Praxis by Fay Weldon

“The funny farm, the loony bin, the mental home. The shelter for the mentally disabled. I have visited them all, over the years.”

Another Weldon re-read and this time it’s Praxis, a novel I read for the first time some decades ago. It’s an interesting book to come back to for many reasons, but as I read it in tandem with Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, the two books worked, rather curiously with no small amount of synchronicity–odd really as the books are about entirely different things, for while Life after Life explores alternate lives and brings up the possibly of changing fate, Praxis focuses on a character who rarely exercises her Free Will. It was pure accident that I read these two books simultaneously, and while both books focus on the lives and the choices of two women, time wise, Praxis extends into the late 20th century, whereas Life After Life is rooted in the first half of the 20th century.

Weldon, a feminist writer who’s been the centre of some controversy, concentrates on the lives of women with themes that include: female identity & self-image, transformation & reinvention, gender inequality, female madness and the vicious relationships between women. While Weldon’s work, full of bitingly wicked humour, obviously fits in any feminist canon, her work can also be considered Transgressive fiction for the way her marvelous characters subvert societal norms. Praxis is the story of a 20th century woman who’s transformed (not for the better) by her relationships with men. A female chameleon with little sense of just who she really is, Praxis subsumes herself in her relationships, becoming what her lovers expect/want her to be. Becoming what is expected or desired brings only unhappiness and confusion, and through this character’s transformations, we see Praxis struggling with her identity, her own worst enemy as the years fall away spent on some meaningless daily life that fulfills someone else’s demands and expectations. And then the day comes when Praxis acts spontaneously and as a result goes to prison. Is she a feminist hero or a monster?

The Praxis of the title is the youngest daughter of Lucy Duveen and her common-law husband, Benjamin. The story is told by a now elderly Praxis, a woman who has apparently spent a few years in prison for an unspecified crime. Praxis writes down her story, going back in time to at age 5, “sitting on the beach at Brighton,” with her mother and her older sister Hypatia. Lucy and her two daughters give an idyllic impression to passer-bys including WWI veteran and former bombardier, Henry Whitechapel, who now lurks on the beaches pretending to take photographs for tourists with film (if he actually has any) that he never develops.

Praxis, Henry noticed, was easily bored. When other diversions failed she would run  shrieking into the sea, still wearing her shoes and socks, to the distraction of her mother, and the distaste of Hypatia, who was content for hours staring at the sea and making poetry in her head.

“If that young one were mine,” thought Henry Whitechapel, “I’d belt her one.” Later he was to have the opportunity of doing so. He had never married, and had no children of his own; his lungs and his concentration were not what they had been before the war; nor certainly at that time was his sexual capacity. But a romantic interest in the opposite sex remained, and Lucy Duveen, sitting on the pebbly beach with her hamper, her parasol, and her two little girls, made for him a romantic image.

Told in both first and third person narration, we follow Praxis through her life, through her university days, her lovers, marriages, divorces, children, step-children, endless cooking and cleaning, and there are several points at which Praxis finds herself in a life she didn’t plan and doesn’t want. With a ‘how-did-I-get-here’ feeling, a stupefied Praxis marvels that lacking a sense of self, she’s been molded into a person she no longer recognizes in order to please whichever man is in her life.

Staring at herself in the mirror, at her doll’s face, stiff doll’s body, curly blonde doll’s hair, she wondered what experience or wisdom could possibly shine through the casing that Ivor had selected for her. She did not blame Ivor: she knew that she had done it to herself : had preferred to live as a figment of Ivor’s imagination, rather than put up with the confusion of being herself.

But while Praxis tries to hard to please the various men in her life, she fails to befriend women, and since Weldon is big on the betrayals of women towards their own sex, there are several times when Praxis’s peculiar, and very possibly mad, sister, Hypatia (“People fail you, children disappoint you, thieves break in, moths corrupt, but an OBE goes on for ever,“)  takes measures to ensure her sister’s unhappiness. It’s no coincidence that the very best things that happen in Praxis’s life occur on those rare occasions when women stick together.

While the style, tone and theme of Praxis were all vastly dissimilar to Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life, there were connections. Life after Life gives us a protagonist who lives many versions of the same life. Choices made in a split second lead Ursula down different paths in an alternative universe sort-of-way. While Weldon’s Praxis is grounded in bitter reality, her life is segmented by divisions and a metaphysical connection with the star Betelgeuse–which signals death of one self and the rebirth of another ‘new’ Praxis. While Ursula has moments of disturbing deja-vu, Praxis feels a strong disconnect with her life–almost as though one day she wakes up and wonders just how she got to this place.

Praxis, who becomes entangled with the swinging sixties, also runs head-long into feminism, and Praxis has mixed feelings about feminists–initially repelled, they begin to make sense to her–although as the years pass, once again, Praxis feels out of touch:

The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself, their buttocks arrogant in tight jeans, openly inviting, breasts falling free and shameless and feeling no apparent obligation to smile, look pleasant or keep their voices low. And how they love! Just look at them to know how! If a man doesn’t bring them to orgasm, they look for another who does. If by mistake they fall pregnant, they abort by vacuum aspiration. If they don’t like the food, they push the plate away. If the job doesn’t suit them, they hand in their notice. They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.

I can’t conclude without mentioning one of my favourite characters in the book, Irma, a friend from Praxis’s university days. Irma is the sort of hard, driven woman who always seems to know what she wants and how to get it. She marries a man she thinks will be successful and she leads a rather terrifying life of social success and mental emptiness. At one point, for example she offers Praxis some practical advice:

“There’s only way to get out of the fix you’re in,” said Irma. “And that’s to sleep your way out of it. Sorry and all that.” 

Since this is a Weldon novel, Irma undergoes her own radical transformation, becoming a militant feminist and appearing on television while her ex-husband nastily argues that all “poor Irma” needs is:

  “a good lay. But where is she going to find that? Look at the way she dresses.”

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Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym

The title of Barbara Pym’s first published novel, Some Tame Gazelle, might not seem to have any connection to the plot, but the quote appears early in the novel:

Some tame gazelle, or some gentle dove:

Something to love, oh, something to love! (Thomas Haynes Bayly)

I happen to share that feeling–people need something to love, and if there’s no person available, then let it be a dog, a cat, a hamster, or a budgie. If push comes to shove, a plant will do. Even my neighbor has his Harley Davidson since his missus departed for less turbulent pastures. Anyway, the need to have something to love is evident in Some Tame Gazelle, the story of two spinster sisters, Harriet and Belinda Bede, in their fifties whose lives are built around the local church and its clergymen. The sisters live together in a life of genteel comfort, and while they can afford a maid, there’s a little nip and tuck when it comes to meals if no guests are expected at the table. The two sisters are completely different: Belinda, the eldest sister is a romantic introvert whose male ideal, somewhat incongruously is the ”dear Earl of Rochester.” Yes, Belinda in many ways is someone who doesn’t get the nuances of character as we later see through Belinda’s decades long devotion to the unrequited love of her university days–now the local, pompous married Archdeacon Hoccleve. Harriet, on the other hand, is an extrovert, a plump flirt who obsesses about her appearance, and always has a crush on whichever young, pink-cheeked, innocent curate is assigned to the local church. She’s a groupie of sorts: ”She was especially given to cherishing young clergymen, and her frequent excursions to the curates’ lodgings had often given rise to talk.”

The novel begins with bubbling excitement over the new curate’s attendance at dinner. Belinda is fully expecting Harriet “to be quite as silly over him as she had been over his predecessors,” and the relationships Harriet has with the series of curates who’ve passed through seem to cover all sorts of roles from surrogate mother & sons to vague courtship.  One of Harriet’s problems is that she doesn’t know whether to mother the curate du jour or giggle and flirt with him. Needless to say she does both–but she’s not alone in the parish when it comes to fussing over the curate. This seems to be a popular pastime with the single women, and whether or not they are too old to be jealously possessive about the highly-prized curate is beside the point. But in spite of the slight awkwardness generated when a mid-fities spinster fusses over a single man young enough to be her son, those involved seem happy with the arrangement. It’s one of those ‘no damage done’ situations with everyone glossing over the possibly unhealthy ramifications of these relationships. Harriet immerses herself in questions such as ‘is the curate getting proper meals?’ and whether he needs a new of pair of hand-knitted socks. For their part, the curates benefit by getting regular free meals.

So while the novel opens with the exciting prospect (for Harriet, at least) of a fresh, young, curate, The Reverend Edgar Donne, Belinda faces the thrill of the Archdeacon’s wife, Agatha going away on holiday and leaving her obnoxious husband behind. To Belinda, of course, the Archdeacon, “dear Henry,” can do no wrong, but we get a glimpse of the domestic trials of being married to the Archdeacon–an immature man of insufferable ego and full of constant complaints:

Belinda recognized the voice as that of the Archdeacon. He was leaning out of one of the upper windows, calling to Agatha, and he sounded very peevish. Belinda thought he looked handsome in his dark green dressing-gown with his hair all ruffled. The years had dealt kindly with him and he had grown neither bald nor fat.  It was Agatha who seemed to have suffered most. Her pointed face had lost the elfin charm which had delighted many and now looked drawn and harassed.

Belinda cannot fathom the reason behind Agatha’s bad temper and thinks that “Agatha should humour dear Henry a little more.” This is a position of some naiveté as Belinda, who has never moved beyond idealized love, has no idea how grueling married relationships can be and just how taxing and demanding her idol Henry really is. The prospect of Henry alone creates no small amount of speculation between the sisters and raises the question whether or not the Archdeacon is upset or delighted by his wife’s absence.

When the day came for Agatha to go away, Belinda and Harriet watched her departure out of Belinda’s bedroom window. From here there was an excellent view of the vicarage drive and gate. Belinda had brought some brass with her to clean and in the intervals when she stopped her vigorous rubbing to look out the window, was careful to display the duster in her hand. Harriet stared out quite unashamedly, with nothing in her hand to excuse her presence there. She even had a pair of binoculars, which she was trying to focus.

With Agatha away, the Archdeacon makes more visits to the Bede household, and Belinda makes a few visits to the vicarage. Vague long-distant memoires and lost opportunities are stirred accompanied by just a whisper of mild discontent.

How odd if Henry were a widower, she thought suddenly. How embarrassing, really.  It would be like going back thirty years. Or wouldn’t it? Belinda soon saw that it wouldn’t. For she was now a contented spinster and her love was like a warm, comfortable garment, bedsocks, perhaps, or even woolen combinations; certainly something without glamour or romance. All the same, it was rather nice to think that Henry might prefer her to Agatha, although she knew perfectly well that he didn’t. It was one of the advantages of being the one he hadn’t married that one could be in a position to imagine such things.

Some Tame Gazelle makes some interesting statements about love; we see Belinda still in love, decades past the initial onset, and she cannot see that the Archdeacon is flawed and not really worth her worshipful attention, and yet does that really matter? There are a couple of times when reality punctures Belinda’s image of the Archdeacon, but she turns away from her perceived disloyalty and criticism and chooses to keep her perfect image of the Archdeacon. Harriet, is a study is serial adoration, and she smoothly moves her infatuations from one curate to another. While no great crisis occurs in this delightful, humorous  novel of manners, nonetheless the calm, orderly world of the Bede sisters is threatened by the arrival of two eligible men including one of Harriet’s long-lost curates, now middle-aged Bishop Theo Grote,  who returns from darkest Africa. According to Belinda, Bishop Grote “doesn’t have all his goods in the shop window,” and as one of Harriet’s past pet-project curates, he’s now a eligible bachelor….

Lives and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon

“She devils are beyond nature: they create themselves out of nothing.”

I expect that many people who read this post will have seen the film, Lives and Loves of a She-Devil. The film is a lot of fun, but it doesn’t really do justice to the Fay Weldon novel on which it’s based. The film with Roseanne Barr and her rival in life and love played by Meryl Streep is really very funny, but the book is much, much darker, and while like the film version, this is a tale of revenge, the book is much more subversive and its humour is black. You’ll laugh at the film but chances are you won’t have the same reaction to the book. Lives and Loves of a She-Devil was the first Fay Weldon novel I read, and it sealed me as a fan. Weldon is an outspoken feminist writer who’s come in for her share of controversy, and simply because she is a figure of some controversy, she’s all too easy to misquote. 

While Weldon’s work obviously fits in any feminist canon, her work can also be considered Transgressive fiction for the way her marvelous characters subvert societal norms. Weldon’s frequent themes include gender inequality, female reinvention, female identity and self-image and the often vicious relationships between women. Lives and Loves of a She-Devil is a tremendously powerful story–the tale of how one woman, a wife and mother, is abandoned by her husband and replaced by a prettier, sexier woman. Rising from her despair and thrusting aside all societal norms, maternal concerns, & obligations the discarded woman eventually triumphs over her enemies. Yes, a story of female empowerment and a rather frightening tale of a woman scorned who, because she’s willing to go as far as necessary, learns to live her life according to an entirely new set of rules.

Ruth, an overweight, unattractive woman who’s 6′ 2″, is an excellent wife and mother. While she’s appreciated by her somewhat scatter-brained in-laws, she’s neglected and undervalued by her accountant husband, Bobbo, who at the best of times says that Ruth is “no beauty, but a good soul.” Ruth, who is virtually powerless in the relationship, does everything to please Bobbo, even tolerating his announcement that he wants an “open marriage.” She’s aware of his extra-marital affairs which he discusses with relish, but now Bobbo has fallen in love with one of his clients, Mary Fisher, a wealthy, prolific author of trashy romances. Ruth is trying her best to ignore the affair, but after a particularly degrading scene, Bobbo moves out of his home in the suburb of Eden Grove, abandons his wife and two children and moves to Mary Fisher’s splendid home, the High Tower.

Fay Weldon’s style is spare, low on descriptions and high on mythic qualities. This is how the novel, alternating between first and third person narrative, opens:

Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies.

Mary Fisher is forty-three, and accustomed to love. There has always been a man around to love her, sometimes quite desperately, and she has on occasion returned that love, but never, I think, with desperation. She is a writer of romantic fiction. She tells lies to herself and to the world.

Is that hate or contempt lying under the description of Mary Fisher? Probably a bit of both, but add envy to the mix too as Mary Fisher is the embodiment of everything Ruth isn’t: small, petite, feminine and highly desirable. And here’s a quote that shows just how well Fay Weldon can write:

Now outside the world turns: tides surge up the cliffs at the foot of Mary Fisher’s tower, and fall again. In Australia the great gum trees weep their bark away; in Calcutta a myriad flickers of human energy ignite and flare and die; in California the surfers weld their souls with foam and flutter off into eternity; in the great cities of the world groups of dissidents form their gaunt nexi of discontent and send the roots of change through the black soil of our earthly existence. And I am fixed here and now, trapped in my body, pinned to one particular spot, hating Mary Fisher. It is all I can do. Hate obsesses and transforms me; it is my singular attribution.

While Bobbo and Mary Fisher have the looks, the power and the money on their side, Ruth is dumped with the two squabbling children, a gluttonous vomiting dog who humps anyone lower on the totem pole, a cat who fouls the house, and an unfortunate guinea pig. Bobbo and Mary live in sex-soaked idyllic bliss while Ruth suddenly has to worry about money–how to pay bills and buy food (there’s one great scene in which Ruth directs the children to search the house for coins). To add to the worries, Bobbo tells her to move to a smaller, cheaper home. Part of Ruth accepts what has happened to her–after all, she reasons ”to those who hath, such as Mary Fisher, shall be given, and to those who hath not, such as myself, even that which they have shall be taken away.”

Ruth has always behaved well and put Bobbo’s needs before her own. Why shouldn’t she accept divorce, destitution and displacement and be happy for the few years she had? But Ruth doesn’t see it that way, and she doesn’t react the way Bobbo expects her to.  Strangely, once removed from the position of wife, something begins to happen to Ruth. Liberated from her own repressive behavior,  ”Hate obsesses and transforms” her, and she has revenge in mind. As events unfold, it becomes clear that revenge is an emotion that can take you to the place you want to go. Ruth abandons the roles assigned to her: doting wife, patient mother and begins a transformative journey–both literal and figurative, and along the way she confronts other women in various miserable circumstances including a clueless welfare mother who’s impregnated by a series of transient rogue males, a group of Wimmin, and also the much-abused wife of a judge who has a secret “passion for bondage and whips.” As Ruth continually reinvents herself, she leaves an imprint on the lives of everyone she touches, and rather magnificently, she becomes all the things her husband, to assuage his guilt, accused her of. She becomes a She-Devil who “creates havoc and destruction all around,“  and by abandoning the roles she is expected to endure, and breaking all the ”rules” she plots her revenge…

Since this is a Weldon novel, the economic poverty of women is evident, but Weldon is not a man-hater; rather she revels in the power of sexuality, and she’s also very funny:

“She’s such a good wife,” said Bobbo’s mother, moved almost to tears. “look at that ironing!” Bobbo’s mother never ironed if she could help it. In the good times indeed, she and Angus liked to live in hotels, simply because there’d be a valet service. “And what a good husband Bobbo has turned out to be!” If she thought her son was narcissistic, staring so long in the mirror, she kept her thoughts to herself.

But Bobbo looked in the mirror at his clear, elegant eyes, his intelligent brow and his slightly bruised mouth, and hardly saw himself at all; he saw the man whom Mary Fisher loved.

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Everything and More by Geoff Nicholson

Another entry in my Year of Geoff Nicholson project, and this time it’s Everything and More–a Nicholson novel I loved for its originality and sheer compressed scope–you’ll see what I mean later. The novel, with a few minor exceptions, is set inside Haden Brothers, a vast, seemingly endless London department store (“including 12 different eateries,“) designed as a replica of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel & built in the 1930s by “maverick visionary” Edward Zander, the architect who mysteriously disappeared once the project was completed.

However, Zander’s building has few of the rhythms, repetitions or classical form of its supposed model. Rather it suggests a series of multiple codings, elements of Russian Constructivism, Italian Renaissance and stuccoed Baroque. It is decked, as though at random, with crenellated parapets, pantile roofs, ogee arches, steel balconies, oriel windows and flying buttresses. Carved into the fabric of the building are angels, putti and mythological beasts. There are gargoyles, caryatids, mosaics, expanses of Moorish tiling and some magnificent stained glass. Zander had envisioned a menagerie on the ninth floor and wanted the whole building to be painted blood red, but he was talked out of these schemes.

 This story is the perfect vehicle for Nicholson’s frequent themes of collection and obsession, for after all, doesn’t shopping encompass both of these neurotic pastimes? And what better place for the compulsive shopper to hang out than Haden Brothers–the 400 department emporium that boasts that it sells “everything and more,” where shopping is an experience rather than a mundane activity.

Enter two eager job seekers: Vita Carlisle and would-be artist Charlie Mayhew. Charlie applies for a job because he’s an unwelcome guest sleeping on the sofa of the only friend who’s still talking to him. Vita has a boarding school & university background along with an impressive resume, and while her determination to work at Haden Brothers seems a little odd, her professionalism and apparent fanaticism about the workings of the sprawling shopping metropolis really can’t be faulted or penetrated. Vita could obviously do a lot better than Haden Brothers, but she insists that she’s in love with the place and working there is her dream. Both Charlie and Vita are employed on the spot by Derek Snell, who’s officially head of personnel and unofficially, the pimp for the reclusive owner of Haden Brothers, Arnold, the last of the line. Arnold lives in the penthouse suite, accessible by a private lift, on the very top of the Haden Brothers building, and he hasn’t stepped into the outside world for years. Derek Snell, a rather sleazy character, has an eye for the sort of women his boss prefers, and since he is, in essence, the pimp for the king of Haden Brothers, he has a position of some power:

Derek Snell was no fashion victim, or at least he had been victimized in about 1975 and had never entirely recovered. He wore a brown Viyella suit with wide lapels and deep turn-ups, a chunky knitted wool tie, a shirt with a flapping collar and a pattern of tiny veteran car motifs. He was a toothy, slim-chinned man, about forty-five with a lot of gingery hair that curled round his head like a tarnished halo.

Vita becomes part of the so-called Flying Squad–a sort of troubleshooter, and here she is in the toy department with “raw, lean, adrenalin-driven, toy buyer,” Carl:

On Vita’s first day in the department he took her aside and told her, ‘We sell a lot of merchandise here on the basis that we’re educating the little fucks, stimulating their imaginations, fostering hand-eye coordination, that kind of crap. The truth is, what we’re struggling to do here is sedate and socialize a generation of would-be Adolf Hitlers.’

Vita looked at him uncertainly but still managed a smile.

‘The thing to remember is this,’ Laughton continued, ‘all children are thugs, fascists and megalomaniacs. There was a time when they wanted scaled-down versions of the real world; toy animals, toy soldiers, dolls, building blocks to make miniature cities. Then they pulled the eyes out of the animals, tore the dolls limb from limb, massacred the soldiers, razed the cities.

‘These days, they play with computer games, and they can play at destroying whole life forms, whole planets and galaxies. They take to it like ducks to water. It all comes perfectly naturally to them. And they genuinely believe that when they grow up they’ll be able to do all this stuff for real. But when they do grow up they discover, with one or two important exceptions, that they don’t get to blow things up at all, and that really hurts them. It’s a discovery nobody ever quite recovers from. I know I haven’t.

‘That’s why toys are so attractive to adults, why they carry so much nostalgia with them, because they remind us of a time when we were power-mad, conscienceless dictators.’

While Vita moves from department to department as part of the elite Flying Squad, poor Charlie becomes a furniture porter. The subliminal messages piped out over the sound system geared to make shoppers and employees alike behave don’t seem to work on the porters who take the example of their subversive leader, Anton, and spend most of their time devising elaborate ways of not working. This means hiding when there’s work to be done, spending hours quibbling over payroll deductions in the accounting office and engaging in “extravagant pilfering.” What’s so interesting is that Vita is involved in the day-to-day activities of ensuring that Haden Brothers runs smoothly, while Charlie becomes snared in the subversive shadow life of Haden Brothers, the bomb threats, the mysterious graffiti that appears periodically on the shop’s windows, the hidden, fully operating miniature railway, and the secret passages down deep in the basement. Only the Head of Security, Ray Chalmers seems to recognize that there are elements undermining the efficient day-to-day operations of the huge department store, and since everyone connected with Haden Brothers seems to lose all sense of proportion, Chalmers declares war on the subversives:

I’m not trying to say that it’s like Vietnam out there, but in a sense it is. It’s a jungle. The enemy’s hard to spot. The terrain is difficult and we don’t always get the backing we need. There are goons. There are traitors and double agents. There are men from our side who’ve abandoned discipline and gone native. At least in Nam they were allowed to use defoliant, napalm, cluster bombing. I wish we could do that at Haden  Brothers. That would shake the buggers up, flush them out so they could be punished with loads of prejudice.

The newest furniture porter seems like a suspicious character to Chalmers. After all, what’s his first name?

Initially Charlie isn’t thrilled with his job, but over time he becomes entranced with the fabulous exotic extravagance of the building as he begins to note “strange faces and African masks carved into the woodwork, wrought iron archways with swastikas and pentagrams, staircase finials that looked like simple spheres but turned out to be intricately carved globes of the world.”

While on the surface, Haden Brothers is a monument to shopping and materialism, there’s a lot of peculiar goings on, and Charlie begins to be aware of just what some of those peculiarities are even as the unfathomable Vita becomes increasingly involved in the surface management.  One of my favourite scenes takes place when a customer lodges a complaint and is summarily whisked off to a seductive paradise hidden away in the secret corners of Haden Brothers. And here, in exotic hypnotic luxury, the half-dazed customer, is grilled:

He wanted to be cooperative  but he was too entranced by the room in which he now found himself. The carp pool was undoubtedly the most imposing and unexpected feature, but then he had not been expecting the Persian tapestries either, not the ornamental fountain, not the parakeets on their perches, not the bejeweled mirrors and tables and fireplace, not the ornately carved golden couches on to one of which he was now being guided. It was impossible to sit on these with any degree of formality and he found himself lying back, reclining like some Roman hero.

Still Life with Volkswagens by Geoff Nicholson

“You don’t think there’s something eye-catching about jack-boots, Nazi uniforms, death’s head insignia?’

Another entry in my Year of Geoff Nicholson, and this time it’s the second volume of the author’s Volkswagen trilogy: Still Life with Volkswagens. This follows Street Sleeper, and there are so many repeat characters with continued history that readers should begin with the first book and then read on. In Street Sleeper, Barry Osgathorpe aka Ishmael, the Zen Road Warrior, bought a battered old VW Beetle, dumped his long-suffering girlfriend, Debby, and took to the road to ‘find himself.’ Along the way he met Fat Les, a VW mechanic, who converted Barry’s junker into Enlightenment, a loaded Beetle that is the envy of those who see this gleaming machine, and together with Enlightenment, Ishmael had many adventures and met the woman of his dreams–even if the feeling wasn’t mutual.

Back to Still Life with Volkswagens which finds Barry (yes, back to plain old Barry) dossing in a caravan in Yorkshire. His short-lived days of adventures are over, and Enlightenment is permanently parked and covered due mainly to Barry’s current obsession about the planet, greenhouse gases and global warming. He’s considering forming a club called the Green Beetles for those committed to never driving their cars:

They may clean and polish them once in a while, even sit in them from time to time with their friends and families. The important thing is; they will never drive them. They will leave their cars parked next to their house or caravan, never start the engines, never pollute mother earth with their deadly fumes.

Debby is still in Barry’s life, and she’d still like to travel a bit but Barry defensively argues that he “never want[s] to go anywhere or do anything.” Problems begin for Barry when Volkswagens mysteriously begin exploding all over England, and banking scion Carlton Bax, the world’s “foremost Volkswagen collector[s]” goes missing. Involved whether he likes it or not, Barry is forced to abandon his inertia. Not only is Barry a prime suspect for both crimes, but the love of his life, Marilyn, now a weather-presenter on television, reappears in Barry’s life and begs for his help. Marilyn suspects that her father, Charles Lederer, recently released from a mental asylum may be responsible  for the war against Volkswagens and the disappearance of her lover, Carlton Bax. (If you’ve read Street Sleeper, you’ll remember both Marilyn and Charles Lederer, and it’ll also make sense to you why Lederer hates Volkswagens).

Since author Geoff Nicholson developed some many great characters in Street Sleeper, it’s wonderful to see them back for the second part of this trilogy. After all, why waste characters by only using them once? So Fat Les reappears–now the proud owner of a “clean and flawless Volkswagen emporium” near Southend. It’s in this building, an “exhilarating piece of Odeon-style seaside deco” called  ’Fat Volkz Inc,’ that Fat Les runs his very lucrative VW business.  According to humorless Detective Inspector Cheryl Bronte, Fat Les is yet another suspect in the disappearance of Carlton Bax. Also making a re-appearance is Marilyn’s nymphomaniac mum, Mrs. Lederer who gets her “revenge”  on her neglectful husband by offering her body to cab drivers which is a bit difficult when a man she mistakes for a cab driver is driving a custom Beetle.

Add to this crazy list, Phelan, a sicko, cunning neo-Nazi who likes to be whipped (amongst other things) by leather-clad dominatrix Renata Caswell (who also appeared in Street Sleeper). Phelan’s master plan is to organize a gang of yobos or as he describes them: “A band of supermen, roaming this great country of ours in chariots of fire, by which I mean Volkswagen Beetles.”

Naturally Still Life with Volkswagens is full of Nicholson’s brand of dark humour. Here’s Barry having a conversation of sorts with Phelan:

“You’re like me Barry. You look at all these people and what do you see? Do you see your equals? Do you see creatures made in god’s image? I don’t think so Barry. I think you see a lot of useless clutter. Don’t you think a lot of that clutter could be tidied away?”

“I’ve never thought about it,” Barry says.

“Oh, I think you have,” Phelan says insinuatingly. “Haven’t you ever thought to yourself that the world would be a much better place if only there were more people like you in it?”

“I suppose so.”

“I’m here to tell you Barry that there are more people like you in the world than you might think.

Take a drive around the M25 Barry. What traits are displayed by your fellow man? Aggression, selfishness, bad temper, competitiveness, madness brought on by stress. that’s not what the world ought be like, is it?”

“No,” Barry admits.

“When Adolf Hitler conceived of the idea of the autobahn that’s not what he had in mind at all. He saw long straight fast motorways uncluttered by riff raff and deviants.”

“What?” says Barry.

“You’re a good citizen, aren’t you Barry? You’re law-abiding, moral, politically middle of the road, not sexually or socially deviant. You’re male and you’re white.”

“Well, to an extent,” Barry stutters.

“Why deny it Barry? Why be ashamed? You don’t want the world left in the hands of extremists and perverts, do you? Of course you don’t. In your heart of heart you’re just like me, just like us. You know Hitler was right.”

“About motorways?”

In this tale of the battle of ‘good’ vs. the forces of evil, Geoff Nicholson’s humour knows no taboos, so he’s just as ready to poke fun at neo-nazis as he is at any type of extremism–be it perversion, obsession and collectors (all favourite themes for this author), so it should come as no great surprise that while the book includes a fair amount of trivia about Volkswagens, somehow or another, various Volkswagen drivers and collectors are mentioned: Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, Hitler and even the Fabulous Elvis also find their way into these pages. And for anyone who plans to scream in outrage at the very idea, let me say that Nicholson’s black humour diminishes Manson and Hitler into the pathetic, sick human beings they were, empowered by people misguided enough to sign on for their madness (and no I’m not comparing Manson to Hitler. They just both happen to appear in the book). Who knew so many weirdos were attracted to Volkswagens, and what does that say about me? Oh never mind.

Not only does the author show some of the weirder aspects of the Volkswagen enthusiasts, but by interjecting fact into his fiction (there’s even a bit of the author’s own life in these pages), somehow the craziness blends, and neo-Nazis of the Apocalypse and Volkswagens exploding nationwide just don’t seem that far-fetched:

Manson starts to live out more of his fantasies. He sets up a production line behind the Spahn Ranch, which he calls the Devil’s Dune Buggy Shop. Volkswagens are stolen from town, taken to the ranch, stripped down, converted into vehicles of the Apocalypse. Some of them can be bartered for drugs and weapons, and he hopes they’ll be useful in some of his other fantasies, like kidnapping busloads of schoolgirls, raiding a military arsenal, murdering a few rich pigs.

Pride of the fleet is Manson’s own command vehicle. It is one Hell of a dune buggy. It looks both futuristic and ancient. There is a ‘magic sword’ sheathed in the steering column. locks of human hair tied around the roll bar, a sleeping platform, armour plate, a machine gun mounting, a fur canopy. It has been recently resprayed, then desert sand thrown onto the paint while still wet, to form a kind of camouflage.

When the whole shooting match is over, this Command Vehicle will be displayed at a car show in Pomona, California, and get a lot of admiring attention from the custom Volkswagen fraternity.

Charles Manson Family Dune buggy graveyard Spahn Ranch Dec. 27, 2011 Santa Susana Pass Road

The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham

Time for a re-read of another wonderful W. Somerset Maugham novel, The Moon and Sixpence, published nearly 100 years ago in 1919. This novel is inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin, but in this fictionalized account, the protagonist is British, a man called Charles Strickland. In some ways, the novel reminds me of the best of Henry James, for we have a narrator who isn’t exactly involved but is a peripheral canny observer to crucial events. We don’t ever find out a great deal about the life of our narrator as this is the story of Charles Strickland, and when the novel opens we know that Strickland is an artist of some renown. We also know that there is some controversy about Strickland’s life with the intriguing information that his son and biographer, the Rev. Robert Strickland has “an astonishing ability for explaining things away.”

The narrator goes back in time to his youth as an aspiring author in London, part of a circle of writers, and his introduction to Mrs. Strickland, one of a number of women who hosts luncheons for those in the literary world. The narrator rather likes Mrs. Strickland, a woman in her late 30s, as she’s kind and has a genuine “passion for reading.” Unlike many of these literary groupies, she has no ambitions of her own, and is apparently content to have these young authors in her home–as if their mere acquaintance makes her own life more interesting. Mr. Strickland is noticeably absent, but since he’s a broker on the stock exchange, and according to his wife, “a perfect philistine,” his absence seems both expected and no loss to the literary society that gathers at Mrs. Strickland’s table. But all hell breaks loose when rumours abound that Strickland, after 17 years of seemingly-happy married life, has deserted his wife and family and run off to Paris with a woman. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Strickland summons the narrator and begs him to go to Paris, track down her husband, and bring him back. The narrator somewhat reluctantly accepts…

Over the course of a number of years, the narrator runs into Strickland. One time is, of course, an intentional meeting with Strickland, in theory, being lectured about his ‘moral obligations.’ Strickland, however, is the most curious character. How can one appeal to morality and conscience when the person who’s receiving the lecture has simply opted out of the moral system he’s supposed to adhere to?

When people say they do not care what others think of them, for the most part they deceive themselves. Generally they mean only that they will do as they choose, in the confidence that no one will know their vagaries; and at the upmost only that they are willing to act contrary to the opinion of the majority because they are supported by the approval of their neighbours. It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set. It affords you then an inordinate amount of self-esteem. You have the self-satisfaction of courage without the inconvenience of danger. But the desire for approbation is perhaps the most deeply seated instinct of civilized man.

No one, of course, forced Strickland to marry, have children or become a mediocre stock broker, but he seems, in his youth, to have made the decision, as most of us do, to go with the flow, and now, at forty, seeing the years ahead, he has taken drastic, one might say callous measures, to change his life. Strickland’s genuine lack of concern of the opinions of others “gave him a freedom which was an outrage.”

A second meeting with Strickland 5 years later would seem to reveal more information about his character, but instead a tragic chain of events involving Strickland only creates a chasm of questions and ambiguities. One thing is clear, however, if those involved or connected with Strickland expect him to abide by any traditional code of morality or behavior, they are going to be hurt. Strickland is a toxic and destructive man. He takes and uses and expects the same in return.

The narrator admits a deep curiosity about Strickland which has morphed into fascination with a character that cannot be dissected, understood, analyzed or neatly boxed:

It was tantalizing to get no more than hints into a character that interested me so much. It was like making one’s way through a mutilated manuscript.

Years later, the narrator’s fascination with Strickland leads him to Tahiti where the truth, if there is indeed a truth about Strickland, is revealed in his nebulous legacy.

Our narrator is almost, but not quite, a tabula rasa, and even though this is predominantly Strickland’s story, if we dig carefully enough, flashes of the narrator’s character appear. We see not just fascination with Strickland but also perhaps a deeply buried sympathy. At first the narrator admits to a “touch of envy” for the “pleasant family life” at the Stricklands, but after an evening with them, he admits that while he understands the “social value” of the family unit, he desires a “wilder course. There seemed to me something alarming in such easy delights.” And then there are the narrator’s comments about the nature of women:

I did not then know the besetting sin of woman, the passion to discuss her private affairs with anyone who is willing to listen.

And:

It requires the feminine temperament to repeat the same thing three times with unabated zest.

Strickland’s use of women is divided in two simple groups: sex and models, and if the two become one temporarily, well so much the better:

What poor minds women have got! Love. It’s always love. They think a man leaves them only because he wants others. Do you think I should be such a fool as to do what I’ve done for a woman?

While the narrator is fascinated with Strickland simply as a previously-unknown character type, there also are strains of the doppelgänger in their relationship.

There is something disconcerting to the writer in the instinct which causes him to take an interest in the singularities of human nature so absorbing that his moral sense is powerless against it. He recognizes in himself an artistic satisfaction in the contemplation of evil which a little startles him; but sincerity forces him to confess that the disapproval he feels for certain actions is not nearly so strong as his curiosity in their reasons. The character of a scoundrel, logical and complete, has a fascination for his creator which is an outrage to law and order. I expect that Shakespeare devised Iago with a gusto which he never knew when, weaving moonbeams with his fancy, he imagined Desdemona. It may be that in his rogues the writer gratifies instincts deep-rooted in him, which the manners and customs of a civilized world have forced back to the mysterious recesses of the subconscious. In giving to the character of his invention flesh and bones he is giving life to that part of himself which finds no other means of expression. His satisfaction is a sense of liberation.

W. Somerset Maugham is a subtle writer, much under-read these days. When I reread these favourites, even though it seems as though I’ve returned to an old friend, there’s always something fresh to uncover. Certainly the test of an excellent novel is to return to it 2, 3, or 4 times and to find it new and intriguing each time.

A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym

“It seemed as though life had been going on around me without my knowing it, in the disconcerting way that it sometimes does, like the traffic swirling past when one is standing on an island in the middle of the road.”

Regular readers of this blog know that I have a soft spot for the unreliable narrator, but in Barbara Pym’s exquisite Novel of Manners, A Glass of Blessings, we have an unobservant narrator–quite a curiosity when you think about it. After all, we rely on the narrator to fill us in on what is going on, but here we have someone who is often clueless and certainly the last person to understand the implications of the events around her.

First a bit about Barbara Pym (1913-1980)–a novelist who happens to be a great favourite of mine and is horribly under-rated. Pym never wrote a bad novel. Quartet in Autumn, a novel that concerns 4 single civil servants post-retirement is one of my all-time favourite books.  Her characters are often mired in the minutia of the worlds of anthropology, fusty academia, or the clergy: all great stomping grounds for the raw material to create novels. Pym’s stories are on the quiet side of life, so we read about lonely spinsters, confused vicars, the pettiness of church functions, and the hum-drum nature of village life.  A Glass of Blessings is an affectionate portrait of a young woman in 1950s Britain, Wilmet (named after a character on a Charlotte Yonge novel), a young married, childless woman who longs to be useful. Wilmet actually leads a very privileged life; she and her husband, Rodney live with his mother Sybil in her London home. Meals are arranged thoughtfully for Wilmet by her kind, sagacious mother-in-law, and the household chores are performed by a servant, and while all the day-to-day work is completed seemingly effortlessly and invisibly, thirty-three-year-old Wilmet feels superfluous. Not that she wants to take over the household management or start scrubbing floors. After all, she knows other women who ‘have’ to work and genteel spinsters who’ve gone down in the world and need to supplement their meager incomes.  So rather than think of getting a job, Wilmet tries to be “useful” through various projects, and given to incongruous thoughts & flights of imagination, she sets out to improve Piers Longridge, the underemployed, somewhat mysterious wastrel brother of her best friend, and to make a friend of dowdy spinster, Mary Beamish, whose enthusiasm for self-sacrifice and good works makes Wilmet “feel particularly useless,” rather inadequate and gratingly irritated.

Not a great deal happens in the novel–no great drama, but instead we see the people in Wilmet’s daily life and how she mis-reads situations in the months covered by the novel.  In many ways A Glass of Blessings is a direct 20th century link to Jane Austen’s Emma. Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse is someone who wants to dabble in match-making until her plots explode in her face. Wilmet, on the other hand, is just trying to carve a place for herself in the world and not having a great deal of success. Both Emma Woodhouse and Wilmet don’t see the obvious–the stuff that everyone else around them understands, and yet Emma and Wilmet are never the object of ridicule. While other books delve into the depths of passion through adultery and dynamic love affairs conducted by bored married women, Wilmet, without consciously realizing it, toys with these notions through the somewhat awkward attentions of her best friend Rowena’s husband, and the ever-growing importance she places on her friendship with Piers. Other quiet dramas in the novel concern Sybil and Wilmet’s Portuguese lessons, where the new curate, the very good-looking Father Ransome will live, the excitement of  blood donation, committee meetings, a trip to the hairdressers, and various ecclesiastical events.

Rather refreshingly, Sybil as Wilmet’s mother-in-law is an interesting character who likes her daughter-in-law. She is sympathetic to women who are married and juggle work and home responsibilities, considering them ”splendid and formidable.”

I read in the paper the other day of a woman civil servant who was discovered preparing Brussels Sprouts behind a filing cabinet–poor thing, I suppose she felt it would save a few precious ten minutes when she got home.

Since a great deal of the novel concerns Wilmet trying to find a spot for herself in the world, it should come as no surprise that various characters possess specific notions of what a woman should and shouldn’t do. In one scene, for example, a colleague of Rodney’s comes to dinner and Wilmet asks for a dry Martini:

A shadow, surely of displeasure, seemed to cross James Cash’s face, and I guessed that he was probably one of those men who disapprove of women drinking spirits –or indeed of anyone drinking gin before a meal.

Part of Wilmet’s charm, and she really is very charming, is that she doesn’t really ever grasp what is wrong with her life and yet she doesn’t explicitly complain or even recognize that in many ways she’s caught in a shifting time. She’s the class of woman who’s not supposed to work, and since she has no home or children to occupy her, that leaves charity work–something that doesn’t have a strong appeal.  She’s “tried one or two part-time jobs,” but Rodney has “old-fashioned idea that wives should not work unless it was financially necessary.” While there’s no economic hardship, and Wilmet is very well taken care of (some could say pampered) she’s adrift without even fully realizing it. She’s so naïve that she doesn’t realize that she faces a quiet crisis in her life and in her marriage.

Here’s Wilmet thinking about her birthday present from her husband:

“And that reminds me, I saw Griffin at lunchtime and arranged about your present.”

“Thank you, darling.” Mr. Griffin was Rodney’s bank manager. I imagined the scene, dry and businesslike: the transfer of a substantial sum of money to my account, nothing really spontaneous or romantic about it. Still, perhaps something good and solid like money was better than the extravagant bottle of French scent that some husbands–my friend Rowena’s, for example–might have given. And the whole thing was somehow characteristic of Rodney and those peculiarly English qualities which had seemed so lovable when we had first met in Italy during the war and I had been homesick for damp green English churchyards and intellectual walks and talks in the park on a Saturday afternoon.

A great deal of Wilmet’s time is spent either thinking about the local church, St Luke’s with its High Anglican ceremonies or attending social events there. But in spite of this, A Glass of Blessings is not a religious novel in any sense of the word, so religious faith or conversion doesn’t appear–although Wilmet does make a rather limp effort to drag Piers off to various services. The church is seen as the centre of Wilmet’s life, and so the focus is on the impact created by the installation of a new male housekeeper at the vicarage who lavishes the rather worldly, and soon-to-retire father Thames with exotic dishes while bemoaning the plebian, boorish tastes of the much more down-to-earth Father Bode. Not everyone in the novel has religious beliefs. Wilmet’s mother-in-law, Sybil and her  “ bleakly courageous agnosticism”  is shared by her son, and Piers is an atheist. Sybil also believes in ‘good works’ through social endeavors, and while her interests do not enter the realm of ecclesiastical authority, she supports Wilmet in her church functions and attends tea parties with some of the parishioners including “distressed gentlewoman” the heavily-rouged Miss Prideaux.

Back to commonalities with Austen, Pym is also very generous to her characters. Both authors find the foibles of human nature greatly amusing, and both authors find rich material in daily life and in the social exchanges between characters.  A Glass of Blessings is the marvelous story of Wilmet’s maturation–not a particularly easy process for someone who is protected from the harsh realities of the world.

Review copy.

Footsucker by Geoff Nicholson

“I’m not demanding the full-blown romantic love thing, but in general I don’t think you can love a person just for their feet, much less for their shoes.”

Another entry in my Year of Geoff Nicholson, and this brings me to Footsucker, a novel, which I freely admit, is not for everyone. But first let me say that I knew a footsucker–the correct term being Foot Fetishist, I believe. Yes, it’s true, I knew a man who appeared to be perfectly normal in every way, and yet he managed to get himself arrested for frenziedly sucking women’s toes. In public. Without their permission. Was I shocked or surprised? Well yes, sort of. I’d noticed that he really paid a lot of attention to the feet of women passing by. He always noted painted nails and well-tended feet while I tended to be oblivious. After his arrest, I considered why he hadn’t been able to find a consenting partner, and asked myself if the illicit nature of his obsession was part of the fun. I suppose that knowing that man led me to be very interested in Geoff Nicholson’s novel, Footsucker–because the author really seems to get his facts right, and he could have been writing about the foot fetishist I knew. Not that I’m an expert or anything.

I’ve mentioned before, that Nicholson seems to find obsessives interesting subject matter–curious really as obsessives in real life can be rather boring people–always rabbiting on about the same thing. In Footsucker, the narrator is a man who’s obsessed with women’s feet. When the novel begins, he has organized a nice little scam (again not unlike the true case I just mentioned). He hangs about on the street, looking respectable in a suit and a tie, and pretending to be “attached to a fashion PR company,” he carries a clipboard that is just a prop for the ‘market research’ he professes to gather. In reality, this is a way to stop women, ask them about their shoes, and if he’s lucky, snap a few photos he can drool over later. He often hangs about outside of shoe shops, and most women go along with his little scam until he starts asking whether or not they wear shoes during sex. That question is usually the deal breaker. Then one Friday, he meets Catherine, a tall, attractive American woman wearing an unusual pair of shoes, “spike-heeled, zebra-skins“:

I approached her. She stopped willingly enough and when I asked how many pairs of shoes she had, she said about two hundred and fifty. No doubt my eyes lit up, and I hoped I wasn’t drooling. I asked her what the shoes were like. She said, and I took it down word for word, ‘High heels, peep-toes, ankle straps, a lot of red and black leather, some very soft suede, one or two in silk, some fur mules, some ankle boots, some thigh boots, lots of weird animal skins; you know, your basic set of slut’s shoes.’

I felt like all my Christmases had come at once. When I asked if I could photograph her from the ankles down she was delighted. I squatted down on the pavement and started shooting the zebra-skin shoes. She moved her feet for me, arching them, turning her ankles this way and that, displaying them for me to admire. She really seemed to be getting into it.

This is the beginning of the relationship between the narrator and Catherine, so here we have a foot fetishist and a woman who’s happy to go along with her new boyfriend’s tastes. To the narrator, his wildest fantasies are now fulfilled, and he can finally indulge his sexual preferences with a consenting partner–a woman who happens to have perfect feet. All those scrap books, his video collection, and his own private shoe collection–all hidden from the world up to this point–can finally be shared, appreciated and understood. The narrator even has the great good fortune to meet a shoemaker with a “dark edge to his work”  who specializes in making FM (Fuck-Me) shoes, and this peculiar, grimy, desperate little man, is the second person to become obsessed with Catherine’s feet….

Something strange always happens when sexual fantasies are fulfilled: perhaps a wrinkle is created in the Cosmos as moral boundaries, often invisible until we know we’ve crossed them, shift into unexplored and sometimes uncomfortable territory. While Footsucker is the story of one man’s very specific sexual obsession, there’s an underlying thread which addresses the testing of boundaries and morality and comfort levels. The story is also full of foot trivia as the narrator confides his thoughts to the reader, so we read about various foot shots in many films, the narrator’s views of the deficiency of men’s magazines,  as well as some foot fetishist terminology. Ultimately, however, the story turns out to be a bit of a who-dun-it. But be prepared, there are lots of sex scenes in the book, so you can’t say you haven’t been warned.

One aspect of the novel, and we see this in the title, is that foot fetishists seem to be on the lower end of the totem pole in the fetish world. The narrator doesn’t think that his ‘interest’ is taken seriously, and given the response evoked from a few of the characters in the book, it would seem that the narrator is onto something. His attempts to confide in people usually end in humiliation of one sort or another, and a great part of the book seems to be the narrator’s attempts to claim understanding and acceptance–a paradox as, after all, fetishes are normally kept private. And here’s one response from an uncaring member of the British police force:

I’ve heard it all. And I’ve seen most of it. And as long as no one gets hurt and as long as kids and drugs and animals aren’t involved, then who really cares? Some people want to drink each other’s piss, some want to shove their fists up each other’s backsides. There are blokes out there who like to have their foreskins nailed to the floorboards. Now you and I might think they’re sick, filthy sods who should be taken outside and given a good kicking, but anyway, it’s a free country, isn’t it?

The Small Back Room by Nigel Balchin

“In 1928 my foot was hurting all the time, so they took it off and gave me an aluminium one that only hurt about three-quarters of the time. It would be alright for a bit, and then any one of about fifty things would start it off and it would give me hell.”

So begins Nigel Balchin’s novel, The Small Back Room, published in 1943. The filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, working as their production team, The Archers made an exquisite film version of the novel. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s well-worth catching. I discovered Balchin’s fiction, finally, in 2011, and The Small Back Room is my third Balchin novel. That should give you an idea as to how much I like this writer. Mine Own Executioner and A Way Through the Wood aka Separate Lies both feature a troubled male protagonist who wrestles with various moral issues. The protagonist of The Small Back Room also struggles with a number of issues: pain, alcoholism, and office politics. The latter, while fundamentally petty, could ultimately cost lives.

It’s WWII and Sammy Rice is a weapons scientist who works in Professor Mair’s obscure research department under the auspices of the Ministry of Defence. While the work of the department is vital to the war effort, the research is also bogged down by trivialities and petty office politics. There’s also no real organisation to the work, and one huge time-waster is the so-called “Keystone Komics.” This is the term given to “bright ideas” for weaponry and various military/defence equipment (“poisoned barbed wire,”  a “retractable bayonet,” and migrating birds carrying “plant diseases” ). These ideas come in the form of letters sent in, mainly from the public, to Professor Mair. Some of these ideas have promise and others are ludicrous, but Mair seems unable to distinguish between the promising and the ridiculous. When the book begins, Sammy is quite sick of it all. He’s just attended a weapons trial with grumpy General Holland for the Reeves gun. As far as the army is concerned, the gun has problems, and as far as Sammy is concerned “the thing was pretty but darned complicated.” Sammy knows that the gun’s disappointing performance will cause more arguments at work as both Professor Mair and R.B. Waring favour the gun. Waring is a political game player who fancies himself as the number 2 man in the department. He’s a big, good-looking fellow– ”rather like a film star playing a successful business man.”

There’s one positive to Sammy’s life and that’s his secret relationship with Susan, a secretary in the research department. Sammy and Susan live together, and rather like Felix’s wife, Patricia in Mine Own Executioner, Susan deserves some sort of award for tolerance, patience and understanding. Both Felix and Sammy take advantage of the women in their lives, but in The Small Back Room at times Susan’s patience is stretched to breaking point. Sammy is rather emotionally dependent on Susan, and he tends to treat her badly when other areas of his life aren’t going well.

When Sammy returns to work, he discovers that Waring has bagged a large office, and this is a sign of things to come :

I glanced around the room. Waring had done himself very well. He had a whacking great partner’s desk about six feet square, with a leather top. There were three telephones on it, with a filter extension to Susan. One was a green Secret phone. He had a big swivel desk-chair and an arm-chair for visitors. The whole thing made our rabbit-hutch upstairs look pretty poverty-stricken.

That night, Sammy gets a call from Pinker, a civil servant who claims to be a “harmless Assistant Secretary” and yet at the same time appears to have an incredible amount of inside knowledge about the Ministry of Defence:

Pinker was in the pub looking as dapper as ever. He always looked as though he’d just had a hair-cut. I was never quite sure whether Pinker was one of my closest friends or just a bloke I knew, until we started to talk. Then it was all fixed for you in the first two  minutes. He insisted on buying me a drink and said it was a long time since we’d met, so I thought this must be one of the times when we were blood brothers.

An exchange of information takes place which would initially seem to be the normal sort of complaining about one’s workmates, but there’s an undercurrent to the conversation that indicates that Pinker is a power-monger:

“Look,” I said. “Just what is your job? I’ve never really known.”

Pinker grinned. “I’m a harmless Assistant secretary in Gower’s outfit,” he said. “But don’t let it worry you. Dion O’Banion kept a flower shop in Chicago.” He looked at me and said suddenly, “why do you stick with your job?”

Considering Dion O’Banion was a gangster who operated a legit flower shop as a cover for his criminal activities, we can speculate about Pinker’s comment especially when he hints at a shake up within Sammy’s department.

A large portion of the novel concerns a new secret explosive that is responsible for the deaths of a number of civilians, namely children. Captain Stuart contacts Sammy and asks for his help:

Stuart lit a cigarette. “It’s the fourth this week,” he said abruptly. “Always the same sort of circumstances, and always after Jerry planes have been over.”

I said, “You mean they’re dropping booby traps?”

“Yes. It looks like it.”

“Always kids?”

“No. Three kids and one man.”

“No survivors, of course?”

“The people who’ve touched the things have been blown to glory. Frightful mess. This time we’ve got a survivor–the kid’s little brother. By some miracle he wasn’t touched. But as he’s only three he isn’t a lot of help.”

And so Sammy agrees to help Stuart with the defusion of the mystery explosive device when and if they find one intact. Stuart draws up notes for a disposal:

I read through the notes. He was quite right. They were a very careful and intelligent analysis of what we did know, but we knew darned little. The most interesting thing was his conclusion.

“As you said, there are three main possibilities over fusing

(a) Time fuse

(b) Magnetic (metal response)

(c) Trembler (movement response)

Photo-electric seems fundamentally improbable. One assumes that the thing will be designed so that there is the least possible chance of it being found unexploded and examined. This seems to put a time fuse out of court. Moreover, all the evidence suggests that the things explode only when they are approached or touched. On the other hand, it isn’t easy to see how a simple trembler fuse could be made to stand up to being dropped from a plane.”

It’s clear, of course, that before the novel has concluded Sammy is going to face one of those unexploded devices and wrestle all of his demons as he dismantles it…

At 192 pages this is a very tightly written story, an excellent character study of a man who suffers from a range of problems and who isn’t exactly what you’d term stable. He battles pain and alcoholism, wrestles with self-pity, and tries desperately to avoid conflict at work. Ultimately his greatest battle will be with an unexploded device. Obviously Sammy is the novel’s hero, but he’s a flawed hero–someone who’s just trying to do his job with the least conflict and for someone whose nerves are shot, he does remarkably well–especially when you consider that Sammy is tempted to crawl into a corner with a whiskey bottle and forget the rest of the world. It’s mainly thanks to Susan that he doesn’t do this. While this story of dark despair contains a number of damaged people–stuttering Cpl Taylor for example, there are others who appear to sail through life with no permanent scars, and these two sets of people rub shoulders and mingle with discordant results. Sammy struggles with self-doubt and self-loathing while people like Waring commit unconscionable acts and still sleep well at night. But in the final evaluation, Sammy like most people, is his own worst enemy. Here he is waiting for Susan to come back late from work:

I suddenly found myself hating Susan and telling myself it was her fault. She knew it would happen, and yet she hadn’t even taken the trouble to ring up about it. I thought, “She’ll come in with her worried expression on, and she’ll say, “Darling, I’m so sorry” in that way I hate, and fuss about, and it doesn’t mean a damned thing.” I remembered her dancing with Iles, and Dick kissing her. I knew she’d liked it. Why shouldn’t she? I thought, “She tries, but she’s just a bitch really, like any other woman. I’m a damned fool not to face up to it, and to make her.” I began to see what a fool I’d been to let myself get used to relying on her so much. There was something bloody humiliating in sitting there sweating and shaking because some damn woman was half an hour late. Anyhow, it was Susan who’d always made the fuss about it. If she couldn’t take more trouble about it, the quickest way seemed to be just to have a drink and be done with it.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré

“He had that art, from miles and miles of secret life, of listening at the front of his mind; of letting the primary incidents unroll directly before him while another, quite separate faculty wrestled with their historical connection.”

Fueled by the promise of a new film version of John le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I requested a review copy from netgalley. I went through a le Carré phase some years ago, but Gary Oldman as Smiley brought back waves of nostalgia for the reading pleasure I once exacted from le Carré. Would I be as impressed by Smiley’s world the second time around? And the answer to that question is a resounding: YES!

John Le Carré (aka David John Moore Cornwall) is best known for his spy novels, and I should add that he worked for some years, in the very juicy 50s and 60s, for MI5 and MI6 before his extremely successful writing career. His professional background must be taken into account for authenticity leaps off the pages. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the first novel in the Karla Trilogy; the other novels are The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People. The novel contains jargon specific to the Circus (MI6), and you might want to acquaint yourself with the Circus lexicon before reading the book. There’s a nice explanation on Wikipedia, but the page also reveals key elements of the plot.

But back to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy–a slight deviation from a children’s nursery rhyme, and what a perfect title that is. Watching James Bond films may create the illusion that being a spy is great escapist fun. After all, where else would you get those fast cars, incredible gadgets, and sexy, voluptuous women? But le Carré shows us that the spy game is deadly serious, and no one takes it more seriously than Smiley–the protagonist of the novel.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy finds George Smiley in forced retirement from MI6, and he’s not happy about it. Put out to a rather bleak ‘pasture’, Smiley is depressed and bored. It doesn’t help that he and his wife, Ann are separated–the only traces left of her in his life are the bills he keeps receiving for her extravagant flings and bank notification that she’s grabbing most of his pension. Just as he’s ready to accept that he should sell his London home and move to the country, he’s contacted by someone from his past, Peter Guillam, the head of the Scalphunters–a division in MI6 which deals with kidnapping, murder, and blackmail.

Smiley was eased out the Circus along with the head man, known as Control, the year before. Both men were seen as dinosaurs and considered “as close as thieves”  who could no longer cope with the demands of the shifting espionage world. Consequently the reins of power changed hands– Smiley and a few others loyal to Control (who’s now dead of cancer) were booted out, and the Circus is now run by Percy Alleline, and his deputies Bill Haydon, Roy Bland, and Toby Esterhase.  Here’s Guillam explaining the radical changes at the Circus:

In your day, the Circus ran itself by regions. Africa, satellites, Russia, China, South East Asia, you name it: each region was commanded by its own juju man; Control sat in heaven and held the strings. Remember?

It strikes a distant chord

Well, today everything operational is under one hat. It’s called London Station. Regions are out, lateralism is in. Bill Haydon’s Commander London Station, Roy Bland’s his number two, Toby Esterhase runs between them like a poodle. They’re a service within a service. They share their own secrets and don’t mix with the proles. It makes us more secure.

Smiley is drawn back to the spy world when Guillam takes him to meet Oliver Lacon, a civil service officer responsible for the Intelligence services. Lacon has arranged for Smiley to have a secret meeting with agent Ricki Tarr–a rather shifty figure who tells a story of a passionate affair with Irina, the wife of a Russian agent.  In the throes of passion, ready to defect and terrified of the consequences, she revealed that she had an enormous secret regarding the identity of a mole, known as “Gerald [was] a high functionary in the Circus.” Although Irina was set to defect and arrangements were made for a special plane to whisk her to Britain, something went wrong. She was drugged and whisked off to Moscow instead. Realising that his cover’s been blown, and fearing for his life, Tarr subsequently dropped out of sight. Now he’s resurfaced to tell his tale to Lacon and Smiley.

This information sends Smiley on the hunt for the mole–and really he’s picking up where he left off as both he and an increasingly paranoid Control suspected a mole in British Intelligence after the failure of a critical operation in Czechoslovakia. Smiley never stoops to resort to “I-told-you-so” recriminations as he is all too aware that precious time has been lost, and now that he’s outside the Circus, it will be no easy task to unmask the mole.  As Lacon notes:

We can’t move. We can’t investigate because all the instruments of enquiry are in the Circus’s hands, perhaps in the mole Gerald’s. We can’t watch, or listen, or open mail. To do any one of those things would require the resources of Esterhase’s lamplighters, and Esterhase like anyone else must be suspect. We can’t interrogate; we can’t take steps to limit a particular person’s access to delicate secrets. To do any of these things would be to run the risk of alarming the mole. It’s the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?

So it’s Smiley’s job to hunt for the mole… Smiley discovers that one of the biggest elements at the Circus is source Merlin: a secret highly-funded operation in which intelligence information is seeping from the Soviet Union, and he suspects that this information is deliberately created to obfuscate British Intelligence.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is an incredibly well crafted novel that explores the increasingly uneasy world at the Circus and also Smiley’s intense mental world as he hides out at a drab hotel which becomes his “operational headquarters.” While the world of the global spy networks has a sort of sordid glamour–replete with intrigue, false identities and dangerous missions, the most fantastic aspects of this novel reveal the labyrinths of intrigues at MI6 and the human capacity to deceive :

The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal. The fifty-year-old who knocks five years off his age. The married man who calls himself a bachelor; the fatherless man who gives himself two children … Or the interrogator who projects himself into the life of a man who does not speak. Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they are making a fantasy about themselves.

There’s a marvellous intro from le Carré in this edition in which he describes the extremely fine line of the role of the double agent:

For while on one side the secret traitor will be doing his damnedest to frustrate the efforts of hos own service, on the other he will be building himself a successful career in it, providing it with the coups and the grace-notes that it needs to justify its existence, and generally passing himself off as a capable and trustworthy fellow, a good man on a dark night.

Le Carré’s novel was published in 1974, and it’s impossible to overlook the influence of the scandalous affair of the so-called Cambridge Spies, so it’s not surprising that in the intro, Le Carré also goes on to discuss Blake and Philby–admitting to “a particular dislike for Philby, and an unnatural sympathy for Blake.”  Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is not fluff, and it’s not a particularly light or easy book to read, so be prepared to concentrate. The author’s depiction of this other shady world creates an intensity that’s difficult to forget.