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inspynomo -- update!

I'm well behind on posting for InSpyNoMo, it's awful! I've actually got The Phantom Spy by Max Brand, One, Two, Buckle My Shoe by Agatha Christie, Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, The Mystery of Dr Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer, Bulldog Drummond by Sapper and Casino Royale by Ian Fleming just about ready to go, with Russian Hide-and-Seek by Kingsley Amis and The Spy Who Died of Boredom by George Mikes on their way.

However, it's been too freaking hot for anything the past week. (For London. Well aware it's a borderline frost alert compared to some places.) I've pretty much spent that last seven days working on a tyepset because all I had to do was endless tedious formatting, which is productive and boring, but mindless and thus non-strenuous.

I still have another four books to go to complete the month-long project, which is a bit shitty on my part. Still, it's been such a fab way of getting me back into researching that I've decided upon finishing the International Spy Novel Month, I will begin the International Spy Novel Project and try to post a report on a new book once a week until either my PhD is finished or until the PhD takes over and I become a proper recluse instead of just a fake one like I am now.

Regardless, starting tomorrow I will be back to posting a book a day. I'm sort of thinking I might start a new, separate blog for InSpyNoPro. It'll have the complete series of posts, as well as an on-going reading list and anything else I can come up with that might be relevant.

What do you think?

petite purls

Have you seen this new online magazine, Petite Purls? Too cute! I'm apparently a bit late to the scene on this one, but I'm delighted I've found it. It caters specifically for babies, tots and kids' knits, which is awesome considering several people I know have either just become or are on their way to becoming sprogged.

Weirdly enough I was thinking just last week that it's weird, given knitters presumed predilection for knitting for children, that there's no teeny pattern-specific magazine out there. And now there is!

Thus far the patterns are geared somewhat more for little girls than little boys (though I can think of a couple of little boys that would look adorable dressed in a watermelon-themed tanktop), but it's only their first issue, so I'm sure it will balance out.

Great work, Editor Ladies! I can't wait to see the next issue!

stash dash

Now that the exchange rate is starting to settle my yearning for stash has increased a billionfold. The combination of Etsy (Knitmommy!) and Ravelry (Alishairish!) (Admittedly in the UK, but still! Look at that destash page!) is killing me. I am fully aware that this is ridiculous. I have oodles of yarns, and not just sock yarns, which is the usual culprit. Back in February I broke and decided that so long as it wasn't sock yarn I was free to buy it. This was because I had a lot of sock yarn. Heaps of the stuff. So I allowed myself to buy a sweater's worth here, a cardi's worth there...

I added 7 jumper's-of-various-sizes worth of yarn to the 4 already there since February. This isn't very much in the grand scheme of things. However, I've currently got two cardigans on the needles (2 months and 1 year, 2 months respectively) and a tunic (6 months) and I've been doing nothing but sock-knitting and shawl-planning since the end of May. And I wasn't supposed to buy any non-Loumms yarn at all this year.

Maybe I should concentrate on increasing my fabric stash instead...

inspynomo -- day 18, the adventures of caleb williams, or things as they are

I've promised myself cookies if I get this up quickly, so hopefully this won't be too long. If I were terribly organised, I'd have made a chronological list of what I wanted to read instead of just grabbing something off the shelf at whim, but there you have it. Organised chronological lists are clearly not my forte, so it took me until Day 18 of InSpyNoMo to get to what many people consider the very start of the British spy genre.

It's worth noting that the debate as to where, when and how the spy genre got started is actually fairly intense. Some claim it all began with James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy (1826), some say Homer's Odyssey, some believe it began with the story of Caleb and Joshua, some that it actually all began with Japanese folktales of ninjas and migrated over trade routes. Although these all have elements of espionage, I believe the genre (as a genre) didn't really begin to take shape until the early 1900s when the spy thriller, when a continuous movement began. Nonetheless, it's interesting to look back at pre-genre examples of spies in fiction as, if you remember Eric Ambler, they provide insights into the attitudes and preconceptions at work the time in which they were written.

I was reminded of William Godwin's The Adventures of Caleb Williams, or Things As They Are (1794) while I was reading One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940) by Agatha Christie. In it Christie's Poirot is faced with agents of the British Secret Service, a Greek secret agent and a myriad spies and spooks sneaking about trying to change the world. I might look at it more in depth for Day 19, as it's a wonderful example of how the popularity of the spy genre influenced other genre writers in the lead up to the Second World War. However, the reason why it made me turn to Caleb Williams is that the phrase 'things as they are', the subtitle for Godwin's text, is repeated throughout the text. It made me wonder if Christie herself hadn't done a bit of research into the history of the spy genre herself when setting about to write her story.

I've mentioned before that spies in fiction, prior to WW2, were rarely placed in the position of the hero. Rather they were if not the villains then certainly not anyone to be taken into a lasting confidence. Looking back as a genre was beginning to take shape, attitudes towards actual spies and secret agents were levelled with wariness and mistrust (which you can definitely see at work in Riddle of the Sands, for instance). In fact, more often than not, the spy is little more than a criminal operating on a grand politicised scales, while the hero is unwillingly thrust into events beyond his control, which he nonetheless seeks to rectify. This isn't relegated to the pulpier side of the genre; even more literary authors, such as Rudyard Kipling (Kim, 1901) or Joseph Conrad (The Secret Agent, 1907), reflect a passionate uneasiness for the type of person who could enter themselves into spying.

Their stories situated the spy in the borderlands of morality. While they recognised the necessity of spying for reasons of national security, the actual figure of the spy was regarded with anxious disquietude. Anyone who would knowingly engage in such suspect activities must himself be suspicious. Although this attitude was not relegated solely to foreign agents, there was a tacit agreement that spying was something ‘the other side’ engaged in. This means that characters such as Verloc and even Kim, certainly Mahbub Ali, are immediately held with suspicion, even if they are unusually central to the plot.

Curiously, the suspicion that cast all spies as villains can be traced back to an eighteenth-century preoccupation with property crime as well as a disconcertion with social mobility (which itself could considered a form of 'status crime' against the upper classes). Consider the story of Lady Godiva’s naked canter through Coventry. The townsfolk agreed not to observe Godiva as she passed by, but that Peeping Tom broke that trust and spied on her. ‘Peeping’ was a crime of the most intimate nature, because it violated the sanctity of the private body, but also socially assumed shields between gender and class. So we find that while military and political spies were a common feature of all political systems, conventions of honour and social privacy held that spying of any form, be it espionage or voyeurism, was considered something of a rape of social order and values.

This certainly provided the grounds for William Godwin’s novel. Caleb Williams discovers his master, Mr Falkland, has murdered a man and walked free by framing another. In spite of his lowly position, he sets out to expose Falkland's crimes. Initially, Caleb, though amazed and secretly delighted in his own daring, is more appalled he ever discovered the secret in the first place than he is with the nature of the crimes themselves. After his intention to expose the truth becomes known by Falkland, he finds himself on the run. As Falkland's men chase him from up and down England, Caleb adopts a number of different disguises in order to avoid capture. He quickly realises that if he is to survive he must adopt the gestures and accents of those around him, their style of dress and the way they walk must become his; yet, in these transformations, he fears that the necessity of his ‘counterfeit manners’ becomes akin to is role as spy against Mr Falkland.

As he becomes further enmeshed in his disguises and the lies that go with them, Caleb is increasingly aware that he is losing his grasp on himself. His own real identity seems to be getting written over. Later, he frets that

[e]very atom of my frame seemed to have a several existence, and to crawl within me.

However, he know he can only succeed in escaping Falkland's by spying on those who take him in, in order to and he is all too aware that spying was what got him into this mess in the first place. Eventually Caleb becomes

seized with so unconquerable an aversion to disguise [that] the idea of spending my life impersonating a fictitious character, that I could not for present at least reconcile my mind to anything of the nature.

Weary of being on the run, he decides to ‘come in from the cold’ and take his information against Mr Falkland to the authorities. 

Is Caleb Williams really the first true proto-British spy thriller? It's indeed a possibility. Its peeping protagonist on the run until such time as the adversary can be exposed bears many of the elements we now associate with the genre. The navigation between moral ambiguity and active voyeuristic participation can be seen later reflected in the twentieth-century division between realism and sensation. The underlying moral uncertainty that haunts Caleb throughout his adventure will later become one of the key features of the realistic branch of the genre; while the sensational side becomes steeped in the chase narrative that necessitates chameleon-like shifts through disguises and cover stories.

There are heaps of things I could get into here, but it would make for an intolerably long post (particularly as I started out by saying this would only be a short one! Suffice to say, Caleb Williams is part of a long history of British crime stories. It's a history that is as much politically motivated (as Godwin certainly intended his novel) as it is socially and morally motivated. The roots of almost all major thriller genres can be traced through to texts like Caleb Williams. Though they disguise themselves with an escapist front, virtually all major thriller genres actively seek to question the social/political infrastructure of their time. They engage the reader in a dialogue, asking whether or not things should remain as they are, or if there mightn’t be something better.

inspynomo -- day 17, shamelady

I went running yesterday for the first time in years. When I came in, dripping with sweat and stinking, I felt so fucking alive I could have died. It was awesome! I couldn't understand why I didn't do it more often, Today my disembodied legs are being tortured for treason in a far-off dictatorship with no room for negotiation. All I want to do is slather them with that Deep Heat numbing stuff and moan, but we've got two birthday barbecues to go to which means I have to be cheerful. All day. It fucking bites.

Also, my downstairs neighbours have had the builders in all fucking week and it's making me crabby (it's SATURDAY! Go home! Stop knocking down walls!). All this has conspired to rid me of my usual filter, so this post is going to be a little saltier, shall we say, than normal.

Shamelady (1966) follows the adventures of Charles Hood, the 'toughest secret agent in the business' according to The Times blurb on the cover of my edition. He's employed by a City group called The Circle, who send him out to do various secret agenty things on behalf of the City (the financial capital of The World centre of London) and Britain. He gets sent out to investigate a communist accounts fiddle and winds up entangled in an international gold-smuggling ring. He's a bit inept and gets caught a great many times, falls for a girl who is one of the gang and who twice admits she lied before but now she really does love him, before finally falling for another girl and skipping off into the sunset with her once the Big Baddie gets mowed down in a French cave.

There's also a computer named Lulu that is programmed to TERMINATE but doesn't because it's a computer and he is Charles Hood, Super Spy Man Extraordinaire.

There's literally fuck all about Shamelady or its author James Mayo (pseud. for Stephen Coulter) online. Of the few things I could find about it, the one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that Mayo was a friend and fan of Ian Fleming, who helped him research for Casino Royale and later went on to become a spy himself. I actually wonder if this is why there's so little on him. He apparently worked for Eisenhower during the Cold War (despite being British) and there's a lot of speculation on the type of work he was involved in.

Regardless, Mayo indeed was a Fleming disciple and used Bond as a springboard for his agent. As Alice Dryden notes, 'The Charles Hood novels attempt to better the Bond novels by having double the number of girls, double the violence, and half the credibility.'

I want to say she's wrong and that there are hidden depths to the work and that the insights into the psychology of the Cold War and international criminals far outwieghs the negatives, but she's basically right. It's enjoyably escapist, but only if you get can past the awful cliches that punctuate the story: the borderline pornographic sex scenes, 'tender' conversations between Hood and his lady of the moment, the male fantasy consensual rape sequence, the fist-gnawing revelations, the odd blubbering from Hood after a fight and endless chases. In this respect, it's a rather frustrating read. I found myself doing a lot of eyerolling and scoffing, and yet the bits in between really are very well thought out, and the actual plot holds together well.

The narrative bears a carefully woven balance between spy-fi formula and the realities of espionage during the Cold War. It is actually quite political, it's warmingly philosophical and it does offer a very honest, rather dismal view of the dreary world of ordinary men.

[Hood] was appalled when he looked out over the roofs and domes and saw the black streams of City prisoners marching along to deliver themselves up for the day. The great human swarm crawling along stretched out to the suburbs […] swinging on to buses, disappearing into doorways – to do what? To fiddle all day with bits of paper. To sit at desks, to strip off their coats on hot days, roll up their shirtsleeves, push out their chest and snap their braces – and get right down to looking at their files.

This conflict between disdain for those who do their work behind a desk and a suppressed desire to relate to them is found throughout the genre, harking right back to Riddle of the Sands (Carruthers is a City clerk who bores easily, while Davies laments he 'never quite fit' behind a desk).

There is a decided filmic quality throughout, which makes it a highly visual read. Mayo places the reader in the centre of the action; there is none of the detached agony of witnessing violence you find in Hall or le Carre. It is very immediate. Even one of the more ridiculous scenes in which Hood is being pelted with a deluge of leaden cricket balls and has only a shark-fishing rod and a couple of hooks to defend himself, you can feel each thwack of the balls over your head, feel the cartilage in your knee splinter when he gets hit and the merciless tear of flesh and bone when the hook finally catches his opponent's shoulder. Even fly-fishing in the desert comes alive.

I'm rather conflicted about Shamelady -- is it just a poorly done copycat of Bond? Does it shit all over the conception of the British superspy? Does it actually achieve anything on its own or is it merely a piece of hackneyed drivel that badly needs rewriting?

Or does it really bear merit as a piece of thoughtful exposition that hides behind a sensationalist narrative in order to portray the deeper fears of technology and Britain's failing grip as a world superpower that were so pressing throughout the post-war/early Cold War years? I'm not sure. In any case, it's the third in the Charles Hood series, and after reading it I did go out and Abebooks the other two, so it must have triggered something in me. Clearly, it needs more investigation.

One final note: when researching, I did find two rather interesting links: John Fraser's Jottings on Thrillers and a speculative article by John S Craig on whether James Bond was based on a real person. Both worth a read.

not enough crime fiction links?

Here's two more:

1. Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography 1749--2000 by Allen J Hubin. It is what is says, a comprehensive bibliography, though alas not the entire thing, just the addenda. I think I might have to look into purchasing a copy.
2. Mystery File. From my brief perusal, this could be a very useful blog to have lying around.

inspynomo -- day 16, the mask of dimitrios

In the run-up to the Second World War, fictional spy heroes were rarely professional spies, rather they were ordinary men caught up in the madness of a continent on the brink of war. Eric Ambler definitely follows in this vein. The hero of The Mask of Dimitrios (1939, in the States A Coffin for Dimitrios) is the very ordinary Charles Latimer, a British mystery writer on holiday in Istanbul.

Through a chance meeting with Colonel Haki, head of the Turkish secret police and a fan of crime fiction, Latimer becomes enthralled with the enigmatic Dimitrios Makropoulos. A career criminal and assassin, Dimitrios had racked up charges for drug dealing, slavery, assassinations and espionage. He had been chased by police over continents for decades, yet now his body had turned up suddenly in an Istanbul morgue.

Latimer is fascinated with the idea of Dimitrios, both as a real-life murderer and as a real-life murder victim, and falls into a casual investigation of his own. At least, that's what he tells himself. Latimer's quiet fascination turns into an obsessive need to follow the trail, and this leads him straight into a dangerous world of corruption, subterfuge, murder and political intrigue. Telling himself all the while that he can quit when he wants to, Latimer’s amateur detecting takes him across Europe in search of the shady associates of the dead criminal. 

For the most part, the story is much more interesting in terms of what it achieves within the genre than as a story in and of itself. Ambler once said in an interview that thrillers:

really say more about the way people think and governments behave than many of the conventional novels. A hundred years from now, if they last, these books may offer some clues to what was going on in our world.

I think this is already apparent in his works. Ambler was a working class leftist with a high sense of morality and had equal interest in human sociology as well as human psychology, and felt he was more attune to the sentiments of ordinary Britons than those 'running the system'. As Britain entered the Second World War, it was becoming more and more apparent that the working and lower classes felt the old rules didn't apply. This is certainly reflected in the way Ambler seems to abolish old conceptions of the hero/villain dichotomy. Before him the heroes were British, mostly upper class, mostly conservative gentlemen, who put up a patriotic fight in the face of dirty foreigners. Ambler largely ignores national differences as an indicator of trustworthiness and makes a point of leaving 'villain' relative and 'hero' incidental.

To a certain extent, I rather feel that this is his most lasting legacy. Ambler, in humanising his heroes and villains, made them harder to distinguish. Indeed, these days villains are very often more interesting than the hero, and often incite a horrified sympathy from the reader, who recognise themselves in the darkest villain.

inspynomo -- day 15, the man who was thursday

I think I've mentioned in a previous InSpyNoMo post the link between modernism and early spy fiction. Though they end up in different places, I do think they were born out of the same project. The seminal works of the early spy genre certainly were preoccupied with questions of where the individual 'fit' in the increasingly industrialised, overpopulated cities of the western world. There was so much social and political flux at the time; rather than merely a means of escaping the grim reality of the everyday, this type of fiction offered a means of both understanding and monitoring how society and the institutions that governed society operated and what directions they were moving.

One of the genre's most recognisable early features is its focus on the reconciliation (and in some cases, re-establishment) of the place of the individual within a rapidly changing world, with the provision of reassurances that the institutions in place are justified and work towards their better interest.

The Thirty-nine Steps, The Secret Agent and Riddle of the Sands are all excellent examples of this, but today's book is perhaps the best example of all.

The Man Who Was Thursday (1908) by G K Chesterton is one of those novels that constantly appears to be one thing, yet is always another -- and as one of the very best, very early spy novels I would expect nothing else. I'll only give a brief synopsis, and though it's a bit of a spoiler, you'd easily be able to pick it up for the first time and enjoy it just as well.

At a small gathering of poets, we are introduced to the two characters that will shape the entire course of the novel. Gregory is a poet and an arnarchist. Syme is a poet and a policeman. Syme is commissioned by Scotland Yard to infiltrate and destroy the Central Council of Anarchists. The man from Scotland Yard explains that there is a difference between the naive anarchists, who merely think rules hinder freedom and thus ought to be broken, and the radicals, who actively seek to destroy the system.

'[T]hey mean death,’ emphasises the constable. ‘When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without right or wrong, they mean the grave. They have but two objects, to destroy humanity and then themselves.'

Syme quickly secures a place on the central commity and is given a codename, Thursday; all of the council members are named after days of the week. Yet as Syme moves through the organisation, each ‘anarchist’ he uncovers is revealed to be a fellow police officer, put in place by Scotland Yard. This revelation is somewhat startling, as each of them had striven to uphold the façade as seamlessly as possible in order to avoid detection. Finally able to throw aside their disguises, they race to seek out and eliminate the elusive Sunday, leader of the council, only to discover that he embodies all that they seek to uphold. He is the very man from Scotland Yard who sent them in to investigate the Central Council of Anarchists from the start.

This revelation achieves a great number of things, but I like these two best. First, this discovery comes as both a frightening interruption in the belief in the symbolic order they (the police) think they are upholding, and a relief. In posing as the anarchist chief, the man behind Sunday forces them to question and to defend themselves. This at once both confirms the uprightness inherent within the symbolic order and emphasises the need to be constantly alert to those who threaten it in order to maintain it from harmful bodies.

Second, we find that the only true anarchist is Gregory, who takes Syme to that fateful council meeting, where he gained his entry into the Central Council of Anarchists. Gregory should have been made Thursday, but was superseded by Symes. Had Gregory managed to infiltrate the council of faux anarchists, his very presence would have lead to real anarchy. Yet, because he is the embodiment of Philosophical Anarchism, and able to argue beyond it, he is virtually unrecognisable by the people who claim to follow the same mandate. He is dismissed as fraudulent, as not being ‘anarchist enough’, at the very beginning of the adventure by the sub-committee of real, if ‘harmless’ anarchists.

These two results culminate in a feeling of there having been a narrow escape. The only true revolutionary is proven to be not merely ineffective in realising his aims, but an insignificant threat when faced with the might of the symbolic order. The superiority by the big Other, represented by Sunday, within the symbolic order, represented by Scotland Yard, is solidified, thus allowing Syme and his fellows to return to the safety of the established order, secure in the knowledge that it cannot be meaningfully disrupted.

This basic concept has had enormous repercussions on the genre that followed. The convoluted absurdity that no one is who they say they are yet to be wary of those who insist they are is a cornerstone of the genre. It is a springboard into social paranoia, xenophobia and intensified political, industrial and economic secrecy. Yet for many, particularly writers coming from the Cold War era, its acknowledgement of the extreme absurdity of basing a system of (inter)national security on assumptions and clandestinity demonstrates just how foolish the system and those who build it really are.

Matthew is reading this right now (his token participation in my project), I might see if I can get him to write up a post with his observations once he's done.

inspynomo -- day 14, the secret adversary

I've been an avid listener of Forgotten Classics since about the third episode. Forgotten Classics is a mostly weekly podcast hosted by Julie, who has made it her business to uncover those classic stories that have slipped by the wayside as new ones come in. We're (we're!) reading Uncle Tom's Cabin at the moment -- not really forgotten, but not as centre stage as perhaps it ought to be; past readings include The Black Moth by Georgette Heyer and China Court by Rumer Godden. Aside from being a wonderful reader, Julie manages to get the balance just right between her various 'segments' and the chosen story. Although I often rather wish she'd get more into the miscellany, I actually relish the fact she keeps us wanting more, by keeping it brief and diving into the stories quickly and without fuss.

I'm pretty good at knitting and reading at the same time, especially with older editions of the books I've been reading, which flop open and stay that way with relative ease. However, in 'reading' The Secret Adversary (1922) by Agatha Christie, it's been rather lovely to sit back and let Julie do the work!

I really quite liked The Secret Adversary, but more as an early spy novel than as something by Agatha Christie. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if readers who haven't looked much beyond Poirot or Miss Marple found the adventures of the young Tommy and Tuppence vaguely disappointing. But this is as much a question of the development of Christie as a writer honing her craft as it is anything else. It was only her second novel and very much dependent on the context of Christie's experiences of living in the 1920s.

The story follows Thomas Beresford and Prudence 'Tuppence' Crowley, old childhood friends who chance upon each other in Piccadilly and lament that the post-war years are doing nothing for their livelihood. They are both short of funds (no rich relatives to be seen) and finding life altogether dull. In lieu of anything else, they start up The Young Adventures and place an advert saying they are willing to do anything and to travel anywhere. Their first assignment, however, turns out to be more exciting than they could have imagined, and they are quickly sucked into the world of international intrigue and national security, face-to-face with the elusive 'Mr Brown'.

Because I think this is a book that should be read, or at least listened to, I will say little more than that about the plot. However, a bit of exposition into the various facets you can expect from it should do no harm.

As is common in examples of the genre from this era, the spy of the piece is the villain, even if the heroes do engage in espionage themselves. As in Riddle of the Sands, the heroes here must engage in spying only insofar as the people they are up against are spies. Interestingly, though, Tommy and Tuppence straddle the boundry between amateur and professional. They are professional insofar as they have been hired, but they lack the sort of training Bond or Quiller benefit from. Nonetheless, their amateurism is met with an instinct for action and the ability to think quickly in tight situations.

The diaries of 'Mr Brown' offer some quite keen insights into the peculiar qualities of spies and secret agents.

I saw that I would have to lead two lives. A man like myself is bound to attract notice. I must have a successful career to mask my true activities. Also, I must cultivate a personality. [...] If I had chosen to be an actor, I should have been the greatest actor living. No disguises, no greasepaint, no false breads -- personality! I put it on like a glove. When I shed it, I was myself [...] a man like ever other man. I called myself Mr Brown. There are hundreds of men called Brown. There are hundreds of men just like me.

This illustrates precisely what is it that makes the spy quite so terrifying. At their most successful, they are able to transform themselves into something familiar, something that is almost comfortingly safe and secure. It's this ability to infiltrate seamlessly that makes the spy something to fear. Of course, as Hannay observes in The Thirty-nine Steps, it only takes one slip for the facade to be broken. But even when their identity is faced with doubt, they are largely protected by the very human desire for people to be who they say they are. Although, and regrettably, these days we are more inclined towards cynicism, I think this desire still holds, which is why Christie's twist at the end is still entirely affective.

As I was researching for this, I came upon one interesting list (1,000 novels everyone must read -- the crime fiction division) that I will have to inspect properly later and two quite interesting websites. The first is Girlebook, an e-book venture headed by a mother and daughter team, which specialises in those forgotten classics written by women. Their catalogue is relatively small compared to some, but they are gather apace and I was rather pleasantly surprised with what they have on offer.

The second is a community blog called Crime Fiction from Poe up to the 1950s, which I found via Mysteries in Paradise. I don't have a live journal, so I don't think I can participate, more's the pity, but after reading through some of their backposts I'm pretty tempted. The group seems to be mostly interested in Golden Age and cosies, but there are several Top 10 lists that got my attention and some of the reviews are most insightful, indeed.

inspynomo -- day 13, the shapes of sleep

This has possibly been the laziest Sunday I've had all year. Matthew and I went over to Louisa and Aneet's for dinner last night, for which Aneet cooked up a storm! It was one of the finest curries I've ever tasted. Who knew the depths of her culinary talents?

As we didn't get home till gone 3 in the morning, we spent most of today in bed, eating, reading, lounging, until Matthew headed off to spend Father's Day with his dad and I bought a punnet of plums for some plummy cake. (It's cooling right now, so as soon as I'm done this I will be helping myself to some as a reward.)

Not infrequently my brain will fill in or substitute details for things until I become quite convinced that what I thought was there really is what's there. The discovery of the truth is either hilarious or disappointing. In this case I have been convinced since I put this book down that it was called The Shades of Sleep, which I think rather mysterious and almost supernatural. It's not called that at all, and while it doesn't change the story itself, I have to admit a bit of me crumbled when I learnt the truth.

The Shapes of Sleep (1962) by JB Priestley is more an international detective story than a spy spy story, even so it feels like a proper example of the genre. The spy in question is Ben Sterndale, investigative reporter and cynic. He is a spy insofar as he doesn't believe the bullshit he's fed by powerful people, and can work out enough of what's really going on to produce hunches that get him into trouble. Yet his investigating does indeed require him to delve into the act of espionage and in this story, it brings him face to face with actual secret agents.

He's hired by an advertising agency to find out who stole an important document from one of the director's desk. The document was sold to the director who, since the theft, has begun to realise it was probably stolen in the first place and really just wants out of the situation before the major shareholders find out what he's done. Sterndale's initial lead is in hospital (following a car 'accident') and before he dies cries out about the shapes of sleep. Though Sterndale isn't quite sure what that means, he decides to follow his next to Germany, to find out. There, a number of coincidences gets him caught up with a group of British secret agents who believe he's a dirty Commie and would have had him arrested if not for their leader who is probably the only real spy in the plot. Major Churston-Spenser is actually a sort of free agent, who fakes loyalty to three sides and plays them off each other. His only real interest is to make enough money selling phoney secrets to be able to escape the South America and retire.

In any case, Sterndale eventually uncovers the fact that the man at the heart of it all is one Professor Voss, experimental psychologist and communist who had been working for some time in West Germany as a double agent for the Other Side. He had been working on a method of sending subliminal propaganda messages via certain shapes. Voss kills himself once he begins to feel his secret is out, leaving Sterndale to scoop a vital sheaf of paper which document how it can be put into practice.

The obvious thing of interest here, of course, is that Sterndale is sent out by an unsuspecting ad agency to find a tool that would allow that agency to psychologically manipulate the public into believing whatever the 'shapes of sleep' made them. This all suggests a deep-rooted distrust, distaste even, in the media and the power of hidden propaganda on the average citizen. As far as Sterndale reckons, the ad agency has no more claim to this power than the Other Side (and through a series of convenient events neither actually gains possession). He clearly dislikes the secrecy propagated by the Cold War and how susceptible it makes us to 'behaving like hypnotised sheep'.

What is also interesting is what results after the traditional thriller angle peters out, two chapters from the end. We are suddenly left with a genuine Socratic dialogue in which the position of women in society and how the relationship between the sexes is effectively a series of infiltrations coming in from either side in an attempt to understand each other. No conclusion is really reached, but it's clear that Sterndale (and perhaps Priestley?) is left wondering whether men haven't spent most of history crapping all over the human race.

The correlation between equality between the sexes, advertising and propaganda is an interesting one, particularly today. This isn't quite what Priestley is getting at, certainly, but when you think about the depiction of women in advertising, of male-female relationships, the depiction of a heteronormative world, of the 'alternative cultures' within a heteronormative social landscape, you have to wonder if these shapes of sleep haven't been put to work after all.