Tue 17 Jan 2023
A 1001 Midnights Review: LEN DEIGHTON – The Billion Dollar Brain.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[5] Comments
by John Lutz
LEN DEIGHTON – The Billion Dollar Brain. “Harry Palmer” #4. Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1966. Putnam’s, US, hardcover, 1966. Dell, US, paperback, 1967. Film: Lowndes, 1967 (with Michael Caine as Harry Palmer and Karl Malden as Leo Newbigen).
Len Deighton’s first novel, The Ipcress File (1962; later filmed with Michael Caine), marked the debut of one of the major stars of espionage fiction. Since then this former photographer, illustrator, teacher, and occasional cookbook author has written a string of stylish and tightly plotted espionage novels that are thoughtful commentaries and reasoned examinations of society as well as first-rate thrillers.
One of Deighton’s chief concerns is the morality of the world of espionage, but his treatment of this theme is never ponderous or heavy-handed. Instead he chooses to examine the ethics of the characters about whom he writes with an ironic wit; his prose has a lightness that further leavens this rather weighty subject. The books are also full of vivid description — of places, people, meals, natural wonders — that give the stories an air of authority; his use of documents and appendixes further convinces the reader that the espionage world is really as described. Along with John LeCarré, Deighton is one of our foremost contemporary writers of espionage novels.
The billion-dollar brain of this novel’s title is a remarkable computer owned by a Texas mogul who has assembled his own private espionage network. This wild-card covert agency poses a grave threat to just about every government on earth, and what makes it tick is the incredibly complex computer, the quintessential technical-wonder successor to man’s own reason and self-asserted destiny.
Deighton’s insubordinate, deceptively tough, unnamed first-person spy is given the task of neutralizing this menace, and along the way meets some fascinating characters. There is sensuous, champagne-swilling Signe Laine, a Finnish beauty who favors expensive underwear and has a knack and passion for besting males; Dawlish, the fumbling Intelligence chief who runs the show; Colonel Stok, of Red Anny Intelligence; Harvey Newbegin, the neurotic American agent who is in on the chase; and the maniacal General Midwinter. The action is on an international scale, swinging from Helsinki to London, Texas, Leningrad, and New York.
This is a tightly constructed, imaginative, high-tech sort of thriller. Space Age espionage, in which Colonel Stok makes the disturbingly relevant observation “Two not very clever men will have to decide whether to extend a hand or pull a trigger.”
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
January 18th, 2023 at 10:05 am
Nowadays you could buy a more powerful laptop for a thousand dollars and get change!
January 19th, 2023 at 6:29 pm
“Oxford Street runs into Houston Street, and who can blame it.” My favorite line in the book.
Even Ken Russell couldn’t completely kill the pleasure of Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, Oscar Holmolka as Colonel Stok, and Deighton’s plot, though he came close with a great deal of help from Karl Malden, who I swear didn’t have any idea what movie he was in or what it was about from his performance.
This and IPCRESS both had a slight SF touch to them, something I always wished Deighton had leaned into (even though he did the alternate history SSGB).
January 23rd, 2023 at 1:38 am
I’ve read a whole bunch of Deighton novels and still a few left to go. I’m pacing myself, trying to make them last. Each title is consistently entertaining.
What’s the least that can be said about this multi-faceted talent? You can clearly see he is a fully-fledged dramatic novelist from his chilling, “Bomber”. The guy is no slouch. I name “Bomber” as one of the most harrowing war stories ever; even rated against the best nonfic accounts of WWII.
In spy fic: Deighton really carved out a niche –as if with scalpel — for himself among his predecessors. Can’t underestimate his subsequent influence. He was a game-changer.
I’m not over-awed by his prolixity –I don’t gobble down all these silky releases of his, which eventually waned into trilogy upon trilogy. If anything, I think he ‘lost-his-way’ in the twilight of his career. His single titles are more superb and bold than all these ‘franchises’ and ‘series’ he has become prone to.
Back on track. Why enjoy Deighton? It’s his prose. Prose that pays back such huge ROI. Any single page or paragraph unfolds realms of savviness and perception. I mean, just the adroit, hip manner in which his characters observe the world around them. It had to happen, it had to be Deighton to deliver this. As good as LeCarre is, LeCarre just doesn’t have this verve.
I recall one line from Deighton, especially: his famous ‘no-name agent’ arrives at his superior’s cottage for a dinner party and he dismally notes the “plastic thatch” roof. Says it all.
But even in his weakest works, Deighton is always that sharp-eyed. He always notices everything, he takes time out to address it in the way that LeCarre just could not trouble to tarry with. Deighton has a slant all his own; which was his alone; and which is why I appreciate him.
I’ll cite a further example: “Spy Story”. Drab title; drab book. Paunchy, middle-aged, suburban nuclear submarine expert, the protagonist. The book is almost somnolent. No action. Yet it is still a favorite with me. Why? Because of the Deighton prose artistry. It just exudes cool. Practically the whole story takes place in dingy flats. But it’s just as good as, “Horse Under Water” which treats sunken U-Boats off sunny Portugal.
It’s that same dabness, that suaveness, that superlative stylish writing alone which makes the great Harry Palmer/Michael Caine movies. Lukewarm criticisms? H’mm. Ehh. Believe it or not, some moviegoers hate Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz”.
There’s just no accounting for human reactions to cinema. There are no rules. Be that as it may, the Palmer films undeniably solidified Sir Michael Caine’s illustrious middle-career. They turned him from a fop into a hunk. They were seemingly made for him; and remain a hoot to this day. Still watchable, still entertaining.
Of that quirky trio of flicks; “Billion Dollar Brain” stands out as the all-out weirdest; arguably the most singular and off-the-rails movie in its genre short of Dr. Strangelove.
Even if Karl (“Cheyenne Autumn”) Malden was experimenting with LSD that year of his life, he couldn’t have harmed this absurd romp. It might even have helped the result.
As is, “Billion Dollar Brain” is so far out as to nigh-well be un-classifiable as anything else except Ken Russell magic. It was a perfect marriage of maniacs.
I ask you. In what other film can you see a rogue corporate redneck army from the USA invading Soviet Russia falling prey to the same fate as befell the Teutonic Knights of the Holy Roman Empire during the Battle-of-Lake-Peipus, in Eisenstein’s “Alexander Nevsky”? And well-photographed to boot.
I mean, seriously. Can anything so diabolically grandiose and lurid, possibly be labeled so bad?
And Len Deighton ultimately responsible at the heart of it all. Just another feather in his cap, I say.
Hurrah for Deighton! Kind of a blowhard and a hard-arse in private life, or so I have heard. Ah well …nobody’s perfect…
January 23rd, 2023 at 10:09 pm
I haven’t read as much of Len Deighton as maybe I should have, but I love comments like this that are way longer than the review they’re replying to. Thanks, Lazy!!
January 30th, 2023 at 2:01 am
I do go off sometimes. Usually embarrassed about it afterwards. After many times being burned from flaming disagreements, my heart-of-hearts has learned to confine itself to ‘raves’ rather than ‘rants’. Live and let live, is what I abide by now. “Any love is good love” as the Beatles said.
Deighton –definitely someone I’d gush about. Many pleasurable hours spent flipping his pages. And those Caine movies. Whew! Wish I could experience them again, fresh. East-ender Caine with those giant black horn-rimmed eyeglasses. Aww…