This is a krimie set in Prague during the last days of the Nazi occupation in the spring of 1945. A terrible time in a terrible place, to be sure, but handled with dexterity by Pavel Kohout, a terrible time because of the death throes of the Nazi regime, and terrible place because of the coming Armageddon between that Nazi army of occupation in Czechoslovakia and the Red Army just over the hill. In addition, everyone assumes that when the Nazi grip further loosens there will be a Czech uprising.
In the midst of this Dantesque inferno a Czech police officer and a German homicide detective are assigned to apprehend a serial killer of widows. The Czech is very junior and gets the job because he speaks German, while the German is attached to the feared Gestapo though he never thinks of himself as ‘one of those beasts,’ but he finds it helpful to let others think he is. The German underestimates the Czech and the Czech misjudges the German.
There is a lot of Prague in it, and I got out our well-worn tourist map to follow some of the fro’ing-and-to’ing.
It runs to nearly 400 pages and I confess skipping yet another scene of chaos and confusion that did not seem to be moving the story along. The human dimension was of far greater interest as the two reluctant colleagues, each aware that in a few days they may be at war with each other, work together, come to trust one another, and guardedly confide in their common fears and hopes. While there are paeans to Czech nationalism, the Germans are not reduced to cardboard ‘beasts’ though some certainly were, as were some of the Czechs, including the perpetrator.
Pavel Kohout
It all makes sense in the story, and the odd couple reminded me Robert Janes’s mis-matched pair Jean-Louis St. Cyr and Hermann Kohler, the former a master of Cartesian rationality and the latter a mystic of sorts, who together police occupied Paris at about the same time but in less apocalyptic circumstances. Kohout has several other titles but I think I will move on to something else, namely a krimie set in the Belgium Congo and published in 1950.
My short lesson in Czech history while we were there in 2014 included this observation. When Woodrow Wilson created Czechoslovakia, the Czechs and Slovaks banded together to drive the Germans and Hungarians out of THEIR country. Then the Germans came back and drove out Jews, gypsies, and more, and in poured even more Germans. Then the Communists took over and drove out Germans again, along with 200,000 Czechs. Then the Red Regime decayed and the communists were driven out, though they had few places to go by then, some did go to Russia. Then the Slovaks and Czechs drove each other out of THEIR country, this, for the first time, was done peacefully. One can only wonder what the future will bring. Who next will be expelled, and how it will be done.
I have a few complaints about the translation that often renders ‘Reich’ as ‘Empire’ and refers to German military vehicles as jeeps (General Purpose, or GP, vehicles made by General Motors in Detroit) and now a closely guarded brand-name. ‘Reich’ refers to the nation, its people, its realm, its regime. The French speak of the Republic in the same way. But the curse of Naziism has rendered the ordinary use of the term ‘reich’ impossible today. Reich does not imply or entail an empire, however that is defined, any more than the French Republic does. Ergo it is mistaken hang the adjective ‘imperial’ on German functionaries in Prague, though that is done more than once. And no, the Germans did not have American jeeps nor did BMW or Mercedes make something comparable. If this is the writer’s error, it should nonetheless be corrected. This is a fine book, and such errors distract the attention of a reader.
My guess is that Picador, the English publisher, no longer employs sub-editors who might notice these things, preferring computer power to brain power.
Author: Michael W Jackson
The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011) by Mark Cousins
It has fifteen parts and is currently being aired on Studio TV. We have watched three episodes with great interest, and occasional comprehension.
What we like is the low-key presentation and comments, the worldwide scope from Zimbabwe to Afghanistan and the generosity of spirit that underlies both. All so rare on the air these days when shouting replaces thought, when the crass drives out all else, and the relentless me-focus shrinks the world, and that is on the the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC)!
The most recent episode was an account of the last days of celluloid filmmaking before the CGIs (Computer Generated Images) conquered all.
Among those in the spotlight were Lars von Trier one whose films deadened me when I was a film festivalian, but he gave a modest and cogent explanation for his approach, as did some others, though none of it encouraged me to watch their films. They make ‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad’ (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961) seem like an action movie! It is all so intellectual, dessicated, retentive, inward, abstract, meta, self-referential, reflexive, slow … well you get the idea by now or you never will. Gone are plot and character, gone are place and time, and with them, meaning. Instead the images on the screen are to trigger some unconscious response in the viewer. Uh huh… Well, unconscious anyway.
However, the broader theme was that actors are human beings and CGIs are not. Accordingly, Mark Cousins featured directors who concentrated on film characters as human beings. They have imperfect bodies, which age, sag, and sometimes let them down. (Amen.) They also have emotions that cannot be articulated in an six-second scream but have to have portrayed. (For an example, BCGI (Before CGI) recall Steve McQueen, without a word, bouncing the ball off the wall in ‘The Great Escape’ [1963].)
Tsai Ming-liang, a Taiwanese director, had some insightful things to say, and talked mainly about his ‘Vive l’Armour‘ (1994). His comment on the Hollywood fetish of CGI concerned the deadening effect of the screen busy with multitudes of CGIs from spaceships, endless weapons, to vampires, and a deafening surround soundtrack. Sadly that is too often true.
Tsai Ming-liang
Cousins focussed on the last scene in ‘Vive l’Armour’ where a distressed young woman cries, and cries, and keeps crying in an exhausting (to watch) seven-minute take. Emotions engulf and cannot be switched on and off, that is the point. I appreciated that argument intellectually, but I confess it did not inspire me to sit through any of his work.
Here she is.
As said above, I found much of the material covered in this segment, as in some of the others, to be inward looking, made only for other directors, not an audience. Though much was said about humanity in the program, it seemed there was little for the actors to do but stand in front of the camera. These directors often prefer a single handheld camera, cutting the cost of elaborate camera work, producing little more than a home movie to my eye. The director is the auteur who creates everything, when everything else has been discarded, the actor is the last prop. More than once Von Trier has done films without sets, leaving only actors. Maybe next he will dispense with them, too. That would leave the director doing a selfie into the camera, which some of these films seem to be anyway.
‘The Lost World of James Smithson’ (2007) by Heather Ewing
I have visited Smithsonian museums many times in Washington D.C. At last count there were nineteen (19) of them on the Mall. Vast and varied!
I vaguely knew that James Smithson (1764-1829) started it all with a whopping great cash gift in the 19th Century, and that Smithson was English and never set foot in the United States. That satisfied my need to know (-it-all) for years.
My interest was pricked a few month ago in reading a biography of John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States. Uniquely, after he left the presidency, defeated in a bid for re-election, he served in the House of Representatives for nearly twenty years, dying at his desk. In Congress he was instrumental in securing the Smithson gift and putting it to work as Smithson intended. (There were others who hoped to siphon the money off for their purposes; these others included the sitting president, Martin van Buren.) Quincy Adams navigated through these sharks and shoals, arriving at the first museum, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, that is the red brick building often referred to as the Smithsonian Castle these days, from the turrets of which Abraham Lincoln observed the Confederate Army at Harper’s Ferry in 1862.
Taken as read, I thought no more of it, until I happened to mention Quincy Adams’s role to a friend, who did not know that the Smithsonian was started with a private bequest or that the donor was English. I then realized how little of the story I knew because I could not shed any light on how or why the gift was made.
Clearly it was time to top-up my know-it-all tank and I sought out and read a biography of James Smithson. What did I find?
He was born to an English mother in France, where she had gone, as have many others, to have her illegitimate baby. The father, most likely, was the Duke of Northumerland, a man who owned about one percent of England. His mother was volatile and threw her own considerable wealth into one endless, pointless, and unproductive lawsuit after another trying to get yet money out of others. James grew up speaking French with other children and English with his mother. When she returned to England with him, he had to be naturalized. The Duke never recognized either his mother or him in any way.
Naturalization took an act of parliament, though routine, it was also conditional, namely that James, like all the others, was prohibited from holding public office, either elected or appointed, and could not receive any benefit from the crown, e.g., a royal pension. Later in his life he bristled as these restrictions, as well as the illegitimacy which prohibited him from taking his rightful place in society, as he saw it. He was twice estranged, once socially and once politically from Mother England.
His mother indulged him and used her contacts to get him into Oxford, at one of the lesser colleges, Pembroke, which contrary to the other more prestigious colleges, emphasized learning — rather than drinking and gambling — and even more unusual it emphasized science, and most unusual of all that dirty and stinking science where even a gentleman got his hands dirty — chemistry. It was a time when many advances were being made in chemistry outside the two historic universities and the Master of Pembroke College, striving to elevate the reputation of the college, went into chemistry with enthusiasm. Smithson loved it. He published many papers, and was elected to the Royal Society at twenty-two, the youngest ever at that time.
He inherited modest means from his mother, and invested it in canals and railroads, and made a lot of money out of each, which he reinvested, accumulating far more dosh than he could spent of display cabinets for his mineral collection, or blowpipes for his chemistry experiments, or on his travels.
Like other young gentlemen of his class and era, he made a Grand Tour through Europe; in fact he made three such Grand Tours. Whereas others frequented galleries, salons, and cathedrals, Smithson sought out chemists, chemistry laboratories, minerals, mines, and miners. He took meticulous notes, collected many specimens (rocks and dirt to the inn-keepers who often refused his baggage entry), measured anything that could be measured, and tried to measure some that could not be measured. Amateur scientist, yes, but deadly serious and completely focussed. He had several unwanted adventures on these Tours because Europe was rent by the Napoleonic Wars, e.g., he spent a year in a cold, stinking prison in Hamburg as a British alien at a time when all of Germany was occupied by Napoleon’s army, which saw a spy in those copious notes Smithson took of the geography and geology. In his travels around Europe he must have crossed paths with John Quincy Adams, on his many diplomatic missions, but they did not meet. Did he ever came across Ethan Gage?
Many of his English friends who had supported the French Revolution in the early days, were suspect in Great Britain as Jacobins. A few went into voluntary exile, including several to the United States, and they wrote to tell Smithson of the premium given to science in the United States. He also met Americans on the Grand Tour and they also told him that science was uninhibited and valued in the United States. He noticed when the incumbent President John Adams lost to Thomas Jefferson one was the President of the American Philosophical Society and the other President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The two leading political figures of the decade were intellectuals! Did George W. Bush ever read a book, after ‘The Little Prince,’ I wonder? Bill Clinton stopped reading with ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ Mitt Romney and books…does not compute. Barry O’Bama only reads himself.
In addition Smithson saw the vast private museum of Lumley Keate, a distant relation, broken up and auctioned, when all lamented that such a carefully acquired and artfully curated collection was sold piece-by-piece as curios, rather than preserved as a whole. In an England impoverished by the endless wars with Napoleon, there was no public means to capture this patrimony for the country. England along with Europe was consumed by wars from Portugal to Russia and the Baltic Sea to Sicily, leaving little time, space, or finance for science.
He continued to travel in Europe, despite the upheavals and convulsions. His health had never been good, and after that year in prison it got worse. Whole years are missing from the tale because the intrepid author could find no record of his activities, and surmises he was laid up somewhere recovering his strength. In 1829 he died in Genoa, Italy where he had gone see a collection of mineral specimens. He was buried there and in due course his will was probated in London. He had made the will some years earlier; he wrote it himself without consulting a lawyer; this is always a recipe for trouble. In it he left the income of his worldly goods to a nephew during the nephew’s lifetime, his only living relative, and the goods themselves to be divided equally among the nephew’s children, legitimate and illegitimate, when the nephew died, and in a secondary clause, ‘to the United States of America to found at Washington under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.‘ A quaint second clause it seemed, until the nephew drank and whored himself to death in two years, dying without issue. Accordingly the secondary clause applied. [Aside, reader of Charles Dickens’s ‘Bleak House’ know what is coming next: The Feast of the Lawyers.]
The British Government, skint from all those Napoleonic Wars, moved to seize the fortune for the Crown. Somerset House informed the American minister in London, who passed the word to the President (Andrew Jackson). A plenipotentiary was dispatched to London to secure the money for the United States. He did superb job, no doubt paying bribes, to keep the matter out of the Chancery Courts. It was Richard Rush, a wily Pennsylvanian, who had been United States Attorney General for President James Madison and Secretary of the Treasury for President John Quincy Adams, and previously ambassador to the Court of St. James. He wrestled the money from the British Bulldog in only two years. Various distant relatives of Smithson, retainers, friends, some of many scientific associations Smithson frequented, all tried to contest the will, and Rush parried each.
That was only the beginning of a story that would take another book to tell in detail. The short version is that no one in Washington wanted the gold. (Rush brought it to Washington in twenty-one chests, each filled with gold bars!) Southerners thought it would enrich the federal government to dominate the states with their precious states right (to slavery) and Northerners thought it was a devious British plan to take over the country.
How big? About 100 million pounds today! That is about $US166 million or $A179 million today.
A satellite image of the eastern half of the National Mall with 10 Smithsonian museums located on it.
This is what the money bought. The Castle is 14 above. This is only half the Mall, the others are on the west end. (1, 7, and 8 are not Smithsonians.)
In time the Smithsonian Institution on the Mall emerged, though it took many hands, like Quincy Adams, Alexander Graham Bell (yes, Don Ameche invented the telephone), Joel Poinsett (the flower man), and others to overcome, first, the objections, and then to stave off the swarm of special interests who wanted all, most, or some of the money siphoned off into hundreds of pet peeves, from butterflies in Maine, to public lectures in every town on fingernail clipping, and so on. It took years. Work began on the red castle in 1855 about twenty years after Smithson’s death. Even then claims from relations and retainers continued to arrive at the White House. I expect they still arrive today, addressed to the Smithsonian!
Where did the money come from? Why did he do it? The first is the easier question to answer. He invested in canals and railroads, and was one of the first to do either and one of the few to do both, and they each paid off and continued to do so all of his life. He also invested in inventors, some of whom paid him back twenty times over.
Why did he do it? Let’s break that down into some smaller, more focussed points. What we have here is multiple causation.
Let us be clear he left his money to his only living relative, that twenty-five year old nephew. Only when fate intervened did that secondary clause come into play. Perhaps it was a amusement for him to write in that afterthought.
He had long been estranged from England by the reactions to his illegitimate and foreign birth. He was completely divorced from the French by that year in the slammer. More generally, he saw Europe bent on destroying itself. Wherever he went there was war, France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Austria ….
He had seem examples of philanthropies in England and France, though few aimed at scientific knowledge. Rather he had seem great scientific collections sold as paperweights, while to find specimens he had had to travel the length and breadth of Europe.
Did he want to immortalize himself as a man of science in a way that his own scientific labors did not achieve? He was a very able and dedicated chemist but he made no breakthroughs to put him in the pantheon, and he knew it. If so, Europe was not the place.
From the United States he had heard many good stories about the value of science there and that democracy did not hold a man of talent back because of his illegitimate or foreign birth. (He had a total loathing for sea voyages and never thought to go there. Even to sail from England to France was something he avoided, in one case, for four years, so much did he fear the ocean.)
The book is a sterling example of thorough research and the dexterous handling of uncertainty, and speculation. Little is known of Smithson’s life, partly because trunks with his private papers burned in a fire, much has to be inferred. The author tracks him rather like astronomers identify celestial bodies by the distortions they cause passing in front of star fields. She has combed bank records, passport files, police reports, and the correspondence of his contemporaries for mentions of Smithson and draws conclusions from them. The author handles these inferences well, they are qualified but integrated. There are many ‘possibilies,’ ‘surelys,’ ‘probablies,’ ‘maybes,’ and so on. None of this is easy, not even that name Smithson for it was not his birth name. For details, read the book.
“The Imperial Rockefeller: a biography of Nelson Rockefeller” (1982) by Joseph Persico.
My study of United States presidents extends to candidates and vice-presidents. Recently I was reminded of Nelson Rockefeller’s finest hour when he stared down the Republican extremists at the 1964 nominating convention.
Part of it is on You Tube. That whetted my appetite and so I looked for a biography. According to the subtitle that is what this book is. On that more later.
The Rockefeller in these pages is full of energy, enthusiasm, and good will though not always well disciplined. Among his many attractive features is a complete lack of self-consciousness about his own singularity as an incredibly wealthy titan who chose, repeatedly, the hard and often unrewarding work of public life: many years on commissions and committees and seventeen years in elected office. He never expected anyone to thank him for his efforts, and just as well because no one did.
Equally impressive is Rockefeller’s interest in evidence and argument about public affairs, domestic and foreign, which translated into talent scouting consultants, researchers, speech writers, and retainers of many stripes, notably Dr. H. Kissinger. Rockefeller generated a blizzard of position papers, reports (often to himself), assessments, public hearings at his own expense and more. He was, on this account, a whirlwind to work for and often thoughtless in driving his staff to produce more and better.
Many billionaires keep it to themselves, including some far wealthier than Rockefeller, but Nelson followed his father in philanthropy and his commitment to art and architecture are another side to the man. He sought out, bought, and on this account seemed to enjoy contemporary art; it was more than an investment for him. There is a charming account of Nelson walking past an ‘objet d’art’ in an office building, stopping in his tracks to study it, causing a pile-up of the following entourage, and quivering with excitement Rockefeller sent an aide to find the artist. In due course, Rockefeller, driving a hard bargain, bought the work and kept it in his private office for years. A reader is left In no doubt that Rockefeller loved the expression, the creativity, the provocation he found in painting and sculpture.
In architecture he thought big, witness that colossus at Albany that now bears his name.
He was critical in bringing the United Nations to New York and donating the land on which the building now stands.
Less appealing is his Hamlet procrastination about seeking the presidential nomination. He could never quite go for it. Perhaps his easy life made it but an option for him, one among many others, rather than a desperate lifelong quest as it was for his nemesis Richard Nixon. Rockefeller had no fear of losing because win-or-lose, he was always Rockefeller, but Nixon had nothing else so he committed himself completely to the task. All of this is my speculation for the book sheds little light on the inner man, despite the title “Biography” there is little about his life. It is more a memoir of the author’s experience of working for Rockefeller.
Rockefeller is quoted saying in later life that he was too busy being governor to devote three of four years to mounting a presidential campaign. In his case that meant setting up a national organization and going anywhere and everywhere to support Republican candidates. But his heart would not have been in it, and he would have been unable to conceal it. He wanted to do things himself not lead cheers for others, though that is what Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan did and they got nominated.
Rockefeller was a completely unrepentant Cold Warrior and a 100% Hawk on Vietnam, and never changed.
He seems, on this account, to have been blind to colour and to the racism of the United States. He mouthed platitudes now and again but it was scripted not felt, say in contrast to Bill Clinton who was absolutely right on race. Likewise he was deaf to the early stages of women’s liberation. Not a leader on either of those scores.
The author even ten years later seems star-struck by the The Grand Nelson, and why not? He was certainly one of a kind. Other rich men, I cannot think of a female example, have dabbled in politics, but he was a stayer in New York State politics for sure, four gubernatorial elections and fourteen years in the Governor’s chair, and much accomplished in shaping New York, if leaving many bills to be paid later. (He financed many of his state projects by selling bonds that one day had to be paid, long after his tenure – sovereign debt.)
There is a story that in 1968 Hubert Humphrey approached Rockefeller about going on his ticket as Vice-President. He declined, saying “I’m a Republican, and always will be.” But what did that mean to him? A tribal loyalty, a second skin that could not be shed, even after that confrontation in 1964 with the mob Barry Goldwater let loose, not even after being comprehensively out maneuvered by Nixon in the 1968 convention. While many Republicans doubted Rockefeller was a Republican, Rockefeller never doubted it. He was what used to be called a Ripon Republican, a breed now destroyed by the Tea Party tail of the Republican Parody. (Intentional.)
In fact, Rockefeller’s presidential efforts were few. One primary in Oregon, many position papers and press conferences on national and international issues, but few campaigns to win votes, or systematic efforts to win the support of Republican Party delegates. In 1968 he declared himself a candidate one week and then withdrew the next.
It is a mystery, for the author says Rockefeller dominated any room he entered with the force of his personality. Yet though he often dreamed of being president, Rockefeller said later, he never made the sustained and disciplined effort it needed, though he was quite capable of sustained and disciplined efforts as his other public service shows. Indeed he was quite tenacious over the years in pressing his agenda.
Then in the dark and confusing days after Nixon’s unprecedented resignation, Rockefeller accepted Gerald Ford’s offer of the Vice-Presidency. There are a lot of questions there. Why did Ford turn to Rockefeller? Why did Rockefeller accept? On that it seems that Rockefeller thought he could make something of the office in the extraordinary circumstances after Watergate. After all Henry Kissinger was his creature, superintending foreign policy. He, Nelson Rockefeller, would throw himself into domestic policy! That ambition sufficed to motivate him to endure a long, embarrassing, and unfriendly confirmation in Congress, but it perished after a couple of meetings with President Ford.
For the first time in his life, Rockefeller had nothing of moment to do. Dutifully he made the best of the hand he held, going to state funerals, opening parks, handing out ribbons and medals, and the like.
When Ford prepared to run for (re-)election, the Republican Party, then dominated by its Southern tail, ruled Rockefeller unacceptable. To his credit Rockefeller accepted that fate, too, and in fact nominated Bob Dole for the job, going quietly into retirement. (Bob Dole has since been demonised by the Tea Party ultras.)
He had worked for every president from Franklin Roosevelt to Gerald Ford in one capacity of another with the exception of John Kennedy, both Democrat and Republican. (In fact, he later did a short stint for Jimmie Carter.)
The end of his term as Vice-President marked the end of his life in public service. He spent his last years with his art collection, finding ways to make it accessible to the public through exhibits, reproductions, and publications with introductions which he sometimes wrote himself and his gravelly voice seems to rise from the page to offer his visceral response to many works.
The book ends with Nelson’s empty desk in Room 5600 in New York City where he did most of his work with the painting he hung on the wall in front of the chair, Georges Rouault’s ‘The Old King,’ a work I have admired in reproductions over the years. It was a gratifying confirmation to know that Nelson liked it, too.
The old king is remote, glacial, determined, defiant even, and unattractive, but clearly a force. Perhaps it is the measure of what Rockefeller wanted to be.
Pedant’s note. Ford was not elected president and Rockefeller was not elected Vice-President but I kept it simple above, because these are elected offices. Weak, I know.
The Caine Mutiny
“The Caine Mutiny” (1954) at the Dendy Quay on the very wide screen.
What a treat! A great cast, a rattling story, superb performances, starting with the conscience-stricken Executive Officer Steve Maryk played by Van Johnson (showing the scars on his face of a car accident before filming started). José Ferrer does a star turn in the last segment (with a bandaged hand, a result of a sporting injury off the set). These blemishes add to the authentic feel of the movie. Fred McMurry, E. G. Marshall, Claude Atkins, Lee Marvin, Tom Tully, James Best, and more offer chiseled performances.
But none can match Bogart when he testifies. No rolling of eyes, no histrionics, no drooling, none of that Jack Nicholson stuff. Click, click, click go the ball bearings as he goes off the deep end, and then, oops, tries to pull back, but it is too late – the Mad Hatter has been seen by one and all. It is the one scene everyone remembers.
Bogart said he never did understand Queeg so he just did what the director, Edward Dmytryk, told him to do. Ever the professional Bogart did it well for a short guy with bad teeth, a receding hair line, and a weak chin. No matinee idol good looks had he. He’d never make it today in Hollywood.
The film is much more focussed than Herman Wouk’s novel, which wanders all over the landscape of the civilian lives of the officers and men, yet the film did seem long to me at 124 minutes. The ingenue Mr Keith seemed an unnecessary distraction, though perhaps he is what Maryk was two years earlier. But his mother, his girl friend, his immaturity are annoying. While in the cutting room I would also have cut some of the repeated vistas of the mighty U.S. Navy and the repeated passages under the Golden Gate Bridge.
The film is a set of character studies, of Queeg, the worn out captain, of Maryk the Executive Officer in over his head, the glib but spineless would-be novelist played to a T by Fred McMurray, the defense lawyer who knows the mutineers were both right and wrong, and the ingenue.
For all of that I see that the imbecile factor is such that it rates a 7.9 on the IMDB just ahead of some of Adam Sandler’s films, a benchmark for puerile nonsense.
Mark Hebden, “Pel is Puzzled” (1981)
Another fine instalment in this long-running series that has a little bit of everything, including the start of Pel’s devotion to Yorkshire Pudding. Pel is mainly puzzled by smoking a pipe, something he hoped would impress the widow Madame Geneviève Faivre-Perret, since he thinks it very English to smoke a pipe, and she, he is told, likes things English and smoking a pipe will not only impress her, it will cut down on the killer cigerettes he smokes. That is the theory; the practice is quite something else à la Monsieur Hulot.
What starts out as a traffic accident soon embroils Pel in art theft, murder, fraud, and espionage. He is shaken to realize Frenchmen are willing and able to sellout the country and, consequently, all the more determined to bang them into the slammer très vite, too, Mon Brave!
De Troq, not yet on the team, puts in a brief appearance. Misset as usual blows it. Judge Polovari saves Pel’s hide, while Judge Brisard nearly drives him bats.
The plot involves the Tour de France, and offers Pel many chances to comment on the idiocy of riding bicycles up mountains in the rain! It is an ingenious idea, by the way. Only Pel sees the bigger picture while each of his detectives, apart from Misset, sees only a portion. Misset sees nothing, par for the course.
Pel’s courtship of Madame Faivre-Perret remains in abeyance. She is away and he is uncertain. In fact, he almost approaches another women only to discover, well Sergeant Nosjean discovers it…. and not a moment too soon!
“The Eagle Catcher” (1995) by Margaret Coel
The first is a long running series set in the fictitious Wind River Reservation of Arapahos in Wyoming today, that is, the middle 1990s. The protagnoist is Father John O’Malley with able assistance from lawyer Vicky Holden as they discover an oil scandal which in turn is dwarfed by a corrupt land grab from the 19th century with contemporay implications.
The description of the Great Plains in high summer is on the money, as are the currents among the Indians and between them and the Europeans, red and white get along but apart. The idea that this isolated and unappealing post works for Father John because he is an alcoholic sort of makes sense, though as a member of the Red Sox Nation he is a long way from Fenway in voluntary exile. On the reservation among largely dry Indians he has not the temptations of a bar on every corner and the privacy of getting drunk in anonymity that Boston affords the Irish.
The secret lies, as it so often does, in the files, archives, records if one only knows where to look and what to look for there. I always like that idea but here it is blindingly obvious.
The characters are individual though the bad guys are on the cardboard end of the continuum, more plot devices than personalities. Ditto the star crossed young lovers is a well worn (out) motif. And the FBI agent is the old tired stereotype of a blundering, lazy fool, who evidently does nothing but interfere.
I also find the descriptions of chases and fights tedious. I want more detecting of the brain work type. By the way, the idea that Father John could do all he does with a separated shoulder – well it is not possible.
Still I will read another to see how the series develops.
Britta Bolt, “Lonely Graves” (2014)
Set in contemporary Amsterdam, on streets we walked along in our 2014 visit. Plenty of local colour, canals, bicycles, New Market stalls, the new city hall, Amstel River.
Told in four parts, (1) the protagonist, Peter Posthumous (yes, some name), (2) the Moroccans, some of whom are up to no good, (3) the security agents monitoring the Moroccans (some of whom are up to no good), and (4) the security boss who seems to be playing his own game. It switches back and forth frequently and at other times stays in one part/ voice for a while to develop a point.
Apart from the local colour, I also got a recipe which I will try out on the lab rats at home in due course. I found several recipes for the dish on Serious Eats.
This is the first of a trilogy so the story telling is attenuated, recipes, coffees, etc which slows the tempo.
As said, local colour, it starts with details about flushing the canals over night between midnight and 4 am and how that circulates the water.
Peter Posthumous is a city official who looks after the funerals of unclaimed bodies. He is an obsessive and can never let anything go and so makes mountains (or is it dragons, Don?) where there are none. As a result he has been moved from one job to another and may yet be moved again. That is a nice set-up and his concern to treat the unclaimed dead with respect is touching, though it seems more about him than them.
I bought at Waterstone in the Kalverstraat in Amsterdam in June 2014.
“Holy Orders” (2013) by Benjamin Black
This title is sixth in the series of Dr. Quirke, Dublin police pathologist, and his associate Inspector Hackett. I bought it in Dublin in 2014 on Grafton Street. “Benjamin Black” is the pen name of the reputed novelist John Banville, a fact trumpeted on the book!
It is easy to read and full of local colour in 1950s Ireland when the Roman Catholic Church ruled all. The streets, the rain, the repressed atmosphere are all there drawn with a light hand. I said ‘repressed atmosphere’ but none of the characters seems particularly to feel that, but much is forbidden but so well forbidden for so long perhaps people don’t even think about it. And yet Quirke has a sinful, sexual relation with an actress, his wife having died earlier.
The plot concerns the news today from that time, the sexual use and abuse of children, and to add the exotic, some Tinkers (travellers, gypsies) and their argot. That latter seemed a strain to me.
There is nicely done scene where Phoebe, Quirke’s daughter feels some lesbian impulse, no doubt a thread to be picked up in the next novel in the series. I also liked Quike’s hallucinations and that, too, would seem to be a thread for the future. He is last seen in this having a head X-Rayed to see what, if anything, is causing his blackouts.
Like the heroes of many krimies Quirke spends far too much time feeling sorry for himself, and yet is irresistibly attractive to every woman he meets.
The resolution of the weak plot was cheap and nasty. Yet I will certainly read on, by starting with the first in the series.
Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem” (1963)
I re-read Hanah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” inspired to do so by the film “Hannah Arendt.” By the way, the subtitle “The Banality of Evil” is implicit in the book and stated only on the last page by way of conclusion on page 252. At the end of this review staunch readers will find a note about Howard W. Campbell at the end. (Don’t know about Campbell? Then read on to find out.)
Despite the furore at the time, portrayed in the film, Arendt did not:
1. In any sense exonerate Eichmann,
2. Condemn Jews in any way,
4. Blame Jews for their own destruction,
5. Assail the court proceedings,
6. Oppose the death sentence,
7. Question the legitimacy of the trial, and
8. Assert that Eichmann was a Zionist.
Though each of these lies was said at the time dutifully repeated by those that do not think but react.
Once one of these falsehoods was said, it was repeated by other journalists too lazy or irresponsible to check the facts, long before Rupert Murdoch could be blamed. Needless to say none of the journalists who recycled these falsehoods ever apologised.
Nor was such intellectual laziness limited to journalists. Over the years I have heard them from academics who should know better than believe everything they read, something they quickly condemn in students while doing it themselves.
First things first, the role of Jews in their own destruction is there, reported as fact throughout the book, the local organization of the Jewish Council. Where a Jewish Council did not exit the Nazis tried to set one up. Some Jews who cooperated with the Nazis in these councils were later themselves tried for crimes in the Successor Trials that followed The Nuremberg Trials but not specifically for crimes against Jews. She does not sensationalise this Jewish cooperation, and acknowledges that in its early stages in Western Europe it may well have seemed the best thing to do.
She also points out that others cooperated in their own destruction at times when whole peoples were moved, deported, and then murdered. Likewise she is very clear that resistance was impossible.
In all these references to Jewish cooperation amount to, say, fifteen pages of the 300 in the book. Perhaps a little more.
Second, it is forcefully argued that Eichmann in Jerusalem was demonised in order to allow the trial to tell the whole story of Jewish persecution and destruction. That is why the prosecution introduced volumes of material that had nothing to do with Eichmann. He was a cog, albeit a vital one, but nonetheless a cog, not a director, decision-maker, influencer of others. He was a cog who could have been easily replaced. But the trial was not about him, and is that not what trials are supposed to be about, the defendent. In exile on Argentina, Eichmann did boast of his part in the Final Solution, true, but perhaps he did this to ingratiate himself with the exiled Nazis he found there as much as anything else. Men do brag and exaggerate, now don’t they?
Third, all the nations occupied by the Nazis had Successor Trials shortly after the Nuremberg Trials. None of these trials presented indictments about murdering Jews. Having no state, Jews did not. Israel as the Jewish state had as much right to hold such trials as any other state, she concludes.
Eichmann’s self-defense was that the emigration, evacuation, and destruction of Jews were acts of the German state which were above the law and normal morality. Though he did often refer to orders, “ein befehl ist ein befehl,” and even mentioned Immanual Kant. His six-day interrogation, his testimony in the trial, his many written submissions are muddled, inconsistent, repetitive. He was working only from memory in Jerusalem and he was not a bright man to begin with. No Albert Speer he.
While rejecting resistance as a possibility she also reviews and dismisses the pop psychology explanations of the Jewish cooperation in their own destruction as some kind of death wish. One reviewer of the book said the same of her. That she had written a negative book about Jews because she hated herself as a Jew. There is no limit to imbecility.
All of Eichmann’s social, intellectual, bureaucratic superiors knew and accepted the destruction of Jews. Who was this functionary, one-time salesman, to judge compared to them? Remember not all the professional officials were Nazi thugs. At The Wannsee Conference where Eichmann did the coffee, Count Ernst von Weisacker represented the Foreign Office. Eichmann was thrilled to be in such distinguished company at the time.
There seems also to have been a big difference between the approach to the Final Solution in Eastern Europe compared to Western Europe. In the east there was no local government, e.g., Poland, a puppet government, e.g., Croatia, or a Fascist ally like Hungary. Sometimes for a while Western European Jews had some protection afforded by their own governments, although Jewish refugees say in France were surrendered quickly. But by 1944 even this protection was not enough. Italy seems overall to be the best place for any Jew, including refugees who could disappear into the crowds, hills, forests. Bulgaria is another country where the unwillingness of locals to cooperate stymied the Nazi killing machine. Belgium is another exception because there many, many Jewish refugees and almost no Jewish organization, the Nazis had no place to start. But almost from the start German, Polish, and Russian Jews were murdered on an industrial scale. By 1944 nothing stopped the Death Machine.
Eichmann on trial
Her argument is that the crimes were unprecedented and so the justice done them had to be likewise unprecedented. [Everyone knew they were crimes which is why all the euphemisms were used. She does not consider this point, though she notes how seldom there was an explicit reference to extermination, killing, murder, etc.]. Law serves justice. Law should not thwart justice. No graduate of a law school would ever say that!
She has many criticisms of the lackadaisical and incompetent defense attorney who seemed to neither know nor care much about the events, Eichmann, or the trial. She is also very scathing about the melodramatic, wandering prosecutor who never seemed to focus on the accused.
In the end we have great evil partly done by this pathetic, hardworking, if stupid and unimaginative individual. He was shallow, unread, incapable of learning from his experiences, unreflective and untroubled by what he was doing. What he did care about was his career advancement and he spent lot of time, rather incompetently, trying to secure promotion. He never read a book, certainly not a novel, a poem, or a play, and probably nothing more taxing than a few pages in coffee table books, if that. He flunked out of both high school and vocational training. He repeated clichés and stock phases he heard without grasping their meaning or their trite nature. He is no Faust aware that he had sold his soul to the devil for a few magic tricks.
The Nazis were able to destroy as many Jews as they did, in part, because Jewish communities were so well organized and disciplined. When the Jewish Council in Poznan told a list of families to assemble at the train station for resettlement, they did. This order made the fiction easier to bear, as Eichmann dimly realized, but it made the killing easier. If the Jewish Council had told the truth, it is not resettlement but murder, or refused to cooperate the result would have been terrible, but perhaps fewer would have died. Perhaps. It is a question Arendt asks, and she speculates that fewer would have died though with foreknowledge and dread. Does the doctor tell the terminal patient the truth of allow the patient to die in hope?
Safe to say we have all met people like this Eichmann, but fortunately none of them held the power of life and death over us. They even exist in universities, a PhD is no guarantee of thinking. [Jackson pauses to recall several exemplars.] We all react to stimuli but seldom do any of us think. Some people never do. Ameboa react to stimuli, too.
Not everyone who does great evil is a fearsome demon. Readers may recall that in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel “The Brothers Karamazov” the devil that visits Ivan is a dirty, smelly, stupid, and vulgar lout. He is no Mephistopheles, but rather Anyman. Simone de Beauvoir said something similar about Pierre Laval, evil but insignificant. Of course, years after their crimes, defeated,captured, reduced to prisoners, not even vicious killers seem very threatening.
The book exudes urgency and importance. The prose is hard and clean, no embellishments, no learned references, very few citations of other studies though some. It is easy to imagine the author pounding it out on a typewriter to meet a deadline, not an editorial one, but In this case a moral one, namely get it all and get it right. There will never be another chance. Of course, she made mistakes in proper names, sometimes, in dates by a week or a month, and there are overstatements a few times. These errors have been pounced on by reviewers for years, who themselves evidently have never made a mistake, to discredit the entire book.
I noted that the Dutch journalist Harry Mulisch is cited a few times. I found his novel “The Assault” a compelling book, ditto the film based on it. Infinitely sad and yet somehow satisfying it was when the message is at last delivered. That would have been a better name for the novel, “The Message.”
In reading this book again I was reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Mother Night” and it’s protagonist Howard W. Campbell who never laid a finger on anyone, spied on Nazis at great personal risk, sublimated his own personality to his espionage, and …. was a war criminal because “you are what you do.”
