Hi folks, this post represents me putting a rough-and-ready finish on a job I left half-done a while back. You’re reading a long-delayed conclusion to my series Before the Fall: Notes on The Dawn of Everything. I have now finally finished Graeber & Wengrow’s fascinating book and can offer my thoughts on the back half of it.
I had far fewer problems with the book as a whole than I had with the first few chapters. Experts who have criticised this book have generally thrown in a few nice comments as well, and it’s easy to see why. The Dawn of Everything, as the name suggests, is sweeping. I feel a wide range of people will find things in it that they really like even if they can identify places where they think the evidence is thin or where the reasoning invites a ‘well… not necessarily.’
Via Wikimedia commons: ‘National Museum of Anthropology – Teotihuacán. Reconstruction of murals in a patio of the Palacio de Atetelco in Teotihuacán showing coyote warriors.’ Photograph by Wolfgang Sauber.
It’s often argued that inequality and power structures are necessary in any sufficiently large population; once you go past a few hundred people, the argument goes, you need governments, ruling classes and bureaucracies. Graeber & Wengrow disagree, and this is the strongest point in the back half of the book. It’s demonstrated most clearly in their survey of early cities around the world (such as Teotihuacán and Mohenjo-Daro) that had egalitarian features. Outside cities, it’s also obvious in the clan structures of indigenous North America, imagined communities as big as a city that linked disparate strangers across vast distances.
I agree with the authors on this point around scale and have for a long time, and it was satisfying to read their arguments and examples. I can exercise power through my membership in unions, campaign groups, political parties, and through my vote. The late David Graeber would scoff at how limited these powers are, but the point is that these are powers I exercise precisely as part of a large collective, not as an individual or in a small group (and better versions of my union and my democracy can be pointed to or imagined). People can be powerless in a small, intimate group – an abusive family, a house share under a controlling landlord, or a tyrannical workplace – and powerful in larger collectives of the kind I just mentioned. In fact larger workplaces tend to have more power than smaller ones. It’s a bit like blaming environmental devastation on ‘too many people’ – what really decides the question is how the people are organised, not how many there are.
Via Wikimedia Commons: Español: Palacio del Sol visto desde la Pirámide del Sol, Teotihuacan, México. Photograph by Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata.
Another idea that comes under fire is what I call tech-tree thinking. This assumption is there in the architecture of videogames but a lot of writers also assume that societies ‘develop’ or ‘achieve’ certain upgrades like agriculture or democracy, which provide a buff to their stats, while some other societies ‘fail’ to do so. Humans dabbled in agriculture without committing to a full-on farming life for many thousands of years. Some took on farming then gave it up when it didn’t work out for them. Some never bothered with it. And we find examples of democratic institutions throughout the archaeological, anthropological and historical record. These are not thresholds that peoples pass through or fail to pass through. They are things we can choose to do or not to do.
Here’s a point that never would have occurred to me, but that I found compelling: Graeber & Wengrow see (at least some) early cities as cradles of democracy, and trace the origin of aristocracy to the ‘heroic societies’ of nomadic pastoralists. In the picture they paint, democracies are developing in cities, aristocracies in the hills nearby. They trade with each other, but develop in mutual opposition. Later the aristocratic nomads conquer the cities, but for long periods after that royal power is circumscribed by powerful urban councils.
The most interesting story unfortunately also struck me as the most tenuous in terms of evidence. The authors paint a picture of a powerful kingdom developing along the Ohio river in North America, imposing the will of its rulers through mass bloodshed; of this society collapsing as the population migrated to freer places; of a cultural memory of this experiment in hierarchy and empire digging itself deep into the traditions and instincts of the North American Indians, even vast distances away; of this memory informing the development of an anti-authoritarian political tradition. It’s a great story because it shows indigenous political institutions as something other than ancient traditions; they were informed by a particular experience in the not-too-distant past. It’s compelling and could well be true, but the evidence related here doesn’t prove it. It’s an example of how your mileage may vary with some of the material in this book. Speaking of material, they sometimes advance explanations for things that I can only see as second- or third-order explanations. We hear that large scale adoption of certain crops depended on that particular crop arbitrarily being used for (that most convenient of phrases) ritual purposes.
Excavated ruins of Mohenjo-daro, with the Great Bath in the foreground and the granary mound in the background.’ Photograph by Saqib Qayyum.
I still see a lot of value in categorising different societies using the rubric of production, in seeing economics as something that sets broad but hard limits on what can happen in politics and culture. While I don’t think the authors share these ideas, they didn’t go out of their way to attack them either, though I expected them to. The promised ‘plague on both your houses’ did not descend; Hobbes came out a lot worse than Rousseau.
I’ve had this book for at least three years, I shit you not. I wanted to read it very carefully and take loads of notes, so what I was doing with my little series here, 14 or 15 months ago (Jesus Christ), was reading, note-taking and writing a blog post on each chapter. This project, modest as it was, ground to a halt after just five chapters out of twelve, and so did my reading of The Dawn of Everything. My interest in the book had somehow become an obstacle to my actually getting it read. I made zero progress for a long time, then bit the bullet, bought the audiobook, and got the rest all listened to in a couple of weeks. No note-taking and no twelve-part blog series, just this capstone on the job I left unfinished.
Second Foundation is the third volume of the original Foundation trilogy so before I get into it I’ll sum up what I wrote here on this blog about volumes 1 and 2, Foundationand Foundation and Empire.
I liked the deterministic mid-century materialism of Foundation. On the other hand, it could be smug and cynical and it was extremely of its time (imagine, someone probably died in combat on Iwo Jima knowing what the Seldon Plan was). It was quite dry, to-the-point, talky and minimalist.though it got more flashy and dramatic as it went on. Then at the midpoint of Foundation and Empire Asimov threw the old formula out the window. So long, mid-century determinist fable – don’t let the vast socio-economic forces hit you in the arse on the way out – it’s time for a fun swashbuckling adventure about a villain who can do mind control. This new formula boasted better characterisation and pacing, but overall I missed the tweedy old Foundation.
Second Foundation, like Foundation and Empire, contains two stories separated by a few decades. The first story concludes the story of the Mule, the psychic warlord introduced in the previous volume. He searches for and struggles with the Second Foundation. At last towards the end we get a glimpse of this mysterious institution.
Skirting around spoilers, we don’t see any more of the Mule in the next story. ‘Good,’ I said to myself. ‘We’re back on track. No more Space Yuri. We’re back to the Seldon Plan. Amoral characters as unwitting agents of vast historical forces. Empires hobbled by their own overextension. Kingdoms brought low by atomic hairdryers.’ But I ended up disappointed; this too was a story about psychic powers and mind control. We are focused on the Second Foundation in this story, and they just so happen to be a bunch of psychics like the Mule. Asimov labours to tie it in with the whole idea of psychohistory.
Dust jacket of 1953 edition
The Magneto in the High Castle
To get a sense of how I feel about this, imagine if half-way through The Man in the High Castle Philip K Dick had suddenly introduced Magneto from the X-Men. For the uninitiated, Magneto is, like the Mule, a mutant with special powers; he can control metal with his mind. So imagine if a good chunk of The Man in the High Castle is about Magneto picking up panzers and flinging them around squishing prominent Nazi leaders. Dick’s counterfactual 1960s Nazis are developing plastics, so I suppose they finally build a plastic tank and squish Magneto in turn. After Magneto is vanquished, there is one final episode in the story, concerning the Japanese Emperor, who it is revealed also has magnetic powers. Dick goes out of his way to explain this, somehow, with reference to the I Ching, in order to tie this absolute nonsense back into the original ideas of the story.
However fun this scenario would be, it would kind of distract from the fascinating questions that Dick uses his alternate history to ponder. To take another example, just for fun, imagine if half-way through The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu, when we are invested in wondering how humanity is going to hold off an alien invasion, the clouds part and Jesus descends, turns a lot of water into wine, and dies on a cross somewhere half-way through Death’s End.
This is kind of what happens with the original Foundation trilogy. Its second half is fun and not by any means devoid of the interesting ideas we find in the first half. The mysteries – where is the Second Foundation? Who are its secret agents? Who is its mysterious leader, the First Speaker? – are solid with good development and payoffs. But they are mechanical. They have more to do with the craft of storytelling than with the science of psychohistory.
And, I mean… no doubt Dick would have written Magneto pretty well too, and would have found some time to ponder the nature of reality itself in between the scene where Bormann gets squashed by a panzer and the scene where Goebbels gets boa constricted by a lamp-post. But it would still have been a wild and irrelevant departure from a promising story.
The spiral galaxy Messier 83. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Acknowledgement: William Blair (Johns Hopkins University)
Motivations
The second half of this volume presented some problems for me, even aside from all that. In this story a group of private citizens from the Foundation are hunting for the Second Foundation, because some people’s brainwaves have started to show up a little strange on the mind-reading machines, and it is suspected that the Second Foundation is interfering.
The motivations of this group of private citizens don’t make much sense. The Second Foundation saved them and it is part of the Seldon Plan, which is their secular religion. And then during the story, agents of the Second Foundation save their arses again and again. The two Foundations have no basis for conflict at all. In spite of all this, our Foundation characters remain determined to root out the Second Foundation and its agents with extreme prejudice. Not only does it seem perverse, it doesn’t seem urgent at all. There is no existential threat to the Foundation here. The story lacks urgency, unless it is our desire to see how the Second Foundation will stop these gobshites, but the author doesn’t really commit to that either.
It gets worse (and spoilers follow). When the Foundationers identify one Second Foundation agent in their own circle, they immediately torture and restrain him (p. 229, 1994 HarperCollins Voyager edition). When the Foundation crowd believe they have found fifty agents of the Second Foundation, they do not take long to decide on their narrow range of options:
‘What will we do with all of them… these Second Foundation fellas?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Darell, sadly. ‘We could exile them, I suppose. There’s Zoranel, for instance. They can be placed there and the planet saturated with Mind Static. The sexes can be separated or, better still, they can be sterilized – and in fifty years, the Second Foundation will be a thing of the past. Or perhaps a quiet death for al of them would be kinder.’ (p 232)
A subsequent scene confirms that one of these fates has indeed befallen the fifty agents. Though we are not told which one, it hardly makes a difference!
The early-1950s viewpoint of the author offers some sources of interest and amusement, and, occasionally for me, mild disgust. But I was struck in a nice way by this description of an automatic ticket machine as a futuristic wonder:
‘You put a high denomination bill into the clipper which sank out of sight. You pressed a button below your destination and a ticket came out with your ticket and the correct change as determined by an electronic scanning machine that never made a mistake. It is a very ordinary thing[…]’ (p 169-170)
We have that now, and the only abnormal thing there is using cash instead of card. My knee-jerk reaction is to think, ‘how quaint.’ But on reflection, what prescience.
Conclusion
So that’s how I felt about Second Foundation: enjoyed it, recommend it, but expected more and felt it could have been more.
My verdict on the whole Foundation trilogy (I haven’t read the prequels and sequels written forty years later, so for me it is still a trilogy): “The General” in Foundation and Empire and the first few dozen pages of “The Mule” in the same volume represent a kind of peak Foundation for me. It’s lost some of the excessive dryness of the first volume without yet taking on all the extraneous psychic stuff. After this point, it never stops being entertaining or having good ideas; to its credit, it never retcons; and in some ways the writing improves… But it loses touch with its basic theme. The author seems to have lost interest in the question of predicting and planning the future through mathematics and psychology.
No wonder it ends unfinished, only half-way through Seldon’s thousand-year interregnum. Maybe that’s for the best. The rise of the Foundation into a new Galaxy-wide empire would not have been half as interesting as its early struggles for survival. Let’s remember the assumptions the series is built on: that empires are good and interregna are bad. Later stories would have had to go back and deconstruct a lot of that, if they wanted to remain thoughtful and interesting.
Last year I wrote about Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation (1951), in which a small community struggles to preserve culture and technology on the fringe of a collapsing galaxy-wide empire. Hari Seldon, the man whose command of the science of psychohistory allowed him to predict the collapse, has laid out a plan for this community, the Foundation, to unite the Galaxy in ‘only’ a thousand years or so. Foundation is episodic, as every 50-100 years the Foundation is presented with a new existential threat and the question is ‘How will the immortal science of Marxism-Seldonism get them out of this one?’
The sequel Foundation and Empire consists of just two longer episodes, ‘The General’ and ‘The Mule.’ They’re both good and they’re both set in the same world, one after the other. But in tone, theme and style they are two completely different novels. With ‘The Mule,’ we can see Asimov completely throwing out the old formula and introducing a new one. His story about interstellar socio-economics becomes a boisterous space opera about psychics and mind control.
The first part of the book is peak ‘old-formula’ Foundation. I unambiguously love it. General Bel Riose, the most capable military leader in the decaying rump of the Empire, sets out to conquer the Foundation. His will, his ability and the forces at his disposal are all more than sufficient to the task. How can he possibly fail?
The main characters are two captives of Bel Riose: the old Imperial aristocrat Ducem Barr and a Foundation trader named Lathan Devers, who are trying to spoil the General’s design. Their mission centres on an apparent contradiction: they must pursue this task with urgency and initiative even as they maintain their faith in the inevitability of a Foundation victory through the Seldon Plan.
A part of my pleasure in this story came from the way our two main characters speak with very distinct voices. Here’s Lathan Devers on page 37 (2016 HarperCollins edition), faking indifference but with some measure of genuine conviction:
Listen […] what’s defeat? I’ve seen wars and I’ve seen defeats. What if the winner takes over? Who’s bothered? Me? Guys like me? […] Get this […] there are five or six fat slobs who usually run an average planet. They get the rabbit punch, but I’m not losing peace of mind over them. See. The people? The ordinary run of guys? Sure, some get killed, and the rest pay extra taxes for a while. But it settles itself out; it runs itself down. And then it’s the old situation again with a different five or six.
I’ve gone into Foundation’s influences on Star Wars before, but it’s so clear in this book, right down to the characters’ voices and attitudes. There are whole pages where we might as well be in the company of Obi-Wan Kenobi and Han Solo; Ducem Barr does a good line in traumatised reminiscences and holding forth about psychohistory the way old Ben does about the Force, and Lathan Devers would have you believe that he’s in it for the money, doesn’t give a damn about your struggle for freedom, and doesn’t have any time for far-fetched ancient belief systems.
Devers, however, is in it for the revolution. He tells the leaders of the Foundation that he wants to ‘spread the wealth a bit, and keep it from concentrating too much out of the hands that work for it.’ (78) And in the next episode we learn that ‘Devers died in the slave-mines […] because he lacked wisdom but didn’t lack heart.’ (89) This is part of a satisfying pattern where each episode by the way refers back to the characters in the previous one.
Compared with the earlier Foundation stories, this one has more detail, more drama, more interstellar travel, and more character. It even has some action. We get a few scenes with the Galactic Emperor himself. It’s still a very talky piece, as if Asimov wrote it with an eye to royalties from a radio play adaptation. But it’s a development.
The contradiction between individual initiative and historical inevitability is resolved very well. Without getting into spoilers, maybe the actions of our main characters were just part of a more general movement which could be predicted mathematically, or maybe they are there only to illustrate the broader trend. They didn’t solve the problem by their own actions – Ducem Barr remarks after the event that ‘through all this wild threshing up of tiny ripples, the Seldon tidal wave continued onward, quietly – but quite irresistibly.’ (76) But that doesn’t mean their actions didn’t matter.
First edition cover. From Wikipedia.org
The Mule
I grumbled about Foundation being very dry, talky and un-visual, and having almost zero women in it. The second half of Foundation and Empire blows all these complaints out of the water. The lead character, Bayta Darrell, is a strong and smart woman; there is more humour, travelogue, spectacle, more set-pieces. The narrator becomes sassy and sardonic.
At the same time it might be a case of “be careful what you wish for.”
There are things that would have been impossible in previous Foundation stories, not all of it good. Asimov moves from the version of sexism where you pretend there are no women in the entire Galaxy to the version of sexism where you describe women’s appearances more than you really need to, or have supposedly sympathetic men say patronizing shit to them. There is hack stuff, whimsical stuff, clichés: a silly clown who talks Shakespearian; a scene which is just making fun of the way women in a typing pool talk to each other; a psychedelic bit where a special musical instrument triggers hallucinations; an episode in which a villainous nobleman captures all the main characters because he wants to have sex with Bayta.
All in all, this story is written more like a traditional novel of its time. So on the one hand it’s better-crafted and easier to get into. On the other hand, it’s less distinctive. It becomes less about the things Foundation is about.
It starts very good, with all the strengths of the new formula on display. Asimov does a neat job of showing us how the Foundation has grown authoritarian and how its outside colonies of traders chafe under its rule and long for independence (as predicted by Hober Mallow and Lathan Devers). ‘Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.’ (89) Instead of giving us a page from the Encyclopedia Galactica explaining it all, the author conveys it through a sequence where a newlywed couple, one from the Foundation and one a trader, go on a family visit and end up being recruited by the Traders’ resistance movement.
So far, so good: we have a Foundation story but told in a more balanced and engaging way. It is setting us up for a story of class warfare and social revolution. Then all of a sudden it ceases to be a story about sociology or economics or politics and becomes a story about mind control. The Seldon plan is thrown into disarray by the appearance of a man who can hypnotize people. Haha! You didn’t consider that possibility, did you Hari Seldon? You dumbass.
Before I get into criticism of the Yuri’s Revenge turn, let’s just clarify that the story is good and fun and intelligent. The mysteries and twists are one step ahead of the reader. But it’s not a spoiler to say that for the rest of the trilogy the mind control never really takes a back seat. And I just didn’t get as much out of this series from here on out.
Suddenly it all gets a bit ‘Your command is my wish.’ Cover art for Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 Yuri’s Revenge (2001) featuring Udo Kier, a great German actor who passed away this year. Was the Mule a model for Yuri?
What’s my problem with the mind control? Science fiction stories are generally based on “what ifs.” In this case: what if we could predict (and subtly shape) the future development of society through psychology and mathematics? But half-way through the trilogy Asimov suddenly asks, ‘And what if, also, there was a magical guy who could permanently control the emotions of everyone he met?’ It complicates and obscures the original ‘what if’ question.
A defence of Asimov here would be to say that psychohistory deals only with masses of humans, so the mind control stuff is relevant because it’s something happening on the individual level that psychohistory can’t predict. This is stated explicitly a few times. But I just don’t buy it. There’s got to be a more subtle way of interrogating the role of the individual in history and the potential weaknesses of the Seldon Plan. Say, introduce a guy who’s really charismatic, or a small organisation that’s really disciplined. There’s a lot that can happen on a level lower than the actions of billions. Introducing magical mind control, no matter how much Asimov labours to explain it and tie it into psychohistory, doesn’t further explore the concept. It just takes the story somewhere else entirely.
The mysteries are no longer like “how will the Foundation exploit atomic gadgets to control their stronger neighbours?” and more like “Which of these characters is the big baddie in disguise?” and “Which of these planets is the secret base of the Second Foundation?”
I want to re-emphasize that this story is better on a craft level than what came before. My friends who read Foundation at the same time as me didn’t like it, because of the very shortcomings that are addressed in Foundation and Empire. But from my point of view Asimov threw out the baby with the bathwater here. My enjoyment of ‘The Mule’ was tinged with disappointment.
I’ve also read the third novel in the series, Second Foundation, and I will be sharing my thoughts some day soon. Stay tuned.
Bring the House Down has a killer set-up, a ‘WTF’ moment that grabs the reader. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival an earnest young woman, Hayley Sinclair, performs a solo spoken-word show about the climate crisis. Theatre critic Alex Lyons writes a gratuitously cruel one-star review within a few minutes of walking out of the show, sends it to his editor – then goes to a bar and meets the performer whose work he has just savaged. Alex and Hayley go back to his place, but he has meanwhile neglected to tell her that he attended her show, or that he has just humiliated her in a major national newspaper and probably crushed her dreams forever. Don’t worry, she finds out the next day when she looks at the morning paper in his flat. Her revenge is swift, merciless and very public.
After this explosive set-up the pace settles down but never slackens. What really makes this story is its narrator Sophie, Alex’s colleague, who is understated, cautious and quietly troubled in contrast to the outspoken and self-righteous confidence we see from other characters. She gives us a rounded view of Alex, which is not necessarily to say she makes him any more sympathetic. Nobody knows his bad sides better than she does by the end of the book, but she is disinclined to give him the kind of one-star review he freely dispenses. Her voice carries us through the novel with a tone of awkward discomfort mounting to a sense of personal crisis.
At one stage Sophie has to review a twelve-hour long historical drama (titled An Uncivil Peace) whose events she can’t follow and whose characters she can’t tell apart. But she gives it five stars and a gushing review (‘…blistering…’), because she feels that a lot of people put a lot of effort into it. Later, in a different mood, she attends a play about refugees staged and set inside a shipping container. The clever staging gimmick and the important topic fail to distract her from the clichéd dialogue, bad plot, and the offensive nature of a bunch of mostly white students portraying refugees. After scrupling and hesitating, she gives it a brutally honest review and a single solitary star. Soon after, she passes a poster advertising An Uncivil Peace which proudly boasts her five-star rating. She hurries past it, cringing.
The ratings she gave these two texts were pretty much arbitrary, related more to what was going on in her head at the time than to experience or quality. The one-star review was at least honest.
From Wikipedia Commons, a scene from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2009 or 2010
I was interested in how this novel explored criticism. I review stuff here on this blog, but you’ll notice I don’t give out ratings. If people want to know if they should watch some movie or read some book, I say: read what I’ve written about it; get a sense of what it’s like; get a sense from my words of what I, the critic, am like. You should be able to triangulate from that if a book is worth your time and money.
For example, how about this book? It doesn’t have orcs, spaceships or Bolsheviks in it, and yet I read it cover-to-cover and have nothing bad and plenty good to say about it. If you’ve been in Edinburgh during the Fringe, which I have, it probably helps. If you’re interested in art, journalism and the creative process, and like the narrator you are thirty-four and a parent of small kids, that will help too.
This book explores what is problematically called “cancel culture” and lets us make up our own minds about the characters. Victims who call out shitty behaviour are usually portrayed in the media as a mindless puritanical mob but this novel is generous and understanding, while allowing us to decide for ourselves how much of the reaction is going too far or missing the point.
Of course we need criticism that’s useful and not just PR; people have taken time off work and spent money to go to the Fringe, and they need to know if a performance is worth their while. But Bring the House Down makes you think about how critics who are in steady jobs are at a massive advantage in relation to artists, almost none of whom are making any money. The critic is in a reserved, defensive posture and the artist is making themselves vulnerable. No, that’s not fair.
Notice as well how our narrator Sophie becomes Alex’s only confidante. When he’s ostracized as a result of his fucking over women, he selects the nearest woman to be his emotional support. It seems perfectly natural to both of them.
See? I wrote some sentences and paragraphs that took you a few minutes to read. Wasn’t that more useful than the fake objectivity of a star rating?
And should you accept my judgement? Who am I? I wrote thousands of words about how much I love Tiberian Sun. I wrote a good review of Rebel Moon and I stand over it. I’m not pretending to be the fount of universal good taste and wisdom. I’m just telling you what I thought and how I felt. My liking something might be a sign that you won’t like it – but that’s also useful for you.
I would say to critics, if you have to rate texts, get granular and let us see under the hood – the way blogger vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com does. He breaks it down into categories like adrenaline, likeability and emotion, and explains every step of the assessment process, finally sorting his reviews into a hierarchy that ranges from ‘Brilliant’ through ‘Outstanding,’ ‘Good,’ ‘Not Bad,’ ‘Bad, but with redeeming features’ and ‘Just plain bad,’ to ‘Eye-gougingly, excrecently terrible.’
Even this kind of rating is not for me. In my opinion, the Vacuous Wastrel got jaded and overly-critical a little way into his Terry Pratchett read-through (although I love Pratchett, I would certainly get jaded if I was reading a heap of his books back-to-back). But it’s a lot better than giving us five points on a scale and leaving it at that. His judgements are transparent and useful and generally fair.
Maybe a certain text just isn’t for you, and your one- or two-star review will stop someone who it is for from experiencing it. Maybe you were having a bad day and weren’t receptive. Maybe you were twenty-five and loved it, but would have hated it an thirty-four, or vice versa. Maybe you’ll feel one way in the hour after seeing it, and another way a month later.
The other thing about my criticism is that I write when I have something to say, not necessarily when I love or hate something. I loved season 2 of Andor and took notes on it. But I never used those notes. That’s not a negative judgement on the best TV show I’ve seen in years.
These have been some of the meditations that Bring the HouseDown inspired and provoked in me. In light of them, you will easily understand why I don’t assign a star rating.
Introducing a wailing Youtube therapist, my AI girlfriend and the serious social problem of bus theft.
People have been talking about this for a while but 2025 has been the first year that it really sank in for me: computers and the internet are getting worse, and you…
Hang on. What’s this now? I can’t see the words I’m typing. There’s a big charcoal-coloured box blocking my word processor.
I know I’m offline. I don’t want to see ‘my feed’, I want to see the words I’m writing.
It won’t go away. Does it go away when I click? No. Do I just have to wait?
I’ve figured out that mashing my keyboard keys makes it go away. But the point is, I don’t want to see ‘my feed’ when I’m trying to write. It’s very distra…
UFO CRASH-LANDS IN POLISH FIELD
KATE MIDDLETON’S HAIR IS A DIFFERENT COLOUR
BRUCE WILLIS HAS DEMENTIA
I’M 42 AND ONLY ATTRACTED TO MARRIED MEN
7 SIGNS THAT SOMEBODY LIKES YOU ACCORDING TO PSYCHOLOGIST
FLIGHT ATTENDANT WARNS PASSENGERS: THIS IS THE SEAT YOU SHOULD NEVER SIT IN
10 ACTORS WHO HAVE AGED TERRIBLY
6 THINGS YOU HAVE TO KNOW BEFORE YOU BUY SOLAR PANELS IN IRELAND
THESE 5 FOODS WILL KILL YOU INSTANTLY
Oh look, I’m online now. And ‘my feed’ has popped up again. Ugh. It’s a load of clickbait… Wait. Bruce Willis? No, poor guy…
Shit. What was I going to write again?
I guess I was going to talk about how the internet is shit, how we are descending further every day into the Interslop. And I was going to illustrate it with some screenshots.
Like this one. More AI slop from ‘history’ pages. Yes, that man has horns. And the text whitewashes what was probably mass sexual slavery. And AI layers this earth-toned grit all over everything that just makes it all the more creepy and uncanny.
But it’s not just AI. And not everything has gritty dirt tones. Now when I want to open a PDF document on my phone, I have to sit through a video ad that usually looks something like this:
Jesus. Hasn’t the internet gotten really tacky? Just vulgar. And when it’s not tacky, it’s weird.
For example: If I’m listening to something on Youtube these days, I get sudden interruptions from a man’s voice wailing at me. And before I show you the screenshots I want you to read the words he wails. Please keep in mind that these words below are sung as if they are song lyrics, in a way that’s anguished, high-pitched, melodramatic and breathless:
…procrastination is a trauma response, not laziness… warning signs of dopamine-chasing behaviour in men… how hypersexuality and procrastination are interconnected…
So many questions. First, is this really happening, or am I hallucinating? Well, I took some screenshots so I know it’s real. Next question: why is this apparition saying this to me? Why does the algorithm think I want this? Who thought it would be good to put these words to music? I don’t leave it play til the end because it’s too unsettling, so I don’t even know what it’s an ad for. But it appears to be for some mental health or counselling app. Let that sink in: this is supposed to be good for mental health!
While we’re on the subject of ‘why did Youtube think I wanted to see this’ – introducing my new AI girlfriend:
Well. She seems nice.
Youtube also thinks I want to see an ad for a new AI programme that can create songs.
If it’s ‘very scary’, why is she smiling? Even the most pro-AI people appear not to be sure how they are supposed to feel about it.
In other internet news, Facebook now has ad breaks, which I like because it encourages me not to be on Facebook. It’s a little speed-bump on the mindless scrolling. But like everything, Facebook also now has prompts to use AI at every turn.
So you don’t have to write Facebook comments anymore. You can just sit back and let the bot answer on your behalf. But, well, there never was any obligation to write Facebook comments. If you don’t like doing it, you could just not do it. So who is this for?
But bless you, chatbot. You’re here to reassure me if I get frightened about bus theft:
‘Is bus robbery common?’!! It’s good that on top of reading my friends’ funny posts, I get to read AI’s unintentionally funny attempts to assert its relevance.
And if we didn’t have AI, we wouldn’t be able to create awesome, educational, valuable stuff like this:
If you asked me, ‘Who are the Irish?’ the simplest and most straightforward answer would indeed be: ‘Niall of the Nine Hostages, Brian Boru, Bring Boru, Saint Patrick, Newfoundland, Buenos Aires, Newfoundland.’ Well done, chatbot You’ve named two Irish people, one typo, one Welsh person, and some place names in the Americas.
Is ‘Bring Boru’ distinct from ‘Brian Boru?’ He would seem to be, because they have different stone busts. FYI, in case you thought these were real stone busts done by 11th-century Irish masons, no, no they are not, they were just made up by the chatbot.
This preoccupation with nationalities and haplogroups points to another feature that is emerging as the Internet descends into the Interslop. Like so much of the internet in general and AI slop in particular (for example, the creepy horned Aryan Icelandic family), there’s a just-about deniable racialist edge to it.
Being on the Interslop is a strange experience that’s hard to put into words. The closest I can manage is this: it’s like looking at the ads page of an old-time newspaper full of quack remedies and crackpot inventions, but with bizarre, apparently meaningless letters and numbers scrawled on the paper, as if in cipher, filling every margin. While you are reading, the village idiots of a dozen villages you will never visit are yelling in your ear. Meanwhile you are experiencing intervals of auditory and visual hallucinations. But you can screenshot and preserve these hallucinations and pore over them.
You might say it serves us right for putting 40-60% of all social interaction on platforms run for profit by the weirdest and most hubristic North Americans. But we didn’t really get to make a rational choice about it. There was no big vote in 2009-2010; everyone who was twenty just went on Facebook because that’s where everybody else was, and stayed there so they could keep up with their friends who moved to Australia. Youtube was good because it was where all the videos were. If social media had been basically a schizophrenia simulator at the beginning, I doubt it would have taken off. But now that the ascendancy of the big platforms has choked all the competition, they can show their true face, and get as messy and nakedly profit-driven as they want. I’m still going to share this on Facebook. What else am I going to do?
Of course, I know the real reason why the therapy ads were wailing in my ear about procrastination and hypersexuality. It’s not that anyone thought it would be a good idea. Nobody had to think it was a good idea. The people paying to run these ads are rewarded for quantity, not quality. And quantity is no longer an obstacle. In the time it took me to write this post, I could have pumped out many Gigabytes of eerie slop with minimal effort, and I would have got a hundred times more engagement. So why do I bother writing? Well. We were pretty innocent fifteen years ago. If we thought maybe privately-owned, profit-driven tech and social media monopolies might be a bad thing, we couldn’t yet put into words why. But we have no excuse now. Now we know what the online world starts looking like when you base everything on the pursuit of ‘engagement’ for its own sake.
I’m folding my promised conclusion on Dr Zhivago into this broader post on history in movies, dealing with it along with Kingdom of Heaven, Platoon and A Complete Unknown.
There was a game called Commandos 2 (Pyro Studios, 2001), a stealth adventure set in the Second World War. The game’s own manual contained a long bullet-point list of its own inaccuracies, ranging from ‘the bridge on the River Kwai was made of metal, and it was never blown up’ to ‘there are no penguins at the North Pole.’ It has stuck in my mind because I’ve never seen anything like it since, not in movies or games or TV shows, though now and then the afterword of a novel will include one or two confessions. But what an excellent idea: for a text to own its inaccuracies, to be deliberate about them, to signal, “What you are about to experience is part fantasy.” It takes a lot of confidence and maturity for the authors to risk undermining their own authority like this.
I wonder why this isn’t standard practise, why no government has obliged producers of historical movies to release an ‘accuracy statement’ for me to pore over. Maybe the answer is that a lot of history is open to debate, so these statements would open a can of worms. In a recent series I asked of the 1965 epic movie Dr Zhivago, ‘is it accurate?’ I couldn’t answer that question without getting into my own opinions and understanding of the era.
It’s not as simple as asking ‘Did what happens in X movie actually happen?’ The answer is going to be ‘mostly, no.’ But here are some questions to which we can give more interesting answers: ‘What is this movie saying about history?’ ‘How well is it getting this message across?’ and ‘Is that message accurate and fair?’
From Dr Zhivago (1965, dir David Lean)
Dr Zhivago
Let’s ask these questions of Dr Zhivago.
Parts of it are very good – individual monologues, scenes and images convey significant historical events in a dramatic, emotional, visual way. For example, I like how the Moscow street changes over the course of the movie. I mentioned Yevgraf’s monologue. It’s good that we have armoured trains, even though they are in the wrong place and time. This film gives us a strong sense of place, especially in the haunting train journey sequence. It is lavish in supplying the sets, crowds and explosions that give a sense of mass participation in events, of sharp conflict. Its slow pace and the care it takes to root us in its spaces are refreshing in the context of a lot of today’s cinema, with its short scenes and rapid cuts (see Oppenheimer, which I’ll mention later too).
I think that historical movies have their value even when they are inaccurate. They furnish the public with reference points (oh yeah, Roosevelt, the president from Pearl Harbor), and even when these reference points are good only as punch bags for criticism (Gladiator makes a mess of Roman-era battles, but here’s what they really looked like) they are performing some service in that at least. If scholars of history don’t criticize these movies, especially movies we like, we are missing an opportunity to teach. So even as I criticize Doctor Zhivago I cut it plenty of slack. Compared to a lot of other movies that bill themselves as historical, it’s solid enough.
The screenwriter, Robert Bolt, was a former communist who maintained links with the British communist party until 1968. I think this helps explain a lot about the movie: the way it humanises the revolutionaries, the care and feeling in the writing. Maybe this script represents Bolt, through the avatar of Yuri, getting over (or at least coming to new terms with) his love affair with October (Ten years later he wrote a two-act play about Lenin which I am curious to read).
The film appears to advance a thesis about the Russian Revolution: that while it was a natural response to Tsarist tyranny and war, it was itself tyrannical and violent – worse, that the Revolution represented the antithesis to individuality. I don’t agree with this view (you can find a lot of my own views here) but I assume you didn’t ask; the interesting question is whether the movie adds up to a good argument for this view.
Partisans in the forest, from Dr Zhivago
The Squid Game Baby Civil War
I don’t think it does. The movie’s message impressed me more when I knew less about the real history. I’ve already noted how many times Yuri is confronted by a mean Bolshevik or Bolshevik-adjacent person who is contemptuous of his poetry. In these conversations (first with Kuril, then Yevgraf, then Antipov, Razin and finally Komarovsky) the movie’s case is stated explicitly: that Yuri himself, his private life and his creative output are not compatible with the revolution. The movie is here overplaying its hand because Yuri is actually an understated, inoffensive, decent person, not a wild man or a troublemaker. So what people say about him does not accord with what we see. The theme has to be stated so bluntly in dialogue, again and again, because we don’t see it organically.
The movie presents the Revolution and its supporters generally in a negative light. To do so it too often it relies on exaggerations or inventions, or a collapsing of the timeline that goes beyond reasonable limits. This is a common failing in historical movies: the writer (who is working to industry deadlines and specifications) puts in what they assume was there and what the producers and audience expect to be there. So within weeks of the October Revolution we see a poet exiled for ‘individualism.’ A few weeks later we have villages burned by an army which wasn’t there as a punishment for aiding another army which also wasn’t there.
As regards the Civil War, we get some striking images but little sense of the whole to which they belong. The war enters and exits the stage according to the needs of the narrative, not according to its own logic. This reminds me of something more recent: in the third season of Squid Game we have a miraculous baby who never cries or needs to be fed, or even opens its eyes; its function is to be cute and vulnerable, to add tension to the bloody contest. The Civil War as presented by Dr Zhivago is like the baby in Squid Game. The war adds tension, and we are periodically reminded that it’s there (even before it’s there) but when it isn’t immediately needed, it is docile.
The movie as a historic event
A movie is a big undertaking and, more so than a book, its production and reception constitute historical events in themselves, and you have to be clear on whether you’re talking about the movie as a movie or the movie as an event. Let’s illustrate what I mean by straying over that line in relation to Dr Zhivago. Here I’m far more critical.
What was courage on the part of Boris Pasternak – writing a novel about Russia’s revolutionary years that dissented from the enshrined narrative – is on the part of western filmmakers not courage but complacency, because they are promoting a narrative that’s not at all controversial in their own part of the world. Pasternak doesn’t need to remind his Soviet readers that the Whites were powerful and reactionary, that the Reds brought about popular reforms, or that intervention happened; Soviet readers have heard all that a hundred times before. But Dr Zhivago’s cinema audience in the west is unaware of these parts of the context. And the movie goes further: it treats the revolutionaries with far less sympathy than the novel and makes key changes, such as Yuri being exiled from Moscow and Lara being anti- instead of pro-Bolshevik.
The Russian Civil War, like Dr Zhivago, was an international affair. This film was a US-Italian co-production with an English director and writer, filmed in Spain, Finland and Canada. Why is that important? Because the United States, Italy, Britain and Canada all intervened in the Russian Civil War, all kept it going long after it should have settled down; because the White Finns committed a terrible slaughter against the Red Finns in 1918; and because Franco, a fascist dictator who killed several hundred thousand people with the explicit purpose of preventing an October Revolution in Spain, was still in power when this movie was made there. The apparent complacency of the western filmmakers is really something worse: they are throwing stones in glasshouses.
I don’t think you have to be from a group (say, the Russian people) to write about that group. But if you put yourself in this position, you do have a lot more work to do to get it right. This movie wasn’t made with such an understanding. Few movies were in 1965.
You could argue that Bolt as a former communist is in some way a member of the tribe he depicts. He has, I guess, some kind of vulnerability here. It does come across in the writing and to some degree mitigates the complacency, the obliviousness, that I’m complaining about.
Kingdom of Heaven
Scholars of history still only know about a few topics. For example, I thought Oppenheimer (2024) was very good but I wouldn’t be much help to someone who wanted to know if it was accurate.
Kingdom of Heaven (2005, dir Ridley Scott) is a good historical movie, as far as I can tell (I can’t remember what’s in the Director’s Cut and what isn’t). In the broad brush-strokes of the story it tells, it corresponds to the books I’ve read on the Crusades and some scenes follow the primary accounts very closely, such as the scene where Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) offers a refreshing drink before personally executing Reynald de Chatillon (Brendan Gleeson). Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom) is changed from an older, well-established power-broker in the Crusader States to a newly-arrived and penitent young knight who has an affair with the king’s sister. This change is so obvious, and at the same time historically inessential, that there is no concealment going on there, no sense of dishonesty.
There is a good example of where it simplifies history within reasonable limits: when Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187 he enslaved that part of the population which was not ransomed in a complex process; Kingdom of Heaven does not get into the weeds but presents the essential point, that Saladin spared the population from a massacre and most of them walked away with their freedom and all with their lives.
But there are individual lines that are pretty ridiculous. David Thewlis’ character says, ‘I don’t place much stock in religion.’ Dude, you’re a Knight Hospitaller in the 12th Century. You’re half-monk, half-knight and the only reason you live in this part of the world is because the Bible happened there. All your stock is in religion. Also, he’s not a merchant so I feel ‘stock’ is an ill-fitting metaphor.
Let’s consider the theme and this movie as an event. Kingdom of Heaven, considered as a statement on the War on Terror, is interesting. Robert Fisk reported on a screening in Lebanon where the crowd performed a spontaneous standing ovation following a scene where Saladin reverently places upright a crucifix which fell over during the siege of Jerusalem. I don’t know if this Lebanese audience was mostly Muslim or mostly Christian, but either way the reception is moving.
I read the film as liberal imperialist (we can all get along within the status quo), and personally I’m anti-imperialist (we can’t get along so long as the colonisers remain in charge of this land). But the film makes its case well. It presents two political tendencies within the Crusader States that really did exist. The faction around Balian had a more diplomatic and pluralist vision for the future of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, as opposed to Reynald and Guy who were aggressive and chauvinist. The parallel it suggests with the liberal and conservative wings of the pro-war coalition in the US in the 2000s is reasonable. There’s a lot of invention here, but in a medieval setting where we have scant records this is necessary. Screenwriter William Monaghan did a good job.
Charlie Sheen as Taylor in Platoon (1986, dir. Oliver Stone)
Platoon (1986) is an interesting one. I’ve read a few memoirs of US soldiers in Vietnam (If I diein a combat zone by Tim O’Brien and Chickenhawk by Robert Mason) and this movie is really true to those firsthand accounts. Director Oliver Stone was, of course, basing the story on his own experiences. It’s a highly authentic reflection of the experiences of US soldiers in the Vietnam War.
That’s the problem, too. How fair a reflection of the real history is it if we get a lot of movies from the US side and almost none showing the Vietnamese side? Millions of Vietnamese died compared to 58,000 US personnel; the Vietnamese still have landmines and the effects of Agent Orange. There’s just no comparison. The Vietnamese are not really humanised in most of these movies either.
Credit here to Oliver Stone, who gave a Vietnamese perspective in other movies he made. Further, he had a valuable story to tell in Platoon, and someone else couldn’t have told it and he couldn’t have told some other story in the same way. He does put Vietnamese people front and centre in the terrifying scene in the village, where we come within a hair’s breadth of something like the My Lai massacre.
But the issue stands. There are a lot of great movies about the Vietnam War but this is a hard limit to how great they can be as historical movies given this major problem.
A Complete Unknown
I have some thoughts on the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (2024, dir. James Mangold) that are relevant here.
This is another topic I’ve read about, and in my judgement A Complete Unknown is a very fine example of how to condense the messiness of recorded history (or in this case biography) into a dramatic and entertaining story. Dylan (Timothé Chalamet) gets a ‘composite girlfriend,’ Sylvie (Elle Fanning), who is mostly Suze Rotolo but also not; like with Balian, the movie is changing something without trying to fool us. The theme is well-grounded in real history and it lands powerfully. Dylan, like most of his generation, entered into the struggle for a better world but ultimately walked away. Those who tried to badger him into staying there against his will come across badly, but it’s left open for the viewer to make up their own mind what they think about Dylan.
I was mildly disappointed that we didn’t get to see Phil Ochs (except indirectly, when Joan Baez sings a cover of his song ‘There but for Fortune.’) We see a lot of Pete Seeger and a good bit of Johnny Cash and a couple of glimpses of Dave Van Ronk. If you ask me, Phil Ochs has far more business being in this movie than Johnny Cash does. He would be a powerful foil to Dylan, but I suppose that function in the story is carried out more than adequately by Joan Baez and Pete Seeger.
So Phil Ochs should be there, but the movie is busy enough as it is. The movie has simplified things within reasonable margins. *Huffs* I guess.
The above points suggest a few rules for historical movies, some positive, some negative:
If you find a good dramatic scene in the primary sources, absolutely use it (Saladin killing Reynald, Bob Dylan visiting Woody Guthrie).
If you want to change things, be obvious about it (Orlando Bloom, Suze Rotolo).
Simplify events within reasonable limits (Jerusalem 1187).
Ask if the world needs to hear this story (again) or if there’s a more valuable angle you can take.
You can tell other people’s stories, but only if you do the homework.
You probably shouldn’t make a moral judgement on a nationality which had basically no input in the production – but if you must, then find a way to make yourself and your audience vulnerable.
You can do parallels with today, if they actually fit and you do the work to show how they fit.
Your movie benefits from using a historical setting, but you have to pay the overheads. For example, if you want to have knights in your movie, don’t let any of them say ‘I don’t place much stock in religion.’
If you have to exaggerate and invent to make the theme land, you’d want to ask yourself if the theme is valid.
This is the third part of my notes on a re-watch of David Lean’s Dr Zhivago, a 1965 historical epic about the Russian Revolution. I’m going through it with an eye to historical accuracy.
The first two parts have been mixed – sometimes the crew really seem to have done their homework but we’ve also seen some things changed for the sake of simplicity (fair enough), some big things changed in order to reinforce the movie’s theme (Not so fair enough), and some things changed for no apparent reason at all.
Now it’s time to get to the part that most interests me, the film’s presentation of the Civil War. Unfortunately, it’s messier than anything we’ve seen so far.
The burned village
Yuri and his family are on a train passing through the Ural Mountains when they see a burned-out village and, on rescuing a woman from the ruins, learn that the Red commander Strelnikov ordered the burning to punish the villagers, who were falsely accused of selling horses to the White Armies. There are several ways that this is implausible.
First, this is winter 1917-18 in the northern Urals. Until the Czechoslovak Revolt of May 1918 this was a peaceful region. There are no Whites here to buy horses. Maybe this could be happening at this time in the Don Country or Turkestan, ie thousands of kilometres away. But not here. Even in the Don Country, or one of the other places where strings of battles flared up and died down at this time, we would be unlikely to see the burning of a village.
The Reds did worse things than this during the Civil War. But at this point in the movie we are only a few months out from October. The war has not begun yet, the cycles of violence have not had a few goes-around yet. And when we do see Red reprisals against a village, these would be targeted against the wealthier inhabitants.
What kind of atrocity would be plausible? A little later, food detachments descended on villages to confiscate surplus grain, and this naturally led to conflict. A scene serving the same purpose but involving some excess by a food detachment would make sense here, and the chronological fudge would be forgivable.
Strelnikov, armoured trains, Red Army
Armoured train interior. Note the machine-gun pointing out a loophole right beside Strelnikov’s desk. Neat detail.
Yuri goes for a walk while the train is stopped, and stumbles on an armoured train commanded by Strelnikov (a nom de guerre that means something like ‘shooter’). His real name is Antipov and he is Lara’s estranged husband. This is another of those scenes that gives the impression that revolutionaries were grievously offended whenever a man wrote poetry.
One of my readers, a socialist like myself, sent me this message regarding Antipov/ Strelnikov:
‘Hey interesting take on Dr Zhivago. I always assumed that Antipov was based on a crude portrayal of Trotsky ie not in bolsheviks or mensheviks, total fanatic and bordering on a latter day incel (‘the personal life in Russia is dead’ because of revolution, actually Trotsky wrote on how the revolution awakened the Russian personality [after] years of oppression) and then there’s his role in civil war later in the film.’
I replied:
‘Yes, the armoured train etc. maybe the filmmakers were going for Trotsky […] I see him more as one of these very romantic left SR types [members of the Left Socialist Revolutionary party, the Bolsheviks’ early coalition partners] who zigzags between sentimentality and ultra leftism […] He seems to me a lot like an early Red Army commander named Muraviev although important differences too.’
The first three de facto commanders of the Red Army (the above-mentioned Muraviev, then Vacietis and Kamenev) were non-Bolsheviks. Cooperation with the other parties and non-party individuals was the rule in these early days, especially with Left SRs and anarchists. That Antipov is resurfacing as a Red commander at this point makes a lot of sense.
Meanwhile his behaviour make sense for his character: his insistence on his ‘manhood’ and his apparent revolutionary ardour are a defence against the deep pain and vulnerability in him. If his private life really is dead, it haunts him. His fanaticism and cruelty would be a better fit for later in the war, but atrocities occurred this early (though not anywhere near here), often at the hands of non-party Red leaders like Antipov.
Two Red Army soldiers with pointed bogatyrka hats. All stills are from Doctor Zhivago (1965) dir. David Lean
The rest of it does not make sense. On the one hand I’m definitely glad that in the one movie about the Russian Civil War there is an impressive armoured train, staffed by Red Army soldiers in the pointy bogatyrka hats. It would be a shame if that never made it into the vivid colours of mid-century film (likewise with all the cavalry we see later, these are features of the Civil War).
But when we see the armoured train, it’s way too early! It’s the first fine spring day of 1918. It was snowing a few days ago. There are no armoured trains yet. Trotsky’s train first rode out in August 1918 and it was still just a train, no armour yet. Early armoured trains were makeshift; for example one in Turkestan was armoured with compressed bales of cotton.
What about the uniform worn by the Red Army soldiers? It had not yet even been designed. It was formally adopted around January 1919 and it was nearly a year later before most Red soldiers were wearing it. What’s more, the Red Army itself basically didn’t exist yet. It was a couple of months old, still very small, and entirely concentrated in the west, facing the threat of a renewed war with Germany. The Red Army wasn’t in the Urals at all, anticipating no military threat there (they turned out to be very wrong!).
This isn’t just a pedantic point of chronology. The movie is missing out on the most interesting and important fact: the Red Army just didn’t have its shit together at this stage.
What you would have in this region at this time would be Red Guards. They would be enthusiastic local civilians, say, part of the workforce of a local factory or mine, or a few hundred poor peasants. If the Whites reared their head, local people would flood into the Red Guards to meet the threat. They would do silly things, like abandon the frontline to go home for a hot meal and a change of clothes. But they would not burn a local village because their own houses would be in the village.
Yuriatin
We learn that the town of Yuriatin has changed hands: ‘first the Reds, then the Whites. Now the Reds again.’ Like the pointy hats and armoured trains, this would be plausible a year later but not now. No town in the Urals fell to the Whites before the Czechoslovak Revolt of May 1918.
We also learn that there are ‘the Reds in the forest. The partisans’. That’s another example of the movie’s bad habit of mentioning things way too early just because they are going to feature later (White Guards, Bolsheviks and now Partisans). A partisan movement developed across Siberia and the Urals later, after the Whites seized control. This movement really got going after Admiral Kolchak took over all the other White factions in his coup of November 1918 and began to persecute even the moderate socialists who had supported the Whites up to this point.
So that is how the Red partisan movement got started. They have no business mooching around in the woods in early Spring 1918. Who are they partisaning against? It’s like if a movie showed us the French Resistance taking refuge in the woods months before the German invasion of France.
The boarded-up mansion
Yuri’s adopted family have a mansion out here, which the local revolutionary committee has boarded up and declared property of the people. Landlords’ houses were indeed boarded up, to stop criminals from looting the books and fine furnishings and artworks inside (A few examples are given in Eduard Dune’s memoir, Notes of a Red Guard, in the chapter titled ‘Rob the Robbers’). Later the big house might be turned into an artist’s retreat or an orphanage.
Here we get the movie’s only hints at the land revolution. The Varykino estate – the land, tools, livestock and buildings – would have been divided up between local farmers back in autumn. We get a glimpse of this when a local man addresses Yuri’s adopted father as ‘your honour.’ His very likeable response is: ‘Now, now, now. That’s all done with, you know.’
But he is not so easygoing when he sees the house boarded up. Yuri has to warn his adopted father not to tear down the boards. That would be counter-revolution, and ‘they shoot counter-revolutionaries.’ Again, a year later this would be a reasonable. At this point it’s not true and nor would he think it’s true.
Likewise, later we have several claims that deserters from the Red Army are shot. If that were true, the Reds would have run out of bullets and lost the war. They had literally millions of deserters, and the penalty was to lose pension rights on a second offense. Armed mutiny or suspected treason were treated with great harshness but desertion was treated leniently.
The Last Tsar
We can be absolutely sure that it’s still 1918 because that summer, when Yuri and his family are settled nicely in the cottage, bad news comes.
‘Not another purge?’ demands Yuri’s adopted father. This is a very strange thing to say. The first ‘purge’ of the Communist Party took place several years later and consisted of expulsions, not arrests or executions. The script is giving the impression that the Bolsheviks, by summer 1918, have already been through multiple rounds of bloody 1937-style inquisitions.
But no, the bad news is not ‘another’ purge. It’s that Soviet authorities in Yekaterinburg have killed the Tsar and his family. This places us in July 1918.
What doesn’t come across in the scenes of idyllic rural life that frame this news is that over the last three months, in the cut between this sequence and the last, the Russian Civil War has begun and escalated wildly, and the Urals are ground zero. Those Red Guards drawn from the local mine or factory would have been swept aside by professional soldiers – detachments of the Czechoslovak Legion, bands of officers and Cossacks. Those who could not escape westward to friendly territory would become partisans or be killed. The revolutionary committee down in Yuriatin who boarded up the estate are likely most of them dead. You would expect the Whites, on taking Yuriatin in June or July, to have come up to the estate of Varykino and restored to its previous owners full possession of the mansion and its lands. At the very least Yuri’s family should have some soldiers billeted on them; they are at the front line, on a piece of ground that will change hands four or five times between now and mid-1919 when Yuri is abducted by the partisans.
Idyllic scenes at Varykino
So we don’t see war when we should, and we do see it when we shouldn’t.
Incidentally, we also hear that Strelnikov has gone to Manchuria. I don’t know why would have gone there, but if he has, he’s a dead man. It’s wall-to-wall White émigrés and Allied agents in Manchuria, and the most violent and depraved White warlords control the territory between here and there.
Where are all the counter-revolutionaries?
Yuri is forced to serve as a doctor in a partisan unit for, by my reckoning, a year and a half, from summer 1919 to the winter of 1920-21. The timeline starts to make some sense. We see a charge across ice in late 1919; I’m not sure of the tactics on display here but really anything goes, because nobody really knew what they were doing in the Russian Civil War. Anyway, this might be the crossing of the Irtysh river in November. After forcing the river the Reds took Omsk, capital of the ‘Supreme Ruler’ Admiral Kolchak. After that comes the Ice March, a long period of pursuit and mopping up. Then comes a long war against Ataman Semyonov and other warlords of the Far East, which drags on into 1922 (when the Reds take Vladivostok) and even 1923 (when the last White army is defeated). The various things we see in this sequence with the partisans could well be taking place during these lengthy, confused and far-flung campaigns.
Rapid changes of season in these scenes indicate the passage of time from mid 1919 to the winter of 1920-21 in 20 minutes of screen time (although later lines of dialogue indicate that we are still in mid-1920)
A major problem with this movie is that we don’t properly see a single White Guard in all its three hours. People opposed to the Revolution are phantoms off-screen. In this sequence, White Guards are rifle flashes in the treeline, distant fleeing figures, corpses. There is no indication of who the Whites are, what kind of threat they pose or to whom, or what they are fighting for.
The only time we see White Guards, it is a pathetic showing. They are a few dozen of what appear to be military cadets, young smooth-cheeked men in white uniforms. They are quickly mown down with machinegun fire, after which the Yuri and the Reds inspect the bodies with looks of mingled pity and disgust.
Note the irregular uniforms. There are even some sailors. This is what Antipov’s men should look like earlier in the movie, and their armoured train should be a line of bullock carts
The Red commander glares at the dead body of the White leader, a stuffy-looking officer, and growls, ‘The old bastard.’ This old-school Tsarist martinet has brought these kids on a hopeless crusade and gotten them all killed for nothing.
Presumably these are graduates of some military school set up under Kolchak. Kolchak’s officers did have a bad habit of sending raw recruits into hopeless offensives. In itself this scene is a fair comment on the White cause.
The problem is that it’s all we see. The Whites come across as small bands of foolish adventurers who don’t pose any real threat. In reality the Whites controlled three-quarters of the territory of Russia from mid-1918 to the end of 1919, and held onto sizeable chunks of it for years after. On the second anniversary of the October Revolution, their forces were simultaneously in the suburbs of Petrograd and at Orel on the road to Moscow. On two major fronts they massed over 100,000 fighters each, plus tens of thousands on most of the smaller fronts. They far outclassed the Reds in military expertise, and, thanks to the Allies, had parity or superiority in munitions and supplies. They also had the Allies themselves: several hundred thousand soldiers, sailors and pilots of the intervention. These White governments were repressive, violent and anti-Semitic. And they really had the potential to win the war.
When you know this context, it’s easier to understand why the Reds we see in the movie are a bit uptight. But it becomes less easy to understand why Razin, the partisans’ commissar, seems to think his job is to scour all of Russia punishing ‘dubious poets’ and ‘unreliable schoolmasters.’ No. That’s not the partisans’ job. Their job is to fight behind the lines of a brutal military dictatorship supported by the most powerful countries in the world.
By the way, Razin is another one to add to our collection of Reds who are offended by poetry.
Noel Willman as Razin, the partisan unit’s rather intense political commissar.
Gérard Tichy as Liberius, the commander of the partisan unit. The movie gives a general, though unsympathetic, sense of how dual command worked in the Red Army.
What is missing from this movie? There really should be a scene in which Yuri meets a plastered Cossack pogromist with earrings and a wild forelock, and a necklace made of gold teeth; or maybe a twenty-year-old who commands five thousand men, attends séances, wears the skin of a wolf, and snorts cocaine from the scalp of a murdered commissar. That would give a slightly exaggerated but reasonable impression of what the Whites were all about.
The war’s end
Yuri deserts from the partisans. He limps through a snowy landscape, pursuing huddled indistinct shapes which he imagines to be his wife and child. This captures the misery, confusion, exhaustion and dislocation of this moment in history, the winter of 1920-21. It was ‘Russia in the shadows,’ as HG Wells put it, the young Soviet Union bled white and traumatised from seven years of total war.
Yuri finds his family gone, but Lara is still around, and they shack up together. Komarovsky puts in an appearance, warning them that they are about to be arrested and shot and offering to protect them. Their ‘days are numbered.’
But why? Lara because she is the wife of Antipov/ Strelnikov, who has fallen foul of the Soviet regime for unspecified reasons; Yuri because of his ‘way of life’ – here we go again – ‘everything you say, your published writings, are flagrantly subversive.’ I thought his writings were individualistic, not subversive. And anyway, what has Yuri published in the last two years while riding around Siberia treating gunshot wounds and typhus?
By the end of the war the cycles of violence had taken many spins around and the Soviet security organs had developed harsh instincts. Since mid-1918 the Cheka and the revolutionary tribunals have shot tens of thousands of people, at a low estimate. So in one sense Yuri and Lara are right to be afraid and the film’s tone of doom and dread is not out of place.
But either Komarovsky is bullshitting them or the movie is bullshitting us. Lara has been estranged from Antipov since the outbreak of the First World War; I don’t think she would be on the radar of the authorities. And although many things have changed since early 1918 (a de facto one-party state, an all-consuming total war, years of hunger and epidemics) I feel the Soviet authorities would still really, really not care about Yuri’s poetry. He has never lifted a finger against the Soviet regime. His ‘way of life’ has consisted for the last two years of serving as ‘a good comrade [and] a good medical officer’ in a partisan unit behind enemy lines.
But Yuri and Lara believe that their heads are on the block. Lara and her two daughters, one a child and one unborn, go with Komarovsky. Yuri takes his chances with the Cheka, though they never do come for him, except in the form of Yevgraf who saves him from sleeping rough in Moscow.
Back to the framing device
Meanwhile back in the future, Yevgraf and his niece Tanya have been talking all night, piecing together the story we have just witnessed. Now they finish the last few pieces of the puzzle. They do so very well as far as story is concerned. Not so much the history. Tanya (Yuri and Lara’s daughter) was ‘Lost at the age of eight when Civil War broke out in the Far East.’ She was born in 1921, so this would be 1929 or 1930. There was a brief Sino-Soviet War in 1929, but no Far East Civil War.
Yuri’s death rings true. Many who lived intense lives during the Revolution and Civil War succumbed to illnesses in the decade after.BOf course, there were epidemics and a shortage of medical supplies. But there was also a physical and spiritual exhaustion, which is what does for Yuri in the end.
Lara, meanwhile, ‘died or vanished somewhere. In a labour camp […] A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid.’ The arrest of Lara appears to happen in the early 1930s, so before the 1936-9 terror. But it is still all too authentic. The population of prison camps run by the successors of the Cheka grew from 8,500 to two million in a few short years as the Stalin regime tightened its grip.
For all that, the film ends on an optimistic tone. Tanya plays the balalaika as her grandmother did, and her boyfriend seems kind, and rainbows grace the rushing waters by the dam.
And I’ll leave it there, at the end of the movie. I had a conclusion here but it ran on too long. I’ll finish and post that next week.
Meanwhile, if you want to read more about the Russian Civil War according to yours truly, check out my series Revolution Under Siege:
This is Part 2 of my notes on a re-watch of David Lean’s 1965 historical epic Dr Zhivago. Part 1 is here. This post will look at how the movie presents the First World War, the Russian Revolution and post-revolution society.
1: The World War
About one hour in, the story of Dr Zhivago, which had rumbled to a halt, is jump-started again by the outbreak of the First World War. Yuri, Antipov and Lara all end up at the frontlines. We witness the army mutinies that accompanied the Revolution. Yuri and Lara fall in love but restrain themselves from actually cheating on their respective spouses.
This section begins with a voiceover from Yefgraf. It’s a very strong monologue layered over a montage which is by turns lavish and bleak, summing up Russia’s experience in World War One, from enthusiastic jingoism to horror, misery and revolt. This monologue is performed by Alec Guinness with dry understated tones betraying just an occasional hint of intense emotion. Yevgraf joins the army along with a bunch of peasant conscripts: ‘Most of them were in their first good pair of boots… By the second winter of the war, the boots had worn out. Even comrade Lenin underestimated the misery of that 1000-mile front – and our cursed capacity for suffering.’
This and all other stills are from Dr Zhivago (1966, dir. David Lean)
This monologue is so good I used it in the podcast version of Episode 1 of Revolution Under Siege. But it has some problems. Yevgraf says that he was ‘ordered to enlist’ by the Bolshevik Party at the outbreak of the war as part of an organised infiltration of the army. I’ve never come across any mention of the Bolsheviks sending agents into the army for a years-long deep undercover project. The Bolsheviks negotiated Tsarist repression by having their legal and illegal sides of the organisation, and if we assume Yevgraf is a trained agent in the illegal component, then it would be very wasteful to send him into the army like a needle in a haystack. The Bolshevik Party was very much on the back foot when war broke out. Between repression, wartime chauvinism and conscription, membership withered and activity waned.
Many working-class militants were conscripted into the army and navy, or ordered to enlist by the courts as punishment for their political activities. Some of these people resurfaced in 1917 as leaders and agitators on the frontlines or on the naval vessels. By mid-1917 the Bolshevik Party had developed a very extensive ‘Military Organisation’ of party members in the army and navy. You can see how a paranoid officer might interpret this as the army being ‘infiltrated by Bolshevik agents.’ The thing is, almost none of the members of the Military Organisation were Bolsheviks in 1914, much less full-time agents on undercover missions.
Yevgraf also describes party policy toward the war in a very strange way. Which country wins is ‘Our task was to organise defeat. That would be our victory.’ That’s a cold and perverse way of explaining an internationalist, anti-war position. Only an opponent would phrase it that way. The Bolsheviks did not ‘organise defeat’ and even in 1917 there were Bolshevik-influenced units, such as the Latvian Rifles, which fought valiantly. Here the screenplay has given us a revolutionary straw man.
What about the visuals which accompany the narration? We see a big recruitment parade, cutting to the horror of the frontlines and the violence of battle. Finally we see the soldiers clambering out of the trench and running back eastward. The imagery tells a story in a simple and very powerful way. As we see here, the Russian army had a tradition of officers dominating and abusing the rank-and-file: we see an officer brandishing his sabre and roaring at the men, ‘Come on, you bastards!’ But apart from the flagrantly abusive officer, the beards and the exotic hats, none of this World War sequence is really drawn from the specifics of the Eastern Front. It mainly draws on the Western Front, tropes familiar to British popular memory of the First World War. It’s not that what we see is wrong, so this is a missed opportunity rather than a big problem. But these images don’t draw out what was distinct about the Eastern Front, which was far more mobile than the Western.
It could be November 1916 on the Somme.
What’s with Antipov? Why is a revolutionary playing a valiant role in the imperialist war? This is authentic. The personal reason is given in Yevgraf’s remark that ‘Happy men don’t volunteer.’ The history-buff reason is that many leftists in all countries supported their own country’s war effort. It just so happened that moderate socialists in Germany saw Germany as the most progressive empire, while moderate socialists in Russia just happened to see their own country in the same way. The Bolsheviks would call Antipov a ‘defencist’ or ‘social chauvinist.’
Antipov’s glasses discarded in the midst of a disastrous infantry charge.
2: Mutiny
Next comes a vivid scene where a crowd of deserters meets a fresh and disciplined unit on the road. It’s a well-shot and dynamic scene, full of tension, as we wonder which side will win out. The deserters hold fast. They convince the new recruits to join the revolt against the war. They all proceed to shoot and bludgeon the officers and continue homeward.[i]
How authentic is this scene? Things wouldn’t have happened this quickly, and the revolting soldiers would not have been this trigger-happy. The scene errs on the side of portraying the soldiers as cruel, removing a lot of mitigating context and hesitations that would have preceded the grisly outcome. The scene is making things simple, brief and visual, but is it conveying a historical untruth? In the last analysis, no. Basically, in many cases soldiers and sailors did kill their officers.
We see a firebrand soldier named Kuril (Bernard Kay, named simply as ‘The Bolshevik’ in the credits) taking the lead and preventing the mass of deserters from disintegrating. He is the cadre in this scene, the frame that holds the revolt together, the leavening agent which causes the bread to rise (Fittingly, the same Kuril goes on to join the Red Guards in a later scene). But when Kuril appeals to the fresh unit to join the deserters, his words should be more along the lines of, ‘Let’s go home and divide up the estates of the landlords,’ and not so much baldly declaring that Russia is not his country. The latter is a curious agitational tactic and it’s surprising that it works.
3: The Revolution
I’ve already mentioned how the movie compresses fourteen months of tumultuous events into one line of dialogue (‘The Tsar has been arrested. Lenin is in Moscow! Civil War has begun!’). Soon after this Yuri receives an ‘order [from] the Provisional Government’ so we are back in real-life chronology, somewhere between February and October 1917, between the overthrow of the Tsar and the seizure of power by the Soviets.
Around this time Lara and Yuri hit it off. In the book, she is fiercely supportive of the Bolsheviks, but the movie’s Lara never breathes a syllable of approval for the revolution. This gives her a bit of a flat personality.
We cut to Moscow and see Yuri’s wife and father-in-law reading a letter from him dated July 20th. ‘Eight weeks ago!’ they say. So it must be late September 1917. There is street fighting outside their window – machineguns and artillery. ‘They’re at it again!’ rages the father-in-law. ‘I wish they’d decide, once and for all, which gang of hooligans constitutes the government of this country.’
This is frustrating! The film nearly got it right! If they had said twelve weeks instead of eight, or August 20th instead of July, that would have made sense – there was street fighting in Moscow for days following the Soviet insurrection of late October.
The Revolution happens off-screen, and that’s fine. But the glimpses we get of it don’t need to be this muddled. It’s not that it was made simpler for dramatic effect. It’s just made a mess of, in ways that would have been pretty simple to fix.
But the movie redeems itself in little ways that show the filmmakers did their homework. Kuril the militant gets in some good and authentic lines. The befuddled old soldier asks, ‘This Lenin. Will he be the new Tsar, then?’ Kuril explodes: ‘Listen, Daddy! No more Tsars, no more masters! Only workers, in a workers’ state. How about that!’
This movie is clearly anti- the revolution but it delivers that message with certain small reservations and nuances.
4. Life under the Soviets
Kuril, departing to join the Red Guards, says to Yuri: ‘Goodbye, honoured doctor… Want some advice? … Adapt yourself.’ It’s not clear what Yuri has done to invite this veiled threat. He has been totally inoffensive from Kuril’s point of view. This is a foreshadowing of what’s going to happen when Yuri returns home to Moscow to experience life after the Revolution.
The two main features of life when Yuri returns home are (1) famine, disease and general hardship and (2) a stifling political culture in which everyone, like Kuril, seems to be offended by his existence for no apparent reason.
The Moscow neighbourhood which the film crew built specially for the movie. Partial barricades, armoured cars, Red banners and patrolling soldiers indicate that the October Revolution has just concluded.
Famine, disease and hardship
A film critic in The Guardian criticised this movie at the time for reducing the Russian Revolution to ‘a series of consumer problems.’ I suppose starving and freezing can be broadly described as consumer problems. I actually think this is a strength of the movie. Yuri’s silently-suffering wife Tanya has had to sell a clock to buy salami for a meal to welcome him home from the war. Nobody mentions it, but at one stage all the banisters disappear from the stairway of their house – fuel shortages, you see. Consumer problems were the texture of daily life during the Civil War. Dr Zhivago does a good job of showing that.
As we see here, wealthier citizens such as Yuri’s adopted family (we learn in this section of the movie that they are landlords with an estate in the Urals) had to share their homes with working-class people. Mansions and large town houses were divided up into apartments. I agree with Yuri that ‘this is a better arrangement, comrades. More just’ (even though the houses of the wealthy were often unsuitable for renovation into apartment blocks). Because what we don’t see are the absolutely horrifying slum conditions in which workers and the poor lived in Tsarist Moscow: dormitories, shared rooms, beds shared by workers on different shifts. And unfortunately, as the film critic I quoted above correctly noted, the film portrays Yuri’s new housemates as a mob of horrible ‘proles.’ No nuance or humanizing moments for these representatives of urban working-class Russia.
The World War broke the precarious supply system that had kept the cities fed and fuelled. We see the railway station thronged with people leaving Moscow, and this is sadly accurate. The population of the large cities collapsed during the Civil War, as the supply situation grew worse still – Petrograd’s population declined by over half, and Moscow was not much better off. The film is perhaps guilty of accelerating this process but the depiction is well grounded.
What’s not accurate at all is the way Yuri is scolded by the authorities for mentioning famine and disease in Moscow: ‘You’ve been listening to rumourmongers, comrade. There is no typhus in our city.’ This is nonsense. The Soviet authorities did not try to deny hunger or cover up epidemics like, as Boris Johnson would have said, ‘The mayor of Jaws’ [sic].
Tanya introduces Yuri to the new roommates and a visitor, the Soviet delegate (or People’s Commisar of Jaws) who gives Yuri a rude welcome home from the war. The delegate is played by Wolf Frees.
Below are the words of the revolutionary leader Trotsky (whose likeness we see on posters in these scenes) speaking to a public meeting in Moscow in June 1918:
I have with me some telegrams which the People’s Commissar for Food has received from small towns. There the population is, literally and in the exact meaning of the word, on the brink of complete starvation and exhaustion. […] From Sergiyev-Posad: ‘Give us bread, or we perish’ … From Bryansk, May 30: ‘There is a very high death-rate in the factories of Maltsovsk and Bryansk, especially among the children: there is hunger-typhus in the uyezd.’ […]From Pavlov-Posad, on May 21: ‘The population is starving, there is no bread, we cannot get it anywhere. From Dorogobuzh [24] on June 3: ‘Great hunger and mass sickness.’
Note not just the public acknowledgement of famine and typhus but of the most frank and harrowing reality of it.
The new Soviet regime took public health very seriously. One White Guard who later wrote a memoir left a bleakly comical description of how he impersonated a doctor and was sent all over Siberia on a public health mission.
The posters below from Wikimedia Commons are Soviet public health warnings from this broad period.
Political Culture
The idea that hunger and disease were covered up is just one of the ways Dr Zhivago is basically wrong in how it shows the early Soviet regime. Yuri is treated in an appalling way by the authorities and the public. The local Soviet delegate yells at him, ‘Your attitude has been noted!’ What attitude? Who’s noted it? The low point is when Yuri arrives home to find his new housemates ransacking his apartment. Then he meets his half-brother Yevgraf for the first time. Instead of the pleasant reunion Yuri expects, he gets his marching orders. Yevgraf warns him that he must leave Moscow because his poetry is ‘not liked.’
‘I think the girl [Yuri’s wife Tonya] was the only one who guessed at their position,’ Yevgraf narrates, implying they could all be shot or arrested or something.
Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin), scared of Yevgraf
What’s the problem with Yuri’s poetry? This is some time in the winter of 1917-18. Yuri is enthusiastic about Bolshevism and calls Yevgraf ‘my political conscience.’ The problem is that his poetry is too ‘individualistic’ and his reasons for liking Bolshevism are too subtle.
If this seems unfair and absurd, it’s because it is. People were not arrested or killed simply for writing ‘individualistic’ poetry in early Soviet Russia. This is early 1918 and the number 1 item on the Soviets’ agenda is whether and how to make peace with Germany, and the related question of how to survive if Germany attacks. The second item is securing food and fuel supplies. The third item would probably be the small forces of White Guards operating in peripheral areas, the foremost being Kornilov’s Volunteer Army in the Don and Kuban regions. Individualistic poets are not on the agenda at all. If Yuri was writing odes of praise to Kaiser Wilhelm or General Kornilov, the Soviet authorities would certainly have had a problem with that. But that isn’t it.
And just consider what we know about Yuri. As marks against him in the eyes of the Soviets, he is the adopted son of a landlord family, with a large house in Moscow and an estate in the Urals. But he accepts the redistribution of both properties without conplaint. He spends most of 1917 in a military unit sympathetic to the Revolution, treating the wounded, saving countless lives and earning the deep esteem of the soldiers. He comes back to Moscow and at once gets to work in the local healthcare system. He expresses support for the revolution at every opportunity.
‘Specialists’ like Yuri who were willing to work conscientiously under the new regime (doctors, engineers etc) were not scorned or abused or rejected. They were valued. Past political actions disagreeable to the new regime (which Yuri, in any case, has none of) would be overlooked. They would be given higher rations. This idea that he would face arrest or imprisonment just for writing poetry is nonsense.
The apparently healthy but idle father-in-law (Ralph Richardson), on the other hand, might find himself conscripted into a labour battalion, say, to dig trenches during the military emergency of 1919. He is not at all invested in politics of either right or left, so it’s quite unlikely that he would end up in deeper trouble than that.
I haven’t referred much to Boris Pasternak’s novel, on which this movie is based, because it was five years ago that I read it. But this point is important: in the novel there is no warning from Yevgraf, no hint that Yuri might be arrested for his poetry or for his ‘attitude.’ Yuri and his family simply leave Moscow of their own accord because of the hunger and fuel shortages, like about a million other people. The filmmakers felt the need to make this very significant and historically inauthentic change.
Chronology
When I write something like, ‘this wouldn’t have happened in February of that year, maybe in June’ readers might think I’m being pedantic. The basic sequence of events in the Russian Civil War is not widely understood so I need to pause and spell out the significance of some of the things I’m saying. If a film simplifies the timeline for the sake of making things more brisk and comprehensible, that’s good. But if the chronological mix-ups in a film erase some of the most interesting features of a historical period and present an alternative version that diverges dramatically from the evidence, that’s a big problem for me.
Winter 1917-18 was a world apart from winter 1918-19, or even summer 1918. The same rules did not apply. The Soviet regime did not spring into being as a repressive one-party state. But in response to conditions of chaos and war which escalated sharply from May 1918, it grew steadily harsher and more repressive. A film about the period should trace these developments in the sameclever way that Dr Zhivago tracks fuel shortages through the unexplained disappearance of banisters. Instead the Soviet regime springs into being fully-formed, a strange composite of the revolutionary and Stalinist eras and the screenwriter’s imagination.
This was a severe time. I can think of a few scenarios where an innocent person like Yuri would fall foul of the authorities and end up getting arrested, or even in an extreme case shot. As the Civil War drags on the scenarios become more numerous and plausible. And if he got in trouble, his adopted family background would be held against him. But none of these scenarios involve individualistic poetry, or acknowledging the existence of typhus.
4. The Train
Next comes the most powerful part of the movie, for me: the epic train journey from Moscow to the Ural Mountains.
Are the conditions portrayed accurate? The crowded station, the rush for berths, the dark squalid bunks and the straw? It would be difficult to exaggerate how bad the railways were in this period. Today this journey by rail would be one or two overnights but fuel shortages, breakdowns, harsh weather and rail traffic all meant that the gruelling 11-day journey depicted here is perfectly authentic.
What excellent worldbuilders we have in David Lean and his crew, and screenwriter Robert Bolt. How real this carriage and journey seem – yes, in the way Pauline Kael dismissed as ‘primitive’ (she said that David Lean movies are for the kind of people who are impressed because painted horses on a stage backdrop look ‘real enough to ride.’ Namely, me), but also on a human level. I’m glad they chose not to cut the moment when the anarchist convict (Klaus Kinski) stares at an old couple exchanging a moment of affection while lying on the floor of a crowded carriage. He looks absolutely desolate. I don’t know if it’s accurate or not about shovelling out the straw and sprinkling the disinfectant, about breaking the ice when you roll open the door – but I’m glad it’s in the movie. It’s good also that there are moments when they break out the accordion and do some singing and dancing.
The anarchist (Klaus Kinski)
I’ve already mentioned the anarchist who is imprisoned for forced labour on the train. I haven’t come across mentions of forced labour on the railways at all, let alone this early. I’m not sure if his reason for being here is plausible, but his character certainly is. The Soviet regime raided and cleared out numerous buildings occupied by self-described anarchists in Spring 1918, before the outbreak of Civil War. I say self-described because Soviet authorities regarded them as not proper anarchists, but as assorted bandits, adventurers and dubious characters, armed to the teeth and occupying key buildings. This happened after the train journey we see, but not much later. It’s an engaging performance by Kinski. Here is a mad and unpleasant person, but he’s also admirable and pitiable in equal measure. He might be the kind of person who would have been arrested in the raids of Spring 1918. At first he seems to be anti-authoritarian but his admiration for the Red commander Strelnikov tells us he loves violence and strongmen. It’s also a hint that he fought alongside the Red Guards prior to his imprisonment. You wonder what he did.
A detachment of Kronstadt sailors. According to his cap, the man in front served on the Aurora, the vessel which fired the signal, a blank artillery shot, to begin the assault on the Winter Palace in Petrograd during the October Revolution
There are also Kronstadt sailors on the train, on their way out to assist at the front lines. A lot of these lads would be anarchists too, not the bandity kind but the serious, political kind many of whom worked alongside and eventually joined the Bolsheviks. Kronstadt sailors played a key role in the revolution of 1917 and in this period detachments of them were indeed sent out to remote corners of Russia to bolster the Reds in this or that skirmish against counter-revolution. Though it seems strange that a load of sailors would be going thousands of kilometres inland, it’s only one of a lot of very strange things that were common occurrences during Russia’s revolutionary period.
The next post will deal with the Civil War, so the burned village and Strelnikov will have to wait.
A final word on the theme of this movie. Clearly it is anti- communist and critical of the revolution. But though this movie often straw-mans Bolsheviks, it never demonises them. It is conscientious about giving each Bolshevik at least one humanising and relatable moment.
Kuril, as I remarked, has some good strong lines. The delegate tries to stop the ransacking of Yuri’s house. Antipov is the most obnoxious but also the most vulnerable. We pretty much view Yevgraf as a teddy bear by the end of the movie. Even Razin, whom we will meet later, has a line where he reveals he once has a wife and four children. What happened to them? The grumpy new janitor of Yuri’s Moscow house gets a good line about how the building had room for thirteen families.
It is only a show of even-handedness, or maybe you could just call it one-sidedness with accompanying nuances. But it matters. After I posted last week, one of my readers sent me a message saying that ‘those scenes of the Tsarists suppressing workers revolts was, to my parents’ generation [people born before World War Two], the dawn of a realization that there mightve been a good reason for Communism in Russia….’
Dr Zhivago is going to get plenty of criticism in the next post, but let’s give it some credit. It was more balanced than a lot of the other texts and narratives that people would have encountered at the time. Maybe, considering certain books by Robert Service and Antony Beevor, and the dreadful Russian TV show about Trotsky, that’s even more so the case today.
[i] The incident in the novel on which this scene is based is longer and more involved. In both versions, a poor officer stands on a barrel to address the mutineers, only to fall victim to a slapstick accident followed by a rifle shot. In the novel this guy was a smug agent of Kerensky’s Provisional Government, and the guys who kill him are a specific hardcore bandit-like group, not the general mass of deserters.
From the back of a lorry, men in red armbands throw leaflets to a cheering mob of soldiers. The unit’s doctor, Yuri Andreievich Zhivago (Omar Sharif), is handed a sheet by a bewildered illiterate elder.
‘The Tsar is in prison,’ Yuri reads aloud. ‘Lenin’s in Moscow!’ He looks up and adds, ‘Civil war has started!’
Yuri Zhivago (Omar Sharif), Kuril (Bernard Kay, Lara (Julie Christie) and the old man (Erik Chitty). This and allother stills from Dr Zhivago, dir. David Lean, 1965
Yuri Zhivago and his unit are a little out of touch. Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II was arrested in March 1917 (Gregorian calendar), Lenin arrived in Russia in April 1917 but did not go to Moscow until early 1918, and the Russian Civil War started in May 1918. Yuri appears to be catching up on fourteen months of news. Word travelled slowly in revolutionary Russia, but not this slowly.
Most of the movie is not this bad and parts of it are pretty strong. I’m inclined to be generous to Dr Zhivago, a 1965 historical epic directed by David Lean, because the movie is generous to the viewer, serving up crowd scenes, spectacular landscapes and big, painful emotions.[i]
But this single line of dialogue is a succession of statements each of which is more jarring to my ears than the one before. It’s like someone scrolling on their phone and declaring, ‘A new coronavirus has broken out in China. American police have murdered George Floyd! Trump supporters have tried to stage an insurrection in New York!’ Note that I’ve got the city wrong and that I assume someone who’s just heard about COVID 19 somehow knows who George Floyd is.
Then again, maybe we will be watching that movie in fifty years.
The verdict of historian Jonathan Smele on Dr Zhivago is not generous: he notes that it is pretty much the only movie in English about the Russian Civil War, which is a shame because it is ‘mostly lamentable’ even though it’s ‘admirably snowy.’[ii]
Smele did not elaborate, but I’m going to,[iii] probably at length, over two or three posts.
This movie was enormously successful and popular at the time of its release. It raked in five Oscars and a ton of money. Very few English-language films have tackled the October Revolution and, aside from this and Warren Beatty’s Reds, none that I’m aware of have portrayed the Russian Civil War.[iv] So this movie, between its massive success and the lack of other films tackling the same subject matter, has had an outsized influence on how people in the English-speaking world see these events.
What follows are my notes on a re-watch of Dr Zhivago, focused on how it presents the history, sometimes comparing it to its source material (the novel of the same name by Boris Pasternak).
1: A flash-forward to… when?
Dr Zhivago starts with Yevgraf (Alec Guinness), an apparatchik in the Soviet security forces, finding his orphaned and long-lost niece and telling her the story of her long-lost parents, Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova. This frames the narrative in a neat way as Yuri and Lara are the couple who are canoodling tragically on the movie’s poster.
This framing device works… unless you’re a nerd like me, in which case it will leave you wondering when exactly this flash-forward is supposed to be happening. [v]
The engineer (I’m unable to identify the actor) and Yevgraf (Alec Guinness) reading a book of poems by Zhivago titled Lara
The niece, Tanya (Rita Tushingham), looks around twenty and we will learn she was born in 1921. Maths would suggest we’re around the years of World War Two. But clues in the scene suggest otherwise.
The overall situation (a hydroelectric dam that seems to be fully operational plus also a horde of women and girls recruited from reformatories excavating rock with their bare hands) suggests we are in the period of shock industrialisation, the Five-Year Plans. And because Tanya is definitely not fourteen or fifteen, 1937 to early 1941 is our range. Right?
Maybe not. Other cues point to the 1950s. Yuri Zhivago’s poetry is going through a period of growing popularity.
‘Everyone seems to [admire him] – now,’ says the engineer.
Yevgraf replies acidly: ‘Well, we couldn’t admire him when we weren’t allowed to read him.’
Zhivago has been posthumously rehabilitated, meaning we are in a period of relative liberalisation. Relative prosperity, too. Referring to the era of Revolution and Civil War, Yevgraf does a ghoulish version of the Four Yorkshireman routine: ‘There were children in those days who lived off human flesh. Did you know that?’
This comparison between now and the bad old days only makes sense in the era after the death of Stalin in 1953, his denunciation in 1956, and the rehabilitation of vast numbers of people victimised by the Stalinist terror.
Only… Yevgraf’s niece is not in her mid 30s. And the dam appears to be called the Stalinskaya.
Where does that leave us?
If this scene is taking place in 1936-41, then the atmosphere is off. Soviet Union had just gone through a famine and massive campaign of repression in the early 1930s, followed by a terrible slaughter and mass imprisonment campaign that peaked in 1937. The engineer should be soiling his pants at the sight of Yevgraf, not complaining about shortages of machinery (though Tanya looks terrified at first).
Why have they made the film in this way? How serious a departure from history is it? It’s not outrageous so much as odd. It’s just strange to hear Yevgraf talking about how back in his day, there was cannibalism and certain poets were censored. Not like the era of plenty and pluralism known to historians as [checks notes] THE GREAT TERROR.
2: Central Asia
We flash back to somewhere in Central Asia, some time in late Imperial Russia. In a powerful contrast to the red stars and industrial trappings of the framing device, we see vast mountains and plains. Through the eyes of a little boy, we see the Orthodox priests, black-garbed like a murder of crows, who are presiding over his mother’s funeral. It is a moving scene: a musical crescendo, leaves blown from trees in a sudden gust of wind, nails hammered into the coffin. The little boy is then adopted by a kind family from Moscow who were friends of his mother.
Russia had colonies in Central Asia, and many Russian settlers still have descendants today in countries such as Kazakhstan. So the trappings of the Orthodox Church imposed on a Central Asian scene grounds us in the old Russia of the Tsars, imperial and obscurantist.
The little boy who is burying his mother is of course Yuri Zhivago (in this sequence played by Tarek Sharif, son of Omar). In the novel Yuri’s half-brother Yevgraf was born of a woman native to Central Asia. The movie, without ever saying so out loud, performs an interesting reversal: Yevgraf is the European and Yuri the ‘Eurasian.’ I don’t think fidelity to history was the primary concern here – David Lean just wanted to cast Omar Sharif. But having a lead actor who is from outside Europe is a good move from the point of view of history. Every third or fourth character you run into in the Russian Civil War turns out to be an Armenian from Persia, or a Baltic German who is obsessed with Mongolia, or one way or another has some colourful and complex national identity.
3: Moscow in 1913
(CW: SA)
My nerd rage at the chronological vagueness of the flash-forward is assuaged in the next section of the movie. Dialogue in a later scene (‘I have seen you. Four years ago, Christmas Eve’) places the action in this part of the movie in the winter of 1913-14.
Yuri is now an adult, studying medicine, writing poetry and preparing to marry his adopted sister Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin, incidentally the daughter of Charlie Chaplin). But he keeps running into this girl Lara (Julie Christie), who we know thanks to the framing device will go on to be the mother of Yuri’s child.
Lara, a seventeen-year-old student, is groomed, seduced and raped by a businessman who has leverage over her family, a predatory and perspicacious old monster named Komorovsky (Rod Steiger).
Lara brings this section of the movie to a close by shooting the sexual predator. But Komorovsky survives. Lara and her revolutionary boyfriend Antipov (Tom Courtenay) get married and move away to a distant village.
To film this and later parts of the movie, the crew built a couple of blocks of Moscow in a field in Spain and buried it under fake snow. It was well worth the effort. It looks the part. We will see this neighbourhood, including the huge townhouse of Yuri’s adopted family, going through sweeping changes over the course of the film.
The protest
It is on the main street of this Spanish Moscow that we see a workers’ demonstration crushed by the forces of the Tsarist autocracy.
The corresponding scene in the novel takes place during the 1905 Revolution. Viewers might assume wrongly that this is the infamous Bloody Sunday, or even that this scene represents the entire 1905 Revolution – watching this at age 15 or 16 I vaguely thought it was, but now I know that this massacre would not even qualify as a Bloody Wednesday on the scale of Tsarist Russia.
But the movie is not making a historical misstep here at all. Showing an event like this in 1913 makes sense. Several hundred strikers were massacred at the Lena goldfields in 1912, and in response there was a wave of strikes that only ended with the outbreak of the First World War. This would have involved protests and repression like we see here. The demonstrators perform the ‘Varshavianka’ and the ‘Internationale,’ both period-accurate. At the end of their demonstration, they march back the way they came, presumably sticking together until they reach the safety of a working-class district. But I’m not sure of the tactical rationale behind the dragoons attacking and dispersing them on their way back. I’d assume they would prefer to block the march from entering the affluent district.
It’s worth noting that we don’t see the inside of a factory, a railway yard or a slum. The focus is on how the demonstration turns Yuri’s head, sweeps him up in its romance, and how the state repression appals him. The focus throughout the movie is on how Yuri, who is part of a well-off family, reacts to the twists and turns of the revolution.
After the dragoons’ attack on the protesters
The Bolsheviks
On several occasions characters talk about the Bolsheviks. Antipov denies being a Bolshevik, but doesn’t tell us what party he’s in. ‘The Bolsheviks don’t like me and I don’t like them. They don’t know right from wrong.’
They are mentioned almost as if they were the only revolutionary party in the running. Komorovsky says to Yuri: ‘Oh, I disagree with Bolshevism. … But I can still admire Bolsheviks as men. Shall I tell you why? […] They may win.’
Before 1912, few knew who the Bolsheviks were. They were one faction of one leftist party (the Russian Social-Democratic and Labour Party). In 1912-14 the Bolsheviks grew rapidly. Antipov disliking them is a plausible glimpse of the leftist in-fighting and debates that went on. (The fact that he carries a pistol on a demonstration suggests he is a Socialist Revolutionary, a party with a terrorist legacy. I doubt he’s a Menshevik.)
Komarovsky’s remarks are not so plausible. The Bolsheviks weren’t a household name. Komorovsky would not have anticipated their victory and if he even knew who they were he wouldn’t expect Yuri to.
I can see why they name-dropped the Bolsheviks here in spite of the above points. The screenplay is introducing little things that are going to be big later. It’s not terrible – but it is wrong.
Tsarism
‘It’s the system, Lara,’ Antipov declares at one point, apropos of nothing. ‘People will be different after the revolution.’ The audience knows instantly that Antipov’s naivety will be cruelly exposed. But to me that’s a bit crude, a bit of a straw man.
All the same, we do get a glimpse of the system. This section paints an ugly picture of late Imperial Russia. A predatory, cynical capitalist, brutal state repression, even an orthodox priest dispensing free doses of sexual hypocrisy to Lara when she goes to the church for guidance.
But we do not see the squalid living conditions of the peasants or, bar the scene where Antipov is dropping leaflets outside a factory, the working or home lives of the urban proletariat. People show a remarkable ability to write many thousands of words and make many hours of cinema about revolutions without ever mentioning little things like the land question. You know, the number one factor motivating almost every modern revolution including this one.
Until next time…
I remember seeing this movie as a teenager and being swept along by it and I can really understand how, four decades earlier, millions were really enchanted by it in cinemas. All the more reason to interrogate how it presents the history. I’m approaching it now with a more analytical eye but I still appreciate and enjoy a lot of what I see here. So far, it’s not a bad job by the standards of a historical epic set in a country that few of the cast or crew would have ever set foot in.
But as I’ve made clear, there’s a bit of ‘The Tsar has been arrested! Lenin is in Moscow!’ to come. And the further we get, the more it goes off the rails.
In the next post we’ll look at how Dr Zhivago treats the First World War and the revolutions of 1917. For good and for bad, there’s a lot to talk about.
[i] ‘Lenin’s in Moscow’ can be shorthand for ‘Lenin has arrived in the capital city! No, not Moscow, the other capital, the one that doesn’t feature in this movie. Yes, St Petersburg.’ And ‘Civil war has started!’ is just Zhivago’s on-the-spot reaction. Some people in early 1917 characterised events the same way. But all that is a stretch. The average viewer will take it at face value.
[iii] What are my credentials for tackling this, and why does it interest me? Over the last few years I’ve written a lot about the Russian Civil War, and you can find the full book-length project here:
[iv] Soviet and Russian cinema is a different story. 1934’s Chapaev spawned a whole sub-genre of Civil War movies. I should mention the HBO TV movie Stalin (1992, dir Ivan Passer) which is overambitious and rushed but which does include a handful of fairly well-written scenes dealing with the Civil War.
[v] In the novel, this framing narrative takes place on the Eastern Front of World War Two. Yuri and Lara’s daughter is a boisterous young woman serving on the frontlines.
The most obvious fact about the stories of John le Carré is the one that goes unaddressed explicitly until The Secret Pilgrim (1990): these are stories primarily about what the British call ‘the officer class’. We do not entirely neglect the ones who are actually doing the spying (lamplighters, scalphunters, etc) and we are quite interested in the agents and assets (the Joes). But the figure around whom the typical story revolves is the British (often half-British) upper-class male intelligence officer. His job is to groom and cultivate spies, which involves exploiting the vulnerabilities of people, getting them to risk being tortured and shot, and generally treating human beings as a means to an end.
Another feature of le Carré’s work, very apparent in the 1980s, is that many of his characters are stark mad. In order to be attracted to this work, it helps if the intelligence officer is one of the psychological walking wounded, and by doing it he gets even worse. The le Carré character is not usually motivated by his political convictions but by his neuroses.
This is not as cynical as it might seem (John Le Carré is never as cynical as he might seem) because the neuroses themselves are not always entirely ignoble.
Today’s cover image: a 1988 postage stamp celebrating Perestroika (Reform) in the Soviet Union
The novels I’m about to talk about involve a new level of introspection compared to what went before. But ‘optimism’ is the other word that springs to mind. Even though it’s a weary and qualified optimism, and it turned out to be wrong, it’s still genuine and it really animates these books.
A Perfect Spy (1986)
The 1980s marked a personal milestone for le Carré: he wrote A Perfect Spy, a great semi-autobiographical novel that we can file under ‘things men do sooner than go to therapy.’ I’m not just being glib there, he pretty much admitted it in this interview.A Perfect Spy is not even a little bit optimistic, but I think that once le Carré got it out of his system he felt a lot better about everything.
A British diplomat and intelligence officer named Magnus Pym disappears. Is he in mourning for his late father, or going through a personal crisis, or defecting across the Iron Curtain? While his wife and his boss and the whole Anglo-American spook apparatus are running around trying to find him, we flash back to before his birth, to a Baptist church in rural England in the 1930s, where a teenage boy named Rick Pym is brazenly conning his entire community out of their money.
The novel really comes to life from this point on. Rick (father of the present-day missing diplomat Magnus) is a shameless cliché-spewing con artist whose act encompasses his entire being and sucks in all those around him. He is a kind of king to a nomad tribe of fellow crooks and their ‘lovelies’ who travel all around Britain blackmailing, cheating and partying. He goes to people’s deathbeds to talk them out of their life savings and leave their families with nothing; he sends his son abroad on a mission to find some chimerical treasure; he’s a black marketeer during World War Two; he runs for parliament; he aspires to stay one step ahead of his ‘temporary problems of liquidity’ and take his place among ‘the highest in the land.’
Superficially Magnus is not like Rick. On a deeper level, it’s a different story. To those who know the grown-up Magnus, he seems to be a charismatic, capable person. Like his father, lying is as easy as breathing to him. But the lie is true for him, in the moment. The flashbacks take us from Magnus’ second trimester to the present day, and from the moment he is old enough to talk we see him giving himself fully to whoever happens to be standing in front of him, whether it’s a Catholic priest, a student communist leader, an MI5 officer, a Czechoslovak spy, or a long succession of unfortunate women. Figuring out just where he is in the middle of all his bizarre words and actions is what’s so engrossing about the novel.
The first edition cover. I liked the first edition covers from the 60s and 70s, but the 80s ones are not great.
How easy it is for the morally disoriented child of the criminal underworld to find a niche in the world of espionage. How comfortable he finds it there, how much like home. Until all his mutually irreconcilable commitments begin to catch up with him.
I’m a bad liar and anyway it rarely occurs to me to lie. I have great alternative weapons in my arsenal such as fudging, saying nothing, and hiding behind irony. So outright liars are intriguing to me. Their customs and ways and motivations are to me as remote as those of ancient peoples or uncontacted indigenous tribes. Though he’s strange, Magnus is also sympathetic. Our sympathy comes from understanding the gap between his public persona and what a deeply vulnerable person he is inside.
I think I was supposed to disapprove mightily of his great transgression of British patriotism but it seemed to me no worse than anything else anyone else does in any le Carré novel. I thought he was a much better human being than his father. I felt let down by the ending, but I can’t see where else it could have gone. This is a powerful story, better than anything else of le Carré’s that I’ve read.
The Russia House (1989)
Barley Blair is a good man with a straightforward, wholesome psychology. How did he find his way into a le Carré novel? Ah – maybe he’s another innocent who’s about to be chewed up and spat out by the spook world. Then again, maybe not; could go either way. Which is what kept me reading to the end.
Blair runs a small publishing company that he inherited from his father. The father was a pre-1956 communist, but of this Blair only inherited an affection for all things Russian. Well, most things Russian; not the secret police or the nuclear missiles. The new period of glasnost and perestroika – reform and openness – under Gorbachev has allowed Blair to visit book fairs in Moscow and make friends in Soviet literary circles. When he gets drunk after a visit to Boris Pasternak’s dacha, an intense (and also drunk) Russian man approaches him with an enigmatic request.
The meaning of this encounter only becomes clear much later. Katya, a young single mother who works in Soviet publishing, gives Blair a strange manuscript which he takes home. It turns out to be full of secrets about Soviet superweapons. Not the kind of secrets you might usually find in a spy thriller, such as how terrifying the Soviet nuclear arsenal is, but secrets about how useless their targeting systems are, how badly the tests are going. Strangely enough, when Blair brings the information to the western spy agencies, they seem a lot more threatened to find out their enemy has feet of clay.
The dissident rocket scientist sees himself as a doomed revolutionary. He meets Blair on the grounds of the Smolny Institute in St Petersburg, a suggestion, backed up by dialogue cues, that in their mission he hopes to channel the spirit of the October Revolution.
The Russia House has a lot of the staples of le Carré – dismal office politics that are somehow compelling, hypocrisy, tension, danger and darkness. But it stands out. The main character is a white male Briton, but he’s not an intelligence officer. He’s a poor ‘Joe.’ Most importantly, it is not about exploring this man’s neurosis. Blair is not a saint, but his motivations are straightforward and good: he wants his country to have a friendly partnership with the Soviet Union, to which end he wants to expose how fake the threat of nuclear war is; and meanwhile he is falling in love with Katya. This is a book about following a decent character who’s taken on himself a dangerous mission, and watching how he holds up under terrible pressure.
Soviet Russia has been this shadowy threat for decades in le Carré’s writing. Finally he takes us there in this book. What’s it like? There is a memorable scene set in a dysfunctional hospital; we see through Katya’s eyes a culture of informal and unedifying trade in goods and favours; fear of surveillance and arrest hangs over our characters. Blair secretly thinks Pasternak was over-praised and he is beginning to doubt that the great dissident writers he has been seeking actually exist. A complex and human Soviet Union emerges from this book.
The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
When I read the blurb of The Secret Pilgrim I thought it sounded self-indulgent and inessential, so I didn’t bother to read it for years. That was a mistake, because once I started it I was gripped, and flew through it.
The novel begins in the then-present day, with the end of the Cold War. Our old friend George Smiley has retired for real this time (I promise) and has been absent from le Carré novels for over a decade. (In A Perfect Spy and The Russia House there is not so much as a reference to him or, as far as I can make out, to anyone mentioned in his previous stories). But he returns to give a talk to a class graduating from some kind of spy school. The narrator is their teacher Ned, an aging former intelligence officer (and a secondary character from The Russia House – so there it is) whose career spanned the Cold War. Smiley’s talk turns into a very late night of slightly boozy reminiscences and reflections.
Smiley will say something like, ‘But of course, one mustn’t think we spies are in the business of protecting the country. The basic immorality of what we do is an acid gnawing at our souls and at the heart of democracy.’ At which point Ned will describe Smiley looking apologetically into his glass of brandy before adding, ‘But of course, as long as human nature is what it is, we must always have spies. To deal with situations like…’ He will glance at Ned – ‘…that business in Cluj-Napoca in 1976.’
At this point, narrator Ned will cut in. ‘But I hardly heard what he said. I was already back in Cluj, and I was staring into Elena’s eyes. To this day I don’t know whether she betrayed us, or we her. I suppose it hardly matters…’
There will follow a self-contained novella, fifty or a hundred pages long, describing some tragicomic bungle or ambiguous triumph. There are nine or ten of these episodes all told, spanning a period from the 1960s to the 90s, each one a cracking read in its own right, but each one adding a little to the portrait of Ned himself, and each one addressing itself to the question of Ned’s own journey in life, his search for a sense of purpose. The cause which seemed purposeful and defined at the dawn of the Cold War has by the 1980s dropped him into a reeling, disorientating world where he is surrounded by mental illness.
The framing narrative with Smiley is very strong too. I’ve poked fun, but Smiley’s reflections make for very good reading. And for the Smileyologists out there, Ned’s little episodes feature many characters from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – Esterhase, Haydon, etc.
Some episodes are more serious, some less so. There is a heartwarming story about a strange favour Smiley did for someone back in the day, and an absolutely harrowing account of an ex-priest and child abuser who spied for Nixon’s bombing campaigns against Cambodian villages, then got tortured by the Khmer Rouge. My favourites are some of the lower-stakes stories. There is one about a con artist from the Eastern Bloc who convinces the west that he is a patriot and martyr.
I must mention that there is a run-in with a character named Britta, who is eerily similar to her namesake in the sitcom Community (2009-2015). Is this where they got the name? Dan Harmon doesn’t seem like a John le Carré guy. I never felt this way about Britta in Community, but this Britta really is the worst. OK, second-worst after the Cambodia guy.
The second-last episode shows Ned interviewing Frewin, an eccentric civil servant who has been anonymously denounced as a spy. Despite Frewin’s extravagant delusions, he is astute enough to see that he and the spiritually lost Ned have a lot in common, such as a growing disgust with capitalism, the very system Ned set out to defend all those years ago. The final episode hammers the point home. Ned meets a posh and utterly amoral arms dealer. Ned has to ask himself whether this evil man represents everything he has spent his life protecting. Smiley in his after-dinner remarks takes up this theme as well – for example he suggests that the new recruits should spy on the Ozone Layer.
The Night Manager (1993)
Honourable mention here for The Night Manager, which I did not finish. This one is about a hotel worker who sets out on a mission to take down an evil arms dealer. I found the opening compelling and wanted to see how it would all turn out, but the main character set about making a ‘legend’ for himself (ie, living out a fake life to create a verifiable cover story), and he took too long at it.
Conclusion
Communism is defeated, le Carré suggests, so now it’s time to turn our fire on the excesses of capitalism: on environmental destruction, labour exploitation, imperialism and war profiteering. He didn’t want to destroy capitalism (more’s the pity), just tame its excesses. His hope that people in Europe and North America would take on capitalism en masse anticipated the anti-globalisation movements and the Occupy protests. But like his hopes for Russia, his vision of a kinder and fairer capitalism has definitely not been realised.
Le Carré took his own advice, even if too few others did. In his last few books he took on capitalism and empire with increasing sharpness. That’s what I’m going to write about in the next post.
The 1919 Review 