My apologies for not having posted here since early June. In the interim I've spent the best part of a month cycling Eurovelo #17, one of the long distance cycling routes throughout Europe. I'll post more about that trip later.
In the meantime, I wanted to give an update on what I've been reading over the last few months. Shortly before I went away I read Shirley Jackson's collection The Lottery and Other Stories. This is a superb introduction to Jackson's distinctive ouevre, featuring the title story that uncovers a collective desire for conformity so powerful it compels us to turn a blind eye to obvious injustice, as well as half a dozen stories--The Daemon Lover, Of Course, The Renegade-- in which the mysterious provocateur, James Harris, appears in person or is alluded to as a destabilising and malevolent force, exposing the largely female protagonists' own weaknesses and delusions.
John Langan's The Fisherman blew me away. It's a beautifully written novel that initially seems to be about a widower finding solace in fishing as a way to come to terms with the loss of his wife, but it morphs into something far more profound and horrific, a distubing meditation on succumbing to the temptations of fantasy versus the hard and bitter struggle to accept and get through grief, and find the strength to go on living. It is, without a doubt, one of the best fantasy/horror novels I've read in the last ten years.
I revisited The Tooth Fairy, by Graham Joyce, (a first edition copy he'd signed for me at Fantasycon 2000) and found it as perceptive and honest a portrait of childhood and male coming of age, as anything by any other writer in the genre. Although the fantasy tropes are deployed sparingly (some commentators found them redundant), I found the titular creature to be driven by complex motivations in his/her interactions with Sam--not just spite and self-pity, but loneliness, desire and insecurity, all of which traits are reflected in Sam's behaviour and attitude to his friends and the world at large. As always Joyce writes with empathy and a genuine fondness for his characters. His loss is one many of us still find it difficult to comprehend.
Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles is a memorable re-imagining of the Illiad from the point of view of Patroclus, Achilles' childhood friend, explicitly cast here not only as friend but lover. I first read an abridged and child-friendly version of the Illiad in a huge collection of Greek myths and legends I borrowed from Worcester library at the age of 8. It started a life long love affair not only with Greek myths, but with the mythologies from other cultures, particularly the Arthurian legends, but also of Celtic folklore--the tales of Mabinogian, and of Cuchulainn and Finn McCool-- and by way of Marvel's Thor, with Norse myths. Miller traces Achilles' and Patroclus' relationship from childhood, to their joining Agememnon's vast fleet as it sails to war against Troy. She portrays Patroclus' enduring love for Achilles, in spite of the latter's fatal pride in his battle of wills over Briseis, his captive, taken from him by Agememnon by way of compensation for the loss of one of his own captives. Briseis is given far more agency here than in the original, but it is Patroclus himself, in a tale of generals, heroes and gods, who comes across as both the most heroic and most humane of characters.
Moving away from the realm of the Fantastic, I reread the first two books in James Ellroy's LA Quartet--The Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere. If you're already familiar with Ellroy then anything I say about his work will be superfluous, but if you've encountered him only through the adaptations of LA Confidential and The Black Dahlia, then do yourselves a favour and read the quartet. Beginning in the late 40s and moving through to the late 1950s, the novels follow various recurring characters and specific individual protagonists through cases involving serial killers, corrupt cops, bent lawyers, Hollywood moguls, gangsters, commie-baiting district attorneys, and detectives dazzled by the allure of fame. Each of the books is tightly plotted and features a line-up of deeply flawed but fascinating cops, crooks and femmes fatale, and each plays out against a backdrop of the political machinations and police corruption that shaped the course of law enforcement in LA throughout the 1950s and beyond. Featuring real life characters like Mickey Cohen and Howard Hughes, alongside some of Ellroys most memorable characters, including the epitome of murderous corruption, Dudley Smith, and venal gun-for-hire turned lovestruck avenger, Buzz Meeks, the first two books remain as provocative and entertaining as when I first read them back in the early 1990s.
Having recently rewatched Tomas Alfredson's sublime film adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, I figured it was time to get to grips with the source material. I'd read John Le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a few years back, and his penultimate novel, Agents Running in the Field, when it was published in 2019, but for whatever reason, I'd never got round to reading the Smiley v Karla trilogy. I got hold of copies of all three and have just finished reading Tinker ... and its sequel, The Honourable Schoolboy. The first offers a deep, and at times perplexing examination of Britain's declining influence in the post-world war II world through the medium of the espionage thriller. Protagonist George Smiley and his betrayer, Bill Haydon--both senior officers in the Circus, Le Carré's fictionalised representation of MI6--share a profoud sense of directionlessness, of loss of purpose motivated by Britain's irreversible decline as a world power. But while Smiley, through his work and relationship with colleagues, reaches an accommodation with the new order of things, Haydon sees this loss of status as a betrayal, as the snatching away of that to which he felt entitled. It is this, rather than any strong committment to Communist Russia that motivates his betrayal. Karla, we feel, has recognised Haydon's sense of injustice from early on, just as, in his meeting with Smiley in a prison cell in India, without him giving anything away about himself, is able to deduce Smiley's own weaknesses and use them against him.
The Honourable Schoolboy follows on a short time after the concluding events of Tinker ..., with Smiley now as acting head of the Circus, and, in midst of looking into cases buried by Haydon, uncovering a suppressed investigation into a money laundering operation in the far east that may be part of a larger, covert KGB scheme. A former asset of the Circus, Jerry Westerby, is brought of out retirement and sent to Hong Kong posing as a sports reporter to begin investigating the background of the operation, and in doing so, 'shake the tree' that will lead the KGB's assets to reveal themselves. While Smiley is an important figure in the novel, being the instigator of much of what follows, it is Westerby who becomes the focus of our sympathies. In the course of his investigations, he finds that a Hong Kong businessman, Drake Ko, has links to Russia, and brother who is a high ranking officer in the Chinese intelligence service. In a complex but enthralling plot during which Jerry falls for Ko's mistress, an English woman who also has ties to the Circus, he uncovers an intricate network of grifters, arms and drug dealers, corrupt local politicians, gangsters and their bodyguards, and a supposedly long-dead legendary pilot, all caught up in Karla's scheme to protect his spy working inside the Chinese secret service. If Le Carré has an ideal English operative, then Westerby epitomises it. On the surface, he's something of failure--his father was a newspaper magnate who left Jerry penniless; he's a womaniser with numerous relationships behind him; a reporter whom colleagues see as something of a joke. On the other hand, he's characterised by a commitment to honour, loyalty, and patriotism. He's pragmatic and practical and able to think on his feet, yet he's also given to delusion (about himself) and to foolish, quixotic gestures that threaten to endanger his own life, but also the lives of those he cares about. Academic and political commentator Mark Fisher posited that the notion of 'post-colonial melancholia' hung over Tinker, Tailor .. and I would suggest that it looms even heavier over The Honourable Schoolboy, suffused as the novel is--particularly in its ending, when the Circus is manipulated into handing over its newly acquired asset to the Americans--with an air of desperation, of people like Smiley and Guillam being yesterday's men. What lingers is the memory of Westerby's final grand gesture, his refusal to accept his own powerlessness in the face of inevitable compromise. The reader is left with the impression that Le Carré, shares with his protagonist, a sense of loss coupled with a profound disgust at our failure to accept that loss.
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