Haunting music carries over water

At dusk, as I began my evening stroll in White Rock at the bear statue on East Beach, the distant sound of music drifted faintly across the water. Was it someone playing a flute on the beach? No, the tide was flooding. A boat? But there were none in view.

By the time I drew level with the eponymous white rock, and saw this Buddha-like figure apparently meditating on top of it, the music was closer and more audible.

Perhaps, I thought, someone was playing the Chinese zither, continuing to celebrate the Moon Festival recently held on the beach.

As I drew level with the pier, I understood that the source of the sound was halfway out the long wooden structure.

Toby, a local musician, was playing a soft-voiced electric Gibson. The music, nearly all his own compositions, floated out over the dusk beach and haunted my very soul.

A Colder War by Charles Cumming

Image from Amazon

This latest thriller by Charles Cumming again features MI6 chief Amanda Levine and her friend Tom Kell, a hard-drinking middle-aged spy with a bad reputation he'd like to live down.

The plot is intricate, and the settings ground readers in Teheran, Istanbul and London. The evocative but pitiless language delivers the same hard message as A Foreign Country.

The world of the spy is a cold country. Working for "the firm" corrupts the employees, who become inured to the need to lie. The eternal ingrained habits of distrust and secret-keeping erode the personality to the point where it becomes all but impossible to have normal relationships.

Yet where there's life, there's hope. Thomas Kell, now in his forties, ousted from MI6 and divorced, is deeply affected by meeting Rachel, the daughter of a dead agent. For her, he is able to pry his heart open enough to hope for love and redemption.

But can he? Kell was..."back in the dreary routine of twenty-first-century flying: the long agitated queues; the liquids farcically bagged, the shoes and belts pointlessly removed." With these few words Cumming evokes the contemporary normalization of fear and suspicion at the same that he conveys Agent Kell's feelings of drab defeat, even as he undertakes a new assignment that offers him some promise of returning to the fold. When Kell confronts a CIA colleague whom he blames in part for his disgrace, (but of course there's always the guilt too), he is taken "into a tight bear-hug embrace with all the warmth and authenticity of a Judas kiss."

Masterfully, the author displays the disconnect between words and feelings. Tom Kell notices how "the relaxed, carefree way in which [Jim Chater] said: 'Oh, yeah?' betrayed a profound disquiet" to his observant enemy, an ally from the CIA. And even from a distance, Kell observes in Cecilia Sandor's upper lip "the absurd and unmistakable swell of collagen, her vast breasts out of all proportion to her reedy frame." In this story, what you see is rarely genuine.

Filtered through Tom's thoughts, Cumming describes good agents as "often bright, ambitious, emotionally needy," alongside the qualities needed to run them: "a mixture of flattery, kindness and empathy." Because secrecy breeds intimacy, he likens Vauxhall Cross to a bordello, where over nocturnal drinks, officers discuss their work with other officers, the only ones they can talk to, and then "one thing [leads] to another."

Yet even among agents, who are obliged to spy even on their colleagues when a mole is suspected, , there are still behaviours that are considered beyond the pale. People caught "running background checks on a new girlfriend, for example, or looking for personal information about a colleague-- would quickly be shown the door."

Chillingly, as they discuss the timing of whether to try to catch the mole first or to tell their CIA colleagues the bad news, C (Amelia) and Kell refer euphemistically to the potential consequences of holding out on Langley, the likelihood that a Red Cross convoy will be destroyed:

"Collateral damage?" Amelia said, as though she wanted Kell to take responsibility for it.

"Collateral damage," he replied.  

This scene evokes the memory of the possible foreknowledge Britain had before the bombing of Coventry. If indeed they had it, the intelligence, gained at Bletchley Park, could not be used, lest the other side learn their code was broken. In wartime, there was no doubt that numerically speaking, this strategy saved lives. It also allowed individual deaths that could have been prevented.

Humans are not equipped to make such decisions; they shouldn't be required to do it. And the ones who willingly choose to work for organizations that expect them to are either sociopaths to begin with [like the villainous double agent in this story], or must sacrifice aspects of their humanity that most of us consider essential for normal functioning.

In war time, secret intelligence is understandably necessary. Yet society continues to create and populate such organizations, and individuals compete to staff them, even in times of supposed peace.

Rabbits and Roses

On the deck of a footbridge across the North Saskatchewan River in Edmonton, the art work reflects the context of locality.

The wild rose is the emblem of the province of Alberta, and the snowshoe hare is a very jumpy prairie rabbit with powerful hind legs.

If a parallel footbridge crossed the Fraser River in BC and was similarly decorated, it would have a dogwood flower and a very different looking rabbit: a cute little brown one.

Brooklyn film at VIFF fulfilled its promise

Image from VIFF

It's 1952, and Eilis, freshly arrived from the small town of Enniskorthy on the Irish Sea, has arrived in Brooklyn and begun work as a salesgirl (pre-arranged by an Irish priest) at Bertolucci's Department Store in New York. The story is based on the wonderful novel of the same name by the Irish writer Colm Toibin.

Inevitably, films are different from the books that inspire them, so one never knows quite what to expect. The story, simplified for the screen, kept close to the original story of Eilis's reluctant emigration, engineered by others in what they believe are her best interests. Of course, life brings up the unexpected, and emigration has inevitable effects.

The hard choices that this young woman must make inspired moments of laughter. Though Eilis remains brave, I was not the only one in the audience to shed tears for her, especially over the poignant but inescapable consequences of leaving her homeland to finally belong, as she says, neither in America nor Ireland, but "somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean."

There is still a chance to see this film at the VIFF, and I've a hunch it will making the rounds of certain select theatres after the festival.

The eroding side of the river

I spent much of my childhood in Terrace. Not far from a sharp bend in the Skeena River stood a dairy, its verandahed farm house amid plenty of pastureland Where the cattle grazed.

We children were endlessly fascinated by the big river. After each spring flood, we hurried down to see what configuration of sandbars the rising waters had formed this time. We used a trail along the river bank that led to the boundary of Frank Brothers Dairy. Gradually, the pastureland shrank as the river claimed more land with each annual flood.

Many years later, upon strolling down to the river, I was shocked to see how much land was gone and how close the old farmhouse now stood to the bank.

Standing beside me on a footbridge by the North Saskatchewan in August, my daughter looked up at the house in the picture and commented, "That house is going to go within the next few years."

I doubted her prediction until she explained the river's flow. Because the current flows faster there, the outside elbow of a bend is the eroding side of the river. When we turned to the the inside of the bend, it was obvious how the slower current there had piled up sand and silt in the shallows. 

Looking back at the attractive home on the brow of the hill, she pointed out how the wooden posts that held up the porch had already been braced after falling downward due to erosion. At last I understood the reason for the steady loss of the Frank pastures to the Skeena, in my old hometown.

Gumbo, with feet

Walking in William Hawrelak Park in Edmonton with my adult daughter in August, I was excited to spy the kind of mud that as children we called gumbo. Yasemin is wearing a pair of light canvas shoes -- a kind unsuitable for stepping on gumbo, though her buying them got a needy person a free pair.

My mother used to be bothered by gumbo when it stuck to our shoes and clothes, but we kids loved it. The dry cracked layer on top formed fine "cookies" for our "bakery."

Picking up the slabs of mud to put on leaf plates was just as easy as taking real cookies from the oven. This year, during the protracted dry spell, the soil cracked in our garden here in Surrey. This was abnormal for our climate zone, where the ground usually stays moist and spongy year round.

Tearing up the tarmac at Edmonton's Blatchford Field

Blatchford Field in Edmonton was Canada's first municipal airport. Wing Commander Howard Blatchford, an air ace in World War II, died aged 31 when his Spitfire went down in the English Channel while he was escorting bombers to Amsterdam. His father Keith was the Mayor of Edmonton; it was he who created the historic city airport, now closed. The Aviation Museum is open, but in late August the bulldozers were busy tearing up the tarmac to turn the land to other uses. The lines on the memorial panels (one seen at the left) are from "For the Fallen," a poem by Lawrence Binyon. One line of the oft-used Remembrance Day poem appears on each of the panels of the memorial tablet at the gate of the Museum: 

"...They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."