Newsmen's Novels
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing NEWSMEN'S NOVELS BY PEARL K. BELL Inside every reporter a great author is straining to be let out. Inside every foreign correspondent a skilled confectioner of espionage...
...As Stalin gapes in trembling disbelief at the hoplites, charioteers, and plumed Hellenic kings arising from the tooth-sown soil, he suffers his fatal stroke and Kevork must run for his life...
...Lucky in love, unlucky in the Kremlin...
...Ambler has scarcely been at the top of his form recently, but Sulzberger is not in the same league...
...In pursuit of well-heeled travelers, Prince Sissomak has adorned his capital city with " 'Instant Mekong,' the park in which all aspects of the Mekinese scene could be comfortably toured in two hours, making it quite unnecessary for foreigners to undertake tiresome journeys up-country...
...Against the grain of the genre, he lays out a verbal obstacle course that will annihilate all the semiliterate yokels with a less perfect classical education than his own...
...More to the point, he is strangely unaware that spy books should be effortless fun to read...
...What could be more logical...
...In the end the Bonze is of course outfoxed by Ivansong...
...C. L. Sulzberger, eminence grise of the New York Times foreign corps, and Dennis Bloodworth, the London Observer's man in the Far East, are both first-rank journalists, yet they have written books that are vastly different in quality...
...Nasser is suspicious of the entire enterprise, and throws the tooth merchant into jail as an Israeli spy...
...Yet you are surely the world's most brilliant bum and most flamboyantly unsuccessful crook...
...But everything is not temple-peace-and-flowers in the neutral little kingdom...
...Moreover...
...These busy conspirators are innocent kittens, though, compared to the most sinister rogue of all, the Paramahamsa Bonze, "our man from Nirvana," a self-appointed guru with fat and pendulous earlobes like the Buddha's thanks to plastic surgery...
...brachiate, and hundreds more marked Obs., Arch., or Rare by lexicographers...
...Then, with brisk American efficiency, he orders the Cadmian teeth dumped from a bomber into the deep trough of the Newfoundland Basin...
...Thus every other sentence is littered with philological fossils like tracasscries, pileoled, biiboquet, bashibazook...
...There is no reason to suffer an amateur novelist with terminal logomania like Sulzberger when we can read a pro like Bloodworth...
...Inside every foreign correspondent a skilled confectioner of espionage thrillers is panting to be born...
...These generalizations have survived over the years because of the popular misconception that a life of adventure and excitement is more important to literary invention than innate talent...
...A former French colony, Mekong is now ruled by a smart young aristocrat with a canny eye for the tourist trade...
...The author of two witty and graceful books about the Orient that manage to be authoritative without a hint of pomposity the Chinese Looking-Glass and An Eye jor the Dragon blood worth sets his story in a satiric amalgam of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand that he calls Mekong...
...I had trouble remembering whether I was reviewing a spy story or the Compact Edition of the OED...
...Compounding the general confusion, the CIA has moved a company of Marines into Mekong by disguising them as members of a Kutprice Kampers tour...
...Kevork, a fierce Armenian patriot who has an appropriate quotation from the ancient epic poems of his people for every occasion, is also, unfortunately, an astonishingly crude ethnic stereotype A Levantine Charlie Chan with the gift of tongues...
...Any Number Can Play (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 233 pp...
...The Tooth Merchant is narrated by a seedy young Armenian, Kevork Sasounian, a sometime smuggler and full-time lady's man...
...Kevork loses no time trying to make a killing with his serendipitous find...
...His chance arrives when an opportune encounter with the mysterious and beautiful Rima, half-Circassion and half-Greek, brings him a treasure of incalculable value...
...Reading Sulzberger, I cannot refrain from pointing out, is like pulling teeth...
...Rioting students have burned down the Thai embassy, and even the British Ambassador is a secret agent for Peking...
...Communist guerrillas are moving steadily south toward the capital, a metropolis with more pockets of double-cross-purpose intrigue than a magician's cut-away coat...
...Torn from the grubby bed of an Istanbul whore in the summer of 1952 and strong-armed by the Turkish security service into a dangerous mission for NATO, Kevork slips across the border into Soviet Armenia to investigate rumors that the Russians are constructing a huge atomic project in the area...
...6.95...
...forced into becoming the accomplice of a British Intelligence officer named Greeen (sic) to protect the mainland parents of his Chinese wife, Thinking Lotus...
...By the time I hacked my way through such thickets as "the mailed cataphracts with their clattering quadrigas, their margonels, arbalesters and arquebusiers...
...Here the plastic elephants stand in immobile dignity amid orchids of virgin nylon...
...For one thing, Kevork has overpriced his product...
...If there is an Armenian Anti-Defamation League, Sulzberger will probably be hearing from it...
...By means of a contact who else but his compatriot Mikoyan kevork succeeds in reaching Stalin and tries to persuade him to purchase "a huge army, unprejudiced by past teachings, obedient and ready to be trained for any purpose...
...He is, in addition, a linguistic genius who speaks not only Armenian and Turkish but also, without accent, Russian, Georgian, and the Azer-beijani, Kurdish, Adzharian and Abkhazian dialects, not to mention English, French, Italian, German, Arabic, Persian, Albanian, and Greek (both classical and demotic...
...No matter that the Americans in the book, like so many Yanks of British manufacture, tend to be hackneyed Coca-Cola-swilling cretins, half Sergeant Bilko and half Richard Nixon...
...Rima demonstrates the eerie power of her legacy by sowing three of these marvelous molars in the earth, which promptly bears forth three Hellenic warriors...
...To relate the bad news first: Sulzberger's The Tooth Merchant (Quadrangle, 275 pp., $7.95) is a somewhat amusing idea buried under a ton of exhibitionistic pedantry...
...Eisenhower argues that nato needs weapons, not infantry...
...Bloodworm's principal character is a British journalist, Larry Ivansong...
...The dictionary is unquestionably the better buy...
...To insure his fidelity, the Turks have taken his parents and sisters hostage, but in Russia Kevork learns that an earthquake has wiped them all out, leaving him free to pursue his own amoral ambitions...
...Through her Greek mother's family, Rima is the present-day custodian of a huge sack of magical teeth from the dragon slain by Cadmus in the Greek myth of Europa and the bull the same teeth Jason carried along on the voyage of the Argonauts...
...Curiously, I found the perfect mocking phrase for Sulzberger's prose-sesquipedalian glossolalia"-inDennis Bloodworm's clever and spirited tale of Southeast Asian mystery and political huggermugger...
...Greeen & Co...
...The English language, Sulzberger seems intent on proving, is a series of etymological hurdles only the privileged few can clear...
...Although the plot device is mildly clever, Sulzberger swaddles his tale in preposterous layers of fustian, forgetting that no amount of specialized information is of any consequence in an espionage novel if the narrative itself cannot hold the reader fast...
...As the head of Turkish Intelligence says to our down-at-heels hero: "You are a bum and unsuccessful crook...
...The Cypriots want soldiers loyal to enosis, and "how can we swear to our cause objects that do not understand any cause...
...Sulzberger makes the mistake of poaching on the territory of that master-craftsman Eric Ambler, and foolishly tries his hand at a familiar Amblerian personality, the multinational, multilingual ne'er-do-well, the lecherous petty crook who is always just one shaky step ahead of the police...
...Bloodworm's complicated bauble of plot and counterplot is beautifully paced, very funny, and perfectly credible in its basic incredibility the indispensable requirement of political fantasy...
...He is in fact an English-born con man who runs the oldest free-floating religious crap game in the Far East, the Guru Club, and whose softly whispered advice to influential heads of state can "further encourage political leaders to make false moves, inflame hatreds, provoke insurrections, divide countries and break up alliances...
...Two new spy novels, however, again demonstrate that success depends less on far-flung experiences than on the ability to be fictionally entertaining...
...I can offer At a priceto sell this army to a country that lost 20,000,000 dead in World War II...
...In turn the Armenian attempts to peddle his dentoid army to the Cypriot nationalists, the Israelis, the Egyptians, and the Americans, but there are no takers...
...Ben-Gurion feels it wouldn't be kosher to defend the State of Israel with non-Jewish soldiers...
...For another, a host of battle-ready Hellenes is not exactly what the prospective customers have in mind...
Vol. 56 • March 1973 • No. 5
