Len Deighton: City of Gold (1992)

Edition: Arrow, 1993
Review number: 1287

Len Deighton is almost as famous for his meticulously researched World War II stories (and non-fiction) as he is for his Cold War spy thrillers. City of Gold is his farewell to this sub-genre, and I think it is the best of his late novels. Like several others of his Second World War stories, it is inspired by actual events; set in Cairo during the North African campaign, it tells of the hunt for a spy who was revealing all the details of the Allied plans to Rommel, thus enabling him to win victory after victory and make the capture of Cairo seem only a matter of time. The investigation is given a twist because the reader knows that investigator Major Cutler is not really who he appears to be; he suffered a fatal heart attack escorting a prisoner to Cairo, and the prisoner, who was an actor before being conscripted, is now pretending to be the major. So as well as having to make an investigation he is not trained for, he is constantly worried about the possibility of discovery.

This twist adds an extra touch of humanity to the story, which otherwise could easily have been dry for a thriller. As you might expect, Cairo is expertly realised (it is as convincing as the setting in Olivia Manning's Levant trilogy, set in the same place at the same time and written by one who was there), and the background details show the research to have been thorough. Cairo, the city of gold, is a corrupt place in the period, and now it is a frightened one, and so the novel is filled with examples of the sordid side of human nature; Deighton keeps this entertaining rather than depressing.

City of Gold is the best of Deighton's nineties novels, the only one to really score near his classics of earlier decades. Thirty years on from The Ipcress File, Deighton was probably not really thinking about gaining new fans and there is little that is new here; but it is far more successful than MAMista, the only one of his late novels which could be described as innovative.

I can heartily recommend City of Gold to anyone who enjoys war stories; it also makes it clear that Alan Furst has turned out to be Deighton's natural successor in this field.

Len Deighton: MAMista (1991)

Edition: Arrow, 1992
Review number: 1285


Written in between Bernard Samson novels, MAMista is Len Deighton's first attempt to find a new subject for his fiction, following the end of the Cold War in Europe. MAMista ends up being one of Deighton's most radically non-typical novels, most like Close-Up from the rest of his output in lots of ways - and that too was a novel written at a time when he was searching for a way forward as a writer. Another novel which is even more similar, though not by Deighton, is John le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl.

The subject of MAMista seems exceptionally up to date now, rather more so than it did at the time. It is about a terrorist group (or freedom fighters, as they would term themselves) in a poor country in South America where the main economic activity is the cultivation of coca leaves. Three outsiders become either MAMista members or effectively hostages, and the backbone of the story is the description of a terrible trek through the jungle after a raid. At the time, it felt as though Che Guevara was three decades behind the times, but now terrorism is back at the centre of our consciousness, even if not in South America.

The most important thing to say about MAMista is that it is not really a thriller, but a tragedy. There is no hope of a happy ending for anyone but the members of the oppressive regime in this novel, which makes it definitely Deighton's most downbeat. The connection with Close-Up lies mainly in not being in the thriller genre, but the parallels with The Little Drummer Girl are in the storyline, as both plots are about terrorists and hostages. So Deighton's first response to the end of the Cold War was to move out of the thriller genre almost completely, to write a mainstream novel with some of the trappings of a thriller.

It has to be said that MAMista is not one of Deighton's best novels, though it grows on one on repeated reading. None of the characters are particularly engaging, and the tone of the narrative is relentlessly cheerless, lacking the cynical humour usually characteristic of the author. This means that it doesn't hold the attention as this sort of project really should, particularly as the storyline lacks the urgency and forward motion of a thriller (and this slowness is presumably intended, as it mirrors the confusion and pointlessness of the guerilla campaign).

Chris Verrill: Is For Good Men to Do Nothing (2004)

Edition: XLibris, 2004
Review number: 1286

What was your initial reaction to the September 11th atrocity? Watching it in California at a communal breakfast with other Americans (as Chris Verrill did) is likely to have had a very different feel from the experience I had of seeing it happen in mid-afternoon. To many, it was shock and grief (with perhaps a tinge of guilty thrill at the drama of the collapsing towers - I remember some comments at the time that the news coverage had something of the air of a Hollywood film stunt) or a desire for revenge; in other circles, it was glee at the humbling of American power. For me, too, my reaction was somewhat conditioned by previous near involvement with a terrorist attack: I was within earshot of an IRA bomb in the City of London, and it damaged the church I was attending at the time. As an aside, something that has irritated me since 9/11 is the way that Americans seem to suggest it was the only terrorist attack that ever happened. For Chris Verrill, the first reaction of shock was quickly followed by a burning desire to do something constructive; Is For Good Men to Do Nothing is the story of what he did.

There were two sides to what he did: first, he travelled the world to try to understand how people who were not Americans thought about the attack and the wars that followed in Afghanistan and Iraq; at the same time, he worked to get a Rotary Club sponsored educational project under way in Afghanistan. There is a shared motive for both: the idea that ignorance is one of the main issues which led to the attack and which helped define the American response and the way in which the rest of the world percieved it. Verrill readily admits that education on both sides is necessary; there are still many Americans who have never been outside the forty eight continental states and who live in appalling ignorance of the rest of the world.

Now, Chris Verrill is also happy to acknowledge that Americans have made mistakes, most notably in their flauting of international law (in company with the UK) in the attack on Iraq which was unsanctioned by the United Nations. My feeling is that he perhaps doesn't go far enough in this, though he meets many people who are willing to tell him so far more forcefully than I would. This feeling is partly one that I have in response to George W. Bush, who comes across as the epitome of the stereotypical American: arrogant, dumb, ignorant, loud, and under the thumb of the interests of cynical businessmen. A recurrent theme of the discussions in the book is argument over just how much sincerity there has been in the stated US war aims in Iraq, as opposed to how much the conflict is over control of oil reserves.

A lot of reviews of this book are likely, I suspect, to do what I have started doing: put together a review which is really an essay entitled "What I think about 9/11 and the war in Iraq". While such thoughts may be of interest (and it is important to set out how the reviewer's perspective differs from the authors, if readers are going to be able to evaluate the review), the purpose of a review is not to make a political speech but to help a potential reader decide whether they will like a book. I suspect that there are many people who will be put off by the subject and would not even consider picking up Is For Good Men to Do Nothing, either because they just aren't interested in politics or because they feel that there is nothing more worth reading about 9/11. In fact, this is a really interesting story, mainly because Verrill comes across as genuinely interested in the opinions he hears, even when they are very different from his own. More than that, this book gives hope that there are Americans not caught up in mindless jingoism and above all shows that determination to make a difference is important.

In one way, this is a book which has changed my opinions. Not about Bush or Bin Laden, but about the Rotarians. The Rotary Club is not an organisation I knew much about, but the impression I had was that it was sort of like the Freemasons, but for those who couldn't be bothered about stupid rituals. I thought it was a mutual aid organisation for members of the establishment, the kind of place where the behind the scenes machinations of minor right wing politicians might occur. But now I know more, and it turns out that it is a worldwide charitable organisation full of people who want to make a difference.

There is one thing I feel I need to mention, even though it is rather pedantic. The quotation that supplies the title (in case anyone doesn't know, the rest of it basically says that this is the way for evil to triumph) is popularly attributed to eighteenth century British statesman Edmund Burke (perhaps best known for his protests against the restrictions placed on the American colonies which led to independence), and Verrill follows this. However, if you look it up in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, this is listed under "Misquotations", and turns out to be a popular version of a less memorable statement made by Burke.

This may be just a little piece of pedantry, but there's something else I didn't like much, which comes near the end. It is not that a speech made by George W. Bush is praised; given the quotations, I too thought it admirable. But then Verrill uses the speech as the basis of a patriotic appeal: not only does it make him proud to be an American (fair enough), but it should make the reader proud to be an American. This jarred - because I'm not an American; and it felt as though Chris Verrill was committing the very kind of unthinking chauvinism that he is writing the book to combat. I was unfortunately left feeling uncomfortable for the final twenty or so pages.

Despite this, I enjoyed Is For Good Men to Do Nothing, which is an excellent piece of journalistic writing. It makes the reader think, and in the current climate that can never be a bad thing.

Sylvian Hamilton: The Bone Pedlar (2000)

Edition: Orion, 2001
Review number: 1284

Any novel which begins with a sentence as eye catching, absurd and grotesque as "In the crypt of the Abbey Church at Hallowdene, the monks were boiling their bishop" deserves to be read. It's also hard to live up to, and The Bone Pedlar doesn't quite manage it despite being consistently interesting to read.

Most people probably know something about the background to The Bone Pedlar, which is one of the more disreputable yet strangely fascinating aspects of the medieval church, the trade in supposed body parts of the saints as relics (or if they don't, they will certainly have heard of the most famous surviving example, the Turin Shroud). Because of the reverence paid to them and the miracles associated with them, they were focal points for pilgrimages and brought vast sums to the churches and abbeys which owned the best ones. If you think we have moved on from this, just think about how we treat Elvis and Beatles memorabilia.

The story concerns a knight in the England of King John who has become rich by acting as a dealer in relics. (There seem to be rather too many nobles who work for a living in this novel considering the period, a time when knighthood still remained quite closely connected to landownership and military service.) Sir Richard Straccan obtains a relic of the apostle St Thomas for a client, but when the fingerbone is stolen, his daughter is kidnapped as an incentive for Straccan to find and retrieve it. The Bone Pedlar is basically a medieval thriller with a bit of horror thrown in, and as such it works quite well.

One major criticism, however, of The Bone Pedlar is that its medieval background lacks versimilitude. The society depicted is too classless, and there is too little distrust of travellers and outsiders (a common defect in the portrayal of the period). At least there is a generally quite high level of piety. This is of course not meant to be a novel containing a detailed picture of medieval life, but all too often the narrative seems only vaguely rooted in period, a serious problem in a historical novel. If not taken too seriously, though, The Bone Pedlar is a fun and enjoyable thriller with a great opening.

Len Deighton: Charity (1996)

Edition: HarperCollins, 1997
Review number: 1283

This is the concluding novel not just of the long running Bernard Samson saga but of Len Deighton's fiction as a whole. It brings to a close a series of attempts to deal with the ending of the Cold War - an event with a big impact for an author of spy fiction: different settings tangential to the genre in MamISTA, City of Gold, and Violent Ward, and the story of the downfall of Communism itself in the last trilogy of Samson novels. I suspect that the difficulty Deighton experienced in finding a new theme appropriate to the times was a contributing factor to his stopping fiction writing when he did.

The reader's expectation with Charity is that it will wrap up the remaining loose ends, and leave Bernard and Fiona's future sorted out. Having read Spy Sinker, followers of the series know more about what really happened on the day of Fiona's return to West Berlin than Bernard does - so the big question is really how much does he find out, and how much pain does he bring on himself and those around him by his investigations?

Although Charity is set before the end of Soviet control over Eastern Europe, Deighton makes sure we know what happens after the end of the novel with little ironic reminders - such as describing a falling person as looking "like a toppling statue of a tyrant". The ending itself is rather abrupt; the last chapter comes with something of a jerk. It is really about new beginnings for the characters, starting relationships over again - entirely appropriate, given the huge changes about to impact their world.

Three series characters dominate British spy fiction: James Bond, George Smiley, and Bernard Samson. They are all quite different from each other, even if you could argue that Bernard is very similar to Deighton's earlier Harry Palmer character and something of a mix of the other two. Smiley is all subtle intellectual; James Bond is all brute force action. Bernard does both parts, and this makes him both more exciting to read about than Le Carré's character and more interesting and certainly less unpleasant than Ian Fleming's. More is revealed about Bernard's inner character than about either Smiley or Bond, even though his narration (and neither Smiley or Bond is every allowed the luxury of telling their own story) is written in such a way that it is clear that Bernard is hiding quite a lot. This of course makes him more believable as a character, as does the way that his powers as an intellectual spy master and an action hero are both carefully limited by Deighton, presumably to this end. The series (ten novels in all, including a prequel not involving Bernard personally) is a substantial body of work, intimately connected to the fall of Communist East Germany and thus a major fictionalisation of some of the most important historical events of the last half century.

Monica Ali: Brick Lane (2003)

Edition: Doubleday, 2003
Review number: 1282

Since the success of Midnight's Children, there have been quite a few novels about the Indian subcontinent; but there are not so many about the experience of the immigrant community in the UK (or at least, not so many that are well known). The most obvious writer to compare Monical Ali to is Hanif Kureishi, but his novels portray very different people. Brick Lane is about the poorest of Bangladeshi immigrants, living in a rundown Whitechapel housing estate, one of those places where each block seems to contain large numbers of people originating from the same village, huddled together as a way to shelter from the strangeness of urban London.

Nazneen has been sent over from Bangladesh in the early eighties to make an arranged marriage to a much older man, but one who prides himself on being advanced and modern (unlike some of the men, who hardly allow their wives to leave the home). Brick Lane is about how she comes to terms with the city, taking her story right up to the time of writing. Nazneen's life is compared with that of her sister, who remained in Bangladesh and who had a much harder time.

Brisk Lane is a much praised bestseller for a debut novel, and yet I did not feel it was as good as I expected it to be. Life in these estates is pretty grim (as I saw when I was a student in the area, and as I am sure Monica Ali knows full well). There are difficult times for the novels's characters - it climaxes in a riot - but they always seem to be more at arm's length than they should be. The setting is nothing like as bleak and certainly not as expressively conveyed as Zola's Paris, for example. This is partly because description in this novel is very sparse; Ali is concerned with Nazneen as a character to the exclusion of everything else, and she is (for me) too placid and passive to carry the novel. The subject matter is perhaps one reason for the success of Brick Lane - it's very much the sort of thing that is bound to be praised by the majority of the liberal community, and it obviously struck a chord with many readers. It didn't work so well for me, for some reason.

Biff Mitchell: The War Bug (2004)

Edition: Double Dragon, 2004
Review number: 1281

There are two, clear, parallel trends in modern computing. One is that the virtual world is going to become more like the real one, in the sense that it will be possible to deceive human participants into perceiving it as though it were real: like the virtual world of The Matrix, internally consistent and believeably solid, yet containing possibilities beyond mundane physics. No illusion destroying tools like keyboards in the way; and no system failures. On the other hand, reality is becoming more like the virtual world, as computers take over more and more (gadgets like Internet connected fridges which eliminate the need for food shopping, for example), and interfaces become smaller and more invisible and intuitive. The War Bug is set in a future in which reality and virtual reality are almost indistinguishable, in which most individuals live complex virtual lives more satisfying than their real existences, interacting with the avatars of other real people and constructed virtual personalities. There are two big hurdles, one legal, and the other technical: the Reality Laws prohibit the construction of a virtual personality which pretends to be real; and no one has yet managed to endow a virtual personality with true sentience. The plot of The War Bug concerns a man who has created a virtual family, a wife and daughter, who are somehow true people and who can convincingly persuade others of this (though Mitchell is more vague about the definition of sentience to link it to this kind of Turing Test like view; he seems to indicate more that it is the ability to carry out introspection). When his secret is discovered, all three are put in great danger from powerful people who control the online world, who want to exploit computer sentience for their own ends. At the same time, an extremely sophisticated computer virus, the War Bug, is beginning to destroy whole virtual communities - how is this, which appers to Abner as a huge pig, connected to his work and his family?

There is one immense hurdle to reading The War Bug, and that is its style. It is extremely colloquial, relentlessly quirky and often exceptionally irritating. The prose gives the impression that it is the act of a strange stand-up comedian. It is well worth keeping going, though, and the style is reasonably appropriate to the content. (I can see that other people would possibly find it amusing, too, but it is not a form of humour that greatly appeals to me, and as a joke it goes on far too long - a criticism I also often feel is applicable to stand-up comedians as well.) The informality of the prose is so great that it presents something of a paradox: it is written in language so colloquial that it becomes hard to read. The chapters are very short, and jump around a lot, which means it takes a long time to understand what is going on and to get a feel for the main characters. Some editing would have been useful here, particularly of the background presented in the very first pages, which nearly persuaded me not to continue.

In some ways this is basically a criticism that certain aspects of this novel are not to my taste; other readers may well love the way in which The War Bug is written. Once I did finally get into it, I found the story fascinating; it deals with philosophical ideas that have interested me for a long time, ones which could be said to be basic to the (intelligent end of) the science fiction and fantasy genres: the nature of reality, and the nature of humanity. The story suddenly becomes gripping at the point where Abner's family is kidnapped by powerful individuals who want to obtain the secret of sentience, in a way that the destruction of the virtual cities and even the deaths of thousands whose avatars were caught up in their ends had not been. Though many of the ideas are not particularly new (reference points include the obvious Gibson and Stephenson, but I felt that there was also a strong kinship with the drug induced virtual worlds of Stanislaus Lem's The Futurological Congress), it is well done and the background shows that Mitchell is a writer with at least some ideas of his own.