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I Am Pilgrim by Terry Hayes

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I Am Pilgrim is an amazing book. A sequel is thankfully next up for Terry Hayes. His Year of the Locust is a good read as well.

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Ian Fleming’s Commandos - The Story of 30 Assault Unit in WWII by Nicholas Rankin.

This is one of several interesting books that popped up in the wake of Ian Fleming’s 100th birthday. But unlike the works of Macintyre, Chancellor and Sellers, it took a few years longer (published in 2011) and concerned itself in detail with one of the lesser known aspects of Fleming’s wartime exploits: that subset of the British Commando forces that Naval Intelligence cut off the main body and forged into an intelligence gathering specialist outfit under the responsibility and auspices of Fleming.

Nicholas Rankin does a splendid job in unearthing a vast treasure trove of sources and wartime recollections, combing not only through archives and published tomes but also talking to the few remaining witnesses.

The genre of the WW2 chronicle/memoir/history is a popular staple with British publishers, so competition is fierce. Rankin easily stands out with his work, weaving information, anecdotes and facts into a broad tapestry of events and decisions that shaped our past - and sometimes do so to this day.

After war broke out in September ‘39 things did not go well for Hitler’s adversaries. German Wehrmacht moved swiftly first through Poland, then consolidated its conquest with the iron fist of military and Gestapo rule. After which they set out to move westward with the known results.

In the first six chapters, Rankin paints the picture of a desperate British war effort dealing with setbacks and disasters - not few of them resulting from lack of intelligence and solid data. DNI Admiral Godfrey and his assistant Fleming found themselves in the politicking crossfire between various organisations and factions, trying their best to improve intelligence gathering and get a grip on things - while Wehrmacht occupied France and threatened to move further into Spain and capture Gibraltar.

Rankin tells the story of these months, infighting between SIS and SOE, organising a possible guerilla front from Gibraltar in case Hitler’s Wehrmacht should try to take Spain. At the same time Britain had to prepare defences against ‘Operation Seelöwe’ (Sea Lion) with their freshly formed Commando special forces whose exact operative philosophy was still in flow.

Around 1941 the British received reports about ‘the Brandenburger’*, special Wehrmacht forces that supposedly concerned themselves with intelligence gathering ops close to the advancing German forces. In April ‘41 these were essential in capturing the Yugoslav 4th Army HQ as well as the Greek Naval HQ wholly intact.

These reports didn’t resonate with SIS or SOE - but they were more successful in giving Godfrey the idea for ‘intelligence commandos’ and pushing for NID’s own version with the powers that be when the time was right.

A number of training installations and commando bases had been established across the UK; volunteers had been interviewed and given the task to pick others. Britain was still badly behind on the wireless deciphering, Enigma machines had just gotten extra wheels and plugs that made the task for Turing and his colleagues at Bletchley Park much more difficult.

NID’s answer to this predicament was to propose a special commando force whose sole aim was to target intelligence objectives that promised to yield highly sensitive data, codes and ciphers. In short, everything that might possibly enable the British to
read German wireless signals with minimum delay and analyse the product as fast as possible for their own manoeuvres.

By 1942, the proposal for a Naval Intelligence Commando Unit was given the green light and NID provided the list of targets and which material the unit would try to secure from these.

Interestingly, while the book is titled ‘Ian Fleming’s Commandos’, Fleming himself turns more into a background character the further events move from initial operations in North Africa and Italy, then D-Day, the liberation of Paris and finally into the smouldering ruins, the rotting evil carcass of the Third Reich itself.

The protagonists on this journey into the darkness of Nazi-Germany are Patrick Dalzel-Job, ‘Sancho’ Glanville, Tony Hugill, Ralph Izzard and Charles Wheeler amongst many others. On their trip they saw the worst of war, the worst of mankind - but at times also the best of their fellow human beings.

Rankin doesn’t spare us the ugly parts, the pointless deaths and the barbarous violence of war. And its crimes. Thankfully, he also doesn’t spare us the horrors of Buchenwald, Dachau, Dora-Mittelbau, the SS regime of destroying people through slave labour, reducing them to creatures barely clinging to their lives. Thousands and thousands died after the concentration camps were liberated.

We must never forget where the rule of Nazis ends.

Also noteworthy, Rankin points out how influential the commando concept was and how much weight modern military theory puts on ‘special forces/special ops’. But the actual import of 30AU’s successes grew the nearer they came to VE-Day, victory in Europe on 8. May 1945. The vast majority of their ‘pinches’ in terms of importance were the Tambach Archives, German Naval archives dating back to the mid-19th century. And the plans to then modern peroxide turbines working in rockets and submarines.

Some of the intelligence helped nailing war criminals with the Nuremberg processes. But most of the pinches seemed to have little actual import on the war effort - and a lot of it was what we would call today industrial espionage.

However, Rankin’s account of 30AU and its men is most informative, readable and provides us with a glimpse behind the 007 facade. Recommended.

*Actually, Division Brandenburg, while originally devised as a small special purpose force, initially even staffed to some extent by civilian volunteers with knowledge of local customs and dialects, quickly moved away from their intelligence tasks and became an ever more ordinary gap stopper for Wehrmacht demands. Real military impact in the greater scheme seems to have been minimal. The German admirals 30AU conversed with at Tambach while waiting to move the archives held much the same opinion of the British commando forces. They considered their true military impact slim - but the boost to morale enormous.

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Addendum: There’s a baffling claim by Nigel West to the effect that Fleming was supposedly never ‘indoctrinated’ into the ULTRA source. Rankin rightfully finds this hardly credible since Fleming‘s tasks as liaison between NID and SIS as well as his frequent visits to Bletchley not just suggest ULTRA clearance; his role in choosing intelligence targets and shopping lists for 30AU made him crucial in filling gaps in that particular source. How would he have been able to do this without being inside the ULTRA circle?

Rankin doesn’t outright refute this claim, but it’s evident he doesn’t buy it. Rightfully so.

Then there’s the Tambach affair of Fleming calling on Glanville to execute the German admirals. Rankin notes that this story only surfaced in 1978, when Fleming was already long dead. Also, that Glanville - like others in the 30AU outfit - didn’t like Fleming. In summary, Rankin suggests that this was perhaps an early example of Fleming flexing his imagination, like he has done several times over the years, telling some tall tales while reality didn’t support his version of events.

Rankin left out several of the wartime stories Fleming came to allude to over the years, rightfully keeping to the known and confirmed facts. Perhaps he’s a bit too dismissive of the story - a serious allegation by any standard - but he’s also right to point out how it wasn’t made earlier and that Glanville had no high opinion of Ian Fleming.

Be that as it may, the exchange happened under four eyes, and probably with no official record to support or dismiss it either way.

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The Secret History by Donna Tartt

This is now an over 30 year old classic that even spawned its own little sub genre of intellectual/‘dark academia’ thrillers. I daresay I should perhaps have read this earlier. At its core there’s the aspiration of the young to become the people they strive to be - and their failure to do so because the people they are just won’t allow them to.

Tartt plays with an ensemble of mysterious characters, at once much more sophisticated than her Ripley-like hero, yet also a big step more ruthless. Her alter-ego adores these enigmatic elitist outsiders, aspires to run with that crowd and become one of them. That constant desire to belong, Tom Ripley would have understood it.

Without spoiling too much I can reveal that not everything is as it seems - and some things are a lot darker. These young kids - which would now be middle aged and possibly have grandchildren - went way beyond their Greek studies and committed acts that changed their lives. Not for the better.

Despite this, The Secret History is not really a thriller, nor a mystery in the classic sense. It’s more roman à clef, a deconstruction of the life and times of the young and foolhardy at some small New England college. Some of it is quite entertaining, some rather banal. I might have liked it much more had I read it 30 years ago.

But The Secret History does have a strange charm, in spite of its inconsequential nature. From a certain point it starts to fascinate and one wants to witness this like a slo-mo crash test. One can’t help wondering where the different dummies will fly.

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Batman Arkham Knight: The Ridder’s Gambit. By Alex Irvine. A tie-in novel set between Arkham City and Arkham Knight, it follows the Riddler trying to take over Gotham after certain happenings in Arkham City. I like the use of the ensemble cast, no villains are wasted. Ironically, Irvine said he let his kids help pick out what villains to use. They have great taste, and Irvine knew how to write them well. I like the switching between Batman and Robin, it was great to see how the events of Arkham City affected both of them. The police force and the media play an enjoyable role. Vicki Vale isn’t the screaming dismal she was as Kim Basinger was! So an enjoyable Batman and Robin story, properly of their best stories together of the last 20 years.

Home and Alone by Daniel Stern. One of the better autobiographies I’ve read in a while. Funny, with a bit of drama and ego clashing. Stern of course talks about Marv and Home Alone 1 & 2. Some interesting viewpoints, but I’d recommend just reading as a lot of things are surprising in his life. Who can’t relate to that? Also, he must still hang around Joe Pesci, as he swears as much as Pesci does!

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Thanks Max. Can it be read and understood without playing the games or knowing the timeline or the comics?

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It should be. There are spoilers for the games, but as a standalone story, it should be fairly understandable. The Riddler is at his most chilling here. Also, this is a regular novel, not a graphic novel.

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Thanks Max. It being a regular novel is what intrigued me. For all my love of film, I do not do well with graphic novels.

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Always happy to help another fan of stuff I like!

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The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie

This book came to ill fame chiefly because of the fatwa declared on its author in 1989 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, a baffling and entirely bizarre religious zealotry to our western minds, supposedly so much more enlightened and rational. I intended to read it, bought it even - but then life happened, a Cold War came to a pause (that we mistook for an end) and many things in our daily lives changed for the better.

My path lead me - briefly mostly - to Bruxelles, then London, Dublin, then home again, usually with lots of other stuff cluttering up my mind and life. Over the years I followed many controversies surrounding this work while other developments kept one busy - and after a couple of years one grew tired of the debate (that was not my own) and gradually a sense started to manifest that I needn’t actually read the book any more since everything about it has already been said, and repeated, and inverted and then read by me in numerous outlets.

The 2022 attack on Salman Rushdie once more made me realise not only was this author still living under a constant and substantial threat to his life, the attacker also apparently acted on the fatwa issued over 30 years ago - without having read more than a couple of pages of the book.

So last week I finally set out to close this gap in my own education. After having finished The Satanic Verses just now the first thing that comes to mind is, how astoundingly topical this book still is to this very day. It was written almost two generations ago, yet the experiences of its immigrant characters, their struggles for identity and settlement, would likely resonate with most of their contemporary counterparts.

So much has happened since 1988, yet so little has changed. This book could have been written last year.

What is The Satanic Verses, a satire? A fantasy novel? A tragedy?

It’s really difficult to find a pigeon hole for this kaleidoscope of myths, legends and magical realism.

Two men, two Indian men, fall from the skies above Merry Olde England - and are saved by supernatural forces neither they nor the reader understands. Their salvation comes at great cost that irreversibly changes their nature. And the fierce struggles they fight with and against that change is at the core of the tale and the lion’s share of its content.

Bizarrely, both men fight for their sanity in vain, yet they often seem saner than their surroundings. They go through different iterations of their troubles, affect past and present with the supernatural effects of their changed nature, sometimes in fables and dreams.

A central quote:

Most migrants learn, and can become disguises. Our own false descriptions to counter the falsehoods invented about us, concealing for reasons of security our secret selves.

Much has been made of the ‘satanic verses’ of the title or the supposedly blasphemous narrative and depictions. All I can say is, the book is much more critical of its characters and their - western/asian - ignorance than anything else.

Another quote, only too topical:

In the eternal struggle between the world’s beauty and its cruelty, cruelty was gaining ground by the day.

At its core it’s an appeal to humanity, to staying true to ourselves, to not give up in the face of adversity and doom. To be human in spite of it all.

Recommended.

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Clayface, less than a month to go!

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A question from Goodreads and myself:

Do you read for escapism, entertainment, or education?

I say all three, in particular with James Bond!

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There’s more character development for Batman/Bruce Wayne in this passage than in the two Tim Burton movies combined. I’ll be seeing the author speak possibly next week. It sounds like a sequel (that isn’t Batman Returns) is on the way. For now, this is promising.

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The Secret Life of John le Carré by Adam Sisman.

When Adam Sisman set out to write his le Carré/David Cornwell biography he knew it would take him several years and enormous amounts of cogency to get Cornwell to agree and support the undertaking of a definite biography - while keeping his subject at arm’s length to avoid producing an ‘authorised’ work (perhaps not entirely without educational merit, but a different kettle of fish altogether).

Sisman quickly was confronted with the less savoury side of Cornwell’s philandering; itself not unheard of with men of Cornwell’s generation - or any other* for that matter, just think of our raison d’être and his venerable creator. Despite not being squeamish about such matters, Cornwell understandably didn’t fancy them being bandied about for all and sundry as idle entertainment. In all fairness, he mostly seems to have been concerned about what it would do to his wife to have these affairs aired out.

However, after much toing and froing - adultery by far wasn’t the only sensitive issue - a compromise was reached: Sisman would only use broad strokes and mostly keep involved persons anonymous in his biography. In turn, after the Cornwells’ death he’d be free to publish the ‘secret annexe’: the account of Cornwell’s various affairs spanning at least five decades as far as Sisman was able to verify.

Frankly, while this is in my view necessary for a ‘complete’ biography, it only adds minor details to an element of Cornwell’s character many readers may already have been aware of. I’m neither part of the publishing world, nor do I follow society gossip - yet most of these ‘secrets’ weren’t new to me. You can even deduce some of the detail from le Carré’s books themselves; he frequently cannibalised his own life for the sake of his art. When that life calmed down somewhat and didn’t provide the drama any longer, the lack of a ‘muse’ also showed in the work.

Anyway, The Secret Life of John le Carré is an intriguing read for fans. But if you’re unfamiliar with David Cornwell’s life and background it’s a bad place to start your exploration. Ideally, begin with Sisman’s proper biography; at least read le Carré’s memoir The Pigeon Tunnel and his semi-biographical A Perfect Spy.

*And for every heterosexual man cheating on his wife it usually takes a woman to accomplish the deed. So it’s a sin vastly more popular with both sexes than we oftentimes are lead to believe.

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The James Bond Films 1962-1989: Interviews with the Actors, Writers and Producers by Lee Goldberg.

An interesting, quick read. Sir Roger Moore, charming as always. Based on his interview, I think Peter Hunt didn’t want to come back when Moore was Bond. Simply, because he didn’t view Moore as Bond, even after working with him. That’s a shame, as they would have been an interesting pair. I think Tom Mankiewicz was interesting, but he seemed to view Bond as a unique individual. Not in the way that Fleming wrote him. Props to Timothy Dalton, as he was truly trying to do something different. John Glen was fun to read as well. I’m thankful that Michael G. Wilson is seemingly open about talking about the Bond process. That will be missed when he’s gone.

The only bad interview in it was the Richard Maibaum interview. He was disgustedly so full of himself, while criticizing others. While egos are always in the media business, he was as much of a hothead like Lazenby. Dear Richard “The Dick” Maibaum in the afterlife: You were NEVER the only one who could write Bond successfully. I’m still conceived that EON wouldn’t let him direct a Bond movie because he would be more of a dictator than a director. He also criticized actors, for either changing his words, or not saying them the way he wanted. However, Goldberg said that he and Maibaum (rightfully so) got in trouble with EON for that particular interview. So, while I am thankful for Maibaum’s scripts, I can’t respect him as a team player. He was honestly lucky that he didn’t get fired for that interview. I’m sure that if he was offered NSNA he would have taken it.

So overall, I do recommend it. A great blast from the past.

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C‘mon. Maibaum was such an important element of the Bond films, he is entitled for venting his frustration.

Especially when people criticize writers and give actors a blanket apology because they had to say all this bad dialogue and act out these ludicrous plots…

… when it so often is due to actors demanding their ideas are to be incorporated („But that won’t work!“ - „THEN MAKE IT WORK, YOU‘RE THE WRITER, AREN‘T YOU?“) and dropping lines or adding things.

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Ah…that gem.

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Just finished Batman Resurrection yesterday. Not a bad read. It takes off every time the story takes you somewhere that the films never did. That being said there’s a lot of inclusion of characters from both Batman ‘89 and Batman Returns that sometimes borders on gratuitous box ticking, but the new settings are interesting and the handling of one of the main characters (I hesitate to say “villain”) is actually quite interesting. On the whole I would recommend it to anyone who likes Burton’s universe. Now I’m off to the newest Jack Reacher novel. Big fan of those, though I found the last one lacking. So far this is a stronger piece of work.

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Remember the 1000 Euro edition of Taschen´s “The Shining”?

In December they will release a 100 Euro edition:

Maybe the “Dr. No”-book will be available next year for an affordable price…

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