the silence (w&d bergman)

The third in a Bergman trilogy.

Spanish dwarf troupe - tick

Kid out of tin drum - tick

Psychological warfare - tick

Adorable elderly hotel worker - tick

Language games - tick

Playfulness - tick

Female sexuality - tick

Imposing female characters - tick

Mystery - tick

Plot clarity - cross

Narrative ‘development’ - cross

The last two are perhaps the most intriguing. This is a film that takes place over the course of little more than twenty four hours. (The three Bergman films I have seen this week have a carefully composed and restricted timeframe). The film starts and ends on a train, but at no point do we know where the boy and his mother are going. ‘Home’ apparently, but what home is or means is never clear. The boy’s father is alive but we don’t know if he’s going to be there. We don’t know why they, and the woman’s dying translator sister, left home in the first place. We know the women want things - not to die, to connect physically with someone - but we don’t know why one is at death’s door and the other is picking up a stray man whose language she can’t speak. A tank dawdles down a nighttime street and we don’t know whether it belongs to the good guys or the bad guys. There’s a transcendent absence of clarity. And yet this film is one of the most remarkable, engaging films you will ever see. It’s a dream state, a child’s eye view, a lacuna, a pause in the earth’s turning. Which is also what going to the cinema is.

Things I love about Bergman: you never quite know what to expect with his films. In spite of his reputation there is no model. Each film has an idiosyncratic flavour. All those years ago, when the Electric was still a fleapit, I was taken to watch a double bill. Time of the Wolf and Le Mepris. I didn’t value Bergman then. Godard seemed more sexy. I was wrong about that, probably, and it took many years for me to start to separate the films from the myth about the films. Claro, they contain darkness, they contain their stuff of the human spirit, but they also contain such light, such perfect shading, such nuance. 

winter light (w&d bergman)

What might peak “Bergman” look like? The name is placed in inverted commas under the assumption that the idea of the auteur supersedes the reality. “Bergman” is bleak, despairing, nordic, snowy. Not all Bergman films share these qualities. Some are more “Bergman” than others. Winter Light is in this sense quintessentially “Bergman”. It opens with a ten to fifteen minute sequence of a church service, unadorned, save for the way the camera picks out the few faces in the congregation, who we assume might be characters we will later follow. Some are, some are not. Not to give too much away, what follows is despair, random suicide, emotional violence, snow, cold, and some kind of doomed human resilience. It is, perhaps, peak “Bergman”, as austere as one could hope for, a few hours stripped back to a kind of desperate pointlessness, religion that fails to console, lives that are endured rather than enjoyed. I have to confess to enjoying it, noting that the scene where the priest tells his would-be paramour how much he hates her, and she reciprocates, is a scene where the bleakness spills over into a kind of warped, gothic humour, completely undercut by what immediately follows. 

pasazerka (w&d andrzej munk, d. witold lesiewicz, w. zofia posmysz)

Munk died in a road accident whilst making this unfinished film, at the age of 40. The narrative develops around Liza a female former SS guard at Auschwitz, returning to Europe aboard a cruise ship from the Americas. A passenger boards who she recognises: Marta, a prisoner who she had 'adopted' as her assistant at the camp, before being transferred to Berlin. She has assumed that Marta was dead, and that the secrets Marta holds about her past had gone with her. Their relationship is also affected by the love that Marta had for a fellow prisoner. Theirs was a love which transcended their dreadful circumstances and Liza was both fascinated and jealous.

The complexity of this relationship is posited against the backdrop of the horrors of Auschwitz. Munk, (of jewish descent, who managed to escape during the war), filmed in Auschwitz itself. The realism is overwhelming, as is the horror. At one point, a stream of children file, smiling, oblivious, into a hut. One girl even stops to pet the guard's Alsatian. Meanwhile, on the roof, a soldier dons a gas mask and drops Zyklon B into cavities. The cruelty is pervasive, sometimes foregrounded, but even when not, it is always occurring, at the edge of the screen. Added to which, the mud, the darkness, the sickness, the hopelessness, is laid out by Munk, through the eyes of the guard. Glazer chose to stay on the other side of the wall. Munk takes us inside Auschwitz, with its barbarism and its string quartets.

The film is unfinished, with his contemporaries supplying a voiceover and including stills from the material on the cruise ship which couldn't be coherently edited together. This blog exists in part to document films that have slipped under the radar, names that should be revered but are not. I have the luck to live near Cinemateca, where it's possible to stumble over films that one would otherwise never get to see. The Passenger is an extraordinary piece of filmmaking and perhaps the first and last time that a fictional movie about the holocaust has ever got as close to capturing something of its reality. 

men in the sun & other stories (gassan kanafani, tr hilary kilpatrick)

Kanafani’s stories deal with the consequences of the Nakba, rather than the event itself. Desperate refugees, having lost everything, doing what they can to make ends meet. The celebrated opening story recounts the tragic journey of three men seeking to cross the desert from Basra to Kuwait, a land of supposed opportunities. (Following the same path that Saddam fatefully took years later.) It is a mission that ends in absolute disaster, of a similar vein to the disasters that occur at borders across Europe and between Mexico and the USA, among others. Desperation is the driver, a desperation far removed from the kind of problems these characters’ ancestors might have faced. Ancestors who lived quiet lives near the orange and olive groves, in villages which no longer bear the names they did then, or don’t even so much as exist. To think that Kanafani’s tales are even more prescient today than when he wrote them is just another factor in the indictment of the Israeli state’s crimes against the Palestinian peoples.

os verdes anos (w&d paulo rocha, w. nuno bragança)

Os Verdes Anos, Rocha’s first film, is an effortless, affectionate dive into the emerging Lisbon of the early sixties. Julio, a winsome lad from the provinces, comes to the big city at the invitation of his uncle. He gets a job at a cobblers and falls for Ilda, who works as a maid for a wealthy family. Their nascent love affair, perfectly captured by the fine-honed screenplay, plays out as an inspiring model and cautionary tale. Julio is gauche,  but gradually begins to find his feet and his manhood. Ilda has ambitions to change her station, ambitions which her wit and beauty more than justify. Will they find a way to construct a future or will the big city swallow them up? The narrative is rendered with such unfettered charm that their story seduces, no matter the resolution. This charm lies in the pared back dialogue, the remarkable cinematography of Luc Mirot and the beguiling score by Carlos Paredes. One instantly understands how Os Verdes Anos thrust Rocha to the forefront of European cinema. The theme of a rural soul coming to the big city echoes Chabrol’s Les Cousins, and the way the film captures urban life is reminiscent of the nascent films of Godard, Iosseliani and others. That movement from the rural to the urban feels as though it has more or less played itself out in Europe. The contemporary version of this journey is one of immigration from the south or the third world to the fortresses of the western economies. 

youth of the beast /yaju no seishun (d. seijun suzuki w. ichirô ikeda, tadaaki yamazaki, haruhiko ôyabu)

Suzuki’s B-movie was a random pick, one of the joys of living close to your local arts cinema, as they are known. Great title aside, the film is resolutely action driven, with the hard-nosed hero, Jôji, wreaking havoc in the Japanese underworld. I have to confess that there were numerous moments where I lost the plot as it stitched together the rivalries of the Yakuza bands. The gaudy tone and colour feel like the antithesis of those movies loved by the arthouse crowd, the stately oeuvres of Ozu and Mizoguchi. This is unredacted action, and one can imagine a youthful Tarantino adoring the vibrant if senseless tones. Kill Bill is just a few steps away from Youth of the Beast, and then the family line leads to the banalities of those movies which feature on the lists of films that have somehow grossed over a billion dollars. Indeed, Suzuki’s tone feels that it owes as much to the American occupation as it does to anything which might be defined as ‘Japanese’. 

borom sarret & la noire de (w&d ousmane sembène)

Sembène’s two short films, twinned at this screening, offer complementing visions of the struggles of the African continent through the differing tales of two characters. In Borom Sarret, the narrator drives a cart for a living, constantly on the edge of penury, until the worst possible thing happens when his cart is confiscated by the police, having taken it into the affluent neighbourhood of Borom Sarret. Sembène’s camera prowls the streets of Dakar, showing us the beggars and the griots, and the ordinary lives of its citizens. The narrator takes a pregnant woman to the maternity  ward and a dead baby to the cemetery, impassive in the face of life and death, both just a fare to help him put food on the table for his wife and children. The short film has a neo-realist feel, and is laced with a dry humour. La Noire De follows the travails of Diouana, who has been hired by a French family as a childminder. She follows them when they move from Dakar to Antibes, but finds herself trapped in virtual servitude, leading to a savage denouement. As well as relating the clear venality of post-colonialism, Sembène’s film is elevated by the subtlety of the depiction of its characters. Diouana is no meek victim. She likes to dress up, she sulks, she fights her corner. There is one telling moment where the husband and her exchange a look which reveals the possibility of attraction, something that could destroy down the social divide. The closing sequence, where he returns Diouana’s meagre possessions to her mother, is laced with an implicit danger, and the skill of the filmmaking is that the viewer wants that confrontation between the arrogant Frenchman and the Dakar locals to ignite, and makes it clear that even if it doesn’t happen now, it will do sometime soon. 

le mépris (w&d godard)

I figure it must have been in 1983, there or thereabouts, that my erstwhile friend Jason took me to a double bill at the Electric on Portobello Road of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Le Mépris. Back then the Electric was still a fleapit. I have a vague memory that we entered in daylight and exited into the night. That serendipitous shifting of the spectrum which seems to have been caused by the clash between light and darkness that cinema constructs. I was seventeen, I believe, and that screening of Le Mepris has always remained as a keystone in the process of falling in love with cinema. It has been, entonces, nearly forty years since I last watched the film. I guess it must have been in part Bardot herself, but my greatest memory of the film was of the shimmering Mediterranean which Godard’s film, a film about the making of a film of the Odyssey, a quintessential Mediterranean text, celebrates. The quality of the light from that far-flung world must have dazzled, all the more so to then emerge into the darkness of the London winter night.

How much has altered. When I watched it I would have been younger than all the cast and they would have seemed like gods to me. The trials and tribulations of relationships, around which the narrative is constructed, would still have seemed like a foreign land. I imagine I would have had no idea who Fritz Lang was, let alone Piccoli. Watching it yesterday, only the immortalised Lang would be older than me. The film within a film is about gods and men, although this is part of a sly game, because in the modern world, rather than the grecian one, the film stars have become gods. Bardot is an effigy of beauty, Palance of unredacted masculinity, Lang a sagacious world weariness. If any director filmed actors with an awareness that he was constructing a panoply of Homeric immortals, it was probably Godard, faithful to the first three letters of his surname.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Le Mépris, a story told in three acts, is the way in which Godard reins in his ironic detachment. This is a drama, in the conventional sense, with conventional narrative beats and characterisation. The characters are at once less obviously his puppets than in other films, and more so, subsumed as they are in the meta-drama of his personal narrative which underpins the film. (Filmmakers struggling with the complications of being both ambitious, beautiful, and human.) The extended scene between Bardot and Piccoli, which makes up the second act, foregoes the winks at the camera, permitting the actors to remain absorbed in the budding tragedy of their characters’ failed relationship.

With Delarue’s delirious strings, Raoul Coutard’s crystalline cinematography and the plasticity of the small cast, this is almost a model for what a film might be, a mix of the romantic and the intellectual, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. No wonder it seduced me back then, a young man on the brink of his journey into the big wide world of gods and monsters. 

les carabiniers (w&d godard w. jean gruault, w. beniamino joppolo)

Les Carabiniers, Richard Brody informs us, “In first run, it attracted so few viewers—an estimated 2,000—that its box-office statistics went unreported.” It’s a chaotic mess of a film, in many ways, adapted from a stage play, which sees Godard’s Brechtian instincts pushed to the max, and illustrates the limitations of this approach. The film tells the story of two country boys who are sent off to the war, where they rape and pillage to their heart’s content, only to return home and find that not only are their promised rewards non-existent, but they are also about to be executed, paying the price for defeat. The two protagonists are deliberately painted as two dimensional, and the whole film has the feel of something flat and didactic. Where, perhaps, the spectacle of theatre permits this, cinema, wedded to an idea of psychological truth, feels unconvincing when it goes too far in its abandonment of that notion. Godard might have argued that the film does indeed represent a tortured truth. “If Les Carabiniers had no success in Paris, it’s because people are worms. You show them worms on the screen, they get angry. What they like is a beautiful war à la Zanuck. For three hours they kill lots of Germans. Then they go home happy, heroic. Real war, they don’t want. It isn’t war that is disgusting, it’s ourselves. People are cowards.” Indeed, it’s not hard to think of the actions of Russian troops in Ukraine as one watches the film, and the realities that Godard presents. But the alienating devices that work are so effective when the audience is drawn to Godard’s characters are less so when pegged to characters we have no reason to fall for. Godard messes around with Belmondo and Karina, and it always feels as though they are in on the joke, even if it’s at their expense. Here, the joke is that these characters are, no matter how pretty, essentially heartless monsters, and it’s hard to want to identify with this.

Perhaps for this reason, if anything Les Carabiniers could be used as a study in the significance of charisma as an actuarial trait. Godard was more than aware of the importance of beauty and charm as weapons to be utilised by both actor and director. He repeatedly took full advantage of his actors’ charismatic qualities in order to rope the audience into an unconventional way of seeing. He tries the same thing here, but it doesn’t quite work, no matter how pressing and significant the subject matter of the film. 

vida de familia. (w&d josé luis font, w. enric ortenbach, arnau olivar)

Another in the list of lost films from the Franco era, I stumbled across Font’s family drama having a few free hours to spare on a passing visit to Madrid. It is an intriguing film, which looks at the way that the unit of the family served to stifle Spain with both its conservatism and its decadence. Eduardo is a doctor from a wealthy family who wants to open a clinic in an old house which has been left to go to ruins by a family who can’t think of anything to do with it. He and his forthright wife, Elisa, launch a campaign to get the family to permit this development, but his aunts and uncles are intransigent. The issue goes, in Dickensian style, to the courts, but no resolution seems imminent. The film is both an intimate portrayal of an upper class family, but also a sweeping portrait of late sixties Barcelona. A fascinating B story reveals the social divisions, as Eduardo’s dissolute cousin has an affair with the landlady of a bar, a relationship he’s terrified to reveal to his mother, the patrician Aurelia. The film is in black and white, which feels appropriate, but there’s one quietly astonishing sequence when Eduardo & Elisa visit the old house they want to recover. All of a sudden, Font switches to colour, the camera panning around the stately home and gardens which are in ruins, a compelling metaphor for a suffocating society letting past glories go to seed. 

le petit soldat (w&d godard)

More Godard. In the highly appropriate surroundings of Cine Universitario, a cinema that feels as though it continues to exist in a mid 70’s timewarp. (20 pesos for a cup of tea, something that reminded me of pre-Picture House carrot cake at the Ritzy in Brixton.) 

Le Petit Soldat is a strange, frenetic film. People are always running everywhere. They run to their cars, they run away from their cars, they’re constantly in a hurry, never getting anywhere. The camera indulges in sudden, swinging pans, from one character to another, or up the side of a building. The restless energy suggests a director chasing something down, without knowing exactly what. All the classic Godard tropes are there: moody boys, pretty girls, metaphysical conversation, outlandish US automobiles, slapstick gun-play, pretension, misogyny, but all of this is allied to an unwieldy political consciousness. It’s a bit like watching the natural history footage of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, that frantic struggle which ends in a brilliant fluttering of wings, only in reverse. This is a film that gets dirtier, less funny, uglier, as it unfolds. The torture scenes in the last fifteen minutes, whilst perhaps soft fare compared to what we are permitted to see now, nevertheless still pack a punch, especially the waterboarding. The film documents techniques of cruelty which will be repeated ad nauseam over the coming decades. Images which had never been shown before with such vivid, manic clarity. A man with a wet T-shirt over his head, explaining how the air is being sucked out of his lungs, an image of grotesque beauty, stuff to make a CIA or KGB agent weep with joy, whilst the resistance screams with anger.

There’s nothing new about torture, but there was something new in presenting it so pornographically, like a Bataille novel brought to life. The director himself seems caught in the paradox of the seductive power of his camera to create images beyond the pale. How does he react? He pans, he cuts, he runs, he desperately seeks the seriousness that might be permitted in his crazy world of make-believe. 

beyond a boundary [c.l.r james]

James makes a rather beautiful observation regarding not just cricket, but sport in general; that this is for many an aesthetic experience, on a par with watching, for example, theatre or ballet. His own prose, above all as he describes the forgotten cricketing heroes of his boyhood Trinidad, makes the point forcefully. Watching these players expanded his understanding of the possible, the potential that is latent in the human form. Cricket is perhaps all the more remarkable for being a sport that is not contingent so much on physical strength or power. On the cricket field there’s room for all sorts. It’s a game where even today, players can continue to operate at the highest levels into their late thirties, even their forties. The spindly veteran spinner can outthink the dashing young batsman. 

The book is at its best when looking backwards to the past. His account of the way in which the local cricket matches binded his Trinidadian community together, youngsters and elders, men and women, is beguiling. It helps to explain why cricket, with its extended, day-long playing times, so often mocked, is in fact a great celebratory communal event. James is also, unsurprisingly, very good on the way in which cricket helped to form a Trinidadian identity, as well as a West Indian identity. In this regard it seems a pity that the book ends before the period of West Indian dominance which marked my own youth. Doubtless he would have had a few contrarian things to have said, alongside the plaudits. 

However, perhaps the strongest section of the book is the one where James discusses the origins of the professional game in England. Earlier in the book he has described his passion for English literature, formed through this colonial schooling. His thesis on the way in which sport, particularly cricket, is as important as anything else in the construction of Victorian society is beautifully outlined in the chapters on Grace and the evolution of the game in the nineteenth century. Born in 1901, it feels as though James has spoken with those from previous generations who lived through this remarkable period. In a few brief chapters he manages to convey as much about the transformation of Victorian society towards something still recognisable today as many an extended novel. Not least because his own upbringing permitted him to see the cohesive power of sport, something which even now occupies little space in intellectual discourse, despite the fact that organised sport has become, across the whole world, a dominant cultural practice. 

cat and mouse [günter grass]

Cat and Mouse is a novel that’s as agile as it’s title suggests. The narrative is seemingly straightforward, dealing with the difficulties of evolving from childhood to adulthood. However, this simplicity is muddied by the fact that the characters undergoing this transformation are living in Nazi Germany, during the war, on the Baltic coast. Grass’ prose feels, even in translation, effortlessly lucid. The slipages as the narrator veers between the third and second person as he tells the story of Mahlke, the child-man with the outsized Adam’s Apple, sometimes addressing him and sometimes the reader, feel like a masterly trick, revealing the narrator’s incipient guilt. This guilt gradually builds, suggesting that it is not merely caused by the narrator’s part in Mahlke’s downfall. but also by the war itself. Without in any way ever suggesting that he’s taking on the burden of that which he was born into. This is a guilt which is unavoidable, destined, as much as a story has an unavoidable shape, as much as a cat unavoidably goes for the mouse. 

muriel (d alain resnais, w jean cayrol)

Somewhere in my head Muriel had acquired iconic status. I'm not quite sure why. There's a book of Truffaut's reviews I was given at the age of 17 which probably talked about it. (It's boxed up somewhere so I cannot check.) Maybe it's just the simplicity of the title. Maybe it's Resnais himself, the mysterious maestro of detached emotion who ended up being a devotee of Ayckbourn. A grand survivor from the heyday of Nouvelle Vague, still doing his idiosyncratic thing. You wonder if they still talk to one another, the survivors, him and Godard and Varda and a few others. Do they head to Cineworld to check out the latest Soderburgh and then have a few pints afterwards in a quiet bar, where maybe someone half-recognises them and comes over in a drunken haze, mistaking one for Truffaut or the other for Giscard D'Estaing?

I kind of hope so. Maybe, if they do, they spend the odd twenty minutes trying to work out what Muriel is really all about. I've rarely seen a film edited in a more unusual fashion. The first 45 minutes is given over entirely to a slightly stagey evening meeting between four people, including the worldly-wise Helene, played by Delphine Seyrig. Then the movie rattles through a whole dollop of plot with a string of three- second edits, which seemingly move everything forward to a new starting point. Which is the cue for the next wordy scene, before another fast forward. As though Resnais had discovered the art of the music video twenty years earlier, dispensed with the music and slotted these sequences into what at times does indeed feel like an Ayckbourn play.

The film's most arresting moment comes when it includes a five minute documentary-style passage, seemingly out of keeping with the remainder of its aesthetic, about the Algerian war. In fact this war haunts the film, with one character still affected by the abuses he witnessed there, and another falsely claiming to have served there. These strong, political themes are mixed with dry humour and melodrama. The whole concoction makes for a film which is frequently baffling and constantly wrong-foots the viewer. We never quite know what type of movie we're watching. It challenges our patience; which is not such a bad thing, but in a somewhat peculiar twist it does so through it's banality. Perhaps in the end it's what you would get if you were to blend Sartre's seaside tale, Nausea, with a dash of Ayckbourn and a soupcon of Battle of Algiers. One awaits the remake.

lunar caustic [malcolm lowry]

A few months ago I decided to join Twitter. Fittingly for the purposes of this review the decision was taken within the middle of a sleepless night. I came across a quotation from someone called Malcolm Lowry and using small childlike steps of the ingenue, I 'favourited' it. This is the quotation:

When they smashed into the hurricane the jaguars moaned in terror like frightened children.

A few days later I discovered that Malcolm Lowry was 'following' me.

This was both somehow flattering, but also disconcerting. Because, to the best of my knowledge, Malcolm Lowry has been dead since before I was born. I decided to 'follow' Mr Lowry, and it seems he is alive and well and tweeting. Which can only be a good thing.

Because Lowry must be one of the most under-appreciated British writers of the twentieth century. There's a tendency to gloss over his existence. You can sort of see why. He never, to the best of my knowledge, wrote about stately homes. Or even class. There's a quasi-autobiographical streak to his writing which (until Amis fils came along) was considered a bit bad taste, or French. He writes about life at the global margins and never puts in any neatly intellectual perspective as a sop to his British audience. Lunar Caustic, a novella which describes life in a New York mental hospital, feels like the work of someone who's got down and dirty with the margins of society. I found myself thinking about the endlessly venerated Orwell, whose work seems twee and contrived in comparison (like the sweet cottage he lived in at the top of Portobello Road). Lowry, it seems, listened to the stories of a marginal world, wrote them down, and then found out his country didn't want to hear them.

Lunar Caustic is a brisk, brilliant 90 pages long. It's an observational, slyly humorous account of a British drunk, suffering from hallucinations, who somehow finds himself assigned to this New York madhouse, which overlooks the river. It's probably now prime real estate, but the book conjures up a New York where poverty is still a keynote in the city, a city which belongs to sailors and madmen as much as bankers and artists. The book's protagonist casts his jaundiced eye over a world he's found himself briefly trapped in, observing the human instinct for storytelling and the way in which (pace Foucault) definitions of madness have always had a socio-economic basis. The book's failing is that it is too short; we want to know more about Plantagenet, his drinking, his piano playing and his ex. Nevertheless the prose is always fluent; Lowry's anti-heroic voice singing out from this hidden corner of the world.

In an earlier life, Plantagenet has been a sailor. One of his journeys involved, (with a neat symmetry from my reading point of view), transporting wild animals through a typhoon off the Bay of Bengal. At which point the writer informs us, and I think it bears repeating:

When they smashed into the hurricane the jaguars moaned in terror like frightened children.

the spy who came in from the cold [le carré]

Reading this book is like taking a walk through one's childhood, even if it was published before I was born. For all it's ability in the first half to conjure up the strange world of post-war London, this isn't a great book. The second half becomes surprisingly bureaucratic for what was in its time a vast commercial success, as what turns out to be Leamas' trial is spun out over several chapters. Nevertheless, Le Carre has already succeeded in investing the text with all the mystique of that world which is now all but forgotten. The notion of the Communist threat, and the reality of the Cold War are things that would appear to have evaporated altogether. But for anyone born from the 40s through to the early 70s, this monolithic conflict dominated our fears, and our dreams.

Besides the way it captures the complexities of British attitudes to all this, attitudes determined by the joy of the game, as though a war had something to do with a crossword puzzle, perhaps the most telling aspect of the book is the positive light in which it presents two Communists. Firstly the ingenue, Liz, who the writing carefully depicts as someone who succeeds in seeing through both sides' game in order to discern human truths that lie behind it; and Fiedler, Leamas' interrogator, who becomes an increasingly sympathetic and tragic figure, one of the only ones operating within this world who actually has any real values. (Unless one grants Leamas this accolade, seeing his actions as a kind of heroism, rather than the alternative, the actions of a world-weary cynic.)

Looking at the writing of Zizek, whether we trust him or not, we see him critiquing materialism for its lack of idealism, something which ultimately undercuts our ability to achieve happiness, no matter how great our material comforts. Perhaps its overly speculative to view the supposedly fearsome Fiedler as a sacrificial lamb. Nevertheless, it seems curious that Le Carre, a man like Green concerned with the way the pattern of history shapes the ordinary man's dreams and happiness, should endow this initially fearsome figure with such subversive dignity.

The book is artful, and told at a brisk pace, and perhaps its hard to gauge the true impact its anti-heroic viewpoint might have had on a Britain still reluctant to believe that their noble wars had been replaced with such a tawdry one, where heroism was now, by and large, redundant.