Book Review: The Matarese Circle

 

© 1979 by Robert Ludlum

 

Let me confess that I am not an expert on the spy novel. In five decades of reading, I’ve actually only put away three: Moonraker, by Ian Fleming, The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum, and now this, The Matarese Circle, also by Ludlum. I had given Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy a go nearly twenty years ago but made little headway and gave it up about fifty pages in.

I’ve always said I should make my way through Fleming’s Bond oeuvre. Yet I never do for some reason. It would not be in the Venn diagram intersection of Bucket List Books and Urgent Must-Read Books. Perhaps if I won Powerball or discovered a Picasso under a cloth in the attic I might get to them. It is this type of spirit that informs my attitude toward the spy novel.

But I found a trio of hardcover Ludlum books a few weeks ago while accompanying my littlest daughter in her thrifting obsession, all for $5. I had to bite.

Way, way back when the Mrs. and I were newlyweds, we went to see the first Bourne movie. I was impressed. It was a great movie, and I say that with no reservations. The sequels sucked, with their over-dependence on that nauseating sea sickness of shaky cam, but the first one was good enough to make me seek out the original source material.

Now Ludlum appears to me to be an old school Cold War enthusiast. His novels are intricate pieces of work detailing the sticky web of pre-computer practical spywork: calling from different locations, mail drops; creating, maintaining and utilizing espionage networks; dueling with lies; fake identities; sleuthing in vast libraries; comparing dental X-rays; a thorough knowledge of hand guns; and a MacGuyver-esque ability to rig the most common, everyday objects into fiery explosive devices.

This appealed to me. In part, to assuage my embarrassment at failing to finish Tinker Tailor et al. Possibly John Le Carré is the intellectual spy novel and Ludlum the hands-on. Le Carré the right brain and Ludlum the left. Dunno, but that seems kinda right in these admittedly uninformed musings.

Anyway, I don’t intent to go into the plot here. Suffice it to say the Matarese Circle is an evil, secret society bent on world domination, and our hero must join forces with his deadly Soviet enemy to bring them down. Six hundred pages, which probably could be trimmed by about a third, but then you wouldn’t get to see the protagonist make all those fiery devices with everyday objects.

The bottom line, though, what really, really, really struck me, was how wonderfully refreshing it was to read a completely non-PC book. In this era of our own self-Sovietization of culture, of censorship in the public entertainment media to the cause of the hardest leftist ideology, how amazing it was to journey through a book that throws exactly zero F’s in this direction.

There’s no LGBT nonsense. There’s no social justice nonsense. True, it was written in 1979, and it’s also true that it’s a total product of its time. Perhaps it’s the comparison of then and now that struck me so. I was 12 when The Matarese Circle was published, and I was unaware of it, being in the thrall of Alien and Isaac Asimov stories. But I’m certain my father read it, and tens of thousands of other men like him.

Our hero, “Bray,” is a non-repentant alpha male. A toxic male, if I’m allowed to use a word tossed about by those who seek safe spaces. Bray – a veteran of the Korean War and a world-weary Cold Warrior – walks in a completely non-feminist world. Well-defined gender roles are a common thing in this world, this world that had existed for centuries if not millennia, and it is completely unremarkable to the characters. Our female protagonist and Bray’s love interest does not feel oppressed by the patriarchy. Yes, Antonia is tough and even though she has trained as a terrorist, she can’t beat the crap out of a dozen 200-pound male mercenaries at a single go. She is tough and brave as a woman, not as a masculine female.

Did I mention Bray is an alpha male? So alpha that the night before his final odds-against-him confrontation with the Matarese Bray buys and cooks a porterhouse steak, pairing it with a bottle of Scotch, and cigarettes, cigarettes, cigarettes. Somebody cancel this character!!!

My one negative with the story, other than its length, is that there were a lot of deaths. A lot of innocent people murdered (by the Matarese). I didn’t necessarily keep track, but enough happened for me to take notice. Maybe twenty, twenty-five civilians get whacked. Add about a hundred or so of the bad guys. And a lot of biting down on cyanide tablets, which may or may not have been cliché in 1979.

All in all, I give it a solid B. The subject isn’t my area of interest, but I was able to read it consistently, putting away 30-40 pages at a sitting. Would be a good beach read in paperback form. I have two other Ludlum hardcovers on the shelf, there for when the spirit hits me, which at this point seems like next summer and the summer after that.

As a side note, I read that The Matarese Circle was nearly made into a movie fifteen years ago off the success of the Bourne movies. Denzel Washington was cast as Bray and Tom Cruise as the Soviet counterpart. Both completely miscast, naturally. And I’m kinda glad it was never made, because 1) Hollywood can’t make a decent movie anymore (maybe it could’ve fifteen years ago, but it was starting to decline even back then), and 2) all that refreshing stuff I mentioned in the preceding paragraphs would have been tossed aside. No, it would have been garroted and left for dead on the side of the road with a scrawled note tacked to its chest: How DARE You!

Still the Funniest Show on TV

 

One Year in Texas

 

Today marks the one year anniversary of the Hopper clan’s move to Texas.

What have I learned and accomplished this past trip around the Sun?

What’s the best thing about Texas, for me?


Well, to be honest, that’s a tough one. I could go on about higher earnings, lower taxes, bigger house, newer house, new cars, and all that material stuff, but in reality we were doing well in New Jersey and now we’re doing a little better 1,550 miles away. I feel that it’s a better place for my girls, though they’ll be loath to admit it. I could mention how I got a better paying job working with nice people in seven weeks, eliminating one of my existential fears about the move. I could mention more, but I don’t think I’d be writing anything of lasting importance.

So, what’s the best thing about Texas, for me?

It might sound kinda goofy, but for the past twelve months I’ve felt – no, been inundated – with a sense of promise down here. That something good is just around the corner. It’s a cloud I’ve been walking through for my entire time down here. But it’s not something passive; it’s something that will demand an active response from me. I think I know what that is, I’m just gearing and screwing myself up to do it. Aw heck it’s analysis paralysis, but of a much lesser and weaker kind than the form that overwhelmed me in Jersey. And that “cloud of promise” was never present to me up in the northeast.

That’s all I have to say. I have lived elsewhere in the past; eight or nine towns in New Jersey, three semesters at Rutgers, an eighteen month stint down in Maryland. Although we made some good friends down in Maryland, I never truly liked it down there and was always looking forward to a return. Now, though, in Texas, despite having good friends and great relatives up north, I’m not homesick for the Garden State.

Texas is home for me, at least for now.

(And plane travel several times a year is now the new normal!)

The National Museum of the Pacific War Pt. 2

 

My favorite part of last weekend’s trip to the Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas – and definitely the favorite part for my seven-year-old twin nephews, too – were the life-size artifacts from World War II. Planes, tanks, guns and bombs. It really provided a new angle to all the reading I’ve been doing over the past two years. Brought it more to life. Yeah, you can look at all the pictures of B-24 bombers in the world, but when you see one twenty feet away, it grants things a truer perspective.

Anyway, here are the highlights from the trip:

 

B-25 bomber

F4 Wildcat

M3 Stuart Tank

3-inch Japanese gun

Japanese triple barrel gun (25mm)

Garand M1 rifle

Japanese 35mm gun

American BOFORS gun - rapid fire 40mm cannon

Japanese "Rex" float plane

Japanese "Val" dive bomber. Reddish tint due to being behind a screen and seen only once the five-minute concluding film finishes.

Mock "Fat Man" bomb - Plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki. If I were to stand next to it the top of my head would be at the level of the black rectangle near the top center.

My only regret is that I did not think to get a picture of that midget Japanese sub, the first exhibit in the museum. I’ll get it then when we return in three years, when the boys are a little older and my girls go on the tour with us to escape the brutal south Texas heat.

The National Museum of the Pacific War

 

What a great long weekend we had down here!

Early Saturday morning we packed up the car with four days’ worth of luggage, food and drink supplies, and some books for car reading, and set off to visit my sister-in-law. She and her family live in the suburbs of Austin, Texas hill country, in a huge spread that holds an old house, a guest house, an in-ground pool, a separate three-room office, a barn, and six acres of land. This would be our first visit, though they’ve visited us twice since our relocation from New Jersey.

Anyway, they were wonderful and gracious hosts. They have seven-year-old twin boys, which my girls played with in the pool and on the trampoline and zip line. Saturday we swam all afternoon, then went out for some pizza listening to live music. Sunday we all journeyed to Fredericksburg, about an hour away, and spent the day shopping and eating. My brother-in-law and I and the boys spent two hours at the National Museum of the Pacific War – but more on that in a minute.

Monday, the Fourth of July, was spent tubing down the Comal River. This was the first time I’ve tubed in about forty years (and I’ll probably tube again in another forty …). It was okay. Initially the girls liked it, but it was extremely crowded and the river flowed at such a lazy pace it took us nearly three hours to float five miles. I baked in the sun for those three hours, but thanks to massive and frequent applications of sun block I only got burnt around my neck and on my inner elbows.

My old carcass was too exhausted to hop in the SUVs with everyone else to see fireworks that night so I stayed back at the guest house. After a long luxurious shower and an hour’s reading in the paradise of central air, I watched some fireworks bursting over the distant southern horizon, probably the same ones my family was watching in downtown Austin. It was a memorable night for me, as I was also thinking much Deep Thoughts.

Tuesday we celebrated my sister-in-law’s birthday and then headed out around lunchtime (they were going to Six Flags Great Adventure – her birthday present). We got home to a joyous Charlie the Jack Russell mix and relaxed in preparation for the short work week ahead.

My highlight of the visit was the trip to the National Museum of the Pacific War. It was on my bucket list of things to see / do / visit in Texas, one I compiled nearly a year and a half ago. It was also a pleasant surprise when I realized, down there, that it was only an hour’s drive a way. Texas is, after all, a huge state. Even better was that my brother-in-law, a highly intelligent man sixteen years younger than me, is a history buff and had always wanted to check the museum out. With a pair of seven-year-old boy twins, what was the downside?

So we went in at 1 pm while the ladies walked up and down Fredericksburg, a small tourist town, shopping and suffering in the hundred degree heat which we had the fortune to escape in the museum. Why Fredericksburg? Well, the town’s the boyhood home of Admiral Chester Nimitz, one of the driving forces for our victory against the Japanese in World War II. Apparently, a few decades ago, the Nimitz family donated a hotel they owned to the government to start a museum for the Admiral. This soon grew to a few other buildings over a couple of acres, and by national fiat the Museum of the Pacific War was created.

We visited the main museum. One city-block-sized floor of winding corridors filled with life-sized exhibits, memorabilia behind glass, video presentations, maps, newspapers, and other interactive features. It took us two whole hours to traverse it all, but in honesty, I did not feel the time fly by. I did feel transported back in time eighty years.

The first room held some seats like cargo boxes and a five minute “prelude to war” film played over and over, setting the tone. Then you would walk leisurely through interconnected rooms progressing chronologically through the phases of the war – the build-up, Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Midway, Guadalcanal, the island hopping strategy of Nimitz, Tarawa, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the death of FDR, the development and dropping of the atomic bombs, and the war’s aftermath.

My favorite exhibits were the life-size ones. The museum actually holds a Japanese midget sub (not so midget-y at a 75-foot length), a B-25 bomber, an F4 Wildcat, a Stuart tank, several guns of varying caliber, both American and Japanese, and a replica of the Fat Man atomic bomb. I took pictures of these and I will post them tomorrow.

At the gift shop at the end I spent an indecisive 15 minutes trying to find a book to purchase. I hovered over several volumes of Samuel Eliot Morrison’s official naval history of the war, but I think these need to be bought as a set somehow somewhere sometime. Instead I opted for a book on submarine warfare of World War II. The museum had a mock-up sub interior complete with periscopes (which the boys loved) where I confessed to my brother-in-law that due to claustrophobia and intense fear of drowning, I could never serve in the submarine forces had I been alive back then. So this book is to help me gain a dose of, I dunno, vicarious courage maybe.

Afterwards we went to – go figure – a German beerhouse down the street for a late lunch. Apparently Fredericksburg has a huge German contingent, dating back to before World War II. Young Chester Nimitz would find himself fighting against his … neighbors, at least indirectly. Oh well. Such is this crazy world we live in, crazy since at least eighty years ago (and probably going back a lot, lot longer than that).

Pics tomorrow …