Summer break is often a time for longer reads. This includes comics, of course, and I recently had a veritable blast making my way through Appollo’s and Brüno’s Commando colonial trilogy, a set of thrilling spy adventures set across WWII Africa that engagingly complicate the conflict by bringing in a colonial dimension… Still, I’d rather dig into it at Gotham Calling whenever those French albums get translated and, for now at least, keep this blog’s focus on works that can be read in English.
So, instead, I’ll recommend a couple of classic novels for those of you who find yourselves with a bit of time on your hands and in the mood for other original approaches to political fiction:
ASHENDEN (1928)
“This book is founded on my experiences in the Intelligence Department during the war, but rearranged for the purposes of fiction. Fact is a poor story-teller. It starts a story at haphazard, generally long before the beginning, rambles on inconsequently and tails off, leaving loose ends hanging about, without a conclusion. It works up to an interesting situation, and then leaves it in the air to follow an issue that has nothing to do with the point; it has no sense of climax and whittles away its dramatic effects in irrelevance.”
Somerset Maugham’s preface to this very witty piece of spy literature, based on the author’s own experience as a British intelligence agent during World War I, already kicks things off in deliciously ironic terms. Maugham complains about so-called realist writers, explaining that life is too messy and often tedious, so it’s up to the storyteller to give it a shape and overarching meaning. I’ve no doubt Maugham did just that here, to some degree, but the irony is that the ensuing book reads much more like a slap in the face of the sort of escapist spy adventures that had been gaining popularity in the UK for a while (bestsellers like John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps), as it’s full of anti-climaxes, action-light assignments, and dryly described situations that, even when they pay off, tend to do so with subdued drama, their larger consequences kept off-page.
As a result, although there is a unifying framework in the form of the titular Ashenden, a writer who spends much of WWI in Switzerland carrying out undercover missions assigned by a colonel codenamed R (a clear precursor of Fleming’s M or le Carré’s Control), the book almost feels like a collection of short stories with a few recurring characters. Some tales are told in a single chapter and others take two or three chapters in a row, creating a haphazard rhythm that really suits the general project of defying the genre’s formulas by showing espionage as a bunch of uneven fits and starts, with great stretches of boredom in the middle (one of my favorite chapters, near the end, involves a trip to revolutionary Russia that settles into a long hilarious description of the annoying American sitting near Ashenden during the train ride… who just won’t shut up!). I especially like the fact that, unlike R, our protagonist is a mid-level operative who doesn’t know the big picture, so we share his limited POV as he succeeds or fails in tasks that are only pieces in a complex puzzle and neither him nor the readers are given the satisfaction of fully understanding the implications.
And lest you think I’m overinterpreting some kind of botched or poorly conceived piece of writing, bear in mind that the prose itself can get amusingly self-reflexive way beyond the cheeky introduction:
“He went back into his room to put on slippers and a dressing-gown, and as an after-thought dropped a small revolver into his pocket. Ashenden believed much more in his acuteness than in a firearm, which is apt to go off at the wrong time and make a noise, but there are moments when it gives you confidence to feel your fingers round its butt, and this sudden summons seemed to him exceedingly mysterious. It was ridiculous to suppose that those two cordial stout Egyptian gentlemen were laying some sort of trap for him, but in the work upon which Ashenden was engaged the dullness of routine was apt now and again to slip quite shamelessly into the melodrama of the sixties. Just as passion will make use brazenly of the hackneyed phrase, so will chance show itself insensitive to the triteness of the literary convention.”
Perhaps all this could sound boring and unappealing to fans of the very sort of thrillers Ashenden is toying with, but I’m sucker for the deconstructionist approach when it’s done cleverly and with more amusement than arrogance – like what Watchmen or Alias would later do to superheroes. And like in those cases, more than a literary game, the result here ends up engaging with the very philosophy at the core of the respective genre, as there is a recurring tension between a neat sense of order and a misanthropic worldview (‘nothing is so foolish as to ascribe profundity to what on the surface is merely inept’). Hell, the overall sardonic distance even makes it easier to swallow the protagonist’s dated attitudes and politics, which might’ve felt more unpleasant in an aggressively heroic narrative.
I suppose Ashenden still feels fresh because the variety of fast-paced action thrillers it subverts is the one that remains dominant today, so the book can also be read as a fun counterpoint to current bestsellers and blockbusters. The additional irony, however, is that, in a roundabout way, this novel ended up contributing to those thrillers’ very rise and longevity. Shortly after publication, this work was adapted into a play which, in 1936, was adapted to cinema by Alfred Hitchcock, under the title Secret Agent. Somewhere along the line, Somerset Maugham’s gesture was watered down, if not downright reversed, rearranging the tone, cast, and situations into a full-blown adventure yarn that includes a chase at a Swiss cholocate factory and an exploding train in the climax!
Hitchcock had been developing an influential take on the spy film in his previous couple of movies (The Man Who Knew Too Much and The 39 Steps), but those still involved the notion of ‘average’ citizens caught in an expected web of intrigue. Now, the protagonist becomes a cool, flirty, quippy secret agent involved in wild set pieces, pretty much laying out the blueprint for the James Bond franchise, even the film turns out to have a few clever tricks up its sleeve (there is a macabre twist halfway through that jolts some of the characters out of their debonair attitude).
To be fair, though, the most eccentric figure (played by Peter Lorre, who has to be seen to be believed) is an assassin lifted straight out of Maugham’s work. Known as the Hairless Mexican, the character was introduced in this memorable dialogue between Ashenden and R:
“‘I gather by what you have not said that he’s an unmitigated scoundrel.’
R. smiled with his pale blue eyes.
‘I don’t know that I’d go quite so far as that. He hasn’t had the advantages of a public-school education. His ideas of playing the game are not quite the same as yours or mine. I don’t know that I’d leave a gold cigarette-case about when he was in the neighbourhood, but if he lost money to you at poker and had pinched your cigarette-case he would immediately pawn it to pay you. If he had half a chance he’d seduce your wife, but if you were up against it he’d share his last crust with you. The tears will run down his face when he hears Gounod’s ‘Ave Maria’ on the gramophone, but if you insult his dignity he’ll shoot you like a dog. It appears that in Mexico it’s an insult to get between a man and his drink and he told me himself that once when a Dutchman who didn’t know passed between him and the bar he whipped out his revolver and shot him dead.’
‘Did nothing happen to him?’
‘No, it appears that he belongs to one of the best families. The matter was hushed up and it was announced in the papers that the Dutchman had committed suicide. He did practically. I don’t believe the Hairless Mexican has a great respect for human life.’
Ashenden, who had been looking intently at R., started a little and he watched more carefully than ever his chief’s tired, lined and yellow face. He knew that he did not make this remark for nothing.
‘Of course a lot of nonsense is talked about the value of human life. You might just as well say that the counters you use at poker have an intrinsic value, their value is what you like to make it; for a general giving battle, men are merely counters and he’s a fool if he allows himself for sentimental reasons to look upon them as human beings.’”
NOSTROMO (1904)
“In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco—the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity—had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud.”
I’ve been making my way through Joseph Conrad’s writings in these past years and, while nothing beats the sheer awesomeness of The Secret Agent (not to be confused with Hitchcock’s film of the same title), so far Nostromo has become a close second. It’s set in the fictitious Latin American country of Costaguana, which seems constantly embroiled in wars and revolutions (not unlike the San Theodoros of the Tintin albums The Broken Ear and Tintin and the Picaros). The story mostly focuses on a silver mine around which revolves a mess of political intrigue, violence, romance, and neocolonialist exploitation, but the whole thing has such an epic scale that this description barely scratches the surface…
Honestly, as much as I love Conrad’s deranged (when not downright grotesque) characters and cruel twists of fate, what really grabs me is the storytelling itself. I heard this book has a reputation for being boring and difficult, probably due to the wordy prose and supposedly slow pace, but I found its mosaic structure utterly engrossing: as you make your way through it, the text keeps mischievously pulling the rug from under your feet. Yes, the beginning may feel like a fanciful description of the landscape (although knowing the geography will pay off later) and it’s not always immediately clear what is mere scene-setting or a what is a detour… But the beauty of it is that pretty much everything both is *and* isn’t a detour, since it all depends on your perspective!
So, a passing anecdote about a dictator on a mule can turn out to be the center of the book several chapters later, the titular protagonist is absent or a vague background figure until halfway through, and a paragraph can suddenly jump forwards or backwards in time (hours, days, years, decades…), revisiting the same situation over and over again with a new point of view, perhaps reframing it in the grand scheme of things or zooming into a microcosmic level to explore the psychology of a single individual whose actions may or may not determine the course of the brutal tide of history. There are sequences that seem straight out of a pre-Zapata western, including an exciting secret operation to smuggle out a bunch of silver during one of the civil wars, which I’m guessing some readers will remember as part of the larger saga and others will recall as the main tale itself (with the rest as backstory). Seriously, there are so many twists and turns that even the last twenty pages (out of 500!) manage to radically shift gears once again, so that what promised to be an epilogue wrapping things up actually becomes a tragic/darkly comedic love triangle centered on characters introduced ages ago, piling up final ironies on top of each other.
And yes, the prose is verbose as all hell, but it’s also pretty entertaining, like when describing the incredible general Pablo Ignacio Barrios:
“All his life he had been an inveterate gambler. He alluded himself quite openly to the current story how once, during some campaign (when in command of a brigade), he had gambled away his horses, pistols, and accoutrements, to the very epaulettes, playing monte with his colonels the night before the battle. Finally, he had sent under escort his sword (a presentation sword, with a gold hilt) to the town in the rear of his position to be immediately pledged for five hundred pesetas with a sleepy and frightened shopkeeper. By daybreak he had lost the last of that money, too, when his only remark, as he rose calmly, was, “Now let us go and fight to the death.” From that time he had become aware that a general could lead his troops into battle very well with a simple stick in his hand.”
Always the nihilist, as far as I can tell Joseph Conrad does not expect us to fully admire any of the flawed people who crowd Nostromo. Yet I’m not gonna lie: while not as brutally racist as in Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s prose does seem especially dismissive of the Latin and indigenous population (just as his narrator’s voice tends to sound condescending towards women, despite some interesting female characters). Edward Said nails this issue in Culture and Imperialism, where he posits: ‘Conrad was both anti-imperialist and imperialist, progressive when it came to rendering fearlessly and pessimistically the self-confirming, self-deluding corruption of overseas domination, deeply reactionary when it came to conceding that Africa or South America could ever have had an independent history or culture.’
Crucially, though, Said adds: ‘Yet lest we think patronizingly of Conrad as the creature of his own time, we had better note that recent attitudes in Washington and amongst most Western policymakers and intellectuals show little advance over his views.’ Hell, in many ways Conrad writing over a hundred years ago was much more skeptical of Western philanthropy than the 21st-century neocons!
Ultimately, Nostromo is such a thematically rich, massively sprawling narrative, with challengingly non-linear storytelling and a multitudinous eccentric cast, that it somehow feels particularly suited for hardcore X-Men geeks… or, perhaps more appropriately, for fans of Gabriel García Márquez (especially his longer masterpieces, like One Hundred Years of Solitude, Autumn of the Patriarch, and Love in the Time of Cholera). It’s just that it has more passages about mines:
“Mines had acquired for him a dramatic interest. He studied their peculiarities from a personal point of view, too, as one would study the varied characters of men. He visited them as one goes with curiosity to call upon remarkable persons. He visited mines in Germany, in Spain, in Cornwall. Abandoned workings had for him strong fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like the sight of human misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They might have been worthless, but also they might have been misunderstood. His future wife was the first, and perhaps the only person to detect this secret mood which governed the profoundly sensible, almost voiceless attitude of this man towards the world of material things.”
