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Tag Archives: role playing

Deception’s Toll: An Unlikely Spy

22 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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anti-Semitism, book review, British Fascists, character-driven narrative, class snobbery, England, historical fiction, MI5, Rebecca Starford, role playing, self-deception, thriller, World War II

Review: An Unlikely Spy, by Rebecca Starford
Ecco, 2021. 338 pp. $28

Evelyn Varley has made something of herself, she thinks. It’s late 1939, and the girl from the wrong side of the tracks in Lewes, East Sussex, has come a long way since she won a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school, then Oxford, where she took Firsts in German and literature. Along the way, she befriended Sally Wesley, a girl from a wealthy family that practically adopted Evelyn, showering her with the warmth, hospitality, excursions, gifts, and spirited conversation she never received at home. And when war breaks out, Sally’s father recommends Evelyn to a friend in government, and presto! she gets a job with the War Office.

At first, that means typing and filing, nothing glamorous, and her office is situated in an old prison, to boot. But eventually, MI5 recruits her to infiltrate an organization of British Nazis. Appalled by their views, especially their violent anti-Semitism, Evelyn nevertheless steels herself to the task, unaware that she will have to choose between her conscience, loyalty to country, and her lifelong friends.

The Olympia Exhibition Centre, London, where a British Union of Fascists meeting in 1934 turned violent, costing the movement support. At its height, the BUF boasted more than 50,000 members. (Courtesy Kenneth Allen, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Character-driven thrillers are unusual in themselves, and this one’s terrific. Don’t be put off by the opening, a somewhat confusing section that takes place after the war. I think the author wants you to know that something shocking has happened, to hold your interest, after which the novel goes into Evelyn’s back story. It’s a prologue by another name, and I understand why Starford takes this approach, but it feels clumsy in parts, not at all like the rest of the book. The narrative sorts itself out soon enough, though, and you see how Evelyn unwittingly trains for her future career.

At her boarding school, as the poor girl, she’s the “charity case,” the butt of vicious hazing. Sally rescues her somewhat, being an outsider too, a connection I find a little hard to believe. But if it’s a false note, it’s the only one. Evelyn succeeds socially on her own where Sally doesn’t, by copying their tormentors and earning their acceptance. The price she pays is steep, however — forgetting who she is, learning her new friends’ contempt for her origins, and hiding behind a dissembling heart. Years later:

Sometimes, as Evelyn lay in her bed upstairs, she was wracked by loneliness. She loved her parents, but now she could see them for their true selves, free from the burnish of childish idolatry or just plain youthful ignorance. She knew her father belittled her because he couldn’t face the idea of her one day looking down on him, and she recognized how meager her mother’s existence had become, counting out her shillings at the bakery and going without new clothes or books or an outing to a restaurant, refusing any activity that she deemed indulgent. Evelyn was embarrassed by this puritan denial of even the smallest forms of pleasure. She didn’t want her life to be a mere transaction; she wanted to feel the workings of experience deep in her bones. She knew her parents sensed this change in her, but since she could never tell them about what really happened at school, she had to live with the knowledge that they believed she had actually become this person and was not merely wearing a disguise.

Consequently, she’s got the makeup of a perfect operative, capable of assuming a necessary guise, belonging nowhere, therefore adaptable. But once again, she pays an extortionate price for the thrill of being useful, the knowledge that she’s standing up for her beliefs, which leads her to deceive people, including herself.

What a brilliant portrayal, the better for Evelyn’s hesitations and insecurities. So often, spies in fiction have ice water for blood and seldom make mistakes, only bad bets because they’ve been misled or have no choice. Evelyn’s a different sort altogether, struggling not to engage emotionally, wondering every second if she’s overplayed her hand, and unsure what she’s accomplished, if anything. Unlike many in her trade, she shies away from damaging anyone, unaware that she’s done it despite herself. Sally’s fiancé, a handsome, thoughtless brute, thinks of pain as an “accolade,” Evelyn believes, “something to be earned, and something to be inflicted.” She despises him but has yet to learn how the manipulations she’s assigned to perform work the same way. The reader senses what she doesn’t.

Starford has a gift for active physical description that evokes feelings — there are some truly lovely passages —and she’s at her best among the British Nazis. Their rallies, riots, harangues, and even their quiet dinner parties curdle the blood. Their belief beyond all persuasion that Jews have destroyed their lives and run the world has never gone out of style, so that the historical feels like now. I can’t help think that the author has intended a tacit comparison to alt-right conspiracy theorists, no matter what human target they favor.

This chilling, moving novel, at once character-driven and a page-turner, deserves attention.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Life As Theater: Morality Play

12 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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Barry Unsworth, blasphemy, book review, Catholicism, fourteenth century, historical fiction, justice, literary fiction, morality plays, mystery (criminal), mystery (religious), plague, role playing, sedition, superstition, theater, traveling players

Review: Morality Play, by Barry Unsworth
Doubleday, 1995. 206 pp. $16

On a cold December day during the second half of the fourteenth century, Nicholas Barber steals upon a group of traveling players who stand away from a dying man, one of their number. Fascinated by the players’ wordless empathy, Nicholas watches too long, and they spot him and demand that he come forward. It’s a dangerous time in England, where the plague rides again, and suspicion and fear influence every interaction, not least with vagabonds.

But Nicholas is a vagabond himself, a priest who has left his diocese without permission. He has abandoned his good cloak in a house where he was committing adultery, and knows his way with a pair of dice in his hand. And when the actors move on toward Durham, where they are to perform Nativity plays for the lord’s court, Nicholas accompanies them.

He could have said that they’d just lost a man they need to replace. But Nicholas is also burning a bridge. The bishop of Lincoln, his patron, might take him back if he turned around right then and honestly repented his lapses. But appearing on stage violates the law. And though that scares him, Nicholas can’t resist — something about playing a part, belonging to the small, tightly knit troupe, has touched him.

However, the next village they happen on has recently witnessed a murder; a young boy has been killed, and a deaf-mute young woman sentenced to hang for it. Martin, the leader of the troupe, convinces the others to perform a play based on the killing, as it has been recounted in rumor and disputation around the village. To do so risks severe punishment, for, on stage as in life, truth comes only from God, and the players, already at society’s margin, will overstep if they pretend to interpret their world — and a profane event, no less. Nicholas, understanding the religious proscription intuitively, is appalled. But the show, as always, must go on.

Frontispiece to Wynkyn de Worde’s 1522 edition of the morality play Mundus et Infans (courtesy G. A. Lester, ed., Three Late Medieval Morality Plays, via Wikimedia Commons)

What a premise, as elegant as you could want. And what a title, literally evoking the medieval mystery play while figuratively showing the changeable nature of moral choices. Further, what the medieval mind called a mystery had to do with Scripture and God’s actions, ever inscrutable. But here we have that framework and an actual mystery alongside, which the performance of the play helps to solve.

I have read this novel several times over the past decade or two, and it remains among my favorites. Most people, if they’ve read Unsworth, will point to Sacred Hunger as his masterpiece, and it’s hard to disagree. Yet Morality Play has so much to say about the role that subsumes the player, not just the other way around, involving so many aspects of private, political, and social life, that I’m in awe.

Success here hinges on the characters, and you’d have to look hard and long before you found a more finely drawn ensemble, literally and figuratively. Besides Nicholas, whose desires outstrip his common sense (which makes him human), you have Martin, teacher, leader, and group conscience; Straw, the outwardly fragile, gifted mime; Stephen, the brooding drunk with a commanding presence; and others, each sustained in-depth without more than a line or two of backstory. Together, they create an amazing performance.

Then there’s Unsworth’s prose, simple, highly physical, conveying the time and place from the inside out. Among other things, the medieval theater comes to life in full panoply, as with a performance of the play of Adam, in which Nicholas changes roles between the Devil’s Fool and a normal one:

I shook my bells and struck the tambourine as I went back through the people. I was a different person now, they did not hate me. They knew me for a japer, not a demon. I understood then, as I passed through the people and shook my bells and saw them smile, what all players come to know very well, how quickly shifting are our loves and hates, how they depend on mocks and disguises. With a horned mask and a wooden trident I was their fear of hell fire. Two minutes later, still the same timorous creature as before, with a fool’s cap and a white mask, I was their hope of laughter. I was discovering also the danger of disguise for the player. A mask confers the terror of freedom, it is very easy to forget who you are. I felt it now, this slipping of the soul…

Morality Play is a work of genius, a mirror on human nature in the fourteenth century and now.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book for my bookshelf, where it has pride of place.

Costume Drama: Design for Dying

16 Monday May 2016

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1937, backbiting, costume, Edith Head, fashion, fraud, historical fiction, Hollywood, mystery, Renee Patrick, role playing, scandalmongering, studio politics, twentieth century

Review: Design for Dying, by Renee Patrick
Forge, 2016. 317 pp. $25

A young woman lies shot dead in an alley. You’ve heard that one before. But this time, it’s Hollywood, 1937, and the victim, “who’d rather live high for a few weeks than low for a lifetime,” was wearing a gown and jewelry filched from the Paramount Pictures wardrobe.

Sunseet Boulevard, Hollywood, 1937 (Courtesy losangelespast.com via  oac.cdlib.org)

Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, 1937 (Courtesy losangelespast.com via oac.cdlib.org)

In case you’re not a walking encyclopedia of the silver screen, let me inform you that the wardrobe mistress at Paramount back then was little-known Edith Head, later to become the most famous name in film costume. But now, she’s on the verge of being fired, and if the studio were looking for evidence against her, the scandal attached to this murder could be Exhibit A.

However, Miss Head isn’t alone. Lillian Frost, a star-struck New Yorker who came West for a screen test and has settled for a job as a department store clerk, was the dead woman’s roommate for awhile. Not that she liked Ruby Carroll much–many people didn’t–but Lillian found her fascinating, and still does. Moreover, she’s missing a brooch, given her by her late mother, and suspects that Ruby stole it. So when the police pull Lillian in for questioning, causing a stir at the women’s millinery counter, she does her best to persuade Detective Morrow to let her see the jewelry her former roommate died wearing. The brooch isn’t there, but she recognizes the dress from The Return of Sophie Lang, a movie she’s seen. That leads to Paramount Pictures, and–you guessed it–Lillian convinces the good detective to let her come along for the ride.

Right away, Edith Head impresses her as a professional woman who knows exactly who she is and what she was meant for:

She wore a shirtwaist dress the color of fresh buttermilk, a pattern of pale green leaves scattered across the fabric. Her petite frame should have been overwhelmed by the print but something about her bearing balanced it perfectly. . . . Her dark hair was cut into a bob, sharp bangs in a ruler-straight line above eyes that moved past lively to ferocious. . . . As her gaze swept over me I had the sense of my measure being taken, both ruthlessly and accurately. I straightened my spine, and could have sworn the woman nodded in approval.

It’s a wonderful partnership, and Lillian revels in it, not least for the free fashion advice. But I do have two objections to this clever novel, and I’ll get them over with now. There’s no way on earth, not even the movies, that Lillian would have ready access to the apartment she once shared with Ruby after the murder. The police would have gone through the place, sealed it, and, if necessary, posted a guard. All the evidence would have been swept up, and there would have been nothing more for Lillian to do. Likewise, the police wouldn’t have tolerated her presence (never mind her interference) while investigating the case.

Nevertheless, if you can overlook these flaws, and the occasional melodrama, you’re in for a treat. To begin with, Renee Patrick (a pseudonym for a husband-and-wife team) has Hollywood down pat–the preening, the cut-throat competition thinly veiled behind toothy smiles and air kisses, the jockeying for position, the narcissistic obsession with who might be watching and whether they’ll applaud. Is a friend really a friend, or someone looking for an advantage? That’s the question Lillian must constantly ask herself. It’s part of the mystery, which, outside of the implausible procedure, is very well done, sometimes in parody of the Hollywood genre.

The capsule descriptions can be very funny: “His slicked-back hair and thin mustache aimed for sophistication but only emphasized he had the flat, pie-plate eyes of a carnival huckster.” The dialogue offers plenty of thrust and riposte, with a chuckle on many a page. The Hollywood cameo appearances include Preston Sturges, Bob Hope, and, most memorably, Barbara Stanwyck.

But Edith Head outshines them all, perceptive to nuance and conscious of detail, just as a designer would be. Besides, she makes a terrific mentor for Lillian, who’s plainly too smart to remain a store clerk forever. And even if you don’t know anything about fashion, it’s fun to watch Miss Head at work.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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