Political Rhetoric, Part Deux: The Spanish Rule

If you've received an email from an unknown Nigerian sender, it's likely you've been marked for a current version of The Spanish Prisoner con. Don't bite. Delete the message and cease despairing, you're in exalted company.

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Watching the latest instalment of The Borgias the other day, I wondered how many of our lawmakers experience life in a manner akin to Jeremy Iron's Pope Alexander VI. Surrounded by fawning minions (even family members are required to employ the ironic "Your Holiness") how many have more than a passing concept of existence under their rule?

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Life is tough for the up-and-coming pope. Vikram Seth's gargantuan A Suitable Boy¹ is definitely small "m" monstrous compared to the monstrosity committed by the Borgia boys to secure their sister's wedded bliss to the equally illegitimate Giovanni Sforza. Being a little short of the ready, the gotta-do-what-you-gotta-do situation of murdering their Turkish houseguest provided a cool 400,000 ducats. 

The value in today's money? Put it this way. There was a war to fight and a reluctant groom. How much would an aristocratic you demand to wed the illegitimate child of a despised foreign upstart religious leader rumoured  to have failed the minimum requirements²  for his position?

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Similar to today's rulers, Alexander VI wrestled with divided loyalties. Father to his flock and his biological children, he was faced with the usual bunch of fools and ingrates. They talk back, but they grudging obey his orders. To the minimum extent possible. 

Unlike Colonel Cathcart of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, who volunteers his squadron for any mission that might interest Newsweek (or was it Life?) and thus propel him into a general's uniform, Alexander's contemporaries acquiesced to less subtle manoeuvring. The Borgia sons could step in and have the most annoying troublemakers poisoned, or otherwise eliminated. Some of Heller's military brass would have approved.

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I quite enjoyed reading Catch-22 after having watched the film. Movie-book comparisons are sometimes disappointing, but in this case, the reading provided additional background to the movie. I loved the movie adaptation, Catch-22 (1970), with its cast of characters I've never forgotten. 

Doc Daneeka (Jack Gilford) who first describes the non-existent "catch".  Singer Art Garfunkel in the role of Lt Nately. Jon Voight playing 1st Lt Milo Minderbinder, the amoral black marketer who arranges for the squadron to bomb their own base. Comedian Bob Newhart as the aptly named, but ineptly promoted, Major Major Major Major. I can't remember the actor, but the image of Hungry Joe and the flathatting plane are forever burnt into my retinas.

Legislation tends to be the solution for governments today. Of course the courts, like Cesare Borgia's inept assassins, manage to foul things up with unexpected and unwelcome interpretations.

Don't weep too many crocodile tears for our so-called public servants³. We're the ones jammed between a rock and a hard place.

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Notes
¹ A monstrous omnibus of a tome that's actually a trilogy. Lata's family search 1950s India for a suitable spouse. Everyone has an opinion, even the bride-to-be. More than a simple soap opera, take it to the seashore and lap it up. I loved it.

² The Spanish Borjia (Italianized as Borgia) family was rumoured to be Moriscos, or descendents of Spanish Muslims who converted during the Reconquista. This led some contemporaries to ask, "Is the Pope Catholic?" These days, Granada celebrates the end of the Moors in Spain annually in the Alhambra. Its US counterpart is known as Columbus Day.


³ Don't worry if the link's broken. It was just a T-shirt. Only Diamonds are forever.

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Part Deux refers to the rhetoric spewed by the political classes.

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After reading the Catch-22 version of the prisoners dilemma, you might be interested in seeing The Spanish Prisoner congame in action. 

Take a peek at Charles Cumming's The Spanish Game. British expat and former spy, Alec Milius, doesn't dare return home from Madrid. Paranoid, he knows the CIA's out to get him. MI5 and Six are probably still on the warpath to. 

Not that Milius doesn't deserve a bad rap, seeing that he's cheating with his British employer's beautiful Spanish wife. After a Basque kidnapping and torture, it doesn't take much for Milius to agree to cheat on her as well. 

In this wheels-within-wheels espionage thriller, who's the reader to trust? And why is Milius suddenly so much in demand?  A most enjoyable read.

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Books mentioned

• A Suitable Boy
• Catch-22
• The Spanish Game

Love, War and Remembrance

Civil unrest in the Middle East has been in the news these last few weeks. In unconscious sympathy, I read two war novels this week, Birdsong, a tale of WWI, and The 6th Lamentation, a WWII story.

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Sebastian Faulks' Birdsong is a haunting story of love among the ruins.†

The tale begins in 1910 with orphan Stephen Wraysford's arrival in the Somme town of Amiens on a mission to learn about the local textile trade for his English employer. Stephen next proceeds to do the unthinkable -- accepting the hospitality of a local family, then falling in love with the woman of the house, Isabelle Azaire, and convincing her to run away with him.

However, as with Tolstoy's heroine, Anna Karenina, Isabelle's guilt drives her to abandon the young Englishman.

Fast forward to 1916 and the Battle of the Somme (1 July to 18 November). Stephen has returned to England to enlist in the Great War to fight for his home country, rather than for the French. His education and fearlessness quickly lead to promotion out of the ranks.

Battle landscape on a good day.
 Image courtesy cwgc.org, image #42

Yet what his superiors fail to see is that Stephen's belief in never having been loved has lead him to take the military propaganda -- be blood thirsty towards the enemy -- to heart. He focuses all his energy towards avoiding connections to his fellows and lives to kill.

Most of the book is concerned with survival amid the unspeakable horrors and agony of life in the trenches. However, interwoven with this is the "contemporary" (1970s) story of Elizabeth Bensen, a solitary woman in search of information about the grandfather she never knew -- Stephen Wraysford.

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Nevertheless, the story ends on a positive note. It's a vindication of sorts -- the atonement so missing from Ian McEwan's excellent love story Atonement and equally compelling film version with James McAvoy and Keira Knightley. So, despite the crushing gloom, Birdsong does deserve its BBC best book ranking.

After reading Birdsong, William Broderick's mystery thriller The 6th Lamentation* was almost a breeze. I picked it up a few weeks ago because the title rang a bell. It certainly didn't disappoint. Agnes Aubret, failed mother and slightly more successful grandmother has a secret that's been gnawing away at her soul for fifty years. She's just been diagnosed with motor neuron disease with only a short time to live. So her granddaughter, Lucy, may understand the origins of the fault lines within the family, Agnes decides to dictate her story.

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Father Anselm, monk and former hack lawyer, has a story too. A story to track down. For he's the Vatican's chosen investigator into the claims of suspected Nazi war criminal, Edouard Schwermann, who recently demanded sanctuary at Anselm's home priory.

Schwermann claims he's innocent and to back this up he cites his having been received sanctuary at this same priory and then smuggled into England at the end of the war. With the blessing of the authorities he began a new life under a new name. The justification? As an SS officer based in occupied France, he helped smuggle Jewish children to safety.

Every survivor connected to the running of this smuggling operation has something to hide, but they appear to have one belief in common -- fellow smuggler Agnes and her child perished in the concentration camps. It's up to Lucy to decide what to divulge during Schwermann's trial.

I quite enjoyed this book. While still dark, its mood was considerably lighter than that of Birdsong. And while it remains true to the theme of senselessly wasted lives, there is more joy to its ending.

I'd say Birdsong's is the greater book, but Lamentation the easier read.

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Should you enjoy Sebastian Faulks' writing, you might be interested in the current BBC2 4-part series, Faulks on Fiction, and the accompanying BBC publication Faulks on Fiction: Great British Characters and the Secret Life of the Novel. Each episode of the series focuses (sequentially) on the Hero, Lover, Snob and Villain.

If you want more of Father Anselm, try Broderick's murder mystery The Gardens of the Dead and A Whispered Name, a novel of the 1917 Passchendaele campaign.

Notes

†   Apologies to Browning, Waugh and Burne-Jones.

* The book explains that the Bible contains five Lamentations and that the Holocaust may be considered a sixth.

Books mentioned

• Birdsong
• Anna Karenina
• Atonement
• The 6th Lamentation
• Faulks on Fiction: Great British Characters and the Secret Life of the Novel
• The Gardens of the Dead
• A Whispered Name