Word: monsarrat
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...Mask of Dimitrios (with Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet), weeded subversion out. But then Ambler changed. After 1940 he didn't write a book for eleven years. He was in charge of propaganda films for the British Army until 1946, and spent a few years writing screenplays (e.g., Monsarrat's The Cruel Sea). In 1951 a disillusioned Ambler, returned with Judgement on Deltchev, about a political trial in Eastern Europe under rather totalitarian circumstances. Though careful not to directly criticize the Soviet Union, Ambler portrays political ideologies as a sham--deluded masses being used as a front to cloak...
...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...