Word: monsarrat
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reader is encouraged to believe that this new novel by Nicholas (The Cruel Sea) Monsarrat is about the celebrated defection of British Diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. It is an exemplar, say the publishers, of a series dramatizing issues "weighing upon men's minds in the mid-Twentieth Century...
...Monsarrat's narrative soon proves puzzling. His hero is a Foreign Service security officer known as "Drill-Pig." attached as third secretary to a Western embassy, who appears to be more important than the ambassador himself. Is Mon sarrat trying to say that the necessity for security in the West has infected the whole organization and personnel of the British Foreign Service with the methods of a totalitarian state? Smith and Jones do not seem to be staking their lives on a confrontation of opposing faiths; they appear only as a couple of sexual deviates who might just...
...story, the reader will realize that the things that troubled him all along about Drill-Pig are really the result of deliberate contrivance: he has been hornswoggled into believing that he is being given a fictional insight into one kind of life while actually being presented with another. Monsarrat's novelistic sleight-of-hand can be excused only as a demonstration of a conviction that the code of Communism is identical with the code of freedom, and that the philosophic claims of Western civilization are only hypocrisy. The excuse seems worse than the trick...
...World War I is the creation of Graves and Hemingway, Remarque and Dos Passes, R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End and Maxwell Anderson's What Price Glory? World War II, though less well served, has had its Mailer and James Jones in the U.S., Monsarrat and Waugh in Europe. But where is the panoptic work which would survey the between-wars generations that carried catastrophe in their bones like a disease...
...Ruth Williams. In the resulting uproar, the British government peremptorily banished Seretse from Bechuanaland in an attempt to appease the outraged segregationists in neighboring South Africa. "A disreputable transaction," growled Winston Churchill at the time. But Seretse stayed banished for six years, the Bamangwato rumbled their discontent, and Nicholas Monsarrat based a novel on the story (The Tribe That Lost Its Head). Only by renouncing all claims to the chieftaincy did Seretse finally get permission to return home with his bride...