Joker and the Cult of Intelligence

I remember being struck by the intensity of the moral panic that surrounded the release of Todd Phillips' The Joker back in October 2019. It had been some time since we last saw anything quite like it--not since the '90s, perhaps, with the panic the more remarkable because, rather than this being a matter of "concerned parents" and the like it seemed to be "liberal" film critics whose duty should ordinarily be a defense of artistic freedom leading the calls for censorship.

The panic has since turned to disdainful dismissal of the panic. This is partly because this is the media's usual way of overcompensating after a more than usually conspicuous display of the extreme stupidity of its personnel. (Consider, for example, how it went from extreme credulousness about self-driving cars being almost here circa 2015 to its present sneering about the prospect of such vehicles ever happening.)

Yet it is also a matter of the film's limitations in handling the issues that it dared to take up (even as its taking them up was clearly the real reason so many critics had it in for the movie). Where those weaknesses were concerned a particularly significant one seemed to be the filmmakers' overreliance on Martin Scorsese's The King of Comedy, and what went with it, its blurring the line between reality and fantasy--leaving at least room for that infamous cop-out, that it was all "just a dream." However, more significant than that was the conception of the character of Arthur Fleck himself--in ways going beyond how the depiction of his mental illness allowed for the possibility. Consider the contrast between what Fleck is, and what the Joker is. In every incarnation of the Joker of which I know the Joker is not merely a murderous criminal, but a criminal "genius." However, Fleck is the opposite, a man who seems a good deal less than mediocre--consistently awkward in manner, inarticulate in speech, foolish in his choices large and small. Of course, people do have their hidden depths, and some rather unprepossessing individuals surprise us with their thoughtfulness, acumen, knowledge and other gifts--in which we may well catch the flash of genius--but I cannot think of any moment in which the film hinted at anything of the kind.

Naturally it is hard to imagine that such a man could ever become the archnemesis of the formidable Batman. And considering that I cannot help suspecting the reason is that this is because Arthur Fleck was imagined as a beaten-down working class man. One might imagine they thought so because of the genuinely smaller opportunities people have in that social strata for acquiring education and culture and developing their abilities and talents than those born in more affluent circumstances, and because it is part of the cruelty of poverty, material security and other such hardships that they are mentally stultifying. Yet even allowing for that unhappy reality something could have been done with the character here. Fleck might have been imagined as one of those poor but bright kids who missed the very limited chance at a better life society offers them; perhaps an avid reader; perhaps simply as one of those unassuming people who now and then manages to say something that catches the people looking down their noses at them off guard and leaves their supposed "betters" spluttering or speechless. However, he wasn't. And it seems to me more plausible that the writers of the movie could not imagine that such a person could be intelligent, articulate, or forceful in any way prior to his deciding that he had nothing left to lose and picking up a gun; that they thought that had he been any of those things he would have somehow ceased to be working class, as if only people who deserve to be "losers" can be found at the bottom.

The result is that, at least on this one point, when taking up subjects very little touched upon by American cinema the filmmakers' work ended up significantly colored by the prevailing prejudices about social class generally, working people particularly--and very likely, the presumption of meritocracy--to its cost.

Remembering Angus Calder's The People's War

For as long as I can remember the narrative about World War II prevailing in the United States (which received a massive boost in the late '90s from Tom Brokaw and "Stephen Ambrose") has been a distinctly conservative-nationalist one, and even a jingoistic-militarist one--a lesson in the ever-presence of monsters in the world, and the evil that "ideologues" do; the cowardice and foolishness of appeasement, invariably identified with leftie peaceniks, at whose every expression of reticence about going to war, any war, the word "Munich" is to be sneered; the necessity of national unity and deference to leaders in a cheerful spirit of "can-do" and "get-it-done" spirit, above all in what is so often made to seem the sole legitimate collective endeavor, war; the eternal and supreme value of the old-time patriotic and martial attitudes, and the idolization of men of the type of George Patton and Douglas MacArthur, not in spite of but because of what persons of liberal sensibility are prone to see as their failings; the inherent goodness of the English-speaking peoples and the depravity of the continentals and the world's need for America to lead it; and of course, the superiority of the elder generation, the superhuman "Greatest Generation," to its spoiled, flabby, worthless children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Moreover, this understanding corresponded to how Americans think of others as experiencing the war, especially those "nearest others," the British. Passing more or less the same concept through their "stage Englishman" stereotypes, of course, they picture a stiff upper-lipped elite Carrying on and Making Do as the bombs fell--whether in those mansions to which children like the Pevensies were evacuated, or at the front, where Cockney enlisted men cheerfully followed their public school-graduated officers to death in a display of "convenient social virtue" that made even "the Yanks" as described here look so egalitarian that the Brits could only shake their heads.

Of course, anyone who gets beyond the most superficial knowledge of the conflict quickly begins noticing a great deal that does not fit in with this narrative. Still, to catch the inconsistencies is one thing, to add them up to create a different and possibly truer image is quite another, and that made discovering Angus Calder's The People's War quite the revelation when I first happened upon it way back when--rather than a history of the conflict in which those on top tell those below them what they would like to think an attempt at a history of the conflict from below. The intent apart, there was what it showed--a deeply unequal and deeply divided nation which brought all its pre-war bagagge with it into the conflict, where the elite, not so different from its "better Hitler than Blum"-minded counterparts on the continent, profoundly ignorant and profoundly disdainful of its poorer countrymen, and thinking first, last and always of the preservation of their own privileges at any cost to the country and the world, proved reluctant and feckless war-leaders, and discredited themselves in the wake of defeat after defeat in Norway, the Low Countries, France, where the "miracle" of Dunkirk was really a partial escape in the wake of a disastrous defeat that would never have been allowed to happen at all by an even slightly determined and competent Anglo-French leadership, and which turned what might have been a limited post-World War I blow-up into an even greater catastrophe. It also showed coming out of it a war waged by the people, and won by the people, the close of which, befitting a "people's war," brought with it a new social contract--with the Beveridge report, the election of '45, the first Attlee government, and the beginning of a period of reform rather than the end that the war proved to be elsewhere (in America, the end of the New Deal, with the reformist impulse not to make much comeback until the Great Society era a generation later).

Radically leftish as all this sounds there is a critique of this view from the left--not least of the extent to which the war never ceased to be an Establishment war, the sharp limits on the post-war reforms at home, and the extent to which even very limited reform at home was matched by constancy in policy abroad. Rather than leading the way to a world where there would never be another war--to the left's vision of global governance that would spare the world another conflict like the one that had just ended--that Labour government took the role of number two member of the Western alliance in the Cold War, while fighting to hold on to the Empire as much as it could for as long as it could. And in line with all that, as David Edgerton points out, the welfare state was consistently second to the warfare state in British post-war life. In short, if it was well that the Allies defeated the Axis and Britain's people did their part, and it was well that the British people had their welfare state, it was no happy ending to the tale--with the fact the more obvious in the age of Thatcher, and Blair, and Cameron, and Johnson.

As one might guess from the fact, in considering how little remembered "the people's war"-type understanding of the conflict seems to be by these days by the British public (which, contrary to the incessant output of Heritage drama, seems no more historically-minded than its American peers), it is not the leftist critique that has shunted it aside, but quite the opposite--the triumph of the rightist-nationalistic version of the war's memory, which to go by what we have seen on the big screen has been promoted vehemently in recent years by Euro-disdaining Brexiteers and Blackadder-bashing right-wing revisionists. In an age in which the danger not only of war but full-blown great power war presses this can seem a most inopportune forgetting of the painful lessons of what has been widely accounted the bloodiest century in human history.

Steve Shagan’s The Formula and the Future of the Coal Industry

It seems the name Steve Shagan is not much heard these days, but once upon a time he was fairly prominent as both a novelist and a screenwriter. He wrote the novel Save the Tiger, and the screenplay for its cinematic adaptation (1973), the film for which Jack Lemmon won his Oscar, and the Oscar-nominated screenplay for the historical drama about the S.S. St. Louis, Voyage of the Damned (1976). His crime novel City of Angels became the film Hustle (1975), while his later scripts included those for Michael Cimino’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s 1984 novel The Sicilian (film 1987) and, in those years in which legal thrillers and Richard Gere both remained robust box office draws, Primal Fear (1996).

As it happened these works, if in many cases commercially and critically successful at the time, have not endured. (Looking back I can’t help but be struck by how while dozens of Lemmon’s films have become classics--the Billy Wilder movies like The Apartment or The Fortune Cookie, or the movies produced from Neil Simon’s material like The Prisoner of Second Avenue, or Blake Edwards’ Days of Wine and Roses, or Costa-Gavras’ Missing, or The China Syndrome, or The Odd Couple--the movie for which he actually got an Academy Award is practically forgotten. I remember Hustle mainly for the unlikely pairing of Burt Reynolds and Catherine Deneuve as the leads, which the film itself seemed to underline with their leaving a screening of Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman together.) But all the same I do remember reading a number of Shagan's thrillers--among them 1979's The Formula (which, it might be added, became yet another feature film).

Those thrillers, The Formula included, were very much of their time--high-stakes, jet-setting international thrillers where the accent was more on danger and suspense than big, minutely detailed action film-type set pieces. (They seemed especially ‘70s in their pre-Reagan-era sex-and-drugs-partyness; their blend of essentially conventional politics with a hint of post-Watergate cynicism to keep a modicum of credibility; and their Los Angeles-ness in an era in which that city was still the locus of American filmmaking, their period cop drama cliché and especially their L.A. cop cliché when that was particularly prominent. "Goddamn ulcer!" yelled Tactical Chief John Nolan before he "popped a Gelusil from the open bottle on his desk"--and I pictured it as if it were on a movie screen in front of me.)

The results were satisfactory enough as the thrillers they were meant to be (at least, to a reader like myself who preferred the ‘70s stuff to the ‘90s with its psychobabblers and pathologists and such), but certainly not masterpieces, and even less satisfactory when one moved away from their effectiveness as mere diversion to their handling of their themes. (The big "discovery" in Shagan's rather Dan Brown-ish 1984 novel The Discovery, for example, was particularly underwhelming, not least because of the weakness of the historical premise.) Still, The Formula had its interest on that level. Set against the backdrop of the then-current energy crisis the book revolved around the pursuit of a technique the Third Reich developed for converting coal into oil much coveted by various interests, forcing the hero on a danger-filled international journey to recover it. Some years after reading the book, when there was another energy crisis upon the world evocative of the ‘70s (that of 2003-2008), I found myself thinking of how that theme still seemed depressingly relevant as people spoke of "peak" oil as a very near-term possibility, and some speculated about the conversion of some of our more abundant coal into scarcer oil as a way to relieve the pressure. The intense concern about peak oil, and possible coping mechanisms such as that, passed amid the combination of global economic stagnation (since the Great Recession growth has been in the toilet, with all that implied for the rate at which the demand for energy has increased), a shale boom that has after many false starts produced a relatively cheap expansion of fossil fuel supplies (such that with gas so readily available it’s actually become tougher to sell coal-fired electricity), and the advances renewables have made (however much a Big Coal, Big Gas, Big Oil, Big Nuclear-boosting mainstream press continues to sneer at them), while the ever more aggressive assessments of the severity of the climate crisis have the ecological harm our fossil fuels will do seeming a more pressing danger than a shortfall of production. (Tellingly "Leave it in the Ground!" has become a slogan.)

Of course, the fact remains that, even in the most favorable scenario, transport is shifting away from fossil fuels only more slowly than electricity production. We may already have electric cars, but the speed at which the world will replace internal combustion engine-powered vehicles remains open to question--while alternatives replacing oil in aircraft and ships is a somewhat more distant prospect. Might it be that the coal industry, currently tottering on the basis of its uncompetitiveness in providing electricity, survive on the basis of sustaining that need for cheap oil? The prospect seems dim these days. Yet if the prospect of a peak oil-induced supply crunch has only been postponed as some suggest, and a method for converting coal to oil becomes cost-effective in the resulting market (the way coal-fired electricity has, temporarily, become salable amid an energy crunch) we could see coal remain a part of the scene for as long as it takes to move past oil altogether--especially should the energy transition drag.

Hopefully, it won't--any longer than it already has.

Do Bad Reviews Have More Impact Than Good Ones?

One of those bits of unexplained, unsubstantiated bits of Internet "wisdom" I have run across holds that where books are concerned it takes a dozen good reviews to cancel out the effect of one bad one.

How did they come to that conclusion? As I said, it was unexplained and unsubstantiated. Yet simple math makes it clear that on Amazon, following a one-star review, it takes at least ten five-star reviews to get a better than 4.5 star average (4.54), and twenty such reviews to bring one’s average closer to 5 stars than 4.5 (4.76).

Of course, star-based rating systems are an attempt to quantify something only awkwardly quantifiable, but I have found myself wondering if there is not in those numbers some reflection of the reality. At the very least it seems to me that, all other things being equal, positive reviews individually have less effect than bad ones, and I can think of at least three reasons why this is the case.

1. Our personal experience--in many cases, long and painful personal experience--teaches us that most of what is out there runs the gamut from mediocre to plain dreck. Reviewers, considering it their job to grade content from good to excellent, and it increasingly seems, from excellent to outstanding, claim the complete opposite about any one thing. Therefore the odds are that anything we are being told is so great is likely overpraised--with the result that, all other things being equal, a less than glowing review is the more likely to be accurate from a purely statistical standpoint than a breathlessly praise-filled one. This may be reinforced by another aspect of the situation, namely that reviewers often seem to be incentivized to produce positive reviews--but it is less common that they have an incentive to produce negative reviews, and it would be my guess that most are less alert to those occasions when that incentive exists. (Considering popular works, for example, I have often noticed that reviewers tend to go out of their way to say negative things about works which are in some way critical or satirical of the political status quo--with the critical opprobrium directed at the recent Don’t Look Up an obvious example.)

2. It is more often the case that the critical, denigrating review will be specific in its comment, and support its assertions. Putting it bluntly, when we are pleased by something--perhaps the more in as we pleased by it--we are not moved to examine it very closely. Our impulse is simply to enjoy it.

Our reaction is the opposite when we are displeased--and communicate our displeasure to others. And it helps that we are more likely to see a need to demonstrate the validity of our reaction to others when we are hostile.

3. It may be that bad reviews are more entertaining than good ones--even when they do not necessarily work well as reviews. A positive review which is well-written is apt to really be about the thing being reviewed, rather than about itself or its author, and we respond to it accordingly. When someone does a good job writing a positive review we may respect the quality of the writing and the intelligence of the assessment, but our principal interest is in the item which received the review. Even if they showed some wit the entertainment value of the review is likely to be slight, because it was about the entertainment value of something else.

By contrast many an author of a negative review makes the review about itself, and for that matter, themselves, rather than what they reviewed. They put on a show of tearing apart the work they so disliked (or at any rate, tearing apart something because they are likely to get far removed from the thing they are actually reviewing). They become an insult comic giving a performance. Of course, this is rather narcissistic and mean-spirited approach, but if twenty-first century pop culture teaches anything else (and I’m not sure that it does) it is that narcissism and meanness for meanness’ sake have colossal audiences. And a reviewer who has entertained their audience is likely to be heeded even when not really reviewing the thing at all. (Indeed, this may have much to do with how people are, on average, quicker to volunteer a negative comment than a positive one--with obvious implications for the more casual sort of reviewer who supplies so much of the customer reviews at sites like Amazon.

Up against all that it seems only too predictable that one would need legions of positive reviews to subdue a handful of negative ones. For those sending their work out into the world, especially when they do not have a colossal media machine behind them, this is not a happy thing--a single troll easily doing a lot of damage, often entirely undeserved damage to the already slight chances of their work's being seen, and simply for the pleasure they derive from having caused harm. Indeed, one may wonder if for many it is worth bothering to pursue reviews anyway. If we need twenty five-star reviews to wipe out a single one-star rating, then the odds are massively against even the best work getting a fair hearing--and it may be well worth reconsidering the conventional wisdom about what publicity will do for a great deal of work.

The Unevenness of Technological Development, and the Vision of RethinkX

Amid the steady analytical output from the RethinkX think tank the principal document tying the implications of their studies of energy, transport, cellular agriculture and other technologies remains their Rethinking Humanity report of September 2020, which argued that order-of-magnitude price drops in the cost and natural resource inputs required to produce the goods of five "foundational sectors" in economic life--food, energy, transport, materials and information--will, with virtually mathematical certainty, mean a crisis in human existence as radical as the transition from prehistoric to civilized times, which the authors predict happening in the next two decades. As the cliché had it the crisis spelled not only the possibility of bitter conflict and great danger, but also opportunity, with the optimistic outcome the authors of the study envisioned the end of civilization’s unequal and brutal "Age of Extraction" with its hierarchies and exploitation, and the beginning of an "Age of Freedom."

There is, of course, no need to rehash the argument here. Apart from the fact that anyone who would like can download a copy of the sophisticated but highly readable document free of charge from the authors’ own web site I have already got in my two cents on the matter. I only raise all this as background to my mention here of the particular dimension of the issue I find myself thinking about now, namely the profoundly different rates of change across those five sectors. After all, there is no question but that the pace of technological change, the drop in costs, in information, has far, far outpaced any such trend in the other areas. Indeed, even as the price of producing, copying, storing, processing and transmitting information has fallen at mind-boggling rates over recent decades the prices of all the rest have remained stubbornly high, as we were painfully reminded during the food-and-fuel crisis of ‘06-’08, and are reminded yet again during what may be the even sharper inflationary shock we are all now living through.

The fact can seem a cruel irony. After all, while there is no questioning the great practical amenities the digital age has provided, many of which benefit those who have been particularly disadvantaged in various ways (cellular telephony, for example, may well have sped the development of modern communications infrastructures in developing nations), it would seem that from the standpoint of the world’s ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed billions, and even the budgets of all but the most affluent "First Worlders," there is far more desperate need of cheap food, materials, energy and transport than of those amenities. It may also seem that the revolutionizing of information so far ahead of the others, with society so little changed, has meant that even the potentials of the revolutionizing of merely the informational sector are far from being as fully realized as they might have been. Consider, for example, how once upon a time it was hoped that Internet access might be a public good, but instead one must pay vast sums to service providers, and get in return heavily surveilled, algorithm-fiddled, ad-choked Internet where we can’t avoid running into paywall after paywall after paywall. Consider how, as the pandemic recently showed, telecommuting had made so little advance after a generation of everyday Internet usage.

Still, as anyone familiar with the history knows the progress of technology has never been even (thus in the nineteenth century did we have newfangled steam locomotives delivering goods to train stations to be picked up by drivers of the same sort of horse-drawn carts people had been using for millennia), and alas, never revolved around the needs of those who have least, and most need their lot ameliorated. More significantly, the developments in the other four sectors they anticipate would seem to depend on the gains in information technology discussed here, from the vision of cheaper transport summed up in Transportation-as-a-Service (reliant on advances in artificial intelligence), to the prospect of cheaper production and fabrication of materials (which utilizes computerized 3-D printing). The result is that the successes in information technology may well prove to have been a prerequisite for what follows, reminding me of something claimed by a famed futurologist whose ideas I have been considering for decades--Ray Kurzweil. As he acknowledged the changes in technology were overwhelmingly coming in the area of computers, but computers will change everything. Should that prove true RethinkX may turn out to have done an even better job than Kurzweil of explaining how such a thing came to pass.

Review: The Aquitaine Progression, by Robert Ludlum

In its premise The Aquitaine Progression is consistent with the familiar Ludlum formula. (An American East Coast bourgeois in Europe finds himself caught up in an international conspiracy, and on the run from both the bad guys and the authorities as he tries to stop the villains.) Likewise many of the factors plugged into the formula likewise familiar. (The collision of war veteran and antiwar protestor, mad American generals who were spendthrift with their soldiers’ lives in an Asian land war and mad French generals who had opposed De Gaulle, the ghosts of World War Two and Algeria and Vietnam, the use of terrorist outrages to pave the way for an international fascist takeover. Even old Carlos gets a few mentions, as do the Sonnenkinder, the latter proving the more significant.) Indeed, some of the borrowings seem particularly specific. (Joel Converse’s history so much recalls that of Quinn O’Brien from The Chancellor Manuscript that it can seem as if Ludlum decided to take what was a supporting character in that earlier book and build a novel around him--the way that Ludlum arguably did with Stefan Varak from the same book when creating The Parsifal Mosaic’s Michael Havelock.)

However, this time around Ludlum is clearly attempting to do something different with these elements. Perhaps in part because those elements are so familiar Ludlum discards the element of mystery of who the bad guys are and what they want. In contrast with, for example, the mere hints Ludlum offered at the outset of The Holcroft Covenant, the identity of the villains, and their intentions, are entirely clear from the start in this book, to the protagonist as well as to the reader. (In fact, rather more mystery surrounds the identity of those sponsoring the hero's fight against them.) The result is that the hero’s task is, even more than before, not unmasking the villains but simply stopping them. And perhaps because the hero is the familiar Ludlum type in important ways, Ludlum modifies the figure significantly--while investing more heavily than usual in character development. Unlike the protagonists of his prior three novels--Brandon Scofield, Jason Bourne, Michael Havelock--Joel Converse is no professional super-agent. (Where Quinn took his law degree to the FBI Converse is just the lawyer operating in the world of international business he appears to be.) However, unlike many of Ludlum's earlier, non-secret agent heroes he has a deep familiarity with violence. Converse was a naval aviator in the Vietnam War who, after being shot down, was captured and, escaping from a prisoner of war camp, learned to elude pursuit, learned to stalk enemies and kill in cold blood, right in the jungle--and then back in civilian life tried (never entirely successfully) to put all that behind him. The nightmare experience, it might be added, also made his enmity toward the villains in this book and their intentions deeply personal. (It was their chief who was ultimately responsible for what proved to be Converse’s fateful mission, just part of a pattern of psychopathic madness on the part of General "Mad" Marcus Delevane in what seems to me, of all the ‘80s-era Ludlum novels, the one that comes closest to the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam outrage that fueled ‘70s-era thrillers like Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript.) Also unlike many of the later Ludlum heroes Converse is neither single nor a widower, but a divorcee whose prior marriage (of course, unhelped by all the wartime baggage) is much more than a minor biographical detail.

Joel’s experience of the war, and the broken marriage, are important personal history for the purposes of the protagonist's development, and critical, too, to the unfolding of the plot--as well as what makes Ludlum’s taking one more "go" at this type of tale of more than the usual interest. Apart from providing a more than usually realized, and motivated, hero, it matters when Ludlum this time around (initially, at least) eschews the action movie heroics. Joel's principal weapon against the enemy is not a gun but the law--the search for entirely legal means with which to disrupt the machinations of the villains (why else turn to an accomplished international lawyer rather than one of the spy/commando types?)--while when violence does come into the picture Ludlum handles it as the clumsy and ugly acts of confused, panicked, often damaged men, with consequences not easily left behind, legally or psychologically, the more in as when Joel reaches out to people he knows for help in his battle and is dismissed with psychobabble about having "mentally regressed" to the traumas of his past. To Ludlum's credit it all rings true, and gives what could easily have been standard thriller stuff more than the usual frisson and force and bite.

Seeing it all I actually wondered if we were not going to see a return to the intensity and edge of the Ludlum of the ‘70s. Alas, after the midpoint of the book all this becomes less evident, the story becoming more conventional, a straightforward, thriller mechanics-oriented man-on-the-run tale without the hope of big revelations up ahead, while Joel comes to act the part of the hyper-efficient secret agent, capably dispatching enemy after enemy. The individual bits are rendered competently enough, while Joel's flight derives some compensating interest from its parallels with his wartime experience. Still, it is in the end standard chase stuff, with the middle third or so of the book having the hero getting cornered and having to trick and fight his way out and then running until he gets into another corner more times than would have served the book best, with scene changes that might have provided relief absent for very long stretches, even as the overall story comes to sprawl excessively. There come to be simply too many minor characters introduced late in the narrative to pose some minor threat or play some minor role in advancing the struggle against the villains before getting knocked off. Then when the hero, who is "back in from the cold" well before the story’s end, turns from flight to counteroffensive against his enemies, too much hinges on those supporting characters’ ability to conjure armies of helpers with the required esoteric skills at everything from computing to the application of plastique, the last reflecting just how far that return to the conventional goes. Putting it bluntly, after all that time Joel spent assembling his legal brief that was his actual mission, which he pursued down to the end, his finally stopping the villains still comes down to a thrown-together commando raid that seems generic and anticlimactic after all that came before. Meanwhile the villains’ schemes, while not completely prevented from causing havoc, come off as whimper rather than bang, the more in as the rot the book described as leading up to it was (limited) rot within the Establishment rather than the rot of the Establishment the way it was in those fiercer ‘70s-era novels.

The end result is that the book does not quite realize the promise of its first half, while being an object lesson in the problem of trying to stretch the lean old spy thrillers into quarter-of-a-million-word monsters like these. Still, at its best I found The Aquitaine Progression more engaging than any of his other post-’70s books, and certainly a far stronger performance than Ludlum’s third and final crack at the "Fourth Reich Rising" scenario a decade later in 1995’s The Apocalypse Watch.

Review: The Parsifal Mosaic, by Robert Ludlum

Coming right after The Bourne Identity The Parsifal Mosaic seems to significantly follow that book’s pattern, opening with a scene of violence marking a break with the protagonist’s prior life, after which the protagonist pursues the mystery of their personal past as an American security state which, convinced that an important former agent has become a menace, pursues them with shoot-to-kill the order of the day, all of which is of course tied up with something bigger. Also as with Bourne the scenario is of the more nationalistic than post-Watergate variety--a particularly extreme version of the "Commies have infiltrated the government!" hysteria scenarios of the Cold War. (The Sonnenkinder of The Holcroft Covenant were too obviously a thriller device, even in the eyes of those fearful of fascism’s resurgence, but in Cold War America urban legendish nonsense about armies of Soviet sleeper agents was the kind of thing in which a good many people were ready to believe--and as Russiagate shows, still are.) This time around, however, the treachery reaches into much higher places, and the stakes are literally the highest such thrillers offer--heading off a threat of all-out nuclear war between the two superpowers.

Intricate political scenarios, especially at the international level, have generally not been a strength of Ludlum’s. (Even when he did a better job, as with Trevayne and The Chancellor Manuscript, the setting was domestic.) That we see such a scenario working out up close makes it harder to overlook the implausibilities--the more in as Ludlum treats it all at such length, The Parsifal Mosaic the first of his six hundred pagers (or at least, close to it, my copy of the original hardback ending on exactly page 599).

Compounding the problem is that the book as a whole is awkwardly structured.

The story starts with a defining moment in the life of "Consular Operations" agent Michael Havelock. Having learned that his lover, Jenna Karas, is working with the KGB he is forced to personally gun her down on a beach in Spain. Sickened by her betrayal of him, and by his betrayal of her (he did love her, after all, and he cold-bloodedly murdered her), he calls it quits and retires to an academic existence. But of course it is the case that like Michael Corleone in the third Godfather film, just when he thinks he is out when they pull him back in. The entreaties of various recruiters fail to bring him back to the Great Game, but something else does the trick in short order--Havelock, incredibly, spotting Karas in a train station in Rome. She’s alive! he realizes. And she knows he knows that she knows that he knows that . . . And off he goes after her as she desperately tries to evade the man who shot at her on that beach, Havelock determined to find out how he has been deceived, and why, while American intelligence determines to stop him.

During this phase of the book--which lasts more than half of its six hundred pages--there is an abundance of incident, but very little forward progress of the story. Rather the mechanics of pursuit, evasion, surveillance, combat are, a few hints of more apart (a Soviet mole in the upper reaches of government, the odd behavior of an American Secretary of State whose stature is basically the legend of Henry Kissinger times twenty, the fear that somehow this will lead to nuclear war), pretty much all the narrative has to offer. It is only after the midpoint of the book that Havelock succeeds in tracking Jenna down, and that they start investigating the conspiracy that brought them to this state. The biggest revelations come early, after which the remainder of the book consists mainly of Havelock trying to find a mole whose identity is unambiguously revealed to the reader well before the end (even if there are a few other surprises in store), and never packs quite the dramatic punch that it should because responsibility for Havelock's betrayal ultimately ends up being so diffused.

The result is that The Parsifal Mosaic feels like two, or two-and-a-half, smaller thrillers strung together, each of which runs longer than it ought as a result of the number of links in the chains being longer than would have been optimal, and a fair amount of overwriting, with many a lengthy scene or subplot amounting to less than the space allotted it ought to have warranted. (Havelock’s attempt to intercept Jenna at the Franco-Italian border was overlengthy, the description overly complicated. Meeting with a man in New York who has important information for Havelock about Karas’ whereabouts Havelock realizes that he is a Nazi criminal whose atrocities he personally witnessed as young Michal Havlicek back in Czechoslovakia during the war, now living here under a false identity--but in spite of adding yet another dramatic shock the fact is actually quite unimportant to the story. And so on.)

As might be hoped, for all the overwriting and overreaching Ludlum’s skill with the mechanics is by no means absent, and the book does have its moments. The scenes depicting Havelock’s discovery that he has been lied to by his own people in Rome and his readiness to turn on his bosses have real bite, while the revelation of the secret at the heart of the crisis was memorable. So was the dramatic irony of a significant meeting between an unsuspecting Havelock and the man the reader learned was the mole almost a hundred pages earlier as the story approaches its climax. While I found Secretary of State Anthony Matthias an exceedingly unconvincing creation (the product of not much more than Ludlum’s rather characteristically centrist tendency to portray the power elite as the superhuman "brilliant" and "best" of the meritocracy he is so sure exists), the surrogate father/son, mentor/protégé relationship between him and Havelock was not without its interest. And if the book lacked the edge that contributed to Ludlum’s best (works like Trevayne, The Gemini Contenders, The Chancellor Manuscript--and among the books of the ‘80s, The Aquitaine Progression) in favor of McCarthyish hysteria about Soviet sleeper agents and suchlike he at least displays more nuance than many another writer handling such themes did. (Ludlum, at least, acknowledges that "Commies" became that in reaction to the horrors of history as others had experienced it--"A God who threatens eternal fires if one rises up against a living hell is no God for nine-tenths of mankind" says a Soviet defector who never abandoned his loyalty to the ideology, even after he broke with his government--while Ludlum more generally allows the moderates in the Soviet government ready to work with the hero in averting the danger their ideological affinity rather than requiring them to break with it in order to be recognized as men of conscience.) All the same, there were a good many times when the book tried my patience, when it was easy to put it down and say "I’ll just come back to this later," and in the end it seemed less than the sum of its parts, again leaving me thinking that Ludlum’s earlier, leaner narratives were more satisfying than those that followed.

Review: The Holcroft Covenant, by Robert Ludlum

Reading my way through other long sequences of books by popular authors I have often noted that they often produce a number of fairly varied works in the earlier part of their career from which they distill a formula with which they tend to stick afterward. Thus did Ian Fleming produce very different works in Casino Royale, Live and Let Die, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, and From Russia, with Love--and then extract from them the formula that he used in subsequent books like Dr. No and Goldfinger and Thunderball, which in their turn provided much of the material for the formula seen in the classic Bond movies of the '60s (the international travel, the megalomaniac villains with their high-tech, geopolitically consequential plots, etc.).

So does it seem to me to go with Ludlum, with books like The Scarlatti Inheritance and The Rhinemann Exchange and The Gemini Contenders providing a body of work Ludlum distilled into the formula that he came to be known by, with the first true example 1978's The Holcroft Covenant--with its international range, and especially its use of West European settings; its globally consequential conspiracy in which international terrorism is an instrument of the villains, but not in the way most of the public thinks; its action movie heroics and its romantic subplot; ticking off all the boxes.

Being the first The Holcroft Covenant is, as one might expect, fresher in feel than many of the books that would follow it, but Ludlum's increasing tendency to overwrite, and clutter the narrative with the melodramatic tics for which he is notorious (italics, exclamation points, "Madness!" and "Maniacs!" and so forth), is also quite evident, more so than before. I might add that the mystery is diminished by the biggest revelation arriving at the beginning, namely that Noel Holcroft is actually the son of the Third Reich's banker, who in his contrition over his involvement in its crimes embezzled vast sums for the sake of helping the victims after the war, and left the responsibility for completing that task to him, while the would-be architects of a Fourth Reich about which we learn at the opening very soon prove to have other plans for the plan. Of course, Holcroft is slower to learn all of this than the reader (indeed, in the early part of the story, annoyingly slow to realize that the fact that people are constantly being gunned down and poisoned around him has anything at all to do with him and his present situation). All the same, even he figures it out eventually, as a result of which fact Ludlum's tale this time around has less to do with unraveling the mystery of "What is it all about?" than with the mechanics of stopping the villains, with Holcroft’s effort to get the funds released and keep them from the Neo-Nazi plotters running nearly five hundred pages. Still, Ludlum manages to hold the reader's attention through it, while the book's twist ending is by itself plenty to make it memorable. ("How about a Bond novel where the bad guys win?" I once wondered. So it goes here.) Indeed, while I am not particularly enthusiastic about sequels it seems to me that this book more than any other by Ludlum merited one--but then that would have taken Ludlum out of his usual territory into science fiction-land, and unsurprisingly Holcroft, unlike four of Ludlum's other novels to date, never got such a follow-up.

The Enlargement of the German Defense Budget: What Does it Mean?

In recent years I have generally refrained from attempting to offer comment on immediate events, especially in a news-y sort of way--my researches instead tending to be somewhat more long-term in their orientation (as with my recent stuff on British policy). This is, in part, because I like to take my time and give myself a chance to be thorough when attempting a piece of analysis, but also the generally lousy job the media does in supplying information that would provide a basis for an analysis that would be better than superficial in the extreme and, quite likely, outdated just ten minutes later (as the "analysis" the media itself tends to give us shows). What I have seen of its coverage of the current war in Ukraine, absolutely true to the pattern, has been exceedingly vague and extremely short on explanations or insight, even given the unavoidable uncertainties and rapid unfolding of the situation. (Consider how much we are actually being told in the headline-grabbing stories about the fight for Chernobyl, or the Battle of Kiev--not much of substance.)

However, one development did catch my eye as worth mentioning here, precisely because it seems that something can and should be said about it, namely the German government's announcement of increases in its defense spending. According to what we are now hearing it means to raise its defense spending to over 2 percent of its GDP by 2024--though we are not told much in those pieces of why 2 percent should represent a significant benchmark, or what it would mean in terms of Germany's particular economic position. The other figure we are seeing is 100 billion euros--with a glance beyond the headlines (for example, at the actual Febraury 27, 2022 speech by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz from which the press has derived these little factoids) indicating that the 100 billion euros would be a "one-off sum" out of the 2022 budget to provide a "special fund for the Bundeswehr" that would pay "for necessary investments and armament projects."

What do the numbers really mean?

According to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Germany's defense expenditure averaged 1.2 percent a year in 2011-2020, if generally rising in recent years (so that it was just a hair under 1.4 percent a year in 2020, and in 2021, it seems, a hair over 1.5 percent). The result is that in the decade of the '10s it averaged an expenditure of 40 percent less than the 2 percent mark, and in 2021 spent a quarter or so less.

What does that mean in currency terms? Well, using the World Bank's GDP figures (in this case, the constant 2015 dollar series), adjusted for inflation using its own deflator, that would work out to an extra $290 billion in 2020 dollars devoted to the German armed forces over the decade of the '10s had it spent at that level. And today, given a German GDP of about $3.8 trillion, it would translate to a German defense budget in the $80 billion+ a year range (as against the under $60 billion to which the rising trend of German defense spending brings its efforts today). This might well make Germany the world's number three defense spender after only the U.S. and China.

Still, impressive as it is that would be considerably less than the other figure we are seeing, the 100 billion euro figure, which at today's rate of exchange equals $113 billion, about twice Germany's already elevated recent expenditure--more like 3 percent of the country's GDP than 2 percent—which, especially if, as implied in Scholz's speech, it comes on top of the defense appropriation for the year (producing a budget well to the north of $160 billion), would change Germany's place in "the league tables" from "maybe third biggest" defense spender in the world to "definitely third biggest by a long way."

The result is that Germany is publicly announcing what may well be a tripling of its defense spending this year to levels (4+ percent of GDP) unseen since the Cold War era, as well as a longer-term commitment to elevated spending at some uncertain level, with the 2 percent+ figure cited as the target from 2004 forward indicating a much raised floor--with this particular way of communicating the budget increase, one might add, carrying a particular meaning for the country as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By common agreement 2 percent on defense is their minimum obligation, a minimum of which they have tended to fall short. In the past Germany was no exception, but here it declares that this will no longer be the case in what its government presumably hopes will be taken by allies, and non-allies, as an indicator of, besides its commitment to a more forceful posture, the NATO alliance (as one might expect, a major theme of Scholz's speech).

These are big numbers, intended as, among much else, a big political signal, which I suspect will not be the last, with other NATO members (the French, the already high-spending British) plausibly announcing their own increases--testimony to the extraordinary events of the present, and extraordinary in their own right.

I have said it before but it bears repeating. The 1990s, and their illusions, are now far, far behind us as history, the end of which was another of those '90s-era illusions, marches on.

The Half-Life of the Interest of Popular Fiction

I recall seeing a data set which showed that of some 60 million copies of works of fiction sold in the first half of 2018, some 3.6 million were classics--6 percent or so in a period that I have no reason to regard as unrepresentative. That is scarcely more than the reported sales of just those books with James Patterson's name on their covers (not long ago credited with accounting for about 4 percent of the total), which means that Patterson alone was coming close to matching the sales of every famous old author you have ever heard of put together, from Jane Austen to Emile Zola.

Comparisons aside, this works out to not much more than a copy a year for every forty to fifty Americans. Moreover, consider the reasons for the sales. How many of them are for students in school assigned the books? How many for restocking libraries? And how many to make a coffee table or a book shelf look good? In short, few of even this small percentage of sales are a matter of individuals voluntarily, seriously choosing to read the works in question. Meanwhile, even those who do pick up such books without some educator demanding it do so because they feel they "have" to do so as self-respecting persons of education and culture, many in the most "middlebrow" fashion. The result is that those who pick up such books very often because they genuinely enjoy even a part of "the canon" is very small indeed.

Why raise this all too familiar point again? The reason is that it seems a useful point of comparison with the sales of those books that have become old without becoming classics. Sales of these are harder to glean from the available data. But it seems that even the popular books of yesteryear acquire the disadvantages of age without the advantages of being classics, commercially as in other ways. One is not assigned to read them in school, and librarians feel less obliged to keep copies in stock. Meanwhile individuals looking to show off are less likely to think they can impress anyone by having them on their coffee table or their book shelf, and few will feel they "have" to read them for any reason. All that automatically means fewer sales, and even beyond sales, less chance of their being noticed by those who might actually find them interesting. And when people do happen upon them, in contrast with those approaching Important Literature, with which all but the most callow are prepared to show some patience because even if it is not all that entertaining when they first pick it up it (perhaps, because it has come down to us from another time, with different standards) it may yet prove worth their while, no such case is made for popular fiction. Facing it their demand to be entertained immediately, significantly and fluently is uncompromising, and it must be admitted that given the narrowness of most personal tastes, very little is likely to make the cut.

All of this affects all fiction. (Certainly those who insist that anything they pick up conform to a 2020s' standard of "wokeness" will find very, very little older fiction bearable.) However, I suspect that it is a particular problem for the thriller genre, and especially thrillers of the "high," big picture type. Political thrillers derive much of their interest from the topicality of their premise--and that tends to decline very quickly. (I recently read a Customer Review of a Robert Ludlum novel from the 1980s in which the reviewer complained about the book's being set in the 1980s, as if the reader were somehow cheated by that! Such a complaint is of course absurd--but reflective of how easily such work loses its interest.)

Meanwhile, with visual media leading and print fiction following, the expectation has increasingly been of brisker, more action-packed thrillers; and in line with the demand for action and briskness (and not only that) the books easier to read. (Back in the '60s, the '70s, even the '80s John le Carrè managed to be among the top bestsellers of his day. Now even a Robert Ludlum likely would not make the cut. Besides the problem posed by how today's superabundance of spy-fi sets the standard with regard to pacing and thrills, he expects his readers to know words like "pavane" and "bromide," which is totally a deal-breaker in an age in which Dan Brown sets the standard with regard to prose.)

Indeed, looking back the fact that I read so much of those thrillers strikes me as having been a matter of picking up the '80s-era hits of Clancy and Ludlum and Cussler back when those books’ authors were, if already passing their peak of popularity, still fairly new, and those writers still fairly prominent on the bestseller lists; in my having a stronger-than-average in their themes; and in the early ‘90s being a period before visual media so totally supplanted those sorts of thrillers in their niche; all of which went to form a rather different interest. But formed that interest was, and so here I am writing about those authors and their books all these decades later, long after, to all evidences, general interest in them has decayed to nearly nothing.

Is Bad Sci-Fi Holding Technological Progress Back?

Ordinarily we hear about how science fiction has encouraged technological progress--how science fiction writers set forth ideas long before scientists and engineers took them up as objects of practical work and maybe even played a part in their doing so, how science fiction stories inspired scientists to pursue scientific careers in the first place, and so forth. (Indeed, Hugo Gernsback, who more than any other single individual may be credited with having made science fiction a genre in the publishing-pop cultural sense, pointed to exactly such justifications for the view of science fiction as more than entertainment.)

However, it seems to me that there is another side to the story, all too evident in the kinds of stories science fiction tends to tell--not least, horror stories which treat scientific and technological progress as a transgessive, cosmic order-upsetting act, inevitably, brutally, deservedly punished, epitomized by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Indeed, writing about the way fiction has tended to depict robots in particular Isaac Asimov coined the term "Frankenstein complex" to refer to what he saw as a psychological hang-up over the prospect of "robot rebellion," "robot apocalypse" and the like, and consciously opposing himself to that trend, pointedly wrote other kinds of stories depicting robots as part of a positive future. In that object he succeeded admirably--but that success has not always been acknowledged, or his intentions respected. Indeed, when Hollywood inevitably adapted the famed collection of those stories, I, Robot, what the filmmakers wound up giving the audience was, in contrast with a tidy, rational, progressive Asimov future a spectacle of robots on the rampage as beleaguered humans blasted away at them with machine guns. Of course anyone who actually followed the storyline amid all the stuff blowing up and all the robots coming at the viewer like horror movie monsters saw an attempt at something more nuanced--the traumatized anti-robot bigot Del Spooner recognizing the humanity in the machines--but all the same, it was a flashy, high-concept summer blockbuster sold on the basis of action-adventure rather than ideas, in line with a genre revolving around grandiose spectacle based on large-scale physical destruction and reptile-brained appeals to fear and prejudice.

That said, one may wonder just how much difference it all makes. A recent Pew Research Center study affirmed the impression that far more Americans are exposed to science content via entertainment than actual news. It also reported that on the whole they think it does their understanding and attitudes toward science no harm. They even report that those polled regard the media as depicting science quite positively. Still, I can't help suspecting a gap between what they may think in the abstract, and the way they actually react when looking at a particular scientific or technological prospect, with the conversations I have had with actual people in actual life consistently persuading me that Hollywood blockbuster-variety Luddism has had rather a deeper effect on their thinking and feeling in regard to these matters than they admit, or even realize. It is hard to see how it could have acted as anything but a drag on progress in an age that has had far too little of it.

Review: Trevayne, by Robert Ludlum

In reading my way through Robert Ludlum's canon I was particularly late in coming to Trevayne. This was in part because it is one of his older and less commonly available books, to which I had generally been less attentive, but also because, published pseudonymously (under the name "Jonathan Ryder"), it seemed to be somehow off of the main track of his work. Actually reading it, however, my impression proved incorrect. Certainly the Ludlum formula had yet to take shape. Here the titular protagonist is a happily married family man for whom any extracurricular involvements are out, he is brought into the mess at the book's center by rather undramatic mutual agreement (albeit in far from full awareness of the facts), and the book is set entirely in the U.S. rather than a globetrotting adventure. Moreover, the book's thrills come from suspense-building plotting--from the hero's detective work and menacing (if, in the immediate term, non-violent) personal confrontations with the powerful and corrupt individuals he finds in his way as he goes about it--rather than action-adventure, the incidents of actual violence coming late, often off-stage, and just about never describable as "action," with the sole exception not involving Trevayne in any physical way. (Indeed, the cover art of my 1988 paperback edition of the book seems so inconsistent with the story as to merit some remark here. The image beneath the title is of a man in a suit facing toward us sprawling out his limbs as he is shot in the back by a soldier with a rifle in front of the dome of the United States Capitol--putting me much more in mind of the famous scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still than anything actually inside the novel, as if someone had accidentally switched the cover of the book with that of a novelization of that film. These things happen, you know--as the lawsuits testify.)

Still, Trevayne seems to me a milestone in Ludlum's career. This is the first of Ludlum's books in which we get a sense of the hero as a lone individual (save perhaps for a few helpers) up against an enemy that is truly, overwhelmingly vast. Indeed, the type of conspiracy Ludlum presented here--the reach of the vast defense contractor collectively known as "Gennessee Industries," which vast as it is proves to itself only be the tip of an iceberg--was shortly to reappear as Inver Brass in The Chancellor Manuscript and The Icarus Agenda. It also significantly anticipated the Pentagon corruption in The Gemini Contenders and the ascent of corporate power envisioned in The Matarese Circle.

As one might guess from such parallels one may rank it with The Chancellor Manuscript as one of his more critical works--while being remarkable even among these in ways besides its originality. One reason is that while Ludlum's fortè has rarely been verisimilitude in his presentation of the details of machinations in high places, in Trevayne he was rather more than usually sophisticated and convincing in his portrait of the conspiracy's tentacles, and the detective work that led Andrew Trevayne to it. The picture Trevayne uncovers certainly has its less plausible touches (not least the extent to which he had it all coming back to one company) but all the same, the way subsidiaries stand in back of other subsidiaries, obscuring complex ownership arrangements and the influence that goes with them; the links between "legitimate" business and organized crime, and the extension of such corruption into organized labor and high politics; the revolving door between the public and private sectors, and the ways in which the private sector exercises public power; the way elder statesmen hailed as a democracy's best and brightest speak the platitudes of government by, of and for the people in public to the applause of all the respectable and sneer at the idea in private; the way the "practical," "pragmatic" office-holders make their peace with such things, and in the hope of doing some good, and maybe even actually doing so, become implicated in the corruption themselves, facilitating it; are all too in line with unseemly realities, and rather credible in the portrayal, with this even going for the minutiae of accounting and engineering and law Ludlum references. It matters, too, that rather than such things being briefly mentioned background details, as in Ludlum's later, more action-oriented Ludlum novels, in this book--which devotes so much less attention to the mechanics of manhunts and being on the run and shootouts--Trevayne and his team's working their way through the bowels of the empire that is Gennessee is the heart of the matter.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, while the novel seemed to me less visceral than some of his other works (The Matlock Paper, The Chancellor Manuscript, struck me as angrier) the book may actually be the more radical intellectually, not least in the sense it gives of such villainy works, how powerful they are, how high up and how deep the corruption goes, while this time the hero himself gets compromised and coopted. One consequence is that the ultimate issue of the contest is far from certain at the book's end, Trevayne's hope that he could ultimately get the better of them only drawing his more deeply into their trap. In fact it seems significant that the last words of the book are their expression of their self-assurance--and one is allowed to wonder if Trevayne's children, a bit more radical politically than he (which radicalism he and his wife were prone to brush off as childish and callow), were not right after all about the limits of what one man could do playing by the rules of the System when he took up the President's offer to chair what had seemed an essentially pedestrian subcommittee investigation of defense contracting and found himself up against far, far more than he bargained for. Also unsurprisingly, even after the success of Doug Liman's adaptation of The Bourne Identity had Hollywood snapping up the film rights to various Ludlum novels I do not remember a single word about its taking an interest in this book. However, I think Ludlum would have left a more interesting and more substantial body of work had he given us more books like this one, and fewer shoot 'em ups and reiterations of and sequels to the same.

Review: The Gemini Contenders, by Robert Ludlum

Robert Ludlum has more than once incorporated an element of family epic into his books, particularly his World War II-themed work, as with The Scarlatti Inheritance, and later did so again in The Holcroft Covenant. Yet in 1976's The Gemini Contenders he wrote out an actual multi-generational saga about the Fontini-Cristi family, the first half of which tracks the Fontini-Cristi's first two generations all the way through that conflict.

As it happens, that is not Ludlum's only divergence from the usual. This time, bound up with the world war, is another secret war, being waged in the pursuit of a religio-historical mystery that we are told could be of world-historic significance--the contents of the vault delivered by the Greek Orthodox Order of Xenope to the Fontini-Cristis for safekeeping.

Today I suppose that Dan Brown would be the obvious point of comparison--as this novel similarly presents a conflict of religious orders intriguing and killing over the possession of a secret they believe would shake the world if ever it got out. But of course Ludlum did it a generation earlier here, quite differently--and, I thought, considerably better. The family epic approach--which intertwines an intrigue running through three generations with two of the century's major wars and comes down to a struggle between twin brothers with utterly opposed political ideals and ambitions in highly charged conflict--gives his narrative a far greater dramatic interest than Brown's book had. Additionally the revelation at the end of the novel regarding "What it was all about" seemed to rather more interesting, and handled in a rather more sophisticated fashion. (This being the '70s Ludlum could afford to be less smarmily conciliatory toward "faith" after raising the clash of "faith and reason," and more lucid about just what such a secret's getting out would mean in actual life. As one character says, the secret of the vault both changes everything, and changes nothing.)

I even preferred Ludlum on the level of prose. This being an early Ludlum novel the narration is comparatively efficient and the manifestation of his well-known tics (the italics, exclamation points, etc.) was less frequent, while even when his writing was not all one might have hoped for Ludlum at least sounded like an adult writing for other adults--whereas the idea of a "Young Adult" version of The Da Vinci Code seemed superfluous to many (myself included).

Review: The Matlock Paper, by Robert Ludlum

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

In Robert Ludlum's third novel, 1973's The Matlock Paper, the FBI, looking to identify the leader of a powerful drug trafficking network in the northeastern U.S., determining that Connecticut's "Carlyle University" is central to the activity, enlists one of that university's professors, James Matlock, to help in their investigation--and promptly plunged into a conflict between parties of which he knows nothing, and for which he is woefully unprepared and unequipped.

As is generally the case with the early Ludlum The Matlock Paper is more a suspense story than an action story, if one with the danger and violence and piling up of bodies beginning rather early on and coming more consistently afterward than in his two preceding works. On that level the book is efficient and effective. Moreover, while I generally find that even the better thrillers are more satisfying in their mechanics than in their explanations of what in the end the intrigue was all about--and Ludlum was no exception in that regard--this time around he gets a good many points for at least having a surprise to spring on us. As it turns out the big network was organized and run by the administrators of New England's universities in an attempt to save their institutions financially in an era in which government and private donors were not willing to give them the resources they needed to go on. And in the end Matlock is caught between Little Ivy university presidents-turned-Pablo Escobars and the Black nationalist movement's military wing's answer to the Navy SEALs operating out of a frat house named "Patrice Lumumba Hall" (in a Little Ivy-type liberal arts college in the early 1970s!), and forced to make a temporary alliance of convenience with whichever seems the more survivable to him.

The scenario may seem ridiculous, but then as Ludlum's characters so often scream the "Madness!" of "Maniacs!" is pretty much what makes a Ludlum plot a Ludlum plot, and all things considered it seems to me that there is more than just over-the-top plotting in this image of Matlock caught in between president Adrian Sealfont and Black radical Julian Dunois--the political symbolism unmissable, a centrist nightmare of a country caught in between a traditional Establishment sinking to the very depths of corruption on the one hand and "extremist" radicals on the other. Distinctly '70s, the book seems about as unlikely as any of Ludlum's works for a film adaptation, but I'm sure that someone is trying to make something of it anyway, with such an effort perhaps looking more plausible amid the "Madness!" and "Maniacs!" of 2022--which, I must admit, have me wondering what Ludlum, were he alive and still working, would be producing after looking at today's American political scene.

Announcing . . . The Secret History of Science Fiction

Back in 2015 I published a history of science fiction--Cyberpunk, Steampunk and Wizardry--tracing what we commonly discuss as the "main line" of American (and to a lesser extent, Anglo-American) genre science fiction from the moment of its emergence as a genre in the 1920s largely centering on the activities of Hugo Gernsback, through the Golden Age and the New Wave, down into the twenty-first century, trying to explain what has too often been recounted as hazy fan lore in a more rigorous, lucid way.

All these years later I don't feel as if I have much to add to what I presented in that book in regard to the main line of the genre's development. But I have found myself taking an interest in many an aspect of genre history in back of that main line or underneath it--like what really kept science fiction stories selling in the old days, and how fandom has been having the same fights over and over and over again since the 1950s, and how in our time, however much some pretend otherwise, science fiction has become much more a thing that people watch or play than something they read.

The resulting pieces--many of them previously published but many also appearing here for the first time--are gathered together in The Secret History of Science Fiction, available in both paperback and e-book editions.