MICHENER'S CARAVANS

Published in 1963 and set in 1946-7 (before the Partition of India), this book reminds us what a great investigator and thoughtful writer Michener was. The story itself is outmoded and Michener does not show great insight into the psychology of his characters. But one wonders if anyone in "exceptional" America read it when Charlie Wilson went to arm the Taliban against the Soviet supported regime, when soldiers were sent after 9/11 only to remain there for more than a dozen years. 

The author described Kabul as resembling Palestine in Jesus' day, of death by stoning, of an eye for an eye and a life for a life, of the fate of the country to be determined--whenever Afghanistan might be left to itself--by the struggle between the many bearded men led by mullahs from the hills and the few young experts with degrees from Oxford, Sorbonne or MIT, the former making up 99.99 percent of the country. 

"We are a brigand society and we murder our rulers," says one of the characters. There are indeed striking descriptions of a violent and very different society that has very likely not changed much except that the munitions have multiplied, the mullahs reinforced with money and ideology from an even more fundamentalist source, and the young experts very likely all killed, corrupted or disenchanted. It is a quiet book and does not address itself to the political issues. It muses on the fact that the Afghans look so much like the Jews and thought of themselves as one of the "lost tribes"; they rejoiced equally when the Germans proclaimed them the First Aryans.

Michener's story also gives prominence to wanderers who traded goods (perhaps stolen) and made annual migrations with their goats and camels between the Oxus (now in Turkmenistan) and Jhelum (now in Pakistan), a trek of two thousand miles.  Were they Povindahs? Kochis? Whatever, they were the gypsies of Central Asia.  The author tells of the Desert of Death that lies between Iran and Afghanistan and of the mysterious City at the border. The heat and absence of humidity of the desert were such that the Helmand River flows into the desert and simply disappears.  

The most ambitious among the Afghans in this book wants to build a dam and transform the desert gradually into farmland.  He even explores the ancient karez tunnels that were sunk deep into the ground to bring up water; such tunnels may have had Persian origins and are to be found all the way from Iran and Pakistan through Afghanistan to the desert town of Turpan in Western China.  Some years ago, I read a whole bunch of books on the Silk Road as if in a trance.  The romantic caravan trails they described, I learn now from Michener, crossed at Kabul.

VARIETIES OF SPY THRILLERS

Many are like crime or police/detective novels in that the plot involves some misdeed planned or committed and the prevention or retribution thereof.

Novels of this genre often appeal primarily to the sense of righteous indignation on the part the reader. Those novels that have incomplete control of this aspect often tend to become tedious and objectionable recreations of the school-yard quarrels—he/they started this, he/they hit me/us first, and therefore whatever we did or do in retaliation is somehow justified. If that is not sufficient, then the writer might resort to more or less overt appeals to patriotism/jingoism. But then the “spy” part tends to get lost and the story could just as well be some more or less cunning version of cowboys and Indians. There is too much of this sort of writing that deserves to be lumped together as pulp fiction.

John LeCarre is deservedly celebrated for rescuing this genre from the spirited but otherwise not very edifying adventures of James Bond. His prose was brooding and sometimes precious—“Smiley had bored him; he looked sulky and cheated; distressing downward folds had formed on the lower contours of his cheeks….” Or, as Smiley drove past “the unlovable fascades of the Edgeware Road, the wind had dropped, the sky was black with waiting rain, and all that remained of the sun was a lingering redness on the tarmac.”

But he wrote also of the gritty aspects of spy-craft, of following and watching a suspect; how in certain countries “the security forces knew next to nothing about” its subtle requirements, “probably because no administration in living memory had to feel shy about it.” He wrote of the motivation for betrayal, a hope “to advance the Russian cause ahead of the American” but not to injure any British interest until the Suez incident “finally persuaded him of the inanity of the British position” and “he became a committed, full-time Soviet mole with no holds barred.”

More recently, David Ignatius (see for example, Bloodmoney: a novel of espionage) has written with insight into the enemies (or victims?) of the American war in Af-Pak, how some were created by the actions of the Americans as the Taliban and al-Qaeda are said to believe, how ingeniously the enemy had copied what the CIA had done to such great effect in “following the money” to track down perpetrators of evil against them, how they are bound by their own values of hospitality, vengeance and perhaps of sanctuary.

The "spying" usually lifts the genre beyond the boundaries of a particular country and gives the opportunity for the writer to explore cultural differences. Does this mean that some work like “The Tale of Two Cities” might be reclassified as a spy thriller? Probably not and in any case, the plot of that novel could very well have been framed for a purely English situation. Mayhem in foreign countries does not necessarily result in a spy thriller. Problems and solutions that cross national boundaries, the threat of violence and the need for secrecy in action—I believe these are essential. It will surely not hurt if the characters are interesting though spy thrillers do not need to be psychological (Smiley versus Karla) and should certainly not be paranormal.

At least these are my preferences; I have no desire to see them enshrined by any Academy or Official Body!