Hide and Seek - Xan Fielding

 Xan Fielding was a Special Operations Executive agent sent to occupied Crete in 1942 to organise resistance groups.   He was later joined by Paddy Leigh Fermor but they only worked together briefly because they were in charge of separate halves of the island.   Fielding had no active part in Paddy and Billy Moss's 1944 kidnap of the German commander (see below, Ill Met by Moonlight) save that the idea was originally his.

Fielding's account is different in tone to the gung-ho adventure of Billy and the selfdepracating narrative of Paddy.   Fieldings believes that his mission to Crete was a failure and British Command let the Cretans down by not invading.   Command also forced him to lie to his Cretan followers, which causes him profound shame.

Billy's account of the war in Crete is based on his diaries of the time.   Paddy's was not written until the others were dead.   Hide and Seek was written in 1954 after Fielding had revisited the island post-war.   It is therefore a travel book as much as a war book.   It was probably always how Fielding, the lifelong traveller, viewed it.   Born in India, he was brought up in France by his French grandparents and - like Paddy Leigh Fermor, but separately, he walked across Europe from West to East as a pre-war teenager.   When war broke out he was living and working in Cyprus.   It was only the Cretans' vigorous response to the invasion-by-air (history's first) that persuaded him he might have a role to play.

One advantage Xan Fielding has over Billy Moss is that he is a much better writer, better even than Paddy Leigh Fermor who was, eventually, persuaded to accept a knigthood for his literary work.   Paddy is fluent and imaginative, but seems always to be holding back, afraid to impose himself on his own narrative.   That is the key to his friend Xan's superiority.   He gets the balance exactly right.

Xan, who died in 1991, was in later life a translator from the French.   He was the man who translated Pierre Boule's Planet of the Apes and Bridge on the River Kwai.

Albanian Assignment - David Smiley

 Smiley, whom some suggest may have provided le Carre with the name, was a career cavalry officer who spent most of World War II with the Special Operations Executive.   He was a regular resident of the house in Cairo known as Tara.   Thus he knew Paddy Leigh Fermor and thus, inevitably, this book includes an introduction by Paddy.   Other than partying, Smiley and Paddy did not serve together.   Paddy was a Cretan specialist, Smiley served with Billy McLean, in Albania, twice.

The Albanian situation in the second half of the war was even more complicated than the Cretan.   The Italians had annexed the country and only really when Italy surrendered did the Nazis get involved.   At this stage the Albanian resistance, which had always been divided between supporters of King Zog and Communists, turned active against once another.   Smiley and McLean's first mission had been to unite them and get them fighting the enemy, their second was to try and salvage what they could.   Their situation was further complicated, according to Smiley, by Communist moles within SOE Command at Cairo and later Bari.   Smiley and McLean, in the field, were allied with the Zogists but Command ignored their reports and supported the Communists of Enver Hoxha.   Hoxha, meanwhile, contributed to the deaths of serving British SOE officers - again, according to Smiley.

Smiley, like all right-wingers, claims to be uninterested in politics.   He is not involved with negotiations (left to McLean and Julian Amery, who arrived slightly later, both of whom, of course, later became Conservative MPs).  Smiley prefers blowing things up.   He is generous to those who served with him, whatever their nationalities or beliefs.   He really likes Albania.   The fairly slender text is packed with fascinating military details.   It should be noted that Smiley only wrote after he retired from a lifetime military career.   Along the way he had worked with MI6 and served all over Europe and the Middle East.   Before the war he had served in Abyssinia and Palestine.   His tone sometimes jangles the modern liberal ear, but he certainly knew what he was talking about.   As for his personal conduct, he held the Military Cross and bar.   In other words, he won it twice.  That's quite an achievement.

Abducting a General - Patrick Leigh Fermor

 Basically, Abducting a General is the other half, or alternate view, of the General Kreipe abduction on Crete in the first half of 1944.   Paddy Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss were the British officers in charge and it the initial proposal was Paddy's, developing a much vaguer idea mooted to him by Xan Fielding.   Paddy was a major, senior to and older than Captain Billy Moss but it was Moss who had the big success with his account, Ill Met by Moonlight (reviewed earlier on this blog).  Fermor was himself a literary man but held off writing his account until thirty years or so after Billy's death.   It was partly published in a WW2 magazine and went largely unnoticed.  This version, published by John Murray in 2014, after Paddy too had died, is a reconstruction from the papers he left behind, with helpful introductory notes and extremely useful reports from the field retrieved from the War Office.

The facts don't alter - after all, Paddy was involved with Moss's books and indeed most other accounts.   He translated The Cretan Runner into English and was a source for Antony Beevor's scholarly account which in turn has deep reciprocal links with the works of Beevor's wife, Artemis Cooper, whose biography of Fermor and study of wartime Cairo are both reviewed on this blog.   What makes Paddy's account different is persepective.   He lived a very long life and had time for the deepest reflection.   For much of the time he and Moss were on Crete in 1944 they operated separately, Moss escorting the abducted General while Fermor hurried everywhere across the island meeting contacts and other agents, all of whom he knew, whereas Moss knew none.

In terms of describing the action, Moss is probably the better read.   In terms of understanding the machinations of the Special Operations Executive and the sheer courage of the Cretan resistance, I prefer this.

The Ariadne Objective - Wes Davis

 This is the story of the SOE in Crete.  It syntheses the personal accounts of Paddy Leigh Fermor and Billy Moss (see various posts on this blog over the last couple of months) with the 'universal' approach of pure military historians like Antony Beevor.   It works well and is probably the best introduction to the subject.  What Davis brings to the party is deeper research than Fermor or Moss could ever have achieved.  Davis, for example, gives us the names of the crew of the bomber that dropped Fermor but was unable to drop Moss onto the Cretan massif in February 1944.   Where Davis differs from other accounts - for example, the type of bomber it was that carried Fermor and Moss - I tend to side with Davis.  In this instance, for example, why would a British crew fly an American bomber?

Davis is particularly could on John Pendlebury, the eccentric British academic who carried out the groundwork for Fermor and Moss (and Xan Fielding, come to that) and who died the ultimate hero's death during the Fall of Crete in 1941.  Pendlebury gets a chapter to himself - richly deserved.   Davis slightly plays down the abduction of General Kreipe in April '44, which reflects its importance with historical retrospect but does not reflect the fervour it raised at the time.

Obviously I am now quite familiar with the central story but Davis adds a lot of fresh detail and has a 100% engaging style.  I thoroughly enjoyed The Ariadne Objective.  I recommend it to generalist and specialist alike.

Cairo in the War - Artemis Cooper

 Artemis Cooper might be defined as heritage writer.  The books she writes are connected with her heritage as the granddaughter of Duff Cooper, politician, diplomat and military historian, and the aristocrat actress Lady Diana; daughter of aristocrat and writer John Julius Norwich, and wife to military historian Antony Beevor.   Her themes are perfectly encapsulated here, the scandalous story of the cultural broth that made Cairo infamous during World War II.

Cairo was then a British protectorate - not quite part of the Empire but effectively ruled from London.  The British expats, and the first wave of military commanders stationed there, were either Raj, posh or risque, sometimes all three.   This is not really the story of the ordinary infantryman, a long way from home in an alien climate, though they are mentioned.

We have the highly dubious royal family, led by the notorious King Farouk, initially in his youthful pomp, latterly at the start of his long debauched decline.  In public the royals are devout Muslims, behind closed doors they are boozing and copulating with the everyone else.

The war becomes a reality with Rommel's advance through the desert.  Cairo survives.  Then the war-story turns to the Special Operations Executive, with Cairo the base for operations supporting resistance movements in Greece, Crete and the Balkans.

It is incredibly well done.  The characters are expertly summarised and Cooper somehow makes it easy for her reader to keep track of the various cliques and conspiracies.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Ill Met By Moonlight - W Stanley Moss

 The wartime classic, Ill Met By Moonlight is built around the contemoraneous diary of Moss while he and the far better known Patrick Leigh Fermor went to Crete in 1944 to abduct the Nazi commanding the island, General Kreipe.

The reasons for the abduction are confused - Moss and Fermor have different memories of the plan's conception (during a high-spirited leave in Cairo).   Moss was an SOE newbie whereas Fermor had been leading the resistance on Crete for a couple of years.   The main point, in fact, was the sheer bravado of the exploit, guaranteed to dominate headlines around the world.   Personally, I suspect the Allied Command was delighted to stage a massive distraction in the Eastern Mediterranean while they prepared to land in Normandy two months later.

It is more like two weeks before D-Day when the raiders manage to get off the island with their captive (obviously they succeed; no one was going to publish a book about a wartime failure in 1950).  In the six or so weeks since Moss landed he and Fermor and their motley band of Cretans and Russians have survived many scapes and setbacks.   For the modern reader what stands out is the bravery of all parties, especially the locals who have most to lose and will have to face brutal reprisals.   Moss writes really well and this new edition is well put together, with extra material from Fermor, who wrote several books about his service on Crete.   Highly recommended.

Hornet Flight - Ken Follertt

 A story loosely based on fact, Hornet Flight is mainly set in Denmark.   Young Harald Olufsen is coming of age in a country bloodlessly annexed by the Nazis.   Most citizens accept the situation; some, of course, welcome it.   Teenagers like Harald get by with harmless jokes and pranks.

There is a fledgling resistance, run by MI6 through Hermia Mount, who lived in Denmark before the war and who is engaged to Harald's older brother, a flight instructor.  On the island where Harald lives the Nazis have built a secret base - indeed, Harald worked on it during his previous summer holiday.  Local workers were cleared away before the final installation took place, but Harald sometimes sneaks by on the shortcut home.

In Britain, Bomber Command is taking a hammering.   If they keep getting shot down at the present rate, they won't be able to help their new Russian allies by bombing Nazi targets in western Europe.   The British are about to deploy radar.  They wonder if the Nazis have developed something similar.  Is that, in fact, what the base on the island is doing?

With the a massive raid planned and only days away, Hermia is smuggled back to Denmark to contact her agents.   She reunites with Arne Olufsen and asks him to visit his home and look into the base there.  In doing so, he confides in Harald.   Another islander, Peter Flemming, is a police detective in Copenhagen, with an invalid wife, ambition, and a significant dislike of his former friend Arne.   If it furthers his ambition, Peter is perfectly happy to work with the Nazis.   The potential involvement of his rival is a bonus.

Harald, meanwhile, is expelled from school (thanks to Peter Flemming) and working oddjobs on a farm on the estate of his rich Jewish schoolfriend.   Harald finds an aged plane hidden in a barn - the Hornet of the title - and sets about repairing it.   Harald can fly a little, but his schoolfriend's sister, ballerina Karen Duchwitz, is fully trained.   Together, they plan to fly photos of the radio installation across to Britain.

Follett is as good as anyone at racking up the tension.   The flight itself is spellbinding.  Some of the secondary action, however, is poor.   There are a couple of unexpected deaths - I won't spoil the book for others by saying who dies - but the last one is poorly done, almost as if Follett has lost interest.  There is far too much coincidence at play and the book is far too long.   Length is always a problem and pointing to dispensible passages with an author as skilled as Follett is almost impossible.   I was never bored, yet I felt things were just moving too slowly.

The characters were fine,.   Follett, as he often does, has young adults as his leads.   This too is fine but these two, Harald and Karen, are too pre-skilled to be absolutely credible.   Arne is an excellent secondary protagonist.   Peter starts off convincingly conflicted but we - and, I fear, Follett - lose interest as his emnity to the Olufsen brothers mounts.   Hermia (sorry) is dull as dishwater.

Not classic Follett then, but still well worth reading.   I'm keen on trying his Century Trilogy.

Ungentlemanly Warfare - Howard Linskey

 

When I reviewed my first Linskey, The Dead, in the middle of last year, I noted how careful he was in crafting his prose and how I really must read more of his work.  Not so much now, I'm afraid.  Ungentlemanly Warfare is a pretty standard SOE yarn, though to be fair Linskey does plough relatively fresh ground by incorporating the Milice, the Vichy brownshirts, as the direct opposition to the Maquis underground resistors Harry Walsh is sent to France to organise.  His principle mission is to kill the scientist developing the Me 163 jet fighter plane which, if made operational, will threaten the upcoming D-Day landings.  So far so good - and I should also add in the plus column the nice way Linskey plays the class war within SOE.  Guerrilla warfare is ungentlemanly, therefore those who fight guerrilla wars are not gentlemen; Harry Walsh is only middle middleclass and therefore perfect to aid and abet the guerrillas, but he can never rise above the rank of captain which he earned in the field - thus by default, really - at Dunkirk.

Now for the less good.  The writing at the start of the book is really poor - overdone, unsubtle, unconsidered, unrefined.  There are some appalling proof reading failures: Scott's Guards will live with me forever.  Things certainly improved as the story progressed, either because Linskey gets more involved with the action sequences or perhaps because the first couple of chapters came from an old draft which Linskey managed to restart with an improved skill set.  Certainly I stopped thinking 'This needs editing' and ceased to notice any bloopers, and that's good enough for me.  But then--- Oh god, clever little cameos for Ian Fleming and Kim Philby.  Showing off your research.  Only your research wasn't quite deep enough, Howard.  A level deeper and you'd have found that the first hero of ungentlemanly warfare was Peter Fleming, Ian's brother, who was in charge of proposed guerrilla warfare in Kent when, as seemed certain in 1939 and 1940, Hitler invaded Britain.  See Giles Minton, Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

The story itself is predictable - Harry has to risk his girlfriend to get to the target.  I don't want to give the game away but the point of a successful adventure story is that the hero has to personally bring down the anti-hero, and that doesn't happen here, so the story doesn't quite succeed.  And I will no longer be quite so keen to read more Linskey.

V2 - Robert Harris

 

Harris yet again surprises with his ability to turn quite thin material into a compelling read.  I mean, everyone knows the story of von Braun and his V2 rockets.  We know they didn't win the war and we know they didn't do as much damage - or create as much fear - as the V1 doodlebugs.  Indeed, this story is so thin that Harris actually splits into two narratives - English woman, German man - to stretch it to an acceptable read.  And yet it is great fun, even thrilling at times.  How does he do it?

Well, he has clearly done his research.  That is a given with Harris.  He carefully gives us just about enough to show it is reliable without overburdening us as so many modern authors do.  For example, in order to make us even slightly interested in what happened at Peenemunde he gives us an RAF raid on the site in which Rudi Graf's love interest is killed.  Graf is Harris's German protagonist, a scientist, not a Nazi, and a friend of von Braun, who is an SS officer.  Our English heroine is Kay Caton-Walsh, a WAAF who sleeps with unsuitable men and blags herself into a proper war job, working out the launch site of rockets.  This is perhaps Harris's best device.  As the end of the war draws nearer, the protagonists in this novel are brought physically closer - Graf and the rockets at the Dutch resort of Sheveningen, Kay and the trajectory-trackers a few miles south at Mechelen in Belgium.  The thrilling part of the book comes when the Germans figure out the Allies are there and aim a rocket at them.

There are a couple of interesting characters who go nowhere, which unsettled me, notably a feisty girl who works in the Nazi brothel, and a psychopathic SS man who builds the rocket factory with slave labour.  V2 is a good book, and great fun to read, but with a bit more ambition it could have been outstanding.

Agent Jack - Robert Hutton

I’m always fascinated by what British fascists got up to during the war. Mostly, of course, they did what everybody else did and either fought or supported the fighters. It’s that exceptional few that fascinate. Agent Jack is the story of Eric Roberts, the ultimate Mr Ordinary, who worked for MI5 before, during and after the war, initially as a fascist himself, spying on communists, then as agent provocateur, gathering together those who wished to help Hitler conquer Britain.

That’s the problem – he was an agent provocateur. Despite Hutton’s best efforts, there’s no way round the fact that the people Roberts recruited would almost certainly have got up to no real mischief had he not brought them together. Dutton’s problem is, they didn’t do any harm and were just a bunch of repellent but otherwise ordinary nutters. There’s no denying Roberts’ courage and care; equally we can’t pretend he prevented any outrages against the national interest.

His is a story worth telling, but only as a part of other stories. For example, MI5 were reluctant to push Roberts’ recruits too far because of the fiasco surrounding the failed attempt to intern the well-connected and very foolish Ben Greene. Greene had been set up by an agent provocateur and was promptly released. He did no harm whatever thereafter. The real damage was to Max Knight, who worked with Roberts for the wonderfully named British Fascisti and then brought him to MI5.

The best thing about the book for me was the vivid portrait of Victor Rothschild, whose role had never before been clear to me. It is now, and I owe that entirely to Robert Hutton and this book.

Potsdam Station - David Downing

There seem to be countless novels on the market dealing with 'good' people involved in Nazi Germany. Of the cuff, for example, there is Alan Furst, Volker Kutscher and, of course, Philip Kerr. Then there is the sub genre (see C J Sansom, Len Deighton and Robert Harris) of what-if-the-Nazis-had-won fiction. Downing belongs to the former school and classes with Furst in the degree of detail. I would not have classed him with Furst in literary achievement, having previously read the first of his second series, Jack of Spies (also reviewed on this blog), which is set in the lead-up to World War I. Potsdam Station is the fourth in his series featuring John Russell and Effi Koenen and went a long way to changing my mind.

Russell is an Anglo-American journalist and spy. He is also a somewhat disillusioned communist. Effi is his girlfriend, a former German movie star, now living undercover and helping to get Jews out of Berlin. At the start of this novel Russell and Effi have been apart for almost four years. Russell is trying to tag along with the Soviet Army as it closes in on Berlin in the final days of the war. He also wants to find his son Paul, who is serving with what remains of the German army.

Russell succeeds, thanks to his old communist associates. He is sent ahead of the army as part of team trying to recover as much information about the Nazi A-bomb project as humanly possible. Meanwhile Effi is entrusted with an 8 year-old Jewish girl and Paul becomes detached from his unit. Thus the three key participants move through the increasingly battered city, slowly closing in on one another. It is a fairly common storyline but Downing's command of detail lifts the story well above the ordinary. His writing here is better than I remember in Jack of Spies. Perhaps it is simply a matter of him having more affinity with World War II.

Whilst I didn't hate Jack of Spies, I couldn't recommend it. I have no such problem with Potsdam Station, which is a cracking read. I have an ebook of the first in the series, Zoo Station, which I still haven't read. Must crack on.

City of Gold - Len Deighton

City of Gold is late period Deighton, from 1992. I don't remember hearing about it at the time and wonder if it wasn't the greatest hit. That said, even mediocre Deighton is better than most people's best and this novel is by no means mediocre.

The setting is Cairo, early 1942. Rommel is advancing on the city. The Allies cannot stop him. He seems to know their plans before they do. There is an obvious reason for this. Someone is leaking information. Major Cutler is heading for Cairo to find out who. He has a prisoner with him, Jimmy Ross, facing court martial for killing an officer. Cutler suffers a heart attack. Ross switches identities with him. He only intends to be Cutler temporarily, just until he can find a way of escaping properly, but events get the better of him. He finds himself wholly dedicated to finding the source of Rommel's information and in love with a beautiful girl called Alice.

Ross is by no means the only person pretending to be someone else. Cairo is full of people playing a role, whether it is the deserter Wallingford, pretending to be a special duty naval officer but in fact building a black market empire, or Dalrymple who has not formally deserted, just failed to answer orders. Then there are the sort of people who tend to gravitate to places like Cairo whether there's a war on or not. The Jewish financier Solomon, his Muslim opposite number Mahmoud and, best of all, the flamboyant Prince Piotr Nikoleiovich Tikhmebrazoff. On the fringes of this shady group is Peggy West, an English nurse whose husband Karl is supposedly working with the Zionist Jews in Palestine.

You can be confident Deighton has done his research. He tells us about it in his introduction to this 2010 reissue. The book is packed with colour and detail. Of course he knows his military history - Deighton has built a second career in the field. The story crackles along. Most of the storylines are resolved at the end. That said, it's not SS-GB.

The Last Enemy - Richard Hillary

Hillary was born in 1919, an Australian brought up and educated in Britain. He joined the RAF on the outbreak of war, shot down five enemy aircraft and then, on his fifth mission, was blown out of the sky over the Channel by a Messerschmitt.


The canopy of his Spitfire was faulty and he couldn't bail out as quickly as he should. His hands and face were badly burnt before, ultimately, the plane rolled and he fell out of the cockpit into the water. He was rescued by the local lifeboat and taken to a series of hospitals, ending up in the care of pioneering plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe.


That's as far as Hillary takes us in this memoir, written in 1942. He goes into no detail of how bad his disfigurement was and this slightly crappy edition provides no preface or introduction to tell us what happened to him in later life.


Considering the book itself, Hillary starts with his shooting down. He then backtracks to his idle days at Oxford and enlistment, with his varsity pals, in the RAF. He describes training in Scotland and the long wait to achieve a Spitfire posting. It gets a bit dull, to be frank. However the second section, in hospital, turns out to be surprisingly effective. Hillary finds an engaging tone somewhere between modesty and extreme heroism (which, modestly, he focuses on the other patients, all of them burnt airmen). There is no real end, presumably because he was still receiving treatment when he wrote the book.


This is where a capable introduction or appendix would have come in handy. Hillary certainly was receiving treatment, from another specialist, in 1942. His disfigurement was so bad that Lord Halifax had refused to let Hillary be seen on a propaganda tour. Naturally this was a massive blow to a young airman full of testosterone and it seems he lost confidence. Hence he was taken to New York - to the Ritz Towers Hotel, where legendary Anglo-Indian actress Merle Oberon is said to have administered two weeks of specialist reassurance. Soon Hillary had blagged a return to flying, even though his hands were so maimed that he couldn't handle a knife and fork. He crashed his light bomber in January 1943. He was still only 23 years old.

The Girl From Venice - Martin Cruz Smith

The Girl From Venice is Cruz Smith's latest, the successor to Tatiana, which I recently reviewed here. It is a very different kettle of fish (excuse pun - it's about a fisherman). Set during the strange period between the Allied invasion of Italy and the Nazi departure. Venice, scrupulously unbombd by either side, delineates the boundary between.


Cenzo is the middle of three brothers, a fisherman from one of the poorer islands in the lagoon where fishermen live. His older brother Giorgio is a movie star, a Mussolini favourite, the so-called Lion of Tripoli. Younger brother Hugo was drowned during what may have been the only airborne attack on Venice. One might Cenzo fishes a young girl out of the water. He thinks she is dead but she's not. She is Guilia, daughter of Jewish academics. The Nazis are searching everywhere because she holds a secret.


Cenzo eventually arranges for her to be smuggled to safety. This is where the book loses momentum. Cenzo is too determinedly ordinary to be our hero. He only comes alive when Guilia is around. Fortunately he finds her again for what is to all intents and purposes Act Three, but it has to be said Act Two is a bit of a slog, albeit the flamboyant Giorgio livens it up from time to time. The ending is good and I enjoyed reading about Mussolino's bolt hole in the wonderfully named Salo. I'm assuming this is historic fact because Cruz Smith is so damned good at research. He writes pretty well too. He has decided to soak this story in fisherman lore and tweaks his prose accordingly, successfully. Events rapidly become myths - superstitions are made into plot points.


Overall then, an enjoyable read, sufficiently off-beat to hold our attention when poor old Cenzo doesn't quite manage to.

Wheels of Terror - Sven Hassel

Well now. I remember Sven Hassel being very popular in the UK in the mid-Sixties and early Seventies. War books not really being my thing, I never read any, although my dad read them all, and pretty much forgot all about Hassel until I stumbled upon this 2014 Phoenix reprint of his second novel, from 1959, in my local library. I thought, why not? I looked further into the author...

Right, so Sven Hassel was not German, although he certainly fought for the Germans in World War II. Sven Hassel was not his real name but the name he gives to his first-person narrator in his books. Hassel was not even the name he published under in his native Denmark, nor even the name he legally adopted in 1965. Suffice to say, he remains highly controversial in Denmark to this day. Was he hero or traitor or victim of circumstances? That's probably never going to be established to the satisfaction of all. What we can say, more or less for sure, is that he spent the second half of his long life in Barcelona where he died in 2012, and he left a series of fourteen books about a band of misfits (Brigade of Misfits is the alternative title of the only movie version of a Hassel book, which as it happens is an adaptation of this one, Wheels of Terror), the 27th (Penal) Regiment, serving in all the worst battles in all theatres of World War II.

These men are absolutely expendable - all have been convicted of serious crimes and military service is their punishment. They are absolutely brutal but Hassel keeps them human by alternating scenes of appalling violence with the rough humour and downright silliness of men forced to keep unnaturally close company.

The literary style is remarkably original. Each chapter starts with a kind of precis; for example: "They were wounded. You need imagination to get the meaning of that. To go through hospital to understand it." Oddly, none of the core characters are actually wounded or hospitalised in the chapter that follows. You also get an idea of the phraseology in that quotation. It seems somehow oblique, skewed. The sentences are curt, choppy, the paragraphs kept to two or three lines. The dialogue, on the other hand, is florid and grandiloquent. Take this interchange:

"Is that an order, dear Old Un?" asked Porta. "Since you're a sergeant why can't you say in a nice and military fashion: 'I order Obergefreiter Joseph Porta to shut his mouth!'"

 "By God then, it's an order! Shut up, will you!"

 "Now, don't get fresh, you Unteroffizier-crap. When you speak to me you're kindly asked to do so in the regulation army manner addressing me in third person. Full stop."

 "Allright. I, Unteroffizier Willy Beier, 27th (Penal) Panzer Regiment order Obrgefreiter Joseph Porta to shut up!"

"And I, Obergefreiter by God's grace in the Nazi army, Joseph Porta, who's beaten the world record in obstacle-racing, am completely indifferent to Herr Unteroffizier's orders. Amen."

There is no story as such, just a series of adventures or escapades as the Germans advance into and retreat from the USSR. The book ends with an event, not a resolution. It is all highly unusual. I stuck with it but am unclear where I stand on it. Did I like it? Well, I certainly enjoyed some parts and other bits stimulated my imagination. I shall probably have to sample more to try and make up my mind. Perhaps the first in the series, Legion of the Damned, which seems to me to be the best known.

 

The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk

When I saw that Herman Wouk was celebrating his 102nd birthday earlier this year I felt obliged to seek out his best-known work - his bestseller The Caine Mutiny (1951).

Wouk goes to great lengths to assure us that this is not a fictional account of his service during the war, which just happened to be on a minesweeper-destroyer, much like the Caine. Indeed, he certainly isn't Willie Keith, the main character through whose eyes we view the story. Wouk was ten years older, for one thing, and not born wealthy. Wouk tries to show us that the character closest to him is aspiring novelist Tom Keefer, who encourages the mutiny then gives evidence against the mutineers at their court-martial. Wouk, like Keefer, got his publisher's contract whilst serving at sea.


The truth is, Caine is not a true story - there was no ship of that name, and no mutiny - yet the power of the novel comes from its undoubted veracity.


Wouk's service informs every page. He knew exactly what it was like to serve your time aboard a floating hulk like the Caine. He knows full well it is not going to be commanded by premier quality seamen. However, he makes the point repeatedly, they are all of them willing to do their duty. For the ordinary crew it is just another job. For the handful of officers it is a berth in which to learn their craft and hopefully advance up the ranks. The new captain, Philip Francis Queeg, is just such an officer. He joined before the war and is therefore a regular navy man (unlike the wartime 'reserves' like Keith and Keefer); he has nine years' service but this is his first command.


Queeg is unpleasant. Because he knows he can never be friends with his officers, he goes overboard as a disciplinarian. He carries the rulebook to ludicrous extremes, alienating one and all. But he never crosses the line. He never goes beyond the rules. The problem which leads to the 'mutiny' (which is held by those who carry it out to be justifiably relieving the captain of command) is because he seems to be a coward in action and quite possibly deranged.


The trial takes up a huge chunk of the book - so much so that Wouk turned it into a hugely successful play in 1953. The slight downside is that, whilst Willie Keith has been charged with encouraging the mutiny, he was not even on the command deck when it happened. The trial focused on is that of Lieutenant Stephen Maryk, Queeg's executive officer, who actually seized command.


The trial and the mutiny are both truly spellbinding. The novel is long but never drags. Willie Keith is amusing enough - especially in his self-indulgent affair with the nightclub singer May Wynn - and Queeg more than crazy enough to hold our interest. Willie's coming of age and Queeg's psychological collapse are built up through incidental, wholly convincing details.


The Caine Mutiny is a war novel without equal. It does something that most others fail to do in that it spells out the price that every man pays for military service. Never mind the risk - there is little to no risk in minesweeper destroyers; the damage is psychological. Free, intelligent men are prepared to submit themselves to a rule book that is petty and oppressive because they come to realise that those in charge couldn't get them to do such mind-numbing, pointless activities any other way.

Blood of Victory - Alan Furst

The more Furst I read, the more I'm impressed. The cover blurb from the Sunday Times likens him to Robert Harris and Sebastian Faulks. I like Harris, I have so far steered clear of Faulks, but for me the closest comparison is with John le Carre. High praise, I know, but they both immerse us in their world of espionage; they write obliquely, almost furtively; and they both have an aura of insider knowledge. Le Carre's relatively brief involvement with the SIS is well known and covered in various reviews on this blog (if anyone is wondering, I'm still trying to force myself to finish reading The Perfect Spy). Furst identifies himself as a journalist; presumably he has cultivated links and sources in the spy world. What he can't have, of course, is any first hand knowledge of clandestine activities in the Balkans during the first half of World War II. Yet that is his world in all the novels of his that I have read. How would you even start to research such a topic?

There is no apparent overlap between the novels (again, subject to the proviso that I haven't read them all) and Furst makes things even more difficult for himself by having non-English or non-American protagonists - in this case I A Serebin, onetime Soviet hero, writer of delicate fictions set in Odessa, and now a leading figure of the International Russian Union (that is to say, non-Soviet emigres) in Paris. Serebin finds himself seduced (literally) into a multinational plot to disrupt German oil supplies from Romania. The scheme is incredibly complex and I lost track completely. It didn't matter a jot - for me, the convolutions are the point. What mattered to me was Serebin, a splendidly-drawn character, sentimental in his care for a former lover, now dying, and utterly indifferent to the dangers he faces. Unlike so many lesser writers in the genre Furst does not lose focus on his hero. Serebin is there on page one and he is front and centre in the action sequence at the end. I was more than captivated by his current lover Marie-Galante, a femme anyone would risk fatality for.

For me then, Alan Furst is in the top two or three exponents of spy fiction. The big excitement is that he is still getting better with each new novel.

Noonday - Pat Barker

Noonday is the concluding part of Barker's second wartime trilogy (unlike the Regeneration Trilogy, it doesn't seem to have a name), which interestingly carries the characters forward from WWI to WW2, specifically 1940 and the London Blitz.


I have said before, in my review of Toby's Room, that this trilogy is not as good as Regeneration, albeit the premise is much the same - artists at war are subjected to pioneering medical treatments. The difference is that Regeneration is about poets, many of whom we have heard of, having their traumatised souls put back together in a North Country sanatorium; this second sequence is about painters and plastic surgery and is set primarily in bohemian London, which makes it all a bit precious. Another shortcoming is that the characters are not real people but heavily and obviously based on real people, which is distracting for those of us who can guess. And, unfortunately, the central character in the latter is a woman, Elinor. In Toby's Room, therefore, credibility is stretched to get her into the hospital where Kit Neville is having his face restored.The truth is, society women played virtually no meaningful role in WWI. Some indeed did a bit of nursing but mostly it was just good works and posturing. Things were different in WWII and that makes Noonday a much better book than Toby's Room. Elinor, her husband Paul, and the disfigured Kit Neville are all actively engaged on the Home Front, Paul an ARP warden, Elinor and Kit both driving ambulances. They are all now in their Forties, facing the same middleaged crises we all face, only heightened by the very real prospect of being blown to smithereens at any moment.

Barker is a fantastic writer and there are moments of great beauty here. There is a moment towards the end when Kit and Elinor wave to one another across a firestorm which is truly heartbreaking. I also really enjoyed the skewering of Kenneth Clark, long before his Civilisation fame, recruiting war artists from his personal coterie and chasing after young girls.

[Also reviewed on this blog]

To Sir, With Love - E R Braithwaite

Probably best known for the 1967 film version starring Sidney Poitier, Judy Geeson and Lulu, the original book is actually set in the five years following the end of World War II. Braithwaite, a Guyanan, is a university graduate who had a successful engineering career in America. On the outbreak of war he came to the Mother Country and served with distinction in the RAF. Demobbed, he seeks work in London. With his qualifications he should walk into a well-paid job, but of course he is black, and for the first time in his life experiences colour prejudice. His account of how that felt is some of the most powerful writing in a powerful book. He is not brow-beaten, demoralised, ashamed of his race - the responses that have become stereotypical in liberal white fiction - he is bloody furious. He feels the cancer of hate boiling up.
In the end he is persuaded to try teaching. He doesn't need training thanks to his degree, and the London Council will take on all comers. Braithwaite finds himself sent to a poorly-regarded school in the East End. To his surprise, he finds an enlightened Head with a progressive programme of education and a passionate belief in the potential of his pupils. The other teachers are a mixed bag but most are behind the Head. Braithwaite finds himself in charge of the top class, boys and girls who will soon be venturing out into the world of employment and national service.
The book is as much about progressive education as it is about prejudice. A key point is that schools are a vital element of the local community. The local adults are unthinkingly prejudiced but accept Braithwaite when their children make them.
To Sir, With Love is a truly beautiful and moving book. The success of the film probably did it no favours in terms of literary repute. But Braithwaite, whom I'm delighted to learn is still among us at the age of 104, is a fine writer and deep thinker who wears his learning very lightly. He doesn't seem to have written many books, and some of them I'm guessing are scientific, but I am definitely keen to read more of his autobiographical fiction.

Spies of the Balkans - Alan Furst

On the face of it, Furst works in a limited canvas - war comes to ... wherever. But that's the beauty of a World War; it tends to happen everywhere. This time we are in Salonika: the year is 1940 and our hero is Costa Zannis, in charge of a Byzantine special unit of police, part Special Branch, part Diplomatic Corps.

Zannis is good-looking and single. He starts off sleeping with an English spy, hatches a plot with a German Jewess married to a Wehrmacht officer to facilitate the escape of Jewish escapees to Turkey, and ends up seducing the wife of the dubious local millionaire who financed the said escapes. Inbetween time he is called up to active service as the German army masses on the border and recruited to evacuate an English agent from Paris.

As well as exploring the various facets of Zannis's character, Furst also brings to life his family and associates. This is what brings me back time and again to Furst's novels.  So much detail, such effective writing, faultless research, a labyrinthine plot - and all in less than 300 pages. The sheer rigor is astonishing, the results captivating.  Absolutely my favourite writer of World War II spy fiction.