Edward Wilson is known- though perhaps not as known as he should be- for a handful of fast moving and historically-based espionage novels. What differentiates his fiction from his fellow genre travellers- e.g., Le Carré, McCarry, Ben Pastor, Robert Littell, Alan Furst- is his humane, but unapologetic, leftist perspective. Nothing all that radical, yet insistent, particularly when it comes to the relationship between an increasingly subservient Britain and an ever more powerful U.S.. In a sense, Wilson is a throwback to earlier spy novelists like Eric Ambler and Graham Greene who were never afraid to openly display their anti-fascist tendencies. Another quality that makes Wilson different from others of his ilk, and, in fact, marks him as a true original, is that taken as a whole, his novels constitute a veritable history of the power relationship separating and binding the US and the UK, from the end of WW2 into the 21st century. Drawing on tropes from both past spy fiction as well as film noir, Wilson's novels, some eight in number, range from the Vietnam-set A River In May to his most recent, the just-after-WW2 Farewell Dinner For a Spy. Coming at the reader in short, sharp segments, the novels span not only eras but continents, corridors of power, and even battle theatres. Through it all Wilson's compromised protagonist, William Catesby, burdened with an ambiguous relationship to the state, works for but sometimes against the prevailing political interests.
Opposing Forces
One could say that Wilson's narratives exist both inside and outside a genre in which an assortment of ambiguities present themselves, or what, with a nod to Gramsci, might be called morbid symptoms. In fact, Wilson has a special relationship to those symptoms and their accompanying monsters, having viewed them up front and political during his days in Vietnam where he served as a Special Services officer. Surely that must have been a gargantuan learning curve, or, at any rate, a hard way to acquaint oneself with the dark side of American foreign policy. Enough for Wilson to eventually renounce his American to become a British national. If nothing else that experience gave him an opportunity to observe the last dregs of one empire and the rise and foam of another. No wonder Catesby's backstory mirrors his own. Both come from ordinary backgrounds. While Wilson, thanks to a U.S. Army scholarship, was trained by the state, Catesby- his name conjuring up images of the 17th century Gunpowder plot- gained a scholarship to Cambridge. Had Catesby not accepted that scholarship he would probably never have been recruited by MI6, nor would he have married into a family with near-establishment connections. His wife, for personal as much as political reasons, also works for the intelligence service, in her case, MI6's domestic counterpart, MI5. Which means they are, to some degree, and however amicably, in competition, both at home and in the field. Despite the ground rules of their profession, they still manage to exchange limited amounts of information, to the point that both husband and wife know more about the other's job than either let on. Less Prizzi's Honor than Nick and Nora Charles. Yes Catesby's marriage and murky job description only adds to his status: akin to a walking contradiction in search of a logical conclusion. One that seems dependent on the possibility of a socialist Britain, lest the country sinks into the mulch of the new American empire. In the end, Catesby tries to be loyal to his country, but only so far as his politics allow; otherwise, it's a matter of negotiating a tricky world of opposites and ambivalences, in which state crimes and duplicities, from the ideologically dubious to the morally ambiguous, proliferate. Which can't help but lead to conflicts of interest, no matter how deadly serious or seriously deadly they might be, handled both seriously and humorously, whether at home or abroad, in the power drenched corridors of Whitehall or a bench in Green Park where Catesby's orders can be deconstructed by his relatively sympathetic superior.
Reconciling the Irreconcilable
But, then, this is Spooksville where nothing is often not what it seems and oppositional forces gather as the novel progresses. Like other practitioners of his ilk, Wilson's truc is to portray fact through fiction, though that depends on whom and what he's describing. On the other hand, one might as well say he's out to portray fiction through fact. Whichever, flashing one's leftist credentials in front of reader inevitably places one's protagonist in precarious and surprising positions. That is, if the intention is to dig into the contradictions of the state as Wilson does. And Catesby can't help but collide with the powers that be, and, no matter how much he would like to find some middle ground, is forced to decide whether to collude or not. It's not that Catesby, having emerged from WW2 with his anti-fascist ideals intact, needs to be more circumspect regarding the contradiction between work and politics, so much as he might have been even more radical and hard-edged regarding his relationship to the state and, ultimately, the maintenance of a mixed economy. However, thrown into the deep end, Catesby is too preoccupied to take a more extreme position, to question anything beyond the obvious, or to read the relevant texts. It's more than enough for Catesby to simply read his surroundings and act accordingly.
Wilson manages to side-step those contradictions between his protagonist's employment and his politics by making Catesby a marginal figure, both inside and outside MI6. Consequently, although he's working for the state, on the other hand he has been a Labour Party candidate for Parliament in the 1945 General Election, albeit in a safe Tory seat. It makes one realise that despite his employment, he could be, some forty years in the future, be described as something akin to a Bennite (and perhaps Wilson had in mind Benn's account of how, after leaving Oxford as a reluctant member of the establishment, he turned down MI6 in order to go into politics, as if that were the only choice available for someone in his position at the time).
Dictating the Past and the Future
As his orders change so does the novel's geography. Consequently, Catesby, in Farewell Dinner..., moves from London and Whitehall to post-war Marseilles and a world of striking dock workers, leftists and CIA interventionists. From there Wilson airlifts the novel to Laos, already, even in those post-war years, awash with drugs and fire power. Suddenly we are on the periphery of Wilson's first novel, and the author's experiences in those killing fields, the sole contribution of which would be, according to Catesby, drugs and napalm. And even there Catesby seems caught between opposing forces. Forced to play different roles for different factions, Catesby's allegiance remains constant. Which isn't to say he's not cynical. After all, it's a quality endemic to the region and his profession. Nevertheless, Catesby's cynicism appears to be more affected than real, more a disguise than deeply felt. At least that's the conclusion drawn from the chapters in which he is portrayed dictating his past to his grand-daughter. The two have a particular rapport, the latter believing the former's earlier life is important enough to one day be set down in print. And she's right. After all, what Catesby relates is the book one's reading, as well as any other books about Catesby that might appear in the future, or perhaps even in the past. That his grand-daughter is not related by blood to Catesby only emphasises his belief in what is possible, and a modernity in which nurture, i.e., qualities of love, take precedence over that of blood, birthright and privilege.
The View of a Cultural Entryist
Beyond tracing the history of post-war Britain, Wilson's books are, for the most part, about power: who has it and who only thinks they have it. Which invariably leads to an investigations surrounding the politics of corruption and class conflict. "Was it possible to be a good spy and a decent human being?" Catesby asks himself in Farewell Dinner.... It's a conundrum that comes in one form or another in every Wilson novel. After all, it might be a binary world for some, but for Catesby there are more than enough shades of grey to go around. It's an attitude that keeps Wilson's fiction interesting and prevents it from ever falling into the nether-regions of pastiche, even if the latter seems to go with the territory. Another factor separating Wilson from other stylists, is his mock-parody of the class system, particularly when it comes to language and the over-used term "British humour." This is most evident in various bits of repartee: between Catesby and his wife; and between Catesby and his MI6 superior Henry Bone. As entryists, Wilson and his protagonist, are hooked, perhaps excessively so, on the culture's tics and eccentricities, whether through humour or understatement, in which more is meant than is being said, the sort of thing that Le Carré is so adept at and comfortable in portraying. And perhaps it really does take someone on margins to note, as does entryist-manqué William Gibson in Pattern Recognition, that "The British have evolved passive-aggressive leverage in much the way they've evolved irony." In Wilson's hands, that humour and passive-aggressive understatement is pervasive enough to allow Catesby to cross political and class lines, a useful ability for a spy who lives and works in a world of spies, who spies on others as much as he is spied upon.
Amongst other oppositional forces embedded in his work, none is more apparent than the manner in which patriotism is set against nationalism. Loyal to the British state in its fight against fascism and the possibility of establishing an independent social democracy, Catesby makes it clear he is neither a nationalist nor a royalist. As well as being ambivalent about spying for the British state, he exploits his position when and where necessary, which means engaging in a certain amount of dirty work if that's what it takes to intervene in or bear witness to any crimes committed in his name and those aspects of the country that he loves. Through it all, and despite the best efforts of the CIA and the local mafia, Catesby remains an idealist with a hopeful eye on the future. That idealism and those aspects have much to do with Catesby's background, having grown up in Lowestoft, the village in East Suffolk. Having referred to it throughout the book, it's clear that Catesby takes no small amount of pride in his working-class, semi-rural roots. As for Wilson, even though he has turned his back on America, he seems to retain an affection for his home town of Baltimore, its past (the home Dashiell Hammett, Poe etc.) and its working class culture (the site of the first American General Strike). Not surprisingly, his relationship to that part of the world, manage to seep into the pages of Farewell Dinner... When the corrupt Lester Roach chides a fellow American agent for sounding British, the latter says, "It's because I'm from Maryland." Indeed, it's a mid-Atlantic attitude that gives Wilson permission to take things a step further when it comes to putting a particular spin on the politics of the British Intelligence Services and its relationship to an America whose obsession with anti-communism is about to threaten the world. All indicative of the oppositional couplings deployed by Wilson, whether MI6 and the CIA, MI5 and MI6, marriage, class, or simply the old and new.
Undiminished Rage
Stylistically speaking, Wilson might not bring anything that's new to the genre. But that'a not his intention. What he manages to do is politicise a genre whose politics is normally submerged within the confines of the state, which is to say narratives about networks of old boys, colonialists, neo-liberal idealogues and bad apples, but rarely addresses the nuances of systemic abuse. At the same time, Wilson's fiction wouldn't be so effective if it didn't tempt inquisitive readers to make their own investigations (yes, according to a Politico article, Putin, as stated in Farewell Dinner..., did supply the Red Army Faction with weapons and money). As Frederic Jameson has noted in reference to Ben Pastor, espionage fiction, to be effective, has to engage politically, and, in doing so, heighten conflict and establish a degree of complicity. That Wilson foregrounds ambiguity and complicity to the degree that he does, allows Catesby to subvert the usual espionage narrative. Unlike Le Carre's Smiley (at best a liberal), Furst (ditto), Pastor's Bora (a patriot but neither a nationalist nor a fascist), Philip Kerr's Gunter (ditto), Catesby's loyalty remains double-edged: a socialist at a time when, unlike in America, is was hardly an unpopular position to take. It's not so far from the type of novel crime writer Jean-Patrick Manchette sought to accomplish at the end of his life, espionage fiction (e.g., the posthumous Ivory Pearl) that depicts how crimes trickle down from the state to the street. Not only anti-fascist but anti-bourgeois, particularly regarding a certain type of spy and functionary. Cohabitating with drug dealers crooks and arms salesmen, Catesby is able to find allies amongst workers, revolutionaries, as well as maverick colleagues in MI6. Of course, Catesby's pursuit of monsters will remain unresolved. With an unflinching view of the world when it comes Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs and Britain's war in the Malvinas, Thatcher war on the working class, the plot to overthrow Harold Wilson, Cambridge spies, etc., Catesby does his best to hold history to account. But clearly it's too much for any one protagonist to handle. Likewise, any one author. But Wilson, whose anger underpins every novel he's written, does what he can. As Catesby says to his grand-daughter, "I hope your rage never diminishes." Hopefully that applies to Wilson's future novels, drenched, as they are in, in the blood and intrigue of recent history.
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