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#BookReview The Unfortunate Englishman (Joe Wilderness #2) by John Lawton @groveatlantic

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The Unfortunate EnglishmanAbout the Book

Berlin, 1963. East End-Londoner turned spy Joe Wilderness has had better days. He is sitting in a West Berlin jail, arrested for shooting someone he thought was about to kill him. His old boss, Lieutenant Burne-Jones of MI6, comes to Berlin to free him, but only under the condition that he rejoin British Intelligence. The knowledge that Wilderness gained of Berlin’s underworld while working the black market just after World War II will prove useful to Queen and country now that the city has become the epicenter of the Cold War, dividing the world in two with its wall.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, another MI6 man, Geoffrey Masefield, is ruing the day he first agreed to be a spy. In the beginning, it had all seemed so simple, so glamorous: the international travel, the top secret files, the vodka, the women. . . . But now Masefield is stuck in Lubyanka, the KGB’s Moscow prison, waiting for a lifeline from his former employer. Meanwhile, over in England, a Russian spy is pining for his homeland. Having lived as Bernard Forbes Campbell Alleyn for years and taken a wife and had two daughters under that alias, he’s now been exposed as KGB Captain Leonid Liubimov. Arrested for treason and then for espionage, he is in prison at Wormwood Scrubs, London. The only ticket out for these two men is a spy exchange.

Posted back to Berlin, Wilderness is to oversee the exchange of Masefield and Liubimov, but his black market nous hasn’t diminished. There’s money to be made and ten thousand bottles of fine Bordeaux that Wilderness hasn’t forgotten about.

Format: Hardcover (368 pages)   Publisher: Grove Press
Publication date: 5th May 2016  Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

The Unfortunate Englishman is the second book in the author’s Joe Wilderness series, the follow-up to Then We Take Berlin. I listened to the audiobook version of that in 2020 and you can read my review here. I was fortunate enough to win a copy of the third book in the series, Hammer To Fall, from Readers First last year so I thought it was about time I read its predecessor (a copy of which I spotted in my local Oxfam bookshop).

The book’s opening chapter continues directly on from the final scene in Then We Take Berlin. Once more Joe Holderness (known to his friends as Wilderness) is in a scrape and on course to get a tongue lashing from his wife Judy, if and when he gets home. (By the way, I love Judy. She always knows when Joe’s up to something nefarious, dangerous, or both.)

Then it’s back to 1945 and the story of how a KGB agent managed to assume the identity of another man, Bernard Alleyn, and live undiscovered for nearly fifteen years, all the time passing secrets back to the Soviet Union until he is unmasked.

Moving forward to 1960, Wilderness is involved in recruiting business man and metallurgy expert Geoffrey Masefield to travel to the Soviet Union as part of a trade delegation in the hope of discovering information about the Soviets missile capability. The storyline is reminiscent of the case of Greville Wynne, arrested as a spy and sentenced to eight years in a Soviet prison. (His experiences have recently been dramatized – with quite a lot of artistic licence – in the film The Courier, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.) Wilderness disappears from the picture in this part of the book, the focus instead on Masefield’s time in Moscow. Masefield is rather the innocent abroad, fulfilling his boyhood dream of becoming spy yet a little disappointed that it’s not quite like in the James Bond books. He’s rather easy prey for the KGB who know exactly how to take advantage of a man’s weaknesses.

There’s a brief trip back in time to Berlin in 1947 to discover more about those ten thousand bottles of Bordeaux before the book picks up where it started, with Burne-Jones rescuing Wilderness from a Berlin jail in 1963. After a few frustrating years shuffling paperwork, Wilderness is ordered to return to Berlin to oversee the spy exchange.  As you might expect, not everything goes to plan, especially when Wilderness encounters two old sparring partners from the past plus the woman who, for a brief time, captured his heart. Perhaps he should have heeded the advice of his friend Eddie: “Joe, Berlin has been a disaster area for you. It’s marked on the map with a big black cross and a sign saying ‘here be dragons’.”

Although written five years ago, the book seems surprisingly up-to-date. Proving nothing much changes, the failure of the Americans and British to anticipate the construction of the Berlin wall cutting off West Berlin is described as a ‘failure of intelligence’. Where have we heard that recently? And no doubt Burne-Jones’s observation that ‘it is far better to say nothing and appear ignorant than to admit we knew and appear futile’ still applies as well.

I loved the brief appearance by a character from the author’s other series and also how the title of the book could be interpreted in a number of ways.  Is ‘the unfortunate Englishman’ Alleyn, separated from his family and languishing in a British jail, Masefield, the inept spy captured by the Soviets, or even Wilderness, more at home in the field than behind a desk?

The author clearly has a love of short chapters – The Unfortunate Englishman has 171! – but it’s a classy, perfectly paced spy thriller with great period atmosphere and a plot which is a satisfying blend of the personal and the political. I can’t wait to pluck Hammer To Fall off my bookshelf and get stuck in.

The Unfortunate Englishman is book 19 of my 20 Books of Summer 2021. Nearly there!

In three words: Gripping, pacy, action-packed

Try something similar: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré

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John LawtonAbout the Author

John Lawton worked for Channel 4 for many years. He is the author of Then We Take Berlin, the first in the Joe Wilderness series. He has also written seven novels in his Troy series, the standalone novel, Sweet Sunday, a couple of short stories, and the occasional essay. He writes very slowly and almost on the hoof in the USA or Italy, but professes to be a resident of a tiny village in the Derbyshire Peak District. (Photo credit: Goodreads author page)

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#BookReview Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks @HutchHeinemann

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Snow CountryAbout the Book

1914: Young Anton Heideck has arrived in Vienna, eager to make his name as a journalist. While working part-time as a private tutor, he encounters Delphine, a woman who mixes startling candour with deep reserve. Entranced by the light of first love, Anton feels himself blessed. Until his country declares war on hers.

1927: For Lena, life with a drunken mother in a small town has been impoverished and cold. She is convinced she can amount to nothing until a young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke, spirits her away to Vienna. But the capital proves unforgiving. Lena leaves her metropolitan dream behind to take a menial job at the snow-bound sanatorium, the Schloss Seeblick.

1933: Still struggling to come terms with the loss of so many friends on the Eastern Front, Anton, now an established writer, is commissioned by a magazine to visit the mysterious Schloss Seeblick. In this place of healing, on the banks of a silvery lake, where the depths of human suffering and the chances of redemption are explored, two people will see each other as if for the first time.

Format: eARC (368 pages)                     Publisher: Hutchinson
Publication date: 2nd September 2021 Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

Although Snow Country is the second book in a planned trilogy – the first of which was Human Traces published in 2005 – it can be read as a standalone.

Opening with a dramatic prologue that some readers may find too graphic for their taste, the book explores some profound psychological and moral issues through events in the lives of its principal characters – Anton Heideck, Lena Fontana and, to a lesser extent, Rudolf Plischke.

The first part of the book featuring Anton Heideck provides a vivid picture of pre-First World War Vienna with its coffee houses, opera houses and concert halls. Unfortunately, most of the delights of the city are out of the reach of young Anton as he tries to scrape a living as a private tutor and journalist. Anton begins an intense relationship with the enigmatic Delphine, a young woman hired as a companion and French tutor to a Viennese family.

As Anton becomes more successful, assignments to Paris and Moscow follow as well as a trip to report on the US-led construction of the Panama Canal. The latter has resonance for citizens of France because of the earlier involvement of Ferdinand de Lesseps, for a time a national hero because of his role in the construction of the Suez Canal. Unfortunately, his attempts to build a sea-level canal across the isthmus of Panama ended in failure with investors in the project losing everything. However, the outbreak of the First World War has momentous consequences for Anton, leaving emotional scars and unanswered questions.

Lena’s story is one of a young girl growing up with few advantages in life, except perhaps that her alcoholic mother has chosen to raise her rather than give her up for adoption like so many of Lena’s half-sisters and brothers, the result of her mother’s brief couplings with various men. Even learning the identity of her father leaves Lena feeling abandoned and her instinctive self-expression and unconventional nature sets her apart from others. Gradually she transforms herself from illiterate school girl to independent young woman although not without moments of desperation and emotional disappointment along the way, including a relationship with idealistic young lawyer, Rudolf Plischke.

Although the book seems to be at least two different stories with little connection between them, chance – or perhaps, fate – sees Anton, Lena and Rudolf arrive at the sanatorium, Schloss Seeblick. Lena is employed there as a servant, and Anton and Rudolf are there for professional reasons. Lena is the connection between the two men, although they are unaware of this. For Lena and Rudolf their meeting is an opportunity to resolve some unfinished business between them.

Initially Anton’s interest in the sanatorium is purely professional, having been commissioned to write an article about it. He learns more about the sanatorium and the philosophy behind its treatments through his conversations with head therapist Martha Midwinter. These include discussions about the theories of Freud and others, a lot of which I’ll freely admit went over my head. Whilst studying the papers in the sanatorium’s archives for his article, Anton comes across a letter whose contents resonate with him: ‘The human mind has evolved in a way that makes it unable to deal with the pain of its own existence. No other creature is like this.’ Anton begins to wonder if Schloss Seeblick might offer him a way to resolve his own mental torment, caused by a combination of the unresolved issues in his personal life and his experiences as a soldier in the First World War. Through his subsequent sessions with Martha, we begin to learn more about Anton’s wartime experiences and understand their lasting impact on him, including what we would today recognize as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

The observation that ‘life is full of missed connections, of bad timing’ is an apt description of the book and I enjoyed Snow Country, especially Lena’s story, although I was left with the feeling that I wasn’t quite clever enough to appreciate everything the author was seeking to explore in the book. However, I guess it’s no bad thing for a book to leave you with the sense there’s more to the world, and to other people, than you think you know.

My thanks to Hutchinson for my advance review copy via NetGalley. Sebastian Faulks will be appearing at Henley Literary Festival on 2nd October to talk about Snow Country. The event is also being live-streamed and tickets are still available at the time of writing.

In three words: Profound, complex, moving

Try something similar: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker or The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon

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Sebastian FaulksAbout the Author

Sebastian Faulks was born in 1953, and grew up in Newbury, the son of a judge and a repertory actress. He attended Wellington College and studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, although he didn’t enjoy attending either institution. Cambridge in the 70s was still quite male-dominated, and he says that you had to cycle about 5 miles to meet a girl. He was the first literary editor of The Independent, and then went on to become deputy editor of The Sunday Independent. Sebastian Faulks was awarded the CBE in 2002. He and his family live in London. (Photo/bio credit: Goodreads author page)

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