Why don't Republicans Love George Bailey?

It's a Wonderful Life - the Sequel

FADE INTO CHRISTMAS 1958. Pan over prosperous Bedford Falls – Christmas music fades to funeral durge – pan into well tended grave yard – George Bailey, a little thicker, a touch of gray on the side, lifts his head, puts on his hat and walks alone out of the snow-covered Bedford Falls Cemetery. Behind him, a solitary digger throws dirt into a grave behind a tombstone that simply reads “Potter”. George is startled by an angular young man with tight fitting black suit, close cropped hair and a bow tie who suddenly appears next to him. 
'George!'
'I don't believe we've ..'
'Oh we have a common acquaintance – you surely remember Clarence …'
George is shocked but attempts to hide it. He looks at the young man closely. On second look he doesn't look that young … .. FLASH BACK TO SCENES IN THE BANK show the missing $8000 … 
'Are you..' … George looks up with his eyes to the sky without moving his head.
'No – No!' The man in the dark suit theatrically looked down and then smiles at George and extends his hand. George pulls away in disgust.
'Now listen here Beelzebub or whatever your name is – 
'you can call me Bub if you like..'
I don't want any …'
'But it concerns the missing $8000 – Aren't you a bit curious …?' Bub smiles and wiggles his eyebrows.
'Well – yes – NO! What are you talking about? And what are you doing going around passing yourself off as a colleague of Clarence for?
'Well – we are in the same line – as it were – I was to Potter as Clarence was to you ..'
'Well that doesn't surprise me that flinty old ..'
'Now now – mustn't speak ill now …'
'What about the $8000?'
'Its been invested.'
'In what? Poisoned baby food?'
'In a sense perhaps. Its called a Republican political action committee.'
'Political Action what? – sound like some kind of Nazi or Communist thing ..
'Come with me George. Let me take you on a trip – like Clarence took you on long ago – only lets go 50 years into the future. And see just what your political action committee has become …

BLACK AND WHITE FADES TO COLORIZED FILM. GEORGE AND BUB
float over modern day Washington DC. Bub points here and there and George pulls back in horror. A Headline/News reel Montage appears – War in Iraq – WMD – Cheney's grin turns sinister – Bush reads to children – Torture – Abugrab – heck of a Job Brownie – Stock market crashes -Bush ducks shoe in Bagdad – Sarah winks – Glen Beck harangues fat Tea partiers– 'Kenyan president !' Donald Trump's combover– Mitt holding the cash – Fiscal Cliff..

'Do you see George?'
'Wait a minute. I am a Republican. I like Ike. I'm President of the Bedford Falls Chamber of Commerce for Gosh sakes!. This isn't the Republican Party. We believe in this country – we aren't the kind of people who would push this country in Recession just to make a point!'
'We have to strangle the Socialism! Starve the Beast!'
'Yeah – I saw where you want us to go – Clarence showed me Bedford Falls when you guys take over – Its called Pottersville!'
'But Roosevelt was worse than Stalin. '
'Well my brother got back from the war and went to college on the GI Bill. He's doing good – better than he ever would have done without it And paying taxes too!
'Well – your not a Republican anymore George. Ike was a softy.  We are taking back the country for the kind of people that belong in power – not ..not ..
'Yeah I know what you mean .You and your ilk are the one who aren't Republicans – Lincoln's Republicans anyway – you are something else – nastier – a bunch of greedy bastards – like old man Potter ...'George sniffed 'What is that smell anyway? Is somebody striking matches?'
'Yes – yes that's right George. That's right! Every time a demon farts – a billionaire gets more bling.'

FADE

Trekking through Malacandra - CS Lewis "Out of a Silent Planet"

Original Published on Amazon as a book review
Out of a Silent Planet
I had never read Lewis, (or much of what others have written about him), except for 20 pages of the Screwtape Letters when I was a teenager. I didn't like it then, but I suspect that it was because I didn't have the disciple or desire to read closely written prose, even from the Devil. I have always known Lewis was a colleague of Tolkien, a medievalist, a favorite author of the intellectual Christians. Aside from all that, I didn't have any preconceptions about him when my sister sent me a vintage copy of 'Out of a Silent Planet' (original price 95¢) which she had held onto since her teen years.
Three fourths of the book is physical description. From the English countryside to the space ship he traveled on, the flora, fauna and geology of where ever he was, it was all painted carefully with the full prose arsenal available to Lewis, whose vocabulary was voluminous, yet always apt, and whose style was direct and clear. Malacandra, the planet to which the main character, Ransom is taken, if described by a lesser writer would be depicted as a cartoon, but Lewis's style is so understated, that the story has to be taken seriously in the way the discourse of a sober careful, well educated Englishmen of the twentieth Century is taken. Perhaps that attitude is a cultural prejudice, or social stereotype that maybe does not translate anymore, particularly after exposure to hours of Monty Python . Normally, I prefer the gaudy, overstated, hyperbolic blasphemy of American writers like T. Pynchon, Hunter Thompson or even Tom Wolfe. But Lewis grows on you - if you let him.
Ransom is kidnapped by two English University men, of his own generation and class, one a huckster, Devine and the other a 'mad' professor, Weston. The story is almost too fantastic to take seriously, except for the exact, painstaking language Lewis uses to describe his surroundings while it is happening.
They arrive on Malacandra and Weston, the mad professor - As I said, I have read nothing of what other people have written about 'Out...Planet', - Weston reminds me of a caricature of Robert Heinlein, the science fiction author. Through his fiction we learn that Heinlein believed that man's destiny is in the stars and we are going to have to kill aliens if we want to succeed in that domain. Heinlein was also a very good writer whose descriptions of space travel set the standard for 'hard science fiction' - fiction that stays within the scientifically conceivable, and is explained with the history of the technology usually incorporated into the story - and that style is everything that Lewis' descriptions are not. Ransom is almost oblivious to the technology of the spaceship and how it developed and as a result so is the reader. That is not what Lewis is writing about.
  The other kidnapper, Devine, is there for the gold. He went to college with Ransom and Ransom hated him then.
  Ransom escapes and discovers three main species of intelligent life on Malacandra - spoiler alert - Malacandra is Mars. Ransom doesn't divulge this until much later in the story, but the description said it was Mars on the back cover of the 95¢ book I am reviewing,so I think it is OK to reveal that. This knowledge brings you closer to the exact and consistent manner with which Lewis constructs the book. His account of Mars is at odds with what any 10 grader knows about the barren desert planet fourth out from the sun. In the sixties there was a controversy that supposed the Canals of Mars were engineered. Lewis gradually draws you into a vision of Malacandra as a lush vibrant world. Not great science, but well structured as a story.
As stated, color and vibrancy abound. The book was popular with the 'Acid' cultural of the late sixties, perhaps because the world he describes is definitely over the Rainbow.
  Ransom's  examination of Malacandra is meant to seem systematic and scientific. Back on earth, he is a philologist. He learns the planet's language, (fortunately all four species speak the same language). He makes friends with a beaver-like creature, a Hross. There is also a forest dwelling ghostly, long shanked, long faced humanoid (Sorn) that covers huge distances walking, as well as a a mechanically talented frog-like animal (Pfifltriggi ). They are ruled by Eldils, almost invisible flying beings, among whom include the planet's leader, more like a god, who speaks but isn't seen.
  The story is told with a minimum of drama, and is described in a very flat manner. Lewis is more 'English' that the English. His narrative style seems modeled on HG Wells' manner of story telling. On second thought, I doubt that Weston is modeled after Heinlein. I am not even sure that Lewis was familar with the Science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. Sci Fi had advanced in realism and even characterization since Wells wrote The Time Machine and War of the Worlds. Out of a Silent Planet was written by someone who either was ignorant of modern (1950's and 60's) Science Fiction or hated it. I suspect it is probably the later, because Lewis was a profound scholar.
  The story had a tragedy and a climax, but they are not depicted the way normal books deal with such things. These denouements are clearly only a vehicle for final conversation between the head Eldil, Oyarsa and Ransom, just before the three earthlings get ready to return home. It gives a cosmology which is not at all congruent with Christianity, but more Buddhist explained with Norse mythic nomenclature. Oyarsa, who is God come down off the mountain, talks about the origins of not only the Malacandria but also earth or as it is called Thulcandra. Oyarse is in contact with the Eldil that 'rules' our planet and describes him as 'bent' which is Ransom's translation of a Malacandraian word which might also mean crazy or unstable. For being a fairy tale, it is internally very consistent, profound theologically, and the further you read into the novel the more you appreciate it.
  Without even 'goggling' "Christianity and "Out of the Silent Planet'" I am sure that I will discover that some people have written that the book is a Christian allegory. That is not based on my knowledge of Lewis, it is based on my knowledge of Christians, a belief I have held off and on throughout my life.
I thought 'the best part' was also the most awkward part, the very end. It is a post script where Lewis the author is chided by the 'real' Ransom for editing out a huge linguistic section of his book, where he describes the Malacandrian Language in detail. Lewis still defined at least 15 or so words. He also says that he had to leave out all manner of more detailed descriptions including how each species has great internal diversity. There are some Hross's with silver fur, black fir, brown fir, and one with a comb on top of the head of the males in another species.I t was a scholarly critic of his own work presented as part of the work itself.
  Lewis 's 'Christian' point I suppose is that all intelligent creatures are united spiritually, that we all come from the same place and will return to the same place. That death is nothing to fear and that perhaps the mechanical/ scientific secrets of the universe are best left alone and that we should unite with nature and maintain ecological harmony. While it seems neo-luddistic, in the manner Tolkien I suppose, (World War I had damaged a lot of people in different ways) I believe that is a good code by which to live.

'The Russia House' in perspective

This review of The 'Russia House' by John Le Carre' was originally published on Amazon.com on March 28, 2013

John Le Carre's 'The Russia House', published 24 years ago, is perhaps the last of his cold war novels. As the story unfolds, Gorbachev is in power, Perestroika and Glasnost are on everyone's lips, Reagan and Thatcher are running the West, and American power is in ascendancy.  The old Communist states are seen as ripe for Western business.  A minor player in British publishing, at a book fair in Moscow, receives an unsolicited manuscript - really a set of notebooks - that he is told will change the world.  He is made to promise he will give the notebooks to someone else, who he knows vaguely, but when that man can't be found - he turns it over to the British spies at Whitehall.  From there the espionage machinery starts to turn and we watch the lives of those involved unravel.

In his long career, that all his reader's pray is still a work in progress, LeCarre' wrote mostly about three things: The Cold War, the Israeli-Palestinian struggle (and its loose corollary the "War on Terror"), and Africa.  Yes, there are some that don't fit this categorization -such as  'The Tailor of Panama', which was his most comic work, as well an early look at George Smiley and his life in a murder who-done-it  -  'A Murder of Quality' - works which are harder to categorize.

Since 'The Russia House' falls into the first category, the Cold War,  this review will focus on that side of LeCarre's fiction. To split it further,  I think his vision of the Cold War is divided into two phases - The first phase - which includes 'Call for the Dead', 'The Spy Who Came in from the Cold' and the 'Karla Trilogy' and the second phase where I see LeCarre's doubts about the morality, honesty and utility of the West's espionage efforts begin to dominate his narrative.  This second phase includes of  all of the rest of the Cold War novels, 'Absolute Friends', 'Single & Single', 'A Perfect Spy', 'The Secret Pilgrim' (his last Smiley novel)  and  'The Russia House'.  I think these two phases reveal something about LeCarre's view of history, which seems to have changed considerably and perhaps embittered him to what has become of his old profession in when he worked in MI-6.

Of course why wouldn't his view change?  He has lived and written for a long time.  His career covers so long a stretch that, the premise of any bureaucracy during such a long period would begin run its course and lose its mandate.  Consider the movies that were made from his books.  Richard Burton, Oskar Werner and Clare Bloom starred in '...from the Cold' while the stars of the new version of  'Tinker Tailor ...' were Colin Firth, (who was in nappies when the first LeCarre' movie was made)  and Tom Hardy (wouldn't be born for more than a decade). There is no question that LeCarre understood the moral ambiguity of spying back in the early 60's - he invented the concept.  He broke new ground and was criticized by conservatives at the time for seeming to draw a moral equivalence between spies on each side of the Iron Curtain.  But he had the 'good guys' apologetically win even if it meant them enacting some very diabolical double crossing to get the victory. He left little doubt that that was for the best no matter how dirty it left all concerned.

But by the end of his Cold War phase, his message had changed.  Part of it was the ascendency of the Americans in the Intelligence world.  The British had always held the upper hand in the realm of human intelligence.  They were closer to the action across the channel and they had generations of training in international business and as colonial administrators.  But in the 80's, a new kind of intelligence came to the fore - technical intelligence, satellite imaging, data that measured missile accuracy and  the stealthy nature of radio signaling and interception.  Computers held the files, not library stacks.  This began to drain the blood out of the trade, and gave rise to a new kind of spy which had the Americans managing the controls.

Le Carre' was born in 1931 and came of age before 1956 - when the British Empire was toppled by Dwight Eisenhower over the Suez crisis, just as he toppled the French empire by letting the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu two years previously.  Young men of his age and class, were taught a certain style and savoir faire that lent him much of the material for his characterizations. He has talked about his own father's past as a con man, whose criminal activity afforded his own training in the British 'public schools', and in Bern studying Foreign languages, an unusual up-bringing which might have given him the stealthy personality needed for espionage, as he illustrated in 'A Perfect Spy'. This time, place and circumstance connects him to Kipling and Orwell as well as to Conrad and John Buchan. He is only separated from the 'Great Game' by a generation or so, and sees the world through the eyes of men who heroically struggled for some greater good of God and Queen.  On some level he hates it, but it is part of him and he knows it is part of him.  He was weaned by men who remember the great days of Bletchley Park, of the British Intelligence owning the Nazis out right through the Enigma Machine and  connection to Admiral Canaris  - doing it with the old boy network, where Cockney unreservedly served Cambridge, while maintaining a sharp pride and a disdainful sense of independence. The system worked because of an English social understanding that could never be duplicated through any bureaucratic institution. LeCarre' has always had it in for the Yanks, those descendents of the Puritans who were scandalized by the loose morals and lack of religious orthodoxy of the recently Catholic now Protestant Elizabethans and Stuarts.

"The Russia House" is a encomium to Russia or at least to its people.  The heroes of the book are all Russian, from the scientist who gives them the notebooks to the woman who delivers it.  The West has one hero, but he is ineffectual and in the end can't quite pull off what he promised to do.  Nothing makes a good read like the story of a great villain.  The Americans are the villains here, but unfortunately, like a well behaved boy longing for approval, they are not quite 'Great' villains. The Americans  are bloodlessly unnoteworthy by every measure.  Their resultant ruthlessness lacks any panache and  is dulled by their buck-passing committees full of yes men. Even the KGB and the Russian spies are no longer as clever or brutal as in the old days.  Hence the book isn't as thrilling as some of his previous work.  Listen to this description of the Americans assigned to work with the Brits.

 They wore navy blazers and short hair, and they had a Mormon cleanliness that I found slightly revolting. ... These dull, unfamiliar faces had no place at the heart of our operation, and at such a crucial moment.  They were like a gathering of mourners in advance of an anticipated death ...

It is hard to feel much about such men.

The narrator of the tale, Palfrey, is a British lawyer who is there to put the legal approval on all of the operations from wiretapping, to creating the documents for the agents before they commence their operations that say they understand the penalties for revealing what they know - penalties forever enforceable, while of questionable legality.  He too is a bloodless timeserver, only dreaming of  his next assignation with Hannah, another man's wife, bogged down with a hopelessly rationalized guilt.

 LeCarre' can't deliver what is no longer true.  The great age of spying is over.  Smiley is gone and there is no one to replace him, because no one could possible have Smiley's life experience.  Some writers of 'international intrigue' still pretend James Bond is still at work, but when you read LeCarre', you know Bond never did exist.  LeCarre' holds up a mirror to a world that is true and yet can be boring and routinized as the work-a-day world most of us inhabit, which is espionage.  It is not the escapist fiction for which spy novels are noted. It demands the reader engage.

Spying is waiting.  Spying is worrying.

The story is partially about waiting and worrying.  Social receptions where no one says what they are thinking, drool quips that have lost their bite, drinking, and more waiting, more drinking and worrying.

The Brits made the initial intelligence score of Goethe the old fashion way - with luck and a sensitivity to human sources.  But they almost blew it and because of poor handling in the beginning pretty much doomed it anyway.  Niki Landau, a Polish-Jewish immigrant in the publishing trade is given the notebooks unsolicited, and told by the beautiful, (but not young or glamorous)  Russian woman, Yekaterina (Katya) Orlov, who gave them to him insisting that they are to go to Barley, an acquaintance from a rival firm.  Niki's past complicates things.  He insists he is British first, then Polish and then anything else.  He loves England and wants to be a British gentleman. But the Brits did less than he thought they should to get his sister out of Poland, so he is a little conflicted.  He looks for Barley and finally goes to Whitehall to see if they know him. Because of his background , the Intel Brits in Whitehall put him through interrogation humiliation and so set up the coming disaster, by insisting that when they find Barley, he must work for them.  You think - if only Smiley were still at the helm it would have been handled better. The old school has been dismissed.  Smiley is gone and replaced by careerists and timeservers who have lost their will to protect their turf and more important - do the right thing.  The American interlopers wait in the wings and the Brits get one chance to make the play themselves.  They use the amateur Barley, (who the source insists is the only one he will deal with - based on a long ago drunken night of pledges of eternal dedication to friendship and peace)  and a compliant publishing company to try and contact the mysterious 'Goethe', a shy scientist who might be the brains behind the Soviet Missile testing apparatus.

The 'MacGuffin' of the story is a book written by Goethe that purports to prove that the Soviet nuclear force was hollow, spent, unmaintained and unlikely to be anywhere near the threat assumed by Western Defense specialists.  Barley, is the British "Joe" a drunken, divorced failure who never loses his unflappable cheerful British exterior, a cool hand on the tenor sax, dealing out bon mots and jokes full of pith and wit, always hiding any doubt behind a jaunty exterior. He falls in love with Goethe's messenger and one time lover, Katya,  a soulful, sincere practical mother of two.  Love will conquer duty, but then Barley isn't a 'professional', so the Intel Brits seem to lose control of the situation.  This will be the impetus to bring in the Americans.

There is a case to be made for LeCarre' as one of the premier novelists of the 20th century - or at least the last 50 years.  Perhaps the best two reasons for this is longevity and the universal importance of his subject.  From longevity we can measure and compare his view of history with what actually happened, and he clearly saw the end.  His vision from his earliest novels fits and slides into what now seems like ancient history.  Back then, he saw and showed us the weakness of the Soviets and also the strengths.  Both help explain why Soviet Communism lasted so long and why it finally fell.

LeCarre's moral vision has been clear and consistent even if how he applied it was not.  There was an larger good that sometimes had to trump the 'smaller' human good - but that had its limits.  When the larger good began to mean crushing innocent brave people in order to maintain an economic dominance - for Goethe's notebooks poised a great threat to the 'Military Industrial Complex' ( to use the phrase of perhaps the last President who was not a complete prisoner of it, Eisenhower), while for the rest of us they would have meant confronting the truth of what our society is really about.

From Richard Burton to Gary Oldman with Alec Guinness in the middle - LeCarre' has covered so many social attitudes and personal styles and political ideologies that it is amazing he remained so clear in his idea of what is truly important.  In '..in from the Cold', when the Burton character Leamas sends Fiedler, (played by Oskar Werner), the decent Communist, to his death to protect the ex-Nazi monster Mundt, who had been turned by the Circus(obliquely again in the earlier novel  'Call for the Dead'), you can see the diabolical duplicity is at least recognizable human - blood is paid with blood.  What the Americans do in "The Russia House" is bloodless and antiseptic.  It is clean evil, and because of  America's historical amnesia, it is nothing that ever threatens to bother anybody later on.

Smiley, (who may have pulled the trigger on Fiedler and Leamas, or maybe he was coerced by "Control" - LeCarre' leaves that open ...) is the the tortured soul of the espiocratic world, the epitome of conscience, yet he can lie to good men to send them to die to save the larger good.  Smiley who spent the entire world war living in Germany as a spy, knows how to keep his head down and do what needs to be done for no reason other than duty.

The Karla trilogy, ("..Tinker Tailor..", "The Honourable Schoolboy", "Smiley's People") is the most remarkable set of connected novels written in my lifetime, with the possible exception of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin Napoleanic sea stories. It is the great Cold War story, seemingly based on the real  hunt for Kim Philby, the Soviet spy who penetrated the very highest levels of MI-6 during the post war and then escaped to live out his life in a musty Moscow flat.  Karla is LeCarre's master Soviet spy who nurtures and handles the Philby-based spy, who is codenamed "Gerald".

The meticulous detail is a delight for the reader. LeCarre' depicts in the Karla Trilogy the old style for collating and  intuiting information, or the lack of it, to, as we would say today, 'reverse engineer' to the source, to ultimately find the leaks that identify the mole in the circus.  His character, the filing room fixture Connie Sachs called it 'taking back bearings' which is an old surveying term to see where you are, based on where you have been.  The description of the file rooms and the methods for organizing them seems quaint when today it is about managing computer files and databases.  "Janitors", (older semi-retired spies) sit at the entrance to the 'stacks',  checking briefcases, and looking for signs that the rules are being ignored.  No photo copiers, sometimes it all depends on memory and mnemonics and bold ruses to misdirect the janitors.  Smiley's spies, who must spy on and deceive their own mole-controlled side, look for the little inconsistencies in the yellowing news clips and faded carbons.

I was a bureaucrat in my twenties, just in from the 'field', (I had been working on land surveying crews) helping manage an engineering office in a growing city's Public Works department.  It was while working there that I discovered '..Tinker, Tailor..'.  Our files had the same feel that the Circus' files had.  We had scandals too, developers  trying to sneak projects in without going through expensive review processes, using insiders from the various city departments to pad the files with backdated letters and memos illegibly signed.  I was part of some of these snipe hunts, trying to ID the moles, mostly to protect myself if I were to be accused in the future.  So I thought I understood the drama better than I would otherwise.

LeCarre's books have generated many movies and TV series, the most recent a new go at "..Tinker,Tailor.." with Gary Oldman as Smiley.  It is about two hours and some minutes and so must compress the action.  The story self-consciously avoids some of the signature scenes from the previous cover of the novel, the acknowledged masterpiece, the BBC adaption with Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley.  For example, Patrick Stewart, (Captain Picard) plays a younger Karla in the only meeting between him and Smiley.  Set in an Indian jail in the mid-50s, Karla, in prison chains, impassively facing a sweating, feverish Smiley,  is given a choice between returning to Moscow where execution seemed certain, or defecting.  I have seen Stewart in many performances other than Star Trek and he is a great actor, (see him as Sejanus in the Derek Jacobi - BBC version of  'I Claudius'), but I have never seen him better than in that ten minute scene with Smiley.  The thing is - he spoke not one word during the whole scene.  Yet when it was over, you knew Karla.

LeCarre' doesn't portray many strong women in his Cold War novels.  In "The Little Drummer Girl" Charlie, (played by Diane Keaton in the movie version) was a true main character, but wasn't a great character - she was weak, and easily manipulated.  Ann Smiley was a sexually unencumbered upper class wife who Smiley loves through each of her infidelities, until the last one, which has world shaking consequences.  His secondary characters are pretty interesting,  such as Faun, his 'Factotum', lithe in tennis shoes, who kills with his bare hands and has Smiley's back on all of his dangerous rendezvous, and Rickie Tarr, a self-described hood, who has no compunction about any strong arming or wet work until he falls for a spurned Russian spy and is prepared to give up everything for her. And of course there is Roddy Martindale a quintessential Whitehall official, a gossipy queen who trades information in stuffy upscale  men's clubs (where the silverware is polished but the food is appalling) innocently torturing Smiley with the latest gossip about his faithless wife.  'The Honourable School Boy' main character is Jerry Westerby, the classic old school charmer, whose  honour Code is 19th century but whose outlook is bleak and modern.  And of course his paper chaser, the drunken, fat, lesbian Connie Sachs, whose memory is prodigious and who sees connections that escape even Smiley.

The genius of the Karla Trilogy is that it educated us about what intelligence analysis was before the concept was overwhelmed by 'technical means'.  Deception, leaking real intelligence to see what reaction it causes, all done to look for the slightest hint of the underlying capacities and intentions of the other side.

"The Russia House" was probably the last of the LeCarre Cold War novels, except for "The Secret Pilgrim" which is a charming set of funny and poignant back story vignettes told by a grandfatherly Smiley to the the new graduates of the British Spy "Nursery", known through all his novels as Sarratt.  There is very little that is charming about "the Russia House" though.

As we said, it is the 1980s and the Soviets were still maintaining an inhuman apparatus of social and political control.  But it's starting to fray.  The German scientists who built their missile program were dying off and the Russians who have replaced them no longer believe in the rightness and inevitable triumph of their system.  The Americans have had a rebirth of sorts - but it is an ugly baby.  Reagan has released the Puritans, whose cold eyed, passionless, unquestioning operators had no connection to the previous OSS generation who had an esprit-de-corp that was at least comprehended, if snickered at, by their 'Cousins' in the 'Circus'.  The old school had at least remembered that the Russians had been allies in the great events of their lives.  They had been eclipse by a new breed, an arrogant group who saw no ambiguity in world and had little patience for the human cost of their work.  The had become overlords rather than allies and the true enemy was becoming harder to distinguish.

 Barley, the amateur spook who has returned to Moscow and is trying to re-contact Goethe and get the rest of his notebooks begins to see what the true stakes are in his quest.  Goethe wants to avoid all of the 'Gray men', American or Russian, and go directly to the world by publishing his unedited notebooks and let the chips fall where they may.  Slowly Barley begins to understand what Goethe clear sees, that the America establishment has as much, if not more, to lose if the world comes to realize that 'the Russian sword is rusted in its scabbard'.  If the world knew that, then how could they generate the political will needed to drain American taxpayers for the endless stream of new weapons and systems that purport to protect us from annihilation?

 'The Russia House'  is one of LeCarre's bleakest tales.  It has echos of  '...in from the Cold' when Leamus and Liz Gold were left dead on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall.  But LeCarre' clearly saw the purpose to their deaths.  The purpose for the tragedy in '...Russia House' is naked greed and power, nothing more.  Wasn't it always though?  Didn't we all have blinders on during the Cold War?  Russia and the East was always different than we were, crueler perhaps, but it was their country and the limits of power were understood before World War II.  Wasn't  the whole thing a scam, perpetuated by a few to enrich and empower themselves?  And if so, why did it take  LeCarre' so long to write about it as such?  The reason, I think is that he didn't think it was a scam.  Most of us didn't back then, at least until Vietnam.  But as the evidence came in, it is clear to me that  LeCarre' changed his mind.  That is a human thing to do and the one thing he was always true to was the human side of the spy game.

As a sixty some year old who has been reading LeCarre' since my twenties (and before that if you count the movies),  I didn't question the validity of Smiley's quest, mostly because I felt a human connection to Smiley.  I trusted Smiley and rooted for him to overcome the 'Gray men'.  But he is gone and the Gray men triumphed as he knew they would.  In 'The Russia House', the spies have weakened and are no longer honest with themselves, but still, I recognized myself in them.  Smiley and his generation were different, we are less for it because they are gone, even if we see the world clearer now.

Review of "Riding A Tiger" by Robert Abel

This review was originally published January 8, 2009 on Amazon.com

Robert Abel's novel `Riding a Tiger ...' captures the special feeling that came from living in Beijing during the time just before the Tiananmen Uprising of 1989. I speak with some authority on this matter, as I was there at about the same time. Deng Xiaoping had opened the door. The Cultural Revolution was over - but nobody knew what was coming next. Communists were still in power in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. No one knew what was around the corner. Work Units still controlled where people worked in China. Shanghai still looked much the same as it had in the 1930s rather than the 'Futurama' set it is now. Business still needed a party man to approve any significant action. It was neither fish nor fowl - but the rules were definitely changing. 'Riding the Tiger..' to me is a book about those rules in flux.

The story is told through the device of a confession to the Chinese Communist police - similar to the story of "The Last Emperor" which oddly was being film at about the same time as his story was being told. He tells of how he became embroiled with some "wholesale" capitalist ventures - bring Water Melon into Beijing. Things go wrong and things get improvised and from the story we get the much of the feel of what Beijing was like under the surface at in the months leading up to the Spring of 1989.

The characters feel very true. The story is partially about the underground economy in a transitory Capitalist/Communist State - aka China at that time - as said above it was a unique time. The novel illustrates the debilitating features of Communism better than an openly critical story. The main character, Arnold was sympathetic to a kind of socialism as he was obviously a lukewarm American leftist, so he respected the forms of Communist justice..

`Riding a Tiger ...' also tells the how the everyday people of China coped with the burden of Communism during that time. Retail business was springing up everywhere but the wholesale supply? Where did it come from? As was well known, wholesale business was a very slimy union of Corrupt government officials and criminal gangs. But how did the hardworking people putting up retail shops get the goods? Bringing Arnold into the venture as a front man was a very practical and very Chinese solution to a clear business problem. Arnold 'goes with the flow..' and that is what landed him in trouble.

How the Chinese in the book reacted to the decades of propaganda and squared their patriotism with the economic facts of life was another brilliantly illustrated point of the book. `Riding a Tiger ...' illustrates the effect that the idealism created from years of exposure to Lei Feng (A heroic Self-sacrificing Communist Soldier) type stories had on the characters in the story. This idealism combined with their fearlessness, made the story real and gave a hint of the actions we would see on the streets of Beijing in 1989.

The story takes place in the fall of 1988. How does it presage what is to come in the Spring? It does in laying out how the logistics of the revolt could have come together - the trucks, the underground communication network, the second government in the hutongs that seems to co-exist with the real one, all of that lays the groundwork for what happened later.

There are dead bodies the book as well -so the stakes of the story are serious. And the point of his interviews with the Beijing public safety authorities is to get him to confess his involvement in the actions that lead to these deaths.

In other books - Jonathon's Spence's 'Treason by the Book' and a Ming dynasty Detective story "The Celebrated Cases of Dee Goong An" (translated by Robert Van Gulik) and it is clear that unlike the Western justice system - China's has historically been about confession. How the confession is obtained is immaterial. Confession not necessarily a sign of cooperation either, not in the way the West views it. It is just necessary. The whole point from both the 'defense' and the prosecutor is to get the facts out in the most direct way possible.

As the West and the Chinese continue on their appointed path together in the future, this will be one of the biggest hurtles, as more Arnolds get embroiled in the affairs of China. We (English-Americans) take 'innocent until proven guilty' as a Divinely inspired concept, but the Chinese are much more practical. If 80% of the people the police bring in are probably guilty why not start from that premise? If a few people get screwed on the way, well, society is still better off - it is cheaper more efficient - China doesn't have the plague of lawyers we do either... Yes the rights of the 'individual' are trampled, but when society breaks down who give cares about that anyway. That is not my view but if you have taught, liberal, opened minded students in China as I have, you will find it is more often than not their view.

So in that sense, the book is instructional - a slice of time, a unique time, (Like when the Mongols controlled the overland routes allowing Marco a peek ...) It was a transitory world in the 80s. Half Commie - half Capitalist but really neither. Before the real threat of Students and workers uniting emerged there was a pretty easy going attitude toward foreigners riding around, buying train tickets,meeting people randomly with no one 'minding you' as occurred in the 70s or in the East block. Arnold had to go pretty far to attract the attention of the authorities and I think that was a sign of the times as well.

But when he got in trouble, the real Chinese justice was revealed. I think that 'Riding a Tiger ...' gets behind the stories we hear about a dissident being jailed and his family not knowing where he is and then he reappears , seemingly ok, but not so eager to talk about it ... it gets at the psychological aspects of the Chinese system method of discovering how a crime takes place.

Good Fiction is generally more instructional than `non-fiction' and this book is good fiction. It should be read.        

Review of "Julian" by Gore Vidal

This Review was originally published December 22, 2012 on Amazon.com

The 4th Century AD in the West was bracketed by the conversion of Constantine and the Capture of Rome by Alaric's Visigoths in 410. The Conversion of the Emperor led to the recognition of Christianity as the first among the many religions in the Mediterranean world (Edict of Milan 313) and Alaric ended once and for all Rome's aura of invincibility. Between those years, the power of Rome waned and Byzantine (newly named Constantinople in 330) rose. Christianity gradually began to assume the power of theocracy, controlling people's lives in a way that the Paganism that it replaced never did. As the church's power grew, the many variants of Christianity and the dogmas of those variants assumed a greater importance. Three of those, Arianism, Monophysitism and Dyophysitism were all different ideas as to the nature of, and the relationship between, God and Jesus. The different views of the nature of God and Jesus became rallying cry's for vicious mob violence and the military conflicts between various Christian sects of that epic. In a way that is hard to fathom today, arguments about whether Christ was the son of God or the same as God and whether he was a real physical presence on earth or part physical and part spiritual were the background of deadly struggles, all completing for allegiance of the as yet extremely civilized and culturally united Mediterranean world. Constantine settled it with a Solomon stroke that incorporated bits of each of the many ideas of God and wrapped it in a Platonic structure (the Theory of Forms)which became the Trinity, the Nicean Creed, the incomprehensible 'God the Father, Son, Holy Ghost'.

These incorporeal ideas meant a great deal to Christians of that time, especially in the Eastern Mediterranean. Therefore, when Constantine's nephew assumed the the Purple in the Middle of this convulsive century, the two year reign of Julian 'The Apostate' began, and gave Julian a chance to try and fix what he saw was the new state religion's creeping toward control of the rest of society.  Gore sees Julian as the original 'separation of Church and State' politician and this is the motif of this biographical novel of the little known Emperor.

I say little known, because his appellate 'the Apostate' put him outside of traditional biography. Christian orthodoxy demanded he be demonized by the church fathers forever after. After Julian's death the Christians returned to power and they never again lost it. The final Fall of Rome led to the rise of the Ultra-Christian 'Dark Ages' and Middle Ages, which of course has shaped the course of Western Civilization and our view of the past for better or worse.

Vidal clearly posits that it was for the worse. As anyone who has read Vidal, they know he takes a very personal, 'cui bono' view of history. His heroes are often history's villains. For example his Novel 'Burr' looks closely and sympathetically at the man who shot Alexander Hamilton and lent his name to a moribund rebellion against the young United States and was the indirect subject of the story that every school child of the early baby boom and before read in elementary school, "The man Without a Country". Vidal loved to give the finger to popularly accepted opinion.

The facts about Julian are well known, but the context that Gore gives those facts is startling. Julian was one of the greatest military generals in history. Vidal takes us through his campaigns and explains that genius in a very clear manner. Julian, a 'conservative' Epicurean Pagan, was also a writer on par with the other literary Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. He was a philosopher and a humanist of immense liberality, wishing, cajoling and legislating to to protect religious liberty in an increasingly intolerant Christian world.

Vidal tells the story through letters between Julian and his friends from youth, as well as letters among those friends talking about Julian, in frank and not always flattering terms. As in all of Vidal's historical novels he gives flesh and blood depiction and voice to some of the world's most influential figures, such as the emperors who preceded and succeeded Julian.

The novel is regarded by some as Vidal's greatest work. That might be - to me it is the most thought provoking of the works of Gore that I have read. The 4th Century was the caldron that formed much of what the modern western world would become. Julian was a champion of a road not taken, a road that to me held out the promise of a more tolerant and hopeful world. If the Roman Empire had chosen religious tolerance who knows what the result would have been? Islam (or something like it) might have arose with a much less belligerent character. The Mediterranean might not have split and Serbs and Croats might not have hated each other. Persians would still be Zoroastrians.

'What If History' is a fun game to play but ultimately not useful because as far as I know we can't go back or sideways in time.. But it is important that we see history as clearly as possible if we are to successful plot the future which is what we do with every action we take in life.. Because history is the only real guide that we have to what we are and what we will become.

Julian is a wonderful book and gave me a deeper appreciation of Gore Vidal's literary talent

(1-8-24) see interesting link on 4th Century religious life.  https://m.jpost.com/archaeology/article-780980