Review: Blaine Harden, The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot

Books about North Korea are popular. The macabre theatre of the regime, aimed at Western audiences, fascinates us in a way which the nasty, brutish and short lives of its citizens never would.

And there is a general sense that, however awful, nothing can be done about North Korea. The regime is mad but so by now are the people. It's a Lose-Lose situation.

This readable book splices a history of the early years of North Korea's existence (say, 1945 - 1955) with the story of a North Korean jet fighter pilot who, shortly after the Armistice in the Korean War (1953) defected to the South flying his MiG. From take off to landing, it took him 17 minutes (page 180) but the defection had been meditated for several years. And it was in no way heroic. The pilot just imagined that life would be better in the USA than North Korea - where it might indeed have been suddenly terminal. With a family background closely connected to working with the Japanese Occupiers, you never knew.

The book is most interesting when it uses archival documents, some of them recently released, to document two things. First, the distrust and exasperation with which Kim Il Sung (the founder of the Kim dynasty) was held by his masters in Moscow and Beijing, and right from the start. Neither Stalin or Mao had any regard for him.He was very lucky to have survived and for so long - in the end, he probably did so because he could play off the two regimes during the later period of the Sino-Soviet conflict. As I read my newspapers, Chinese distrust and exasperation with the regime on its border continues to this day. Maybe Russian too - though President Putin has recently extended the hand of friendship to  Kim Jong Un.

Second, the dishonest and fairly incompetent handling by American agencies of No Kum Sok's defection - sufficiently so to cause some anxiety to President Eisenhower who didn't want half of what his agents, military and CIA, were giving him. And, ironically, having escaped from North Korea and its compulsory lies, the first thing the Americans asked of No Kum Sok was that he should lie about what he knew: When you are asked if you saw American planes operating over Chinese air space - the pilot had been based most of the time in China - you say that you didn't. Even though you did, daily.

Review: Tom Burgis, The Looting Machine

How come Africans are so poor when Africa is so rich in natural resources? Simply because the revenues generated by exploitation of those resources are split between the giant multinationals who operate the mines and oil wells - and the personal bank accounts of government ministers or other racketeers who collect the rent in profit shares, licence fees and bribes. Nobody else gets a look in. It's as simple as that.

Tom Burgis is an investigative journalist and a lot of this book reads like the cut and paste of past investigations, with generous helpings of disclaimers to protect him from English libel laws. So he dutifully records that everyone living who he names denies having done what it is commonly believed they have done. Everyone else is corrupt but not me, they all say. All Cretans are liars.

There are many fascinating - and harrowing tales - scattered through this book, along with many statistics to make you weep. Not much has changed since King Leopold of the Belgians ran his racket in the Congo - size of Europe -  that he personally owned.

If Burgis is right - and the idea of "resource curse" is not novel and is widely held to be at the root of sub-Saharan Africa's tragedy - then the implications are actually worse than he tells us. I will elaborate.

A country, a state is a geographically defined entity which has its borders accepted by the United Nations. The government of that country is any body which the United Nations (and at least as helpfully, the United States) recognises as entitled to make laws, control the borders and decapitate people or put them in the electric chair. The United Nations is fairly broad minded about what qualifies you as a legitimate government. Most any bunch of gangsters will do and the longer they hold on, the more legitimate they become. All the advanced, civilised Western nations exchange Ambassadors with Equatorial Guinea which currently is Number One in the world for an inverse relationship between GDP per capita ($30 000) and individual well-being. New gangsters in the Presidential palace may, initially, have a hard time - but Burgis points out that nowadays China will often enough come to their rescue with immediate up-front cash advances against future deals.

In general, the local labour forces required to exploit mines or oil wells are small. In general, the governments of resource-rich states can both run the country and pocket personal billions just from the money passed to them by the oil companies or the uranium miners. They don't need tax revenues from local people.

And the implication is this: they don't need the local people at all. Maybe they need 10% of the population as a helot class to do manual labour and service jobs. The rest of the population could simply die and there would be no ill-effect. Indeed, it would solve the problem of insurgencies and protest movements. Let Ebola or, more selectively, genocide carry them off. A country free of people would make life much easier for the regimes and the multinationals. And the United Nations would not mind: there is no minimum population you need to get in - Nauru is a full member with a population of under 10 000

This is an information-rich book. If you read it alongside Frank Ledwidge's Losing Small Wars you get an even gloomier picture for prospects in Africa's resource-rich countries.

Review: Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights

This is a 2015 re-issue of a 1994 novel with an Introduction by Philip Pullman.

It's a Quest, Grail and Chase thriller. The hero, Johnny Porter has to get from A to a very inaccessible B; then he has to Meet the person who will give him what he has come for - in this case, Information; then he has to get back from B to A. Over 478 pages, it's an extended anxiety dream from which you cannot escape. In other words, it's a thriller.

I suspect the author got caught out a bit by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is notionally set in post-1991 Russia; but really it's set in the Soviet Union, even though the Siberian weather - which plays quite a large part in the narrative - didn't change with the regime.

I found the main character, Johnny Porter, actually a bit of a cipher. For all his multiple talents, he's not very interesting. All the interest is in the narrative which supports him.

This narrative makes rich use of detail - rather like Martin Cruz Smith's 1981 Gorky Park. So much so, that the author felt we needed a couple of maps to help us. Unfortunately, at least one and probably several editors at Faber and Faber, the book's upmarket London publishers, failed to notice that the maps on pages 158 and 417 have been transposed so that the first one, when encountered, is merely baffling and the second one too, until you realise that this is not part of the plot but a publisher's mistake.  

Review: Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans

I wanted to read this book and did so, cover to cover, but I found it rather disappointing. It's very much a conventional military history of battles fought, seen from our side and theirs (as one would nowadays expect). There are lots of these battles, mostly involving the Brits and their colonial troops, taking place and taking their toll from Gallipoli in the West to the Hijaz in the East. The slaughter is not so massive as on the Western Front, though there is plenty of casual cruelty running alongside. And on a much larger and more horrific scale, there is the Armenian genocide, which Rogan explains in terms of the Turks' image of the Armenians as a Russian Fifth Column in the Anatolian heartland. Rogan is interesting when he points out that the main details of the genocide have been in the public domain since 1919 when the new Turkish government tried and condemned its main instigators.

When he moves outside military history, Rogan paints a sorry tale of the callousness and perfidy of the Allies in their pursuit of Imperial ambitions, secretly carving up Ottoman territory between themselves (Sykes-Picot and so on), making promises to the Zionists (the Balfour Declaration) and misleading Arab nationalists about their true intentions as they enlisted them as expendable temporary allies.

I would have welcomed more on the emergence of Turkish identity as the successor to Ottoman identity - after all the period he writes about was dominated by the "Young Turks" not the Sultan and Caliph. Rogan portrays the Ottomans as pursuing an essentially defensive policy - which they were, surrounded as they were by sharks - but there must have been some in Constantinople thinking beyond that.

Review: Richard Davenport-Hines, Universal Man, The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes

Back on 13 January 2013 I enthusiastically reviewed Richard Davenport-Hines' An English Affair, a history of the Profumo scandal. So when I saw his new book on the Waterstone's table, I bought it.

Unfortunately, it lacks the structure and the passionate sense of injustices done which drove the previous book. A lot of this new book reads like cut and paste ( a frequent problem with modern books which are never written out from start to finish) and the attempt to impose structure through chunking Keynes' life into seven compartments doesn't eradicate or even disguise this weakness. As a result, the book isn't very readable - something which surprised me.

It does contain a lot of information, sometimes elegantly dispensed, and it does deal with things - notably Keynes' sex life - which previous biographies have pussy-footed around. Keynes wasn't coy about his sex life and regarded it as very important  - important enough to chronicle and then archive -  so the lurid details are fully justified.

Keynes' success owed itself to three things: his intellectual brilliance, his capacity for very hard work, and - despite his sharp-tongued willingness to cause offence - a superb ability to make use of the many Old Boys' (and Young Boys' ) networks in which he was enmeshed. That last is one reason the Establishment to which he whole-heartedly belonged never persecuted him in the way that it persecuted Alan Turing. Good luck is another.

Review: Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel Germany and Austria-Hungary at War 1914 - 1918

This is a good book. 566 pages of text and 220 of apparatus. I discovered an enormous amount which I did not know, simply because Watson writes his history as if from the capitals of the losers, something which is rarely done. History belongs to the winners.

But in addition to what I learnt about Wilhelmine Germany and Hapsburg Austria-Hungary (Ottoman Turkey, the other main loser is omitted), I also read a very measured assessment of the criminality and destructiveness of the First World War, a war without any moral merit in which leaders simply chose to murder and starve millions of their own citizens in pursuit of - sometimes vague - Imperial ambitions - or, in Austria-Hungary's case, Imperial vanity. On the Allied side, Tsarist Russia approached the war in the same spirit, lusting after Austrian and Ottoman territory, pursuing its recurrent delusion that the way to protect its very long borders was to make them even longer. 

There is also an important thread through the book which shows us that the other face of military discipline is military indiscipline. Soldiers do not do as they are told: they loot, burn, rape and kill women and children; they desert, mutiny and surrender. Watson documents this and gives the figures.

Nowadays, unreliable soldiers are replaced by missiles: we do not put boots on the ground. They always become boots in someone's face and soon there are no hearts and minds, except those of criminal elites, on your side. Trouble is, the missiles seem to hit the ground in such a way that they have pretty much the same effect.

Review: Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios

First published in 1939 this remains a remarkably fresh detective novel. Plus ça change - here we have not just murderers (who are always with us) but drug dealers, people traffickers, shady nightclub owners, assassins and, perhaps best of all, a dodgy bank registered in Monaco so that it does not have to publish anything or pay taxes.

The third-person narrative casts a writer of detective novels as its lead character who sets out in search of the history of a recently deceased criminal only to discover him, eventually, alive. The fiction writer, described as a prig by one of the underworld characters with whom he gets involved, is led on - as we all are - by fascination with the Other: those on the other side who make their living, and their lives, by breaking laws or moral taboos rather than enforcing them. Ambler explores this fascination at some length by setting up a working relationship between the writer Latimer and the crook Mr Peters. Just sometimes one feels that Ambler has Latimer protest too much, just in case the reader is tempted to conclude that he has been seduced by the other side - and this is perhaps the only aspect of the novel which feels a little dated. A modern writer might have fewer moral scruples or worry less about moral ambiguity.

It's a very good read. Ambler makes quite generous assumptions about his readers' general knowledge and willingness to add to it. It is quite a pleasant change to read someone who does not assume you are ignorant or determined to remain so.