With Dalek expert Gav Rymill, I’ve written 28 entries on different models of Dalek, charting their evolution from the very first Dalek story in 1963-64 to their more recent full episode, 2022’s Eve of the Daleks. There are some new facts and insights included, such as my outlandish theory about when and why writer Terry Nation decided to make them look the way they do.
Each entry is illustrated with a CG rendering of the particular model by Chris Thompson.
The machine, he is told, is incapable of making mistakes. His only chance to escape the drudgery of his assigned position is to volunteer for a much more dangerous scientific job: joining a survey expedition to the post-apocalyptic ruin of Britain...
The basic idea here is a reversal of recognised convention: African explorers and scientists venturing into Britain, measuring native skull size and sizing up local resources such as coal and precious stones. First published in 1954, and republished by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1957 (the edition I've got here), it's playing with anxieties of the time in which it was written.
Colonialism is just part of that anxious mix. The implication is that British, European and American civilisation has been wiped out by nuclear holocaust. As well as fear of the bomb, there is a fear about Britain's reduced status in the world; here, radiation has led to mutation and British people are now just four feet-tall. Their achievements are all but forgotten, too. The Africans have a mangled idea of the history of these people, who they think were at war with the Romans under Napoleon, and whose heroes included "Crom Well" and "Quix Ot" (p. 17).
The cave-dwelling Britons have no knowledge of or interest in history. They are parochial, timid and superstitious, most of them hostile to strangers or any suggestion of change. When one man suggests a better method of dental practice to save people from going mad with toothache, he is forced out of the community.
Grame and the other African explorers are no less short of foibles. They constantly squabble and fight, scientists governed by ego, desire and prejudice as much as by objectivity and logic. As in Margot Bennett's other, later science-fiction novel, The Furious Masters (1968), sexual attraction seems to make people more caustic with each another and sex is bound up with the threat of violence.
My pal Matthew Sweet explored The Long Way Back and the life of its author in his 2015 documentary for Radio 3, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, and wrote a piece about the novel for Unherd in 2020: "Was the British empire a curse?"; the comments under the latter made me think of the response to the dentist. Matthew calls The Long Way Back Bennett's "masterpiece" and likens it to Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a critique of empire.
In addition, it reminded me of other, latter fiction set in post-apocalyptic Britain, such as The Bed-Sitting Room (1969) and Riddley Walker (1980), in which vestiges of the world we know now survive the nuclear holocaust but lose their sense and meaning. Towards the end of the novel, Grame and the surviving members of his team reach the ruin of a once-great city where, in a vast but partially collapsed building, they find the remains of an inscription in stone.
"'There are figures,' Valya said. 'They look like 1993, but I couldn't be certain.' She took out her notebook, and copied faithfully the letter J, followed by nine or ten blanks. They all tried to discover, by fingering, what the letters might have been, but most of them were no more than a roughness on the stone. On the last line, the indentations grew deeper, and Valya wrote carefully, '—e p—a—e —f —od pas— — — a— —und— — sta— — —ng.'" (pp. 184-5)
This, they deduce by filling in the blanks, once read "The place of god's passage and understanding", on which basis they conclude that the whole city was considered holy. It's a joke, I think, playing on a cliche in archaeology, where a site whose purpose is not known is described as having ritual significance.
But also, this is another reversal. The indentations surely once spelled out a relatively well-known phrase from the Bible, in Paul's letter to the Philippians (chapter 4, verse 7):
"The peace of god passeth all understanding."
They've failed to understand that there is no understanding, seeing certainty where there was none.
The novel ends with the surviving members of the expedition flying home - or, as the novel puts it, "flying into uncertainty", unsure of the reception awaiting them and with a looming threat of war. We finish with one of the Britons they've met, watching them go,
"with his heart rising up, while he dreamed of the future when Britain might raise itself, generation by generation, to become a nation that would conquer the earth." (p. 206)
Again, this dream is ironic because we, the reader, can see what conquest has wrought. Yet there does not seem to be much hope that the characters have learned the same lesson.
Speaking of hope, last night BBC Four showed the 1954 production of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, adapted by Nigel Kneale and directed by Rudolph Cartier. It begins with an introduction from BBC head of drama Michael Barry:
"To me, the most alarming thing in the play is the fact that it has no hope, and as the mortally ill author George Orwell preciously brought his one script south from Glasgow to London, he couldn't find it within him to give hope to the play."
The Long Way Back came out the same year as that TV adaptation. Margot Bennett was, like Orwell, in Spain during the civil war - there's even some suggestion that they knew one another while in Barcelona. I wonder how much their respective sense of humanity, or what Barry calls man's inhumanity to man, was forged there...
I have more reading to do.
The Borthwick Institute for Archives, in York, boasts thousands of precious old documents — including the archives of Frankie Howerd and Sir Alan Ayckbourn — and closely monitors air quality to hold back the ravages of time. I spoke to Gary Brannan, Keeper of Archives and Research Collections.
Reducing falls in care homes with Earzz acoustic monitoring
Dr. Pradyumna Thiruvenkatanathan, Founder and CEO of Earzz, explained to me how intelligent acoustic monitoring can transform the provision of care, with benefits for residents and staff.
Air quality for monsters at Millennium FX
Award-winning prosthetics in TV and film are made using hazardous chemicals. I spoke to Neill Gorton at Millennium FX about the tech employed to keep his staff safe from the creatures they’re building.
Shirah Bamber, Preston’s new Innovation Ambassador
Preston City Council has announced the appointment of Shirah Bamber as its new Innovation Ambassador, tasked with raising the profile of the city as a place for all things tech.
Mapping safe cycle routes across Oxfordshire
Easy-to-use Cyclox mapping software provides safe routes for cyclists across the city of Oxford and the whole of Oxfordshire. The result is more people than ever getting on their bikes. I spoke to Cllr Emily Kerr from Oxford City Council and Robin Tucker, Co-chair of the Coalition for Health Streets and Active Travel (CoHSAT), to learn what was involved.
Beth Smithson is a former occupational therapist in the NHS who now helps to tackle school avoidance and refusal by better understanding our senses.
Flying cars were once a dream of science-fiction but eVTOL air taxis now offer a real prospect of greener, cleaner transport. I spoke to Jeremy Howitt (Future Flight Campaign Lead at the Snowdonia Aerospace Centre), Shazan Siddiqi, (Senior Technology Analyst at IDTechEx) and John Goudie (Founder and CEO of SLiNK-TECH).
Dr Niall Boyce produces a free weekly newsletter that aims to keep us up-to-date on the latest advances in mental health science.
Each year, pupils aged 12-15 from Beech Hall School in Tytherington swim the English Channel. Yes, really! I interviewed headteacher James Allen about the ambitious programme.
Sparta Global kickstarts careers in tech
David Rai, Co-Founder and CEO of Sparta Global, told me how his company has gone about training thousands of people from diverse backgrounds in tech-based skills, and found them new careers.
“In the early spring of nineteen sixty-three, there was a rumour — unconfirmed and a little scandalous — that George Smiley might almost be happy.” (p. 26)
I was going to ask for this for Christmas and then couldn’t wait: a new le Carré novel despite the author no longer being in the field, and a new adventure for spymaster George Smiley, for all he long ago retired.
Whereas Silverview (2022) was written by le Carré and finished after his death by his son, the novelist Nick Harkaway, this is an entirely new novel by Harkaway. Or rather, it isn’t, because it’s been devised to fit neatly between two of the old classics, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). As well as owlish George Smiley, it features lots of familiar characters from both those books — such as Control, Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam, Bill Haydon, Alec Leamas, Connie Sachs and Ann Smiley — and makes subtle play with the fact we know what is to be befall some of them in events to come.
Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon. People other than Arthur Conan-Doyle were writing Sherlock Holme stories while Doyle was still alive. Kingsley Amis wrote Colonel Sun (1968) four years after the death of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. New stories continue to be written about Bond and Holmes and whoever else, some continuing their adventures into the present day, other working as period pieces, looking back to the time when the original adventures were set. (See, to choose an example entirely at random, Sherlock Holmes and the Great War.)
That’s the big point of difference here: le Carré was grappling with the contemporary world, all gritty, cynical realism. Karla’s Choice is a historical novel, conjured as much from depictions of the previous books on TV and in film. It is a pastiche.
I think it’s a good one: it feels authentic and I suspect would work well if you (re)read the Smiley novels in order, inserting this one into place. The familiar characters are well captured, Harkaway acknowledging in his both author’s note and acknowledgements the debt he owes to the various actors who’ve realised the characters on screen. At the same time, new characters, whose fates we can’t be sure of, are also nicely delineated and feel in-keeping.
In the opening pages, Harkaway accepts that the very idea of a new Smiley novel not written by his dad will be unthinkable to some. He then invites us to see, with him, how well he’s achieved his aim. That’s clever: co-opting us, perhaps even seducing us despite ourselves. We become part of the game.
And that matches the plot. Susanna Gero, a Hungarian refugee with a new life in London working for a literary agent, answers the door of her office to a strange man — who has orders to kill her boss. Susanna’s quick-thinking and brave response leads to attention from the Circus, and soon she’s embroiled in the secret world. George Smiley should not be involved as he recently retired, following the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But he and Susanna find that once ensnared with the ‘grey mistress’ of the service, it is all-but impossible to escape…
As well as authentic, it’s an enjoyable, engaging story — and, in its last section, extremely tense. The period setting with Smiley in his prime works better, I think, than seeing the character living on agelessly into the modern age, almost but not quite giving his view on Brexit, as per le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017).
But at the same time something is lost in making Smiley a figure from history. There’s no longer that tantalising sense of this all being real and now and incredibly relevant, of le Carré using a fictional spy story to raise the curtain a bit on what's really going on.
There’s one moment where we come close, an echo of today in this echo of the past. As the stakes get ever higher, Smiley considers what difference it will make to the wider world if he is successful in besting his opposite number, the Russia spymaster known as Karla.
“Would Moscow abruptly suffer a shortage of brutal and brutalised men, thinking to make good whatever sinkholes were in them by destroying the West? By finally achieving Peter the Great’s ambitions and standing Russia at the pinnacle of the world? Would the Cold War, with all its terrible arsenals and its power to compress and unshaped ordinary lives, come to an end? Would the nuclear demon go back to hell, and the fear of a Russian land invasion sweeping everything before it, not stopping until it reached Normandy and Lagos and Palermo, fade into history because Karla fell to Smiley’s unknightly lance?” (p. 220)
And then, in the end, there is the choice Karla makes that gives the book its title. It is not what Karla does but the thought of how Smiley will need to respond that is what resonates.
See also me on:
Joining host Richard Smith are astronomy writer Giles Sparrow, Rick aka @brickpandorica and me.
I’ve been interested in Markstein since reading about his falling out with fellow writer David Whitaker when the latter was sent to Moscow in July 1969 on behalf of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain to protest the treatment of Solzhenitsyn. At the guild’s AGM on 31 May the following year, Markstein made a number of claims about what had happened in Moscow, despite not having been there. On at least one point he had to apologise because the source of his claims, writer Lewis Greifer, was there to rebut them. See pp. 333-334 of my book for more.
Greifer also crops up in this slim volume, available to buy from Portmeirion (where The Prisoner was filmed), which sketches a fascinating portrait of Markstein — or rather, of what we don’t know about him.
“It escapes me why GM’s birthdate should have come so contentious in website discussions,” says his friend Sidney Allinson in the introduction (p. 4). “In fact, he was born in 1926” — though no source is given for this fact — “which would make him about 21 years of age in 1947, which was when I knew him. We both worked as reporters with The Southport Guardian newspaper [in Merseyside.] At the time, for reasons best known to himself, he presented himself as being an American, complete with an authentic-sounding accent.”
We can understand why, in the years immediately after the Second World War, a German-born young man would want to hide his real accent and identity. In what follows, we learn Markstein also presented himself as Canadian though it’s thought he was actually born in Berlin and moved to England with his Jewish mother before the outbreak of war.
In her contribution to this book, “A Cooler Shade of George Markstein” (pp. 10-17) Catherine Nemeth Frumerman says mother and son moved to London in 1935 when George was about nine, adding that he was born Gustav Georg to actress Grete Maria Markstein — who in turn claimed to be the daughter of Albert Einstein. The source for this is apparently Michele Zackheim's Einstein's Daughter: The Search for Lieserl, which it says here was published by Riverhead Books in 2000. Frumerman says this information may have come from Markstein’s business partner Jacqui Lyons, who is thanked but not directly quoted by Zackheim.
But Ricky Davy in “So Who Was George Markstein?” (pp. 20-52) says Zackheim’s book was published in 1999 and is more sceptical about what is claimed.
“The book is an account of the life [of] a German woman named Grete Markstein, who believed herself to be the daughter of Einstein. Her son, Gustav Georg Markstein, it is claimed, later became George Markstein (via a name change to Herschdoerfer following Greta’s 1935 marriage). Knowledge in the book of this man ends in 1947 in Cheshire, several years after Grete passed away, and no tangible proof is given that George and Georg are the same person, although the tale does have some plausibility.” (p. 22)
Cheshire borders Merseyside, where Allinson worked with Markstein in 1947. So maybe, maybe, he was the same person as Georg. But was he really Einstein's grandson? In fact, Einstein's daughter Lieserl, is thought to have been born in 1902 but to have died the following year.
This is just one example of competing claims in the book. Central to this is Markstein’s repeated claim to have conceived The Prisoner, based on his knowledge of the real-life Inverlair Lodge, which was from 1941 No. 6 Special Workshop School of the Special Operations Executive (SOE). In contrast, star Patrick McGoohan claimed to have conceived the initial idea as well as to have dictated much of what made it to the screen.
“Creator of the Whole Fantasy — A Correspondence Between George Markstein & Roger Goodman” (pp. 54-67) details Markstein’s various claims and reproduces several of his letters (and Christmas cards). “When The Secret Agent Is Whisked Away” (pp. 78-95) is a transcript of Goodman’s interview with Markstein on 19 April 1980 at the ICA in London following a screening of The Prisoner episode Checkmate. Repeatedly, Markstein speaks of television as a collaborative enterprise with no single author — while reiterating that The Prisoner was his idea. But note the manner in which he doesn’t answer some questions, leaving us to fill in the blanks.
“Q: Mr Markstein, you said earlier on that you felt that the concept of the Village was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed at the time, certainly not today. Do you have any evidence of that?George: Yes.
Q: You do?
George: Yes.
Q: You are not going to elaborate?
George: I cannot. I am not prepared to discuss certain things, because I cannot.” (p. 94)
It’s a very odd interview, Markstein railing variously against computers and CCTV, the “era of experts” and the state of television at the time, but denying that television has any power to influence the thinking of the viewer. “Never have we had less freedom,” he declares at one point (p. 86), on the basis that we must empty our pockets before getting on a plane and that the Mall in London is closed to traffic.
“Is it because it is a Sunday and the Queen wants to sleep late? The Queen isn’t even in London, she is in Windsor. That’s why I’m against technology. You might ask what has the Queen and Buckingham Palace got to do with technology, but it all ties in. I am against progress.” (p. 86)
Dave Barrie’s “Who Is Number One?” (pp. 75-77) sifts such evidence but favours McGoohan as “the driving force [behind The Prisoner]from very early on” (p. 77). James Follett’s “There's No Mystery” (p. 97) counters that “Patrick McGoohan was not a story man.” The book ends with a quotation from Joan Drummond McGoohan underlining her late husband's central role — cited here under the title “Who knows?” (p. 98)
To be honest, I think identifying who came up with the initial idea is less interesting a question than how it then developed into what we saw on screen week after week, and why Markstein and McGoohan were both so proprietorial about this particular series. The idea that it’s down to a single person seems oddly reductive, making it somehow less.
As for Markstein, we are told that he was and remains a “sphinx”. Having read this book, I think he’s less enigma as unreliable source.
“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149)
“was based on his 1961 report to the New York Academy of Sciences which dealt with the biological and environmental effects of dropping a 20-megaton bomb on Manhattan”. Geoffrey Goodman, “Obituary — Tom Stonier”, Guardian, 28 June 1999.
“addressed more to women than to men [because] the mother is far more intimately concerned with the health of the family than the father. It is the mother who sees that the children have green vegetables and milk, and who nurses then when they have measles.” (p. 11)
“Science affects us all; so far, overwhelmingly to our advantage. If there are times when we feel this is not so, as members of a democracy we have some kind of duty to find out what is happening.” (p. 154)
“little more than another text book, and heavy going at that.” (Robin Turner, “Nuclear penguins and others”, Birmingham Post, 8 August 1964, p. 5.)
“Thought provoking … easily read but thorough” (John Berrie, “Woman’s angle”, Nottingham Evening Post and News, 7 August 1964, p. 10.)
“Everything factual has been checked by scientists whose knowledge is far more than equal to the task” (p. 7).
“She likes variety in writing and is now doing something in Science Fiction,” (p. 1)
“Man can’t afford to retreat; it is by discovery and invention, from fire and flint axe onwards, that he has survived. The axe is dangerously sharp, and the fire has grown as hot as the sun.” (p. 13)
