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Apr. 19th, 2021 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWhen I got my copy of my agentsib Allison Epstein's A Tip for the Hangman I was extremely happy to see an Ellen Kushner blurb on the back, because if there is a single demographic I think should seek out this book immediately it's "people who loved Swordspoint and crave more novels about queer young men making ill-advised personal and professional decisions in an early modern political quagmire."
A Tip for the Hangman is an Elizabethan spy thriller focusing on a stressed-out Cambridge student named Christopher Marlowe, who's on the verge of recruitment into a career in anti-Catholic espionage -- not so much out of any personal religious or political convictions but because it pays well, and as a scholarship student the odds are significantly against Kit Making It without a substantial cash infusion. The first half of the book focuses on Kit's attempts to juggle his new and dangerous gig along with his responsibility to his struggling family back home, his burgeoning relationship with fellow student Tom, and his exam schedule, with varying degrees of success; the second half takes place after a timeskip, with Kit in fact on the verge of Making It in the London theatrical scene when the juggling act picks up again at a significantly increased difficulty level.
I feel like most of the fictional Marlowe appearances I've encountered have focused primarily on his writing and his relationship to Shakespeare and the Renaissance stage. A Tip for the Hangman takes the opposite tack -- the book is very interested in Marlowe's relationships to class, religion, sexuality, and the consequences of his own actions, but Marlowe's literary career happens pretty much entirely in the interstitial spaces of the text, with the act of imagining how the action as portrayed in the story resonates back into what we have of his writing left more or less entirely as an exercise for the reader. (Obviously a secondary effect of this is that it makes me want to go back and reread a bunch of Marlowe plays, but.)
Anyway, as a spy thriller it's exactly as messy, morally gray, and occasionally depressingly farcical as it should be -- not James Bond but rather ... I want to say 'John Le Carre' but I haven't actually read any yet (I know! I keep meaning to!) but that is my understanding. Probably my favorite terrible thing that happens is when Kit gets in a stupid bar fight with his brother-in-law, and then his boyfriend stabs the brother-in-law because he thinks the stupid fight is an espionage fight, and then instead of course they both go to jail -- it's just such a massive pile-up of thoroughly plausible bad judgment all around! Kids, don't become spies!
A Tip for the Hangman is an Elizabethan spy thriller focusing on a stressed-out Cambridge student named Christopher Marlowe, who's on the verge of recruitment into a career in anti-Catholic espionage -- not so much out of any personal religious or political convictions but because it pays well, and as a scholarship student the odds are significantly against Kit Making It without a substantial cash infusion. The first half of the book focuses on Kit's attempts to juggle his new and dangerous gig along with his responsibility to his struggling family back home, his burgeoning relationship with fellow student Tom, and his exam schedule, with varying degrees of success; the second half takes place after a timeskip, with Kit in fact on the verge of Making It in the London theatrical scene when the juggling act picks up again at a significantly increased difficulty level.
I feel like most of the fictional Marlowe appearances I've encountered have focused primarily on his writing and his relationship to Shakespeare and the Renaissance stage. A Tip for the Hangman takes the opposite tack -- the book is very interested in Marlowe's relationships to class, religion, sexuality, and the consequences of his own actions, but Marlowe's literary career happens pretty much entirely in the interstitial spaces of the text, with the act of imagining how the action as portrayed in the story resonates back into what we have of his writing left more or less entirely as an exercise for the reader. (Obviously a secondary effect of this is that it makes me want to go back and reread a bunch of Marlowe plays, but.)
Anyway, as a spy thriller it's exactly as messy, morally gray, and occasionally depressingly farcical as it should be -- not James Bond but rather ... I want to say 'John Le Carre' but I haven't actually read any yet (I know! I keep meaning to!) but that is my understanding. Probably my favorite terrible thing that happens is when Kit gets in a stupid bar fight with his brother-in-law, and then his boyfriend stabs the brother-in-law because he thinks the stupid fight is an espionage fight, and then instead of course they both go to jail -- it's just such a massive pile-up of thoroughly plausible bad judgment all around! Kids, don't become spies!
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Date: 2021-04-19 10:05 pm (UTC)Or maybe "Kids, don't let your boyfriend find out you're a spy!"
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Date: 2021-04-28 02:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-20 12:24 am (UTC)I've inflicted this on you, right?
Anyway, as a spy thriller it's exactly as messy, morally gray, and occasionally depressingly farcical as it should be -- not James Bond but rather ... I want to say 'John Le Carre' but I haven't actually read any yet (I know! I keep meaning to!) but that is my understanding.
People being recruited into espionage straight out of Cambridge for much less romantic reasons than patriotism or personal ideals is, in fact, very John le Carré.
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Date: 2021-04-28 02:35 am (UTC)Have I ever asked you which John Le Carré book I ought to read first if I'm going to start with one? If this is a repeat question I apologize, but I would very much like your advice.
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Date: 2021-04-28 03:43 am (UTC)Thank you!
Have I ever asked you which John Le Carré book I ought to read first if I'm going to start with one? If this is a repeat question I apologize, but I would very much like your advice.
I don't remember if you have, so if so, I don't mind! I started with The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963) because it was the first one I found on my grandparents' shelves in high school and it deserves to have been his breakout novel—it's one of his most concentrated theses of what espionage as a profession does to people—but Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) is the one that started me reading his back catalogue when I finally got around to it in college, so either of them strikes me as a good introduction. Personally, you might take more to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. As for other le Carré, I am actually very fond of Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) even though they are much more conventional mysteries and in hindsight read a little lke dry runs for later, more complex books; I have never been able to feel much about The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), but Smiley's People (1979) while requiring knowledge of at least Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is very good; A Legacy of Spies (2017) is also probably-similarly opaque without knowledge of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, but as a late revisiting of a most famous work, it's worth it. The Secret Pilgrim (1990) is either a mosaic novel or a short story collection with an old-fashioned frame and I just really like it. There are numerous novels in between these points that I don't feel strongly about or just haven't gotten around to, but his sort-of-memoir The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016) is amazing. And I'm still pissed off I didn't write to him about a lost Archers film, because I don't know who else is still alive that I know to have seen it.
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Date: 2021-04-20 08:24 am (UTC)Whereas, in a supreme bit of irony, the most recent Valdemar subseries from Mercedes Lackey is an advertisement that says, "Kids, you should totally become spies!" (Strictly, this is qualified to the extent that you should totally have the appropriate Gifts, whether Magery or mind-magic, in order to qualify for spy training, but still.)
As is traditional with Lackey, the takeaway is Do Not Try This At Home, because Lackey's singular gift is the ability to pull off plot structures that should never ever work in a thousand years by sheer force of narrative energy....
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Date: 2021-04-28 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-20 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-28 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-20 06:22 pm (UTC)I went through a run of reading Marlowe's plays, and god, they are painful.
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Date: 2021-04-28 02:39 am (UTC)...painful how?
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Date: 2021-04-28 07:36 pm (UTC)Firstly, because Marlowe has no idea what to do with women, and could very much tighten up his plotting, and secondly because he's so angry and doesn't quite seem to know what to do with it. The Jew of Malta is the story of a man who goes "If you don't deal fairly with me, I will burn the world down, and I will take pleasure in it" and ends up destroying everything he loves, and in the end, himself, for the sake of his own revenge.
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Date: 2021-04-20 08:09 pm (UTC)You have a book? A book I can read?
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Date: 2021-04-28 02:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-05-04 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-20 09:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-28 02:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-04-28 03:44 am (UTC)I remember almost nothing about the plot of this novel, but I remember really liking it.
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Date: 2021-07-03 01:45 am (UTC)