22 October 2015
A Pearl Beyond Price
by J.R.Thomas
It is one of those special autumns. Not the Indian summer, however welcome and warming. Not the disastrous sporting performance, forcing us to realign our enthusiasm to our second choices. Not the party conferences, set piece speeches, rude crowds wasting eggs, and daggers being polished. No; much more exciting than all that. It is an autumn of Bond. Nobody could be unaware. It has been creeping toward us all year, interviews with Mr Craig, road-tests of Aston Martins in the Sunday papers, the background Ian Fleming documentary, chat show interviews with Ralph Fiennes, travel articles about Mexico. And now it is upon us, the new Bond, arriving very shortly. The trailers in the local Odeon are so long that you might be forgiven for thinking that you had wandered into an early screening of the movie. This weekend’s Sunday supplements are full of product placement – for the film, and for the products expensively trailed in the film. Even Mrs Daniel Craig – Rachel Weisz – has been interviewed, promoting HER new film with many mentions of her husband (“who appears shortly….”).
James Bond has become part of our twentieth and twenty-first century flow of life, the adventure spy movies to beat all adventure spy movies, the cars, the stunts, the girls, the action, the fantasy kept on a lead just short enough to convince us that, if we had lived our early lives a little differently, that might somehow have been us.
Few of those mesmerised by the big screen action will have read Ian Fleming’s books. They were big sellers in their time, setting up Mr Fleming for a comfortable life, though alas not one he was to enjoy for long. He died, aged fifty six, in 1964. Readers venturing to the bookshelf might be in for shock, though. Fleming created a flawed hero, an anti-hero, who, whilst he had some of the glamour and action of the onscreen version, was a much darker and more complex character than he has been on celluloid. Bond, in the books, is fighting demons, a man from a privileged background clinging to his traditional ordered past, troubled by what he has seen, by abandonment and loneliness, by a world where he has to do morally dubious things and yet gets pleasure from them.
Fleming was not the only man to create a spy struggling with his own impulses, a Brit whose private and withdrawn nature is subverted into the service of government. There are two writers a reader might enjoy even more than Fleming; both of them still with us; living, as seems entirely fitting, deep in the English countryside. Both of them, though, set their works in a more realistic bureaucratic secret service, where men and women jostle and push for promotion, not by what they achieve with the Walther PPK, but by the crispness of their reports and the accuracy of their filing systems.
One is well known and still working. That is John Le Carré , 84 this week, the neglected son of a confidence trickster of enormous skill and sophistication, a former spy himself (as was Fleming), creator of flawed careerists and delineator of that mostly dull but occasionally vicious secret trade plied in the shadows beyond the safe secure world in which we have lived since the First World War. His best known hero – though Le Carré weaves such complex characters that it is difficult to describe any of his leading players as simply heroes or villains, they are much too weakly human for that – is that great spymaster, George Smiley. Smiley, made flesh by Alec Guinness in the magnificent television adaption, is a quiet contemplative man who buries himself, a silent black spider in many dangerous webs, in the manipulation of the murky world he inhabits, whilst his domestic life falls apart in the politest possible English way.
And the other you may well not have heard of. He wrote nineteen superb books, usually known as the David Audley series, and then sheeted-over his typewriter in 1995, never to produce the promised twentieth and final one in the series, creating a mystery to conclude a series of mysteries. His name is Anthony Price. If Mr Price ever had any practical spying experience he has never admitted it. But his original craft has impulses perhaps not unlike spying; he was a journalist. He ended that career as editor of the Oxford Mail, a daily newspaper written for an erudite and intelligent audience.
Mr Price is 87 now, and a very private man, having only once given an interview concerning the novelistic part of his life. His first book in the David Audley series was published in 1970, well before Le Carré came to fame with his opening best seller, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Price’s leading man, Audley, is a cerebral, reclusive, middle-aged historian who works for the intelligence agencies analysing Middle Eastern politics. In the first novel, The Labyrinth Makers, he is put onto a job for which he has no training or obvious aptitude. As the title suggests, Price’s plotting is fiendish and complex, with Audley doubting the motives of everybody around him – and concerned as to what failure might do to his career. Price’s plotting, carefully polished writing (especially his dialogue) and the human credibility of his cast continue throughout the next eighteen books.
What distinguishes Price’s writing is that quality of character development. He interweaves the careers and lives (and occasional deaths) of people who become completely real in their personalities, their motivations, their weaknesses and ambitions, their strengths and doubts. Audley himself develops from his withdrawn grumpiness through career success and marriage to a more ruthless cynicism, a man who would like the world to be a better place – but knows it won’t be. The most interesting character is perhaps Major Jack Butler, a gauche blunt northern soldier with a chip on his shoulder, who with brute energy and efficiency works his way up the Intelligence Service, not least by knowing when to defer to the talents of his clever but troublesome team. That he begins as Audley’s boss, but ends up working for him, is one of the fascinating threads in the books.
Price writes each book from the perspective of one of his lead characters. Audley himself leads in The Labyrinth Makers, but in the second book, The Alamut Ambush, it is his assistant, Hugh Roskill, a straightforward RAF man, who is the main protagonist, and whose services training begins to crumble as he develops doubts as to what his superiors might be up to. A perplexed Butler stars in Colonel Butler’s Wolf. One of the most fascinating characters is Peter Richardson, who … but we must not reveal too much. Price created a soap opera – in the way that Trollope did in his great sets of novels – through his ever evolving and revolving cast, but what distinguishes Price’s writing from many soap opera formats is the immense believability of his people, the way they develop and change, rise and fall, love and lose, are struck down and recover – or don’t. Incidentally, Price rejects in his only interview a belief which many readers must hold – that Audley is Price. He says “Audley is big, clever, and Cambridge because I was small, Oxford, and not so clever” so that “nobody will think he’s writing about himself”.
The other unique feature of the nineteen books is that each one has some historical or archaeological context, some strong backstory in which the current action takes place. These vary from the America Civil War (an academic under threat) to the English Civil War (an mysterious enactor of battles found dead on the fake battlefield), from Roman Britain (Butler joining a friend on Hadrian’s Wall, realising that odd things are once again afoot on the edge of England) to the Second World War (the Normandy battles). That interweaving of past events with current day action produces yet another level of esoteric puzzle-making which makes the books very difficult to put down. Price is fascinated by how the past creates shadows on our present world; as to how we are, as he says, in “the second Great Age of Treason” – the first being that of the time of the first Queen Elizabeth.
So, by all means, go and queue for the latest Bond. Sit and thrill and long for a vodka martini; but, if you really want to be both shaken and stirred, go to a second-hand bookshop or get online and find yourself an Anthony Price.
For Nick Jones’s 2011 interview with Anthony Price visit the blog “Existential Ennui”.
