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!

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.

The Examined Life

Best book of the year so far is Stephen Grosz’s compilation of case stories from his thirty years as a psychotherapist, The Examined Life; How We Lose and Find Ourselves. Freud once wrote that he was surprised how his case histories read like short stories, which was a tad disingenuous but never mind. Grosz’s read like little parables, only wrapped around a moment of revelation or understanding, and the result is moving and enlightening.

Recounted with grace and clarity and mostly in the space of a few pages, the stories introduce us to a particular patient or occasionally a particular theme. There’s the patient in an affair with a married man who absolutely refuses to see that he will never commit to her, the widow lurching from one silly, pointless crisis to another as a way of distracting herself from her grief, the small boy who behaves as outrageously as he possibly can, spitting in the therapist’s face every session, the man who is boring as a subversive form of aggressing others. All life is here, in its misshapen splendour, and the beauty of every story is that we get to see these people through the compassionate eyes of Stephen Grosz. There’s neither pity nor irritation, simply sympathetic interest backed up by a razor sharp intelligence. When we reach the moment of higher understanding, when for instance, Grosz realises that the small boy’s spitting is designed to provoke his anger, because that anger tells them both that he can change, that he isn’t as permanently broken as both of them fear, it’s like the moment Kafka talks about, when the book is an axe for the frozen sea within us.

I often think that one of the fundamental goals of life is to be seen – and ideally accepted – exactly as we are. The point of therapy is to make us see and accept ourselves, but the lure of the therapist is wrapped up in the longing for someone else to do it. Indeed, in one of the stories, in which a man with HIV keeps falling asleep in his sessions, Grosz becomes aware that healing his patient is about holding him alive in his own mind. It’s easier for the man to accept the possibility of his death if he knows he lives on elsewhere. So, if one of our goals is to be seen properly by others and mentally held safe there, then one of our biggest basest fears is that our image will simply deteriorate in the minds of others, that they will fail to give us the benefit of the doubt, or their own anxieties and aggressions will deform or distort our true and constant portrait. For me, this is why psychotherapy is so fascinating: it shows us what we can really give one another that matters, and in its practice it shows us how these important things can so easily be bent out of shape or changed into some mutant version of their original, valuable intentions. Still considering this essential notion of being held in thought in other people’s minds, Grosz talks about paranoia and shows how it is used to ward off the altogether more painful belief that other people are actually completely indifferent to us. I suppose it’s a version of Oscar Wilde’s saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

There have been doubts expressed about the ethics of publishing case histories, even though it’s been common practice ever since psychotherapy began. But for anyone who worries about such things, there’s a little note at the back of the book in which Grosz explains that he sought permission from every patient he mentions and let them read the relevant part of the manuscript. I find a tear in my eye every time I read his comment that all were willing to share their experience, and most expressed a hope that their story would help others. This is the whole point of accepting that we are flawed, mistake-oriented creatures who often find supposedly simple things almost impossible to do: from this perspective, we are in touch with our humility. And humility breeds compassion. Both are absolutely essential for loving and being lovable. Everyone should read this book and feel it chip away any ice around their hearts, to let our admirable human capacity for love and compassion flow through.

 

The (Non)Sense of an Ending

Okay, so now I’ve finally read Julian Barnes’ Booker-winning novella, The Sense of an Ending, and understand what the fuss is all about. I should state upfront that I am not at all fond of stories that heavily anticipate a climactic ending with full closure and disclosure, only to leave the reader setting down the book and saying: ‘Eh? What happened there?’ So this leaves me in a quandary, as I am a big Barnes fan, and think of him generally as an exciting and unique author. Which of course he is. But I do think he got the Booker for this one in the way too many actors get Oscars, which is to say, they are generally deserving but have been pipped at the post by other people on other occasions.

Given that the only thing really worth talking about in this novella is the ending, I’m going to talk about it, but I promise to post large spoiler alerts when we get there. Essentially this is a tale of remorse and the vagaries of memory. Our narrator is a man in late middle age, looking back on his adolescence and the first serious love affair of his life. Whilst the first physical affair is with Veronica, his first true love is for Adrian, the serious, intelligent boy who joined his sixth form and took it by storm with the force of his mind. I would dearly love to give this book to all Mr Litlove’s friends from schooldays as I’m pretty sure they would recognise a perfect portrait of late male adolescence, all wit and bluster and camaraderie as a thin carapace over intolerable vulnerability. Anyway, the friends leave school and at university, Tony becomes involved with the prickly and difficult Veronica, enduring a wincingly awful weekend with her folks and of course, nowhere near enough sexual activity for his liking before they break up. It’s not long before Veronica is dating Adrian, and Tony has understandably mixed feelings about this. Decades pass, life happens (although not much life in Tony’s case), and then, divorced, alone but not discontent, he receives a strange letter from a solicitor telling him he is the recipient of a cash bequest from Veronica’s recently departed mother, and Adrian’s diary, which Veronica now has and proves distinctly unwilling to give him. Trying to get hold of this diary, Tony is forced to confront his past and go over the events from this distant time. It’s clear he’s involved, and not in a good way, with the tragedies that date from this era  – but how?

So, the story signals to us loud and clear that Tony is an unreliable narrator. He tells us repeatedly that his memory of certain events is hazy. He wasn’t sure what was going on half the time he was living it, so he certainly isn’t about to be clear now. The whole point of the novella is to show the reader that we can never be absolutely sure of the histories we tell ourselves, public or private, summed up in a quote that Adrian used to their history master, and which Tony repeats for emphasis:

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’

Okay, so the stage is set for us to be frustrated in the production of a reliable history, even as we may strain after one. However, what we also need to be clear about is that we know narrators are unreliable only because the story shows us they are. This is a very important point, or else we sink into narratorial anarchy, in which absolutely anything could be happening and the narrator is simply neglecting or refusing to tell the reader about it. That simply wouldn’t be fair, now, would it? No. So narrators are unreliable only to the extent that their unreliability is proved by what other people say or do, by the clues we are given, and by the events that unfold in consequence. I say all of this because there are so many wildly speculative opinions about what might have happened in this story that my main urge on reading about them was to quash a few with common sense.

Huge spoiler alert.

What we can be sure did NOT happen:

1. The child is Tony and Veronica’s. There is only one chronicled properly sexual encounter between the two of them and it is highly detailed. We know perhaps more than we would like to know about the protection used and its evident success. The main frustration Tony has with Veronica is that she’s not, ahem, succumbing to him more often, and so given that this is his main interest in the relationship, he’d tell us about other times if they existed. It’s a big thing for both of them that they only make love once.

2. The child is Tony’s with Veronica’s mother, Sarah. The only evidence evoked for this seems to be the description of two unrelated events, in which Sarah throws an imperfect fried egg in the bin, and Tony’s sperm is washed down the sink in his bedroom. The egg/sperm link seems hopelessly tenuous to me, and besides, both of these instances are gestures of waste, not creation. This reading assumes a huge omission on the part of Tony’s narrative, and this is not at all in keeping with the memory issues that the narrative presents. Tony tells us that when his emotions with regard to Veronica are coloured by their unpleasant break-up, he only remembers bad things about her. When he feels more fondly towards her, he recalls some nicer aspects of their relationship, like the time they danced together in his room. But the dancing is by no means a significant event – it is without consequence. Tony’s memory, like everyone’s, is affected by his present emotions, and so he may interpret differently according to the occasion. But he’s not leaving great big chunks of narrative out, like having sex with his girlfriend’s mother!

3. Veronica and Mary are two different people. I sort of like this because it’s so bonkers, but it is ridiculous. The only justification for this is Tony’s comment on seeing Veronica  ‘She somehow managed to look – to my eye – both twentyish and sixtyish at the same time’. That’s the palimpsest effect of memory, where traces of earlier times are just visible beneath the older surface, nothing more.

4. I believe I read hints of incest going about. I can’t even begin to deal with this it’s so wrong. Veronica’s family is portrayed as a perfectly ordinary, average family, and Tony suffers the way any teenage Romeo would, from the brother’s indifference, the father’s awkward joshing and the mother’s misplaced sympathy. Tony’s experience is intended to evoke Everyman’s – his is a common fate, not an extraordinary one. That is, after all, the whole problem with his life – nothing has ever really happened in it.

So what DID happen?

I refer you back to the quotation about history that gets repeated for good measure to make sure it’s hammered into the reader’s brain. We cannot know for sure. The documents are inadequate, the memories imperfect. We can’t solve this story like a puzzle because we’ve been warned from the start that we’ll be lacking the right pieces. But Tony does go through a sort of rite of passage, in which he realises that people’s emotional lives are far more complicated than he wanted to think. He is forced to recognise his callousness and lack of emotional literacy across his life; he knows he’s avoided as much real feeling as he possibly could in the name of self-protection. And he is obliged to accept the inconvenient truth that his baser actions, which he would like to forget and cover up, did have consequences. But Tony’s problem has always been that he interprets through his emotions – he’s too locked into himself to have any wiser perspective. So the guilt he feels by the end is reflected in all sorts of mild events – Veronica’s anger with him, the child-man’s dislike of him, Margaret’s abandonment of him. They could all be explained by reference to what’s actually happening in the lives of those people; Tony might still be as irrelevant as fate has made him thus far. But it’s only the sense of his own guilt that gives him a right to any centrality in the story he tells.

Sure, the story invites speculation, but it also frustrates it, too. Because stories are always that – a shapely construct that knits together events as if they were causally related. Perhaps they are, perhaps they are not. It’s the only awkward and insufficient truth that Julian Barnes allows us.

Finally, if you would like to see some of those speculations about the ending, hop over to the hugely talented Andrew Blackman’s blog post on The Sense of an Ending – Explained which is also a masterclass in how to conduct a lengthy, varied and extremely good-natured literary discussion.