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Midwest
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| Posted: Mon Dec 10, 2007 10:50 pm Post subject: Graham Greene and Jo |
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Jazzbro and I have discovered that we both like Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene novels.
My favorite Joseph Conrad, above any, is "Heart of Darkness"--well, technically that's a novella. Both my husband and I have Nostromo on our reading lists too; it's been recommended to us as the one novel that really "gets" what Paraguay is like, which is of interest because our boys were born in Paraguay.
As for Graham Greene, I am particularly fond of The Quiet American, The Heart of the Matter and Travels with My Aunt.
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jazzbro
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| Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 12:44 am Post subject: |
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Tough to argue with Heart of Darkness.
Might try Conrad - The Confidential Agent
Almost Dickensian setting. Turn of the century London conspiracy drama with an unwitting (and witless) anarchist abettor stumbling into tragedy. Perhaps one of the original 'spy novels'.
Gives a bit of a flavor for what the anarchist movement of the time must have been like.
More to come. If any one else is checking out this thread, Greene and Conrad are classic political thriller writers in more of a British tradition. And Greene is quite accessible. If you like LeCarre you'll love these guys. |
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Midwest
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| Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 11:17 am Post subject: |
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Greene's also infinitely adaptable in terms of movies--both The Quiet American and Travels with My Aunt made very good movies. So did End of the Affair, at least IMHO.
Jazzbro, am putting Confidential Agent on my Goodreads To Read list. I may not live long enough to finish all of 'em!
Edited by MW for comprehensibility's sake.
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jazzbro
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| Posted: Tue Dec 11, 2007 8:58 pm Post subject: |
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I really liked The Quiet American (the book) and haven't seen the movie. And I'm saving The End of the Affair for - I don't know when cuz it may be the only Greene I haven't read. (Also haven't seen the movie yet).
Try,
Greene - The Comedians - Papa Doc-era Haiti is the setting for another treatment of an exile's adventures. I forget all the bits of this one but I thought it was really good.
Greene - Our Man in Havana - sort of a farce. In fact pretty much the inspiration for LeCarre's 'The Tailor of Panama'. Vacuum cleaner salesman in Cuba is co-opted by British Intelligence to spy for them. Vacuum cleaner salesman is actually just a vacuum cleaner salesman but BI doesn't believe it until too late.
Greene - The Power and the Glory - MM would like this one. Story of a wandering 'whiskey priest' in Mexico when religion is banned. On the run from the constabulary. Bleak. Pitiless. (Not necessarily 'enjoyable'.)
Greene - The Ministry of Fear - sort of a paranoid tale of fate and (potential) redemption in WWII London...
"The Ministry of Fear," published in 1943 when World War II was raging in London's skies, is perhaps Greene's finest entertainment and my personal favorite of his novels. Greene produces here a quintessential noir novel using a premise we often associate with Alfred Hitchcock's films: an innocent man accidentally stumbles upon a secret that turns him into a man marked for death and hunted by the law. However, Greene's main character, Arthur Rowe, is hardly innocent. He is a solitary, lonely individual who harbors a deep guilt over a crime he committed in the past. When he speaks the wrong phrase to a fortune-teller at a fair, he suddenly finds himself the target of a shadowy group of spies in London -- the Ministry of the title. Soon he's fleeing through blitz London, framed for murder, desperate and near-suicidal, but harboring an anger toward the people who have tried to kill him.
Suddenly, Greene pulls a massive plot switch on the reader. The novel makes an abrupt shift that alters the whole nature of the plot. Rowe's story becomes that of possible redemption and the washing away of past sins..but at the expense of feeling whole and complete. To say much more would ruin the surprises of the novel and the internal odyssey of the main character. It's one of the most fascinating moral and character-driven thrillers ever written. And the backdrop of war-torn London, facing daily rains of bombs, is astonishing. It's almost a fantasy world, albeit a horrific one.
Wonderful.
I'd recommend Ministry of Fear or The Comedians of these but they're all good.
btw MW - I got confused.
The Confidential Agent is a Greene book (NOT Conrad) and it's also really good.
But the brief summary I gave was for a Conrad book called "Secret Agent". Frankly you can't go wrong with either but the one with the anarachist plot is "Secret Agent" by Conrad and it's the much earlier (turn-of-the-century) book. Also made into a BBC drama I think. Sorry for the confusion. Similar titles... you know. |
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buddhakisa
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| Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 12:12 am Post subject: |
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Where's Mickey Spillane when you need him?
MM needs to read the latest Jack Whyte novels about the Templars, actually sounds like you might be one. 
-SM-
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Midwest
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| Posted: Wed Dec 12, 2007 10:58 am Post subject: |
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Buddha, you'd like both of these guys. Not only to they write well, but they write enthralling stuff. Oddly enough, my elder son thinks the Templars are fascinating. This from a kid who mostly reads and watches anime.
Jazz, thanks for the recommendations. I have not read The Comedians, but I did see the movie (not so good. I look forward to the novel being better, as novels almost always are).
Edited by MW because her mind is especially porous today
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jazzbro
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Midwest
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| Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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No, Jazz, I hadn't see it until now. Read the Theroux piece--piqued my interest. I'm not sure I'm up to reading the three-volume biography cited there, but I'd sure like to know more about him.
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jazzbro
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| Posted: Sat Feb 23, 2008 9:27 am Post subject: |
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(MW - note the Conrad reference!)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080222.wcoessay0223/BNStory/specialComment/home
Interesting commentary. Speculates that suicide bombing, and particularly the recent type, may be 'the beginning of the end' for this round of terrorism.
What makes a suicide bomber tick?
Resorting to the use of mental patients to carry out recent Baghdad bombings suggests a moral bankruptcy
GERALD OWEN
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
February 23, 2008 at 12:00 AM EST
Life seemed to gruesomely imitate art, in a pair of suicide bombings in Baghdad earlier this month, which killed close to a hundred people, with a peculiarly horrific new twist in the lamentable annals of terrorism.
It was as if someone in Iraq had been reading Joseph Conrad's chilling 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, in which a cowardly and lazy terrorist gets his brother-in-law, who suffers from an unnamed mental disorder, to carry the explosives in an attempt to destroy the Greenwich Observatory in London. In our time, the innocent and manipulable Stevie's endless drawings of circles might have got him classified as autistic.
Stevie trips on a tree root in Greenwich Park and sets off the bomb, blasting a large hole in the ground and leaving only unrecognizable shreds of himself. The tree is destroyed, too, but the target, chosen for being a symbol of science and technology, is still intact.
On Feb. 1, two women went into two pet markets of Baghdad, about six kilometres apart, at al-Ghazl and New Baghdad, both especially known for their birds. They blew up themselves and dozens of others, not to mention many of the animals for sale. The bombs may have been set off by remote control. The Iraqi and American authorities said that the facial features of one or both of them suggested Down Syndrome, and some reporters were shown photographs that satisfied them that this was true of at least one of the women.
An Iraqi boy mourns the death of his father as he sits next to his coffin in Baghdad earlier this month after the attack by two female suicide bombers.
Then on Feb. 10, the acting director of the Al-Rashad psychiatric hospital, Dr. Sahi Aboub, was detained in an investigation into a suspected larger plot by insurgents to deploy mental patients as suicide bombers. This week, the Iraqi government began sweeping up mentally disabled and homeless people in Baghdad — applying a law from the Saddam regime — so that insurgents cannot use them as suicide bombers.
But now, the U.S. authorities in Iraq say the two women have been identified, and that they were treated in other Baghdad hospitals for depression and schizophrenia. Their medical records make no mention of Down Syndrome. One of them had heard voices telling her to kill herself, and had had electro-shock therapy several times, in a psychiatric hospital named after the rationalistic medieval philosopher Ibn-Rushd, known in Europe as Averroes.
The psychotic diseases of bipolar depression and schizophrenia are of course very different from Down Syndrome, a genetic disorder, but both versions of the events make it very doubtful that the women were truly acting from their own will. A U.S. spokesman said they "had reduced mental capacity."
As for Stevie in The Secret Agent, he never had a chance to be diagnosed; one know-it-all character in the book dismisses him as "a degenerate," making an inept reference to a once-famous 19th-century criminologist, Cesare Lombroso.
Though Joseph Conrad's story was suggested by a real event in 1894 that was never fully explained, Conrad thoroughly reshaped it, and added the element of someone mentally handicapped, picking up on a casual reference by a friend of his, the novelist Ford Madox Ford, who called the perpetrator of the non-fictitious bombing "half an idiot" — apparently in a non-technical sense. He was at least like Stevie in having been under the influence of a sinister brother-in-law.
ANARCHISTS AND PROVOCATEURS
Martial Bourdin, the man who really blew himself up outside the Greenwich Observatory, belonged to an anarchist group — as does Adolf Verloc, the secret agent who gives the title to the novel. He is a retailer of pornography, a spy and an agent provocateur in the pay of the Russian embassy (the czarist regime wants to discredit revolutionary socialists). The sleazy and shabby Verloc is very unlike many of his successors in spy fiction; he is no slick or glamorous James Bond.
An embassy staffer, Mr. Vladimir, who is pressing Verloc for results, comes up with the ingenious idea of causing the greatest possible public panic by shaking the modern faith in science. Verloc's act of sacrilege against its temple in Greenwich — "it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics," says Vladimir — is designed to lead in turn to a harsh British crackdown on the far left.
Verloc's insincerity and cowardice are key to his use of his hapless brother-in-law, so that he can keep himself at a safe distance. The assault on Greenwich is not intended as a suicide mission; he does not calculate on Stevie's clumsiness. There is nonetheless another character in the novel who is obsessed with the idea of being a suicide bomber.
Suicide missions have always been a weapon of the weak, but, hitherto at least, they have not been carried out by people of weak or defective will, who do not know what they are doing. The medieval group that gave the world the word "assassins" were a Shia sect with a few inaccessible fortresses. From time to time, they would send a man to kill a political potentate (Sunni or Christian), having the assassin go in so close as to fatally stab the target, with near-certainty of success — nothing thrown or shot from a distance could be so reliable — and equal assurance not being able to escape, and of being punished by death. Some extreme Russian socialists of the late 19th century did likewise, and became known as "terrorists."
Neither the original assassins nor the original terrorists targeted ordinary civilians; they had no preference for indiscriminate violence, though a shock to the people at large was certainly an aim.
Even the Japanese kamikaze flights of the Second World War were weapons of the weak. By the time they were undertaken, Japan was losing the war. Throwing airplanes and their pilots at Allied ships was a counsel of desperation.
Suicide attacks are weapons of the weak who persuade themselves that they are very strong. The would-be suicide bomber in The Secret Agent, known only by a nickname, "the Professor," is a resentful and frustrated chemist, and a great designer and stocker of explosives. In particular, he is the supplier for Verloc's Greenwich attack. The Professor is far from mentally handicapped, but is quite insane — a sociopath in current parlance, and the most thoroughgoing nihilist in the novel, with a relentlessly mad logic.
An Iraqi boy mourns the death of his father as he sits next to his coffin in Baghdad earlier this month after the attack by two female suicide bombers.
Everywhere he goes, he packs on himself a flask with an extremely powerful explosive, and his hand is always in his pocket, on a small rubber ball with which he can detonate it if anyone tries to arrest him, destroying himself and everyone and everything else in the environs. This gives an extraordinary belief that he is supremely free and powerful: "He was a moral agent — that was settled in his mind. By exercising his agency with ruthless defiance he procured for himself the appearance of power and prestige." He is an extreme contrast to the benign and helpless Stevie, who does what his sister's husband tells him, imagining that Verloc is a kind man.
Suicide bombing does not depend on any expected rewards in the afterlife; it can also be done by secularists and by hardline atheists such as the Professor. But it does depend on grandiosity, on a megalomaniac view of oneself, a belief in the gloriousness of the cause. Though there has been much discussion of suicide bombers' psychology, the folly and wickedness of most of them do not fit comfortably into ordinary diagnostic categories.
EXTREME SENSE OF AGENCY
Conrad's Professor shows how this swollen-headedness can be effectual within a very narrow range; he can protect himself from the authorities, whom he loves to taunt. While his wealth in dynamite is all too real, he is living in a world of his own. Even so, the Professor — played by Robin Williams in the 1996 film of the novel — walks off unshaken as the book closes. By then, Verloc has been killed by his wife, who had above all been devoted to Stevie. Soon after, she jumps off a ship into the English Channel. No criminal charges result from all this.
Though Joseph Conrad's novel is prophetic, it reveals a dead end, a final moral bankruptcy. Sending the insane or the mentally handicapped to their deaths suggests an inability to exploit people's convictions. If al-Qaeda of Mesopotamia or whoever else dispatched the two women on Feb. 1 into the pet markets are today's Verlocs, their insurgencies will peter out.
An analogous case, a little closer to us in physical distance and in culture, is that of the IRA's resorting to "proxy" bomb attacks in Northern Ireland. In 1990, they took hostage the family of a Catholic kitchen worker, Patrick "Patsy" Gillespie, employed by the British army, thus forcing him to drive a car heavily loaded with explosives into a British checkpoint. A remote-control detonator set off the bomb that killed Mr. Gillespie, five British soldiers, and gravely wounded six more.
That aroused a revulsion among Ulster Catholics, particularly in Londonderry, which had been a great centre of sympathy and support for the IRA. Years passed before the present comparative peace was reached, but Mr. Gillespie did not die quite in vain.
Maybe this revolting episode in Baghdad is the beginning of the end of a nightmare. |
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