The Inside Man

John le Carre never wrote in black and white. The thinking man’s spy novelist was a master of grey, in its many shades and moods.  The grey of moral dilemma.  Of conscience-stricken betrayal.  Of ethical crossroads that cause protagonist and reader alike to hesitate and doubt the way onward.

The complex operation outlined in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (which, frankly, is an early work and one of his less accessible novels) is ultimately aimed at discrediting an idealistic, but efficient East German intelligence officer and replacing him with a brutal ex-Nazi war criminal, now willing to betray his masters to the British.  His novels, in fact, are less about spies than about the frailties of the human condition.

George Smiley, le Carre’s most famous character (he of tubby stature and mild manner, forever cleaning his spectacles with the broad end of his tie) is the antithesis of James Bond, but is perhaps more ruthless. Smiley ultimately defeats his nemesis, the Soviet spymaster Karla, by exploiting the Russian’s love for his schizophrenic daughter, who is in a private Swiss clinic.  The Smiley-Karla duel spans several  books – and the subtlety of le Carre’s writing is in Karla ordering traitor Bill Haydon (a thinly veiled Kim Philby) to begin an affair with Smiley’s wife, so that Smiley doubts his own motives for suspecting Haydon.

And le Carre had a fine sense of balance. In what I consider his finest novel, The Little Drummer Girl, the Israelis recruit a small time English actress to penetrate a Palestinian terror cell, but the book takes her from the Jewish victims of suitcase bombs to refugee camps which the Israeli Air Force is attacking.

Having worked for both MI5 and MI6 (before retiring when his name was revealed to the Soviets by Anthony Blunt, the Fifth Man), le Carre was unmatched in his Cold War atmosphere and descriptions of espionage tradecraft.  The chalk mark on the wall. The dead letter box.  The ‘lamplighters’ and their clandestine surveillance techniques.  

And le Carre was an Englishman with a capital ‘E’.  Born to the establishment, yet set apart by circumstance – abandoned by his mother at an early age and often let down by his father (who was an upper class conman, ultimately jailed for fraud) he was emotionally crippled by his childhood, but well suited to cast a jaundiced eye at the Oxbridge intelligence officers of the ‘Circus’ and their Whitehall compatriots.

And now an era of spy literature has come to an end.  I shall miss you, David Cornwell.  Rest assured that John le Carre will live on.

 

He has slipped the surly bonds of earth: RIP Chuck Yeager.

Yes, he was the first to break the sound barrier.

He was also an ace fighter pilot in WW II, was shot down over France and walked across the Pyrenees to Spain and freedom, was the first to test fly a captured MiG 15 during the Korean War, and did a hundred plus combat missions in Vietnam.  And he was The Voice of the Airline Pilot.

In the 1950’s and into the 60’s an audio phenomenon was noted by passengers and air traffic controllers throughout the United States. A great many airline pilots had started speaking with a West Virginia drawl.  Or as near to it as they could bend their native accents.   In his book, The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe called it ‘Pygmalion in reverse’.  It was the back country, ‘aw shucks, cairn’t hardly’ moonshine mellow tone that originated with the most righteous aviator of all, Chuck Yeager.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the airline pilots (who were almost all ex-military) were also trying to project an aura of cool – doesn’t matter how dire the emergency, we’ll deal with it in the split second available to us, don’t-you-worry-your-pretty-heads.   For that’s what Yeager was about – the ultimate test pilot who had the experience and instinct to make the right call when the chips were down...every time.

And that included some unorthodox moves.

A couple of days before his barrier-breaking flight in the Bell X1, Yeager took a tumble from horseback and broke some ribs.  Naturally, he couldn’t report it – he would lose the test flight.  The problem was, with taped-up ribs, he couldn’t reach across to close the aircraft canopy for the mission.  On the advice of his friend and programme engineer, Yeager carried a length of boom stick with him and used that to lever the canopy shut.  And he broke the sound barrier that day, with a little help from a broom stick.

He did fail once, in an attempt at the world altitude record. He had reached 104,000 feet (in an NF-104, a rocket assisted version of the Starfighter) and fell victim to ‘inertia coupling’ – where the aircraft is in a spin, but also tumbling end over end.  In an uncontrollable descent of 80,000 feet in one minute, Yeager was almost knocked unconscious, but managed to eject.  He separated from the ejection seat and the parachute deployed.  And then the free falling ejection seat tore through some of the parachute shroud lines and then collided with him, cracking open his faceplate, and the burning residue of the ejection charge entered his helmet where it was briskly fed by the chin-level oxygen nozzle that was still functioning.  Essentially, a fire inside his helmet while descending on a damaged parachute.

He survived. 

In later years, Yeager was, among other things, air attaché to Pakistan.  He got very upset when the Indian Air Force blew his personal Beechcraft to bits when they attacked Islamabad airport in the ’71 war.

Chuck Yeager was an aviator’s aviator, a boy from the boondocks without a college education, who rose high through stick ‘n’ rudder talent and sheer determination.  Now he has gone higher still, into the wild blue yonder, and if a requiem is to be sung it should be in the words of fellow aviator John Gillespie Magee...

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, – and done a hundred things
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew –
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

 

     

  

"Life imitates Art...

...far more often than Art imitates Life" wrote Oscar Wilde in 1889.  And the sci-fi pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s were inspiration enough for Germany's top scientists in World War II. At least in design terms, sci-fi art was brought to reality.

Here is the Ruhrstahl X4 (below) and a variation, the Kramer X4 (below that), the world's first air-to-air missiles. They were wire-guided to their targets, and even though neither saw actual combat before the war ended, the technology was adopted by many other nations and is still in use today.

But the point is, when Dr Max Kramer first put pencil to paper, was he not seeing in his mind's eye the pulp fiction rocket ships of his youth ?  Sci-fi was big in pre-war Germany (as, strangely, was Western pulp fiction -- they couldn't get enough of cowboys and Indians).

Even Wernher Von Braun grew up on stories of space travel. In fact, his aim was to get to the moon, and when the first V2 rocket hit London in late 1944, he famously said, "The operational test of the V2 was completely successful. Only it landed on the wrong planet."

And just look at the lines on the V2 (above)...haven't we seen that shape before ? On a dozen sci-fi magazine covers ?  Von Braun kept the faith and helped the Americans get their space programme off the ground, and ultimately wrote his own sci-fi novel, 'First Men on the Moon'.

Of course many other sci-fi ideas were brought to life; In a 1911 novel, Hugo Gernsback, the founder of Amazing Stories magazine (the Hugo Awards for science fiction are named in his honour) accurately predicted radar and its underlying technology. It would take up till 1935 for Life to catch up. 

Arthur C. Clarke described the concept of 'geostationary satellite communications' and GPS decades before they became a reality.  And long before Google and Wikipedia were conceived, Isaac Asimov predicted that networked computers would bring libraries to individual homes and transform education.

Today's sci-fi art may inspire real life wonders of the future. And yet...contemporary sci-fi book covers seem strangely timid compared to the space faring days of yore. As if the great leaps of imagination have already been taken.  Sci-fi pulp is dead, true. And e-books are swiftly replacing the volumes we would pluck out of the bookshelf and drool over, back in the day.  The cover art doesn't seem to be so relevant anymore. I hope I am wrong...

But, damn, weren't those rocket ships funky ?

Ritchie at his Roots

 

Thank God. One of my favourite directors, Guy Ritchie, has returned to his senses and to the genre where he shines -- the London underworld drama. The heist flick is where he began, and where he introduced British low-life actors like Jason Stratham.  

After the likes of 'King Arthur' and 'Aladdin' (delicate shudder) Ritchie is back with 'The Gentlemen' and his partners in crime are an ensemble cast led by the evergreen Mathew McConaughey as an expat American drug lord.  Or weed lord, to be precise, as the film carefully makes the distinction between recreational marijuana and the hard stuff.

One pleasant surprise is scene-stealer Hugh Grant, who -- given the chance to be anything other than the romcom silly duffer -- proves his acting chops with his portrayal of the seedy (and camp) private investigator.  Michelle Dockery trades her cut glass Downton Abbey accent for street smart on-the-way-up Cockney patter, and Colin Farrell is excellent as the earnest mixed martial arts coach.

And the director, with his own mix of blue blood (posh lineage, public school) and blue collar experience (expelled at 15, mean streets livelihood) knows exactly the right balance to strike.

Ritchie returns to his roots but keeps it contemporary with manic YouTubers, rising Asian influences in the UK and the coming legalization of weed (and the profits to be accrued thereof).

Altogether an excellent romp and a worthy successor to 'Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels', 'Snatch' and 'RocknRolla'.

 

 

Desi Apple

Now that’s a launch !

It pushes all the right emotional buttons and it’s the soul of simplicity. And it’s the sort of work possible when the brand name and logo merge seamlessly into a single entity. Forbes magazine has rated it as the most valuable brand in the world.

And the ‘coolness’ factor that it embodies is beyond price.  It is one of those brands that doesn’t even bother to advertise in some key markets; the product pull is so strong that customers seek information on their own, and update each other on new launches and delivery dates.

It was not always so.  The original logo was a B&W pen and ink drawing of Newton sitting under the apple tree, but Steve Jobs (whose idea that was) had the good sense – and the lack of ego – to bring in designer Rob Janoff.  After a week spent drawing apples, Janoff arrived at the minimalistic graphic that is now the ultimate branding icon.

Which leads me to think that Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, was a dangerously naive idealist.

 

 

Mumbai, 24^th Sept.

Rhea, Sara, Deepika, Shraddha, Rakul, Simone...is it a gentlemanly ‘ladies first’ policy at the Narcotics Control Bureau or is there a deeper motive ?

It has certainly left a section of macho Bollywood more than a little miffed.

“This Women’s Empowerment is getting out of hand,” complained a male action star on conditions of strict anonymity,”Not only are they starting to get paid a decent fraction of a man’s fee in this business, they have started to dominate the spotlight in cases like this. I have been using cannabis for years and years and nobody is bothering to summon me.”

Another industry spokesman commented that there was no such thing as bad publicity in Bollywood – whereas no publicity is death. “Many a flagging career has been revived by a drunken brawl or an extra-marital affair.  A drug summons and rabid network reporters chasing you down the highway to the NCB office is the new PR coup. You can’t buy exposure like that.”

Forget about ‘hash/THC/weed/doobies’ as the endearingly uninformed tabloid press put it, the men of tinsel town feel that they have put in the time and earned their reps – as Fardeen did with a possession of cocaine charge, nearly twenty years ago. And Sanju...let’s not go there.

“These young women are amateurs who want it all NOW,” is the common complaint, “They are unwilling to do the hard work, the all-night parties, the learning that comes from watching the senior druggie artistes at work. One puff of weed and they think they own the limelight.”

And the NCB ?  Well, that’s just the patriarchal bureaucracy that India excels at.  Why summon a truculent, sweaty, male star full of testosterone and arguments ?  Here they can dominate and bully pretty and wealthy women who they would normally tiptoe around.  

And for the rest of their lives, some ageing and overweight NCB officers will dine out on the stories, not of seizing heroin caravans at the Pakistan border, but of grilling Deepika for 6 hours straight across the conference table over a three-year old WhatsApp chat that mentions the word ‘hash’.