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Tag Archives: John Le Carre

Ambling

12 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Helen MacInnes, John Le Carre, Kim Philby, Len Deighton

Back in my teens and early twenties, spy stories probably constituted the bulk of my reading, both fiction (Helen MacInnes, John Le Carre, Len Deighton) and non-fiction (The Penkovsky Papers, Kim Philby’s My Secret War, a rather dense tome on General Gehlen). Through it all, one name kept repeating: Eric Ambler. The recent reprints of Helen MacInnes novels all come emblazoned with exactly the same quote from Newsweek that the editions I read in the early 70s carried: “Helen MacInnes can hang her cloak and dagger right up there with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.” Ambler was inescapable: if you liked this stuff, you had to read him. And yet I never did.

I am not exactly sure why. I think, for whatever reason, I had pegged him as the spy fiction equivalent of Edgar Wallace: populist, slick, rather trashy, and above all a representative of an earlier generation. It is an unfair characterisation, of course. Ambler’s career as a novelist stretched from 1936 to 1981, which isn’t all that different from Helen MacInnes’s career, 1941 to 1984. To say that, as spy writers, they belong to different generations is probably stretching it a bit. As for the identification with Edgar Wallace, I have no idea where that came from, but if I’d thought about that Newsweek quotation I’d have realised how far off the mark it is. After all, Ambler is being compared with MacInnes and Greene, neither of whom is exactly in the Edgar Wallace camp.

Journey into FearBe that as it may, it all means that Journey into Fear, a very gratefully received Christmas present from Maureen which I have just finished, is the first thing by Eric Ambler I have read. I should have been reading him 40 or 50 years ago.

Apart from the early chapters being told largely in flashback, it is a very straightforward story, straightforwardly told. Graham (no forename is ever given) is a British armaments engineer in Turkey to wrap up a deal essential for Turkey’s defence in the war that is just starting (it is the early months of 1940). On his last night in Istanbul Graham is shot at as he returns to his hotel room. Graham is inclined to dismiss it as a robbery gone wrong, but Colonel Haki, the head of Turkish intelligence, knows better. Any delay to the deal could be fatal to Turkey’s interests, and if Graham were killed it would put things back by at least six months. Haki therefore persuades Graham to change his plans; instead of travelling back to England by train, where he would be a sitting duck, he joins an old tramp steamer heading for Genoa, from where he can more safely return home.

The bulk of the novel is set aboard this boat as Graham slowly comes to recognise the parlous position he is in. The whole is a brilliant exercise in creating an atmosphere of fear which Ambler orchestrates by repeatedly offering hope and then dashing it. Graham realises that one of his fellow passengers is the Bulgarian assassin that Haki identified, but he can’t convince the ship’s crew that he is not delusional. He has been given a gun for his protection, but the gun is stolen from his cabin. A fellow passenger, an erotic dancer who is clearly trying to seduce Graham (for money, as we later discover), offers to steal her husband’s gun and pass it to Graham, but she isn’t able to deliver the goods. Another passenger proves to be a Turkish agent sent by Haki to protect Graham, but the agent is killed. The German mastermind of the assassination plot offers Graham what seems like a way out, but it turns out to be a deception to make it easier to kill Graham once they get to Genoa.

There are moments of dramatic action, the climax of the novel is quite spectacular, but in the main the novel works as a slow, quiet, accumulation of tension. There’s a way out, no it’s closed off; there’s another way out, no it’s closed off again. And Graham is an ordinary, middle class, middle aged man who has never before found his life in danger, and has never before had to act the way he must act now if he is to stay alive. And all of this is played out in the narrow confines of a rusty old boat, where the handful of fellow passengers may be allies who cannot be relied upon, or enemies who cannot be identified.

What struck me about the novel was how appropriate the comparison with Helen MacInnes is, although Journey into Fear is about half the length of an average MacInnes novel. There is, for a start, the sense of place; though MacInnes would play her story out against familiar landmarks and public spaces, where Ambler’s novel takes us to seedy nightclubs and smoky offices. There is the centrality of a journey, where deadly enemies are right behind or possibly one step ahead; though for MacInnes the journey would be through the sharply described mountains of Above Suspicion or the coastal landscape of Assignment in Brittany, while for Ambler it all takes place in the equally sharply described decks and salon and cabins of the tramp steamer. Above all there is the fact that the story concerns an innocent, an amateur, caught in a violent world that they do not understand and for which they are ill prepared, but who finds within themselves resources of wit and nerve that prove equal to the task. Though MacInnes will introduce romantic interest who proves equally resourceful, whereas Ambler’s romantic interest is, in the end, unreliable. And though both MacInnes and Ambler equip their novels with enough cliffhangers and bursts of action to keep any reader gripped, the real focus is psychological, how nerves and fear and resolve shape and twist and move things along.

It has taken me a long time to discover Eric Ambler, I suspect that now I shall be making up for those long years of neglect.

2017 in Review

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

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Anthony Gottlieb, Arthur C Clarke, Becky Chambers, Benjamin Black, books of the year, Bruce Sterling, C.J. Sansom, China Mieville, Christopher Priest, Colin Greenland, Dave Hutchinson, Edmund Crispin, Emma Chambers, Emma Newman, Gerry Canavan, Gwyneth Jones, Helen MacInnes, Iain Banks, Iain R. MacLeod, Joanna Kavenna, John Banville, John Crowley, John Kessel, John Le Carre, Judith A. Barter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Laurent Binet, Laurie Penny, Lavie Tidhar, Lily Brooks-Dalton, m john harrison, Margery Allingham, Mark Fisher, Matt Ruff, Michael Chabon, nina allan, Octavia Butler, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Paul Auster, Paul Nash, Rick Wilber, Rob Latham, Steve Erickson, Stuart Jeffries, Tade Thompson, Tricia Sullivan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoon Ha Lee

It’s that time of year again, when I dust off this oft-forgotten blog and post a list of my reading through the year, along with other odd comments.

2017 has been, in some respects, a very good year. My first full-length book not composed of previously published material, appeared in May. Iain M. Banks appeared in the series Modern Masters of Science Fiction from Illinois University Press, and has received some generally positive reviews, much to my relief.

Also this year I signed a contract with Gylphi to write a book about Christopher Priest, which is likely to take most if not all of the next year. In addition, I’ve put in a proposal for another volume in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction; the initial response has been quite good so I’m hoping I’ll have more to report in the new year. So, in work terms, it looks like the next couple of years are pretty much taken care of. Continue reading →

Reading for pleasure

09 Wednesday Sep 2015

Posted by Paul Kincaid in Uncategorized

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Helen MacInnes, John Le Carre, Len Deighton, mary renault

Rather more years ago than I care to remember, I was on a train in Greece. I was sitting next to an Orthodox priest. As soon as he found out I was English, he picked up a paperback that someone had left on the seat, and insisted on reading passages to me while I corrected his pronunciation. Meanwhile, an old lady sitting facing us would occasionally feed us fruit from the basket on her knee. It is one of the most abiding and most attractive of my memories of Greece.

The book that the priest found on the train was Neither Five Nor Three by Helen MacInnes. It was a book I knew well, I’d finished it myself not long before that trip to Greece. It seemed very appropriate, this was exactly the sort of happenstance that you are likely to encounter in one of Helen MacInnes’s novels. Except there, of course, the whole encounter would be redolent of mystery or threat. Continue reading →

Peace and rumours of peace

06 Sunday Jul 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books

≈ 1 Comment

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John Le Carre, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Xan Fielding

hide & seekI have just finished, very close together, Hide and Seek by Xan Fielding and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré. At first glance, you’d think they have nothing much in common. Fielding’s book, first published in 1954, is primarily an account of the years he spent on Crete as an SOE agent and guerrilla leader during the war; Le Carré’s novel, first published 20 years later in 1974, is one of the finest spy thrillers ever written. Fielding’s prose is crisp, matter of fact, undecorated; Le Carré’s prose is richer, more discursive, full of digressions; both are effective, but they work in very different ways. Continue reading →

Reprint: The Labyrinth Key

30 Monday Jun 2014

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

≈ Comments Off on Reprint: The Labyrinth Key

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Arthur C Clarke, Cordwainer Smith, Giordano Bruno, Greg Egan, Howard Hendrix, John Le Carre, Matteo Ricci, Michael Swanwick, William Gibson

I haven’t added a reprint to this blog for a little while, so here is a review of The Labyrinth Key by Howard V. Hendrix which first appeared in The New York Review of Science Fiction 195, November 2004. Continue reading →

The Commerce of War

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by Paul Kincaid in books, science fiction

≈ 7 Comments

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C.S. Samulski, John Le Carre, Linda Nagata, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan

In a BBC profile that I happened to watch again recently, John Le Carré said that he had watched the Berlin Wall come down and then waited. And nothing changed. The governments of the West continued with exactly the same policies they had concocted as a response to the Cold War.

He was right, of course, but not completely so. Things did change, in ways that the governments of the West did not expect or allow for. For instance, one of the weapons used by the West in the Cold War was rampant consumerism. The idea was to drain the resources of the Soviet Bloc, while western capitalism was kept in check by a range of natural balances such as the poverty of some markets (Africa), the unavailability of others (China, Russia), and the ready supply of resources from western-friendly states (oil from the Middle East). The Cold War did indeed end with the draining of Soviet resources, but it also removed most of those checks and balances on western capitalism. In fact, many of these checks were deliberately removed by the last Cold War governments (of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher), controls introduced in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s were lifted because they were seen as outdated, and besides it was payback time for the people who funded these governments. Consequently, the wealth and power of banks and multinational companies and other big players in the capitalist game exploded, until they reached a state that was beyond the ability of any government to control. We are all (or, at least, all of us who are not already plutocrats) paying the price now.

And yet, despite an economic collapse so great that if it had occurred 30 years before the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War, the financial institutions remain essentially untouched and untouchable. Their influence can now be seen reaching into every aspect of government policy and foreign relations and indeed anything that affects the way we live today. One natural and perhaps inevitable development of that state of affairs lies at the heart of two novels I have read recently. Continue reading →

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