The Village Book Group that I helped set up a year ago has proved to be a winner. We are a mixed bunch with a variety of reading tastes and so our themed evenings make for fascinating discussion and much hilarity.
This month's theme was 'Betrayal' and I had in mind a John le Carre. Not only because I have never read him, but the books are republished in the new 'softer' Penguin Modern Classics binding and I've fallen in love with them. As a book in the hand they cannot be bettered with their eau de nil livery, floppy pages, a binding that lays flat without excessive spine-cracking persuasion, good sized font and line spacing and generally a very happy-making reading experience. Plenty say le Carre books can be complicated so I plumped for The Night Manager on the basis that I'd seen the TV series so would have the plot and characters in my imagination, even though I much prefer to do this the other way round, no matter, it would be fine.
It wasn't.
I'm not sure whether my concentration was shot to pieces by national developments...
Or was I distracted by the images of the TV characters (I confess Tom Hiddleston mostly) and the fact that the book has much action that I think was omitted from the series.
Or perhaps I wasn't giving myself a long enough run at it...maybe I needed a 100 page sitting to really get into it.
I soldiered on in a complete fog of ambiguity and started to feel a bit stupid. Even worse miserable, because if I haven't got a book on the go that I can't wait to pick up again then really what's this life all about. I was completely confused and finally threw in the towel at p160, experiencing a wave of relief before panicking that the book group was meeting in two days time and I wouldn't have a lot to show for it. I know I could easily have found a fall-back reserve but I'm trying to read anew for this group, and really enjoying it, which is where Ben Macintyre comes in.
I downloaded A Spy Among Friends : Philby and the Great Betrayal onto my Kindle and within minutes I was feeling less stupid and completely in control of my reading life again, flicking the pages like a thing possessed.
I was too young to grasp the whole Burgess - Maclean - Philby spy scandal back in the 1950s and 60s but goodness me what a scandal it was; a betrayal so profound it seemed almost impossible to believe...likewise for those nearest to Kim Philby, who suspected nothing about his Soviet connections, and when suspicions were raised refused to believe their charming friend capable of such duplicity.
'You didn't just like him, you worshipped him'.
This is not a biography, more an attempt to describe a friendship, namely that between Philby and his closest fellow spy and confidante, Nicholas Elliott and a wider circle that included some well-known figures...Malcolm Muggeridge, Graham Green, Dennis Wheatley, Peter Ustinov's father Jona, Ian Fleming, Tim Milne (nephew of A.A.Milne). Writers and journalists make the best spies apparently, even better it would seem if they had been through the brutal prep-school system, attended a top flight public school and thence to Cambridge University, a place that 'boiled with ideological conflict' in the 1930s and beyond. We had an interesting discussion about the potential impact of the 'brutal prep' school' on these men and the qualities they may have taken into adulthood as a result.
Friendly to all but emotionally connected to very few, Kim Philby had been spying for the Russians for six years before he was recruited into MI6 during the war, and here's a thing, I had never really known the difference between MI5 and MI6, nor the class divisions, until Ben Macintyre explained it...
MI5 - maintaining security and combating enemy espionage...below the salt, working to middle class ' a little common'
MI6 - gathering intelligence and running agents, upper middle class, elitist and very old school.
It was MI5 who first suspected Philby and MI6 who would have none of it, mostly at the behest of Nicholas Elliot who defended his friend against countless accusations over his part in the escape of fellow Soviet spies Burgess and Maclean to Russia. There would be questions in Parliament, answered by the then Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan, about the identity of the 'Third Man' who had tipped them off and Kim Philby (guilty as charged as we now know) would be exonerated and eventually brought back into MI6 to carry on his duplicitous life. Ben Macintyre analyses film footage of a press conference called by Kim Philby, to answer questions and protest his innocence, and it is fascinating to watch it now. A consummate liar and dissembler at work and apparently MI6 would eventually use this as a training video.
It's a sad and sorry life with a trail of discarded and damaged women and children left in his wake, but Philby's luck would eventually run out and throughout the book all I could think was 'How is Nicholas Elliot going to feel when the penny finally drops?'
And how is Philby going to react...
A lifelong friendship that had been deeply meaningful to one yet meaningless to the other.
In fact Elliot, never one to reveal his innermost emotions, insisted that he be the one to confront the disintegrating and now alcoholic Philby (much against MI5's better judgement) and here the plot thickens when it appears Philby, after initial interrogation by his once closest friend and the signing of a confession, is effectively allowed to escape to Moscow. Ultimately it becomes clear that this might have been the most expedient political outcome...the scandal and revelations of a court case, the duping and misplaced trust experienced by those who couldn't step back and see the situation objectively, all far too embarrassing for Harold Macmillan, now the Prime Minister, and the British government to contemplate...witness the fact that many papers relating to the case remain under lock and key.
But, as seems equally likely, was this also a clear case of the old-boy network looking after its own...
I got my John le Carre moment in the end because he has written an afterword for A Spy Among Friends that recounts many very revealing conversations he had with Nicholas Elliot in the aftermath, and which offer further opportunities for the reader to reach their own conclusions.
And so a brilliant Kindle read and a great discussion at book group about the Great Betrayal, treachery, treason and all manner of pertinent points raised.
Meanwhile am I alone in my le Carre confusion...
Which of his books would you recommend because they all look delightful on the shelf...
And I wonder which book title you might have chosen for the theme of 'Betrayal.'
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