No Need to Complicate Things

Sarah Lyall of the New York Times noted some oddities in her advance reading copy of Moriarty, a latter-day Sherlock Holmes novel by Anthony Horowitz:

In the reader’s edition, some copies of which were sent to The New York Times, “Moriarty’s” narrator, an American detective named Frederick Chase, is laying out the background to the story – how Holmes and Moriarty came to be at Reichenbach Falls and what is believed to have happened next. All of a sudden he switches to capitals. “NO NEED TO COMPLICATE THINGS HERE, I THINK,” the text announces. “WHAT I’VE WRITTEN IS BROADLY TRUE.”

Can the narrator be offering some meta-commentary on his own text? At first it seems so. But then it happens again. In a spot where Chase and a Scotland Yard inspector have found an important clue that seems to be an excerpt from a previous Holmes story written by Dr. Watson, things suddenly veer off-piste again. “IT MAKES NO SENSE FOR FREDERICK CHASE TO HAVE READ THE SIGN OF FOUR,” the text declares.

There are at least six of these capitalized interjections, and sadly, they turn out to have nothing to do with anything so exciting as postmodern cleverness. They are instead Mr. Horowitz’s notes to a copy editor or, as Mr. Horowitz’s agent in London, Jonathan Lloyd, said, some “mild author reaction to some copy-editing points.”

It seem that the book’s British publisher sent the wrong file to its American counterpart, and folks in the US didn’t catch those interjections while putting that file into proof form.

None of Horowitz’s comments, Lyall reports, is rude, profane, or otherwise embarrassing—and authors responding to copyediting can become heated. These are simply the sort of “stet” instructions that every published author has sent back at some point. Such copyedits and responses to them used to be confined to colored pencil on paper, but now they’re in the form of electrons like the rest of a manuscript, and it’s harder to keep them sorted out.

Those capitalized comments also indicate that Horowitz doesn’t use or trust “Track Changes” and “Comments” in a Word document, and I’m fully in sympathy with him on that.

Working Through the Horowitz Family Lore

Back when I read the first Alex Rider book by Anthony Horowitz, I disliked the snobbery and xenophobia built into it. Those qualities may have been borrowed from the British spy thriller’s genre conventions, but Horowitz chose to perpetuate them. (And revisit them.)

All the odder, I thought, given that Horowitz hadn’t grown up as an insider in British society, especially when attending the Rugby public school in the 1960s as, well, a Horowitz. But then I read that his family legend, as described among other places in this interview with the Jewish Exponent, actually presented his father as a rich insider:

his father’s secret service as a so-called “fixer” for Prime Minister Harold Wilson couldn’t fix the financial problems at home once the Jewish family’s fortunes evaporated. . . .

But secrets got the best of his dad, whose survival of bankruptcy banked on certain Swiss accounts that held a secret fortune in his name.

Unfortunately, says his son, those accounts held numbers as unfamiliar to the rest of the family as the Da Vinci codes. “He died of cancer at age 55, when I was 22,” his cache of cash unfound.

“And all of a sudden, these letters started arriving from different banks, starting out the same way, offering their condolences about my father’s death, but then saying how he owed them hundreds of thousands of pounds.” . . .

“Somewhere in Switzerland, he had all this money. My mother went there two or three times searching for it. She never found it. We had to sell everything,” says Horowitz. “My mother had to go back to work.”

I’ve read enough family and local lore that my historian alarms immediately went off. That narrative seemed far too tidy, explaining away all faults and losses and lack of evidence.

Back in mid-2007 I prepared some notes for a blog posting expressing doubt that the senior Horowitz ever had much actual money, or close ties to Harold Wilson (who was known within British politics as his own “fixer”). I was going to suggest the senior Horowitz’s possible similarities to the father figures in John Le Carré’s A Perfect Spy (based on the author’s own father) and Graham Greene’s The Captain and the Enemy—i.e., men conning the world, their loved ones, and themselves.

But at the end of that year, without any butting in from me, Horowitz began to rethink his family lore, as revealed in this Telegraph profile:

He took his family’s wealth for granted; but when his father died, he found himself, aged 21, a pauper. There was only a notebook filled with indecipherable squiggles related to Swiss bank accounts. Despite a year-long attempt to find the missing wealth, it has remained a mystery — as has its origin. “I don’t think my father was a crook, but I don’t know,” he says. “I recently found that one of his closest associates was wanted on fraud charges.[”]

The old story still surfaced occasionally, as in this 2008 interview with the Independent, but the senior Horowitz was never such a mythical hero as first described. Horowitz now writes of his family [hat tip to Gail Gauthier] with more overt and admirable skepticism. Leaving me with less to complain about.

Shifting Perspective: Alex Rider Goes Comics

The Stormbreaker graphic novel was adapted from the movie, so some of its differences from Anthony Horowitz's original novel might have been influenced by the conventions of commercial films rather than the conventions of comics.

For instance, the villain has become a tall, muscular American rather than a short, stunted Lebanese or Egyptian. I'd think that would make the villain more formidable, but Horowitz has lamented the change.

However, I also think movies and modern comics have a lot in common: combining images and words, developing along parallel tracks about a hundred years ago, and using some of the same narrative strategies.

The novel begins with young Alex overhearing the news of his uncle's death one night. It throws us into his experience of loss, and ties us to his point of view. Several chapters later, the narration jumps out of Alex's perspective for the first time. We then become privy to a brief conversation among a spy agency's leaders about him, a conversation that Alex can't hear.

In contrast, the graphic novel has an early scene of Alex speaking to his uncle by cell phone. Uncle Ian says nothing to Alex about what he's doing, but the comics panels show us: he's involved in a deadly car (and, if I recall right, helicopter) chase. This scene might have been added to the screenplay for a couple of reasons. It would open the movie with an action scene, and would give us more of a sense of Uncle Ian as a character, and thus Alex's loss, than the book does.

Regardless of that scene's genesis, I think it highlights something that comics (and movies) do more often than novels: shifting around among different characters' points of view. Comics routinely show us what villains are up to, spell out several characters' thoughts, and show us what the protagonist can't see. Some novels still do that, of course, but over the past century American novelists have been much more interested in creating a tight focus and maintaining a consistent point of view.

Perhaps comics, with their visual dimension, make it easier for readers to sort out multiple points of view than a prose novel can. One page of typeset prose looks much like another, after all, but a picture of the Green Goblin in his workshop is clearly, immediately distinguishable from a picture of Spider-Man wondering where the Green Goblin is.

Anthony Horowitz: "How Depressing It Is"

A while back I linked to this complaint in the tabloid Daily Mail from Anthony Horowitz, creator of juvenile spy Alex Rider. Reading the graphic novel adapted from the movie script adapted from the original novel brought that article to my mind again today.

Horowitz claimed it was just too hard for him to create villains when he had to avoid ethnic and other stereotypes:

How depressing it is that Herod Sayle, the Lebanese businessman that Alex Rider fought in his first adventure, Stormbreaker, quietly morphed into Darrius Sayle, Californian trailer trash, by the time the film came out last summer.

In the UK edition, he's the son of a failed hairdresser, but in the American edition that had to be changed when I was accused of homophobia - because to some people hairdressing would seem a gay profession.

Over there, he's the son of a failed oral hygienist.

Horowitz's article didn't acknowledge that the original name "Herod Sayle" was a cheap pun to begin with. It left out how the character had already "morphed" from Lebanese to Egyptian in the US edition of the book, undoubtedly with his approval, so he had long compromised the original characterization.

What's more, Horowitz's whinging about losing "hairdresser" in favor of "oral hygienist" obscured how that he apparently believes boys who grow up poor in the Third World must have a "failed" father. Actual grinding poverty has no place in this view of life.

Whether Egyptian, Lebanese, or Californian, Herod/Darrius Sayle is born poor and tumbles into an elite British education. In the books, he as a young child saves rich people's lives. In the graphic novel, his mother wins a lottery. Sayle hates the bigotry and bullying at his new school so much that it motivates both his success as a computer magnate and his genocidal scheme.

Of course, anybody would hate bigotry and bullying directed at them; I've already written about Horowitz's lack of understanding and compassion on that point. His implied lesson in Stormbreaker, in all its forms, is not that the future prime minister shouldn't have bullied Sayle at school, but that Sayle shouldn't have been sent to that school in the first place; he would have been happier in the Lebanese slum/Egyptian slum/California trailer park where he began.

Just as Horowitz's characterization and plotting seems to play to bigotry, so does his Daily Mail essay. It's a standard-issue rant against the constrictions of "political correctness"--yet how in the world does that follow from the essay's start?

When it comes to children's literature, the most fun that a writer can have is creating the bad guys ... and the fact is that there's nothing kids like more than a good villain.

At the end of the day, Peter Pan is just a girl in green tights, but when Captain Hook enters the stage, the theatre comes alive to the sound of jubilant boos and hisses.

Who is it we remember from Treasure Island? Is it Jim Hawkins, the cabin boy, or the effortlessly stylish Long John Silver?

Ethnicity and "political correctness" never come up with those classic villains. Stevenson and Barrie didn't build those characters on stereotypes, and they didn't write to newspapers lamenting how much easier it would have been to do so.

In fact, the roots of Captain Hook's character rest in--irony alert!--an elite British education. In the stage play, Hook's last words are "Floreat Etona," the motto of Eton College, and Barrie later wrote a speech titled "Captain Hook at Eton." In the novel, Barrie's narrative voice whispers, "Hook was not his true name. To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country in a blaze." Captain Hook was an insider, not an outsider, which made him a character for the ages.

Given Horowitz's article from last year, we might wonder what he came up with as the antagonist in the newest Alex Rider adventure, Snakehead? The Telegraph reports he's the leader of an "Asian crime network" named Winston Yu:

In typical Horowitz fashion, though, he is far from being the usual two-dimensional villain. He is the son of a Chinese woman who has sent her boy to an expensive public school (Harrow) on the strength of her earnings as a hired assassin.

Yes, that's "typical Horowitz," with more than a little ethnic stereotyping at the foundation.

Stormbreaker and the Enemies of England

Just because I disliked Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker, the first Alex Rider thriller, doesn't mean I can't find significance in its literary influences. And I'm not just talking about the James Bond novels.

Rather, there's a history over a century and a quarter long behind this scene, on page 104 of the US edition:

Alex stared, unable to quite believe what he was seeing.

A submarine. It had erupted from the sea with the speed and the impossibility of a huge stage illusion. . . . The submarine had no markings, but Alex knew it wasn't English. . . . And what was it doing here, off the coast of Cornwall?

A hostile ship just off the British coast shows Horowitz's debt to what's become known as "invasion literature." This genre that began with The Battle of Dorking in 1871 and remained popular in Britain until World War I made thoughts of such warfare less entertaining. This field begat the British spy thriller through Erskine Childers's Riddle of the Sands (1903), so it's only fair for its echo to reverberate down through Stormbreaker. The invasion genre was also a major influence on science fiction via H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds (1898).

Two of my favorite authors even got into the act. In 1909, P. G. Wodehouse wrote a parody of invasion literature called The Swoop! In his Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz comic page of 1904-05, L. Frank Baum had his travelers from Oz spot a German naval ship off the US coast. (Nothing came of that.)

Usually the invaders in British invasion literature are Germans, though there's always the possibility of Russians and occasional Turks and Arabs as well. How does that change for Alex Rider's post-Cold War world?

Not much, it turns out. The bad guys in Stormbreaker are:

• Russian assassin Yassen Gregorovich
• Lebanese (in the UK edition) or Egyptian (in the US edition) computer genius Herod Sayle [Harrods sale, get it? aren't foreign names funny!]
• scarred circus performer Mr. Grin
• blonde-bunned assistant Fraulein Nadia Vole (as in rodent)

Vole's actually a triple threat because "Fraulein" is clearly German, but Nadia is a popular girl's name in both Slavic and Arabic cultures!

"Invasion literature" popularized the notion of an island surrounded and infiltrated by enemies, and Stormbreaker reinforces that world-view. The villain tells Alex, "You'd be surprised how many countries there are in the world who loathe the English. Most of Europe, just to begin with." The head of MI6 speaks of "China and the former Soviet Union, countries that have never been our friends"--WW2 alliances entirely forgotten.

There's no reason in Stormbreaker's plot for the villain to come from outside Britain, just as he doesn't have to be "so short that Alex's first impression was that he was looking at a reflection that had somehow been distorted" and he doesn't have to have "very horrible eyes." But he does, he is, and he has.

Sayle's stated motivation is that he was badly bullied at school because he was a small foreign newcomer:

"From the moment I arrived at the school, I was mocked and bullied. Because of my size. Because of my dark skin. Because I couldn't speak English well. Because I wasn't one of them. . . ."

To that Alex replies, "Lots of kids get are bullied and they don't turn into nutcases." Indeed, the book has already told us that Alex himself was bullied at a new school because of "his gentle looks and accent."

Of course, the book has also told us that Alex is "well built, with the body of an athlete"; English and white; rich; and highly trained in karate. So Alex was bullied only once. He acknowledges no difference between his situation and Sayle's, and the book implies that we shouldn't, either.

The succeeding books seem to extend this basic pattern. In the Main Criminals page of the Alex Rider website, five of the seven villains are foreign, three of those Russian. Only one, Damian Cray, is English. He's also (a) interested in India and Buddhism, (b) a crusader for environmental preservation and animal rights, and (c) linked by names and characteristics to certain gay British icons. Hmmm.

As it turns out, while I was cogitating this little essay Horowitz was writing on the same topic from another direction. In the 5 June edition of the right-wing Daily Mail tabloid he lamented that it's not so easy to be beastly to downtrodden groups these days. So where's a thriller writer to find scary villains?

Might I suggest exercising enough imagination not to rely on stereotypes that were cliché a century ago?

The Stormbreaker Contrivance

Yesterday I wrote about a passage in Lionboy: The Chase that impressed me as a good example of how authors can plant information and occasionally remind readers about it, preparing us for the moment when it will become crucial to a plot. Today I turn to an example of how not to do this. Namely, not even trying.

Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker introduced the world to the young Alex Rider, a surprisingly capable teenaged espionage agent. "Surprisingly" not just because he's fourteen years old, but because whenever Alex needs an unusual skill, Horowitz reveals that he already has it.

For instance, page 21 tells us:

He had started learning karate when he was six years old. One afternoon, with no explanation, Ian Rider had taken him to a local club for his first lesson and he had been going there, once a week, ever since. Over the years...

Six sentences follow, describing Alex's black belt and how he'd use it to deal with bullies at school. Unfortunately, that long flashback paragraph comes in the middle of what's supposed to be a fast-moving fight scene, just after a junkyard guard has confronted Alex. So the explanation slows down the action as well as making the contrivance of the plot inescapably obvious.

This defect is especially regrettable since establishing Alex's skills could fill another big hole in the book: the lack of detail about the life he enjoyed with his uncle Ian, the life he's lost with his uncle's death. The book opens with Alex learning that Ian Rider has died. Horowitz thus has a grand opportunity to mention Alex's memories of special times with his uncle. Going to karate lessons, for example. Such specifics would make Alex's loss more real and thus more touching, and lay the groundwork for the junkyard fight.

Instead, over and over Stormbreaker springs new information on us. On page 56 we discover that Alex is an expert pickpocket--after he's picked someone's pocket. The book never provides a reason for a boy to have learned this skill, which even he should have found remarkable.

On page 61 the book reveals that Alex has "lived abroad so he now speaks French, German, and Spanish." Yet there's no mention of such long foreign sojourns or languages back on page 3 when Alex thinks briefly about traveling with his uncle.

Page 166, ridiculously late for a 192-page book, tells us that Uncle Ian has made sure that Alex knows how to drive. And wouldn't you know it? There's a jeep available!

Horowitz makes a great deal of how the MI6 spy agency doesn't train Alex in using a gun; in contrast to all that information he leaves out, he repeats this fact so we can't miss it. But, as it turns out, Alex can fire a pistol so accurately that from many metres away he can hit the Prime Minister in the hand rather than the chest, and knock a computer plug out of a wall. At just the crucial moment, of course.

The Alex Rider Brand

Anthony Horowitz's first Alex Rider spy adventure, Stormbreaker, drops a lot of brand names: "Gap combat trousers," "Condor Junior Roadracer," "Kawasaki four by four."

In doing that it follows the model of the James Bond tales. Ian Fleming, too, characterized his hero through brand names, and the Bond movies are awash in product placements.

Even considering that precedent, Stormbreaker goes further into exalting brand-name products than I'd ever seen, in this exchange from chapter 3:

"Please, Alex. Sit down," Crawley said. He went over to the fridge. "Can I get you a drink?"

"Do you have Coke?"

"Yes." Crawley opened a can and filled a glass, then handed it to Alex. "Ice?"

"No, thanks." Alex took a sip. It wasn't Coke. It wasn't even Pepsi. He recognized the oversweet, slightly cloying taste of supermarket soda and wished he'd asked for water.

So not only is our untrustworthy MI6 recruiter burdened with the name "Crawley," but he tries to foist no-name cola onto our young hero under the noble name of "Coke." No wonder Alex is so grumpy and alienated throughout the book! Fortunately, "he poured the cola into a potted plant" before it could harm him.

It baffles me to see Wikipedia say, "Due to primarily being spy fiction, the series is compared to James Bond and Rider is often referred to as a youthful version." The series is compared to James Bond because Horowitz makes the comparison inescapable. He titles one chapter in the first book "Double O Nothing." Other hints of influence include Alex's first alias being Felix Lester; Bond's CIA contact is Felix Leiter. It would be hard to get more explicit about modeling your series on Bond without inviting a lawsuit over stealing someone else's brand.

And then the Alex Rider books did so well that a few years later the Fleming estate had to commission its own teenaged Bond.