THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD is the victim of its many imitators. It seems today rather cliché: the disillusioned government operative, the brown raincoat, the double (or perhaps it’s a triple) cross, the drinking, the idea that everybody loses: so far, so spy novel. This is a literary world very familiar to me, because my father was a great reader, and a great lover of a certain kind of dog-eared paperback, and I am a veteran of my father’s bookcases. As my parents always let me read just what I pleased, the alcoholic double agent alone in his Berlin apartment was a relatively major feature of my early internal life (no wonder I have problems).

THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD only seems cliché today because it was so massively influential in its time. What it presented was shocking then: international affairs with no goodies and no baddies, and no victory possible. Today, this is the default position of virtually every high schooler; but at that time it was revolutionary, and the book has cast a long shadow over the spy novel ever since.

The story is focused on one Alec Leamas, who is a spy near the end of his career. The book does not quite reveal all to the reader, till right near the end, so I don’t want to spoil it for you; but essentially he accepts a mission which involves convincing the East Germans that he has been fired by MI5, and is now a disillusioned drunk ripe for turning. There a two wrinkles: one, that he actually is a disillusioned drunk ripe for turning, and two, that he falls in love. He travels to East Germany with his new communist handlers, and cross and double cross abound, drawing in his lady love, and ending in a sad non-victory on all sides.

The book is well written and keeps you guessing, and I enjoyed it. Here’s a sample: “The airport reminded Leamas of the war . . Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates amongst people who have been up since dawn – of superiority almost, derived from the common experience of having seen the night disappear and the morning come.”

Curiously however what I most enjoyed was the Afterword, in which Le Carre talked about the process of writing the book. He was a quite unknown staffer in the secret service at the time: “I had been poor too long, I was drinking a lot, I was beginning to doubt, in the deepest of ways, the wisdom of my choice of job. The familiar process of embracing an institution, then fighting my way clear of it, was taking over my relationship to my marriage and my work”

He was just thirty years old, and interestingly he rapped the book out in just six weeks, the dark world of the novel reflecting his dark internal state. The book was a massive success, and changed his life overnight: “My marriage broke up, I went through most of the withdrawal symptoms that fame instills in writers, even if they pretend it doesn’t. I found a new wise wife and put myself together . . .But of course I will never forget the time when a disgusting gesture of history coincided with some desperate mechanism inside myself, and in six weeks gave me the book that altered my life”

I found it all rather an interesting insight into how one bumbles into life change.

I am now way, way, behind on this blog. As a result, I must tell you now I will not be able to do YOUNG BLOOD by Sifiso Mzobe full justice, despite the fact that it is an interesting debut novel with a distinctive voice, as I read it months ago.

As I vaguely recall, YOUNG BLOOD follows the story of a young man in Durban’s townships, who, failing at school, allows himself to be drawn into the world of car theft. A initially innocent young soul, he is, in the fine tradition of such novels, very soon in way over his head, and learning moral lessons left right and centre.

The story is by turns boring (drink-sleep-do small time drugs) and terrifying (stealing cars, bribing police, etc); which is I suspect very much what it is like to be a small time car thief.

Much of the writing is quite charming; here is a sample: “The love affair between Mandrax fiends and housebreaking is age old. There is nothing more unreliable than a Mandrax fiend, except perhaps Durban December weather.”

This last part, about Durban weather, encapsulates much of the local charm of this book, which vividly captures a part of South African life that is not well documented. At the end, the central character is redeemed by returning to school, which twist I did not believe for a second; but this was still a worthwhile little book, about a small section of South African society.

You will observe that I am really losing the plot. Spy novels?!? When have I ever read spy novels? And wait, I even just read another one that I’ve haven’t blogged about yet (I’ll give you a clue, someone comes in from the cold). Anyway! Ian McEwan rather bravely decides to write an entire novel as a woman. Impressively, he more or less succeeds. It’s the 1960s, and some young woman is at Cambridge. She has an affair with her elderly professor, and he suggests her for MI5. She is a hesitant and unwilling spy, which is a good thing, because once she passes the rigorous interview process she finds that woman are only allowed to be secretaries anyway. One really forget how much we today owe to our mother’s generation. Eventually she is assigned to liaise with a writer, who the service feels is likely to write the right sort of books. The plan is to give him money, without him being aware where it comes from, so as to encourage writing of his kind, which they believe will foster the right kind of thinking – anti-communist, pro-western values, etc etc. Here is where it gets interesting, because unfortunately she falls madly in love with this writer, and so not telling him who is paying the bills becomes more and more complicated. Eventually he finds out, and a weird sort of double bluff begins, which ends the book with an unexpected twist.

The young woman at the centre of the book is chosen for this project with the writer because she is an enthusiastic reader, and this book is very interesting on the subject of reading as a defining activity. It made me realise I have read many books on what it means to be a writer, but very few on what it means to be a reader. Here’s the woman on he reading: “I could take a block of text or a whole paragraph in one visual gulp. It was a matter of letter my eyes and thoughts go soft, like wax, to take the impression fresh off the page. To the irritation of those around me, I’d turn a page every few seconds with an impatient snap of the wrist. My needs were simple. I didn’t bother much with themes or felicitous phrases and skipped fine descriptions of weather, landscapes and interiors. I wanted characters I could believe in, and I wanted to be made curious about what was to happen to them.” This struck me, because it is pretty much exactly how I read. I’ve never understood people who think about what they read; the idea is to not have your own thoughts, but someone else’s.

It was in the very dark and distant old days, before this blog was begun, when the earth was still hot, and etc, that I began on Trollope’s series. I think I started out of order with the Barchester novels, and then moved on to the Pallisers; and THE PRIME MINISTER’S CHILDREN is the last. Now all that lies before me is his stand-alone single books, re-reading of the series in retirement, and of course sad and lonely death.

THE PRIME MINISTER’S CHILDREN is unfortunately the worst of the bunch. Or maybe it’s fortunate, because otherwise it would just be too sad to be finishing them at last. The story follows the main characters into their second generation, with all the romantic entanglements we remember from generation one. The Prime Minister’s children both want to marry people of whom he disapproves. The daughter wants to marry a boy without much income, and the son wants to marry an American. Cue heartbreak and distress. This sounds like the outline of a great and typical Trollope, so I am not quite sure why it is so unsuccessful. Perhaps it is in part because the narrative lacks drive; in part because Trollope struggles to pull together his multi-book themes; and in part because – very, very unusually for this author – a woman who tries to break the mould is bitterly defeated. Essentially the prime minister’s son is in love with this lady, Mabel, and she sort of half turns him down, because while she needs the money, she isn’t quite in love with him; and Trollope makes it all go horribly wrong for her from then on, at every turn.

Though I didn’t quite enjoy the book as a whole, I still enjoyed being embraced by Trollope’s warm and confident writer’s voice. Here he is, top of chapter:

Perhaps the method of rushing at once “in medias res” is, of all the ways of beginning a story, or a separate branch of a story, the least objectionable. The reader is made to think that the gold lies so near the surface that he will be required to take very little trouble in digging for it. And the writer is enabled,–at any rate for a time, and till his neck has become, as it were, warm to the collar,–to throw off from him the difficulties and dangers, the tedium and prolixity, of description. This rushing “in medias res” has doubtless the charm of ease. “Certainly, when I threw her from the garret window to the stony pavement below, I did not anticipate that she would fall so far without injury to life or limb.” When a story has been begun after this fashion, without any prelude, without description of the garret or of the pavement, or of the lady thrown, or of the speaker, a great amount of trouble seems to have been saved. The mind of the reader fills up the blanks,–if erroneously, still satisfactorily. He knows, at least, that the heroine has encountered a terrible danger, and has escaped from it with almost incredible good fortune; that the demon of the piece is a bold demon, not ashamed to speak of his own iniquity, and that the heroine and the demon are so far united that they have been in a garret together. But there is the drawback on the system,–that it is almost impossible to avoid the necessity of doing, sooner or later, that which would naturally be done at first. It answers, perhaps, for half-a-dozen chapters;–and to carry the reader pleasantly for half-a-dozen chapters is a great matter!–but after that a certain nebulous darkness gradually seems to envelope the characters and the incidents. “Is all this going on in the country, or is it in town,–or perhaps in the Colonies? How old was she? Was she tall? Is she fair? Is she heroine-like in her form and gait? And, after all, how high was the garret window?” I have always found that the details would insist on being told at last, and that by rushing “in medias res” I was simply presenting the cart before the horse. But as readers like the cart the best, I will do it once again,–trying it only for a branch of my story,–and will endeavour to let as little as possible of the horse be seen afterwards.

And then there is his wisdom. Here is a letter from poor defeated Mabel: “It is not the presence of the skeleton that crushes us. Not even that will hurt us much if we let him go about the house as he lists. It is the everlasting effort which the horror makes to peep out of his cupboard that robs us of our ease.”

Oh Anthony, I will miss you!

Like Edith Wharton, Junot Diaz is clearly working through some powerful personal issues. Almost every single one of these stories is about regret for infidelity, and is full of a kind of steaming pain, while also being strangely hilarious.

Here, for example, is a brilliantly funny line that I’ve been thinking of often: “Show me a beautiful girl and I’ll show you someone who is tired of fucking her.” Or he is here on his mother: “My mom wasn’t the effusive type anyway, had one of those event-horizon personalities – shit just fell into her and you never really knew how she felt about it.”

Regular readers of this blog may recall my great love for Diaz’s last book THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO, which gave me an entirely new understanding of the possibilities of writing for us confused people of the diaspora. I did not enjoy THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE HER as much as OSCAR WAO – perhaps because I am not fond of short stories – but I still enjoyed his immensely contemporary voice. Here he is for example, on his mother’s friends, who encouraged her to hate his brother’s girlfriend: “They could have moderated things a little, don’t you think, but they were, like, Fuck that, what are friendships for if not for instigating?” I just love the punctuation around like, I love the sentiment, I love the don’t you think.

That said, I did start to find the obsessive concern with infidelity a bit dull after a while, especially in the last story, which is all about a professor in Boston (very like Diaz) who is busy being miserable about fucking around on his girlfriend. I know it’s charitable, but I started to feel like: dude, get a grip; and my love of his literature wobbled a little.

According to reviews, this novel bridges the gap between poetry and narrative. Clearly, I thought I was going to hate it. The introduction did not help; speaking of Levy, the writer says:

“. . she was a writer as much at home within the fields of visual and conceptual art, philosophy and performance as within that of the printed word. She’d read her Lacan and Deleuze, her Bartes . . Like the emotional and cerebral choreographies of Pina Bausch, her fiction seemed less concerned about the stories it narrated than the interzone (to borrow Burrough’s term) . . . “

Oh god! “Less concerned about stories,” as if that makes you a better writer! GOD. i am glad I did not give up however, because SWIMMING HOME turns out to be rather a lovely novel.

It tells the story of a family who arrive for their vacation in a rented house in France to find another lady there, who says she has confused her dates, and thought she had the house rented. They invite her to stay, and it slowly becomes clear that the lady is in fact there because the father in the family is a famous poet, with whom she is in love. The lady and the poet have a sort of melancholy half-baked affair, and the story ends rather sadly. It’s an interesting plot, with really gorgeous writing. Here is the lady and poet on the way to a hotel:

As they strolled down the Promenade des Anglais in the silver light of the late afternoon, it was snowing seagulls on every rooftop in Nice. She had casually slung the short white feathered cape across her shoulders, its satin ribbons tied in a loose knot around her neck.

And here they are in the elevator up to their hotel room:

She stared at the multiple reflections of Joe’s sweating arm around her waist, the green silk of her dress trembling as they saild silently in the lift that smelt of leather to the third floor.

The book has some light hearted moments, also, as when the poet becomes annoyed with a friend who is acting horrified about someone else’s behaviour. The poet says: “It’s rude to be so normal, Mitchell,” which I found strangely hilarious.

What most impressed me was the author’s ability to weave the various poetic elements in and out of the story, with multiple complex repetitions, in a way that seemed entirely natural and in service to the plot. Really remarkable writing.

This is a book about the Harvard experience by someone recently graduated from Harvard. It begins well; here is the first description of the central character: “Penelope Davis O’Shaunessy, an incoming Harvard freshman of average height and lank hair,” which I found entertaining.

Thereafter, it goes down hill. That period of early adulthood has been covered, and covered well (BRIDESHEAD REVISITED, OF HUMAN BONDAGE, etc etc and ETC), so if you’re going to do it you better have something new to add. Unfortunately PENELOPE does not. It’s such a basic story, with such routinely ‘comic’ moments, that after a while I started to wonder if there was some much larger joke that I was missing.

It’s a heroic moment for this blog! Somehow, it appears that without planning to, I have just read eight books in a row by women! This has never happened before. Nothing even close – last year hardly a third of the year’s books were by women. I’ve felt guilty about it, but not guilty enough to make a change. I guess it’s because in the past I mostly read dead people, and most women currently dead were too busy with the misery of cooking and cleaning and having mountains of babies to have time to write while they were alive. But now that I’m reading living people, women with labour-saving devices and birth control are showing up in my library. Well done feminism.

GONE GIRL is a brilliant page turner. I went to bed at 9.30pm, thinking I’d do a little reading, and when I looked up again it was 1.30am. I never read thrillers – I probably haven’t read once since I was completing my father’s bookcases as a teenager – and I’m glad I gave this one a chance. The next night I went to bed at 8.30pm, because I knew what kind of book I was up against, and finished it before midnight. My eyes are fiery pits. Totally worth it.

In the best tradition of thrillers, and of real life, a woman disappears. The story is then told from two perspectives: her husband, after her disappearance, and the woman herself, Amy, through her diary before she disappears. The diary suggests that she is a fun, relaxed woman, who was growing increasingly afraid of her husband. SPOILER ALERT Then the husband’s story continues in the same time frame, but we are suddenly introduced to Amy in the present – because she isn’t dead, but she is framing her husband! Okay, when you write it down it doesnt sound that interesting, and yet somehow it is.

This is partly due to the fact that you genuinely like Diary Amy, and then real Amy explains how carefully she conducted a persona she has total contempt for; the ‘cool girl’ that is what women think men want. She says:

I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. . . And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.”

So it’s a sort of generally feminist idea that you can agree with, but it’s twisted in awful ways against you.

It’s also rather well observed. Try: “Sleep is like a cat: it only comes to you if you ignore it.” Or “People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges.” Here are two points I’v always agreed with.

And here’s a fine description: “The waitress, a plain brunette disguised as a pretty brunette;” and another: “She’d French-braided her limp hair and clipped it to the back of her head in a rather poignant updo, and she wore lipstick.” Poignant updo! For some reason that kills me.

Having said how much I loved it, I have to confess that I didn’t quite buy the ending. And I notice that in the best tradition of pulp, I am already forgetting it; it’s passing through me like meat that is off. And on that disgusting note, I’ll go to bed with my new novel. Also by a woman!

Having just read Jane Austen’s PERSUASION, I moved on to another old friend, George Eliot’s MIDDLEMARCH. Apparently I am having some kind of literary high school reunion. While PERSUASION gets better as it and I age, I am really sad that the same can’t be said for MIDDLEMARCH. It’s one of these disturbing cases where either I am changing or the novel is; and I suppose grim old reality demands that it is the former.

Now, my recollection of this book is of a heartbreaking romance between an idealistic young woman and a handsome young artist, who are divided for much of the novel by their high standards and fine ideas. This is certainly one plot line, but it’s the stupidest. I guess somewhere since high school I decided that suffering for your ideals is kind of dumb. The far, far, far better plot line is around a second couple who also live in the village of Middlemarch: the doctor Lydate, and the lovely young lady Rosamund.

When Lydgate arrives in Middlemarch, he is determined to become a great medical researcher, and is clear he does not have the money to marry. Then he falls in love with the beautiful, silent Rosamund, and somehow falls into marriage. He promptly runs out of money and begins a slow and awful decline away from the great man he meant to be towards a comfortable provincial GP. As Eliot explains:

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and se our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

God, that’s depressing.

And so is this:

For in the multitude of middle aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.

George Eliot was a woman, and like many female Victorian novelists, she was not fond of the ‘sweet-innocent-virgin’ model of femininity. Rosamund’s beauty and modesty are nothing short of a trap, and Eliot is clearly much more fond of the young woman who is part of the third couple in the book, Mary. Mary is not sweet or innocent, nor very pretty, and she is a little sharp tongued:

At the age of two and twenty Mary had certainly not attained that perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in quantities ready mixed, with a flavour of resignation as required.

I found this hilarious. And here’s an equally entertaining description on her young man, Frank:

He was a vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for mature life.

On thing I love about Victorian novelists is that they are never shy to lay it out for you. There’s no ‘I think,’ or ‘in some cultures,’ in the nineteenth century, they like just to be BOOYAH: Here’s the truth! Here’s a great one:

Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.

Or

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

Or

That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency . . . If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

What can one possibly say about this book? It’s as close to perfect as you can come without burning your fingers.

This is probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve read it, and it’s still charming, and soothing, and somehow rather encouraging. It tells the story of one Anne Elliot, who in her youth was convinced that she should not marry the man she loved, because he was so very poor. As an older woman (like late 20s, but that was old in the early 1800s) she meets him again, and somehow they get back together.

Morons, usually men, think Austen writes romances. I think she writes books about how to live. It’s nice that she gets her man, but what is really moving about this book is the courage and elegance with which she lives out her bad choices before he comes back. And this is where Austen is comforting, and even inspiring, for we may or may not get our man, but we will all most certainly make bad choices and have to live with them.

Commenting on this novel reminds me of my friend, a young playwright, who was sitting next to an elderly man at a play by Arthur Miller. During intermission he was flipping through the program, and seeing a rehearsal photo, realised the elderly man was ACTUALLY ARTHUR MILLER. So when my friend told me this story, I was like: OMG! Did you talk to him? What did you say? And my friend was like: I didn’t say anything! What could I say? Nice work on DEATH OF A SALESMAN? I enjoyed THE CRUCIBLE? He’s bloody ARTHUR MILLER. And my awkward friend, who spent the entire second act gazing out of the corner of his eye at ARTHUR MILLER, reminds me of me, trying to blog about bloody JANE AUSTEN.