By Swapan Dasgupta
There are some things the English continue to do
better than most others. Pageantry is, of course, first on the list. Coming a
close second, in my humble eccentric view, is crime fiction—a field which
Scandinavians feel they too have acquired some expertise. Crime naturally
involves the presence of at least one body and at least one flat-footed
detective modelled along Inspector Lestrade who is so generously accommodated
by Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Japp whose close attachment to Hercule Poirot
stops at gastronomy. However, beyond the classic whodunit, there is a sub-genre
where crime and espionage provide a luscious cocktail. And in that department,
writers such as John Lawton, Simon Tolkien, Philip Kerr and Charles Cumming
have proved worthy disciples of the one and only guru, John Le Carre.
The complexities of treachery and the romance
surrounding the perfidy of the bright Establishment figures who betrayed King
and Country for Stalin and the elusive Revolution has, predictably, been the
starting point of any story involving betrayal. Even six decades after Guy
Burgess, the outlandish diplomat who flaunted his homosexuality and was
compelled to accompany the more sedate Donald Maclean to Moscow, the English
are yet to get over their fascination for the 20th century version
of Flashman, the proverbial cad and bounder in the old school tie.
“To betray, you must first belong”, the legendary
Kim Philby once observed in an interview given to a journalist in dreary Moscow.
But Philby, like Burgess, Maclean and Sir Anthony Blunt, the last of the
Cambridge spy ring to be outed, always belonged. After all, the Secret
Intelligence Service or MI6 as it is better known, was not any old outfit. It
existed, as Le Carre once wrote “to defend the traditional decencies of our
society: it would embody them. Within its own walls, its clubs and country
houses, in whispered luncheons, with its secular contacts, it would enshrine
the mystical entity of a vanishing England. Here at least, whatever went on in
the big world outside, England’s flower would be cherished.” It was this
fanatical desire to reconcile the civilities, decencies and even the hugely
complex class system of an England with a ‘cause’ that blended the illusion of
classlessness with drudgery and brutality that was the subject of Alan
Bennett’s play “An Englishman abroad.” Centred on a chance meeting of an
Australian actress touring the Soviet Union with the Royal Shakespeare Company
with Guy Burgess trying to make the best of his enforced exile in a grey, shortage-riddled
Moscow, it brought out the fact that treachery and Englishness could go hand in
hand. What Burgess yearned from his lost homeland was a suit from his Savile
Row tailor, a pair of hand-crafted shoes from the unobtrusive shop in St
James’, a pair of white pyjamas from a particular shop with a Royal Warrant
and, above all, an Old Etonian tie.
“Poor loves”, a slightly drunk and very arthritic
Connie Sachs despaired to George Smiley in Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on hearing of a possible mole in the
‘Circus’, “Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken
away.” It’s a lament that resonates in
the character of Charles Leigh-Hunt in John Lawton’s Old Flames and in the
counter-factual depictions of a post-1940 Britain where a Halifax-led
Government had sued for peace with Hitler in a desperate bid to preserve the
Empire. In France, where Marshal Petain did indeed compromise with the
rampaging German war machine, Vichy is a truth that still remains buried in a wilful
exercise of collective national amnesia—much in the same way as the widespread
prevalence of loyalism to the British Crown is viewed as a non-phenomenon by
India’s historians. In Germany too, there is still veil over the turbulent 12
years of the Third Reich which is only just beginning to be slowly removed. In
the United Kingdom, however, a grotesque perversion of the same spirit that saw
Englishmen celebrate its monumental disasters such as the Charge of the Light
Brigade and Dunkirk has now led to an outpouring of post-colonial angst and a
ridiculous bout of self-flagellation.
The literate sections of contemporary Britain are
today engaged in wistful nostalgia over the post-War ‘Austerity Britain’, a
time that was marked by rationing, the Labour Party’s quest for a New
Jerusalem, Dennis Compton, the Third Programme, the last stand of RP (received
pronounciation) and, above all, the event that brought a sage which began with
Lord Clive to an ignominious end, Suez 1956.
If the historian Correlli Barnett is to be believed,
Britain’s decline was inherent in a post-War consensus that was marked by the
denial of economic uncompetitiveness and the deification of welfare
entitlements—“We didn’t win the war to go back to the 1930s”. That
self-delusion was to persist until Margaret Thatcher, decried in high Tory
circles as the “grocer’s daughter”, drove home the realities of decline but
also masked it in some robust flag-waving over the victory in the Falkland
Islands. But somewhere along the long journey from 1945 to 1979, reality did
begin to peek through the heavy blackout curtains. The turning point was Suez
which, far more than the disorderly retreat from India, signalled the end of
Empire.
The abrupt realisation that the age of Rudyard
Kipling and G.A. Henty was history has been vividly captured by Lawton in Old Flames. Metropolitan Police
Commissioner Sir Stanley Onions, a working class Yorkshireman-made- good,
receives the news of the murder of his son-in-law by Cypriot guerrillas. He is
naturally shattered but simultaneously livid: “What the blood hell are we doing
in Cyprus? What in God’s name have we got to do with the Gyppos (Egyptians)?
It’s like the Boer War all over again. What is this? The last bash at the wogs?
I thought all that malarkey went out when I was a boy; I thought we’d just
fought a war for a better world? No wonder the niggers are picking us off like
flies. We’ve no business there. Let the niggers have bloody Cyprus, let ‘em
have the f…ing desrt!”
Last week, as the depredations of Bashar al-Assad
against his own people in Syria generated a wave of moral indignation among
those who treat the Guardian as gospel, an impish reader of the Spectator recalled a poem by that great
wit A.P. Herbert in 1940 when “Some great minds were contemplating a ‘strike’
on the Soviet Union to punish it for its invasion of little Finland”. The
composition was called “Baku, or the Map Game” and began: “It’s jolly to look
at the map, and finish the foe in a day./ It’s not easy to get at the chap;
these neutrals are so in the way./ But what if you say ‘What would you do to
fill the aggressor with gloom?/ Well, we might drop a bomb on Baku. Or what
about bombs in Batum?” The poem ends: “…And then, it’s so hard to say who is
fighting, precisely, with whom,/ that I know about bombing Baku, I insist upon
bombing Batum.”
This week Germany goes to the polls. The most
emotive issue, some perceptive observers have noted, isn’t either Syria or even
the Euro. Passions have been aroused over a Green Party proposal demanding that
German observe one meatless, ‘veggie day’ each week.
This, more than anything else, indicates why modern
Europeans don’t want a war over either Baku and Batum or Damascus. There isn’t
enough justice to cover the whole world.
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