As the sensational trial of former Minister of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukaev continued this week in Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky District Court, it seemed more and more like a replay of the infamous show trials of the Stalin period—the charges bogus, the outcome predetermined. Ulyukaev is the first Kremlin minister to be charged with a crime while in office since 1953. While Ulyukaev’s case points to a conflict over power and resources within Putin’s elite, it is also a manifestation of a broader crackdown by Putin.
Books
Jesmyn Ward
Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.
Jesmyn Ward’s writing marries a devastating realism with a unique sensitivity to the long echoes of violence and trauma. Her National Book Award-winning novel Salvage the Bones brought mythic resonance to the ordeal of a family from a town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast during the days just before and after the devastation of hurricane Katrina. Her new novel Sing, Unburied, Sing nods to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison with a tale of addiction, imprisonment, love and struggle — told by the living, the dying and by ghosts. In this episode, Miwa Messer talks with Jesmyn Ward about her electric fiction.
In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle.
Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by visions of her dead brother, which only come to her when she’s high; Mam is dying of cancer; and quiet, steady Pop tries to run the household and teach Jojo how to be a man. When the white father of Leonie’s children is released from prison, she packs her kids and a friend into her car and sets out across the state for Parchman farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary, on a journey rife with danger and promise.
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Soccer’s Culture of Corruption
FIFA remains largely unreformed, and Western countries seem powerless to force change. David Conn’s new book shows that the saga of world soccer’s governing body since the 1970s has foreshadowed geopolitical shifts, notably the waning of the political and economic dominance of the West.
The Crackdown in Cambodia
“Descent into Outright Dictatorship,” read The Cambodia Daily’s final headline on Monday, a defiant last cry from a fiercely independent newspaper that has now been shut down by Prime Minister Hun Sen’s government. The waning of the international community’s influence over Hun Sen raises ethical questions about Western aid to Cambodia. It is now evident that foreign donors like the United States are financing the policies of an increasingly dictatorial government.
Egypt’s Failed Revolution
To the Editors: I appreciate Joshua Hammer’s thoughtful review of my book, The Egyptians: A Radical History of Egypt’s Unfinished Revolution, and more importantly the space given over to highlighting some of the many aspects of Egypt’s current plight. Emboldened by international support, both political and financial, the dictatorship of former General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi continues to intensify its crackdown on all forms of opposition and dissent.
Locking Up The Mentally Ill
To the Editors: David Cole’s “The Truth About Our Prison Crisis,” not surprisingly, does not mention the perhaps 200,000 severely mentally ill in jails and prisons. Despite recognition for decades of the prisons as the “de facto mental hospitals” there is relatively little concern among the populace, or officials, about that development.
How Australians Vote
To the Editors: As a former Chair of the Australian Electoral Commission, can I comment on the thoughtful piece by Eric Maskin and Amartya Sen, “A Better Way to Choose Presidents”? In Australia since the 1920s voting at state and federal elections has been compulsory. At the 2016 federal election, voter turnout was 95 percent, compared with 58 percent in the US election that year.
The Outside-In Art of Grayson Perry
In the art world, Grayson Perry believes, despite the blockbuster exhibitions at national galleries, “popular” is a term of abuse, linked to populism and unthinking prejudice. But in his exhibition “The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever!” he shows that craft is also “art,” and that it belongs to us all. It’s here, even more than in his overt political statements, that Perry is truly democratic and profoundly “popular.”
What Are Impeachable Offenses?
Because it has been used so rarely, and because it is a power entrusted to Congress, not the courts, impeachment as a legal process is poorly understood. There are no judicial opinions that create precedents for how and when to proceed with it. Past cases are subject to competing and often contradictory interpretations. Some might even be tempted to argue that because impeachment is ultimately political, it cannot be considered in legal terms at all. That extreme view cannot be right. Impeachment must be a legal procedure because it derives from specific constitutional directives.
A Legacy of Spies
Almost sixty years have passed since George Smiley first appeared in John le Carré’s novel Call for the Dead. And even then the diffident spy felt “pedestrian and old-fashioned,” as though ” . . . he had entered middle age without ever being young.” Just two years later came his apparent defeat in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which ended with Smiley desperately waiting for British agent Alec Leamas to to escape over the Berlin Wall: ” ‘Jump, Alec! Jump, man!’ . . . [Leamas] heard Smiley’s voice from quite close: ‘The girl, where’s the girl?’ Shielding his eyes he looked down at the foot of the wall and at last managed to see her, lying still.” (Both Leamas and the unknowing Liz Gold have been betrayed by Leamas’s spymasters, sacrificed to protect an East German double agent.
Graham Greene called le Carré’s 1963 novel “the best spy story I have ever read,” and its bleak force remains undiminished while Smiley has, of course, endured. Guilt-ridden yet relentless, English literature’s most complex espionage agent soon became both the sage and conscience of his trade. And of his country. For if the two novels mentioned above — along with The Looking Glass War — constitute the early distillation of le Carré’s themes of secrecy and betrayal, loyalty and courage, and the subsequent Karla trilogy (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; Smiley’s People) their fleshier incarnation, all are indictments of post-Empire Britain. And of class, always class, which le Carré skewers with lethal accuracy. “His suit was just too light for respectability,” Smiley notes in Call for the Dead of a bureaucrat who is “a barmaid’s idea of a real gentleman.”
And now in A Legacy of Spies, le Carré’s latest novel, “A fresh-faced, bespectacled English public schoolboy of indefinable age in shirt and braces bounces out from behind a table. “I’m Bunny, by the by,” he announces. “Bloody silly name, but it’s followed me around since infancy and I can’t get rid of it.” Bunny, a lawyer for the Service, is about to interrogate (chummily, at first) Smiley’s old protégé Peter Guillam, who has been summoned to London from retirement in Brittany — “to clear up a bit of unpleasantness from the past, dear boy.” The unpleasantness in question is, in fact, the story of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold — for Alec Leamas, it turns out, had a son, and Liz Gold had a daughter. “They have convinced themselves, not without reason, that their respective parents died as a consequence of what appears to have been a five-star-cock-up by this Service, and by you and George Smiley personally,” Bunny explains. “They are seeking full disclosure, punitive damages and a public apology that will name names.”
Guillam, his passport confiscated, must revisit the files on Operation Windfall (conveniently if improbably stored in the original safe house) and reveal all. Because, as Bunny’s colleague puts it, “Once we have the truth, we’ll know how to doctor it.” Le Carré has lost none of his sardonic wit. And his taut descriptions still exude menace and dread, particularly in the flashbacks that bring this novel to life. “Inside Berlin city limits,” Alec Leamas reports in his 1960 debriefing, “but it’s forest, flat roads and flying snow. We pass the old Nazi radio station which is our first marker. The Citroen’s a hundred yards behind us, not enjoying the icy roads. We go into the dip, gathering speed.” Leamas is extracting an agent, code-named Tulip, from East Germany, in a subplot that forms a critical link with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and is expertly interwoven. “In one chair sits George Smiley,” Leamas recalls of the session, soon after Tulip’s escape, in which an enemy agent is turned, “looking the way only George looks when he’s conducting an interrogation: a bit put out, a bit pained, as if life is one long discomfort for him and no one can make it tolerable except just possibly you. And across from George in the other chair sits a powerful blond man of my own age with fresh bruises round his eyes.” Leamas is looking at the man who will soon have him killed.
Peter Guillam is our guide through this maze of interlocking plots, which does indeed lead to Smiley, but not before a child of the past runs Guillam himself to ground. “The face [is] Alec’s, but with pouchy discontent where pain lines should have been. The same pugnacious jaw. In the brown eyes, when they bothered with you, the same flashes of buccaneering charm.” This is Christoph, Alec Leamas’s son and another of le Carré’s masterful character sketches. “You know what? Patriotism is dead, man,” he lectures Guillam. “Patriotism is for babies. If this case goes international, patriotism as a justification will not fly. Patriotism in mitigation is officially fucked. Same as elites. Same as you guys.” Coked up and scruffily menacing, he demands a million euros: “No lawyers, no human rights, no bullshit.” A gun does come into it, in a brilliantly pathetic scene that shows how death might arrive clumsily, with no more purpose than a tantrum. Where his father had courage, Christoph has merely appetite.
But le Carré, clear-eyed as ever, is not casting back to a nobler age. If the narrator of an earlier novel, The Secret Pilgrim, says of Smiley, “He hates nostalgia, even if he’s part of other people’s,” then the same can be said of his creator. In A Legacy of Spies, the glib technocrats of the shiny new Service are wonderfully and contemptuously drawn, but their old-school predecessors are the ones called to account. And, fittingly, by children. For children, in one form or another, have always been central in le Carré’s novels. From Billy Roach, the watchful schoolboy in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, to the vengeful orphans here and, indeed, to Guillam himself, the golden boy molded by Smiley. “Well, now for the reckoning at last,” he concludes, ” . . . did you, George, consciously set out to suppress the humanity in me, or was I just collateral damage too?” And was Guillam’s Cold War a noble cause? “Or were we simply suffering from the incurable English disease of needing to play the world’s game when we weren’t world players any more.” (The question haunts le Carré’s fiction. The enduring appeal of his novels, however, lies not in their philosophy but in their exquisite density of character and place, the result of le Carré’s unrivalled ability to see: winter light after rain, snow on cobblestones, a traitor’s smile. And if A Legacy of Spies is thinner in this sense, the reader, unlike the spy, can always return to the past for pleasure.
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Sig Nordal 