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.

Severe

Well, this is a book that will divide its audience! When I was first offered a copy of Severe for review and saw the cover with its high heels and whips and wads of banknotes, I thought it best to do some strenuous research first, to make sure it wasn’t a Fifty Shades bandwagon novel. And in fact, far from it, this is a very literary novel indeed. Its genesis is rather fascinating as it’s based on a true story. In 2009, Régis Jauffret covered a scandalous murder trial for Le Nouvel Observateur. One of the richest men in France, the banker Édouard Stern, had been found shot dead in his luxurious Geneva apartment wearing a full latex suit, and the accused was his mistress, Cécile Brossard. The novel Jauffret wrote was based on the facts of this case – the sadomasochistic extramarital sex, Brossard’s futile flight to Australia in the aftermath of the crime, and her jail sentence, but in a preface to the story he insists that the reader tread carefully – authors of fiction are known to lie while telling the truth. With this little sophism out of the way, he put together a novel that was astute enough to provoke the Stern family to seek an injunction against publication.

Straight off the bat, then, we’ve got ourselves an interesting question of ethics. Is it right to publish a novel based so closely on a crime that’s painful to those still living? Or is it preferable to cite the need for free speech, when the Stern family who are immensely wealthy, may want to cover up misdeeds and wrongdoing that are better out in the open? Is it possible that Jauffret, as an insightful writer, might simply hit on truths that go deeper than intended because he has followed the emotional logic of the crime and made an imaginative leap into the darkness beyond it?

In any case, this is not a novel to titillate or entertain. Beyond the hints and oblique references to a world of distinctly kinky practices, there is nothing here that would upset a maiden aunt (whom I always imagine to be made of pretty stern stuff anyway). The novel stays within the somewhat confused and chaotic thoughts of the (unnamed) mistress as she makes her getaway bid, seeking oblivion in champagne, pills and the neutral, comfortless zone of air travel, but unable to prevent her mind from roaming back over the events of her relationship. The novel is subtitled ‘a love story’, only it’s the love story of two deeply damaged people, and as such the love is damaged and disturbing. Our narrator is a woman with a background of desperate abuse, and so attachment inevitably goes hand in hand with hatred and aggression. She works part-time as a call girl until she hits the jackpot in her rich banker. She becomes his ‘sexual secretary’ providing all the personal services he requires, but falls in love with him too, a sort of unstable, insecure longing to be essential to him. She has a husband, but he’s a straw man in the background, willing to go along with anything she does to earn money.

And it’s the money that’s the sticking point. Our narrator has managed to get a million dollars out of her lover, who has thought twice about it and taken it back. The narrator knows that the money is the best representation of his love that she’ll ever own, and so her fury at being deprived of it shouldn’t be read as purely mercenary in our normal understanding of the term. In fact the narrative repeatedly asks us to rethink all sorts of normal definitions, prime among them the idea of ‘love’, which is not soft and cuddly here, but cold, harsh, bleak and violent. Equally we’re asked to reconsider the notions of ‘victim’ and ‘killer’ as well as that of ‘responsibility’. Our narrator is aware that her lover is in all sorts of trouble with the wrong kind of people, and that his life is in danger from a variety of directions, not least of which is death by his own hand.

I relieved him of a life that was as brilliant and dark as the finish on his coffin. It was a predator’s life, and his cynicism earned him the admiration of the financial press, swift to kneel before the crooks who lubricate their speculative capitalism, just as peasants used to kneel before their manure-producing pig. If victims were the ones being judged, they would often be given harsher sentences than their killers.’

Oh this is such a French novel. I read it in translation, but I’d be interested to know how much of it appears in the passive voice, the voice that American word processing programs will underline as a grammatical error (Strunk and White say firmly that it is important to know who is responsible at all times). In the dislocated, grieving, paranoid mind of the narrator, responsibility is a very moot point indeed. There’s inevitably a touch of the unreliable narrator here, as our narrator’s thought processes are under extreme strain and clearly not orthodox at the best of times. But what I found most impressive and also most alienating in the novel is its refusal to give us the conventional comfort of explanation. At the furthest outskirts of human behaviour, Jauffret is content to let the irrational, the incoherent and the inexplicable stand, just as they are. And that, I think, will offend readers a great deal more than any sadomasochistic practices. But it’s also the most ethical part of the story.

(I should add that it’s recently been made into a film entitled Une histoire d’amour.)