Michael Schmicker's Blog - Posts Tagged "ian-fleming"
James Bond Meets Salvador Dali (Book Review)
“The name’s Dougherty – Victoria Dougherty.”
And she’s come up with an erudite, neoclassic, Cold War thriller.
“The Bone Church” is set primarily in Nazi-occupied – and subsequently Soviet-occupied – Eastern Europe. The plot revolves around the Infant of Prague, a famous Catholic religious icon pursued for different reasons by the Czech Resistance and Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels. The atmosphere is sour and gritty – ration coupons, coal smoke, greasy goulash. The story repeatedly time-shifts between the 40s and 50s, and the plot is twisty and byzantine – choked with hints and suspicions, scattered clues, double-crosses, tails, moles, and blackmailers. Everybody carries faked documents. Nothing is what it seems.
Multiple writers, particularly British, have chosen this Kafkaesque era and communist Eastern Europe as a setting for a novel. John le Carre set the bar with “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,” named “the best spy novel of all time” by Publishers Weekly in 2006. Graham Greene’s most famous Cold War works take place in Cuba and Vietnam, but he set “The Third Man” in Allied-occupied Vienna. British novelist Ian Fleming dispatched his suave hero James Bond – “The name’s Bond, James Bond” – on missions into Moscow-controlled Austria, East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Dougherty’s Czechoslovakia. If Fleming were still alive, I’m confident he’d invite her over to Dukes Bar to swap notes over a shaken, not stirred, martini. The 007 creator delighted in oddly named characters like Goldfinger and Blofeld; Dougherty created the gypsy Srut, an odd jobber for the Prague Underground. Bond sported a Walther PPK; Dougherty’s hero Felix packs a Walther P38. Bond escapes baddies by using gyroplanes and strap-on jetpacks; Felix and Srut hijack a fire truck, and careen through Prague. Dougherty even delivers a fiery explosion scene rivaling “For Your Eyes Only.”
But “The Bone Church” is closer to John le Carre and Graham Greene than Bond parody.
Like le Carre, Doherty explores the moral grays of the Cold War era, and how the challenged respond. Like Greene, a fellow Catholic (he a convert, she born to the faith), Dougherty serves up a flawed, all-too-human Church of Rome. Protagonist Felix is an honorable Jesuit, his father Marek noble and self-sacrificing. But her secondary cast includes a corporate-ladder-climbing bishop; a nasty nun; a worldly Cardinal chauffeured around in a Mercedes limousine carrying a leather briefcase stuffed with hundred-dollar bills; a fetishized Infant of Prague doll; and a Vatican hierarchy castigated by Srut in the novel – and by a number of authors in real life – for failing to more forcefully confront Hitler and the Holocaust horror during World War II. The debate over Pope Pius XII’s response still rages today, adding a moral gravity to Dougherty’s novel wholly absent in Fleming’s cartoon Bond.
The thread of surrealism woven into “The Bone Church” is proprietary Dougherty. Scenes worthy of Salvador Dali pop up throughout the story. Felix sees visions of Simon the Zealot and St, Bartholomew; confers with his dead mother-in-law; laces on his hockey skates and escapes down a frozen river dodging a hail of gunfire while dragging Srut behind him on a rope. The Goddess of Soliloquy flies off the façade of the National Theater and pokes her head through the fire truck window to give Felix advice while Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” thumps through his head; St. Michael the Archangel, appearing to him in street clothes, counsels him in extremis; the dead Srut steadies his shooting hand; during an extended gunfight inside the Bone Church (which lends the novel its title), a life-size human skeleton of Jesus Christ crashes down on the hero’s head; a tribe of “Indians” sporting bows and arrows and living in teepees on the Czech-West German border help him across no man’s land; a sculptor signs his work on the back of an eyeball – sly homage to Bunuel and Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou”? Probably not, but who knows? Nothing is what it seems.
All I know is that Dougherty has managed to slip into the room with Fleming, Greene and le Carre and deliver a clever, original take on Cold War noir.
Got that? Good.
Meet her at the bookstore at midnight, comrade. She’s got a package for you.
And she’s come up with an erudite, neoclassic, Cold War thriller.
“The Bone Church” is set primarily in Nazi-occupied – and subsequently Soviet-occupied – Eastern Europe. The plot revolves around the Infant of Prague, a famous Catholic religious icon pursued for different reasons by the Czech Resistance and Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels. The atmosphere is sour and gritty – ration coupons, coal smoke, greasy goulash. The story repeatedly time-shifts between the 40s and 50s, and the plot is twisty and byzantine – choked with hints and suspicions, scattered clues, double-crosses, tails, moles, and blackmailers. Everybody carries faked documents. Nothing is what it seems.
Multiple writers, particularly British, have chosen this Kafkaesque era and communist Eastern Europe as a setting for a novel. John le Carre set the bar with “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,” named “the best spy novel of all time” by Publishers Weekly in 2006. Graham Greene’s most famous Cold War works take place in Cuba and Vietnam, but he set “The Third Man” in Allied-occupied Vienna. British novelist Ian Fleming dispatched his suave hero James Bond – “The name’s Bond, James Bond” – on missions into Moscow-controlled Austria, East Germany, Yugoslavia, and Dougherty’s Czechoslovakia. If Fleming were still alive, I’m confident he’d invite her over to Dukes Bar to swap notes over a shaken, not stirred, martini. The 007 creator delighted in oddly named characters like Goldfinger and Blofeld; Dougherty created the gypsy Srut, an odd jobber for the Prague Underground. Bond sported a Walther PPK; Dougherty’s hero Felix packs a Walther P38. Bond escapes baddies by using gyroplanes and strap-on jetpacks; Felix and Srut hijack a fire truck, and careen through Prague. Dougherty even delivers a fiery explosion scene rivaling “For Your Eyes Only.”
But “The Bone Church” is closer to John le Carre and Graham Greene than Bond parody.
Like le Carre, Doherty explores the moral grays of the Cold War era, and how the challenged respond. Like Greene, a fellow Catholic (he a convert, she born to the faith), Dougherty serves up a flawed, all-too-human Church of Rome. Protagonist Felix is an honorable Jesuit, his father Marek noble and self-sacrificing. But her secondary cast includes a corporate-ladder-climbing bishop; a nasty nun; a worldly Cardinal chauffeured around in a Mercedes limousine carrying a leather briefcase stuffed with hundred-dollar bills; a fetishized Infant of Prague doll; and a Vatican hierarchy castigated by Srut in the novel – and by a number of authors in real life – for failing to more forcefully confront Hitler and the Holocaust horror during World War II. The debate over Pope Pius XII’s response still rages today, adding a moral gravity to Dougherty’s novel wholly absent in Fleming’s cartoon Bond.
The thread of surrealism woven into “The Bone Church” is proprietary Dougherty. Scenes worthy of Salvador Dali pop up throughout the story. Felix sees visions of Simon the Zealot and St, Bartholomew; confers with his dead mother-in-law; laces on his hockey skates and escapes down a frozen river dodging a hail of gunfire while dragging Srut behind him on a rope. The Goddess of Soliloquy flies off the façade of the National Theater and pokes her head through the fire truck window to give Felix advice while Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” thumps through his head; St. Michael the Archangel, appearing to him in street clothes, counsels him in extremis; the dead Srut steadies his shooting hand; during an extended gunfight inside the Bone Church (which lends the novel its title), a life-size human skeleton of Jesus Christ crashes down on the hero’s head; a tribe of “Indians” sporting bows and arrows and living in teepees on the Czech-West German border help him across no man’s land; a sculptor signs his work on the back of an eyeball – sly homage to Bunuel and Dali’s “Un Chien Andalou”? Probably not, but who knows? Nothing is what it seems.
All I know is that Dougherty has managed to slip into the room with Fleming, Greene and le Carre and deliver a clever, original take on Cold War noir.
Got that? Good.
Meet her at the bookstore at midnight, comrade. She’s got a package for you.
