Ah yes, sorry about that, enthusiasm, see. Mind you, the chapter where 'Palmer' learns this term is another episode that drags the narrative out, a day / night trip to a specialist's cottage in North Wales. The whole scene could have been done in London.
Unlike my readings of Len Deighton’s previous two ‘Harry Palmer’ novels, I declined to refer to the appendices while reading the narrative, although I did glance quickly at the page notes when given. This, I felt, might prevent me from being annoyed by them. It did. Instead I was annoyed by other things. My Harper’s copy from 2009 features a long introduction from Deighton explaining how Berlin became [in his words] ‘a second home’ after meeting the director Kurt Jung Alsen at the National Film Theatre in London following a showing of his film The Story of Private Pooley. Deighton subsequently went to visit Alsen in East Berlin. I mention this because Private Pooley was made in 1961, and Deighton does mention the Wall being put up, but given Funeral in Berlin was published in 1964, its events take place in late 1963 and Deighton had written and published two novels in this period, I query this ‘a second home’ reference. I can understand being obsessed with a city, especially if one is researching, but that description seems far too endearing. It doesn’t help matters that the action of the book only resides in Berlin for half its time. The rest of the book is spent in France, Prague and a dreary London, mostly in offices and on telephones and with hardly an ounce of interest from page-to-page.
Dreary describes it well. Funeral in Berlin is about as cold a yarn as a Cold War yard gets. It is frozen. Inexplicably dull, the novel isn’t helped by a plot so maze like you need a map to unravel it. Characters appear from the hedgerows as you turn corners, or pages, and incidents that cry out for some sort of excitement fizzle away to nothing. The climax takes place on derelict ground in London on Bonfire Night with ‘Palmer’ chucking fireworks about while his homosexual agitator tries to gun him down. The stuff in Berlin finished chapters before. The whole exercise is a tawdry experience. Ex-Nazi’s hide in plain sight in Germany and Spain, corrupt British officials pull invisible strings across the continent, Israeli secret service agents seek a super-dooper agricultural fertilizer [yes, really] and the Russians pull better strings than the British. The Americans dip their oar in the mustard in the form of Harvey Newbegin [not Leo as in the film Billion Dollar Brain, his role in this book is so insignificant despite pages and pages devoted to him, that the screen writers edited him out for the cinema version]. The best sections involved the old Bolshevik Colonel Stok, who at least felt real, read real and talked real. Everyone else seems to be acting like someone else and sounding like it, from Johnnie Vulkan’s crooked German to Samantha Steel’s deceptive Jew, to Hallum’s fortune seeker to ‘Harry Palmer’ himself, pulling the metaphorical wool over everyone’s eyes.
Deighton gives us all that detail we have already come to recognise as his forte: the rain rolling off Vulkan’s face onto his shoes, Hallum’s cats, Stok’s toes picking up coal-pokers, Alice chain-smoking, Dawlish’s weeds, Jean and her irrepressible haircuts. Deighton takes us away from his lead character occasionally to offer goblets of insight into the other main players, reverting to a third person narrative each time, but the brief respite from ‘Harry’s know-it-all dialogue and description doesn’t lighten the mood enough. Dawlish’s procrastinations and pontifications don’t help. A modicum of explanation might assist, but there isn’t any. Sometimes I felt as if ‘Harry Palmer’ was being deliberately obscure simply so he [by which I mean Len Deighton] could prove how obtuse the rest of the cast [by which I mean us] truly are; in his mind at any rate. The whole thing is as dense as a rock cake and quite as indigestible. Maybe I am missing the charm of a truly Cold War, but the novel felt curiously irrelevant, as if the plan and its execution and the people around it had no bearing on history or even on ‘Harry Palmer’ who remains as untouched by events as the rain soaked newspaper he spies on the street at the novel’s end.
Berlin – a new crisis? screams the headline. ‘Palmer’ barely registers the fact, he’s too busy catching up on dreary old pre-swinging London. I consider the film adaptation of Funeral in Berlin to be the least interesting of the Harry Palmer movies, certainly the 1960s trilogy, but goodness this book was hard work.
In a second introduction, illustrator Arnold Schwartzmann explains the creative process behind his montage cover. This was more interesting than the novel which follows. Still, at least the very excellent cover goes some way to generating the landscape of Deighton’s cloaked and crooked spy world.
The plot of the movie is vastly altered and the locations effectively condensed. The film IMO does what the book should be doing, creating a tense and believable Cold War environment. FIB '66 has its good moments, just not enough of them for me. I understand why people like it. Compared to the book, it is streets ahead.
Len Deighton’s ‘Harry Palmer’ escapades come to an end in familiar fashion, although not without some interest thanks mostly to a more streamlined plot. The narrative though does the usual meanderings all over the world and eventually becomes its own laconic funeral as an episode of much promise peters out into a series of head-to-heads during which Deighton’s unnamed protagonist decides that the “day of the political philosopher is over. Men no longer betray their country for an ideal; they respond to immediate problems.” ‘Palmer’ displays the same immediate instincts when protecting his country’s interests; no ideal – political or personal – will divert him from his arduous and unfathomable tasks.
Billion Dollar Brain begins effectively enough with a touch of mystery surrounding the theft of some ‘eggs’ from Portadown and ‘Palmer’s pursuit of them to Helsinki. Following the death of his contact Dr Kaarna, ‘Harry’ reacquaints himself with Harvey Newbegin, the American rascal who barely featured in Funeral in Berlin, yet appears to be a big cog in ‘Harry Palmer’s European wheel of agents. Newbegin has got ‘Harry’ and everybody on the hop, including his new squeeze Signe, his wife, Russia’s Colonel Stok, a bunch of Latvian rebels and the frankly bonkers ultra-nationalist General Midwinter. This last character has a crazy introduction in New York at a strange sub-swinging-sixties costume party packed full of people reenacting American Independence. Strange doesn’t do half the explaining. It was at this point that the novel began to go off the rails. What had been an intriguing and well-constructed tale of deceit, double cross and delectable seduction simply unravelled into a trawl of chapters designed to send one to sleep.
I exaggerate slightly, but Deighton’s incessant need to demonstrate how singularly unexciting life is for a secret agent merely makes his books unexciting as well. For half its length, Billion Dollar Brain is clever, incisive and swift. Then it just becomes boring as ‘Palmer’ travels to New York, to Texas, to London and Helsinki and Leningrad and barely a thing happens unless it comes from someone’s mouth. Dialogue drives stories – it can also kill them. Deighton seems to have forgotten that thrillers ought to be thrilling and having his hero uncover a couple of red herrings, a couple of corpses and shoving a bad guy under a bus simply isn’t enough excitement for this reader. It doesn’t help that most of the conversations are about nothing related to the central story: the virus infected eggs and how General Midwinter plans to use them to overthrow communism. In fact, I am not sure it is even hinted at; Midwinter – who is as unhinged as any great baddie should be – doesn’t even get to be the main villain. He’s sort of shuffled in and shuffled out when Deighton wants to score political points about the USA and its ill-informed anti-socialist agendas. Instead, Deighton concentrates on Harvey Newbegin, who isn’t a grand villain; he’s just a man who loves money and cheats on his wife with a teenage sexpot.
I was somewhat disconcerted by the age of the lovely Signe Laine. She claims to be “almost eighteen” and Deighton describes her as an ingenue, yet apparently she is one of Midwinter’s great assets, having eliminated three enemy agents. She wants to attempt the same on poor Harvey, but ‘Palmer’ skittles him away too fast, although she knows Harvey’s number is already up whatever the deluded lovesick American thinks. Colonel Stok watches all the proceedings with a heavy eye and a nice line in wit, which is lacking almost everywhere else.
Regards the age of characters, Deighton seems to have changed his mind over ‘Harry Palmer’. In Horse Under Water, ‘Palmer’ was described as having been involved in the Second World War. Here he tells Signe that eighteen years ago he was sitting exams, so he could be as young as 34 [GCE’s at 16] or 39 [a three year degree at 21] or he might be older if he took exams in the army. Alternatively, given ‘Palmer’ hides behind identities, he might be lying about his age also, or about his army experience – who knows? This disguise of character has advantages in terms of reinvention, but doesn’t help us empathise with anything ‘Palmer’ tells us about himself, others or the world as we begin to misunderstand what he is about, where he has come from and why he is how he is. Like Harvey Newbegin, he succumbs to the nymphet’s charms anyway, probably because it’s all in the line of duty, although he never makes that clear either.
The innovations Deighton introduced for his debut The Ipcress File – all those appendices and the neat lines about London and the life of an operative – have become old-hat in four books. The landscape hasn’t changed any for ‘Harry Palmer’. If anything, the cynicism has gone, to be replaced by doses of lethargic banter. ‘Palmer’s on-off affair with his secretary Jean is becoming a bore, especially as he keeps making love to other women as soon as he gets into the field. She is still obsessed with her hair. His boss, Dawlish, is beginning to sound like that public school bowler hatted comic strip official Sir Gerald Tarrant from Modesty Blaise; his attention to overgrown weeds and crass antiques doesn’t so much add depth as despair. The scenes where he condescends to ‘Palmer’ and ‘Palmer’ condescends back have ceased to be amusing. Here, they also go on far too long and get in the way of the story. The same could be said of the sojourn to New York. The film version sensibly transfers most of this dialogue and meeting to Texas. The weeks of in depth training ‘Palmer’ receives at Midwinter’s HQ as skimped over in favour of a dull night swapping family stories with Harvey and his wife. The fantastic titular Billion Dollar Brain hardly gets a chapter. It’s surprising how much of the novel was extracted for the movie, although not necessarily in the right order or location. Like Funeral… the movie is an improvement on the book.
The final chapters are set back in London as ‘Harry’ tries to secure safe passage for a traitor, his wife and child: a distinctly tensionless series of scenes that call into question ‘Palmer’s ethics. I mean, what are his ideals, his purpose, as a British agent? While James Bond [and others] are described as killers, men at the behest of their governments, in the bear pit of espionage, ‘Harry Palmer’ hovers around it knocking pawns off the proverbial chess board. It really is a game to him: who can be trusted, who not, how to manoeuvre someone into an unresolvable position, how to escape, where to hide, what to say or usually what not. Even when ‘Palmer’ tells us, I can’t recognise the clues and have to back track they are so unobtrusively hidden in the action – or more likely the interminable dialogues. I just want something to happen and, in the last two novels especially, nothing does in ‘Harry Palmer’s world.
It’s easy to see why Ian Fleming and James Bond were so popular when you read this kind of novel, one which makes you feel the author is determined to be pretentious, considering his work too good for his own readers. Thrillers ought to build to a climax and this one, like its immediate predecessor, does not. The impressionable first half feels like a wasted opportunity.
Comments
Ah yes, sorry about that, enthusiasm, see. Mind you, the chapter where 'Palmer' learns this term is another episode that drags the narrative out, a day / night trip to a specialist's cottage in North Wales. The whole scene could have been done in London.
FUNERAL IN BERLIN (1964)
Unlike my readings of Len Deighton’s previous two ‘Harry Palmer’ novels, I declined to refer to the appendices while reading the narrative, although I did glance quickly at the page notes when given. This, I felt, might prevent me from being annoyed by them. It did. Instead I was annoyed by other things. My Harper’s copy from 2009 features a long introduction from Deighton explaining how Berlin became [in his words] ‘a second home’ after meeting the director Kurt Jung Alsen at the National Film Theatre in London following a showing of his film The Story of Private Pooley. Deighton subsequently went to visit Alsen in East Berlin. I mention this because Private Pooley was made in 1961, and Deighton does mention the Wall being put up, but given Funeral in Berlin was published in 1964, its events take place in late 1963 and Deighton had written and published two novels in this period, I query this ‘a second home’ reference. I can understand being obsessed with a city, especially if one is researching, but that description seems far too endearing. It doesn’t help matters that the action of the book only resides in Berlin for half its time. The rest of the book is spent in France, Prague and a dreary London, mostly in offices and on telephones and with hardly an ounce of interest from page-to-page.
Dreary describes it well. Funeral in Berlin is about as cold a yarn as a Cold War yard gets. It is frozen. Inexplicably dull, the novel isn’t helped by a plot so maze like you need a map to unravel it. Characters appear from the hedgerows as you turn corners, or pages, and incidents that cry out for some sort of excitement fizzle away to nothing. The climax takes place on derelict ground in London on Bonfire Night with ‘Palmer’ chucking fireworks about while his homosexual agitator tries to gun him down. The stuff in Berlin finished chapters before. The whole exercise is a tawdry experience. Ex-Nazi’s hide in plain sight in Germany and Spain, corrupt British officials pull invisible strings across the continent, Israeli secret service agents seek a super-dooper agricultural fertilizer [yes, really] and the Russians pull better strings than the British. The Americans dip their oar in the mustard in the form of Harvey Newbegin [not Leo as in the film Billion Dollar Brain, his role in this book is so insignificant despite pages and pages devoted to him, that the screen writers edited him out for the cinema version]. The best sections involved the old Bolshevik Colonel Stok, who at least felt real, read real and talked real. Everyone else seems to be acting like someone else and sounding like it, from Johnnie Vulkan’s crooked German to Samantha Steel’s deceptive Jew, to Hallum’s fortune seeker to ‘Harry Palmer’ himself, pulling the metaphorical wool over everyone’s eyes.
Deighton gives us all that detail we have already come to recognise as his forte: the rain rolling off Vulkan’s face onto his shoes, Hallum’s cats, Stok’s toes picking up coal-pokers, Alice chain-smoking, Dawlish’s weeds, Jean and her irrepressible haircuts. Deighton takes us away from his lead character occasionally to offer goblets of insight into the other main players, reverting to a third person narrative each time, but the brief respite from ‘Harry’s know-it-all dialogue and description doesn’t lighten the mood enough. Dawlish’s procrastinations and pontifications don’t help. A modicum of explanation might assist, but there isn’t any. Sometimes I felt as if ‘Harry Palmer’ was being deliberately obscure simply so he [by which I mean Len Deighton] could prove how obtuse the rest of the cast [by which I mean us] truly are; in his mind at any rate. The whole thing is as dense as a rock cake and quite as indigestible. Maybe I am missing the charm of a truly Cold War, but the novel felt curiously irrelevant, as if the plan and its execution and the people around it had no bearing on history or even on ‘Harry Palmer’ who remains as untouched by events as the rain soaked newspaper he spies on the street at the novel’s end.
Berlin – a new crisis? screams the headline. ‘Palmer’ barely registers the fact, he’s too busy catching up on dreary old pre-swinging London. I consider the film adaptation of Funeral in Berlin to be the least interesting of the Harry Palmer movies, certainly the 1960s trilogy, but goodness this book was hard work.
In a second introduction, illustrator Arnold Schwartzmann explains the creative process behind his montage cover. This was more interesting than the novel which follows. Still, at least the very excellent cover goes some way to generating the landscape of Deighton’s cloaked and crooked spy world.
Excellent review, well thought out.
The film is probably my favourite of the three. That version has a really satisfying plot I think.
The plot of the movie is vastly altered and the locations effectively condensed. The film IMO does what the book should be doing, creating a tense and believable Cold War environment. FIB '66 has its good moments, just not enough of them for me. I understand why people like it. Compared to the book, it is streets ahead.
BILLION DOLLAR BRAIN (1966)
Len Deighton’s ‘Harry Palmer’ escapades come to an end in familiar fashion, although not without some interest thanks mostly to a more streamlined plot. The narrative though does the usual meanderings all over the world and eventually becomes its own laconic funeral as an episode of much promise peters out into a series of head-to-heads during which Deighton’s unnamed protagonist decides that the “day of the political philosopher is over. Men no longer betray their country for an ideal; they respond to immediate problems.” ‘Palmer’ displays the same immediate instincts when protecting his country’s interests; no ideal – political or personal – will divert him from his arduous and unfathomable tasks.
Billion Dollar Brain begins effectively enough with a touch of mystery surrounding the theft of some ‘eggs’ from Portadown and ‘Palmer’s pursuit of them to Helsinki. Following the death of his contact Dr Kaarna, ‘Harry’ reacquaints himself with Harvey Newbegin, the American rascal who barely featured in Funeral in Berlin, yet appears to be a big cog in ‘Harry Palmer’s European wheel of agents. Newbegin has got ‘Harry’ and everybody on the hop, including his new squeeze Signe, his wife, Russia’s Colonel Stok, a bunch of Latvian rebels and the frankly bonkers ultra-nationalist General Midwinter. This last character has a crazy introduction in New York at a strange sub-swinging-sixties costume party packed full of people reenacting American Independence. Strange doesn’t do half the explaining. It was at this point that the novel began to go off the rails. What had been an intriguing and well-constructed tale of deceit, double cross and delectable seduction simply unravelled into a trawl of chapters designed to send one to sleep.
I exaggerate slightly, but Deighton’s incessant need to demonstrate how singularly unexciting life is for a secret agent merely makes his books unexciting as well. For half its length, Billion Dollar Brain is clever, incisive and swift. Then it just becomes boring as ‘Palmer’ travels to New York, to Texas, to London and Helsinki and Leningrad and barely a thing happens unless it comes from someone’s mouth. Dialogue drives stories – it can also kill them. Deighton seems to have forgotten that thrillers ought to be thrilling and having his hero uncover a couple of red herrings, a couple of corpses and shoving a bad guy under a bus simply isn’t enough excitement for this reader. It doesn’t help that most of the conversations are about nothing related to the central story: the virus infected eggs and how General Midwinter plans to use them to overthrow communism. In fact, I am not sure it is even hinted at; Midwinter – who is as unhinged as any great baddie should be – doesn’t even get to be the main villain. He’s sort of shuffled in and shuffled out when Deighton wants to score political points about the USA and its ill-informed anti-socialist agendas. Instead, Deighton concentrates on Harvey Newbegin, who isn’t a grand villain; he’s just a man who loves money and cheats on his wife with a teenage sexpot.
I was somewhat disconcerted by the age of the lovely Signe Laine. She claims to be “almost eighteen” and Deighton describes her as an ingenue, yet apparently she is one of Midwinter’s great assets, having eliminated three enemy agents. She wants to attempt the same on poor Harvey, but ‘Palmer’ skittles him away too fast, although she knows Harvey’s number is already up whatever the deluded lovesick American thinks. Colonel Stok watches all the proceedings with a heavy eye and a nice line in wit, which is lacking almost everywhere else.
Regards the age of characters, Deighton seems to have changed his mind over ‘Harry Palmer’. In Horse Under Water, ‘Palmer’ was described as having been involved in the Second World War. Here he tells Signe that eighteen years ago he was sitting exams, so he could be as young as 34 [GCE’s at 16] or 39 [a three year degree at 21] or he might be older if he took exams in the army. Alternatively, given ‘Palmer’ hides behind identities, he might be lying about his age also, or about his army experience – who knows? This disguise of character has advantages in terms of reinvention, but doesn’t help us empathise with anything ‘Palmer’ tells us about himself, others or the world as we begin to misunderstand what he is about, where he has come from and why he is how he is. Like Harvey Newbegin, he succumbs to the nymphet’s charms anyway, probably because it’s all in the line of duty, although he never makes that clear either.
The innovations Deighton introduced for his debut The Ipcress File – all those appendices and the neat lines about London and the life of an operative – have become old-hat in four books. The landscape hasn’t changed any for ‘Harry Palmer’. If anything, the cynicism has gone, to be replaced by doses of lethargic banter. ‘Palmer’s on-off affair with his secretary Jean is becoming a bore, especially as he keeps making love to other women as soon as he gets into the field. She is still obsessed with her hair. His boss, Dawlish, is beginning to sound like that public school bowler hatted comic strip official Sir Gerald Tarrant from Modesty Blaise; his attention to overgrown weeds and crass antiques doesn’t so much add depth as despair. The scenes where he condescends to ‘Palmer’ and ‘Palmer’ condescends back have ceased to be amusing. Here, they also go on far too long and get in the way of the story. The same could be said of the sojourn to New York. The film version sensibly transfers most of this dialogue and meeting to Texas. The weeks of in depth training ‘Palmer’ receives at Midwinter’s HQ as skimped over in favour of a dull night swapping family stories with Harvey and his wife. The fantastic titular Billion Dollar Brain hardly gets a chapter. It’s surprising how much of the novel was extracted for the movie, although not necessarily in the right order or location. Like Funeral… the movie is an improvement on the book.
The final chapters are set back in London as ‘Harry’ tries to secure safe passage for a traitor, his wife and child: a distinctly tensionless series of scenes that call into question ‘Palmer’s ethics. I mean, what are his ideals, his purpose, as a British agent? While James Bond [and others] are described as killers, men at the behest of their governments, in the bear pit of espionage, ‘Harry Palmer’ hovers around it knocking pawns off the proverbial chess board. It really is a game to him: who can be trusted, who not, how to manoeuvre someone into an unresolvable position, how to escape, where to hide, what to say or usually what not. Even when ‘Palmer’ tells us, I can’t recognise the clues and have to back track they are so unobtrusively hidden in the action – or more likely the interminable dialogues. I just want something to happen and, in the last two novels especially, nothing does in ‘Harry Palmer’s world.
It’s easy to see why Ian Fleming and James Bond were so popular when you read this kind of novel, one which makes you feel the author is determined to be pretentious, considering his work too good for his own readers. Thrillers ought to build to a climax and this one, like its immediate predecessor, does not. The impressionable first half feels like a wasted opportunity.
Disappointing.
After myself giving up with a Deighton years back you don’t make me want to pick it up again!
I do like the concept of Midwinter: a stupid rich guy trying to end the Cold War himself is a great idea for a villain.