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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of a Kind,
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This review is from: Ashenden or The British Agent (Leather Bound)
For many well-educated readers, espionage and detective fictions are guilty pleasures--books that make you shrug and smile helplessly when people notice you reading them. Somerset Maugham's Ashendon Stories are the secret pinnacle of the genre--world-class espionage fiction that you can proudly show to anyone.
Somerset Maugham was a thinking man's genre writer--one of that small handful of great writers of genre fictions like Graham Greene, Dashiell Hammett and John LeCarre, with direct experience of their subject--men who knew their topic from the inside out and knew it well enough to make art of it. They are rare and if you are an adult, reading Ashendon may give you reason to say, "thank God Maugham isn't Fleming." Ian Fleming took pains to put James Bond in situations of steadily decreasing believability and no one's writing can contrast more strongly or more refreshingly with Fleming's than Maugham's. Ashendon is not Bond, the super-spy who would wrestle with a giant squid in "Doctor No;" nor is he the man of fantasy who will win the day by bedding the next woman to see him for more than forty-seven seconds. Ashendon is the spy who makes sense; the close and dispassionate observer whose job puts him in contact with unlovely situations full of pain and irony that are disturbingly real and equally disturbingly human. If you read the Ashendon stories, you can read them proudly. They are gems that belong on everyone's bookshelves and you won't have to feel guilty at all.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The British Storyteller,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Ashenden or The British Agent (Leather Bound)
This book bears little resemblance to the usual "spy" or "detective" story. The book contains half a dozen tales linked only by the character Ashenden, who tells the story but seldom participates. As for spying you get only glimpses of the daily boring routine aspect of the trade. The individual stories each have their own interest. At least two of them are very good character sketches of rather strange people. The writing is always good.
I'm a retired Russian historian. I bought the book because Maugham really was a British agent in Petrograd during the October Revolution. You do get an impression of the tension and the violence of the time but it could be any revolution anywhere.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
VERY LOOSELY ORGANIZED, ALMOST NEVER SUSPENSEFUL, AND SUFFERS FROM A MAJOR QUALITY-CONTROL PROBLEM,
By
This review is from: Ashenden or The British Agent (Leather Bound)
In my hardback copy of ASHENDEN (1927), Maugham's "Preface" (1941) provides autobiographical background and discusses how life and art differ in his fiction, with some snide remarks about other modern novelists; his comments on plot seem to be largely derived from Aristotle's Poetics. (Ironically, THIS book does not have any sort of A-to-Z plot that holds it together.) All in all, ASHENDEN is VERY LOOSELY ORGANIZED, ALMOST NEVER SUSPENSEFUL, AND SUFFERS FROM A MAJOR QUALITY-CONTROL PROBLEM: although a few passages are really excellent, many parts are very long-winded and seem out of place in an espionage book; many others (including several whole chapters) seem like padding.
SPOILER ALERT: TO DEMONSTRATE THIS POINT, I'M WRITING A SUMMARY OF THE BOOK: Chapter 1 ("R."): Ashenden, a writer, meets the head of the British Secret Service and is recruited. Chapter 2 ("A Domiciliary Visit"): Returning from a mission to his hotel in Geneva, Ashenden finds Swiss police in his room; he easily thwarts them but wonders who has informed against him; similar to his "Preface," fiction and life and beginnings, middles, and ends are mentioned, with sniping at some writers of modern fiction. Chapter 3 ("Miss King"): Ashenden is called at 3 a.m. to the bedside of Miss King, the dying English governess of two Egyptian princesses, but she has had a stroke, and he is unable to get any message from her before she dies; if it is read alone, this chapter amounts to an Unsolvable Puzzle. Within the total book, either this episode must become relevant later, or Maugham is doing exactly what he has criticized other writers of doing. (Rather than give my own answer, I will let other readers of ASHENDEN think about this and decide which it is). Chapters 4, 5, and 6 form a unit. Chapter 4 ("The Hairless Mexican"): R. sends Ashenden to Italy on a new mission with General Carmona (aka the Hairless Mexican, a flamboyant and peculiar spy who is the type that Ian Fleming and others would later imitate in their works); their mission is to get papers that a Greek is going to pass along to the Germans. Chapter 5 ("The Dark Woman"): During their journey to Italy, the Hairless Mexican tells Ashenden about a woman he deeply loved but whose throat he cut, believing her to be a spy working for the Mexican government; then they discuss the conventions of Detective Fiction. Chapter 6 ("The Greek"): The Hairless Mexican murders the only Greek on the ship, and he and Ashenden search for the papers but find none; Ashenden finds a telegram waiting for him, and they go out to eat (Maugham has a good scene in which the Hairless Mexican dances with women, Zorba-like); Ashenden decodes his telegram at the railroad station and learns, ironically, that the Greek spy was delayed by illness and that the wrong Greek has been killed; thus far, this is the best chapter. Chapters 7 and 8 form a unit. Chapter 7 ("A Trip to Paris"): Ashenden gets a new mission: take the lover of an Indian freedom fighter to the border of Switzerland as bait to kill this man; Ashenden admires the opponent greatly, but R. calls the man a "greasy little [N-word]"; Ashenden surmises that R. reads "shilling shocker" detective fiction, speculates on R.'s apparent discomfort in high-class settings, and notes that some woman has given R. some roses for his office. Chapter 8 ("Guilia Lazzari"): After several exchanges of letters with Guilia Lazzari, the Indian freedom fighter falls into the trap but commits suicide with poison; Guilia Lazzari asks for her dead lover's watch, a gift which had cost her 12 pounds; this is a very good chapter. Chapters 9 and 10 form a loose unit. Chapter 9 ("Gustav"): Gustav is a Swiss businessman who was writing model reports for the British--only they were totally worthless, since he never left home to get information; Ashenden gives him a small assignment: get information about a Brit living in Switzerland who is working for the Germans. Chapter 10 ("The Traitor"): Ashenden, claiming to be an ill member of the Censorship Department, makes the acquaintance of the Brit who is a traitor (and his German wife and ugly little dog); the German spymaster falls for the bait and sends the traitor back to England to work in that department; instead, the traitor is executed (I wondered why, instead, he was not given false information to feed to the German spymaster); this is a long and well-written chapter, showing some of the complexity of a few people and closing with a sad scene of the traitor's wife realizing that her husband is dead, when the man's dog howls as she leaves the post office with no letter from him. Chapters 11, 12, and 13 form a loose unit. Chapter 11 ("Behind the Scenes"): Ashenden is sent to a country herein called "X" to stay in touch with people who might start a revolution; while there he learns that the American ambassador is miffed that the British ambassador has not sat down with him over a drink to discuss matters; Ashenden passes this tip to the British ambassador, who is grateful and asks Ashenden to come dine with him; this is a very short chapter; in what seems a subordinate manner, a Galician Pole who helps Ashenden is mentioned (this man will be a central figure in chapt. 13). Chapter 12 ("His Excellency"): In a long chapter, the British ambassador tells Ashenden about his love affair with a coarse, ignorant female acrobat (whom he sometimes beat up) before his marriage, and his life-long regret that he broke it off and married a woman he did not love; some of these details are as vivid as those of Philip's infatuation with Mildred in Maugham's novel OF HUMAN BONDAGE, but what place does this tangential material have in a book about espionage during WW I? Chapter 13 ("The Flip of a Coin"): Ashenden, walking to meet the Galician Pole mentioned in chapter 11 about a mission to blow up a German munitions factory and its many Polish civilian workers, looks up at the "frosty stars"; when he meets the man, he cannot think clearly enough to make a decision and, after pondering the cosmic futility of men's lives--his own and the British ambassador's included--he abdicates responsibility and tosses a coin to "decide" whether the mission goes ahead or not; we are not told which way the coin landed: in one sense, an Unsolvable Puzzle is created by this chapter's ending; however, this chapter probably is an instance of "Didactic Fiction" about the nature and purpose of "Life." Chapters 14, 15, and 16 form a final loose unit. Chapter 14 ("A Chance Acquaintance"): Ashenden, on a new mission in Russia, travels with an American businessman who talks constantly during their 11-day train ride across Russia; this seems to have little direct connection with the plot pertaining to espionage. Chapter 15 ("Love and Russian Literature"): The narrator makes self-conconscious reference to "these stories" and the characterization thus far of Ashenden, indicating that Ashenden has a "tender" side that has not yet been represented; Ashenden's brief love affair with a married Russian woman (5 years before the Russian Revolution) is recounted in a silly satiric manner; they went to Paris to test whether they would be compatible, and she, who ate scrambled eggs every morning, told him yes, but he, who detested those eggs, escaped to New York instead; the structural point of this long digression is solely to introduce this woman. Chapter 16 ("Mr. Harrington's Washing"): Ashenden's mission fails when the Bolsheviks take control; the talkative American, Mr. Harrington, insists on getting his washing before leaving the city and is found lying dead on a street by the Russian woman and Ashenden, still clutching his laundry; this ending seems to be an attempt to create a feeling of pathos in readers, but for me it does not succeed. As I remarked above, this book is very loosely organized, almost never suspenseful, and suffers from a major quality-control problem: although a few passages are really excellent, many parts are very long-winded and seem out of place in an espionage book; many others (including several whole chapters) seem like padding. However, Maugham DOES have a good vocabulary, and most readers would do well to keep a large dictionary nearby.
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