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From: blp Category: Other stuff Date: 10 December 2006 Time: 01:56 PM Review: Notes towards a bestselling spy thriller 1. He is recruited in high school. 2. He takes acid trip and finds himself in a mirrored elevator, gazing up at ‘the image of a man’. 3. He spends time in training observing trajectories, tracing circles, propping up things not meant to stand alone, throwing and catching using a yellow ball and a white cup, waiting, understanding boredom, being frustrated, conversing and watching television. 4. The problem for all CIA agents is to retain their intelligence and their passion for inquiry, while at the same time nurturing their capacity for blind loyalty. Soldiers don’t ask questions. CIA agents do. Obviously it’s a question of which questions. 5. His training kicked in with his first case. He begins to understand that thinking through the details of any problem is, for him, a matter of sorting the binary possibilities of combining circles and diagonals in various ways etc. The physical qualities of the world he is observing simplify and simplify again, as if he is perpetually adjusting the focus on a camera. But instead of becoming blurry, the forms emerge clearly, revealing their underlying simple geometries. Appropriately, the process of examination begins with photos on a pinboard; for case #1: football players, a wizened gardener, a roll of lace at the funeral of the massacre victims, a geodesic dome, the Montblanc Tunnel seen from the Swiss side and a sunset photographed by a little girl in Gaza before she became a terrorist – Jamella Al Khan. The case is finally resolved without drama as he is looking at a road sign near the same mouth of the Montblanc on the Swiss side on a foggy October morning: a circle with a diagonal bisecting it. Diagonals point in neither direction and lead nowhere. They link disparate things and offer themselves at the same time as facts. They display the possibility of stepping sideways, out of whatever opposition one may be in, into the creation of a new, more surprising opposition. This time it leads him back to Jamella’s note, sent to Le Monde the previous week: ‘We will be the fog on the image. We are the terrible embodiment of the beauty signified by Rock’n’roll. We are the faultlines of the earth that heave with the horror of the placid places, horrible because of what they conceal: the world made of demons.’ The focus changes, a shape looms up like a marble head in deep shadow against a bright blue sky. Without knowing how, he finally knows. He realises he has everything he needs. He drives back to Bern and makes the phone call that will prevent a siege at the American Embassy in Rome. Six months later as a direct result of this operation, Jamella will be dead, her face turning gradually into a silhouette as her blood seeps away onto the white tiles of a public lavatory under the parabola that crowns the Royal Albert Hall in London. On stage, beneath that same bell curve, Joni Mitchell is duetting with David Bowie. Removing his leather gloves, he slipped into a seat in the seventh row as they sang the words 6. Terrorists have changed. Russian gravestones and elevators. Rome. A man buried alive. A man falsely believed to have been buried alive. Pale flowers. Sugarry tea. Desexualisation. Gender change. False accusations. Investigations. Cocaine. Placards. Mausoleum. Resurrection. This man was his father. Not his father. This man believes him to be guilty of murder. This man believes him to be a woman (who has hurt him). This man believes the woman to be unbalanced. This woman is conducting her own personal investigations. This man believes this woman to be guilty of murder, of burying another man alive. This man is having to educate his superior. This man has confused this woman with someone else. This man believes himself to be plotted against. This man is going to meet a woman, a totally unsympathetic character, and fall in love with her. This man is going to do some damage to his superior and to the first woman. His superior is going to follow a false lead to a Russian gravestone and have a premonition. This man is going to be obsessed with a particular perfume (or uncannily plagued by its recurrence, which, perhaps, induces nausea). His superior is going to become the object of the affections of the first woman. This man is going to lie to him about her (but sincerely). This man is the unconscious dupe of another woman who has killed his superior. She has a malignant sidekick, also female. This man is going to have a sexual encounter with a secretary from the office and leave her. First off we need to state that they began from precepts that were inarguable. There was Dooley (Dooley) and there was the other one, Franks, who was such a wet, feeble, runny-nosed, faggy little shit we wonder how it is that he was ever allowed into the service. Questions will have to be asked and we are in little doubt that there will be blood on the carpet. Not that there hasn’t been quite a bit already.