Modern Arabian Nights
Greer, Herb
diffidence with respect to prescribing content, standards, and behavior for students. If he cannot bring himself to stipulate that every high school pupil must study chemistry or learn a foreign...
...A brief synopsis is never very fair to any work...
...The world would be organized by chummy nations who could settle down and live happily ever after, secure in the knowledge that we are all the same, really-brothers and sisters under the skin, no less...
...to a clear straight prose which is used to describe most of the violent action...
...It does violence to the language...
...can are very strange indeed, but not very amusing...
...Listen, lady...
...to be left alone so they can make a better life for themselves (with lots of no-strings aid from the West...
...King Lear or Hamlet can be made to seem preposterous in this way...
...Is that your conviction, Charlie...
...The Israeli victims, quick and dead, are a contemptible lot, sunk in greed, ambition, and adulterous lust after au pair girls, besides being weak and stupid-your typical Jews, hardly worthy of survival...
...This is stressed by wheeling out "liberal" or left-wing Israelis who express dark doubts: unless Gaza and the West Bank are given up, Israel will lose its "soul...
...None of these arguments rises above the level of journalistic catchphrases which have been mouthed at hundreds of press conferences...
...He is generally kindly...
...Want to run for it...
...Whether he sees it all or not is beside the point...
...Reading The Little Drummer Girl is something like looking into a zoetrope...
...Le Carrd makes the press exaggerate the number of casualties, ignore those who are non-Jewish, and "sanctify" the child...
...Now the Americans, who (as everybody knows) have everything these days, 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 also possess a malignant worldsized organizational squid (not invisible, but in the media age we must not expect too much...
...Perversely, this leads to mistrust of democratic political processes, for true wimpishness does not permit one to take comfort from decisions that aggrieve any minority, however small or selfish...
...It was because the terrorists had begun killing hostages, but this was not mentioned in the article...
...It belonged to me...
...0...
...of man is a taxonomical abstraction, one rather weak faith among many stronger ones...
...For those who have forgotten or never seen this contraption, I will explain: it resembles a wide deep coffee-can, pierced all round with vertical slits and mounted on a turning column...
...Except for a hand crippled by an Israeli bomb, Khalil is a mirror image of Joseph...
...For scruples among diaspora Jews, Le Carve dips into his files for a dime-store aphorism of Arthur Koestler's, posing a dilemma for Israel: is the country to be a Jewish homeland, or an ugly little Spartan state...
...w State and Zip -_ THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 19...
...When the Israelis are not a wretched gaggle deserving of a gelignite lunch, they are cold, hard, implacable, ruthless, and extremely deadly-a species of quasi-Hitlerian Ubermenschen who homilize a lot and play very dirty...
...One smells the conversations with PLO "freedom fighters," notes taken while enjoying an excursion through the ruins of Beirut...
...the killing of the terrorists had helped to brutalize British society into a nearfascist state of mind...
...Charlie, primarily we are decent people...
...Since this scaly monster first reared its head in the waters of the Bay of Pigs, we have learned that it is hopelessly clumsy, incompetent, disorganized, blind, stupid, inefficient, and about to take over the country...
...Your sense of right...
...Fictional treatment of The CIA, when it aspires to quality, tends toward the pi and the sour, wallowing in drugstore irony and fabricated disillusion...
...It may surprise Americans to know that the author is not a newcomer to the genre of shallow, perverse polemic...
...The brilliant intelligence officer speaks: "Charlie, what we seek to do, we wish to define ourselves, we wish to introduce ourselves, and though nobody here is given to apologizing overmuch, we also wish to say we're sorry...
...We are aiming to address the natural humanity in you, that is all...
...You were the capitalist-imperialist-warmongering Imperial Penis 1 " "Holy shit," I said numbly...
...Use coupon to order your copies today...
...The background and history of the conflict are dealt with by reference to atrocity stories which are commonplaces of Palestinian propaganda...
...And what rhetoric...
...endowed with blond hair, candid blue eyes, and a charming open manner, he is proud to be a first-class liar...
...The gyrations inside Le Carr6's tin tAlfred A. Knopf, $15.95...
...Now and then we do need reminding that the brotherhood 17 In The Marrakesh One-Two Richard Grenier has written a bloody, chaotic, acute, and enormously funny send-up of the spy genre...
...But Charlie, who has "chaos and momentary terror inside her," does not accept the offer...
...Your feelings...
...We did a couple of them and that's how it is...
...If one believes that education should have tang and savor, that schooling should be flavorful as well as nutritious, and that public policies shaping it should hew to standards and expectations at least as demanding as those we apply to eating places, then wimpishness will not suffice...
...We know too that it is omnipresent and omnipotent in the Third World, where it ruthlessly claws down the hopes of revolutionary freedom fighters, smothers little nations, and crushes the poor and the liberators-except in Cuba, and Vietnam, and Africa, and Central America, and a few other places where it is naturally trying hard, but not doing very well...
...At one point he mentions an orthodox Jew whose ambition is to have his daughter go to Oxford and then join the firm...
...what he does see feels right, and one believes that he is more than a tourist or a writer gathering "material...
...In a genuine novel the life of the characters takes precedence over what I call the nudge-wink factor...
...No, I didn't...
...For one, the Prophet, his family, and all his close colleagues are too sacred to be shown on the screen...
...The policy wimp may be feckless but he is not evil...
...This person's heart knows that no one wants to harm us, or oppose us except in the way of friendly competition...
...This quality has much to do with the portrayal of human beings in the story, and it is precisely what gives life to the British spy novels of David Cornwell, a.k.a...
...i P.O...
...But it is vulnerable to manipulation by those whose intentions are not good...
...This American corner on the ultimate causes of political evil is a species of fancy which never seems to go away for long...
...Not at all anti-Semitic, they are only antiZionist...
...Unfortunately there is no time for him to say, "Allah, forgive them, for they know not . . . " There is nothing last-minute about this slant...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 of the spy genre, set in some of those places where the CIA is trying but.not doing too well-in this case the Maghreb and part of the Middle East...
...Film-makers who are greedy but have a pretentious mission (in this case promoting "understanding" between Islam and the West) come off very badly...
...He has done very well out of both activities...
...In education policy, wimpishness has several origins...
...He has doubts about the carnage, he is a man of depth and sympathy and rich emotions and has scruples, and you wonder what he is doing on the Israeli side...
...The broad axiom which arises from all this is that if anything ugly happens anywhere in the world and involves us or our interests (say the bombing of our Beirut Embassy), it is necessarily our fault, because we employ and/or support the primary bad guys...
...area of terror and counter-terror...
...This is Joseph, Charlie's control officer and lover whom she calls "Jose...
...We'll give you money...
...There is also a reminder that Israeli bombings kill "dozens of children at a time...
...Well, yes and no...
...You have your air ticket, I believe...
...but it is also a useful corrective to the brothers-and-sisters-under-the-skin superstition...
...But for their aggressiveness and cruelty, neither Jews nor anyone else would have enemies out therecertainly not among the Palestinians, who are human and just want "their land" back...
...That they kill at all is the fault of Zionists who have stolen their land...
...if enemies do exist, they are the paranoid elements of our own government and their conspiratorial backers, employees, and client states...
...The deadly terrorist does not strike back or even defend himself when his killers burst in...
...The book's Godfather is one Khalil, a Palestinian terrorist chief who signs his bombs by twisting the excess wire inside them into a doll...
...In my minority opinion it is simplistic, cheaply melodramatic, bathetic, incredibly silly, and, worst of all, manipulative, shallow, and propagan distic on the very issues it is supposed to explore impartially and in depth...
...There was once a time when a certain sort of bright and decent person refused on principle to believe in God, because God was an excuse for oppression...
...My dinner companion called them wimps...
...I mean what the hell...
...This features a car-bombing in central London that "rates hardly a notice anywhere...
...The "realism" is not murderous but deft, with the delicate flair of a brilliant stand-up comic...
...FNUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUHUHglottal stop...
...Instead he deploys a lethally humor ous common sense, even in highly intimate situations: "I just love holding it," she breathed fervently...
...If he cannot bring himself to stipulate that every high school pupil must study chemistry or learn a foreign language (or salute the flag, or shave, or treat fellow students with respect), it is certainly unrealistic to expect the policy wimp to take on organized groups of adults with loud voices, media access, and political clout...
...If I add that we are also Israeli citizens, I trust that you will not immediately foam at the mouth, vomit, or jump out of the window, unless of course it is your personal conviction that Israel should be swept into the sea, napalmed, or handed over gift-wrapped to one or another of the many fastidious Arab organizations committed to our elimination...
...They are "driven by faith," "full of life's fun," perhaps monsters in Israeli eyes, but really "kids" and "babies," "full of love and discreet...
...John Le Carry...
...You want to get up right now...
...The British in particular are prone to this view, but it is not unknown inside the continental United States...
...Early in the century Bernard Shaw and his coterie were putting it about that the real cause of wars was the greed of armaments manufacturers...
...After he kills a number of their people including a child, the Israelis want him dead...
...And it's a pretty miserable call, too, let me tell you...
...He is outwardly tolerant...
...On this premise you will surely sit with us a little longer and hear us out...
...Having fallen in love with him, she is betrayed by a bugged radio she happens to be carrying, and confesses all...
...Sorry, greetings, and again welcome...
...One Israeli is made into the exception which proves the rule about ugly Zionist Jews...
...There is no hint in this account of the profound enmities so well described and analyzed in Grenier's book...
...According to a certain (decent) strain of public opinion, it is a mirror image of the KGB in any case, and they are all bastards together, chopping up each other in a silly game that is not worth the candle...
...There is more confused abstraction in the book than cogent reality, which may account for Le Carr6's sometimes bizarre ideas about Jews...
...The use of this parting cheap shot (which happens to express a false set of alternatives) highlights the fact that Le Carrd is facing a dilemma of his own: is he going to follow his talent and write more good novels, or is he going to continue with the lucrative hack work of gathering `material" as he did in the Middle East, using it to cobble up fashionably polemic best-sellers...
...Having described all this in a sullen, rather sneering manner, he lets us know that the child was really an unpleasant, neurotic little brat...
...His strip of paper or plot is a hammered papyrus of Trilby and the TV standby about the undercover cop who penetrates organized crime to finger the Godfather, just escaping with his life...
...They also have a secret network reaching into every fissure and cranny of the Western and Middle Eastern worlds, from Hollywood and British show business to the German police, the media, Palestinian refugee camps, terrorist training bases, the holiday resorts of Greece, Hampstead-I mean, they are everywhere...
...Grenier's style is flexible, ranging from the Wrigley's Spearmint-cum-Tom Wolfe manner I could hear the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer but I didn't hear nobody pray, man...
...What rescues them from absurdity is the skill of the author in suspending7disbelief, which is mostly a function of his sympathy for the environment and characters in his story...
...Illustrated...
...He is accommodating...
...Even the Wall Street Journal insisted: this is "one of the finest, most troubling books of this master story-teller...
...The name of this atrocious Yankee beast is-ah, you guessed it-the CIA...
...In The Marrakesh One-Two* Richard Grenier has written a bloody, chaotic, acute, and enormously funny send-up *Houghton Mifflin, $14.95...
...These are not the papier-mathe villains, freelance madmen, or red counteragents of "nor mal" spy-fiction, but inhabitants of a real, very large culture which operates on other wavelengths than ours, believing fanatically in things we do not believe in, and profoundly alien in ways which those who have not seen them simply cannot grasp...
...Jim Jones, with quotes from the Malleus Maleficarum thrown in...
...When Charlie meets and sleeps with Khalil the Godfather Terrorist you find out...
...The closer to the United States the trouble comes, the more culpable we are...
...Why don't you just tell us how you feel about that...
...There is also a deal of information about Islam, both Sunni and Shia, presented as Nelson's background for the Mohammed film...
...Shortly thereafter Nelson and the feminist advance to the back seat of a Rolls Royce, where the capitalistimperialist et cetera has its revenge, in one of the droll sexual encounters scattered through the book...
...We are aiming at your good, caring, human heart...
...First of all the book is mislabeled...
...As he says more than once, the big picture is not his business...
...a riot in Libya, and minor cloak and dagger work including an interview with a distinctly surrealistic ayatollah...
...There is plenty of grand guignol as promised: slaughter with guns and a knife and bare hands...
...Running in tandem with the carnage and spookery is a ludicrous and hilarious account of how Nelson and, his Hollywood-Lebanese producer fail to finish the Mohammed bio-pic...
...You were preventing the improvement of human nature...
...so does a Social Register avatar of Gloria Steinem whom Nelson meets twice once in a bizarre interview during his kidnapping and again at an airport in the Persian Gulf: "Listen, lady," I said...
...Partly from the exquisite group sensitivities of the "new politics...
...I suspect it has a serious point, which is that there is no use expecting Islam to be fair to us...
...that these stronger ones make for differences...
...Your polemical politics-the names you give to your beliefs-well, we would like to put them on a back burner...
...There is, for instance, the first confrontation of Charlie the actress with her Israeli captors...
...Avoidance of confrontation is part of the policy wimp's public make-up...
...Nancy...
...Whatever its origins, wimpishness involves the lack of resolute convictions save at the vaguest and most general level, a dearth of clearly perceived standards and norms, and an unwillingness (or inability) to make choices about which there is no consensus or decisions that are other than the lowest common denominator...
...against her admittedly feeble will they transform her into an agent so dedicated, so devious, and so plausible that she is able to penetrate a terrorist network of ferocious complexity, leading an Israeli hit squad straight to Khalil, who is promptly riddled with bullets...
...The question-begging, caviling, and specious psychology of that piece are closely paralleled in The Little Drummer Girl, beginning with the sentimental irony of the title and following through to the anti-Israeli arguments put into the mouths of Jews...
...The attack should never have taken place, and Le Carrd affected not to know why police negotiations had been stopped...
...for atmosphere...
...It derives partly from pedocentrism-the notion that the school ought to be tailored to the needs of the individual child, rather than the child obliged to adjust to the school-a notion that has dominated American educational thought for most of this century...
...I am sure no reference to the Elders of Zion is intended, but the resemblance is compelling...
...The glum aseptic prose of the narrative does muffle some of the propaganda, so that its effect is a bit less stark than my description...
...The thrust of Le Carrd's story and characters is unmistakable: like our own paranoid conspirators, like those villainous armaments manufacturers who caused wars, it is the Israelis who are the primary bad guys in the Middle East...
...We shall have to wait and see which one he prefers...
...And I didn't see nobody pray, either...
...In 1980, after Britain's SAS had rescued hostages from a terrorist siege of London's Iranian Embassy, Le Carrd published a full-page article in the Observer...
...In a tract like The Little Drummer Girl the charac ters, plot, and everything else take second place to the propaganda...
...And partly, I believe, from plain old-fashioned confusion about what is right and what is wrong and who is to say...
...this is illuminated and the can is spun, like a top...
...Do you know that you were the one that came and announced my death sentence...
...It is intellectual and ideological...
...Partly from the "do-your-ownthing" libertarianism imbibed on university campuses in the sixties and seventies...
...His flair for languages helps as he skitters around the wilder fringes of Arab politics, bribing a little here (not always successfully), blackmailing a little there, even passing on weapons for the hijacking of an airliner...
...Nelson is last seen back on duty, chatting up an expensive American whore who has been bedding the Shah...
...The book opens with a bomb outrage in Bad Godesberg near Bonn...
...Not once...
...they exploit, corrupt, starve, Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright living in Europe...
...The book jacket promises blood lusts, assassinations, coups d'dtat, and hijacking "depicted with mur derous realism...
...But you were the class enemy," she said imploringly...
...Herb Greer MODERN ARABIAN NIGHTS Israel, the CIA, and two new thrillers from Richard Grenier and John Le Card...
...This is the case with Grenier's book...
...Box 696, West Branch, Iowa 52358 Please send me_.copy(es) of THE LIFE OF HERBERT Address i HOOVER The Engineer, 1874-1914 by George H. Nash i at $25.00 per book, postpaid...
...Partly, no doubt, from heartfelt love for one's fellow men...
...It is not a novel but a tract in the form of an, elaborate fiction...
...This bloody moment upsets the actress badly, but she is taken back to Britain, where she never breathes a word to the media, takes up acting again, and one night sees her Israeli control officer in the audience...
...Wimpishness is not, in its essence, a behavioral trait...
...And it fosters the formation of more and more young Americans who replicate in their personal style and intellectual orientation the characteristics of the policies that guide their education...
...They have no real network worthy of the nameonly a thin scattering of sympathizers in Europe, including liberal lawyers and civil-rights activists...
...The Israeli terrorist-chaser and his private army have ways of making you talk, which they use on their intended victim's brother-just before they sedate him and his girlfriend, put them into a car packed with explosives, and blow them to bits on a German autobahn...
...You were the cancer of history...
...Only friendly competition...
...When a refugee camp is bombed they suffer horribly, with plenty of women and children about the place...
...He is indisputably well-meaning...
...Not much less, though...
...I mean The CM, that most wonderful of all things to all decent and fearful persons...
...It is not, in itself, bad...
...there are ways around this, but the iconophobic Arabs who are backing the film keep withdrawing their money...
...The fictional premise is neat: being confused and never quite certain of herself, she will identify a little better with the terrorists and so convince them that she is really on their side...
...A strip of paper with figures printed in sequence is mounted on the inside...
...Le Carrd seems to think that a. reader who has followed him as far as page 422 is prepared to believe anything...
...These sinister forces talk about nuclear weapons in an aggressive way and affright big nations like Russia and China...
...Sensing a secret shrinking in her, Kurtz lunged for it immediately...
...There are Jewish and nonJewish victims, including one Israeli child...
...Yes, Virginia, there is a CIA, but I am not talking about that...
...Through all the wise-cracking and the jokes and the cock-eyed farcical behavior there runs a cold insistence that there are foreign bodies out there who are not like us and do not wish us well...
...Even their German lady terrorist helper reads Erich Fromm and believes in Sein, nicht haben...
...The narrator-protagonist, who bears the unlikely name of Burt Nelson, is unusual as fictional spies go, almost as bemused as Candide, but lacking his ironclad innocence...
...he enquired, dropping his voice...
...Peering through the slits, one sees the figures on the paper leaping, dancing, turning somersaults, and performing other amusing gyrations...
...To be fair, she is a nut, whom nobody really likes, not even the warm-hearted Palestinians...
...He is a volunteer son of a bitch for his country, good at his job of lowerechelon CIA gofer...
...But-unlike the Israelisthey are modest about their dead, with none of that hysterical and exaggerated publicity...
...But-if newsmagazines, television, and the reviews quoted in a full-page advertisement in the Times of London are any criteria-the critics of America have been stunned, enchanted, and more or less swept off their feet by this book...
...This appears to be an attempt to establish some sort of bona fide for Le Carrd's impartiality, but the rest of the book is so loaded that it comes off as one more piece of arbitrary rigging-voulu, to say the least...
...The two of them happen to be in love, and so they go off together, into the night...
...Any proof to the contrary is forged by the bad guys, so forget all that...
...GWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWAWK...
...The two storylines converge over Iraq in an insane multiple hijacking, a climactic and virtuoso mingling of horror and low farce...
...It is a little like an essay on Christianity which dwells on the Homo-Homoiousian dispute, auto-da fe and the Inquisition, Matthew Hopkins, the Children's Crusade, Galileo, snake fondlers in the Ozarks, the older generation of New Mexico Penitentes, and the Rev...
...The idea is to put the King of Kings under the CIA's thumb by faking dirty pictures of him with the whore...
...Partly from revulsion at anything that anyone could think of as discrimination...
...That does not mean all soft-spoken, mild-mannered, outwardly easy-going people espouse wimpish policies, any more than all vigorous orators and hearty back-slappers are given to education policies with teeth...
...It will be remembered that this man is talking to a girl who has been kidnapped and is being held against her will...
...and generally oppress smaller countries whose poor people only want...
...To this end Le Carrd asks the reader to believe that a member of their intelligence organization-one of the most professional in the world"assembles his own private army...
...in the Greek Islands this crew kidnaps ,a vacationing English actress (who is mediocre at her job, fiercely pro-Arab, neither bright nor very stable, and extremely radical chic...
...They themselves are weak and desperate and soft-hearted, sweet-tempered even when making bombs, given to cute idiosyncratic touches like twisting detonator wire into a doll...
...Not long before that, a fertile imagination had given birth to the Elders of Zion, a kind of malignant, invisible, world-sized organizational squid, whose tentacles were sapping the Christian moral fiber and precious bodily fluids so that the Jews could take over...
...Rather, it suffers from a surfeit of good intentions...
...In that sense, like good and decent people the world over, I guess you could reasonably call us nonsectarian, non-aligned and deeply concerned about the many wrong directions the world is taking...
...On and on, five times a day...
...This works until she has passed a night of passion and conversation with the formidable Khalil...
...Never, never, never...
...In our less palmy days this type is apt to deny on principle that there is any such thing as an enemy, especially on the international scene...
...It was inevitable that a good writer was going to come along and put a match to this convention...
...The Palestinians, now, they are something else again...
...Your beliefs themselves-the more confused they are, the more irrational, the more frustratedCharlie, we respect them totally...
...A specially bound edition, numbered and signed by the author, is now available for advance order for a limited time only...
...In short, a warm, human, familial folk...
...between peoples which run far deeper than the epidermis, and are not about to be dissolved by taxonomy, or by sentimental Schwdrmerei, or by clumsy good intentions...
...one very bloody attempted coup against the King of Morocco and a terrorist kidnapping of the hero...
...Much of this is put humorously, as it were like Voltaire in a xenophobic mood, not entirely fair to Islam...
...Because Israel was a confused abstraction to her, engaging both her protectiveness and her hostility...
...good people...
...Partly from the cultural and social relativism dwelling in the liberal elites that have long played leading roles in education policy formation...
...A consequent search for financial oases keeps-the film unit on the move from Morocco to Libya to Cairo, the Gulf States, and on to preKhomeini Teheran...
...Charlie swallows this transparent potpourri of lies, insults, and verbal fluff, obligingly goes along with the back-burner suggestion, and eventually agrees to track down a man so that these gabby Svengalis can kill him...
...The method used to convert Charlie from pro-Arab actress to pro-Israeli agent is simply to bombard her with rhetoric...
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...0 Name Announcing the definitive biography of one of America's most accomplished yet least understood leaders The first volume examines Hoover's pre-public career, focusing on his rise to pre-eminence as an inter national mining engineer and businessman...
...As with the hostagemurder in the London siege, both Arab exploitation of the Palestinians and the PLO covenant's aim of wiping Israel away are quietly smothered out of the discussion...
...You had to be removed so that mankind could advance...
...Grenier exploits the satirical possibilities of this farrago with consummate skill...
...Cornwell's new novel, The Little Drummer Girl, t makes do without all that, moving away from his solidly British home ground and into the swamp of the Arab-Israeli conflict-specifically into the...
...The SAS action, he moaned, had "awakened the sleeping psychopath in all of us...
...Should this introductory passage leave the reader with any sense of ambiguity, the author clarifies his case as the book goes on...
...A lot of this is either wasted effort or makes no apparent sense, but Nelson is rich in negative capability and carries on in his cheerful competent way...
...18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 victims, merely strokes Charlie's cheek and forgives her just before he is shot down...
...I agree with the second adjective...
...He may not be boring-many policy wimps are good company-and in private he may even be an opinionated opera critic, a daring rock climber, or a tyrannical Little League coach...
...It saps the vitality of the culture...
...Which was overstatement, surely...
...Perhaps it is...
...The explosion is managed so as not to disturb passing traffic, which shows what clever fiends these Yids-er, Jews-are...
...His cover, not very deep, is the role of screenwriter on a cinematic biography of Mohammed, which has its own problems...
...i HERBERT HOOVER PRESIDENTIAL i LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, INC...
...The very fictional resolution of the plot underlines the criminalIsraeli thesis: the book's whole cast of anti-Israeli activists in Europe, civil-rights lawyers and all, are wiped out in a Corleone-style holocaust...
...If it were not for our primary bad guys there would be no Cold War, no subversion, no spies, terrorists, hostagetaking, revolutions, anti-American propaganda, or foreigners who hate us...
...This may explain the flat and improbable quality of so much of the dialogue...
...It belongs to me, I know it...
...I do not want to lean too heavily on this, because The Marrakesh One-Two is first of all wonderful entertainment...
...But his "policy persona," which is the aspect of him that influences what goes on in schools and colleges, can be described in terms akin to those a restaurant reviewer recently used to evoke a bowl of soup she had consumed: "vague and sweet and starchy...
...Looking through the eyes of a stubbornly and self-consciously American narrator, Grenier is still able to give the sense that he sees what is there in this exotic world...
...This book troubles me because that response to it seems an illustration of Lincoln's political saw that you can fool some of the people all of the time -at least in the United States...
...Go home...
...Here I find myself in a slightly embarrassing position, since I found this work utterly lacking in sympathy, humor, or even simple psychological plausibility...
...The rich Iranians say shash ("I crush my eyeballs") to flatter the Americans, but do not give them any money...
...The aim is never in doubt: to grab the reader's lapels and ram home the argument that Israel is opposed only by kindhearted, helpless refugees who kill for love...
...We mean to ask nothing of you which conflicts in any wise with your strong and decent ethical concerns...
...I enclose a i check or money order...
...Khalil, who (unlike the Israelis) always kills for love and respects his Le Carre seems to think that a reader who has followed him as far as page 422 is prepared to believe anything...
...What remains are the Ugly Israelis, lurking everywhere to destroy those who threaten them-and well aware that they themselves are the guilty parties...
...Orders will be filled as City i I received until quantities are exhausted...
...Some things have to be done...
...Nelson is not your fundamentally moral anti-establishment figure ~ la Harry Palmer, forced into the business against his will...
...Do you know I almost got whacked out in Marrakesh...
Vol. 16 • July 1983 • No. 7
