The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

Last of the John le Carré novels on my list, and quite possibly the last book review posting of 2007. Many thanks for those of you who’ve followed along thus far — I hope to have more interesting books (and other postings) available in 2008!

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

The story opens on a bleak picture of the state of British intelligence in Germany in the early 1960s, a time of heightened intrigue and conflict between rival security services and the agents who operate in the crevices between East and West. Alec Leamas, former head of British intelligence operations in West Berlin, has seen his entire network of East German agents eliminated in a very short space of time by East Germany’s top spymaster, Hans-Dieter Mundt. Leamas is called home (seemingly in disgrace) to England, and given a new assignment to engineer the downfall of his East Berlin counterpart — the man who had essentially destroyed Leamas’s career. To do so, Leamas must give up his old life and go deep undercover, working his way down in life in a carefully crafted spiral of alcoholism and decline until he can offer himself as a plausible source of information for the East Germans. If he can plant false information that frames Mundt as a British double agent, Mundt will be executed, and Leamas will be allowed to end his working life in espionage and ‘come in from the cold’, or so he hopes. But matters are rarely so simple in the world of Cold War espionage, and Leamas will soon learn that the value of his own life is far more negotiable than he had ever imagined — particularly when the price is being set by his masters at home.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the third book that John le Carré wrote, and many fans of espionage fiction regard it as one of the all-time best espionage novels ever written. Le Carré’s depiction of a down-at-heel, unglamorous, and morally ambigious world of false double agents and planted information was rather revolutionary for its time, not least because it presented Western intelligence services as being no more noble or honourable than their communist counterparts. Some critics initially condemned the novel’s sense of defeatism and its cynical examination of Western values. Yet the very harshness of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has only contributed to its lasting appeal, where other flashier depictions of high Cold War spy games seem childish or outdated or hopelessly naive from a twenty-first century perspective. The book is a truly fine example of its genre, setting a standard to which other espionage novellists have attempted to aspire ever since it first came out in 1963.

The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

Picking through the other John le Carré books I’ve read before, I came across this one — one I didn’t care as much for as some of the others I’ve read. I’ve one more John le Carré book in the queue, and that’ll go up over the weekend.

The Tailor of Panama by John le Carré

The title character of The Tailor of Panama is the clever and industrious Harry Pendel, the expatriate British proprietor of Pendel and Braithwaite Ltd (formerly of Savile Row, now of Panama). Pendel counts any number of rich and influential members of Central American society amongst his honoured clients, and his wife works in close contact with a number of the extremely influential individuals who are working to engineer the transition of the Canal from American to Panamanian hands in a few years’ time. But (because this is a le Carré novel) Pendel has any number of secrets he is willing to go to great lengths to conceal from his wife and his family — and the arrival of Andrew Osnard, a man with some unspecified connection to the British Embassy in Panama, threatens to ruin the comfortable life that Pendel has built as tailor to the well connected. So when Osnard asks Pendel to report the idle chatter and gossip he hears from his clientele, Pendel responds with an enthusiasm that is not merely borne of desperation. Indeed, as he begins to embrace his secret life as a collector of information, he becomes increasingly enthusiastic about his work, because sometimes it is easier to start a rumour than merely to report one.

I have never seen the film that was made of this book, but I was interested to see how John le Carré would craft a novel that wasn’t about ‘them wicked Russians’. And I have to say that I think I prefer the wicked Russians, when all is said and done. The substitute for the Soviet Union is a mish-mash of Highly Influential Shadowy Persons, arms dealers and media people and the like, who don’t seem to do much of anything except sit around, drink expensive wine, and conspire for the sake of conspiracy on a level that crosses the border of implausible about two-thirds of the way through the book. Everyone seems to be out to cheat or swindle or sleep with the spouse/girlfriend of everyone else, and the majority of women in the book seem to be nigh incapable of thinking about anything that isn’t in some way related to sex. (That last point is something of a trend that I’ve noticed in most of the le Carré books I’ve read.) Truthfully, that sort of intrigue just isn’t to my taste. The Tailor of Panama was published in 1996, so le Carré also paints a depressing portrait of a Conservative Government on its last legs and a British intelligence service that is so drunk on delusions of post-Cold War grandeur that it swallows Pendel’s fantastic tales whole and begs for more. If nothing else, the book shows that John le Carré is capable of writing espionage thrillers that exist outside the Cold War milieu…and yet making that transition requires an equivalent shift in mentality that isn’t always easy to achieve 100 percent of the time.

A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

Another John le Carré for today’s book review — I’ve one or two more to post, and I’ll have them both up before the end of the week.

A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

Le Carré’s books are as a rule very psychological in tone, exploring the nature of espionage from a deeply personal perspective. The questions he poses his stories are the sort that spies and spy-masters have asked themselves ever since espionage first proved its worth in warfare: what might make someone want to spy? What kinds of espionage would a potential spy be most proficient at? To what extent can a spy conceal his clandestine activities from unfriendly or even friendly eyes? And above all, under what circumstances might a spy be persuaded to spy for the other side? A Perfect Spy takes all of these questions and stuffs them into a storyline that blends history and autobiography in a delicate and complex mix.

The story revolves around Magnus Pym, a high-ranking member of the British diplomatic corps who also happens to be one of the intelligence service’s best field officers. By all appearances, he’s charismatic, well-liked, intelligent and dedicated, a model husband and father and diplomat and field agent. But Magnus has an incredibly convoluted past, full of closed doors and secret file cabinets into which he has compartmentalised his life. And this past has not only made him into a superlative agent for British intelligence, but it also has made him into an incredibly effective double agent for the Czech intelligence service. A Perfect Spy delves deep into that past and how it has played out into the present day…where Pym is on the run from both of his political masters, and preparing for the moment when one or the other of them catches up to him at last.

It’s another massive, brain-bending book from Le Carré, clocking in at nearly 700 pages in my paperback edition and yet uniformly gripping all the way through. So much of the book is told from a quasi-narrative viewpoint, where Pym ‘tells’ his son (or his wife, or his old boss) the details of his childhood and youth in order to explain why he is the man he has become — and while that narrative can be a little hard to follow at times it does help you feel as if you’re fallen right into Pym’s head and are accompanying him on his final journey. Again, as with most of Le Carré’s works, there’s something careful and precise about his writing that gives me the feeling of reading a book written in translation. I must say, though, that this book isn’t a high Cold War book like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, or even a book about the trials and tribuations of British intelligence as the Smiley trilogy was. It’s a story about a deeply confused man — or rather, a boy whose entire life has been one great big mixed-up complicated game of Let’s Pretend. So if the psychological side of espionage interests you, A Perfect Spy is exactly the sort of book that will let you pick apart an exemplary subject, one Magnus Pym, and come to know him as well as he knows himself. Which is to say, hardly at all.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People by John le Carré

I was going to post these three books in separate reviews, but putting them all together feels like a neater package. I have several other John le Carré book reviews in the queue, so I’ll likely be posting them fairly soon.

On a side note — one thing I’ve always noticed when reading John le Carré’s books is that I often feel as if I happened to be reading a book in translation. There’s a certain carefulness to his word choice, a very deliberate precision that I don’t often detect in books that haven’t been translated from another language. I still don’t quite know what to make of that sensation, but it’s one of the reasons why I truly enjoy reading the le Carré canon.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

‘Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief….’

Although the title of this book comes from the words of a children’s counting rhyme, John le Carré places these simple words at the heart of a darkly sinister tale of high Cold War espionage. The book opens in an already tense atmosphere, an unsettled time for those who work in and for British Intelligence. The high-profile failure (and subsequent exposure) of an important operation in Czechoslovakia has led to a massive shake-up in the service, and those who have managed to keep their jobs want nothing more than to put the failure behind them. But one of the most senior Intelligence officers, who had lost his place and was forced into ‘early retirement’, believes that there is something far more sinister behind the operation gone wrong. George Smiley, the officer in question, believes that there is a traitor concealed somewhere in the highest levels of the service — a Soviet mole who bears the ultimate responsibility for countless betrayed agents and blown operations. Since he has nothing left to lose, Smiley decides to use all of his old contacts and intelligence tricks to unearth the mole…and in the process, he must confront past mistakes and interrogate old rivals and friends, all the while aware that one of those friends might be the traitor he intends to destroy.

John le Carré’s world is really a classic image of the old-school spy novel: more tame than Ian Fleming, more down-to-earth than Tom Clancy, but gripping nonetheless. He deals in all in shades and variations of grey, from the grey skies of London to the grey buildings in Cambridge Circus (the home base of the British Intelligence network) to the grey areas of morality where his characters always seem to dwell. George Smiley, though fantastically clever, is a rather faded character — as if years and years of working on Her Majesty’s Secret Service had washed all the colour out of him. The story is crafted carefully enough to make the reader second-guess most every first impression of the characters as the tale spins itself out and the story become more intricate. The story has a resolution, not a happy ending, but then again a happy ending would likely feel somewhat out of place in le Carré’s world.

The Honourable Schoolboy

In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, George Smiley manages to discover the identity of the Soviet mole who had infiltrated the highest echelons of British intelligence — and also finds out that the man in question had been sleeping with his (Smiley’s, that is) wife. So The Honourable Schoolboy opens onto the essential wreckage of Smiley’s personal and professional life. But Smiley is determined to clear up the mess that has landed in his lap, and so he sets out on the track of his oldest enemy — Karla, his counterpart in Soviet intelligence. His weapon of choice in this round is the Honourable Jerry Westerby, a brilliant but erratic agent who is set on Karla’s trail through Hong Kong and Cambodia against the backdrop of the end of American involvement in Vietnam. By the end of the novel, it might seem as if Smiley and the reader are no closer to Karla than they were before, but the stage is set for the final showdown in the final book of the trilogy.

The Honourable Schoolboy is another of Le Carré’s terrifically convoluted tales of Cold War espionage. The action keeps flashing back and forth from Smiley, stuck in London and trying to hold the fort against the criticisms and attacks from Whitehall and the American ‘cousins’, to Westerby, running all over the Far East and delving deep into the urban jungle of colonial Hong Kong. And whereas Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy introduces the reader to George’s Smiley’s secret world, it’s in The Honourable Schoolboy where the deeper contradictions of that world begin to show. One of Smiley’s colleagues reflects on the strain of intelligence work and how it is clearly beginning to affect his superior’s view of the world:

…one of two things will happen to George. He’ll cease to care, or the paradox will kill him. If he ceases to care, he’ll be half the operator he is. If he doesn’t, that little chest will blow up from the struggle of trying to find the explanation for what we do.

And while in some respects it’s apparent that this book is the second of a planned trilogy, a bit of a stop-gap between Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People, it is still a cracking good read in its own right.

Smiley’s People

Smiley’s People was initially published in 1980, and in some ways it definitely reads like a lament for the ‘good old days’ (such as they were) of the Cold War. George Smiley, the hero (or at least the protagonist) of the previous two books, is still bogged down in the bureaucratic war that the intelligence services are always fighting with Whitehall. Most of his old colleagues have faded away, and his purpose is becoming more and more difficult to justify to himself. And when one of his ‘people’, an elderly exile from a country now behind the Iron Curtain, is found murdered in a manner that unmistakeably points in the direction of Moscow Centre and Karla, Smiley must pick up the chase again and track his quarry to ground. In doing so, though, he cannot help but reflect the far simpler and more straightforward past — a past that, like Smiley and his people, is on the point of becoming irrelevant.

The final book of the Smiley trilogy is a good deal bleaker than the first two, which is saying quite a bit for Le Carré’s style of writing and the nature of the story itself. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that this really is the final chase — and Smiley himself is aware that if he succeeds in catching his nemesis, he will only do so by exhausting his own ability to function in the secret world to which he has devoted his life. In his old age, Smiley finds himself questioning the very methods he has to use to track Karla. If he uses Karla’s methods, the same methods he has simultaneously admired and deplored for so long, can he really savour the final victory if and when it comes?

In the conclusion to the Smiley trilogy, Le Carré proves once again that he is a master of classic espionage fiction. His world isn’t flashy and seductive or gung-ho and full of technology. It’s a world that is worn at the edges, tired but serviceable and yet certain to vanish the next time some high-flying civil servant takes it into his head to ‘re-evaluate’ or ‘prioritise’. Le Carré knew it well enough at one point, and in this particular book he gives it something approaching a Viking funeral — dignified, certainly, but not quite so pleasant to watch.

Below the Parapet: The Autobiography of Denis Thatcher by Carol Thatcher

This book doesn’t quite fall into the ‘diaries/memoirs’ or ‘dead politicians’ category, so I’ve set up a new ‘biographies’ category that ought to do the trick.

Below the Parapet: The Autobiography of Denis Thatcher by Carol Thatcher

It’s always interesting to see children of the famous writing biographies of their parents, and even more interesting when these biographies are not overly coloured with bitterness for any neglect or lack of attention that the parents might have displayed when their offspring were growing up. And Carol Thatcher’s book about her father overcomes quite a bit of established opinion in its attempt to make Sir Denis Thatcher less of a caricature and more of a real person.

The general image most people have of Denis Thatcher is that of a bumbling, stumbling sot, given to making inappropriate comments about people of colour and always slinking away to the golf links whenever he can wriggle out of the iron grip of She Who Devours A Red Box And A Permanent Secretary At Breakfast Each Morning. Private Eye’s ‘Dear Bill’ letters have most of the responsibility for that image, but Denis Thatcher tended to play along at times, most notably when he replied to a woman’s question about what he did all day by saying, ‘Well, when I’m not completely pissed I like to play a round of golf’. On the whole, though, much of his time was spent ‘below the parapet’, quietly working as an executive at his fairly successful paint-making business and keeping out of the limelight as much as possible.

Below the Parapet is very much the story of a daughter trying to promote her father as a man in his own right, out of her famous mother’s shadow. And she succeeds, for the most part, though there are times when the careful reader can see the cracks in her attempts to play up the idea of the Thatchers as a family who just happened to be famous. (She certainly doesn’t have much time for her brother Mark — and from the sound of the book, neither did her father — and there’s an undercurrent of uneasiness in the way she talks about her mother.) It’s a fairly subdued sort of autobiography, and goes well with the fairly subdued sort of man Denis Thatcher was.

Republic of Readers? The Literary Turn in Political Thought and Analysis by Simon Stow

As any good book reviewer ought to do, I will have to declare a prior interest in the author of the book I am about to review. I took several undergraduate classes in political philosophy from Simon Stow, and consider him to be one of the best professors I had during my undergraduate days. (Somewhere in my files, I still have the notes I took from his classes.) So when I saw that he’d published a book based on his dissertation, I thought it only appropriate to purchase a copy for myself and attempt to write a brief review of it.

Republic of Readers? The Literary Turn in Political Thought and Analysis by Simon Stow

Most anyone who has made a serious study of the techniques of literary criticism will know that a number of long-established critics like to look at books through a decidedly political lens. Marxism, postmoderism, feminism, New Historicism — the list of these and other ‘isms’ is long and still growing, and often confusing for those who would prefer to simply read a book rather than try to look at the book with the help of a theory that is supposed to explain What It All Really Means. Yet in the past half-century or so, this political ‘turn’ in literary theory has been mirrored by a similar literary ‘turn’ in political theory, in which political philosophers examine certain works or styles of literature in an attempt to determine the effects that books and reading can have on the creation of political ideas. Political and social philosophers like Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum, Terry Eagleton, and Judith Butler have examined the relationship between books and readers, trying to develop theories that explain the proper or ideal role of literature in political thought.

The literary turn in political theory has produced some rather thought-provoking ideas. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, suggests that books like Charles Dickens’ Hard Times or E.M. Forster’s Maurice can help create a feeling of empathy and understanding for those who have been put at an economic, political, or social disadvantage by the current state of society, raising our political and social consciousness. Richard Rorty claims that reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire will help readers recognise cruelty when they see it, both in other people and in themselves. (He uses the seductively cruel paedophila of Humbert Humbert as a case in point: if readers of Lolita come to realise that they have started to accept Humbert’s claim that he was seduced by a prepubescent girl, would that sudden self-awareness make the readers more aware of their own capacity for cruelty or their ability to objectivise other people in the way that Humbert objectifies young Dolores Haze?) These and other ideas of the role of literature in political thought — and the thinkers who developed them — are the focus of Republic of Readers? The Literary Turn in Political Thought and Analysis.

Stow’s book looks at the literary turns in the political thought of Nussbaum, Rorty, Eagleton, and Butler, and attempts to identify the common strands in their competing arguments. He devotes a good portion of the book to picking apart the inconsistencies and problems with these arguments — not necessarily to say that these arguments are entirely wrong, but more to show that some of the underlying assumptions in these arguments are very subjective, more often based on how Rorty or Eagleton or Nussbaum or Butler thinks that a particular work of literature should be read than on how a reader might look at the text for the first time. Stow points out this and other problems with the different textual readings and their applications to political thought, and in doing so he attempts to separate — or perhaps even rescue — political philosophy from literary criticism.

One word of caution: It helps to have a good acquaintance with literary and political theory before delving into this book. I myself have only dabbled in the shallows of political philosophy and literary criticism, so a reader who is less than familiar with either the theorists or the texts mentioned would likely find this book somewhat rough going. (Having had the advantage of sitting through the author’s lectures in the past, I was able to follow his arguments better than I think I would have otherwise.) But for students of philosophy and literature who are interested in a review of the literary turn in political thought — one that avoids the shrillness all too frequently found in this discipline’s debate — Republic of Readers? provides a calm and measured study that does quite a bit to heighten readers’ awareness of the role that literature often may play in shaping how we look at the world.

The Clumsiest People in Europe, or: Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World by Mrs Mortimer (edited by Todd Pruzan)

A bit of humour for this Sunday’s posting — not exactly social satire, unless you think that bad Victorian-era writing satirises itself. In this case, it might just qualify as such.

The Clumsiest People in Europe, or: Mrs Mortimer’s Bad-Tempered Guide to the Victorian World by Mrs Mortimer (edited by Todd Pruzan)

The word ‘Victorian’ can be and is often used as something of a perjorative term, with the meaning ‘narrow-minded’ or ‘prudish’. It’s safe to say that there’s a good reason for doing so at times, especially in connection with clothing styles, moral instruction, or anything related to Oscar Wilde. Victorian cautionary tales for children are as grim and ghoulish as the more traditional fairy-tales, always reminding the young that death is an ever-present part of life and that wicked boys and girls are always punished severely (and good isn’t always rewarded in equal measure). So in that respect, it may not be so surprising that a Victorian children’s book that talks about the various peoples of the world would be long on criticism and short on pleasantness.

This is where Mrs Favell Lee Mortimer’s books come in: three books, to be precise, all written in the mid-nineteenth century. Each book purports to be a guide to the different countries of the world and the people who inhabit those countries (one book deals with Europe, one with Africa and Asia, and one with the Americas and Australia), and Mrs Mortimer manages to find some kind of fault with just about everything and everyone. Each description of a country comes complete with a slew of disapproving comments. Norway might be a beautiful country, with kind and good-hearted and honest people, but ‘The greatest fault of the Norwegians is drunkenness‘. Amsterdam is noteworthy mostly because ‘there is no city in which there is so much danger of being drowned, because it is full of canals‘. The Irish are (horror!) Roman Catholic, which is ‘a kind of Christian religion, but it is a very bad kind‘. When Greeks are unhappy, they are known to ‘scream like babies‘. Mrs Mortimer doesn’t even have many kind words for her own countrymen, though she does take pains to remind her young and impressionable readers of a very simple thing: ‘What country do you love best? Your own country. I know you do‘. Not surprising, considering her overwhelmingly negative opinions on the various bits of Europe that aren’t England proper.

The world outside of Europe is really far worse, though, in her eyes. Most of Africa can be written off as a land of ignorant savages, nasty cannibals, and Mohammedians who read a very wicked book that is made of evil stories and lies. Australia is full of convicts and colonists, of course. The people of Siam resemble the people of Burma, ‘but they are much worse-looking‘. The Chinese are elegant people, but are quite mad. In North America, Washington, DC, is ‘one of the most desolate cities in the world‘ — and most Americans keep slaves, which is an abominable sin. The list goes on and on, to the point where you almost can’t decide whether to laugh at her opinions or bang your head against a wall to get her prissy, disdainful tones out of your ears.

Why is this book worthy of a read-through, then? Well, for starters, Mrs Mortimer wrote the book without ever having left England and with only a limited knowledge of England itself. All of her opinions came from other works and from a mass of different sources — one look at her writings gives a hint as to how respectable Englishmen and Englishwomen of the day looked at other countries within the comforting blanket of the waxing British Empire. Her books went through several editions in her lifetime, and it’s safe to say that Mrs Mortimer’s bad-tempered guides to the Victorian world had a marked influence on young children’s first impressions of other lands and other people. Echoes of her sentiments appear even today in classical stereotypes of ‘foreigners’. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to go back and see where and how certain stereotypes have been reinforced over the years…and with Todd Pruzan’s careful editing of these mostly-forgotten children’s books, it’s possible to look at the world through a decidedly ‘Victorian’ lens.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I actually picked up this book from my father — he bought it after seeing an TV interview that mentioned it, and suggested that I should read it once he’d finished with his copy. Which meant that I had to wait for a bit, as he took his time reading it…but it was worth the waiting.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

At times, it seems as if everyone and his or her mother has written a book about Abraham Lincoln. Hagiographical biography, revisionist history, stacks of dense tomes trying to prove that he was a genetic freak or clinically depressed or homosexual or secretly racist or made out of jam or any number of other shocking revelations. And that’s not even to start talking about the books about Mary Todd Lincoln and her forays into wacky behaviour. So at the outset, it might seem that Team of Rivals is just another Lincoln book to add to the towering pile. But Doris Kearns Goodwin takes a slightly different tack by looking at Lincoln in the context of the men who formed Lincoln’s cabinet during his five years in office — particularly the three men who had actually competed with him for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. Not only did Lincoln bring these former rivals into his cabinet, but he also sought to include the strongest political players from all factions of his fractious political party: former Whigs, hardcore anti-slavery Democrats, and others who were less interested in what Lincoln had to say than in what his political clout could get them. But the new President wanted the best men (as he saw them) surrounding him, and he was prepared to assemble a team of his own former rivals and even enemies if it meant that he got the best men for the job. Managing such a complex jumble of egos and rivalries would seem an impossible task, and Goodwin shows that at times it nearly was — and yet Lincoln was able to do so, in the middle of attempting to fight and win a devastating civil war.

Goodwin draws on reams of correspondence and diaries of the period, sketching images of the nonstop life that Lincoln and his contemporaries led from the frontier circuit courts and smoke-filled back rooms to the glittering drawing-rooms of fashionable Washington mansions. Goodwin’s subjects really come to life on the pages as she compares and contrasts their family backgrounds, their lifestyles, their personal and political beliefs, and their ability to move in the political world of antebellum America. What interested me most in reading Team of Rivals was the stark contrast (which Goodwin doesn’t emphasise nearly enough) between Lincoln’s ability to wrangle his cabinet members and the bigwigs in the Republican party, and his seeming inability to find a decent general for the Union armies. It’s a very odd contrast, and one worth pondering on, because Goodwin doesn’t really elaborate on what might seem to be a noteworthy contradiction.

Team of Rivals is a fairly ambitious book, encompassing pretty much the whole of Lincoln’s life and the lives of his contemporaries and family members as well. There are places where it’s rather slow and clogged with detail, and sometimes it’s hard to keep track of who’s who and what position they hold. But there’s plenty of gossipy details about family life and Washington society, and Goodwin does an excellent job at times in showing just how complicated Lincoln’s task was in keeping the White House running smoothly and still keeping one eye on political currents and undercurrents in state and local politics as well. It’s a good solid history book, and remarkably enough it says something new about a president who has been the subject of many a good book (and many a bad book) in the last century and a half or so.

The Seven Basic Plots: How We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker

This book has been defying my attempts to write a review it for the better part of a month and a half — but I think I’ve managed to emerge victorious at last.

The Seven Basic Plots: How We Tell Stories by Christopher Booker

It’s a longstanding cliché that there are only really a handful of basic plots in the entire canon of Western literature. The cliché is so cliché that it’s somehow gone past cliché and come right out the other side in the form of a 700-plus-page analytical study by former Spectator columnist and Private Eye founder Christopher Booker. Booker suggests that storytelling serves to pass along moral lessons and models from the older generation to their children and successors, and as a result the basic lessons have coalesced over time into seven basic symbolic ‘plots’ that have formed the primary model for storytelling into the present day. These seven plots are as follows:

(1) Overcoming the Monster — Stories like Beowulf, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, Jaws, and many of the James Bond films, where a hero must defeat a monster and restore order to a world that has been threatened by the monster’s presence.
(2) Rags to Riches — These stories feature modest, generally virtuous but downtrodden characters, who achieve a happy ending when their special talents or true beauty is revealed to the world at large. Includes any number of classics such as ‘Cinderella’, David Copperfield, and the Horatio Alger novels.
(3) The Quest — A hero, often accompanied by sidekicks, travels in search of a priceless treasure and fights against evil and overpowering odds, and ends when he gets both the treasure and the girl. The Odyssey is a classic example of this kind of story.
(4) Voyage and Return — Alice in Wonderland, Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, other stories of normal protagonists who are suddenly thrust into strange and alien worlds and must make their way back to normal life once more.
(5) Comedy — Not always synonymous with humour. Instead, the plot of a comedy involves some kind of confusion that must be resolved before the hero and heroine can be united in love. Think of Shakespeare’s comedies, The Marriage of Figaro, the plays of Oscar Wilde and Gilbert and Sullivan, and even War and Peace.
(6) Tragedy — As a rule, the terrible consequences of human overreaching and egotism. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Julius Caesar, Anna Karenina…this category is usually self-evident.
(7) Rebirth — The stories of Ebeneezer Scrooge and Mary Lennox would fall into this basic plot type, which focuses on a threatening shadow that seems nearly victorious until a sequence of fortuitous (or even miraculous) events lead to redemption and rebirth, and the restoration of a happier world.

Within these basic plots are smaller ‘metaplots’ that outline the general structure of these stories. Booker further identifies ‘dark’ versions of these basic plots, ones in which the happy ending is never achieved even though the characters go through all of the stages in the underlying metaplot. There are also a handful of other, smaller plots that are often incorporated into these larger overarching plots, such as the ‘Rebellion’ plot or the ‘Mystery’ plot. Booker looks at both plots and characters, identifying heroes and heroines and the figures who both help them (e.g., the Wise Old Man, the Good Mother, the Companion) and hinder them (e.g., the Dark Rival or Alter-Ego, the Temptress, the Tyrant). If many of these character figures sound like basic story archetypes…well, Booker says, that’s because they are. And he’s dedicated the entire book to determining and explaining how these combinations of plots and characters come together to create some of most well-known (and dare I say, archetypical) stories in the literary canon.

I’ve read quite a few reviews of The Seven Basic Plots, and most of them seem to say some variation on the same theme: The first 300 pages or so are great, but the book goes rapidly downhill from there. These negative reviews touch on the primary trouble with the The Seven Basic Plots. When a particular story does not seem to fit into the established patterns of Booker’s Jungian worldview, his seven basic plots, he immediately declares that the story is irrevocably flawed, defective, or otherwise a perversion of how stories ought to be. As a result, a significant portion of the literature written since about 1800 falls into this flawed or defective category — including stories such as Moby-Dick (because we don’t know whether the real Monster to be overcome in the story is the white whale or Captain Ahab) and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (because he regards the main character, Julien Sorel, as little more than a portrait of egotistical cruelty and selfish ambition for fame and glory). Not even The Lord of the Rings, one of the stories that Booker points to as the ultimate example of his basic plot archetypes, is free from imperfections: Frodo remains an incomplete character because he never finds the feminine half that he needs to become a whole character. In cruder terms, he doesn’t ‘get the girl’, and therefore can never be complete, so he has to sail away as an incomplete and unresolved main character. Booker also has a disturbing prediliction to blame the author’s background for the flaws of his (or, on very rare occasions, her) stories — usually, in true Jungian fashion, by hinting at unresolved mother issues or sexual identity woes. Very rarely does he attempt to look at the story itself or attempt to understand why the author chose to break away from these archetypes. Without them, the author is flawed and the story is flawed, and as a result there is little room for debate.

It’s really a shame that Booker’s methodology falls apart through his sheer insistence on clinging to Jung. It would’ve been a far more fascinating study to explore why certain stories rebel against or subvert these archetypes, and how this deliberate rebellion or subversion makes these stories all the more powerful for the reader as a result. His writing style is an absolute model of clarity and careful word choice, making The Seven Basic Plots seem far less unwieldy for the general reader than its physical bulk might suggest. In the end, Booker’s magnum opus is certainly worth exploring by those who take an interest in the history of storytelling and in the underlying themes that define so many of our best-loved tales. I’m glad that I read it, in the end.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn and The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn and David Burke

Continuing the previous post’s theme of a play by Michael Frayn, here are two books connected to another Frayn play with a similarly historical bent.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (playscript)

The premise of Copenhagen is based on a historical event: in 1941, German physicist Werner Heisenberg travelled to Copenhagen — which at the time was under Nazi occupation — to meet with Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It is recorded that Heisenberg met with Bohr and Bohr’s wife Margrethe, and Bohr and Heisenberg later went out for a walk so they could speak without being overheard by the Gestapo. But when Bohr returned from the walk he was absolutely furious about something, and Heisenberg left shortly afterwards. Though Bohr and Heisenberg had been close friends for many years before that meeting, they barely spoke to each other again after that. The substance of the Bohr-Heisenberg conversation has never been fully explained. Some historians say that Heisenberg was attempting to recruit Bohr to help with the Nazi nuclear energy project (on which Heisenberg was working at the time) in exchange for academic reinstatement and advancement…even though Bohr was half-Jewish. The other, more sympathetic theory is that Heisenberg was trying to give Bohr information about the Nazi nuclear project in the hope that Bohr would be able to pass that information along to the Allies — essentially, that Heisenberg was trying to derail the Nazi attempt to build atomic weapons.

Frayn’s play takes both of these theories and weaves them together, never quite promoting one or the other but (intriguingly) connecting both theories to the principles of physics that both Bohr and Heisenberg were famous for creating: Bohr’s complementarity principle and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It’s an amazingly complex and multilayered play that only has three characters, Bohr and his wife and Heisenberg, and yet seems to contain many more voices than just those of two men and one woman.

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn and David Burke

The Copenhagen Papers was jointly written by Michael Frayn and by David Burke; the latter played Niels Bohr in the original London run of the play. The subject of the book is an elaborate practical joke that Burke played on Frayn during the run of the play, and the joke is complicated enough to require a short historical background even before I can summarise it. The history hinges on the fact that at the end of World War II, Werner Heisenberg and the other scientists who had been working on the Nazi nuclear energy programme were taken to England and interned at an out-of-the-way requisitioned house called Farm Hall, where they were closely watched and interviewed by British intelligence.

David Burke decided that he wanted to play a joke on Frayn, some kind of joke related to the play that Frayn had written. Burke began by inventing a woman named Celia Rhys-Evans, who had apparently lived in Farm Hall at some point during the 1960s and had discovered a number of documents hidden under the floorboards of the house. These documents were written in cryptic, barely legible German, which nevertheless seemed to hint that the captured scientists had been communicating with each other without the knowledge of their British captors. Burke enlisted the help of some friends to fake 50-year-old German documents, and then (as Celia Rhys-Evans) he sent a number of the faked papers to Frayn, along with a letter that asked if these old papers would be useful to him if he ever wanted to write another play.

Not only did Frayn believe that the documents were genuine, but he also began a correspondence with Mrs Rhys-Evans to see if there were any other documents she might have on hand that dealt with the captured scientists. And thus Frayn and Burke set out on a strange and occasionally journey where one forgery followed another and another. Neither was willing to let go of his side of the story, but as the correspondence continued they both became so immersed in the fiction that the whole thing nearly ended in an exhausted stalemate. In the end, Frayn actually had to be told that the whole thing was a hoax.

The Copenhagen Papers is an account of the whole joke from inception to discovery — the truth was revealed by a sympathetic friend who thought that the joke had gone too far. The book is meant to be an exploration of some of the themes touched on in Copenhagen the play: the uncertainty of history and historical evidence, the ambiguous nature of language, the questions that are raised every time we learn something new about the past and how it may have shaped the future…or in this case, the present. Frayn and Burke clearly seem to have come to an understanding over this incident, enough to write a book about it and treat it fairly dispassionately. And even if my historian side almost can’t help but writhe a little to read about a deliberate forging of historical documents for a joke, The Copenhagen Papers is an intriguing exploration of what it means to be present at the creation of ‘history’.