Monday, December 10, 2018

Book Review: The Man Who Missed The War by Dennis Wheatley (1945)


My job, for odd reasons, gives me access to untold amounts of beat-up old pulp paperbacks, which gives me no end of joy. Dennis Wheatleys are fairly common, probably because here in the UK, it seems up until some point in the 70s, every house was contractually obliged to have at least a small number of them. Despite being something of an amateur expert on Britain's 'occult uncle' (I even read the mammoth biography The Devil Is A Gentleman), I'd never heard of this week's offering, The Man Who Missed The War. That's partly because Wheatley was so damn prolific, but also because it's not one of his occult-themed books, so it has been somewhat forgotten about over time.


And look at that cover, anyway, what the heck is going on with that? We all know what a Dennis Wheatley cover should look like, and this isn't it. A Wheatley cover, of course, should look like this:


Naked girl, occult trappings, A BLACK MAGIC STORY written in all caps. That's how to do it. But clearly, The Man Who Missed The War is cut from a different cloth. See, to the general public, Wheatley is mostly only remembered for his black magic thrillers and his associations with the occult. But really, only a handful of the many, many novels he wrote over the course of a 40+ year career deal with these subjects. Most of the the time, Wheatley was writing historical fiction and straight-up thrillers, many of which take the Second World War as their main source of inspiration. This is because Wheatley himself worked directly for the War Office during the war, creating plans of deception and subterfuge with which to fool the Nazis, had they ever successfully invaded Britain (one plan, seemingly simplistic but effective in pre-digital times, was to switch roadsigns all over the country to hamper Nazi transport in an occupied Britain).

The Man Who Missed The War begins with a brief missive to the effect that the Nazi-defeating plan used in the novel was in fact proposed in all seriousness by Wheatley during the war, and now that the immediate threat has passed (the novel being first published in 1945), he is at last free to use his great idea as the basis for a rip-roaring novel of adventure).

Enter Philip, an Angry Young Man who is worried that the British military elite are stodgy and old-fashioned, and that they don't understand what will be required of Britain in a new World War (the story is set in 1939) if that nasty chap Mr Hitler doesn't stop causing trouble in Europe.

Philip lectures his father and family friends, including a stuffy old Navy general and a rotund, friendly Canon, about the dangers of the German air force. It's no good to continue building giant battleships now that the enemy can simply bombard them from the air, you see. It's clear that these opinions are Wheatley's own, and it's interesting to get a glimpse into these criticisms of the British military establishment written so close to the war itself.

(WHEATLEY-ISMS: long political rants about how Germans are genetically evil and laziness is corruptive even among racially acceptable people. All while well-to-do characters indulge in lavishly-described meals, smoke fine cigars and drink expensive hock).

Anyway, Philip has a great idea: if supplies can be transported across the Atlantic from America using vast networks of small, lightweight rafts, then the Nazis will have a much more difficult time disrupting the supplyline with U-boats, and Britain will remain connected with America. But in order to prove that his idea works, he will have to test the rafts personally. The timely death of his friend the Canon provides Philip with the funds to realise this project, and the late churchman's lectures on the reality of the lost city of Atlantis led this reader to anticipate where exactly Philip's sea-going adventures might eventually lead him.

(WHEATLEY-ISMS: the Canon doesn't seem to be a particularly strict Christian, instead following Wheatley's own brand of more all-inclusive, open-minded spirituality. Instead of Christianity being THE WAY, he finds being a priest affords him A WAY to do the maximum good, as spiritual thinking is generally positive, even if the exact details of the religion don't necessarily matter. Oh, and also Atlantis, past lives and astral travel are all real as well and all AWESOME).

Philip's fleet of rafts makes it out of New York harbour ok, but then his plans are disrupted when the Canon returns to him as a ghost (because of course) with a warning: his crew are not in fact jovial Scandinavians, as he had believed, but in fact NAZIS! Before you can say 'Indiana Jones,' Philip is weighing up his options in a classic Wheatley logistics-obsessed fashion, but in the end decides to just settle things with his fists, because after all, it's still a 1940s pulp novel. He punches out the evil Nazi captain, who promptly dies, leaving Philip in a pickle. Unable to prove that the captain was, in fact, a national socialist, he could well face trial for murder in New York.

It doesn't matter anyway, because after making it across the Atlantic, Philip is blown off course within sight of Britain itself, as a huge storm carries him away from the sceptered isle. He's joined by Gloria, a stowaway. She's American by birth but unfortunately stage-Irish by diction. Begorrah! Philip and Gloria share many meet-cute awkward moments in classic 1940s screwball comedy style as their raft meanders across the desolate ocean. And if the story seems to be meandering too, well that's what I was wondering, as halfway through the book, Wheatley has his leads wash up only as far south as the West African coast for a meaningless encounter with some killer crabs (not as good as it sounds). I knew from the back cover copy that they were due to find a lost race of Mexicans living in a hidden valley in the Antarctic (I was so pumped for this) but instead Wheatley was wasting time with one-damn-thing-after-another encounters.

It seemed as though this was the second book in a row I'd read (see my review of The Abominable) that was being marred by 1) poor pacing and 2) unexpected visitations by Nazis because, who do you think shows up at this point only a U-Boat full of Fritz, in another encounter that really goes nowhere. Oh, and the ghostly Canon keeps popping up to reassure Philip (and the reader) that all of this really is leading somewhere important. Really, it is.

Eventually, Philip and Gloria float down towards the Antarctic, all the while shedding their uptight European mores, enjoying nudism, getting drunk, and having drunken sex and suffering terrible hangovers. Wheatley, as a fairly Victorian conservative in most respects, could be unexpectedly liberated when it came to certain things, and this side of him comes to the fore here. Philip also has a radio which he uses to follow the course of the developing war. Via this plot device, we receive blow-by-blow accounts of the early stages of the war, filtered through Wheatley's interpretations.

Finally, things take a belated turn in the 'lost race' direction when Philip and Gloria meet an exiled Russian Prince in Antarctica, who hints that he has discovered something fantastic on this barren continent. The two figure that he must be living somewhere relatively comfortable, so they follow him to a lost valley, temperate because it is heated by (you guessed it) geo-thermal springs. I usually love pulp lost race novels from this period, even despite their usually troubling racial overtones, but Wheatley's Antarctic kingdom is another letdown. The people here are wizened, stunted, and technologically backward. Their valley contains no wonders or marvels.

Philip and Gloria spend two years living in this weird lost valley, get kind of married, and have a kid, before they eventually find out that there's another valley nearby, and these little gnome-like people (in an astoundingly absurd twist, it's revealed that they're actually literally leprechauns) are kept as sort of cattle, Eloi-like, by a more advanced race of - you guessed it - Atlanteans. Finally! It turns out that the Atlanteans are, as is usually the case in mid 20th-century lost race novels, the originators of all the great ancient civilisations, which explains why they look like Aztecs and have step-pyramids. Unlike most lost race novels, these Atlanteans are assholes who not only sacrifice leprechauns on top of their massive step-pyramids to their dark god Shaitan (huh? Why are Atlanteans worshipping the Judeo-Christian devil but using his Arabic name? Stay tuned to find out) but they are also spying on the war and are hoping for the Germans to win. See, because the Nazis are so evil, if Hitler wins the war, the Atlanteans will benefit from the deaths of millions of people the Nazis intend to exterminate. They have the power to control weather from afar, but they believe that they need constant blood sacrifices in order to maintain it. Oh, and Philip and Gloria have to pretend to be Irish Republicans so that the Atlanteans don't suspect them to be Allied sympathisers. Somehow, Wheatley doesn't use this subplot as an excuse to bash Irish neutrality, which after the leprechauns and Gloria's dialogue, might have tipped the balance for me.

If the novel has been patchy and unfocussed up until now, it really goes off the rails at this point. I've got a HUGE soft spot for a good lost race novel, and Wheatley has set himself up with a classic LR situation here, but his interests are really not with the Atlanteans, their history, or their society. Who knows, maybe he was just bored with the concept: by my reckoning, this is Wheatley's third lost-race novel, and his second one featuring Atlanteans. We get some half-hearted details about their city and their lost valley, but Wheatley is far more interested in the nuances of the second world war, which he now ties the story back to. The Atlanteans have magical TV-like devices which allow them to keep tabs on the various war leaders, and Philip engages in detailed conversations about what's going on with the various armies. Wheatley is clearly utilising his own expertise here. We get page after page about how brave and awesome the British and Americans are, and how civilised and sophisticated the British generals in particular are. Wheatley even patently inserts himself into the narrative, palling around with the generals in the War Office, as he did in real-life during this time. He doesn't use his own name, but introduces an unnamed 'man from London' who is short, dark-haired, red-faced, born in 1897, and has a great knowledge of fine wines and champagnes. Hmm.

Poor Philip and Gloria get fairly left behind for quite a few chapters, as Wheatley(!) fawns fetishistically over the handsome, brave British generals, works on plans to stop the Nazis, and gets stuck into the buildup to D-Day. It's astonishing - I don't think I've ever seen a writer so blatantly relive his own real-life glory days through a fictionalised version of himself.

I really thought that things couldn't get any stranger, but somehow they do. It turns out that the British fighting the Nazis is only the visible, earthly portion of a much bigger conflict: good vs evil, heaven vs hell. Wheatley's own strange theology causes him not to directly invoke God very often, as he has a more nuanced take on a kind of 'cosmic good,' though of course he's not as averse to mentioning Old Scratch; in fact, as mentioned up top, he had a bit of a name for doing so.

(WHEATLEY-ISMS: Everything in life is reduced to a good or evil dichotomy; everything Wheatley doesn't like, including socialism, Germans, cheap wine, and cartoon Atlantean bad guys, is literally Satanic.)

Before the last page is turned we have characters travelling on the astral plane, fighting the hordes of Hell, and flying around the world in the twinkling of an eye. If I hadn't been aware of Wheatley's general worldview, and if I hadn't come across similar shenanigans in other books such as Strange Conflict, I can only imagine that this eleventh-hour dip into spiritual warfare would have absolutely blindsided me with its randomness and inappropriateness.

Hopefully I've managed to convey some of the madness that is The Man Who Missed The War. It has quite a few of the charming touches which I have come to expect from Wheatley, but it must certainly rank as one of his least disciplined efforts. The plot lurches from one topic to the next, with apparently no forethought or deliberate pacing. However, even such a disappointing effort from Wheatley is still never boring; it contains such an amount of bizarre and disjointed ideas that it keeps the reader following, if only to find out whatever could possibly be coming around the corner next.


No comments:

Post a Comment