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From time to time I like to read something easy. You more or less know what to expect. In this context, le Carré is one of my favourites. This year I also read his The Constant Gardener.
What really differentiates this kind of literature — like thrillers, whodunits, etc — from ‘literary’ literature is that you fail to connect to the people in the book. They never really come to life. It’s the gripping story, the framework, that has to do the job. And the ‘job’ is to make such a book into a pageturner.
What a difference with a writer like V.S. Naipaul who really writes about Africa and African people, for instance In a Free State.

Le Carré’s problems started in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin wall. His real framework was the Cold War and the spying between the two blocks. His best books were written against this background. Like Smiley’s People, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Call for the Dead, etc.

So he had to find a new ‘attractive’ context to write about and his field of choice was Africa.
But the situation in Africa — Congo, Ruanda, etc — is not as well-known to a general public as the Cold War. So he’s got a lot of explaining to do. This covers almost half of the book and makes it somewhat boring. The main theme is the protagonist — a top interpreter who witnesses a top secret meeting — who tries to save eastern Congo from a new war. You know, the one against all theme.
A good read, although somewhat superficial.

More by John le Carré

In het september-oktober nummer van het gezaghebbende Amerikaanse tijdschrift Foreign Affairs wordt nu openlijk de vraag gesteld: “If it is so easy to pull off an attack and the terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it?”
In zijn artikel Is there still a terrorist threat; The myth of the omnipresent enemy onderzoekt Professor John Mueller ((1. Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University)) deze vraag.

Het feit dat er na nine eleven op Amerikaanse bodem geen terroristische aanslagen meer waren, heeft natuurlijk meer commentaren uitgelokt. Temeer daar er steeds maar weer door de overheid wordt gewaarschuwd voor nakende aanslagen. Maar men geeft dan telkens een verklaring voor het uitblijven van nieuwe rampen.
Mueller suggereert:

One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad. But this explanation is rarely offered.

Mueller overloopt dan andere “verklaringen”, telkens met een weerlegging:

Mueller overloopt nog een aantal would-be verklaringen om te eindeigen met de vraag “Is it possible that the haystack is essentially free of needles?”
Hij geeft echter een veel begrijpelijker verklaring:

One reason al Qaeda and “al Qaeda types” seem not to be trying very hard to repeat 9/11 may be that that dramatic act of destruction itself proved counterproductive by massively heightening concerns about terrorism around the world. No matter how much they might disagree on other issues (most notably on the war in Iraq), there is a compelling incentive for states — even ones such as Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Syria — to cooperate in cracking down on al Qaeda, because they know that they could easily be among its victims. The FBI may not have uncovered much of anything within the United States since 9/11, but thousands of apparent terrorists have been rounded, or rolled, up overseas with U.S. aid and encouragement.

Although some Arabs and Muslims took pleasure in the suffering inflicted on 9/11 — Schadenfreude in German, shamateh in Arabic — the most common response among jihadists and religious nationalists was a vehement rejection of al Qaeda’s strategy and methods. When Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan in 1979, there were calls for jihad everywhere in Arab and Muslim lands, and tens of thousands flocked to the country to fight the invaders. In stark contrast, when the U.S. military invaded in 2001 to topple an Islamist regime, there was, as the political scientist Fawaz Gerges points out, a “deafening silence” from the Muslim world, and only a trickle of jihadists went to fight the Americans. Other jihadists publicly blamed al Qaeda for their post-9/11 problems and held the attacks to be shortsighted and hugely miscalculated.

Mueller besluit dat er geen of nauwelijks al Qaeda sympathisanten in de VS aanwezig zijn. Hij denkt ook dat de capaciteit van al Qaeda sterk overdreven werd.

Gerges argues that mainstream Islamists — who make up the vast majority of the Islamist political movement — gave up on the use of force before 9/11, except perhaps against Israel, and that the jihadists still committed to violence constitute a tiny minority. Even this small group primarily focuses on various “infidel” Muslim regimes and considers jihadists who carry out violence against the “far enemy” — mainly Europe and the United States — to be irresponsible, reckless adventurers who endanger the survival of the whole movement. In this view, 9/11 was a sign of al Qaeda’s desperation, isolation, fragmentation, and decline, not of its strength.

Dit is een gans ander geluid dan het geblaat van Bush en andere Rumsfelden (oja, die hebben ze bedankt) over assen van het kwaad. Ondertussen zijn ze er in geslaagd om heel wat elementaire burgervrijheden in de kiem te smoren. Mueller besluit:

The massive and expensive homeland security apparatus erected since 9/11 may be persecuting some, spying on many, inconveniencing most, and taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists.

This short novel reminded me of other novels, equally set in Soviet Eastern Europe. Of course Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but also the Dutch author Bernlef with Publiek Geheim.

The maid came in with a fresh plate of canapés: but the moment she took stock of our position, she withdrew to the kitchenette and, reaching for a couple of aluminium saucepans, began to bang them together like cymbals.
‘They cannot hear us now,’ he said, standing on tiptoe. He put his mouth to my ear.
‘Are they listening?’
‘All the time!’ he sniggered. ‘There is a microphone in this wall. One in that wall. Another in the ceiling, and I know not where else. They listen, listen, listen to everything. But this everything is too much for them. So they hear nothing!’

Utz is living in Prague, he is jewish and a baron. Not the most apropriate assets to live in Cold War Czechoslovakia. But he is also an acknowledged connoisseur of Meissen porcelain and is owner of an exquisite collection.
Apparantly there is a secret agreement with the authorities: they let him be and he attends to his collection (which eventually will become state property) and enlarges it. He is even allowed to visit Vichy every year, for some undefined desease, but he never defects.
The narrator meats Utz only one day in 1967, but learns more about him through his friends. Some thought about this book as a study of the queerness of a collector. But I believe that this complete focus on a collection is a way of fleeing the grey reality. Inside his little world Utz is able to wipe out the unbearable stupidity of living. But, apparantly, he is focused on more than one collection.
A very fine little novel, like a porcelain figure.

Peter Ackroyd is not a new name in my library. He is a novelist (The Plato Papers) and a biographer (The Life of Thomas Morus). He is also well-known for his biography of a city: London: The Biography.

This novel is loosely based on the life of Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890), an adventurer and would-be archeologist. At the time nobody believed that Troy had really existed. But Schlieman did and he found the site.

In the novel Schliemann becomes Obermann, but of course it is a novel and not a biography. Many elements of Schlieman’s character are present, though: an extraordinary determination, his obsession with the verisimilitude of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, his tampering with evidence, his lust for gold, his young Greek wife, etc.
The novel condenses all this in the span of a few months, and the dramatic end has nothing to do with the real life of Heinrich Schliemann.

Everything is present for an exciting story, and that it certainly is. I’ve read it almost at one sitting. Ackroyd is a good storyteller. Good also because he does not fall for the temptation to write five pages where one will suffice. With 215 pages it is a short novel, but it is the better for it.

Sting
Songs from the Labyrinth
Music by John Dowland
Performed by Sting and Edin Karamazov
Deutsche Grammophon

Ik heb net de CD van Sting met liederen van John Dowland gekocht.
Deze opname heeft al heel wat stof doen opwaaien. Puriteinen stijgeren natuurlijk. En inderdaad als je Sting vergelijkt met een geoefende contratenor… Het is soms pijnlijk duidelijk dat de man niet kan zingen, maar dat geldt voor zovele popartiesten.
Maar de CD verkoopt enorm en laat een jong en ander publiek kennis maken met de levendigheid van oude muziek. En heeft hij geen gelijk? Volgens Sting is het popmuziek uit de 17de eeuw. En waarschijnlijk werd het vroeger ook zo gezongen, het zullen niet allemaal geschoolde zangers geweest zijn die Dowland’s liedereen “performden”. Het klinkt alleszins fris-ruw… Ik moet hem toegeven dat hij moed heeft, al is zijn An Englishman in New York misschien iets verteerbaarder.

Uit de recensie van The Guardian van 16 oktober 2006:

The man who first found fame in the 1970s with hits like Roxanne and Every Breath You Take said there was a link between modern pop and Dowland’s work. “For me they are pop songs, beautiful melodies, fantastic lyrics, great accompaniments,” said Sting. “I feel that my job as a pop artist is to develop as a musician, and to bring into my sphere more complex intervals, complex time signatures.”