Sunday, October 24, 2010

Slow Horses by Mick Herron

It's the scope of spy novels that I admire, as well as the political questions they  often raise. What's more, these days I seem to read more and more of them: Charles McCarry; Le CarrĂ©; though the spy novel I've enjoyed the most over the past few months has been Mick Herron's Slow Horses. Herron doesn't shy away from contemporary politics or the state of the intelligence service. A Brit whose previous work has mostly been more oriented towards detective fiction, Herron's novel is reminiscent of the Brit TV series Spooks. Like the TV series, Slow Horses concerns a factional element within MI5. But, if anything, it's darker,  better written, and even more cynical and entertaining than Spooks. The title, Slow Horses, refers to agents exiled through misdeed, error or mishap, destined to spend their time carrying out meaningless tasks in an anonymous building miles away from MI5 headquarters. Here the plot revolves around the kidnapping of a young Muslim and the Slow Horses' gradual involvement and problematical, not to mention competitive, relationship to the more mainstream members of the intelligence service.  Tightly written in a stripped down,  hardboiled format, Slow Horses portrays contemporary Britain in an unflinching manner. It also has numerous plot twists,  even switching protagonists at various points in the narrartive. Though one would be correct in thinking Herron's attitude to the intelligence community is cynical, the novel is the perfect companion to the events surrounding the 2005 shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes at the Stockwell tube station by the Metropolitan police, weeks after the 7/7 bombings. Moreover Slow Horses ends with the suggestion that Herron might  have a sequel in mind, and, if he does, I'll  definitely be reading it.

Monday, October 11, 2010

The Brave Cowboy by Edward Abbey

 "There is a valley in the west where phantoms come to brood and mourn, pale phantoms dying of nostalgia and bitterness."

Ed Dorn used to say that Abbey's The Brave Cowboy, published in 1956,  was the last cowboy novel. It's true. Most subsequent novels seem more like trips down memory lane. Of course, some would counter with Cormac McCarthy. But the latter's Border Trilogy is more nostalgic for a past that no longer exists, while No Country For Old Men, which is  similar to Abbey's book, in contrasting the old and new, takes a more conservative view of things. In McCarthy's novel,  the hunter represents older, more humane values and the hunted the corruption of the modern world. In Abbey's novel, the cowboy is hunted, and his ethos on the verge of being destroyed, and what hunts him is the law and letter of  present day America, with its restrictions, its highways, fast food restaurants, strip malls,  free market capitalism, etc..  It's definitely the politics, as much as the prose, of The Brave Cowboy that grabs one's attention. Forget the movie adaptation with Kirk Douglas. Even though the screenplay was written by blacklisted writer  Dalton Trumbo and  features Walter Matthau and a young Gena Rowlands (directed by David Miller, a Hollywood veteran with a limited pedigree, best known for directing Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear and, years later,  Executive Action based on the Mark Lane book on JFK's assassination, with another script by Trumbo), the film only hints at the novel's spirit and politics. Perhaps that's understandable given that the film hit the screens  in 1962. Put Miller could have done better by Abbey, whose contention was that the cowboy is destined to be destroyed by the culture he helped created, but not before being turned into a mythologized creature of the past. That image- nicely captured in the film- of Jack on his horse trying to cross a modern highway pretty much says it all. Abbey contrasts the theoretical with the real.  There's Paul, a bookish anarchist, in jail for refusing to register for the draft (the novel takes place around 1950), his politics making it impossible for him to register as a conscientious objector; after all,  he's not objecting to war as such but to slavery, and who believes that nothing- neither law nor country- supersedes friendship. Then there's  Jack the cowboy, the authentic anarchist, who comes to town to break Paul out of jail.  Jack  has no home, can't stand the thought of spending  a night in jail, and doesn't understand why everyone else doesn't feel the same. When he finds that Paul cannot ethically justify escaping,  Jack breaks out with two Mexican prisoners. Striking out on his own, Jack is chased by a weary sheriff, blatantly uncomfortable in his own skin, and his gung-ho deputies.  Abbey may have later developed some idiosyncratic beliefs, some of which (immigration, AIDS) might not have been out of place in the current Arizona political climate, even if some of those Arizonians would have strung him up for his environmental extremism. But Abbey's politics in The Brave Cowboy are never less than perceptive, and his descriptions of the desert and the New Mexico mountains never less than exquisite. Totally unlike The Monkey Wrench, in which he is understandably out to find the lowest common denominator, and more like Desert Solitaire, which remains of the most beautiful deliberations on the American southwest, The Brave Cowboy, which could equally be called "the last cowboy," should be required reading for anyone interested in the west, where we've been and where we're going.