History: This book was published in 1982. Keneally was inspired to write the book by Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor. and his actions in saving Polish Jews from the Nazis.
In 1980 Keneally went into Pfefferberg's shop in Beverly Hills to buy a briefcase. Keneally had just finished a book -signing in Beverly Hills and was on his way home to Australia. Pfefferberg, learning that Keneally was a novelist, showed him his extensive files on Schindler, kept in two cabinets in his back room. After 50 minutes of entreaties, Pfefferberg was finally able to convince Keneally to write the book; and Pfefferberg became an advisor, accompanying Keneally to Poland where
they visited Kraków and other sites associated with the Schindler story. Keneally dedicated Schindler's Ark to Pfefferberg: "who by zeal and persistence caused this book to be written."
After the publication of Schindler's Ark in 1982, Pfefferberg worked to persuade Steven Spielberg to film Keneally's book, using his acquaintance with Spielberg's mother to gain access.
The awarding of the Booker Prize caused some controversy at the time: as this award is for the best fiction, it was debated on whether Keneally wrote fiction or was simply reporting on history.
Plot: This novel tells the story of Oskar Schindler, self-made entrepreneur and bon viveur who almost by default found himself saving Polish Jews from the Nazi death machine. Based on numerous eyewitness accounts, Keneally's story is unbearably moving but never melodramatic, a testament to the almost unimaginable horrors of Hitler's attempts to make Europe judenfrei, or free of Jews. What distinguishes Schindler in Keneally's version is not, superficially, kindness or idealism, but a certain gusto. He is a flawed hero; he is not "without sin". He is a drinker, a womaniser and, at first, a profiteer. After the war, he is commemorated as a "Righteous Person" at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, but he is never seen as a conventionally virtuous character. The story is not only Schindler's. It is the story of Kraków's dying ghetto and the forced labor camp outside of town, at Plaszów. It is the story of Amon Goeth, Plaszów's commandant. After the war, his business ventures fail, he separates from his wife, and he ends up living a shabby life in a small flat in Frankfurt. Eventually he arranged to live part of the year in Israel, supported by his Jewish friends, and part of the year as a sort of internal emigré in Frankfurt, where he was often hissed at in the streets as a traitor to his "race". After 29 unexceptional postwar years he died in 1974. He was buried in Jerusalem as he wished with the help of his old friend Pfefferberg.
Review: It’s a remarkable story of course and Keneally did a great job bringing it to our attention. But the storytelling is hampered, I feel, by his insistence on sticking so closely to facts that he’s reluctant to re-create any cnversation that he doesn’t have detailed records of. The book is therefore told mostly in a style that lacks any immediate dynamic, and although it is an accurate historical account, it may not be a novel.
Opening Line: "In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket – a large ornamental gold-on-black enamel swastika, emerged from a fashionable apartment block in Straszewskiego Street on the edge of the ancient centre of Cracow, and saw his cheauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous, and even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine."
Closing Line: "He was mourned in every continent."
Quotes: "All children would go to Tarnow to be shot, to Stutthof to be drowned, to Breslau to be indoctrinated, deracinated, operated upon. Do you have an elderly parent? They are taking everyone over fifty to the Wieliczka salt mines. To work? No. To seal them up in disused chambers."
Rating: Good
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
274. Ulysses - James Joyce
History: This novel was first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on February 2, 1922, in Paris. Joyce divided Ulysses into eighteen chapters or "episodes".
At first glance much of the book may appear unstructured and chaotic; Joyce once said that he had "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant",
Plot: Every episode of Ulysses has a theme, technique, and correspondences between its characters and those of the Odyssey. In The Telemachiad, we get a picture of Stephen as he has matured since the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The first three chapters introduce would-be writer Stephen Dedalus, familiar to Joyce readers from his earlier novel. On the morning of 16 June 1904, Stephen leaves the disused watchtower he shares with "stately, plump Buck Mulligan", vowing never to return.
After teaching at a nearby school he talks to an aging anti-semetic professor who gives him a letter to deliver to the offices of a Dublin newspaper.
He then goes for a long walk on the beach that gives him plenty of time to ponder his literary aspirations and dead mother fixation. Stephen's mother died and he is wracked with guilt over her death, because he would not kneel and pray.
In "Proteus" we also get our first really daring stylistic chapter, and begin to get a sense of the intense stream-of-consciousness and stylistic play that will come to dominate the book. He finds his way to Sandymount Strand and mopes around for some time, mulling various philosophical concepts, his family, his life as a student in Paris, and again, his mother's death. As Stephen reminisces and ponders, he lies down among some rocks, watches a couple and a dog, writes some poetry ideas, picks his nose, and urinates behind a rock.
"Calypso" is our first peek into the mind of Jewish advertising salesman Leopold Bloom. We also get a feeling for the Blooms' troubled marriage, which will come to underlie much of the book's plot. Leopold Bloom buys a kidney, then returns home to 7 Eccles Street and has it for breakfast. He then defecates. Upstairs Molly, his unfaithful opera singer wife, waits for him to leave so she can entertain her lover.
There are a number of different conflicts that arise in The Wanderings of Ulysses as Bloom attends a funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery, his symbolic encounter with death mirroring Odysseus's descent into Hades.
It's lunchtime, so Bloom stops at Davy Byrne's "moral pub" for a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. He then pays a call to the National Library where he overhears Stephen sounding off about Shakespeare.
Stephen presents his Hamlet argument, and Bloom speaks out against prejudice and shortsighted Irish nationalism. Stephen has a vision of his dead mother, knocks over Bella Cohen's chandelier with his ashplant (cane) and screams Non Serviam before running out of the brothel and getting in a fight with an English constable. Bloom has an argument with a pub bore whose blinkered anti-Semitism mirrors Homer's one-eyed Cyclops.
Stephen and Bloom meet at last in a maternity hospital in a chapter whose structure is meant to represent both the nine months of pregnancy and the birth of the English language.
In terms of our understanding of the characters, "Circe" is also a climax because we approach something like full disclosure.
Stephen and Bloom have been united, and it is here that they begin to get along and have a long discussion in Bloom's kitchen before he shows Stephen out. It is after 2am and for both of them, it is clear that the action of their day has passed and that things are now winding down.
Review: Some depict this novel as a hoax on the literary world, I don't think so. It is a groundbreaking novel, with stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and highly experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, and allusions—as well as its rich characterizations and broad humour, have made the book perhaps the most highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon. That he has a message there can be no doubt. He seeks to tell the world of the people that he has encountered in the forty years of sentient existence; to describe their conduct and speech and to analyze their motives, and to relate the effect the "world," sordid, turbulent, disorderly, with mephitic atmosphere engendered by alcohol and the dominant ecclesiasticism of his country, had upon him, an emotional Celt, an egocentric genius, whose chief diversion and keenest pleasure is self-analysis and whose lifelong important occupation has been keeping a notebook in which has been recorded incident encountered and speech heard with photographic accuracy and Boswellian fidelity. Mr. Joyce is an alert, keen-witted, brilliant man who has made it a lifelong habit to jot down every thought that he has had, whether he is depressed or exalted, despairing or hopeful, hungry or satiated, and likewise to put down what he has seen or heard others do or say. It is not unlikely that every thought that Mr. Joyce has had, every experience he has ever encountered, every person he has ever met, one might almost say everything he has ever read in sacred or profane literature, is to be encountered in the obscurities and in the frankness of "Ulysses." If personality is the sum total of all one's experiences, all one's thoughts and emotions, inhibitions and liberations, acquisitions and inheritances, then it may be truthfully said "Ulysses" comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.
Opening Line: "Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."
Closing Line: "...I put my arms around him and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes and I said yes I will Yes."
Quotes: "Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves".
"I hate that in women no wonder they treat us they way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy".
Rating: Excellent.
At first glance much of the book may appear unstructured and chaotic; Joyce once said that he had "put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant",
Plot: Every episode of Ulysses has a theme, technique, and correspondences between its characters and those of the Odyssey. In The Telemachiad, we get a picture of Stephen as he has matured since the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The first three chapters introduce would-be writer Stephen Dedalus, familiar to Joyce readers from his earlier novel. On the morning of 16 June 1904, Stephen leaves the disused watchtower he shares with "stately, plump Buck Mulligan", vowing never to return.
After teaching at a nearby school he talks to an aging anti-semetic professor who gives him a letter to deliver to the offices of a Dublin newspaper.
He then goes for a long walk on the beach that gives him plenty of time to ponder his literary aspirations and dead mother fixation. Stephen's mother died and he is wracked with guilt over her death, because he would not kneel and pray.
In "Proteus" we also get our first really daring stylistic chapter, and begin to get a sense of the intense stream-of-consciousness and stylistic play that will come to dominate the book. He finds his way to Sandymount Strand and mopes around for some time, mulling various philosophical concepts, his family, his life as a student in Paris, and again, his mother's death. As Stephen reminisces and ponders, he lies down among some rocks, watches a couple and a dog, writes some poetry ideas, picks his nose, and urinates behind a rock.
"Calypso" is our first peek into the mind of Jewish advertising salesman Leopold Bloom. We also get a feeling for the Blooms' troubled marriage, which will come to underlie much of the book's plot. Leopold Bloom buys a kidney, then returns home to 7 Eccles Street and has it for breakfast. He then defecates. Upstairs Molly, his unfaithful opera singer wife, waits for him to leave so she can entertain her lover.
There are a number of different conflicts that arise in The Wanderings of Ulysses as Bloom attends a funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery, his symbolic encounter with death mirroring Odysseus's descent into Hades.
It's lunchtime, so Bloom stops at Davy Byrne's "moral pub" for a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. He then pays a call to the National Library where he overhears Stephen sounding off about Shakespeare.
Stephen presents his Hamlet argument, and Bloom speaks out against prejudice and shortsighted Irish nationalism. Stephen has a vision of his dead mother, knocks over Bella Cohen's chandelier with his ashplant (cane) and screams Non Serviam before running out of the brothel and getting in a fight with an English constable. Bloom has an argument with a pub bore whose blinkered anti-Semitism mirrors Homer's one-eyed Cyclops.
Stephen and Bloom meet at last in a maternity hospital in a chapter whose structure is meant to represent both the nine months of pregnancy and the birth of the English language.
In terms of our understanding of the characters, "Circe" is also a climax because we approach something like full disclosure.
Stephen and Bloom have been united, and it is here that they begin to get along and have a long discussion in Bloom's kitchen before he shows Stephen out. It is after 2am and for both of them, it is clear that the action of their day has passed and that things are now winding down.
Review: Some depict this novel as a hoax on the literary world, I don't think so. It is a groundbreaking novel, with stream-of-consciousness technique, careful structuring, and highly experimental prose—full of puns, parodies, and allusions—as well as its rich characterizations and broad humour, have made the book perhaps the most highly regarded novel in the Modernist pantheon. That he has a message there can be no doubt. He seeks to tell the world of the people that he has encountered in the forty years of sentient existence; to describe their conduct and speech and to analyze their motives, and to relate the effect the "world," sordid, turbulent, disorderly, with mephitic atmosphere engendered by alcohol and the dominant ecclesiasticism of his country, had upon him, an emotional Celt, an egocentric genius, whose chief diversion and keenest pleasure is self-analysis and whose lifelong important occupation has been keeping a notebook in which has been recorded incident encountered and speech heard with photographic accuracy and Boswellian fidelity. Mr. Joyce is an alert, keen-witted, brilliant man who has made it a lifelong habit to jot down every thought that he has had, whether he is depressed or exalted, despairing or hopeful, hungry or satiated, and likewise to put down what he has seen or heard others do or say. It is not unlikely that every thought that Mr. Joyce has had, every experience he has ever encountered, every person he has ever met, one might almost say everything he has ever read in sacred or profane literature, is to be encountered in the obscurities and in the frankness of "Ulysses." If personality is the sum total of all one's experiences, all one's thoughts and emotions, inhibitions and liberations, acquisitions and inheritances, then it may be truthfully said "Ulysses" comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.
Opening Line: "Stately, plump, Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed."
Closing Line: "...I put my arms around him and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes and I said yes I will Yes."
Quotes: "Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves".
"I hate that in women no wonder they treat us they way they do we are a dreadful lot of bitches I suppose its all the troubles we have makes us so snappy".
Rating: Excellent.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
273. Cranford - Elizabeth Haskill
History: The best-known novel of the 19th century English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It was first published in 1851 as a serial in the magazine Household Words, which was edited by Charles Dickens.
Plot: The book has little in the way of plot and is more a series of episodes in the lives of Mary Smith and her friends, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two spinster sisters. One of the "major" events in the story is the return to Cranford of their long-lost brother, Peter Jenkins, which in itself is only a minor portion of the work, leaving the rest of the novel at a low-key tone. More like a book of short stories about the town of Cranford, and the lack of male characters within it.
Review: I thought this was a very boring book, not only in the way it was written but the lack of substance. Some of it can be humourous, like the cat that swallowed the piece of treasured lace, or Peter that dressed up like a woman holding a baby, but not enough to hold my attention, because as soon as it introduced an interesting character, they were gone, tragically like dead, or enlisted in the army. I hate to do it, but I compare this writer with the dreaded Jane Austen.
Opening Line: "In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women."
Closing Line: "We all love Miss Matty, and I somehow think we are all of us better when she is near us."
Quotes: ". . . she would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed! she knew they were superior."
Rating: Poor.
Plot: The book has little in the way of plot and is more a series of episodes in the lives of Mary Smith and her friends, Miss Matty and Miss Deborah, two spinster sisters. One of the "major" events in the story is the return to Cranford of their long-lost brother, Peter Jenkins, which in itself is only a minor portion of the work, leaving the rest of the novel at a low-key tone. More like a book of short stories about the town of Cranford, and the lack of male characters within it.
Review: I thought this was a very boring book, not only in the way it was written but the lack of substance. Some of it can be humourous, like the cat that swallowed the piece of treasured lace, or Peter that dressed up like a woman holding a baby, but not enough to hold my attention, because as soon as it introduced an interesting character, they were gone, tragically like dead, or enlisted in the army. I hate to do it, but I compare this writer with the dreaded Jane Austen.
Opening Line: "In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women."
Closing Line: "We all love Miss Matty, and I somehow think we are all of us better when she is near us."
Quotes: ". . . she would have despised the modern idea of women being equal to men. Equal, indeed! she knew they were superior."
Rating: Poor.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
272. Get Shorty - Elmore Leonard
History: Published in 1990.
Plot: The book's story centers around Chili Palmer, a small-time shylock (or loanshark) based in Miami, who is sent after Leo Devoe, who has scammed an airline out of $300,000 in life insurance by faking his own death. Leo had been aboard a plane whose flight was delayed, prompting Leo to leave the plane and go drinking in the airport bar. Leo misses the plane's actual take off,and when it crashes Leo's "widow" is given a check for 300,000 dollars, money which Leo takes to Las Vegas. Leo's trail takes Chili to Las Vegas, where he finds a more interesting assignment: the casino is looking to collect from Harry Zimm, a horror film producer based in Los Angeles. Palmer, himself very interested in the movie industry, takes the extra assignment and heads for Los Angeles.
Palmer lets his interest in the movie industry overshadow his collection job. He sneaks into the house of Karen Flores (Zimm's friend) in the middle of the night, startling both Zimm and Flores, and after he tell Zimm he has to pay his Las Vegas markers,and then explains that he has a idea for a movie. Zimm is immediately taken in by Palmer's charm and his movie idea, although Flores is still skeptical. Palmer recounts Leo Devoe's story in the third person, and recalls chasing Leo to Las Vegas as if it were an uncompleted work of fiction. Flores in smart, and soon points out that the story clearly isn't fictional, she saw the plane crash the news in the past week, and Palmer is the obviously the shylock mentioned in the story. Soon, Zimm asks for Chili's helpin dealing with a good script he wants to buy. Zimm tells Chili that this script, "Mr. Lovejoy" could be Academy Award worthy material. In an altercation with Catlett, Zimm and Palmer tell him that, while his investmentin Freaks is sound, they are making another movie first. Catlett tells them to move the money into this new picture; Zimm says he cannot, as the new movie deal is "structured".
Meanwhile, Catlett is involved in a Mexican drug deal which doesn't go through. He has left the payment in a locker at the L.A. airport, but the Colombian sent to receive the money, Yayo Portillo (Catlett keeps calling him Yahoo), doesn't feel safe unlocking the locker with so many DEA agents staked out nearby. Catlett later meets Yayo back at his home, and after Yayo threatens to tell the DEA who Bo is, Bo shoots him.
Catlett soon offers the locker money to Zimm as an investment, telling him to send Palmer to get the money. Palmer senses something amiss, signs out a nearby locker as a test, and surely enough is taken for questioning by drug officials when he tries to open it.
Palmer and Flores are meanwhile seeking the interests of Martin Weir (the title character), a top-tier Hollywood actor to whom Flores was once married, to play the lead in Zimm's film.
The loose ends are tied up when Barboni comes to Los Angeles looking for the money Palmer collected from Leo Devoe only to find the key to the locker from the failed drug deal in one of Palmer's pockets. Thinking Palmer has stashed his cash in a locker, he goes to the airport and is busted by drug officials. In a final showdown with Catlett, Catlett is double-crossed by his partner, Bear.
The novel ends with Zimm, Palmer and Flores having visited a few production studios and wondering why writing the ending of a story was always the hardest part.
Review: On one level the book is pure Leonard an exciting underworld story with great street talk and those edgy characters that he does so well. On another level the book is a social satire and, with its shift from Vegas to L.A., shows us a contemporary world lost in greed and seduced by show biz. Palmer's easy success as a producer (in essence doing his own life story) is a thinly veiled commentary on the shallowness of Hollywood and the lack of skill of many of its leaders.
Opening Line: "When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of their off-and-on cold winters: thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo or lunch at Vesuvios's on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off."
Closing Line: "Goddamn endings, man, They weren't as easy as they looked."
Quotes: ''That's what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn't like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how to write, didn't you? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas . . . where they belong, if you aren't positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I've even seen scripts where I know words weren't spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don't think it's too important.''
Rating: mediocre
Plot: The book's story centers around Chili Palmer, a small-time shylock (or loanshark) based in Miami, who is sent after Leo Devoe, who has scammed an airline out of $300,000 in life insurance by faking his own death. Leo had been aboard a plane whose flight was delayed, prompting Leo to leave the plane and go drinking in the airport bar. Leo misses the plane's actual take off,and when it crashes Leo's "widow" is given a check for 300,000 dollars, money which Leo takes to Las Vegas. Leo's trail takes Chili to Las Vegas, where he finds a more interesting assignment: the casino is looking to collect from Harry Zimm, a horror film producer based in Los Angeles. Palmer, himself very interested in the movie industry, takes the extra assignment and heads for Los Angeles.
Palmer lets his interest in the movie industry overshadow his collection job. He sneaks into the house of Karen Flores (Zimm's friend) in the middle of the night, startling both Zimm and Flores, and after he tell Zimm he has to pay his Las Vegas markers,and then explains that he has a idea for a movie. Zimm is immediately taken in by Palmer's charm and his movie idea, although Flores is still skeptical. Palmer recounts Leo Devoe's story in the third person, and recalls chasing Leo to Las Vegas as if it were an uncompleted work of fiction. Flores in smart, and soon points out that the story clearly isn't fictional, she saw the plane crash the news in the past week, and Palmer is the obviously the shylock mentioned in the story. Soon, Zimm asks for Chili's helpin dealing with a good script he wants to buy. Zimm tells Chili that this script, "Mr. Lovejoy" could be Academy Award worthy material. In an altercation with Catlett, Zimm and Palmer tell him that, while his investmentin Freaks is sound, they are making another movie first. Catlett tells them to move the money into this new picture; Zimm says he cannot, as the new movie deal is "structured".
Meanwhile, Catlett is involved in a Mexican drug deal which doesn't go through. He has left the payment in a locker at the L.A. airport, but the Colombian sent to receive the money, Yayo Portillo (Catlett keeps calling him Yahoo), doesn't feel safe unlocking the locker with so many DEA agents staked out nearby. Catlett later meets Yayo back at his home, and after Yayo threatens to tell the DEA who Bo is, Bo shoots him.
Catlett soon offers the locker money to Zimm as an investment, telling him to send Palmer to get the money. Palmer senses something amiss, signs out a nearby locker as a test, and surely enough is taken for questioning by drug officials when he tries to open it.
Palmer and Flores are meanwhile seeking the interests of Martin Weir (the title character), a top-tier Hollywood actor to whom Flores was once married, to play the lead in Zimm's film.
The loose ends are tied up when Barboni comes to Los Angeles looking for the money Palmer collected from Leo Devoe only to find the key to the locker from the failed drug deal in one of Palmer's pockets. Thinking Palmer has stashed his cash in a locker, he goes to the airport and is busted by drug officials. In a final showdown with Catlett, Catlett is double-crossed by his partner, Bear.
The novel ends with Zimm, Palmer and Flores having visited a few production studios and wondering why writing the ending of a story was always the hardest part.
Review: On one level the book is pure Leonard an exciting underworld story with great street talk and those edgy characters that he does so well. On another level the book is a social satire and, with its shift from Vegas to L.A., shows us a contemporary world lost in greed and seduced by show biz. Palmer's easy success as a producer (in essence doing his own life story) is a thinly veiled commentary on the shallowness of Hollywood and the lack of skill of many of its leaders.
Opening Line: "When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of their off-and-on cold winters: thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo or lunch at Vesuvios's on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off."
Closing Line: "Goddamn endings, man, They weren't as easy as they looked."
Quotes: ''That's what you do, man, you put down one word after the other as it comes in your head. It isn't like having to learn how to play the piano, like you have to learn notes. You already learned in school how to write, didn't you? I hope so. You have the idea and you put down what you want to say. Then you get somebody to add in the commas . . . where they belong, if you aren't positive yourself. Maybe fix up the spelling where you have some tricky words. There people do that for you. Some, I've even seen scripts where I know words weren't spelled right and there was hardly any commas in it. So I don't think it's too important.''
Rating: mediocre
Sunday, October 25, 2009
271. The Third Man - Graham Greene
History: Greene's novella, or "entertainment," was written in 1950 as a sort of preliminary draft for a screenplay and was not actually intended to stand alone as a written work. The motion picture, stated Greene, is better than the story because it is the story in its finished state, and it is the film, starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles, that most people will remember.
Plot: The film is set in Austria's capital city Vienna, devastated and recovering from the Second World War. The city was at the time divided into four separate zones and one international zone, jointly controlled by the victorious Allied powers.
American pulp Western author Rollo Martins arrives seeking an old friend, Harry Lime, who has offered him the opportunity to work with him in Vienna.
Arriving at Lime's apartment, Martins discovers that Lime has been recently killed by a lorry while crossing the street. Shocked, he heads to the cemetery to attend Lime's funeral, where he meets two British Army Royal Military Policemen, Sergeant Paine, who is an enormous fan of Martins' books, and his superior, Major Calloway. After the services, Martins accepts an invitation to speak to the members of a local book club, delaying his departure to do so. He is contacted by a friend of Lime's, Baron Kurtz, who wants to talk about Lime's death. Kurtz relates that he and Popescu, another friend of Lime's, had picked Lime up after the accident and brought him over to the side of the street, where before dying he had asked them in a brief conversation, to take care of Martins and Anna, Lime's actress girlfriend. Kurtz mentions the theatre Anna works in, but advises that the case is pointless to pursue and best left.
Martins heads to Anna's workplace and arranges a meeting with her. During their conversation, he becomes suspicious and wonders if Lime's death had really been an accident. The porter at Lime's apartment house tells Martins that there was in fact
no possibility that Lime could have been alive after being hit by the lorry, due to a broken neck, and adds that he saw a third man helping to carry the body across the street, not two as Kurtz and Popescu had said. Martins pressures the porter to tell
his story to the police, but the man refuses, becoming agitated, and asks Martins to leave.
Martins walks Anna back to her apartment. To her surprise, the police are there searching her room. They find a forged passport used to escape the Russian quarter of the city, and take Anna with them. Martins then visits Doctor Winkel, a friend of Kurtz's, Popescu's and Lime's, and who was present when Lime was killed. On Martins' arrival, Winkel is preparing to eat a sumptuous meal of roast chicken and is obviously doing well, despite the rationing that is the norm in Vienna. Martins questions Winkel about the circumstances surrounding Lime's death, and Winkel reassures Martins that there were only two men present at Lime's accident. Martins is not convinced, due perhaps to Winkel's air of evasiveness.
The next day, the porter offers to give Martins more information about the death, but when he arrives to talk, the man has been murdered. Escaping from the hostile and suspicious crowd outside the porter's house, Martins is driven to the book club
meeting, but unable to collect his thoughts he makes a poor show. His sole coherent response is to an inquiry from the audience, a man (Popescu, one of Lime's friends) who asks what his next book will be, to which he pointedly replies that his upcoming novel is called The Third Man and will be inspired by actual facts. He flees when he notices two suspicious-looking men at the back of the hall.
The British policeman Calloway advises Martins to leave Vienna and, when Martins refuses and demands an investigation into Lime's suspicious death, finally reveals the truth about Lime's racket. Calloway shows him a dossier and photographs proving
that Lime stole penicillin from military hospitals (the first known antibiotic and at the time a new and scarce life-saver commanding a very high price on the black market), and sold it for a high price in highly diluted form, with devastating effects on his many victims. Martins, convinced, agrees to leave Vienna. As he departs the police station, a Russian officer comes in and asks Calloway for Anna's forged passport in order to take her back to the Russian quarter. Martins heads back to Anna's apartment to say goodbye and discovers that she too had been told by Calloway about Lime's activities. Leaving her apartment, Martins discerns across the darkened square, a man watching from a dark doorway. A lighted window illuminates the man's face briefly. It is Harry Lime, alive, well and smirking. Unable to catch up with Lime when he flees, Martins summons Calloway, who determines that Lime has escaped into the sewers via a kiosk. Calloway realizes that Lime has been using the sewer tunnels to move about the city undetected. Finally convinced that the wanted man is alive, the British police exhume Lime's coffin and find that another man, Joseph Harbin, has been buried in his place. Harbin, an orderly in a military hospital who had recently vanished, was thought to have stolen the penicillin.
The next day, Martins meets with Lime in the Soviet sector, on Vienna's famous Ferris wheel, the Riesenrad, in the Wurstelprater amusement park. They talk and Lime is dismissive about any effects of his activities. He offers to bring Martins in on his racket and implies that Martins will be disposed of if he causes further problems, but Martins rejects the suggestion and hints that he will not be easy to dispose of. Lime compares the people moving on the ground far below to dots, and asks in a celebrated monologue (see below) whether Martins would really feel pity, if "one of those dots stopped moving, forever", and whether he would actually decline the monetary rewards of doing so.
Calloway asks Martins to help capture Lime by luring him to a rendezvous. Martins negotiates safe conduct for Anna out of Vienna in return; she leaves the train angrily rather than depart Vienna, accept his offer, or set aside her feelings for Lime. Martins reconsiders his involvement, but Calloway takes him to a hospital and shows him children crippled physically and mentally by meningitis after receiving Lime's under-strength penicillin, and Martins agrees to assist in drawing Lime out for them. When Lime arrives at the cafe, Anna calls a warning. He evades capture and reaches the sewers, but police reinforcements have arrived and begin a mass search of the underground tunnels. He is eventually cornered and fires at Sergeant Paine, killing him, being shot by Major Calloway in return. Lime, badly and perhaps fatally injured, drags himself up a staircase to a grating, but is unable to push it open. Martins, using Paine's gun, climbs the steps and shoots his old friend. In the aftermath, Martins attends Lime's second funeral. He waits by the roadside to speak with Anna, but she simply walks past him.
Review: I listened to this book, read by James Mason. I enjoyed it but didn't get the story, which is apparently unfinished. When Graham Greene was asked to come up with a script for Carol Reed to film, he saw an opportunity to flesh out the bare bones of an idea--suppose someone saw an old friend, supposedly dead, on the street one day. Of course, Greene & Reed & Orson Welles turned this idea into the great movie The Third Man (1949). For the novel, Greene returned to the scenario and rendered the whole story as he originally envisioned it. Most of the changes are fairly minor--freed of the presence of Joseph Cotten, Martins is English not American--but sadly missing is the famous line from the movie, which Welles apparently wrote himself, about Italy under the amoral Borgias producing magnificent culture while Switzerland's hundreds of years of democracy has produced only chocolates and the cuckoo clock. It does retain the great concluding chase through the sewers of the city, which seem to physically embody the moral cesspool that Cold War Europe was becoming. This is a work that presages LeCarre and much of the ambivalent spy fiction of the 60's & 70's. It is perhaps not quite up to the standards of the movie or of some of Greene's other books, but those are high standards indeed.
Opening Line: "One never knows when the comet but I get the impression that you would rather not be bothered."
Closing Line: "Poor all of us, when you come to think of it."
Quotes: “I'd make comic faces... and stand on my head and grin at you between my legs... and tell all sorts of jokes. I wouldn't stand a chance, would I?”
Rating: Okay.
Plot: The film is set in Austria's capital city Vienna, devastated and recovering from the Second World War. The city was at the time divided into four separate zones and one international zone, jointly controlled by the victorious Allied powers.
American pulp Western author Rollo Martins arrives seeking an old friend, Harry Lime, who has offered him the opportunity to work with him in Vienna.
Arriving at Lime's apartment, Martins discovers that Lime has been recently killed by a lorry while crossing the street. Shocked, he heads to the cemetery to attend Lime's funeral, where he meets two British Army Royal Military Policemen, Sergeant Paine, who is an enormous fan of Martins' books, and his superior, Major Calloway. After the services, Martins accepts an invitation to speak to the members of a local book club, delaying his departure to do so. He is contacted by a friend of Lime's, Baron Kurtz, who wants to talk about Lime's death. Kurtz relates that he and Popescu, another friend of Lime's, had picked Lime up after the accident and brought him over to the side of the street, where before dying he had asked them in a brief conversation, to take care of Martins and Anna, Lime's actress girlfriend. Kurtz mentions the theatre Anna works in, but advises that the case is pointless to pursue and best left.
Martins heads to Anna's workplace and arranges a meeting with her. During their conversation, he becomes suspicious and wonders if Lime's death had really been an accident. The porter at Lime's apartment house tells Martins that there was in fact
no possibility that Lime could have been alive after being hit by the lorry, due to a broken neck, and adds that he saw a third man helping to carry the body across the street, not two as Kurtz and Popescu had said. Martins pressures the porter to tell
his story to the police, but the man refuses, becoming agitated, and asks Martins to leave.
Martins walks Anna back to her apartment. To her surprise, the police are there searching her room. They find a forged passport used to escape the Russian quarter of the city, and take Anna with them. Martins then visits Doctor Winkel, a friend of Kurtz's, Popescu's and Lime's, and who was present when Lime was killed. On Martins' arrival, Winkel is preparing to eat a sumptuous meal of roast chicken and is obviously doing well, despite the rationing that is the norm in Vienna. Martins questions Winkel about the circumstances surrounding Lime's death, and Winkel reassures Martins that there were only two men present at Lime's accident. Martins is not convinced, due perhaps to Winkel's air of evasiveness.
The next day, the porter offers to give Martins more information about the death, but when he arrives to talk, the man has been murdered. Escaping from the hostile and suspicious crowd outside the porter's house, Martins is driven to the book club
meeting, but unable to collect his thoughts he makes a poor show. His sole coherent response is to an inquiry from the audience, a man (Popescu, one of Lime's friends) who asks what his next book will be, to which he pointedly replies that his upcoming novel is called The Third Man and will be inspired by actual facts. He flees when he notices two suspicious-looking men at the back of the hall.
The British policeman Calloway advises Martins to leave Vienna and, when Martins refuses and demands an investigation into Lime's suspicious death, finally reveals the truth about Lime's racket. Calloway shows him a dossier and photographs proving
that Lime stole penicillin from military hospitals (the first known antibiotic and at the time a new and scarce life-saver commanding a very high price on the black market), and sold it for a high price in highly diluted form, with devastating effects on his many victims. Martins, convinced, agrees to leave Vienna. As he departs the police station, a Russian officer comes in and asks Calloway for Anna's forged passport in order to take her back to the Russian quarter. Martins heads back to Anna's apartment to say goodbye and discovers that she too had been told by Calloway about Lime's activities. Leaving her apartment, Martins discerns across the darkened square, a man watching from a dark doorway. A lighted window illuminates the man's face briefly. It is Harry Lime, alive, well and smirking. Unable to catch up with Lime when he flees, Martins summons Calloway, who determines that Lime has escaped into the sewers via a kiosk. Calloway realizes that Lime has been using the sewer tunnels to move about the city undetected. Finally convinced that the wanted man is alive, the British police exhume Lime's coffin and find that another man, Joseph Harbin, has been buried in his place. Harbin, an orderly in a military hospital who had recently vanished, was thought to have stolen the penicillin.
The next day, Martins meets with Lime in the Soviet sector, on Vienna's famous Ferris wheel, the Riesenrad, in the Wurstelprater amusement park. They talk and Lime is dismissive about any effects of his activities. He offers to bring Martins in on his racket and implies that Martins will be disposed of if he causes further problems, but Martins rejects the suggestion and hints that he will not be easy to dispose of. Lime compares the people moving on the ground far below to dots, and asks in a celebrated monologue (see below) whether Martins would really feel pity, if "one of those dots stopped moving, forever", and whether he would actually decline the monetary rewards of doing so.
Calloway asks Martins to help capture Lime by luring him to a rendezvous. Martins negotiates safe conduct for Anna out of Vienna in return; she leaves the train angrily rather than depart Vienna, accept his offer, or set aside her feelings for Lime. Martins reconsiders his involvement, but Calloway takes him to a hospital and shows him children crippled physically and mentally by meningitis after receiving Lime's under-strength penicillin, and Martins agrees to assist in drawing Lime out for them. When Lime arrives at the cafe, Anna calls a warning. He evades capture and reaches the sewers, but police reinforcements have arrived and begin a mass search of the underground tunnels. He is eventually cornered and fires at Sergeant Paine, killing him, being shot by Major Calloway in return. Lime, badly and perhaps fatally injured, drags himself up a staircase to a grating, but is unable to push it open. Martins, using Paine's gun, climbs the steps and shoots his old friend. In the aftermath, Martins attends Lime's second funeral. He waits by the roadside to speak with Anna, but she simply walks past him.
Review: I listened to this book, read by James Mason. I enjoyed it but didn't get the story, which is apparently unfinished. When Graham Greene was asked to come up with a script for Carol Reed to film, he saw an opportunity to flesh out the bare bones of an idea--suppose someone saw an old friend, supposedly dead, on the street one day. Of course, Greene & Reed & Orson Welles turned this idea into the great movie The Third Man (1949). For the novel, Greene returned to the scenario and rendered the whole story as he originally envisioned it. Most of the changes are fairly minor--freed of the presence of Joseph Cotten, Martins is English not American--but sadly missing is the famous line from the movie, which Welles apparently wrote himself, about Italy under the amoral Borgias producing magnificent culture while Switzerland's hundreds of years of democracy has produced only chocolates and the cuckoo clock. It does retain the great concluding chase through the sewers of the city, which seem to physically embody the moral cesspool that Cold War Europe was becoming. This is a work that presages LeCarre and much of the ambivalent spy fiction of the 60's & 70's. It is perhaps not quite up to the standards of the movie or of some of Greene's other books, but those are high standards indeed.
Opening Line: "One never knows when the comet but I get the impression that you would rather not be bothered."
Closing Line: "Poor all of us, when you come to think of it."
Quotes: “I'd make comic faces... and stand on my head and grin at you between my legs... and tell all sorts of jokes. I wouldn't stand a chance, would I?”
Rating: Okay.
270. A Home at the End of the World - Michael Cunningham
History: This book was written in 1990.
Plot: Bobby had grown up in a home in suburban Cleveland, Ohio during the 1960s and 1970s where partying and drugs were a recurring theme. He had already witnessed his beloved older brother's death in a home accident and his mother's death by the time he befriends Jonathan, who comes from a sheltered, but loving family. After Bobby finds his father dead, Jonathan's family takes him in. Bobby and Jonathan become best friends. Closer than brothers, they also experiment sexually. The two eventually lose touch, but meet up again in their twenties in 1980s New York, where Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his eccentric roommate Clare. Clare had planned to have a baby with Jonathan (now openly gay), but Bobby and Clare become lovers, while Jonathan still has feelings for Bobby.
Their romance occasionally is disrupted by sparks of jealousy between the two men until Jonathan, tired of being the third wheel, disappears without warning. He re-enters their lives when his father Ned dies and Bobby and Clare travel to Phoenix, Arizona for the services. The three take Ned's car back east with them, and impulsively decide to buy a house near Woodstock, New York, where Bobby and Jonathan open and operate a cafe while Clare raises the baby daughter she and Bobby have had together with Jonathan.
The trio form their own unusual family, questioning traditional definitions of family and love, while dealing with the complications of their love triangle.
Jonathan invites his former lover Erich to visit and is shocked by the state of his health, and it is determined that Erich is "sick". Jonathan is probably infected too.
In the end, Clare takes her daughter, now a toddler out for a visit to her brother and never comes back. The three men are left to themselves in the large empty house, one actively with AIDS, one infected, and one not infected.
Review: Cunningham's prose style, by turns evocative and reflective, has an unintentional comic side effect. He divides up the narration among the main characters, and they all sound the same. So Bobby, who barely gets beyond ''Uh, like, you know'' when given a line of dialogue, suddenly comes up with sentences on the order of ''Its outbuildings are anchored on a sea of swaying wheat, its white clapboard is molten in the late, hazy light.'' But the intricate, searching prose is all that keeps the novel from being as muddled as its characters. It does more to redeem them than anything they do. This is an unconventional story about the variety of ways one can fall in love and the difficulty of creating a life not bound by conventional roles.
Opening Line: "Once our father bought a convertible."
Closing Line: "Bobby announced that the minute was up, and we took Erich back to shore."
Quotes: ''We'd hoped vaguely to fall in love but hadn't worried much about it, because we'd thought we had all the time in the world. Love seemed so final, and so dull — love was what ruined our parents. Love had delivered them to a life of mortgage payments and household repairs; to unglamorous jobs and the fluorescent aisles of supermarkets at two in the afternoon.''
Rating: Okay.
Plot: Bobby had grown up in a home in suburban Cleveland, Ohio during the 1960s and 1970s where partying and drugs were a recurring theme. He had already witnessed his beloved older brother's death in a home accident and his mother's death by the time he befriends Jonathan, who comes from a sheltered, but loving family. After Bobby finds his father dead, Jonathan's family takes him in. Bobby and Jonathan become best friends. Closer than brothers, they also experiment sexually. The two eventually lose touch, but meet up again in their twenties in 1980s New York, where Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his eccentric roommate Clare. Clare had planned to have a baby with Jonathan (now openly gay), but Bobby and Clare become lovers, while Jonathan still has feelings for Bobby.
Their romance occasionally is disrupted by sparks of jealousy between the two men until Jonathan, tired of being the third wheel, disappears without warning. He re-enters their lives when his father Ned dies and Bobby and Clare travel to Phoenix, Arizona for the services. The three take Ned's car back east with them, and impulsively decide to buy a house near Woodstock, New York, where Bobby and Jonathan open and operate a cafe while Clare raises the baby daughter she and Bobby have had together with Jonathan.
The trio form their own unusual family, questioning traditional definitions of family and love, while dealing with the complications of their love triangle.
Jonathan invites his former lover Erich to visit and is shocked by the state of his health, and it is determined that Erich is "sick". Jonathan is probably infected too.
In the end, Clare takes her daughter, now a toddler out for a visit to her brother and never comes back. The three men are left to themselves in the large empty house, one actively with AIDS, one infected, and one not infected.
Review: Cunningham's prose style, by turns evocative and reflective, has an unintentional comic side effect. He divides up the narration among the main characters, and they all sound the same. So Bobby, who barely gets beyond ''Uh, like, you know'' when given a line of dialogue, suddenly comes up with sentences on the order of ''Its outbuildings are anchored on a sea of swaying wheat, its white clapboard is molten in the late, hazy light.'' But the intricate, searching prose is all that keeps the novel from being as muddled as its characters. It does more to redeem them than anything they do. This is an unconventional story about the variety of ways one can fall in love and the difficulty of creating a life not bound by conventional roles.
Opening Line: "Once our father bought a convertible."
Closing Line: "Bobby announced that the minute was up, and we took Erich back to shore."
Quotes: ''We'd hoped vaguely to fall in love but hadn't worried much about it, because we'd thought we had all the time in the world. Love seemed so final, and so dull — love was what ruined our parents. Love had delivered them to a life of mortgage payments and household repairs; to unglamorous jobs and the fluorescent aisles of supermarkets at two in the afternoon.''
Rating: Okay.
269. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carre
History: This book was published in 1974. It is the first volume of a three-book series informally known as The Karla Trilogy. These three books are also the 5th, 6th, and 7th novel in the entire series of Smiley novels.
Plot: George Smiley, the old, estranged, overweight, taciturn and sharp-minded protagonist, is recalled from his uneasy retirement when there are signs that one of the top-ranking officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service (referred to throughout as "The Circus") is a Soviet mole. A little more than a year before the events of the first chapter, "Control," the elderly chief of the Circus, believes that one of the five highest-ranking officers in the Circus is a Soviet mole. When he receives an offer from a disgruntled Czech general to reveal the mole's identity, Control privately launches "Operation Testify": he recruits Circus veteran Jim Prideaux to meet the general near Brno, in Czechoslovakia. As soon as he gets to the rendezvous, Prideaux is ambushed, and wounded by two bullets in the shoulder blade.
The first chapter opens with Prideaux taking up a post as a languages master at a small private school for boys after being repatriated to England. He brings along his vintage Alvis roadster, and lives in a caravan on the school grounds.
In London, George Smiley returns to his apartment to find his former protégé, Peter Guillam, waiting for him. Their conversation sketches the aftermath of Testify: Control was disgraced, and died shortly thereafter. Smiley was dismissed shortly after Control left the Circus, having argued that Prideaux's ambush was a sign of treason in the Circus. Control was replaced by Percy Alleline, an ambitious and highly political officer. Alleline was also Control's arch-rival within the Circus.
Control's star was already fading, and Alleline's rising, thanks to a high failure rate of Circus operations and a mysterious new source of top-grade Soviet intelligence, code-named "Source Merlin." Merlin's intelligence was dubbed "Witchcraft," which Percy Alleline had been feeding to his allies in Whitehall and the armed services. The four case officers handling Source Merlin are now the Circus's top rank: Percy Alleline, Bill Haydon, Roy Bland, and Toby Esterhase — in fact, these four men, plus Smiley, were the five Control suspected of being the mole.
Peter Guillam was demoted to head of "scalp-hunters," a sort of throwback to the rougher, hired-thugs version of intelligence officers the Circus used in its older days. Now, one of his men, Ricki Tarr, has surfaced after having gone absent during an operation eight months earlier. Guillam drives Smiley to a meeting with Tarr and Sir Oliver Lacon, the Permanent Undersecretary to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the Civil Service official with oversight authority over the intelligence services. Tarr says that on his last assignment, he had an affair with a Russian woman, Irina, the wife of a Moscow Centre operative, who told Tarr that one of her former lovers claimed to have worked as an assistant to the Soviet cultural attaché in London, Polyakov, who in reality is the case officer for a high-ranking "mole" in the Circus, code-named "Gerald" and recruited by "Karla", a shadowy Russian intelligence director.
What makes the story convincing is that no sooner had Tarr cabled London for further instructions when Irina and her husband were snatched from their hotel and put on the next plane to Moscow.
Lacon asks Smiley to "clean the stables" and find the mole, which can only be done using a secret investigation. Smiley is assisted by Guillam, and by his old friend, former Special Branch Superintendent Mendel.
Smiley gradually pieces together the story by analyzing files, interrogating witnesses and trawling through his own memory and those of other retired Circus personnel. His task is complicated because one of the suspects, Haydon, had had an affair with Smiley's wife Ann during the time period of Testify that had broken up their marriage, and he has to separate out his personal feelings.
Smiley first visits Connie Sachs, the Circus's former head of research, possessed of a phenomenal memory. During the interview, Smiley confirms the veracity of Irina's story. Irina knew that Polyakov's real name is Viktorov. Connie tells Smiley that she knew Viktorov was recruited by Karla as a special agent, but that "he simply disappeared off the face of the earth."
She confirms that there were several indications that Polyakov is a "six cylinder Karla-trained hood," but demonstrated no connection between Viktorov and Polyakov. There were also several suspicious signs that Polyakov was running an English mole, but her requests for further investigation were firmly refused by the Circus hierarchy and led to her forced retirement.
Based on a review of files stolen from the Circus by Guillam, Smiley discovers an interplay between Witchcraft and Polyakov's activities and realizes that Witchcraft and Gerald are part of the same conspiracy.
During a dinner with Peter, Smiley tells what he knows of Karla's history, including the fact that they'd met face-to-face once, after the War. Karla had been caught after setting up an illegal network in the United States, and was being held in Delhi.
Smiley interviewed him there, attempting to persuade him to defect, since he was almost certainly facing execution back home. During the interview, he loaned Karla his cigarette lighter, a gift from his wife, which Karla took away with him. Karla
returned to Moscow, outwitted his superiors, and survived. Smiley predicts that one day, Karla will be defeated because of his fanaticism.
Smiley then backtracks through the history of Operation Testify. Based on interviews with Sam Collins, the duty officer on the night of the ambush, and Jerry Westerby, a sports writer and Circus irregular, Smiley establishes that Prideaux was ambushed by Russian troops, not Czech, who were lying in wait for him.
Finally, Smiley tracks down Jim Prideaux, who gives the details of his capture and interrogation. Based on physical descriptions, Jim identifies two of his interrogators as Karla and Polyakov. The focus of the interrogation was entirely on how far Control had gotten in identifying the mole, and the interrogators were armed with amazingly detailed knowledge of his pre-mission briefing with Control ("They knew the brand of the bloody sherry, man.") After he was repatriated, Jim was given a generous severance payment and told in the strongest terms by Toby Esterhase to forget any suspicions he might have.
Smiley is now ready to go over to the attack: he gets Toby Esterhase alone, convinced that he is not the mole, and explains to Toby the shape of Karla's "very clever knot": that Source Merlin doesn't exist, he is a phantom introduced to the Circus hierarchy by "Gerald," whoever he is, as a means of allowing Alleline to supplant Control, and giving the mole a perfect cover for his activities. The Circus hierarchy believes that Polyakov is Source Merlin's London representative, and thus a perfect conduit for supplying the Witchcraft intelligence. But because Polyakov is a Moscow Centre agent, the Circus needs to pretend that he is running an English mole, by giving him "chickenfeed" - worthless intelligence tricked up to seem valuable.
This way, any indicators that the Russians have a mole inside the Circus are just part of the illusion, and the Circus hierarchy itself acts ruthlessly to suppress them, as witness Connie Sachs, Jerry Westerby, and Jim Prideaux. The problem is, in reality, Witchcraft is the chickenfeed, and one of the Circus top men really is a mole, under whose guidance the Circus has unwittingly been "handing Polyakov the crown jewels", i.e. information of great value to the Russians.
Toby tells Smiley enough about the procedures for meeting Polyakov to lay the trap: Ricki Tarr sends a message from Paris, claiming to have urgent information for Alleline, which Smiley knows will force the real mole to call an emergency meeting with Polyakov. Smiley and Guillam lie in wait at the safe house, where the mole is revealed to be Bill Haydon, whose guilt is established in person and on tape.
Alleline, Bland, and Esterhase, humiliated and defeated, bow to Smiley's suggestion that they negotiate with Karla to exchange Haydon for as many of the Circus's betrayed secret agents behind the Iron Curtain as can be saved — now that Haydon has been exposed, they will otherwise be arrested and executed.
Smiley is invited by Haydon to hear a partial and self-serving explanation of his conduct before his departure for Russia, in which Haydon discusses his reasons for becoming a mole, and also reveals that Operation Testify was a trap from the beginning, lain because both Karla and Haydon saw that Control was getting too close to exposing Haydon. Testify was to make sure that Control would have to leave the Circus and Witchcraft was to make sure that Percy Alleline replaced Control as chief of the Circus. Haydon also confesses, somewhat shamefully, that he knew the precise time of the operation because Prideaux came to him before he left for Czechoslovakia, to warn him. (Haydon and Prideaux were best friends, and possibly
lovers, when they were at university together.)
The deal with Karla is broken when Haydon is found dead on the grounds of the camp where he is being held, his neck broken. His killer is never explicitly named, but a series of verbal clues laid earlier in the novel make clear that his killer is Prideaux, taking revenge for being betrayed.
Smiley is appointed temporary head of the Circus, to contain the disaster. The novel leaves him as he is preparing to tell his wife about Haydon's treachery, since Bill was one of her many lovers.
Prideaux returns to his boys' school, and does his best to resume a normal life.
Review: I listened to this book and had difficulty getting things straight. There are so many sub-plots within sub-plots. When characters interact, he doesn’t just use it to provide the reader with information. The interaction itself is part of building the mood and making the characters more three-dimensional. In addition to understatement, he uses the English trait of nicknaming things, in a very consistent way to avoid what otherwise might seem melodramatic. In the course of elaborately and endlessly deceiving their opponents about their intentions and the kind of person they were, they were just as likely to wind up deceiving their friends and themselves. And meanwhile, the great machinery of the war used them and threw them away with a cold relentlessness.
Opening Line: "Jim Prideaux came to Thursgood School in late May."
Closing Line: "Everyone waited on Smiley's answer, but none came."
Quotes: "A committee is an animal with four back legs."
Rating: Mediocre.
Plot: George Smiley, the old, estranged, overweight, taciturn and sharp-minded protagonist, is recalled from his uneasy retirement when there are signs that one of the top-ranking officers of the British Secret Intelligence Service (referred to throughout as "The Circus") is a Soviet mole. A little more than a year before the events of the first chapter, "Control," the elderly chief of the Circus, believes that one of the five highest-ranking officers in the Circus is a Soviet mole. When he receives an offer from a disgruntled Czech general to reveal the mole's identity, Control privately launches "Operation Testify": he recruits Circus veteran Jim Prideaux to meet the general near Brno, in Czechoslovakia. As soon as he gets to the rendezvous, Prideaux is ambushed, and wounded by two bullets in the shoulder blade.
The first chapter opens with Prideaux taking up a post as a languages master at a small private school for boys after being repatriated to England. He brings along his vintage Alvis roadster, and lives in a caravan on the school grounds.
In London, George Smiley returns to his apartment to find his former protégé, Peter Guillam, waiting for him. Their conversation sketches the aftermath of Testify: Control was disgraced, and died shortly thereafter. Smiley was dismissed shortly after Control left the Circus, having argued that Prideaux's ambush was a sign of treason in the Circus. Control was replaced by Percy Alleline, an ambitious and highly political officer. Alleline was also Control's arch-rival within the Circus.
Control's star was already fading, and Alleline's rising, thanks to a high failure rate of Circus operations and a mysterious new source of top-grade Soviet intelligence, code-named "Source Merlin." Merlin's intelligence was dubbed "Witchcraft," which Percy Alleline had been feeding to his allies in Whitehall and the armed services. The four case officers handling Source Merlin are now the Circus's top rank: Percy Alleline, Bill Haydon, Roy Bland, and Toby Esterhase — in fact, these four men, plus Smiley, were the five Control suspected of being the mole.
Peter Guillam was demoted to head of "scalp-hunters," a sort of throwback to the rougher, hired-thugs version of intelligence officers the Circus used in its older days. Now, one of his men, Ricki Tarr, has surfaced after having gone absent during an operation eight months earlier. Guillam drives Smiley to a meeting with Tarr and Sir Oliver Lacon, the Permanent Undersecretary to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, the Civil Service official with oversight authority over the intelligence services. Tarr says that on his last assignment, he had an affair with a Russian woman, Irina, the wife of a Moscow Centre operative, who told Tarr that one of her former lovers claimed to have worked as an assistant to the Soviet cultural attaché in London, Polyakov, who in reality is the case officer for a high-ranking "mole" in the Circus, code-named "Gerald" and recruited by "Karla", a shadowy Russian intelligence director.
What makes the story convincing is that no sooner had Tarr cabled London for further instructions when Irina and her husband were snatched from their hotel and put on the next plane to Moscow.
Lacon asks Smiley to "clean the stables" and find the mole, which can only be done using a secret investigation. Smiley is assisted by Guillam, and by his old friend, former Special Branch Superintendent Mendel.
Smiley gradually pieces together the story by analyzing files, interrogating witnesses and trawling through his own memory and those of other retired Circus personnel. His task is complicated because one of the suspects, Haydon, had had an affair with Smiley's wife Ann during the time period of Testify that had broken up their marriage, and he has to separate out his personal feelings.
Smiley first visits Connie Sachs, the Circus's former head of research, possessed of a phenomenal memory. During the interview, Smiley confirms the veracity of Irina's story. Irina knew that Polyakov's real name is Viktorov. Connie tells Smiley that she knew Viktorov was recruited by Karla as a special agent, but that "he simply disappeared off the face of the earth."
She confirms that there were several indications that Polyakov is a "six cylinder Karla-trained hood," but demonstrated no connection between Viktorov and Polyakov. There were also several suspicious signs that Polyakov was running an English mole, but her requests for further investigation were firmly refused by the Circus hierarchy and led to her forced retirement.
Based on a review of files stolen from the Circus by Guillam, Smiley discovers an interplay between Witchcraft and Polyakov's activities and realizes that Witchcraft and Gerald are part of the same conspiracy.
During a dinner with Peter, Smiley tells what he knows of Karla's history, including the fact that they'd met face-to-face once, after the War. Karla had been caught after setting up an illegal network in the United States, and was being held in Delhi.
Smiley interviewed him there, attempting to persuade him to defect, since he was almost certainly facing execution back home. During the interview, he loaned Karla his cigarette lighter, a gift from his wife, which Karla took away with him. Karla
returned to Moscow, outwitted his superiors, and survived. Smiley predicts that one day, Karla will be defeated because of his fanaticism.
Smiley then backtracks through the history of Operation Testify. Based on interviews with Sam Collins, the duty officer on the night of the ambush, and Jerry Westerby, a sports writer and Circus irregular, Smiley establishes that Prideaux was ambushed by Russian troops, not Czech, who were lying in wait for him.
Finally, Smiley tracks down Jim Prideaux, who gives the details of his capture and interrogation. Based on physical descriptions, Jim identifies two of his interrogators as Karla and Polyakov. The focus of the interrogation was entirely on how far Control had gotten in identifying the mole, and the interrogators were armed with amazingly detailed knowledge of his pre-mission briefing with Control ("They knew the brand of the bloody sherry, man.") After he was repatriated, Jim was given a generous severance payment and told in the strongest terms by Toby Esterhase to forget any suspicions he might have.
Smiley is now ready to go over to the attack: he gets Toby Esterhase alone, convinced that he is not the mole, and explains to Toby the shape of Karla's "very clever knot": that Source Merlin doesn't exist, he is a phantom introduced to the Circus hierarchy by "Gerald," whoever he is, as a means of allowing Alleline to supplant Control, and giving the mole a perfect cover for his activities. The Circus hierarchy believes that Polyakov is Source Merlin's London representative, and thus a perfect conduit for supplying the Witchcraft intelligence. But because Polyakov is a Moscow Centre agent, the Circus needs to pretend that he is running an English mole, by giving him "chickenfeed" - worthless intelligence tricked up to seem valuable.
This way, any indicators that the Russians have a mole inside the Circus are just part of the illusion, and the Circus hierarchy itself acts ruthlessly to suppress them, as witness Connie Sachs, Jerry Westerby, and Jim Prideaux. The problem is, in reality, Witchcraft is the chickenfeed, and one of the Circus top men really is a mole, under whose guidance the Circus has unwittingly been "handing Polyakov the crown jewels", i.e. information of great value to the Russians.
Toby tells Smiley enough about the procedures for meeting Polyakov to lay the trap: Ricki Tarr sends a message from Paris, claiming to have urgent information for Alleline, which Smiley knows will force the real mole to call an emergency meeting with Polyakov. Smiley and Guillam lie in wait at the safe house, where the mole is revealed to be Bill Haydon, whose guilt is established in person and on tape.
Alleline, Bland, and Esterhase, humiliated and defeated, bow to Smiley's suggestion that they negotiate with Karla to exchange Haydon for as many of the Circus's betrayed secret agents behind the Iron Curtain as can be saved — now that Haydon has been exposed, they will otherwise be arrested and executed.
Smiley is invited by Haydon to hear a partial and self-serving explanation of his conduct before his departure for Russia, in which Haydon discusses his reasons for becoming a mole, and also reveals that Operation Testify was a trap from the beginning, lain because both Karla and Haydon saw that Control was getting too close to exposing Haydon. Testify was to make sure that Control would have to leave the Circus and Witchcraft was to make sure that Percy Alleline replaced Control as chief of the Circus. Haydon also confesses, somewhat shamefully, that he knew the precise time of the operation because Prideaux came to him before he left for Czechoslovakia, to warn him. (Haydon and Prideaux were best friends, and possibly
lovers, when they were at university together.)
The deal with Karla is broken when Haydon is found dead on the grounds of the camp where he is being held, his neck broken. His killer is never explicitly named, but a series of verbal clues laid earlier in the novel make clear that his killer is Prideaux, taking revenge for being betrayed.
Smiley is appointed temporary head of the Circus, to contain the disaster. The novel leaves him as he is preparing to tell his wife about Haydon's treachery, since Bill was one of her many lovers.
Prideaux returns to his boys' school, and does his best to resume a normal life.
Review: I listened to this book and had difficulty getting things straight. There are so many sub-plots within sub-plots. When characters interact, he doesn’t just use it to provide the reader with information. The interaction itself is part of building the mood and making the characters more three-dimensional. In addition to understatement, he uses the English trait of nicknaming things, in a very consistent way to avoid what otherwise might seem melodramatic. In the course of elaborately and endlessly deceiving their opponents about their intentions and the kind of person they were, they were just as likely to wind up deceiving their friends and themselves. And meanwhile, the great machinery of the war used them and threw them away with a cold relentlessness.
Opening Line: "Jim Prideaux came to Thursgood School in late May."
Closing Line: "Everyone waited on Smiley's answer, but none came."
Quotes: "A committee is an animal with four back legs."
Rating: Mediocre.
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