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Kingsley Amis reviews You Only Live Twice (and le Carré and Deighton)
Found in the New Statesman (20 March 1964). This is really more of an article on the spy fiction phenomenon of the 1960s that includes a short Fleming review.
***
Literary Agents
by Kingsley Amis
Spy fever has us in its grip. Saturday night on ITV gives us two solid hours of cloak-and-dagger. At 9:10, Espionage, a series that at least every other week has only the most tenuous connection with espionage: it’s as if the planners knew the title was good enough to get the viewers viewing. At 10.5, The Avengers, thought to be good by enough bright people to make other bright people very angry, and playing self-parodic tricks with the conventions of the genre in a way only possible when the audience is deeply experienced in the genre. And, earlier at 7.25, GS5, more of a straightforward criminal investigation affair, but with strong infusions of MI5, international conspiracy etc. In the cinema—who can help knowing that From Russia, with Love is the most successful film ever shown in Britain, and that later this year James Bond will become a double agent in a sense he never suspected, with two different incarnations of himself on the screens at once?
Why, or why now? Partly, no, doubt, because the Rosenberg trial, Khokhlov’s testimony, the Blake and Vassall affairs, have come to put a more realistic and immediate complexion on what, in the days of Sapper and E. Phillips Oppenheim had been holiday reading fantasy. Then, in quite a different direction, one I don’t actually care for much, there is the possibility that the secret-agent persona is peculiarly attractive to the common, conforming mid-century citizen, who can see himself in his daydreams as very uncommon indeed, passing muster as one of the herd but, inside, a lone individual, hard, ruthless, cruel, knowing what nobody else knows… Maybe. But cultural causes for cultural phenomena are always preferable. I think Mr. Ian Fleming has done most to infect us with the bug.
Admitting publicly to enjoyment of Mr. Fleming’s works draws just the same kind of disgusted hostility, the same accusations of anti-cultural affectation, or commitment, as claiming to like jazz did 10 years ago. (Not any more, though, unless Mr. Paul Johnson happens to be of the company. Interesting that that polymorphous backwoodsman—still stuck with the Choral Symphony at the age of 16—should have launched in this journal the first really violent attack on Mr. Fleming back in 1958.) Well, I am not deterred. The man who wrote the bridge-game scene in Moonraker, the assassination-planning scene in From Russia, with Love, the beach scene at the beginning of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and the ski-pursuit later in the same book is a good writer whether you like it or not.
Mr. Fleming is firmly in the older, free-associating, cloak-and-dagger tradition, but bolts his fantasy down equally firmly with a lot of documentary detail. Agreed, Thunderball, for instance, couldn’t happen. Even if there, are global criminal cartels like SPECTRE they could’'t hijack a Nato bomber, with nuclear bombs on board and use the bombs to blackmail the Western governments for a billion pounds. But if they could, they would use for the hijacking someone exactly like Col. Giuseppe Petacchi, who would have surrendered himself and his Focke-Wulf 200 to the Allies in World War II just as described, and would contemplate buying with his share of the loot the very Ghia-bodied 3,500 GT Maserati we are told about. That’s what all those brand names, which Mr. Fleming’s detractors get into such a state over, are doing there: linkage with reality, intrinsic interest, and efficient characterization-shorthand—if Petacchi had been the sort to covet a Rolls, or a souped-up Fiat 500, he might well not have gone along with the scheme.
The latest installment i]You Only Live Twice[/i is the most fantastic so far. Bond, widowed at the end of the last one, has slid further down the slope of Byronic self-destruction he started on at the beginning of Thunderball. It takes all the efforts of Sir James Molony, the famous neurologist (now a Nobel Prizewinner), to talk that old reptile M into allotting Bond a new assignment; persuading the Japanese Secret Service to give him the Russian Far Eastern signals traffic they have been deciphering for the last year. Remustered out of the 00 section as 7777, Bond goes off to Japan and spends over half the book finding out and being told about the place - the kami-kaze, the samurai, the haiku, the bushido, and of course the geisha—before getting down to business. This consists of killing a certain Dr. Shatterhand in his remote, closely guarded fortress as a favour to the Japanese and a demonstration that the British are not so effete as everybody thinks. In return, the contents of the Russian file will be handed over.
Shatterhand turns out to be someone markedly unamiable whom we have met before. He operates a garden full of meticulously itemised poisonous trees in which Japanese intruders are continually committing suicide—an odd way of life for a man determined, we are told, to evade notice. He cuts an impressive figure in the medieval chain-armour he adopts as protection against the various lethal thorns, and the garden bits are strange and chilling. But Bond wins too easily, and the trees don't get a fair crack at him. They are not a suitable mechanism for an action story in the way Mr. Fleming’s cars arid casinos and underwater exploits are. You don’t get chased by the Jamaica dogwoods and you can't gamble with the St Ignatius’s beans. When Bond recovers his memory—he gets a bullet-wound in the head while escaping by helium balloon—and makes his intended trip to Vladivostok, things should look up. Colonel-General Grubozaboyschikov, late of SMERSH, must have some scores to payoff.
An interest in realism turns up when a genre is past its first youth: Stories about daily lunar life and routine come along after 30 years of moon-monsters; Chief Inspector Barlow of Z Cars replaces Lord Peter Wimsey (not before time). Wherever they may end up, Messrs. John le Carré and Len Deighton start off with some concern to tell the truth about the Secret Service. They agree in their different ways that it’s a dirty game, a conclusion which Mr. Fleming, on the evidence of his novels, would never assent to. Dangerous, devious, coarsening, hardening, yes, but it’s Her Majesty's Secret Service we’re dealing with. No matter: who reads Sapper for the ideology? The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Mr. le Carré’s third and best novel so far, not only portrayed the game as unrelievedly dirty but made you wonder if you had ever realized before how dirty dirty games could be. His first i]Call for the Dead[/i, now reissued in paperback, is no more cheerful in sum, though it shows a considerable flair for mildly non-U dialogue and an informed interest in snobbery. A civil servant who knows he is only very mildly suspected of having been a communist while at Oxford seems to have committed suicide because of it. If he really did, why did he arrange for an early telephone call on the morning after the fatal evening? Or perhaps his wife arranged it for herself. But she is an insomniac. An espionage plot begins to emerge, with a violent denouement.
The initial situation about the suicide recalls the whodunit, and it is thence that Mr. le Carré’s work partly derives. His second novel, A Murder of Quality, was squarely in the line of the traditional detective story. This ancestry perhaps explains his tendency, not finally curbed even in his third book, to overload his story with mystifications. The real fault of Call for the Dead, however, is that the relations between the suicide and his wife are taken far enough for us to need to understand them, and no further. But the bad and horrid men and horrid events are really bad and horrid.
Notes for students: 1) Mr. le Carré’s M, one Maston, is openly devious and unsympathetic—contempt for one’s chief is almost the distinguishing badge of the newer school; 2) the principal agent, George Smiley, has trouble with his conscience, and 3) is also unlike Bond in being physically unimpressive, “bewildered and mole-like behind his spectacles,” more like Chesterton’s Father Brown than anyone Mr. Connery could play; 4) readers of The Spy Who will want to know that the present book tells what the diabolical Mundt did before he went back to East Germany.
Compared with Mr. Deighton, though, Mr. le Carré is as limpid as Black Beauty. I couldn’t read Horse Under Water and had tough sledding with The Ipcress File. The endless twists and turns of the plot, the systematic withholding of clues and even of transitions, are made doubly harassing by a style of dialogue, shared by all the characters, whereby the line of argument disappears under allusions, wisecracks, disembodied reflections. At one evidently crucial point the hero, who for some inscrutable reason is left nameless, is given the chance of buying a secret file off a colleague. I couldn’t make out whether the hero angrily took the deal or angrily turned it down, only that he was angry, and I wasn’t too clear about why, either.
A summary of the general drift would require from me the kind of rereading normally accorded an examination set-book. There is something about an atom bomb, I think it was, and brainwashing, and a high-up agent going double, or turning out at the end to have gone double earlier. Meanwhile we have had all too much of the hero’s chippy knowingness, which sees to it that a coffee-bar or an airport is never just a coffee-bar or an airport, but of those coffee-bars, one of those airports: the idiom of a man who has been everywhere already and didn’t like it the first time.
The whole thing is supposedly told to the Minister of Defence, who at an early stage makes what I thought was a reasonable request for enlightenment over some detail. The hero answers with his usual humility:
“It’s going to be very difficult for me if I have to answer questions as I go along,” I said.
“If it’s all the same to you, Minister, I’d prefer you to make a note of the questions, and ask me afterwards.”
“My dear chap, not another word, I promise.”
And throughout the entire explanation he never again interrupted.
I know why. He was asleep.
***
Literary Agents
by Kingsley Amis
Spy fever has us in its grip. Saturday night on ITV gives us two solid hours of cloak-and-dagger. At 9:10, Espionage, a series that at least every other week has only the most tenuous connection with espionage: it’s as if the planners knew the title was good enough to get the viewers viewing. At 10.5, The Avengers, thought to be good by enough bright people to make other bright people very angry, and playing self-parodic tricks with the conventions of the genre in a way only possible when the audience is deeply experienced in the genre. And, earlier at 7.25, GS5, more of a straightforward criminal investigation affair, but with strong infusions of MI5, international conspiracy etc. In the cinema—who can help knowing that From Russia, with Love is the most successful film ever shown in Britain, and that later this year James Bond will become a double agent in a sense he never suspected, with two different incarnations of himself on the screens at once?
Why, or why now? Partly, no, doubt, because the Rosenberg trial, Khokhlov’s testimony, the Blake and Vassall affairs, have come to put a more realistic and immediate complexion on what, in the days of Sapper and E. Phillips Oppenheim had been holiday reading fantasy. Then, in quite a different direction, one I don’t actually care for much, there is the possibility that the secret-agent persona is peculiarly attractive to the common, conforming mid-century citizen, who can see himself in his daydreams as very uncommon indeed, passing muster as one of the herd but, inside, a lone individual, hard, ruthless, cruel, knowing what nobody else knows… Maybe. But cultural causes for cultural phenomena are always preferable. I think Mr. Ian Fleming has done most to infect us with the bug.
Admitting publicly to enjoyment of Mr. Fleming’s works draws just the same kind of disgusted hostility, the same accusations of anti-cultural affectation, or commitment, as claiming to like jazz did 10 years ago. (Not any more, though, unless Mr. Paul Johnson happens to be of the company. Interesting that that polymorphous backwoodsman—still stuck with the Choral Symphony at the age of 16—should have launched in this journal the first really violent attack on Mr. Fleming back in 1958.) Well, I am not deterred. The man who wrote the bridge-game scene in Moonraker, the assassination-planning scene in From Russia, with Love, the beach scene at the beginning of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and the ski-pursuit later in the same book is a good writer whether you like it or not.
Mr. Fleming is firmly in the older, free-associating, cloak-and-dagger tradition, but bolts his fantasy down equally firmly with a lot of documentary detail. Agreed, Thunderball, for instance, couldn’t happen. Even if there, are global criminal cartels like SPECTRE they could’'t hijack a Nato bomber, with nuclear bombs on board and use the bombs to blackmail the Western governments for a billion pounds. But if they could, they would use for the hijacking someone exactly like Col. Giuseppe Petacchi, who would have surrendered himself and his Focke-Wulf 200 to the Allies in World War II just as described, and would contemplate buying with his share of the loot the very Ghia-bodied 3,500 GT Maserati we are told about. That’s what all those brand names, which Mr. Fleming’s detractors get into such a state over, are doing there: linkage with reality, intrinsic interest, and efficient characterization-shorthand—if Petacchi had been the sort to covet a Rolls, or a souped-up Fiat 500, he might well not have gone along with the scheme.
The latest installment i]You Only Live Twice[/i is the most fantastic so far. Bond, widowed at the end of the last one, has slid further down the slope of Byronic self-destruction he started on at the beginning of Thunderball. It takes all the efforts of Sir James Molony, the famous neurologist (now a Nobel Prizewinner), to talk that old reptile M into allotting Bond a new assignment; persuading the Japanese Secret Service to give him the Russian Far Eastern signals traffic they have been deciphering for the last year. Remustered out of the 00 section as 7777, Bond goes off to Japan and spends over half the book finding out and being told about the place - the kami-kaze, the samurai, the haiku, the bushido, and of course the geisha—before getting down to business. This consists of killing a certain Dr. Shatterhand in his remote, closely guarded fortress as a favour to the Japanese and a demonstration that the British are not so effete as everybody thinks. In return, the contents of the Russian file will be handed over.
Shatterhand turns out to be someone markedly unamiable whom we have met before. He operates a garden full of meticulously itemised poisonous trees in which Japanese intruders are continually committing suicide—an odd way of life for a man determined, we are told, to evade notice. He cuts an impressive figure in the medieval chain-armour he adopts as protection against the various lethal thorns, and the garden bits are strange and chilling. But Bond wins too easily, and the trees don't get a fair crack at him. They are not a suitable mechanism for an action story in the way Mr. Fleming’s cars arid casinos and underwater exploits are. You don’t get chased by the Jamaica dogwoods and you can't gamble with the St Ignatius’s beans. When Bond recovers his memory—he gets a bullet-wound in the head while escaping by helium balloon—and makes his intended trip to Vladivostok, things should look up. Colonel-General Grubozaboyschikov, late of SMERSH, must have some scores to payoff.
An interest in realism turns up when a genre is past its first youth: Stories about daily lunar life and routine come along after 30 years of moon-monsters; Chief Inspector Barlow of Z Cars replaces Lord Peter Wimsey (not before time). Wherever they may end up, Messrs. John le Carré and Len Deighton start off with some concern to tell the truth about the Secret Service. They agree in their different ways that it’s a dirty game, a conclusion which Mr. Fleming, on the evidence of his novels, would never assent to. Dangerous, devious, coarsening, hardening, yes, but it’s Her Majesty's Secret Service we’re dealing with. No matter: who reads Sapper for the ideology? The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Mr. le Carré’s third and best novel so far, not only portrayed the game as unrelievedly dirty but made you wonder if you had ever realized before how dirty dirty games could be. His first i]Call for the Dead[/i, now reissued in paperback, is no more cheerful in sum, though it shows a considerable flair for mildly non-U dialogue and an informed interest in snobbery. A civil servant who knows he is only very mildly suspected of having been a communist while at Oxford seems to have committed suicide because of it. If he really did, why did he arrange for an early telephone call on the morning after the fatal evening? Or perhaps his wife arranged it for herself. But she is an insomniac. An espionage plot begins to emerge, with a violent denouement.
The initial situation about the suicide recalls the whodunit, and it is thence that Mr. le Carré’s work partly derives. His second novel, A Murder of Quality, was squarely in the line of the traditional detective story. This ancestry perhaps explains his tendency, not finally curbed even in his third book, to overload his story with mystifications. The real fault of Call for the Dead, however, is that the relations between the suicide and his wife are taken far enough for us to need to understand them, and no further. But the bad and horrid men and horrid events are really bad and horrid.
Notes for students: 1) Mr. le Carré’s M, one Maston, is openly devious and unsympathetic—contempt for one’s chief is almost the distinguishing badge of the newer school; 2) the principal agent, George Smiley, has trouble with his conscience, and 3) is also unlike Bond in being physically unimpressive, “bewildered and mole-like behind his spectacles,” more like Chesterton’s Father Brown than anyone Mr. Connery could play; 4) readers of The Spy Who will want to know that the present book tells what the diabolical Mundt did before he went back to East Germany.
Compared with Mr. Deighton, though, Mr. le Carré is as limpid as Black Beauty. I couldn’t read Horse Under Water and had tough sledding with The Ipcress File. The endless twists and turns of the plot, the systematic withholding of clues and even of transitions, are made doubly harassing by a style of dialogue, shared by all the characters, whereby the line of argument disappears under allusions, wisecracks, disembodied reflections. At one evidently crucial point the hero, who for some inscrutable reason is left nameless, is given the chance of buying a secret file off a colleague. I couldn’t make out whether the hero angrily took the deal or angrily turned it down, only that he was angry, and I wasn’t too clear about why, either.
A summary of the general drift would require from me the kind of rereading normally accorded an examination set-book. There is something about an atom bomb, I think it was, and brainwashing, and a high-up agent going double, or turning out at the end to have gone double earlier. Meanwhile we have had all too much of the hero’s chippy knowingness, which sees to it that a coffee-bar or an airport is never just a coffee-bar or an airport, but of those coffee-bars, one of those airports: the idiom of a man who has been everywhere already and didn’t like it the first time.
The whole thing is supposedly told to the Minister of Defence, who at an early stage makes what I thought was a reasonable request for enlightenment over some detail. The hero answers with his usual humility:
“It’s going to be very difficult for me if I have to answer questions as I go along,” I said.
“If it’s all the same to you, Minister, I’d prefer you to make a note of the questions, and ask me afterwards.”
“My dear chap, not another word, I promise.”
And throughout the entire explanation he never again interrupted.
I know why. He was asleep.
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Comments
Fleming's work was a game changer and many amongst the literati didn't like it. How could anybody writing enjoyable fast moving thrillers, particularly somebody who's stock in trade was sex, violence and snobbery, possibly be a good writer ?
They just didn't get it and it didn't fit with their world view and Amis's comparison with the reaction to anybody that pertained to like Jazz was spot on.
Kingsley Amis was the exception amongst the literati, he appreciated Fleming's talent and was a staunch fan of both him and Peter O'Donnell.
The fact that he was slightly less generous toward Le Carre and positively disingenuous towards Deighton probably says more about his taste in fiction - he preferred the fantasy end of the spy genre - than it does about their prowess as writers.
Indeed, it could also have been a generational thing. Fleming and O'Donnell were of a similar vintage to Amis whilst Le Carre and Deighton were that bit younger and were both an integral part of that cool sixties vibe.
One things for sure Fleming, Deighton and Le Carre have all made a huge contribution to breaking down the snobbery associated with genre fiction and these days, it is more and more the case, that a good writer is a good writer regardless of their chosen genre.
PussyNoMore thinks that has to be a good thing.
And even today Fleming is still a bit disreputable among the establishment, whereas Le Carre is treated like a god who transcended the genre.
Yes, Amis occasionally could be perverse in his tastes. He had an adverse reaction to anything he thought was artsy or pretentious.
Indeed--anything done supremely well has a chance at greatness beyond the confines and expectations of genre.
This is so true and PussyNoMore thinks that this is were the movies work against Fleming.
Despite the fact that most of them have little to do with the source material, their overt commercialism often act as a disincentive to people trying his books.
A case in point was the Le Carre v Fleming event hosted by Intelligence Squared in London in 2016. PussyNoMore had the great fortune to be sat next to a very attractive Le Carre fan and when the passages were read from Fleming’s novels, she turned to Pussy and remarked “My God, I never knew he was this good “. Of course, she’d never read any of Fleming’s works!
This situation is reflected in bookstores when you often see the complete Le Carre for sale without a Fleming in sight ! Quel bordel !