Ian Simpson's Blog

Stalin's Englishman: The Lives of Guy Burgess by Andrew Lownie

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


If Andrew Lownie, wearing his agent's hat, had tried to flog this as a work of fiction I suspect some publishers would have rejected it as being too far-fetched; the reader would be unable to suspend disbelief. But it's fact, and likely to be as near the truth as is possible in the murky world of espionage. The research that has gone into this immensely readable book is prodigious and there are extensive quotes from a wide variety of sources. Burgess was a basically dreadful man with some attractive traits: an openly promiscuous homosexual when that was illegal; an immensely cultured man yet a slob; very bright, academically and emotionally, with a mind that continued to function while pickled with alcohol; excellent, witty company yet capable of gross rudeness; a committed communist, supportive of the Soviet Union, with a hedonistic, unashamedly upper-class lifestyle that was unalterably English; shambolic yet well enough organised to send suitcases full of classified material to his Soviet handlers. In exile in Russia he continued to sport his Old Etonian tie and looked forward to receiving Fortnum and Mason hampers from his mum. How could all that have happened? You should read a book I found amazing in more ways than one.



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'Have you got tickets for Bellini's Norma?' a friend asked Annie, my wife, last October. 'Cecilia Bartoli is going to be Norma. It's the must-have ticket for the Festival.' We got ours before Christmas - only just in time.
Last night we were there. The spacious Festival Theatre was full. Foreign visitors mixed with cultured locals; real opera buffs rubbed shoulders with those who thought Bellini was a Russian pancake, Bartoli a sauce for pasta.
The production was eccentric. The story of Druids and Romans, sacred groves and human sacrifice had been relocated to Nazi-occupied Paris. Opera plots are generally silly but the super-titles made what we saw on stage completely ridiculous. It didn't matter. It made us focus on Bartoli's brilliantly powerful, furious Norma. We were privileged to be there. In an odd sort of way it was like watching Tiger Woods play golf in 2000, the best at their best. Unforgettable.
Thank goodness our friend alerted us to the run on tickets.

I recently got an e-mail from a friend who, on a golfing holiday in the Algarve, was unable to play due to a trapped nerve. He spent the time reading my book, Sons of the Fathers .
The final scene has Bobby Jones being carried shoulder-high from the final green in the 1927 Open at St Andrews.
My friend's father, a medical student at the time, had always sworn that he was one of those who had carried the great champion from the eighteenth green but my friend had failed to identify him from photographs of the scene. This had not stopped it from becoming a family legend.
My friend said he enjoyed my description of the occasion.
His e-mail adds another, and very pleasing, father and son thread to the theme running through the book.

On Saturday J & G Innes in St Andrews held a launch of my new book, Sons of the Fathers. The story is set in St Andrews, my home town, and some people have long memories ...
The launch was going along nicely when a lady of about my age came up to me and said she wanted to confess something that happened over fifty years ago. A girl at her (girls') school had given her a peacock's feather and she had held it as she rode her bicycle home. On her way she had passed me as I walked home from my (boys') school. She had tickled the back of my knees with the feather and I hadn't liked it. This had been on her conscience for over half a century and she felt better for telling me now.
I told her that I had been deeply traumatised by the incident, but was getting over it.
We had a good laugh and, yes, she did buy the book. Sons of the Fathers (Sheriff Hector Drummond #1).

Today we drove down to Abbotsford, the splendid house built by Sir Walter Scott on the banks of the Tweed. The Borders were near their best with weak sunlight warming fields that had recently given up their crops and the first brush strokes of autumn tinting trees and grasses.
Abbotsford has been recently restored and is run by a trust. The ground floor of the house is fully accessible and there is a well stocked gift shop and café.
Scott was a great writer who achieved international acclaim during his life. When his printer and publisher failed financially and Scott had yet to pay for Abbotsford's construction, he was tempted to declare himself bankrupt. Instead, he wrote more novels and, shortly after his death, his creditors were paid in full. Latterly writing became a chore and a duty. He did it in a small room, now open to the public. It is lined with books, the topmost shelves being accessed by a narrow gallery. The stairs to the gallery were not the only ones leading from his workplace; another flight led to his bedchamber where he fled if unwanted visitors should call. It was strange to occupy the space in which so much great literature came into being. There were no computers then, no spell-checks, no delete buttons, only primitive pens, ink and lots of paper.
The sad thing is that Scott's style is too wordy for today's taste and the fine characters driving his excellent stories remain seldom discovered in their finely bound graves.

'Only Ian could have blood AND vomit on the Old Course,' a fastidious friend commented about the start of Murder on the Second Tee. I'm not so sure about that. A lot of different fluids have been spilled on the sacred links over the centuries. And in a variety of circumstances.
The setting of the book struck a more positive note with a Goodreads friend; it reminded him of a birdie he had at the eighteenth.
I remember the great PD James giving a lecture in which she spoke of the importance of place to a story. If the background is convincing it makes the book convincing provided that what happens is in some way moulded by the place. A particular place can affect the behaviour of those who live and work there, and sometimes even visitors.
I was lucky enough to have been brought up in St Andrews and to have played the Old Course many times. The course has seen many dramas over the years and has tested the great and the good, the rich and the famous. And ordinary people; it belongs to the community, not a club, and anyone may enter the ballot for tee times or enjoy walks across it on a Sunday, as the course has always been shut on the Sabbath (except if there is a big tournament).
If the course is not enough, the Royal Burgh, or 'the auld grey toon' is steeped in history. It has been pounded by French guns, and during the religious struggles protestant martyrs have been burned at the stake and a catholic cardinal's body hung from the walls of the castle.
The challenge for me was to write a story worthy of the background.

Perhaps because my birthday falls a day later, I am very aware of the 4th July. For all its faults, I like America for its grand scale and positive attitude, and I have been lucky to count a number of Americans as my friends. But what am I? A yankophile?
Foreigners who like us Brits are called anglophiles. Actually that means they like the English, but no one could possibly like them without also liking us Scots. Bizarrely we also have a word, frankophile, for those who like the French, or maybe it's just France, but we do not have a word for people who like any other nation; we do not refer to krautophiles or spanophiles or polophiles or japophiles. Does this gap in the lexicon betray xenophobia, or do we just like everyone (except possibly the French)as a matter of course?
Be that as it may, Lincoln's description of 'a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal' rings out as powerfully in cyberspace as it did over the blood-soaked field of Gettysburg.
I'm proud to be a yankophile.

We all have truths that we would rather not share, dark secrets that distort our sleep: we might lose our friends, become social lepers; people might concoct any excuse to avoid visiting our home; we might become the butt of snide remarks and malicious gossip.

I am proud of my wife, Annie. She faced up to these risks with her usual resolution when she whispered to a friend, 'We have mice.'

The response was extraordinary. Her friend hugged her and said, 'So do we.' Three magic words. Emboldened, Annie has told many more with the same result; the truth is that South Edinburgh is infested with field mice and no one wanted to admit it. The wee blighters like old houses with central heating and the crumbs of nice food that get dropped by wandering grandchildren. They're smart, too; everyone has set traps baited with the finest temptations yet not one mouse has been caught. If they have a sense of humour they must find us very funny. But at least we're now being honest about them.

Our house was built when Queen Victoria was still mourning her beloved Albert. We bought it thirty-five years ago and there were mice. I went round with polyfilla, plastering any hole in the structure and since then we have been mouse-free. Till recently, that is. My wife did not take well to finding small, black droppings everywhere. She visited the local hardware store and bought up rolls of steel wool; she filled any gap she found then put putty on top; she bought traps, some humane, some lethal, and baited them with good chocolate (well, we live in South Edinburgh). But not one mouse was caught and the droppings continued to drop. One evening I was seated in the bathroom when a tiny beast rounded a corner, saw me and fled. Where, I know not.

More steel wool was bought, more holes found and sealed. The traps were baited with cheese (French). Still no success. The wee blighters began to knaw at our carpets.

We started to bait the traps with raisins, but they simply ate those leading to the mouth of the trap without entering. My wife went back to the hardware shop for more steel wool, but the shopkeeper, now very prosperous, had sold out. 'Never mind,' he said, 'they'll go back out to the fields once the better weather comes.'

The strange thing is, we have come to respect the intelligence of our adversaries. 'Well, no sign of our furry friends this morning,' my wife reported today, the merest hint of affection in her voice. But we won't be sad to see them go.

'Is your husband dead or has he had a stroke?' South Edinburgh's uber-bitch asked my wife yesterday at a charity sale.
'He's alive and well, actually,' Annie replied.
'Well, there's something wrong with him,' the u-b persisted.
'He has a rare muscle-wasting condition and his mobility is limited, but he's been told that something else will kill him,' my wife said cheerily.
When she told me, I thought this was hilarious, but if my wife had been recently widowed, she'd have been devastated ('At least I hope you would,' I said). It was a truly terrible remark, all the worse because there is no particular ill-feeling between the two women.
How many writers would have the confidence to put that scene in a book? People don't really behave like that, one might think. But yes, they do. We have been given imaginations and should mine every ounce of precious metal they hold, using old-fashioned thought to fashion the unlikely ore into something credible.