have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, Bond’s underwater mission to plant a limpet mine on the hull of the motor launch in the earlier Live and Let Die also owes something to Crabb. I assume that Fleming, as a senior official in Naval Intelligence during World War 2, knew all about Crabb’s adventures before the general public did.
Recent events mean that the passage where Crabb is told about the Russians’ development of an underwater special forces unit seems strangely contemporary. But then Crabb tells us that “The England you know was made in the fifties and the rest of the world too”.
I enjoyed this book hugely when it came out, and found more in it on a recent re-reading. It is a powerful and haunting novel that deserves to be better known.
The Good Reader 