Category: Books

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Black magic and black ops

 

© Cork University Press

 

A few posts ago, I mentioned the Satanic panic that seized Northern Ireland in late 1973 and early 1974.  As Halloween is nearly upon us, I thought I would republish the following, which is a slightly revised version of something I wrote a decade ago, after I’d read Richard Jenkins’s book on the topic, Black Magic and Bogeymen (2014).

 

When I was eight years old, I lived in a tiny village near the border between Counties Tyrone and Fermanagh in Northern Ireland.  Thinking back, I suspect that when my neighbours saw me they’d whisper, “Look… There’s the most gullible child in the village.”

 

They probably thought I was gullible because I readily believed any old guff people told me, especially relating to things that, scientifically speaking, didn’t exist – i.e., manifestations of the supernatural.

 

I was a sucker for ghost stories.  For instance, an uncle once told me about the Cooneen Ghost – a tale involving a local family who supposedly were tormented by poltergeist-type knockings on the doors and windows of their house.  When they tried to escape the entity by emigrating to North America, it travelled with them.  The phantom knockings continued in their cabin on board the ship and then at their house in the New World.  After hearing that, I lived in dread of hearing similar knockings on the doors and windows of my house.

 

I also believed that fairies were real because a girl in my primary-school class had assured me that once her mother had been in the family’s stick-house (Northern Irish for ‘wood-shed’) when she’d heard crying sounds coming from a block of wood.  Presumably these were made by a fairy whose home was in the tree that’d been chopped down for the timber.

 

I even believed in banshees for a while because an older boy spun me a yarn about how, one night long ago, his father had heard a hideous screeching noise out in the darkness; and very soon afterwards, someone well-known to his father died unexpectedly.

 

So you can imagine my alarm one day when a couple of my primary-school classmates started talking about devil worshippers being active not only in Northern Ireland, but in the town of Enniskillen a few miles along the road from us.  They talked about a family in Enniskillen who, according to rumour, drew all the curtains in their house as soon as it got dark and then spent the night performing black-magic rituals.  They described the carcasses of freshly-sacrificed goats that’d been discovered beside the River Erne in Enniskillen with their hearts removed.  Most alarmingly, they claimed a child, about our age, had been abducted by devil worshippers and later been found dead and cut into pieces.  I swallowed every word of this and took it as gospel truth.

 

Talking of the gospel, I’ll say in my defence that I belonged to a fairly religious community of Northern Irish Protestants.  We were a paradox.  On one hand, we prided ourselves on being rational and not superstitious, seemingly unlike the Roman Catholics, with their talk about saints, visions and weeping statues; but on the other hand we believed everything that was said to have happened in the Bible because it was the Word of God.  And since the Bible said the devil existed – he did exist.  Our local clergyman confirmed this.  I remember him telling us sternly during a Sunday sermon that if you believed in the existence of God, you had to believe in the existence of the devil too.

 

From wikipedia.org

 

So if the devil was real, surely it followed that evil people who worshipped him by slaughtering humans and animals were also real?

 

During the decades since, I often wondered how my primary-school classmates got hold of those grisly stories about devil worship in early-1970s Northern Ireland.  Well, I finally found the answer when I read Black Magic and Bogeymen, a 2014 book by Richard Jenkins, Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield and a one-time undergraduate at Queen’s University in Belfast.  This investigates a “wave of rumours about black magic, Satanism, animal sacrifice and child abduction” that “swept across the north of Ireland in late 1973 and early 1974.”

 

According to Jenkins, “(b)etween 5th August and mid-December 1973, sixty-five items about witchcraft and black magic appeared in the mainstream press north and south of the Irish border: news reports, features, editorials, letters to the editor, church reports, and what appeared to be religious announcements…  Most of the reporting concerned the east of the province: Belfast and counties Antrim, Armagh and Down…  The reports peaked between mid-October and the third week in November, clustering around Hallowe’en.”

 

At their height, these reports seemed to reflect genuine panic in parts of Northern Ireland – adults concerned that their children might be kidnapped and sacrificed, and children generally scared witless.  (I was one of them.)  As Jenkins observes, children were also among the worst culprits for spreading the rumours.  They “seem to have actively elaborated or invented stories about bad people doing bad things” and were “likely to have contributed to the meagre ‘tangible evidence’ of supposed witchcraft and black magic practices.”

 

Jenkins explores the many factors likely to have fostered these stories of devil worship, black magic and ‘witchcraft’.  (My apologies to any Wiccans or other practitioners of white or pagan magic reading this, but to 1970s Northern Ireland’s Protestants and Catholics, witchcraft was devil worship and vice-versa: end of.)  He describes the heightened interest in the occult in Western culture at the time, signified by such things as the sensational black-magic novels of Dennis Wheatley and high-profile movies like Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973).  He devotes a chapter too to “the supernatural lore that was part of the enchanted world-views that could be encountered in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s” and no doubt made some people believe the rumours more readily – supernatural lore that includes not just the ghosts, fairies and banshees that so worried my eight-year-old self, but also traditions of faith and folk healing and a great enthusiasm for celebrating Hallowe’en.

 

Obviously, something that casts a huge shadow over Jenkins’ subject matter is the Northern Irish Troubles.  In their fourth year when the rumours began, the Troubles had already claimed an appalling toll – 467 people killed in 1972 alone.  Jenkins discusses how “social conflicts may be symbolised and re-worked in supernatural imagery and stories, not least in threats such as witchcraft and fears of spiritual jeopardy”.  The Troubles figured in the rumours in more tangible ways too, for example, through tales of teenagers getting embroiled in the occult after “trying to contact the souls of those killed in the Troubles, using Ouija boards or other methods.”

 

Jenkins attributes considerable blame for the scare to the province’s local newspapers, which generally reported the stories with ‘very modest facts’ that were ‘inflated and misrepresented’, ‘framed with unconnected material’ and ‘ornamented by apparently authoritative, if somewhat imprecise, anonymous information.’  Admittedly, those newspapers were under massive pressure.  A few years earlier their main stories had been about ‘livestock sales’ and ‘the Women’s Institute’ but now they were regularly covering ‘intimidation, murder and mayhem.’  Thus, standards weren’t high among their beleaguered journalists.

 

© Carrickfergus Advertiser

 

Fascinatingly, another possible culprit identified is the British Army, which depending on your political viewpoint was then in the province as protectors or oppressors, as peacekeepers or occupiers.  Jenkins provides evidence suggesting the army was happy to stir the pot of black-magic rumours.   It conducted ‘black propaganda’ operations promoting the belief that, yes, diabolical things were going on and religious and / or superstitious Northern Irish parents should keep their offspring off the streets at night.  On those streets, they were actually unlikely to tangle with devil worshippers; but they could tangle with paramilitaries or the security forces.

 

Jenkins prints an interview conducted in 1993 with the legendary Intelligence officer and ‘psychological warfare’ expert Colin Wallace, who claims he and his men went around Northern Irish properties mocking them up with magic circles, esoteric symbols, blood, bones, candles and inverted crosses to make it look like unspeakable rituals had taken place in them.

 

Tragically, one element in the stories was real – the child who, my classmates had told me, had been ‘cut to pieces’.   Jenkins devotes a chapter to the murder of ten-year-old Brian McDermott.  Brian was reported missing from his home in east Belfast at the start of September 1973 and his remains, ‘burned, mutilated and partially dismembered’, were discovered in the River Lagan a week later.  Although the police dismissed the idea that the murder was the result of some occult ritual, Jenkins notes how “a ‘black magic’ interpretation of the murder of Brian McDermott became an established tale of the Northern Irish Troubles.”  Officially the crime remains unsolved.  According to the journalist Martin Dillon, British Army Intelligence suspected the killer as being John McKeague (himself killed in 1982), one of the conflict’s most notorious and feared loyalist terrorists.  However, the fact that McKeague was in prison at the time of the murder casts doubt on his culpability.

 

Richard Jenkins conducts his investigations with academic thoroughness, analysing certain stories and rumours from different perspectives as he goes through the various actors in the drama – the Troubles, religion, superstitious belief, the media, the army, etc.  His approach is exhaustive and may seem exhausting to the casual reader.  However, I found Black Magic and Bogeymen fascinating – well, I was there at the time – and it’s surely the last word on the subject.

 

Returning to my own experience, I recall being asked in December 1973 if I wanted to go to the Christmas pantomime being held at Enniskillen High School and telling my parents flatly that no, I didn’t, because Enniskillen was full of witches and devil worshippers.  My Dad went ballistic at me for believing such ‘a pack of nonsense’ and then demanded to know who’d told me those stories.  I gave him the names of my guilty classmates.  “More fool you,” he raged, “for listening to them slabbering eejits!”  And that was that.  I stopped worrying and agreed to go to the pantomime.  Somehow, that angry burst of rationality from my Dad cured me of my fears.

 

Surprisingly, decades later, I remember my Dad – who originally hailed from Country Cavan in the Irish Republic – having a whiskey with an old Irish friend.  The pair of them started talking about their childhood in the Irish countryside and how, once the sun went down, their family members would tell ghost stories.

 

“I’m not kidding,” marvelled my Dad.  “After dark, you’d be too terrified to step outside the house.”

 

“I think,” said his friend, “that was why they told us them stories.”

 

Which proves I wasn’t the first member of the family to be troubled by tales of ghosts, fairies, banshees, black magic and bogeymen.

 

© Hammer Films / Seven Arts Productions / 20th Century Fox

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Edith gets eerie: E. Nesbit’s ghost stories

 

© Greyladies

 

Until recently my single point of reference for the English writer E. (Edith) Nesbit, who lived from 1858 to 1924, was her children’s book The Railway Children (1906).  I have memories of my primary school teacher, Mrs Atkinson, reading this book to us in instalments when I was eight or nine years old; and, later, I saw the 1970 film version of it, directed by Lionel Jeffries, on TV.

 

The bit of The Railway Children that’s always remained in my head comes from the film.  The three kids, played by Jenny Agutter, Sally Thomsett and Gary Warren, witness a landslide that buries a section of railway track and they have to warn an approaching train to slow and stop before it crashes cataclysmically into the rubble.  This necessitates Agutter and Thomsett stripping off their red bloomers and waving them like flags in the air.

 

I should say I was at an age where I was more interested in the landslide – I recall being spooked by Gary Warren exclaiming, “Look at that tree over there… Lord, it’s moving!” – than in the sight of Jenny Agutter, who’d later appear in Walkabout (1971), Equus (1977) and An American Werewolf in London (1981), and Sally Thomsett, who’d later appear in Straw Dogs (1971) and the popular TV sitcom Man about the House (1973-76), waving their brightly-coloured undergarments at a locomotive.

 

So, E. Nesbit was known to me as a children’s writer and as the author of one children’s book in particular.  But she also wrote adult literature, poetry and non-fiction, as well as being a founding member of that venerable British democratic-socialist organisation the Fabian Society, whose other early members included George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Ramsay MacDonald and Emmeline Pankhurst.  Despite writing items such as Women and Socialism: from the Middle-Class Point of View and Women and Socialism: A Working Woman’s Point of View (both 1885), she was not a fan of women’s suffrage – according to her Wikipedia entry, “mainly, she claimed, because women could swing Tory, thus harming the Socialist cause.”

 

Meanwhile, her personal life was unpleasantly complicated and sometimes tragic.  Her first husband, Hubert Bland, was a philandering cad who sired three children with two other women while he was ostensibly married to Nesbit – Bernard Shaw observed that Bland had “simultaneously three wives, all of whom bore him children.”  Nesbit lost her father at the age of three, her only sibling when she was around 12, and a son when she was in her early forties.

 

I wasn’t familiar with her backstory when, a short time ago, I picked up a paperback collection of seven of her ghost stories.  If I’d known more about her, I might have been less surprised at what I read.  Nesbit’s tales of the supernatural aren’t the comfy, cosy ones you associate with her time and place, i.e., Victorian and Edwardian England, where there’s a popular image of well-heeled gentlemen and ladies assembling around a log-fire at Christmas-time, with glasses of port and sherry, for the purpose of mildly spooking each other by telling a ghostly ‘yarn’.  No, Nesbit’s stories have unexpected bite.

 

The opening  one in the collection, From the Dead, begins with some painful marital complications not wholly dissimilar to those Nesbit faced with Hubert Bland.  A maliciously forged letter causes the narrator to abandon his fiancé and marry someone else.  When he learns the letter was forged, he casts out his wife in disgust.  A change of heart sends him in search of her but, months later, when he finally locates her, he’s informed that she’s just died in childbirth.  There ensues a scene that put me in mind of the apparition near the end of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839).  The newborn child survives but the final line remarks sombrely: “It is four years old now, and it has never spoken and never smiled.”

 

John Charrington’s Wedding is more straightforward and traditional but it ends too on a downbeat note: “I saw her face.  Shall I ever forget it.  White, white, and drawn with agony and horror, bearing such a look of terror as I have never seen since, except in dreams.”

 

Then comes Man-Size in Marble, perhaps the most famous of Nesbit’s ghost stories.  It has a young couple moving into a cottage in the English countryside where they discover, nearby, an ancient Norman church containing the funerary statues of two cruel-looking knights.  The husband also hears a legend about how every Halloween – or Hallowe’en as it was back then – those statues come to life and stalk around the neighbourhood.  He declines to tell his wife of the legend for the patronising reason that she “was always nervous, as highly strung natures are, and I felt that these tales… might have made our home less dear to my wife.”  Incidentally, he has a habit of calling her ‘Pussy’ and ‘Puss cat’, which reminded me of Henrik Ibsen’s famous indictment of the patriarchy, his 1879 play A Doll’s House.  In that, the beleaguered heroine Nora has to tolerate a husband who insists on calling her ‘skylark’ and ‘songbird’.

 

Partly due to the husband keeping his wife in the dark about the sinister legend of the statues,  Man-Size in Marble has a grim denouement too.

 

© Adorable Media / BBC Film

 

In 2024, Man-Size in Marble was adapted for television by Mark Gatiss, who retitled it Woman of Stone.  This was broadcast by the BBC on Christmas Eve as an instalment in the channel’s revived A Ghost Story for Christmas franchise (1971-78 and 2005-present).  Now I like Gatiss generally, and I like a lot of his work, but I’m not a fan of his adaptations of classic ghost stories penned by the likes of M.R. James.  I think they’re too glossy and overcooked and, somehow, they miss the authenticity that made the originals effective.  Anyway, I haven’t watched his version of Man-Size in Marble.  E. Nesbit features in it as a character, supposedly…  Played by Celia Imrie, no less.

 

Next is The Ebony Frame, whose narrator retrieves an aged painting from a storeroom not because of its canvas, which is blackened beyond recognition, but because he wants to reuse its frame, the ebony one of the title.  He discovers that the blackened panel at the front never had a picture at all, because the frame actually contains two pictures, turned inwards, secured face-to-face.  One of them, he’s shocked to learn, is of “Myself – in a cavalier dress, ‘love-locks and all’!”  The other is of “a woman of the type of beauty beloved of Burne-Jones and Rossetti.”  The sealed-together portraits point to a forbidden love affair in the distant past, while the narrator’s likeness to the cavalier suggests he’s the man’s descendent or even reincarnation.  Predictably, he’s soon having frighteningly realistic dreams where the saucy Burne-Jones / Rossetti lady comes to him, keen to rekindle their romance.

 

Yes, The Ebony Frame is yet another haunted-painting story – it was first published in 1893, three years after Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray.  But I found the idea of the two concealed pictures ingenious.

 

At ten pages, The Mystery of the Semi-Detached is the shortest thing in the collection.  It differs from the other stories in that it’s a dark tale of premonition.

 

Also different is the penultimate entry, The Pavilion.  From the conversations of the main characters, two young men and two young women, we learn how the title structure is connected to “some story about a wizard or an alchemist or something, and it was burned down, and then they rebuilt it in its present style.”  It’s also engulfed by the stems and leaves of what’s said to be a Virginia creeper, though one person observes that it looks ‘more like a South American plant’.  And because “there have always been so many rabbits and weasels and things found dead near it”, the pavilion is reputed to be haunted.  A dare is made and the young men spend the night in the place.  Needless to say, the creeper proves to be more mobile than anyone had thought.  The Pavilion contains some unexpected character dynamics, which elevate it above the level of most killer-plants-at-large horror stories.

 

Lastly is The Shadow, perhaps the clammiest and most dread-inducing tale in the collection.  This begins with the afore-mentioned scenario of Victorians making themselves comfortable at Christmas-time to tell ghost stories – but then takes the reader to places where there are ghosts but the vibe is definitely not comfortable.  Following a festive dance, three young woman gather in a room and entertain themselves with spooky tales.  Eventually, they invite the housekeeper to join them and coax her into telling one, and get more than they bargained for.

 

The Shadow features an entity that’s a harbinger – or a bringer – of death and, as the title suggests, its appearance is dark and incorporeal: “Between us and the coffin, first grey, then black, it crouched an instant, then sank and liquefied – and was gathered together and drawn till it ran into the nearest shadow.  And the nearest shadow was the shadow of Mabel’s coffin.”  Ultimately, the housekeeper’s young audience discover that the thing in her story has entered their world as well.

 

To sum up, these tales present a bleak view of the supernatural.  They depict it as a hostile realm, with the humans who blunder into it having mostly unhappy or tragic fates.  Also, in a couple of cases, the foolish actions of men help bring about fatal consequences for the female characters.  The stories are excellently written.  Like all good children’s writers, E. Nesbit perfected her craft writing for a readership who don’t have the patience to tolerate florid, overwrought and pretentious prose like many adults do.  As a result, her style is admirably clear and direct.

 

 From wikipedia.org

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Cormac’s tales from the riverbank

 

© Vintage

 

I’d assumed I was long past the age where I could get really, really excited about books.  If I had to compile a list of my favourite 20 books of all time, I would expect everything on it to be stuff I’d read in my teens, twenties or, at a stretch, my thirties: James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy (1946-59}, etc.  I still read a fair bit, but nothing I peruse these days seems to generate the same frisson that certain books did in me during my youth.

 

I wouldn’t completely agree with the legendary blues singer and musician B.B. King when, in 1969, he sang The Thrill is Gone.  But I would say the thrill survives in a reduced capacity.  You get older, you become less impressionable, and nothing surprises you anymore.  Or so I thought.

 

I was surprised when, a couple of years back, I read the books in Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord trilogy (1995-97), about King Arthur, and found myself entranced by them – so much so that when I got to the final volume, 1997’s Excalibur, I wrote on this blog that I was “almost reluctant to read it because I’d come to know so well, even love, the characters from the earlier two books – and this being the King Arthur legend, I was aware things wouldn’t end happily for them.”  It’d been a long time indeed since a series of book had had such an effect on me.

 

Now the same thing has happened with Cormac McCarthy’s semi-autobiographical novel Suttree (1979).  A few pages in, I realised I was reading a very special book – for me, anyway – and I consumed the rest of it with a passion.  And I imagine that in my top-20 books list, one of the entries that I read during the first half of my life has just been demoted from it and Suttree has taken its place.  Yes, I reckoned McCarthy’s novel was that good.

 

Before I continue talking about Suttree, a warning – there will be spoilers.

 

The novel recounts the adventures, and misadventures, of a young man called Cornelius Suttree while he lives on a houseboat on the Tennessee River by the rundown edge of Knoxville in the early 1950s.  He ekes out a living fishing and selling his catches at the local market.  He also fraternises with the neighbourhood’s underclass, a rogue’s gallery of misfits, eccentrics, down-and-outs and mad people.  McCarthy, who died in 2023, was not one for giving interviews, so I assume it’s never been determined how much of Suttree is autobiographical.  I’d imagine, though, that the novel – written over 20 years – is at least partly inspired by the period of his marriage to Lee Holleman in the 1960s when, according to his Wikipedia entry, “McCarthy moved to what Holleman’s obituary calls ‘a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxviille.’”

 

As the narrative unfolds, we learn about Suttree’s past.  He’s from a well-to-do family and his lifestyle choices haven’t pleased his father.  In a letter to him, that father states his belief that “the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it.  If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it.  In the law courts, in business, in government.  There is nothing occurring in the streets.  Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.”  We also learn that he’d been in a marriage that, ultimately, he’d run away from.  More on that in a minute.

 

Incidentally, we get clues that Suttree is quite a handsome devil – as McCarthy himself was in his young days.  At one point he and some mates get into a catastrophic brawl in a dodgy Knoxville dance-place: “Before they reached the door someone hit him in the head with a bottle…  He must have fallen foul of yet other hands afterwards because when he woke in the hospital he had a broken finger, three broken ribs, a mouthful of loose teeth and one missing.”  Though he’s now gap-toothed, Suttree has the following conversation with a nurse: “You created quite a sensation.”  “What, among the inmates?”  “No, silly.  Among the nurses.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Evening Star Books

 

I’ve used the word ‘narrative’ but Suttree doesn’t have the structure of a typical novel.  It’s rambling and episodic, really a patchwork of vignettes and short stories featuring the same characters in the same setting.  The reader takes pleasure in the randomness of it, not knowing what grotesqueness, hilarity, idiocy, beauty, horror, weirdness or, indeed, moment of sheer poetry is going to appear next.

 

A couple of the longer ‘short stories’ see Suttree leave Knoxville, temporarily, with painful results.  In one episode, he discovers that the son he left behind has died and sets off to attend his funeral, even though he has barely any money.  When he gets to his destination, his former wife and in-laws, and indeed the whole community, react to him with contempt and hatred.  He only leaves the town alive thanks to the begrudging intervention of its sheriff, who opines: “You, my good buddy, are a 14-carat plated son of a bitch.  That’s what your problem is…  Now I’m goin to do you a favour.  Against my better judgement.  And it’s not goin to make me no friends.  I’m goin to drive your stinkin ass to the bus station and give you an opportunity to get out of here.”

 

Another time, a chancer called Reese and his family arrive on the scene.  This symbolically occurs during a flood, when all sorts of flotsam and jetsam are being washed past Suttree’s houseboat: “Next came looming out of the yellow mist a patchwork shack composed of old slats and tarpaper and tin snuff signs all mounted in wild haphazard upon a derelict barge and turning with the keelless rotations of a drunken bear…”  Reese inadvertently befriends Reese, his wife and his children, who inhabit that barge-shack and, for all his worldly wisdom, gets suckered into helping Reese with a get-rich scheme we know is doomed from the start.  They travel upriver and begin fishing for mussels, believing there’s money to be made from selling their shells and pearls.  Though there’s a little light, with Suttree romancing Reese’s daughter, what follows is mostly a gruelling litany of hardship, futility and, finally, tragedy.

 

However, much of the book simply records Suttree’s interactions with the characters who live, fish and scavenge around him.  They’re an intriguing bunch even if you don’t envy them their existences.  They include the Ragpicker – his title says it all – who claims not to believe in God because “I got no reason to think he believes in me”; Daddy Watson, a former railwayman happy to tell Suttree about the gory train crashes he witnessed during his working life; Ab Jones, a black man who with his wife Dolly runs an illicit bar on another houseboat and whose defiant nature invariably gets him into trouble; Mother She, an ancient and decrepit witch who provides the novel with its most hallucinatory episode; Michael, a native American fisherman whom Suttree briefly befriends; and Red Callahan, who ‘s perhaps the closest thing in Suttree to the psychotic Francis Begbie in Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), another episodic book about a bunch of misfits living in punishing circumstances.

 

One part of Suttree that’s particularly Welsh-like – i.e., simultaneously horrible and funny – concerns a male prostitute called Leonard.  He enlists Suttree’s reluctant help to dispose of the corpse of his father, which his family has kept hidden at home for months, pretending the old man is still alive so they can keep collecting his social security money.  At one point during the operation, Suttree protests, “That’s the awfullest stink I ever smelted.”  Leonard retorts, “That‘s the biggest reason we had to get him out of the house.”

 

Apart from Suttree, though, the most prominent character is the chaotic Gene Harrogate, a youth whom Suttree first encounters while they’re both in prison – Harrogate for the unusual crime of sneaking into a watermelon field near his home, cutting holes in the crop and then having intercourse with them.  (As the stunned farmer says, “You ain’t goin to believe this…  Somebody has been f*ckin my watermelons.”)  Following his release, Harrogate takes up residence in Suttree’s neighbourhood, living “under the final concrete arches of the viaduct where they ran to earth…  The earth was cool and naked and dry.  Here some bones.  Broken glass.  A few stray dog-turds…  there was never a retreat so secluded.”

 

From pixabay.com / © Riedlinger

 

Suttree becomes his surrogate big brother, trying to rein in his wildest and daftest impulses and having to mop up after him when his antics end in disaster.  He’s remarkably patient, considering how madcap Harrogate’s schemes are.  At one point, the lad learns he can earn a dollar for every dead bat he finds and hands into Knoxville’s medical authorities, who are keen to monitor rabies in the local chiropteran population.  Soon Harrogate is firing poisoned pellets into the air from his skiff, at dusk, hoping the swooping bats will mistake them for insects.  “Bats had begun to drop everywhere from the heavens.  Little leatherwinged creatures struggling in the river…”  More spectacular, and no more successful, is a project he devises after finding a cave / tunnel system that takes him under Knoxville – where, he believes, he can dynamite his way into the vault of the city treasury.

 

Incidents like these make Suttree the funniest of McCarthy’s books.  Although folk who’ve read Child of God (1973), or Blood Meridian (1985), or The Road (2006) would probably argue that having more laughs than the norm in McCarthy’s oeuvre is not a particularly high bar.  Anyway, I found myself guffawing loudly in places.

 

The prose oscillates between Joycean flamboyance and Hemingway-esque precision.  The opening paragraph reads: “Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming of the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunks and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brink or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.”

 

In contrast, after Suttree’s friend J-Bone informs him of his son’s death, McCarthy describes the moment thus: “Suttree set his cup down and looked out of the window.  There was a small pool of spilled cream on the marble countertop at his elbow and flies were crouched about it lapping like cats.  He got up and went out.”  Some may find this disparity in writing styles off-putting.  I have to say, for me, the combination is like catnip.

 

Unflinchingly, the book explores a harsh, brutal but somehow fascinating world, one whose inhabitants certainly suffer, yet you also understand the hold that world exerts over them – through the moments of peace and calm, the occasional pleasures, the camaraderie, the satisfaction of knowing you’re not bound by the rules and regulations of conventional society.   But it’s also a transitory world where nothing lasts for long, including the people living in it.  As the book progresses, characters get killed, get permanently incarcerated (in the prison or asylum) or simply vanish.  As you near the book’s end, you wonder what Suttree’s choice will be.  Will he decide to stay here and become a casualty too, or will he try to escape?

 

But if he does escape, you suspect his experiences on the river will haunt him for his remaining days.  Just as Cormac McCarthy’s experiences of poverty and desperate living in Tennessee haunted him for 20 years and informed this marvellous novel.

 

From pixabay.com / © Leoleobobeo

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Agnes, Queen of the West

 

© Polygon Books

 

By a coincidence I’d just finished reading Gentlemen of the West (1984), the first book published by the late Scottish writer Agnes Owens, when I learned that May 24th – last Sunday – was the 100th anniversary of Owens’s birth.  This article in last Sunday’s Observer informed me.

 

A long time ago, I’d read nine of Owens’s short stories included in Lean Tales (1985), an anthology showcasing work by her and her friends (and originally mentors) Alasdair Gray and James Kelman.  No disrespect to Gray and Kelman, but I thought her stories were the best stuff in Lean Tales and one of them, Arabella, blew me away.  In just six pages, Arabella paints a devastating picture of the title character, who may or may not be a witch.  Arabella obviously doesn’t have much command of , or regard for, normal social skills.  She visits her parents seemingly oblivious to the fact her mother can’t stand the sight of her, she isn’t someone you’d want looking after your pets (though she owns four dogs, whom she carts around in a pram), and her way of dealing with a sanitary inspector’s visit to her ruinous house is not for the weak-stomached.

 

Arabella was the story that brought her to the attention of her literary peers.  In the late 1970s Gray, Kelman and the poet Liz Lochhead ran evening classes in creative writing in Owens’s hometown of Alexandria, northwest of Glasgow.  Owens attended the first class and gave a copy of Arabella to Lochhead, who read it on the train back to Glasgow.  Lochhead recalled trying “to put this terrifying, terribly funny story, so anarchic and archetypal, so short and so complete, together with the class I’d just left and that middle-aged lady in the neat coat and woolly hat with the fringe of dark blonde hair sticking out and the full mouth that turned so decisively down at the corners.”  Owens, who’d been busy raising seven children and working variously as a typist, factory worker and cleaner, later claimed she’d only signed up for the writing course to ‘get out of the house’.

 

Anyway, I’m a fan of Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain (2020), Young Mungo (2022) and the forthcoming John of John (2026), and I recently read an article of his on Literary Hub entitled Poverty, Anxiety and Gender in Scottish Working-Class Literature.  This recommended a reading list that included Agnes Owens’s Gentlemen of the West alongside such better-known titles as Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late (1994), Alexander Trocchi’s Young Adam (1954), Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995).  Stuart described her as “one of the most detailed observers of working-class life that I have ever read” and opined that “her writing brings a tenderness and a kindness to a hard, industrial landscape that is usually dominated by men.”  I realised I had on my bookshelf a very old copy of Gentlemen of the West that I’d purchased in a charity shop and, following Stuart’s endorsement, I retrieved it and read it.

 

The book can be described as either a collection of connected short stories, told by the same narrator, or an episodic novel, each chapter recounting an adventure experienced by its hero.  That hero is Mac, a young west-of-Scotland man who spends his time toiling in frequently shite weather on a building site, jousting with his curmudgeonly mother in the small tenement flat he shares with her, and drinking in the local pub, the Paxton, among a weird, sometimes frightening range of what could be euphemistically termed ‘characters’.  The tenor of Mac’s existence is nicely summed up by the opening paragraphs of one story / chapter entitled Christmas Day at the Paxton:

 

“It was Christmas Day, a Saturday.  The streets were covered in ice and nothing was moving except me.  There was not a soul, a dog or even a bus in sight and worst of all I suspected the pubs would be closed.  I headed in the direction of the Paxton with my mother’s Christmas message ringing in my ears.

 

“’Where’s yer Christmas present ye ask?  Well, where’s mine?  Every year it’s the same.  Not a sausage dae I get aff ye.  No’ even an extra pound an’ a’ the neighbours showing aff their presents.   Well, I’m sick o’ it – ‘

 

“’And a Merry Christmas to you!’ I had shouted as I walked out.”

 

The reader never loses sight of the precariousness of Mac’s life.  In the following story, The Aftermath, he reports, “All the week after Christmas I was in a foul mood.  It was a long holiday for the building-site worker.  My money was gone by Boxing Day.  I faced New Year without a penny in my pocket…”  In the Paxton, he often wonders where his next beer or whisky will come from – though modern readers may find it quaint that the stories are set in an era when a pint cost 50 pence.  Of course, wages then were correspondingly low.  (Incidentally, I’m of a vintage whereby I can just remember being able to buy two pints of Light for a pound at the Rugby Club’s wee upstairs bar on the Northgate in Peebles.)

 

Among the tales recounted in Gentlemen of the West…  Mac, a Protestant, goes looking for a dead friend’s memorial service and gets stuck in a Roman Catholic chapel while mass is being performed.  He encounters an old schoolmate who then limpets onto him when he discovers there’s a gang after him.  He intervenes when he believes his mother is getting too friendly with a character called Proctor Mallion, who’s the very last person he wants as a stepdad – “His first wife ran away wi’ the insurance man and his second left him efter he pushed her out the windae.  Lucky for her it wis on the ground floor”.

 

He gets paid off at his work following a row between the brickies and the building site’s boss-man.  He gets re-hired, only to discover later the boss-man has employed as a general labourer someone called McCluskie, who’s just spent time in prison for manslaughter.  Mac explains the crime to a young apprentice thus: “…if I take this brick hammer an’ smash it ower yer heid, that would be murder.  On the other haun’, if I accidentally push ye aff the scaffolding when ye get up, that’s manslaughter.”

 

© Little, Brown Book Group Limited

 

There’s a supporting cast that includes the winos who drink by a local riverbank – “Billy Brown, Big Mick, Baldy Paterson and Craw Young… huddled round a large flat stone that displayed two bottles of Eldorado wine and some cans of beer” – and the memorably erratic Paddy McDonald who lives in a tumbledown bothy alongside “live rabbits in the oven – lucky for them it was in disuse – pigeons in a cage in the bedroom, and a scabby cat always asleep at the end of a lumpy sofa, with the dog at the other end.”

 

It’s tempting to view Gentlemen of the West, episodic in nature and populated by unfortunates and never-do-wells, as a forerunner to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting.  But there are important differences.  Mac and at least some of his associates are in employment.  That employment’s shaky, though.  And as the 1980s unfold, you dread to think how the doctrine of Thatcherism (resources concentrated in London and southeastern England, to hell with the rest of Britain) will upend their community.  Also, they don’t have the drug-fueled nihilism of Welsh’s characters, though I suppose the Trainspotting gang could be seen as the feral, heroin-raddled offspring of Mac and his mates a generation later.

 

If you compare the chapter / story Up Country, in which Mac makes a spontaneous daytrip out of his town, ends up on a boat on the Firth of Clyde with “some sightseers on deck with the loud English patter”, and then ends up for a few hours on an uninhabited island, with the episode in Trainspotting where Renton and co. briefly visit the Scottish Highlands, the differences are stark.  Mac blunders around the island like an innocent child, first feeling euphoric (“The view was terrific, all lochs and mountains.  I felt contempt for my mates who would be firmly established in the boozer by now, slugging away at whisky and beer, unaware that were better ways of passing the time”), then feeling creeped out as he realises he’s all alone there and stumbles across a small cemetery.  In Trainspotting, the Scottish scenery inspires the far more cynical Renton to embark on his famous rant about the Scots: “The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation.”

 

On his way back from the island, Mac encounters an eccentric German tourist who’s come to Scotland “to study castles…  Then I shall write my book.”  Mac reacts with bemusement but also respect: “I looked after him wishing I could be as sure of everything.”  He even takes inspiration from him and the story ends with the line, “…some day I will get away from this place.  Some day I might go and see castles myself.”  In Welsh’s novel, unlike Danny Boyle’s 1996 film adaptation of it, Renton and the others don’t run into a foreign tourist.  But with drug habits to finance, you know their reaction to one would be far more predatory.

 

In other parts too of Gentlemen of the West, we see decency in Mac, for example, in his interactions with the hapless Paddy McDonald.  And we see it in other characters.  McCafferty, in charge of the building site, comes across as an insufferable dick in the episode Paid Aff, but in the very next one, McCluskie’s Out, he’s willing to give a second chance to a guy just out of prison.

 

But the book’s real heart isn’t Mac but his long-suffering and sharp-tongued mother, the ‘auld wife’ as he calls her.  On the surface, their relationship is one of never-ending bickering and arguing – ‘banter’ is much too gentle a word for it.  Yet it’s clear that the auld wife is the bedrock supporting Mac’s meandering, occasionally chaotic existence.  And no doubt there are countless other, resilient women in the surrounding tenements providing a similar service to countless other men.  Owens, whose son John was a bricklayer, was probably all too familiar with the role.  In the article in the Observer, John is quoted as saying that if his mother based Mac and the Auld Wife’s relationship on the relationship she had with him, things were “a bit exaggerated… though I may be forgetting how cheeky I could have been as a young man.”

 

Only at the end of the final story / chapter, Goodbye Everybody, is the true nature of their relationship made explicit.  Mac makes good on the promise he made in Up Country and sets off for Aberdeen in the hope of finding a better living for himself.  It’s impossible not to feel a lump in your throat as you read his account of the morning of his departure and he describes how his usually formidable mother is ‘shaking’ and ‘searching for words’.  When he walks off down the street, not looking back, he knows “she would stay there watching until I was out of sight.”

 

And you suddenly appreciate Douglas Stuart’s observation that Agnes Owens brings a ‘tenderness’ and ‘kindness’ to a ‘hard, industrial landscape… dominated by men.’

 

From Glasgow Women’s Library

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Spying economy class

 

© Gardner VI Books AMS006

 

So it’s farewell to Len Deighton, the author, military historian, screenwriter, illustrator and gastronomist who passed away on March 15th at the venerable age of 97.  As a tribute, here’s something I wrote a few years ago after I’d finally got around to reading The IPCRESS File (1962), the spy thriller that made Deighton’s name and supposedly provided an antidote to the more romanticised spy novels popular at the time featuring a certain James Bond.

 

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a James Bond buff.  Because of this, I’d wanted for a long time was get my hands on a copy of Len Deighton’s 1962 spy novel The IPCRESS File – my interest in it being that it’s often touted as the anti-Bond.

 

Whereas 007 is a posh ex-public schoolboy with oodles of money and charm at his disposal, Harry Palmer, spy hero of The IPCRESS File, is an unprivileged and ordinary-seeming bloke with only his working-class wits to help him negotiate the hazardous, occasionally dangerous world of espionage.  Whereas Bond swans around in glamorous international locations enjoying the finest in cuisine, liquor and cars, Palmer trudges the lugubrious streets of London peering at the rain and pigeons through an oversized pair of glasses.  Whereas Bond wins ladies’ hearts with his unflappable insouciance, Palmer gets dumped on by his superiors for his insolence, which to them signifies that he’s a troublesome oik who doesn’t know his place.

 

But hold on.  That’s the impression I always had of Deighton’s character thanks to seeing in my youth the 1965 film version of The IPCRESS File, which featured in its lead role that impeccably deadpan man of the people Michael Caine.  (At least, he was a man of the people until the 1970s, when he started moaning about having to pay tax.)  It was a surprise, then, to finally open the original novel recently and discover that it wasn’t what the film version had led me to believe.  It wasn’t quite as different from the Bond novels as I’d expected.

 

I should qualify that by saying I’m talking in terms of characterisation, not in terms of plot.  For unlike the straightforward, action-adventure plot dynamics of the average Bond novel, the narrative of The IPCRESS File is a twisty, at times head-scratching thing that produces plenty of surprises about who’s working for, and spying on, whom.

 

© Lowndes Productions / Rank Organisation

 

Anyway, firstly, forget about Harry Palmer.  The hero of Deighton’s novel goes through its 250-odd pages without ever revealing his name.  Early on, somebody calls him ‘Harry’, but he immediately muses: “Now my name isn’t Harry, but in this business it’s hard to remember whether it ever has been.”  All we have is an anonymous narrator recounting events with a laconic turn of phrase whilst giving few clues about his personality and background.  In other words, the main character in The IPCRESS File is a cypher, an empty space into which readers can project their own personalities and so imagine themselves at the centre of the intrigue.

 

A cypher was pretty much what James Bond was too – not so much a properly-rounded character as a device for drawing in the reader.  His creator Ian Fleming was careful not to give him too much individuality.  This policy extended from his bland name (famously borrowed from the ornithologist who wrote the book Birds of the West Indies) to his lack of a life-history – it was only in You Only Live Twice (1964), the last novel published in Fleming’s lifetime, that we learn much about it and even then it turns out that Bond was orphaned at an early age, i.e. denied anything as character-forming as a family background.

 

Being a blank canvas isn’t the only thing that Deighton’s protagonist has in common with Bond.  Both their jobs involve some globe-trotting.  Now this came as a shock to me after seeing the film The Ipcress File – unlike the book, ‘Ipcress’ isn’t capitalised in its title – which determinedly confines its action to the British capital.  However, the book sees him pursue a kidnapped scientist to Lebanon – resulting in a deadly blunder that the film has happening in a London car-park – and later being posted to a Pacific atoll that the American military have commandeered in order to observe and measure the explosion of a neutron bomb.  The Pacific episode, set in a remote and inhospitable fragment of the tropics that the Americans have converted into a base containing “two athletic fields, two movie theatres, a chapel, a clothing store, beach clubs for officers and enlisted men, a library, hobby shops, vast quarters for the Commanding General, a maintenance hangar, personnel landing pier, mess hall, dispensary, a PX, post office, a wonderful modern laundry and a power plant”, is at times so odd and surreal it doesn’t so much resemble a spy story as something by J.G. Ballard.

 

And like Bond, the hero of the literary IPCRESS File has refined taste buds.  We variously see him tucking into ‘Russian tea and apple strudel’, ‘Dgaj Muhshy (chicken stuffed with nutmeg, thyme, pine nuts, lamb and rice and cooked with celery)’, ‘totem poles of lamb, aubergine, onion and green pepper’, ‘iced Israeli melon’ and ‘fine lobster salad and carefully-made mayonnaise’.  Even his sandwiches seem classy by 1962 standards, consisting of ‘cream cheese with pineapple, and ham with mango chutney… with rye bread’.  Admittedly, this theme appears too in the film, which has a scene where Caine’s Harry Palmer bumps into a superior in a shop and is chided for paying “ten pence more for a fancy French label” of button mushrooms.  The disdainful superior adds: “You’re quite a gourmet, aren’t you, Palmer?”

 

The character’s enthusiasm for a quality meal reflects a similar enthusiasm on his creator’s part.  Indeed, when he was still working an illustrator, Deighton spent four years producing Cookstrips for the Observer newspaper.  These were what nowadays we’d call ‘infographics’.  Each presented a recipe for a particular dish, with pictures, arrows and a minimum of text making the preparation process as simple and clear as possible.

 

From Wikipedia / © Harper Collins

 

Where Deighton’s hero and Fleming’s hero part ways is in their relationships with their employers.  While Bond seems at ease in the secret service, Deighton’s character lacks the wealthy and privileged background that most of his colleagues and superiors have.  And he isn’t impressed by what that background has produced.  He begins the novel working for Military Intelligence under a man called Ross, “a regular officer, that is to say he didn’t drink gin after 7.30 P.M. or hit ladies without first removing his hat.”  Ross, we hear, has given him plenty of ‘toffee-nosed dressing downs’ and at one point he rambles at inordinate length about his huge and lavish garden.  “Ross,” the perplexed narrator breaks in, “Mrs Laing and Dorothy Perkins are roses, aren’t they?”

 

Early in The IPCRESS File, though, he’s transferred from Ross’s unit to a civilian intelligence department of the Home Office called the WOOC(P).  Not that he’s much happier with the person in charge there, a character called Dalby who’s “an elegant languid public-school Englishman of a type that can usually reconcile his duty with comfort and luxury.”  When Dalby asks him if he “can handle a tricky little special assignment,” he retorts, “If it doesn’t demand a classical education I might be able to grope around it.”

 

Having to work with people from moneyed backgrounds presents him with another problem.  His superiors don’t seem to appreciate the fact that he needs a steady income and regular payment of expenses to survive.  When he switches from Ross’s outfit to Dalby’s, he wonders how long he “would have to make the remnants of this month’s pay last before the new scale began.”  Later, he complains that he’s “still two months behind with pay and three with allowances” and that “a claim for £35 in overseas special pay” was “overdue by ten and a half months.”

 

This also surfaces in the film, with Ross and Dalby (played by Guy Doleman and Nigel Green) depicted as a pair of condescending bowler-hatted toffs who view Palmer as an irritant with ideas above his station.  But the unflattering commentary about Britain’s class system is diluted slightly by the addition of a military theme.  Ross and Dalby are both of upright army-officer stock while Palmer, we hear, had an inglorious time in uniform.  (I assume that as an ordinary soldier he was caught up in illegal black-market activities in Germany, though I could be wrong.)  Anyway, he’s spent time in a military prison and might be thrown into one again if he gets on the wrong side of his employers.

 

Thus, Palmer’s insolence isn’t just the result of a general social resentment – it comes too from a particular resentment against an institution, the army, that’s blighted his past and could potentially blight his future.  Meanwhile, the film plays down his financial frustrations and shows him protesting instead against the needless bureaucracy of his work.  Dalby, for instance, insists on a lengthy report being written after every excursion he makes ‘into the field’.

 

Incidentally, James Bond gets the best of both worlds.  He’s well-bred enough to know his way around a flashy casino or expensive golf club, and is choosy about what he eats, drinks and drives, but he knows how to avoid coming across as an arse when mingling with ordinary working folk.  Note how easily he gets into conversation with a pub landlord in Moonraker (1955), say, or with Tiffy, the bargirl at the bordello in The Man with the Golden Gun (1965).  As Henry Chancellor puts it, he’s a ‘snob about things’ but not ‘about people’.

 

To sum up then, I found the hero of Len Deighton’s The IPCRESS File rather more Bondian than I’d anticipated.  But what distinguishes him from Ian Fleming’s super-spy is class.  One has an ample supply of it.  For the other, it’s the bane of his bloody life.

 

From Wikipedia / © David Rose / The Daily Telegraph

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Weird Penguin: Claimed!

 

© Penguin Books

 

In 2024, Penguin Books launched its Weird Fiction series.  So far, this series has consisted of five classic titles: Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895); William Hope Hodgeson’s The House on the Borderland (1908); Gertrude Barrows Bennett’s Claimed! (1920); Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries; and a collection of well-known stories of the weird by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, W.W. Jacobs, May Sinclair, M.R. James and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called Weird Fiction: An Anthology (2024).  When I saw these books on sale in my local bookstore, I bought the two by Gertrude Barrows Bennett and Algernon Blackwood, which I hadn’t read before.

 

A while back, I posted my thoughts on Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries.  Here’s what I made of Bennett’s Claimed!

 

While the content of Ancient Sorceries could be described as horror with a strong dose of the weird, Claimed! is a banquet of weirdness with the occasional plate of horror placed here and there.  It’s a short novel whose plot hinges around a strange box – “an oblong, bluish-green box, about a dozen inches long by half as many wide, highly polished, but severely simple of workmanship.  Its sole decoration was a single short line of characters belonging to some foreign language, which had apparently been incised across the top with an engineer’s tool and the lines filled in with scarlet enamel.”  The box won’t open and the inscription has a disconcerting habit of disappearing from its top surface and reappearing on its bottom surface, making those who possess it wonder if they’d turned the thing upside down without remembering doing so.

 

Ownership of the box passes from a mad sailor to a shopkeeper, who soon becomes mad, and then to a wealthy and irascible old industrialist called J.J. Robinson.  The latter doesn’t quite tip over into madness, but he certainly develops an unhealthy obsession with the box and with deciphering its secrets.  After an assault by a mysterious nighttime intruder, Robinson is left ailing and bedridden, though he insists on keeping the box by his side: “…he sank back, clasping the thing right to his breast…  ‘I got it!’ he croaked.  ‘What I want I get, and – what I get I keep! They can’t take it away from – old Jesse Robinson!  Nobody – can take it!  You – hear me?’”

 

At this point, Robinson’s niece Leilah and a young doctor called John Vanaman get involved in the strangeness while they try to care for the stricken but uncooperative old man.  Vanaman realises something odd is afoot when he sits by the slumbering Robinson’s bed one night and has a vision whereby a sea-tide seems to sluice in under the door and across the floor, even though he’s “sitting in the bedroom on the second floor of a house in Tremont, over fifty miles from the Atlantic shore.”

 

Even worse, something unspeakable enters the room with that impossible tide: “That which was in the room beneath the tide, and which had pushed the tide hither – before it, now gathered, took form, and rose up, sudden and monstrous…  Exactly what shape it had, Vanaman could not later clearly remember.  He could recall only his own fear and intuitive sense of it as a thing of awful force and of a potential destructiveness terrific beyond finite comprehension.”

 

Bennett sets up this scenario in the first 20 pages of the novel and it’s great, phantasmagorical stuff.  Alas, the mid-section of the book is less gripping.  There are a few incidents that set the pulse racing, such as a mysterious suicide and a bit where a hapless spiritualist tries to help, only to get her come-uppance.  But mainly it’s about the romance that inevitably brews between Leilah and Vanaman while they look after Robinson and try to work out what’s wrong with him.  As the straightforward, clean-cut hero and heroine of the story, they aren’t terribly interesting – and neither is their romance.

 

However, after the plot has become bogged down in Robinson’s mansion, page 65 sees a dramatic and welcome shift of gears.  Restored, the old man informs Vanaman: “We’re going to sea, my son.”  The action then shifts to a ship Robinson has chartered in order “to meet the party that wants my property, fair and square.”  He’s referring to the people, or beings, who created the box and who belonged to an ancient land that long ago sank below the ocean during a natural cataclysm.  In due course, we’re introduced to the Jack-London-esque character of the ship’s master, Captain Tom Porter – “well known and liked among the blunt, outspoken fraternity of his own kind” – and his hardy crew.  Happily, these new characters and the new locale give the novel a second wind.

 

There follows an unexpected abduction, a stirring nautical chase, and an impressively psychedelic finale wherein the protagonists cross a portal in time and space.  And this ties up all the mysteries surrounding the box…  Well, at least, I think it does.  For a 127-page novel, there’s been an awful lot going on.

 

One nice thing about Claimed! was that it introduced me to its remarkable author, whom I hadn’t heard of before.  The Minneapolis-born Gertrude Barrows Bennett spent her adult life working as a stenographer, but for three years from 1917 to 1920 – a fraught period when she had to support both a daughter and an invalid mother – she also earned money as a writer.  She had short stories and novellas published in magazines like Argosy and All-Story Weekly and produced four novels: The Citadel of Fear (1918), The Heads of Cerberus (1919), Avalon (1919) and finally Claimed!  According to her Wikipedia entry, her writing ceased when her mother passed away and she was suddenly under less financial pressure.

 

Brief though her writing career was, Bennett did enough for the noted science-fiction critic and historian Sam Moskowitz to hail her as “the great woman writer of science fiction in the period between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and C.L. Moore.”  And though there’s debate about whether or not the legendary H.P. Lovecraft – who started his writing career around the same time she did – was aware of and influenced by Gertrude Barrows Bennett, there’s so much mind-boggling weirdness present in Claimed! that it wouldn’t surprise me if he was.

 

From philsp.com

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Weird Penguin: Ancient Sorceries

 

© Penguin Books

 

In 2024 Penguin books inaugurated its Weird Fiction series, which to date has seen the republication of five venerable titles: Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895), William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland (1908), Gertrude Barrows Bennett’s Claimed! (1920), Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries and a collection, Weird Fiction: An Anthology (2024).  Well, I assume Weird Fiction: An Anthology is a new collection, but it consists of some venerable short stories.

 

I’d already read those first two novels and most of the tales in the anthology, whose line-up includes such well-kent scribblers as Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, W.W. Jacobs, May Sinclair, M.R. James and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  But I hadn’t read the Bennett and Blackwood books.  Recently, their striking covers – illustrated in pastel colours, especially pink – caught my eye while I was in a Singaporean bookshop I frequent, Kinokuniya Books in Orchard Road’s Takashimaya Shopping Centre, and I wasted no time in buying them.

 

Here are my thoughts on the volume by Algernon Blackwood.  I’ll write about the Gertrude Barrows Bennet one later.

 

Ancient Sorceries contains five stories, the title one plus A Psychical Invasion, The Nemesis of Fire, Secret Worship and A Victim of Higher Space.  All feature Dr John Silence, described in the book’s blurb as “Physician Extraordinary… the greatest occult detective of the age.”  Yes, Silence is what in modern parlance we’d call a ‘paranormal investigator’ – but when the paranormal manifests itself in malevolent forms, he also battles against it.

 

Series of stories about occult detectives have been common in horror fiction… and I have to say I have a problem with them.  That problem is one of believability.  You can swallow the notion of the hero having one dramatic encounter with the supernatural in one story, maybe even of them having a second dramatic encounter with it in a second story.  But when that hero deals in story after story with supernatural jiggery-pokery, cropping up in different forms – ghosts, werewolves, poltergeists, whatever – it becomes almost impossible to take seriously.  That’s especially so when you consider how most human beings go through their lives with no contact at all with what might be defined as ‘occult’ or ‘paranormal’.  (During my many years on the planet, I’ve had one strange experience, lasting all of half-a-minute, which I couldn’t explain and which, if I was so inclined, I could attribute to the supernatural.)  This means a writer of such tales has to show a great deal of skill in making them seem plausible.

 

Also implausible is the idea that the occult detective, a mortal human being, can constantly take on dark forces of immense, unnatural power and triumph over them.  The success rate for the heroes of these stories suggests that the forces of darkness are, in reality, pretty weak sauce.

 

The afore-mentioned William Hope Hodgson wrote stories about an occult detective called Carnacki the Ghost Finder, first published as a collection in 1913.  He managed, I feel, to get away with it.  Hope Hodgson helped make his tales more believable by interspersing the ones where the threat was genuinely supernatural with ones where, Scooby Doo-style, it turned out to be a hoax.  Also, his usual narrative device – Carnacki told each story to a group of mates with whom he’d just had dinner – helped too, since it’s possible Carnacki could be exaggerating what happened or even just making it up.

 

On the other hand, I’ve read a few stories that the prolific pulp writer Seabury Quinn wrote about a French occult detective called Jules de Grandin and found them bloody awful.  (It doesn’t help that de Grandin’s patois – “Sang du diable…!  Behold what is there, my friend…  Parbleu, he was caduo – mad as a hatter, this one, or I am much mistaken!” – is closer to Inspector Clouseau than Hercule Poirot.)

 

Usually, the best I can hope for is to regard the stories as out-and-out fantasies – which is the case with Manley Wade Wellman’s stories of Silver John, set in the Appalachian Mountains.  Or as ‘silly but fun’ – the reaction I had to Alice and Claude Askew’s stories about Aylmer Vance (‘Ghost-seer’).  But in no way do I find them scary.

 

Blackwood, in his day a celebrated author, journalist, broadcaster and, generally, someone who ‘lived the life’ – his CV includes stints as a farmer, hotelier, barman, model, secretary, businessman and violin teacher and he was also a Theosophist and eager outdoorsman – has a big reputation as a writer of chilling stories.  The literary critic S.T. Joshi lauded his fiction as “more consistently meritorious than any weird writer’s except Dunsany’s”, and anything by him I’ve read before now I’ve found impressive.  I was thus looking forward to seeing how he would tackle this subgenre and its believability issue.

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Outlook

 

In fact, I’m afraid the trouble with a couple of the stories in Ancient Stories is that Blackwood is so keen to make them appear believable that he over-compensates.  They end up with more prose in them is necessary.  They would have been more digestible if they’d been a dozen pages shorter.

 

The title story, Ancient Sorceries, is a case in point. Dr John Silence doesn’t feature much in this one.  He just interviews its main character, Arthur Vezin, about some strange experiences and passes comment at the end.  Vezin was travelling by train across northern France when, impulsively, he decided to get off at a remote station, stay in the locality for the night and resume his journey the next day.  (A quiet sort, Vezin had been put off his train journey by the unwelcome presence of many noisy tourists, mainly ‘unredeemed holiday English’.)  Vezin ended up staying in a little town that seemed normal on the surface but, of course, had weird things going on underneath.  A mysterious mental torpor began to affect him.  Rather than get the next day’s train, he remained in the town longer and longer and became increasingly listless:

 

“It was, I think on the fifth day – though in his detail his story sometimes varied – that he made a definite discovery, which increased his alarm and brought him up to a rather sharp climax…  At the best of times he was never very positive, always negative rather, compliant and acquiescent; yet, when necessity arose, he was capable of reasonably vigorous action and could take a strongish decision.  The discovery he now made that brought him up with such a sharp turn was that this power had positively dwindled to nothing.  He found it impossible to make up his mind…”

 

Alas, Blackwood’s description of Vezin’s gradual – very gradual – descent into this torpor goes on for too long.  He’s trying to make it sound realistic and credible, but as you read it over several pages, you feel a similar torpor taking possession of your senses.  Things admittedly liven up near the end, but the climax feels like it’s been a long time coming.

 

Also guilty of this is The Nemesis of Fire, whose action takes place on a remote English country estate, involves artefacts from ancient Egypt and features a fearsome fiery phenomenon that causes things, and people, to burst into flames.  This is narrated by one of Silence’s associates and immediately we’re reminded of a Sherlock Holmes story being told by Holmes’ loyal sidekick, Dr Watson.

 

This time, too much prose is spent describing, and adulating, Silence’s character.  For example: “His voice had that quiet mastery in it which leads men to face death with a sort of happiness and pride.  I would have followed him anywhere at that moment.  At the same time his words conveyed a sense of dread seriousness.  I caught the thrill of his confidence; but also, in this broad light of day, I felt the measure of alarm that lay behind.”  Yes, this helps us believe Silence is a remarkable man, capable of taking on and defeating supernatural horrors.  But again, it goes on too long.  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made it plain that Watson greatly admired Holmes, but did so economically and didn’t let it get in the way of the actual story.

 

That said, the other three tales in this volume are fine.  The Psychical Invasion is a sturdy haunted-house story that benefits from a novel idea.  Rather than bring a team of ghost-hunters with him into the house, Silence comes accompanied by a cat and dog – working on the belief that animals are more sensitive to the paranormal than humans.

 

Secret Worship is about a man returning to a monastic school in the mountains of southern Germany where he studied as a child – again, this is a ‘Silence-lite’ entry where the detective remains in the background most of the time – and is increasingly disturbed by the hospitality he gets from the brothers / teachers there.  I thought it was the strongest story of the lot, a masterpiece of mounting unease.

 

The last tale, A Victim of Higher Space, is agreeably wonky and I wonder if a young Ian McEwan read it prior to writing his short story Solid Geometry, which featured in his early collection First Love, Last Rites (1975).

 

One thing that’s slightly annoying about this book is its incompleteness.  For some reason it omits a sixth Silence story, The Camp of God.  This is included in an earlier collection, The Complete John Silence Stories (2011), which comes with an introduction by S.T. Joshi.  I can’t understand how a publishing company as mighty as Penguin allowed that sixth instalment to slip through the net.

 

© Dover Publications

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The big Mc

 

From wikipedia.org / © Nonsenseferret

 

It’s exactly a decade since the Scottish writer, poet and columnist William McIlvanney passed away on December 5th, 2015.  Here’s something to mark this melancholy anniversary.

 

For myself and many book-lovers in Scotland in the 1980s, William McIlvanney was both a source of pride and exasperation.  Pride that modern Scottish literature was capable of producing someone as good as he was; but exasperation that the British literary establishment seemed to have little interest in him or his peers (like Alasdair Gray and James Kelman) north of the border.  On their radar, Scottish writers didn’t make much of a blip.

 

Back then, the clique of authors, critics and academics who, through Britain’s highbrow media outlets, decided what was fashionable were a privileged Oxford / Cambridge-educated bunch who lived in London and seemingly lived up their own arses too.  I always find it telling that in 1984, when things felt at their very worst, the Booker Prize – the flagship award for the UK literary establishment – managed to have on its short-list five books that had novelists, biographers, literary critics and literary lecturers as their main characters.  The only shortlisted book that was about people who didn’t make a living out of literature (you know, like 99.999% of the human population) was J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun.  And it didn’t win, though it should have.

 

The novel that helped put McIlvanney on the map was 1975’s Docherty, which was about a tough west-of-Scotland miner and his family trying to cope with everything that the early decades of the 20th century threw at them.  Thus, McIlvanney was never going to ingratiate himself with the ‘in’ crowd by writing about writers, biographers, critics or lecturers either.

 

I’d read McIlvanney’s 1977 novel Laidlaw as a teenager – more about that in a minute – but it wasn’t until I was at college that one of my tutors (Isobel Murray) urged me to read a book of his that’d just been published, 1986’s The Big Man.  I’m glad I listened to her because The Big Man proved to be one of my favourite books of the 1980s.  It features another miner, called Dan Scoular.  He’s an ex-miner, actually, because this is the post-miners’-strike 1980s, Scoular has lost his job and he and his family are struggling to make ends meet.  The imposing Scoular happens to be good at fighting, though it’s a side of him that he’s suppressed for a long time.  Then he’s approached by a Glaswegian gangster who offers to pay him a small fortune if he takes part in an illegal bare-knuckle fight.  Thus, Scoular faces a dilemma – does he do something that he finds abhorrent if it saves him and his loved ones from penury?  Inevitably, after he ignores his better instincts and agrees to the proposal, he finds out that there are more complicated and even nastier things going on in the background.

 

© Hodder and Stoughton

 

The Big Man is the most cinematic of McIlvanney’s books and it was no surprise that it was filmed, in 1990, by David Leland.  The film gets some things right.  The villains, played by Ian Bannen and Maurice Roëves, are good.  However, it gets a lot wrong, including a Hollywood-esque, feel-good ending far removed from the bleak, ambiguous note with which McIlvanney closes the book.  Another problem is that, at the time, there wasn’t a bankable-enough Scottish star for the filmmakers to cast in the role of Scoular.  So they had to search around and the next best thing they could find was a Northern Irishman, Liam Neeson.

 

Now I like Neeson, but every time in The Big Man that he opens his mouth and those dulcet County Antrim tones of his emerge, the sense that you’re in a hard-pressed mining town in the West of Scotland goes out of the window.  It’s a pity that the film wasn’t made during the years since, when some bankable Scottish actors have come to prominence (though it might be difficult to find one with the necessary, hulking physicality that Neeson had).  Incidentally, The Big Man – a movie about Scottish ex-mining communities and ruthless Glasgow criminals – also has Hugh Grant in its cast.  I’ll give you all a minute to pick your jaws up off the floor.

 

A later novel by McIlvanney, 1996’s The Kiln, received a lot of acclaim.  It even had a recommendation on its cover from Sean Connery.  I’ve just praised McIlvanney for not writing books about writers, but The Kiln actually has a writer as its central character, one in the throes of a mid-life crisis.  However, the novel is more a coming-of-age novel because its hero spends much of it looking back on his working-class youth, especially on a period he spent toiling in a local brickworks.

 

When The Kiln appeared, it seemed to cement – an appropriate verb for a book about bricks – McIlvanney’s status as a major figure in Scottish letters.  But it seemed the last time that he commanded such attention.  Recently, I was thinking about The Kiln and I remembered reading it while I was making a long-distance bus trip during the only occasion I was in Australia – which was in 1997, almost thirty years ago and almost twenty years before McIlvanney’s death.  What on earth happened to him after that?  I’d come across an occasional interview with him or article by him in the Scottish press, but that was about it.  In 2006 he published one more novel, Weekend, though it arrived with little fanfare – the antithesis of the reception The Kiln got a decade earlier.

 

© Hodder and Stoughton

 

Though as far as mainstream literature was concerned McIlvanney seemed to disappear from view after The Kiln, he did in recent years win belated acknowledgement for his work as a crime writer – specifically, for his 1977 novel Laidlaw, which was republished in 2013, and its sequels The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) and Strange Loyalties (1991).  (The latter book also serves as a grim semi-sequel to The Big Man.)  All are about a tough but intellectual and philosophical Glasgow detective called Jack Laidlaw.  Since then, crime novels set in Scotland have sold by the barrow-load and Scottish crime writers like Iain Rankin, Val McDiarmid, Denise Mina, Christopher Brookmyre and Stuart MacBride have enjoyed lucrative careers, so McIlvanney can be seen as the man who started it all.  His Jack Laidlaw was the prototype for Inspector Rebus and the rest.  In effect, McIlvanney created ‘Tartan Noir’.

 

Even when I read Laidlaw at a young age, I found it a bit uneven (as prototypes usually are), its prose shifting slightly uncomfortably between Glasgow-speak and Raymond Chandler-isms.  It wasn’t helped by the way it was marketed, either – “Turn down a Glaswegian when he offers you a drink,” intoned the blurb on the back, “And he’ll break your legs,” which wasn’t what the book was about.  Laidlaw focuses more on psychology than on violence, and I found it disconcerting that in its final pages the hero isn’t rushing to catch the murderer so much as he’s rushing to save the murderer from gangland-backed vigilante justice.  But all power to McIlvanney for inventing what would become Scotland’s biggest literary export.  Iain Rankin, in particular, has always admitted his debt to him.

 

McIlvanney was a political thinker too and during the 1990s – back in those long-ago days when Scotsman Publications produced material that was worth reading – he was a perceptive columnist in the Scotland on Sunday newspaper.  I also remember him delivering a speech in Edinburgh’s Meadows during the March for Scottish Democracy rally held on December 12th, 1992, demanding the creation of a Scottish parliament.  On stage, in front a crowd of 30,000 people, he performed far better than any of the politicians in attendance.  He memorably summed up the case for a parliament saying: “We gather here like refugees in the capital of our own country, wondering what we want to be when we grow up.  Scotland – the oldest teenager amongst nations.”

 

But at the same time he pleaded for racial tolerance.  “Scottishness,” he pointed out, “isn’t some pedigree lineage.  It’s a mongrel tradition.”  I suspect that with McIlvanney’s speech that day began the emphasis on ‘civic nationalism’ that Scottish nationalists – at least, the decent, mainstream ones, not the fringe, far-right heidbangers – have been at pains to cultivate ever since.

 

Finally, William McIlvanney played an indirect role in the start of my writing career.  My very first short story to see publication, a slice-of-life piece set on a Scottish farm with the self-explanatory title Lambing Time, appeared in a magazine called Scratchings, then produced annually by Aberdeen University’s Creative Writing Society.  Scratchings had been launched in the early 1980s with the help of a financial contribution from McIlvanney.  At the time he was Aberdeen University’s writer-in-residence and he was approached by two young students who “wanted to borrow 40 pounds to start a poetry magazine.  Would he be able to lend them the money?”  He did, Scratchings was born, and it provided a home for Lambing Time a few years later.

 

Incidentally, the two students who successfully tapped McIlvanney for 40 pounds were Dundonian Kenny Farquharson, now a columnist with the Times newspaper; and Invernessian Alison Smith, now better known as the novelist Ali Smith, who’s been shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize – yes, the award whose shortlist bugged me so much back in 1984.

 

© Hodder and Stoughton

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The best of the Bonds (Part 2)

 

© Penguin Books

 

Continuing my look at On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, both the best James Bond novel (published in 1963) and best Bond film (released in 1969).  We rejoin the book and film at the moment in their plots when Bond attempts to infiltrate the headquarters of his arch-enemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld, high in the Swiss Alps…

 

Bond duly goes to the Piz Gloria, pretending to be Sir Hilary Bray – and here the film glaringly contradicts the continuity established by its predecessor.  At the climax of You Only Live Twice-the-movie Bond and Blofeld have a face-to-face confrontation, but in OHMSS Blofeld doesn’t recognise Bond at all.  Actually, Bond might be forgiven for not recognising Blofeld either, for the filmmakers decided to recast the role of Blofeld too.  Not only do we have Sean Connery replaced by George Lazenby in OHMSS, but we have the goblin-like Donald Pleasence replaced by the bigger and more physical Telly Savalas.  To be honest, Savalas is a shade too thuggish-looking for the role, but he’s believable when doing the strenuous things required by the script, such as leading a group on skis in pursuit of Bond and wrestling with him during a breakneck bobsleigh ride.  Much as I like Donald Pleasence, I couldn’t imagine the sinister English character actor bouncing about on a bobsleigh.

 

What’s officially going on in Blofeld’s clinic, Bond learns, is that a group of young female patients are receiving treatment for food allergies.  What’s unofficially happening is that Blofeld is brainwashing them whilst simultaneously developing various destructive bacteriological agents in his laboratories.  The brainwashed ladies are to become his ‘angels of death’ and, when they return home, they’ll release those agents to decimate whole species of livestock and crops.  Blofeld finds out who Bond really is but the secret agent manages to grab a pair of skis and stages an epic night-time escape from Piz Gloria.  Blofeld’s henchmen pursue, but Tracy turns up in time to rescue him.  Afterwards, he links up with Draco again and persuades him to launch an audacious attack on Piz Gloria using helicopters and his Unione Corse men.  Blofeld’s plans go up in smoke, although Blofeld himself escapes – despite Bond’s best efforts – using a bobsleigh.  Mission accomplished, Bond proceeds to marry Tracy, and things hurry to their tragic conclusion with Blofeld making an unexpected appearance during their honeymoon.

 

Both the book and film proceed along similar lines here, although it’s interesting to see how certain aspects of the 1969 film are expanded from what Fleming put in his 1963 book.  In 1963, Blofeld was content to wage bacteriological warfare against Britain and Ireland, devastating their wheat, chickens, beef, potatoes, etc.  By 1969, Blofeld has widened his horizons – it’s the whole world’s food supply he wants to decimate.  Accordingly, the ‘angels of death’ undergo an upgrade too.  In the novel they’re a prim, middle-class, goody-two-shoes bunch, all from the British Isles.  Rather disdainfully, Bond reflects: “The girls all seemed to share a certain basic girl guidish simplicity of manners and language, the sort of girls who, in an English pub, you would find sitting demurely with a boyfriend sipping a Babysham, puffing rather clumsily at a cigarette and occasionally saying, ‘Pardon’.  Good girls who, if you made a pass at them, would say, ‘Please don’t spoil it all’, ‘Men only want one thing’, or, huffily, ‘Please take your hand away’.”  One of them even takes umbrage when Bond jokingly compares them to the girls in the St Trinian’s films: “Those awful girls!  How could you ever say such a thing!”

 

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

 

In the film, the angels come from all over the world and they’re way more glamorous.  Indeed, a good number of the actresses went on to brighten up my adolescence during the 1970s with appearances in various cult films and TV shows.  There’s Angela Scoular, who also starred in an ‘unofficial’ Bond movie, the dreadful, zany, swinging-1960s comedy Casino Royale (1967); Catherine Schell, who’d be a regular in Gerry Anderson’s sci-fi series Space: 1999 (1975-77); Norwegian actress Julie Ege, who appeared in the kung-fu horror movie Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires (1974), a co-production between legendary Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers and legendary British studio Hammer Films; Jenny Hanley and Anouska Hempel, both of whom appeared in Hammer’s ultra-tacky Scars of Dracula (1970); and the impeccable Joanna Lumley.  In the late 1970s, of course, Lumley would play Purdey in the revival of The Avengers (1961-69), The New Avengers (1976-77).  In fact, you could argue that OHMSS-the-move features three Avengers actresses.  In addition to Diana Rigg and Joanna Lumley, the face of Honor Blackman – who played Cathy Gale in The Avengers and Pussy Galore in 1964’s Goldfinger – is shown fleetingly during the credits sequence.

 

Nobly, mindful of Bond’s relationship with Tracy, Fleming has his hero seduce just one of the girls – something he does purely in the line of duty.  The filmmakers are less inhibited and for a little while on Piz Gloria Lazenby behaves like a fox in a chicken coup, shagging left, right and centre.  The movie also plays up the humour of the situation.  Sir Hilary Bray is supposed to be Scottish, so Bond dons full Highland dress before going to dinner with his hosts and their supposed patients.  Yes, after having a Scotsman play Bond for five films, producers Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman wait until he’s played by an Australian before they pop him into a kilt.  This enables the Angela Scoular character to use her lipstick to write her room number on the inside of Bond’s thigh, under the table, which prompts the following exchange: “Anything the matter, Sir Hilary?” “A momentary stiffness… caused by the altitude, no doubt.”  If the dialogue for this Bond movie sounds sharper than usual, it’s probably because Simon Raven, the famously dissolute English author, was hired to polish it.

 

When Bond escapes from Piz Gloria, Peter Hunt and his crew predictably pump up the action scenes beyond what was in the book, but I’m not complaining.  Even 56 years later, the scenes where Lazenby skis, runs, drives and fights for his life are very impressive and Hunt makes good use of his experience as a film editor – the action has a frenetic quality that, viewed now after the Bourne movies (2002-16), seems far ahead of its time.  Similarly ramped up is the climactic assault on Piz Gloria mounted by Bond, Draco and his gang.  In the book it comes across as a brief ‘smash-and-grab’ raid but in the film it’s a full-on battle, complete with grenades, flame-throwers and flying bottles of acid.  Rarely does the pulse quicken as much as it does here when Monty Berman’s James Bond Theme kicks in in the midst of the mayhem.

 

One change the filmmakers made to the plot that I think improves on the book is Tracy being captured by Blofeld.  In Fleming’s original, after Tracy come to Bond’s aid, she disappears into the background again.  In the movie, Blofeld triggers an avalanche that leaves Tracy unconscious and at his mercy, and Bond missing, presumed dead.  When Bond, who of course isn’t dead at all, goes to Draco for help, the Corsican mafia boss has a very real reason for giving him help – his daughter’s life is at stake.  It also allows Peter Hunt to show Savalas flirting, with an obviously menacing undercurrent, with Rigg at his mountaintop HQ.  Again, I don’t think poor old Donald Pleasance would have done the flirting bit very convincingly.

 

Fleming depicts Bond and Tracy’s wedding as brief and low-key, but again the film makes it a big, opulent affair.  M, Q and Miss Moneypenny (who’s tearful, for obvious reasons) are in attendance, as are Draco’s henchmen, many of whom spent the early part of the film getting the shit beaten of them by Bond.  However, both the book and the film converge for the ending, which is as melancholy and understated as it is shocking.  There hasn’t ever been an ending to a Bond film like this one – well, not until 2021’s No Time to Die.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

Indeed, it’s annoying that the filmmakers saw fit to follow this with 1971’s Diamonds are Forever, which gets Bond’s revenge on Blofeld out of the way in the first ten minutes, and then becomes a big, lazy, jokey and ludicrous Bond epic that would be the blueprint for Bond films later in the 1970s after Roger Moore had inherited the role.  For a proper, spiritual sequel to OHMSS, I think you have to look to the gritty Timothy Dalton Bond movie Licensed to Kill in 1989.

 

OHMSS-the-film received some unfavourable reviews and made less money than its predecessors, and for years it was regarded as the runt of the litter of the 1960s Bond-films.  Much of the animosity towards the film was because George Lazenby played Bond in it for the first and only time.  (By Diamonds are Forever, Broccoli had managed to patch things up with the truculent Connery and got him back into the role.)  Lazenby certainly isn’t a great actor, but I would argue that because this is a different sort of Bond movie, one where its hero appears vulnerable and wounded, the awkward and uncertain Lazenby actually fits the film.  He’s believable in terms of what the character has to endure.  I couldn’t imagine ‘Big Sean’ breenging through the movie in his usual manner and having the same emotional impact.

 

Happily, though, OHMSS has been re-evaluated and today is regarded as one of the best of the series.  In fact, when 007 Magazine ran a poll in 2012, it was voted the greatest James Bond film ever.  Cubby Broccoli’s daughter Barbara and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson, who were running the Bond franchise in 2021, were so aware of OHMSS’s improved reputation that they tried grafting bits of it onto No Time to Die.  Both films share, for example, a figure grasping a trident in their credits sequences, Louis Armstrong singing We Have All the Time in the World on their soundtracks and, obviously, downbeat endings.  Though I feel No Time to Die’s nods to OHMSS only highlight the fact that it’s the lesser of the two movies.

 

A happier tribute to OHMSS occurs in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010).  When Leonardo DiCaprio, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy and co. hit the ‘third level’ and find themselves on a snowy mountaintop battling opponents on skis, it’s obvious what film is being referenced.  Indeed, Nolan has more-or-less said that OHMSS is his favourite Bond movie.  (He’s also named Dalton as his favourite Bond actor, so he’s clearly a 007 fan after my own heart.)

 

And much of the film’s greatness is due to the fact that, no matter what innovations were brought to the table by the talented Peter Hunt and his crew, it owes a lot to the original Ian Fleming novel – which, for me at least, is the best of the Bond books too.

 

From wikipedia.org / © ETH-Bibliothek

Posted on

The best of the Bonds (Part 1)

 

© Jonathan Cape

 

Today, I’ve learned, is James Bond Day – even though it’s a bit hard to celebrate the occasion when (1) the franchise now belongs to Jeff Bezos, who, with his vast fortune, private space programme and bald head, would make a good Bond villain, and (2) we currently have no idea who the next James Bond will be.

 

However, to celebrate the occasion, here is the first half of a lengthy treatise I’ve written about On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: both the 1963 novel by Ian Fleming, which I think is possibly the best of the books, and the 1969 movie, which I think is definitely the best of the films.  For simplicity’s sake, I’ll abbreviate the title to OHMSS.  Oh, and if you aren’t familiar with the storylines of the book and film, be warned that his entry will be chock-full of spoilers.

 

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service was the tenth of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels.  He wrote it in early 1962 at Goldeneye, his estate in Jamaica.  Nearby, meanwhile, Jamaican locations were being used for the filming of the very first James Bond film, Dr No.  Thus, James Bond was undergoing a metamorphosis – from a literary phenomenon into something bigger, a franchise incorporating large-scale moviemaking and merchandising and whose central character would soon be an icon of 1960s pop culture.  Though the novels were refined examples of pulp fiction, Fleming – who was methodical about his research – at least tried to give them a veneer of believability.  With each successive film, however, Bond seemed to drift further from the realm of possibility and into that of outright fantasy.

 

OHMSS-the-novel feels different from its literary predecessors, but not because Fleming tries to take it in the direction the films were going.  He does the opposite.  It makes Bond more believable as a character, not less.  It’s ostensibly about the first face-to-face encounter between Bond and his archenemy Ernst Stavros Blofeld, who is head of the secretive and deadly crime syndicate SPECTRE.  But OHMSS also explores Bond’s emotional side and highlights his vulnerability.

 

Key to this is OHMSS’s sub-plot about the romance between Bond and Contessa Theresa ‘Tracy’ di Vicenzo, a woman whose father, Marc-Ange Draco, runs a crime syndicate too, the Unione Corse of Corsica.  At the novel’s end, with Blofeld seemingly vanquished, Bond and Tracy get married – only for Blofeld to suddenly reappear in the final pages, spray their bridal car with bullets, kill Tracy and leave Bond as a babbling wreck.  As a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement noted at the time, this Bond was “somehow gentler, more sentimental, less dirty.”

 

When Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman got around to filming OHMSS six years later, five Bond books had been turned into movies and, already, the continuities of the books and films were hopelessly at odds.  In the books, Blofeld had made a ‘backstage’ appearance in OHMSS’s immediate predecessor, Thunderball.  In OHMSS’s successor, You Only Live Twice, Bond and he have a second and final meeting.  It’s the grim tale of the traumatised Bond hunting down and getting his revenge on Blofeld, much of it taking place on a bizarre ‘island of death’ off the Japanese mainland, whose deadly fauna and volcanic discharges attract a steady stream of visitors wanting to commit suicide.

 

In the Bond movie-world, though, Blofeld had featured in the backgrounds of From Russia with Love (1963) and Thunderball (1966) and then played a leading role in the film immediately before OHMSS, 1967’s You Only Live Twice – yes, the title that came after it in the book series.  As a result, there isn’t much grimness in You Only Live Twice-the-movie.  It’s a jolly science-fictional romp involving stolen spaceships, a secret base disguised as a Japanese volcano and Donald Pleasence playing Blofeld with a white jumpsuit, severe facial scar and fluffy white cat.  The film is a cartoonish thing compared with the book because, as far as the films are concerned, the murder of Bond’s wife hasn’t happened yet.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

When OHMSS began filming, the filmmakers – Broccoli and Saltzman, scriptwriter Richard Maibaum and director Peter Hunt, who’d worked as a film editor and second-unit director on the previous five movies – made the brave decision to follow Fleming’s book closely, right up to the tragic denouement.  So keen was Hunt to be faithful to the book that supposedly he carried a copy of it with him around the set, its pages marked with his own annotations.

 

At the start of OHMSS-the-book, it seems like business as usual for Bond.  As with the previous novels, he’s a sophisticated, money-is-no-object consumer of the sort of food, drink, cigars, clothes and cars that most of Fleming’s post-war, austerity-Britain readers could only dream about.  Although Fleming writes early on that “James Bond was not a gourmet.  In England he lived on grilled soles, oeufs cocotte and cold roast beef with potato salad,” a page later we hear him bitching about the quality of a meal he’s just had in a French eatery, about “…the fly-walk of the Paté Maison (sent back for a new slice) and a Poularde à la crème that was the only genuine antique in the place.  Bond had moodily washed down this sleazy provender with a bottle of instant Pouilly Fuissé and was finally insulted the next morning by a bill for the meal in excess of five pounds.”

 

However, the tone soon changes.  Bond is in France at the tail end of a mission to locate Blofeld, an interminable and fruitless mission that’s pissed him off to the point where he’s ready to hand in his resignation to M.  Then he crosses paths with the troubled but imperious Tracy.  In a pricey hotel-cum-casino she commands him: “Take off those clothes.  Make love to me.  You are handsome and strong.  I want to remember what it can be like.  Do anything you like.  And tell me what you like and what you would like from me.  Be rough with me.  Treat me like the lowest whore in creation.  Forget everything else.  No questions.  Take me.”

 

Later, on the coast, Bond intervenes to prevent Tracy from committing suicide and the two of them fall into the clutches of some heavies who turn out to be working for Tracy’s father, Draco, godfather of the Unione Corse.  Draco is delighted with Bond taking a protective interest in his daughter and urges him to marry her – offering a one-million-pound dowry as a sweetener.  Bond declines the marriage offer but agrees to continue romancing Tracy, if it’ll help her mental state.  He also manages to coax some information out of his would-be father-in-law regarding Blofeld’s whereabouts.  The super-villain, it transpires, is hiding in Switzerland.

 

The same events occur in the film version, although in a different order.  First, Bond saves Tracy from drowning herself, then he gets to know her intimately.  Also, the action takes place not in France, but in Portugal – Peter Hunt felt that by this time cinemagoers were overly familiar with the French coast.  Just before the credits kick in (and we get to hear John Barry’s instrumental OHMSS theme, regarded by many as the best Bond tune of the lot), there’s also some breaking of the fourth wall as Bond turns towards the camera and quips, “This never happened to the other fellow.”  For yes, this movie features a brand new James Bond.  Gone is the slurring Edinburgh brogue, hairy Caledonian brawn and insouciant Scottish scowl of Sean Connery – who by then, apparently, couldn’t even bring himself to exchange words with Cubby Broccoli – and in his place is the inexperienced Australian actor George Lazenby.

 

Actually, such a novice was Lazenby at the time that the only thing he was known for was appearing in a TV commercial for Fry’s Chocolate Cream.  I’ve heard a story that Broccoli saw him a barber’s shop, liked the ‘cut of his jib’ and picked him on the spot.  However, interviewed on the making-of documentary that accompanies my DVD copy of OHMSS, Lazenby claims that he already had an audition for Bond lined up.  He went to that barber’s because he knew that Connery had used it in the past and he thought it was his best bet for getting a ‘Bondian’ haircut.  The establishment was used by other people associated with the Bond movies and Broccoli happened to be there when Lazenby walked in.

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists

 

In contrast with the inexperienced Lazenby, the actress playing Tracy in the movie was already a star – Diana Rigg, who’d made a name for herself playing Emma Peel in the gloriously baroque 1960s TV show The Avengers (1961-69).  Fascinatingly, for a film series that’s often accused of de-humanising the books and emphasising big, dumb spectacle at the expense of characterisation, Tracy is a more fleshed-out character in the film than in Fleming’s novel.  She’s given more to do and, played by Rigg, she has a sparkle that’s missing in the rather aloof, ambiguous character that Fleming sketches.  Tales about how Lazenby and Rigg didn’t get on during the shoot are legion – most notably about Rigg munching garlic prior to the filming of scenes where Bond and Tracy kiss.  Director Hunt has disputed these claims, although I’ve seen at least one interview with Rigg where her comments about Lazenby are uncomplimentary.

 

Both the book and film show Bond getting an unexpected lead about where to find Blofeld in Switzerland – the College of Arms in London has had dealings with his adversary, who wants them to prove he is heir to the aristocratic title of ‘Compte Balthazar de Bleuchamp’.  This allows Bond to adopt the guise of Sir Hilary Bray, a College of Arms genealogist, and travel to Blofeld’s hideout, a mysterious medical clinic perched on top of the Piz Gloria in the Swiss Alps, where he promises to do some research in support of Blofeld’s claim to the title.

 

In the novel Fleming devotes a lot of time to the College of Arms, whose work clearly interests him.  It also allows him to explore the theme of snobbery.  As Sable Basilisk, a genealogy expert interviewed by Bond, comments: “I’ve seen hundreds of smart people from the City, industry, politics – famous people I’ve been quite frightened to meet when they walked into the room.  But when it comes to snobbery, to buying respectability so to speak, whether it’s the title they’re going to choose or just a coat of arms to hang over their fireplaces in Surbiton, they dwindle and dwindle in front of you… until they’re no more than homunculi.”  It’s satisfying that Blofeld’s snobbery is the weakness that allows Bond to ensnare him.  Mind you, some would say this is rich coming from Fleming.  His Bond novels, with their suave, sophisticated, well-travelled and well-heeled hero, have often been accused of snobbery themselves.

 

It’s also during this stage of the book we learn about Bond’s family.  For example, he’s informed by the College of Arms that his family motto – and coincidentally a title for a Pierce Brosnan Bond movie 30 year later – is ‘The world is not enough’, of which he says, “It is an excellent motto which I shall certainly adopt.”  And we learn that his father was a Scotsman who “came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe” (a detail honoured by the 2012 Daniel Craig Bond movie Skyfall), while his mother was Swiss.

 

Not that Fleming is complimentary about his parents’ nationalities.  Another genealogist, Griffin Or, says of the Scots in olden times: “In those days, I am forced to admit that our cousins across the border were little more than savages…  Very pleasant savages, of course, very brave and all that…  More useful with the sword than with the pen.”  Of his mum’s homeland, meanwhile, Bond snorts, ”(m)oney is the religion of Switzerland.”  M replies to this: “I don’t need a lecture on the qualities of the Swiss, thank you, 007.  At least they keep their trains clean and cope with the beatnik problem…”  (If M reckoned there was a problem with the beatniks, God knows how he felt in the late 1960s when the hippies appeared.)

 

Fleming gave Bond a partly Scottish parentage because, it’s said, he was impressed with the job Connery did of portraying his super-spy when filming of Dr No took place in Jamaica in 1962.  Dr No-the-film’s influence is detectable elsewhere.  In Blofeld’s Alpine base, which in the book is a ski resort as well as a clinic – in the film it’s only the latter – a character points out to Bond a certain lady among the fashionable skiers: “And that beautiful girl with the long fair hair at the big table, that is Ursula Andress, the film star.”  Andress, of course, was Connery’s co-star in Dr No and has a place in cinematic history as the first major Bond girl.

 

To be continued…

 

© Eon Productions / United Artists