The plot of William Haggard's Slow Burner (reviewed here) centers on a British program to develop civil nuclear power in the hopes of scoring a major economic coup.
While nuclear energy has never stopped being topical, this idea was especially so at the time because in the '50s the British government really did bet heavily on its scientists achieving a breakthrough in civil nuclear power, both for the sake of cheap domestic power, and as a source of export income with which to achieve a healthy balance of payments (as a country dependent on massive food and energy imports, while its manufacturing and financial position slipped).1 The object of those hopes was the Magnox reactor, which never justified such a confidence (the world generally preferred the American pressurized water reactor, today still the mainstay of civil nuclear power), but the expectations do come to pass in Slow Burner, specifically in the titular, very different technology. A nuclear power source compact enough to be installed in a suburban attic and packed up and driven about in the boot of a car, it put Britain twenty years ahead of the rest of the world in that field--the only way, the book says, that the British economy was not twenty years behind it.
Moreover, the implications of this for Britain's economic life are repeatedly underlined within the story, so much so that the characters worry that the thief might be running West as much as East, and seem more concerned about the implications of losing perhaps their only prospect for a healthy balance of payments than they are about the Soviets upsetting the Cold War balance of power. Indeed, it is Britain's economic predicament that Sir Jeremy Bates has in mind ("Fifty or sixty million . . . and food, at the level of subsistence, for perhaps forty"; manufacturing plant "a generation out of date") when he thinks to himself that a "man who could consider going abroad, selling his knowledge, was worse than a danger, worse than an apostate" (114).
The point comes up in smaller ways, too--a burglar enlisted by Colonel Russell's people for an illegal black bag job told that if things go badly he could be resettled where he likes in the Sterling Area.
Sterling Area? he wonders, surprised by the qualification.
Yes, he's told, because just now dollars are hard to come by.
Next to this any menace from the Soviets in the book appears vague, shadowy.
Unsurprisingly, a good part of the book's interest for me was in its quality of being a time capsule from '50s Britain, capable of surprising in such ways.
1. While it doesn't say much about the government's specifically nuclear ambitions, David Edgerton's Warfare State nonetheless has a good deal to say about British policy regarding R & D in these years, and the view of some of its critics that it was too devoted to big-ticket prestige projects (of which the Concorde supersonic transport was another example).
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
An Un-Bond: William Haggard's Colonel Charles Russell
I remember that when reading Ian Fleming's James Bond novels I was struck by how much the character and his outlook, his associated image of glamour, the basis of his existence as a globe-trotting British agent (policing the Empire in its last days, playing junior but more skillful partner to the Americans in the Cold War contest) was very much a product of a particular period that has since passed. This has been so much the case that novelists working in the series, less able to rely on brand name and flashy filmmaking than their cinematic counterparts, have in recent years so often seen no option but to go back to those days--Sebastian Faulks and William Boyd taking Bond back to the '60s, Anthony Horowitz taking Bond all the way back to the '50s (or in the case of Jeffrey Deaver, starting with the character again from scratch in the present day).
Still, Fleming's creation has held up considerably better than Haggard's, and his longtime protagonist, Colonel Charles Russell, head of the imaginary Special Executive.
Russell, like Bond, is a formidable ex-military counterintelligence operative; like Bond, handsome, suave, urbane; like Bond a man who enjoys good food, drink and the other luxuries. Still, his version of luxury is different. Instead of the dated image of jet air travel and casinos, there is the even more dated image of the club, the country house, enjoyed by this old officer with his regimental moustache and pipe. Bond might brood about the taxi driver's manner, but Russell never has occasion to, appearing to exist untouched by the changes of the world surrounding him.
Indeed, at times Haggard's characters can almost seem caricatures (at least, to an American rather sensitized to "stage Englishmen" by terrible Hollywood writing). This is particularly the case when Haggard writes figures like Sir Jeremy Bates in Slow Burner, with the following line exemplary: "it was barely four. It would be unheard of for Sir Jeremy Bates to leave his office at tea-time" (116); or better still, when Bates comes home after a drunk to a valet who offers no question or comment:
Such things are even more evident in their social attitudes, the bigotry and snobbery fiercer and more bluntly expressed. While Fleming wrote many a foreign villain, he generally eschewed depicting treachery by Britons. The French unions may have been a Soviet fifth column in Casino Royale--but the British unions (even the Jamaican unions), however much Fleming disliked organized labor, were in the end no traitors to the nation. Many a scientist can be counted among Fleming's villains--but scientists as such were not presented as a perverse lot.
Not so with Haggard, who condemns scientists as such as untrustworthy because their affinity for reason makes them a bunch of damned crypto-Communists; and when the traitor is exposed, the scientist is indeed a man of "the far, far Left," while also being "no gentleman," not solely as a matter of his less than upper-crust social origin but his "character" in his dealings with his wife.1 (And that is not only all we know about him, but, it seems in Haggard's rather old-fashioned view, all that we need to know.)
All that makes it seem less surprising that there was never a Colonel Russell film franchise--and why, even by the standards of series' that did not land successful movie franchises to keep him on people's minds, the books have slipped into comparative obscurity.
1. "Take a clever boy . . . and put him into a laboratory for the next seven or eight years. What emerged inevitably was a materialist . . . a man who would assume without question that the methods of science could be applied to human societies" (58)--a prospect the narrator clearly regarded with horror.
Still, Fleming's creation has held up considerably better than Haggard's, and his longtime protagonist, Colonel Charles Russell, head of the imaginary Special Executive.
Russell, like Bond, is a formidable ex-military counterintelligence operative; like Bond, handsome, suave, urbane; like Bond a man who enjoys good food, drink and the other luxuries. Still, his version of luxury is different. Instead of the dated image of jet air travel and casinos, there is the even more dated image of the club, the country house, enjoyed by this old officer with his regimental moustache and pipe. Bond might brood about the taxi driver's manner, but Russell never has occasion to, appearing to exist untouched by the changes of the world surrounding him.
Indeed, at times Haggard's characters can almost seem caricatures (at least, to an American rather sensitized to "stage Englishmen" by terrible Hollywood writing). This is particularly the case when Haggard writes figures like Sir Jeremy Bates in Slow Burner, with the following line exemplary: "it was barely four. It would be unheard of for Sir Jeremy Bates to leave his office at tea-time" (116); or better still, when Bates comes home after a drunk to a valet who offers no question or comment:
Confound and damn the fellow! His lack of interest was an insult. A gentleman's gentleman--the convention had survived, the convention of the English manservant, secret, uninquiring, impersonal (111-112).It is much the same with William Nichol, who after nearly getting run over by a would-be assassin in a big truck, and losing his hat, takes a cab because he "was not a man to walk hatless in London" (127).
Such things are even more evident in their social attitudes, the bigotry and snobbery fiercer and more bluntly expressed. While Fleming wrote many a foreign villain, he generally eschewed depicting treachery by Britons. The French unions may have been a Soviet fifth column in Casino Royale--but the British unions (even the Jamaican unions), however much Fleming disliked organized labor, were in the end no traitors to the nation. Many a scientist can be counted among Fleming's villains--but scientists as such were not presented as a perverse lot.
Not so with Haggard, who condemns scientists as such as untrustworthy because their affinity for reason makes them a bunch of damned crypto-Communists; and when the traitor is exposed, the scientist is indeed a man of "the far, far Left," while also being "no gentleman," not solely as a matter of his less than upper-crust social origin but his "character" in his dealings with his wife.1 (And that is not only all we know about him, but, it seems in Haggard's rather old-fashioned view, all that we need to know.)
All that makes it seem less surprising that there was never a Colonel Russell film franchise--and why, even by the standards of series' that did not land successful movie franchises to keep him on people's minds, the books have slipped into comparative obscurity.
1. "Take a clever boy . . . and put him into a laboratory for the next seven or eight years. What emerged inevitably was a materialist . . . a man who would assume without question that the methods of science could be applied to human societies" (58)--a prospect the narrator clearly regarded with horror.
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Review: Slow Burner, by William Haggard
Boston: Little, Brown, 1965, pp. 192.
WARNING: MILD SPOILERS
Until recently I had read only one novel by William Haggard, mainly because it was conveniently available at the time--Yesterday's Enemy (discussed here).
In hindsight, that book--a relatively late entry into his long-running Colonel Russell series--seems less characteristic than I took it for. The book had Russell out in the world on his own, away from the milieu of British officialdom that looms so large in his other books.
Recently, however, I picked up the first book in the series, Slow Burner, particularly with an eye--again--to the status he once enjoyed as a master of the form, on a level with writers like le Carre or Fleming. Reading it I found Haggard's writing on the whole plain and straightforward (much more so than le Carre, or even Fleming), but not artless. He has an admirable economy with words, and his writing an appealing crispness and polish, especially evident in his use of evocative sentence fragments. ("Afternoon tea on magnificent silver and not enough to eat" (72), he wrote, in a suggestion of the extremely shabby gentility of a family of Irish aristocrats.)
I would add, too, that his interest in character is considerable. Like le Carre Haggard has a deep interest in this particular milieu--the grown-up public schoolboy-senior civil servant-class of which Haggard was a part; indeed, as le Carre has said was the case with himself, this can seem his primary interest, and his writing about espionage just his way of approaching it. The ambitions and anxieties of the people living in this world, their affections and enmities, their jealousies and prejudices, are the stuff of the book to a very great degree--though unlike le Carre Haggard is not terribly critical of his subject. Indeed, while his characters were clearly not of our time, they did not seem nearly so much out of theirs as they do in le Carre's books. There is insecurity about the country's position, and about their class's place within the country--the novel actually opens with senior government scientist William Nichol feeling inhibited about being seen smoking a cigar in the back of the government car in which he is being driven in the current age of austerity and egalitarianism--but one does not get the sense that the country's imperial stature and its traditional ruling class are finished, the way one does reading about Smiley and his people.
The book reflects this in its handling of its two principal plot threads--one, the playing out of the complex of personal antagonisms within the Establishment that eventually leads to attempted murder (particularly that centering on Sir Jeremy Bates and Nichol); and the other, a more conventional spy tale of identifying and stopping a traitorous scientist selling out Queen and Country. The former gets the greater attention, and frankly holds more interest, while the latter is rather slow-moving, and slight on thriller mechanics, the more so because the central character, Colonel Charles Russell, is chief of a counterintelligence service (the imaginary Special Executive) rather than an agent, and one who for the most part acts like a service chief, giving orders and dealing with other officials, rather than playing spy games out in the field in spite of his position. Surveillance is much more often talked about than portrayed; while the one piece of black bag work shown rather than just discussed is essentially played for laughs--and like many an old comedy, concludes with wedding bells.
On the whole the result is uneven, but engaging--if more for its idiosyncracies, the stronger of its characterizations, and its quality of being a time capsule from '50s Britain (a matter meriting its own post, here) than the actual spy story within it, whether taken from the standpoint of le Carre-like drama, or Fleming-like thrills.
WARNING: MILD SPOILERS
Until recently I had read only one novel by William Haggard, mainly because it was conveniently available at the time--Yesterday's Enemy (discussed here).
In hindsight, that book--a relatively late entry into his long-running Colonel Russell series--seems less characteristic than I took it for. The book had Russell out in the world on his own, away from the milieu of British officialdom that looms so large in his other books.
Recently, however, I picked up the first book in the series, Slow Burner, particularly with an eye--again--to the status he once enjoyed as a master of the form, on a level with writers like le Carre or Fleming. Reading it I found Haggard's writing on the whole plain and straightforward (much more so than le Carre, or even Fleming), but not artless. He has an admirable economy with words, and his writing an appealing crispness and polish, especially evident in his use of evocative sentence fragments. ("Afternoon tea on magnificent silver and not enough to eat" (72), he wrote, in a suggestion of the extremely shabby gentility of a family of Irish aristocrats.)
I would add, too, that his interest in character is considerable. Like le Carre Haggard has a deep interest in this particular milieu--the grown-up public schoolboy-senior civil servant-class of which Haggard was a part; indeed, as le Carre has said was the case with himself, this can seem his primary interest, and his writing about espionage just his way of approaching it. The ambitions and anxieties of the people living in this world, their affections and enmities, their jealousies and prejudices, are the stuff of the book to a very great degree--though unlike le Carre Haggard is not terribly critical of his subject. Indeed, while his characters were clearly not of our time, they did not seem nearly so much out of theirs as they do in le Carre's books. There is insecurity about the country's position, and about their class's place within the country--the novel actually opens with senior government scientist William Nichol feeling inhibited about being seen smoking a cigar in the back of the government car in which he is being driven in the current age of austerity and egalitarianism--but one does not get the sense that the country's imperial stature and its traditional ruling class are finished, the way one does reading about Smiley and his people.
The book reflects this in its handling of its two principal plot threads--one, the playing out of the complex of personal antagonisms within the Establishment that eventually leads to attempted murder (particularly that centering on Sir Jeremy Bates and Nichol); and the other, a more conventional spy tale of identifying and stopping a traitorous scientist selling out Queen and Country. The former gets the greater attention, and frankly holds more interest, while the latter is rather slow-moving, and slight on thriller mechanics, the more so because the central character, Colonel Charles Russell, is chief of a counterintelligence service (the imaginary Special Executive) rather than an agent, and one who for the most part acts like a service chief, giving orders and dealing with other officials, rather than playing spy games out in the field in spite of his position. Surveillance is much more often talked about than portrayed; while the one piece of black bag work shown rather than just discussed is essentially played for laughs--and like many an old comedy, concludes with wedding bells.
On the whole the result is uneven, but engaging--if more for its idiosyncracies, the stronger of its characterizations, and its quality of being a time capsule from '50s Britain (a matter meriting its own post, here) than the actual spy story within it, whether taken from the standpoint of le Carre-like drama, or Fleming-like thrills.
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