The man from Barbarossa - plot question
SeanIsTheOnlyOne
Posts: 408MI6 Agent
Hi everyone,
Before starting, this topic obviously contains spoilers.
I have a question about the man from Barbarossa (I found this one pretty average to be honest).
The US will probably decide to attack after the utimatum expiry and Irak will retaliate using the Scapegoats stolen by Yuskovich, which is exactly what he intends to. So far, everything is clear.
But the thing I don't get is this photography of Bond, Natkowitz and Adoré carrying the missiles. What is it supposed to mean ? Why would three western agents be involved in this while we are precisely dealing with weapons Irak will use against their own side ?
Comments
Paging @Silhouette Man .....
Thanks, @Barbel. 🙂
That's a very good question, @SeanIsTheOnlyOne. Sadly it's been so long since I last read The Man From Barbarossa that I can't really remember! I know that part of the villain General Yuskovich's plan was to embarrass the Western alliance (in particular the UK, the US and France) which was coming together at the time against Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. So I take it that this photograph is intended to implicate the West in some way and cause international embarrassment and a welcome distraction from what the renegade Russian villains are up to?
It sounds to me a bit like the same type of thing Colonel Sun Liang-tan was trying to do in his eponymous novel. There, Colonel Sun wanted to implicate Bond and M by having their dead bodies conveniently discovered at the scene of a mortar bomb attack on a Soviet Russian summit meeting in Greece. Thus, the British Secret Service would be implicated in the attack, further pitting the British and the Soviets against each other while of course wily Red China was really responsible, this being at the time of the Sino-Soviet Split. This thing with the photograph rather reminds me of that but I could be wrong of course. I really need to read the novel again before providing you with a more complete answer (if indeed there is one!).
Even as a big John Gardner fan and defender I will say that some of his Bond novels did seem to change somewhat plot wise as they progressed, i.e. they started out as being about A but then progressed to be more about B or even C instead. I think that's especially true of The Man From Barbarossa where the novel starts off with a supposed Nazi war criminal being abducted and put on a televised show trial and then progresses to a plot using nuclear weapons in a hijacked jumbo jet and getting involved in Iraq as well as reinstating hard-line communism in Russia. So, a pretty full schedule for the villain! Again, I'm going from memory here so I could be forgetting details.
Perhaps part of the plot confusion in this novel comes from Gardner's usual working method of starting with a plot idea or character and working from there to see where it takes him. It's almost as if he gets a way through the book with one main plot strand and then realises during the writing that the plot should actually be about something else but by that stage he's written the book and it's too late to totally rewrite it. I gather that this isn't a writing method peculiar to Gardner alone. Just this last week I heard Sir Ian Rankin being interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about his new Rebus book and saying that he writes in exactly the same way and to have a novel too much plotted out means he then doesn't want to actually write it as he knows everything that's going to happen and it's therefore joyless. There should in theory have been less scope for this to happen with Gardner as I know part of the contract with Glidrose stated that each Bond novel had to be plotted in outline before they were greenlit. This was of course to the chagrin of Gardner who felt things would've been much better if he could have just been left to his own devices and write in the tried and tested way that worked for him. After all, he had been a bestselling author since the 1960s. I recall Kirkus Reviews saying that it was as if Gardner had written The Man From Barbarossa after one too many vodka martinis, a rather insensitive remark considering Gardner's well-documented battle with alcoholism and the fact that he'd not taken a drink since his recovery in 1959.
I'm not sure how useful all of this rambling conjecture was but once I get the novel reread I'll get back to you on it. That doesn't preclude any other member here giving their opinion on the question you raise, of course.
@Silhouette Man thanks a lot for your comment ! I read it with a lot of pleasure 🙂
Actually I think this photo matter is supposed to show the Soviet government is not involved in this, ortherwise the country would become the ultimate target from a western point of view, which is exactly what Yuskovich wants to avoid because of the concern of a nuclear retaliate from the US.
The thing is Yuskovich seems quite sure nobody will ever discover he's manipulating both sides. But here, I don't believe one second the US will fall into such a trap because of a single photo that means nothing. They know who Bond is and the first thing they will do is contacting London, Paris and Tel Aviv to make sure everything is all right with their agents.
Yuskovich reminds me some kind of badly written Columbo villain, so self-confident that he conceives his crime thinking people around him are all stupid and can believe everything they see without any suspicion. That is very poor plot thinking from Gardner IMHO.
If you reread the novel indeed, I'm obviously interested in your opinion because it's an element that I find very disturbing for a spy thriller...
Yes, I imagine it's intended in some way to deflect blame or suspicion away from Soviet Russia and on to their enemies in the classic switcheroo way SPECTRE and other villains like Stromberg did in the Bond films, essentially pitting two superpowers against each other for their own respective ultimate gain, whatever that may be.
On the point about General Yuskovich thinking he won't ever be found out I'd imagine that could just be put down to the latitude such Bond villains all have, that is they are all to varying degrees mad. With Gardner's villains (and some of Fleming's too of course) there always seemed to be an element of unaccountable madness such as delusions of grandeur (a recognised symptom of schizophrenia) which, for one example, SeaFire's Sir Max Tarn suffered from. This folly led many of Gardner's villains to have foolhardy overconfidence in their nefarious schemes. One thinks of Dr Anton Murik in Licence Renewed and Sir Max Tarn in SeaFire who both plotted created a potential disaster that they were sure their respective devices could then clean up and make safe for a, presumably, astonished world. Of course, neither device or plan would have actually worked at all, and the results would have been disastrous. I know this may seem like a cop-out answer, but I think madness is certainly an element of many Bond villains's makeup and that is not a factor exclusive to Gardner's villainous creations.
I will certainly be rereading this novel as soon as I can, and I'll get back to you with a (hopefully) more specific and substantive answer at that point. It is certainly one of Gardner's more densely plotted novels and more complex to read and write about as a result. I believe the UK edition is the longest Bond novel Gardner penned and it was his favourite Bond novel he wrote too, replacing his earlier favourite Icebreaker, with which it shares certain plot similarities.
That is very poor plot thinking from Gardner IMHO @SeanIsTheOnlyOne
IMO The Man from Barbarossa was one of Gardner's worst, whatever the author himself may think of it. A plot which, as you both suggest, just isn't feasible, with Bond involved undercover as a member of a film crew recording the show trial of a Nazi war criminal. By 1992 I think the world was rather fed up with spy thrillers harking back to elements involving WW2; seen it, done it, and done it better, as it were. While Gardner does hint at modern at politics, melding the two strains together doesn't succeed as a literary device. He over complicates his plot by doing so and it was complicated enough to begin with. It doesn't help the story is dialogue driven and the characters who utter the dialogue are universally dull. Regards the photograph. I've only read the novel once and to be brutally honest, I don't even remember the incident, so it must have been fairly unimportant to the overall narrative arc.
@Silhouette Man I agree madness is part of the concept of villain, but considering Gardner describes Yuskovich as a military mastermind, we could have expected something more subtle than taking a picture of three western agents carrying missiles just to make the US believe Soviet Russia is not behind this. It's not like if Bond was someone totally unknown from the CIA and other intel services. The thing is it could have been much more relevant with Yuskovich not knowing Bond and his foreign partners are western spies. From the moment he learns it, this photo trick becomes so risky that I just don't understand how such a "brilliant" mind cannot rethink about it, or at least use other unknown hostages.
@chrisno1 the first half of the novel is not bad. Gardner wanted to try something different and dealing with the Holocaust in a Bond novel was a very bold decision. If this Scales of Justice group really was what we think it is at the beginning, the whole story would have been interesting, with some moral dilemma for Bond introduced early, making the climax much more exciting than the terrible actual one. Do you see my point ?
Yes, I agree, you certainly do expect more from a military career man like a top ranking general, which is what Yuskovich was. I hate to keep returning to Colonel Sun as an example but due to the shared high military rank I think it is at least comparable. As we know, in that novel Sun wanted to frame Bond and M for the intended murderous mortar bomb attack on the Soviet delegation at the summit meeting in Greece. That's all well and good, but when you think about it what would the head of the British Secret Service be doing personally overseeing Bond mortar bombing a Soviet summing meeting? Not only that, Sun intends to torture Bond and inject him with a toxin from mushrooms that will cause him to have convulsions after his bones are broken. Surely the Greek police and the Soviet or British authorities wouldn't be fooled by this and know from their injuries that they were killed by something other than blowback from a mortar bomb attack gone wrong? In his desire to torture both Bond and M for his own sick pleasure (rather than extracting the secret information his Red Chinese masters want him to) it seems Sun is willing to jeopardise the whole frame-up. Sure, the Soviets and Bond and M would be killed but any investigation team worth their salt would soon work out it was a frame-up by another power and in the time of the Sino-Soviet split who is a more likely culprit than Red China?
I'd contend that the same poor military strategy was behind the flaws in General Yuskovich's plan too. In the real world (which TMFB very much reflects) look at the initial Soviet Russian strategy in response to Hitler's Operation Barbarossa in 1941 or the more recent failure of Putin's armed forces to make quick headway in Ukraine.