One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"In all his time in camps and prisons, Ivan Denisovich had lost the habit of concerning himself about the next day, or the next year, or about feeding his family. The authorities did all his thinking for him, and, somehow, it was easier like that." (p. 40)

This extraordinary book, detailing the waking hours on a bitterly cold day in a Russian work camp sometime in the early 1950s, is based on the real-life experience of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was released from such labour in 1957. 

First published in the USSR in 1962, my 1970 translation by Gillon Aitken is at least the third version in English. I can see why this book so haunted a generation. It seems to have influenced subsequent memoirs - of Soviet gulags, of the concentration camps in the war, of systems of oppression more generally.

In the USSR, the book and its implicit criticism of the regime overseen by Stalin was initially welcomed - perhaps emblematic of the new, more liberated era of Khrushchev. When Khrushchev was himself stripped of power in 1964, Solzhenitsyn fell out of favour. His books weren't exactly banned in the USSR, but life was made increasingly difficult. 

When, in 1969, Solzhenitsyn was chucked out of the Union of Writers in Russia, various bodies around the world staged protests of one kind or another. Most notably, the author was awarded the 1970 Nobel Prize for Literature. In July 1969, the Writers' Guild of Great Britain sent two delegates to the International Writers Guild conference being held in Moscow with the specific brief of making some protest about the treatment of Solzhenitsyn. One of those delegates was David Whitaker, and I've been reading his accounts of what happened there - and the fall-out from it. More of that anon.

The book is full of extraordinary moments: the men discussing the merits and techniques of Eisenstein's cinema as they get on with their weary toil in the snow; the man who is in prison because of the heinous crime of having received a note of gratitude from an English admiral after service in the war; the way a prisoner receiving a parcel of food from their family finds themselves in debt to everyone else...

In observing these details within the drudgery, Solzhenitsyn shows us the mechanics of the operation, the way the oppression works. The infighting of prisoners compels them to work, to play an active role in the system imprisoning them.

 "Who is the prisoner's worst enemy? Another prisoner. If only the prisoners didn't fight with each other, then..." (p. 114)

And while it's about the system, it's also about how an individual might survive in such conditions. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov hordes a crust of bread, does favours to earn himself an extra bit of thin soup, and squirrels away a broken bit of hacksaw blade with which he can later fashion a knife that will be useful for mending clothes. Only then the prisoners get searched and this small theft risks putting him,

"in the cells on 300 grams of bread a day and hot food once every three days. He imagined at that moment how enfeebled and hungry he would become and how difficult it would be to recover his present condition of being neither starved nor properly fed." (p. 117)

All that effort to keep going could be undone in an instant. And we're left with the horrible fact that this is just one day in 3,653 of Shukov's 10-year sentence. The last line of the book adds one further systematic cruelty.

"The three extra days were because of the leap years..." (p. 157)

Frankenstein in Baghdad, by Ahmed Saadawi

In the chaos of war-torn Iraq, even claiming the body of dead loved one is difficult. Hadi, a junk dealer, collects scraps of different corpses and stiches them together into a single body in the hope - he claims - that it might have a proper and dignified burial. But the patchwork figure is then inhabited by the soul of another dead person, and animated by the longing of a mother for her long-vanished son. The creature awakes... and immediately seeks revenge on all those it has been murdered by.

Frankenstein in Baghdad is a shocking, often queasy read, Jonathan Wright's translation of Ahmed Saadawi's original Arabic full of visceral detail. It's not just the monstrous creature - the police routinely beat and torture suspects, gangs molest citizens, there is sectarian violence. And yet this is a black comedy, with an eye for the foibles of ordinary people.

One example is the dilemma faced by Mahmoud al-Sawadi, a young journalist, who once wrote a piece about a criminal called Mantis.

"The Mantis's brother had led a small gang that terrorized the locals until he was arrested and detained. The news of his arrest was greeted with great joy by many, including Mahmoud, who then wrote a newspaper article about the need to enforce the law against this criminal. He philosophized a little in the article, saying there were three types of justice - legal justice, divine justice and street justice - and that however long it takes, criminals must face one of them." (pp. 165-6)

This article earns Mahmoud esteem and praise, until the Mantis's brother is set free - another example of corrupt, incompetent policing in the novel. When a rival gang then kill the brother, it seems Mahmoud's philosophy is right - but Mantis has taken exception and Mahmoud must flee the town. Years later, Mahmoud considers returning home but is assured that he's still remembered.

"Don't come. Don't show your face. Stay where you are, for God's sake, unless you want the three forms of justice applied to you. Now the Mantis often talks about them, even on the radio. He's stolen your idea." (p. 169) 

The novel stitches together the strange and the mundane to create a whole of its own. I found it a little slow to get going, with too many characters I couldn't keep track of. But that's then its power: we get to know these people and their interweaving stories.

There's magic - in the old woman whose longing brings a patchwork corpse back to life, and the astrologers whose accurate predictions don't help them save themselves. There's the suggestion that this is all real, carefully researched and documented by the writer from primary sources. And at the end the different characters all reach some kind of closure, our last sight a principal figure curled up with a stray cat and apparently free of the anger that drove so much of the story. If it starts as a story about the ravages of war, the injustice and desire for revenge, it concludes with a sense of peace.

Incidentally, none of the three books I've read this week won the Clarke Award last night, which went to Tade Thompson's Rosewater, which looked great. I was at the ceremony and, as well as seeing lots of old friends, got to meet Aliya Whiteley, whose work I've admired for so long. Afterwards, we were escorted to the Ice Bar, which was cool.

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies

My friend Red gave me The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies almost a year ago, but work got it in the way so I've only just read the first instalment - Fifth Business, originally published in 1970.

The book is a memoir by an old teacher, Dunstan Ramsay, sent to the headmaster of his school. It's a rather rambling life history, beginning with a snowball fight, then taking in Dunstan's relatively impoverished childhood in a Canadian village, his horrifically conveyed service in the First World War, and his later teaching and academic career, writing books about saints.

Davies is clearly influenced by Jung - the main characters in the book seem to represent Jungian archetypes. There's plenty on memory - one mean act haunts one man for decades and overshadows the life of another, yet is entirely forgotten by the perpertator. As Dunstan details his own experience, we follow the threads of these other, connected lives until very late - on page 244 of 257 - we realise this is less memoir than confession and the threads suddenly tie up.

The effect is that as you're reading it this is an enjoyable amble that wears its intelligence lightly, but it becomes in retrospect something much more affecting. It's not just the plot; there are so many asides and observations that I suspect I'll long be picking over. For example, there's Dunstan's friendship with the maverick Jesuit, Padre Blazon, who had over 100 and in a Viennese hospital, still eagerly courts radical views:

"The Devil knows corners of us all of which Christ himself is ignorant. Indeed, I am sure Christ learned a great deal that was salutary about Himself when He met the Devil in the wilderness. Of course, that was a meeting of brothers; people forget too readily that Satan is Christ's elder brother and has certain advantages in argument that pertain to a senior."
Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (1970) in The Deptford Trilogy, p. 240.

The Box of Delights and dreams of Christmas

I've written another piece for the Lancet Psychiatry, this time on The Box of Delights and other stories about dreams.

Having loved the TV adaptation from (whisper it) 30 years ago, writing the feature gave me an excuse to compare it to the original book and marvel at Alan Seymour's adaptation - full of small improvements that never intrude themselves on the source.

The cast are all excellent, too, but special mention must go to Bill Wallis, whose performance as Rat is brilliantly disgusting. What a brilliant actor he was.

I'm also thrilled to learn the top fact that as well as the casting of former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton as the wizard Cole Hawlings, working as an assistant floor manager on the production was Paul Carney - grandson of William Hartnell. Thanks to Guy Lambert for sharing that!

Doctor Who: 2012

Episode 790: The Snowmen
First broadcast at 5.15 pm, Tuesday 25 December 2012
<< back to 2011

Clara snogs the Doctor
The Snowmen (2012)

On 3 September 2012, Caitlin Moran asked Twitter:

"I know I'm going to regret this, but: what is the OFFICIAL number of companions the Doctor has had?"

It's a question that doesn't have an answer, for reasons I'm about to explain. But I did try to puzzle it out once for a work thing - and, at least for the series post-1989, I've a modest proposal...

Generally, it's quite easy to define a companion. There's three of them in the first episode: Susan, Barbara and Ian. When they leave, a new companion takes their place. Susan, leaves in Flashpoint (the final episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth), and a week later the Doctor meets Vicki. Ian and Barbara leave the TARDIS in The Planet of Decision (the final episode of The Chase), not knowing that Steven is already on board.

That's generally the rule: a companion leaves and a new one is introduced, usually in the same story or one story apart. Most companions last about a year in the series.

But there are plenty of exceptions to this general rule. In The Horse of Destruction (the final episode of The Myth Makers), Vicki leaves and is replaced by Katarina – who is then killed off four weeks later in The Traitors. That episode introduces Sara Kingdom, who travels with the Doctor and Steven for the next eight weeks before also being killed.

Do Katarina and Sara count as companions? Neither are listed in the Characters from Season 3 page on the BBC's own Doctor Who website - if that means anything. But other lists say one or both of them do.

I once asked the actress Jean Marsh if she considered Sara to be a companion. She told me, firmly, no: it was made clear to her at the time that companions got a better rate of pay than she was on. But does what the production team decide have any bearing?

There's also an argument that Katarina counts because, although she's in just five episodes, they're spread across two separate stories – The Myth Makers and The Daleks' Master Plan. Sara's nine episodes are all part of that latter story, so she doesn't count.

(Jean Marsh has since appeared in lots more episodes as Sara for Big Finish - most of them written by me. I think if she wasn't a bona fide companion before, she is now because of those adventures. You are welcome.)

But if companions need to be in more than story, that would rule out Grace Holloway, who only appears in the TV movie (1996). And if she counts as a companion, does Chang Lee? He appears in the same story, travels in the TARDIS and is on good terms with the Doctor at the end.

Does a companion need to travel in the TARDIS? Liz Shaw never did. The Brigadier travelled by TARDIS in The Three Doctors (1972-3), and appeared in numerous stories - but does he count as a companion? If he does, what about other regulars from UNIT - Benton and Yates in the old days, or Kate Lethbridge-Stewart today?

Doctor Who Magazine
#367 (March 2006)

Mickey wasn't a companion when we first met him in Rose (2005), but became one when he joined the TARDIS in School Reunion (2006), though he left again after three episodes. Publicity referred to him as the TV show's first black companion - but that's also what was said about Martha Jones when she joined the TARDIS a year later.

In fact, since the series came back in 2005, it's been tricky working out who counts as a companion. There are the main ones: Rose, Captain Jack, Donna, Martha, Amy and Rory, and Clara. But what about everyone else?

Does Adam count as a companion? He travelled in the TARDIS in two separate stories - Dalek and The Long Game (2005), but the point in the second story is that he's not a suitable candidate, so the Doctor drops hims home.

Perhaps how the production team viewed Adam and Mickey's status can be gauged from the fact that, when they joined the TARDIS, the actors playing them weren't credited in the opening titles. When Mickey returned in Journey's End (2008), actor Noel Clarke was credited after the opening titles. We might use those titles as an indicator of who counts:

• Credited in the titles of Journey's End, therefore a companion:
• Catherine Tate (Donna), Freema Agyeman (Martha), John Barrowman (Captain Jack), with Elisabeth Sladen (Sarah) and Billie Piper (Rose).
• Credited after the titles of Journey's End, so not a companion:
• Noel Clarke (Mickey), Camille Coduri (Jackie), Adjoa Andoh (Francine), Eve Myles (Gwen), Gareth David-Lloyd (Ianto).

That feels sort of right, but then the opening titles for the episodes following Journey's End credit people we might not think of as companions: David Morrisey (Jackson) in The Next Doctor (2008), Michelle Ryan (Christina) in Planet of the Dead (2009), Lindsay Duncan (Adelaide) in The Waters of Mars (2009) and Bernard Cribbins (Wilf) in The End of Time (2009-10).

Except for Wilf, these characters only appear in one episode and I don't think really count as companions - but then who am I to decide?

Well, entirely ignoring what I've said before about none of us getting to say what counts and what doesn't, I've a modest proposal. It goes like this:

Snog = companion

Yes, if we see the Doctor kiss someone, then they're a companion. It only counts for companions post-1989 but then, when companions have returned to the series - so far, only Jo and Sarah Jane - they've got a big hug from the Doctor.

Anyway, the list excludes Adam, Mickey and Wilf, but I think it works pretty well. And I'm delighted by the last one:

• Grace (the TV movie, 1996)
• Captain Jack (The Parting of the Ways, 2005)
• Rose (The Parting of the Ways)
• Madame de Pompadour (The Girl in the Fireplace, 2006)
• Jackie (in Army of Ghosts (2006) when she also travels in the TARDIS)
• Martha (Smith and Jones, 2007)
• Joan (Human Nature, 2007)
• Astrid (Voyage of the Damned, 2007)
• Donna (The Unicorn and the Wasp, 2008)
• Christina (Planet of the Dead, 2009)
• Amy (The Time of Angels, 2010)
• River (The Day of the Moon, 2011)
• The TARDIS (The Doctor's Wife, 2011)
• Rory (Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (2012)
• Kate Lethrbridge-Stewart (The Power of Three, 2012 - though it's only a peck on the cheek)
• Clara (The Snowmen, 2012)
• Elizabeth I (The Day of the Doctor, 2013)

Next episode: 2013

Modern Man, a short film what I wrote

I've written a new short film, Modern Man. Watch it, like it, share it with everyone you ever met - and use the hashtag #VMShortsvote.

But how did it all come about?

I can still taste the cocktails. In November last year, I attended the glamorous Virgin Media Shorts awards 2012, where my film, The Plotters, was shortlisted but did not quite win. There was a lot of free fizz and then cocktails, and I danced with – or at – Hannah from S Club 7. It's a tough old life, showbiz.

Six months later, I had an email from Sebastian Solberg, director of photography on The Plotters. He wanted to enter the 2013 VMS competition, this time as a director, and had an idea for a short. Would I be willing to write it? I thought, nobly, of free fizz and terrible dancing and said yes.

It helped that Seb's idea was a good one, full of comedy potential and easy to shoot all in one room. He came to visit me the next day, we sat out in the garden in the sunshine and I pitched how I'd ruin his idea. 

Looking back at the one-paragraph brief he sent me, the finished film sticks pretty closely to his original idea. That first meeting, I made three major suggestions:

1. The title, Modern Man.

 2. That it should have no dialogue. I'd met Neil Brand a few weeks before and we'd talked about silent comedy (he suggested that Mr Tumble on Cbeebies owed more to Chaplin than Oliver Hardy.) That had got me thinking about writing a film without dialogue. Also, the first cut of The Plotters had been much too long – the VMS competition has a maximum run time of just 2 minutes 20 seconds – and we'd struggled to cut it down, losing lots of great jokes and performances. A silent comedy would allow for more easy fiddling.

3. That it should have an impressive establishing shot, like the CGI 17th-century London we'd had to open The Plotters. It's important to grab the audience's attention from the start and an expensive-looking shot helps the film to stand out. I'd also been talking to my brother about the famous cut between a prehistoric bone and a spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey. So, we'd steal that cut and begin our film in the year 100,000 BC.

Seb didn't hate my ideas and later that day he went location scouting and found somewhere five minutes' walk from his home. He emailed me pictures the next day. “I've attached the original version and the final version (which as a bit of movie magic applied to me.)”

Putney, 2013
Location scouting for Modern Man

Putney, 100,00 BC
CGI test for Modern Man

Suddenly it was all looking doable and real, and there was even a filming date (22 June, which I couldn't do as I'd be at a family thing). I sent Seb the first draft of the script later that evening. He sent lots of notes back – on character, on beats in the script, on the whole thing. He also wanted “Clive” to be “Rupert”. I sent a second draft to him the next day.

I also sent that second draft to my brother Thomas Guerrier and actor/writer/warlock Adrian Mackinder – with whom I cowrote The Plotters – and Eddie Robson, whose Welcome to our Village, Please Invade Carefully is so annoyingly good. They provided good notes, honing jokes and emphasis.

On 13 June, Seb sent me emails with designs for one of the props and some notes on the main action sequence following a meeting with the film's stunt co-ordinator. Yes, I had to read that again, too: the film's stunt co-ordinator. Lorks.

The next day Seb was rehearsing with Romy Ahluwalia, one of our actresses. Emails started to come thick and fast, with confirmed names of cast and crew. The messages stopped coming from Seb and came from production manager Katya Rogers and producer Jassa Ahluwalia. It was all fast gathering pace. On 16 June I responded to lots of comments with a new version of the script. We swapped ideas for the lead actor, and on 18 June, Katya sent round a complete list of cast and crew – with Sean Knopp playing Rupert. Excitingly, he was in Doctor Who.

On 20 June, I trekked across south London to a house in Festing Road in Putney where the film would be shot two days later. I went through into the kitchen where three young children were playing. No, wait, it was Jassa, Katya and Seb and I am just quite old. It was a baking hot day and I made the mistake of asking for a mug of tea, so sweated handsomely through the deliberations. Seb went through each shot with director of photography Dale McCready. Excitingly, he'd worked on Doctor Who.

Meanwhile, I chatted to Jassa and Katya and stunt co-ordinator Dani Biernat. Excitingly... well, guess what show she might have worked on.

Once Seb was finished with Dale, we read through the script one last time and picked over some final details. I headed home feeling good, passing an important cultural landmark just a few doors down from our location.

Simon Guerrier @0tralala 20 Jun
This afternoon I walked past Mr Benn's house. The costume shop at the end of the road has gone. #brokenbritain
Mr Benn @therealmrbenn 20 Jun
@0tralala And as if by magic, you get tweet from Mr Benn to say hello! Festing Road? There was a fancy dress shop on Lacey Road, long gone!

I delivered a final, locked script that evening and found myself redundant.

A flurry of emails followed – the callsheet with a starting time of 08:00, shooting script, unit list, movement order, general risk assessment, details of which bits of public transport would not be working. None of it was for me. While the cast and crew made the film, I spent my Saturday on a bouncy castle.

I got to see a rough cut of the short last week, but am thrilled to see the final thing. Well done to Seb and the team. It looks *amazing*. And bloody hell, a mammoth!

The Wedding of James Bond

The tenth James Bond novel, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) begins with Bond revisiting the scene of the first – the casino from Casino Royale. On a winning streak, he pays off the debt of a pretty girl, who then invites him up to her room. This is Tracy – soon to be Mrs James Bond.

Bond's first night with Tracy is not exactly romantic. She's cross and weird, telling him:

“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.”

Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, p. 36. 

 Bond can see she's troubled and self-destructive, and she makes it explicit that she's shagging him because he paid her. So it's not exactly gallant that he doesn't walk away but instead gets his money's worth. Of course, it's been well established that Bond is an amazing lay. Later, Tracy tells him:

“'That was heaven, James. Will you please come back when you wake up? I must have it once more.' Then she had turned over on her side away from him and, without answering his last endearments, had gone to sleep – but not before he had heard that she was crying. 

What the hell? All cats are grey in the dark.”

Ibid., pp. 36-37.

It's hardly a great start to their relationship, but Bond then keeps his eye on Tracy and stops her when she tries to kill herself after a day on the beach. This rescue is interrupted by some hoodlums who take Tracy and Bond away to a Corsican gangster called Marc-Ange Draco – who turns out to be Tracy's dad.

So far, its a strange and exciting beginning. Draco and Bond quickly become friends – they might work on opposite sides of the law, but they're both rough diamonds with a liking for the finer things in life. The despairing dad explains Tracy's history, and again there's nothing very romantic about it.

“'I was married once only, to an English girl, an English governess. She was a romantic. She had come to Corsica to look for bandits' – he smiled – 'rather like some English women adventure into the desert to look for sheiks. She explained to me later that she must have been possessed by a subconscious desire to be raped. Well' – this time he didn't smile – 'she found me in the mountains and she was raped – by me. The police were after me at the time, they have been for most of my life, and the girl was a grave encumbrance. But for some reason she refused to leave me ... The result, my dear Commander, was Teresa, my only child.' 

So, thought Bond. That explained the curious mixture the girl was – the kind of wild 'lady' that was so puzzling in her.” 

Ibid., p. 46.

If this mix of glamour and abuse sits uncomfortably, Bond at leasts turns down Draco's offer of money to help straighten Tracy out, and instead recommends a clinic in Switzerland – which will be quite convenient later in the book. Bond returns to London, but he's smitten. Fleming doesn't exactly go overboard in schmaltz, using Bond's new secretary to show how much he's changed:

“Loelia Ponsoby had at last left to marry a dull, but worthy and rich member of the Baltic Exchange, and confined her contacts with her old job to rather yearning Christmas and birthday cards to the members of the Double-O Section. But the new one, Mary Goodnight, an ex-Wren with blue-black hair, blue eyes, and 37-22-35, was a honey and there was a private five-pound sweep in the Section as to who would get her first. Bond had been lying equal favourite with the ex-Royal Marine Commando who was 006 but, since Tracy, had dropped out of the field and now regarded himself as a rank outsider, though he still, rather bitchily, flirted with her.” 

Ibid., p. 57.

James Bond in love. What a dick.

And all this love stuff is just a side show anyway. Bond has also got an important lead from Draco on the whereabouts of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the super-villain whose SPECTRE organisation Bond has fought in the last two books. Bond hasn't met Blofeld, but a man who might be him, Monsieur le Comte de Bleuville, is living it up in a posh ski resort in Switzerland. And he seems rather pleased with his title, as he's been writing to the College of Arms to get it officially recognised.

The plot that follows is good fun, Bond posing as Sir Hilary Bray, an expert on heraldry who can help trace Blofeld's line. In doing so, he can also establish the man's history and link him to his crimes. But to do this, Bond has to go stay in Blofeld's luxury complex, high on the top of a Swiss mountain, without even packing a gun.

That's important. As always, the more the odds are stacked against Bond, and the more he must rely only on his wits rather than luck or clever gadgets, the better the adventure. Coincidences mount up against him – first a man who knows the real Sir Hilary is visiting, then one of Bond's own colleagues turns up. We hear the terrible scream of a man “accidentally” falling down the bob-sleigh run, and the threat of such a death hangs heavy over Bond. It all licks along quite nicely. Fleming nicely puts in brackets stuff Bond doesn't know, as Blofeld's henchpersons watch his every move, putting us in a privileged position that helps build suspense.

Also guests of the Count are a group of pretty girls from all round the UK – not from round the world as in the film. They're being treated for allergies to chickens and potatoes, and are all keen to get Bond into bed. He obliges one called Ruby – though we're told he's not forgotten Tracy, this is just him doing his job and getting information. Even so, it's odd to hear Bond call a girl “Baby” and there's something oddly prissy about what he gets up to:

“He gave her another long and, he admitted to himself, extremely splendid kiss, to which she responded with an animalism that slightly salved his conscience. 'Now then, baby.' His right hand ran down her back to the curve of her behind, to which he gave an encouraging and hastening pat.” 

Ibid., p. 122.

There's some fun stuff as he sneaks about, dodging the CCTV and opening locked doors to get into Ruby's room. Again, the details about smell make Bond seem weirdly OCD.

“Her hair smelt of new-mown summer grass, her mouth of Pepsodent, and her body of Mennen's Baby Powder. A small night wind rose up outside and moaned round the building, giving an extra sweetness, an extra warmth, even a certain friendship to what was no more than an act of physical passion. There was real pleasure in what they did to each other, and in the end, when it was over and they lay quietly in each other's arms, Bond knew, and knew that that the girl knew, that they had done nothing wrong, done no harm to each other.”

Ibid., p. 127.

This is all a little convenient. Bond – and Ruby - might feel entirely guiltless, but what would Tracy think? It's telling that he lies to her, says he never touched the girls – but tells the truth to her father, who accepts the fact without reproach. If the marriage had continued, how faithful might Bond have been?

As well as shagging the patients, Bond finally gets to meet Blofeld. Though this is the first time they meet, Bond has clearly gathered a lot of intelligence already:

“He knew what not to expect, the original Blofeld, last year's model – about twenty stone, tall, pale, bland face with black crew-cut, black eyes with the whites showing all round, like Mussolini's, ugly thin mouth, long pointed hands and feet – but he had no idea what alternations had been contrived on the envelope that contained the man.”

Ibid., pp.102-3.

Given the bald, Nehru-suited look of three Bond films (plus Charles Grey in Diamonds Are Forever and Max von Sydow in Never Say Never Again), it's striking how different the book Blofeld is:

“The man was tallish, yes, and, all right, his hands and naked feet were long and thin. But there the resemblance ended. The Count had longish, carefully tended, almost dandified hair that was a fine silvery white.” 

Ibid., p. 103.

Perhaps it's the “dandified”, but I imagined him played by Jon Pertwee. That Bond is able to catch this master criminal by playing to his vanity about a family title is really nicely done – a character flaw that makes a credible lure. Note also the book Blofeld is not accompanied by a white cat.

Speaking of the films, On Her Majesty's Secret Service also shows the influence of the film Doctor No. Fleming originally disliked the casting of Sean Connery but was soon won over – and here accommodates the accent into the canonical Bond:

“My father was a Scot and my mother was Swiss ... My father came from the Highlands, from near Glencoe.”

Ibid., p. 59.

Ursula Andress is also one of the celebs dining at Blofeld's restaurant (on page 114). I'm tempted to suggest that the exciting escape from the Swiss mountain in the midst of an avalanche is also a nod to the action set pieces of the films. Bond's mum being Swiss means he's an okay skier, though Fleming is keen to make his style basic and old-fashioned, which ensures it's not to easy and that the odds remain against him.

Amid Emma Coat's 22 rules of good storytelling compiled while working at Pixar, there is:

#19: Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.

Bond – desperate, exhausted and with baddies almost on him – bumping into Tracy feels like a cheat. Yes, Fleming has set this up and it was Bond himself who recommended that she go to Switzerland, but it still feels too easy. Tracy is good in a crisis and helps Bond escape. He needs to get back to London to report, so she drops him at the airport. And Bond suddenly gets all romantic.

“Bond suddenly thought, Hell! I'll never find another girl like this one. She's got everything I've looked for in a woman. She's beautiful, in bed and out. She's adventurous, brave, resourceful. She's exciting always. She seems to love me. She'd let me go on with my life. She's a lone girl, not cluttered up with friends, relations, belongings. Above all, she needs me. It'll be someone for me to look after. I'm fed up with all these untidy, casual affairs that leave me with a bad conscience. I wouldn't mind having children. I've got no social background into which she would or wouldn't fit. We're two of a pair, really. Why not make if for always?” 

Ibid., p. 172. 

This might seem a bit brutal and pragmatic, but it's perfectly in character. In context, it's even quite moving. Bond tells Tracy to meet him in Berlin, where they'll tie the knot.

Back in London on Christmas Day, Bond visits M's bizarre, nautically themed home to present all he's learned and work out what Blofeld is up to. There's something comic and late-60s The Avengers about M's house being based on his old ship, even down to his old staff now acting as a butler.

Experts arrive to confirm Bond's suspicions, and we get a full briefing on the new, deadly science of biological warfare. It all sounds credible, quoting a “United States Senate paper, Number 58991, dated August 29th 1960, prepared by 'The Sub-committee on Disarmament of the Committee on Foreign Relations'” (on page 191). Yet, as always, we need to take the things Fleming states as fact with a pinch of salt:

“Now there is plenty of medical evidence for the efficacy of hypnosis. There are well-authenticated cases of the successful treatment by these means of such stubborn disabilities as warts, certain types of asthma, bed-wetting, stammering, and even alcoholism,drug-taking and homosexual tendencies. Although the British Medical Association frowns officially on the practitioners of hypnosis, you would be surprised, sir, to know how many doctors themselves, as a last resort, particularly in cases of alcoholism, have private treatment from qualified hypnotists.”

Ibid., p. 187.

Having established what Blofeld's about, British intelligence is then rather hamstrung by tricky things like international law and the lack of help they can expect from the Swiss in extraditing Blofeld. Luckily, Bond is now owed a favour from Tracy's dad, and enlists the Corsican underground to lead an attack on Blofeld's base. Draco is only too pleased to help, seeing this as a sort of dowry. Tracy is less pleased:

“'All right. I won't ask questions. And I'm sorry I cried.' She added fiercely, 'But you are such an idiot! You don't seem to think it matters to anyone. The way you go on playing Red Indians. It's so – so selfish.'”

Ibid., p. 226.

The thing is that she's right. There's no reason for Bond to go, except his own macho nonsense. The attack is a bit of a disaster – despite an exciting chase down the bob sled run, Blofeld escapes and Bond is badly wounded. He heads to Berlin and to Tracy, where again it's not quite romantic:

“'What worries me is how we're going to make love. In the proper fashion, elbows are rather important for the man.' 

'Then we'll do it in an improper fashion. But not tonight., or tomorrow. Only when we're married. Till then I am going to pretend I'm a virgin.' She looked at him seriously. 'I wish I was, James. I am in a way, you know. People can make love without loving.' 

Ibid., p. 230.

Yes, the real tragedy is that they don't have a proper, loving shag before she snuffs it. A second bracketed section tells us that – in another coincidence - Bond has been spotted by his enemies. It's beautifully done – Bond's wedded bliss while we know something awful is coming, and then the simplicity with which he doesn't quite accept that Tracy is dead.

At the end of the fifth novel, Fleming killed Bond; at the end of the tenth* he kills his wife. I'd loved this book best of all when I originally read the novels in my teens. This time, I was struck by the fun and smart plot (especially after the awful The Spy Who Loved Me), how difficult things are made for Bond, and the striking “visuals” of the setting and action set pieces. The romance between Bond and Tracy is odd, unequal and often uncomfortable, and never quite convinces. She's yet another damaged girl “cured” by Bond having sex with her. Yet the ending is beautifully played and haunting, partly because of a tantalising glimpse of Bond being happy and putting someone else first.

(* For Your Eyes Only isn't a novel but a collection of short stories.)

It's cold outside

“'A fool always wants to shorten space and time; a wise man wants to lengthen both.'
John Ruskin – who had never tried to walk to the South Pole – quoted with some irony in Wilson's sledging journal, 11 December 1902”

David Crane, Scott of the Antarctic, p. 217

I bought David Crane's Scott of the Antarctic three years ago, when I visited Scott's ship Discovery in Dundee. Have finally got round to reading it.

Robert Falcon Scott's two trips to the Antarctic – first in 1901-04, then in 1910-12 – are remarkable Boy's Own adventures from an age of imperial confidence and conquest just a breath before the First World War. Constantly we're reminded that those who survived the trips South were then to face the trenches. Scott, like the Titanic which sank a month after his death, seems to prefigure the Great War as a bookend to the triumphant Victorian era. For Scott's sometime-friend JM Barrie, Scott seemed to embody the heroism of the day. Why, though, does he still resonate today?

Crane has access to diaries, letters and naval accounts, as well as the slew of books written by Scott himself and those who knew him. He provides an authoritative account that strives to paint Scott neither as hero nor villain, and addresses criticisms from those that have.

It's full of choice details, too. We know, for example, that in 1891, Nelson's Victory was moored on the Thames (p. 47). Or there's the way Scott's party adapted Mrs Beeton's Cookery Book.

“Recipes for the cooking of beef were used for the seal and those for duck and goose for skua and penguin.”

Ibid., p. 197n.

A letter from Scott's wife Kathleen while he's out stumbling toward the South Pole shows that tabloid tactics have not changed in the last 98 years.

“19 November [1911], Kathleen's [letter]:I worked all morning. Then a 'Daily Mirror' man came to see me and upset my greatly. He said if I would allow a photograph of the infant writing a letter asking for money for you to appear in the 'Mirror' he was convinced he could get four thousand pounds ... My dear, I do humbly beg your pardon if I have done wrong, but I said no. Not only can I not bear my weeny being bandied about in the half-penny press, but also I doubt greatly that any sum approaching four thousand pounds would be got. Dearest, I do hope you approve. I couldn't bear it, though.”

Ibid., p. 516.

That letter is given in an eerie, three-page sequence intercutting Scott's last diary entries with the letters his wife was still sending from England. The domestic worries contrast with the ordeal out in the snow, and Kathleen natters about friends she's had dinner with, no suggestion that Scott's not coming back. Scott himself, as Crane says, seems to have written himself out of the future of their son.

We, of course, know Scott's not going to make it; even if we didn't, Crane makes the reaction to Scott's death the subject of his first chapter. It's the same trick as in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia; the legend first, then the real man. (Lawrence and Scott were near contemporaries and might well a good comparative study.)

There is, then, a peculiar, morbid tone to Scott's story, counting down the days to that last diary entry where Scott signs off, “It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.”

A decade before that penultimate sentence, Scott made his first journey to the Antarctic on Discovery, the people of Cape Town came out to see them.

“'Heard an amusing yarn of lady being asked why she was coming on board this ship,' Royds [Scott's First Lieutentant] noted, 'replied that in case of any disaster think how interesting it would be to know that she had actually spoken to and seen the officers!! Nice way of looking at things and not very bright for us.'”

Ibid., p. 128.

It's as if every move that Scott makes is moving him closer to death, as if it's all been destined. That's a danger with biography; in retrospect, where we end up is out starting point so of course the route to it makes perfect sense. But living through it, we're faced with choices and chances whose outcomes we cannot predict.

There are still plenty of gaps in our knowledge about Scott. Little is known about his early life. There are a few instances of his name in school registers and log books, some surviving notes to his mother. Crane assumes this means young Scott did little good or bad to distinguish himself from his generation – otherwise there'd be a record. Instead, Crane explains what's known of a typical life in the navy as a rough guide to the molding of Scott.

We've an insight into the Scott of 22 when he writes home in 1890, on the Amphion as it makes its way back from Honolulu. Scott and his bored shipmates have had a race to grow beards:

“'I was a bad last – a brilliant idea struck me that checking my hair proper, would help to “force” the beard, so I had my back cut with one of those patent horse-clipping arrangements; it didn't seem to do the least much good, but it gave me a very weird appearance.'”

Ibid., pp. 43-44.

There's something telling here in the bold plan, the fearless of embarrassment or failure, and the plan then not working. Later, there's little but teasing rumours about Scott's love life prior to his meeting his wife. Crane holds back from theorising, and admits:

“Biography can confidently offer profounder insights [into any life] only by pretending to a knowledge that it does not possess.”

Ibid., p. 348.

Again there are telling details in what we do know. Scott wanted a simple wedding, not in naval uniform. He seems to have feared any kind of bother on the day; a simple, straight-forward marriage attended by “enough admirals to stock the world's fleets” (p. 374) and a telegram from the king.Scott's letters to Kathleen – before and after the marriage – seem desperate to assure her of his feelings. This, I thought, suggested he either came across as cold or that she needed constant assurance. Kathleen's character is not the subject of the book, but I found the moments Crane devotes to her fascinating. She's tough, resourceful and independent. Other explorers – like Nansen – take her for dinner in Paris. And other women cannot stand her.

Scott himself says little in his diaries of the squabbles between the explorer's wives on their second journey south – the wives making the trip as far as New Zealand. Perhaps he's too polite to mention such things, perhaps he didn't even notice. There's a sense of a bullishly single-minded leader, striking out to his doom.

He had to be single-minded. The book reminded my of the Dr's study of archaeological adventures, where egos, national politics and luck are all as important reasons for going as the scientific needs. Scott's constantly weighed down by his own personal circumstances, and the need to provide for his mother, sisters and wife. Perhaps that explains his need to escape into an icy cold but all-male endeavour.

In fact, for trip two, the scientific needs get chucked over the shoulder as Scott discovers midway to the south that his old rival Amundsen is heading for the ice as well. You can practically hear the fiendish Norwegian twirling his moustache.

I can't help feeling that if Scott had been the one to suddenly announce he was also heading South that Crane and history would remember him for his wily pluck. Amundsen was better equipped, experienced and knows how to use his skis. I'm hardly betraying my country to say so.

In fact, the paucity of knowledge about what Scott was facing comes as quite a shock.

“On the eve of Discovery's voyage it was a commonplace that the world knew more of Mars than it did of Antarctica.”

Ibid., p. 315.

It's not just the cartography. Scott is woefully, dangerously ignorant of the value of dogs and mules in pulling sledges. The motorised equipped has not been properly tested, and the English don't know how to ski. Their knowledge of nutrition ultimately ruins the second expedition, and greatly imperils the first. Crane is good at explaining exactly what the cold did to the explorer's bodies. It's not for the squeamish.

Even for those in the crew not attempting the Pole, the rations were not adequate. Scott's diaries from the first trip South include his anguish at the “evil” of scurvy. As Crane explains:

“Behind this prickliness lay centuries of ignorant prejudice and an association in the popular and scientific mind with venereal diseases that time had done little to lessen. The irony of it was that for all practical purposes, science had left Scott in a worse position for combating scurvy than it had his predecessors a hundred years earlier. As early as the 1740s the young Scottish surgeon James Lind had demonstrated the curative powers of lemon juice, but after the virtual elimination of scurvy from Royal Navy ships, a shift from the use of lemon to the less effective West Indian lime had combined with the confusing evidence of polar expeditions to leave Lind and his remedy discredited.

The cause of scurvy is, in fact, a vitamin C deficiency, resulting in an inability of the body to produce collagen, a connective tissue that binds muscle and other structures together. Three years after Discovery's return Alex Holst and Theodor Frolich were close enough to an understanding to demonstrate that scurvy was a dietary problem with a dietary solution, and yet even then prejudice, professional jealousies and institutional resistance – those classic symptoms of scurvy's medical history – meant that there was still nothing like a consensus on its causes. 'I understand that scurvy is now believed to be ptomaine poisoning,' Scott could still write in 1905.”

Ibid., pp. 195-6.

Despite – perhaps because of – these fearsome shortcomings, this is a story of great heroism. Scott and Crane are both keen to underline the good qualities of the men, over any petty squabbles in their own accounts.

“It is a measure of the man that Royds – and Cherry, too – go on with it in spite of his fears, but the age that gave us the White Feather and shot men with shell shock had little time for such sensitivities.”

Ibid., p. 169.

There have also been criticisms of Scott's ultimate achievement, and though the second trip might have been overshadowed by Amundsen reaching the pole first, and then Scott's death, Crane is keen to bolster Scott's scientific achievements. Yes, science was secondary to the race for the pole, but Scott died with important rock samples on him, and he'd kept notes and observations till the end. His first journey is also of massive importance to Crane's case:

“The massive volumes of results and observations that came out under the auspices of the British Museum and the Royal Society over the next nine years are the unarguable legacy of Discovery's scientific work.”

Ibid., p. 308.

But none of this is what makes Scott such a hero, that makes him still a hero today when all the attitudes and world-view he was part of and stood for have long since gone their way. What makes Scott a hero is his death – and the way he and his men met it. The death of Oates, walking out into a blizzard with a dryly delivered quip worthy of James Bond, is all the more moving in context.

More than that, Scott's a hero because he failed. That, as George Orwell argued, is a uniquely British kind of heroism.

“English literature, like other literatures, is full of battle-poems, but it is worth noticing that the ones that have won for themselves a kind of popularity are always a tale of disasters and retreats. There is no popular poem about Trafalgar or Waterloo, for instance. Sir John Moore’s army at Corunna, fighting a desperate rearguard action before escaping overseas (just like Dunkirk!) has more appeal than a brilliant victory. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction. And of the last war, the four names which have really engraved themselves on the popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli and Passchendaele, every time a disaster. The names of the great battles that finally broke the German armies are simply unknown to the general public.”

George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn”, Essays, pp. 142-143.

Scott might be a Victorian explorer, but what his adventures most made me think of were the Apollo missions to the Moon, just a half-century later. At least after reading this account, the lunar landings seem so much less risky compared to the journey's south, where the ice tore through the crew and their equipment and ship, slowly eating them away.

I've seen President Nixon's pre-recorded TV address had Armstrong and Aldrin not made it back off the lunar surface. Would they have been bigger heroes in the national and global consciousness for that failure? Or would they have quietly brushed under the carpet?

Snow, shelves, Sherwood

Snowed in. There are no trains running so I can't get to work. It's like being back in Chicago. Only here we're all taking a duvet day. Means I've a chance to catch up on the hundred things I'm racing to finish. The Dr mutters darkly about how this time next week I'll be San Francisco.

I don't tell her I might be in Vegas.

The inclement weather has scuppered the plan to have new shelves built today; the Man can't hope to reach us. Which is a bother 'cos the Dr and R. spent all yesterday clearing the old shelves out of the way. There are books stacked all over everywhere now, and the old shelves themselves were gone within minutes of being put up on Freecycle. So we have a strange and echoing living room, a good foot wider to the right.

We sat in the tinny-sounding space last night to watch Attenborough's programme on Darwin and the Tree of Life, and then Being Human. Bah! that both shows were on at the same time. Bah! that it took an hour for Being Human to be up on iPlayer. But woo! for such splendid telly. And Moses Jones tonight.

Nimbos and the Dr are thinking of venturing out to take photos and build snowpersons later. I have work to get on with. Spent the weekend finishing something as-yet unannounced. But something I can now speak of is Robin Hood: The Siege. It's a talking book read by the apparently quite dishy Richard Armitage – the Dr has made known her approval of this assignment. The story is set during the BBC TV show's forthcoming third series. Release dates will depend on when that's shown...

Right. Plenty to get on with. But I'm going to go back to bed.

Fountain of snot and knowledge

I've returned from Chicago with a cold, plus chocolates and Indiana Jones Lego for the Dr. She's also pleased I know the stink she likes after only four years of being hitched.

The convention was great fun but exhausting - a Doctor Who convention is one of the rare places where the rubbish filling my head can be useful. The food was huge, the snow was festive, and everyone was just lovely. Made a lot of new friends and got drunk with some old ones. The air-con made it feel like I'd sunburnt my face, and the heating meant I couldn't decide whether to where muppet-skin jumpers or tee-shirts.

Spent most of my time in the hotel itself, though we did escape to TGI Friday one night for enormous food and K. took me to Target. Both were just the far side of the hotel car park, so they hardly count. But hey, it was cold.

Oddly, the snow seemed to affect domestic flights more than it did international. There was much concern as the blizzard came down on Sunday, especially amongst those who had a million miles to drive.

On Monday, a fantastic fellow called Dennis ferried us into town for a last look round the Art Institute of Chicago. How strange to see it covered in snow, the same yet so different from last time.

I'd last been there in June 2004, in the blistering heat of my honeymoon. Chicago was the one place we visited in our grand tour of family and friends that the Dr and I thought we might like to live. Again, I was impressed by the beauty and history and buzz of the place, still zinging from the election of their boy.

After the art we went for a long walk looking for something to eat. Had a last, gargantuan lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, then nabbed a taxi back to the car park and raced to the airport.

My plane home was on time until the last minute, when the cold killed the tug towing us from the gate. We eventually took off about an hour and a half late; hope everyone else got home okay.

I watched WALL-E (which might have been written by Russell T Davies), Iron Man (far, far better than I'd expected) and a really rather brilliant documentary called Young @ Heart. Also did plenty of writing.

Have spent the morning trudging through my email. Now have Codename Moose popping round to show me his homework and to watch something that counts as Research. Have pitched for something, been organising something else and am generally back in the thick of it like I was never away...

"Shooting history in the foot"

I’ve enjoyed Jon Snow’s often jokey Snowmail preludes to each evening’s Channel 4 News, which are often funnier, more insightful and more to the point than the various BBC journalists’ blogs. Then there’s Snow’s terrible taste in stripy, brightly coloured ties, his ever-present bike and the occasional scandalised tabloid front page. Usually because he’s beaten them to a salacious scoop.

But that was about all I knew about him, really. So I wasn’t sure what to expect of his memoirs, Shooting History. The paperback offers some intriguing pull-quotes. Denis MacShane of the Independent calls him,

“a modern-day George Orwell”

while Matthew Parris offers the rather back-handed compliment that,

“when it dawns on the reader how extremely anti-Establishment Jon Snow’s views are, one’s respect for his impartiality as a broadcaster only grows.”

The book starts with Snow’s comfortable childhood, the son of the head of a public school (and later Bishop of Whitby), and he’s a better chorister than scholar. He’s brief but surprisingly frank about near-abuse and early sexual encounters, but it’s his year as a VSO in Uganda that really makes an impact, followed by an anti-apartheid sit in at Liverpool Univeristy, flunking out of college and three years hard graft for a drugs shelter. There’s something of the radical zealot about this character-forming period, like having realised he’s been one of the privileged ones he’s desperate to make amends.

Snow rather comes to journalism by accident, but the political zeal is vital to the kind of journalist he becomes. There’s a terrific tension between the imperative to report objectively and professionally and his own deep-rooted desire to act. There are times meeting Idi Amin or other dictators when he’s aware he could physically attack them, even kill them… His horror at Europe and America’s various colonial and militaristic projects (for all his evident love of the countries and people) is born from the simple, evident proposition that they’re not playing fair.

In effect, Snow’s been right there in the midst of some of the key events and with the key people of recent decades, and this is an insightful modern history. But for all the big stuff about wars and world leaders, there’s plenty of telling small details. On pp. 74-5 his bicycle gets him to a scoop long before his stuck-in-traffic rivals, and later the bike astounds his colleagues in Washington DC. There’s mention of his influential friends – lawyers and politicians of the crusading bent – and the effect his thrill-seeking wanderlust has on his family life. These, too, are dealt with briefly and frankly, and I can see why the Independent might liken this plain style to Orwell.

There is, though, more good humour than in Orwell’s reportage, and a delight at the absurd.

“Geoffrey Howe, still Foreign Secretary, once told me how Mrs Thatcher, who rarely took a holiday, found herself, with her husband Denis, on a five-day break in a small town in Austria. By some ghastly coincidence, the Kohls were at a hotel nearby. She decided she’d best nip trouble in the bud, and sent word to the Chancellor suggesting a casual meeting. He replied that he could not possibly find time to see her, being too tied up with work commitments. That afternoon, she and Denis took a stroll, and there, three streets from their own hotel, was the substantial figure of Kohl sitting happily with his wife Hannelore and a solitary security guard in the sun outside a café, devouring a vast cream bun.”

Jon Snow, Shooting History, pp. 283-4.

The villainous Eliot Carver in Tomorrow Never Dies says that the most important question for a journalist to answer is why. Snow’s great achievement here is to interlink the wars and world leaders he’s encountered, joining up the dots to explain how we get where we are now. He shows how the mess made of Africa by withdrawing European colonial powers provided a breeding ground for terror. He was there on the ground in Grenada to see the Reagan administration wilfully ignoring the nonsensical elements of its intelligence to pursue a reckless, aggressive war.

“It was one of the very rare occasions on which America took not a single journalist into war with her. Ostensibly the aim of the invasion was to ‘rescue’ the American medical students from the annexe at the bottom of the runway. Five thousand US troops were sent on the mission. Instead of hitting the bunkers that didn’t exist, they attacked the wrong building, a mental hospital, killing patients. Resistance was almost non-existent, but that did not prevent three US Black Hawk helicopters from crashing into each other while they assaulted another building which turned out to be completely empty. At the end of it all, after a couple of hours of ‘fighting’, sixty Cuban workers, twenty-four Grenadians and nineteen American troops lay dead. Most of the medical students complained that that they didn’t want to be rescued at all.”

Ibid., p. 221.

In the final chapter, Snow draws these many threads together into a crusading manifesto – one aimed at the broadcast media as well as political leaders. He is angry at the media’s shrinking horizons and the failure of the North of the world to engage with and comprehend the concepts and imagery – and grievances – of the South.

“This is a time for nations and peoples to come together, a time to rekindle the United Nations dream and let it reflect more honestly a fairer new world order. But the national politicians don’t want to talk about it, and the media is relieved – for it is the stuff of boredom. If the fashion for war against a noun is with us, why not a ‘war against ignorance’? We have an obligation to our children and our children’s children to break out of our self-centred lethargy and to engage – not as we did before, extracting whatever we felt was worth taking – but in enabling everyone to share in whatever is productive and enriching for all of us. If we do not, assuredly the resentful and dispossessed will come for us with greater and greater ferocity. They will not come in an overwhelming Second World War kind of way, but in never-ending stabs that render our developed daily lives more and more insecure.”

Ibid., p. 378.

We must ask the difficult questions and face the difficult truths. As he says, the attacks of 9/11 were not, “just a band of disaffected educated Saudis. These people are emotionally succoured and backed by great numbers in the world who see no hope, who have nothing to lose, and who think ‘America had it coming’.”

It rests on us to ask why.

Splitter!

“At the end the comandante raised his arm in the Fascist salute. ‘¡Arriba España!’ In the early days of Bernie’s captivity, at San Pedro, many prisoners had refused to respond, but when a few were shot they had complied, and now there was a dull ragged response. Bernie had told the other prisoners about an English word that sounded almost the same as ‘Arriba’ and now it was ‘Grieve España’ that they called back.”

CJ Sansom, Winter in Madrid, p. 256.

Mother-in-law leant us this, which gripped when I should have been reading work things. It’s about three public school boys, caught up in Spain after the civil war, as Franco debates whether or not to go in with Hitler.

Bernie Piper is the son of a shopkeeper, in Spain to fight for the reds against fascism. Missing, believed dead, he’s in a work camp in Cuenca, slowly toiling to death, destroying pagan cave paintings. (This might constitute a spoiler were it not also revealed in the back-cover blurb.)

Bernie's grieving girlfriend Barbara has been taken up by the Clark-Gable-moustached spiv Sandy, who got expelled from the old school and never got on with Bernie. Sandy’s up to something mischievous involving gold mines and Jewish refugees. So another school mate, hero and Dunkirk veteran Harry Brett, is sent out to spy on Sandy.

It packs in the historical detail, explaining the power groups, economics and cultural nuances to build up a vivid picture of these terrible times. There also some fun gags involving real historical characters. All this helps flesh out an engrossing plot, and the last 100 pages are especially hard to put down. The Dr was a little disappointed by the abruptness of the ending; I thought it effectively placed the whole thing in the context of the rest of the war.

The 4½-page historical note is and one of best and most concise summaries of the period I’ve seen. But the novel itself explores the splits between what are ostensibly two sides. The British-bribed monarchists vie for power with the fascist Falange, while Bernie’s as much at risk from his fellow communists as he is his captors. And at its heart are those with no particular leanings, ordinary, decent, everyday people helplessly caught up in the horrors.

The acknowledgments don't mention Orwell or Hugh Thomas - which is pretty much all I know about this most uncivil of wars. But I'm intrigued by a couple of the other sources:

“Phillip Knightley’s Philby, KGB Masterspy (London 1978) opened the world of wartime espionage for me […] The article by J. Bandrés and R Llavona, ‘Psychnology in Franco’s Concentration Camps’ (Psychology in Spain, 1997, vol. I, no. I, pp. 3-9) is a chilling account of the abuse of psychiatry.”

Ibid., p.537.

There are posters in the train stations all over London enthusing about Sansom’s other books, and one day when I’m not reading for money I shall endeavour to look them out.