HUMAN WRECKAGE
A Timely Story of a Book
Every book has a story. There’s a story to every book. Every author, every edition and every reader. Let’s consider City of Gold by British author Len Deighton.
Deighton died last spring, age 97. He was a prolific writer. His spy thrillers were infused with detective noir. His hardboiled protagonists were cynics because no operation ever went as planned and these grubby men, usually as anonymous as their jobs in the shadows, had neither public school nor regimental ties in their wardrobes. Despite similarly sparse prose styles, the Deighton hero is the antithesis of Ian Flemming’s 007 snobby cartoon character (albeit a delightful one). Deighton embraced London’s “Swinging Sixties” and even published illustrated cookbooks for sophisticated bachelors on the make. RAF veteran Deighton was also a respected military historian. Blood, Tears and Folly is the most insightful, almost breezy, overview of the Second World War I have ever read. Beyond the canned obituaries, Deighton’s death prompted The Guardian and The London Review of Books to print appreciative essays on elements of his oeuvre. Skipping his forays into French cookery, I’ve read everything he’s written, many titles twice. I’ve seen all the films based on his novels and others where his writing warranted a screen credit.
Ann and I are dedicated readers. We’re fortunate that we’ve an informal network of like-minded family and friends. Suggestions and books are exchanged. Bags. We’d live in a bedlam of books, tippy firetrap stacks if clutter didn’t agitate me so. We’re hoping to age in place. But we can’t forget about our survivors and the inevitable cleanup. Inventory control. And there could come a day when Ann and I decide to downsize further beyond the modest confines of the Crooked 9. Our lives could conceivably compress into a seniors’ residence cell. No space for a paper library – man, I can’t even bear to contemplate the volume of physical music in the house – so stock must be rotated through, not accumulated.
One charming aspect of our neighbourhood is the sprout of “little libraries.” Giant birdhouses on a pole up front in a yard. Ann and I enjoy walking around and stocking them with enough literature to smother Alex Patterson, V.C. Andrews, outdated text books and ersatz religious tracts. We donate boxes of books to charity shops which tend to lure fellow bibliophiles hunting for a cheap score in good condition. Places like that, we drop off, I don’t dare go in.
The sole contemporary novelist whose books are automatic purchases upon publication is Colson Whitehead. Everyone else I admire is dead. In the spirit of reduction I’ve taken to rereading works by my favourite authors. Fresh eyes following dusty decades and the uncomfortable knowledge that a particular volume will never be taken to bed a third or fourth time. Yet my reluctance to part with them is crippling. As I reread my father’s edition of John le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I’m aware I’m doing what he did. And Ann has read it since. That book’s not going anywhere over my dead body. I believe I’m prepared to part with other ones though. I think I can. I think I can.
City of Gold is late Deighton. The Cold War had defrosted and so he went backward. This novel is set in 1942, Cairo. The Abwehr has penetrated the British high command. General Rommel’s Afrika Korps is rolling toward Egypt as speedily as Germany’s blitzes through Poland or the Low Countries. (The Allies would eventually turn the tide of the Second World War in the Western Desert, but not until 1943.) I was all over this book when it was published. I bought the hardcover at Audreys Books on Jasper Avenue. I bought copies for my father and brother – full disclosure: those ones would’ve been scooped off a Chapters remainder table six or eight months later. Still …
I remember a long distance call with my father. I said I was reading Fleming’s James Bond novels on my morning and evening commutes. I assumed he wouldn’t be impressed; I felt like a kid again, as if I’d broken something in the living room. Dad said, “I’ve always got time for a good story.” City of Gold is a good story.
Friends dropped off a bag of books recently. One of those reusable bags you pay for and as indestructible as the cheap plastic bags they replaced. There were a couple of returns inside. Had they not come back it’s possible I wouldn’t have missed them. I think. A couple of other books were intended for Ann. Down the side of the stack against the gusset was an Arrow paperback of City of Gold. I thought, “This one’s little library bound. The hardcover’s on the shelf downstairs and, anyway, I read it recently.”
I took a moment to examine it anyway. The title was rendered in metallic ink, embossed. The image was a “golden hour” rendering of a jerboa, a “desert rat” and certainly not your average Norwegian brown. The hardcover jacket features the pyramids at Giza, a pair of palm trees and a military ambulance in a similar light, sunrise or sunset. The shock came as I flipped through the Arrow edition. My “recent” read was in fact 34 years in the past, 1992. Because my mind is as potty as my mouth, I thought, “Fuck.”
Three and a half decades of life and death, marriages and divorces, modest successes and epic failures, elation and the blues, jobs and postal codes, flux and stasis, and comedy and tragedy all in; a sudden immersive tsunami, a blurry quick-cut montage. And that’s just the half of it.
Latter day American noir author John D. MacDonald (unjustly neglected from my standpoint) once published a collection of his early pulp fiction called The Good Old Stuff. Its title is the nature of literature and music. When you reread an old book or listen to a classic album again, you can go back and you can stay as long as the page count or the two or four sides allow. I remember when I got this. I remember the first time I read it and why. I remember the first time I heard it with whom and where we were.
I placed City of Gold atop my night table stack. Ann and I have booked a short trip later this month. A compact book is a handy distraction when you’re hanging around a departure lounge and later mildly discomfited inside a cramped cabin crammed with other people and their baggage. Ann and I will be sitting beside each other. But once I open City of Gold again I might as well be on a different plane.
Dispatches from the Crooked 9 is your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything meaningless. No AI and little intelligence of any sort since 2013! Visit my companion site www.megeoff.com to buy my last couple of books. You can also listen to songs I’ve co-written with The Muster Point Project before scooting over to its YouTube channel.
