ASHENDEN:  THE BRITISH AGENT

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)


(Note:  lots of spoilers in this report).  As WW1 got under way, Ashenden, novelist and play-wright, felt the need to do something for the war effort, so he joined the Intelligence Service.  "R", his immediate supervisor, sent him to Geneva to operate a courier service conveying information provided by German spies to sources in France.  He made a weekly trip to France on the ferry boat and this was a source of curiosity to the local police.  So he was interviewed and after a few tense moments was able to convince them that he was a mere author searching for the peace necessary to his artistic output.  He's staying at a local hotel along with an assortment of odd expatriots, among whom were a former girlfriend and an Egyptian royal family.  A Mrs. King was a servant to the family;  she was roundly mistreated by the two daughters, who seemed to delight in shaming her before the rest of the residents.  She was very old and maintained a haughty presence in spite of her lowly position.  Also present were Baroness von Higgins, an old friend of Ashenden's, and several more spy types, all more or less involved in secret information bartering.  One night, Ashenden is called to Mrs. King's room.  She's dying and has something to tell, but will only share it with Ashenden.  With her last gasp, she utters "England", and expires.

For his next job, Ashenden is sent to Italy with a character called "the hairless Mexican".  This is a totally narcissistic personality attached to a strong fearless body with no hair.  He brags constantly and is along to assassinate a courier from Greece who is carrying valuable papers.  The plot becomes confused and Carmona (the Mexican) with blithe unconcern, kills the wrong man and tells Ashenden that there were no papers on his body.  Then he catches a ship to Spain with the remaining monies.

At the next meeting with R in Paris, Ashenden learrns of an East Indian agent named Chandra Lal who has been creating a lot of havoc for the British by working with the Germans to undermine British influence in India and other places.  R sets up a plan by which he uses Lal's girlfriend to attract him to France, with the intention of wringing a lot of information out of him.  The trap works, except Lal commits suicide via a small bottle of prussic acid before he's arrested.

The next city R is interested in is Lucerne.  There's a couple living there, a botanist and his wife, who are suspected of being double agents for Germany.  Ashenden registers in the hotel they're living in and becomes friends with them.  After some more Sneaky-Pete finagling, he persuades the botanist to return to England, where he's shot.  The wife falls apart and is left dangling and bereft.

In another unidentified city, Ashenden acts as a double agent in order to test the loyalties of several ambassadors.  The American drinks a lot and leaks information that is overheard by his maid and delivered to Ashenden.  The latter gets him sent back to America.  In a more or less ancillary operation, Ashenden learns about an opportunity to blow up a Polish armaments factory, but has trouble deciding whether to do it or not, as it would result in the deaths of a large number of Polish citizens.  He flips a coin to make the decision, but the reader never learns the outcome of the toss.

In the final episode, we see Ashenden in Vladivostok, where he's about to entrain for Petrograd.  He's traveled by ship around the world to get there and is not looking forward to the ten day train ride.  (It's never explained why he didn't just take ship through the Baltic Sea).  He's joined on the journey by a New England salesman named Harrington.  Harrington is tall and thin and an immaculate dresser.  He talks constantly about his clothes and why things are better in New England and drives Ashenden nuts.  They arrive in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) at last.  Kerensky is head of the government and is in a quandary about how to unite the Russian people, and all the political sects, into one faction.  Soon chaos reigns and rioting in the streets occurs, with the militia cruising around stealing and shooting people.  Harrington is upset because his laundry has vanished.  Against advice, he runs out of the hotel to look for the washer-lady and never comes back.  Later, Ashenden finds him face down in a pool of blood.  End of book.

I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this book, and i realized that it was not at all what it seemed to be.  The character of Ashenden is caught in a stream of occurrences about which he can do little, and he appears to be carried along in a completely nonsensical series of events.  At several points, the Polish arms factory, and Harrington's death, there is no sense of drama or story-telling, just an ongoing sequence of meaningless violence and brutality.  I think Maugham was playing a double game of a metaphoric sort, alluding to the horror of human experience, especially war, and how it permeates almost all human activity, without actually coming out and saying it.  Ashenden's career rolls along like an ocean wave, gaining impetus as it nears the shore and finally crashes on the beach.  That's the only way i can think of that would resolve the abrupt ending of the book.  The double meanings inherent in the way it was written don't appear to me to suggest any other rationale.  It's like Maugham was so horrified by so-called normal events that he could only intimate what he considered to be the reality of what he saw through suggestion, and not very overt suggestion at that.  Or perhaps, since he saw the skull beneath the skin of human existence so clearly, it was the only way he could think of to make what really seems like a "cri de coeur";  a heartfelt scream against reality as he saw it.