Industrial espionage in Italy: a review of Eric Ambler's Cause For Alarm.
For various and sundry reasons, my posting of book reviews here dropped off a cliff in 2010, although I did manage to keep my end up over on LibraryThing; I thought I'd try to class up my LJ a bit by cross-posting some of my reviews from LT to it. I begin with one of the more recent ones:
I read Eric Ambler's Cause For Alarm (NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1990 [copyright held by Eric Ambler, 1939; renewed 1966]; 246 pps.; ISBN: 0-88184-664-3) from Wednesday, 22 December 2010 through Tuesday, 28 December 2010.
One of Eric Ambler's typical stories of an ordinary man plunked down into espionage circumstances, Cause For Alarm relates how a down-on-his luck English engineer named Nick Marlow, who has a promising young surgeon fiancée named Claire, takes a somewhat seedy job as a Wolverhampton firm's Milan representative; as it is the late 1930s, this means that Marlow has to deal with the "joys" of Mussolini's Fascist regime and the Ovra (Organizzazione Vigilanza Repressione Anti-fascismo: "vigilant organization for the repression of anti-fascism...secret police; the Italian counterpart of the Nazi Gestapo" [p. 94], comprised largely of former Mafiosi) as well as slightly unusual twists in the normal Italian business practices of bribery to secure contracts. Marlow befriends a professed American expat named Zaleshoff and a sinister lover of the ballet named General Vagas, a "Yugo-slav," as rendered here.
While Cause For Alarm is a swift, entertaining read that one can readily imagine as a classic "B"-list thriller from the early 1940s, it never really keeps one in a cold grip of suspense; this is largely due, I think, to the first person narration of Marlow, which evokes John Buchan's Richard Hannay novels (The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, etc.) more than it does one of Graham Greene's machine-tooled thrillers of the era or Ambler's own A Coffin for Dimitrios. While things get far more sticky for Marlow than most people, including this reviewer, would like to personally experience, one never feels the sense of existential dread that one can in the novels of Greene, or of Ambler's modern heir, Alan Furst.
Then too, Cause For Alarm in many places reads more like a film treatment than a proper suspenser, particularly in the semi-amusing banter between the male and female characters and the semi-serious bickering between Marlow and Zaleshoff. A modern reader might well be suspicious of the casual generalizations of various nationalities and weary of the use of effeminacy-cum-homosexuality as shorthand descriptions of villainy; an American reader will likely grimace at the missteps that Ambler makes in the speech of his American character, but this is a failing common to many British writers, even very good ones (viz. Alan Moore having Richard Nixon declare, "I will not be pressurized!" instead of "I will not be pressured!" in Watchmen). And I suppose Americans have to gamely endure the latter as just desserts for generations of American writers over-doing the "pip-pip," "jolly good show," "what-what" tics of their British characters.
Despite my reservations, which are really cavils, Cause For Alarm is a good soft-boiled thriller with an underlying serious message -- foreshadowed by the book's epigraph, a quotation from Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel -- that must have been uncomfortably timely for many readers when it was first published in 1939 (and is not any less relevant today...); its scope is plausible enough to read like a "now it can be told" account underlying a relatively minor news event such as one might hear on BBC Radio 4, and its conclusion is both plausible and pointed enough to make a modern reader nod his head and mutter, "Ah-hah..."
I read Eric Ambler's Cause For Alarm (NY: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1990 [copyright held by Eric Ambler, 1939; renewed 1966]; 246 pps.; ISBN: 0-88184-664-3) from Wednesday, 22 December 2010 through Tuesday, 28 December 2010.
One of Eric Ambler's typical stories of an ordinary man plunked down into espionage circumstances, Cause For Alarm relates how a down-on-his luck English engineer named Nick Marlow, who has a promising young surgeon fiancée named Claire, takes a somewhat seedy job as a Wolverhampton firm's Milan representative; as it is the late 1930s, this means that Marlow has to deal with the "joys" of Mussolini's Fascist regime and the Ovra (Organizzazione Vigilanza Repressione Anti-fascismo: "vigilant organization for the repression of anti-fascism...secret police; the Italian counterpart of the Nazi Gestapo" [p. 94], comprised largely of former Mafiosi) as well as slightly unusual twists in the normal Italian business practices of bribery to secure contracts. Marlow befriends a professed American expat named Zaleshoff and a sinister lover of the ballet named General Vagas, a "Yugo-slav," as rendered here.
While Cause For Alarm is a swift, entertaining read that one can readily imagine as a classic "B"-list thriller from the early 1940s, it never really keeps one in a cold grip of suspense; this is largely due, I think, to the first person narration of Marlow, which evokes John Buchan's Richard Hannay novels (The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, etc.) more than it does one of Graham Greene's machine-tooled thrillers of the era or Ambler's own A Coffin for Dimitrios. While things get far more sticky for Marlow than most people, including this reviewer, would like to personally experience, one never feels the sense of existential dread that one can in the novels of Greene, or of Ambler's modern heir, Alan Furst.
Then too, Cause For Alarm in many places reads more like a film treatment than a proper suspenser, particularly in the semi-amusing banter between the male and female characters and the semi-serious bickering between Marlow and Zaleshoff. A modern reader might well be suspicious of the casual generalizations of various nationalities and weary of the use of effeminacy-cum-homosexuality as shorthand descriptions of villainy; an American reader will likely grimace at the missteps that Ambler makes in the speech of his American character, but this is a failing common to many British writers, even very good ones (viz. Alan Moore having Richard Nixon declare, "I will not be pressurized!" instead of "I will not be pressured!" in Watchmen). And I suppose Americans have to gamely endure the latter as just desserts for generations of American writers over-doing the "pip-pip," "jolly good show," "what-what" tics of their British characters.
Despite my reservations, which are really cavils, Cause For Alarm is a good soft-boiled thriller with an underlying serious message -- foreshadowed by the book's epigraph, a quotation from Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel -- that must have been uncomfortably timely for many readers when it was first published in 1939 (and is not any less relevant today...); its scope is plausible enough to read like a "now it can be told" account underlying a relatively minor news event such as one might hear on BBC Radio 4, and its conclusion is both plausible and pointed enough to make a modern reader nod his head and mutter, "Ah-hah..."