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!

The Song of Achilles

For the larger part of the Orange-Prize-winning Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, I wondered whether I was reading the same book as everyone else. I’d seen nothing but glowing reviews about how wonderful it was, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was reading an – admittedly very well written – YA novel. If I’d had a teenage daughter, I’d have been pressing it into her hands. And I admit I was a bit concerned that a prize for women’s fiction had been given to a retelling of the Iliad that took a war-mongering masculine classic and domesticated it into a rather soppy love story. But happily my experience was redeemed by the last 50 pages, when the emotional train wreck Miller has been working up to coincides with the magnificent awfulness of the Iliad. Those last 50 pages were about as powerful as anything I’d ever read, though they are a bit of a sobfest. But still. In a story where honor is so very important, I was relieved that honor was restored to this version by the end.

So The Song of Achilles is actually about Patroclus, an exiled prince who becomes Achilles’ lover and steadfast companion. Patroclus is an awkward sort, a geeky, gangly boy who’s not much good at games and lingers on the edge of life, alienated. When he kills a boy by sheer accident, he is cast off by his parents and sent to the small island of Phthia, whose king, Peleus, is known for taking in orphans and training them up for his army. His son is the half-god Achilles, a fearless, golden youth to whom everything comes easy, and who knows he is destined to be Aristos Achaion, the greatest fighter among the Greeks. By a small miracle (for Patroclus) the two become friends, though Achilles’ mother, the sea goddess Thetis, is against it from the start. She is an over-possessive, overbearing mother with the divine power to back it up. But luck favours the pair, who are sent to Chiron’s crystal cave in the mountains for training, a place protected by the centaur’s divinity from Thetis’s intruding gaze. Here, they grow into young men and become lovers. When Helen is stolen by Paris and taken to Troy, Thetis intervenes, hiding Achilles away in the hope she can prevent him from fighting in the war and fulfilling the prophecy (which comes with a galling sub-clause, as prophesies tend to do). But Patroclus finds him, and before long the Greek kings do, as well. The Iliad will not be denied, after all.

Well, so far it’s been like a really good episode of Hollyoaks or Dawson’s Creek. The reader is invited to cast the young Brad Pitt in her mind’s eye as Achilles, with someone slightly scary like Cher for Thetis. Hmm, a gorgeous young man who looks marvellous in a tunic, with a domineering mother to whom he is too bound…. Is it just me, or does that invite a certain stereotype of homosexuality? And poor old Patroclus is the misfit loner of this particularly glamourous high school. The real mystery – of why Achilles should fall in love with him at all – is left entirely enigmatic. I desperately wanted there to be a reason, some quality that Patroclus could call his own, but he’s stuck with the girl’s part of embodying nurture and devotion. I can’t figure out if that’s a win for political correctness or not.

However, once the war gets going, the tone becomes darker and more serious and some necessary growing-up is done, by Patroclus if not by Achilles. I won’t give any more details away, but the ending is absolutely heart wrenching. I’d been worried for so long with this novel that it would be about nothing but a love affair. And that seemed thin and insubstantial when compared to the heavyweight Iliad, which is about why we live and why we die, and honor and pride and sacrifice and tragedy, and so much else. But by the end, love had taken its proper place, as the best and the worst reason for acts of heroism. And that did seem like a worthy union of a feminine perspective and a deeply masculine tale.

In Praise of ‘Difficult’ Novels

What makes a novel difficult? Well, just about anything that doesn’t conform to the conventional unfolding of plot and character. And yet the whole point of convention is to produce a book that tricks us, that we can read as if it weren’t a book at all but an alternate reality into which we had slipped. ‘Easy’ books hide their very bookishness with artifice and illusion, and the reader willingly accepts being duped. You could think of a book, then, as being to life what a dream is to a waking state. We know we are dreaming, but the experience is so uncannily life-like and intriguing that we forget. So-called ‘difficult’ books are like lucid dreams, into which a different level of consciousness intrudes; we are made aware of the fact of dreaming, aware that this is not the same as reality, aware of the constructed and arbitrary nature of the whole experience. And why would we want to encounter this supposed ‘difficulty’? Because being aware of the hidden truth of creativity makes it even richer and more intriguing than before.

J.R. Crook’s beguiling novella, Sleeping Patterns, is one of the most original little experiments in fiction that I’ve come across in a while and the strangest hopscotch of a love story. It’s dedicated to the memory of the author, J. R. Crook, who is, never fear, alive and kicking. And then introduced by one of the principle characters, Annelie Strandli, known mostly in the narrative as Gretha. She has received the following narrative through the post, in chapters that have been shuffled like a deck of cards into the wrong order. This (dis)order is maintained, though the numbered chapters give the reader a clue as to whereabouts in the chronology of the story we are.

The location is a student hall of residence in South London, where the Finnish Gretha has come to study, leaving her boyfriend, Gunnar, behind her. She becomes curious about a shy, withdrawn student, Berry Walker, who is an insomniac and an aspiring writer. With the help of her friend, Jamie Crook, she manages to steal into his room occasionally to filch pages of a work in progress out of his desk drawer. The manuscript pages tell the parable of Boy One and his friend Boy Two, who are in early adolescence. Boy One is a dreamer who cannot help falling asleep in lessons, much to the rage of his teacher and despite his friend’s attempts to keep him awake. But Boy One believes in the power of dreams to tell a different kind of story, and one more significant than that contained in the real world. He’s encouraged and abetted in this by the cranky prophet who runs the sweetshop, and whose crazy philosophies entice him. Is this, then, the prequel to Berry Walker’s appearance in Gretha’s life, is it his fictionalised backstory? Does it explain his inability to sleep and the importance Gretha holds for him?

Gretha eagerly pores over the pages she discovers, avidly seeking for the meaning they contain, just as the readers of Sleeping Patterns are obliged to search out small details in the mixed-up chapters of the narrative in order to orient themselves in the events of the story. Mimicking the disrupted sleeping patterns of Berry Walker, the unfolding narrative is broken up and scattered. Both inside the story and from the reader’s perspective we begin to question what’s real and what’s fictional, and to find different sorts of patterns to help us. The story itself is not complicated, and the language is pure and simple, so this is not a book that confuses, despite its structure. But it does give the reader the strange experience of watching the mind scurry about putting the bits of the puzzle together again, trying them out in different orders, waiting to pounce on a useful clue. Everything is resolved with the arrival of the final chapter (placed last in the book, as well) and given a surprising and yet satisfying twist. At this point the elements of narrative slot into place like bullets in a chamber. But having the story in place only gives rise to a whole new layer of interpretation. Who loved and who was the beloved? Who was writing and who was reading?

Sleeping Patterns draws for inspiration from the theory of Roland Barthes who wrote an essay entitled ‘The Death of the Author’. In it, he argued that meaning was in the hands of the reader, and that searching for authorial intention, as critics had previously done, was futile. The ‘death’ of Jamie Crook that opens the novel is a neat salute to Barthes and a clever way of showing the reader how the theory works, rather than telling it. But you don’t need to know anything about literary theory to enjoy this novel; you just have to go with the flow, keep your wits about you, and be ready to take up your changing and evolving place in the dance of readers circling around the eviscerated fragments of J. R. Crook’s cunning story.

Warning: I Am Upset

Well, college has done it again. I went in on Wednesday, thinking to have a look at my room and to figure out how best to pack it up, only to be met by one of the heads of Housekeeping, very embarrassed and apologetic on my behalf. They’d been given the order to clear my room, and all my stuff was now boxed up in the storage rooms. If they wanted the room for someone else (as a stiff little note informed me later on that same day) then why on earth didn’t they just ask me? I’d have cleared it out, and been able to send a mountain of documents for shredding and another to be thrown away, all of which would have been easier than having to do it at home (I have twenty boxes arriving in the college van this afternoon!). And it would have been a chance to say goodbye at some level. I feel like there’s a dignified way of doing this, but college is determined to be as clumsily punitive as possible.

I realise that I need to back up a bit here and fill you in on what’s happened so far this year. Early in January, I cracked and wrote to the Master, as I still hadn’t heard a word from college, no letter, no email, I’d even received a pay slip for the princely sum of £7 (what for, I have no idea). Mr Litlove and I had consulted a lawyer, but she wasn’t much help. She was very unwilling to deal with college, as the university is a law unto itself pretty much, and usually gets its way in the end. I would have walked out after two minutes, but Mr Litlove is made of much sterner stuff, and he kept insisting there must be some way we could signal our displeasure and sense of injustice. In the end, she remembered that we could instigate a grievance procedure. So when I wrote to the Master, I said that this was something I could do, although of course I would prefer not to. After about five weeks, he replied with a very conciliatory letter. This was nothing to do with my work, indeed the college would be very happy for me to continue to provide study support – only it had to be at the level of a College Teaching Associate, not as a Fellow. He was trying to big up the CTA position, saying some other Fellow had chosen it as a route. But the point, I guess, is that he chose it. By having the Fellowship taken away I had lost my research grant (£2,000 over two years), my book grant (£400 a year) and my medical insurance. I wouldn’t even have a pigeonhole in college any more. Not to mention the drop in status. The positions are not at all comparable, although the law doesn’t recognise the loss of a Fellowship, alas, so in providing some sort of alternative, no matter how shabby, the college had more or less covered itself.

Well, I admit I sat on this for a bit. Mr Litlove was all for me making a fuss, asking them to put together a proper proposal for a job that would show me how I’d make up the lost money and so on. But I knew I wasn’t going back. And eventually I wrote the Master a brief note, saying that I did not want the CTA role, and explaining why, and then wishing the college the best for the future and generally being my polite-beyond-all-reason self. A few weeks before I wrote this, I actually received a plaintive email from a student I’d seen last year, asking if she could come again. It cost me to turn her down, as I hate knowing that someone is suffering whom I could help. But yet again it proved that no one knows about this; there’s been no announcement, nothing in the council minutes. I suppose they didn’t really tell the students in the first place that I existed, so it’s no surprise if they don’t inform them I’m no longer there. They just want me to disappear, and transparency doesn’t come into it; they couldn’t come out of this looking good, after all. Then this morning, I heard back from the Master (it’s about a fortnight after I wrote), just three lines thanking me for the work I’ve done and wishing me the best for the future. Is it wrong to feel this is too little too late?

I’m considering writing an article about what’s happened for the THES, I suppose – I’ve never written for a newspaper before and don’t know how best to approach the subject. But is this unreasonable of me? I feel I’ve lost my ethical bearings, and I know my general sense when wounded is to feel that I’m probably at fault. Although I’m not. And I don’t want to go back. All I wanted was for there to be some sort of nice, mutually respectful severing of ties, which it seems I am not to get.

Anyway, on a different note entirely, let me draw your attention to the way in which I’m moving forward from all this, with an article of mine that’s just come out in Open Letters Monthly about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a woman who had a great deal more to complain of than I have. In fact I became interested in her after reading her gorgeous book, Gift from the Sea, a gently feminist philosophical exploration of women’s lives and how they might be lived better, which is as relevant today as it was when it was written 60 years ago. Once I’d realised the author of the book was the same Anne Morrow Lindbergh who had had her son kidnapped and murdered, I became very curious to know how she had managed to produce such a beautiful, reparative, reconciliatory work after all she had suffered. And then that took me to the Lindbergh marriage, which proved to be a fascinating piece of biographical history. Well, please do pop over to OLM and read some of the other wonderful articles available there, too.