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Reviews
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Books, Reviews
FIELD GRAY, by Philip Kerr
Bernie Gunther just wants to be left alone. Wanted for war crimes he didn’t commit back in post-WWII Germany, forced to flee from Argentina after he discovers a few uncomfortable facts, he’s now living under an assumed name in Cuba, splitting his time between the casinons and the bordellos. Even in Havana he can’t find peace, as a secret policeman named Quevedo strong-arms him into turning informant.
So a little boat trip to Haiti seems like a good idea. Especially with a companion like Melba, beautiful and young. The fact that she’s wanted for murder is a bit of a turn-off, but at Bernie’s age he can’t be choosy. Things were going swimmingly right up until the United States Navy boards their boat, and Melba pulls a gun.
So begins Field Gray, Philip Kerr’s seventh novel about Bernie. This time Bernie isn’t the detective; he’s the suspect and the witness, questioned by US Army war crimes investigators, by the CIA, and by French intelligence. His story is the story of much of Europe, from the rising political thuggery in the early thirties, through invasions of France and Russia, to post-war chaos.
This is more a historical novel than a crime story, since there’s no crime to investigate, and since Bernie is no longer the tarnished knight he once was. In the early books of the series he still had the burning sense of justice that led him to quit the Berlin police rather than work for the Nazis, but as the years have passed he’s been forced to make compromises to stay alive. Now he’s weary, and nearly powerless. He can’t fight his captors, he can only insult them.
I’ve read all the books in this series, and in my opinion this is the finest. At the end of the book I was torn. Bernie deserves to find the peace he craves, but a peaceful retirement doesn’t leave much room for a sequel, now does it?
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Movies, Reviews
Tuesday’s Overlooked Films: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
06.21.11 | Permalink | 4 CommentsThe other day, sportwriter Joe Posnanski was blogging on LeBron James, and how when we root against him, we’re really rooting against a character we see on TV, not against a real person. To make his point, he brings up a (very) minor character from the movie Casablanca. In the film he’s a figure of fun, a self-important ass to be humiliated. But what do we know of his real life?
I thought that would make an interesting story, the unexpected life of someone who to exist in order to be mocked. Then I realized it’s already been done, in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.
The film begins in 1945. Preparations for the invasion are well underway. A young officer decides to prove a point by launching a training exercise – and “attack” on London – a day earlier than scheduled. When he captures the Home Guard general staff relaxing in a Turkish bath he’s berated by a pompous old officer, whose outdated ideas about “honor” and “chivalry” he dismisses out of hand.
We then flash back forty years, to 1902, when the pompous old officer was himself a dashing young lieutenant named Clive Candy. Hero of the Boer War, winner of the Victoria Cross, now returned to England. He doesn’t stay long, instead heading to Germany, where he manages to insult the army, with the result that he’s forced to fight a duel. Candy’s doesn’t care much for duelling, and his opponent – chosen by lot – also thinks it barbaric, but it’s a matter of honor, so they fight.
As they recover from their wounds they become fast friends. The German, Theo, falls in love with Candy’s friend Edith Hunter, and fears they must duel again for her hand, but Candy is delighted that his two great friends shall be together. Only later does he realize his own feeling for Edith.
Years pass, and Candy remains idealistic and a bit naive. By 1918 he’s clearly an anachronism, the old man who doesn’t understand the new rules of war. His old friend Theo, freed from a prisoner-of-war camp, can’t bring himself to believe that Candy and the British really are the well-meaning souls they claim to be, and they part on sad terms.
By the start of the second World War he’s not just out of date but potentially embarrasing, yet he’s never lost his sense of dignity. When Theo arrives in England, a refugee now, Candy intervenes to keep him from being interned. When Candy’s regular radio address is cancelled he berates the government functionary who gives him the word before falling silent, then saying, “Sir, my deepest apologies. I know it isn’t you.”
A summary of the plot can’t do this wonderful film justice. Clive Candy is a gentleman of the old school, who prefer to fight fair and lose. Everyone tells him that he’s wrong, that this is a new kind of war, but he never wavers, he never changes, and in the end his side fights fair, and wins.
ADDED: It occurs to me that I think of this film in the same way as Goodbye, Mr. Chips, another film that follows a man through his entire adult life, and I think part of the appeal of these movies to me is that we all want our lives to add up to something. When we’re old and know that there are few days ahead, we’d all like to look back and say, “Yes, I did some good. I changed the world, if only a bit.” I know that sort of thing certainly plays to my own romantic nature.
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Books, Reviews
Forgotten Book: DARKNESS AT NOON, by Arthur Koestler
06.10.11 | Permalink | 4 CommentsI supposed that it’s unusual to name as a forgotten book one that was listed in the top ten novels in English in the 20th century, but I have to wonder how widely Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is read today.
This novel tells the story of Rubashov, a communist since his early youth, a hero of the Russian Revolution, and later a prominent envoy (frequently undercover) to other European countries. As the book opens he’s awakened by hammering at his apartment door. Even before he answers there’s little question in his mind as to the reason: he’s being arrested.
The first section of the novel details the time spent pacing in his cell, his interactions with the other prisoners – mostly limited to tapping on code on the pipes running through the walls – and, most importantly, his reminiscinces of the things he’s done for the Communist cause.
At first his case is investigated by Ivanov, an old acquaintance, but soon he’s replaced and the implacable Gletkin begins his interrogation. Rubashov is kept awake and staring into a lamp for hours as Gletkin takes tiny nuggest of fact and builds them up through inference and supposition into plots against Number 1, the supreme ruler (neither Stalin nor Russia are ever identified by name). Though he knows it’s useless, Rubashov resists, denying Gletkin’s chains of logic.
Rubashov realizes the central mistakes of Communism: the insistence on correct thoughts, and the use of only one sanction, death. Dissent is not just opposition to the political program of the state, but mere differences of opinion. The head of the navy, Rubashov’s former friend, is executed because he advocated for large submarines with a long range, implying an aggressive foreign policy. With the country in a weakened state, the official line is for smaller, defensive submarines. But the Navy man won’t give up his ideas and is killed for them.
In an quote before the last sections of the book, Koestler makes his main point clear:
Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view.Darkness At Noon is important in the way it documents the patterns of thought that led to Stalinism, written by someone who knew, as Koestler, a Hungarian, had himself been a committed Communist until the Soviets began holding show trials for his friends. And one final note: for a great book, this doesn’t ask of the reader the effort that most Great Literature requires. It’s an easy read, though you’ll be thinking about it long after you close the cover.
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Books, Reviews
THE RED RIGHT HAND, by Joel Townsley Rogers
Everyone saw the death car as it roared down the sleepy country byway, the demented tramp laughing at the wheel, Inis St. Erme sprawled beside him, already dead or dying. A family saw it as it swerved to strike their beloved St. Bernard. An artist saw it as it sped through his semi-circular drive, scattering his easels and grinding the paintings beneath its wheels.
John Flail, however, did not see it, as it ran him down from behind.
And, more remarkably, Henry Riddle did not see it either, despite the fact that the car he himself drove sat stalled at the entrance to Swamp Road, at the other end of which the car was found. A half-dozen witnesses saw the car, with St. Erme slumped to the side, his arm hanging down against the door, but Riddle did not.
The horror would not be real until they found St. Erme’s body, and it was Riddle himself that found it, as a hastily assembled group searched the swamp near where the car was discovered. Half-sunk in the muck it was, with only an arm visible. An arm without a hand.
The reader can see as well as Riddle that all the signs point to one man as the killer. But Riddle won’t believe it, so he sits writing in a dead man’s house and tries to find another explanation, an explanation that sounds at first like a madman’s raving, but then, incredibly, it begins to make sense. And the reader begins to doubt his own sanity.
This brief description doesn’t do justice to the oddness of Joel Townsley Rogers’ 1945 novel The Red Right Hand. The oppressive atmosphere of insanity pervades every scene, every word even (though I never actually though myself insane; no more than usual, anyway). To my mind the novel was clearly influenced by Cornell Woolrich, and not just in the tone – outrageous coincidences abound, for example, and the ultimate explanation is bizarrely far-fetched. The last twenty pages essentially rewrite every single event that precedes them. And yes, there’s a damn good reason that right hand is missing.
In fact, the solution is so convoluted that I think Rogers made a mistake. The killer does one thing that he would never have done had he known… but by that time, he did know. Also, it was half an hour after I finished the book that I realized who one of the bodies belonged to.
This book doesn’t have Woolrich’s propulsive narrative drive – the first forty pages are slow going – but once it got moving I couldn’t put it down. It’s certainly not a great book, but it’s a really good one, and it’s very much out of the ordinary, so if you like your mysteries mixed with a little horror (two great things that go great together), this book will fill the bill.
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Reviews, Television
Human Target Makes My Brain Explode
So I watched the first two episodes of Human Target this week, and I have to say it’s pretty good. The flashbacks in each episode let you know what’s going to happen next, but the how-did-we-get-here keeps you watching. Both episodes had their moments. And both had moments that had my eyes rolling like that guy in Scanners.
(Here be SPOILERS.)
In the first episode, security consultant Christopher Chance is on the inaugural journey of California’s new bullet train, travelling at 200 MPH towards Los Angeles. His client is the beautiful project manager of the train project. At one point, she realizes that someone has triggered all the emergency-stop handles, causing the train’s brakes to engage and overheat. If the brakes are used again they’ll EXPLODE! (Eye roll.)
Not only that, but in just 20 minutes they’ll be entering a tunnel, and inside the tunnel is a curve, and when they hit that curve they’ll fly right off the tracks and THEY’LL ALL DIE!!! (My eye rolling is now audible as far away as France.)
Apparently nobody ever thought of TURNING OFF THE DAMN ENGINE. Just guessing here, but at 200 miles per hour there’s probably some pretty serious wind resistance, and I’m guessing that in 20 minutes you would probably coast to a stop.
The second episode – in which Chance has to protect a hacker on a flight from San Francisco to Seattle, was even more farfetched. At one point the plane is one fire, and Chance is trying to increase airflow through the cargo bay to blow it out. The airstream above them is, according to him, going much faster, so he decides to “flip the plane” (roll inverted). This, instead of, oh, say, CLIMBING A FEW DOZEN FEET. (At this point my eyes rolled fully back in my head, with the whites visible from space.)
Despite these preposterous plot tricks, the show is actually pretty entertaining. It was even better under it’s original title, Burn Notice. Stay with me here: Chance is Michael Weston, his old buddy Winston is Sam Axe, and lunatic information broker Guerrero is lunatic gunrunner Fiona Glenanne (although Fiona is juuuust a bit easier on the eyes – Jackie Earle Haley is one freaky lookin’ dude). They even had Burn Notice‘s “Carla” (Tricia Helfer) as the target on the first episode.
The main difference is that while you shouldn’t try the tricks on Burn Notice at home, you shouldn’t try the Human Target tricks on any planet governed by the laws of physics.
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