off the shelf old books reviewed anew

Confessional by Jack Higgins. Published 1985.

Jack Higgins seminal blah is set in 1982 with the Communist Party of Russia still trying to take over the world and fictional IRA hitman Liam Devlin now working as a lecturer in English literature at Trinity College Dublin while still being called on at weekends by British Intelligence, the IRA and every other major world player, to sort out the espionage and statecraft problems that are otherwise considered too hot to handle for professional full time spies, assassins, police men, terrorist groups and armies.
Apparently he was at Trinity College during my time there but our paths never crossed.
Devlin first became famous as a character in Higgins' The Eagle Has Landed, a classic piece of World War Two hokum where he was called on by Himmler to help the Nazis and Michael Caine kidnap Winston Churchill.
The boy gets around.
I love Confessional while being slightly shirty about the orgiastic violence.
There is an hilariousness to it that may not be entirely intentional.
It is the most enjoyable thing I've read in yonks.
First the Brits, then the Rah, ask Devlin to sort out a renegade assassin who has been retained by Russia to frame the IRA and British army for countless murders and thereby keep the sectarian pot boiling in Northern Ireland..
It's never clear why Devlin is working for the Brits. There's no mention of  money. Maybe they're plying him with first editions of James Joyce books. It's not exactly clear either why he's no longer working full time with the Rah. An unconvincing aside informs us that Devlin disapproves of the violence in the modern IRA campaign.
The Russian assassin himself is introduced to us readers in a flashback scene where he's doing a KGB training exercise and kills three of his fellow participants just for larfs.
General Maslansky, the KGB kingpin in charge of the exercise is evidently familiar with life in a Jack Higgins book and barely pauses amid the mayhem to philosophically shrug his shoulders at the exuberance of youth before turning the clearly loopy loo assassin loose on the Rah and the Brits..
As for the great Devlin.
Here's the thing.
Everyone that Devlin sets out to protect in Confessional at the behest of British Intelligence and or the IRA, gets killed in short order because from the beginning of the book to near the end, Devlin never figures out that his phone has been tapped by the Russian assassin himself who lives next door.
I mean after the first few hits, even the most amateur of us would be getting a bit more cautious about repeatedly telling various persons whose lives are in danger over the phone: "Stay right where you are at 12 Grosvenor Place. I'll be there to collect you in the morning at 11am.. The codeword to let me in will be Womble."
And this guy is the guy the Brits and the Rah (and the Nazis) and gawdelpus the UN for all I know, come running to when things go awry.
Bloody hell.
No wonder the Northern Ireland conflict was intractable.
Along with every other conflict in the world.
Jack Higgins research is always impeccably terrible.
So the backdrop for this assassins' blood fest danse macabre ignores the fact that during the real life Northern Ireland conflict, the Russian KGB were in reality running all IRA factions as proxies against Britain.
If you ignore this slight cosmic omission in the basic plot line, the book's premise that both the English State and the IRA were being simultaneously targetted by the Russians, is ridinkulous but not fatally so.
The best fun is in the creeping feeling on reading Confessional that the plot seems to be escaping on Jack Higgins and that he was too rich or too bored or too lazy to ever bring it back into any semblance of coherency.
It is a charming quirk of style that characters in his books regularly end up musing: "I'm no longer playing the game. The game is playing me."
I think it happened to Jack himself as he was typing away on this one.
He was no longer writing the book.
The book was writing him.
The British secret service man arrives at Devlin's Dublin house for a conference with Devlin. Moments after the British contact departs, the operational head of the IRA (for real) Martin McGuinness shows up, tapping on the French windows and enters for his own consultation.
Tapping on the French windows.
There's sinister.
I'm a traditionalist in these matters and I yield to no one in finding characters in spy novels entering and leaving through the French windows teetotally the most amusing thing since the first episode of Benny Hill.
But before the Brit or the Rah man ever arrived, the rogue psychotic Russian assassin himself, known as Cuchulainn, was already there in his alter ego as priest Father Harry Cussane, having a cup of tea with Devlin in the drawing room before returning home to his house next door for a quiet evening between murders listening in on Devlin's phonecalls.
Wah ha ha ha.
Sorry, I lost it there for a moment.
Devlin's failure to protect anyone the IRA or the Brits ask him to mind is matched only by Martin McGuinness' own.
Over the course of a few chapters McGuinness loses five top IRA hit men whom he's told to either protect someone, watch someone or kill someone.
With this sort of attrition, one wonders how the Rah or McGuinness ever got such a reputation for menace.
There's also a somewhat dissonant matter of factness in Higgins chaotically blase denouement when the Brits and the IRA inevitably realise that the whole Northern Ireland conflict has been kept going for a quarter of a century by the Russians not through sponsorship of the IRA as a proxy army but through a single loan assassin hitting targets from all sides.
Everybody sort of goes: "Ahhhh. So that's what that was."
Nobody is astonished.
Nobody falls out with the Russians.
There's no international tension.
No ambassadors are sent home.
I'm telling you Maggie would have had a cow.
And a war.
As the loose ends are tied up in a welter of last minute assassinations, with various people whom Devlin is meant to be protecting getting predictably massacred, we do get a nifty little walk on part for Yuri Andropov the sinister bespectacled KGB Chief who was President of Russia for a full five minutes in 1982 just long enough to achieve true lasting fame as a character in a Jack Higgins novel.
I bet his mother was proud.
On hearing of the blood soaked debacle involving Harry Cussane, Devlin, the IRA, M15 and everybody else in Ireland and Britain, and that the KGB is responsible, Andropov sends KGB General Maslansky to Siberia (that old gag) and it transpires that the entire Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the KGB itself and of course Andropov himself who had been head of the KGB through most of this time, had been utterly unaware for three decades until the denouement of Confessional that the entire Northern Ireland conflict had been orchestrated, concocted and conducted by General Maslansky on his own initiative and that he had spent a quarter of a century from the 1960s up to the 1980s using a single assassin to hit targets from all sides in Northern Ireland with gay abandon on behalf of Mother Russia but for no conceivable gain and with no coherent purpose never mind an exit strategy and without Brit Intel, the Rah or the Russkis themselves ever figuring out what was going on.
Wow.
In the Jack Higgins universe that's what caused Northern Ireland.
Wow.
You've got to imagine me saying Wow like the dog from the opprobrious television cartoon series Family Guy.
You've got to sass it.
There you go.
Wow.
But I digress.
Higgins goes further into the high giggle zone as his denouement unfolds, with the Russian assassin/priest now unmasked, and his paymasters turning against him, poor old Cuchailainn/Father Cussane/Mikhail Kelly (His Baptismal name. I would have mentioned it earlier but I was confused.) opts to go more rogue than before, declaring a last ditch vendetta against the Russians and the Brits and the Rah and the world, by deciding on the spur of the moment to assassinate the Pope who happily is visiting London at the time.
For some reason that escaped me, Cuchulainn/Father Cussane/Mikhail decides not to kill Liam Devlin when he finally has the drop on him.
Pussy, as the young people say nowadays.
So the assassin leaves Devlin alive who shortly thereafter gets a phonecall from the head of British Intelligence who incredibly still has a lot of faith in him.
"You must protect the Pope," the head of British intelligence informs Devlin.
At which point I naturally concluded the Pope was doomed.
A sexy Russian girl concert pianist whom the back of the book led me to believe was going to figure prominently, pops up belatedly in the story.
She gets a few people killed and does little else.
If you blinked you'd miss her.
There's more of blooming Andropov than there is of her.
I felt quite cheated.
Having inexplicably (and unforgiveably in my view) spared Devlin, the assassin nips over to England and wends his way around Britain for about thirty pages laying a false trail as he stalks the Pope, and taking a well earned breather for another few pages to fall in love with a beautiful Gyspy girl before effortlessly evading the flailing domestic security capabilities of the cops, M15, Liam Devlin, and the Rah, and securing his long awaited personal audience with the Pope.
The book is a hotch potch of inspirations. It has some of the elements of a Freddy Forsyth thriller, brisk pace, hokumnic plotting, marginally credible backdrop, walk ons for famous politicians, and all that. The notion of the assassin as a priest seems to me a bit borrowed and then extended from I think a scene in Robert Ludlum's Bourne Identity where the assassin Carlos The Jackal meets his contact in a Catholic Church confession box, a scene which presumably enthused Jack Higgins back in the 1980s as much as it did me because he got a book out of it. The training scene at the beginning of Confessional where the Russian assassin/priest kills three of his own is a bit like the opening of Star Trek Two Wrath Of Khan where a bloody space battle was revealed as a hologrammatic training simulation only after we'd been appalled by the seeming deaths of half the cast of usual suspects.
I ask you.
What great writer among us has not been influenced by Star Trek Two.
The ending of Confessional lurches further into Hollywoodiana, with some lovely slapstick farce, kin to the movie Fowl Play, with Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn (Devlin and a conveniently attractive British police woman) racing to save the Pope who as per Devlin's usual method of protecting people has been left entirely alone for a good ten minutes with the most lethal assassin on earth.
There's no sex scene but I think Higgins implied that he bedded her. (Devlin not the Pope. The policewoman not Cuchulainn.)
The scene where the assassin Cuchulainn is alone with Pope John Paul the Second is compelling reading.
It's not what I wanted it to be.
It's not quite ridiculous enough to top what came before.
But it's got a certain portentous self parodying magnificence that however briefly makes life worth living.
It's typical of Jack Higgins that even in the upper reaches of lunaception he.can come up with a notion, the deadly assassin alone with the famous Pope, that's genuinely interesting.
If he'd maintained that standard of hokum earlier on in the book, it would have been a thundering good read for all the right reasons rather than for what are conventionally considered all the wrong ones.
I'm quibbling.
It's a thundering good ridiculous read anyway.
Softer too in a way than the usual Jack Higgins blunt force trauma fare.
The sexy Russian concert pianist sleeps with nobody.
The assassin sometimes shows mercy amid flashes of conscience.
The depiction of priests is respectful as is the evocation of Catholicity.
Pope John Paul is shown as an almost mythic figure.
There's a clue to what's behind this in the book's dedication.
Jack Higgins has dedicated it to his four children.
I'm guessing that after twenty years of whap bam thud, when the kiddies came along, he became suddenly less inclined to exult in depravity.
Oh and the Martin McGuinness character is good too, slightly more believable than the other famous walk ons.
There's something about the characterisation that I can't quite put my finger on.
Yes.
I bet Higgins actually knew him.
I never for a moment thought he knew Churchill, Himmler, Michael Caine, Yuri Andropov or the Pope.
But I think he actually knew McGuinness.
It's just a feeling I have.
Sometimes I'm right.