Reading at the same time as V. two spy-ish autobiographies of the Thirties, Eastern Approaches & The Infernal Grove, i am struck at the uncanny resemblance. I feel at home in this topsy-turvy, midcentury, European conspiroclasm: as absurd as anything P. could devise, & as lethal.
In later books P. seems to have mostly dropped the tension between the potential interpretations of his stories as actual conspiracies & as sheer paranoia. This quality makes me think also of that tension between supernaturalist & psychological explanations in ghost stories around the turn of the last century--The Turn of the Screw but not only James--which creates a special space within the genre all its own.
Near the end of the book i sort of realized that "V." wasn't an initial of a name or a word but the Roman numeral 'five': & that the character seeking a single entity whose name begins with that letter, is simply wrong. On p. 167:
"An ivory comb, five toothed: whose shape was that of five crucified, all sharing at least one common arm. None of them was a religious figure: they were soldiers of the British Army. She had found the comb in one of the Cairo bazaars. It had apparently been hand-carved by a Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an artisan among the Mahdists, in commemoration of the crucifixions of '83, in the country east of invested Khartoum..."
On p. 443: " 'Here. In case you think tomorrow it was a dream.' Her hair fell loose. She handed him an ivory comb. Five crucified Limeys--five Kilroys--stared briefly at Valletta's sky before he pocketed it. 'Don't lose it in a poker game. I've had it a long time.' "
A souvenir of torture becomes a token of love, connecting the divided stories...the artifact that would prove the existence of V., & which eludes Stencil at last--at arm's length.
--This just after P. has explained the notorious "Kilroy" cartoon graffito by means of an electronic diagram for a band-pass filter. (Whereas i believe he noticed the resemblance himself, & so reverses the pareidolia.)
One can also count the four ['happy master'--ha!] Faustos (the last being "an interregnum") & we actually get to meet still another one.
And i think of P.'s two worlds, the modern one without tragedy or heroism, & the secret twentieth century, of the Great Game & profound obsessions; the character who wishes he did not have to choose, & the character who constantly makes the crazed meaningless gesture of choosing... This is like an inverted Bhagavad Gita that, instead of justifying war with fatalism, undermines it with existentialism.
