A Small Town in Germany in Around the World in 80 Books

Mar 05, 2025 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) added it

Shelves: author-man, author-white, challenges-all-2025, a-reviewed, a-read-gelesen-2025, europe-uk, genre-crime, publdate-1960s, theme-spy, 4-star

This was very moreish. Once I'd got past the prologue, I was hooked on its mysterious prose, round-about way of getting at things, mix of detection, spy and existentialist philosophy, bleak atmospheric descriptions and acute and cruel dissection of British class difference. This is the sort of novel nobody writes any longer. It transported me back to a time during which I lived (1968) but was a child; and there was the added interest in it being a book set in Germany (and a rare Anglophone publi This was very moreish. Once I'd got past the prologue, I was hooked on its mysterious prose, round-about way of getting at things, mix of detection, spy and existentialist philosophy, bleak atmospheric descriptions and acute and cruel dissection of British class difference. This is the sort of novel nobody writes any longer. It transported me back to a time during which I lived (1968) but was a child; and there was the added interest in it being a book set in Germany (and a rare Anglophone publication that actually manages to get the German right nearly all the time). Bonn as the capital -- how long ago that all seems now. Britain desperate to join the Common Market!! A haunting book to read in this post-Brexit age.

I was very taken with the central character, Alan Turner who has a working class background (or rather, an even more indeterminate background, 'without a childhood', that renders him an object of distaste of all the upper-class poshos in the diplomatic service). And the reflection-game with the object of his hunt, the huge importance of the person of Leo Harting to the plot, a man who has disappeared and whom Turner must find, sneaking around from clue to elusive clue, shuttling from one evasive conversation to the next, layers within layers, red herrings and twistings -- it's all masterfully done. Turner and Harting mirror each other, and yet not.

The novel is uproariously sexist. The men see the women as 'girls' or 'dollies' to be ogled, or as dried-up creature with 'mannish' hands, and this is somehow bracing. It is of the age, and it is of any ages that may yet return, so it is salutary to read it and to remember how woven into social discourse this misogyny was, so much so that it occasions no ire. Plus there is the obsessive homophobia, or should I say homo-suspicion. Every few pages somebody accuses somebody else of having a 'fancy boy' or engagine in 'a bit of public school vice' or being a 'sod' (I now cannot unsee 'sod' for 'sodomite'; I had not realised and will not be able to say "sod it all" in a casual way every again). At the same time, there is a sympathy here for the badly-done-by woman and for the homosexual and for the impotent man and for the whittol. And of course, the racism. This is undistilled 1960s.

Brilliant use of 'indirect libre'.

This was time travel at its best: bereft of nostalgia, rife with smells and hauntings and the terrible pasts of the Germans.

Here are some of the details that evoke an age and a certain Britishness:

'A brown woolly cosy covered the pot and the cubes of sugar were individually wrapped and stamped with the Naafi's insignia.' p.98 [Wrapped sugar cubes! To note down such details and render them historically accurate; authors do research to insert this kind of detail into their historical novels and LeCarré seemingly effortlessly sticks it into his contemporary novel. Oh, would all contemporary novelists today be so ruthlessly observant.]

'in a good clerical hand, very bold on the downstrokes and refined at the curves, in a black, powdery ink' p.193 [the age of handwriting! 'tis over, for now]

One diplomat says, 'I'm talking fact: home-grown British fact.' p.263. Ah, the days before British politics was so saturated with ideology that the very idea of a 'fact' has become a laughing stock today.

And here's a sample of the cynical noir worldview:
'Democracy was only possible under a class system, that's why: it was an indulgence granted by the privilege.'

Chosen for the 52 book reading challenge, prompt 'social class' (and it has that in spades).
...more

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