Prelude #21

 

The 21st of my preludes for guitar. This one's in E minor.

michaelpeverett · Prelude No 21 in E minor

All the Preludes so far: 

michaelpeverett · Preludes

Sinkiang Executive

Blind in one eye because of the sweat but when I dragged at the stick the big metal sphere floated down past the bottom of the windscreen and out of sight and the smaller one followed, but more slowly. The stick was shuddering in my hands and the whole machine was coming alive as the airstream was forced against the ailerons. The high thin scream of the ancillaries overlaid the bellowing of the jets and the voices in the headset sounded unreal, their meaning lost in the tumult that was shaking the aircraft.

Blood pooling into the lower half of the body and the suit reacting, squeezing. The organism was in terror because somewhere below and behind it the two missiles were trying to turn or were already turning and moving in to the target and there was no action, simply no action at all to be taken except to maintain the muscular strength necessary to hold the controls in their present attitude so that the Finback would eventually pull out of the dive before the ground came up and blotted it into a smudge.

One thousand.

The right eye had moved to look at something and snatch at an item of data for me and I examined it: we were flying in a diminishing curve at one thousand feet above the ground and my head was tilting upward to look through the windscreen because it wasn’t going to be the first missile or the second missile it was going to be the surface of the earth that would provide the other component of the impact, so be it, go out cursing Parkis I hope you rot in hell. 

We must have cleared the missiles but it was academic because the needle was down to four hundred feet and colours were filling the windscreen and sliding downward, trees, buildings, gold on a dome, downward, as the nose began coming up and the buffeting began and broke off and began again until the thing was shaking like a dog and we flying level through ground pockets and shifts of air with the perspective of a townscape streaming across the windscreen — towers, rooftops, domes — and suddenly the trees again, spreading past and behind in a tangle of winter lacework against the frosted land.

You are too low.

Understood. Adjust altitude.

The blackout had fluttered at the brain and for a moment the windscreen had darkened but the light was back and cerebration started up again, avid for data and desperate to analyse.

Remember the mountains. And your briefing. I was now at the point of that wedge-shaped pattern and the risks had narrowed to the certainty that at any next second they would throw more missiles into the air unless I could keep low enough: to use what terrain masking was available and get off their screens. Get off their screens and go for the Khrebet Tarbagatay and do what I had been briefed to do: disappear.

I assumed at this time that there were further missiles in launch or already airborne but we had two minutes left before we hit bingo fuel and it was long enough, would be long enough if I could stay this close to the ground without hitting a hill or a tower or a radio mast, and that was a matter of chance. The rest was a matter of following instructions.

The snow cloud was drawing across the range with its base on the ground and its darkness began closing in as I held the Finback on its course while the buffeting started again and shook the ground and the sky and the blood inside my skull and then eased off gradually, leaving vision partially clear.

The terrain below was now rocky and desolate, with crags rising towards the mountain range in the first haze of the snow. There was nothing —

Mirrors.

The shape was in all three of the mirrors and steadily increasing in diameter as it floated in the wake of the Finback, the explosive warhead catching the light and the fins revolving slowly as it homed in on its target. The thing was coming at me faster than I could run and if I tried making turns it would follow wherever I went because I didn’t have the speed to break away and send it ballistic so the only thing I could do was get out and the only way to get out was to slow down because at this speed my limbs would be torn off but if I slowed down that thing in the mirrors would close in for the kill.

My left hand dragged the throttles back. I didn’t know it was going to do that but the organism was taking over and the brain went on recording, interpreting, as the senses fed in the data: eight hundred knots on the airspeed indicator, seven hundred, six.

Don’t forget anything.

Signal barely understood.

Don’t forget.

Five hundred.

Floating in the mirrors, the fins turning slowly and lazily against the cold grey sky, the warhead enormous, a great sphere.

Remember camera remember camera remember camera remem —

All right got it now but that bloody thing’s going to blow us up and I can’t —

Camera.

Pulled at the lever and snapped the release and put my hand through the strap and looked up and saw the needle at four hundred knots and looked higher and saw the three mirrors filled with the spinning shape.

At three hundred and fifty I blew the canopy off and triggered the seat and felt the cartridge fire and thought Christ we’re hit and then the windblast sent me whirling in the sky and in the middle of a visual sequence I saw the Finback and the long thin missile closing on it in the final seconds before the detonation boomed and the shockwave kicked me away and fragments came fluting through the smoke of the sunburst that had been the aircraft, picking at my body and whining past and picking again until I felt the jerk of the harness as the main chute deployed, a sense of life after death and the reek of chemicals, a glimpse of a torn panel turning like a falling leaf, a numbness creeping and then cold, intense cold, embalming the consciousness.

(The Sinkiang Executive,  end of Ch 11)

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You can read the whole novel online here (though I can't guarantee it's either legal or safe for your phone):

https://libcat.ru/knigi/detektivy-i-trillery/shpionskij-detektiv/288618-adam-hall-the-sinkiang-executive.html#text

I think you can read all the other Quiller novels on this site, too. The text of The Sinkiang Executive seems complete and mostly very accurate, though it's hazy on quotation marks and sheds the diacritics in the snatches of Spanish, German and Hungarian. (Russian is given as English, Quiller being fluent in it.) 

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Operation Slingshot involves flying a stolen MiG across the USSR and then bailing out near the Chinese border. No point in filling you in; you need the previous 120 pages to fully grasp the context. 

But even when you've passed through all nineteen chapters of furious action, it's difficult to say what the point of it was. Quiller is still alive; that's one thing. Certain objectives have been ticked off; what they were really about, and whether ticking them off made the world better or worse, aren't questions that greatly preoccupy us (or Quiller, or his author); it's like an office job. Reading the novel is more about experiencing the process than drawing conclusions. It's even hard to say if Quiller's a nice guy or not. We're streaming his experience the whole time, we don't see him from outside. 

"A spy thriller of the first rank", the front cover quotes -- and I think "spy thriller" is quite a helpful term, placing the emphasis on the action rather than the mystery. There are no moles here, no twists, and surprisingly little suspense. The thrill is all about what Quiller is doing in the moment; flying a fighter jet, stopping a train, searching an apartment, eluding a tail, killing someone, having sex with someone. 

But back to my sample extract. In extremity Quiller's identity splits and pluralizes: the organism, the right eye, cerebration, even the aircraft itself, the drills, the briefings, the London control. I think that's what must account for the striking use of "we" in the fifth paragraph. The normal grammar of pronouns and persons is being centrifuged like Quiller's blood. 

A fan on GoodReads reports having read The Sinkiang Executive about a dozen times. I suppose such mad dedication is partly about encountering Quiller at a formative age, the way I encountered Sudden. Waiting till you're  67 is naturally a bit different. All the same I sort of get it. There's an inexhaustible feel to the torqued prose, an awareness of only partially capturing all the sensory overload, a surrender to momentum active enough to suck you back in after the book's over, as I found out when I was trying to pick a sample.

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Adam Hall was the author of around 18 cold-war spy novels featuring Quiller, a British agent; The Sinkiang Executive (1978) was the eighth. 

Behind "Adam Hall" was the Bromley man originally named Trevor Dudley-Smith (1920 - 1995). He wrote more than 100 books in many genres and under various pseudonyms; a rather Daniel Defoe-like figure, it seems to me, comparably well-informed about everything and with a comparably dependable prose style. He later changed his name to Elleston Trevor, originally the pseudonym under which he published his best-known book The Flight of the Phoenix (1964).

Picturing The Great Gatsby

 

The jacket: Gatsby's "gorgeous car".

Gatsby's Rolls-Royce 40/50 ("Silver Ghost") is simplified to essentials without losing any of its power. (Nick Carraway's description, the owner's naïve pride and Tom Buchanan's contemptuous epithet "circus wagon" all emphasize that Gatsby's car was vast, luxurious and ornate.)

These are illustrations by Charles Raymond for a 1968 Folio Society edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. By 1968 the novel was an acknowledged classic. It wasn't a success on first publication, and when Fitzgerald died in 1940 he had little reason to think his work would be remembered. 

From what I can see Charles Raymond's work as an illustrator hasn't been particularly acclaimed. His best-known commission was Dr Alex Comfort's bestseller The Joy of Sex (1972), for which he supplied the watercolour illustrations, and was also the model (with his wife Edeltraud) for Chris Foss's pen and ink drawings.

Anyway, I think he did a fantastic job with The Great Gatsby. Of course I didn't read it in this fancy Folio edition (which I found at Mum and Dad's) but in a handy bung-it-in-the-backpack paperback, and later I re-read it online. 

But when I looked at these illustrations they gave me new thoughts about what I'd been reading. I stopped seeing the novel as mainly about the American Dream and projection and imagination and delusion and class and wealth. It is certainly about all those things, but only because it's also about very physical things, bodies and bodywork, the punch packed by Tom Buchanan, the thrill of Daisy's voice, Gatsby's smile, Myrtle Wilson's sensual vitality, the liberating and deadly horsepower of automobiles.

Frontispiece: Jay Gatsby. There was a change in Gatsby that was simply confounding (Ch 5).

Illustration for p. 24: Daisy Buchanan. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it (Ch 1).

Illustration for p. 46: Jordan Baker. Jordan Baker came out of the house and stood at the head of the marble steps (Ch 3).

Illustration for p. 51: the man in Gatsby's library. A stout, middle-aged man, with enormous owl-eyed spectacles, was sitting somewhat drunk on the edge of a great table (Ch 3).

Illustration for p. 89: Daisy and Gatsby. And as she said something low in his ear he turned towards her with a rush of emotion (Ch 5).

Illustration for p. 109: Daisy in motoring gear. She walked close to Gatsby (Ch 7).

Illustration for p. 143: George B. Wilson. The gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass (Ch 8).

Illustration for p. 146: Henry C. Gatz (Gatsby's father). A solemn old man, very helpless and dismayed, bundled up in a long cheap ulster (Ch 9).