The Secret Pilgrim - John le Carre

Billed as the last of the 'Smiley' novels, The Secret Pilgrim (1990) is actually the story of 'Ned', a Circus spy whose mostly second-division career is built under the aegis of Smiley.  As his career winds down Ned is put in charge of the Sarratt nursery for fledgling agents.  It occurs to him to invite the retired Smiley to give an after dinner speech to the students.  He never really believes that the secretive master will actually come, but he does, and he speaks freely.  But it is Ned's experiences which illustrate Smiley's points.  Thus what we have is an episodic sequence from Ned's career interspersed with commentary and context by Smiley - not at all an easy device to pull off, but Carre, being himself a master, does so without apparent effort.  He also succeeds in making it moving.  Ned, like Smiley, runs spies and interrogates traitors.  For Smiley it was Karla and the ultimate traitor, Bill Haydon; for Ned it is lesser fry - conflicted men and women, culminating in the tremendously sad, tremendously lonely Foreign Office underling Cyril Frewin, whom Ned has to win over and destroy just days before handing in his credentials.

Smiley, too, hands in his credentials.  "It's over," he says, "and so am I. ... Please don't ask me back ever again."  The Cold War has ended, but Smiley and his creator set us up for the new enemy, unfettered capitalism, as deadly to the common interest of mankind as any nuclear bomb.  The best le Carre novel I have read in years.  Genuinely superb.

The Drought - J G Ballard

Ballard's classic climate disaster sci fi has never been more relevant.  Dr Charles Ransom lives on a houseboat on a lake by a river, a hundred or so miles from the sea.  But it hasn't rained for years, the river is drying up, fresh water is at a premium and society is starting to break down.  Ransom is one of the last to leave for the coast, taking with him a few fellow strays.  He has left it almost too late.  The beaches are now a militarized zone, cut off by chainlink fences to protect the desalination plants.  But the people are restive.  Every day there is an incursion...

Years pass - this is Ballard's clever move - and the populace by the coast is fragmented.  Some live miserable lives, working together to collect seawater on desalination beds.  Others, like Ransom and his ex-wife, fend for themselves on the periphery.  Ransom develops the belief that there is a secret supply of water inland.  The best way to find it is to follow the dry river bed back the way he came.  He collects another rag-tag band and sets off.

He returns to Mount Royal and Hamilton, to the very street he lives on back in normal times.  The water supply is virtually next door, at the Lomax estate.  Richard and Miranda Lomax were always eccentric.  Now they are stark mad, eating stray people and breeding mystical halfwits with the demented shaman Quilter.  Ballard makes his final section a dark, twisted take on The Tempest, which is pretty dark anyway when you think about it.

It's a magnificent book, the best of Ballard's sci fi that I have read thus far.  With a great last line.

The Darkroom of Damocles - Willem Frederik Hermans

I'd never heard of W F Hermans before I got the Pushkin newsletter.  He was a leading postwar novelist in the Netherlands and won many prizes.  Having now finished The Darkroom of Damocles (1958) I'm not at all surprised.

Henri Osewoudt is a strange young tobacconist in the small town of Voorschoten.  He is in many ways androgynous - he doesn't need to shave and yet he is clearly not impotent.  He has married his older cousin, who taught him everything he knows about sex.  His father was murdered by his mother during a fit of insanity.  The mother has since been released into Henri's rather lacklustre care.

In 1940, as Holland is falling to the Nazis, Henri bumps into a Dutch officer called Dorbeck who, bizarrely, looks a lot like Henri, except for the fact that he has dark hair and can grow a beard.  Dorbeck asks Henri to develop a roll of photographic negatives for him, which Henri does (badly) and posts off to the address Dorbeck provided.

He hears nothing for four years.  Then Dorbeck sends a message.  He is now a leading member of the underground, working with London to get rid of the Nazis.  He draws Henri into the circle and Henri very quickly finds himself assassinating traitors and collaborators.  He finds a new Jewish girlfriend and thus has to rid himself of the old wife.  He is captured by the Nazis, freed by the Resistance, disguises himself as a woman and, in that guise, crosses into the part of Holland already liberated by the Allies - and is promptly arrested as a collaborator.

The rest of the novel is about his yearlong quest, in custody, to prove his innocence.  He needs the war hero Dorbeck to come forward but Dorbeck cannot be found.  What has happened to him?

I must confess I was getting a little bored with the last bit - until the thunderbolt was very cleverly dropped.  It really is a stunner - one I've used in my own short fiction but never saw coming here.  Some critics have likened Hermans to Camus and Sartre, and I see where they are coming from.  Highly recommended.

The Case Against Satan - Ray Russell

 

A real discovery so far as I'm concerned.  I had never heard of Ray Russell before stumbling across this short novel in the horror section of an online used bookseller.  Russell (1924-99) was an editor at Playboy who published all the greats - Vonnegut, Bloch, etc.  This, and the collection Haunted Castles, which dropped through my letterbox this morning, seem to be the extent of his own published work.  On the one hand it's a crying shame because he is stunningly good; on the upside, he took his time and got his stories as near perfection as possible.

The Case Against Satan came out in 1962, long before The Exorcist, which it clearly influenced.  Here, too, it is a young girl (sixteen years old) who is possessed by a demon and exorcised by her local priest and the diocesan bishop.  It's a long time since I read or saw The Exorcist so I can't remember if the lead priest in that had his doubts about demons.  The priest here, Gregory Sargent, is very modern in his views.  He trusts psychiatry, which the Catholic church in 1962 didn't, and he writes racy articles for magazines not a million miles from Playboy.  Bishop Conrad Crimmings is old school.  The contrast between the clergy, plus Sargent's inner conflicts, mirror the battle for the soul of Susan Garth.  In the non-clerical world we have conflict between anti-Catholic printer and agitator John Talbot and the easy-going precinct police lieutenant Frank Berardi.  And at the root of Susan's possession Russell in no way shies away from the likely cause - which to the best of my recall, The Exorcist goes nowhere near.  All of this in 138 beautifully written pages.  Gothic for grown-ups!

Billy Summers - Stephen King

 

The latest King novel, Billy Summers is the story of a former US army sniper turned high-price, high-principle hitman.  Billy only kills bad men.  In this instance, he is promised a huge amount of money - enough to retire on - to terminate a lowlife killer who kills a man who beat him at poker and attacks a woman who brushes off his advances.  It seems a lot of money for a lowlife who's likely to get the needle anyway, but a lot of the cash is to cover Billy going undercover in the hick town, potentially for months, whilst the victim's lawyers argue against his extradition to a death-penalty state.

Billy always figures that these waters are deeper than they seem.  Billy likes to seem dumber than he really is.  It's part of his self-preservation routine.  He takes precautions, which get compromised when he settles into his fake life a little too well.  So he carries out the hit and disappears.  The promised payment doesn't arrive.  Billy has been stiffed.  That is unacceptable.

The rest of the novel is Billy's quest for settlement.  He has a young woman, Alice, alongside, whom he rescued from the street after she had been gang-raped.  Gang rape is also unacceptable and a price has to be paid.  All through the book we get Billy's back story: how he became a killer, then a sniper.  We also get a powerful reprise of The Shining when Billy and Alice are in Colorado, preparing the final act, but that is the only hint of the supernatural in Billy Summers.  In that sense it follows Mr Mercedes and the Bill Hodges trilogy.  In a sense we also get the gunslinger of The Dark Tower.  A lot of King tropes, then, which only enrich the story.  It is a beautiful book, as good as anything King has written, not a single bum note that I could see.  A consummate treat from a living, thriving master.

McGlue - Ottessa Moshfegh

 

McGlue (2014) is the only novella so far from multi-award-winning US author Moshfegh.  It's a cracker.  I read it in a sitting because I couldn't put it down.  McGlue is a total reprobate, more or less seduced into running away to sea by an acquaintance called Johnson.  The year is 1851; both McGlue and Johnson come from the township of Salem.  McGlue's only interest in life, from an early age, has been rum.  Johnson keeps him well-liquored and relatively safe, because Johnson ultimately wants McGlue to do him a favour.  One morning in Zanzibar McGlue comes more or less to his senses.  He is taken aboard ship, kept confined, and returned to Salem to stand trial for the murder of his friend Johnson.

The book consists of McGlue trying to untangle the tatters of rum-soaked memory.  He is often unable to tell fact from delusion - Johnson, for example, regularly visits him in prison as he awaits trial.  It is wonderfully done.  Moshfegh inhabits every pore of her unappealing yet oddly innocent protagonist.  She's won a lot of prizes and no wonder.

Confessions of a Mask - Yukio Mishima

Confessions of a Mask is Mishima's first major novel, published when he was only 24.  It is a roman a clef, heavily autobiographical, about a young man coming of age in the dying days of the Second World War.  It is different and daring in that it is about the hero's burgeoning homosexuality, which he hides behind a 'mask' of normality by courting a young woman he tries hard to convince himself that he loves.  I hadn't realised before that 'Yukio Mishima' is itself a mask, a pen-name adopted to shield his respectable and strait-laced family.  Nothing Mishima writes is ever likely to be bad.  He is, to my mind, one of the finest writers of the Twentieth Century, the great 'lost' Nobel Laureate.  But personally, he is repellent - moreover, he knows it.  Here there are passages in which you very nearly hate him, yet he saves the situation because you cannot possibly feel more repelled by Mishima than Mishima himself does.  Knowing what he ultimately did makes the frequent references to suicide in this young man's text all the more ominous.  Confessions of a Mask is a masterpiece, no question, but it's not a comfortable one.

The Anarchy - William Dalrymple

 

I adored Dalrymple's Return of a King; this one not so much.  I knew no more about Afghanistan than I did about colonial India, but Dalrymple managed to educate me about the former - again, not so much about the latter.  Of course, the latter is even more complex, but I never felt confident about the geography or tribal ethnicity of the main protagonists of The Anarchy.  That said, I was clear about the causes of the Anarchy and its timeframe.  Unfortunately, it was all rather a depressing mirror of the state I now live in and detest.  Debauched, long-outdated aristocrats desperate to claw their last profit from the poor, outwitted by the first global corporation, imposed upon a culturally rich nation by foreigners who had yet to accumulate much culture of their own.  The standout character was Shah Alam, the last hope of the Mugal Empire, who did his best, suffered much, and ultimately came to nothing much.  Tipu Sultan of Mysore was another strong character but overall the cast seemed to be rather two-dimensional.  Dalrymple only really came good when discussing those on both sides who truly loved India as much as he does.  And the chapters were far too long.

Mr Wilder & Me - Jonathan Coe

I've read a bit of Jonathan Coe before and always enjoyed them - but Mr Wilder & Me is in another league.  It's simply a masterpiece of fiction.  The story is simple enough - in 1977 a young Greek woman called Calista Frangopolou is asked to provide translation services for the Greek shoot on Billy Wilder's penultimate film, Fedora.  She becomes innocently friendly with Wilder, his writing partner I A L Diamond ('Iz') and their respective wives.  She continues with the crew as they move on to Munich and Paris.  In Munich she hears about Wilder's wartime service and a postwar documentary.

In the obvious sense it's a study of a refugee who became a feted director but outlived his vogue - mirrored, of course, in Tom Tyron's rather trashy novel about Fedora which I rather enjoyed at the time.  But Calista is telling her recollections from circa 2013, when she has become a moderately successful composer of movie music and has twin daughters about to leave the domestic nest.  Lessons learnt from Wilder and Diamond back in the day come into play.

I don't know how Coe has done it, but in a book only 250 pages long he manages to create an enormous amount of room for his characters to move and develop in.  This is how he is able to avoid cheesy coincidence and deploy extremely poignant subtlety instead.  And in the middle of the book, when Billy's secret is revealed, he slips effortlessly into movie-script format - more brilliantly still, he does it in Wilder-Diamond style.  Like everything else in Mr Wilder & Me, it's note perfect.

Slough House - Mick Herron

 

Slough House has been deleted from the Regent Park mainframe.  The Slow Horses are being tailed.  Ex-Slow Horses are being tracked down and killed.  Jackson Lamb, for all his innumerable faults, is not going to tolerate things happening to his joes - which is bad news for those who commit such affronts.

Diana Taverner, first desk at the Park, has meanwhile dabbled with privatisation.  Not for personal gain, of course, but because the GRU have been sending over idiots to spread toxic chemicals around English cities.  This turns out to be a mistake on many levels, not least of which is that, in her hour of need, she has to turn to Jackson Lamb.

Also back in the frame is Sid (Sidonie) Baker, who once took a bullet for River Cartwright, is back from the dead, hiding out at the country house River just inherited from the Old Bastard.  She thinks she is being pursued by Mormon missionaries.  The Yellow Vests are venting on the streets of London and Jackson Lamb meets a gay American of restricted growth who believes his boyfriend has been murdered on the orders of Vladimir Putin.

Mick Herron's alternative take on the Secret Service is back for a seventh anarchic romp - the best to date in my opinion.  The critical take on contemporary Britain is absolutely on the nose and there were many laugh out loud moments.  Herron is also excellent on the suspense, where needed, and the car chase through benighted rural Kent was beautifully done.  A masterpiece of its kind.