Catherine Eisner

Wednesday, 12 August 2015

Michael Haneke’s Amour: Throwing a Wrench into French Plumbing and . . . La Nouvelle Vague

‘No health without hygiene’ would seem an admirable sentiment for plombiers parisiens were it not for the paradox spawned by a nation of hypochondriacs fixated on the former at the expense of the latter, if Michael Haneke’s movie, Amour (2012), is to be believed.

Plumbing the Depths.

These thoughts are prompted by a scene in this Austro-French film where its principals – an elderly couple (Georges, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and Anne, Emmanuelle Riva), prisoners of the infirmities of old age and of a neglected period Paris apartment in concurrent decline – lament the scarcity of Parisian plumbers and their chronic tardiness. Witness these exchanges . . . specifically the key passage spoken by Georges:

‘Les Frodon, ils ont attendu trois jours quand leurs toilettes étaient bouchées . . . Pas franchement agréable.’

•

GEORGES

You can depend on that guy.

ANNE

I hope so. The last time, he kept us
waiting for ages, if you remember.

GEORGES

(laughs while acquiescing)
Yes, that’s true . . . If I call a
regular professional, we’ll still be
waiting in two months time.

ANNE

(more to herself)
Really?

GEORGES

The Frodons waited three days when
their toilet was blocked.
Frankly not pleasant.

•

‘The Frodons waited three days when their toilet was blocked. Frankly not pleasant.’

Here is the significant text that, in my view, contains within it the key to decrypting the central puzzle of this Austrian writer-director’s film à clef: the choice of national stereotypes as lay figures to satisfy the compositional aesthetic of satirised bourgeois French film-making, i.e. 2 x cultured elders to embody ageing salon gauchistes; and a supporting cast of 1 x understanding wife of an adulterer à la Buñuel; 1 x pert unconscionable care nurse à la Clouzot; . . . not forgetting the vox populi represented by 2 x potentially manipulative grippe-sou menials à la Chabrol (a genial caretaker of the apartment building whose shirking wife’s ‘maladie’ suggests a valetudinarianism supportive of the Tendance Hypocondriaque towards which the cynical British critic believes the French nation is unfailingly predisposed).*

Let’s be clear, the formative years of Trintignant and Riva, both octogenarians, were experienced in a France governed by the Front populaire, under which for the first time all French workers were guaranteed a two week paid vacation, a revolutionary boost to employee benefits that also included the 40-hour week, in effect a socialist Bill of Rights that demarcated the French ideological comfort-zone out of which France has since never strayed.

The Polish plumber is in trouble with his piping.

Plombiers de tous les pays, unissez-vous!

In this context, the intention behind the Austrian satirist’s characterisation of the complacent/complaisant petite haute bourgeoisie becomes clear, for even when Georges is inconvenienced by the indifference of dilatory workmen (If I call a regular professional, we’ll still be waiting in two months time) he is obliged by France’s socio-Marxist legacy to sentimentally indulge their excesses and, apparently, pledge solidarity with any confraternity of slackers he may encounter.

There is a nudge here, surely, towards the notorious ‘Polish Plumber’ controversy of 2005 (Haneke’s screenplay for Amour was in development from as early as 1992), which exposed the resentful closed shop mentality of France’s entrenched ingénieurs sanitaires, ridiculed by francophone detractors who sought to ape the Communist Manifesto by mischievously proclaiming: ‘Plumbers of all countries, unite!’

So I continue to speculate thusly: Has Haneke’s Amour, therefore, a secret agenda to mock France’s labour protectionism? Through jaundiced Austrian eyes is this neo-Poujadism seen to be an absurd travesty of the workers’ paradise proselytised by the Comintern? Indeed, does Haneke decry France’s ring-fenced faux stakhanoviste entitlements as unearned by the lineal descendants of the Popular Front, and does he deplore the revival of such a self-serving partisanship – of a kind that once fomented the vicious internecine strife of a riven France under Nazi Occupation – now it’s seen to be expended on the vilification of Polish incursionist plumbers?

Au fond, when it comes to being a master of sly digs to remind French filmgoers of the true enemy of the people from France’s ravaged past, then – in Haneke’s skewed authorial vision – it evidently takes an Austrian highbrow to demonstrate who is top dog.

Of course, such an interpretation may be the sour grapes of a wary Brit . . . and yet . . . and yet . . . read on . . . there is more to Haneke’s Austro-French commentaries in Amour than the following simple words superficially convey . . .

‘Les Frodon, ils ont attendu trois jours quand leurs toilettes étaient bouchées . . . Pas franchement agréable.’

•

*An E**xcremental* *Blockage is Frankly Not Pleasant . . . t**he Turbid Conduits of French Thought.*

And it’s unpleasant, too, and mean-spirited to shiftily introduce into a supposedly sober screenplay the jejunity of taking potshots at that crucible of iconoclastic French Cinema, Cahiers du cinéma, whose editor-in-chief, appointed 2003, is Jean-Michel Frodon (pseudonym adopted from Frodo of Lord of the Rings).

I do not believe my dark suspicions are ill-founded. You tell me. What other meaning can be attached to ‘Les Frodon’ unless, specifically, the scatological reference is to a certain costiveness now observable in the pioneering journal of the Nouvelle Vague of French cinema, whose alumni includes Claude Chabrol, Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut and Roger Vadim, all New Wave auteurs who have directed Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva in films regarded as far in the vanguard of global cinematic style.

To my mind, it’s almost as if Haneke is stating pedagogically that the French currently need a Refresher Course in avant-garde movie-making and that Amour is his Exercise in Style à la Queneau, a disparaging approach that, in my view, undermines the gravity of his subject matter.

Even his parodying of Intellectualisme Français is diminished by the fatuity of his characters’ expressions of apatheistic existential malaise. (Perhaps Haneke is sardonically remembering that Albert Camus permitted his seminal novel, L’Étranger, to be published in occupied Paris under German censorship, a contra-philosophical decision that still sparks controversy.)


Existential fatuities. Georges: Things will go on as they have done up until now. They'll go from bad to worse. Things will go on, and then one day it will all be over.

I even go so far as to question, given Haneke’s subversive agenda, whether this pseudo-existential babble is just another smirking allusion – like his condemnation of French plumbers and their time-keeping by statute – to the essential blockage in the turbid conduits of French thought, never mind the state of French drains.

In other words, is this Austrian asking, seventy-five years after the Occupation of Paris, ‘Have the French truly put their house in order?’

And is Haneke answering a resounding No?

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*According to data from France, 13 percent of the French nation are afraid of suffering from disease in the absence of any signs or symptoms. Similarly, 32 percent of respondents have a persistent unfounded anxiety when certain signs or symptoms concern them. Government figures reveal that, annually, the French consume more medicine per head than any other country in Europe, astonishingly, at a cost 75 percent higher than the total NHS bill for prescription medicines in Great Britain.

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UK STOP PRESS : French baker fined for working overtime.

Dateline — Lusigny-sur-Barse — March 14 2018 : A French baker has been fined 3,000 Euros for keeping his business open seven days a week. The baker refuses to pay the penalty and is supported by the town mayor. ‘France has a traditionally strict attitude towards work, upholding the 35-hour working week, and informally guaranteeing long breaks for lunch and the whole of August off . . . In 1995, legislation was passed guaranteeing bakers a minimum five weeks off every year, but town halls are still allowed to regulate opening hours. In Paris, for example, bakeries are split into two selected groups — one that can close in July, and another that closes in August. Such a division is, however, much harder to enforce in countryside areas such as the one around Lusigny-sur-Barse, which has a population of less than 2000.’

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Horror of a Forty-Hour Week like being punched in the stomach.

In Laurent Binet’s hybrid history-as-postmodernist-infranovel (?), HHhH, 2009, centred on the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, Binet admits the legacy he and his own generation have inherited from the Popular Front of 1936.

Writing, unconsciously (it seems to me), in the manner of a Chauvinist Lothario, proud of his gauchiste Sorbonne credentials, he describes a ‘gorgeous’ French interlocutor: ‘[She is] the daughter of Communists, like us all.’

In a similar perspective, from l’intellectuel rive gauche, Binet also writes:

On August 21, 1938, Edouard Daladier, the French council president, gives an edifying speech on the radio:

Faced with authoritarian states who are arming and equipping themselves with no regard to the length of the working week, alongside democratic states who are striving to regain their prosperity and ensure their safety with a forty-eight-hour week, why should France — both more impoverished and more threatened — delay making the decisions on which our future depends? As long as the international situation remains so delicate, we must work more than forty hours per week, and as much as forty-eight hours in businesses linked to national defence.
Reading this transcription, I was reminded that putting the French back to work was the French right’s eternal fantasy. I was deeply shocked that these elitist reactionaries, understanding so little the true nature of the situation, would use the Sudeten crisis to settle their scores with the Popular Front. Bear in mind that in 1938, the editorials of the bourgeois newspapers shamelessly stigmatized those workers whose only concern was enjoying their paid holidays. Just in time, however, my father reminded me that Daladier was a radical Socialist, and thus part of the Popular Front. I’ve just checked this, and staggeringly, it’s true: Daladier was the defence minister in Leon Blum’s government! I feel like I've been punched in the stomach. I can hardly bear to tell the story: Daladier, former defence minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defence not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week — one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. At this level of political stupidity, betrayal becomes almost a work of art.

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Monday, 13 July 2015

Christina James: The Telling Detail of Her Panoptic Vision. (In the Family.)

The art of the ‘police procedural fiction’ is supremely challenging and writers who succeed in transmuting the sheer slog of evidence-gathering – often, in truth, months of drudging unproductive investigations – into a riveting dramatic narrative commanding the reader’s intense empathic identification with both the protagonists and antagonists are very rare indeed. One thinks of Thomas Harris or James Ellroy or P. D. James as preeminent in the expression of the verisimilitude of true crime detection characterised by breathless suspense.
http://www.saltpublishing.com/products/in-the-family-9781907773242

Rara Avis.

Such a rara avis is Christina James, whose crime novel In the Family (the welcome debut of her Detective Inspector Yates series) demonstrates her deft assurance in sifting the ambiguities of subjective and objective reality, in the personal witness of suspects and detectives alike, as one would expect from the incident room of a by-the-book evidence-based police investigation . . . so, in James’s unique narrative diction for documenting the progress of this baffling multiple murder case, you’ll find style is form and form is style, in every sense of the term ‘form’, particularly. (Felon’s cant included).

It follows, then, that James has borrowed not a little of her unfussy, factual, panoptic narratives from the approved style and disciplines of first-person police incident reporting, prioritised as: Immediate impression of the crime scene faithfully rendered; Raw, direct, undoctored quotation of witness statements; An abundance of minutiae so no specific detail escapes the observer's notice (who knows what observations are crucial to the case?); Concise descriptive clarity to avoid misinterpretation of the report by alert critical readers; Hearsay reported as hearsay, not as evidential fact; Avoidance of over-legalistic or technical terms in favour of to-the-point, fact-based reporting; Honesty in retelling events, even if they reflect badly on the investigator's handling of the case (writing an untrue account may jeopardise the investigation later, or challenge the credulousness of the reader!) to name the principal guidelines observed; nor does the frequency of coppers’ regulation tea breaks pass unnoticed.

So here, exhibited by In the Family, is a triumph of documentary viscerality to relish . . . from the very start you feel you are right there, actively present at the inciting incident (a body in a shallow grave off a motorway slip road) from which the tentacles of the investigation proliferate.

‘Ars est celare artem . . . you might find it useful not to forget that,’ an expert witness reminds us on page 179. And, certainly, James, like the murder suspect of her creation, demonstrates the truism that it takes true art to conceal art and induce in us (and the investigation team) the suspension of disbelief.

To this end characterisation and mood are augmented by almost preternaturally vivid and palpable evocations of fast-moving action, a super-reality summoned by well-drawn characters realised with the crispest of strokes: An eminent criminal psychologist possesses the ‘elegant angularity of a whippet’; a school’s ‘sea-green thick-rimmed cups’ are remembered from parents’ evenings; fingernails ‘bitten to the quick . . . varnished pillarbox red’; ‘She was already weary of playing hostess to his curmudgeonliness.’ [A Flaubertian sentence of subtle shades and texture!]; ‘She rolled her eyes at him. [It occurred to the inspector] she looked a bit like a mad dray horse herself’; ‘. . . the tiny cockloft of an office . . .’; ‘. . . he indicated some half-rotted apples on the ground.’; ‘. . . ten chocolate ginger biscuits carefully set out in an overlapping circle on a plate.’; ‘He was still loath to invest in proper toilet paper: there was a store of the squares of tissue in which oranges had been wrapped . . .’; ‘. . . the teacup slid a few inches across her slippery pale blue nylon overall.’; ‘. . . she was wearing a crimplene skirt of a curious yellow ochre hue . . . Rather incongruously, her feet were shod in scarlet leather moccasins.’

This word-painting with a purpose is of the highest order.

Parricidal Murderesses.

But more than this, our interest is centred on James's entirely novel treatment of avarice as a kind of criminal pathology, recalling the sociopathic manipulative behaviour of parricidal murderesses motivated wholly by greed for insurance payouts or inheritances, such as the notorious Mary Ann Cotton (between 1857 and 1872 she poisoned three husbands, her mother, a lover, eight of her own children, and seven stepchildren) and sisters Catherine Flannagan and Margaret Higgins (executed 1883) for poisoning family members and friends for small insurance settlements; and, more evocatively, from my own deepest darkest Sussex, Mary Ann Geering, hanged from the scaffold at Lewes prison in 1849 for the poisoning of her husband and two sons to gain death and sickness benefits from a Friendly Society, sums described by the defence counsel as so trifling that the jury could not impute so grave a crime to so small a motive.

It is the re-emergence of this sinister kind of cupidity – the kind that covets easy money and abandons received moral codes – which we find so troubling in the 21st century, especially when the motives for such crimes are complicated by familial duress . . . or even influenced by the secret emotional pressures of incestuous consanguinity.

‘It’s brass that interests us,’ one interlocutor of the prime suspect pronounces and one learns that the prime suspect does not disavow her complicity with this view. This is dangerous territory for moralists because, after all, covetousness is numbered among the seven cardinal sins and among the ten commandments so to relabel a ‘sin’ as a ‘pathology’ smacks of fashionable psychosociological revisionism.

Panoptic 360-degree Neo-docu-novel.

Nevertheless, Christina James – from the 360-degree panoptic vantage of her neo-docu-novel and with the skill of a forensic pathologist – can be said to be reinventing for our times the ‘Fortune-Hunting’ novel of the 19th century (was their any other kind in the Age of Materialism?), wherein the hero and heroine in want of a fortune are invariably named Sterling and Libra.

Please be assured, discerning reader, In the Family is truly an unputdownable novel of disturbingly (and determinedly) acquisitive criminals viewed from the Panopticon of James’s infallible authorial omnipresence by whom the very hairs on the heads of her characters are numbered . . . because, as all lovers of classic detective fiction are aware, it’s the telling detail that counts . . . and here, throughout the chase, you may be certain it is the telling detail that’s spot on.

Friday, 10 July 2015

A BAD CASE and Other Adventures of Disturbed Minds

http://www.saltpublishing.com/products/a-bad-case-9781844719624

From Publisher’s Announcement

What links Clorinda to the mysterious disappearance of her new friend Theresa, in broad daylight, on the streets of New York? What is the true relationship between high-born, nine-year-old Elise von Alpenberg and her sinister guardian, Kepler von Thul? Why does young Marthe’s uneasy interview with the notorious spy, Anthony Blunt, stir up suspicions of complicity against her boss, the Establishment socialite Barbara Ely? And who is the true Fourth Man? And what connects Barbara to Constance Bryde, an unfaithful wife enmeshed in the cat-and-mouse surveillance operations of a divorce solicitor’s enquiry agent? Or how will jilted mistress, Rhona, deliver a long-overdue comeuppance to her Significant Other, the supercilious on-screen Talking Head? And who, you may well wonder, is the next doomed subject of portraitist Deverell-Hewells’s murderous thoughts? And, finally, can Nina discreetly maintain the façade that hides the eternal triangle of her complicated lovelife? These questions and more are answered in Eisner’s third series of mordant case histories intimately documenting bizarre dramas triggered by the subclinical dependencies of disturbed minds.

Published this year

Pages : 244pp

Format : Paperback

Trim Size : 203 x 127mm

Publisher : Salt Publishing (21 Jan. 2015)

Language : English

ISBN-10 : 1844719626

ISBN-13 : 978-1844719624

From Publisher’s Clippings File for Catherine Eisner’s Fiction

A meticulous recorder of behaviour, pitch-perfect on accents and the faultlines between class, sex and age, Eisner imbues each account with an unsettling verisimilitude that reaches its peak in ‘An Unreined Mind’.

Cathi Unsworth The Guardian

Eisner’s collection is subtitled, Hidden Lives of Love, Madness, Murder, Loss and Deception, and while the sense of madness and loss is amplified by the book’s extraordinary and disturbing cover, there is also a tremendous sense of fun here. The title story is the last testament of its asexual narrator. It’s a odd story, full of strange characters and erotic imagery: the narrator’s husband refers to her as his ‘long noodle’, and poor Uncle Irving’s body has to be identified by dental records – all that is left of him is his toupee. The stories in this collection are dark and the characters are ‘driven by bizarre and sometimes criminal compulsions.’

Carys Bray Postnatal Confession

I’ve long been an admirer of Catherine Eisner’s piquant and highly original fictions in the literary journal, ‘Ambit’, and of her singularly rich pictorial and sensuous prose. Here at last she is given a very much broader canvas for her character studies of women at the end of their tether, though it’s the minute detail of their dysfunctional, drug-dependant (and even criminal) lives I admire so much.

Johanna Behrendt Editor

Eisner herself intrigues me almost as much as her work. This is because she is profoundly knowledgeable in so many different fields: she understands the pop scene of the 1960s; she obviously knows a lot about the publishing industry; she exhibits more than a passing acquaintance with a wide range of ‘mind-altering substances’; she is erudite, although she wears her learning lightly, pronouncing telling mots justes upon the giants (and some of the minnows) of Western civilisation’s authors, artists and musicians across many centuries; she understands Latin and several European languages besides English; she has an acute ear for dialect (in A Bad Case, southern Irish, especially) as well as the varying cadences of speech that derive from differences in social standing; and, if she has not lived among the British aristocracy, she has clearly had opportunities to observe it at first hand. Wow!

Christina James Crime Novelist

Eisner has mastered the twist in the tale and her stories cascade vividly into derangement.
Cameron Woodhead The Age

. . . a genuinely unsettling voice, at once comic, intelligent and slightly, scarily deranged . . . a true technical triumph.
Kate Clanchy MsLexia

Erotic . . . enthralling . . . very pictorial . . . very original.
Neville Marten Ink

Extracts from Narrative (Pages 145 – 196 A Bad Case)

In the humdrum is the beginning of murder.

Since breakfast, by slow degrees, a dark cloud had descended upon my consciousness, assuming a quality of sinister significance to which I was compelled to give thought.

I shivered, and at last conceded that an acute and homicidal hatred, with all the cunning of actual lunacy, now exercised an absolute mastery over my will.

I removed my fountain-pen from the breast pocket of my medical white coat and marked an X on the breakfast tablecloth beneath an offensively large bread crumb.

Just then I did not wish to be reminded of my marriage to Ingrid but once the idea had gripped my mind no steps I took could shake it off.

For mad I most certainly was that morning of the abandoned breadcrumb.

Once the grotesque problem of murder began to dominate my thoughts, it haunted me like a presence, and temptation grew apace.

The descent into Hell is easy.

Do I need to describe my wife when an artist greater than myself has captured her essence . . . It’s a living likeness! For long ago she had reached that moment in the passage of a woman’s life when, as it is said, the mirror no longer returns the expected consoling reflection and, therefore, must be turned to the wall.

Royal Portraitist Prof. Anthony Deverell-Hewells

Now You See It, Now You Don’t.

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see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html

Tuesday, 7 July 2015

Stoneburgh Spy Campus (Pt. 5): Tyrants, Ideologues and Spies are ‘Stronger by Treachery’ says Weisse

‘Bones are strongest at their broken places,’ declared Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s lecturer on politico-criminalistics), as he commenced his second lecture on Day Two of the Psychodynamics of Espionage conference, though, in my own view, his choice of expository text seemed to condemn his listeners to the aridities of a secular sermon.
But, surprisingly, the Prof then darted off on a tangent to illustrate how his text provided a precise metonym for current breaches of border security by insurgents, namely the strengthening of incursion tactics at Calais, the point of Britain’s weakest offshore defences .
‘The bones of a born survivor heal from a break,’ he explained. ‘They are strongest in the place where they were once broken.’
He then planked down a pair of wire-cutters on the lectern with a rhetorical flourish.
‘Similarly, the clandestines camped in Calais (whose political allegiances are of the most troubling dubiety) are now known to be surpassingly inventive in exploiting a chink in the armour of UK-bound hauliers – in this case, literally – and it is by this weakness that they strengthen their tactics to traffick hostiles into Britain.’
Weissener paused and flipped a switch.
At once an x-ray view was projected on to the screen behind him, revealing a cargo of trafficked illegals, massed inside a curtainsider truck. (They were so crammed together that some unfortunates among the human freight had been forced to stand.)

‘I don’t think it has yet been observed by the international Press,’ Weissener continued, ‘that the desperate conditions in the illegal camps at Calais resemble in many ways the PoW camps of two world wars insofar as latterday camp inmates are driven to attempt astonishing feats of ingenuity in their pursuit of new means of escape.’

He produced a length of cable and invited a conference delegate from the assembly to – stooge-like with a sickly grin – snip it with the wire-cutters.

‘Zapp! And that is how easy it is to get under the wire,’ Weissener told us grimly. ‘The wire in question is the high-tensile TIR cable [Transports Internationaux Routiers standard] that secures the curtainsider trucks transporting goods through the Channel Tunnel.

‘Yes, anti-slash armoured curtains may well be up to spec, and double padlocks clearly in evidence, BUT these are to no avail if would-be clandestine entrants to the United Kingdom have clipped the security cable and RECONNECTED IT WITH SUPER GLUE once they have penetrated the cargo space. This ploy means that – though the TIR cable is seen to pass through all fastening points and remains taut – the glued severed ends are actually concealed behind the curtainsider’s strap fasteners.

‘And, yes, the vigilant driver may well re-test the tension of the cable, say, after he’s been occupied at the pumps, YET – to return to my original proposition – the vehicle’s defences “are strongest at their broken places.” Or “strongest” certainly in the opinion of those clandestines whose deceptions have gained them admission to their free ride out of continental Europe.

‘Another thing. It is even known that padlocks are sheared off the tensioned TIR line then reassembled with super glue . . . the more easily later to prise them silently apart undetected.’

Pregnable Embassies

‘Notwithstanding this . . .’ again the lightning of the Prof ’s darting mind seized on another aside, ‘. . . there is a complacency prevailing in the haulage industry that’s very similar to the reliance placed by security agencies on the impregnability of those impressively substantial, antiquated, square-cornered, steel-plated safes in which our embassies overseas continue to hoard classified documents.

‘Fact. The seams of such safes can be easily detected and forced open with basic workmen’s tools such as a heavy hammer and cold chisel . . . even the best examples of this Victorian construction can be ripped open by driving a wedge or chisel into the riveted seams, usually found at one of the top corners. Once the rivets are popped, the corners can be peeled back . . . however, forgive me, for those safe-crackers among you I am anticipating the instruction you’ll receive for the next addition to your crime sheet . . . your Advanced Peterman Course this afternoon.’ [Polite laughter]

Outlawry Strengthened by Broken Pledges

At which point, I truly believed Stoneburgh’s most eminent theoretician had veered so far from his subject that he would find no way back.

I was wrong.

‘And now, you may ask, to what purpose do I mention these breached defences so easily penetrated by the exigent guile of self-taught outlaws “riding the rails” to Dover?
‘The lesson I adduce and which I wish our counterespionage agencies to take most to heart is: A successful law-breaker is strengthened by transgressive acts.
‘Being outside the rule of law, the “incursionists” crossing borders bound for this nation have no code of conduct to observe and the ease with which they evade international law-enforcers makes them stronger in their defiance of the polities of our hard-won democratic way of life.’
The effort of this peroration caused Professor Weissener to pause and reach for a glass of water. He was clearly troubled by the extreme complexity of his own circuitous argument.
He wiped his forehead and resumed, wandering off the point (judging by the response of his listeners) to cite any number of political and martial acts of treachery to substantiate his views.
‘The future historian will, no doubt, describe the present-day incursions upon Britain in an allegorical vein, and it’s true that no more striking example of deception by would-be insurgents is the sublime instance of the Trojan Horse, the symbol of a broken pledge since the ‘gift’ to the Trojans was dissembled as the Greeks’ offering of atonement to the goddess Athena.
‘Some of you may take this interpretation to be visionary, but the insidious peril I am combating is an actuality and one that may turn a foot soldier into a rebel leader, and make a declarant of broken promises stronger by treachery.
‘Hence arises a grave mischief.
‘Tyrants, ideologues and spies are stronger by treachery.
‘Modern history is replete with examples: Hitler and the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact (by his treacherous invasion of the Soviet Union Hitler reclaimed territories gained by the Soviets); Churchill and the forced repatriation – at the end of WW2 – of Cossacks (including women and children) to the USSR and their certain execution (an act of betrayal that has not tarnished Churchill’s reputation as revered ‘Saviour of the Nation’); the ambiguity of de Gaulle’s seeming promise to Algeria’s pieds noirs – “Je vous ai compris!”– and his subsequent u-turn did nothing to constrain his high-handed presidentialism during the succeeding decade of his politique de grandeur; Horatio Nelson’s betrayal of Neapolitan revolutionaries in 1799 in violation of the terms of an armistice has not toppled the admiral of ‘Immortal Memory’ from his pedestal nor impugned his gentleman’s ‘code of honour’; the posting to Washington of the master-spy Kim Philby as chief British intelligence officer at the capital served only to raise his espionage activities to a new level of treachery and strengthen his hand . . . and so on . . .’

A Trojan Horse Assumes Many Guises.

Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener glanced at his watch and gathered together his lecture notes.
‘But here I must end my illustrations. My subject is treachery. Your job is counterespionage. Major problems of vital national security continue to confront us and your goal is to identify those who break the sacred bond of trust before they assume the false integrity that can make them seem unassailable despite the denunciations of whistleblowers, as was the case with that arch traitor and double agent, the odious dipsomaniacal snake in the grass Kim Philby.’
I smiled to myself, and such was the sustained impression of a secular sermon that I expected him to add, ‘Here endeth today’s lesson,’ but, instead, Weissener again flipped a switch and a final image was projected on to the conference screen above him.
‘Before I close I would earnestly impress upon you particularly the notion that a Trojan Horse can assume many guises, and we should heed those doubters who, like the seer Cassandra, saw through the incursionist deceptions that threatened Troy but were ignored, and hence had to face defeat and submission to a hostile occupation.’

Re. The trafficking of ‘incursionists’.
‘I would earnestly impress upon you particularly the notion
that a Trojan Horse can assume many guises.’
Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener
(The limitless ingenuity of bootleggers in the Prohibition Era.)

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Calais Stowaways:

Penalties for hauliers caught with clandestines on board are variable, according to levels of negligence, with a maximum level of £2000 per stowaway.

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