Jay Rothermel
14th July 2009, 02:29
The Cliché has Landed
Some thoughts on Flight of Eagles (1998) and Jack Higgins’ Good War
By Jay Rothermel
______________________
Today Jack Higgins produces a series of vile, aesthetically lazy and self-satisfied political thrillers about a vigilante security force of the British government hunting-down fifth-columnist UK Muslims supporting “terrorism.” This is the popular novel version of racist poisons peddled at a higher level by born-again empire-lovers like Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.
Higgins made his fortune (literally and figuratively) with a series of World War Two thrillers. Pillars of Hell (1963) and A Game for Heroes (1970), the earliest, were dress-rehearsals for larger canvases and the international bestsellerdom of The Eagle has Landed (1975) and the fine Storm Warning (1976).
It is no secret that every Higgins novel repeats a few action beats and choice dialogue sets from earlier, stronger Higgins novels. For instance, the World War Two thrillers invariably feature scenes of Himmler and Hitler and other members of the Nazi High Command trying to steal a professional march on one-another. UK and U.S. leaders like Churchill and Eisenhower are shown as thoughtful and energetic men who immediately see the importance of supporting a Higgins hero’s mission.
Decent chaps, really. Higgins’ Churchill never talks about nerve-gassing and strafing Arabs or how a cabal of rich Jews runs the world; Eisenhower never talks about employing Gestapo officers to police the post-war German labor movement. These are mere historical facts. Higgins naturally finds it more acceptable and profitable to flatter readers with a little loyalty to the Washington, D.C. High Command. It is always better, regarding the Allies and World War Two, to “print the legend.”
* * * *
Flight of Eagles celebrates a supposed nobility of RAF and Luftwaffe officers during the Second World War. Published in 1998, it is Late Higgins, the repeater and re-processor of successful and favored scenes from earlier novels. For Higgins the honor of army and flying officers serving on the UK, U.S. or German side is beyond question. His Gestapo officers are usually B-movie plot devices, but the honor of the traditional officer caste, even the Wehrmacht, is sacrosanct.
To embody this, Flight of Eagles presents us with twin brothers: Max and Harry Kelso. The sons of a U.S. World War One ace and a German noblewoman, they are favored by fortune with good looks and family wealth. Max will fly for Goering’s Luftwaffe after following his mother back to the Fatherland. Harry will fly first as a Yank in the RAF, and later in the war in the USAAF. Both are gifted fighter pilots, inheriting the preternatural skills and killer instincts of their late father.
Higgins keeps Max untainted by fascism while depicting his service to the rule of a German bourgeoisie which fascism alone kept in power during the tumultuous social upheavals of the Great Depression. Admired and honored as a hero of the nation by Hitler himself, Max and his aristocrat mother have no use for National Socialism or the ruffians and parvenus and former chicken farmers who lead the NSDAP.
Both Max and Harry become, on their respective sides in the conflict, heroes of the Battle of Britain. Because Germany lost the war and the Nazis today are rightly seen as villains of the first water, Higgins is obliged to allow Max to express his contempt for the Third Reich while at the same time acting “nobly” and heroically – as any officer must, irrespective of the state they serve.
Writing about opposite sides in a war by depositing a brother on each side of the conflict is cliché beyond the dreams of cliché. In Flight of Eagles Higgins heightens the sheer level of absurdity he has created by stripping the plot of any dramatic complication. One brother sees first-hand the rise and fall of the Third Reich, but exhibits no hint of curiosity about the cause of such events. The other brother, thanks to wealth and family connections, is privy to the inner workings of Washington, yet shows no desire to understand those workings. Higgins clearly wants to get his characters out of the way of the thriller plot’s iron necessities. The twist ending is similarly undercut by hasty scene building and this lack of complication earlier in the novel.
Flight of Eagles begins as a brother versus brother story set against the backdrop of war. These chapters Higgins quickly dispenses with as he crushes the second half of the novel into a mangle of Secret Operations Executive (SOE) derring-do. Here the novel intersects with a thriller series Higgins developed almost a decade before: Night of the Fox (1987) and Cold Harbour (1990) featured commandos and spies operating out of the village of Cold Harbour on England’s Channel coast. They carried-out secret missions in northern France at the behest of Churchill, historically a roman candle of bad military ideas. Higgins and his characters, of course, would never say a word against him.
A strength of Flight of Eagles is its depiction of lifeboat rescues of downed fliers in the English Channel near the ColdHarbour locale. Higgins is clearly passionate about the Lifeboat Service, and lavishes special attention and care in these scenes. Several of his previous World War Two thrillers also featured dramatic lifeboat rescues, most magnificently in Storm Warning (1976). He captures the laconic confidence of men and women working together in crisis in these scenes, just as he leaves the rest of the novel to fend for itself aesthetically.
The almost pornographic vulgarity of Nazi politics is brought home in Flight of Eagles in a few scenes. We are treated to conspirators against the Reich being hung from meat hooks on loops of piano wire in a scene reminiscent of one in the 1988 TV miniseries of Herman Wouk’s novel War and Remembrance.
Like all figures who emerge as leaders in fascist movements, Nazi officials were spiritless middle class nonentities (“men from nowhere”) who gave the loyalty of their outraged sense of self to a pragmatic leader parading as a world-historic messiah. Higgins’ portrait of Himmler perfectly captures this. Surrounded by trappings of Aryan myth and dressed in a martinet’s regalia, here is the small forgotten farmer, crushed by Versailles and enraged by Weimar, haunted by the prospect of proletarianization, suddenly and because of his own cunning brought to a seat at the Round Table of infamy.
In Flight of Eagles Higgins portrays Nazis in general as monstrous and villainous fools using Europe to sate their absurd psychological appetites. In this way he makes appear more human their opposite numbers from the U.S. and UK. Allied leaders and their agents are the embodiment of honest good sense. SOE leaders Dougal Munroe and Jack Carter are driven by a moral superiority and vigilante instrumentalism in carrying-out Churchill’s vainglorious command to “set Europe ablaze.” Eisenhower makes an appearance, flattering the reader’s vanity for admiring Harry Kelso’s accomplishments as an air ace. Because Flight of Eagles is a historical thriller and not history, Eisenhower’s true career as an architect of Wall Street aggression against the toiling populations of Europe and Asia goes unmentioned.
As with most Higgins thrillers, the everyday pleasures crowd around the margins: an ageless teddy bear uniting past and present; steak and kidney pie at ColdHarbour’s Hanged Man pub; young lovers dancing the evening away before the long arm of coincidence spoils it all forever. Food and drink are always plentiful on both sides of the English Channel in Higgins’ World War Two thrillers. Officers are wounded, burned, and lose psychologically suggestive limbs at a high rate and toss it off with aplomb. Women love them and wait for them. High ranking officers wait, too, to hear in the watches of the night if their feints and plots against the enemy have succeeded or blown-up.
Jack Higgins was one of the first to realize World War Two could be strip-mined by political thriller writers, just like the Cold War. The lurid frisson of fictional characters intersecting with the likes of Himmler and Canaris in novels like The Eagle has Landed was the final step in capitalist media’s aesthetic working-over of war as a commodity subject. The voyage from Eric Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway to Alastair MacLean and Jack Higgins took only one generation.
Throughout the dozen World War Two political thrillers he has written, Higgins has kept his attention focused primarily on the region around southern England and northern France, with only a few side-trips to Berlin. Anti-colonial struggles in Asia during the war, and the imperialist war in Asia itself, find no place in Higgins. Stalingrad in a Higgins war thriller is simply a place where one of his German officers became a little more disillusioned with the Hitler brand of command. The great showdown between German imperialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the USSR has no relevance in Higgins.
To call this set of political priorities “Eurocentric” is to suggest Higgins might be able to play a more progressive role as a novelist, but has chosen not to. Of course this is absurd. Novels by Jack Higgins and his compeers are part of the finely woven ideological mesh of capitalist (not European) rule; the novels celebrate the necessity not of European but imperial violence and the arrogance of its managers and operatives. They play an important part in rationalizing social castes and professional layers associated with that rule. Higgins has no time for rank and file workers, in or out of uniform: they decide nothing. The few proletarians in Flight of Eagles are employed as a faceless and nameless lifeboat crew.
* * * *
In the battle waged against defeatism by Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin today the World War Two thrillers of Jack Higgins are no less important, have no less value, than do the writings of overtly political apologists for bourgeois right like Christopher Hitchens, David Horowitz, and all the myriad “humanitarian interventionists” (Susan Sontag, et al) giving their own brand of left-cover to Wall Street’s wars.
Such wars have their casualties. The devolution in aesthetic quality in Jack Higgins’ novels can be said to have begun around 1997, and coincides with their political devolution. After the 1996 novel Drink with the Devil, any authentic political air completely escaped. Higgins moved from his own genre “brand” of IRA and post-IRA thriller to a deliberately mid-Atlantic amalgam of Washington-London Tom Clancyism, where both UK and US secret operatives worked together against International Terrorism. After 2001, the terrorists became explicitly Arab Muslims living in the UK and the Middle East. At the absolute reactionary nadir of this work, Dark Justice (2004), a mosque and Middle Eastern charity in London are portrayed as organizing centers of Islamic terrorist groups. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have no greater ideological partisan today.
Another clear sign of devolution in subject matter, scale, and simple quality in Higgins’ output is the fact that Flight of Eagles was his last World War Two thriller. These thrillers usually emerged every few years, surrounded by more typically contemporary political thrillers about Northern Ireland. For Higgins fans and thriller fans they were an especial source of interest, even if later additions fell short of the satisfactions of The Eagle has Landed and Storm Warning. Sadly, Higgins left behind the fertile ground and artistic strengths of his finest period when he enlisted in Bush and Blair’s Long War.
__________________________________
Some thoughts on Flight of Eagles (1998) and Jack Higgins’ Good War
By Jay Rothermel
______________________
Today Jack Higgins produces a series of vile, aesthetically lazy and self-satisfied political thrillers about a vigilante security force of the British government hunting-down fifth-columnist UK Muslims supporting “terrorism.” This is the popular novel version of racist poisons peddled at a higher level by born-again empire-lovers like Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.
Higgins made his fortune (literally and figuratively) with a series of World War Two thrillers. Pillars of Hell (1963) and A Game for Heroes (1970), the earliest, were dress-rehearsals for larger canvases and the international bestsellerdom of The Eagle has Landed (1975) and the fine Storm Warning (1976).
It is no secret that every Higgins novel repeats a few action beats and choice dialogue sets from earlier, stronger Higgins novels. For instance, the World War Two thrillers invariably feature scenes of Himmler and Hitler and other members of the Nazi High Command trying to steal a professional march on one-another. UK and U.S. leaders like Churchill and Eisenhower are shown as thoughtful and energetic men who immediately see the importance of supporting a Higgins hero’s mission.
Decent chaps, really. Higgins’ Churchill never talks about nerve-gassing and strafing Arabs or how a cabal of rich Jews runs the world; Eisenhower never talks about employing Gestapo officers to police the post-war German labor movement. These are mere historical facts. Higgins naturally finds it more acceptable and profitable to flatter readers with a little loyalty to the Washington, D.C. High Command. It is always better, regarding the Allies and World War Two, to “print the legend.”
* * * *
Flight of Eagles celebrates a supposed nobility of RAF and Luftwaffe officers during the Second World War. Published in 1998, it is Late Higgins, the repeater and re-processor of successful and favored scenes from earlier novels. For Higgins the honor of army and flying officers serving on the UK, U.S. or German side is beyond question. His Gestapo officers are usually B-movie plot devices, but the honor of the traditional officer caste, even the Wehrmacht, is sacrosanct.
To embody this, Flight of Eagles presents us with twin brothers: Max and Harry Kelso. The sons of a U.S. World War One ace and a German noblewoman, they are favored by fortune with good looks and family wealth. Max will fly for Goering’s Luftwaffe after following his mother back to the Fatherland. Harry will fly first as a Yank in the RAF, and later in the war in the USAAF. Both are gifted fighter pilots, inheriting the preternatural skills and killer instincts of their late father.
Higgins keeps Max untainted by fascism while depicting his service to the rule of a German bourgeoisie which fascism alone kept in power during the tumultuous social upheavals of the Great Depression. Admired and honored as a hero of the nation by Hitler himself, Max and his aristocrat mother have no use for National Socialism or the ruffians and parvenus and former chicken farmers who lead the NSDAP.
Both Max and Harry become, on their respective sides in the conflict, heroes of the Battle of Britain. Because Germany lost the war and the Nazis today are rightly seen as villains of the first water, Higgins is obliged to allow Max to express his contempt for the Third Reich while at the same time acting “nobly” and heroically – as any officer must, irrespective of the state they serve.
Writing about opposite sides in a war by depositing a brother on each side of the conflict is cliché beyond the dreams of cliché. In Flight of Eagles Higgins heightens the sheer level of absurdity he has created by stripping the plot of any dramatic complication. One brother sees first-hand the rise and fall of the Third Reich, but exhibits no hint of curiosity about the cause of such events. The other brother, thanks to wealth and family connections, is privy to the inner workings of Washington, yet shows no desire to understand those workings. Higgins clearly wants to get his characters out of the way of the thriller plot’s iron necessities. The twist ending is similarly undercut by hasty scene building and this lack of complication earlier in the novel.
Flight of Eagles begins as a brother versus brother story set against the backdrop of war. These chapters Higgins quickly dispenses with as he crushes the second half of the novel into a mangle of Secret Operations Executive (SOE) derring-do. Here the novel intersects with a thriller series Higgins developed almost a decade before: Night of the Fox (1987) and Cold Harbour (1990) featured commandos and spies operating out of the village of Cold Harbour on England’s Channel coast. They carried-out secret missions in northern France at the behest of Churchill, historically a roman candle of bad military ideas. Higgins and his characters, of course, would never say a word against him.
A strength of Flight of Eagles is its depiction of lifeboat rescues of downed fliers in the English Channel near the ColdHarbour locale. Higgins is clearly passionate about the Lifeboat Service, and lavishes special attention and care in these scenes. Several of his previous World War Two thrillers also featured dramatic lifeboat rescues, most magnificently in Storm Warning (1976). He captures the laconic confidence of men and women working together in crisis in these scenes, just as he leaves the rest of the novel to fend for itself aesthetically.
The almost pornographic vulgarity of Nazi politics is brought home in Flight of Eagles in a few scenes. We are treated to conspirators against the Reich being hung from meat hooks on loops of piano wire in a scene reminiscent of one in the 1988 TV miniseries of Herman Wouk’s novel War and Remembrance.
Like all figures who emerge as leaders in fascist movements, Nazi officials were spiritless middle class nonentities (“men from nowhere”) who gave the loyalty of their outraged sense of self to a pragmatic leader parading as a world-historic messiah. Higgins’ portrait of Himmler perfectly captures this. Surrounded by trappings of Aryan myth and dressed in a martinet’s regalia, here is the small forgotten farmer, crushed by Versailles and enraged by Weimar, haunted by the prospect of proletarianization, suddenly and because of his own cunning brought to a seat at the Round Table of infamy.
In Flight of Eagles Higgins portrays Nazis in general as monstrous and villainous fools using Europe to sate their absurd psychological appetites. In this way he makes appear more human their opposite numbers from the U.S. and UK. Allied leaders and their agents are the embodiment of honest good sense. SOE leaders Dougal Munroe and Jack Carter are driven by a moral superiority and vigilante instrumentalism in carrying-out Churchill’s vainglorious command to “set Europe ablaze.” Eisenhower makes an appearance, flattering the reader’s vanity for admiring Harry Kelso’s accomplishments as an air ace. Because Flight of Eagles is a historical thriller and not history, Eisenhower’s true career as an architect of Wall Street aggression against the toiling populations of Europe and Asia goes unmentioned.
As with most Higgins thrillers, the everyday pleasures crowd around the margins: an ageless teddy bear uniting past and present; steak and kidney pie at ColdHarbour’s Hanged Man pub; young lovers dancing the evening away before the long arm of coincidence spoils it all forever. Food and drink are always plentiful on both sides of the English Channel in Higgins’ World War Two thrillers. Officers are wounded, burned, and lose psychologically suggestive limbs at a high rate and toss it off with aplomb. Women love them and wait for them. High ranking officers wait, too, to hear in the watches of the night if their feints and plots against the enemy have succeeded or blown-up.
Jack Higgins was one of the first to realize World War Two could be strip-mined by political thriller writers, just like the Cold War. The lurid frisson of fictional characters intersecting with the likes of Himmler and Canaris in novels like The Eagle has Landed was the final step in capitalist media’s aesthetic working-over of war as a commodity subject. The voyage from Eric Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway to Alastair MacLean and Jack Higgins took only one generation.
Throughout the dozen World War Two political thrillers he has written, Higgins has kept his attention focused primarily on the region around southern England and northern France, with only a few side-trips to Berlin. Anti-colonial struggles in Asia during the war, and the imperialist war in Asia itself, find no place in Higgins. Stalingrad in a Higgins war thriller is simply a place where one of his German officers became a little more disillusioned with the Hitler brand of command. The great showdown between German imperialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the USSR has no relevance in Higgins.
To call this set of political priorities “Eurocentric” is to suggest Higgins might be able to play a more progressive role as a novelist, but has chosen not to. Of course this is absurd. Novels by Jack Higgins and his compeers are part of the finely woven ideological mesh of capitalist (not European) rule; the novels celebrate the necessity not of European but imperial violence and the arrogance of its managers and operatives. They play an important part in rationalizing social castes and professional layers associated with that rule. Higgins has no time for rank and file workers, in or out of uniform: they decide nothing. The few proletarians in Flight of Eagles are employed as a faceless and nameless lifeboat crew.
* * * *
In the battle waged against defeatism by Washington, London, Paris, and Berlin today the World War Two thrillers of Jack Higgins are no less important, have no less value, than do the writings of overtly political apologists for bourgeois right like Christopher Hitchens, David Horowitz, and all the myriad “humanitarian interventionists” (Susan Sontag, et al) giving their own brand of left-cover to Wall Street’s wars.
Such wars have their casualties. The devolution in aesthetic quality in Jack Higgins’ novels can be said to have begun around 1997, and coincides with their political devolution. After the 1996 novel Drink with the Devil, any authentic political air completely escaped. Higgins moved from his own genre “brand” of IRA and post-IRA thriller to a deliberately mid-Atlantic amalgam of Washington-London Tom Clancyism, where both UK and US secret operatives worked together against International Terrorism. After 2001, the terrorists became explicitly Arab Muslims living in the UK and the Middle East. At the absolute reactionary nadir of this work, Dark Justice (2004), a mosque and Middle Eastern charity in London are portrayed as organizing centers of Islamic terrorist groups. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have no greater ideological partisan today.
Another clear sign of devolution in subject matter, scale, and simple quality in Higgins’ output is the fact that Flight of Eagles was his last World War Two thriller. These thrillers usually emerged every few years, surrounded by more typically contemporary political thrillers about Northern Ireland. For Higgins fans and thriller fans they were an especial source of interest, even if later additions fell short of the satisfactions of The Eagle has Landed and Storm Warning. Sadly, Higgins left behind the fertile ground and artistic strengths of his finest period when he enlisted in Bush and Blair’s Long War.
__________________________________