Horse Under Water (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Despite all this I rate it 3.9 - reading is personal, nostalgia makes the world go around, and I still have my memories of my teenage years in the sixties. I always liked my heroes to be successful and an anti-authoritarian attitude goes down a treat for me.

The plot itself was all over the place. The writer uses the Protagonist to establish that when he says ‘It’s so confusing, isn’t it?’ Charly said. Deighton did make a valiant attempt to end on a high note. Clearly writing visually with a movie deal in mind, he vividly described the tense confrontation in the heroin lab and subsequent shootout/bloodbath aboard the boat. And as in The Ipcress File, he brought the book to a satisfactory conclusion with the post-mission office chat. The Appendices were a nice touch and added heft to the story's authenticity. Speaking of Singleton and Giorgio, they were never fleshed out as characters, even though Palmer spends a lot of time in their company. Giorgio's death (and Joe's) had little emotional impact because I felt I didn't know the man. Charly gets the most fleshing out--literally--as descriptions of her lounging about in a bikini or her failed attempts at keeping her robe closed while making coffee are included now and again to goose the reader out of the doldrums that set in trying to remember who exactly that German admiral under an assumed name was and why the Royal Navy defector did what he did with the Fascist movement.

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This second outing was just about as confusing as The IPCRESS File. The nameless agent (renamed Harry Palmer in the Michael Caine movies) of the mysterious WOOC(P) secret service is at first sent out to retrieve counterfeit currency from a sunken German U-Boat off the coast of Portugal. A rag-tag group of hangers-on gradually join the proceedings, almost all of them are not whom they say they are. The mission turns into a hunt for heroin instead (thus the use of the slang word 'Horse' in the title) which also is not the real mission. Eventually everyone reveals their true motives and the real purpose of the mission becomes clear almost at the very end of the book. The protagonist is mostly as confused as we are, but finally sees the goal. Oh, and there was an ice-melting machine somewhere in there as well to add another red herring to the mix. Horse Under Water is the 2nd of my re-reads after having recently learned of the Penguin Modern Classics republication of all of Len Deighton's novels which is being planned over the course of 2021 in an online article Why Len Deighton's spy stories are set to thrill a new generation (Guardian/Observer May 2, 2021). The secret weather buoys generally used by the wartime Kriegsmarine were not as sophisticated as the one described in the novel. They were not submersible and, at the end of their expected battery life of two months, they were supposed to self-destruct with an explosive charge. [1] See also Weather Station Kurt. What is unique about the book is that although fiction, Deighton drew much from his knowledge of military history --and to let you share in that pleasure--he provides a running patter of footnotes and an appendix at the end. Readers of Rebecca West will see where he got some of his ideas from. The plot involves a sunken Nazi sub lying off the south coast of Portugal and various things that may or may not be interred inside. British intelligence sends the supremely cool and jaded Harry Palmer on a Royal Navy diving course just so he can participate in the effort to retrieve them. Rivals are on the scene, including a sinister Portuguese aristocrat and an expat American jazz critic with mysterious sources of wealth. Allies include a former Italian navy diver and the obligatory enticing female ("She was cleaning fish in the kitchen. She wore a microscopic white bikini.")

Len Deighton's unnamed spy, first encountered in The Ipcress File, stands somewhere between the OTT hero antics of James Bond and the far more believable and prosaic world of John Le Carre's George Smiley. Horse Under Water is not quite as well known the three Len Deighton novels that were made into Michael Caine movies; which it should be. I watched the waves moving down on to the shore. Each shadow darkened until one, losing its balance, toppled forward.

Deighton was born in Marylebone, London, in 1929. His father was a chauffeur and mechanic, and his mother was a part-time cook. After leaving school, Deighton worked as a railway clerk before performing his National Service, which he spent as a photographer for the Royal Air Force's Special Investigation Branch. After discharge from the RAF, he studied at St Martin's School of Art in London in 1949, and in 1952 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1955. This second of Deighton's novels differs structurally from the first, The IPCRESS File, and perhaps psychologically from his third, Funeral in Berlin. As these are the only three I have read so far means I cannot quite get a handle on how Deighton will develop eventually. Horse Under Water hasn't got quite the flair that IPCRESS File does when touching on the color and atmosphere of the cultural context of the 1950s and early 1960s. And it doesn't take us into the multi-perspective point of view that Funeral in Berlin does. What Horse Under Water does achieve is a much tighter storyline than the other two. It's more conventional in that regard, albeit all the more satisfying in some ways because of it. The plot centres on retrieving items from a Type XXI U-boat sunk off the Portuguese coast in the last days of World War II. Initially, the items are forged British and American currency, for financing a revolution in Portugal on the cheap. Later, it switches to heroin (the "Horse" of the title), and eventually it is revealed that the true interest is in the "Weiss list" – a list of Britons prepared to help the Third Reich set up a puppet government in Britain, should Germany prevail. Thrown into the mix is secret "ice melting" technology, which could be vital to the missile submarines then beginning to hide under the Arctic sea ice. A 1968 film adaptation of Horse Under Water was planned, but following the poor reception of Billion Dollar Brain it was abandoned. I enjoyed The Ipcress File and have since set out reading all the Harry Palmer novels. This second one was a good read as well, though not as strong as the first, suffering from protracted exposition that didn't forward the story; for example, the opening chapters detail Palmer's diving course that did little except explain how he later possessed diving skills (even though he did very little of the actual diving; Singleton and Giorgio doing the heavy lifting in that department).

The one character Deighton infused fully with life was Harry Kondit. I envisioned Kondit being played (with aplomb) by Tony Curtis had this novel ever been adapted for the screen. This Brooklynite abroad had a way with the broads (Charly falls under his spell briefly until she's later trying to perforate him in a self-righteous hell hath no fury moment in the drug lab). Not to be outdone by a colonial, Palmer also enjoys a night of prurient passion with Charly. Who says Deighton's books break the Bond formula? Now I am much older, and perhaps a little jaded. I can enjoy the book, but now notice how very "busy" it is. Seemingly all the good guys have encyclopaedic knowledge of pretty much any topic. What I once saw as an acceptable form of insolence in the agent now seems false. He likes to look after number one, reasonable enough, but he doesn't always see the big picture. He's not as smart as he thinks he is! Exotic setting (coast of Portugal); and Deighton's trademark 'elements of the absurd'. Deighton nimbly keeps all the clues suspended before laying them down in their final arrangement. Lots of WWII-related content for history fans. As a result we end up with a book which has a few different threads being investigated. Len Deighton was a student of Art and an illustrator and he brings these techniques to his writing too. He very cleverly creates this foreground - our protagonist hearing noises, the taste of coffee, the way a ciggerette is rolled, side conversations - and in between all that, there are plot elements erractically mentioned. This can on one hand display the fact that our spy, our protagonist is an "always active" brain which takes in everything around him, but on the other hand, can reduce the reader's patience to actually put up with the book as unlike Le Carre, the plot really is paper thin and barely moving. There is more sardonic humour and a few leaps of faith, that in the real world would probably be amiss but it makes for the pacing and readability of these books.

Horse Under Water (1963) is the second of several Len Deighton spy novels featuring an unnamed British intelligence officer (named Harry Palmer in the film adaptions of other novels). It was preceded by The IPCRESS File and followed by Funeral in Berlin.