Tag Archives: Cold War – Fiction

Funeral in Berlin

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Funeral in Berlin [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Len Deighton, book 3 of the Harry Palmer series.

Deighton Funeral in Berlin

Where Horse Under Water (the immediately prior “Secret File” by Deighton) had a crossword conceit, Funeral in Berlin is instead ornamented with chess tactics. I read it as a chaser to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and it worked well that way, highlighting the distinctive styles of the two authors–not to mention the fact that Deighton’s book did in fact follow le Carré’s by about a year (i.e. 1963, 1964).

The anonymous narrating agent cracks wise with even more consistency than in the previous books. There are fifty-one short chapters, which tend to lengthen slightly towards the end. The extremely circumspect first-person prose is broken up with five chapters that use third-person passages to give the viewpoints of other key characters. There are also a set of six brief appendices furnishing overviews of relevant intelligence agencies and legal and technological contexts. These are helpful for readers enjoying the book more than a half century after it was written, but for some reason I was irked by the footnote method of referencing them during the story.

There were a couple of curious and welcome minor details during the closing chapters. Chapter 45 saw our man unwinding with a copy of J.F.C. Fuller’s Decisive Battles of the Western World. In chapter 49 he discussed with his superior Dawlish the organizational need “to take the social pressures off the homosexuals.”

The 2009 edition I read was equipped with a new author’s introduction regarding his “most successful book” by certain commercial measures. Deighton reflects there on his own experiences in East Germany and his disinterest in writing “serious literature.”

At the rate I’ve been reading these “Secret File” novels, I won’t finish them until 2035 or thereabouts, but they are all at the public library, and they read fast enough individually that I could mop up all of them next month. I certainly aim to continue at some pace or other.

Deighton Funeral in Berlin Penguin

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Spy Who Came in from the Cold [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by John le Carré, book 3 of the George Smiley novels.

Le Carre the Spy Who Came in From the Cold

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was a tardy entry in my reading list for classic espionage books. It was less witty than the Deighton novels of the same era–early 1960s Cold War–but it had more gravity and pathos. I can see how it acquired its iconic status, and I am curious about the screen adaptations. It read in a flash; the prose was practically transparent. The rather limited third-person voice was effective, and the pacing of the short chapters was lightning fast, even though the book features relatively little “action.”

I certainly enjoyed it enough to want to read more le Carré, and I’ll probably proceed forward to The Looking Glass War. While I am tempted to roll back to his debut novel Call for the Dead, I gather that it is a mystery with a retired spy for its protagonist, rather than spy fiction proper.

Declare

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Declare [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library] by Tim Powers

Powers Declare

I came to Tim Powers’ Declare on the strength of a friend’s recommendation, and also Charles Stross’ comparison to his own work in The Atrocity Archives. Although the subject matter of espionage plus supernatural elements was certainly similar to Stross’ “Laundry” novels, I was surprised to find myself comparing Declare to a very different, and altogether more popular book: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. Both are bulky, character-oriented novels rooted in the socio-political frames of particular periods; both are self-consciously English; both have emotional depth; both mix in some real historical persons as characters; both introduce their central supernatural elements in a gradual manner; and in both cases those elements are anchored in archaic intelligences and their complex relations with humanity. I would even compare the narrative role that Powers assigns to T.E. Lawrence (“of Arabia”) to that occupied by the Raven King in Clarke’s book. And both Powers and Clarke are performing a comparable sort of transcendent pastiche: adding magic to the LeCarre spy thriller on the one hand and to the Austen saga of realist satire on the other. Powers gets more points for fidelity to history, Clarke for verisimilitude of magic.

Comparisons aside, I did very much enjoy Declare. It was not a flawless book. There was a certain attribution of supernatural efficacy to Christian piety and sacraments that was never properly justified, and I occasionally found a sentence in laughable need of easy repair. (An example of both from p. 486: “He opened his mouth to speak the first words of the Our Father, but realized that he had forgotten them.”) But there is a healthy and profitable use of dramatic irony — attentive readers can stay a half-step ahead of the central characters — and Powers manages to instill a real numinosity into the higher orders of espionage that he invents for World War II and the Cold War. The psychology of double-agency is a long-standing interest of mine, and Powers makes it central to his novel in a way that I appreciated. The recruitment and induction of spies (“agent-runners”) is presented through an explicitly initiatory framework that should be accessible and engaging to those who share those interests with me as well.