Literary Review - December 2005 / January 2006

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DIARIES&MEMOIRS

together, reading, speaking or teaching on creative writing courses’. Bernice always gave strictly practical advice: she taught self-discipline. ‘To write a novel you must sit down and stay sitting.’ But you need imagination and lunacy too – both, she says, unteachable. Beryl Bainbridge believes that if Bernice had been happier, she would have had no need to write. As it was,

P HILIP W OMACK

DADAIST DOGTRAINING

S OMEONE L IKE M E : T ALES FROMA B ORROWED C HILDHOOD

★By Miles Kington (Hodder Headline 343pp £16.99)

T RUTHANDMEMORY have a shifting relationship. At a talk about Duff Cooper’s diaries, I asked John Julius Norwich if there was any truth in a Clive James poem about his mother. It asserted, among other things, that Diana Cooper had been escorted into Paris by two dozen Spitfires, and that she carried a phial of poison ‘Against the day there was nothing left to live for’. ‘Absolute rubbish,’ he thundered from the stage. And then, ‘Oh no, wait, my daughter is waving her hand.’ She had left London with an aerial bodyguard; but the poison was a piece of poetic embroidery, his daughter said. How easily a legend springs up; how quickly the world re-edits itself as the real and the not-real weave in and out of each other. Everybody, consciously or not, retells stories to make them better. It is a habit which is particularly apparent in writers, and in none more so than the autobiographer. Miles Kington has, in this rich, convoluted and humorous set of memoirs, taken it a step further. Even the title is unreliable. It is not, as one of Kington’s neighbours suggested, a plea for friendship. It refers to the subject of the book – a person who is not quite Miles Kington, in a family not quite like his own. His family consists of a father who finds the world constantly surprising, a mother who practises dying, a theatrical brother called Ralph and the young, observant Miles. The book begins before Miles is born, and runs in a series of glorious, glowing vignettes until he rattles off to university. There is no real sense of the development of Miles as a person, since he appears, even in the womb, to have the same way of looking at the world as he does when he is grown-up – questioning the absurdity of life and words. But this does not matter, since each chapter is a Saki-like snapshot which is whole in itself. Kington’s satirical eye revels in inversion – anthumous ceremonies to celebrate people before they die being a

her twenty-five novels brought her fame, fortune, films, the Booker Prize, and an enthusiastic following. She was beginning to think about her next novel when she had a stroke and died last October. As Joan Didion says, ‘Life changes fast. Life changes in an instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.’ To order these books, see order form on page 78

typical example. He delights in the strangeness of everyday conversation: ‘You shouldn’t use children as shuttlecocks,’ said Father. ‘It’s not cricket. You shouldn’t move the goalposts.’ His dialogue is sharp and fast – most of the scenes revolve around arguments between the family members. One of these arguments concerns how to train their dog, Bonnie. Miles believes that dogs should just be taught the basic commands – sit, stay and come. But Ralph, the flamboyant older brother, is all for teaching him tricks. Their father asks them to demonstrate what they have taught Bonnie. Miles’s commands go without a hitch. But when Ralph asks Bonnie to come, she sits; she stands up when asked to stay, and comes when asked to sit. ‘A total failure!’ says the father. ‘Not exactly,’ says Ralph. ‘It’s an act of Dadaism ... What I just demonstrated was an obedience which sounded and looked like an act of extreme disobedience.’ A wonderful piece of trickery, and there are many more like it. To order this book at £13.59, see order form on page 78

FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE FOR WRITERS

Grants and Pensions are available to published authors of several works who are in financial difficulties due to personal or professional setbacks. Applications are considered in confidence by the General Committee every month.

For further details please contact: Eileen Gunn General Secretary The Royal Literary Fund 3 Johnson’s Court, London EC4A 3EA

Tel 0207 353 7159 Email: egunnrlf@globalnet.co.uk www.rlf.org.uk

Registered Charity no 219952

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

Page 16

HISTORY

N ORMAN S TONE AKGBFIELD DAY

T HE M ITROKHIN A RCHIVE II: T HE KGB ANDTHE W ORLD

★

By Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (Allen Lane 677pp £30)

T HECENTREPIECEOF this large volume lies towards the end, and it concerns the biggest blunder made by Moscow, which came towards the end of the existence of the USSR. At Christmas 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. A very small group within the Politburo decided that it was the right thing to do, and pushed it past colleagues who were not enthusiastic but who were compelled to sign up. One Afghan ruler, who had killed his Soviet-client predecessor, was himself killed, and another Soviet client was moved in. This solved nothing: on the contrary, the country went to rack and ruin, maybe half of the population either being killed or fleeing to Pakistan. The USSR then faced a ten-year guerrilla war, which it could not win and could also not abandon. This was surely the biggest ever failure of foreign intelligence on the part of a supposed superpower, and it reinforced the general demoralisation that attended the last decades of the existence of the USSR. How on earth did the Soviet machinery of foreign intelligence fail on this scale? The Mitrokhin archive is a large collection of documents that appeared providentially in England in 1992. The author, Vasili Mitrokhin, was one of those determined eccentrics whom Russia produces: a KGB man who had somehow been sidelined into managing collections of documents, and who copied some of them for future use. The Soviet system was like that: people might become ‘unpersons’ and be supposed to disappear, even from the official record; but someone, somewhere, would be preserving the documents in the expectation that they would again be needed. Mitrokhin claimed, as he approached the British in 1992 for ‘exfiltration’ (ie escape from Russia), that he had a considerable archive of KGB documents bearing on the Cold War, and the British looked after him until his recent death. He was steered by the best-known British expert on intelligence: Christopher Andrew, with whom these volumes were written. This second book concerns what might be loosely called ‘the Third World’. In the Seventies, as the Americans licked their wounds from Vietnam and Watergate, and as Britain herself slid into powerlessness, Moscow developed enormous ambitions. Khrushchev, in the Fifties, had expected that ‘the contradictions of

capitalism’ would finish off the West, and when oil prices octupled in the Seventies that expectation did not look stupid. Sir James Goldsmith, for instance, bought a huge estate on the Pacific coast of Mexico, supposing that Western civilisation would go under, in a welter of ecological disaster, political soft-headedness (with Jimmy Carter in the White House) and perhaps also Aids. The Soviet response was to construct an enormous oceangoing fleet – an enterprise that might make you reflect that crashing empires always build utterly unnecessary ships, in the manner of the Kaiser’s Germany or Ottoman Turkey. That fleet was meant to create a Soviet empire in Africa, and as this book catalogues, the KGB sent its emissaries all over ‘the dark continent’. In the later Fifties and Sixties, newly decolonised African states, some with enormous mineral resources, were led by megalomaniacs who thought that they could ‘industrialise’ just as the USSR was held to have done. Maybe this was the worst lie ever peddled by Soviet Moscow: that Stalin had taken a backward, illiterate and peasant country, and, within a generation, turned it into a superpower, defeating Nazi Germany and sending people into space. Russia in 1914 had been among the most go-ahead places in the world, and Communism lived parasitically off that, as it lived parasitically off everything else. However, in the Sixties, various Third World rulers thought that they, too, could have planning and one-party states, and make industrial miracles; Western development economists aided and abetted. The result was a plethora of Nassers and Nkrumahs and National Liberation Fronts, providing a field-day for the KGB. It is something of a miracle that India did not entirely go under in this period: she cooperated all over the place with the USSR, but at least domestic voting went on, and neither Nehru nor his daughter, Indira Gandhi, ever went in for the oneparty illusion. The Mitrokhin archive has some interesting details as to KGB involvement in these matters. Anyone sensible knew by 1968 at the latest that Communism was an utter failure, but here was a wonderful world opening up for cynical careerists. Soviet expansionism offered a good opportunity for Russians, living in a world of blunt razors and leaking ballpoints, to go to places where you could get Western goods – that was even true of Kabul – and at the same time pass yourself off as a Soviet patriot. The pabulum of this book consists of the reports of these agents (all men), solemnly handing over a few thousand dollars to this or that Third World jumper up and down – in Angola, Nicaragua, even poor little Grenada in the Caribbean. There is a considerable flavour of hidden black humour about the book, but you are struck all along by forebodings of what is to come, namely, the disaster of Afghanistan. That country had been, in the words of Vladimir Bukovsky (whose

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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