What to read if...you fancy ouzo (or raki) in the shade

Back in the day, a friend, a sculptor, introduced WTRI to the concept of coextensivity in art theory: that is, the idea that the viewer completes a work of art (looking back, it sounds like the kind of thing people came up with in the sixties and seventies - heavily influenced by Marcel Duchamp, spritzed with a little Baudrillard…); a conversation that probably arose because I was regarding him through the viewfinder of a medium format camera at the time.

(Somewhere, there are studio photos of the sculptor and another friend, playing at Mission Impossible - although the look was definitely more The Avengers, suit, catsuit, but no bowler hat - a flicker of an eyelash before the Tom Cruise reboot, so maybe there was something in the air. We hummed the Mission Impossible theme music to create the right atmosphere. Seriously. Oh yes, in the olden days we made our own fun.

The studio was at the top of a magnificently ugly Victorian building (an old school) in Clerkenwell, just before it became fashionable, and Hugh Grant lived there in About a Boy; lots of stone stairs (although, thankfully, the lights were in situ); although even there - the newsstand on the Green was one of those engagingly curvaceous ones you see in European cities; there was a pub carefully calibrated to look like an 18thc dive; St. John (the vanguard of nose-to-tail eating) had set up shop around the corner: the harbingers had come.)

But if, for the sake of argument, we accept this theory of coextensivity without further questioning of its credentials - (WTRI generally prefers to avoid the more fashionable “interrogation,” because it always conjures up an unhappy hypothesis cowering under an arc-light, a brutal academic barking with Brechtian ruthlessness (Hangmen also Die) “We have ways of making you talk!”) - and here I can see you leaping ahead: the ultimate coextensive work of art is, of course, a book. Which, in this context, then leads us to consideration of the possibility of coextensivity within books. And the perfect, origami-ed example to discuss this is Eric Ambler’s The Light of Day.

Some of you will already know that WTRI thinks rather well of Eric Ambler - at some point we should discuss him further, although, that feels more of an autumnal or wintry endeavour: all that smoke, mist and mirrors of double-dealing, and manoeuvring in the shadows. The Light of Day, though, works very nicely as a pendant to Our Man in Havana (the other week, here) - Athens, Istanbul, white suits, tourists - and spies.

Arthur Abdel Simpson could easily be James Wormald: a small man, battered by life, probably similar education; (in a supremely English institution - the private school with public school aspirations, that attempts to inculcate the big school indoctrination intended to produce leaders, but can never provide the effortless connections; producing, instead, anxious minnows who know the rules of the game without being cut out to play it) - except that Simpson is also a one-man exemplar of both the colonial and post-colonial landscape (we've moved a little further down the line here, from the late fifties, to the early sixties); his existence and person, at best, a constant dialogue, often a battleground, between the Egypt of his mother and the England of his father. He’s acquired the skills to move between worlds; including the art of the “well, sir” (the spurious, possibly convincing, always entertaining explanation to authority if one's deviated from the rules) from his NCO father; and a steely pragmatism from his mother, who picks herself up and moves on, after his father's death; wangling Arthur a place at that school and apparently (or so it seems to the juvenile Arthur) derogating responsibility for him, whilst acquiring a prosperous (Egyptian) second husband. It's not hard to see why Arthur, seething with unrecognised and barely articulated anger but naturally timid and sensitive (one character describes him with cruel accuracy as an “outraged sheep”), should, in asserting his right to autonomy, to his self (a struggle that starts after his father’s early death; exacerbated by school), sail ever closer to the wind, until he's tacked right over to the other side. He describes himself as a journalist whose career is in the doldrums: beached in Athens with a much younger wife (belly-dancer at a nightclub); working the gig economy before it's acquired a catchy title - a bit of tour guiding, airport pickups and (not generally within the journalistic remit) a system for the snaffling of travellers’ cheques - so maybe Arthur’s really a small-time crook; although, he doesn't see it like that: more the realpolitik of a disappointed life.

A miscalculation catapults him into an infinitely more dangerous orbit: first as a reluctant courier, subsequently, as a reluctant spy; the minnow wriggling desperately on a hook, attempting to escape the depredations of far more ruthless and dangerous people than Arthur will ever be.

I think that if I were to single out one specific group…one type, one category, as being the most suspicious, unbelieving, unreasonable, petty, inhuman, sadistic, double-crossing set of bastards in any language, I would say without any hesitation the people who run the counter-espionage departments. With them, it is no use having just one story; and especially not a true story; they automatically disbelieve that. What you must have is a series of stories, so that when they knock the first one down you can bring out the second, and then, when they scrub that out, come up with a third. That way they think they're making progress and keep their hands off you, while you gradually find out the story they really want you to tell.

Well sir.

Which is exactly what Ambler, and Arthur, his proxy, do: folding a series of stories within each other; and then - a cardsharp flicking open the pack for inspection - unfolding them, to reveal the next narrative. Arthur is an unreliable narrator; and, like all such narrators, when he tells us something, he really tells us something else. But, unlike many such narrators, we gain a sense that his claim

I’m simply trying to explain what happened, to be completely frank

is not untrue: he really is trying, his voice both eager and suffused with jaded realism; outraged, resigned, complaining, self-justifying - but never self-pitying; revealing a pathetic, repulsive, sympathetic, sometimes almost admirable self. (Whom he's telling is also an open question - the novel cumulatively offers several possibilities, depending on how we want to read things.) When his claims to a journalistic career are unravelled by an affectless succession of statements from his interrogator, harshly funny in their accumulation (we’ve already had ‘thirty-one and ‘fifty-four) -

In January ‘fifty-five you were arrested in London. In your possession were samples of the various obscene or pornographic materials which you had been attempting to sell in bulk

- his response is both his counter narrative and his modus operandi:

I knew it would do no good to become angry. ‘I have edited and sometimes written for a number of magazines of a literary nature over the years…Sometimes they may have been a little daring in their approach…I would remind you that books like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley's Lover, which were once dismissed by [the] authorities as pornographic or obscene, are now recognised as literary works of art and published openly.’

Major Tufan, Deputy-Director of the Turkish Second Section, dismisses this (“I am not interested in how you explain away the past, or any illusions about yourself that you may wish to preserve”), which, in its icy objectivity, both pinpoints and completely misses the point: for Arthur the lie (explanation; justification), repeated so often has, by accretion, acquired the nacreous lustre of a truth; and additionally (the story folded within the story), connects him to a formative and scarring experience of his youth, when he was constructively expelled from school, in his final year, for circulating a titillating“Byronic” poem. Major Tufan can't know about this, of course, but we do - because Arthur's already told us - and can also make our own deductions about the provenance of the poem, called The Enchantment, just as one of Arthur's magazines in 1955 is called Enchantment; just as he takes pride in the knowledge of history he deploys in his tour-guiding; his knowledge of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley; cultural affinities claimed.

Arthur's defence - and the act of making it - are his assertions of self: I knew it would do no good to become angry; you gradually find out the story they really want you to tell, but still, he won't take things lying down (nor is he above the anonymous letter or report to the authorities; and he has a defensive knowledge of the law; especially that related to British nationality and its entitlements). Born with a foot in both camps and (it transpires) a desire for autonomy that trumps conformity, he needs it. There's a sense that his drift into criminality is the result of an almost lifelong defence, a war of attrition against a leviathan that barely notices him, except when he raises his head too far above the parapet, in direct contravention of his early upbringing (a happy childhood memory: “It's always the same with interrogation. I remember my father trying to explain it to Mum one night just before he was killed”); and a rebarbative riposte against the rejections (internalised) which seem inevitably to arise from being himself: his mother; the girl he’d meet with his friend Jones iv [sic], after school; the glamorous, effortlessly sophisticated (and desirable) Miss Lipp (“‘indignant sheep’”).

And, of course, Arthur's perception and recollection of these rejections (despite his best efforts) may not be the whole story: for instance, his mother's determined packing off to school; or when he recalls Mr. Hafiz, the rich restaurateur who became her second husband, his exclamation still that of an angry child -

It was disgusting for a man of his age to be in bed with Mum

- here are narratives susceptible to multiple interpretations; his mother's actions also casting a refractive glitter over his own current relationship with the belly-dancing Nicki; so that even as he plans to placate her with a stone-marten stole, he caveats the idea with the necessity of returning to their flat first, to check she's still there, because

‘One day,’ I thought, ‘she will go out and not come back.’

Arthur has learnt his lessons; but, as with so many of us, can't always understand the workings out.

Ambler allows us to see all this; and then folds in an additional layer to the story, by co-opting us, the readers, and our expectations; strolling us through Arthur's reluctant career in counter-terrorism as Major Tufan’s creature; laying out for us Tufan's coolly realistic assessment, placing it alongside Arthur's objections and differing perceptions; then, letting us bring our own expectations to complete the picture; (and, if we want to be really tricksy, our expectations of a novel by Eric Ambler - although that's unnecessary); before a swift, penultimate reversal, revealing a very different picture: a long con, if you like.

Because they're all crooks ultimately: Arthur, Major Tufan, the major’s rivals (and antagonists) for Arthur's services. Major Tufan may emanate cold-blooded rectitude and be acting for the greater good, but he still uses the traditional box of tricks - blackmail, coercion, implicit violence (Arthur manages to fend off anything further) - as Arthur's other employers, except that they don't balk at explicit violence from the off. Arthur's violence isn't physical, rooted instead in transgression and betrayal (the epitome of the spy’s life, before he even becomes one).

I myself am British to the core. Even my background is typically British

that last assertion true enough; although there are also intimations that he's tried being Egyptian, as well (perhaps in an attempt to reclaim his mother, and his childhood), until they booted him out. British is what he's left with; papers that confirm this, another matter. But what Arthur's really fighting for is acceptance - as himself -

I got on fairly well with the other chaps [at school.] Because I had been born in Egypt, of course, they called me ‘Wog’, but, as I was fair-haired like my father, I did not mind that.

- a lifelong battle that has degenerated into a conditioned reflex.

The point I am making is that persons in authority - headmasters, police officials - can do a great deal of damage simply by failing to see the other fellow's point of view.

Also true. In planting his flag and entrenching, he's also trying (it becomes clear) to reclaim what the scant references reveal as a happy childhood: the Arthur he was then, in Cairo, secure with his two parents, learning about well sirs.

Now

I am not asking to be loved. I am not asking to be liked. I do not mind being loathed if that will make some pettifogging government official happier

- again, as with a child, the opposite is, at the very least, an aspiration; subsumed as a litany of rejection accepted, in the interests of survival; codified here as the right passport.

It is a matter of principle…

I give the British Government fair warning. I refuse to go on being an anomaly. Is that quite clear? I refuse!

Arthur Abdel Simpson.

Well sir.

But if you're lucky enough to be reading this for the first time (or even, rereading after a long time), and you pick up the Penguin reissue: do not on any account read the blurb. It completely destroys Ambler’s elegantly wrought strategy (two-thirds of the novel), played out as cat-and-mouse with the reader’s expectations. Why? Why? (Or just, why don't you give it a miss, so no spoiling of fun?)