Horse Under Water

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From Professor Nobu Kitagawa’s Notebooks On Effects of Lightning on the Human Body (Tr. from the Japanese by N. Kitagawa) John Latham 2nd Prize, National Poetry Competition 2006 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. Organisations and acronyms are another way of avoiding the issues, as anyone who’s worked in a big organisation knows. Related links

In both those (and other) instances, the novelist has passed away and their estates - charged with looking after the interests of the author's works - are, seemingly, happy to go along with this. Berlin Game First of the Bernard Samson spy novels in which this forty-something British Intelligence agent uses his detailed knowledge of Berlin and its spy networks to ascertain who is the high-level mole within his Department. With devastating consequences.

Horse Under Water’s exposition about the drug trade is interspersed with Palmer’s successive attempts at a clue, changing STURGEON to STALLION to STARLING, and there are crosswords outside the plot too.

I do wish someone would ask me to the races with him/her Dominic McLoughlin 2nd Prize, National Poetry Competition 2005 Roald Dahl's children's books are a famous victim of this seemingly benign, but in truth dangerous trend to - literally - rewrite the past. If you've only read Deighton's novels, you may not be aware of this unusual entry in his catalogue. Let's explore it further. What is it?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. I first read this book over 50 years ago, when I was 14 years old. I thought at the time that the author had a great writing style, and that he seemed to be really knowledgeable and COOL. And re-reading the book now (for about the fifth time over the years), my opinion is just the same.

After a few weeks of training to dive our hero goes to Portugal, and after weeks of searching nothing has been found, but a entry in the ships log written in ball point pen makes our hero suspicious that all is not what it appears. The article looked in particular at Horse Under Water, the second book in the series but the only one of the four main books not turned into a film starring Michael Caine (the producer Harry Saltzman chose to film Funeral in Berlin first, because in the mid-60s the city had become the hot-spot of the Cold War, so to speak, and he thought it would make a better movie. While there were some early plans for a Horse Under Water film, nothing - sadly - ever materialised) Famously, it recounts how - given that the Berlin Wall still existed at the time, and filming behind the Wall was, unsurprisingly, not allowed - the producers had to improvise when filming the many scenes requiring actor Ian Holm (as Bernard) and others to be in Eastern Europe. The book is best enjoyed as a series of vividly portrayed set pieces, rather than by worrying too much about the plot. For example, there is a really amusing little chapter in which our nameless hero attends a diving course at a naval base. (Deighton has said that this was based on his own experience on just such a course, which the Navy allowed him to attend while he was researching the novel.)

And, in keeping with the fundamental worldview of the books that the world is vastly more complicated and fractured than any one narrative can capture –‘There would always be unexplainable actions by unpredictable people. (Ch 47) – some loose ends are never tied up. Judging by a number of posts indicating people prefer to read/listen to Deighton's book in audio form, there's clearly demand for this author's books - and, indeed, many authors' books - in listenable format. 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). To my knowledge, in the most recent Penguin reissues of Len Deighton's novels, there have been no edits or excisions prompted by sensitivity readers. The Surrealists’ Summer Convention Came to Our City Jo Shapcott 1st Prize, National Poetry Competition 1985

To that end, there were also postings on Deighton Dossier facebook group asking why readers could no longer get many of Deighton's stories on audiobook format in the US (according to the author's agent, this is a temporary phenomenon, as the rights to said audiobooks is currently being renegotiated). That may be because, although they are written in the sixties, seventies and eighties and nineties, they are not replete with egregious examples of racism, sexism or any other -ism you can think of. Sure, there are a few words and characters which a sensitivity reader might baulk at; but, having read most of the novels at least a couple of times, to me these words - auxiliary though they may be - are just as important as any of the key passages or bits of dialogue. Soon after discovering the canister which Giorgio extracted from the U-boat has traces of heroin in it, the Narrator finds from the Research Dept that da Cunha is in fact a former German naval officer and the shifty Fernie is a renegade British Navy officer and frogman. Aha. Anti-Bond, anti-London clubs, swish apartment and best hotels. The narrator’s offices are in unglamorous Charlotte Street, he lives in a flat in Southwark and his beady eye registers all the shabby details of modern life.Our anonymous secret agent from The Ipcress File is now working with his W.O.O.C.(P). boss Dawlish. 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! Fear also has a big influence on whether a horse will go into water or not. The horse can be scared of the unknown, not being able to judge what is below the water’s surface. The noise of waves crashing can also cause fear.