Horse Under Water (Penguin Modern Classics)

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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. 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. 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.") 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. Our anonymous secret agent from The Ipcress File is now working with his W.O.O.C.(P). boss Dawlish.

It was and remains a book by males for males. Female characters are few and far between and always presented in a paternalistic and sometimes prurient way. It's actually a good study, along with others of its time and genre, of what one might call 'systemic misogyny.' Women aren't absent, just subservient to the men and their exciting story. Confusing,’ I replied. ‘Of course it’s confusing. You involve yourself in industrial espionage and then you complain about it being confusing.’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).

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. 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. 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 dead hand of a long-defeated Nazi Third Reich reaches out to Portugal, London and Marrakech in Deighton’s second novel, featuring the same anonymous narrator and milieu of The IPCRESS File, but finds Dawlish now head of the secret British Intelligence unit, WOOC(P).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. 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! Reading a Len Deighton is somewhere between reading an Ian Flemind and a Le Carre. The plots are as outlandish as Fleming's and the attempt to make it sound somber like Le Carre. I watched the waves moving down on to the shore. Each shadow darkened until one, losing its balance, toppled forward.

I probably would have given at least a 4 when this first came out, but in the context of the 21st century writing i have to drop it to 3. 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) by Len Deighton is the second in the un-named spy series (aka Harry Palmer) Once again the plot is rather confusing but my advice is to just go with it as there's so much to enjoy in the set pieces and the dialogue, and it all makes a sort of sense by the end. On rereading many decades later, I found the book still engaging and engrossing. Since there is a twist ending, and I already know it, the story is no longer as compelling as it once was, but still a fun read.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 detail is frightening but unfaultable; the story as up to date as ever it was. The un-named hero of The Ipcress File the same: insolent, fallible, capricious - in other words, human. But he must draw on all his abilities, good and bad, when plunged into a story of murder, betrayal and greed every bit as murky as the waters off the coast of Portugal, where the answers lie buried. When Len Deighton's first books arrived in the early 1960s they were lauded for their realistic portrait of the world of espionage, and were a refreshing change from the glamourous and unrealistic fantasy world of James Bond. Both The Ipcress File and Horse Under Water certainly feel very credible and real. Interestingly, Horse Under Water contains a bit more adventure and action, and less of the day to day bureaucracy which featured in The Ipcress File. This time our sardonic working-class hero arrives at the shores of Salazar's Portugal, where he encounters a mixture of hard drugs, money and neo-Nazis.

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.

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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. 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. He also wrote travel guides and became travel editor of Playboy, before becoming a film producer. After producing a film adaption of his 1968 novel Only When I Larf, Deighton and photographer Brian Duffy bought the film rights to Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop's stage musical Oh, What a Lovely War! He had his name removed from the credits of the film, however, which was a move that he later described as "stupid and infantile." That was his last involvement with the cinema.