Actually, by this point The Winter Men appeared some years ago. It's probably superior to any of the comics I might have bought in the past few weeks. Haven't managed to get to the comic shop for a while. Another Amazon review:
A final few thoughts on LeCarre:
One of the things I didn't find space for in my earlier posts was to talk about LeCarre's similar use of language and command of idiom. He really is superb at capturing nuances of class and culture through speech. The moment which most obviously comes to mind is at the end of The Secret Pilgrim. In his final chapter Ned tells us of how he's sent to have a chat with a British arms dealer. This delightful individual has been selling weapons to a dictator and the Secret Service would rather he didn't. Ned scrupulously records the response he is given to his admittedly condescending request, carefull to record every inflection and gramatical error. His condescention comes from an over confidence bourn out of an assumption of the Service's authority and the respect in which it is surely still held. Instead he is subjected to a monologue occupying several pages in which he is disabused of any remaining innocence that he might have that he doesn't belong to a dying class and institution. It's a small masterpiece of post-Thatcherite arrogance and insolence. But the way in which Ned and be extension LeCarre frames it in the text not only makes it clear just how much reality is excluded from his well plotted and structured texts (The Secret Pilgrim, with it's structure of episodes linked only by their narrator and the history of the post war Brittish secret service possibly pushes furthest against the form of the spy story of any of LeCarre's fiction), but also retroactively frames the overarching narrative of Smiley and his colleagues as a fall from Eden.
That's not to say that LeCarre ever idealises the Brittish upper class whose rule had by 1993 been displaced by commerce and Thatcherism. On the contrary, he's highly critical in everything he writes about that class. But there's also a nostalgia throughout LeCarre's work for a more stable and known world. Some of my thoughts about this have been stimulated by having finished reading The Tailor of Panama last month. It's perhaps not quite as strong as its obvious model, Greene's Our Man in Havana which moves with a swiftness LeCarre's expansive texts lack, but still fine entertainment, with a marvellous portrait of the Jewish tailor and fantasist Harry Pendel. In their different ways the detailed histories of both Pendel and his nemesis, the British secret agent Andy Osnard both hark back to older worlds of Englishness. The past overshadows both characters to an intense degree, a common LeCarre trope. Pendel also demonstrates some awareness of how these tropes of Englishness are always at least in part constructed, since his whole life is built on a lie. His success at marketing himself as a tailor is based on his manipulation of a fantasy of nostalgic Englishness. Even his real past in the old Jewish East End starts to take on an elements of the fantastical, since it is now equally receding into the past, recorded only by Pendel's nostalgia. Just like Greene's earlier novel, The Tailor of Panama exposes just how much fiction is resent within the world of the Secret Service, but it's equally good at exposing how unstable is this fantasy of Englishness.
Postscript:
And now I shall cease writing about LeCarre and try to catch up with some fo the posts I've wanted to get to for the last few months. I've not had enough time to devote to this blog as I would have liked over the last few months, and that is unlikely to change any time soon, but we shall see how I do.
Brett Lewis & John Paul Leon – The Winter Men
“My little friends, I thought I would have more time to tell you how thing ended up. But perhaps for now I will just tell you the good parts..."
For anyone following this when it was originally serialised, it must have seemed unlikely that it would have ever reached the end. Originally supposed to run for a full 8 issues, it was bounced from one DC comics imprint to another, subject to delays, cut down to 6 issues, then struggled to publish a total of 5 issues before the final extra sized special appeared over two years later. Presumably as a result of all these behind the scenes wranglings, the final chapter in this volume feels rather compressed, the exquisite pacing on display elsewhere dropped in the rush to get the story over as elegantly as possible in the space remaining. Just the good parts...
Kris Kalenov, the central character and narrator in many tightly packed caption boxes, is a recognisable type in these sorts of stories. The lone man, weighed down by some unconfessed violent past, capable of more feeling than he allows the world to see, unexpectedly honourable, and who is caught up in a series of ever escalating events, manipulated by others.
"Like many Russians, I was meant to be poet. But one does not eat good intentions. So...I have become some other things."
I wanted to place this here, next to my last post on LeCarre, because although The Winter Men is a very different kind of work, it shares a few things in common with LeCarre's general worldview and approach. Brett Lewis is similarly attentive to the rhythms of speech deployed by his violent characters.One of the most striking things about this comic is its language, which wonderfully evokes the landscape of post-soviet Russia through its cadence and inflection. I've no idea if Russians actually talk like they do in The Winter Men, but writer Brett Lewis has clearly done his research, and it certainly feels authentic. Especially as the narrative sometimes feels less interested in the post-Watchmen superhero plot with which it is ostensibly concerned (most particularly in that awkward final chapter), and more with bleakly funny anecdotes of daily life. In this respect the strongest chapter in the whole book is probably the fourth, where we simply follow Kris and his compatriot Nikki the Gangster on their ordinary 'biznis' over the course of a single day.
What draws your attention to the language is not just how fine it is, but also the fact that there's so much of it, piled up in multiple caption boxes. There's a density of information both verbally and visually on almost every page with usually as many as 6 or more panels. That none of this ever becomes excessive or overwhelming is equally a testament to the layout and design by John Paul Leon with his wonderfully gritty and expressive artwork. The detail with which he overloads his pages perfectly complements the dialogue's verbosity in constructed an overcrowded landscape for the characters to inhabit and move through. And then in the odd scene where dialogue does fall away, he's equally capable of carrying the full force of the narrative.
Given its troubled production schedule, it seems only too appropriate that the collected edition already appears to be out of print. Although it was probably the superhero element that got it published in the first place, that's actually the weakest element of the book, but only really takes over in the flawed final chapter. It works far better in the early chapters where it functions more as a metaphor for Soviet nostalgia. Otherwise, The Winter Men is a fascinating and bleakly funny portrait of post Soviet Russia and violent men which is worthy to sit next to Jack Womack's Let's Put the Future Behind Us, another American book which is both fascinated and appalled by the complex reality of a country struggling to comes to terms with its Soviet past and a present of capitalism and brute market forces.
A final few thoughts on LeCarre:
One of the things I didn't find space for in my earlier posts was to talk about LeCarre's similar use of language and command of idiom. He really is superb at capturing nuances of class and culture through speech. The moment which most obviously comes to mind is at the end of The Secret Pilgrim. In his final chapter Ned tells us of how he's sent to have a chat with a British arms dealer. This delightful individual has been selling weapons to a dictator and the Secret Service would rather he didn't. Ned scrupulously records the response he is given to his admittedly condescending request, carefull to record every inflection and gramatical error. His condescention comes from an over confidence bourn out of an assumption of the Service's authority and the respect in which it is surely still held. Instead he is subjected to a monologue occupying several pages in which he is disabused of any remaining innocence that he might have that he doesn't belong to a dying class and institution. It's a small masterpiece of post-Thatcherite arrogance and insolence. But the way in which Ned and be extension LeCarre frames it in the text not only makes it clear just how much reality is excluded from his well plotted and structured texts (The Secret Pilgrim, with it's structure of episodes linked only by their narrator and the history of the post war Brittish secret service possibly pushes furthest against the form of the spy story of any of LeCarre's fiction), but also retroactively frames the overarching narrative of Smiley and his colleagues as a fall from Eden.
That's not to say that LeCarre ever idealises the Brittish upper class whose rule had by 1993 been displaced by commerce and Thatcherism. On the contrary, he's highly critical in everything he writes about that class. But there's also a nostalgia throughout LeCarre's work for a more stable and known world. Some of my thoughts about this have been stimulated by having finished reading The Tailor of Panama last month. It's perhaps not quite as strong as its obvious model, Greene's Our Man in Havana which moves with a swiftness LeCarre's expansive texts lack, but still fine entertainment, with a marvellous portrait of the Jewish tailor and fantasist Harry Pendel. In their different ways the detailed histories of both Pendel and his nemesis, the British secret agent Andy Osnard both hark back to older worlds of Englishness. The past overshadows both characters to an intense degree, a common LeCarre trope. Pendel also demonstrates some awareness of how these tropes of Englishness are always at least in part constructed, since his whole life is built on a lie. His success at marketing himself as a tailor is based on his manipulation of a fantasy of nostalgic Englishness. Even his real past in the old Jewish East End starts to take on an elements of the fantastical, since it is now equally receding into the past, recorded only by Pendel's nostalgia. Just like Greene's earlier novel, The Tailor of Panama exposes just how much fiction is resent within the world of the Secret Service, but it's equally good at exposing how unstable is this fantasy of Englishness.
Postscript:
And now I shall cease writing about LeCarre and try to catch up with some fo the posts I've wanted to get to for the last few months. I've not had enough time to devote to this blog as I would have liked over the last few months, and that is unlikely to change any time soon, but we shall see how I do.
