The Girl In Berlin

So it’s spy novels all this week and first up is a very classy example of the genre indeed, Elizabeth Wilson’s The Girl in Berlin. Set in 1951, in the period of confusion and mistrust that followed the disappearance of two British spies, Burgess and Maclean it’s a novel about ambiguity and about how hard it is to distinguish friends from enemies.

Colin Harris is a Communist sympathiser who has returned unexpectedly from Berlin to visit his old friends, Alan and Dinah Wentworth (who just happens to work at the Courtauld for Anthony Blunt). Colin has a murky past with a murder trial from which he escaped free but besmirched, and his presence in the UK is a cause for suspicion amongst the authorities. In a sense they’re right; Colin has fallen in love with a German, Frieda Schroder, who he wants to marry and bring back with him, and Frieda is not at all what she seems. But at the same time, Colin is a bit of a pathetic character, an idealist without clout, clumsy and awkward, the sort of person who always gets on the wrong side of others without really meaning to.

Jack McGovern is a member of Special Branch who is tasked to find out what Colin is up to by a real spy, the suave and enigmatic Miles Kingdom. This isn’t really Jack’s sort of thing, though he’d like it to be. He’s a straight man, ethical and honest and – clearly working without enough information from his mentor – completely out of his depth. Before long, Colin Harris has managed to put himself in a compromising situation. He is seen with a German defector, a scientist with a tell-all autobiography in his hands, and only a few hours after this sighting, the corpse of the scientist is found. Soon Kingdom is sending McGovern out to Berlin and into a hotbed of dangerous characters, who seem to be playing both sides for fools. The only people he likes and feels he can trust are Colin and Frieda; is he making a dreadful mistake?

So this is the kind of spy novel, reminiscent of le Carré, in which we move in a fog of uncertainty, unsure who is trustworthy, wondering what everyone is up to. Jack is a plucky amateur, trying to play with the big boys as if he were a professional, and putting his life on the line as a result. The narrative juggles a number of intertwined plot threads and quite a large cast of characters with elegance, and the writing is sharp and atmospheric. My only criticism is that the subplot with the Wentworths, who are both beautifully drawn characters, doesn’t quite shine the way it might. But when the pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place, finally, I had nothing but admiration for this clever, engaging novel. I thought it had an excellent denouement, the best of the novels I read for this week, horrifying, harsh and plausible.

One final note: this is a literary novel, a modern piece of noir fiction and reads much better as such; I wouldn’t suggest this is the kind of book to take on a beach. But it really repays careful attention and I’ll certainly be reading her two previous novels on the strength of it.

Ten Reasons We Love Spies

1. The original meaning of the word spy comes from the ancient Chinese and means ‘a chink’, ‘a crack’ or a ‘crevice’. Hence the iconic image of spying – the eyeball peering through a gap, seeing what is not meant to be seen. Transgressive viewing, voyeurism, finding out other people’s secrets… spying justifies what might otherwise be seen as naughty and wrong. Perhaps because we believe that what is best hidden is most vital and true.

2. This was why in the 19^th century the spy was considered someone disreputable and shameful. It was not a gentleman’s profession. The twentieth century changed all that – partly because it embraced the antihero, along with the general disgracefulness of humankind, and partly because spying was rehabilitated as heroic, as the cult of the individual grew and grew.

3. There’s a spectrum of spying with James Bond at one end of the scale, the glamourous maverick hero, who is reckless but reliably successful, and at the other the sort of dreary, tedious and dispiriting work undertaken by some of Graham Greene’s chaps, where being flawed and mistaken and often drunk has its own seedy appeal. So we have every flavour of spy now, to identify with or fantasise about.

4. Spying celebrates disguise, dissimulation, deviousness and cunning, as well as the necessity of going ‘beyond’ the limits of the law, which is understood to be insufficiently protective or too slow in its workings. The spy embodies the duality in the human heart, combining the instinct for political responsibility and the instinct to hide from authority. And if it all works out, s/he gets to be rewarded for any successes whilst remaining anonymous and unpunished for crimes committed. These are the advantages of being a spy.

5. But there are disadvantages: a spy is never fully innocent, just as their situations are never transparent. S/he is called upon to negotiate complex events where right and wrong are not easy to discern, and might not be known until much later on. Ends justify means, and powerful negative emotions may be provoked by deceit and betrayal at every turn. Spies suffer a lot, both physically and emotionally, and paranoia isn’t an illness for them but a necessity.

6. Spies can give us a lovely sense of schadenfreude – how close we may have come to international disaster! How our lives may have been threatened! Only we never knew because someone was working silently and fearlessly for our protection. The greater the threatened danger, the greater our readerly comfort.

7. Spies are so good for stories because nothing in their circumstances may be as it seems, and yet everything is thick with potential meaning (codes are a fine example). We are drawn into a web of surmise and interpretation that may well be misguided, and yet lives depend upon it. Intelligence alone is not sufficient – the spy will need flair and luck, some sort of semi-mystical ring of protection in order to suvive.

8. In the spy story all the ordinary certainties are challenged – identity, truth, loyalty, patriotism. But nothing is destroyed. Instead: hello conspiracy theory! The implication is that below or beyond the obvious but deceitful structures lie deeper, disguised ones that are more efficient, more effective and much stronger. How awful to think that no one was in control and nothing was organised! Never fear – the spy will take us to that deeper level where the ultimate goodies and baddies reside.

9. As information becomes ever more cloaked in secrecy and harder to get hold of, so technology comes to rescue us with ever more miraculous inventions. Spies tell us just how much we love gadgets, and how much faith we have in them.

10. The 21^st century is proving to be the era of the female spy. Some novels explore the idea of the ruthless female, others challenge feminine innocence and gentleness and put love and loyalty on trial. All the novels I’ve read or read about are set in the past, when women were invisible because they were considered not just harmless, but useless. What a foolish error!

Crime in Brief

The Cutting Season – Attica Locke

Belle Vie is a gorgeous antebellum mansion, restored to its former glory and now the site of weddings and conferences, displaying its authentically renovated slave cabins to hoardes of tourists. But when a migrant worker is found buried in a shallow grave with her throat slit, a woman from the other side of the fence where a large and soullest corporation farms corn, the old stories of rich and poor, powerful and oppressed rise again in modern configurations. Caren Gray is the black single mother charged with the somewhat ironic task of managing the estate and grounds, a job that has even more layers of history for her as she grew up in the servants’ quarters when her mother was the cook, and can trace her roots back to one of the original slave labourers, a man named Jason whose attempts to leave the plantation were shrouded in mystery. With so many layers of time and guilt surrounding the events that take place, Attica Locke does a tremendous job of unravelling her complex plot with pace and lucidity. In fact the whole thing is so neat and tidy it seems to run on rails, and as events sort themselves out, the parallels between past and present become uncannily clear. This is such a good book, rich with its themes and characters, beautifully written, and consistently gripping. Is it a little bit too tidy? Well, maybe, but not if you like all your loose ends tied at the conclusion to a story.

Revenge of the Tide – Elizabeth Haynes (Dark Tide in the US)

Genevieve Shipley is living out her dream of life on a houseboat in a quiet and companionable marina in Kent, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that she has paid a great deal for her peace and freedom. The first boatwarming party she throws ends with the gruesome discovery, in the small hours of the morning, of a body floating off the pontoon, and worst of all, Genevieve knows who she is and doesn’t want to say. Caddy is a friend from her old life in London, one that was split between a day job she hated in executive sales, and a nightlife that gave her more kicks than she bargained for as a pole dancer in an exclusive club. Genevieve took the job because she had discovered a talent for dancing, and it’s somewhere she can make a lot of money, fast. But when her two lives collide and her opportunist boss turns up at the club, she realises she will have to take on a job that’s just the wrong side of legal, if she’s to make good her escape. The story unfolds in the present as the investigation into Caddy’s death finds her fending off law enforcers from both the police and from the criminal underworld, and gradually what happened in the past, and the circumstances that brought her to the boat and into danger are revealed. I read this more or less in the course of one day when I was tired and wanted a rest, and I really enjoyed it. It’s well written and surprisingly compelling, and the different atmospheres of the marina and the London club are vividly evoked. It’s not Tolstoy, it’s a little obsessed with Genevieve’s romantic life, and nowhere near as clever and literary as The Cutting Season. But I hunkered down with it most satisfactorily.

Through A Glass, Darkly – Helen McCloy

A vintage crime thriller, based in an exclusive girl’s school and involving supernatural doppelgangers – really, what’s not to like? Faustina Crayle, thin, anemic and a bit pathetic is distressed to be summoned to the headmistress and abruptly dismissed, only a few weeks into the autumn term. When she presses her for a reason, formidable battleaxe, Mrs Lightfoot (‘Heavyhoof’ to the girls) refuses to say more than that she creates a disturbing atmosphere and for the sake of the school she must go. Faustina runs to her only friend, another new teacher, the delightfully named Gisela von Hohenems, who just happens to have an attachment to psychologist-come-detective, Dr Basil Willing. The story gradually comes out that Faustina has been causing hysteria amongst the servants and the young impressionable girls by appearing to be in two places at once. Even stolid and unshakeable Mrs Lightfoot gets the wind up when Faustina’s shadow brushes by her on the stairs as the original calls to her from the very top of them. Faustina’s exit from the school is thought to be the end of the matter, but before long a suspicious death takes place, and an eye-witness swears the culprit is Faustina, who was most definitely two hours away in New York at the time. Oh this was a period piece of fun, with gloriously old-fashioned speculation about the possibility of repressed emotion being projected into a malevolent double, Basil throwing his weight around manfully and aristocratically, and references to Goethe, who apparently had a double himself. But it’s beautifully plotted, consistently intriguing, and ends with just the right amount of ambiguity (though not for readers who like everything cut and dried – read The Cutting Season instead). From Arcturus Crime who has recently published a series of classic crime from the forties and fifties.

Winner and Mini Reviews

And the winner of William Boyd’s Waiting for Sunrise is: Ruthiella!

I was very unscientific – I wrote all the names on slips of paper and pulled one out of a bag. I’m terribly impressed by the bloggers who know how to do that random number generator thing, but it is quite beyond me. Ruthiella, if you could email me with your address, I’ll pop the book in the post for you.

Well, I struggle along here, still plagued by anxiety but practising, practising ways to live with it. I am as fastidious as a cat over my emotional life, it seems, and I do not appreciate the current state of messiness. But still, I’ve been reading Harriet Lerner’s excellent book, The Dance of Fear, which I warmly recommend to other anxiety sufferers. She suggests we bring as much patience, curiosity and good humour as possible to bear on the situation, and I liked that list of qualities. I’m also reading Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won’t Stop Talking and finding it almost painful in its accuracy. But I’ll review that properly another day. And finally, I’m listening to The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope, which after a slow start I’m loving. So much plotting and manipulating, so many schemes and intrigues! I think the literature of the 19^th century was designed to be listened to.

I realised there were a few books I’d read in recent weeks that I should review in brief: First off, P. D. James’ A Mind to Murder. Adam Dalgliesh is managing to survive the publication party for his latest book of poems when he’s called away to investigate a murder at the psychiatric clinic over the road. The office manager, an overbearing spinster with a stiffly starched code of morals, has been found stabbed through the heart. This is a very classic crime novel, in which we are introduced to a selection of suspicious folk connected to the clinic as doctors, nurses and administrators, whilst Dalgleish does his thing with the usual elegance and panache (though he makes a fair few mistakes in this one). I find I read P. D. James for the excellent ordinariness of her prose. She is not a lyric writer, nor a quirky one, nor one with an eye for a felicious turn of phrase. But every sentence is neatly turned and well crafted, the events follow one another with satisfying causality, characters are evoked with precision and insight and the whole zips along on its well-oiled rails with pleasing orderliness. I was surprised to note how old this novel is – first published 1963 – as it doesn’t feel it, apart perhaps from a few rather old-fashioned treatments at the clinic. Another advantage of that resolute ordinariness may be this timeless quality.

Martin Davies’ The Year After is a very recent publication, although it harks back in time to the end of WW1. It’s Christmas, 1919 and Tom Allen has just been demobbed. Uncertain what to do with himself in a mournful London, he accepts an invitation to visit Hannesford Court, the home of the Stansbury family with whom he was very friendly before the war broke out. The Stansbury clan were one of those starry families, rich, sociable, blessed. Tom had fancied himself in love with the oldest daughter, Margot, although he had not been in the charmed circle surrounding the eldest son, Harry. He had been a hanger-on, a marginalized member of the happy-go-lucky group, invited for his reliable good manners. Now, Harry is dead, as is his best friend, Julian, who was Margot’s husband. The eldest surviving son, Reggie, a difficult, temperamental young man, is in a convalescent home with horrific injuries. So the Hannesford Court that Tom returns to is, inevitably, not the same as before, even if making valiant attempts to resemble its former glory. This is partly a romance, and partly a mystery story, as Tom tries to find out what happened to a German guest at the Summer Ball before the start of the war. I thought this sounded just the ticket when I picked it up – country house novel, family secrets, hidden crimes – but the elements fail to cohere. It suffers from being not quite enough of anything, and the mystery in particular is a bit limp, given that Tom is returning from the horrors of the First World War against which a small domestic incident pales somewhat. It is quite a nice meditation on the difficulties of picking up life again, after the trauma of the war, and Martin Davies is a very good evocative writer. But it was all a bit meh, alas.

If you want to write a first person narrative, then look no further than Raymond Chandler. The High Window was the first Philip Marlowe novel I read and Chandler is every bit as brilliant as people say. Marlowe is called to the home of Elizabeth Murdock, a bitter and contemptuous old woman who is still trying to call the shots in her wayward family. It turns out that an heirloom has gone missing, a very valuable coin called the Brasher Dubloon, and Mrs Murdock suspects the nightclub-singer wife of her son, a starlet who rejoices in the name of Linda Conquest. This is a very convenient suspicion, as Linda has recently separated from her husband and disappeared, and it suits Mrs Murdock to throw the blame outside the walls of the family fortress. But of course, as soon as Marlowe goes digging, the bodies pile up and the quarry comes ever closer to home. It’s not just that the prose is fantastic – and it is – it’s what Chandler does with it that’s so clever. Every sentence moves the story along, adds to the characterisation of Marlowe, and says something about the action and the time. I loved the way that this supposedly badass private eye is shown to be so tender in his human sympathies by the way he reacts to the people he comes across. There’s a fine ethical conscience at work, sifting the bad guys from the unlucky ones. Well, they’re called modern classics for a reason, and if there isn’t such a term as Golden Age Noir, there ought to be, and Chandler could wear the crown and the sash.