Dreamer, drinker, and erstwhile architect of the titular house of sand, Rex Walls has charisma to burn. That he does so, to the ground, is written in the stars from the outset. Just how he does it and who he takes down with him are what make this memoir so readable.

The Glass Castle

Jeannette Walls
Scribner Book Compan 2006, Paperback, 288 pages, £10.71

In terms of subject matter, The Glass Castle doesn’t do anything new. Walls isn’t the first writer to survive and draw from an impoverished childhood and she won’t be the last. Yet while she doesn’t deliver with the brio of some of the genre’s heavyweights, she doesn’t overreach, either. Under-writing where others might have become overwrought, she succeeds in delivering a resonant, polished memoir that is neither sentimental nor heavy-handed.

The earlier chapters especially benefit from this lightness of touch. Rather than retell her childhood in an adult voice, or worse yet in a child’s voice stained with her own grown-up judgement, she describes events and her reactions as she saw and felt at the time. And so it is that after tumbling unnoticed out of a speeding car and left crying on the roadside, a five-year-old Walls finds hilarity in her father’s description of her bleeding nose — her ‘snot locker’ — rather than upset at her near-abandonment. As an reader, I appreciate this: the section is far more unsettling and its effect is more poignant than it would have been had the adult Walls judged or interpreted on my behalf.

Walls’ father repeatedly jettisons her into situations beyond her control, batting away protests with the assurance that he wouldn’t drop her into anything she couldn’t handle. The way she processes these experiences changes as she develops a sense of responsibility for herself. At seven, half-drowned after learning to swim the Rex Walls way, she accepts his logic; at thirteen, tossed to a pack of drunken rednecks, she isn’t so sure.

A perpetual outsider, the young Walls believed her survival depended not just on being part of the rapidly unravelling family unit, but on holding it together. She writes of how a group of neighbourhood children attacked her and her brother Brian, bragging about seeing the pigsty where the Walls kids lived. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Walls siblings fight back, defending a home and family they believe in less and less.

As the years pass and the Walls children become more capable, their parents detach almost completely from responsibility and, eventually, reality. Walls’ eventual exodus to New York City is both her greatest coup and her lowest ebb: it is the thing she does after all her other efforts have failed. It works, but it just about kills her to do it.

Technically a memoir and literally a story of survival, thematically The Glass Castle is very much about the politics of self-preservation. The author is brutally honest about the consequences of her escape — the rationalisation of choosing herself over her parents, and the guilt and shame that come with surviving what others did not.

This book is the result of Walls’ working-through and it reads as an atonement of sorts — an attempt at telling the whole story, and in doing so, fusing who she was, and who she really is, with who she became. It’s not high art, and it’s not the best memoir you’ll ever read. But there’s an honesty here that a lot of memoirs lack, a heartbroken sense of defense, as though Walls is saying, I did the best I could, but in the end, I had to choose me.

Related posts:

1. The Boy With The Top Knot by Sathnam Sanghera (Kat’s book 2, 2010)
2. Wise Children by Angela Carter (Kat’s book 1, 2010)
3. Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 24, 2009)

Berlin Game (Panther Books)

Len Deighton
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1984, Paperback, 432 pages, £5.99

Deighton’s hero, Bernard Samson, is an ageing spy who has been deskbound for five years. He’s come up the hard way, via a childhood spent in post-war Berlin where his father served in military intelligence. Despite having apparently benefited from nepotism, Samson resents the Oxbridge types whose contacts and breeding have allowed them to bypass him on the professional ladder. He is sharper than his bosses, who don’t have his field experience, and is cynical about their motivation. Samson’s wife, who is also an intelligence officer, is an Oxford graduate from a rich family – a reminder both of how well Samson has done for himself and of the world to which he will never truly belong.

When Brahms Four, a well-placed British intelligence source in East Berlin, starts to get nervous and wants to defect he demands to see Samson – the only agent he trusts. Brahms Four is so valuable that the British want to keep him in place for at least a couple more years. As they investigate the reasons for Brahms Four’s nervousness they discover a Russian agent in their midst. As Samson digs further he begins to suspect that this agent is merely a decoy intended to divert attention from another, more senior, KGB spy.

During his investigations Samson takes a few trips to Berlin, gathering information old friends and colleagues and taking stock of a city torn in two and seemingly trapped forty years in the past.

There are so many thematic similarities with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, that an uncharitable critic might dismiss this as mere imitation. Indeed, at times Deighton reads like a pastiche of Raymond Chandler and John Le Carre. His greatest weakness is handling exposition. Almost every character speaks to Samson as if he is a child with amnesia, constantly asking him if he remembers events so significant that it’s hard to imagine any ever forgetting them. People are constantly telling each other things they already know.

Still, Deighton keeps the plot moving along at a brisk speed and does a good job of keeping the reader guessing at how things are going to turn out. This is the first in, astonishingly, a series of nine – a trilogy of trilogies. I have the second, Mexico Set, on my shelf for a later date.

Related posts:

1. Berlin Game by Len Deighton (Ian’s book 13, 2009)
2. London Match by Len Deighton (Ian’s book 2, 2010)
3. Mexico Set by Len Deighton (Ian’s book 14, 2009)

The Lazarus Project

Aleksandar Hemon
Picador 2009, Paperback, 304 pages, £7.99

The Lazarus Project takes the true story of Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Russian Jewish immigrant to the US who was shot dead by the Chicago chief of police in 1908, and combines it with the fictional story of Vladimir Brik, a Serbian novelist living in Chicago.

Like Hemon, Brik was stranded in the US as a tourist when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia. Brik has since married an American surgeon, whose salary keeps them both while he plans his book about Averbuch. When he runs into an old friend, Ahmed Rora, the pair decide to travel to Eastern Europe to retrace Averbuch’s steps. Rora is a photographer and he documents the trip while enthralling Brik with tall stories from war-torn Sarajevo.

The reasons for Averbuch’s shooting remain unknown but afterwards the Chicago police claimed he was an anarchist who planned to assassinate the police chief. Focusing on Lazarus’s sister Olga as she tries to come to terms both with her brother’s death and with the brutal techniques of the police, Hemon draws a comparison with the panic over Jewish anarchists in the early 20th Century and the fear of Muslim terrorists one hundred years later.

The book is illustrated with historical photographs of Lazarus and with photos taken by Velibor Bozovic, Hemon’s best friend, when the pair made the same trip as Brik and Rora. The lines between Hemon and Brik are blurry, clearly, and as the book goes on, the stories of Brik, Averbuch and Rora begin to blur too.

Hemon’s writing is delightfully odd, with strange word choices adding unusual colours to his descriptions. The book has the feel of a comic novel but the subject matter is tragic and poignant.

The mixing of modern-day and historical stories that gradually entwine to shed light on our modern world reminded me strongly of Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days. While Whitehead was concerned with the construction of America through mythology, Hemon is interested in nationhood and immigration and death. The incredible weight of sadness grows throughout the novel, culminating in a horrifying scene in which the Averbuch family are caught in the Kishinev pogrom.

The Lazarus Project is ambitious in scope but Hemon is equal to the task he has set himself. It’s to his credit that such a complex work feels deceptively straightforward to read and that he communicates with moral clarity without ever over-simplifying his story.

Related posts:

1. Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler (James’s book 43, 2009)
2. The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry (Shane’s book 26, 2009)
3. Crime Fiction by John Scaggs (Shane’s book 10, 2009)

The Boy with the Topknot

Sathnam Sanghera
Penguin 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, £9.99

What starts out as a memoir of growing up as a beloved younger son in a Punjabi family and then building a media life with white London friends as an adult soon zig-zags into family investigation. This isn’t a neatly arced story: we stumble across new developments with no real notice. Far from being an all-knowing observer dropped hints by Sanghera’s narration in some kind of Christmas Carol guided travel through his life, we come across things at the same time as he does, making it a far more accurate depiction of how surprises happen in real life. Bang! Surprise one. Bang! Surprise two. We flit from time to time (all held together easily, you don’t lose track) but you feel engaged rather than distanced. No Joanna Trolloping here.

And ah, the developments. Sorry to be a nuisance, but I’ rather not go into what some of the developments in Sanghera’s family are, partly because they’re not mentioned anywhere on the cover or in the reviews. The book would clearly like you to find out for yourself.

I will say that, while the family history Sanghera discovers is startling and frequently unsettling, this is far from being a “reboot of the misery memoir” as one of the reviews would claim. In fact, this is probably the most honest depiction of family life I’ve ever read, balanced and genuine, with things left unsaid rather than unveiled in great chapter-long confrontations.

Sanghera deserves huge credit (well, he wrote the thing, it’s fairly inevitable) for writing engagingly without being tempted by “-ising” his copy. No sentimalising, no eulogising, but still very funny and sympathetic. He’s both stern and forgiving of his younger self (who comes across – bless the past – as a marginally less un-self aware version of Adrian Mole), who – blessed with opportunities and strong parenting is left completely unaware of anything unusual in the family until the faintly staggering age of 24, and doesn’t follow it up until 30. It’s very rare to read of a discovery that doesn’t result in immediate confrontation, and refreshing – as any fule kno, life doesn’t work that way all the time.

The book’s cover makes it sound half-way between wacky East Is East/Bend It Like Beckham awakening-cum-wacky 80s memoir. It’s partly that, but this isn’t yet another eye rolling memoir offering a childhood up on a plate for us to giggle over and dispose of afterwards. Sanghera’s book is something that we all need: a memoir that depicts life and all the knotty sub-plots and quiet revelations that come along the way honestly, wittily and as naturally as you’ll get without going through it yourself.

Related posts:

1. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Sara’s book 1, 2010)

On Photography (Penguin Modern Classics)

Susan Sontag
Penguin Classics 2008, Paperback, 224 pages, £9.99

As they are, Sontag veers between the wilfully obfuscated prose that academics love and the statement of complete banalities presented as riveting insight.

The best and in many ways the most modern of the essays is the first, In Plato’s Cave, and again it’s fascinating to know what Sontag would have made of the ubiquitous camera phone, or indeed digital photography itself. She predicts many of the effects of the new technologies, in language that at the time of writing must have seemed pretty extreme, and she correctly anticipates the pervasive use of photographic technologies by the governments of supposedly free countries, a phenomenon that she predicted would be less likely in repressive regimes (the former East Germany is a very powerful counterargument, mind you).

Writing at the time of Watergate and the classic surveillance films such as The Conversation and The Anderson Tapes that it inspired, Sontag was not necessarily eerily prescient, but that doesn’t make it any more interesting to see what amounted to a society’s worst fears become an on the whole benign reality.

Unfortunately the essays don’t sustain this level of interest, and now seem rather quaintly dated. Couched as they are in the absurd social science academic discourse of the time (not that the academic discourse of the social sciences has become any less absurd, it has merely turned its attention to other, equally risible navel gasing). Here’s an example:

By disclosing the thingness of human beings, the humanness of things, photography transforms reality into a tautology. When Cartier-Bresson goes to China, he shows that there are people in China, and that they are Chinese.

If you’re not careful, you can be seduced by sentences like these into believing that they make some sense, and this is surely the reason that so much philosophical writing is couched in these terms; far from seeking precision as they should, in fact they seek only to blind with pseudoscience. Examined in any detail at all they fall apart. Was it really photography that exposed the ‘thingness of human beings’, or the simple common sense of millennia? Are things (say a stone) really human? Isn’t Sontag’s observation about reality becoming a tautology the wrong way around; if all they are is a reproduction of reality, what function do they serve? And the sentence about Cartier-Bresson in China is simply completely redundant and laughable. Do obvious things like this need to be stated even in a book for children, never mind dressed up as some profound intellectual insight?

The day after I finished reading On Photography I went to the Pompidou Centre and there saw some of Diane Arbus’s work, which Sontag discusses in some detail. My feeling was that she had expended a great deal of verbiage in order to completely miss the point. They are remarkable to look at (as Sontag says, they are frequently images of ‘freaks’) and beautiful, but they are still merely images. They do not present more than a fraction of a profound insight into the world, except to point out that to be human is a mystery and that people are strange. Not to be sniffed at, but not to be overstated, either.

Any idiot knows that the camera can only lie; a great photograph is a point of view. What makes it remarkable is that it can lie about details in order to enlighten us about central truths, that war is vicious and indiscriminate, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that nature is strange, beautiful and full of majesty, and it can propose an aesthetic interpretation of the world that is unique to every practitioner. This is what distinguishes great photography from everyday snapshots, just as it is what separates the average Tumbr blog from great literature. In both cases, we know it when we see it. The pretensions of academics don’t really help.

Related posts:

1. Inner Workings by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 32, 2009)
2. Stranger Shores by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 40, 2009)
3. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Sara’s book 1, 2010)

Nobody Move

Denis Johnson
Picador 2009, Paperback, 208 pages, £11.99

The central character is Jimmy Luntz, a compulsive gambler in debt to a guy called Juarez. When Gambol, Juarez’s right-hand man, comes to collect, Luntz shoots him in the leg and goes on the run. He meets Anita Desilvera, framed by her husband and her boss for the theft of $2 million. While Anita and Jimmy plot to steal the money, Gambol and Juarez come to town hunting Jimmy.

The book is so pared down that it reads like a film script. Johnson limits his taut, spare prose mostly to dialogue. He’s got a knack for the kind of zinging speech that makes this genre work and he has great fun with a couple of set pieces, including a shotgun fight in the dark.

The characters are all fairly stereotypical and the plot plays out along the expected lines, though Johnson does leave a few loose ends. Though the story is set in present-day California, it could easily be the 1940s. Only the occasional appearance of a mobile phone gives the era away.

Nobody Move is pure homage; Johnson doesn’t do anything new here but he’s obviously enjoying himself and it’s hard to resist being carried along.

Related posts:

1. 2666 by Roberto Bolano (Shane’s book 23, 2009)
2. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (Shane’s book 1, 2010)
3. Tainted Blood by Arnaldur Indridason (Shane’s book 33, 2009)

Pattern Recognition

William Gibson
Penguin 2004, Paperback, 368 pages, £7.99

The central character here is Cayce Pollard, a ‘coolhunter’ who identifies street trends so that big brands can exploit them. Her work is slightly complicated by an allergy to branding and logos so that, for example, she can’t stand to be in the presence of the Michelin Man. In her spare time Cayce is becoming increasingly obsessed with “the footage” – a series of short video clips that are being uploaded to the web by some anonymous filmmaker.

The novel opens with Cayce arriving in London to work for an agency called Blue Ant on a proposed logo for a shoe company. Blue Ant’s founder, the improbably-named Hubertus Bigend, offers her another job – tracking down the maker of the footage. She’s not sure that she wants the filmmaker to be turned over to the uber-marketer but she’s far too curious about the origins of the footage to say no.

So begins a run-of-the-mill and fairly unthrilling thriller in which Cayce heads to Tokyo and ultimately Moscow in search of the elusive filmmaker. Along the way, Gibson ponders cultural differences and the way they are being eroded by global brands, the meaning of cultural artefacts and their place in our history and the power of information.

Those are all themes with great potential interest but Gibson doesn’t do much with them. The first 50 pages or so are full of Cayce’s observations about Britain as the “mirror world” USA but none of these observations rises about the level of perception of the average tourist. Likewise the cultural artefacts – a Stuka bomber, a ZX81 computer and a replica Second World War flying jacket, among other things – are simply there, lying around the plot. Gibson doesn’t seem to know what to say about their significance so they just roll past in the hope that some depth will arrive.

Strangest of all is Cayce’s brand allergy. You would expect such a weird plot device to take on some great significance but it doesn’t. Gibson doesn’t bother to explain its various inconsistencies – why some brands affect Cayce and others don’t – or explore what it’s supposed to mean. It’s just another clever idea to nod at as the plot passes by.

The plot itself is pretty weak. It turns out to be surprisingly easy to track down the filmmaker and though Cayce seems headed for a very sticky situation as the book draws to a close, there’s very little tension along the way. Indeed, just as the book reaches what you think will be the dramatic conclusion Cayce literally wakes up to find that everything has been set right.

Gibson writes well, however, which means that reading the book wasn’t as unpleasant as the above makes it sound. It’s not a bad book, just a bland one. In much the same way that Cayce delivers underground trends to her corporate paymasters, Gibson has identified a lot of significant cultural themes and turned them into the literary equivalent of a globally-marketed running shoe.

Related posts:

1. The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (Ian’s book 1, 2010)
2. Nobody Move by Denis Johnson (Shane’s book 2, 2010)

History

William Riviere (Introduction)
Penguin Classics 2002, Paperback, 768 pages, £14.99

Ida Mancuso is half-Jewish and lives in Rome. As the Axis powers become aware that they are losing the war, so the violence against their racial enemies accelerates. In one remarkable scene, Ida runs through the now deserted ghetto, drawn there as we feel compelled to touch a plate we have been told is hot, and ends up at the railway station, just as the final train is being dispatched to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and as the train leaves, one of the deportees hands her a fragment of a note to his family which she carries around with her wherever she goes thereafter.

Morante is an interesting figure. She was married to the novelist Alberto Moravia, and with him she spent the war in hiding from the Fascist regime. History is her most famous work, which was hailed as ‘the novel of the century’. While this is way wide of the mark, it’s nonetheless a wonderful book.

In many ways, it’s a lament for the way that the left failed the working classes both before and after the war. There is tremendous bitterness in Morante’s summaries of events in the war that precede each section of the novel, each one being devoted to a year. But the most bitterness is reserved for the left’s post-war failure to establish itself as the guardian of ordinary people’s everyday struggles.

In the opening pages of the novel, Ida is raped by a German soldier on his way to North Africa, and as a result she gives birth to a boy, Giuseppe, known throughout the book as Useppe. Useppe is a wonderful, wonderful character, and Morante’s portrait of him is a delightful, wide-eyed pean to childhood. That the childhood is spent in such poverty and desperation only serves to increase the poignancy of Useppe’s good nature.

In the second half of the novel, Useppe acquires a dog, Bella, from his older brother, a Fascist turned partisan turned black-marketeer. The relationship between the boy and the animal is heart-breakingly sympathetic, and is the highlight of the book. Morante steps outside the otherwise completely ralistic framework she has established and allows the dog to speak to Useppe as they trot together through the streets of Rome.

The other key character here is the Dostoevskian Davide Segre, who we initially know as Carlo Vivaldi, an Anarchist Jew who escapes the evacuation to the East and ekes out an existence in the ruins of Rome. He joins the partisans, alongside Useppe’s brother Nino, and in another key scene, brutally kills a German soldier. The dual memory of the Germans’ savagery towards his family, all of whom are killed at Auschwitz, and his own towards the soldier slowly drive Davide mad, a process he accelerates by becoming addicted to opiates and sleeping pills. His only link with the world outside his increasingly incoherent political ramblings is Useppe, who perceives the inner turmoil Davide suffers but is unable to do anything to help him.

There’s really only one thing to complain about with History, and that is the translation by William Weaver, which feels dusty, archaic and rather stilted in many places. Not having access to the original Italian, I can’t say whether or not this is an accurate reflection of Morante’s text, but it certainly feels like there is a filmy layer ever so slightly obscuring the true picture.

History is a profoundly human novel, shot through with anger at the way that political leaders of all types have betrayed the common people. In Ida, Davide and Useppe, Morante gives us three of the most beautifully imagined people, three different victims of the horrific events that surround them. This is an unflinching, sad, and gloweringly powerful book.

Related posts:

1. Berlin Game by Len Deighton (Shane’s book 4, 2010)
2. On Photography by Susan Sontag (James’s book 3, 2010)
3. Your Face Tomorrow. 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell by Javier Marías (James’s book 1, 2010)

Wise Children (Vintage Classics)

Angela Carter
Vintage Classics 1998, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

It’s narrated by Dora Chance, an ageing Brixtonite whose life since 12 has been spent furiously dancing up cash with her identical twin, Nora, and who has taken on the mantle of chronicling the sprawling history of the Hazard family, a cross between the Oliviers, Redgraves and Jaggers. The illegitimate children of legendary Shakespearean actor Sir Melchior Hazard (a ham of the highest order), the Chance sisters are born on the wrong side of the bedspread and the tracks. In a big hurrah for south of the river, they live in Brixton, in a bubble of glamour and grind with their adoptive Grandma – a naturist alcoholic whose iron-jawed nature has much in common with Giles’ indestructible Grandma. I love south London, and as it barely gets a footnote in most novels beyond “This is where crime happens”, this made me empathise with the Chances even more.

Kicking off with the Chances about to turn 75, they’re invited to their illustrious father’s 100th birthday party and here start the reminiscences. From their teens spent as dancing starlets the Lucky Chances to post-WWII mediocrity in nude revues, the girls exist in showbiz’s mucky shadow while their father climbs ever higher, spilling wives and children as he goes. High and low culture eventually meet and they cross paths for a Shakespearean revue which becomes a smash hit, leading to tangles with Hollywood, marriage and intense family rivalry.

But the plot is the least of the reasons to enjoy Wise Children: Carter wields language rather like the Caterpillar wields his peyoteish pipe in Alice in Wonderland, creating jewelled and jaded characters that make perfect sense in their chaotic world, while not always being filled out much beyond a shorthand name and vague outline. Nights at the Circus was liberally embellished with magical realism – it featured a 6′2″ “cockney Venus” with wings and a circus adventure through Russia – and while Wise Children cranks down the whimsy by a few notches, Carter’s witchy way with characters still illuminates every page, from an angelic, nameless tenor who steals Dora’s heart to Melchior’s abandoned first wife, nicknamed Wheelchair, who lives in the Chances’ house. Magic does exist in Wise Children, but it’s sleight of hand: cuckoo’s nest children, borrowed lovers and a liberal smattering of hoodwink.

Carter builds her own Shakespearean farce from his comedy building blocks: mistaken identity being a major one. Fathers and mothers are interchangeable: gin-soaked Grandma may be the Chances’ real mother, their makeshift father Peregrine is the actual father to Melchior’s ghastly twin daughters Saskia and Imogen, Dora swaps places with Nora so she can borrow her boyfriend. Those at the bottom of the social pile rise, cruel children are punished, and the dead rise again for a last-minute entrance. a high-octane finale and list of Dramatis Personae at the end, stock characters and wordplay, Old Nanny, dance teacher Mrs Worthington (ha!), Daisy Duck and the risky Chances and Hazards themselves. Nora and Dora shrug on their full names, Leonora and Floradora, as the moment arises It also touches on the parts Shakespeare delicately glosses over: incest and boyfriend-swapping among others, all dropped in with the same breezy insouciance as Dora’s ongoing battle with saucy spellings: “come (or do you spell it ‘cum’, I’m never sure)”.

Oh yes – and the best definition of a happy ending I’ve ever read:

“But, truthfully, these glorious pauses do, sometimes, occur in the discordant but complementary narratives of our lives and if you choose to stop the story there, at such a pause, and refuse to take it any further, then you can call it a happy ending.”

It’s tricky to pick out specific lines for particular praise as every phrase is woven into the next. Carter’s gutsy, gorgeous world is probably best summed up by its last: “What a joy it is to dance and sing!” Filled as it is with chapters to roll on the tongue and savour, this is also a bloody good read for those balefully enduring a booze-free January.

Related posts:

1. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Sara’s book 1, 2010)
2. Boyhood by J.M. Coetzee (James’s book 24, 2009)

London Match

Len Deighton
Century Hutchinson Ltd. 1985, Hardcover, 432 pages, £10.95

Really. I’ll just spoil it, and that would be a shame. Don’t click through unless you’ve already read it.

The plot carries on directly from Berlin Game. A swanky party in Berlin sees Bernard Samson and Werner Volkmann following a lead on a British woman, an agent for the KGB, who could confirm information about Erich Stinnes, the recently defected Russian Bernard had been pursuing in Mexico Set.

They find her, they interrogate her, and the arc that sees Samson being unwittingly led through his wife’s plot to cast suspicion on important members of the London Central office begins.

Throughout the book there are key themes, particularly the roles of knowledge and skill, and the possibility of them being trumped by ambition and influence. Bernard is the one with the ability and field experience, but Dicky Cruyer, Bret Rensselaer and particularly Morgan, the director general’s hated personal assistant, have more influence because of their office skills.

Morgan is singled out for the most scorn as he does not deal with espionage at all, he’s an office assistant who sits in on meetings to take notes but then chips in as an equal. Every hackle in the room (except the D-G’s) rise as one, but no words are said. The man with no experience is in line to run the department but even Bernard keeps quiet as he can’t risk upsetting his boss. There are several unflattering character portraits of the members of London Central in the three books, all making it clear that these are hateful, pretentious, self-serving people, but only Morgan is compared to a Nazi (Martin Bormann, Hitler’s conniving secretary) in this profoundly anti-Nazi series.

The heavily biased narrative heaps disgrace on those with no proctical knowledge. Unnecessary death follows them, as do leaks and indiscretion.

But it’s Samson himself who is being deceived most thoroughly. His wife, Fiona, is feeding him Stinnes, his prize from Mexico, and Carol Miller, the English woman he arrests in Berlin, is another plant. Samson is pulled along into believing that Bret Rensellaer is a second agent in London Central, and makes him convince anyone he can find that this must be the case. The department totters under the weight of the doubt and intrigue brought about by Samson’s own inverted snobbery and arrogant self-belief that has sustained him through countless cold nights in Berlin.

Disaster is averted, mostly through Rensellaer’s willingness to submit to Samson’s ego and allow him to take the dominant role, and Bernard comes to see how he’s been manipulated. He takes comfort in the continuous nature of the struggle, in a deeply satisfying and surprising end to what has been an excellent set of books.

Related posts:

1. Mexico Set by Len Deighton (Ian’s book 14, 2009)
2. Berlin Game by Len Deighton (Shane’s book 4, 2010)
3. Berlin Game by Len Deighton (Ian’s book 13, 2009)