Alan Furst - Dark Voyage

Holiday reading? Yes: I've long enjoyed the writing of Alan Furst. He writes exquisite English, with nuanced characters, all having complex, ambiguous motives. He has deep sympathy for the fallen, human condition. 

I've read nearly all of his published works now.  They're not generally keepers - I'll read them and then pass them onto the nearest charity shop for the next reader.  As a genre they don't pop up in charity shops quite as often a bloody awful "true crime".  You have to keep your eye out for them, for they are gems.

But Dark Voyage is different. It has the same male protagonist making his way through a world distorted by Nazi Germany, someone who is at root, a modern European in a world dominated by war splitting Europe asunder.  It has the same cast of characters - the shadowy, morally bankrupt SIS agents, the Russian emigres, the fixers and shakers in smart suits. The women. He even manages to get in a dinner at Table 14 at Heinigers in Paris, though only in flashback.

Unusually for an Alan Furst hero, the main character speaks English. Also, most of the action takes place at sea, and here is the rub.  I was, as a former seafarer myself, drawn to the book on that basis.  At the same time - and I'm not entirely sure how the author would take this - Dark Voyage reads like a Douglas Reeman novel.  Reeman's naval stories are - like Furst's books - quintessentially readable tales about the frailty of the human condition in time of war or impending war.  Both writers suffuse their stories with the gentle light of compassion and understanding for their characters.  Both -as the jacket of Dark Voyage attests - fundamentally humane writers. Wonderful, relaxing stuff. Reading does not have to be hard work. 

Peter Higgins - Radiant State

This third novel of the "Wolfhound Century" trilogy manages to stand alone - as all good novels ought - and is entirely readable without first reading the other two.  Higgins has created a weird alternate reality.  I like this kind of "genre busting" - except to say that it is no longer true to say that the work busts genres.  It can be labelled in more than one way, perhaps.  Opening as hard sci-fi, it alternates thereafter between political thriller (an assassin trying to kill the president) and weird pure fantasy (archangels and witches and dead bodies wandering through the trackless woods).

Others have done work like this. It owes much in concept to the work of China Mieville. 

One thing I do like - though it sets my teeth on edge as someone who loves the explanation, the reason, the exegesis in detail - is that he has not explained himself. He makes no explanation of the strange happenings on what is clearly just an Earth with a place that is, whilst never referred to as such, just Mother Russia. He does not account to the reader for their being two moons, or for the dead yet walking the earth, or for archangels and sprites and other strange creatures coming into the story with no more ado than a ticket inspector on a train or a shop-keeper. 

Readable stuff. 

Curved Ridge

Whilst I was physically unhurt by what happened at Curved Ridge, I don't doubt that it had a deep and lasting effect on my psyche. Rob and I (Rob was the lad from Kingussie who knocked me from my perch on the ice) had no business surviving such a fall.

I recall falling head down on my back, and tipping head over heels, until I was facing inwards to the snow and ice, head uppermost. I came to a halt. I truly don't know how that happened, because I had let go of my ice-axes, and they dangled uselessly on their wrist cords, playing no part in my narrow escape from death. One might retain no composure at all during such an event - one moment I was climbing a fifteen foot wall of ice -  someone shouted "Watch out", and the next I was off and falling. In fact my colleague, hoping to snap a racy and exciting action shot of me battling my way up the ice pitch, had slipped and plunged off downwards, unfortunately landing on me on the way past.

When my wits returned - it was probably no more than a few seconds of confusion -  I found myself on the steep snow below the short ice pitch. Of my friend there was no sign. My first understanding was that we had been caught by an avalanche. A few glances about me, however, and I knew the truth, that we had fallen off. I looked around for Rob, but of him there was no sign. 

Darren, the third member of our team, bravely made his way unaided down the ice pitch we had been climbing, and together we gazed into the depths. It was entirely possible that a small yellow speck on the snowfield a thousand feet below was the broken body of our friend. He could not have survived such a fall. It was a sour moment.

We could not follow him down the cliffs of Buchaille Etive Mor, the mountain we were climbing. To get down, we had to move on up to the summit. Girding our loins, we set off, hurrying up and over the top, and on down into easier terrain, country where we might walk without risk of falling to our death. After an hour or so, we chanced upon some of our colleagues from the mountaineering club, to whom we relayed the terrible news. All of them were stunned to silence, appalled at the news of violent death. Someone set off on foot to raise the alarm - this was 1986, long before the advent of mobile phones. The rest of us set off in a group around the skirts of the mountain, through the melting snow, to search for Rob. At this point I was suddenly struck with a tremendous fatigue; I felt terribly guilty about it, as if I was betraying my friend. I could go no further, I was almost staggering with exhaustion. That I had myself been involved in a serious fall, that I was bruised and in shock, and had narrowly escaped with my life, did not occur to me. I felt bad that I could not keep up with my companions.

And so it was that a paragon of the mechanical engineering department came into view some time later, with unlooked-for good news. Rob lived yet! The best news ever delivered in a strong Ulster accent. By some miracle he had survived a fall of some fifteen hundred feet. Really this was what I needed to hear; uncaring of anything else, I felt I could retreat to the minibus without further disgrace. I recall stumbling right through the icy and swirling waters of the river, hip deep, heedless of the cold and wet, the quicker to get back to the minibus.

Much later there was a helicopter, settling onto the car park in the grey and blustery afternoon. In the artificial gale caused by the helicopter, an old Citroen 2CV in the car park was rocking back and forth on its springs to such an extent that we thought it would blow away. From the chopper emerged Mr. Hamish McInnes, mountaineer extraordinaire and leader of the Glen Coe mountain rescue team, dressed in immaculate light blue Gore-Tex over-trousers. The Great Man spoke briefly with us, telling me that Rob and I were incredibly lucky to have escaped with our lives. More chance of winning the football pools than both of us surviving such a fall, he said. Odd that. It didn't feel like I had won the pools. I've thought about it a bit then and since, thought about other narrow escapes. Is there destiny? Does God in Heaven direct the affairs of men, delivering one, whilst allowing another to die alone and in pain? I didn’t really consider myself important enough to be delivered from death, and still don't, but that never stopped me wondering.

Rob dislocated his hip. He fell over a thousand feet over snow and ice and rock and dislocated his hip. And that astonishing luck meant that he made the Daily Mail, as did I myself in a small paragraph in the same article. In hindsight he reflected that the dislocation of his hip had done more damage and hurt more than if he had actually broken his leg. He was on crutches for months and limping for longer still.

I thought I was unscathed. I should have been so lucky. I had always been susceptible to violent nightmares; in fact one night in 1984 I leapt from my bed in a mountaineering hut in the Lake District; it took three men to stop me hurling myself from an upstairs window. They told me I was fleeing from nothing on earth, and the next day they called me "the mad axeman". Well in the spring, in my Easter break from college in fact, I woke up in the middle of the night at home and plunged my fist through a plate glass door. I still don't really know why I did it. I bear the scar still, on my left forearm, since the doctor assumed I was drunk and made no special attempt to stitch me up neatly. What drove me to such an extremity? Guilt that I had escaped with barely a scratch after falling two hundred feet, whilst my companion nearly plunged to his death?  I still don’t know to this day.

That summer I put the Curved Ridge accident behind me. Three of us went to Glen Brittle on Skye in an old black Mk I Escort, and climbed and walked the Black Cuillin. It is only a coincidence, so I tell myself, that I have not climbed ice since the fall at Curved Ridge. The final word? News of the accident, published as it was in the local and national press, made it to the ears of a teacher I’d known from my school days. He was a very experienced alpiniste, a climber of an entirely different stamp to me. He said to me at beer one night, in jocular reference to an article in the local press,

"So did you fall off the dangerous and treacherous Curved Ridge or was it the easy and classic Curved Ridge?"  

The genius of America’s founding fathers - Francis Wheen

The genius of America’s founding fathers was to guarantee freedom from religion and freedom of religion simultaneously. ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ – the First Amendment.

America has preserved the religious imagination it imported from Europe, whereas Europe itself – much of which still resists disestablishment – is now the most Godless continent on Earth”.

Francis Wheen – “How mumbo-jumbo conquered the world” pp 310

Social mobility

I was reading an article in the Economist about social mobility in the USA, and reflecting on my social mobility. I came from dust, from nothing. I have come as far or further than anyone older than I  in either branch of my family, the first person in all the twentieth century to have attained to higher education – the first in many generations.  My dad and my mum were clever enough, but the opportunities were not afforded to them.  I have come further and higher than any before me in my family – and the reason is social mobility.  Social mobility in the 1980’s has got me where I am now.  I got A levels, got into a polytechnic, and got a job – all through either luck or just brains.  This illumines my politics and my beliefs.  It is why I have no patience with public school educated sons or daughters of privilege who have got to top jobs through background and education.  This is why I admire Mrs Thatcher – who got into Somerville on a scholarship, and that by luck rather than anything else.  It is why I can feel a bit chippy about many members of the front bench on both sides of the House – they are in the main, public school educated sons and daughters of privilege.  I'm no socialist, but am a firm believer in social mobility.  I believe opportunities should be available for people from the lower depths to rise to the top – the Clive James’s, the Norman Tebbits of this world.  It is why I have little patience or empathy with those who have a huge weight of generational expectation behind them – four generations a clergyman, or four generations an officer of the Royal Navy. I recall talking to the wife of one such officer at a party. What’s that like to be?

Hilaire Belloc on Islam

“Islam is the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilisation has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past” Hilaire Belloc, “The Great Heresies”(written between the wars), and quoted by the late Frank Johnson in the “Spectator” during 2005.

Mud, blood and poppycock, by Gordon Corrigan

This alternative or "revisionist" review of the Great War, written by former Army officer Gordon Corrigan, was always going to put a frown on some foreheads.  It's always readable, though sometimes you find yourself disagreeing with him, and he is never afraid to editorialise and give his own opinion - always a mistake in my view.

He does repeat some tired old lies. "Britain has never been successfully invaded since 1066" is the purest nonsense, forgivable perhaps, from an Army officer but it would not be acceptable from a professional historian.

And his final conclusion on what it is that wars are won by? Again, rather as is to be expected from a British Army officer, he argues that it is not intellect but courage.  There may be a great deal of truth in that, but I disagree. Wars are won, neither with intellect or courage, but with money.  

A.N Wilson on the English lack of interest in politics

“Would be revolutionaries have often been shocked (as Lenin was when he spent a year in London) by the English capacity to “switch off” politically. This capacity is less marked in the Irish, the Welsh or Scots.”

A.N Wilson, “London – a short history”, (1900-1939 chapter, pp 95)

How true this is. Sometimes I feel like I am in a society full of mutes, as no-one is interested, no-one will talk, about the issues of the day. Yet politics is so important; like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, something else that eludes the understanding of most (English) people, it permeates every single aspect of our daily lives. And yet people are uninterested in it.

I wrote this in 2005; the referendum debate changed things slightly for a while, only slightly, and only for a while. We're back to being political mutes. 

The “spareness of the desert” – Count Almasy, Peter Fleming, T.E Lawrence

“Here [in the desert] nuance took you a hundred miles”

Count Almasy, the villain and hero in Michael Ondjaate’s “The English Patient”, writes of the “spareness of the desert”, where repetition (of words) was equal to flinging away precious water.

Peter Fleming wrote the same thing in his book “News from Tartary”, of the softness of the “oasis peoples” who dwelt in the oases on the fringes of the Takla Makan desert in the 1930’s. T.E Lawrence (admittedly in the film – I do not recall him writing this in “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”) said that England was a “fat country”.

And he was right, and even more so today. We are a fat people, a soft people. And I am a soft man at heart. 

Mistakes

I read The Times and I saw a short “me and my spoons” about erasers. Apparently erasers are ill-thought of by what Michael Gove used to refer to as “The Blob” (that is, the left-wing educational establishment) because they perpetuate a culture of shame of making mistakes. 

Of course, we all make mistakes; everybody fails, and that is fine. “I’m not OK – You’re not OK: But hey, that’s OK”. But we should try to encourage and teach young people to NOT make mistakes.

But mistakes can matter. Mistakes are costly. Mistakes can cost lives. In these piping days of peace, mistakes don’t really seem to matter, but a time will come when the peace is over and mistakes are once more life-threatening. Don’t make mistakes!!