Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

A little warning. I am breaking my own rules here, as I promise "Something Old" will feature books four or more years old. This week's "Something Old" features a book one year old - but I hope you will accept this posting as it was a book that received little attention in New Zealand - and I will deal similarly with other books like this in the "Something Old" spot as the fancy moves me.

“MILKMAN” by Anna Burns (first published 2018)

            I suppose somebody somewhere has made a study of the role of the milkman in low-brow humour. Time was, milk was delivered to homes rather than being bought in supermarkets. And time was, married mothers were mainly at home when their husbands were out at work. So to the advent of merry exchanges such as “Her youngest doesn’t look like his dad.” “Ooo, it must have been the milkman.” Thus was cemented into old-fashioned music-hall ribaldry the image of the milkman as a cheerful, libidinous chap willing to do all manner of services for wives stuck at home.

            Anna Burns’ Milkman quite consciously and deliberately plays on this image as one of its main motifs, and I’m not sure that in its denouement, or at least in its last forty pages or so, this motif doesn’t capsize an otherwise fine novel. But I’ll save my grumbles about this until later, so that I can expand on the novel’s general excellence.

            As you probably know, Milkman won the 2018 Booker Prize, and has been lavishly, but not unanimously, praised. Among the minority of dissenters there was one particularly grumpy review in the New York Times, by Dwight Garner, which condemned the novel thus: “[Anna] Burns expands this material into a willfully demanding and opaque stream-of-consciousness novel, one that circles and circles its subject matter, like a dog about to sit, while rarely seizing upon any sort of clarity or emotional resonance. I found Milkman to be interminable, and would not recommend it to anyone I liked.”

Ah yes, it is written in a circumlocutious style, but goodness, it works – regardless of Garner’s remarks.

Milkman is set in Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” in the 1970s but, as every reviewer has already told you, there are no specific names. The city in which the action takes place is never named (although it is clearly Belfast). The warring factions are never named, though the “defenders” of the state are clearly Protestant Ulster Unionists and all their paramilitary supporters (UDF etc.), and the “renouncers” of the state are clearly Catholic Irish Nationalists and all their paramilitary supporters (IRA etc.). As for the unnamed “country over the water”, it is England.

Requiring even more concentration of the reader is the fact that the characters, too, are nameless. The narrator is an 18-year-old girl, though some hints in the story tell us her narrative is retrospective and she is looking back at events from some time later. She refers to herself only as “middle sister”, to her widowed mother as “ma”, to her siblings as “third sister” and as the “wee sisters” (a trio of eccentric youngsters literate beyond their years) and she refers ironically, in the novel’s opening sentence, to a man who committed violence against her as “Somebody McSomebody”. She identifies her boyfriend as “maybe-boyfriend”, which may, among other things, suggest her reluctance to fully commit to somebody in a society which assumes that any intimate relationship should lead promptly to marriage and having children. For this is very definitely a novel about a young woman who, as well as stepping cautiously through the tribal and clan loyaties of the “Troubles”, is negotiating her way through late adolescence and problems posed by sex.

Despite the lack of names, her family, tribe and neighbourhood are clearly Catholic nationalists.

“Middle sister” in fact wants to separate herself from the political violence and tensions that surround her. Her chief form of escapism is reading nineteenth-century novels (many of which are referenced in the text). In itself this is regarded as eccentric by her family and neighbours – but even worse, she has the habit of walking around the neighbourhood as she reads. Enter a really creepy middle-aged man, who kerb-crawls and stalks her and wants her to get into his car, despite her repeated requests that he leave her alone. He is identified as Milkman. Is he an informer for the state, trying to get information from her about her neighbourhood where “resisters” stack arms and sometimes plan violence? Or is he himself a well-informed member of some paramilitary group? Or is he just a dirty old man who picks up teenage girls? The sexual threat is as potent as the political one.

Additional trouble for “middle sister”, however, is that though she has no sexual relationship with this threatening man, in no time rumour and gossip say she has. She finds herself having to defend herself from accusations made by family and friends about her immorality and loose-living. And this is where the whole technique of having no names begins to make sense. In a watched and besieged society divided into tribes, threatened by violence (from “your” paramilitaries and the other side’s – and from the police), stirred by gossip and rumour and with strong incentives to conform or suffer the consequences – the safest thing to do is to keep your head down and remain anonymous. You don’t want to become a “name”. You don’t want to be singled out by all the people who are watching you and ready to report on behaviour disloyal to the tribe. Consider what happens to “maybe-boyfriend” when he acquires a supercharger from an ancient Bentley Blower racing car. He and the car-enthusiast lads may be interested, but as soon as one neighbour points out it’s an English car, and therefore from enemy country, “maybe-boyfriend” is under suspicion as a possible traitor.

As well as breeding fear, this sort of society breeds neuroses. Milkman is filled characters who are not coping, eccentric or on the verge of madness – “poison girl” who goes about the neighbourhood literally slipping poison into people’s drinks;  “chef” a (possibly gay) youth who goes through the pantomime of preparing elaborate non-existent meals; a boy obsessed to the point of insanity with the rivalry between America and the Soviet Union over nuclear weapons; and a milkman (the “real milkman”, not to be confused with Milkman the stalker) who apparently hates everybody. But there’s an odd note here, for as Milkman tells it, it is the eccentric ones, the “beyond-the-pales”, the nonconformists and oddballs, who are most likely to change things for the better. This message doesn’t come in slogan form. Women in the neighbourhood trying to set up a feminist discussion group are shut down by the older women and the suspicious paramiltiaries, but the epsode is treated as black farce rather than sermon. Even so, in the end those who hold their heads highest are those who slip around the community’s tightest rules.

And having laid out blandly what the novel is about, I have missed the most important element of its success. This is its tone of voice. Despite Dwight Garner’s negative comment, this novel is not “stream-of-consciousness”. The first-person voice of “middle sister” does not roam at random through sensations and events as they come to her. “Middle sister” may be garrulous, verbose, ready with the detailed and colourful metaphors and capable of exaggeration – but her narrative has a clear structure flowing in a certain direction. In other words, it has a clear plot. The voice is a distinctly Irish one, and I do not think you can really understand this novel if you do not hear a young Irishwoman’s voice in your head as you read. I was going to pad out this review by quoting at length so examples of “middle sister’s” delightful, witty, ironic and shrewd analyses of her community, but I will leave you to find them for yourself.

Violence largely happens “offstage”, but the image this novel creates of a fraught and divided society makes it clear that fear was as much a burden in the “Troubles” as bloodshed.

Alas, after all my praise, and as I said at the opening of this review, we come to the last forty pages, and here I think Anna Burns stumbles. The novel ends with a tangle of hidden family- and community-relationships being revealed to us. It is a tying-up of loose ends, with hitherto-undisclosed relationships being explained, like the true situation of “maybe-boyfriend”. It is here that the comic image of the amorous milkman is deployed. I felt a little deflated by the patness of this, but not enough to make me underestimate the novel as a whole. One of the better Booker winners.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

STAYING IN AN HISTORICAL APARTMENT

Forgive me for unloading yet another traveller’s tale upon you (though I must add there are plenty more to come); but in December of last year, we found ourselves in a situation that New Zealanders experience rarely. We were staying for a week in an historical building of some antiquity. Well alright… not all that much antiquity, but sufficiently antique for New Zealanders, and enough to set us thinking.

It happened like this.

We’d flown down from Amsterdam to spend a week in Prague.

Our arrival was an unhappy one. The taxi we had pre-booked to drive us to our apartment didn’t turn up, and after a long and irritating wait, we had to hire another cab off the rank, only now getting used to the fact that we were no longer in the Eurozone. Fortunately the price to make the long trip to the old city was 850 Koruna, which translates as a very reasonable price. The taxi-driver was of limited – or at least heavily-accented - English, but he was cheerful and trying to be helpful by pointing out the obvious. “Smetana was a very famous composer,” he said, as we passed a large poster announcing a performance of Smetana’s works. Going by the Czech National Theatre – now called the Estates Theatre - he said that was where some of Mozart’s work was premiered. We nodded, having already booked to see The Magic Flute there (though I would have much preferred to be seeing Don Giovanni, which premiered in Prague in October 1787). He eventually dropped us off in the tiny, narrow, old-city alleyway where out apartment was.

We were met by the guy who handed over the keys to us. He was a loquacious Frenchman – and he explained that it was forbidden to instal elevators in the old apartment blocks of the old city. So, with our very, very heavy trunks (they were carrying what we needed for three months’ worth of journey), and with the Frenchman saying he couldn’t carry anything for us because he had a hernia, we trundled up four floors to our apartment. I was once again forcibly reminded why, in pre-elevator days, the upper-storey apartments were the cheap ones (and it was in garrets that artists and grisettes starved and worked). I also reflected that the four flights of stairs were probably what kept the price down for budget-strained tourists like us. And I had some scepticism about the key-man’s hernia.

Outside our door, I paused to look down the deep stairwell and immediately thought how anxious parents must have been for their children in the days when this solid building accommodated familes. Did any plunge to their death over the rails? My Hitchcock-stuffed brain at once registered images of the pulsating stairwell in Vertigo.

And so into the apartment.

It was huge.

Here were the two of us, renting it for a week, yet the entrance hall alone was large enough to be an apartment in itself. The kitchen was the size of a dining hall, and there were fully three large bedrooms, all of them with more than king-sized double-beds; and an even larger lounge with a massive television screen and cushioned sofas broad enough to serve as beds. The fact is, eight or nine adults could have been housed here comfortably, with room to spare, and yet here we were on our own. Only the shower room and the lavatory were of modest size.

The Frenchman handed over the keys to us, explained security matters, gave us a map of the nearer parts of the city and put in some plugs for local restaurants and shops (for which service he is doubtless paid a retainer).

And there we were.

We were tired. It was night. We had been promised a distant view of the castle across the Vtlava, but all we could see out the window were near lights. When we had flung our things down, we slumped onto the cushioned sofas and rested a while.

We let the place sink in. The building must have been mid-nineteenth century at latest. Clearly this ample apartment would once have been a family home, or rather the home of a succession of families over many years. It had maintained its spacious shape since the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, so ghosts started walking with me.

What were people who lived here thinking at the time Austria decided to share power with the Kingdom of Hungary in the 1860s? Were there Czechs living here who resented not being equal partners in the empire? Or were only German-speakers so well housed? How did they feel when the empire turned authoritarian during the First World War, clamped down on the newspapers with heavy censorship and conscripted unwilling soldiers like Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Svejk? And what about the rioting and shooting after the war, the messy disintegration of the empire and setting up of the new republic of Czechoslovakia, and the Czech Legion checking the Bolsheviks? Surely some of these events would have caused an uproar in the streets below? And then the sellout of 1938-39 and five years of Nazi occupation. And more years of repression and terror after the Communist takeover of 1948. And what did people in this apartment think of the “Prague Spring” in 1968, and the Soviet invasion that followed? And of the “Velvet Revolution” that removed the Communists and then the break with Slovakia and the creation of the Czech Republic? There was greater or lesser turmoil in all these things across a century and a half.

My ghosts did not suggest Kafkaesque images of impenetrable authority (see the posting Author intoTourist Icon for notes on Kafka’s Prague). Rather, they suggested pure fear. Was that what successive families felt in this apartment and others in this building – or were they complacent people, willing to roll with the status quo or whatever replaced it? There is no way of knowing.

I let the ghosts tramp around me for a while and then, despite our still both being rather tired, we decided to explore a little. Down the many stairs we went and out the front door, to discover there was an Italian restaurant next door to the old apartment block and a wine-and-spirits bottle shop across the road. Pig’s heaven. We walked to a local market, and bought mandarins and bananas and a punnet of juicy blackberries which we devoured at once, sitting on the deep and accommodating window ledge of a restaurant. Then we wound through streets, narrow streets, of jewellery stores, more restaurants, tourist-souvenir-and-trinket sellers and a “museum” of “sex machines”. The streets were crowded with tourists like us, but most of them younger than we are, some obviously looking to go clubbing but all, absolutely all, wearing heavy winter clothes and woollen headgear as we were.

The central square was lit up with Christmas lights, a huge Christmas tree and a display in the shape of the two-towered cathedral with, of course, the real cathedral in the background and the old town-hall with its mobile clock and other buildings of reputable antiquity.

We were still calculating anxiously the price of things in Koruna. I fell upon, and gorged myself upon, a delicious, grilled spicy sausage, a speciality of these parts. She drank mulled wine while I drank mulled cider, and later she bought from another stall goulash soup (yes, it’s Hungarian, not Czech) and a cheese delicacy. As she always does, she admired the patient and handsome horses that draw carriages around the square for tourists with more money than sense.

But oh the crush of tourists as a light snow began to fall!

I assume for most of them, Christmas is a purely secular festival now. The Czech Republic itself is said to be one of the least religious countries in what is now a largely de-Christianised continent. Even so, when we heard a band, in one screened-off corner of the square, playing loudly and a little off-key, we joined the large group of people listening to them; and found they were a youth band of high-school age. Their repertoire had at least some genuine Christmas carols among them. From the Czech-singing woman soloist, I could make out such words as “Bethlehem” and “Maria” and “Gloria”. And nearby, there was a life-sized Nativity scene, though not quite like the spectacular one made of straw that we found some days later up at the castle.

We tramped, now genuinely weary, back to our large four-up apartment, and slumped into bed, letting the ghosts dance a little longer before sleep.

There was again a light snow when we looked out the window in the morning and we could see across the tiled rooftops to a nearby church. But a white-out still denied us the distant view of the castle.

One hundred-and-fifty years is not real antiquity to Europeans or, for that matter, to most of the world’s population. But it is antiquity to most New Zealanders. Surely family tales spanning that much time could be told about preserved villas in Freeman’s Bay or Wadestown or Corstorphine. Somehow, though, they would not seem to echo so much turbulent history, or history that had major effects across the world.

For the week that followed, the large apartment creaked, like its parquet flooring, to the sounds of the two of us, and of the many people who once lived here.

Something New

 We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“SHIRLEY SMITH – AN EXAMINED LIFE” by Sarah Gaitanos (Victoria University Press, $NZ40); “WORDY” by Simon Schama (Simon and Schuster, $NZ39:99)

            As every first-year Philosophy student will know, Socrates is supposed to have said at his trial that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In this sense, an “examined” life is one in which each of us asks fundamental questions about life, considers and analyses carefully our own motives and values, and does not accept things uncritically.

Sarah Gaitanos’ lengthy and well-researched biography of Shirley Smith is subtitled “An Examined Life”. Does this mean that Shirley Smith was a person who “examined” her life by asking fundamental questions, considering and analysing carefully her own motives and values, and not accepting things uncritically? Perhaps this meaning was what Sarah Gaitanos intended. But the further I read into this book, the more I wondered if it was really the author who “examined” Shirley Smith’s life carefully and, like a conscientious lawyer conducting a cross-examination, turned up things she might originally have neither expected nor wanted to find. For, to use the popular slang term, this book is one of the most “conflicted” biographies I’ve ever read. The author seems to have set out to write in unmitigated praise of Shirley Smith, but she ends up presenting us with many caveats about her, especially with regard to one major issue.

The intended praise is declared right from the start, when the author’s Introduction begins “Shirley Smith was one of the most remarkable New Zealanders of the twentieth century, a woman whose lifelong commitment to social justice, legal reform, gender equality and community service left a profound legacy.” (p.11)

Born in 1916, Shirley Smith was of Scots Presbyterian descent and inherited a strong sense of public duty from a father who had basically become agnostic. There was a sad aspect to her childhood. Her mother died when she was a tot and her father was often absent, so there were childhood anxieties when she was farmed out a bit; and then deep resentment when her father remarried. But her dislike of her stepmother was strictly a childhood thing. She gradually came to admire her stepmother for her patience and care.

In many respects her upbringing was a very privileged one. Her father David Smith, was a highly-respected lawyer and later judge on New Zealand’s Supreme Court and Chancellor of the University of New Zealand. Despite their different political views (David Smith was a very conservative man), Shirley was in some ways Daddy’s girl to the very end, consulting him on legal matters even when he was very old. He outlived Shirley’s husband. Young Shirley had private schooling, which she hated, though it is amusing to learn that she first heard about Communism when she was chosen randomly to be the “Communist” candidate at one of her school’s mock-elections. Her brains won her a place at Oxford in 1935, where she diligently studied Classics, failing to get a First largely because she contracted TB, but she was able to recuperate in an expensive sanatorium in Switzerland. She was a young lecturer in Classics at Auckland University College in 1943-44, but she saw Auckland’s Classics Department as a hateful male stronghold and she later depicted Professor E. M. Blaiklock as plotting against her. After Auckland, she briefly taught Classics at Victoria University of Wellington. This biography includes details of her visits to Greece and Crete.

Her poltical views were formed early. At Oxford in the 1930s, she was first a pacifist, and supported the League of Nations union, as most students then did.  At first she found Communists an unbearable, scruffy group, but she was attracted to them when they smartened up their act and took over the University Labour Club. She welcomed the idea of the Popular Front and joined the Communist Party at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Having lost her religion (her study of Lucretius helped) she joined the secular religion. “Being a comrade was like belonging to a religious sect” Sarah Gaitanos rmarks on p.104. It is clear that the author does not share Shirley’s youthful Communist idealism and notes Shirley’s naivete (shared by many others) about the realities of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 (see p.133). But Shirley Smith can be forgiven much in that she was, after all, a youngster in her early twenties, a time when when most of us are easily enthused. Even so, she did return to New Zealand as a courier to local CP members, delivering the Party line that the war against Hitler was just an imperialist and capitalist fraud not worth fighting. She remained a card-carrying member of the Party until 1945 – however, the evidence here is ambiguous, as when she went to renew her membership in 1945, “they told her she’d be more use to the Party as a non-card member” (p.196) She remained in contact with CPNZ leaders and continued to defend Stalin until the events of 1956. Thereafter, she definitely left the Party – at the same time as Elsie Locke and others – but continued to support what could loosely be called left-wing causes.

The things that Sarah Gaitanos would most like to concentrate on – indeed the things that probably propelled her to write this biography – are the achievements of Shirley Smith’s professional career, and her wide activist interests. At 35, she began to train as a lawyer. At 40 she was called to the bar. She had her own practice by the time she was 44. She fought against the “boy’s club” aspect of the legal profession at that time, and was particularly incensed by the laddish drink culture at men-only graduation parties, from which women were barred. She took on many matrimonial cases but also went into criminal law and was the first woman barrister in New Zealand to take a criminal case on her own and win it. Certainly she was a feminist, but following her own form of feminism, which meant standing on the same footing as men, not opposing them. For this reason she was, surprisingly, opposed to the formation of a Women Lawyers Society, which she saw as merely segregating the sexes in the profession. (p.431)

She was involved in Stepping Stones, a humane organisation seeking to help mental patients readjust to the wider community. She was a stalwart of Civil Liberties and also, in the 1950s, of the “Peace Council” which (pp.216-17) was controlled by the Soviet Communist Party. She was an organiser of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, though by the time of her involvement she had come to hate its CP supporters. She was in the movement opposing New Zealand’s involvement in the Vietnam War, she opposed capital punishment and she lobbied for Homosexual Law Reform

What made her reputation most, though, was her honourable representation of clients who might have suffered from prejudice in a law court. She represented members of the Black Power gang – or at least she did until one of her assistants told them off for never paying the fees for their defence. In 1980 she became the go-to lawyer for the Porirua Mongrel Mob. She argued her cases through a fine knowledge of the law, rarely making emotional appeals, and she won many, but not all; and knowing (as all defence lawyers do) that sometimes her clients were guilty as charged. She also, repeatedly, made dogged defences of a mentally incapable man in a number of cases, at one point attempting to take his case to the Privy Council. Here the author suggests (p.407) that “Shirley’s ego was clearly a driving force” in taking this case so far and overstating her case, and she notes that Shirley Smith omitted to mention it in her own memoirs.

Shirley Smith died in 2007 at the age of 91.

This is an interesting and varied life, and well worth celebrating.

BUT while the author wants to present Shirley Smith as an important and notable person in her own right, a pioneer and role-model for New Zealand professional women, she inevitably has to address the fact that Shirley Smith was also the wife of Bill Sutch. And (though she kept the name Smith throughout her life) it was as Bill Sutch’s wife that she was best known to the wider public. He was a much-admired, outspoken and controversial economist, civil servant and author of polemical books, who advanced to being Permanent Secretary of Industries and Commerce under various governments.

The portrait that Sarah Gaitanos gives of their marriage is a very fraught one.

Shirley Smith was a well-conducted and virginal young lady as a student, though two men proposed marriage to her. (In the light of later events, it is ironical that one of them was Martyn Finlay). When finally she met and fell in love with Bill (William Ball) Sutch, he was already married and also having an affair with the woman who would later become Martyn Finlay’s wife (pp.145-46). Shirley and Bill began cohabiting before he was divorced. She looked forward to marriage as making them respectable, but he saw it otherwise – despite his radical views on many things , he told her that she was not to put him “under compulsion” and he was “to do as he pleased” in their marriage. But Shirley later recalled that it “never occurred to me at the time… that he would put me under compulsion and I would suffer.” (p.165)

Put simply, Sutch was a very controlling man, a bit of a psychological bully, who wanted to direct every aspect of his wife’s life. She rejoiced when their daughter Helen was born and looked forward to having more children, but he forbade it. (p.189) There follow many pages showing Shirley’s continuing admiration for Bill’s intellectual skills; but also his continuing domineering attitude towards her. She decided to study law in 1952 partly because she felt drained by doing little but the domestic round. Bill Sutch reacted as if it were eccentric of her to seek a career of her own (pp.208-09). Doubtless this was a common attitude among men at that time; but his vehemence and frequent belittling of her were extreme. While holding down a full-time job, she still had to do the housework and he regarded her legal practice as a mere hobby (p.295). Apparently Bill continued to have many affairs during their marriage (p.240). He also tended to cut her out of things that were the concern of both of them. Shirley was very annoyed that the modernist house designed for them by Ernst Plischke was so often called the “Sutch House” when it was actually built on a legacy bequeathed to her by her grandmother.

It has to be noted here that there were controlling aspects to both husband and wife. Despite her professional commitments, Shirley Smith was a diligent and caring mother to her daughter, Helen. Like her mother, Helen won entrance to Oxford and proceeded to have a distinguished career of her own. However Shirley appears to have monitored Helen’s boyfriends beyond the point of diligence. (p.257) Both Bill and Shirley opposed Helen’s marriage to Keith Ovenden and treated him in a hostile way. There is the bizarre detail that this caused such stress to Helen and Keith that “to get through [fractious family gatherings] Helen and Keith took Valium. And they took it to get through their wedding.” (p.280) Only when Helen and Keith gave Shirley a second grandchild did she forgive them for being married. (p.349)

As well as suffering from Bill’s domineerings ways, Shirley was also distressed by things she discovered about him only after his death. One was a relatively trivial thing, nevertheless characteristic of Bill Sutch’s habitual economy with the truth. Even since Bill and Shirley first met, he had told her the heroic tale of his epic visit to the Soviet Union in 1932, when he had climbed mountains and tramped around lands within the Arctic Circle like a hardy explorer. It turned out, as Shirley discovered after his death, that he had spent a total of two weeks in the USSR, saw the Arctic Circle only from the deck of a passenger liner, and travelled to a few places by ‘plane.

Much more distressing for her to discover was that Bill, the doctrinaire socialist, had speculated on properties and acquired a large portfolio of them without ever telling her about either his transactions or his wealth. These stories were first made public by Truth, the populist right-wing newspaper, seeking to hit back at Sutch after his trial. But to Shirley’s angst, the stories all turned out to be true. (And, incidentally, quashing another conspiracy story popular among Bill’s defenders, as the Ombudsman later reported, Truth had not been tipped off by the SIS when it ran the expose – they had found the evidence by searching public records.) Bill had also never told Shirley about arrangements he had made for property and holidays in the Bahamas. Most distressing of all, Shirley discovered that Bill had been a massive tax evader, and she was told by legal counsel that if this had been known in his lifetime, he would have been prosecuted. It was this last discovery which, according to Gaitanos, seems finally to have disillusioned her about her late husband (p.354).

I am forced to reflect that if Bill Sutch kept so much from his wife, it is likely that he was even more secretive with her on other, even more important, matters. I say this because, when it came to Sutch’s trial for espionage in 1974, Shirley  stood staunchly by him and for a long time refused to believe that there could be any merit in the charges against him.

In her introduction, Gaitanos says tactfully: “I recount the events from Shirley’s point of view, or from a perspective that shows her involvement, perceptions and the psychological toll it had on her. How much did she know? I have gone as far as my sources allow me. There may well be sources I haven’t seen that go further, but those I have are revealing and in some respects troubling.” ( p.14) This statement encodes much – not least Gaitanos’ scepticism about Sutch’s innocence. Gaitanos also notes (p.17) that she did not have access to Bill Sutch’s papers, which have been promised to Sutch’s designated biographer Rosslyn Noonan. Her implication is that if she did have such access, she would probably discover more about Sutch’s covert activities.

            In her characterisation of Sutch’s pro-Communist leanings, Gaitanos is not only relying on the revelations of Mitrokhin Archive, which were made public (in 2014) seven years after Shirley’s death. Gaitanos says that Sutch was recruited by Soviet intelligence as early as 1950 (pp.192-193). She follows in his career evidence of his Communist sympathies. Shirley was disillusioned and made a definitive break from the CP in 1956, first when Khruschev’s “Secret Speech” on Stalin’s crimes was made public, and finally in the same year when the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian uprising. (pp.226-227) But Bill insisted at first that the “Secret Speech” was a fraud and later made excuses for the invasion of Hungary. Similarly, in 1968 he belittled the “Prague Spring” and insisted that the future lay with the Communist Party (p.271).

Bill Sutch was arrested in September 1974 after the SIS had observed him having a clandestine meeting with Dimitri Razgovorov, the “rezident” (i.e. KGB man) of Russia’s Embassy in Wellington. When confronted, Sutch at first lied and claimed there had been no such meeting. His lawyer Mike Bungay made sure that Sutch never had to be called as a witness in the trial, because (as Bungay knew) a good cross-examination would have revealed that Sutch had in fact had many clandestine meetings with Razgovorov.

A brief review of Shirley Smith – An Examined Life on Radio New Zealand said that Gaitanos does not reach conclusions about the Sutch case. I do not agree. Gaitanos comes as close as she possibly can to telling us (a.) that Sutch was guilty as charged; and (b.) that Shirley Smith gradually came to understand this, but found it hard to face the truth. She spun many tales to herself in an attempt to exonerate her husband. Says Gaitanos, “She appeared to hold two paradoxical views, that he both was and wasn’t the victim of lies and conspiracy.” (p.331). There were times when I thought these parts of the book could be renamed The Woman Who Deceived Herself – and then I think that it would be hard for any dedicated wife to believe the worst of her husband, and Shirley’s reaction was no more than could be expected.

Gaitanos is also clearly disgusted by the manouevres and dishonesty of many of Sutch’s defenders, who were too ready to believe that the whole affair was just a right-wing conspiracy to discredit an important, respected left-wing civil servant; or (more bizarrely) that it was a joint conspiracy of the SIS and the KGB. Many of the manouevres of Bungay’s defence were also very questionable, including what came very close to “jury tampering” to get the verdict they wanted. In the light of this, it is hard to take seriously the defence of Sutch which Maurice Shadbolt penned for the New Zealand Listener just after Sutch was acquitted; and one has to dismiss Brian Easton’s bland statement (in his 2001 book  The Nationbuilders) that “a jury of twelve ordinary New Zealanders” acquitted Sutch and that there, presumably, the matter should end.

In 1980, five years after Sutch’s death, the Ombudsman produced a report on the Sutch case (the key clauses are reproduced on pp.355-57), which Shirley and others hoped would show that the SIS had behaved unethically. To their chagrin, the Ombudsman not only exonerated the SIS of any wrongdoing, but pointed out that the SIS should have been even more vigilant as Sutch’s reporting to the KGB man had clearly been going on for a long time before the SIS put him under watch. The strongest possibility (only a possibility, of course) is that, in the meeting when he was arrested, Sutch had delivered to his KGB contact a list of “targets” (or “prospects”) in the civil service whom the KGB could recruit as “assets” like Sutch himself.

Even more damaging to the legend of Sutch, the victim of persecution, is the fact that Shirley Smith gradually realised her husband had not been put on trial unjustly, but was probably guilty of more than he was accused of. It was Attorney-General Martyn Finlay who ruled that Sutch had a case to answer. The trial is said by some to have hastened Sutch’s death. No doubt it did put great strain on him, but he was already a sick man before he was arrested. Bill Sutch had had a heart attack in 1968. One year after his trial, he died of cancer of the liver, which had been growing in him for years. It was not the trial that killed him.

            Given that this is a biography of Shirley Smith, and not of her husband, I am sorry to have lingered so long over this matter, but Sarah Gaitanos does as much lingering as I have done. The point is, Bill Sutch and his trial eventually hijack much of the book. But enough is here to tell us that Shirley Smith’s life was, in its own right, worth celebrating.

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Even if written by a master of the craft, a collection of essays will always be a mixed bag – some hits, some misses. It will especially be a mixed bag if most of the essays were originally written as occasional pieces for newspapers and magazines. The demands of topicality, and the demands of being courteous to people being interviewed, will somehow compromise even the most skillful essayist.

Simon Schama, author of 15 well-received books on history and art, television presenter, essayist and journalist, is certainly a skillful writer and essayist. In the early days of this blog, seven years ago, I recall reviewing with pleasure his seminal book Landscape and Memory. Wordy is Schama’s third collection of essays, and it covers many topics. It is divided into five general sections, to wit – essays on memories; essays on art and art critics; essays on music, theatre and film; essays on history and politics; and essays on food and cookery – with one eccentric coda about an antiquarian search for lost treasures. The book’s subtitle is “Sounding off on high art, low appetite and the power of memory”.

Obviously this is a man of broad interests.

I endorse completely his opening essay in which he explains the title Wordy by expressing his preference for verbose, tumbling prose as written by Rabelais, Dickens and their like, who rejoiced in the exuberance of language – in other words, being “wordy”. Here, too, he notes that the great majority of these essays were written as articles in the Financial Times, with a few appearing in the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar. At which point, the worm enters the apple, because at least some of this book is simply jobbing journalism.

But let me first outline the really good stuff.

I delighted in Schama’s essay on his childhood and adolescence as the son of a Jewish family living in Golders Green. And in the two book reviews that follow this particular essay, he shows his critical discernment. He praises one book about a child who was eyewitness to the horrors of Auschwitz; but he condemns a Holocaust novel for being overwritten and playing with clichés. Schama is not the man to praise books simply because they present a viewpoint with which he agrees. Good writing has to be part of the deal.

In the section on the visual arts, there is an excellent piece called “The Palace of Colour” in which Schama (who used to lecture on art history at Harvard) discusses how much pure colour – as opposed to design or “line” – influences the impact of art and our emotional reaction to it. As one who has visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam a number of times, I also found very informative his essay on that great museum’s recent restoration. His essay on the Australian art critic Robert Hughes is masterly – a great tribute to a man who spent his life reacting against the cliquishness of much of the “art world” and its obsession with fashion rather than skill. If I chose to expand this review to intolerable length, it would be from the Robert Hughes essay that I would quote. And if he is clearly not a total partisan of Hughes, Schama’s own views on the art world are sometimes similar, at least as expressed at the beginning of the essay on “The New Whitney”. I must admit, however, to getting a little lost when Schama discusses artists of whom I have never heard.

In the section on theatre and film, Schama produces a (for this reader) suprisingly illuminating piece about Patti Smith and a pretty good examination of the James Bond mythology, noting that it flourished at a time when Britain needed compensation for having lost its empire and having, in effect, become a client state of the USA. I regret, though, that in this essay he praises the common habit of British writers and movie-makers “to send up Britishness even as they affectionately rejoice in it” – which I translate as “to not really satirise it at all in any meaningful way, and to still maintain a sense of national superiority”.

Finally, the section on politics and history. The essay “Liberalism, Populism and the Fate of the World” – first given as a lecture at Cambridge last year – is a very good quick survey of the origins and effects of populism, especially the type of exclusionist ethnic populism that has been reborn in Europe. I regret only that it loses its way a little when (understandably) it turns into general rage against Donald Trump. (I also regret that some of its paragraphs are recycled in the next, very topical, piece ”Mid-Term Trump”). The final two essays in this section are appropriately nuanced – concerning the Balfour Declaration and a modern Israeli observer who is able to understand the anxieties and claims of Palestinian Arabs. A liberal-minded person Simon Schama, as a Jew, has a deep interest in Israel, but has the understanding to give a very balanced perspective.

I confess to not being interested in the essays on food, though I understand Schama’s delight in the topic.

Having noted favourably all these pieces, I now have the melancholy task of noting this collection’s duds.

There are the perishable ones, which have dated because they were once topical. The profile of the director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, seems related to an exhibition on German culture that the chap was putting together – an exhibition that has come and gone. Likewise, the piece on Tacita Dawn relates to a then current art-show; and another article seems to be a promo for a TV series on “civilisation”.

There are also the mildly annoying ones, like Schama’s unforgivably chauvinistic Anglophile chest-thumpiing in the piece called “Shakespeare and History”, which accepts all the Bard’s patriotic distortions as wonderful pieces of popular history.

Worst, though, are the fan pieces. We all know that interviews which celebrities give to journalists turn out as either hit-jobs or fan pieces. There are no hit-jobs in this collection, but there are fan pieces, which read as if they would be better situated in the glossy pages of a Sunday supplement. Look at the article on the photographer Cindy Sherman. Look at Schama’s uncritical fandom in the pieces on Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Bill Clinton, Arianna Huffington and (especially) Debbie Harry. Does he really believe they are the great cultural icons that he presents them as being? Or does a journalist begin to lose access to celebrities if he is too critical? Most interesting in this format – and the one that I am most ambiguous about – is Schama’s meeting with Henry Kissinger. He clearly has reservations about some of the chap’s past policies, but he ends up in the mode of admiration, which may in fact be justified as he notes Kissinger’s skill in matters of history.

There now. As I said at the beginning, collections of essays are always a mixed bag. But this one has enough worthwhile and interesting pieces to justify  the price.

Snarky footnote –  As a pedant, I can’t restrain myself from noting that on Page 242 Simon Schama misattributes a quotation. He assigns the bon mot “Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles” to Noel Coward. Actually this witticism was coined by the Hungarian Anglophile George Mikes in his little book How to be an Alien published in 1946. Thought you’d like to know.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

GRAHAM GREENE’S “ENTERTAINMENTS” (five novels and two novella published between 1932 and 1958)

As novelist, journalist, controversialist, playwright and short-story writer, Graham Greene (1904-1991) attracted both admiration and hostility, especially with regard to his left-wing views and his on-again, off-again relationship with Catholicism (see earlier posts on this blog about The Man Within; The End ofthe Affair and The Quiet American; and Journey Without Maps). Once established as a writer, from the 1940s onwards, he always had a huge readership, and nearly every one of his novels was at some time filmed. I’m fairly sure that the only ones never to make it to the screen were It’s a Battlefield and A Burnt-Out Case.

One minor cause for comment, however, was the distinctive way Greene used to categorise his work. The fly-leaves of his books would list his full-length fictions as either “Novels” or “Entertainments”. The suggestion was that the “Novels” were serious literary works, whereas the “Entertainments” were simply for fun. (The only other writer I know who did something similar was Georges Simenon, who would list his Maigret detective novels – in fact the most enduring part of his output – separately from his “romans durs”, or “serious novels”.)

Greene kept up this categorisation of his fiction until the publication of his novel The Comedians in 1966, where “Novels” and “Entertainments” are still listed separately. But then he appears to have changed his mind, and from the publication of his next novel Travels With My Aunt, in 1969, he dropped the distinction. The term “Entertainments” disappeared and now they were all listed as “Novels”.

At one time or another, I’ve read nearly all Greene’s “serious” work but – apart from two of them – I had not read most of his “Entertainments” until a couple of months ago, when I decided to read them all in the order they were written. I wanted to see why or how they could be considered as different from his other novels. Beginning with Stamboul Train in 1932, and ending with Our Man in Havana in 1958, five of the “Entertainments” are thrillers and two are (more-or-less) comedies. I introduce you to each of them below, before closing with some comments on how, in spite of everything, their settings, themes and characterisation are as typical of Greene as his other works are. As they were all filmed, and as I have seen most of those films, I append to each comments on how the “Entertainment” appeared on screen. And after all, as has often been pointed out, Greene, the one-time film-reviewer, was very influenced by film in his writing and often used quite cinematic techniques in his prose.

So here goes.

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Stamboul Train (1932) is midway between murder mystery and pure thriller. On the Orient Express (Ostend to Istanbul) various characters struggle with their own problems and become linked by circumstances. An aggressive English woman journalist (surprisingly for a popular novel of this vintage, she is explicitly identified as lesbian) wants to get a scoop by interviewing a Communist politician who may be plotting revolution in his East European country. The politician is wracked with thoughts of his own inadequacy and wonders whether his apparent idealism is just pride. A handsome young Jewish merchant (there seems to be a soupcon of anti-semitism in the way Greene describes him) worries about business affairs, but on the train becomes sexually involved with a chorus girl, down-on-her-luck and on her way to fulfil an engagement in Istanbul. Again – surprisingly for a novel of this vintage – the sex is quite explicit. Under a false identity, a German thief and murderer is on the run from police. The connections made between characters are quite convincing, and it does come to a violent climax, although the ending is more downbeat and dispiriting than most thrillers are. Basically, the good guys don’t win.

Stamboul Train is both a competent and still readable thriller, even though Greene himself came to despise it and later said he wrote it only for the money (see review on this blog of JourneyWithout Maps). In retrospect, it is notable for two things. First, it includes the (very minor) character of a smug popular novelist called Q.C.Savory, who wants literature to be cheery and uplifing with none of this sordid modernist stuff. Informed readers immediately understood that this was a caricature of the popular novelist J.B.Priestley, who threatened to sue, insisted the publishers remove a few phrases clearly linked to him, and wrote a “revenge” review panning the novel. Second, Stamboul Train (first publshed in America as Orient Express) was probably the first modern thriller to take the Orient Express as its setting. Agatha Christie’s more formulaic Murder on the Orient Express was first published two years later (in 1934) and Ian Fleming’s James Bond thriller From Russia With Love, mainly set on the Orient Express, 24 years later (1956).

Film: Stamboul Train was promptly filmed by Hollywood, under the title Orient Express, in 1934, with a second-string cast. The film was hardly noticed, and has not been seen for years. I have not seen it.

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After two “serious novels” came A Gun for Sale (1936), a really down-and-dirty thriller. James Raven is a hired hit-man, recognisable by his twisted hare lip, who has killed a government minister, but who soon discovers that his contact man has paid him with stolen and marked bank-notes, easily traceable by the police. So we have the double-chase. The police are after Raven, and Raven is after the man who cheated him. En route Raven kidnaps as “cover” the chorus girl Anne, and they are together for much of the novel. The complication (read “bloody big coincidence”) is that Anne’s boyfriend is the police detective who is on the trail of Raven.

As a thriller, this is a big step-up from Stamboul Train, with a far more straightforward and urgent plot. You do, however, have to swallow the implauibility of the character of Anne, who stays with Raven even though she has many chances to escape him, and who rather too easily comes to see Raven’s point of view. The milieu is seedy, sordid London, and then the seedy, sordid northern industrial city of Nottwich (Greene’s fictitous combination of Norwich and Nottingham). Appearing in 1936, A Gun for Sale very much reflects a Europe already gearing up for another major war. The real villains are wealthy industrialists and arms traders, implicitly contrasted with the wretched of the earth like the tormented Raven; and there is a crucial scene involving a mass air-raid drill in which gas masks are distributed.

Film: A Gun for Sale was first published in America as This Gun for Hire. It was a bestseller, a number of film studios vied for the film rights, and it was eventually filmed by Hollywood as This Gun for Hire in 1942, directed by Frank Tuttle. I have seen this film a number of times, and think it is one of the best of its type. The story was Americanised, with the setting switched to wartime San Francisco and the enemy, in cahoots with the corrupt industrialist, clearly identified as Japanese. In his starring debut, Alan Ladd was excellent as the stone-faced, homicidal Raven, although the film gave him a broken wrist in place of a hare lip (we can’t have our star looking too grotesque, can we?). Veronica Lake’s character was upgraded from struggling chorus girl to star of a number of production numbers; but Laird Cregar stole some crucial scenes as the double-crossing “finger man” who gives Raven the dud banknotes. The first twenty minutes are a master class in setting up character and motive and – despite many changes to plot – crucial episodes survive, such as the gas-mask drill. The film was very popular. Apparently there was an inferior remake, under the title Short Cut to Hell, in the late 1950s – but it bombed and I have never seen it.

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Greene’s next “entertainment” was The Confidential Agent in 1939, a thriller that again reflects a contemporary political situation. A civil war is going on in an unspecified country, although it is clearly modelled on the Spanish Civil War, which was in its dying days when the novel appeared. Main characters are not given full names, perhaps to avoid using clearly Spanish names. Our hero, called only D., has been sent to England by his government (read the Spanish Republic) to negotiate over crucial supplies with an important English industrialist. But in England he is dogged by L., an agent for the other side in the civil war (read the Francoists). D. is hunted through foggy England – but D. in turn becomes the hunter.  He has to track down some of L’s agents. They have murdered a little girl who witnessed something that they did not want reported to the police. So again, as in A Gun for Sale, there is the double-chase. Given that this is a novel in which Greene was politically “engaged”, it is odd how flat much of it is, including the cliché of a final romantic clinch. For en route, D. becomes involved with some romantic relief from “the other side” in the (most improbable) form of an aristocratic young English beauty, the daughter of the industrialist forsooth. Nevertheless, there are some moments of waspish humour, as when the “cover” for a group of nasty foreign agents is an Esperanto club and when Greene pokes fun at a group of “Buchmanites” or “Oxford Groupers”. Greene is said to have dashed this novel off in six weeks.

Film: The Confidential Agent waited six years to be filmed by Hollywood, and when it appeared (as Confidential Agent) at the end of 1945, it was able to refer directly to the Spanish Civil War and to its hero as Spanish. The trouble was that said hero was played by the very French Charles Boyer, while his aristocratic English girlfriend was played by the very American Lauren Bacall. This caused much mirth among reviewers, the lead performers were ridiculed and the film was not a hit. Oddly enough, Greene himself liked the film and praised the actors. But his main motive was that, unlike many other adaptations of his work, the film actually followed his plot closely and kept its English setting.  I saw Confidential Agent once only, as a teenager, on old black-and-white television. I remember the sequence in which the child was killed as genuinely terrifying (I wonder how I would react to it now?). But, apart from its caricature villains (Peter Lorre, Katina Paxinou), it did not make a big impression.

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In 1943 came Greene’s next “entertainment”, The Ministry of Fear. It reflects the London of the Blitz, and of ongoing fears of Nazi agents, as clearly as The Confidential Agent reflects the Spanish Civil War. Topicality was one of Greene’s things. Arthur Rowe - mentally fragile after a spell in a psychiatric hospital and still wracked with guilt after mercy-killing his sick wife - manages by pure chance to stumble onto a ring of spies. At a church fete, he is accidentally given a cake which, it transpires, happens to contain vital microfilm. He is framed for murder and chased by enemy agents intent on retrieving said microfilm. In turn, he is intent on exposing the spies, with the help first of a private detective and then of the police. Yet again we have the double-chase. Lively enough, and working through a pattern of events with sufficient suspense, The Ministry of Fear is an acceptable thriller but with an oddly surreal tone. There is a scene in which a house is destroyed in a credible air-raid, but many events and characters seem to belong to a dotty alternative universe – a fey second-hand-book dealer; a séance involving eccentric (and very gullible) people; the hero’s incarceration in a mental hospital, run by spies, where his memory is taken from him. Add to this the nightmarish depiction of London and the narration of the hero’s dreams as he shelters in the Tube, and you have what sometimes amounts to hysteria – perhaps a real reflection of a popular mood when England was under siege.

By this time, in my sequential reading of all Greene’s “entertainments”, I was getting a little weary of what was becoming a formula – in A Gun for Sale, The Confidential Agent and The Ministry of Fear there is the double-chase; the flawed hero who so both hunter and hunted; big industrialists or respectable people in the community eventually exposed as the true villains; and a sympathetic young woman who gets attached to the hero and comes to see his point of view. (In The Ministry of Fear, she is the sister of a foreign agent.) Dare I say, they sometimes sound as if they were written for the movies.

Film: Which brings me to the disappointment that was the film version of The Ministry of Fear – doubly disappointing because it was directed by the illustrious Fritz Lang. By this stage, Greene was prominent enough for film studios to snap up the rights to his novels. Ministry of Fear appeared in 1944, the year after the novel was published. It is set in a Hollywood-studio version of England, and stars the uncharismatic (read “dull”) Ray Milland and the forgettable Marjorie Reynolds. It more-or-less follows Greene’s plot, but softens everything and withdraws all nuance. In the novel, when Arthur Rowe (given a different name in the film) finally pairs with the Nazi agent’s sympathetic sister, it is clear that their’s will be a very rocky and probably unhappy partnership. But in the movie it is all sweetness and light and a cliché fadeout on a lame wisecrack about wedding cakes. Again watching it as a teenager, I can remember being disgusted by how unmemorable even the cackling villains were.

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In complete contrast, the next “entertainment” begat what is still probably the best-known movie to be adapted from a work by Greene. It is sometimes cited as the best British film ever made. This is The Third Man – but it has a unique relationship with its film version. This novella was first published in 1950, the year after the film was released. At the urging of the director Carol Reed, Greene wrote the novella specifically so that it could be filmed. It is dedicated to Reed. Reading it is a little like reading a slightly expanded film treatment.

Because this short book has been so overwhelmed by the film version, and because the plot is so well-known, I will not insult you by giving you a plot summary. You already know it is set in post-war battered Vienna, it concerns the flashy criminal Harry Lime and his innocent friend Holly Martins, there is a bogus funeral, a ride on the Prater fairground wheel, a chase through the sewers and a famously downbeat fadeout – not to mention the zither music of Anton Karas.

My own view is that the film is much superior to the novella.

For the record, however, here are a few things that surprised me when I recently re-read it. Disconcertingly, the novella is told in the first-person by the English policeman Calloway (played in the film by Trevor Howard). Even more disconcertingly, the novella’s Harry Lime and Holly Martins (called “Rollo” in the novella) are both Englishmen of public school background. Given that they were memorably played by the Americans Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in the movie, this is the hardest thing to take. In the novella, Harry Lime does not get to make his famous speech about cuckoo clocks (apparently this was inserted into the film by Orson Welles). Also in the novella, there is a repeated running gag about Martins, the hack-writer of Westerns, being mistaken for a serious intellectual literary star. In the film this becomes one single – very amusing – sequence in which the British Council representative (played by Wilfred Hyde-White) forces Martins to make a disastrous appearance before a group of literati.

The Third Man was Greene’s last “entertainment” to be a thriller.

His final two “entertainments” were essentially comedies.

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Loser Takes All (1955) is a very short novella – even shorter than The Third Man.

A middle-aged clerk unexpectedly gets to honeymoon with his young wife in Monte Carlo. He becomes addicted to gambling and wins. But the more he acts like a boorish rich man, the less his young wife likes him. To test him, and make him more agreeably humble, his young wife goes off with another man. It has a cutesie happy ending.

A forgettable piece of fluff, this is very atypical of Graham Greene. Acceptable as light rom-com, it is probably the most trivial thing he ever wrote and certainly the most forgettable. It was made into a British film in 1956, and re-made as an American film under the title Strike it Rich in 1990. Both films flopped. I have not seen either of them.

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Finally, the last novel Greene designated as an “entertainment” – and it is a good one. Our Man in Havana (1958) concerns Wormold, a humble English vacuum-cleaner salesman in pre-Castro Havana. Middle-aged, divorced and rather morose, Wormold makes a precarious living at best, but has a demanding teenaged daughter, Milly, who goes to an expensive private school. Wormold desperately wants to send her to an even more expensive finishing school in Europe – but he doesn’t have the funds. Enter an English MI5 recruiter, who thinks Wormold would make a good spy. He commissions Wormold to gather information on government officials and military movements. But Wormold is not a spy and knows nothing about these things. Solution? To earn his pay, he sends totally fabricated reports to MI5 in London. They are so convincing that Wormold is soon regarded as a top agent. MI5 even believe him when he sends them a blue-print for a vaccum cleaner, claiming it is a secret weapon. And to increase his pay, he fabricates a cohort of non-existent local agents and informers.

Of course it all unravels eventually (and farcically).

There’s an interesting element to this novel. Greene was often seen as forseeing events that only later were to become major news. For example his The Quiet American was written years before American military involvement in Vietnam, but it clearly suggested that it was on the way. Our Man in Havana was written when Batista was still in power in Cuba, and when rebels in the mountains could still be depicted largely as “noises off”. Yet Havana is depicted as a place of sleaze (brothels, strip clubs, porn movies) and of official corruption, especially in the character of the police chief Captain Segura. There is a sequence where Wormold is beaten up by police for breaking a curfew. And one of Womold’s fabrications is that the Cuban government is installing huge secret weapons in the hills, which can be observed only from the air. To readers of a later date, this sounds eerily like the observation from the air of Russian missiles in Cuba, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis four years after this novel was written – but in this case, I think Greene’s version was just a lucky coincidence, not a prophecy.

As Greene had himself been in Britain’s secret service during the Second World War, Our Man in Havana must in some part reflect his amusement with the ineptitude and the willingness to believe tall stories of his former employers – and perhaps their credulous acceptance of bogus spies.

Film: Like The Third Man, Our Man in Havana was made into another very good British film, again directed by Carol Reed, in 1959. In fact, the film was shot in Havana just after Fidel Castro’s rebels had taken over, and Castro paid a visit to the film’s set. Alec Guinness is perfectly cast as the humble-but-devious Wormold, and there are good performances by Ralph Richardson (a pompous chap at MI5 HQ in London) and Noel Coward (the arrogent recruiter), although the scene-stealer is Ernie Kovacs as Captain Segura. The film follows the novel’s plot, but plays up the comedy and plays down the sleaze. Graham Greene himself wrote the screenplay. It was good box-office, was praised by the critics, and I remember enjoying it on the one occasion I saw it.

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Well here endeth my round-up of Graham Greene’s “entertainments”, but what conclusion can I reach about them? How are they distinguishable from Greene’s other “serious” novels?

First and obvious point – the “entertainments” are all genre works, either thrillers or comedies, with not too much nuance in the characterisation, and little of the psychological probing or analysis of social and political matters found in his other novels. As I read my way through the “entertainments”, I found many of them dated in their formulas, although they might have seemed startlingly modern when they first appeared. Early in the 20^th century, British spy-novels and thrillers tended to have upper-crust toffs as heroes (the John Buchan school), but Greene, along with Eric Ambler, was one of the first to make his leading characters middle-class or working class. Note the chorus girls in both Stamboul Train and A Gun for Sale, and the middle-class hero of The Ministry of Fear.  Reading the “entertainments”, I couldn’t help thinking of them in terms of the movies that were made from them, no matter how many differences there were between text and screen.

On the other hand, there is in these “entertainments” much that puts them at one with Greene’s other work. Most obviously A Gun for Sale (1936), with its killer Raven who has had a horrible, brutalising childhood, is very much like a first run at Greene’s next “serious” novel Brighton Rock (1938), with its killer Pinky who has had a horrible, brutalising childhood. Then there is the matter of the man on the run. A Gun for Sale, The Confidential Agent and The Ministry of Fear all turn on a main character who is somehow on the run (from police, spies or other enemies). But then some of Greene’s “serious” novels have the same narrative arc. The Man Within has its main character on the run from the smugglers he has betrayed. The Power and the Glory has the Mexican “whisky priest” on the run from violently anti-clerical forces.

And so we come to religion, which upsets some readers of Greene’s works. Novels like Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The End of the Affair and (especially) The Heart of the Matter turn on theological questions and serious cases of conscience. There is no such religious matter in the “entertainments”. But only Graham Greene could have dropped into his “entertainments” the religious asides that are found in them. The Communist politician in Stamboul Train wants some form of absolution for his failures in life, and wonders if there might have been something in the Catholicism he abandoned in his youth. In A Gun for Sale, Raven thinks of his horrible childhood in a reformatory, and wonders why there isn’t more true Christianity in Christians. (The novel also features a pathetic defrocked clergyman.) The Ministry of Fear has no overt religious references, but Arthur Rowe’s mercy-killing is a big moral question and there is a scene in which Arthur sees and admires a missal and approves of the truthful things it says about war. (Stretching a point, one could also note that when Arthur is forced to lose his memory, he feels inanely happy – but once a remembers who he is, he feels a crushing weight of guilt. This could square with Greene’s idea that Original Sin is part of being truly human.) In The Third Man (both film and novella), Harry Lime and “Rollo” (Holly) Martins have a discussion on where God fits into a horrible world.

Certainly the “entertainments” are (often formulaic) genre works and not as serious in intention as Greene’s other work. But in setting, narrative arc, and some of the religious asides, they are as clearly the work of Greene as anything is.

After a couple of months (April and May) reading all Greene’s “entertainments” for my evening diversion, I could only classify them as “Graham Greene Lite”. Greene was quite right to abandon the system of segregating them from his other novels.