The Torqued Man: John Le Carre Meets Irish Legend

 

 

 

The Torqued Man (2022)

By Peter Mann

HarperCollins, 384 pages

★★★★

 

If you enjoy wartime thrillers, try The Torqued Man, the debut novel of Stanford history lecturer Peter Mann. To raise a glass to my own profession, there’s nothing like a historian to add detail to what would otherwise be a mere chronicle.

 

The main character is Frank Pike, based loosely on the biography of Frank Ryan. He  has been around, though most of the novel takes place in an around Berlin during World War II. Pike has been inside jails in Ireland for his Irish Republican Army (IRA) activities and in Spain after the losing crusade to prevent the reign to Francisco Franco’s fascist-like Falangist movement. Spain is where Abwehr official Johann Grotius–code name Adrian De Groot–finds Pike. (He is an adaptation of Kurt Hälker.)

 

The key to understanding Mann’s novel is to know that Mann has grounded the novel in real circumstances. De Groot officially springs Frank Pike from a Spanish prison to help Nazi Germany recruit Ireland as an ally and a possible base for invading England. That effort–called Operation Green–was a real proposal. It didn’t happen because the new Irish Republic lacked stability and sufficient defenses, and Northern Ireland was part of Great Britain. Both Irelands remained neutral during the war, but if the German navy couldn’t cross the English Channel during the war, the Irish Sea would have been a logistical nightmare. Of course, such realities were clear only in retrospect.

 

Understanding a bit about the Abwehr is also key. If you were a citizen or live somewhere occupied by Germany, you rightly feared the Gestapo. Yet, the Gestapo was the domestic secret police; the Abwehr was a military intelligence agency. In the grand scheme of things, the less-discussed Abwehr had greater power as it controlled spy operations. De Groot is, at best, a reluctant Nazi; in truth, he kept his mouth shut about his views and assumed his position to protect himself. The Abwehr had others like him whose loyalty was “soft.” Mann’s take on internal opposition to Hitler isn’t 100% accurate, but there was indeed a large internal plot to kill Hitler in July 1944.

 

Mann’s novel fascinates because both Pike and De Groot are slippery characters. Pike is pansexual with big appetites for all things sensual. His character is deeply informed by Finn McCool, a hero in Irish mythology who performed deeds of strength and cunning. Like McCool, Pike is filled with energy, bravado, ego, and recklessness. He is the novel’s titular torqued man full of twists, intensity, and shifting agendas.

 

De Groot falls in love (lust?) with Pike. Although it’s probably untrue that many high German officers were gay, some were. Discretion, of course, was necessary. Put all of this together and add personal backstories, wild children, the horrors of wartime Berlin, turf wars, “vitamin” shots, murder of doctors, necessary (and unnecessary) sacrifices, and Finn/Pike’s hidden journal and what it adds up to is deliciously ambiguous. After all, should we trust anything connected to Pike. Don’t blame yourself if can’t always unravel who is playing who. The Torqued Man is like John Le Carré meets Irish mythology– thus a blend of truth, storytelling, and literary license.

 

The only thing that mars Mann’s novel is what I would dub a scholar’s mistake. During his studies he encountered Frank Ryan and the Connolly Column (Irish volunteers during the Spanish Civil War), but decided that material would work better as a novel. I agree, but there’s an inherent danger when one gets too close to the research; namely, it’s easy to think that what you know is common knowledge. Given that he wrote a piece of fiction in English, it would have helped immensely had he translated German military terms and key vocabulary. I assure you, though, that even if your German doesn’t extend beyond wiener schnitzel a wade through The Torqued Man is an exciting journey.

 

Rob Weir

New Richard Thompson Release

 

Ship to Shore (2024)

By Richard Thompson

New West Records

 

Richard Thompson has been among my favorite musicians since he was a young whelp in Fairport Convention. I tend to like his acoustic music a bit more because I can hear song lyrics more clearly and appreciate his guitar wizardry when it’s stripped of electronic tricks, but RT’s also a fine rock musician.

 

On the cover of his newest recording Ship to Shore Thompson looks like an old salt in his watch cap, intense gaze, and seagulls perched on his shoulders. But don’t expect sea shanties or ballads; this is a plugged-in album. The one link to the cover’s sailor persona is that many of the songs are about traveling, the loneliness it entails, and searching for close contact, even the temporary kind. Even the song titles bespeak this yearning: “Lost in the Crowd,” “What’s Left to Lose,” “Maybe.” The last of these has a catchy guitar riff, but can we really picture Richard Thompson in any kind of long-term relationship with a lady in her Jimmy Choo shoes and her Lily Grace sweater/A splash of Opium between her knees?

 

The closest Thompson gets to a sea song vibe is “Singapore Sadie,” a tale of a mysterious no-nonsense lady who looks out for herself and believes that romance is overrated. Thompson has long been considered the duke of darkness; “Sadie” is almost sunny by his standards. If you need confirmation of that, try “The Fear Never Leaves You” or “Life’s a Bloody Show.” His “Turnstile Casanova” is a (sort of) companion piece to “Sadie.” The most “sentimental” (-ish) song might be “Old Pack Mule.” It’s one of my favorite tracks on the album, but fate isn’t kind in this one either. Check out the hypnotic snake handler background music.

 

I suspect my fellow Thompson devotees will agree with me that this is both a solid recording, but one that settles in the middle of his oeuvre pack. I appreciated that Thompson confines electric guitar to instrumental breakouts and did his best to make Ship to Shore a lyrics-forward project. What the album seems to lack–and maybe my view will change as I listen more–is a couple of “holy smoke!” signature tracks. I don’t mean to imply the production is all of piece, but nothing shoots out the lights (as it were). That said, anything Richard Thompson does is better than most of what you hear elsewhere. Will I be at Northampton’s Academy of Music on October 11 when he brings the Ship to Shore to the stage? Do seagulls crap on parked cars?

 

Rob Weir

 

 

            

 

   

 

The Story Teller Could Have Been Spun Better

 

 

The Story Collector (2024)

By Evie Woods

One More Chapter (Harper Collins,) 384 pages.

★★

 

I once attended a talk at Smith College when Kurt Vonnegut was a writer in residence. Students asked him for advice for young writers. He told them that it was important to explain vital things, but cautioned not to over-explain. That advice could have helped The Story Teller.

 

Evie Woods is the pen name of Evie Gaughan. She lives in Ireland, the setting of The Story Collector, which was originally published in 2018. It's a tale within a tale that jumps between 1910 and 2010. Sarah Harper is about to leave her three-year marriage and take temporary refuge in Boston with her overbearing sister. Sarah drinks too much, staggers onto the wrong plane, falls asleep, and awakes as she is about to land in Shannon. Huh? She didn’t need a passport to fly to Boston and how does a drunken woman make it through customs?

 

She's a mess and knows it, but decides to stay in Erin to sort out her emotional distress and her lack of future plans. Luckily she encounters a kindly bus driver who helps her get oriented and find a place to stay in Ennis. Everyone is nice to her except widowed conservation office officer Oran Sweeney even though she's a clueless Yank who knows nothing about County Clare. Sarah gets the lowdown about early 19^th century Thornwood House and why the motorway mysteriously goes around it. It seems to have something to do with cnoc na sí, the hill of the fairies, though locals only half believe in said supernatural beings. As Sarah settles into the wintry land and walks a lot–how else to secure the wine she guzzles on the sly?–she chances upon an old diary hidden in a tree.

 

This is the hook for the Wayback chapters that spotlight 18-year-old Anna Butler and her family. The book’s namesake character is Harold Griffin-Krauss, an American reading anthropology for an Oxford PhD on fairy beliefs. He hires Anna to be his regional contact for setting up interviews. The Butlers are reluctant to allow Anna to travel with Harold, but she's bright, responsible, and the farmstead needs the extra money she earns. Harold's a complete gentleman, quite unlike twin siblings George and Olivia Hawley, the rich, privileged heirs to Thornwood House. As it fittingly transpires, Thornwood and the Hawley family are cursed. Do the fairies have a role in that?

 

It should be noted that story collecting was a real thing. The study of folklore and social anthropology came into their own in the early 20th century. As industrialism, urbanization, and modernism proved transformative, scholars combed the countryside to analyze disappearing traditions. In similar fashion, “song catchers” went into European villages and the Appalachians to trace the origins of folk songs.

 

Woods employs a forth-and-back [sic] narrative structure that parallels the lives of Sarah and Anna; that is, if we broadly interpret trauma, pluck, and confusion about relationships. In both time periods Woods suggests that proper matches are a mix of luck and magic. Overall, Anna's tale is much more compelling than Sarah's. Anna is a young woman forced to grow up, whereas Sarah is an adult who struggles/refuses to do so. Though one can sympathize with Sarah’s misfortunes and allegiance to the bottle, she's essentially awaiting a rescuing knight in shining armor.

 

The Story Collector is thus an awkward hybrid that's not quite a slice of Irish life, not quite a romance, and not quite magical realism. This perhaps explains the novel’s uneven tone. In all candor, at times it read like a YA novel. Why do modern-day residents of Ennis act more like Americans than Irishmen? Does anyone need a character explain where the Celtic lands are located? (Surely most contemporary readers could at least name Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.) Aside from stereotypical foodways and fairies, this story could have taken place in the pine barrens where the Jersey devil is said to roam, or in the Pacific Cascades where Bigfoot is alleged to reign.

 

Tonal shifts and obvious contrivances notwithstanding, The Story Collector is easy reading and has delightful moments. I suspect it will have an audience, but to me it seemed more a treatment for a novel than a finished product.

 

Rob Weir