Book Review: The Private Sector (1971) by Joseph Hone

It sometimes seems those parts of the Internet not taken up with porn or cat videos consist of people breathlessly telling the world about the best film/TV show/beach/bagel "you've never heard of." Well now it's my turn, and my nominee in the category of spy fiction writer is Joseph Hone. How unknown is he? Amazon shows only a few of his books for sale, and even the Toronto Public Library (where I work) has only two titles, and we're a library system that's sclerotic with dusty old genre fiction. And how good is Hone? So good I'm calling an audible and kicking him out of the spy fiction field; there's no need to ghettoize him in a genre, he's simply one of he best writers I've come across, genre or otherwise, in a good long while.

The Private Sector is set in Egypt in 1957 and '67. The 1957 section revolves around the recruitment of Peter Marlow, a dual citizen of Ireland and Britain working in Cairo as a teacher, into the British Intelligence Service. The '67 section follows Marlow as he returns to Cairo to investigate whether a fellow agent is defecting. I'm not going to attempt a plot synopsis because to properly describe the twists and turns would require flow charts, venn diagrams, and possibly a PowerPoint presentation. Just take my word for it that the plot is everything you want in espionage fiction; full of double agents, double-crosses, and double whiskies served in hotel bars to shifty-eyed men trying hard not to look like they're there to spy on the shifty-eyed men down at the other end of the bar.

What's most remarkable about this novel is the beauty and intelligence of Hone's prose. His descriptions of Egypt and Cairo, his ruthless and incisive portraits of even the most minor characters, and his masterful handling of his theme of a British Empire in its final decline, it all takes your breath away. Here's a couple of examples, among many, of Hone's sharp writing:

"...or perhaps it was the rather sinister attraction Arab countries can have for people with  an authoritarian view who have somehow not managed  to express that aspect of their personality adequately at home. Egypt had reconciled Cherry to the mild tyranny of his nature."

And...

"Giant pitch-black Nubian waiters in blues and golds, like coloured pictures from a child's Bible, padded aloofly round their table, pouring out whiskies and dumping ice from great silver bowls, strangers to this tribal feast."

Another reason I don't want to stick Hone in the spy fiction ghetto is that the first third of this novel is pure literary fiction. This section of the novel describes Marlow's early days in Egypt and the beginnings of his relationship with Bridget, whom he eventually marries. This part of the book can be read as a brilliant novella about the human flotsam and jetsam left behind by the rapidly receding British Empire. The Egypt Marlow sees in '57 is a curious, pathetic, and droll world of Brit expats gone to seed and middle-class Egyptians anxiously aping the rituals and tastes of their former masters, wittily symbolized by a boy at Marlow's school who always sets his watch to GMT, two hours behind Egypt. It's in this part of the novel that you realize that Hone shouldn't be compared to people like Ambler or Le Carre, but to writers like Patrick Hamilton and Olivia Manning, two authors who took a ferociously forensic approach to their characters and the social environment they moved in. I was particularly reminded of Manning, whose sextet of novels about an English couple in World War Two (The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy) shares with Hone's book the theme of the British Empire slowly leaving the playing field of history. Both writers do a superb job of describing the melancholy and bitterness of people caught up in this transition.

When it comes to the espionage aspects, Hone is bracingly cynical. None of the spies on view are idealistic or committed, and their masters are seemingly equally free of ideology. Marlow quickly learns that empire building (or breaking) is a kind of game in which the score is kept but there are never any winners. This games aspect of spying is cleverly underlined by several sequences involving badminton, croquet and tennis, and several mentions of different kinds of playing fields. Marlow is essentially tricked into becoming a spy, and Hone shows us that the other spies playing the game do so because it satisfies a psychological itch or indulges a fantasy.

Hone is still alive and writing, and a couple of years ago he wrote an autobiography called Wicked Little Joe that's supposed to be pretty damn good. Finally, credit where credit is due: I was tipped off to Hone by a piece on author Jeremy Duns' blog. The link to his article is here.

Book Review: The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous (1990) by Michael Pearce

Cosy mysteries are not my thing. In fact, I'm not even sure I've read one unless you count all the Agatha Christie's I read as a teenager. It's been noir and hardboiled for me for a very long time. I make an exception for Michael Pearce. His Mamur Zapt mysteries (17 in all) are sometimes described as cosy mysteries, and he certainly doesn't go in for sex, violence and grisly forensic details, but there the similarity ends. It would be more accurate to say that he writes historical fiction that happens to include mystery elements. His novels are set in British-ruled Egypt just before World War I. The Mamur Zapt is the Egyptian title given to the head of Political Intelligence in Egypt. The job, however, is always filled by a Brit, or in this case a Welshman named Captain Owen. Owen investigates crimes both high and low, but only if they have a whiff of the political about them.

In this novel Owen is called upon to investigate the kidnappings of two tourists from the terrace of Shepheard's, the best hotel in Cairo. What looks like a simple crime for profit soon gets more complicated, with links developing to a terrorist group and the Khedive, Egypt's symbolic head of state. Owen not only has to juggle the political aspects of the case but also figure out something of a locked room puzzle: how did two men vanish in broad daylight from a busy hotel terrace?

The real appeal of these novels is the way Pearce recreates Edwardian Egypt. This isn't a fictional Egypt you'd expect; there are no moonlit, romantic interludes in the shadow of the pyramids; no swarthy villains with knives clutched between their teeth; and there's definitely no ancient curses or ambulatory corpses wrapped in bandages. What Pearce concentrates on are the dynamics and tensions of a colonial power, as represented by Owen, attempting to control a country that is seething with nationalist and revolutionary ambitions. Owen is very sympathetic to Egyptian sensibilities and is never patronizing when dealing with his Egyptian subordinates. Pearce, who was raised in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, also earns praise for his refreshing portrayal of Egypt's working classes. When writing dialogue for foreign members of the "lower" classes, most English writers choose to represent their subject's class by having them speak in pidgin English, broken English, or in some version of a Cockney or Yorkshire accent when they're speaking in their own language. In this novel a good number of characters are humble street vendors, but you wouldn't know it by the way they talk. Since they're speaking in Arabic (Owen also speaks Arabic), Pearce makes their speech grammatical and free of malapropisms, as you would reasonably expect. It's nice to see Pearce, like Owen, showing this kind of respect for his characters. For contrast check out the way David Mitchell wrote dialogue for his lower-class Dutch characters in his bestselling The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.

The mystery at the heart of this particular novel is cleverly constructed and revealed, and along the way Pearce effortlessly and elegantly describes the social and political character of Edwardian Cairo. Pearce is a very good writer, particularly of dialogue; like some of the better English writers he has a knack of having his characters speak little but say a lot: a simple phrase like "I see" can have a wealth of meaning in Pearce's hands. And he's also adept at dry, droll humor; in fact, his 1992 novel The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt won the won the Crime Writer's Association Last Laugh Award for funniest crime novel. If you normally cringe at the idea of reading a cosy, or being seen reading one, give Pearce a try and tell people you're reading a sharply-written study of colonialism and nascent Arab nationalism. You won't be wrong.

Book Review: Damascus Nights (1989) by Rafik Schami

In One Thousand and One Nights, the great Arab classic of fantasy and adventure, Scheherazade tells 1,001 stories to her husband King Shahryar. The king has killed every one of his previous wives after one night of marriage. Clever Scheherazade keeps herself alive by telling the king a new story every night but leaving it unfinished by dawn. The king keeps her alive in order to hear the end of the story the next night. In this way Scheherazade keeps herself alive until the king eventually realizes the error of his ways and agrees to spare her life.

Rafik Schami takes the basic concept of this classic of Arabian literature and sets it in Damascus in 1959. Salim the Coachman, a famous storyteller who has spent most his life driving a coach between Damascus and Beirut, is visited in a dream by his good fairy. The fairy tells him that she's the one who's helped make him a great storyteller, but now she's retiring and he will lose his voice. She's asked the king fairy for a favour on Salim's behalf: if he receives seven unique gifts within three months he will regain his voice and once again be a great storyteller. Salim has seven friends who gather at his house once a week to listen to his stories. They try everything to bring back his voice, but nothing, not special food or trips away, works to return Salim's voice. Finally, the friends get the idea to take it in turns telling a story to Salim, and, after he's been told seven stories, Salim does get his voice back.

On one level this novel is a celebration of the Arab tradition of storytelling. Schami effortlessly constructs all kinds of stories, from the traditional featuring demons and fairies, to contemporary tales highlighting the character of Damascus and Syria in 1959. Schami has an amazing ability to craft story after story without repeating himself or sounding formulaic. And both his traditional and contemporary stories are equally strong. His later novels, The Dark Side of Love (review here) and The Calligrapher's Secret (review here), also demontrate this ability, but the storytelling, in both cases, is part of broader and more ambitious novels.

The political aspect of Damascus Nights is not hidden in any way. In 1959 Syria had joined with Egypt in the United Arab Republic, a short-lived attempt to create a pan-Arab nation. Not only had Syria lost its political independence, the age of the secret police and the midnight knock on the door was in full bloom. The fact that Salim and his friends get together for traditional storytelling is clearly shown to be a result of other kinds of speech having become so dangerous. For every traditional story in Damascus Nights we get another that shows the cruelty and injustice of contemporary Syria. Like Scheherazade, Salim and his friends are telling tales to stay safe; any other kind of conversation can lead to prison.

If you've never read anything by Schami before, this novel, as excellent as it is, is only a hint of the creative heights he reaches in his masterpiece The Dark Side of Love. Unfortunately, Schami, who lives in Germany, has done all of his writing in German and not enough of it has been translated into English. I'm sure, however, that when he wins the Nobel Prize for Literature translations of his other works will immediately follow. That's right, the Nobel Prize, and don't forget that it was me that said it first.