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All posts tagged British Columbia
Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson (1994)
'Many tricky dicks walk the trail.' (Jean-Baptiste Porteur, p.88)
I saw this book in several second-hand bookshops before I picked it up for a pound imagining, from the stylish cover, that Davidson was one of the new young generation of thriller writers.
How wrong I was. Davidson was born in 1922 and published his first novel, The Night of Wenceslas, in 1960, the year before John le Carré made his debut – i.e. he is very much one of the old generation of thriller writers.
After Wenceslas Davidson published a novel every couple of years throughout the 1960s and early 70s until 1978 when he disappeared from view. After a gap of 16 years he returned with Kolymsky Heights, his last novel, which gained rave reviews.
Is it any good? What's it about? Does it make me want to go in search of his other seven thrillers?
Kolymsky Heights
Kolymsky Heights is relatively long at 478 pages and quite quickly you realise this is because Davidson's defining quality is a long, drawn-out and frustrating, round-the-houses approach.
We are introduced to a fusty old don in Oxford, Professor Lazenby. His secretary, Miss Sonntag, opens a letter from Sweden which turns out to be empty. Until the prof roots around in the bottom of it and finds some cigarette papers. These contain indentations. He calls in a pupil of his who now works in 'Scientific Services' and who, a few years earlier, had called on the Prof and asked him to do a little gentle spying – in fact more like 'alert observation' – when he was attending a conference in the Eastern Bloc.
Lazenby calls up this man, Philpott, to come and interpret the cigarette papers. They realise the bumps on the surface contain a message coded as a set of numbers. These turn out to relate to books of the Bible, giving chapter and verse numbers. By piecing together the fragmented quotes they arrive at a message which, in an elliptical way, refers to a dark-haired man from the north who can speak tongues and who the writer wants to visit him.
If you like crosswords, I think you'd like this book. Or if you're partial to railway timetables. Precise hours and timings are given for everything, and become vitally important in the later stages of the book.
Philpott passes the message up to a level of the British security services where it is shared with the Americans. They have spy satellites patrolling the earth and photographing every inch of Russia, especially secret installations. Recent satellite photos indicate that a well-established camp in the heart of Siberia has had an explosion and fire, and shows figures tramping amidst the ruins. The guy in charge of monitoring this, W. Murray Hendricks, calls in a second opinion, a naturalist who confirms that… the figures walking around appear to be… ape-men! They have the stance of men but… their arms and legs are the wrong shape!
This chimes with the opening section of prose right at the start of the book, a (characteristically unexplained) preface which appears to be a message written from someone working at a Russian security base, writing to a colleague who is about to join him. It describes the way a baby mammoth was found deeply embedded in ice, was chipped out and transported back to the base, where it turned out not to be a mammoth at all but a human, a woman lying on her side, who had fallen into a crevasse along with some bags and a tusk, and was heavily pregnant (big and bulky with tusks – that's what caused the initial mistaken diagnosis).
So we have learned that: a 40,000-year-old frozen pregnant woman is brought to a top secret Russian research base. Some time later, American satellite photos show ape-like men at a top secret Russian research base. Are we dealing with a 1990s version of The Island of Dr Moreau?
If we are, it takes a bloody long time to get there, because we are still with Philpott and Lazenby trying to interpret the coded and elliptical cigarette-paper message. Eventually it dawns on the Prof that the reference is to a dark-haired, native American from British Columbia, a man known by his clan name of 'Raven', a man he met at a scientific conference in Oxford some 15 years back, which had also been attended by some Russians.
About the Raven
The novel then switches to give us Raven's complicated biography. Christened Jean-Baptiste Porteur, he was brought up in the matrilinear society of the Gitksan people in the Skeena river region of British Columbia, north-west Canada, before being dumped into the care of a local missionary. Porteur was taught English enough to excel in his studies but then ran away to sea for a few years. Eventually he returned to settled society and took up serious studies, becoming known as Johnny Porter.
Porter is a super-gifted linguist, one of the few people to be in a position to make academic studies of the families of languages spoken by the natives of the Pacific North-West from the inside. He publishes work on the subject, is awarded a PhD and academic prizes, but remains, nonetheless, a surly non-player of the academic game.
Now he comes to think about it, Prof Lazenby remembers getting really drunk with Raven and another man, a Russian research scientist named Rogachev, at a conference in Oxford years ago. This Russian, Rogachev, then disappeared off the grid some 15 years ago, rumoured to have joined some secret research facility. They have (through a series of deductions which I found too obscure to follow) decided that the man sending the cigarette messages must be Rogachev. And that he wants to talk to Raven.
So then the CIA are tasked with tracking down Johnny Porter and find him in a remote fishing village in British Columbia. Lazenby flies out there accompanied by Philpott who hands him over to a fresh-faced young CIA man named Walters. The CIA are now heavily involved. At least I think it's the CIA. Langley is referred to (the world-famous headquarters of the CIA) but the agency itself is not mentioned explicitly. Davidson prefers to keep things shadowy and instead refers to 'the plan' which appears to be shared by the Brits and the Yanks.
They finally track down Porter to a backwoods cabin, and present him with all the evidence that Rogachev wants him to travel to a top secret Russian research base in deepest Siberia. In fact, its precise location is still unknown (I found this a little too obscure to understand: I thought they had satellite photos. Like most of the novel, these early passages required rereading to try and figure out what was going on, and even then I often gave up trying to understand the minutiae and just read on regardless.)
Raven becomes a Korean seaman
A vast amount of effort then goes in to describing Johnny's trip by tramp steamer from Japan up into the Arctic Ocean.
As soon as he said yes to the mission, Raven (shall I call him Raven or Porter? Raven has more mystique) was taken to some kind of camp where he was trained in spying and spycraft.
This experience, which took several months, is not actually described in the book, simply referred back to as and when necessary. During his time in 'the camp', the surly, secretive multilingual academic Raven has been rather magically transformed into a kind of superspy, a man who will turn out to be capable of carrying out secret rendezvous with other agents, of picking up new outfits and passports and changing identities and carrying himself off as a whole range of different people, fluent in an impressive array of languages (English, Japanese, Korean, half a dozen tribal languages and Russian) which I found increasingly unbelievable.
Thus the next chapter skips over the training camp episode to give us Raven flying into Tokyo where, with typical stubbornness, he promptly refuses to do what the Japanese CIA agent, Yoshi, tells him.
The CIA plan is for Raven to masquerade as a Korean merchant seaman aboard a Japanese tramp steamer, Suzaku Maru, which is scheduled to puff up along the northern, Arctic coast of Siberia, till it gets to the nearest port to the fabled research base.
I still didn't understand how they know where the base is, or how Johnny will know that, or how they know the ship will stop there, or anywhere nearby. Probably I should have reread the first hundred pages again, to try and piece together the highly elliptical clues. Davidson keeps his cards very close to his chest and only tells the reader the relevant bits of the plan, just before they fall due, and are about to kick in, sometimes only after they've happened. The result is a permanent sense of confusion.
Thus it was only a hundred pages later that the reader learns that 'they' (presumably the CIA) had approached one of the crew of this tramp steamer, Ushiba, and bribed him with a lot of money to take a pill which mimics the symptoms of yellow fever. He becomes extremely ill just as they dock in Japan. The captain transfers the sick sailor to an ambulance, and Raven just happens to be hanging round and have contacted the ship's manpower agencies, as it arrives. So he is quickly hired, masquerading as a rough Korean merchant seaman, Sun Wong Chu, complete with pigtail, speaking the language with a slight speech impediment to the Japanese crew, who despise and ignore Koreans anyway.
There's some tough sailor stuff, in particular a brutal fight with the bosun, who breaks his nose, but Raven works his passage and is gruffly accepted by the others. The 'plan' is for he himself to take a yellow fever pill so that, as the ship approaches Green Cape on the Arctic coast of Siberia, it is forced to put in to port and unload him. This he does, and the captain and bosun think he has somehow picked up the earlier sailor's disease, maybe from infected sheets, mattress etc.
He is treated at Green Cape hospital by several doctors including a woman, Dr Komarova. Then, in a move which bewildered me, Dr Komarova hands him over to the Russian militia who put him on a flight to Yakutsk, where he is transferred to an Aeroflot flight to Murmansk – because that is where the steamer Suzaku Maru, was heading and where, they assume, he will want to rejoin his ship once he is well.
Except that, after recovering for a day or two at a seaman's mission, Raven goes to a rendezvous with an agent, picks up from him a suitcase containing new clothes and identity papers, goes to the gents loos and shaves off all his hair and Korean pigtail, and emerges with a new identity as Nikolai (Kolya) Khodyan, a member of the Chukchee people from the Siberian east, and catches a plane to Irkutsk, changes to one to Yakutsk, then another local flight on to Tchersky, the nearest airport to Green Cape.
Hang on. If it was so easy to get there, to fly there – what was the point of the scam about him pretending to be a Korean sailor? Why the enormous complication of bribing the seaman he replace to take a pill giving him fever (and trusting that the feverish sailor wouldn't give away the plan) – and then making Raven grow a ponytail and pretend to be Korean for weeks, and get beaten up by the bosun and nearly crushed by dangerous equipment and then take the same damn pill and seriously endanger his health when… he could have just flown there in the first place?
I read all this carefully, but remained completely puzzled. I am obviously missing something and I would say that that sense – the nagging sense of missing some vital piece of the jigsaw – is the permanent and frustrating feeling given by reading this book.
So Raven is now Nikolai (Kolya) Khodyan. As planned, he proceeds to the vacant apartment of one Alexei Mikhailovitch Ponomarenko. It turns out that this man was on holiday in the Black Sea when he was approached by the CIA who knew he was a drug smuggler. They threatened to tell the authorities unless he extended his stay on the Black Sea and let his apartment in Tchersky be used by their man Raven. More, it turns out that Khodyan is a friend of Ponomarenko's, whose identity they have borrowed to create a 'legend' (fake identity) for Raven.
Raven discovers Ponomarenko had a gossipy old housekeeper, Anna, and a big brassy girlfriend, Lydia Yakovlevna, both of whom we are introduced to, and both need careful (though very different) handling. Our suave superspy is up to both challenges.
Once unpacked and settled in, Raven goes straight to the Tchersky Transport Company and get a job as a long-distance lorry driver. A great deal of description goes into detailing the work of truck companies in the frozen north of Siberia, and the organisation of this particular company, and the shouty director, Bukarovksy, and various foremen who Raven has to sweet-talk into getting a job – and then we learn a great deal about the different types of trucks.
Davidson very powerfully transports us to a completely strange world, with its language, customs, slang, prejudices and the sheer, backbreaking nature of the work. In summer everything melts, the ships can bring in goods but they can't be distributed because the countryside is a bog. In winter the ocean freezes over – no more ships – but so does the landscape and so trucks can now drive across it. Especially, it turns out, along the rivers, whose flat, deep-frozen-ice surfaces make perfect highways.
(Davidson gives historical background to the economy of the area, which began as appalling forced labour camps in the 1930s and 40s, but was transformed by the discovery of gold and other minerals in the 1960s to something like a viable, if gruelling, mining economy, pp.188-189)
Raven of course knows how to drive all the trucks (including the small, all-purpose 'bobik'). He has – by impersonating a Korean seaman, surviving a brutal fight with the bosun, surviving a bout of yellow fever, carrying out a secret rendezvous in an airport and completely transforming his appearance and emerging a fluent Chukchee-speaking truck driver – established himself as a kind of spy superman, speaking as many oriental languages as required and capable of blending in anywhere as a member of the minority Siberian native peoples.
Raven is signed up as a driver and does the work well, earning respect and friendship among the rough crews. At a party of truck drivers Raven is horrified to notice the woman doctor Komarova, who treated him as the sick Korean seaman a few weeks earlier, taking an inordinate interest in him. (Didn't anyone writing this grand plan foresee that he would meet one set of people as sick Korean and then, returning in a completely different guise, risked bumping into the same people again?)
She comes over and talks. She is interested that he is a Chukchee. She invites him to come and meet her mother who lives in a community of Chukchee. Raven goes and we meet the little old lady and her Chukchee friend who, it turns out (the Chukchee community being so small) was present at his birth!!
Luckily, Raven has memorised the 'legend' prepared for him so immaculately that he is able to talk to this old lady about his numerous relatives and their mutual acquaintances (all the time, obviously, speaking in Chukchee). I found this wildly improbable.
On the way back from the little tea party, Raven determines to kill the doctor who has been asking more and more suspicious questions about his background. He gets as far as putting his arm round her neck and is on the verge of snapping it (he is a big, strong lad) when she squeals that she is in on The Plan, she is part of The Plan, she is his contact with Rogachev!
After that they go back to her place, she explains some of the background (her father and Rogachev were in the same labour camp together; she knew him as a kindly uncle when she was a girl), and the big revelation that it was she who bribed a merchant seaman who she was treating to take the coded cigarette papers which Rogachev had smuggled out to her, placed in a letter and addressed to Prof Lazenby, the fateful letter which was opened by his secretary in her calm Oxford office all those months earlier.
Then they have sex. Obviously. Most women I know like to shag a man who's just tried to murder them.
She was not as well found as Lydia Yakovlevna; lankier, less yielding. But she was lithe, controlled, and quite used, as she said, to getting what she wanted. She was also very much more genuine, arching without histrionics when her moment came, and he arched at the same time, and afterwards she kissed his face and stroked it. (p.247)
Now they work together to smuggle Raven into the research base. This new plan stretched credibility to breaking point and beyond. It turns out the research base is very heavily patrolled and guarded (of course), but is serviced by a rotating squad of native Evenk people, selected from the large Evenk tribe which makes a living herding reindeer nearby. The Evenk are honest and reliable and deeply clannish i.e. don't talk to outsiders, and, anyway, don't do anything more secret than laundry, cooking, humping heavy equipment about. None of them has any idea what the research going on at the base is about.
Dr Komarova will smuggle Raven in by using a ruse. The ruse is this:
Rogachev, head of the research station, is attended by one of the Evenk tribe, Stepan Maximovich. Stepan inherited the job from his father. He never leaves the base. Raven will be taken to meet the clan leader of the tribe, Innokenty, and pretend to be one of them, an Evenk, but who moved as a boy to Novosibirsk in the distant south (to explain his rickety accent). He will then give a long complicated story about how he met down in the south some members of a white (Russian) family, worked for them, got to know and admire them, but how the father, some kind of scientist, was sent by the state off to some kind of 'weather station' in the north 15 or 16 years earlier. Money was sent the family, but no letters, Then the mother of the family died young, but the daughter survived, grew up, got married and is now pregnant. But she herself is now ill. A few months ago he got a letter from the daughter begging to see him. Raven goes sees her and she begs him to track down her father for her, name of Rogachev. He poked around in local offices and got a hint that M. Rogachev was posted somewhere in the Kolyma region. This woman begged Raven to travel to the north to find her father, and ask him to give her unborn child a name, it being the role of parents to name new babies.
This sob story will persuade the Evenk to smuggle Raven into the top secret research facility, hand him on to the personal assistant Stepan, who is the only one who can gain him admittance to the presence of the legendary scientist, Rogachev – so that Raven can hand deliver to him the letter written by his daughter.
And this is what happens. Dr Komarov takes Raven to a meeting with Innokenty and the tribe (flying there by helicopter on the pretext of making a routine medical visit). The Evenk elders completely accept Raven's long cock-and-bull story (pp.262-268). They offer to give him all the help he needs (incidentally, also accepting his use of the Evenk language, which is different from the Chukchee Raven has been using in his persona as Kolya. He is, it will be remembered, a super-linguist).
There then follows the cloak and dagger business of smuggling Raven into the site. Raven poses as the driver of a lorry full of parts and goods which Dr Komarova is taking to the base. They pass through the security barrier, the guards checking her and her Chukchee driver (Raven)'s passes and wave through. Then, as is usual, some of the Evenk porters come out into the snow to help unpack the truck in the sub-zero conditions.
Komarova chooses a moment when the guards' backs are turned and Raven swaps clothes with one of the Evenk tribesmen. This Evenk dresses as Raven, then accompanies Pomarova back to the truck, heavily swathed in scarves and muffles and is signed back out of the complex, while Raven, also heavily muffled, is accepted on the inside by the cohort of Evenk tribesmen currently working there – because they are all in on the conspiracy of him smuggling the letter from the pregnant woman to Rogachev, as agreed off by headman Innokenty. In fact they are almost too much in on the conspiracy as they all smile and grin and wink at the doctor and Raven so much they become tensely afraid the Russian guards will notice something is wrong. But they don't. They think the native peoples are nuts, anyway.
There follows yet more cloak and dagger as, late that night, when the Evenk have gone to bed in their dormitory, Stepan the personal assistant comes and smuggles Raven out of the Evenk dormitory, through secret passages in the research base, and finally into an enormous luxury underground library, with a gallery running round the bookshelves dotted with masterpiece paintings by Picasso, Rembrandt and so on, and leaves him there.
There's a whirring of motors and Rogachev, the man who started this whole preposterous series of events, whirs into the library in his wheelchair. Wheelchair. That explains why he couldn't have gone anywhere to meet a western representative.
First Raven explains the subterfuge which has got him this far, i.e. that he's delivering a letter to Stepan from his pregnant but ill grand-daughter, and they get an envelope and scribble on a blank sheet which Raven can show to the Evenks as the grateful father's reply.
That out of the way, Rogachev can at last explain to Raven, and to the impatient reader, what the devil the whole thing is about. What it's about is this:
The mystery at the heart of Kolymsky Heights
Rogachev tells Raven that the Russians have been experimenting for generations to try and breed a type of intelligent but hardy ape who can function as labour in this bleak, sub-freezing terrain.
(I blinked in disbelief at this point. We know that during the 1930s, 40s and 50s they used slave labour to work these areas. If Russians don't want to do it nowadays, why not pay the local tribespeople, or do what the rest of the West does and import cheap immigrant labour? Breeding an entire new species seems a rather costly and unpredictable way of solving your labour problem, the kind of fantasy idea which only exists in science fiction novels.)
Rogachev tells a cock-and-bull story (this novel is full of them) about his predecessor, Zhelikov, being in a labour camp, but being plucked out and flown to Moscow after the war to meet the great Stalin because the dictator had read a scientific paper about hibernation. This planted the seed in Stalin's mind that he might not die but be preserved alive. Zhelikov listened to Stalin's musings and realised they were his passport out of the labour camp, and so nodded wisely, and agreed to set up a research base to bring suspended animation / hibernation/ cryogenics to the peak of perfection which would be required before they could try it on the Great Leader. Stalin rang up Beria and told him to make it so.
Zhelikov asked that the existing weather research base at Tcherny Vodi, near the labour camp of Tchersky, be greatly expanded. They'd have to dig down into the small mountain it was built on, to build multiple levels below the surface, levels for scientists, for ancillary workers, all the laboratories and so on. Stalin said, Make it so.
With the result that the best of Soviet engineering built the James Bond-style secret underground base which Raven now finds himself in, quaffing sherry amid the bookshelves, surrounded by masterpieces by Mondrian and Matisse. All quite bizarre. I didn't know if I was meant to take this as a parody of a James Bond movie, where the mad scientist reveals his plan for world domination amid symbols of uber-wealth and corruption. All it needed was for Rogachev to be stroking a white cat. Are we meant to take it seriously?
Once the base was established Zhelikov wrote to Rogachev describing the work they were doing and inviting him to join. So he came and had been there ever since.
Now the mad scientist in the wheelchair introduces Raven to his star patient. It is an ape named Ludmilla, lying in bed in a dress, wearing lipstick and glasses and reading. She says hello to Raven. Raven says hello to Ludmilla. The reader wonders if he is hallucinating.
Rogachev explains that the research program to breed intelligent apes made great advances but suffered a fatal flaw: they found they could produce either intelligent apes, or hardy apes, but never the two together. They had been exploring all aspects of the problem including brain circuitry. The discovery of the pregnant neolithic woman and her foetus led to a breakthrough, but not the one they were expecting.
By a series of accidents the research stumbled across discoveries to do with eyesight. Davidson goes into mind-numbing but incomprehensible detail as Rogachev describes the step-by-step progress made, first with rats, then with experimental apes, by which they blinded the subjects – but then used a 'harmonic wave' which they had accidentally stumbled across, and which turned out to 'restore eyesight' (explained from page 315 onwards).
This 'harmonic wave' had several practical applications and Rogachev shows Raven one of them. Turns out Ludmilla the talking ape had been badly injured in the explosion at the research lab which had been detected by American satellites all those months earlier. Her eyes had been damaged and infected (the explosion released some kind of contamination, we aren't told what).
The point is that Russian grasp of this harmonic wave technology is so advanced that they were able to build a) glasses which convert light into digital information which is then b) transported along wires in the wings of the glasses to electrical contacts which c) interact with contacts embedded behind the subjects' ears, contacts which they have wired up to the optical regions of the subject's brain so that d) the blind can see through their glasses!
All this is taking us a long, long way from the initial idea of ape-men and H.G. Wells. Now we are curing the blind. But even this turns out not to be the secret at the book's core.
Because tests of the harmonic band wave had another unforeseen consequence: it completely disrupts the electrical signals which are used to direct guided and intercontinental missiles. By accident, the base has stumbled over a perfect defence system against all kinds of missile attack!
Rogachev now hands Raven two of the shiny square plates which we used to call computer floppy disks, back in the early 90s (p.326). These floppy disks contain all the information needed to recreate the Russian experiments and build harmonic wave machines and so develop their own anti-missile defences. But they must be opened in laboratory conditions, at lower than 240 degrees below freezing, or they will self-destruct.
I will die soon, Rogachev says (he, too, was infected in the explosion and fire). These will be my legacy. Goodbye. And he turns and whirs out of the room in his wheelchair. Raven goes back to the main door and a few minutes later Stepan opens it and lets him out, they retrace their steps to the Evenk dormitory and smuggle him in. In the morning Raven tells the Evenk that the grateful father has given him a letter and a ring to hand on to his beloved daughter. the Evenk think he is a hero and grin at their own involvement in the kind-hearted plot. A few days later Dr Komarova returns for more medical treatment and Raven is again swapped for the Evenk driver, this time the other way round, the Evenk returning to the dormitory, Raven reverting to his role as driver, driving Dr Komarova out of the complex and away, back to Tchersky. Mission accomplished. Well, first part anyway.
Unfortunately, there are two complications. One, at a literally very high level, is that the Chinese launch two test rockets during this period, designed to fly the length of China. Both fail due to direction mechanism failure. Davidson takes us into the nitty gritty of the designs and the failures but the upshot is they're being interfered with by Russian satellites which hover in fixed position way up over the Asian landmass. Is this going to become important? Are the Chinese going to interfere in the story somewhere?
Closer to home, the drug dealer Ponomarenko, unhappy by the rainy Black Sea, hears on the radio that the state is announcing an amnesty for drug dealers. He checks with a lawyer and the cops and then comes forward to report that he has been blackmailed into lending his flat in Tchersky to some dodgy operators, who also wanted to know all about his friend Nikolai (Kolya) Khodyan.
The Black sea cops contact the small police office in Tchersky. They put out a warrant for Kolya/Raven. Dr Komorova hears about it in her capacity as a senior government official in the region. She warns Raven. One escape plan had been for Raven to fly out of the region. Or maybe take another ship. Both now impossible with the authorities checking all papers. Good job he had made a back-up plan.
The bobik
The whole Siberian section of the story has taken several months, during which Raven has wormed his way into the good books of the Tchersky Transport Company, undertaking long distance and countless short distance drives for them. The 'plan' had made provision for 'extracting' him from the location once the mission was accomplished. But Raven is stroppy and contrary by nature and had begun to make an independent escape plan. Just as well.
This plan is to a) cosy up to the chief engineer at the Tchersky Transport Company and b) persuade him to let him have all the component which make up a bobik light truck so he can build one himself from scratch.
On one of his many delivery trips around the region Raven has discovered a big cave, hidden by frozen bushes, big enough to turn into a workshop where he can secure a block and tackle to the ceiling, instal lamps around the place, store food, a sleeping bag and blankets – and then, slowly steadily, week after week, persuade the head engineer at Tchersky, to let him have more and more pieces of bobik and drop them off at the cave, and build a truck from scratch, by himself!
Implausible doesn't seem an adequate word to describe how wildly improbable and unnecessary I found this. Why not just pile Dr Pomarova and a load of food into one of the existing bobiks he gets to use perfectly legally, set off on a long, perfectly legal trip, and just keep going? No. In Davidson's story, he has to build his own!
The Tchersky militia led by Major Militsky become more officious and search every house. Raven hides in Dr Komarova's cellar. Then she drives him out to the cave with food and he does back-breaking work constructing the bobik. She is due to come next night at midnight. Is hours late. He goes out to watch. Tension, stress.
She turns up with food and the battery, the last component needed to complete the bobik, and news that the hunt is getting serious. In fact it has become a region-wide hunt and a general from Irkutsk has flown in to take charge of it. Pomorova tells Raven how much she loves him. Oh darling. Oh sweet man. Yes, yes, says Raven, but realises that she is the only official allowed into Tcherny Vodi. They will interrogate her. They go over her story, trying to plant red herrings. Then kiss goodbye. 'I will see you again, won't I, my love?' She asks. 'Of course,' he replies, lying.
She leaves. He tries to sleep. He can't. He gets up and starts the bobik and inches out onto the frozen river. Half an hour later a military patrol passes by. He has got out just in time.
Raven on the run
Raven drives east. On the map there is a tributary of the main river-highroad which the map says is impassible. It is certainly strewn with rocks embedded in the ice, but he drives slowly and carefully and the bobik is designed to be indestructible. After several hours Raven comes to a hump-backed bridge which carries the highway from Tchersky to Bilibino (p.377). At a succession of Road Stations, Raven cruises in silently with his lights doused, parks and siphons petrol from the tanks of other bobiks in the car parks, the drivers tucked up inside the warm lodges. Not weather to be outside. He is heading east into a big range of mountains known as the Kolymsky Heights. Aha.
In parallel, a security forces general flies into Tchersky from Irkutsk and takes charge of the search. Having interrogated Ponomarenko, he realises this is a sophisticated spying project mounted by foreign powers. He realises the agent will have left the area. He orders all transport within a 500 mile radius to be frozen and checked.
Basically these last 100 pages turn into quite a nailbiting chase, Raven a clever resourceful fugitive, pitted against the General who is also a very intelligent and thorough investigator. While Raven drives East in a bobik the General is misled by several false clues into telling his forces to search to the south for a missing rubbish truck. But when that avenue runs dry, follows other clues, until he is right on the tail of our man.
The cold calculation of the fugitive, and the clever deductions of the general (I don't think we're ever given his name) reminded me strongly of the similar set-up in Frederick Forsyth's classic thriller The Day of the Jackal. A chase.
Raven drives on on on through the snow, hiding under bridges for snatched sleep, surviving on bread and salami, driving over a thousand kilometers, with a number of close shaves, and just squeezing past security barriers along the way, until he arrives at a tiny settlement named Baranikha which has an airport sure enough, but no flights in our out due to a fierce blizzard.
Raven hooks up with a drunk Inuit who he lets drink all his vodka till he passes out, whereupon Raven takes his coat and boots and backpack and skis and identity papers and hustles himself onto the first plane which is now leaving the airport as the snow lifts, to a tiny place out east, towards the Bering Strait, named Mitlakino.
Here he signs in with a jostling noisy scrum of other workers but in the dead of night retrieves his papers, backpack and steals a snowplough. The geography now becomes crucial. Baranikha and Mitlakino are way out at the easternmost tip of Siberia, on the blocky peninsula which sticks out into the Bering Strait and faces on to Alaska. Raven hadn't planned it this way, it was pure fluke that the only plane flying from the airport was heading here. But now he's here he conceives the plan of crossing the Bering Strait from the Russian side to the American side, and freedom. (Although Davidson nowhere explicitly explains this, the reader eventually deduces that at this time of year – the winter solstice – the Bering Strait is completely frozen over. Since it is only 50 miles wide, a man could walk it, admittedly hampered by the fog, snow and frequent blizzards.)
To cut a long story short, the security general has caught up with Raven's trail, they've found the drunk Inuit at the airport as he sobers up and complains that someone's stolen his papers, they've followed the trail to the workers dormitory at Mitlakino, the general yells down the phone to the dopy head of the Mitlakino settlement who does a search and discovers a snowplough is missing. They deduce Raven must be heading to the coast and the general dispatches helicopters from a nearby military base.
The border between America and Russia runs down the middle of the Bering Strait. There are two islands there, the Greater Diomede Island is on the Russian side of the sea border, the Lesser Diomede Island is on the American side.
Raven drives his snowplough through a blizzard along the coast till he gets to a settlement called Veyemik. He hides the plough and knocks on the door of the biggest house, waking the headman of the local tribe of native peoples, Inuit. Here he pretends to be an Inuit on the run from the authorities. The people take him in. Next morning they all go out fishing to iceholes they cut in the deep frost covering the sea. Raven asks to go with them. They take him in a motorised ski-bus out to the hole where the Inuits split up to fish different holes. Raven has asked a series of questions establishing that they are almost within sight of Greater Diomede Island. He slips away from the Indians and sets out on skis.
But there is unusual helicopter activity overhead. The general has figured out where he is, and even has men at Veyemik interrogating the inhabitants, and now knows the fugitive is out on the ice. The general mobilises the defence forces on Greater Diomede who turn out in ski busses, little ski scooters and on skis. Plus the helicopters overhead.
After some complicated hide and seek, during which Raven, in the ongoing blizzard fog, isolates and knocks out a security soldier and steals all his equipment, he eventually realises the general has created a solid wall of trucks and soldiers with headlights and torches on, 250m from the border. Raven climbs up a cliff on the eastern side of Greater Diomede and hides in a cave, but then a helicopter flies slowly low along the cliff, guiding a truck of soldiers which uses a mortar to fire gas mortars into every cave. Raven tucks himself back against the wall but the mortar which shoots into his cave bounces on to his chest and explodes leaving him deaf and half blind. Only a little later do we discover it blew out one of his eyes.
Half-blinded he crawls to the cave entrance and shoots down the militia in the jeep, then half climbs half falls to the ground, crawls to the jeep, and half drives it. The chase becomes horrible now, as the militia close in and shoot out the tyres and lob mortars at the engine (the general has shouted down the phone to the local commander that the fugitive must be taken alive). A mortar detonates on the bonnet which blows shards of metal into Raven's body. He cannot hear and barely drive or think. The wrecked jeep slews in circles but…
Once again and for the final time I was confused by Davidson's elliptical descriptions and by the way he intrudes into this vivid description, parallel accounts of the aftermath and what the Russian authorities discovered in the cave and along Raven's trail. All of this fooled me into thinking he made it just to the edge of the international border but was captured by the Russkies.
Which turns out to be wrong. The first the reader realises of this is when we are told that Raven is being rushed to hospital in Anchorage. I.e., although it is nowhere explicitly stated that he crossed the border, and there is no description of anything the American troops did on their side or how his body was recovered or anything – next we know we have entered a different type of register as the book becomes like an official record of events, describing at high-level the transport of the body. Then we are told that Raven's severely injured body packs up and he dies. Lost one eye, blinded in the other, shot through one knee, chest cluttered with shrapnel, lost one lung, it packs up and Raven dies. His funeral is attended by officials from Russia, who apologise for this sorry incident and for how a confused native must have wandered by accident into a military exercise. And who, naturally, make a note of everyone who attends the funeral.
Which is why none of the CIA officials attend, obviously. In fact no-one attends except the mortician and coroner.
But another reason no-one attends is that Raven isn't dead. Davidson's last trick in this very tricksy narrative is the not-altogether-unexpected revelation that the agency spirited the heavily-wounded Raven away to a super-advanced hospital, and swapped his boy with that of an unknown vagrant who had been – very conveniently – run over and trashed. That's the heavily-bandaged body which is placed in a coffin and whose funeral the Russkies attend and who is cremated.
Meanwhile, Raven recuperates, given the best medical treatment the agency can provide.
And, in the final pages, there is the ring. You may recall that Rogachev gave Raven a ring, supposedly a blessing to his 'daughter', part of the cover story which got Raven into the compound. The ring was in fact Rogachev's weeding ring which, knowing he is soon to die, he gives to Rogachev. Inside is engraved the motto As our love the circle has no end. After he'd been extracted from the base, among many other things Raven showed the ring to Dr Komarova, who has fallen deeply in love with him. Later, after he has fled the tightening net, Komarova goes to check out the cave where Raven had built the bobik. He has very professionally completely emptied it of every trace of his presence (loading it into the bobik and disposing of most of it in faraway ravines on his escape drive east). But she finds a small scrap of paper scrunged up. Inside is the ring with its motto.
Now, on the last page of the book, Dr Komarova has quit her job in Kolymsk and moved west to Petersburg (despite a shrewd interrogation by the general, she managed to throw the investigators off her trail and survived the whole episode without reproach). And three months later she receives a letter, containing an open-ended air ticket to Montreal, an immigration department slip bearing her correct name and passport number. And tucked away at the bottom of the envelope a tiny slip of cigarette paper bearing a single line of writing: As our love the circle has no end.
As love stories go, it has to be one of the weirdest I've ever read, but then the entire novel is meticulously detailed, powerfully atmospheric, often completely preposterous, sometimes incomprehensible but despite everything, exerted a very powerful tug on my imagination and memory.
There are four maps in the novel (more than you sometimes get in history books). Good quality ones, too, showing
the whole of northern Asia (pp.32-33)
the coast of British Columbia, where Lazenby and the CIA man go to find Raven (p.76)
Cape Dezhnev and Bering Strait region (p.158)
the Kolymsky Region (p.417)
But there is the same sense of oddity or something wrong about these as theres is over the whole book. Very simply, the two latter maps should be reversed.
The central section of the novel is set in the Kolymsky region, so the detailed map of the area – which shows Cape Green where the ship docks, Tchersky where the doctor lives and Raven gets his job on the lorries, the location of the research centre and even of the cave he discovers and uses to build his bobik – quite obviously this map should go at the beginning of that section instead of where it is actually positioned, well after that whole section has finished (?)
Whereas it is only on page 410 that we first hear of the small settlement of Mitlakino and Raven decides to take the plane there. At which point the precise geography of the area becomes vital to his plans for escape, and for the final nailbiting descriptions of his escape across the ice – and so this is where the map of Cape Dezhnev and Bering Strait should go – not 250 pages earlier, where it was completely irrelevant and didn't register as important. It wasn't important, yet.
Is this an editorial mistake, a mistake in the printing of the book? Or yet another subtle way of blindsiding the reader and keeping us puzzled, as the suppression of so many other key facts in the narrative succeeded in puzzling me all the way through.
Flat descriptions Although the book is set in some dazzling and awe-inspiring landscapes (the seascapes and frozen landscapes of Siberia) Davidson is not that at descriptions. He gives the facts, but they rarely come to life. Here's an example of his prose.
He got up and walked about the room. In a recess beside the stove an icon was on the wall. The stove was cold, the house now electrically heated, very stuffy, very warm. Books were everywhere, on shelves, tables. He couldn't make out the titles in the dark. (p.243)
You can see the bit of effort Davidson has made to create something more than flat factual description in the use of the verbless phrases 'very stuffy, very warm'. Not very inspiring, though, is it?
Martin Cruz Smith's sequel to Gorky Park, Polar Star, finds his Moscow detective, Arkady Renko way off his beat, working on a factory ship in the Bering Sea. It's the same location as the coastal scenes of Kolymsky Heights, at about the same time (Polar Star 1989, Kolymsky Heights 1994). Smith's book is sensationally vivid in description and atmosphere. I think it's the best of the eight Renko novels because you can feel the icy temperature, the salt spray in your face, the harshness of frozen metal.
None of that is captured by Davidson's prose. It is flat and functional. Eventually, by dint of repetition of the facts, you get the powerful sense of brain-numbing cold, of ice and snow and blizzards. But it is done rationally, by repetition of factual information, not by the style.
Instead of jazzy and vivid description, Davidson has a few mannerisms of his own.
Echoing One is a kind of dumb, blank repetition of events. Very often he'll end a paragraph saying so-and-so plans to do x, y or z. And then the next paragraph begins with 'And so-and-so did x, y, or z.'
'I have thought how this could be managed'.
He explained how this could be managed. (p.306)
He was contacting them himself immediately.
Which, immediately, he did. (p.443)
It's a kind of rhetorical echolalia. It doesn't add to atmosphere or even tension. The opposite. I found it helped harden the colourless carapace of Davidson's prose, often making it even harder to work out what was happening and, in particular, why.
I suppose, it also creates an effect of inevitability. Someone says something is going to happen. And that's what happens. Maybe the effect is to create a subtle sense of fatefulness and predestination, to give the narrative a very slightly mythic quality.
'Sure, Kolya. You'll take the job – just when we get the call.'
And they got the call, and he got the job. (p.197)
It all falls into place, more as if it's a myth or legend or fairy tale, than an ordinary sequence of contingent human events.
Phrase reversal Another tic is reversing the usual structure of an English sentence, from subject-verb-object to object-subject-verb.
His present job he greatly disliked. (p.281)
With his security chief Beria he had discussed this idea. (p.299)
This idea he suddenly found himself discussing in the most bizarre circumstances… (p.300)
The route to Anyuysk she knew, and he stayed under a blanket in the back while she drove. (p.348)
This ridiculous situation he had promptly ordered Irkutsk to deal with… (p.385)
It's a stylistic mannerism, a not very successful attempt to jazz up Davidson's generally flat prose.
I suppose it might be argued that playing with the word order of conventional English like this goes a little way towards mimicking the various foreign languages that are spoken in the book, and maybe creating a sense of the 'otherness' of Russia and the Russian-speakers who the second half is set amongst. Maybe.
Her intense nervousness she covered with an air of impatience. (p.386)
To Zirianka a long-distance helicopter was required… (p.404)
Italics In the extended account of Raven's meeting with Innokenty and the Evenks, Davidson used an excessive amount of italics to make his points, often rather unnecessarily. This reminded me of John le Carré's nugatory use of italics to try and make his dialogue more dramatic.
Since they started their careers at almost the same time, this made me wonder if it's a feature of the fiction of the time: was there something about emphasis in the late 1950s, a historic idiolect from that period which lingered on in their prose styles.
If they merely hovered over his route, they would catch him now. How far, in three or four minutes, could he have gone? (p.444)
For me, the random use of italics didn't intensify the reading experience but created a rather annoying distraction.
Gaps and absences
I read the book with a permanent sense that I kept missing key bits of information about who was going where, and why.
Unless this is simply part of Davidson's technique: to leave key bits of information and motivation out of the novel so as to leave the reader permanently off-balance.
Possibly, a second reading of the book, knowing in advance information which is only revealed later on in the text, would help you make sense of all the hints and obliquities early on in the narrative. Maybe the pattern only fully emerges after several readings. Maybe this is why Philip Pullman is liberally quoted on the front, the back and in the short introduction he provides for the book, describing it as 'the best thriller he's ever read'. In the introduction he says he's arrived at this opinion after reading the book four times. Maybe that's the amount of effort required to see the full pattern. But certain inexplicabilities would still remain: why did Raven undertake the long sea voyage if he could just have flown to Tchersky any day of the week? And nothing can eliminate the truly bizarre scene where Raven shakes hands with an ape in a dress named Ludmilla. The final hundred pages of fast-paced chase revert to something like conventional thriller style. But shaking hands with a talking ape? I still have to shake my head to be sure I actually read that. Did someone spike my drink?
Kolymsky Heights on Amazon
Lionel Davidson Wikipedia article
Posted in Adventure, Spy novel, Thriller
Tagged 1994, Alexei Ponomarenko, America, ape-man, Baranikha, Beria, Bering Straits, bobik, British Columbia, Cape Dezhnev, Chukchee, CIA, code, Dr Komarova, espionage, Evenk, Gitksan, gold, Greater Diomede Island, Green Cape, gulag, Inuit, Irkutsk, Japan, Jean-Baptiste Porteur, John Le Carre, Kolymsky Heights, Korea, labour camps, Lesser Diomede Island, Lionel Davidson, Lydia Yakovlevna, mammoth, Martin Cruz Smith, Miss Sonntag, Mitlakino, Murmansk, Nikolai Khodyan, Oxford, Philpott, Polar Star, Professor Lazenby, Raven, Rogachev, Russia, science fiction, Scientific Services, Siberia, spy, Stalin, Stepan Maximovich, Suzaku Maru, talking ape, Tcherny Vodi, Tchersky, The Night of Wenceslas, Tokyo, Veyemik, W. Murray Hendricks, Yakutsk, yellow fever, Yoshi
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/02/24/kolymsky-heights-lionel-davidson/
Emily Carr @ Dulwich Picture Gallery
This is the first UK exhibition dedicated to Emily Carr (1871-1945), according to the curators one of Canada's most beloved and famous artists although, like most Brits, I'd never heard of her. Carr never married and had no significant relationships, instead dedicating her life to recording the vanishing monuments of the native peoples and the wild landscape of her native British Columbia. It is a fascinating show, the latest in Dulwich Picture Gallery's long track record of small but wonderfully inspiring exhibitions.
Carr was the fifth daughter of a merchant who was able to fund her art studies. Her parents died when she was young, and she had to struggle against her elder sisters' wishes that she find a good husband and settle down – instead she was determined to pursue her artistic ambitions, travelling to San Francisco to study art in the 1890s. Later in the decade and through into the early 1900s she was in London studying painting, with a spell at St Ives too. So she was starting her career right at the birth of Modern Art, as the Fauves were exploring more violent colour contrasts, as Picasso and Braque were about to invent cubism, as the pace of artistic experimentation accelerated in the years just before the Great War.
Young Emily Carr in San Francisco, age 21 or 22, c. 1893 (courtesy of the Royal BC Museum, BC Archives)
The Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibition wing has six rooms, so Carr's career is divided into six sections. For some artists this six-fold division is used to highlight different subjects or media, but for Carr it really brings out how strikingly different her style and approach was at different points of her career.
The first room shows many of her early tree and forest paintings. She had a special affinity for trees, especially the tall, muscular cedar trees which characterise British Columbia. They are like twisting columns among the sombre dark-green foliage. A classic example here is Tree Trunk (1931). Among the studies of trees is a famous image, Indian Church (1929).
Emily Carr, Indian Church, 1929, oil on canvas (Art Gallery of Ontario, Bequest of Charles S. Band, Toronto)
Reproductions don't convey how intense, claustrophobic and brooding this painting is. The commentary explains there was just such a church in the woods but Carr brought the forest much closer than it was in real life, bunched the gravestones closer up against the building, and made the church striking white against the threatening greens of the encroaching forest. It symbolises her white, European ancestry and artistic heritage, set against the fathomless depth and power of wild, unEuropean nature.
The commentary made the telling point that though she did hundreds of tree paintings, there are no leaves. Being familiar with the botanical drawings of Marianne North among others, or the feathery leaf technique of Thomas Gainsborough, I realise this was a very deliberate choice. Her foliage comes in blocks. It is similar in feel to the cubist or vorticist feel for blocks, cubes, rectangles, cones. Nature, for Carr, is forces and directions of energy, rather than fragile detail.
In the 1860s a wave of epidemics, mostly smallpox, swept through the native people of British Columbia, decimating them. Entire villages were wiped out and their buildings, artefacts and striking totem poles left to rot. This was the strange abandoned landscape Carr grew up into in the 1890s. Once she had discovered her first native villages she became obsessed with recording them before they decayed forever, reclaimed by the forest. The result was hundreds of watercolours and oil paintings of totem poles and the other statuary of the natives.
All of these have, I imagine, considerable historical and anthropological importance, but almost all of them are striking and hauntingly beautiful.
Emily Carr, Tanoo, Queen Charlotte Island, BC, 1913 (Image courtesy of Royal BC Museum, BC Archives, Canada)
In this, one of the most famous images, note the use of Cezanne-like inch-long rectangles of paint, the blocky effect, visible all over, but particularly in the clouds and especially in the grass.
Haida Totems, Cha-atl
Tsatsisnukomi, B.C.
and many many more images of totems. Two things stick out for me. 1. These are ruins. No humans anywhere. The same accusation could be made as was made against the English Lake District poets and painters – Nature is a refuge from the messiness of human life, human relationships, above all from the world of work, earning the money to buy the food to stay alive. 2. Like all ruins, they come with a ready-made emotional appeal. (cf Tate's exhibition on Ruin Lust). The gaunt accuracy of her works contrasts with the actual crumbling decay, poignantly.
Late 20s modernism
Then she packed it in. Sometime during the Great War Carr stopped painting in oil or watercolour and took to other things, dog breeding, according to the commentary, which includes photographs of her looking very happy surrounded by her animals. She had got no recognition, sold nothing, made no money. Decided to call it a day.
Some 15 years later, in 1927, a gallery out East decided to have an exhibition about paintings of the Canadian landscape and someone suggested Carr. She sent nearly 30 works and found herself famous! She was invited to attend the exhibition and met the Group of Seven young painters who'd come together to forge a native Canadian style. She found herself praised as a forebear of their attempts and, amid the adulation and praise, was encouraged to take up her brush again.
What she produced from 1927 through the mid-1930s is strikingly different from the earlier work. It is much more modernist, even Vorticist in feel, the subject matter (nature, trees, forest, totem poles – no people) more chunky, stripped down to create solid blocks of thick colour.
Emily Carr, Big Eagle, Skidigate, B.C. c. 1930, Watercolour on paper (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Donated in memory of Dorothy Plaunt Dyde)
Three Totems (1929)
Blunden Harbour (1930)
Totem Mother, Kitwancool
Just as you're getting your head around Carr's progression from late-Victorian realist watercolour through Fauvism and cubism influences to the blocky 1930s style – you walk into the 5th room to discover a dozen or more paintings in a completely different style. The subject is still nature, forest, trees, but she has invented a new technique, based on using petrol to soften the paint once it is on the canvas and stir and spread it around in spools and wisps of colour. This experimental new technique creates a light, flowing style utterly unlike the heavy dark blocks of colour from earlier in the 1930s.
Emily Carr, Happiness, 1939, Oil on paper (University of Victoria Art Collection, Gift of Nikolai and Myfanwy Pavelic)
Windswept trees (1938)
Sunshine and tumult
Note the emphasis on the play of light and the effect of wind, light and wind on slender trees – completely different from the heavy, static, claustrophobic images of the forest which the exhibition opened with. Many of them have the expressionist swirling of paint around the main subject reminiscent of Edvard Munch.
Scorned as timber, beloved of the sky – according to the commentary this painting approaches 'iconic status' in Canada
Final room
The final room shows yet another change in style: her last paintings, done in the late 1930s/early 1940s, are of light over the sea, beaches, the coast. According to the catalofue, 'euphoric sky paintings, rhythmic light-filled beach scenes and clear-cut landscapes'. It would be nice to end on a positive note, but for me these don't work. The technique they all adopt of thick lines of paint – presumably an attempt to catch the infinitely subtle play of light on water, or sunlight between clouds – fail.
Emily Carr, Untitled (Seascape) 1935, Oil on paper mounted on board (The Art Gallery of Greater Victoria)
Cosmic power: sea and sky
Far more interesting are the couple of large paintings of decorated canoes drawn up by the sea or lake shore. The first is an accurate but rather insipid watercolour from 1908. Next to it hang two large oil paintings from 1912, just 4 years later, but a world away. Carr has been exposed to the Fauves and taken on board their experiments with colour: using colour not in relation to the 'real world' but in relation to the other colours in the palette and being used in the painting: so that shadows become purple or green, hillsides can be red or yellow (lessons about colour conveyed so brilliantly in the National Gallery's recent exhibition about Making Colour). Gauguin in Canada.
Canoes, watercolour (1908)
Canoe, oil (1912)
Canoes, Alert Bay (1912)
Emily Carr, Indian War Canoe (Alert Bay), 1912, Oil on cardboard (The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Purchase, gift of A. Sidney Dawes)
Native Indian artefacts
In two of the rooms, in addition to the paintings there are display cases containing 30 or so native Indian artefacts, carved objects and tools made by the peoples whose ruined villages and totems Carr recorded so dedicatedly. They included: helmet with bear, gull mask, raven ladle, octopus spoon, sheep horn feast dish, frog mask, soul catcher, shaman's amulet, dance wand, oyster catcher rattle.
Female mask with labret, c.1820-1830, Carved alder wood mask (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
The audio commentary had many of them explained by James Hart, a Haida hereditary chief and master carver; there was one particularly long piece where he described the myths surrounding the important figure of the raven in native mythology.
The aim, I think, is to give a sense of the Indian culture which she was painting and I certainly thought they had a tremendous depth and elegance. The historical and cultural authenticity of the native artefacts, as well as the resonance of mythical imagination behind the objects which depicted faces of animals, shamans and totems, are like gateways into a really strange and alien universe of belief and practice.
They give you a sense of Carr's startling ambition to try and match and capture their weird insight. In her day she was a bold and imaginative pioneer, heroic in her determination to seek out the ruined villages, sometimes hundreds of miles from the nearest white settlement, to stay there day after day, often on her own, trying to catch the secrets of these haunting objects by the equally mysterious process of covering thin canvas surfaces with strokes of coloured oil.
Towards the end of her life she described her adventures among the native peoples and their art in a best-selling book, Klee Wyck.
Emily Carr in her studio, 1939, by Harold Mortimer-Lamb (Promised Gift to the Vancouver Art Gallery from Claudia Beck and Andrew Gruft)
This is a great show about a fascinating, strong and uncompromising artist. It's been extended to mid-March. Go see.
From the Forest to the Sea: Emily Carr in British Columbia @ Dulwich Picture Gallery
DPG press release about Carr
Emily Carr Wikipedia article
Totem poles of British Columbia
Carr alongside contemporaries
Guardian review
Biography on the Vancouver Art Gallery website
Klee Wyck on Amazon
Other Dulwich Picture Gallery exhibitions
The Amazing World of M.C. Escher (October 2015)
Ravilious (April 2015)
Emily Carr (February 2015)
Art and Life: Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Alfred Wallis, William Staite Murray, 1920 – 1931 (June 2014)
David Hockney prints (March 2014)
An American in London (January 2014)
A Crisis of Brilliance (September 2013)
Tagged British Columbia, Canada, Dulwich Picture Gallery, Emily Carr, Group of Seven
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/emily-carr-dulwich-picture-gallery/
Landslide by Desmond Bagley (1967)
A return to the first person narrative Bagley used in his debut novel, The Golden Keel and, as so often when thriller writers do the first person, he is channeling Chandler.
The little fat guy who appeared to be the factotum around the depot looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and tittered. 'You must be a stranger around here.'
'Seeing I just got off the bus it may be possible,' I conceded. I wanted to get information, not to give it.
He grunted and the twinkle disappeared. 'It's on King Street; you can't miss it unless you're blind, he said curtly. He was another of those cracker-barrel characters who think they've got a franchise on wisecracks – small towns are full of them. To hell with him! I was in no mood for making friends. (Ch 1)
Yep, he's a street-wise tough guy alright. Mind you, here it's appropriate; he and everyone else in the novel talks with a deliberate North American slanginess as it is set in British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada. It's a very conscious choice of tone and idiolect and over the course of the book it succeeds in building up the no-nonense, tough guy persona of the narrator, hard-up mining geologist Bob Boyd who arrives in the small town of Farrell, where he signs up to work for the big family in the area, the Mattersons, to survey land they plan to flood by building a new dam to generate power for their various businesses. Where the prose was a little prissy in Hurricane, here it is rugged and manly: eg Hurricane refers to people swearing or uttering profanities; here almost every male character says 'bastard' on every page.
Heavily researched
Bagley's books contain large chunks of researched information. He worked in a room completely lined with reference books and it shows. No aspect of the plot goes by without hefty chunks of factual back-up, from pages of info to throwaway factoids.
Eg I was struck by a detail in Hurricane, when the British consul and the air stewardess are fleeing for their lives through a banana plantation, that the old man still has time to examine the roots of the plants and announce that, as they weren't properly bedded in, they would be liable to Panama Disease. Uh-huh. Here, the old newspaperman offers Boyd a drink and Bagley has to insert half a page explaining the difference between cheap blended Scotch and true single malt whiskey. He comes across a grizzly bear and informs us of the habits and behaviour of Ursus arctos, along with the best way to manage him.
The background to the plot is the construction of a new dam in the forest of British Columbia. Unsurprisingly, Bagley has done his research into Canada's Forestry laws.
British Columbia is very conservation-minded where its ;umber resources are concerned. Out of every dollar earned in the province fifty cents comes ultimately from the logging industry and the Government wants that happy state of affairs to continue.So the Forestry Service polices the woodlands and controls the cutting… The idea is that the amount of lumber cut, in cubic feet, should not exceed the natural annual growth. Now, when you start talking in cubic footage of lumber in British Columbia you sound like an astronomer calculating the distance in miles to a pretty far star. The forest lands cover 220,000 square miles, say, four times the size of England, and the annual growth is estimated at two and a half billion cubic feet. So the annual cutting rate is limited to a little over two billion cubic feet and the result is an increasing, instead of a wasting, asset. (Ch V, 1)
Bucket philosophy
A central theme of the plot is that the hero has amnesia, no memory of anything till he wakes up in a hospital bed aged 23 covered in burns after a bad car crash. In the early chapters he is treated by a psychologist and the author shares with us some bucket philosophy.
Everyone comes up against this problem sometime in their lives; he asks himself the fundamentally awkward question: 'Who am I?' There are many related questions, too, such as, 'Why am I?' and 'Why am I here?' To the uncaring the questioning comes too late, perhaps only on the death-bed. To the thinking man this self-questioning comes sooner and has to be resolved in the agony of personal mental sweat. (Ch II)
Presented here as new and challenging ideas, this would amuse my son and his mates doing their Religion & Philosophy GCSE with its naïveté. But then again, this isn't a philosophy text book. The pages about identity are there because the main character lost his memory in a car crash, and the themes of identity and the question whether you want to find out who you were before amnesia, drive the plot. They are only sketched in as much as the info about Canadian forestry law or the geology of 'quick clay', that's to say enough to fuel the plot, and no more. This isn't a book about amnesia, it's a book about thrills and spills.
It's 1967, Boyd is a man's man and he knows how to treat women.
I had left Clare early on the morning following our encounter and was surprised to find her reserved and somewhat distant. True, she cooked a good man-sized breakfast, but that was something a good housewife would do for her worst enemy by reflex action. I thought that perhaps she was regretting her fraternisation with the enemy – after all, I was working for Matterson – or maybe she was miffed because I hadn't made a pass at her. You never know with women. (Ch III, 3)
I began to think that to get rid of her was going to be quite a job; there's nothing you can do with an uninsultable woman short of tossing her out on her can, and that's not my style. (VI, 1)
Daily Mail complaints
Like MacLean, Bagley was old enough to live through the 1960s but not to like it. There is refrain of 'world going to the dogs' comments:
Any murderer can get his name in the newspapers, but if a decent man wishes to announce to the world that he's lived happily with his wife for twenty-five or fifty years, he has to pay for it, by God!
She was tall and thin with the emaciated thinness which seems to be fashionable, God knows why. (V, 2)
Presumably he knows his Daily Mail-type audience, and these Angry-of-Tunbridge-Wells comments cement his bond with his middle-aged male readership. To the modern reader they make the narrator seem unnaturally old and out of touch. But much more importantly, make him look not savvy, ignorant of the world he's operating in, a fatal flaw for this kind of hero in this kind of tale, who needs to appear worldly-wise, knowledgeable and in control.
Turns out Bob was badly burned and lost his memory in a car crash which conveniently killed off the Trinavant dynasty who had helped found the town, and that all their assets went to their partner Bull Matterson. Suspicious, eh? Having survived the crash, been repaired physically by plastic surgeons and mentally by the psychologist with the patter about self-examination, Bob returns to the scene of the crime, the small town where it all happened, and sets about provoking Matterson's head-strong son and his thuggish sidekick, while contacting (and falling in love with) the only surviving Trinavant, the attractive Clare.
Boyd needles them again and again so I'm not surprised that when his revelations about his own background make the old man collapse of a heart attack, the sadistic son, Howard, is able to persuade all the loggers that Boyd hit the old man, and so organises the exciting manhunt through the Canadian forest which makes up the final 50 pages of the book. Here Boyd/Bagley come into their own with scads of boys own adventure tips and advice about surviving in the wilderness with a posse of angry lumberjacks at your heels and the traps he sets for them, the ways he outfoxes and escapes them, are highly entertaining.
All of which leads up the dramatic finale which is rather given away by the title of the book. In the last few pages Boyd gets old man Matterson to confess it was his son who set up the car crash to kill the Trinavants, rescues Clare from the dungeon in which she's been held prisoner, gets the sheriff to believe him and to capture his enemy, Howard, and gets his prediction about the unsafety of the dam dramatically vindicated. Completely cleared, he looks set to inherit the Trinavant millions and walks off into the sunset with his best girl.
Although Bagley isn't exactly a stylist, and although long stretches are what we could call 'Bagley Factual' in intention, and although the plot is a combination of Dallas-style machination with a dollop of 1970s disaster movie thrown in, Bagley has made a concerted effort to create a voice and style for his tough, reckless, aggressive hero, and over the long run it works. The swearing, the 'bastards', the 'I didn't give a damns', the 'one move and I'll plug yous', do create a distinctive (if often rather ludicrous) voice, a comic-book hero appropriate for the TV-movie story.
Of the three I've read so far this is the one I enjoyed most and would recommend other people to read.
Landslide (and High Citadel) on Amazon
Landslide Wikipedia article
Desmond Bagley Wikipedia article
Cover of the 1973 Fontana paperback edition of Landslide by Desmond Bagley
Bagley's books
1963 The Golden Keel – South African boatbuilder Peter 'Hal' Halloran leads a motley crew to retrieve treasure hidden in the Italian mountains by partisans during WWII, planning to smuggle it out of Italy and back to SA as the golden keel of a boat he's built for the purpose.
1965 High Citadel – Pilot Tim O'Hara leads the passengers of a charter flight crash-landed in the Andes in holding off attacking communists.
1966 Wyatt's Hurricane – A motley crew of civilians led by meteorologist David Wyatt are caught up in a civil war on the fictional island of San Fernandes just as a hurricane strikes.
1967 Landslide – Tough Canadian geologist Bob Boyd nearly died in a car wreck ten years ago. Now he returns to the small town in British Columbia where it happened to uncover long-buried crimes and contemporary skulduggery.
1968 The Vivero Letter – 'Grey' accountant Jeremy Wheale leads an archaeology expedition to recover lost Mayan gold and ends up with more adventure than he bargained for as the Mafia try to muscle in.
1969 The Spoilers – Heroin specialist Nick Warren assembles a motley crew of specialists to help him break up a big drug-smuggling gang in Iraq.
1970 Running Blind – British secret agent Alan Stewart and girlfriend fend off KGB killers, CIA assassins and traitors on their own side while on the run across the bleak landscape of Iceland.
1971 The Freedom Trap – British agent Owen Stannard poses as a crook to get sent to prison and infiltrate The Scarperers, a gang which frees convicts from gaol but who turn out to be part of a spy network.
1973 The Tightrope Men – Advertising director Giles Denison goes to bed in London and wakes up in someone else's body in Norway, having become a pawn in the complex plans of various espionage agencies to get their hands on vital secret weapon technology.
1975 The Snow Tiger – Ian Ballard is a key witness in the long formal Inquiry set up to investigate the massive avalanche which devastated the small New Zealand mining town of Hukahoronui.
1977 The Enemy – British Intelligence agent Malcolm Jaggard gets drawn personally and professionally into the secret past of industrialist George Ashton, amid Whitehall power games which climax in disaster at an experimental germ warfare station on an isolated Scottish island.
1978 Flyaway – Security consultant Max Stafford becomes mixed up in Paul Billson's quixotic quest to find his father's plane which crashed in the Sahara 40 years earlier, a quest involving extensive travel around North Africa with the charismatic American desert expert, Luke Byrne, before the secret is revealed.
1980 Bahama Crisis – Bahamas hotelier Tom Mangan copes with a series of disastrous misfortunes until he begins to realise they're all part of a political plot to undermine the entire Bahamas tourist industry and ends up playing a key role in bringing the conspirators to justice.
1982 Windfall – Max Stafford, the protagonist of Bagley's 1978 novel Flyaway, gets involved in a complex plot to redirect the fortune of a dead South African smuggler into a secret operation to arm groups planning to subvert Kenya, a plot complicated by the fact that an American security firm boss is simultaneously running his own scam to steal some of the fortune, and that one of the key conspirators is married to one of Stafford's old flames.
1984 Night Of Error – Oceanographer Mike Trevelyan joins a boatload of old soldiers, a millionaire and his daughter to go looking for a treasure in rare minerals on the Pacific Ocean floor, a treasure two men have already died for – including Mike's no-good brother – and which a rival group of baddies will stop at nothing to claim for themselves, all leading to a hair-raising climax as goodies and baddies are caught up in a huge underwater volcanic eruption.
1985 Juggernaut – Neil Mannix is the trouble shooter employed by British Electric to safeguard a vast transformer being carried on a huge flat-bed truck – the juggernaut of the title – across the (fictional) African country of Nyala towards the location of a flagship new power station, when a civil war breaks out and all hell breaks loose.
Posted in Adventure, Books, Novel, Thriller
Tagged 1967, Bob Boyd, British Columbia, Canada, Desmond Bagley, Landslide, thriller
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/09/20/landslide-desmond-bagley/


text:
Q: VBA Macro function out of range Function getNames()
    Dim  wbThis As Workbook,  arr() As Variant, i As Long
    Set wbThis = ThisWorkbook
    For i = 1 To 50
        arr(i) = wbThis.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(6, i).Value
    Next i

    For i = 1 To 50
        MsgBox "employee names are***** ." + arr(i)
    Next i
End Function

I have above my VBA macro code in Sheet1 .In sheet1 I have one click button .on clicking the buttton,i called the getNames function. In sheet1 I have all row and column values .But when i run it shows

subscript out of range/run time error '9'

I tried a lot.Anyone have any idea on this .

A: You need to assign some size to the variant array.
Function getNames()
    Dim wbThis As Workbook, i As Long

    Set wbThis = ThisWorkbook

    redim arr(1 to 50) As Variant

    For i = lbound(arr) To ubound(arr)
        arr(i) = wbThis.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(6, i).Value
    Next i

    For i = lbound(arr) To ubound(arr)
        MsgBox "employee names are***** ." & arr(i)
    Next i
End Function

ReDim can be used without Dim first. LBound to UBound is a more versatile method of looping through a static array from the lower boundary to the upper boundary. The ampersand & is the preferred operator for string concatenation.
Functions are intended to return a value. This may be better as a sub procedure.
You can 'seed' an array by calling the function from a sub.
sub main()

    dim i as long, nms as variant

    nms = getNames()

    For i = lbound(nms) To ubound(nms)
        MsgBox "employee names are***** ." & nms(i)
    Next i

end sub

Function getNames()
    Dim  wbThis As Workbook,  i As Long

    Set wbThis = ThisWorkbook

    redim arr(1 to 50) As Variant

    For i = lbound(arr) To ubound(arr)
        arr(i) = wbThis.Sheets("Sheet1").Cells(6, i).Value
    Next i

    getnames = arr

End Function

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


In Middle East lore the Debba is a mythical Arab hyena that can turn into a man who lures Jewish children away from their families to teach them the language of the beasts. To the Arabs he is a heroic national symbol; to the Jews he is a terrorist. To David Starkman, "The Debba" is a controversial play, written by his father the war hero, and performed only once, in Haifa in 1946, causing a massive riot. By 1977, David is living in Canada, having renounced his Israeli citizenship and withdrawn from his family, haunted by persistent nightmares about his catastrophic turn as a military assassin for Israel. Upon learning of his father's gruesome murder, he returns to his homeland for what he hopes will be the final time. Back in Israel, David discovers that his father's will demands he stage the play within forty-five days of his death, and though he is reluctant to comply, the authorities' evident relief at his refusal convinces him he must persevere. With his father's legacy on the line, David is forced to reimmerse himself in a life he thought he'd escaped for good. The heart-stopping climax shows that nothing in Israel is as it appears, and not only are the sins of the fathers revisited upon the sons, but so are their virtues—and the latter are more terrible still.
Disguised as a breathtaking thriller, Avner Mandelman's novel reveals Israel's double soul, its inherent paradoxes, and its taste for both art and violence. The riddle of the Debba—the myth, the play, and the novel—is nothing less than the tangled riddle of Israel itself.
In an instant I knew. "Ken?" I croaked in Hebrew—yes.
1. How powerful are David's black dreams? Trace the various moments throughout the novel where they become more or less powerful. Do you think he can ever be completely rid of them?
2. What was Isser's motivation for writing "The Debba"? Why do you think he insisted David produce the play so soon after his death–especially when he himself witnessed the conflict it could bring?
3. Discuss David's attraction to Ruthy versus his attraction to Jenny. What about each woman captivates or distracts him? What do you think brings David and Ruthy back together? What does each woman see in David?
4. Discuss Isser's friendships with both Paltiel and Abdullah. How did the relationships evolve from his military days to his death? Do you see any similarities in David and Ehud's relationship?
5. Why is David considered such a threat, so dangerous they send assassins after him? Are they afraid of him or the play? Where does David find the determination to overcome the obstacles he encounters?
6. Discuss family loyalty in The Debba. Does it differ between the Jewish and Arab families we meet?
7. The Debba is steeped in mystery—of both the past and the present. From the myth of the Debba to the circumstances surrounding Isser's death, discuss the power these secrets have over the characters.
8. Where, and among whom, does David feel most at ease? Does he fit in anywhere? Will he ever be able to escape his past?
9. Has this fictional account influenced your knowledge or feelings about Israel's history or current situation?
10. What is Abdullah's ultimate motive for helping David stage the play?
11. How does the revelation of David's true father influence David's feelings about where he fits in the Israeli community? Did your opinion of David's character change when you learned the truth? Were you surprised?
12. What was your opinion of Isser's play, "The Debba"? Discuss the play's supporters and protesters and the intensity of their opinions.
13. Of all the characters seeking vengeance in The Debba, do any of them attain it?


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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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TTV Finance () is a digital television channel operated by Taiwan Television (TTV) in Taiwan, launched on September 1, 2004. Now TTV Finance shares channel with TTV Family.

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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


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