Category Archives: Books

Apparently, war really IS hell…

Found myself back at Barnes & Noble again today, and remembered something else I took a picture of last week when I was there.

Above is a shot of one of the “New in History” shelves. OK, it’s slightly doctored. Hell in the Pacific was actually on a lower shelf and I moved it up to take this, but they were all in the same category.

Sometimes it seems that the only time “history” was happening was from 1939-45, the bookstore shelves are so dominated by that period. Or maybe it’s just because Father’s Day was coming up. In any case, it seemed that about 50 percent of all history books were about WWII, and another 40 percent was about other wars in which the United States was involved.

And I say that as a big fan of military history, and particularly the WWII period. But still, let’s have SOME perspective, people.

The least you could do is provide some variety in the titles. Does no one at the publishing house notice when it’s getting monotonous?

That is all, men. Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em. This is my rifle; this is my gun. Off yer dead asses and on yer dyin’ feet. And other cliches of the era…

THIS is required reading? Seriously?

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Having been required to leave the house because there’s a bridal shower going on there for a family friend, I came by Barnes & Noble and got some coffee, since I hadn’t made any at breakfast.

OK, technically, I got the coffee at the Starbucks about 50 yards away (yes, I’ve become that sort of coffee snob), and came in here to browse books while I drink it. I’m looking for ideas for Father’s Day — both for my Dad, and to see what there is in paperback that I might want to ask for. I’ve found one of each…

Anyway, I passed by the “Required School Reading” table, and of course it was filled with excellent, worthwhile books, many of which were required when I was in school, plus a few more recent classics. I like browsing the school reading table. It feels so substantial and worthwhile, as well as evoking pleasurable memories, because some of these came to be favorites of mine.

Note that you can see Flowers for Algernon, which I mentioned just yesterday in a comment. There were Catch-22, and Utopia, and Emma, and A Tale of Two Cities, and other usual suspects. Then there were more recent entries, such as Freakonomics and the book that the film “The Social Network” was based on. All things that help kids think, and appreciate language, and understand their world a little better.

Then, I noticed that there were two more “Required School Reading” tables. There I found very different fare. It was all commercial, recent, crank-’em-out-on-an-assembly line “young adult” offerings. You can see them in the picture at the top of this post.

At least a plurality of them were about vampires. Teenage vampires, of course. Filled with all of the usual teenage angst, such as worrying about one’s place in society, finding true love, and of course bloodlust.

I really, really hope this was a case of the wrong sign being placed on a table. I thought of asking one of the employees, “Are these really required reading in school? If so, which school?”

But I was afraid of the answer I might get.

Corey’s graphic novel about Alvin Greene

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I’m cleaning out my IN box, and I run across a 10-day-old message from Corey Hutchins saying that his graphic novel about Alvin Greene is available for iPhone and iPad — and probably on paper, by now (yes, it is!). This is from altweeklies.com:

Columbia Free Times staff writer Corey Hutchins and former alt-weekly writer David Axe released iPhone and iPad versions of a 100-page graphic novel that traces the stranger-than-fiction U.S Senate campaign of one of American’s most enigmatic political figures, Alvin Greene.

Readers can purchase iPhone and iPad versions of the book, The Accidental Candidate, for $4.99 prior to its release in hard copy.

“Some of my friends don’t read books,” said Hutchins, a political reporter who chronicled the story of Avlin Greene for Free Times. “But they’re on their iPhones all the time. We thought it was a way to reach an audience that’s not so much into the tree-slaying aspect of literature. Tweet that.”

If you’ll recall, Corey was the only reporter in the universe (to my knowledge, so I guess I should say, “in the known ‘verse”) who actually interviewed Greene prior to his becoming the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Whites not the majority? Nothing new in that…

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Did y’all see the “news” the other day — ironically, the day before my grandson was born — that white babies are no longer the majority? I first heard it on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. Quoth Neal Conan:

We’ve known for years this day would come, but here it is. The Census Bureau announced today that nonwhite births now make up a majority in the United States. Data gathered in 2011 show that nonwhite, Hispanic, African-American, Asian, Native American, mixed race and others combined for 50.4 percent. That’s the first time that white births were not a majority in U.S. history, and that raises some questions about policy – from education to social services programs – and about how we see ourselves as a nation….

Perhaps this is a good time to inject a bit of historical perspective…

I’m still off-and-on gradually making my way through Charles C. Mann’s 1493, while reading several other books at varying rates, and every time I read a stretch in it, I learn something startling. For instance, I refer you to the fact that for most of the history of Europeans in the Americas — up to the mid-nineteenth century — there were far more people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere than there were white. Way more. An excerpt (I hope the publishers will excuse the length of this quote. I share it within the context of urging you to run out and buy this book; there are many other things in it that will surprise you, and enlarge your understanding of our world.):

This was surprising to me for a couple of reasons. For instance, I had long known that before and after the Civil War, South Carolina had a larger black population than white. Which means that before 1860, most of the state’s population was enslaved.

I used to think of that as anomalous. I thought of it as helping explain the fact that South Carolina slaveholders were more fanatically devoted to their Peculiar Institution that the white elites anywhere else. Hence that firing on Fort Sumter thing.

But as it turns out, if you look at ALL post-Columbian immigration across the hemisphere, not just English, you see that far, far more were brought here as slaves from African than came here, either free or indentured, from all Europe. By 1860, this balance had changed in many places (thereby making SC somewhat anomalous), but for most of the time from 1492 until then, a larger black population had been the norm. (Of course, for that same period, there remained more Indians than whites or blacks, in spite of the way native populations had been decimated by European and African diseases.)

I also found it surprising because I spent part of my childhood in Latin America, and it did not prepare me for this statistic — even though I studied history in Spanish in school (Mann’s references to Columbus as Cristóbal Colón seem very natural to me). In Ecuador, where I lived for two-and-a-half years, it was very unusual to see anyone who looked at all African. I knew that Brazil had imported vast numbers of slaves during the colonial period, and that you could see the results on the streets of Rio. I would have said the same of the islands of the Caribbean.

But for there to be that many more blacks than whites across all the Americas? I had no idea. We all are aware that black labor largely built this country, but I guess I thought that was because those workers were owned by a white majority. I was wrong. At least from a hemispherewide perspective.

In any case… whites not being the majority? Nothing new about that on this side of the world.

Has anyone read “Men Against The Sea”?

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And if so, how was it?

I just finished reading Mutiny on the Bounty, for the first time — I think. I initially had this vague idea that I had read it as a child. Yet most of it seemed fresh to me. Of course, I knew at ever step of the way what was to happen next. Who doesn’t know the general outline of the story? Who hasn’t seen at least one of the Hollywood versions? But the actual words seemed fresh as I read them, and certain things about it — such as the fact that, bizarrely, the English sailors refer to the people of Tahiti as “Indians” throughout — seemed totally unfamiliar.

In any case, I’m certain I’ve never read either of the sequels, Men Against the Sea or Pitcairn Island. That is to say, I’ve never read the “chapter book” versions. I have a clear memory of reading the Classics Illustrated version of Men Against the Sea. What sticks out in my mind is the desperate men in the open boat managing to kill a seagull, and Captain Bligh rigidly serving out portions of its blood to the neediest men on board. (Or do I remember Charles Laughton doing that in the 1935 film?)

Anyway, now that I’ve finished the first book, I’m wondering whether it’s worth my while to read the second. I know what happened — Bligh, a tyrant of a captain but an extraordinary seaman, manages to get himself and 17 others safely to Timor, 3,500 miles away, in an open boat with practically no provisions. It stands as one of the most extraordinary feats of seafaring history.

But I’ve got to think it’s not much fun to read. It’s a tale of horrific suffering, day after day. And the main protagonist is a guy who’s hard to like. I mean, Mutiny on the Bounty had gorgeous topless Tahitian girls. (No pictures, but still…) What’s this got to recommend it?

Perhaps the fact that it’s told mainly through the experience of Thomas Ledward, acting surgeon, helps you root for these guys a bit more than you otherwise might. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to read it in Bligh’s voice.

Anyway, has anyone out there read it? Did you like it? And if so, why?

Dick Clark’s dead, and Levon Helm’s dying

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And to channel Lewis Grizzard, I suppose I should say I don’t feel so good myself.

I was sad this morning to read that Levon Helm is in the last stages of cancer. Virgil Caine himself! Not only am I a huge fan of The Band (I saw them live with Bob Dylan in ’74!), but he’s the most awesome, naturalistic actor I’ve ever seen. Remember him as the coal miner himself in “Coal Miner’s Daughter”? You’d have thought they had dragged him right out of the mine, he was so real.

My favorite role was the flight engineer Jack Ridley, Chuck Yeager’s best buddy in “The Right Stuff.” Sample down-home dialogue:

Chuck Yeager: Hey, Ridley… you got any Beeman’s?

Jack Ridley: I might have me a stick.

Yeager: Well loan me some, would ya? I’ll pay ya back later.

Ridley: Fair enough.

Yeager: I think I see a plane over here with my name on it.

Ridley: Now you’re talkin’…

He was also the narrator, because he came closest to having that aw-shucks Yeager quality that the job required:

There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier.

And now, this afternoon, I hear this:

Dick Clark, the music industry maverick, longtime TV host and powerhouse producer who changed the way we listened to pop music with “American Bandstand,” and whose trademark “Rockin’ Eve” became a fixture of New Year’s celebrations, died today at the age of 82.

Clark’s agent Paul Shefrin said in statement that the veteran host died this morning following a “massive heart attack.”…

Clark landed a gig as a DJ at WFIL in Philadelphia in 1952, spinning records for a show he called “Dick Clark’s Caravan of Music.” There he broke into the big time, hosting Bandstand, an afternoon dance show for teenagers…

I first saw “Bandstand” on local TV in Philadelphia. I lived across the river in Woodbury, N.J., in 1960-61, and used to watch all those “big kids” talking about which songs had a good beat and were easy to dance to.

All these years, and he never got old… but time eventually took its toll.

‘No Irish Need Apply:’ Myth of victimization?

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I read something that surprised me this morning, in a book review in The Wall Street Journal. As is fairly typical in opinion pieces in the Journal, the reviewer repeatedly expressed disdain for the author of a book about Irish politics in Boston whenever he failed to be insufficiently conservative (praising him for not dwelling on the Kennedys, castigating him for insufficiently respecting the Southies who fought busing for integration). But I was startled by this revelation:

Unfortunately, Mr. O’Neill has produced a rather straightforward recapitulation of Irish politics in the Hub, sticking to the well-established narrative of mustache-twisting Brahmins (or “Yankee overlords,” in Mr. O’Neill’s phrasing) doing battle against spirited, rascally Irish politicians. Indeed, “Rogues and Redeemers” doesn’t so much upend myths as reinforce them. In Irish America, tales of rampant employment discrimination by Yankee businessmen, who posted signs warning “No Irish need apply” are accepted as gospel. Such anti-Irish bias, writes Mr. O’Neill, was “commonly found in newspapers” and became “so commonplace that it soon had an acronym: NINA.”

But according to historian Richard Jensen, there is almost no proof to support the claim that NINA was a common hiring policy in America. Mr. Jensen reported in the Journal of Social History in 2002 that “the overwhelming evidence is that such signs never existed” and “evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish.” The tale has been so thoroughly discredited that, in 2010, the humor magazine Cracked ranked it No. 2 on a list of “6 Ridiculous History Myths (You Probably Think Are True).” Mr. O’Neill doesn’t inspire confidence by faithfully accepting NINA as fact…

I spent a few moments just now checking to see to what extent it is true that the NINA phenomenon is a “myth” of victimization. What I found kept directing me to the aforementioned Mr. Jensen, whose article on the subject is much cited.

But even Jensen documents that some (although not many) ads saying “No Irish Need Apply” appeared in American newspapers during the period. And no one disputes that such prejudice against the Irish was common in Britain; the only debate has to do with the extent of the practice in this country.

From the Jensen article:

The NINA slogan seems to have originated in England, probably after the 1798 Irish rebellion. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries it was used by English to indicate their distrust of the Irish, both Catholic and Protestant. For example the Anglican bishop of London used the phrase to say he did not want any Irish Anglican ministers in his diocese. By the 1820s it was a cliché in upper and upper middle class London that some fussy housewives refused to hire Irish and had even posted NINA signs in their windows. It is possible that handwritten NINA signs regarding maids did appear in a few American windows, though no one ever reported one. We DO have actual newspaper want ads for women workers that specifies Irish are not wanted; they will be discussed below. In the entire file of the New York Times from 1851 to 1923, there are two NINA ads for men, one of which is for a teenager. Computer searches of classified help wanted ads in the daily editions of other online newspapers before 1923 such as the Booklyn Eagle, the Washington Post and the Chicago Tribune show that NINA ads for men were extremely rare–fewer than two per decade. The complete absence of evidence suggests that probably zero such signs were seen at commercial establishments, shops, factories, stores, hotels, railroads, union halls, hiring halls, personnel offices, labor recruiters etc. anywhere in America, at any time. NINA signs and newspaper ads for apartments to let did exist in England and Northern Ireland, but historians have not discovered reports of any in the United States, Canada or Australia. The myth focuses on public NINA signs which deliberately marginalized and humiliated Irish male job applicants. The overwhelming evidence is that such signs never existed.

Irish Americans all have heard about them—and remember elderly relatives insisting they existed. The myth had “legs”: people still believe it, even scholars. The late Tip O’Neill remembered the signs from his youth in Boston in 1920s; Senator Ted Kennedy reported the most recent sighting, telling the Senate during a civil rights debate that he saw them when growing up ⁵ Historically, physical NINA signs could have flourished only in intensely anti-Catholic or anti-Irish eras, especially the 1830—1870 period. Thus reports of sightings in the 1920s or 1930s suggest the myth had become so deeply rooted in Irish-American folk mythology that it was impervious to evidence…

Make of this what you will.

Personally, I think it unlikely that NO such signs existed. Given what we can see even today of nativist sentiment, and knowing the nation’s history of suspicion and even hostility toward Catholics, it seems almost certain that back in a day when the “n-word” invited no social ostracism, such alienation toward an outside group would have been expressed quite openly and without embarrassment. But I’m just extrapolating from known facts here. Jensen is right — neither I nor anyone else can produce physical evidence of such signs at worksites.

I suspect that the truth lies somewhere between the utter dismissal of the reviewer, and the deep resentment of alleged widespread practices that runs through the history of Southie politics.

What’s the proper price for books that don’t exist?

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Just a couple of days after I posted a video of the director of the Ayn Rand Institute, that organization sends out this release:

Apple Should Be Free to Charge $15 for eBooks

WASHINGTON–Apple and five top book publishers have been threatened by federal antitrust authorities. According to the Wall Street Journal, they are to be sued for allegedly colluding to fix ebook prices.

According to Ayn Rand Center fellow Don Watkins, “Traditional books may come from trees but they don’t grow on trees–and ebooks and ebook readers such as the iPad definitely don’t grow on trees. These are amazing values created by publishers and by companies such as Apple. They have a right to offer their products for sale at whatever prices they choose. They cannot force us to buy them. If they could, why would they charge only $15? Why not $50? Why not $1,000?

“There is no mystically ordained ‘right’ price for ebooks–the right price is the one voluntarily agreed to between sellers and buyers. Sure, some buyers may complain about ebook prices–but they are also buying an incredible number of ebooks.

“What in the world justifies a bunch of bureaucrats who have created nothing interfering in these voluntary arrangements and declaring that they get to decide what considerations should go into pricing ebooks?”

Read more from Don Watkins at his blog.

I didn’t know what the Institute was on about until I saw this Wall Street Journal piece:

U.S. Warns Apple, Publishers

The Justice Department has warned Apple Inc. and five of the biggest U.S. publishers that it plans to sue them for allegedly colluding to raise the price of electronic books, according to people familiar with the matter.

Several of the parties have held talks to settle the antitrust case and head off a potentially damaging court battle, these people said. If successful, such a settlement could have wide-ranging repercussions for the industry, potentially leading to cheaper e-books for consumers. However, not every publisher is in settlement discussions.

The five publishers facing a potential suit areCBS Corp.’s Simon & Schuster Inc.;Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group;Pearson PLC’s Penguin Group (USA); Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH; and HarperCollins Publishers Inc., a unit of News Corp. , which also owns The Wall Street Journal….

This is truly a fight in which I do not have a dog. I think. And it should please the Randians that my own attitude has to do with market forces. I can’t conceive of paying $15 for a book when, after the transaction, I don’t actually have a book.

So I can approach this dispassionately, and ask, to what extent is this a monopoly situation? After all, Apple has competitors — such as Amazon, which actually pioneered this business of selling “books” to people electronically. The WSJ story addresses that:

To build its early lead in e-books, Amazon Inc. sold many new best sellers at $9.99 to encourage consumers to buy its Kindle electronic readers. But publishers deeply disliked the strategy, fearing consumers would grow accustomed to inexpensive e-books and limit publishers’ ability to sell pricier titles.

Publishers also worried that retailers such as Barnes & Noble Inc. would be unable to compete with Amazon’s steep discounting, leaving just one big buyer able to dictate prices in the industry. In essence, they feared suffering the same fate as record companies at Apple’s hands, when the computer maker’s iTunes service became the dominant player by selling songs for 99 cents.

Now that sounds more like what I would think the market would bear, if the market were like me. $9.99 sounds closer to what I might conceivably be willing to pay in order to have access to the contents of a book without actually getting a book. But it still seems high.

Yes, I can see advantages to a e-book. You can store more of them in a smaller space. They don’t get musty, which for an allergic guy like me is nothing to sneeze at. And you can search them, to look up stuff you read, and want to quote or otherwise share. That last consideration isn’t that great for me because I have an almost eerie facility for quickly finding something I read in a book, remembering by context. But… once I’ve found it, there’s the problem that if I want to quote it, I have to type it — which is not only time-consuming, but creates the potential for introducing transcription errors. Far better to copy and paste. (At least, I think you can copy and paste from ebooks. Google Books doesn’t allow it. See how I got around that back here, by using screenshots of Google Books.)

But I still want to possess the book. Maybe it’s just pure acquisitiveness, or maybe it’s a survivalist thing — I want something I can read even if someone explodes a thermonuclear device over my community, knocking out all electronics.

In any case, all of us are still sorting out what an ebook is worth to us. Let Apple set the price where it may, and try to compete with Amazon. Then we’ll see what shakes out.

The infrastructure of a healthy society

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Well, I’m back. I had some sort of crud yesterday that made me leave the office about this time yesterday– upset stomach, weakness, achiness. It lasted until late last night. When I got up this morning, I was better, but puny. So I went back to bed, and made it to the office just after noon. Much better now.

Anyway, instead of reading newspapers over breakfast at the Capital City Club the way I usually do, I read a few more pages in my current book, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, by Charles C. Mann. Remember how I was all in a sweat to read it several months ago after reading an excerpt in The Wall Street Journal? Well, having read the prequel, 1491, I’m finally well into this one.

And I’m reading about how settlement by Europeans in many parts of the New World established “extraction societies.” At least, I think that was the term. (It’s one I’ve seen elsewhere, related to “extraction economy” and, less closely, to “plunder economy.” The book is at home, and Google Books won’t let me see the parts of the book where the term was used. But the point was this: Settlements were established that existed only to extract some commodity from a country — say, sugar in French Guiana. Only a few Europeans dwelt there, driving African slaves in appalling conditions. Profits went to France, and the institutions and infrastructure were never developed, or given a chance to develop.

Neither a strong, growing economy with opportunities for all individuals, nor its attendant phenomenon democracy, can thrive in such a place. (Which is related to something Tom Friedman often writes about, having to do with why the Israelis were lucky that their piece of the Mideast is the only one without oil.)

Here are some excerpts I was able to find on Google Books, to give the general thrust of what I’m talking about:

There are degrees of extraction societies, it would seem. South Carolina developed as such a society, but in modified form. There were more slaves than free whites, and only a small number even of the whites could prosper in the economy. But those few established institutions and infrastructure that allowed something better than the Guianas to develop. Still, while we started ahead of the worst extraction societies, and have made great strides since, our state continues to lag by having started so far back in comparison to other states.

It is also inhibited by a lingering attitude among whites of all economic classes, who do not want any of what wealth exists to be used on the kind of infrastructure that would enable people on the bottom rungs to better themselves. This comes up in the debate over properly funding public transit in the economic community of Columbia.

Because public transit doesn’t pay for itself directly, any more than roads do, there is a political reluctance to invest in it, which holds back people on the lower rungs who would like to better themselves — by getting to work as an orderly at a hospital, or to classes at Midlands Tech.

It’s a difficult thing to overcome. Other parts of the country, well out of the malarial zones (you have to read Mann to understand my reference here), have no trouble ponying up for such things. But here, there’s an insistent weight constantly pulling us down into the muck of our past…

Remembering when I struggled to get a blog off the ground

Here’s hoping they just keep on flying, right on out into space

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This just in from the Ayn Rand Institute:

“Atlas Shrugged” Still Flying Off Shelves!

WASHINGTON—New reports from Ayn Rand’s publisher indicates that sales figures for “Atlas Shrugged” are continuing a remarkable trend.

In 2011 all English editions of “Atlas Shrugged” sold 445,000 copies.

“This is incredible,” says Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute. “Since Obama was elected, ‘Atlas Shrugged’ has sold more than 1.5 million copies. This is unheard of in the publishing industry, for a 55-year-old novel to register sales of this magnitude. And what’s even more remarkable is that this is even more than the book sold in 1957 . . . when it was a best seller!”

In addition, Penguin’s new “Atlas Shrugged” iPad app recently won the Publishing Innovation Award for best app in the fiction category.

“Atlas Shrugged” is a mystery story about the disappearance of America’s great thinkers, industrialists, inventors and artists. Its theme is the role of the mind in man’s existence. A philosophical novel of breathtaking scope, “Atlas Shrugged” has been embraced, in recent years, by people looking for answers to the problems of an ever-expanding federal government.

# # #

Come on, duh — the Tea Party has been a very popular thing in certain quarters over the last couple of years. This is right up their alley. Think about this: Ayn Rand is selling right now for the same reason Sarah Palin books sell. That, and the fact that some people probably confuse Ayn and Rand Paul.

So stick that in your Objectivist pipe and smoke it. Just be sure to do so in the designated smoking area, well away from the building.

Capt. Romney’s crew fights both sides at once

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Note the two sides, above and below, of a mailer I received at home.

One of the good things about being a Patrick O’Brian fanatic is that it provides one with so many good metaphors.

For instance… one of the most difficult things for a man of war’s crew in the age of sail was to fight both sides of the ship at once. One way this might occur would be if a ship sailed between two enemy ships and fired with its larboard and starboard guns at the same time. This took not only a very well-trained crew, but a numerous one — remember, it took a lot of men just to keep changing sail and maneuvering the ship, plus twice the usual number of gun crews. Each gun required a crew of several men, and they weren’t much good if they hadn’t had plenty of experience firing live ammunition at targets under all sorts of conditions.

This required a wealthy commander, because the Royal Navy provided a minuscule amount of powder and shot, and the captain had to shell out his own money if he wanted his men to be able to perform well, even to survive, in a fight.

And only a captain with a numerous, well trained crew would attempt anything so taxing as dashing between two enemy ships to fight both sides at once.

Either that, or a very desperate captain.

I suppose you could interpret this mailer I got at home either way. It was sent out by Restore Our Future, Inc., which exists to promote Mitt Romney.

We know he’s a wealthy captain, with a numerous crew. But is he also desperate?

His foes are the ones who should be desperate. They know that if they don’t stop him in South Carolina, they are done for. But he also knows that, and probably just as soon have done with them all.

So he fires both broadsides at once; never mind the cost.

‘Tinker Tailor’ eminently worth seeing, although of course I have my pedantic objections

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Well, I finally got to see the film I’d awaited for a year, and which opened in Britain in September, and in other parts of this country in December. Thanks to the Nickelodeon for bringing it here (you can still see it there through Thursday).

And the verdict? It was good, very good. You should definitely see it, whether you’ve read the book or not, and whether or not you, like me, own the 1979 TV series on DVD.

Was it as good as that, the Alec Guinness version? No. Still, that leaves a lot of room to be very good indeed. (The series was one of the best things ever made for television.)

The film was slicker, certainly, with more impressive production values. But that’s to be expected. Everything I had read about the film’s effective evocation of mood was true. I don’t know what sort of process the film was run through, but it seemed to have been subjected to something akin to what was done with “Saving Private Ryan.” Only there is a rustiness to the scenes, rather than the greenish cast.

And Gary Oldman is wonderful, as usual. Afterward, my wife was asking where she had seen him before. She couldn’t recall. Was it just that the actor is such a chameleon? Yes, he is (as you can see here and here and here and here and here). Which makes him perfect to portray the forgettable, unremarkable George Smiley. In his own way, perhaps even as good as Guinness.

On the whole, a very good job was done in spite of not having the six hours that the TV series had to do it in.

That said, I have a number of objections, and they are mostly of the pedantic, fanboy sort. They have to do with inexplicable changes in the stories, and the characters — changes that are not excused by the demands of brevity or limitations of the medium. Changes that in some cases unnecessarily complicate the story, even making it less credible.

I’ll warn you now with a SPOILER ALERT, but ask you to return and review my list after you’ve seen the film:

Why on Earth does Control send Jim Prideaux to Budapest, rather than Czechoslovakia? Why make the alleged contact Hungarian? A totally gratuitous change. No harm, but unnecessary. As I viewed the scenery, I wondered whether it was easier to get establishing shots of Budapest that looked as they did in the 70s. But so what? The action, in the book (and the TV series), took place near a cabin out in the woods. There was NO need for an establishing shot, as the locale was generic. It could have been shot anywhere.
Why, indeed, was Jim shot in an urban setting? Just so we could be horrified by the unnecessary death of a particularly vulnerable innocent bystander — an incident completely missing from the original story?
Why did Colin Firth get so little to do in the film? I had assumed that he signed on because the role of Bill Haydon was such a meaty one. Haydon was not only the critical character in the story, he was a particularly charismatic and tragic figure, the hero to a generation of intelligence officers, a flamboyant and brilliant presence, a source of cuttingly ironic remarks, the cynosure of regard by all. And yet, except for a couple of obligatory scenes, he is hardly drawn for the audience at all. (This is one thing that perhaps could be explained by the need for brevity, of course, although it’s an insufficient excuse.)
Given that there is so little time to explain what must be explained, why is a scene added that does nothing but tell us that one of the characters is gay? A character who, by the way, is not gay — to the extent that one respects the book. (Another key character was bisexual — which is accurately touched upon in the film.) Peter Guillam is perhaps the closest to a “James Bond” type you find in the novel — a relatively uncomplicated tough guy (head of the department of tough guys, Scalphunters) with a penchant for fast cars and beautiful young women (something you see more clearly explicated in later books). Why do this? It advanced the story in no way.
For that matter, why was Guillam not portrayed as Smiley’s close friend? The first thing we hear him say to George is to address him as “Mr. Smiley.” In the book, Peter takes George out drinking after Smiley is fired. In this film, George’s sacking is portrayed as a long walk out of the building with Control, who was close to no one. Peter is just one of the people who watch him go. This is no minor detail. In the film, you are left to wonder why Peter is the one person still at the Circus whom George trusts. In the book, you knew why. He was like a Watson to George’s Holmes.
You are particularly left to wonder about that because, in the film, Peter is not that critical to setting the action in motion as he was in the book. And THIS is the biggest unnecessary flaw in the production, one that actually matters. For some bizarre reason, we are asked to believe that a mere phone call from low-level Scalphunter Ricki Tarr to senior bureaucrat Oliver Lacon (one of the few in Whitehall with keys to the secret kingdom) causes Lacon to contact George and launch him on his hunt for the mole. (Lacon hadn’t believed Control when he had alleged the same thing; it is utterly incredible that he would take such extraordinary steps on the word of the mercurial, untrusted Tarr.) We are halfway through the film when Tarr emerges from hiding to tell Smiley his story. This is completely absurd. In the book and series, Tarr contacts his boss, Guillam, who then contacts Lacon (because he is senior enough to do so and be heard), and his detailed story is what convinces Lacon, Guillam and Smiley that there is a mole at the Circus. Without that, there is no credible basis for the investigation that is the plot of this story.
A side casualty of this strange twist is that what should be the tensest scene in the film is missing something critical. When Percy Alleline calls Guillam on the carpet and accuses him of consorting with Tarr (officially regarded as a defector), Peter lies masterfully in the original. In this film, he doesn’t have to lie, because he has not seen Tarr.
Yesterday I mentioned that an unlikely actor was chosen to portray Jerry Westerby. Having seen the film, I wonder why the character was even given that name. In the film, they essentially call Sam Collins “Jerry Westerby.” I understand combining characters in movies, but this isn’t a combination; it’s a substitution. The part the character plays in the story is in every detail Sam Collins, and he in no way does or says anything that Westerby did or would have. Strange. Now that they have confused things to this extent, it will be even harder to make a sequel out of the next book in the series, in which Westerby is the title character.
Then there is all the gratuitous depiction of violence, twisting credibility in order to show blood. Pure Hollywood, I suppose. There’s quite a list, starting with the nursing mother who is accidentally shot in Budapest. Tufty Thesinger is brutally murdered in his office (which is also in the wrong country, by the way — why Istanbul, instead of Lisbon?). So is Boris. Tarr actually sees the brutally beaten Irina carried onto a ship on a stretcher (in the book, he persuaded a witness to tell him of seeing a woman placed on a plane). Irina is shot, shockingly, in front of Jim Prideaux during his interrogation, instead of being eliminated far from anyone’s view in a cell at Dzerzhinsky Square (in the book, Prideaux would never have met Irina, or known she existed). Then there was the implied violence of Toby Esterhase being threatened with immediate extradition — the realization of what he had done should have been enough, as it was in the book and series, to turn him.
Speaking of violence, there is the completely unnecessary change in how the mole Gerald meets his end. Is it really that much more appealing to movie audiences to see a man killed at long distance with a rifle than to get his neck broken with his killer’s bare hands? I wouldn’t complain, except that it makes the mole’s last-second recognition of his killer (which is important to the arcs of the characters) a little harder to believe.

One tiny, last detail — in the TV series, they at least showed George Smiley living on Bywater Street. In the film, it was somewhere else. Probably no one but me would be bothered by that. And it’s forgivable. Perhaps the neighbors wouldn’t allow it; I don’t know.

But other than all that, it was great. Don’t mind me. Just go see it. In fact, if you are a le Carre fan you must see it; excuses will not be tolerated. I look forward to discussing it with you.

I’m going to see Tinker, Tailor!

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Smiley and Control, before they were sacked.

… just as soon as I finish typing this.

I’m pumped about it — and very appreciative to the folks at Nickelodeon for bringing it here in spite of Hollywood’s insulting decision not to send the film to South Carolina for standard commercial release.

I’m wondering whether I’ll like it. Gary Oldman is awesome, but how will he stack up against Alec Guinness, who so embodied the character that le Carre said he didn’t feel that he owned him any more?

Colin Firth as Bill Haydon is intriguing. But I really wonder about the decision to cast Toby Jones as Percy Alleline. When I saw Jones was cast, I assumed it was as Toby Esterhase — not because of the coincidence of given names, but because of physical similarity (“tiny Toby,” as he was called in the book). And I’m sorry, but Benedict Cumberbatch isn’t nearly tough enough, or old enough, for Peter Guillam.

I also think it strange that the filmmakers cast Stephen Graham in the minor part of Jerry Westerby. I think Graham is a fine character actor — I enjoyed him in “Band of Brothers” and “Snatch” — but Westerby is supposed to be an upper-class leading-man type. He’s the dashing sort who calls everybody “old boy.” More to the point, he is the title character of the next book in the series, The Honourable Schoolboy, and that tells me that the powers that be on this project are probably not thinking series. Which is disappointing.

Or will be, if the movie is as good as I hope it will be.

All right, I’m off!

Hey, Burl: I’m reading Black Ocean now…

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Back on a previous post, Burl asked me whether I’ve ever read a book he sent me a year or two ago — which has weighed on my conscience ever since, sitting there among all the others I keep meaning to read.

Well, as it happens, that was one of the “two or three” books I was reading and rereading over the past week. Now, I’ve set the others aside, and have just started to get serious with Black Ocean.

I’m only on page 88, but I have some observations already (just to prove to Burl that I’m reading it).

One is that I’m enjoying watching familiar people pop up in the book. I felt foolish for not realizing who “Ed Burroughs” was until he mentioned his “ape-man.” But then, how would I have known before that? I then checked Wikipedia, and found that the real-life Burroughs was, indeed, in Hawaii at the end of 1941.

Then Sammy Amalu’s name cropped up, which was really weird, because something — I forget what now — a page or two earlier had caused me to think of Sammy, then Google him on my iPhone. I think the thing that made me think of him was a mention of pidgin. And I thought I remembered that Sammy used to hold pidgin in great disdain and refuse to speak it to anyone. (By the way, Burl, did you and Sammy work together?)

Then there was a passing reference to “the Kanahamoku brothers.” Well, I know who one of them was.

I’m sure there are loads of other references that I’m just not getting, because I only lived in Hawaii for a little over a year — things that Burl will get because he has spent most of his life there, as both a journalist and historian.

This weaving of real and fictional characters is reminiscent of the style of Harry Turtledove, who dares to make historical figures main characters in his works of alternative fiction. Burroughs, for instance, is already playing a role as significant as that of Col. Leslie Groves in Turtledove’s Worldwar series.

Oh, did I mention, to those of you who don’t know? Black Ocean is a novel with the premise that the Americans attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, at which time the islands were controlled by the Japanese.

The second thing I’m noticing is that, at least at the outset, Black Ocean is both very much like, and very much unlike, Len Deighton’s SS-GB.

Both are set in 1941. Both take place on islands that, contrary to history, are in Axis hands at that time. Another way that they are alike is that Tad Morimura — a Honolulu policeman who now works for the Japanese — is investigating a death (actually, several) that will run him afoul of the Japanese military, the deeper he goes. In SS-GB, Douglas Archer is a renowned Scotland Yard detective who is now working for the German SS (the Germans having invaded England and won the war). He, too, is looking into matters that will get him into serious trouble with the Nazis (or the English resistance, which seems to pose just as much of a threat to him).

But the differences, so far, are more noteworthy than the similarities.

To begin with, I don’t know what’s happened that changed the direction of history. I thought, for a moment, that when Morimura was explaining to a Japanese Army officer the history of the Hawaiian royal family’s relationship with Japan, that there would be a clue — but I don’t know enough about Hawaiian and Pacific history to know where things diverged, other than that the princess Kaiulani (whom I had to look up, even to know who she was) survived her youth to become an aging queen.

By contrast, I knew from the very beginning what had happened in SS-GB. It was what everyone had feared — Hitler had not squandered his opportunity to invade, and had prevailed, well before the Americans could get into the war.

This makes me much more comfortable with the Deighton book than I am so far with this. And I find myself wondering, is this my own Anglocentrism? Am I more comfortable with it simply because I feel so much more comfortable with British history and culture? There’s no doubt that I’m better able to identify with the characters and understand where they are coming from — how they feel about the German occupation, and how conflicted they might be carrying on with their jobs under such domination.

Whereas, with Black Ocean… I don’t really understand where anyone stands. But I reject the idea that this is because of my own Western frame of reference, or (more disturbingly) that I simply understand and care more about the concerns of Anglo-Saxons than about the Japanese and Filipina and other ethnic characters in the book Burl sent. I really think it’s because the author, Rick Blaine, is being so coy with me as a reader. Yes, a man of Japanese ancestry (although he grew up in Hawaii) like Morimura is going to have an even more nuanced relationship with the Japanese authorities than the thoroughly English Archer did with the Nazis, if only because the Japanese, apparently because of their own racist assumptions, trust him more.

But there’s more than that. Blaine has really muddied the waters. In Deighton’s book, ordinary Englishmen chafe as you would expect them to at the Jerry yoke, griping openly when only their countrymen are around. But in Black Ocean, the locals take Japanese control of the islands more in stride, even alluding to “patriotism” in terms of being loyal to the current order.

A lot of things make sense, such as the Japanese military’s attempt to pin a murder on American provocateurs, or preparing the islands’ defenses. Other things don’t, such as… the journalists at the Star-Bulletin (Burl’s paper) in many ways have to deal with the hassles of occupation — tapped phones, and pressure to cover things a certain way. But beyond that, they seem to (thus far) assume more freedom than you would think they would have under this regime. For instance (SPOILER ALERT!), why would the Japanese assassinate the newspaper’s publisher, apparently not for playing ball, and no one at the paper, initially at least, suspect their hands in the killing? So far, the folks at the paper seem to assume a cocoon of invulnerability like you would typically find at an American paper, not at a paper in a place under the control of Japanese imperialists (but then again, I do know so little about how the Empire of Japan would have related to local media, and I still don’t understand the nature of the Japanese presence).

So what happened, and when did it happen, and how did it happen? I suppose I’ll have to keep reading to find out.

No, Allen didn’t get his ‘groove’ back with ‘Midnight.’ But wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?

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The Guardian celebrated it this way: “Woody Allen gets his groove back with ‘Midnight in Paris‘ after years of decline.”

If only it were true. I mean, the part about getting it back. We have a consensus on the years of decline.

I spent the first moments of 2012 watching the latter part of the film, in which Owen Wilson speaks the Woody Allen lines. Which works pretty well. It brings a smile when this younger man speaks words that you know Allen himself would have spoken 40 years ago. There’s an echo there, and you do smile, because he really used to make you laugh. As Wilson has also done, more recently.

And then there’s the central conceit of the movie, which is that… wait… SPOILER ALERT!

… which is that after midnight, Wilson’s character — the Woody Allen character (let’s go ahead and call him “Gil” to avoid this confusion) — finds himself transported to the very best time to be in Paris.

And when was that? Well, for him it is the same time that it would be for me, the 1920s. The Lost Generation, when you couldn’t swing a bat on the Left Bank without maiming a genius in the art form of your choice. So he finds himself staggering across Montparnasse from party to party with Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Dali, Picasso, and the rest of the gang.

Gil is, by his own estimation, a hack writer for Hollywood who hopes to save himself with a novel he’s struggling with. Hemingway tells him to let Gertrude Stein read it. Ms. Stein, who in real life looked like this — by which I mean to say, looked like somebody no insecure writer would hand his heart to that way — is in the film a sort of amiable den mother who would LOVE to read his book and tell him encouraging things. Which she may have done for Hemingway, but for this nebbish? I don’t know.

Anyway, this premise is loaded with possibilities, and you want to see them explored. But they are not. Allen walks up to this great idea, and then shrugs, backs away and gives us a “so what?’ ending.

And it makes me sad. I mean, this is the guy who made “Manhattan.” It may or may not have been a masterpiece, but it was funny and poignant. And how about that ending: Mariel Hemingway says, “You have to have a little faith in people,” and your heart gets sucked into such depths in a whirlpool formed by the currents of innocence, cynicism and desire. In that moment, you forgive Allen, if only momentarily, for being such a perv and corrupting young girls. In that moment, you recognize the complexity of being human.

And with this thing, what has happened? Nothing. Gil has blown off an engagement that every viewer has wanted to see him walk away from since the first 30 seconds of the film. No conflict there. Every moment spent with the grotesquely drawn caricatures of his “present” life is tedious, and obviously pointless.

There is no depth to anyone in this film, including the protagonist. Here I am thinking “this is really cool; we’re going to meet Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Picasso,” and they are played for not very good laughs, especially Hemingway. And none of the promises are realized. None of them.

So no, he doesn’t have his thing back. But I kept hoping he would; kept hoping it would be as good as it tried to be. But it wasn’t.

My deep-seated, gut-level cultural conservatism

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This evening I was browsing Barnes and Noble (which, like Starbucks, should buy an ad here) and happened to look up and see this sign exhorting me to “Discover Great New Writers.”

I harrumphed to myself as I passed on, thinking, “If they are new, they are not great.”

Which, I realized on another level — the level that listens to everything I say and holds it in scorn — is irrational prejudice. It’s me thinking like a medieval man, thinking that all greatness occurred in the past, and if we see a distance, it was only because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Which is irrational — but, let me hasten to add, no more irrational than the idiotic modern idea that each generation is greater and wiser and more virtuous than the last, the foolish idea that just because our technology is smarter, we ourselves are. I utterly reject that modernist prejudice, and should do the same with its complement.

After all, great writers were all new once.

Still, I am hard-pressed to name a living writer of, say, fiction whom I regard as great. I tried, as I walked through the bookstore.

Patrick O’Brian, I thought. But no, he is dead, although his life did overlap mine. Ditto with Douglas Adams. Now, you are wondering that I consider those great, but I do. Matter of taste. O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels are not only, as other reviewers have said, the greatest historical fiction ever, they rank high among all fiction in my estimation. And Adams was the funniest writer of novels since Twain, again in my own necessarily limited estimation.

There is one living novelist I regard very highly, as you can tell from this recent post — John le Carré. But the last of his books that meant much to me was The Night Manager, and that was published in 1993. Although I did think The Constant Gardener was quite good. I just wasn’t as fond of it as of his earlier stuff. (Also, it seems to me that as he gets older he gets… preachier, in a predictably political sense. Is it just me?)

I look around me and other people seem to take great delight in current authors. Back when I started an effort to get Columbia to read a book together years ago, we stopped after the first one, because the others on the committee that formed were enthusiastic about getting the sorts of authors who might be induced to come visit and speak. The committee had gone along with me on Fahrenheit 451, but after that they wanted writers that I, reactionary philistine that I am, had not heard of. Some of it, I think, was that they wanted writers who were less male, and white, and mainstream, but mostly they wanted authors who were less dead. And I wasn’t having it.

Now, Belinda Gergel’s somewhat more successful bid to have the same sort of program is picking books more like what my committee had wanted.

But are they great books? Well, that’s in the eye of the reader, isn’t it?

My (successful) Quest for George Smiley

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Outside Smiley's house on Bywater Street. No need to knock. George knows I'm here. And where's he going to go? It's a cul de sac. It's over, old friend.

I’d been holding this back for when the movie comes out, but now that it’s passed me by (although I look forward to its being at the Nickelodeon next month), I am much embittered and have decided to go public with the whole story — the Official Secrets Act be damned. See how they like it when it’s all laid out in the papers. Perhaps I’ll go with The Guardian; that should sting. Let Parliament launch an inquiry. Let them connect me to the notorious Rebekah Brooks, for all I care. (After all, I’ve done a freelance job for that same outfit, in the time since they cast me out.) I’ve been a good soldier, put in my time, watched and waited. All for naught. Here’s my story…

As you know, I went to the UK a year ago, ostensibly as a tourist. That wouldn’t fool a real professional, of course, but one keeps as low a profile as one can. I have my own tradecraft for this sort of thing — I make a big splash, publicize my whereabouts… what spy would do that?

It’s worked so far.

My mission — to find the Circus, and more importantly, George Smiley himself.

It was quite a challenge. George hasn’t been seen since 1982. And the original location of the Circus, now that MI6 has the River House (all mod cons, as Bill Haydon would say), is shrouded in service legend. It’s not something you’d assign to some probationer straight out of Sarratt.

First, we spent a couple of days settling in, establishing patterns. One assumes that tiny Toby Esterhase‘s lamplighters are everywhere, so you need to paint them a picture, let them get complacent. This we did — from Heathrow to Swiss Cottage (the very spot where General Vladimir would have been picked up as a fallback, had he not been killed on Hampstead Heath), then all over the city on the Tube, aimlessly. Trafalgar Square, St. James’s, Fortnum’s, Buckingham, the Globe, the Tate, the Cabinet War Rooms, the Tower, hither and yon in the City.

Finally, at the end of our third full day, after night had fallen, we ambled up Charing Cross Road, affecting to be interested in bookshops. We almost missed it, but then there it was — the Circus itself. There was the Fifth Floor, and even Haydon’s little hexagonal pepperpot office overlooking New Compton Street and Charing Cross. Quick, I said, get the picture. It took a couple of tries, the way these things do when you need to hurry. Thank heavens for our “tourist” cover; it excuses all sorts of odd behavior. Then on up the street, and an hour or so of browsing at Foyles to check our backs. Found a couple of decent-looking biographies of Lord Cochrane, but didn’t buy one. (They had shelf after shelf of naval history; it went on and on.) Then we wandered about in the West End, to clean our backs as much as possible, before heading back to Swiss Cottage.

One thing down. Hardest part to come.

By this time, I had decided not to risk the actual modern HQ of the SIS. Mix fact with fiction like that, and it’s like mixing matter and antimatter. Could blow you clear across the universe, or at least to Brixton, and who wants to go there, really? That’s why they put Scalphunters there.

We played tourist for another day. Then another. The Sherlock Holmes museum. A side trip to Greenwich, to stand astride the Meridian, and see the coat Nelson wore at the Nile. Back into town for the British Museum.

Then, it was our last day in London. Had to go to Oxford the next day, and check on Connie. Connie is high-maintenance. So it was do-or-die time. We opted to do.

We thought that twilight would be the best time to descend on George. Vigilance is low. Everyone’s tired then; time for tea and meet the wife. So we went to that general part of town. Spent several hours at the Victoria and Albert. Loads of statues and the like.

We took the Tube to Sloan Square, a good half-kilometer from Bywater Street, and went the rest of the way on foot. We entered the cul de sac as night descended (which it does before 4 p.m. at that time of year). There wasn’t a soul on the narrow street. Everything went smoothly. When we got to the part where Smiley lives, I tried to throw the watchers off by shooting pictures of houses other than his. In a way, though, they were all relevant. George lives at No. 9, of course. But the 1979 TV series was shot at No. 10. And No. 11 has a Banham security system, which the book describes as being on George’s house. No. 9 has an ADT system.

Anyway, after doing what I could to distract any lamplighters in the vicinity, I had J (her workname — best watcher in the outfit, is J) quickly shoot a happy snap of me in front of No. 9. She was a bit nervous, because there were lights in the basement-level windows. She said people who lived there would wonder what we were doing. I muttered no, they wouldn’t: “They know exactly what we’re doing.” The thing was to get it over with quickly, so we did. Given the hurry we were in, I’m struck, as I look at the image, by how placid and dispassionate and, well, Smileyesque I look in the image. Like I was channeling him in that moment.

Then, it was back out to King’s Road and back to the Underground as fast as our legs would carry us, trying not to show that our hearts were pounding like Peter Guillam’s when he stole the Testify file from Registry that time. I was getting too old for this, I knew. As I looked up at the Christmas lights in the trees on Sloane Square, they were as blurry as the stars in a Van Gogh.

I can hardly remember the next couple of hours, but I can’t forget the stroke of luck that befell us later. Nothing short of a miracle, it was.

We had decided to case Victoria Station and its environs, because we knew we had to catch a coach there for the trip to Oxford next morning, and it’s good tradecraft to reconnoiter these things ahead of time. We got a bit turned-around there, and ended up touring the whole station before we discovered that the coach station was on the next block. On one aimless pass through the vicinity of the ticket windows, I looked up and there he was. George himself. Right out of the first paragraph of this passage:

He returned to the railway station… There were two ticket counters and two short queues. At the first, an intelligent girl attended him and he bought a second-class single ticket to Hamburg. But it was a deliberately laboured purchase, full of indecision and nervousness, and when he had made it he insisted on writing down times of departure and arrival: also on borrowing her ball-point and a pad of paper.

In the men’s room, having first transferred the contents of his pockets, beginning with the treasured piece of postcard from Leipzig’s boat, he changed into the linen jacket and straw hat, then went to the second ticket counter where, with a minimum of fuss, he bought a ticket on the stopping train to Kretzchmar’s town. To do this, he avoided looking at the attendant at all, concentrating instead on the ticket and his change, from under the brim of his loud straw hat…

Apparently, our appearance at Bywater Street had sent him on the run, but we had stumbled into him anyway. I left him alone, except for grabbing this picture. You doubt that’s George Smiley? Look at this picture, and this one and this one, and then tell me that. ‘Course it was him. Stuck out a mile.

But now that I’d found him, what was the point? He was just my old friend George. I could hear Toby’s triumphant voice in my ear: “Brad! All your life! Fantastic!” But I ignored him. I got the picture, and moved on. I didn’t even look to see whether he had left Ann’s lighter on the floor.

My mission had been accomplished, and then some… Why did I not exult? All I felt was the urge to polish my glasses with the lining of my tie. But I wasn’t wearing a tie…

: At Victoria Station, suddenly, there was George himself!

: A phone-booth sized loo at Sloane Square. Note that the building in the background looks eerily like the Circus.

: As I looked up at the Christmas lights in the trees on Sloane Square, they were as blurry as the stars in a Van Gogh.

: Outside Smiley’s house on Bywater Street. No need to knock. George knows I’m here. And where’s he going to go? It’s a cul de sac.

: This shot from inside the museum captured my mood as the do-or-die moment came.

: Getting lost among the statues at the Victoria and Albert, preparing to make our final move.

: These “Chelsea fans” affected to be interested in something else as they followed us to that part of town.

: After the Circus, we went underground, to the Cabinet War Rooms. These chaps are made of wax. Permanent stiff upper lips.

: Killing time, watching our backs at Foyles. They have two whole shelf sections of naval history.

: The Circus itself, looming darkly back behind the bus.

: I posed for the usual tourist snaps, so the important pictures would seem natural.

: Astride the Prime Meridian, in the rain. The real tourists were queued up to pose before a plaque, for some reason.

: Make like a tourist, keep the camera clicking…

: The coat Nelson wore at The Nile. He was a LITTLE guy…

: This lass tried to pass for “Mrs. Hudson” at The Sherlock Holmes Museum. Wouldn’t fool a child. When I tried to get her picture, she ran.

: On the way to Trafalgar to establish my tourist cover, I stopped at a Virgin store for a couple of cheap mobiles, just for this mission.

: There were many dangers on this mission; not all of them were this obvious.

: Longest queue in the world, waiting at Heathrow to get into the country. Trying following me in THIS, Toby!

Gimme my Tinker, Tailor! Right now!

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To my considerable outrage, I just realized that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy will NOT be opening tonight at a theater near me.

I’ve been waiting for this thing for a year — it’s the only movie I’ve been eager to see in much longer than that — and the release date has been put off again and again, and I was all ready for it to finally come out on Dec. 9… and it can’t be found.

I read that it was released in the UK three months ago. This is insane. I mean, I’d love to go back to England and see it, but that’s not really an option for me at the moment. I don’t hop the pond that often. It’s sort of a once-in-a-lifetime thing. So far. (I saw “The King’s Speech” at a theater in Oxford the night it opened in England — which, weirdly, was a week or so after it opened back in the States.)

Oh, well… in lieu of that, I’ll share with you this note I wrote today to my friend Hal Stevenson, before I realized the movie wasn’t being released here. Hal recently told me that he had read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold recently, and wanted to know more about le Carre and his work. Since I’m a huge fan (of his early work, anyway), I promised to share some thoughts on what else he might want to read. It’s not brilliant, original literary criticism (I call le Carre’s most acclaimed novel “awesome,” dude), but it gives you an idea to what extent I have been thinking about and eagerly anticipating this non-event.

So I share this now with you as well, as I contemplate going home and watching the original BBC series of “Tinker, Tailor,” which I own on DVD. So there, Hollywood…

Hal,

I haven’t forgotten to write to you about John le Carre..

It’s fitting that I do so today, since the new movie, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” comes out tonight.

I believe you said you had read The Spy Who Came In From the Cold. Well, that was an awesome book. As literature, it’s pure and clean and complete. If you’ve read that, you’ve read THE quintessential Cold War novel. You could stop there, if you wanted to. But who would want to?

I don’t think le Carre has written anything technically better than that novel. But he’s written stuff I enjoyed more.

The Alec Leamas novel is cold, and hard. It’s like a diamond. I can find no fault with it. But while I think it speaks profoundly to the human condition, some of his other novels are… warmer. They let you care about the characters more, get into them more.

For instance, George Smiley appears in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, but as a peripheral character. And he comes across as a sort of reluctant agent of the cold pragmatism of Control, who duplicitously sent Leamas on this suicidal errand.

After that, le Carre decided to be more generous to Smiley. He had already been the protagonist of le Carre’s two books before The Spy Who Came In From the Cold — Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality. Those were short murder mysteries in the Agatha Christie mold. That Smiley worked in intelligence was almost incidental.

But Smiley comes to full-blown life in the trilogy that begins with Tinker, Tailor. That’s the start of what has come to be known as “The Quest for Karla.” Here are some brief thoughts on the three books:

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – At the outset of this novel, George is already in retirement, against his will. He and the head of “the Circus” (le Carre’s euphemism for MI6, based in its supposed location near Cambridge Circus in London), known only as Control, were both canned after an operation blew up disastrously. But a Foreign Office official comes to George with evidence that Control was done in by a mole (this novel is responsible for that term entering the language) who had insinuated himself to the very top of the Circus, and was actually running the whole show now on behalf of Moscow. Smiley begins a process of backtracking through his own life and career and former colleagues as he sets a trap for the mole, unofficially, from the outside. The mole, it is known, is the agent of Karla, a mysterious figure who sort of runs his own show deep within the KGB. Karla is Smiley’s lifelong nemesis, sort of his Moby Dick. Smiley doesn’t know who the traitor is until the end – beyond the fact that it will be one of his closest associates, someone he’s known and trusted his whole adult life. The novel is about these relationships, and what they mean to Smiley, as much as it is about spies. That’s a hallmark of le Carre’s work.
The Honourable Schoolboy – This second novel in the trilogy is very different from the other two. It’s sweeping, and adventurous and cinematic. The ironic thing about it is that it’s the only one that hasn’t been made into a movie (or, more accurately, TV series), even though it reads most like a movie script. It takes place after Smiley has exposed the mole, and turned the Circus inside out. George has been brought back officially into service to head the new, demoralized Circus. Trying to build the agency back up and get some decent intelligence coming in, Smiley pursues a trail of money that should lead to a top Soviet agent – another of Karla’s hand-picked people – in Hong Kong. Lacking professionals on staff he can trust, he sends an old freelance hand – a journalist named Jerry Westerby, who is sort of a half-amateur gentleman spy – to track down this second Karla agent. Westerby does so against the background of exotic locales. You get the sense that le Carre was trying to be a sort of Hollywood version of Joseph Conrad here. There is action, to an extent that is unlike le Carre, who tends to be more cerebral. On the whole, the novel isn’t as satisfying, since it’s more about Westerby and his conflicts than it is about Smiley and the characters you’ve come to care about in Tinker, Tailor.
Smiley’s People – This one is everything The Honourable Schoolboy wasn’t. It’s like a reunion from the first book, and is the climactic act in Smiley’s lifelong contest with Karla. At the outset, George is in exile again from the service after the fiasco in Hong Kong. But an old Russian general, who had spied for Britain in Moscow, has been murdered in London. The Circus doesn’t want to be caught within miles of the general or his old émigré friends, and asks George to come in quietly, unofficially, and lay the general’s affairs to rest – tie up loose ends, pour oil on the waters. George discovers that the general was killed because he had possessed a secret that could be Karla’s undoing. And he spends the rest of the novel making the rounds of old friends, pulling together the strands of a noose around Karla’s neck. But as he gets closer, he comes to doubt whether that’s even what he wants to do.

Moral ambiguity is Smiley’s constant companion. He’s a good and decent man who finds himself doing abhorrent things in the service of his ideals. That is a theme in everything le Carre writes, even when Smiley doesn’t appear.

And he does NOT appear in subsequent novels, except in retrospect in The Secret Pilgrim. That was OK (as were A Perfect Spy and The Constant Gardener), but here are what I think are the best of le Carre’s post-Smiley novels:

The Russia House – The protagonist is so much like Jerry Westerby that it’s like le Carre saw this novel as a do-over, an attempt to get that character right this time. An amateur is recruited to act on behalf of British intelligence to make contact with a source at the heart of the Soviet nuclear weapons program – a source that insists upon dealing with no one else. But can the agent himself be trusted? And is the source for real?
The Night Manager – This is one you can read and enjoy without having read any other le Carre novel. It stands alone, like “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold,” but its tone is the opposite. There’s nothing cold about it. It’s very human. The protagonist is an ex-commando who, for very personal reasons, offers his services to the government to get close to, and bring down, “the worst man in the world” – a billionaire British arms dealer who sells to anyone with the right price. Not to be a plot spoiler, but it’s more of a feel-good book than almost anything else le Carre has written – sort of the opposite of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold in that regard.

I probably like those because I have pedestrian tastes. They’re not as dark as some of le Carre’s critically acclaimed work — certainly not as dark as The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. By comparison, these are sentimental, but I like them.

Well, that’s an overview. I hope you’ll read some of these; I’d enjoy discussing them with you…

Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Is Gary Oldman as good? WHO KNOWS? YOU CAN'T TELL BY ME!!!!

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