April 2023 – Blood and Porridge

April 29, 2023

The literary Bond revisited: Octopussy and The Living Daylights

© Jonathan Cape

I once read a comment made by esteemed poet Philip Larkin about James Bond’s unsuitability for a short-fiction format: “I am not surprised that Fleming preferred to write novels. James Bond, unlike Sherlock Holmes, does not fit snugly into the short story length: there is something grandiose and intercontinental about his adventures that require elbow room and such examples of the form as we have tend to be eccentric and muted.”

As a boy, I would have agreed. I read most of Ian Fleming’s James Bond books back then and the one I was least enamoured with was For Your Eyes Only. Actually, FYEO (as I’ll refer to it) wasn’t a novel but a collection of short stories featuring Bond. In one of them, Quantum of Solace – which had nothing to do with the 22^nd official Bond movie, made with Daniel Craig in 2008 – all 007 did was sit and listen to somebody else narrate a story about a different set of characters.

For me at the age of 11, a good Bond story needed a super-villain with an imposing HQ, and a nefarious scheme involving espionage and / or criminality, and a love interest, and various action scenes where said super-villain tried, unsuccessfully, to bump Bond off. And of course, with Ian Fleming, there’d also be a wealth of background detail culled from Fleming’s experiences as a globetrotting journalist, naval intelligence officer and bon viveur and from his research – research was something he was scrupulous about. Cramming all these things into a short story was not viable, I thought. Thus, the truncated slices of Bondery that appeared in FYEO just seemed weird to me.

They seem much less weird to me today – especially since, after reading FYEO, I saw such opulent but ramshackle Bond films as The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and Moonraker (1979). Their plots were so disjointed, thanks to the filmmakers’ wish to squeeze in as many different, exotic locations and spectacular action set-pieces as possible, that they often felt like a series of short, barely-connected stories rather than a single, coherent, movie-length one.

Anyway, Larkin wasn’t talking about FYEO but about Fleming’s other collection of James Bond short stories, Octopussy and The Living Daylights, which was published in 1966, two years after Fleming’s death. This book constitutes Bond’s final appearance in print, as penned by his creator. It originally consisted of just the two stories mentioned in the title, although subsequent editions beefed it up with the addition of two more, The Property of a Lady and 007 in New York. Nonetheless, it remains a slim volume. Even with four stories, it comes to a mere 123 pages.

Since then, of course, Octopussy and The Living Daylights have lent their titles to Bond movies, in 1982 and 1987 respectively. A film has yet to be made called The Property of a Lady and to be honest I think Adele or Billie Eilish would have difficulty wrapping their vocal chords around the title in a Bond-movie theme song. (“The proper-TEE… of a lad-EE…!” No, can’t imagine it.) Obviously, 007 in New York wouldn’t cut it as a movie title at all. Mind you, there was a TV movie made in 1976 called Sherlock Holmes in New York starring, heaven help us, Roger Moore as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s deerstalker-wearing detective, so anything is possible.

© Eon Productions

Octopussy and The Living Daylights was one of the few Fleming-Bond books I hadn’t read in my boyhood, so when I encountered a copy of it in a bookstore a while ago thought I’d give it a shot. How would I get on with it? Four decades after I’d read FYEO, would I find the short-story James Bond more palatable?

The opening story, Octopussy, is the longest one in the collection but it has Bond only as a secondary character. The story concerns a Major Dexter Smythe, described acidly by Fleming as “the remains of a once brave and resourceful officer and of a handsome man…” Now “he was fifty-four, slightly bald and his belly sagged in the Jantzen trunks. And he had had two coronary thromboses… But, in his well-chosen clothes, his varicose veins out of sight and his stomach flattened by a discreet support belt behind an immaculate cummerbund, he was still a fine figure of a man at a cocktail party or dinner on the North Shore…”

The North Shore mentioned in that excerpt is the north coast of Jamaica. During the post-war years Smythe and his wife, now deceased, established themselves there after escaping from hard-pressed, austerity-era Britain: “They were a popular couple and Major Smythe’s war record earned them the entrée to Government House society, after which their life was one endless round of parties, with tennis for Mary and golf (with the Henry Cotton irons!) for Major Smythe. In the evenings there was bridge for her and the high poker game for him. Yes, it was paradise all right, while, in their homeland, people munched their spam, fiddled in the black market, cursed the government and suffered the worst winter weather for thirty years.”

Yet this easy, comfortable life in Jamaica didn’t fall into Smythe’s lap. Gradually, Fleming enlightens us on how Smythe was able to afford it. In a back story that has echoes of B. Traven’s 1927 novel and John Huston’s 1948 movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, we learn that in the Austrian Alps at the end of World War II, he stumbled across something immensely valuable that he hoarded for himself. To do this, however, he also had to commit murder. Octopussy describes what happens when Smythe’s ‘ancient sin’ finally catches up with him. The bearer of the bad news – that the authorities have found out what he did back in the war and intend to arrest him – is a ‘tall man’ in a ‘dark-blue tropical suit’ with ‘watchful, serious blue-grey eyes’. It’s Bond. But Bond isn’t just carrying out a professional errand. Eventually we discover that he has a personal stake in bringing Smythe to justice.

Once you accept that the story is about Smythe rather than Bond, it proceeds agreeably. The plump and comical Smythe, who paddles about the reef in front of his villa and rather pathetically talks to the fish that swim there – plus an unfriendly, tentacled mollusc whom he’s christened ‘Octopussy’ – gradually loses our sympathy as Fleming peels back the layers and we discover the cruel, and unnecessary, deed he committed to enrich himself decades earlier. Bond is hardly a paradigm of virtue but, equipped with a conscience and a rough-and-ready code of ethics, he’s the antithesis of what’s represented by Smythe. The scene where the flaccid and weak-willed Smythe confesses his crime to Bond is admirably low-key, but Fleming infuses it with a cold, sadistic tension.

The Property of a Lady, on the other hand, is a conventional Bond adventure in miniature. It has 007 turn the auctioning at Sotheby’s of an artwork designed by Carl Faberge – according to the catalogue, “(a) sphere carved from an extraordinarily large piece of Siberian emerald matrix weighing approximately one thousand three hundred carats” – into a trap to catch the KGB’s director of operations in London. Also involved is a female Russian double-agent working in the British Secret Service, whom the service is aware of and uses to feed fake information back to Moscow. To be honest, the plot didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t see how Bond, by snaring London’s top KGB man at Sotheby’s, could avoid alerting Moscow to the fact that British intelligence had cottoned onto the double agent’s existence and were using her for their own ends.

Still, the story is readable and the scenes set in Sotheby’s allow Fleming to show off his knowledge, acquired through research or personal experience, of the world’s most famous broker in fine art. When Bond expresses surprise that the auctioneer doesn’t bang his gavel three times and declare, “Going, going, gone,” an expert informs him, “You may still find that operating in the Shires or in Ireland, but it hasn’t been the fashion at London sales rooms since I’ve been attending them.”

Elements from both Octopussy-the-short-story and The Property of a Lady turn up in Octopussy-the-1982-film, which starred Roger Moore. In the film, the title character is not an octopus but a beautiful and mysterious woman played by Maud Adams, whose father, it transpires, once received a visit from visit by Bond similar to the visit that Major Smythe received in the original story. The film also features a proper octopus, and there’s some business too about a Faberge egg being auctioned off at Sotheby’s. However, if you’ve seen Octopussy-the-movie and don’t remember these things, that’s hardly surprising because it’s a mad mishmash of things – involving nuclear warheads, circuses, exiled Afghan princes, feuding Russian generals, knife-throwing identical twins, hot-air balloons, snake charmers, gorilla suits, everything bar the proverbial kitchen sink. It’s one of the very worst Bond movies in my opinion.

Meanwhile, Hannes Oberhauser, the character murdered by Major Smythe in Octopussy-the-story, plays a small but important role in the backstory of Spectre (2015), the fourth Bond with Daniel Craig in the title role. He’s mentioned in a plot twist that bears upon Bond’s relationship with his old nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz). That twist was much derided by the critics, though as a fan of the books I was pleased that Oberhauser got name-checked in a Bond movie at last.

© Eon Productions

The third story in the book, The Living Daylights, sees Bond assigned a mission in Berlin. He has to kill a Soviet sniper whom the KGB have lined up to shoot a defecting scientist while he flees from the east to the west of the city – the story is set shortly before the creation of the Berlin Wall and Checkpoint Charlie. Bond has a crisis of conscience when he discovers that the enemy sniper is a woman, an attractive blonde whom he’s seen posing as a member of an orchestra that’s performing over on the Communist-Bloc side of town. This story is incorporated, more or less intact, into the early part of the 1987 movie The Living Daylights, which was the first one to star Timothy Dalton as Bond. In the film, however, the action is moved to Bratislava, the defector is a KGB officer and his defection is planned to take place during an orchestral performance in a concert hall.

Although the rest of the plot of The Living Daylights-the-film is rather convoluted and unsatisfactory, and there are a few daft moments seemingly left over from the previous movies in the series, it felt like a breath of fresh air to me at the time. It was an attempt at a slightly more sensible Bond film and had an actor in the lead role trying to depict Bond as the moody, occasionally conscience-stricken character that Fleming had originally written. And having a big chunk of Fleming’s story in it at the start definitely helped.

The final story, 007 in New York, is a trifle – Bond is sent into the Big Apple to warn a former Secret Service member that the man she’s cohabiting with is actually a Soviet agent, though he spends most of the story’s eight pages planning the shopping, eating, drinking, clubbing and wenching that he’s going to do while he’s there. This allows Fleming to show off his knowledge of the city – “Hoffritz on Madison Avenue for one of their heavy, toothed Gillette-type razors, so much better than Gillette’s own product, Tripler’s for some of those French golf socks made by Izod, Scribner’s because it was the last great bookshop in New York and because there was a salesman there with a good nose for thrillers, and then to Abercrombie’s to look over the new gadgets… And then what about the best meal in New York – oyster stew with cream, crackers and Miller High Life at the Oyster Bar at Grand Central? No, he didn’t want to sit up at a bar… Yes. That was it! The Edwardian Room at the Plaza. A corner table.”

Fleming was known to have a predilection for sadomasochism, so it’s telling that 007 in New York also sees Bond considering a visit to a bar he’d heard about that “was the rendezvous for sadists and masochists of both sexes. The uniform was black leather jackets and leather gloves. If you were a sadist, you wore the gloves under the left shoulder strap. For the masochists it was the right.” Bond has an old flame in New York whom he intends to meet up with and enjoy some nightlife with, including the S-&-M-themed nightlife, and it’s here that a tiny sliver of 007 in New York makes it into the movies too. The old flame’s name is Solange, which is the name of the character played by Caterina Murino in Casino Royale, which saw Daniel Craig’s debut as Bond, in 2006.

007 in New York is tied up with a gentle, though unexpected, twist that’s worthy of Somerset Maugham – a writer whom Fleming was a big admirer of. And that, unfortunately is it. Fleming had passed away prior to this collection’s publication and no further Bond material was to be published under his name. Thus, Octopussy and The Living Daylights marked the end of James Bond as a literary phenomenon…

For all of two years, until 1968, when Kingsley Amis published Colonel Sun.

© Eon Productions

April 21, 2023

The Ken and Ollie show

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

A few days ago, Murray Melvin – the much-loved British theatrical actor, director and archivist, and a performer too on TV and in film – died at the age of 90. While the stage was evidently Melvin’s first love, I remember him mainly for turning up in a lot of admirable, or at least memorably oddball, films: Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey (1961), Lewis Gilbert’s Alfie (1966), Desmond Davis’s Smashing Time (1967), Stephen Weeks’s Ghost Story (1974) and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon (1975).

Melvin also appeared in four films directed by that wonderful ‘enfant terrible’ of 1960-70s British cinema, Ken Russell: The Devils, The Boy Friend (both 1971), Lisztomania (1975) and Prisoner of Honour (1991), plus in various items of Russell’s television work. And he was in a half-dozen films directed by the equally-noteworthy Peter Medak: A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (1972), Ghost in the Noonday Sun (1974), The Krays (1990), Let Him Have It (1991), David Copperfield (2000) and The Ghost of Peter Sellers (2018). That last film was a documentary about the making of Ghost in the Noonday Sun and Medak’s own meditation on why the film was such a disaster, why it never got released by the studio, and why it nearly put an end to his filmmaking career. (The answer to all those questions is in the documentary’s title.) Melvin popped up to tell a few anecdotes from his time on Noonday Sun, still as bright as a button even though by then he was well into this eighties.

As a little tribute to Melvin, here’s a reposting of something I wrote back in 2019 about a film that features one of his best performances – Ken Russell’s gloriously provocative The Devils.

I wrote the following piece after watching a 111-minute version of The Devils – the ultra-controversial 1971 film starring Oliver Reed and directed by Reed’s friend, and some would say partner-in-crime, Ken Russell – on a DVD put out by the British Film Institute and introduced by Mark Kermode. However, I understand that a longer version of the film, with an extra six minutes of restored footage, has been available since 2004.

If you haven’t seen The Devils in any of its versions, don’t read on. There will be spoilers galore.

Based on historical events in 17^th century France, and on two works inspired by those events, Aldous Huxley’s book The Devils of Loudon (1952) and John Whiting’s play The Devils (1961), the film deals with skulduggery at national and local levels. The power-hungry Cardinal Richelieu (played by Christopher Logue, who was best known as a poet) encourages Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) to create a centralised and authoritarian France, with the Catholic Church entrenched as keeper of the national faith. This means taking action against those French cities where power has become so entrenched that they function like autonomous city-states.

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

Particularly irksome to Richelieu is the city of Loudon, which has kept its independence thanks to its huge fortified city walls and which has a dismaying tendency to treat its Protestant citizens as equals of the Catholic ones. Richelieu sends his agent, Baron Jean de Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton), with orders to demolish Loudon’s walls and bring the city to heel. However, de Laubardemont is thwarted when confronted by Urbain Grandier (Reed), an eloquent and powerful city priest who’s able to bring the citizenry onto the streets to resist him and his soldiers.

Grandier’s political principles might be high-minded but his personal ones are anything but. A philanderer and predator, he’s already impregnated and abandoned one woman (Georgina Hale) and is busy wooing another (Gemma Jones), whom he marries in a secret ceremony after claiming to have found theological justification that priests can become husbands.

Meanwhile, de Laubardemont joins forces with members of the local clergy, judiciary and trades whom Grandier has offended for personal or professional reasons and they conspire to destroy him. Their means of doing so comes from an unexpected source – the scoliosis-stricken Sister Jeanne des Anges (Vanessa Redgrave), abbess of a Loudon convent. Although she’s never met Grandier, Sister Jeanne has worshipped him from afar, first in a spiritual way and then – through a series of increasingly perverse and graphic visions – in an ungodly, sensual one. Eventually she becomes deranged, her hysteria infects the nuns under her governance, and she accuses Grandier of using witchcraft to possess and corrupt her and her convent. De Laudardemont and his allies promptly summon the witch-hunting Father Barre (Michael Gothard) to investigate. When they’ve gathered enough ‘evidence’, they have Grandier charged with witchcraft and put him on trial for his life.

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

With its mixture of politics, sex, violence and religion, which Russell respectively depicts cynically, explicitly, unflinchingly and sacrilegiously, The Devils was and still is a provocative watch. It had an ‘X’ certificate slapped on it in the USA, which meant few Americans got to see it. X-certificate movies were assumed to be pornographic ones and got few theatre-bookings. In addition, both the studio, Warner Brothers, and the censors took scissors to its more inflammatory scenes. And Britain’s establishment critics were aghast. The prissy and grumpy Leslie Halliwell, whose Filmgoers’ Companion books were for many years the only film-reference books British people read, dismissed it as ‘outrageously sick’ and ‘in howling bad taste from beginning to end’, while the hostility shown by the Evening Standard’s Alexander Walker culminated in a bust-up in a TV studio where Russell smacked the critic over the head with a rolled-up copy of his own newspaper.

These days, predictably, all that condemnatory water has passed well under the bridge. Younger critics and filmmakers recognise Russell as a flamboyant auteur who added welcome dashes of flair, colour, imagination and daringness to a British film industry that was long accustomed to making stodgy historical costume dramas and dreary kitchen-sink dramas and seemed unaware that cinema is supposed to be, you know, cinematic. And The Devils is acknowledged as his masterpiece. For instance, Ben Wheatley, director of Kill List (2011) and High Rise (2016), has said, “The Devils to me stands alone in Ken Russell’s work. It has all the fierceness and craziness of his movies, but it also has a seriousness and an intensity that isn’t in his other movies.”

Anyway, what’s my assessment The Devils? Well, I’ll start with what I regard as the movie’s weakness. Although it’s intended to be over the top, it goes a bit too over the top during the lengthy sequences where Father Barre and his lackeys invade the convent searching for proof of Grandier’s demonic influence. Barre has already, secretly, threatened the nuns with execution unless they agree to behave hysterically. And on cue, those nuns put on a hell of a show – a chaotic fracas of nudity, licentiousness, writhing, screaming, eye-goggling, tongue-waggling, attempted copulation with candlesticks and lewd carry-on with a giant effigy of Christ on the cross. At this point, you feel you’re watching not so much a Ken Russell film as a parody of a Ken Russell film. Which come to think of it, was what his later Lair of the White Worm (1988) was.

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

Otherwise, I think The Devils is magnificent. Its highlights include the stylised sets by a young Derek Jarman, which eschew the grime, grubbiness and gloom you associate with life four centuries ago and instead are dazzlingly white and clean, but also disturbingly clinical. These include Sister’s Jeanne’s convent, whose warren of chambers and passageways have the look of some germ-free medical institution – presumably one for the insane – and Richelieu’s headquarters, which resemble a cross between a giant bank-vault and a well-scrubbed prison and are disconcertingly staffed by priests and nuns. The Devils’ policy of telling a historical story but not with historically accurate backdrops would appear in later British movies, most notably those made by Jarman himself when he became a director, such as Caravaggio (1986) and Edward II (1991). And I suspect that an also-young Peter Greenaway was making notes, because The Devils has sequences reminiscent of his films, for example, one where Russell’s camera closes in on the still figure of de Laubardemont while he stands against a painting-like tableau.

The performances are another highlight. The band of conspirators set on eliminating Grandier are played by a splendid rogue’s gallery of British character actors. Dudley Sutton makes a credibly villainous de Laubardemont, his rottenness tempered with a soldierly practicality and matter-of-factness. Northern Irish actor Max Adrian and British sitcom stalwart Brian Murphy – yes, that’s George from George and Mildred (1976-80) – are fabulously contemptible as the pair of quack medical practitioners who fall out with Grandier when he catches them trying to treat a plague victim with glass globes containing bees placed over the buboes and, even more bizarrely, a stuffed crocodile. “What fresh lunacy is this?” Grandier bellows at them, a line that became the title of Robert Sellers’ biography of Oliver Reed, published in 2013.

There are excellent turns too from the impish Georgina Hale, embittered but endearing as the woman Grandier has wronged, and John Woodvine – Doctor Hirsch in the 1981 classic An American Werewolf in London – as her magistrate father, whose enmity for Grandier helps seal his fate. Meanwhile, decked out in hippy-esque hair and John Lennon specs, Michael Gothard gives a barnstorming performance as the witch-hunting Father Barre. Gothard’s volubility will surprise viewers who remember him chiefly as Locque, Roger Moore’s silent, expressionless foe in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only. More nuanced is Murray Melvin, playing Father Mignon, a priest suspicious of Grandier who first alerts the conspirators to what’s happening in the convent. Later – but too late – he realises that Grandier is innocent of the charges against him.

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

Gemma Jones is sympathetic and convincing as Madeleine, the woman whom Grandier covertly marries and the film’s only properly virtuous character. Abandoning his philandering ways, he comes to regard her as his soulmate. It’s difficult to imagine that Jones in The Devils is the same actress who plays the title character’s mother in the Bridget Jones trilogy (2001-16) – three smooth, smug and determined-to-play-it-safe movies that seem the polar opposite of everything Russell stood for in the British film industry.

Ultimately, though, The Devils belongs to its two stars. Vanessa Redgrave’s portrayal of Sister Jeanne ranges from the unhinged and monstrous to the pitiful and pathetic, often within the same scene. Twisted both mentally and physically, the war in her soul between sensuous yearning and stultifying piety is symbolised externally by the contrast between her comely face and the grotesque hump protruding from her back.

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

Then there’s Reed, at the height of his acting powers – powers that, alas, would wane as his thirst for alcohol increased and he became more famous as a drunken fixture on TV chat-shows than as a serious film actor. He dominates The Devils. He makes Grandier absolutely believable as, simultaneously, a heroic leader of men, a cerebral theologian and a sensation-hungry scoundrel. His performance reaches a peak of intensity during the trial scenes. Reed stuck to films and avoided the theatre, lacking the patience to go out and parrot the same lines night after night. However, when you see him in verbal combat with Sutton before a row of judges (fearsomely clad in Ku Klux Klan-like white robes), you feel this would have been a brilliant piece of acting to watch live on a stage.

There follows the film’s cruel and despairing finale. Grandier is found guilty and subjected to torture by Barre, who uses a hammer to smash his feet to a pulp. Then he’s burned alive in the middle of a city square, in front of a nightmarishly drunken and jeering crowd – no longer does Grandier command the loyalty and affection of Loudon’s citizens. Particularly horrible are the moments when Grandier continues to pontificate in a half-defiant, half-pleading voice while his face blackens and blisters in the flames. This was filmed long before the advent of CGI and everything depended on the skills of the actors, the make-up people and the practical special effects team. I imagine the scene was a difficult and gruelling one to shoot, especially for Reed.

The Devils certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. My partner, who’s no prude, doesn’t particularly like it. She admires the film’s performances and set design, but its dearth of sympathetic characters and surfeit of totally unsympathetic ones, and its unrelenting display of human venality, hypocrisy and superstitious stupidity, prevent her from enjoying it much. However, if you can stomach the film’s bleak view of mankind, and you value Ken Russell’s operatic directing style, The Devils is second to none.

Or indeed, second to nun… Well, I’m sure Ken and Ollie would have appreciated the pun.

© Russo Productions / Warner Bros.

April 15, 2023April 18, 2023

A mish-mash from Mish

© Penguin Books

Anyone familiar with my wokey, lefty, liberal politics might be surprised to hear that I’m an admirer of the Japanese author Yukio Mishima. Indeed, I’d probably include his Sea of Fertility tetralogy – or at least, its first two entries, Spring Snow and Runaway Horses (both 1969) – among my top two-dozen novels of all time.

Yes, that’s Yukio Mishima, the ultra-right-wing Japanese nationalist who rejected democracy, formed his own militia, and in 1970 attempted to take over a military base in Tokyo while calling on the members of Japan’s Self-Defence Force to stage a coup and restore the Japanese Emperor to his former glory. And who, when it became clear that the attempted coup was a flop, committed seppuku, i.e., ritually disembowelled himself.

When I lived in Japan in the 1990s, I remember Japanese acquaintances who leaned leftwards in their politics wincing in horror when I said I liked Mishima’s books. One guy who was in his forties, and had been a ‘New Left’ student in the late 1960s, told me he’d been terrified when he first heard the news that Mishima was attempting a coup d’état. For a moment, he genuinely feared that Japan was going to end up under the heel of a right-wing, militaristic, Emperor-worshipping regime like the one that’d dominated the country in the 1930s and led it to disaster in the 1940s.

And I seem to remember reading an interview with the Japanese composer and occasional actor Ryuichi Sakamoto – now, alas, the late Ryuichi Sakamoto – in which he stated bluntly that he’d hated Mishima and was glad when he heard that he’d done himself in. This was despite Sakamoto supposedly basing his performance in the 1983 movie Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence on the author, and despite him titling the music he composed for the film Forbidden Colours, after Mishima’s 1951 novel of the same name.

I won’t deny that I find Mishima’s extreme politics as objectionable and doolally as the next person. (At least, the next sane person. In 1990s Japan, there were plenty of Uyoku dantai around, i.e., fascistic dingbats who prowled the streets in flag-emblazoned black vans, ranting and blasting patriotic music out of loudspeakers and generally making tits of themselves, and no doubt they thought Mishima’s ideas were wonderful.) But I can forgive him for his politics because I find his writing exquisite. That’s with a couple of exceptions. Forbidden Colours, a book I just could never get my head around, is one.

A friend and former colleague called Eiji Suenaga told me back then about the afore-mentioned Sea of Fertility novels and gave me some interesting advice about how to read them. Don’t, he said, try to read them until you’ve reached middle-age. Only at that stage in your life can you grasp their full significance and really appreciate them. Thus, I didn’t read them until I was in my forties. As I said, the first two in the series absolutely blew me away. However, the third novel, 1970’s The Temple of Dawn, gets rather bogged down with its copious musings on Buddhism, while the fourth and final one, the same year’s Decay of the Angel, feels slightly rushed and sketchy in comparison to its predecessors. Though to be fair to Mishima, he had rather a lot on his mind by then. It’s said that he penned Angel’s final lines on the morning of his suicide. (You can’t accuse Mishima of being a writer who talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk. I mean, he polished off his last novel in between attempting to overthrow his country’s government and ritually gutting himself… I couldn’t imagine Martin Amis doing that.)

One thing that makes Mishima an acquired taste is his bleak intensity. You don’t read his work if you’re looking for some laughs. Thus, in Confessions of a Mask (1949), you get a coming-of-age novel, an obviously autobiographical one, involving suppressed homosexuality and graphic, at times violent and macabre, sexual fantasies. In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963), you get a sect of young boys who quietly go Lord of the Flies, convince themselves they don’t have to abide by the rules of common morality, and start mutilating kittens – with the implication that soon they’ll be doing similar things to human beings. In The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1956), you get a mentally-ill Buddhist acolyte setting fire to the titular temple, the Kinkaku-ji, in Kyoto – an act of arson that’d actually befallen that temple in real life in 1950.

Admittedly, Mishima’s 1954 novel The Sound of Waves is a nice, happy love story. During my Japan days, I noticed how popular it was among certain Westerners living there. I suspect they liked Waves because it allowed them to boast they’d read a book by one of their host-country’s most important 20^th-century novelists – but it spared them having to grapple with that novelist’s normal, angsty, messed-up stuff. However, Mishima himself didn’t rate Waves highly. He once brutally dismissed it as ‘that great joke on the public’.

Well, I recently read Mishima’s 1968 novel Life for Sale and I now wonder if I should revise my ideas about him and the sort of literature he specialised in. It’s unlike anything I’ve read by him before. Unashamedly pulpy in content, wildly episodic in nature, quite outrageous in its plot-twists, the book often feels like Mishima wrote it with his tongue so far into his cheek that it’s a surprise the cheek didn’t burst. At times, it seems a million miles away from the gloom and seriousness of his other work. That’s ‘at times’, though. There are moments when the sombre, highbrow Mishima of old does resurface… But never for long.

It kicks off in the conventional Mishima style I’m familiar with. Page one has the hero, Hanio, attempting to commit suicide. He consumes “a large amount of sedative in the last overground train that evening. To be precise, he gulped it down at a drinking fountain in the station before boarding the train. And no sooner had he stretched out on the empty seats than everything went blank.” Mishima-esque too is the fact that Hanio is driven to this attempt on his own life by nothing of great significance: “Suicide was not something he had put much thought into. He considered it likely that his sudden urge to die arose that evening while he was reading the newspaper… he could only conclude that he had attempted to end It all on a complete whim.”

Hanio survives, however. With a rather more nihilistic mindset than before, he abandons his nine-to-five job and puts an advert in a newspaper: “Life for Sale. Use me as you wish. I am a twenty-seven-year-old male. Discretion guaranteed. Will cause no bother at all.” And that’s when the fun starts. The advert’s first reply comes from an embittered old man with a much younger and voluptuous wife. The wife is currently cuckolding him with a mobster. The old man hires Hanio – who now considers his life both meaningless and expendable – to seduce his wife and make sure that her mobster boyfriend finds them both ‘at it’: “When he claps eyes on you, you’re sure to be killed, and she’ll probably be dead meat too.” Hanio does as he’s told, but things don’t go according to plan. Someone gets killed, but not him.

He then proceeds to his next case. A librarian, “an utterly nondescript middle-aged woman… more like an elderly spinster, perhaps someone who taught English literature at a girls’ college of higher education,” involves him in a plot with some criminals, a rare book about Japanese beetles that’s housed in her library, and a particular type of beetle that supposedly can be ground down and made into a deadly poison. Hanio, with zero interest in remaining alive, is asked to act as a guinea pig for the newly-manufactured poison. He agrees, but again the unexpected happens, and again he survives while someone else gets killed. Meanwhile, in both episodes so far, mention is made of a mysterious, secret crime syndicate called the ACS, the ‘Asia Confidential Service’.

Things become yet more outlandish. Hanio is hired next by a schoolboy who wants him to look after his mother: “She’s ill, but she’ll recover right away with care from you.” What makes this life-threatening is the fact that the boy’s mother is a vampire. Hanio soon finds himself living with the pair, having his blood gradually and gently siphoned away by the vampirical mum, but he’s languidly happy as his death seems to draw near: “he truly enjoyed lounging around at home, basking in the family atmosphere.” This is the most baroque part of the book, but it actually works well. (Thinking about it, I’m not surprised that Mishima and vampires – at least, those of the brooding, aristocratic sort – are a good match.)

The next episode – following another death, again not Hanio’s – is less effective. He becomes embroiled in an espionage saga involving two foreign powers, ‘Country A’ and ‘Country B’, a stolen necklace, an all-important cipher key, and several dead secret agents. It all feels a bit tired, despite Mishima throwing into the plot some mysterious carrots as a whacky extra ingredient. The ‘Country A’ and ‘Country B’ stuff reminds me of old 1960s TV shows like Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-68), where the villains were often foreigners, but ones acting on behalf of ‘unnamed hostile powers’, to avoid the show offending anybody.

After that, Hanio ends up living in a new, lavish apartment – his ‘Life for Sale’ business has earned him a fair amount of yen by this point – which he rents off a rich, drug-addled hippy-chick called Reiko. (Reiko’s dotty old mum explains to him that her daughter takes “that drug beginning with L…”) This enables Mishima, through the character of Hanio, to express his opinion of hippies, which as you might expect is not high. “They were seekers after ‘meaninglessness’, all right, but he could not imagine them having the guts to confront the real thing when it inevitably came calling.” Hanio gets romantically involved with the unhinged Reiko who, for all her wild talk, has a worryingly conventional vision of what married life with him will be like: “Daddy comes home every day at six-fifteen, so I have to start cooking. When everything’s bubbling away nicely, I’ll hurry up and put on my make-up in time for when Daddy turns up…”

Hanio eventually flees from Reiko. In the book’s closing pages, becoming increasingly paranoid, he believes that it’s not just her who’s pursuing him. He might also have the ACS – the Asia Confidential Service mentioned by characters in the novel’s earlier sections – chasing him too.

Thus, Life for Sale is a mish-mash of crime, spy, horror, romance and comedy themes, leavened with a little of Mishima’s characteristic angst. If not every episode is successful, that’s not a great problem – a few pages later, another episode arrives, which the reader may enjoy better. Meanwhile, it suggests the books by Mishima that have long been available in translated form may have given English-language readers a blinkered view of him, i.e., that he was a humourless, cerebral misery-guts who specialised in Literature with a capital ‘L’. But Life for Sale, whose English-language translation didn’t appear until 2019, gives a rather different impression, that he was less of a literary snob, enjoyed genre fiction and had a playful side.

And I hear that last year saw the first English translation of another Mishima novel, a 1962 one called Beautiful Star. Its translator was Stephen Dodd, who also rendered Life for Sale into English. Beautiful Star sees Mishima having a go at science fiction. It’s about “a Japanese family who wake up one day convinced that they are each aliens from a different planet inhabiting human bodies.”

Mishima and aliens? I can’t wait to read that one.

April 5, 2023April 29, 2023

The honour system

Singapore, where I’ve been living for the past year, has a reputation for being a safe and law-abiding place. That’s a reputation I can attest to. At no point, anywhere in the city-state, have I sensed any physical threat to myself or my property. Admittedly, the local newspapers contain a lot of stories about scams and scammers, and I usually receive two or three scam calls – very obvious scam calls – a week. Mind you, when I check the numbers, some of these calls seem to originate in Thailand or Malaysia, so they’re not all the fault of Singaporeans.

But the impression of Singapore being law-abiding was truly brought home to me the other week when, one morning, I toddled along to my local bus-stop to catch a bus into work and saw what had been attached to the bus-stop sign. Evidently, someone had dropped their wallet while waiting there, and someone else had found it. Not only had that someone else not succumbed to temptation and pocketed the wallet, but he or she hadn’t taken it to the nearest police station and handed it in. No, someone else had simply popped the wallet into a plastic bag and stuck it to the sign, along with a sheet of paper announcing the wallet-owner’s name, and left it there with the presumption that sooner or later the owner would return and find it. And in the meantime, nobody else going past the bus-stop would be tempted to sneak off with it.

The wallet hung there for the next three days. On the fourth morning, I arrived at the bus-stop and saw that it was gone. Had the wallet finally found its way back to its owner? This being Singapore, I strongly suspect it had.