Reading early twentieth century American literature--Sinclair Lewis for example, or Theodore Dreiser, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or any number of others--I find myself struck by just how large the Mid-West loomed in the country's imagination in tht period, much more than today.
Of course, those who pay any attention to current events hear about the economic and demographic decline of the Mid-West all the time, but their fiction drives the changed picture home in a way that the general declarations don't.
So do the statistics showing how certain cities became less populous and prominent--and others, more so. A comparison of the U.S. Census Bureau's lists of the biggest cities over time--or even just the top fifteen positions on those lists--tell much of the story.
Chicago, which was the second-biggest city in the U.S. in 1950, fell to the number three spot some time in the '80s, while its population actually shrank by a quarter by 2013. And in that same time frame, Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Milwaukee (ranked #5, #7, #8, #12 and #13 in 1950) all got knocked out of the top fifteen entirely. The same happened with the former #15, Buffalo, New York, which, as part of the "Great Lakes Megalopolis," might be regarded as at least marginally associated with them.
By and large, their places on the more recent lists have been filled by the metropolises of the Sun Belt (and in particular, California and Texas). Los Angeles moved up from the #4 spot to #2 (edging Chicago out) in this same period. Houston leaped ten places from #14 to #4. Phoenix, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, San Jose, Austin (Texas) and Jacksonville, not one of which made the top fifteen in the 1950 list, occupied the #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11 and #13 spots respectively in 2013.
Of course, fiction does reflect the fact. There is no question that Los Angeles came to loom larger and larger in our imaginations as the twentieth century progressed and gave way to the twenty-first (helped by the fact that it is the center of American movie and TV production). Still, to say that someone looking back from the future at the fiction of our time will be as impressed with the presence of the region as a whole in it seems to me something else. (And it seems still less likely that they will get much sense of the deep changes in the Mid-West itself.)
That seems to me less a matter of the changes in life than the changes in what the reputable consider to be "serious" fiction. The social novel, the political novel, the sorts of fiction that a Lewis or Dreiser or Fitzgerald wrote and which provided that sense of a world, have long since been marginalized. A generation ago E.L. Doctorow remarked in a fascinating 1988 exchange with Bill Moyers, "we tend today to be more Miniaturists than we used to be," and a generation on one would be hard-pressed to show this has changed.
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
The Macropolitics and Micropolitics of Spy Fiction
In discussing the concern mentioned in my title, I suppose I should define my terms.
By "macropolitics" I mean the the international scene that is the reason for the existence of intelligence services in the first place. The question of whether or not a government sees other countries as threatening, which countries those might be, and the nature of that threat could all be thought of as macropolitical.
By "micropolitics," I mean the politics of the intelligence service itself. I would put such things as the office politics ongoing within its corridors, its rivalry with other intelligence services of the same nation, its dealings with legislative oversight, its concern for public relations under that heading.
Both have been part of the reality of intelligence work from the start, and neither is new to the genre, with the two commonly figuring in the same plots. The novels of Ian Fleming present a convenient example, as with Moonraker. That novel centers on Hugo Drax's building a ballistic missile system for the British government, and its plot gets properly underway after a murder at Drax's facility. The threat from the Soviet Union in the early Cold War years supplies the novel with its macropolitics. The jurisdictional questions raised by Bond's investigating a question of domestic security, the frictions between the Secret Service and Special Branch, the concern for Drax's image as a celebrated public figure, are micropolitical.
However, by and large the attention given to micropolitics has risen over time. An obvious reason for this is that such services became increasingly professionalized and bureaucratized in the twentieth century, as a result of which the life of organizations simply became a bigger part of the realities of espionage. (Already Maugham, writing of his experience in intelligence during World War I, wrote of the spy as a "tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine.")
Another is that this same transformation of spying into an affair of large, permanent organizations made espionage and its workings better known to the public--while writers drew on the little details for the sake of achieving verisimilitude in the eyes of a more sophisticated readership. (Moonraker, notably, opened up with a lengthy account of the Service's workings.)
And still another is the development of the more politically critical tradition within the spy story, which regards the workings of that machinery with skepticism and distrust. (Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, for example, is a satire of the backward-looking imperial romanticism, bureaucratic ass-covering and sheer stupidity that he found in the British Secret Service--which also defined the novels of John le Carré, whose work included, among other things, an homage to Greene's book in The Tailor of Panama.)
Still, that hardly seems to be all of it. It often seems that as it becomes harder to portray the macropolitics as a titanic struggle against barbarian hordes on the verge of crashing through the gates, the micropolitics get more attention. World War Two spy stories, for example, rarely seem to devote much time to that sort of thing--in part because a real, colossal, life-and-death shooting war was being waged against an enemy acknowledged by nearly everyone to be so genuinely threatening, and so horrific, as to justify almost anything in many minds.
By contrast, Cold War spy stories, because they are set within a "cold" war, contain greater room for doubt about just how dangerous the enemy is, just what the rights and wrongs are. The war never went hot, after all, and the aggressiveness and power of the Soviet Union were never what the hawks said--the Stalinists a realpolitik-minded group relatively accepting of the status quo, and the Bomber and Missile Gaps pure fantasy. Consequently, despite the status of militant anti-Communism as a default attitude in much of the Western world, there was room for greater introspection of this sort, greater sensitivity to the complexities of the situation, with even an undisputed hawk like Tom Clancy able to own that the Soviets had valid security concerns of their own, and look forward to the dismantling of the strategic nuclear missile forces at Cold War's end.
The post-Cold War era saw even less consensus regarding the international scene, the mainstream finding the challenges to the prevailing order more ambiguous, more diffuse. Some still saw Russia as threatening, but it was economically and militarily a shadow of what it had been, and in any event, shorn of the ideology that made it so objectionable to orthodox opinion. China remained Communist in name, but not in any other sense. Its economy was much more dynamic than post-Soviet Russia's--but most realized it was to be quite the while before that rapid growth translated into very much state power, widening the scope for observers to watch the trend with as much optimism as fear, especially as Western companies profited from trade and investment, while many hoped that economic liberalization heralded political liberalization. Iraq and North Korea, despite the grandstanding, were easily dismissed as small-timers, and non-state terrorism was even more easily dismissed than that.
Accordingly, the proportion of micropolitics to macropolitics in our spy fiction went up yet again--with the updates of works originally created in the Cold War period making this especially obvious--"continuation" Bond novels like John Gardner's SeaFire (where the Secret Service is thoroughly overhauled for the post-Cold War), or Jeffrey Deaver's Carte Blanche (where Bond begins his career against the backdrop of the War on Terror) particularly noteworthy in this regard. This was at least as much the case in the cinematic adaptations of the series after the reboot. These gave James Bond some external enemies to fight (a vaguely imagined terrorism, the Quantum organization behind it), but in Skyfall the villain was an ex-operative looking to avenge his personal betrayal against M herself, nothing more and nothing less.
One might see in this the ascendance of that tradition of political critique that undoubtedly played its part. Still, relatively little recent spy fiction has taken such a line, least of all in the more popular work. And despite a flirtation with a more critical view in Quantum of Solace, the Bond films in particular remain an endorsement of the idea that we "need these guys," Skyfall in particular exalting the continuing value of operatives like Bond (any irony in the menace coming from an ex-SIS operative with a grudge apparently unintentional).
What it really seems to suggest is an anemia on the part of the print side of the genre, which on the whole has not been so fresh or innovative or had the cultural impact that it did before, while the movies deal less in the old essence of spy fiction than in its hollowed-out forms and trappings.
Still, as the success of Kingsman, Spy, and Mission: Impossible 5 (or is it 5 million?) has already demonstrated this year, and as Spectre will almost certainly demonstrate again this autumn, writers and audiences still seem to be having fun doing that.
By "macropolitics" I mean the the international scene that is the reason for the existence of intelligence services in the first place. The question of whether or not a government sees other countries as threatening, which countries those might be, and the nature of that threat could all be thought of as macropolitical.
By "micropolitics," I mean the politics of the intelligence service itself. I would put such things as the office politics ongoing within its corridors, its rivalry with other intelligence services of the same nation, its dealings with legislative oversight, its concern for public relations under that heading.
Both have been part of the reality of intelligence work from the start, and neither is new to the genre, with the two commonly figuring in the same plots. The novels of Ian Fleming present a convenient example, as with Moonraker. That novel centers on Hugo Drax's building a ballistic missile system for the British government, and its plot gets properly underway after a murder at Drax's facility. The threat from the Soviet Union in the early Cold War years supplies the novel with its macropolitics. The jurisdictional questions raised by Bond's investigating a question of domestic security, the frictions between the Secret Service and Special Branch, the concern for Drax's image as a celebrated public figure, are micropolitical.
However, by and large the attention given to micropolitics has risen over time. An obvious reason for this is that such services became increasingly professionalized and bureaucratized in the twentieth century, as a result of which the life of organizations simply became a bigger part of the realities of espionage. (Already Maugham, writing of his experience in intelligence during World War I, wrote of the spy as a "tiny rivet in a vast and complicated machine.")
Another is that this same transformation of spying into an affair of large, permanent organizations made espionage and its workings better known to the public--while writers drew on the little details for the sake of achieving verisimilitude in the eyes of a more sophisticated readership. (Moonraker, notably, opened up with a lengthy account of the Service's workings.)
And still another is the development of the more politically critical tradition within the spy story, which regards the workings of that machinery with skepticism and distrust. (Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, for example, is a satire of the backward-looking imperial romanticism, bureaucratic ass-covering and sheer stupidity that he found in the British Secret Service--which also defined the novels of John le Carré, whose work included, among other things, an homage to Greene's book in The Tailor of Panama.)
Still, that hardly seems to be all of it. It often seems that as it becomes harder to portray the macropolitics as a titanic struggle against barbarian hordes on the verge of crashing through the gates, the micropolitics get more attention. World War Two spy stories, for example, rarely seem to devote much time to that sort of thing--in part because a real, colossal, life-and-death shooting war was being waged against an enemy acknowledged by nearly everyone to be so genuinely threatening, and so horrific, as to justify almost anything in many minds.
By contrast, Cold War spy stories, because they are set within a "cold" war, contain greater room for doubt about just how dangerous the enemy is, just what the rights and wrongs are. The war never went hot, after all, and the aggressiveness and power of the Soviet Union were never what the hawks said--the Stalinists a realpolitik-minded group relatively accepting of the status quo, and the Bomber and Missile Gaps pure fantasy. Consequently, despite the status of militant anti-Communism as a default attitude in much of the Western world, there was room for greater introspection of this sort, greater sensitivity to the complexities of the situation, with even an undisputed hawk like Tom Clancy able to own that the Soviets had valid security concerns of their own, and look forward to the dismantling of the strategic nuclear missile forces at Cold War's end.
The post-Cold War era saw even less consensus regarding the international scene, the mainstream finding the challenges to the prevailing order more ambiguous, more diffuse. Some still saw Russia as threatening, but it was economically and militarily a shadow of what it had been, and in any event, shorn of the ideology that made it so objectionable to orthodox opinion. China remained Communist in name, but not in any other sense. Its economy was much more dynamic than post-Soviet Russia's--but most realized it was to be quite the while before that rapid growth translated into very much state power, widening the scope for observers to watch the trend with as much optimism as fear, especially as Western companies profited from trade and investment, while many hoped that economic liberalization heralded political liberalization. Iraq and North Korea, despite the grandstanding, were easily dismissed as small-timers, and non-state terrorism was even more easily dismissed than that.
Accordingly, the proportion of micropolitics to macropolitics in our spy fiction went up yet again--with the updates of works originally created in the Cold War period making this especially obvious--"continuation" Bond novels like John Gardner's SeaFire (where the Secret Service is thoroughly overhauled for the post-Cold War), or Jeffrey Deaver's Carte Blanche (where Bond begins his career against the backdrop of the War on Terror) particularly noteworthy in this regard. This was at least as much the case in the cinematic adaptations of the series after the reboot. These gave James Bond some external enemies to fight (a vaguely imagined terrorism, the Quantum organization behind it), but in Skyfall the villain was an ex-operative looking to avenge his personal betrayal against M herself, nothing more and nothing less.
One might see in this the ascendance of that tradition of political critique that undoubtedly played its part. Still, relatively little recent spy fiction has taken such a line, least of all in the more popular work. And despite a flirtation with a more critical view in Quantum of Solace, the Bond films in particular remain an endorsement of the idea that we "need these guys," Skyfall in particular exalting the continuing value of operatives like Bond (any irony in the menace coming from an ex-SIS operative with a grudge apparently unintentional).
What it really seems to suggest is an anemia on the part of the print side of the genre, which on the whole has not been so fresh or innovative or had the cultural impact that it did before, while the movies deal less in the old essence of spy fiction than in its hollowed-out forms and trappings.
Still, as the success of Kingsman, Spy, and Mission: Impossible 5 (or is it 5 million?) has already demonstrated this year, and as Spectre will almost certainly demonstrate again this autumn, writers and audiences still seem to be having fun doing that.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Bond and the 'Sixties
Over the years, Bond parodies have often blended the send-up of 007 with a broader evocation of the '60s. Austin Powers, for example, is an "international man of mystery"--whose cover is that of a fashion photographer who freaks out at the happening that is the Electric Pussycat Swingers Club, a man possessed of countercultural credentials that Dr. Evil openly mocks.
More recently, the Big Time Rush movie opened with the members of the band dressed in tuxedos and acting out a secret agent fantasy while singing the classic "Help!"
What, one wonders, could be more 'sixties than this blend of Bond and the Beatles?
And yet, what could be more dissonant and unlikely?
Of course, both the secret agent and the band were icons of the decade. Yet, the simple fact is that the 'sixties was not all one thing, no more than any period is one thing, Bond and Beatles the product of different, frankly conflicting currents. One thinks "1961-1969," and the stereotype is youth culture and counterculture, but Bond is a far cry from that, even the Bond of the films. Yes, they looked very fresh and modern, with their hedonistic, sexual, irreverent hero, their fast pace and flashy visual style, their jet-setting narratives and futuristic technology and visceral action, brought to you through the magic of Technicolor and Panavision.
Yet, even the Bond of the screen remained at bottom an updated clubland hero of the kind granddad enjoyed as a kid. A bowler-hatted, suit-wearing, middle-aged civil servant who not only works for an organization run out of a wood-and-leather office by an uptight, pipe-smoking Victorian, but expects to wear black tie for night life, snaps at the nearest Black Guy to fetch his shoes and remarks the inappropriateness of red wine with fish. He even takes a swipe at the Beatles themselves, remarking that they should only be listened to with earmuffs on. Youth culture? It was the kind of thing that Bond was reacting against, explicitly in the novels (think the cab ride in the early part of Thunderball), and only somewhat more subtly in the movies.
With his usual incisiveness, Simon Winder remarked the contradiction between Bond and that broader image of the 'sixties at some length (and some of the recent continuation novels have acknowledged it in little ways, like Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care), but by and large the realization seems to escape most of those looking back at the decade. The humor in the Austin Powers films was at times subtle. (Even in an era when it seems everyone is bragging about being a black belt in some martial art, I suspect that the utter nonsense that is the "Judo chop!" went over most people's heads.) At times, it was even sociologically astute. (The exchange about how there is no world for Dr. Evil to take over anymore is priceless.) However, I never got the sense that Mike Myers' blend of secret agent and Swinging London was meant to be taken ironically--and this seemed still less the case in the Big Time Rush movie.
Still, it has been good for a laugh.
More recently, the Big Time Rush movie opened with the members of the band dressed in tuxedos and acting out a secret agent fantasy while singing the classic "Help!"
What, one wonders, could be more 'sixties than this blend of Bond and the Beatles?
And yet, what could be more dissonant and unlikely?
Of course, both the secret agent and the band were icons of the decade. Yet, the simple fact is that the 'sixties was not all one thing, no more than any period is one thing, Bond and Beatles the product of different, frankly conflicting currents. One thinks "1961-1969," and the stereotype is youth culture and counterculture, but Bond is a far cry from that, even the Bond of the films. Yes, they looked very fresh and modern, with their hedonistic, sexual, irreverent hero, their fast pace and flashy visual style, their jet-setting narratives and futuristic technology and visceral action, brought to you through the magic of Technicolor and Panavision.
Yet, even the Bond of the screen remained at bottom an updated clubland hero of the kind granddad enjoyed as a kid. A bowler-hatted, suit-wearing, middle-aged civil servant who not only works for an organization run out of a wood-and-leather office by an uptight, pipe-smoking Victorian, but expects to wear black tie for night life, snaps at the nearest Black Guy to fetch his shoes and remarks the inappropriateness of red wine with fish. He even takes a swipe at the Beatles themselves, remarking that they should only be listened to with earmuffs on. Youth culture? It was the kind of thing that Bond was reacting against, explicitly in the novels (think the cab ride in the early part of Thunderball), and only somewhat more subtly in the movies.
With his usual incisiveness, Simon Winder remarked the contradiction between Bond and that broader image of the 'sixties at some length (and some of the recent continuation novels have acknowledged it in little ways, like Sebastian Faulks' Devil May Care), but by and large the realization seems to escape most of those looking back at the decade. The humor in the Austin Powers films was at times subtle. (Even in an era when it seems everyone is bragging about being a black belt in some martial art, I suspect that the utter nonsense that is the "Judo chop!" went over most people's heads.) At times, it was even sociologically astute. (The exchange about how there is no world for Dr. Evil to take over anymore is priceless.) However, I never got the sense that Mike Myers' blend of secret agent and Swinging London was meant to be taken ironically--and this seemed still less the case in the Big Time Rush movie.
Still, it has been good for a laugh.
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Review: Outbound Flight, by Timothy Zahn
New York: Del Rey, 2006, pp. 453.
Timothy Zahn's original Thrawn trilogy apart, I've read very few of the Star Wars tie-in novels. However, as the launch of Episode VII approaches, I've found myself taking another look at them, starting with those books most closely tied to the Thrawn saga. The first that I picked up was Outbound Flight, which dramatizes the titular event referenced in the Thrawn books--the attempt, led by Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth and backed by the government of the New Republic, to establish a colony outside the galaxy, which went awry in ways that factored into Zahn's earlier cycle.
As it happens, Outbound Flight runs to some 453 pages, which naturally reflects its having a complex plot tying together multiple threads. As is so often the case, this means that a certain amount of patience is expected on the part of the reader during some rather lengthy exposition. It may have demanded more than it should have, in fact. Much of the first third of the book or so is devoted to an intrigue on Borlak that fed into the main plot, but was in itself relatively minor. It seemed all the more marginal because its principal viewpoint characters were Obi-Wan and the young Anakin--who simply drop out of the story of Outbound Flight prior to its climax, rather than playing any role in the key events later in the tale.
Still, when I got to those events they did justify that patience. Offering plenty of plot twists and action, they culminate in a multi-sided confrontation involving Darth Sidious' agents, Outbound Flight, the Chiss and a party of human smugglers caught in between (among all of whom there are still other, smaller divisions). In writing it Zahn pulls off the considerable feat of making this climax intricate, briskly paced and lucid all at the same time in a technical tour de force that far exceeds anything in the Thrawn trilogy. The book's presentation of the original C'baoth, and the future Admiral Thrawn as a young officer of the Chiss Ascendancy's Expansionary Defense Force, also have their interest, both within these events, and as background to the other books--their depictions lengthier and fuller than the Thrawn trilogy offered. All this helped to make the result a lot more satisfying than I expected, as both an elaboration of the Expanded Universe, and plain old pulp space opera.
Timothy Zahn's original Thrawn trilogy apart, I've read very few of the Star Wars tie-in novels. However, as the launch of Episode VII approaches, I've found myself taking another look at them, starting with those books most closely tied to the Thrawn saga. The first that I picked up was Outbound Flight, which dramatizes the titular event referenced in the Thrawn books--the attempt, led by Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth and backed by the government of the New Republic, to establish a colony outside the galaxy, which went awry in ways that factored into Zahn's earlier cycle.
As it happens, Outbound Flight runs to some 453 pages, which naturally reflects its having a complex plot tying together multiple threads. As is so often the case, this means that a certain amount of patience is expected on the part of the reader during some rather lengthy exposition. It may have demanded more than it should have, in fact. Much of the first third of the book or so is devoted to an intrigue on Borlak that fed into the main plot, but was in itself relatively minor. It seemed all the more marginal because its principal viewpoint characters were Obi-Wan and the young Anakin--who simply drop out of the story of Outbound Flight prior to its climax, rather than playing any role in the key events later in the tale.
Still, when I got to those events they did justify that patience. Offering plenty of plot twists and action, they culminate in a multi-sided confrontation involving Darth Sidious' agents, Outbound Flight, the Chiss and a party of human smugglers caught in between (among all of whom there are still other, smaller divisions). In writing it Zahn pulls off the considerable feat of making this climax intricate, briskly paced and lucid all at the same time in a technical tour de force that far exceeds anything in the Thrawn trilogy. The book's presentation of the original C'baoth, and the future Admiral Thrawn as a young officer of the Chiss Ascendancy's Expansionary Defense Force, also have their interest, both within these events, and as background to the other books--their depictions lengthier and fuller than the Thrawn trilogy offered. All this helped to make the result a lot more satisfying than I expected, as both an elaboration of the Expanded Universe, and plain old pulp space opera.
Just Out . . .
My new book, The Forgotten James Bond.
It focuses on those aspects of the franchise that tend to get overlooked, or which most who talk about the series seem to know only vaguely--like exactly how the '60s-era Bond films helped shape the action movie, the special place of the 1967 Casino Royale movie in film history, and the continuation novels that came after Fleming.
It is now available in both e-book and paperback editions.
You can also read it at the Kindle Library.
If you'd like a preview, you can get one over at Google Books.
To everyone who's taken an interest in my writing, here on this blog and in my books: again, thank you.
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