Bond Unbound: Tremor of Intent (1965)

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There's an interesting essay to be written, I think, about the way our age likes to take any given idealised fantasy of elegance, or empowerment, or escape, or supercompetence and rub its nose in the dirt. I'm talking about the shift in broader cultural taste away from stories of Tolkienesque pre-raphaelite grace and beauty towards stories of G R R Martin grimness, darkness, cynicism and horror. Or the way Batman no longer 'works' as primary-coloured larking about and must instead be darkly knighted. Or, to come closer to the matter of the book under discussion, the way spy stories no longer 'work' as Roger Moore in a polyester whistle, exotic holidays with a bit of artfully rendered nookie on the side, interspersed with some balletically choreographed fisticuffs and running-around. Now the reboot is on the other refit: Daniel Craig, tied to a chair, must scowl toughly whilst heavies thwack him in the testicles with a lead weight. Now the audience must be made to feel as if every punch is connecting with bone, must see blood and torment and the misery of the beaten. We can't say that what was once 'mere escapism' is now 'dark and realistic', because there's nothing realistic about new Bond, Bourne, Dark Knight or any of them. They are all still exercises in aesthetic convention, not mimesis; still predicated on the mendacity that violence is thrilling and 'gets results', rather than the much more dramatically inert truth that violence is distressing and destructive, as damaging to the perpetrator's psyche as to the victim's body and mind. The mendacity that spying is an adventure, rather than a boring dayjob, 50% admin, 30% sitting tediously around, 5% meetings with line managers and the rest drink.

I don't want to labour this point. If you watch Octopussy and haughtily comment that 'real spywork is nothing like this' your interlocutor will of course agree. If you watch Skyfall and say the same thing, you're more likely to be deprecated for spoiling everyone's fun. Yet Skyfall is precisely as far removed from actual spying as the earlier movie, the one in which Swedish supermodel Maud Adams plays an Indian begum and MI6 has bugged the world's supply of Fabergé eggs. Indeed, since people in real life laugh a lot, and since the Octopussy at least achieves a degree of humour, it is arguably more 'life-like' than the ponderously earnest Daniel Craig film. The point being, real is not the deal these texts offer us, not what we go to them for. Real is a salient only insofar as we want these texts not to flaunt too openly that there's nothing real about them. We have, after all, our pride.

The larger truth, I tend to think, is a sort of inverse square law. The more comfortable and pampered the middle-class Western book-reading, film-going audience becomes, the more they feel the urge for a contrasting grimness in their art. Just as desert people dream of oases and green gardens (or so I have heard), it can be that people who have spent their whole lives oasily cosseted sometimes dream of the compensatory fantasy of desert hardness. Not that we want actual hardship and misery (that's not what masochistic fantasy is ever really about), but that it supplies the something we feel, on some level, to be missing. By giving us fun and games overlaid with a rubric of severity, Casino Royale and Skyfall enable us to feel superior to the pumpkinheads who believe spying to be nought but a laugh and a lark and a walk in the park. We know better. We know that the world is really a horrible, brutal place, In fact, the less horrible and brutal our actual lives, the more extravagantly horrible and brutal we believe the world to be. Hence the success of Saw, Hostel, Game of Thrones et al. The problem with comfort, to return for a moment to silky-voiced Alec Guinness in blackface, is that an irkfree life adds up to so little it might look like nothing at all. And no man needs nothing.

The alternative to Daniel Craig being squelch-crunchingly beaten about the testicles (whilst at other times having sex with a procession of beautiful women and acting as our proxy in a series of theme-park-ride-style action sequences) is to go to the other extreme. It's possible to write spy stories that stress the tedium of actual spying. John le Carré has occasionally done this, and books like The Looking Glass War and A Small Town in Germany are, impressively, almost as dull as the diplomatic and civil-service worlds they set out to describe. It would have been a big ask for le Carré to (if you'll excuse me) le carry on with this approach, and his later novels are generally more richly supplied with incident and local colour: Jerry Westerby going rogue and repeatedly shooting his gun in exotic Far Eastern locales in The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) for instance. 'Real' is a fetish word, and not really what we want, or we'd spend our time on documentary and history. Objecting to the fictionality of fiction as 'unrealistic' is like objecting to opera on the grounds that in real life people don't communicate exclusively via singing. It misses the point.

Yet there's something there, isn't there: some reason why we prefer our spy stories to pay lip-service to 'reality'. If genre Fantasy is one of the ways  we come to terms with our past, vampire stories are how we mediate our sexual desires and anxieties, and crime fiction our eschatological fears, then spy stories have some important role to play in our relationship to politics and international relations. These adventures, the moral landscape they sketch out, the sense of urgency and importance, articulate a crucial something that political news reporting generally fails to: that this stuff matters, I suppose.

'Reality' can be more than a surface documentary verisimilitude. The pairing of gentility and violence of the Bond franchise, however unlikely it seems on the surface, perhaps speaks to a deeper truth about the 'reality' of the colonial and post-colonial world. It's similar to what Lukács says about Nietzsche: 'Admirers of the "purified" Nietzsche have been hard put to unite his sanctioning of barbarity with an often subtle and rarefied cultural critique. But we can easily dispose of this dichotomy. In the first place, the union of ultra-refinement and brutality was by no means a personal quirk requiring psychological elucidation, but a universal, psychical-moral distinguishing mark of imperialist decadence. [“Nietzsche as Founder of Irrationalism in the Imperialist Period”, in The Destruction of Reason (1954; 1980), 100]. James Bond's impeccable palate and appetite for fine dining and his ability of break a man's neck with his bare hands fit together in exactly the same way.

One of the conceits of Burgess's sole foray into spy-thriller writing. Tremor of Intent, is that the Cold War East-West 'Communism versus Capitalism' struggle was at root a religious conflict, a game echoing two cosmic forces, black and white, that antedate even God. 'God and Notgod', is how the novel styles it. I'd say the subsequent history has tended to falsify this view, or we'd be as hip-deep in West-versus-Islam thrillers today as we once were in West-versus-Reds back in the day. But it's an interesting approach, for a writer setting out to 'deconstruct' the form. And it's easy to forget just how popular and capacious a genre the Cold War thriller used to be, how ripe a target it once was for the higher-brow treatment.

At any rate, Burgess's sole spy-thriller is not like any other I have read. It is as ever with AB very well written, on the level of specific scenes, of dialogue and in its passages of Joycean textual play. Nor is it badly plotted, or structured, although it is certainly weirdly plotted and strangely shaped. But there are many of the satisfactions of 'conventional' spy thrillers here, an ingenious series of twists and turns, carefully described sex, violence and eating, and a fisheyelense treatment of an actual contemporary scandal of the intelligence world (as Tinker Tailor is to the Kim Philby affair, so this novel is to the Profumo scandal). It's often funny. is always readable, but nonetheless it leaves a strange taste in the mouth. Having thought about it, I wonder if this isn't the taste of disappointment, and that, rather than the scylla of ultraviolence on the one hand, and the charybdis of secretarial tedium on the other, is how Burgess sets out to bring the spy genre as a whole back to—for want of a better word—reality.

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When Goldfinger threatens to saw Sean Connery in half ('do you expect me to talk?' 'I expect you to die Mr Bond!') the scene exists primarily to enable Connery to demonstrate his admirable sang froid. Roger Moore skis off a cliff but saves himself with a union jack parachute, perhaps hidden in his underpants, showing thereby his preparedness. Daniel Craig is testicularly tortured but does not crack, demonstrating his toughness. Burgess's spy, Denis Hillier, recalls a similar scene out of the stock spy adventure, being branded by a supervillain with said villain's initial letter. But Burgess takes this in a rather different direction:

Welcome it, welcome it, he had told his body, as Soskice's executioner voluptuously delayed the searing impact. ... he had not screamed, feeling the intolerable bite, the pain itself S-shaped. The S has hissed into his very bowels, the sphincter—weakest of all the muscles—bidding them open to expel the snake whose body was all teeth. Soskice was disgusted, but no more so than Hillier. 'I didn't mean that,' Hillier had moaned. 'I apologize.' And they had left him for a time in his mess, delaying the consummation. And that delay had (oh, it was a long story bringing in a man called Kosciusko) saved his life. [50]

I don't believe I can think of any other spy-thriller protagonist who shits himself when tortured, but presumably it happens more often than not, in, ahem, 'reality'. That S-shaped scar** has its part to play in the plot: one of Hillier's enemies, the obese pederast and international villain Mr Theodorescu, is able to see past Hillier’s cover-story (that he is a typewriter salesman called Jagger) by observing it, after Theodorescu seductive sidekick, Miss Devi, has tempted Hillier into nakedness. During their elaborately, if rather bafflingly described, coitus—

the nipples were rivets boring through the middle metacarpal bones. His soreness first cooled then anointed by the heat of a beneficent hell that (Dante was right) found its location at the earth’s core. He worked slowly, then faster, and let the cries of birds possess his ears—gannet, cormorant, bitten, ibis, spoonbill, flamingo, curassow, quail, rail, coot, trumpeter, bustard, plover, avocet, oystercatcher, curlew, oriole, crossbill, finch, shrike, godwit, wheatear, bluethroat. The cries condensed to a great roar of blood. The cabin soared, its ceiling blew off in the stratosphere

—and so on: during, I say, this coitus, Miss Devi injects Hillier with a truth serum. When corpulent Theodorescu calls by, Hillier cannot help but tell him all the secrets of British Intelligence, which secrets are Mr T’s stock in trade. Theodorescu then decamps by helicopter, but not before informing the Soviet authorities that they may locate their spy by the S branded on his flank.

Hillier is on a cruise-ship, the improbably-named Polyolbion, chugging around the Med. Under his Jagger-pseudonym he is on his way to Soviet Yugoslavia to retrieve (drugging him if needful) a prominent British scientist called Roper who has previously defected. It so happens that Hillier and Roper were at school together, a Catholic academy; and there's a great deal of 'Catholic' stuff in the earlier portions of the book. We discover that adult Hillier effectively broke-up the owlish Roper's marriage to a German woman called Brigitte, a luscious blonde who was working as a prostitute on the side whilst still married to Roper. After throwing out one of Brigitte's clients from the Roper domicile, Hillier had sex with Brigitte himself. Afterwards Roper flees to the USSR. Now Hillier must fetch him back.

Burgess's strategy when it comes to deconstructing the spy story is not to peddle cod-realism, nor to stress the downbeat and unexciting, but rather to push all the familiar elements into a kind of excess, by turns phantasmagoric and revolting. The things that 'sold' the Bond novels to readers living in the grey postwar world was fourfold, viz.:

• Sex
• Violence
• Exotic locales
• Food

It's easy to forget how titillating the latter two were liable to be for readers, in a world in which rationing cast a postwar shadow many years long, and when package holidays and gap years were mere glints in futurity's eye. But Fleming's books are full of all four, filtered through the snobbish sensibility of someone who (exciting!) takes all of them as nothing more than his due.

Burgess pushes each to parodic extremes. The lengthy, surreally-rendered shag shared by Hillier and Miss Devi, quoted (very partially) above, is one example. The second quantity is rendered via a series of positively Jacobean textual excrescences: Hillier finally tracks Roper down only to be double-crossed by an assasin, who monologues for many pages before being shot by a teenage boy called Alan, and we get:

He thudded fire at the nose and got the right eye. The eye leaped out on its string as in a surrealistic montage. The socket leered as blood prepared to charge and then the whole face was black fluidity mounted on a falling body. The mouth, independent of the smashed brain, cried 'Cor' in Cockney. [144]

But it's the food where Burgess really goes to town, partly in straightforwardly pastiched Fleming-asides ('He ate some boned veal loins en croûte with a noddle soufflé and julienne of young carrots and celery. He drank a '49 Margaux' [94]), but mostly in an queasy-making extended set-piece early in the novel, where fat Theodorescu bets thin Hillier £1000 that he can out-eat him. The result is a staggering scene of gormandizing excess that Hillier, of course, loses.

But the whole novel feels like that scene, in a way; Burgess bends all his considerable stylistic skill to disguise the fatty, sugaryness of the food, and then stuffs it down our craws immoderately. What, we can't help wondering, is he getting at? It seems to be that the wages of sensual indulgence is anticlimax. It leaches into the descriptive prose too: 'the marine sky insinuated itself. through phases of pink and madder, into a velvet transformation'. Often the novel's tone splurges: for splurge is the proper idiom of excess, and excess is one of the novel's main thrusts. The question is: does Burgess bodge the tone by this splurging? Does he engage in (you'll have to forgive me this one) tone burge?

Some people think so. My reaction to the novel was by no means as hostile as Damien Weaver's entertaining hatchet job, published on Bookslut a few years back; but there's something in what Weaver says:

It's like a TV series that runs for too many seasons; we watch the characters undergo so much and variously embody so much that it becomes impossible to take empathize with them or take them seriously as real people with recognizable lives. The characters in Tremor speak openly of the process, further diluting its impact. When the novel's characters show less and less interest in daily living, instead discussing the strange shared journey they're undergoing and the strange ways they're behaving, the reader may wish Puppeteer Burgess would quit flaunting the strings. ... With so many terrible writers writing so poorly it seems perverse to denigrate Tremor, which consists of a good writer by and large writing well, but the classification "satire" does not excuse ungainliness, authorial sloppiness does not render satire "rollicking," and the half-assed trappings of genre convention don't qualify a book as "deconstructive," "subversive," or "genre-busting." Still, those who've suffered through more egregious examples of the above—by, say, Andre Codrescu or Kinky Friedman—and wondered what the fuck the author was thinking may be reassured to discover such drivel has provenance, or at least a milder precedent.

During the interminable monologue of the paid assassin Wriste (whose previous cover was a cockney steward on the Polyolbion) Hillier notes his fondness for lecturing his victims. Theodorescu is prone to the same habit. 'There was, thought Hiller, always something of the schoolmaster in the secret agent' [136]. Really? It's as if to say: see, the spy-story puts us to school. But what is its lesson? 'Everything's an imposture' [199] is Hillier's gloomy conclusion at the novel's end. Everything? Isn't there anything hidden in amongst the misdirection, anything except flimflam? What though?

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A brief coda on codes. They're part of the spy's armoury, of course; and the Da Vinci Code showed how commercially popular they can be in a popular-fictive context. Tremor of Intent is full of them. On board the Polyolbion Hillier receives a communication from base:

He opened the letter. It was, as he'd expected, in code: ZZWM DDHGEM EH IJNZ OJNMU ODWI EXWI OVU ODVP—Long, quite a long message. Hillier frowned. He had no way of breaking the code. Nothing had been said to him about the sending of messages after embarkation ... inside [the envelope], previously unnoticed by him, was the thinnest slip of paper, hardly bigger than a cracker motto. On it a rhyme had been typed:

November goddess in your glory
Swell the march of England's story.

And underneath a cheery message: regards from all here. [54-55]

Hillier pockets this, unsolved. Later in the story, precocious teenager Alan has a go:

'The November goddess is Queen Elizabeth I. She came to the throne in November 1558 ... alternate letters belong to alternate systems, yes. In one system the first letter is the fifth, in the other the fifth letter is the eighth. ... It begins: DEAR HILLIR. [107]

'They may have spelled it wrong,' says Hillier. 'It should be Hillier.' Burgess, sportingly, leaves the rest as an exercise for the reader: 'I didn't get much further that that,' says Alan. 'But it's full of apologies as far as I can see. They're sorry about something or other' [108]. What about the other codes? Look again at the list of birds in the Hillier/Devi sex scene, quoted above, the passage beginning 'gannet, cormorant, bitten ...' What do we make of their initial letters? G C B I S F C Q R C T B P A O C O C F S G W B. Best I can manage it, via an apostolic 12-letter substitution that shuffles certain groups of three around quasianagrammatically, is: S O N O V E R G O D F O R G I V E O U R S I N. What about the strange dream Hillier has, sharing a bunk with toothsome 16-year-old Clara prior to initiating her into the ways of the 'phallic experience' [171]? In dreamland he 'disentangled Virtue Prevails and Love and Fidelity to Our Country and Faithful out of the florid Byzantine cryptograms. Then the letters all snaked up again and the meanings were lost. Instead of his member there came along his chief and colleagues—RF, VT, JBW, LJ. Hue and Cry' [171]. You want to have a stab at that one yourself, maybe?

And the novel's title? A tremor of intent, or 'intention tremor', is a symptom of neurological degradation, sometimes associated with over-drinking. In You've Had Your Time Burgess recalls having a trembling hand one morning, and his alcoholic wife telling him, not without satisfaction: that's a tremor of intent, that is. What's the meaning here, though? Hillier ends up living in Ireland, and the last scene of the novel has him taking Clara and Alan out for champagne cocktails. He is wearing a dog-collar, a priestly disguise that may be more than mere impersonation. He is, after all, aging; his life seems celibate ('his bed would be cold and lonely that night') and he discourses on the cosmic battles of God and Notgod to the youngsters. 'You're a priest,' wondered Clara. [199] 'We'll have a good dinner,' Alan insists. 'On me. With champagne.' 'Lovely,' says Clara. And Hillier wraps up the novel with: '"Amen," said Father Hillier' [200]. It's a backward progress, perhaps, but codes often work backwards. And what word is hidden there in plain view, on the cover of the novel, reversed and cached in TREMOR OF? Flanked by the citadel word fort, no less?

ROME, of course.

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** Hillier's S-shaped scar is an allusion to Fleming's novel, Casino Royale (1953), in which Bond is branded on the hand by Smersh with a Cyrillic Ш' (sh) to indicate SHpion, spy. This rather inconvenient cainmark is quietly forgotten in the later books and in the films. Burgess's memory, evidently, was more tenacious.