Love and Let Die, by John Higgs

I really enjoyed this wide-ranging ramble through Bond, the Beatles and the British psyche. It charts the interweaving histories of the Fabs and 007, not just in their 1960s heydays but up to the present and beyond, exploring disparities and connections, and how our interpretations have changed. In detailing shifts in what Bond and the Beatles mean, it's a history of our changing mores and anxieties. It's a fun and provactive read - a book about connections that really connects.

"That's as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs," quips Sean Connery's Bond in Goldfinger (1964), a moment before someone hits him. Yet less than a decade later, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and ex-Beatles producer George Martin provided the soundtrack for Bond movie Live and Let Die (1973). I've long thought this was evidence of seismic shifts in contemporary culture over a very brief period, but not got much further that that. This is the territory Higgs dives into in his book, with lots of fresh insight and stuff I didn't know, for all that the subjects are so familiar.

How strange to realise that I've been part of these historical changes. I was at university in the mid-1990s when the Beatles enjoyed a resurgence in things like the Anthology TV series, and well remember debates had then about who was best: the Beatles or the Stones. How disquieting to realise, as Higgs says, that we don't make that comparison any more, without ever being aware of a moment when things changed.

Higgs is also of his (and our) time in rejecting ideas that I can remember used to hold considerable sway, such as that John Lennon was the 'best' Beatle, or the band's driving creative force. As the book says, there's growing recognition of what the four Beatles accomplished together rather than as competing individuals. There's something of this, too, in the way Higgs positions Bond to the Beatles. Initially, they're binary opposites, Bond an establishment figure Higgs equates with death, the Beatles working-class rebels all about life and love. By the end, it's as if they synchronise.

This might all sound a bit highfalutin but the insights here are smart and funny. As just one example, here's what Bond's favourite drink reveals about who he is.

"Bond's belief that he knows exactly what the best is appears early in the first novel Casino Royale, when he goes to the bar and orders a dry martini in a deep champagne goblet. Not trusting the barman to know how to make a martini, he gives him specific instructions. 'Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel.' When the drink arrives, he tells that barman that is is 'Excellent,' then adds, 'But if you can get a vodka made with grain instead of potatoes, you will find it still better.' Most people who have worked in the service industries will recognise a customer like this." (pp. 242-3)

Amazing - Bond as an umarell! 

I especially like how free-wheeling and broad this all is. There's stuff on shamanic ceremonies from the ancient past, stuff on Freud and the fine art world and Putin. At one point, Higgs talks about the damaging effects of fame in disconnecting a rock star (or anyone else famous) from everyone else.

"Drugs and alcohol appear to mask this disconnect, but in reality, they exaggerate it - cocaine in particular acts as fascism in powdered form. It erodes empathy and keeps the focus on the ever-hardening ego." (p. 294)

It probes the less palatable bits of popular history, grappling head on the complexities of our heroes' objectionable behaviour and views. Our heroes are not always good people, yet by framing this all as a study of how attitudes and culture have shifted, the book avoids making them all villains. 

I nodded along to lots of perceptive stuff, like the thoughts on why Spectre (2016) didn't work precisely because it used screenwriting structures that usually do well in other movies. But I'm not sure Higgs is always right. He argues that a derisive response to a particular CGI sequence in Die Another Day (2002) led to a serious rethink by the Bond producers, which included sacking Pierce Brosnan. I suspect a more pertinent reason was that - as I understand it - Brosnan injured his knee while filming the hovercraft chase and first unit production had to be postponed while he underwent surgery. That would have been expensive and an ongoing risk for an ongoing series of action movies. The fantasy of a Bond who is, over 60 years of movies, always in his prime, must square up against the practicalities of ageing. And that's in line with what Higgs argues elsewhere.

But I don't make this point to criticise. It's more that I found myself responding to the book as if it were a conversation, inviting the reader to engage - and argue. Most potent of all is the final chapter. Having delved so deeply into the past, the author maps out how Bond should develop from here. Yes, absolutely, a younger, millennial Bond who'll appeal to a new generation, and one big on fun and consent, and whose partners don't all die. But also -

[Thankfully, Simon is dragged off-stage.]

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

On 21 June 1922, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is called before the Emergency Committee of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs in Moscow. He's identified as the author of Where Is It Now?, a poem published in 1913 and considered by some to be a call to action after the failed revolt of 1905. But despite these credentials, the count is also an aristocrat, was out of the country during the revolutions of 1917 and is deemed to have "succumbed irrevocably to the corruptions of his class" (p. 5). He is placed under house arrest in the Hotel Metropol and remains there for years...

But he does more than just survive; he flourishes.

This is an extraordinary, bewitching novel - a man out of his time in a fast-changing new order, his old-world values at odds with the officiousness of modernity. Rostov is a charming, suave protagonist, able to assist and advise a broad range of those he encounters in the hotel, building up friendships and even a family. It's a story of one man against the odds like so much thrilling spy fiction - and there's a feeling of le Carre throughout, which I mean as high compliment. (Rostov likens himself more to Sam Spade in the film version of The Maltese Falcon). 

Yet what really makes this work is that it's often so playful and fun. The reader is just another in the line to fall for Rostov's charm. And then, in the last section, there's a direct threat to Rostov and someone he holds very dear, and it all gets much more suspenseful, to the very last page.

A Gentleman in Moscow was the last novel my late father finished reading - while in hospital for almost the last time - and the last book he recommended to me. Reading it has been a little like a conversation with him, not least because I can see why he'd have liked it so much. There's something of my dad in Rostov, and his wit and worldview. For all this novel enthralled me, it's taken a while to finish, in part because I've been busy on other things. But now, on completing it, I realise I lingered - a book, and connection, I didn't want to put down.

The Sandbaggers: Think of a Number, by Donald Lancaster

I've long been on the look-out for this original novel based on the ITV spy series The Sandbaggers (1978-80). A chum lent it to me last week and I've whizzed through the 125 pages. It's a pacey, gripping shocker, all gruff men being cross about their nasty, dirty world.

The plot involves a phone call from Switzerland, a Russian agent called Lekarev asking for help from SIS director of operations Neil Burnside, the central character of the TV series and a man usually behind his desk in Whitehall. Against his own better judgment, Burnside is sent out to Switzerland to meet this Russian agent who may want to defect - but who may be up to something else entirely.

It becomes clear that Lekarev is a very senior Russian agent, one of the so-called 'Numbers'. In fact, he's number 50, with responsibility for infiltrating the British Government. He knows which members of the Cabinet are actually Russian agents. Rather than allow this to come out, the Russians want him dead - and so do the British. And since Lekarev might say something to Burnside, orders are issued to kill Burnside, too. His own underling, Willie Caine, is dispatched to do the job.

But what is really motivating Lekarev and who are the third party, prepared to shoot people in broad daylight?

Over the years, I've read various reports of this novel, variously critiquing its logic or how much it matches the TV series. I think Donald Lancaster - a pseudonym for thriller writer William Marshall - has done pretty well matching the grim mood but in a location beyond the modest budget of the show. (This was my brief when I wrote a tie-in novel for Primeval.)

By sending Burnside out on a mission, Lancaster ups the stakes with the effect that this feels a bit like a series finale. Right to the end, I couldn't see how Burnside could possibly get out of his predicament - or Lancaster save him without cheating. But the solution is ingenious and I just about buy it.

What's harder to buy is the idea of a Cabinet full of Russian agents who in turn dictate the orders given to SIS. The TV show made an asset of keeping things mundane and drab and boring, tension conveyed by people anxiously waiting for telephones to ring. Think of a Number is much more in Bond territory with this high-level conspiracy. And then it does little with it: we're meant to believe that, while not part of the conspiracy, Burnside's superiors go along with their orders and the imposed death sentence. It's trying too hard; it's too daft.

Putin's People, by Catherine Belton

This extraordinary, meticulously researched book is an essential read just now. Belton charts the rise and rise of Vladimir Putin from his early days in the KGB to the present day (or 2020, when the book was published), to show where everything going on at the moment came from. There's a lot to take in: the scale of the kleptocracy, the astonishing sums of cash involved, the huge number of people caught up in it.

There's a lot on Russian links to Donald Trump, going back many decades, and lots on Putin's long-standing interest in Ukraine. There's lots on Russian support for Brexit and the corrosive effect of "black money" in London. What a lot of damage has been done; the horror of it all is exhausting.

Silverview, by John le Carre

Julian Lawnsdsley has set up a bookshop in a small town, escaping from the evils of the City. One potential customer is a peculiar old man who claims to have been a friend of Julian's father - though Julian's father was meticulous in keeping records and there's no reference to this man. The old man, Edward, has a modest proposal for Julian: to establish in the basement of the shop a club, a society, a Republic of Literature. Oh, and there are maybe some errands that perhaps Julian could help with...

As always, le Carre quickly ensnares us in his world of secrets, conflicted loyalties and keenly observed detail. How deceptively easily he makes it look. There's wry humour and that awful sense of loss - this is all familiar territory, comfortingly unsettling. However, this, le Carre's last novel and published posthumously, is also noticeably slight: 207 pages in relatively large type. Perhaps Julian volunteers a little too easily to help Edward. Perhaps there's something overly convenient, too, in the way he's so quickly taken in by Edward's family - tested by Edward's wife, bedded by Edward's daughter. Perhaps it doesn't add up to a whole huge amount that we've not seen before.

But perhaps none of that really matters one jot. It's good; it's arresting; it's a last taste of this world. Towards the end, when things close in on Edward, it all gets suitably tense. There's the constant sense of horror under the surface. And it's full of haunting moments: an interview with a married couple where they know it's more that just an idle chat; posh dinner with a dying woman; a meeting amid bird life and the ghosts of Cold War at Orford: 

"'We are famous for our bird life here, actually, Julian,' he announced, with proprietorial pride. 'We have lapwing, curlew, bittern, meadow pipit, avocets, not to mention duck,' he declared, like a headwaiter reciting the day's specials. 'Look now, please. You hear that curlew calling to her mate? Follow my arm.'

Julian made a show of doing so, but for some minutes he had been able to follow only the horizon: the remains of our own civilisation after its destruction in some future catastrophe. And there they stood: distant forests of abandoned aerials rising out of the mist, abandoned hangars, barracks, accommodation blocks and control rooms, pagodas on elephantine legs for stress-testing atom bombs, with curved roofs but no walls in case the worst happens. And, at his feet, a warning to him to stick to marked paths or reckon with unexploded ordnance." (p. 159)

In fact, it's all about ghosts: the legacies of old wars, old trauma, old connections and betrayals. There's also the ghost of the author, of course - or authors plural. Le Carre's son Nick Harkaway gave a moving interview last year about completing the book in the absence of his late parents. And there's another ghost for me; this is the first le Carre in a long time that I've bought for myself, not borrowed from my father. The loss is keenly felt, but communing with these spirits one last time I am more than anything grateful.

James Bond in the Lancet

The new issue of medical journal Lancet Psychiatry includes my essay, "Was it obvious to everyone else that I'd fallen for a lie?" on James Bond, and also Len Deighton and John le Carre. I wrote it before I'd seen No Time To Die.

You need to be signed up to read the whole thing, but the teaser first paragraph goes like this:

"When actor Sean Connery died in October, 2020, media coverage focused on his success as the secret agent James Bond. The franchise is still going strong, with Bond now played by Daniel Craig and No Time To Die, the latest film, now in cinemas. That enduring appeal is partly due to the movies consciously keeping up with the times and reflecting contemporary trends. Yet Connery's Bond films are still screened on prime-time TV in the UK; remarkable, given that the first of them, Dr No, is nearly 60 years old and invidiously features White actors made up to look Asian. The best of Connery's Bond films, Goldfinger (1964), was even back in cinemas at the end of 2020. They are exciting movies, and sexy and fun, but their persistence is down to something more profound. The world of espionage portrayed by mid-20th century writers was deeply concerned with scientific and political issues concerning individuality, identity, and the human mind..."

Simon Guerrier, "Was it obvious to everyone else that I'd fallen for a lie?", Lancet Psychiatry vol 8, issue 12, pp 1040-1 (1 December 2021)

The Ipcress File, by Len Deighton

I'm immersed in the world of Harry Palmer at the moment for a thing I'm writing. That's included finally getting round to The Ipcress File (1962), the novel that inspired the brilliant film.

The book is surprisingly different, including trips to Beirut and a Pacific island to watch the testing of a nuclear bomb. Harry Palmer isn't even in it, as the anonymous narrator tells us on page 34:

"Now my name isn't Harry, but in this business it's hard to remember whether it ever had been."

In the film, Palmer is played by Michael Caine, a Londoner born in 1933. Not-Harry in the book is from Burnley - completely changing how he'd sound - and perhaps a decade older, as we're told he was in the fifth form in 1939.

Despite the excursions abroad, the plot is basically the same, with the same mix of drab bureaucracy and imminent danger of death. There's the brilliant twist when the agent escapes from incarceration and discovers it's not been quite what it seems - which is so good I don't want to spoil it here, nearly 60 years after the book was first published.

But my general feeling is that the book is a poor relation to the film. The screenplay condenses the story, reducing the scale but making more focused, quicker-moving and sharper. Even minor characters in the movie are memorable - such as Tony Caunter's non-speaking American agent, a big guy with a distinctive glasses, a plaster over the bridge of the nose. The two men who stand out, I think, are the ones who are kind to our narrator in his hour of need. (He makes sure to pay them for their kindness.)

So I'm a bit surprised by the cover line on my battered second-hand copy of the book from 1995 the Sunday Times calling Deighton, "The poet of the spy story." Surely that's a better description of le Carre, whose prose is so much more beautiful than this clunky stuff. It's fine, it's fun enough, it's got some great moments... But the film is witty, stylish, and so classy that it holds its own against Bond.

The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman

The middle chapter of The Book of Dust is thrilling, rich and downright weird. Since reading volume one - La Belle Sauvage - I've gone back to Northern Lights and reread most of The Subtle Knife (which my son has now pinched), as well as been avidly glued to the TV version. Given that immersion in this fantastical universe, I can report that The Secret Commonwealth is Pullman at his best, the story so compelling that I raced through the hefty tome of 687 pages in just a matter of days.

It's set 20 years after the events of La Belle Sauvage and eight after those of the His Dark Materials trilogy, with Lyra Silvertongue nee Belaqua now a grown-up. Shockingly, she and her daemon, Pantalaimon, are not getting on - when their bond gave the original trilogy such emotional power. We keenly feel their separation, while for those in this world it is utterly scandalous, physically repulsive, that they can be apart. The sense is that they have been changed, psychologically and physically, by the trauma they have been through in previous books. Pan, shockingly, sneaks off without Lyra - something most daemons would find impossible - to explore nocturnal Oxford, where he witnesses a murder...

Lyra and Pan go to report this to the police, but Pan recognises a policeman as one of the murderers. Other figures of authority are also a problem: the new Master of Jordan Collage evicts Lyra from the rooms she's lived in since childhood, and threatens to expel her from the college entirely; there are new people at and gathering power within the Magisterium - one of whom has personal reasons for wishing revenge on Lyra. And far away in the east, something is going on to damage the trade in certain derivatives of roses (yes, really) that suggests the emergence of another, ruthless power...

With the stakes so highly set against her, and an adventure that begins in the locality of Oxford but then jaunts across the world, it feels like Lyra is in a spy novel, and a good one - le Carre or James Bond, but with magic. The characters and situations are vivid and arresting, with plenty of twists and shocks along the way. The atmosphere is tense and bleak through ought. Pullman also develops the mechanics of his world: we see all kinds of exceptions to the normative, binary human/daemon relationship - the daemon who falls for another human, the people who buy and sell daemons, the man who insists that daemons aren't really there. In each case, it's more than just a fun idea; Pullman explores the resulting emotional devastation. How brilliant to make the intricacies of such fantastical relationships so moving.

Whereas I felt La Belle Sauvage lost its way in its second half, The Secret Commonwealth sustains the pace and excitement, while at the same time covering lots of philosophical ground as per previous books. It's as deep but less talky, I think, and also palpably angry, with stuff to say about fake news, restrictions on academic freedom, the parochial nature of reporting and politics. There's a lot, too, on the cruelty of families and the kindness of strangers. I wonder how consciously Pullman is addressing readers of Lyra's age or thereabouts, the now young adults who first read his books as children: how much is this a rant, and how much a rallying cry?

There's one thing I really wasn't keen on: the fact that Malcolm Polstead, protagonist of La Belle Sauvage, is in love with Lyra - who he knew as a baby. Yes, she's now 20 and could be a consenting adult, but I didn't feel comfortable about the balance of power between this Oxford tutor and this vulnerable student who has so much on her plate already. I really hope they don't get together in book three.

But I also can't imagine that Pullman would do anything so simple as that... I wish he'd hurry up and write it.

The Secret Life, by Andrew O'Hagan

I was given this 2017 book after chatting with a friend about Andrew O'Hagan's 60,000 word essay on the Grenfell fire, which brilliantly conjures the lives so awfully lost and then not-so-brilliantly identifies heroes and villains. This book is subtitled "Three True Stories" and in two of them O'Hagan trails in the wake of extraordinary individuals, reporting on what seem to be pivotal movements in history. In between these instalments, he charts his own experiment in matters of identity - and it's altogether different.

First, there's "Ghosting", his account of being employed to ghost the autobiography of Julian Assange, the efforts involved to produce a 70,000-word manuscript, and then why that never got published. It's all really peculiar, and few of the people involved are very likeable, but O'Hagan is good at the small but telling details:

"During those days at the Bungay house I would try to sit [Assange] down with a new list of questions, and he'd shy away from them, saying he wasn't in the mood or there were more pressing matters to deal with. I think he was just keen to get away from [his then residence] Ellingham Hall. I had the internet. I made lunch every day and he'd eat it, often with his hands, and then lick the plate. In all that time he didn't once take his dirty plate to the sink. That doesn't make him like Josef Mengele, but, you know, life is life." (p. 34)

That casual sense of other people being there for Assange's convenience illuminates much of the story. The sense is of Assange talking big and then not delivering, or at least not caring about details, or how that lack of care might affect and damage other people. O'Hagan signs off with his last meeting with Assange, when the book is clearly not going to happen.

"It was a Friday night and Julian has never seemed more alone. We laughed a lot and then he went very deeply into himself. He drank his beer and then lifted mine and drank that. 'We've got some really historic things going on,' he said. Then he opened his laptop and the blue screen lit his face and he hardly noticed me leaving." (p. 99)

His involvement with Assange leads to him being recommended to Craig Wright, the man who, under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, invented bitcoin - or did he? In "The Satoshi Affair", O'Hagan recountsWright's efforts to go public and then decide otherwise - just like Assange. Again, it's a fascinating account of what seems a major moment, one that raises issues about identity, our relationship to technology and the truth, and O'Hagan has a ring-side seat throughout. As with Assange, there's a lot of money at stake and a rather glamorous, showbiz lifestyle being lived - but Wright is another sad, trapped figure racked by indecision and doubt. We'd sympathise with his predicament if we didn't see what it costs everyone else around him.

Between these two accounts is "The Invention of Ronald Pinn." It begins in Camberwell New Cemetery, O'Hagan remarking on the number of young people's graves. He identifies one, Ronald Alexander Pinn, who died in 1984 aged 20, but otherwise roughly O'Hagan's own age, and decides to use the dead man's birth certificate to create a false identity. In doing so, he's inspired by recent revelations about undercover policemen from the Met's Special Demonstration Squard using such identities:

"In several of the cases, officers kept their fake identities for more than ten years and exploited them in sexual situations. To strengthen their 'backstory', they would visit the places of their 'childhood', walking around the houses they had lived in before they died, all the better to implant the legend of their second life." (p. 102)

So that's what O'Hagan does, touring the places Pinn would have known, researching his life, speaking to people who knew him - and then using that to build up an alternative life. He then wants to see what can be done with such a false identity, and goes on to buy white heroin, cannabis and Tramadol, and counterfeit money. He investigates but apparently doesn't buy guns, as if moral scrupples stop him going that far. But who was he paying for the drugs and fake money, and in giving them money what else was he tacitly financing?

These are not victimless crimes. Living in south London, I'm very conscious of the links between the drug trade and knife crime, the lives of children blighted - and ended - by the supply chain. As a bereaved parent, I had a visceral reaction to what O'Hagan did with the name of some mother's son. He's an unapologetic tourist, blithely enjoying a stroll through other people's misery and grief.

At the end of his account, he finds the mother of the real Ronald Pinn and we realise that she must have provided much of the biographical detail given earlier. But it's telling that this is where his account finishes - we don't hear what her son's death did to her, or what she thinks of what O'Hagan has done with her son's name. O'Hagan is, like Assange and Wright, caught up in the thrill of his own story and seems to spare no thought for those hurt along the way.

Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

This is brilliant. In 1950, Juliet Armstrong is a BBC radio producer working in Schools (the department always has a capital S). But ten years before, she worked for the government, transcribing recordings of a group of Nazi sympathisers - as well as doing some more active spy work. We cut back and forth between the two roles as a dark secret from her past threatens to return and engulf her...

As a radio producer who still does a lot of transcribing myself, it all felt brilliantly authentic - for all Atkinson says in her afterword that she made so much of it up. In all the best ways, it has the feel of le Carre - with the language of moles and dead-letter drops. Juliet is just one of many in the book to move from MI5 to the BBC without quite leaving the former.

"There was a subtle - and perhaps not so subtle - emphasis in Schools on citizenship. Juliet wondered if it was to counter the instinct towards Communism." (p. 178)

But the spy plot and moral uncertainties are just part of the appeal. The detail of ordinary life is all perfectly conveyed and compelling. When one of Juliet's broadcast programmes includes an actor clearly saying "fuck", it has just as much drama - and awful consequence - as any of the war stuff. 

It's a wrily funny read, one constant theme Juliet's frustrated sex life. Her perspective full of pithy observations as she moves through the large cast of vividly drawn characters, many burdened with tragedy but doing their best to get on.

"How little it takes to make some people happy, Juliet thought. And how much it takes for others." (p. 231)

Amid all this activity, this life, are some deftly placed clues to what's really going on - such as one character's caual thieving - which I didn't think to put together spot until very late. It's especially clever because often we're ahead of Juliet, spotting one character's sexuality before she has to have it explained. Only in the last section do we realise what the book is actually about. In fact, the one jarring moment is when Atkinson acknowledges that with a wink at the reader:

"Come now, quite enough exposition and explanation. We're not approaching the end of a novel, Miss Armstrong." (p. 315 - 14 pages from the end)

The final revelation only makes me want to read the whole thing again straight away. It's so deceptively simple, such a pleasure to knock through, so rewarding at the end. A joy.

A Legacy of Spies, by John le Carre

"I, who was taught from the cradle to deny, deny and deny again - taught by the very Service that is seeking to drag a confession out me?"
John le Carre, A Legacy of Spies (2017), p. 161.

This is an extraordinary lap of honour, almost a pastiche of le Carre by le Carre himself, the sort of thing in anyone else's hands we would call fan fiction.

It returns us to the world of the Circus and George Smiley, not seen since The Secret Pilgrim (1990), but it's really revisiting the events that led to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) - le Carre's third novel, and the one that made his name. Along the way, we catch up with characters and events from his two other most successful Circus novels - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) and Smiley's People (1979). In fact, since this new book is recounted by Smiley's loyal underling, Peter Guillam, I had Michael Jayston's voice in my head (he played Guillam in the BBC adaptations of those latter two novels; Benedict Cumberbatch played Guillam in the more recent Tinker Tailor film.)

A friend had read and enjoyed this new book without knowing any of this history. I'm now eager to reread those other books to see how well it all fits together. It feels seamless, the only glaring thing being Smiley himself - recruited as a spy to the Circus in 1928 or 1937, depending which book you refer to, but still alive and in good health whenever this new, modern-feeling book is set. It is very contemporary, and though the word "Brexit" isn't used, George tells us he is and always was a European, and is horrified by the idea of England on its own as a "citizen of nowhere".

Yet given the age Smiley must surely be, the only concession to the passing of time is that he no longer wears a suit. The one character to have died since we last visited this world is Smiley's nemesis Karla. Jim Prideaux is still working at the same school as he was in Tinker Tailor, more than 40 years ago.

The story sees Guillam called back to London because there's likely to be a parliamentary inquiry into the events of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. He is reticent, but slowly we unpick what happened - a little ahead of the investigators he is speaking to. There's a real sense of menace in the jovial lawyers who seem ready to hang Guillam out to dry, and in the character of Christoph - a man out of revenge. It's an absorbing read, full of well drawn characters and telling detail. Indulgent, but perfectly done.

The Spy Who Loved by Clare Mulley

This life of SOE agent "Christine Granville" - born Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek in Poland in 1908 - took a while to get in to, not least because it's so dense with meticulous research. There is lots on the frustrations and false starts of a life running messages under Nazi noses, on the bureaucracy and "office politics" of rival intelligence factions, and on her tangled love life.

Peppered with good moments, it then really picks up once the firm (as SOE was known to its employees) finally gives Christine something to do, dropping her blind (without help) into France. She's brave, resourceful and charismatic, and it's thrilling to be at her side in the thick of the action. The odds against her and her comrades make these chapters utterly compelling - particularly the Nazi attack on Vercors, and Christine's attempts to rescue comrades when they're arrested and sentenced to death. Later, the Warsaw Uprising is just as deftly conveyed - Christine wasn't there, but we're haunted by the dreadful events just as she was.

We feel Christine's righteous anger when artillery is not dropped to the desperate resistance fighters in Vercors and Warsaw, despite repeated and urgent requests. There's also her justifiable fury at being constantly overlooked - a mix of sexism, xenophobia, Antisemitism and office politics. After the war, despite distinguished service and the support of such figures as Lord Selbourne - who appealed directly to the Home Secretary on her behalf - Christine was still denied British citizenship. In fact, says Mulley,

"it now turned out that Christine's service to Britain was irrelevant, because she was not a man. 'A married woman is disbarred, under the present law, from obtaining naturalisation independently from her husband...' a rubber-stamping official explained. Without evidence of [her husband] Jerzy Gizycki's death or a valid dissolution of his and Christine's marriage, the Home Office simply saw 'no point in considering whether she could be regarded as eligible in other respects'. Over six million Poles had died during the war, there were few official records, and Christine was in any case disbarred from returning to Poland because of her service for the Allies, but her marital status was more important than her war record. It was a low moment for Home Office policymakers."
Clare Mulley, The Spy Who Loved (2013), p. 289.

She felt the firm had also let her down, failing to find her suitable work after the war. She's a restless woman of action who doesn't fit easily in peacetime, and SOE was itself closed down at the end of the war. Christine didn't exactly help herself - she was spiky and rude, and refused to take on administrative or secretarial duties - but it's hard not to share her anger.

"'I am rather tired, after six years of more or less active service with the firm,' she wrote bitterly, 'of being treated as a helpless little girl.'
Ibid., p. 294.

We follow her efforts to find a place for herself post-war: a spell farming in Kenya; visiting a friend in Germany but too disquieted about being in enemy territory; working on passenger liners. And then too quickly it's over - shockingly, awfully, in July 1952 Christine was murdered by a jilted admirer.

Mulley is also good at picking through the accounts of Christine's life, weighing up their claims. She spells out the case for Christine having inspired Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale - written a few months before Christine's death. It seems quite convincing an idea until Mulley then unpicks it: there's no strong evidence Christine actually ever met Ian Fleming.

An epilogue detailing how Christine's friends tried to protect her reputation after her death is concise and moving. Mulley then offers a note on how she went about collating this story - from an extraordinary range of sources.

But the book then ends on a sour note, with one appendix speculating on why Christine never had or seemed to want children, and then another other giving more detail about her murderer. They're surely appendices because they don't fit with what's gone before, and there's a feeling of prurience, even disrespect to the difficult, brilliant agent who deserved something more.

See also: Nevil Shute's Requiem for a Wren

Dr on Today yesterday

Yesterday, the Dr was up early to get to BBC Broadcasting House, where she was a guest on Today and talked to John Humphrys about Different Perspectives: Archaeology and the Middle East in WWI - a Heritage Lottery Fund project looking into the lives and stories of great archaeologists who became spies during the war.

The Dr was there representing the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, and was interviewed alongside Dr Roderick Bailey, a historian specialising in unconventional warfare in the world wars.

You can hear the segment 2:41:15 into the Today programme of 14 November 2016.

James Bond, 1654

Via a tweet from my chum Farah earlier in the year, I learnt of A Firework for Oliver (1964) by John Sanders. Brother Tom tracked down a copy via the wonder that is Abe Books.

It's a thrilling spy story about a top English secret agent, Nicholas Pym, on the trail of a deadly new superweapon that's being developed by an implacable foe.

The trail leads him into the heart of Europe, and into the arms of a tough but beautiful lady with a tragic past... It's James Bond except for being set in the 1650s, Pym an agent of the Protectorate and the plot aimed at killing his boss, Oliver Cromwell.

From the off, there's an enticing line in dry wit and understatement.

"Pym gave the man in the plain dark suit [his boss, Secretary of State John Thurloe] a cold grin. 'You said something about meeting fire with fire. So be it! Let them find me alone. I am an officer on special service who might know something. They won't kill me at once, without trying to find out what that is. Make it easy for them. Let my face be seen!'

Mr Thurloe leaned back as far as his high-backed chair would allow. A bland expression wiped the anxiety from his face. In an impersonal voice he said: 'Two special envoys from the States-General are arriving in Gravesend in connection with the Anglo-Dutch peace treaty. It will be an occasion for public rejoicing. They dock tomorrow afternoon. You will attend as an additional aide to Lord Clayton, the Protector's brother-in-law, who will be there to greet them.' He picked up one of the pile of dispatches on the oak table and began to read it. Without looking up, he said: 'Don't bother to wear a hat.'"

John Sanders, A Firework For Oliver (1964 [76]), pp. 43-4.

It's a neat reversal to set a spy story under the Puritan regime: instead of Bond boring on about fine food and drink, Pym is scathing of glamorous living. That said, he's no prude - enjoying sex out of wedlock and hardly blinking an eye when the mission takes him to a posh Parisian orgy.

Like Bond, this is a thoroughly male world and perspective - woman can be clever, resourceful and beautiful, but they're still largely at the mercy of men. At one point, Pym just happens to call on a beautiful lady while she's having a bath - and fighting off a comrade who won't take no for an answer. When Pym steps in and knocks the man unconscious, she is suitably grateful...

Pym, though, is not a womaniser. It's good that he's only interested in one woman in the whole adventure; it's not quite so good when she's the only major female character in the book. There are few minor ones, too.

Like Bond, Pym is an ordinary but competent agent with lashings of common sense, an able guide through the shady political world in which he deals. If there's a lot of exposition - not all of it subtly done - the book is good at establishing the setting and politics. I love that the superweapon involved is - to us hundreds of years after the event - quite a minor advance but promises to offer an army a distinct advantage.

Like the best of Bond, the book is a series of dramatic encounters, many of them visually arresting. There are last-minute escapes and coincidences, not all of them entirely credible. But the book rattles along at a frenetic pace, and we soon learn that anyone who spends any time near Pym is unlikely to see out the day.

Where it's different from Bond, apart from the period setting, is that it's also very funny. By yet more fiendish contrivances, on several occasions Pym has to thump his baffled superiors if he's to thwart the enemy. And, having set up a Pyrrhic victory that's very like Fleming's Bond, there's then an unexpected, happy ending.

A bit clunky and contrived, this is a thrilling, fun adventure - and I'm delighted to learn just the first of a series.

A Delicate Truth by John le Carré

I'd forgotten the delicious thrill of a novel by John le Carré.

There was a time when I glutted on his books - and reported all to this very blog. I read The Secret Pilgrim and The Constant Gardener in August 2005, shortly before seeing the film of The Constant Gardener, I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in April 2006, The Honourable Schoolboy the following month and Smiley's People the month after that, The Mission Song in January 2007 and The Looking-Glass War in December 2008. (I also read - and loved - Call for the Dead at some point in that period, but seem not to have blogged about it; and I'd read le Carré in the far-off days before this blog, too.)

His newest novel, A Delicate Truth is all very familiar: an intelligence job goes wrong and is hushed up, but three of the people involved won't let it go. As they attempt to uncover what happened - and who is to blame - the establishment closes around them...

As always, le Carré creates distinct and real characters, most drawn from the country's best schools, all conjured with names and quirks that seem effortless, as if he's copied them down from real life.

For example, former ambassador Sir Christopher 'Kit' Probyn, is diligent, keen and, moving to a new home, deftly learns his new neighbours' names and habits and history, weaving himself into the community. His wife's illness - sparingly mentioned - adds an extra note of grace to a character we quickly warm to, which makes it all the more effective when he's dismissed by his masters as a 'low-flyer' and used in their wretched scheme.

Le Carré's brilliant at building tension as the story plays out. The plot hinges on the privatisation of intelligence work, and the inevitable blunders - and deaths - that result from applying a payment-by-results approach to such uncertain work. The prose is elegant, full of choice detail and often witty, but this is an angry book, the intelligence sector just one further target of a general policy to open up public service to carpet-baggers and zealots. That policy is sociopathic, as he fumes late on (I've redacted the names so as not to spoil the story):

"In a half-hearted effort to find excuses for [character 1], [character 2] even wondered whether, deep down, the man was just plain stupid. How else to explain the cock-up that was [event]? And from there, he wandered off into an argument with Friedrich Schiller's grandiose statement that human stupidity was what the gods fought in vain. Not so, in [character 2]'s opinion, and no excuse for anybody, whether god or man. What the gods and all reasonable humans fought in vain wasn't stupidity at all. It was sheer, wanton, blood indifference to anyone's interests but their own."

John le Carré, A Delicate Truth (2013), p. 296.

As always, there are no easy answers or happy endings, and making a stand against the villains means facing appalling consequences. Le Carré conjures a complex, nasty world, one recognisable from the daily news. But the power of the book is in the simplest of concoctions: good people we feel for, struggling against overwhelming odds to do the right thing.

You Only Live Twice

“[Roald Dahl] had known Ian Fleming well. Both men had worked in espionage for William Stephenson during the war, and both had similar reputations as hard-drinking, gambling, womanizing sophisticates ... He admired Fleming. He thought him one of the few writers worth meeting ... But he was less enamoured of his friend's writing skills, describing You Only Live Twice variously as 'tired', 'bad' and 'Ian's worst book'.”

Donald Sturrock, Storyteller – The Life of Roald Dahl, p. 434. 

It's not Fleming's worst book, but otherwise Roald Dahl was right: You Only Live Twice (1964) is a marked drop in quality and disappointing end to the Blofeld trilogy.

It begins in Japan, in the midst of an adventure. That is usually a good way to grab the attention, but here Bond drinks too much and plays stone, scissors paper against the head of Japanese intelligence, the shrewd and deadly “Tiger” Tanaka. That is rather it.

This is because, to Fleming, Japan is so exotic it might as well be in outer space. The book italicises and explains such alien terms as samurai, futon, sake and sumo. I realise we're simply much better accustomed to such things today, but the more Fleming tries to make Japan seem glimmeringly different, the more parochial Bond becomes.

We then cut back some time to the last day of August in London, and Bond sweating and ugly, grieving over the death of his wife (in the previous book). Doctors have told him there's nothing wrong with him and pills don't seem to help.

“And now he had just come from breaking off relations with the last resort – the hypnotist, whose basic message had been that he must go out and regain his manhood by having a woman. As if he hadn't tried that! The ones who had told him to take it easy up the stairs. The ones who had asked him to take them to Paris. The ones who had inquired indifferently, 'Feeling better now, dearie?'”

Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice, p 25. 

 Bond's indifferent shagging isn't just about him. The decline is symbolic of the state of British intelligence and of Britain more generally. There's a hint of the shadow cast by the Cambridge spies, which feels more like le Carré (whose name I think had been made with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, published a year before this):

“Bond knew that M. had tendered his resignation after the Prenderghast case. This had involved a Head of Section with homosexual tendencies who had recently, amidst world-wide publicity, been given thirty years for treason. Bond himself had had to give evidence”.

Ibid., p. 31. 

Despite what Skyfall implies, I assume that evidence is not because was involved in something gay – especially given his response to plain-speaking (read: bigotted) Richard Lovelace “Dikko” Henderson of Her Majesty's Australian Diplomatic Corps:

“'Don't talk to be about aborigines! What in hell do do you think you know about aborigines? Do you know that in my country there's a move afoot, not afoot, at full gallop, to give the aborigines the vote? You pommy poofter. You give me any more of that liberal crap and I'll have your balls for a bow-tie.'
Bond said mildly, 'What's a poofter?'”

Ibid., p 43.

Bond's been sent to Japan on an impossible mission to prove to M that he's not completely useless. MI6 are after top secret intelligence that the Japanese hold about the Soviet nuclear programme. An intercepted message spells out the scale of the threat – and the UK's paltry standing in the world:

“THE DELIVERY OF ONE SUCH WEAPON BY ICBM ON LONDON WOULD DESTROY ALL LIFE AND PROPERTY SOUTH OF A LINE DRAWN BETWEEN NEWCASTLE AND CARLISLE STOP IT FOLLOWS THAT A SECOND MISSILE DROPPED IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD OF ABERDEEN WOULD INEVITABLY RESULT IN THE TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF BRITAIN AND ALL IRELAND STOP THIS FACT WILL SHORTLY BE EMPLOYED BY NUMBER ONE AS THE TEETH IN A DIPLOMATIC DEMARCHE DESIGNED TO ACHIEVE THE REMOVAL OF ALL AMERICAN BASES AND OFFENSIVE WEAPONS FROM BRITAIN AND THE THE NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT OF BRITAIN ITSELF STOP THIS WILL TEST TO THE UTTERMOST AND PROBABLY DESTROY THE ANGLO HYPHEN AMERICAN ALLIANCE SINCE IT CAN BE ASSUMED THAT AMERICA WILL NOT RISK A NUCLEAR WAR INVOLVING HER TERRITORY FOR THE SAKE OF RESCUING A NOW MORE OR LESS VALUELESS ALLY DASH AN ALLY NOW OPENLY REGARDED IN WASHINGTON AS OF LITTLE MORE ACCOUNT THAN BELGIUM OR ITALY STOP”.

Ibid., pp 50-1.

Bond has battled nuclear threats before, but this is an order of magnitude bigger than events in Moonraker or Thunderball, and never before has Britain sounded so puny. Perhaps that's in consequence of events in the real world, with the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962. The real and the fictional mix when a self-confessed fan of James Bond comes to Britain's rescue:

“Then President Kennedy had come out with the strongest speech of his career, and had committed total reprisals from the United States in the event of a single nuclear device being exploded by the Soviet Union in any country in the world outside Soviet territory.”

Ibid., pp. 55-6.

Kennedy, of course, wouldn't live to see his name-check.

Dikko sends Bond to Tiger, who throws him a party, women and a meal that might kill him, and then they get down to business. In previous books, Bond muttered darkly about the loss of the Empire and the young punks too young to have fought in the war. Here, though, it's Tiger who criticises the state of Britain, in a speech that might as well begin, “I'm not racist, but...”:

“But Tiger was not to be hurried. He said, 'Bondo-san, I will not be blunt with you, and you will not be offended because we are friends. Yes? Now it is a sad fact that I, and many of us in positions of authority in Japan, have formed an unsatisfactory opinion about the British people since the war. You have not only lost a great Empire, you have seemed almost anxious to throw it away with both hands. All right,' he held up a hand, 'we will not go deeply into the reason for this policy, but when you apparently sought to arrest this slide into impotence at Suez, you succeeded only in stage-managing one of the most pitiful bungles in the history of the world, if not the worst. Further, your governments have shown themselves successively incapable of ruling and have handed over effective control of the country to the trade unions, who appear to be dedicated to the principle of doing less and less work for more money. This feather-bedding, this shirking of an honest day's work, is sapping at ever-increasing speed the moral fibre of the British, a quality the world once so admired. In its place we now see a vacuous, aimless horde of seekers-after-pleasure – gambling at the pools and bingo, whining at the weather and the declining fortunes of the country, and wallowing nostalgically in gossip about the doings of the Royal Family and of your so-called aristocracy in the pages of the most debased newspapers in the world.'
Bond roared with laughter. 'You've got a bloody cheek, Tiger! You ought to write that out and sign it “Octogenarian” and send it into The Times.'”

Ibid., pp 76-7.

It's interesting having Bond defend modern Britain – especially as in the movie Goldfinger, released the same year as this book, he slags off the Beatles like some reactionary dick. When he slates Japanese pretensions in a similar tone, Tiger is impressed enough to offer Bond a chance to prove himself. Again, Bond is offered an impossible mission that he's in no position to refuse. Tiger will share the all-important secrets with M if Bond will kill an annoying European living in Japan.

Of course, the European in question is a grotesque creation living in a “garden of death”:

“Tiger exploded his golden smile. 'Bondo-san, I can see from your face that you think I am either drunk or mad. Now listen. This Doctor Shatterhand has filled this famous park of his uniquely with poisonous vegetation, the lakes and streams with poisonous fish, and he has infested the place with snakes, scorpions and poisonous spiders. He and this hideous wife of his are not harmed by these things, because whenever they leave the castle he wears full suits of armour of the seventeenth century, and she wears some other kind of protective clothing. His workers are not harmed because they wear rubber boots up to the knee, and maskos, that is, antiseptic gauze masks such as many people in Japan wear over the mouth and nose to avoid infection or the spreading of infection.'
[Bond replied:] 'What a daft set-up.'

Ibid., p. 65.

Tiger doesn't sending Bond into such a place empty-handed, and offers him some training at his top-secret ninjutsu school:

“'All the men you will see have graduated in at least ten of the eighteen martial arts of bushido, or “ways of the warrior”, and they are now learning to be ninja, or “stealers-in”, which has for centuries been part of the basic training of spies and assassins and saboteurs. You will see men walk across the surface of water, walk up walls and across ceilings, and you will be shown equipment which makes it possible for them to remain submerged under water for a full day. And many other tricks besides. For of course, apart form physical dexterity, the ninja were never the super-humans they were built up to be in the popular imagination.”

Ibid., p. 93.

All this authentic-sounding detail suggests privileged access to stuff most tourists never see. Not for the first time in the Bond novels, it's a load of cobblers. In fact, the ninja myth owes a lot to Bond:

“Considering the ubiquity of the ninja in twenty-first-century popular culture, it is remarkable how fast they appear to have sprung out of nowhere in the 1950s and 1960s ... Any attempts to make a scholarly study of ninja lead down a series of false trails, with modern sources that end up only citing each other, and credulous populist works that claim any reference in an old account to shinobi (stealth, spies, assassins) was in fact a reference to one of several secret ninja societies that stayed in the shadows. This fad achieved global recognition with the appearance of ninja in the James Bond film You Only Live Twice (1967) – reaching, by nature of its genre and franchise, a far wider audience than any more reasoned, less fantastic account of Japanese martial traditions.”

Jonathan Clements, “Clap your hands if you believe in ninja” (11 May 2010), an online excerpt from his A Brief History of the Samurai (2010).

Bond's chief fascination is when he sees ninjas being hit in the groin without flinching. Tiger explains:

“'Well, the sumo wrestler will have been selected for his profession by the time of puberty. Perhaps because of his weight and strength, or perhaps because he comes from a sumo family. Well, by assiduously massaging those parts, he is able, after much practice, to cause the testicles to re-enter the body up the inguinal canal down which they originally descended... Then, before a fight, he will bind up that part of the body most thoroughly to contain these vulnerable organs in their hiding-place. Afterwards, in the bath, he will release them to hang normally. I have seen them do it.”

Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice, p. 103.

It's that last sentence that's the killer.

Bond is fast going native, and will be carefully disguised to look like a deaf and dumb fisherman (in the film, he's conveniently taken a first in oriental languages at Cambridge). But there's one last night in a smart hotel in Kyoto, where he can enjoy the very best of Western civilisation:

“The comfortable bed, air-conditioning and Western-style lavatory on which one could actually sit were out of this world ... Bond ordered a pint of Jack Daniels and a double portion of eggs Benedict to be brought up to his room”.

Ibid., p. 98.

Just before Bond sets off on his mission, he learns an incredible new detail: Doctor Shatterhand and his wife just happen to be the very fellows Bond's been hoping to get hold of:

“Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Irma Blunt. So this was where they had come to hide! And the long, strong gut of fate had lassoed him to them! They of all people! He of all people! A taxi-ride down the coast in this remote corner of Japan.”

Ibid., p. 116.

There's no other explanation for this extraordinary coincidence, no hint that M knew exactly what he was sending Bond into, or that British intelligence was – contrary to reports – that extra step ahead. It's not intelligence but dumb luck, which rather kills the drama. It feels too much like cheating.

Bond heads off to face Blofeld, his cover story being that he's related to a girl in a nearby fishing village, Kissy Suzuki. Kissy is not some naïve island girl – she's spent time in films in America, but didn't like it very much. In fact she's named her pet cormorant after the man Fleming had wanted to play Bond. David Niven was, Kissy tells us,

“the only man I liked in Hollywood”.

Ibid., p. 128.

Kissy helps Bond get up to Blofeld's garden of death, where Bond sees people dying in various horrible ways and dodges the same grisly fate. When he's then captured and stripped of his ninja suit, things all get a bit homoerotic:

“Bond put his hands down to his sides. He realized for the first time that he was naked save for the brief vee of the black cotton ninja underpants... And then Bond was standing in the middle of a small, pleasant, library-type room and the second guard was laying out on the floor Bond's ninja suit and the appallingly incriminating contents of his pockets. Blofeld, dressed in a magnificent black silk kimono across which a golden dragon sprawled, stood leaning against the mantelpiece beneath which a Japanese brazier smouldered. It was him all right. The bland, high forehead, the pursed purple would of a mouth, now shadowed by a heavy grey-black moustache that drooped at the corners, on its way, perhaps, to achieving mandarin proportions, the mane of white hair he had grown for the part of Monsieur le Comte de Bleuville, the black bullet-holes of the eyes.”

Ibid., p. 162.

It's the most peculiar visual image, and that sense of camp continues. When Blofeld taunts Bond with an especially nasty death, Bond responds sarcastically,

“we'll get Nöel Coward to put it to music and have it on Broadway by Christmas”.

Ibid., p. 168.

Yet when Blofeld criticises Bond, he's exactly on the nail:

“'You are a common thug, a blunt instrument wielded by dolts in high places. Having done what you are told to do, out of some mistaken idea of duty or patriotism, you satisfy your brutish instincts with alcohol, nicotine and sex while waiting to be dispatched on the next misbegotten foray. Twice before, your Chief has sent you to do battle with me, Mister Bond, and, by a combination of luck and brute force, you were successful”.

Ibid., p. 171.

It's as much a criticism of Fleming's own sometimes lazy plotting than it is of 007. I wonder if it's not cribbed from a bad review. Blofeld, still in his fetching kimono, then threatens Bond with a big sword. Bond – in just his tiny pants – fights back, and they wrestle in a manner that I couldn't help but imagine as a bit like Women in Love (1969). Bond kills Blofeld rather prosaically and makes his escape just as the whole base explodes – something more like a Bond movie than the previous books. It all feels a bit pat and camp, and strangely unaffecting.

Except the next chapter pulls off quite a surprise. It purports to be a Times obituary for “Commander James Bond, CMG, RNVR”. It's very exciting to finally have the man's past life spelt out:

“James Bond was born of a Scottish father, Andrew Bond of Glencoe, and a Swiss mother, Monique Delacroix, from the Canton de Vaud. His father being a foreign representative of the Vickers armaments firm, his early education, from which he learnt a first-class command of French and German, was entirely abroad”.

Ibid., p. 178.

We learn they died in a skiing accident in the Aigulles Rouges above Chamonix when Bond was eleven, and that he,

“came under the guardianship of an aunt, since deceased, Miss Charmian Bond, and went to live with her at the quaintly-named hamlet of Pett Bottom near Canterbury in Kent ... in a small cottage hard by the attractive Duck Inn”.

Ibid.

The young Bond was expelled from Eton for some,

“alleged trouble with one of the boy's maids”.

Ibid., p. 179.

He then went to Fettes. And finally, we learn Bond's age: in 1941 he was 17, and – faking his age and using his father's connections at Vickers - got a job at what would become the Ministry of Defence. We can even narrow his date of birth down a little more: Tiger tells Bond he was born in the year of the Rat (page 57), so he must have been born sometime between 5 February 1924 and the end of that year. (If I've got my sums right.)

The reference to Kennedy means that the events of You Only Live Twice take place no later than November 1963, and it was apparently written at the start of that year, so Bond is thirty-eight or -nine. And, of course, he's not dead.

Kissy rescues him from Blofeld's lair, and nurses him back to health. Bond is suffering from total amnesia, but Kissy regains the most important aspects of his memory by purchasing a love potion and some porn. It has the desired effect. In the previous book, Bond was married and widowed on the same day, but here Fleming still up the stakes:

“Kissy wondered what moment to to choose to tell Bond that she was going to have a baby and whether he would then propose marriage to her.”

Ibid., p. 189.

Of course, there's no happy ending – that's rare enough for book Bond. Instead he sees the word “Vladivostock” in a bit of old newspaper and is sure it means something important, so leaves Kissy to go and find out. The implication is that Bond never knows he's going to be a father. That child would now be just turning fifty (so older than Daniel Craig).

Kissy's tragedy ought to mean more to us, but she's hardly been in the book and made little mark. She's just another in a long line of women to fall for Bond and then get the cold shoulder.

But also, for all it's a shocking to see Bond in such a bad way having looked death in the face, for the most part the book is taken up by willy-waving discussions with Tiger. It's often funny – Bond now knocking our droll one-liners just like his big-screen counterpart – but for all the macho posturing and apparent threat, all too often I was struggling to care.

Asa Briggs at Bletchley Park

Earlier this month, at a lunch to celebrate my great-aunt's 90th birthday, I was surprised to learn that she'd worked in Hut 3 at Bletchley Park in the war, translating the top secret messages snaffled from the enemy. I asked her what she remembered of her time there.

"The cold," she said.

I asked her about the work she'd done, and - since she spoke French and German - what secret stuff she might have been privy to. She took my arm and leaned forward earnestly.

"You must understand," she said, and I expected her to tell me that it was all too long ago, or that there was still an obligation not to speak of it. But she went on: "It was perishing cold."

The next day, my dad sent me a link to my great-aunt Althea's memories of her time at Bletchley Park, and the Infinite Monkey Cage on Radio 4 devoted an episode to Bletchley Park and code-breaking with special guest Dr Sue Black. I also stared reading Secret Days - historian Asa Briggs' account of his own time at BP, published in 2011 as Briggs turned 90.

The Dr is a big fan of Briggs - especially his books on the Victorians and his history of broadcasting in the UK - and went to hear him speak recently. Secret Days is a little disappointing, too rambling and anecdotal and more like an extended interview than a comprehensive history in itself. The best bits, the Dr felt, are the 36-page introduction to BP, the nine-page "Selected Chronology" and the six-page "Further Reading".

This latter section is exhaustive, with a good sense of how accounts have developed as BP's secret work has been declassified over the years. There's a huge and growing amount of material on the subject, and Briggs himself admits that his own contribution is not the place to start. Rather, it's a response to this huge wealth of material, his own memories of what he did and its context while he's still able to share them. As he says in the book - and the Dr said happened when she went to see him - Briggs is asked more about his short time at BP than any other part of his life and work.

What is the appeal of BP? I've argued before that the interest in spies is the idea of one man (it is usually a man) with only his wits and courage, working against all the odds in the midst of enemy territory. With BP, there's a sense of brain beating brawn, the boffins in their freezing huts running rings round the brute force of the Nazis. It's more complicated than that - and Briggs details his own rough treatment in training, by soldiers who didn't appreciate brains - but BP still offers a not-quite fantasy of geeks winning the war.

Briggs acknowledges this interest with good grace - and deserved pride - and says in his (very good) introduction that he felt obliged to give this testimony of his time. The book needs to be read in that context - not as a definitive work on the subject but as an additional source. Often, he directs us to other sources or accounts with a cursory remark.

“A memorandum by [Brigadier ET] Williams [Montgomery's intelligence chief] on the use of Ultra in the field in military operations (WO208/3575), labelled Top Secret, is one of the most interesting documents on the subject produced during the war.” 

Asa Briggs, Secret Days (2011), p. 18.

But there are nuggets of telling detail and concise, clear exposition that attest to his skill as a historian. Briggs mentions an awful lot of people and the ways they are connected, which is quite a tangle in my head. But there are also great asides about interesting characters.

“The great city of Smyrna in Asia Minor in which George McVittie, head of the BP section cracking weather codes, was born was an unusual starting point for many of his later journeys. After the war he taught mathematics at King's College, London, where one of his pupils was the writer of science-fiction, Arthur C. Clarke. McVittie subsequently crossed the Atlantic to the University of Illinois, where he worked in radio astronomy, building a radio telescope. In 1958 his colleagues published in Nature some of the earliest orbital data relating to Sputnik 1.” 

Ibid., p. 50.

There's nice little details, too, like naming the civil servant, Martin Roseveare, at the Ministry of Food, who was,

“said to have invented the ration card and the points system.” 

Ibid., p. 62.

He's also good on other telling details, describing how a Welsh colleague was taken in for questioning by the authorities because of his suspiciously un-Anglo Saxon name: Hrothgar Habakkuk.

“Hugh Trevor-Roper was to have a somewhat similar experience in 1940. Strolling through the Cornish countryside and looking, as he admitted, scruffy in his unbuttoned uniform, he was arrested by the Home Guard on suspicion of being a spy.” 

Ibid., p. 57.

Even so, Briggs and his friends were still writing to each other in German - discussing obscure German poetry, apparently - without incurring the wrath of the censor. I loved these rare, strange insights, so unlikely and so real.

Briggs is excellent, too, on what exactly was needed to break the German cyphers - and  keen to correct the idea that BP was all genius mathematicians. Briggs doesn't stint in his praise for Turing, but also places his work alongside the other people at BP. For one thing, there were 10,000 people at BP at its peak. But Briggs also argues that historians - like himself - had a particular skill set that was vital to BP's work. It wasn't only maths and the invention of the computer.

The key thing was to spot "cribs" - or anticipate words and phrases that the coded messages would contain. That might be the use of the same opening or closing words, proper nouns such as place names or commanding officers, "Heil Hitler" or messages that comprised nothing but "Nicht zu melden" ("Nothing to report").

“Historians could make excellent cribsters since they were usually well-read, drawn to lateral thinking, and taught to get inside the mind of people totally different from themselves. Senders were good prey. Many Y Service interceptors would have made good cribsters too. They were capable of imagining what their German opposite numbers were like by tracking their habits and styles which did not change when there were changes in the frequencies they were using and even the keys. Many what might be thought of as 'hunches' were genuine insights. Concentration and insight were almost as valuable BP qualities as mathematics, and fortunately many mathematicians, such as Herivel, possessed them.”

Ibid., p. 78 

This made me think of two things. First, it chimed with CP Snow's 1959 lecture on The Two Cultures, and the importance of the sciences and humanities working together. Snow, Briggs reveals, was involved in recommending Oxbridge graduates for intelligence work - including at BP. He was, Briggs recalls,

“the ugliest man I had ever seen”. 

Ibid., p. 57.  

Second, it reminded me of Commander Millington in Doctor Who and the Curse of Fenric, sitting in an exact replica of his German opposite number's rooms, to “think the way the Germans think”. That always seemed a rather fanciful idea to me, but Briggs gives it much more credence. (I'm assuming Ian Briggs, who wrote Fenric, is not a relation of Asa's.)

Briggs then proceeds to concisely explain the “technical side to cribbing”, including three key features without which BP's work would have been much harder: 

“First, the machine would never show up the same letter in an encrypted message as was there in the original text. A would never appear as A; any other letter was possible. Second, the letter coding was reciprocal: if A appeared as B, B would appear as A. Third, Enigma did not encrypt numbers: the numbers always had to be spelt out in letters.” 

Ibid., p. 78

But the work owed as much to lateral thinking, psychology and human foibles as it did to mechanical factors:

“Likewise – and this had nothing to do with the make-up of a machine – it would have been difficult for decypherers to find enough letters to make up a menu from a crib had not the Germans liked to incorporate the names, ranks and addresses of the senders and receivers in their texts. They also like going over old ground in standard format when they dealt with supply, administration and planned schedules.” 

Ibid., p. 79 

Briggs also talks of an attitude to intelligence work at BP, reflected in the way its huge number of staff still kept the secret well into the 1970s and beyond. My great-aunt still rather sees the declassification of material about Enigma as a distasteful lapse in security. The back cover of Secret Days says,

"Briggs himself did not tell his wife about his wartime career until the 1970s and his parents died without ever knowing about their son's contribution to the war effort."

He's good on the different stages at which things were made public, and the battles fought to keep them secret. He explains how not being able to mention the work they'd done in the war affected some people finding work later. Again, he's often good on the detail of this covert stuff:

“Enigma was never referred to as such. Synonyms included 'Boniface', 'an unimpeachable source', and, simplest of all, 'special stuff'.” 

Ibid., p. 95.

He's withering about Ian Fleming, too, and seems - without quite spelling it out - to be particularly appalled at Fleming's indiscretion in naming his Jamaican home "Goldeneye" after a secret and then still classified mission. Briggs contrasts Fleming's love of the "drama" of intelligence work with Fleming's boss - Rear-Admiral John Godfrey, Director of Naval Intelligence from 1939 to 43, and, Briggs claims, the model for M. 

Two quotations from Godfrey tells us all we need to know about his cool attitude to intelligence work - an attitude Briggs clear shares. First, there's a memorandum Godfrey wrote in 1941:

“Intelligence ... is only rarely dramatic; its true basis is research, and the best results are usually obtained from the continuous study of insignificant details which, though singly of little value, are collectively of great importance.” 

Ibid., p. 127.

That's basically the point of the first episode of The Sandbaggers. Godfrey, Briggs tells us,

“also framed the cool precept: 'The value of a source ... is almost invariably greater than any given piece of information that source produces.” 

Ibid., p. 128.

In those two remarks I could read a whole culture. But Briggs is at his withering best when he makes a fleeting reference to Fleming's James Bond novels:

 “The women in them were somewhat different from the hundreds of women who worked in BP”. 

Ibid., p. 127.

There were a lot of women at BP, and their working the machines reminded Briggs of the girls working in the factories in Keighley in his youth. Briggs rather glosses over them - women mentioned by name are usually the wives of the men he's talking about. I wondered perhaps if Briggs was being coy - or naive - about what might have gone on, or if things were just more innocent. He mentions crowded trains heading down to wild parties in London, but otherwise only of,

“chatting to girls who had frequently been highly educated”. 

Ibid., p. 84.

Education is key, too, in the BP story. Briggs bristles at the term “Oxbridge” and the idea that BP was all tied to particular colleges and public schools, yet the same names recur throughout – King's, Sidney Sussex, Eton, Marlborough and Sherborne – with the connections between tutors and their former pupils of lasting importance. Indeed, when speaking of the engineer to whom the first digital computer Colossus owed most, Briggs thinks it worth noting (because it's so unusual) that,

“Tom (Tommy) Flowers, who had no Cambridge or indeed any university, connections.” 

Ibid., p. 98.

There's a chapter on Briggs leaving Bletchley and what happened next, and then one on the internal politics of the trust that has taken over the BP site. Briggs concludes by talking about the renewed interest in the "remarkable personality" of Turing and the efforts to celebrate him, and rectify the grave injustice done. That sits oddly, I felt, because the book otherwise is good evidence that BP was not down to the genius of particular individuals - however brilliant they were and however much their work transformed life as we now know it. Rather, it was the result of a huge, tangled and extraordinary group effort, one we're just beginning to make sense of, far too late for many of those who took part.

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.)