Bond Takes On The Nazi Messiah

A review of 'James Bond in Seafire' by John Gardner

Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 23rd. July 2017.   Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/RCOEK6NDB7XVS?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srphttps://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R333W5679SKKA0?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

James Bond is taking a Caribbean cruise with his latest squeeze, Fredericka "Flicka" von Grüsse, a Swiss intelligence agent. The relationship with Flicka is serious and during the course of this novel, Bond will ask her to marry him, which seems somewhat out-of-character. The liner suffers an explosion, and after some formulaic heroics, Bond joins Flicka in the lifeboat. Back in London, Bond is suspicious and brings the incident to the attention of his superiors on a top-secret watch committee run by the intelligence services, known as MicroGlobe One.

It develops that the liner is owned by an unscrupulous international arms dealer called Max Tarn, who appears to be of aristocratic Jewish heritage. The Tarn family seat is a dilapidated estate in southern Germany called Tarnenwerden, near Wasserburg am Inn, from which the Tarns were expelled during the Nazi era. Tarn is already a person of interest to the authorities and it is decided that Bond and Flicka will investigate him. It turns out that Tarn is a villain, and he is planning something - though what he actually is planning, the 'super-villain spectacular' inimitable to Bond stories, turns out to be a bit of a damp squib (pun intended). Oddly, despite his apparent Jewish ancestry, Tarn is an aspiring Nazi leader, which implies that this Tarn is perhaps an impostor, putting his whole antecedence in doubt, though it may just be that he is a self-hating Jew. The author makes heavy weather of Tarn's political aspirations, making it plain his own disapproval of the character's Nazi views, and this serves as the main motivation for Bond to stop Tarn.

Gardner was selected as an official Bond writer and therefore one of the successors to Ian Fleming. If I'm not mistaken, I think he was the next appointed after Kingsley Amis. As a writer, Gardner is plainly not of the same calibre, or even in the same league, as Fleming himself or Amis for that matter, nor any of the other adventure thriller writers of the same era, such as Alistair MacLean and Len Deighton. Presumably he was selected as an exemplar of the lowest common denominator: the type of writer whose leaden prose would have the widest appeal and therefore deliver the most profits. But he's still a puzzling choice. You would think that Deighton - the quintessential Cold War thriller writer - would have been a better choice, but who knows how these decisions are made?

Gardner, I detect, is fully on-message with the Nazis-as-cardboard-cut-out-baddies hysteria that was - and remains - common among people of his generation. The author wishes to portray anybody with Nazi sympathies as one-dimensionally villainous, to the point where a comparison is explicitly made with Dracula: Bond sardonically dubs Tarn the 'Prince of Darkness' (in counterpoise to the 'Renaissance Prince' that Flicka has him pegged as). Given Gardner's evident distaste for ethnicism and racism, it is quite ironic that he chooses to play up to a classic xenophobic stereotype used for villains of foreign extraction that could be considered unconsciously anti-Semitic (I say unconsciously because another thing about Gardner that is apparent from this novel is that he is very pro-Israel and, in one passage, even blames the British for the King David Hotel bombings of 1946). Originating from an old castle somewhere and seemingly smooth and charming, with a heavy foreign accent, Tarn does seem a bit like Count Dracula and the analogy is interesting in that, much like Bram Stoker's Dracula, Tarn is a malevolent force being chased by his nemesis, but the explicitly anti-Nazi stuff is the sort of thing that might not play so well with my own generation and later, and I certainly have become weary of it. It's unoriginal and seems simplistic and preachy.

The story is also bit too pacey for my liking. I realise this is aimed at a certain type of reader - it's the airport novel market - but there isn't much depth, instead the action jumps around from one location to another without much development of the characters. Bond is in the Caribbean, then he's in London, then he's in southern Spain, then back in London again, then to Israel, then Munich, then back in the Caribbean, etc. All of this running around by the main characters must have involved an immense amount of research, yet paradoxically Gardner does not seem to me to be a very imaginative writer. He writes visually, but the plot is dull (though, to be fair, it does pick up a bit about a third of the way in, when Bond finally confronts Tarn), and the motivations of the characters don't make sense. Perhaps a contributing factor is that this novel was written in the immediate post-Cold War period (which here Gardner calls the 'Tepid War'), and much like the Western intelligence agencies that exist in real-life, Bond and the other characters seem redundant, aimless, even slightly bored, and look like they are searching for a strategic mission and a reason to exist. Tarn is certainly a dangerous foe, but he is a criminal, not a spy. The author therefore has to talk up the Nazi factor: Tarn becomes a Nazi Messiah and, in the novel, neo-Nazis are practically poised to take over key European countries. That's the only way the premise can work as an espial alarum.

These observations aside, SeaFire is written competently and there are some isolated moments of really good descriptive writing. I also like the colourful way that Gardner describes some of the characters, though it's not very politically-correct and some people may find the author's perspective on women fossilised. Here's an example from page 99 [hardback first edition]:

[quote]"She wore a silver evening mini-dress with a diamond choker, but at first sight all they took in were the famous legs, long and incredible, reaching up forever and a day, for she was around six feet tall. Though enviously slim, she was beautifully proportioned, with a nut brown tan, and that other great attribute, the thick long black hair which had been her trademark in the old days.

"Then they saw her face.

"What had once been called both elfin and gamin by a hundred fashion journalists must have still been there under the livid bruises, and the obviously broken nose, for it was as though someone had used her features as a punch bag. When she spoke, there were traces of nasality, and a slight tremor."[unquote]

In the context of a popular thriller, that's smartly done, but even that basic standard is not consistently maintained.

Here's a better one from page 188:

[quote]"...Bond quickly gave the trio a thorough once-over. The bearded man was short and stocky, probably in his late forties with a fine weatherbeaten face. The woman could be any age between eighteen and thirty-five as she had one of those faces with a scrubbed look, dark hair that hung lank around her shoulders, so that it regularly had to be pushed back with a thin hand. The final member of the party was clean shaven, earnest-looking, with his hair beginning to recede. He had the manner of an academic, the shoulders slightly stooped, his eyes bright behind a pair of wire framed glasses."[unquote]

Rating SeaFire puts me in a quandary. This is the first of Gardner's novels that I have read, and I suspect he has written better. He also seems like a nice man with lots of varied experiences - a real 'writer's writer' - but this is not a good novel and I cannot give it more than two stars.

Truth, reality and Fate

A review of 'The Man in the High Castle' by Philip K. Dick

Note: The following review was originally published at Amazon.co.uk on 11th. October 2013. 

Link to original review: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/customer-reviews/R29DH1BXHGBNL5?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

In the world of 'The Man In The High Castle', the Allies lost the Second World War. The victorious Axis powers, Germany, Italy and Japan, control vast swathes of the planet. In North America, the stage for this novel, the two major powers - the Germans and Japanese - fight a shadow war of espial intrigue, which the various characters become caught up in one way or another, direct or indirectly, while grappling with the micro-realities of their lives. The author, Phillip K. Dick, invokes the I-Ching as a literary device to represent the mystery and randomness of Fate and perhaps also to reflect the disenfranchisement and debasement of the Western American characters in the face of their Oriental invaders. Dick also uses the classic meta-fictional device of the `novel within a novel', entitled 'The Grasshopper Lies Heavy', authored by the fictitious `Hawthorne Abendsen'. This is so as to provide his characters with a vision of an attractive-seeming alternative reality, through what, to them, seems a recursive alternate history.

Most people who read this novel regard it as a work of alternate history, but I am not sure that is quite on the mark. The author seems more concerned here with alternative realities than alternate history. Confusingly, the only actual alternate history in this novel is Abendsen's fictitious book, in which the Allies win the Second World War but Britain rather than the USSR emerges as one of the two superpowers. This diversionary reflects the ahistoricity of Dick's entire perspective. The author's only genuine foray into history, such as it is, appears to be more inadvertent than intentional, and might even be something he came to regret. Whatever, Dick presents the reader with an uncomfortable intellectual dilemma concerning the malleability of history and whether we are being told the truth about our collective past. I suspect this was not the intention and that Dick - or his editor - would have preferred that we think about the malleability of the present instead, and wrap ourselves up in all kinds of Eastern mystical twaddle - here we have an alliance of Taoist Orientals, who, of course, are perfectly in mental harmony, balance and synchronicity, in a cold war against a bunch of Occidental Nazis who are, naturally, cold and mechanistic brutes, etc. ad nauseum. When it comes to the past, the author is an even more conventional thinker and falls into the standard-issue "evil Nazis" literary trope. It is this cleave, between Dick's philosophic analysis of, respectively, the past and the present, that I wish to explore in this review.

In all fairness, the Nazi theme is not the real substance of the novel and only provides a compelling backdrop (it could have been, literally, any thematic period in history), but still, Dick would later excuse his failure to produce a sequel on the absurd pretext that he just couldn't bear to go back and read about the Nazis again. The irony of this novel is that the author is the victim of his own abstruseness. No matter how hard he tries, Dick cannot distract us from the contentiousness of history. He rightly wants us to question the basis of reality and identity, but in doing so he is liable to lead the thoughtful, historically-literate reader to the opposite conclusions of those he might have intended. Were the "Nazis" as evil as they are presented, or at all? Are we being told the truth about our history, and thus do we really understand our present? These ironic discursions reflect the wider methods of intellectual control in our culture. The idea of questioning reality and identity is entirely accepted in a confused society. Thus, race-mixing, drug-taking, gender-bending and other distended meanderings are de rigeur and in keeping with our own contemporary cultural climate. But if you question history, or worse still (in the eyes of the cultural commissars) reaffirm standards of truth - which amount to altogether more concrete mental diversions -you are soon in trouble. I have the feeling that Dick would like us to take his pop history of the 20th. century at face value and not question his take on the "evil Nazis", but the thoughtful and inquisitive reader cannot but help `get into trouble' by doing so.

Too often, published history is treated as law when in fact what we `know' (in the sense of what is accepted interpretation) is nothing more than a filtered version of the truth. There is only one truth. That stark fact is uncomfortable for many people who prefer the fashionable postmodern rejection of all that is objective and absolute in the moral, social and academic senses, but the `post-structuralist' school and similar merely represent still more ways of `seeing' or interpreting truth, not the Truth itself. The notion that the German National Socialists were "evil" and that their victory would have led inevitably to a desertified brutocracy is very much in the realm of interpretation and speculation. Part of the problem is that, unfortunately, truth is often confused with `reality'. Reality is related to the truth, but is not the same. Reality is just our experience of truth and is therefore loaded with perspective. In our reality - and that of the characters in this novel - the Nazis were brutes. Yet the author wishes to remind us, correctly, that reality is personal, a perspective or interpretation.

The author achieves this partly through the viewpoint of the characters and their peradventures, and also through various symbolic devices. For instance, we are lead to believe (perhaps implicitly more than explicitly) that 'Abendsen' - the eponymous `The Man In The High Castle' - must live in some kind of grand, palatial residence. In fact, it turns out that he lives in a modest house and has a modest bearing, and one suspects that has always been the case. In another scene, two characters discuss the `historicity' of certain artefacts and the obsession among their Japanese customers for `genuine' Americana: in this case, a couple of cigarette lighters. One of the lighters was used by FDR, the other wasn't, yet they are both alike. How do we come to regard one with greater value than the other? Surely we can't do so on any rational basis as there is literally no material difference between the two cigarette lighters. It's just that one happened to be in the pocket of FDR at some point. As one of the characters, 'Wyndam-Matson', who is running the whole scam, says:- [quote]"...You can't tell which is which. There's no "mystical plasmic presence", no "aura" around it."[unquote] (p.66).

So Dick is trying to convey here the nonsense of placing historical value on artefacts. How is one object more `historic' than another, and more broadly, how can we say what is `real' or `genuine' and what isn't? This is all interesting material, yet at the same time I cannot help but feel that it seems a little facile. The point about the mysticism of historicity is well-made, but Dick seems to be suggesting that history itself is an entirely creative and indeterminate process rather than something `real'. I see this as nothing more than pseud plasticity. The reason people place historic value in objects and like to emphasise genuineness is in order to protect and preserve the past. The fact that an appearance of `genuineness' or `likeness' can be manufactured and faked is immaterial to the point. The characters in the above-mentioned exchange poke fun at the Japanese customers for their naïve fetishism - perhaps rightly so - but if there was no value in historicity, as Dick seems to believe, then we would be one step away from literally inventing the past, which is not actually what happens. It is true that reality is questionable, but the behaviour of the Japanese is, if anything, an example of the opposite pressures, of trying to cling on to the more objective aspects of reality because they know of it. That is, perhaps, a reason for the traditional human totemic affiliation with inanimate objects, and maybe also reflects a kind of fetishism about objects (see, for instance, Marx's `commodity fetishism'), but in the end the explanation of wanting to `hold on to history' and valuing the historicity of the object - "aura" or not - is as simple as acknowledging an important part of history which, if it is to have meaning, should not be permitted to slip into the irrationally extreme relativism that Dick posits.

Dick's heavily relativistic perspective on reality, in which everything is uncertain and entirely personal, has other slippages of logic. It leads to slightly related and equally fashionable, but cringe-worthy notions, such as `the personal is political' and so on. The idea of the `personal is political' I think underlines much of the message in this novel. In Dick's mind, the personal struggles of characters are the political reality and thus reality is whatever is perceived and whatever is the political climate reflects this self-directed reality. These types of self-defining associations of course contain some provisional truths. Nevertheless, they are, at bottom, symptomatic of a certain feeble-mindedness among decadent writers and academics who overlook the mediation between reality and truth. Dick is, to an extent, right: reality is personal - but that is not all there is to reality. Eventually, reality has to have its showdown with the Truth, with the objective world outside of the self, the counterpoise of our inner selves. We all know this intuitively because it is part of a common experience. At some stage, we all have to come to terms with ourselves: to be `true to yourself', a kind of meta-awareness that is characteristic of relative maturity, in which narrow child-like solipsism is abandoned.

Throughout The Man In The High Castle, political issues of identity intrude on characters' private and personal lives and disturb their solipsistic bliss, deciding their respective fates because identity is real - it is `the truth'. In this sense, the social concept of `identity' can be re-conceptualised geologically in terms of a `rock'. Much like individual rock, discrete identities are inchoate and can erode and change in form over time, but the underlying `geologic truth' is unchangeable: human beings organise socially into both imposed and self-directed identities. At different points in this novel, each character has the necessary psychological reckoning as they come up against this rock-like truth. Thus we can see reality as both personal and also as reflecting certain truths about human nature and the way societies work. Identity, then, is the anchor for each character to the more objective realm, a link to reality and the truth of his or her existence. Typically, a character will emerge from a provocative or enlightening dialogue or a period of fugue into a brief few moments of lucidity in which the truth becomes evident.

In the case of `Robert Childan', a white man [but notice the Japanese-type spelling of the surname - in the novel, he speaks and `thinks' `Japanesey' too], and dealer in memorabilia, the revelation comes from interaction with dominant colonising Japanese:-

[quote] "Face facts. I'm trying to pretend that these Japanese and I are alike. But observe: even when I burst out as to my gratification that they won the war, that my nation lost - there's still no common ground. What words mean to me is sharp contrast vis-à-vis them. Their brains are different. Souls likewise."[unquote] [p.112]. 'Childan', though he is white and mentally Western, speaks and even thinks in a Japanese way, albeit he is clearly resisting this sinister acculturation.

`Frank Fink', a crypto-Jewish dealer in memorabilia, but also a proud cultural American, meets his `rock' in the most brutal fashion. `Tagomi', an industrialist, has a weird moment of fugue in which he confronts the `other reality' and its harsh social facts.

Perhaps the most interesting character is `Mr. Baynes', another crypto-Jew who travels to the United States from Germany and meets certain Japanese, including 'Tagomi', eventually revealing certain important, but hitherto concealed, facts about himself. `Baynes' cannot hide his true identity for long. On his arrival in the United States, he makes an explosive and incriminating admission to a complete stranger at the airport, just for the heck of it. Tagomi also senses the double concealment when they finally meet, feeling that something is not quite `German' about `Baynes'. So the truth cannot be hidden forever, even by `Baynes' - I am who I am, you are who you are, we are who we are, and either we will let spill on our own initiative, or we will be found out. Identity is the rock of humanity.