Deep doo-doo: A review of Henry Brinton's Purple-6.
Finished Henry Brinton's Purple-6 (NY: Avon Books, undated mass market paperback edition [cover price: U.S. $0.60; Avon Book Number S135]; originally published in hardcover in 1962 in the U.S. by Walker and Company, NY [Library of Congress Card Catalog Number: 62-18733] and in the UK by Hutchinson, London; 192 pps.) last Wednesday, 26 December.
Purple-6 (the title isn't hyphenated on the front cover, the spine, or on the splash page inside, but is hyphenated on the whatever-you-call-it page just before the novel begins, on p. 7, and in the Library of Congress's card catalog) is essentially a didactic novel encased in a thin techno-thriller veneer that is apparently categorized, for some obscure reason, as a science fiction novel by those secondhand booksellers who stock it. (If anything, it should be classed as a fantasy novel, but I'll get to that presently.)
Brinton has various characters argue, in part, the sensibility of the whole balance of terror/mutually assured destruction (MAD) premise that formed the nuclear weapons doctrine for the U.S. and the USSR (and, by extension, the member countries of NATO and the Warsaw Pact who either had nuclear arsenals of their own or had tactical or strategic nukes placed on their soil by their dominant power) from at least the late 1950s until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The plot, as such, hinges upon a spy ring passing the latest British developments in nuclear-armed missile technology (and, even more worryingly, defense against same) to the Russkies, and a handful of characters agonizing over how (or if) to stop the leak and how (or if) to exploit the missile defense system.
Here's where the fantasy part comes in: the missile defense technology -- based, like Ronnie Ray-gun's still-on-the-drawing board Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, popularly referred to, to George Lucas's annoyance, as "Star Wars"), on anti-missile missiles -- is cavalierly declared by one scientist character to be, in essence, one hundred percent effective. I was surprised to learn that Brinton apparently had at least a modicum of scientific training, based on the other books he's authored in the Library of Congress's holdings (Man in Space, Measuring the Universe, Exploring Earth History, Exploring Other Planets [both of these latter books were co-written with Patrick Moore], and a pamphlet from 1935 that he edited, with the intriguing title, Does Capitalism Cause War?): someone with a basic knowledge of science should know that nothing but nothing can be declared to be 100% effective; someone with a basic knowledge of science should also know that shooting down an incoming missile with another missile is far trickier than it sounds to the average pro-SDI politician. (Brinton might've considered the fact that Robert A. Heinlein, a trained engineer turned successful science fiction author, proposed an idea of missile defense for his 1948 juvenile novel Space Cadet that had nothing to do with firing a missile to intercept another missile.)
The novel is told from the first person point of view of Will Burley, a physicist-cum-manager of a top secret British nuclear command post at Farnden (I'm not sure if Farnden is meant to be a stand-in for Farndon in Newark, Nottinghamshire), who is married to an old Oxford Leftie of questionable political beliefs (and whose beliefs put him in the hot seat, once the loss of secrets becomes known) and an off-the-clock friend of his pernickety, lifelong bachelor boss, Sir Charles Hamer, called "C.H." The plot gets rolling when an emergency phone call from the base at Farnden to Burley's house interrupts his usual Sunday gathering of co-workers, university friends, and various hangers-on of same with the cryptic-to-outsiders message that a code "purple-7" has been announced. The "purple" means that at least one incoming nuclear missile has been tracked by the base issuing the alert; the number following the word "purple" is the estimate, in minutes, as to how long it will be before the missile lands. (It's never explained why purple is used to denote the highest level of danger, as opposed to red, unless Brinton -- or the British military -- meant it as a nod to the ornate, neo-gothic, turn-of-the-twentieth-century apocalyptic novel The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel; on another note, I found it both annoying and oddly pleasant that Brinton, in contrast to most contemporary techno-thriller writers, neither explained each and every alphabet soup agglomeration of letters as soon as it appears in the narrative nor provided a stand-alone glossary.) The reason for the call is to tell its recipient to drop everything and come a'runnin', which Burley and C.H. do. In their haste, C.H. (who is driving his car) inadvertently hits a young girl; to Burley's anguish and fury, C.H. follows protocol and does not stop to aid her, but rather directs one of the base's personnel to summon assistance for her as soon as they drive within the gates of the base. As the reader may well expect, this girl is treated in heavily symbolic fashion, and must bear the metaphorical weight of far more meanings than any character may be reasonably expected to.
In the event, the purple-7 proves to be a false alarm: the missile turns out to be a Soviet manned space probe, destined for Mars, which crash lands in Dartmoor, north of Totnes. (This is another instance of rather dodgy science: no one thinks it incredible that the Soviets would send a manned rocket to Mars in light of the tremendous variation of the distance between Earth and Mars -- from 36 million to over 250 million miles -- which necessitates a tremendous travel time and prodigious amounts of supplies [not the least being food, water and oxygen], and fuel, to say nothing of the lengthening radio delays concomitant with a Mars orbit or landing, etc.; as no indication is given that either side has near-lightspeed, lightspeed, or faster-than-light travel, this is a major blunder on Brinton's part.) Burley is sent out to investigate, but, though he is the one to twig to the fact that the probe was manned, he leaves the site before the most important discovery is made: the Soviets have outfitted their space probe with an exact copy of the guidance control for the UK's anti-missile missiles, code-named ANNIE. There is no question of the Soviets having merely developed a guidance system along similar lines to the British one; it is an exact copy, which means that someone at one of the top secret British bases has passed the schematics along to the Soviets.
The British prime minister orders the mass production, in double-quick time, of ANNIEs in order to beat the Soviets to the punch, and an exhaustive review of security at the bases -- particularly Farnden, where the leak is soon traced -- and a ratcheting up of same. To the latter job is assigned a military intelligence officer named Potter, who proceeds to grill C.H. and Burley mercilessly, bringing the always tetchy personnel issues at Farnden to a boil. Among other things, Potter doesn't like Burley's leftist wife or leftist university chum, nicknamed Dobbin (yes, yes, a reference to William Makepeace Thackeray's epic novel Vanity Fair -- yet another bit of fraught shorthand that telegraphs the book's ending to anyone with a nodding acquaintance with VF), or, come to that, Burley's own beliefs. Spirited discussions as to the advisability of a pre-emptive nuclear strike ensue.
Despite some discomfiting turns in the discussions-cum-arguments among the characters vis-à-vis preemptive nuclear strikes -- which can be boiled down to "Unhappy the trickster who holds onto his last trick too long" -- Purple-6 never comes close to supplanting other classic nuclear scare works of the era, Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler's 1962 novel Fail-Safe (first filmed in 1964) or Stanley Kubrick's dark 1964 comedy Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (also filmed in 1964, and based on a straightforward thriller named Red Alert -- originally published in the UK as Two Hours to Doom -- by Peter Bryant [a pseudonym of Peter George, a nuclear disarmament activist and former flight lieutenant in the RAF]), contrary to the blurb from the Associated Press on the back cover ("Brinton's novel has a lot more meat for the reflective mind than anyone will find in 'Fail-Safe'"). Brinton is so little concerned with the thriller's mechanics that one dangling subplot -- a nuclear bomber from the WRAF's Group 27 Command cannot be recalled after the purple-7 alert that gets the book rolling -- is entirely dismissed after Burley urges C.H. to propose to their chief that they tell the Soviets about it and give them the necessary information to shoot it down before it can drop its nuclear payload, a little less than a quarter of the way through the book. (C.H. is sternly disapproving of the notion: "'Ask the Commies to shoot down our own boys . . . . That's coming it a bit strong.'" [p. 44]) It hardly need be said that this plot thread was the major premise of the aforementioned Red Alert, Fail-Safe, and Dr. Strangelove. One might argue that Brinton didn't forget about this plot thread at all; but, unless one can prove that the book's subsequent events take place over the course of the same 24--hour (or less...) period, I don't think that a convincing argument can be made.
Purple-6's real interest lies in the glimpse it provides into British attitudes towards nuclear strategy, espionage, and the UK's second-string status in the big game between the U.S. and the USSR in the early 1960s. As Anthony Burgess observed in the introduction that he wrote for a reissue of the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, Ian Fleming's super-spy touched a chord in British readers dismayed and disheartened by the reversal of positions on the world stage between the Americans and the British, and by the ongoing embarrassment of the Cambridge Five affair. (Even more embarrassing and dispiriting to the Brits was the role that "the cousins" -- i.e., the American FBI -- played in identifying one of the Five, Donald Duart Maclean.) Purple-6 is shot through with British mixed attitudes towards the U.S.; while Brinton seems to suggest that the Brits with the most intense anti-American feelings were the Lefties, one doesn't have to read very far between the lines of dialogue of the right-wing characters to descry ambivalence, frustration and angry feelings of inferiority towards the Americans (the latter most particularly in their recognition of the fact that the UK simply can't hope to match the U.S.'s industrial capacities in mass producing the ANNIEs in the quantity that the PM wants). When Burley argues with his wife about the U.S., his disposition forces him to play devil's advocate to her anti-Americanism ("'We live under the shadow of their protection, and spend all our time abusing them. We take their financial help and then accuse them of materialism''; p. 151) with a scrupulousness that he doesn't, at bottom, truly feel.
One unfortunate knock-on effect of the Cambridge Five affair was how it convinced certain people in the intelligence community of the inadvisability of employing homosexuals in sensitive positions, due to their supposedly greater susceptibility to blackmail. Ian Fleming had James Bond echo this sentiment in his 1957 novel From Russia, With Love (and, according to Anthony Burgess, Fleming maintained that homosexuals are unable to whistle; see the Coronet Books [Hodder and Stoughton] mass market paperback reprint of Casino Royale, 1988 [ISBN: 0-7736-8042-X]; 4th unnumbered page of Burgess's introduction). Just as some criminologists delighted, in the wake of the Leopold & Loeb murder, to point to homosexuality per se as a cause of criminal, even homicidal behavior (a theory also propounded by Eliot Ness in his role as Cleveland's Director of Public Safety in the 1930s, in proposing a crude profile of the perpetrator of the still-unsolved Cleveland Torso Murders), so too did some intelligence professionals delight in calling for a house-cleaning of "fairies" from various spy agencies and State Department (or foreign service) postings. However, the idea that a closeted homosexual in such a position would be especially vulnerable to blackmail simply doesn't wash; the exposed members of the Cambridge Five -- whose same-sexuality (all save Philby's) is cited as Exhibit "A" of the dangers in employing "fags" -- were suborned by, and defected to, the Soviet Union due to their ideological beliefs, not due to sexual blackmail. C.A. Tripp neatly points out the fatuousness of this premise in his book The Homosexual Matrix (Second Edition, 1987; NY: Meridian [New American Library]; ISBN: 0-452-00847-6):
"Certainly in serious espionage work (and in other of the secret services) any attempt to blackmail by an amateur outsider would be tantamount to suicide; he would stand a good chance of simply being killed immediately. On the other hand, to persons handling confidential information, a blackmail threat (the more subtle the better) from a foreign agent would qualify as fortunate indeed. It would be (and sometimes has been) an open invitation to a double-agent situation -- i.e., a muchly prized chance to feed wrong information to an agent who thinks he has the upper hand when, in fact, he is himself being duped."
-- pps. 200-01
The M.I. officer's investigations of the security breach focus nearly as much on certain people's sexual activities (chiefly because of their sexual orientation) as they do on certain people's philosophical leanings. Indeed, to Potter -- and, sadly, to a certain mindset among the right-wing -- one's political orientation is scarcely distinguishable from their sexual orientation, viz the pungent phrase "parlour pink" that is bruited about, or Potter's assertion that "'There are various protective colourings that these gents take on, and the dilettante is a favourite'" (p. 126 for both). But again, this is knocking on the wrong restroom stall door; as Tripp observes, "For most of this century, in Britain as well in the United States, the very highest levels of governmental confidentiality (particularly diplomatic and espionage services) have been in the hands, and often under the leadership, of homosexuals" (Tripp, p. 201; see also his end-notes #P through #V in the Second Edition, pps. 283-84).
It would be nice to say that Purple-6 is nothing more than a novel of some mild historical interest, that the issues it raises as regards nuclear strategy are now moot; unfortunately the game theory equations have, if anything, become more complex with the promulgation of nuclear weapons to many more actors than possessed them in 1962 (when the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly put paid to the experiment called Western Civilization), and the issues of security and command and control are likewise thornier than ever. Purple-6 just isn't a very compelling consideration of them, even given its brevity. Pop Dr. Strangelove in the VCR or DVD player instead and enjoy a sardonic larf or two before the human race goes up the spout.