Never a dull moment (Eastern Approaches - Fitzroy MaClean)

Member Name: duncantorr

Product:	Eastern Approaches - Fitzroy MaClean
Date:	31/08/09 (174 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Real life adventure

Disadvantages: Rapidly receding into history

"When General Zahidi, a dapper figure in a tight-fitting grey uniform and highly polished boots, entered the room, he found himself looking down the barrel of my Colt automatic. There was no advantage in prolonging a scene which might easily become embarrassing. Without further ado I invited the General to put his hands up....took away his pistol and hustled him through the window into the car which was waiting outside with the engine running."

This is not, as one might guess, an excerpt from a far-fetched spy thriller of a slightly dated vintage, but from the memoirs of a Member of Parliament. Fitzroy Maclean, the autobiographer in question, was admittedly a very unusual MP, having only decided to stand for Parliament under the most unconventional circumstances, but then he was an unusual man generally.

Eastern Approaches covers just ten years of Maclean's life, from 1936-1945, but what an eventful ten years they were. Few people cram as much into a lifetime, and the book reads like a fast-paced adventure story. Eastern Approaches was one of my favourite books when I was a schoolboy, though I have to admit that I had almost forgotten it until I saw that Penguin Books have just brought out a new edition to mark the sixtieth anniversary of its original publication. Re-reading it now, I find that it has lost none of its gripping vitality, although the events it covers inevitably no longer seem as relevant to the contemporary world as they did then and have begun to fade into history.


* Russia and beyond *

The action opens in Paris, with Maclean serving as a young official in the British Embassy. To many this might seem an enviably cushy posting, but he found it dull and volunteered to be transferred to Moscow during the darkest days of Stalin's tyranny. Witnessing at first hand the show trials of the paranoid dictator's real or imagined rivals in the Soviet hierarchy prompts Maclean to some interesting reflections on the psychology of totalitarianism. Much of this part of the book, though, is devoted to his periods of leave, which he used to explore the remoter reaches of the Soviet Union, most of which were officially off limits to foreigners, especially foreign diplomats.

Penetrating the forbidden regions wasn't easy, but by dint of bluff, bluster and trickery Maclean found his way to the mountains of the Caucasus, the deserts of Central Asia, the ancient cities of Bokhara and Samarkand and beyond, crossing the borders into China and Afghanistan. Escaping the attentions of the secret policemen detailed to shadow him is treated as a diverting challenge, to be met by changing trains without warning or by jumping onto passing trucks. He shrugs off with an insouciant charm the likelihood that he was regarded as a spy - perhaps not without reason - and that the Soviet authorities might easily have reacted far more drastically than by merely having him followed. And he finds time for some excellent travel writing along the way.


* Egypt and beyond *

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Maclean sought to resign from the diplomatic service in order to enlist, but was refused. "For six years, they said, I had been learning my job. Now, just as I was beginning to be of some slight use, I wanted, to satisfy my personal vanity, to go off and play at soldiers." So, instead, Maclean notified the Foreign Office that he intended to go into party politics, which disqualified him from staying in the service. He promptly joined the army while, to lend credibility to his cover story, applying to become Conservative candidate at a forth-coming by-election at Lancaster, never expecting to be adopted. He was not only adopted as candidate, but elected as MP.

Not allowing this to distract him, he went with his regiment to the Egypt. Here he ran into an old acquaintance, David Stirling, who was forming the SAS, to which Maclean was soon transferred. Long range raids across the desert followed, attacking German and Italian bases far behind the front line, accompanied by all the hair-raising excitement anyone could wish for - at one point Maclean talked his way out of a tight spot by masquerading as an Italian officer. This in turn led him to more clandestine missions in the Middle East, including the episode with which I opened this review, kidnapping a Persian general suspected of plotting to support a German invasion of that country.


* Bosnia and beyond *

By becoming an MP, albeit an absent one, Maclean had brought himself to the attention of Winston Churchill, who referred to him as "that young man who used the mother of Parliaments as a public convenience". Churchill, though, had uses for such characters. In late 1943, searching for a suitable emissary to the growing resistance movement in German-occupied Jugoslavia, he decided "what we want is a daring ambassador-leader to these hardy and hunted guerrillas" and picked Maclean for the role.

The mission was a delicate as well as a dangerous one. As might be expected in the Balkans, the resistance in Jugoslavia was split into mutually-antagonistic groups. The two main forces were the Cetniks, traditionally supported by the west but of waning effectiveness, and the Partisans, Communist by ideology but increasingly recognised as one of the most effective in Europe, tieing down many divisions that the Nazis must have longed to be able to deploy elsewhere.

Working and fighting alongside the Partisan leader Tito, Maclean was influential in persuading Britain and America to withdraw support from the Cetniks and devote it whole-heartedly to the Partisans. The rights and wrongs of that decision are still debatable: whether it contributed to Jugoslavia turning Communist after the war, or whether the country would have turned Communist in any case whilst western support helped ensure that Tito, who became its President, retained a remarkable degree of independence from Moscow. Either way, the story of Tito's orchestration of the battle from the backwoods of Bosnia to the liberation of Belgrade makes for exciting reading.


* Narrative style *

Maclean's style is fluent, graphic and above all readable. There are few stylistic flourishes or lengthy descriptive passages, but the atmosphere of the various settings is reliably conveyed, while the pace seldom slackens. Perhaps, with so much action packed into the pages, the pace would have had little chance to slacken anyway, even in a lengthy book, but there is nevertheless a skill in holding the reader's interest, and Maclean displays it. He has an engaging, under-stated sense of humour too, as I hope the passages I've quoted serve to show.

If one wanted to be hyper-critical, one might say that rather too much historical background on Balkan conflicts is included - Maclean may have needed to know it to fulfil his role, but the reader doesn't need to. However, these passages can easily be skipped by anyone who finds them tiresome. In any case, they are a minor distraction in the context of a mostly exemplary piece of story-telling.


* The author *

If there is such a thing as minor aristocracy in Scotland, that would be what Fitzroy Maclean was born into, as the scion of landed clan-leaders. Educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he started reading Modern Languages but ended up with a first in Classics, he was evidently a man of versatile intelligence as well as a man of action.

As with many men of action, war gave him his chance to shine, and having joined the army as a Private he left it in 1947 as a Major-General. Of course, it would be fatuous to pretend that class and contacts played no part in his promotion; without them he would certainly not have been so easily commissioned or co-opted into the SAS, let alone adopted so readily as a Conservative parliamentary candidate. Reading between the lines of the book, one is frequently struck by how much he unconsciously displays the boundless self-assurance of a well-connected ruling class. This is, though, less irritating than it might be, because it is clear that he also had plenty of talent, courage and initiative.
By comparison with his war-time heyday, Maclean's postwar career was something of an anti-climax. He remained an MP until 1974, but was only briefly a junior minister, perhaps being too much of a maverick to toe the party line reliably. He busied himself instead with writing - mainly on Balkan and Central Asian history - and with public affairs in his native Highlands. For these he received various arcane honours with extravagant titles, becoming Sir Fitzroy with the baronetcy of Maclean of Strachur and Glensluain, 15th Hereditary Keeper and Captain of Dunconnel Castle and a knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle. He died in 1996.

* The Bond connection? *

Fitzroy Maclean was a friend of Ian Fleming and, with his colourful exploits, it has often been speculated that he might be the model, or one of the models, on which the fictional James Bond was based. Maclean himself tended to make light of the notion, denying that he had ever been a spy or secret agent in the literal sense. But then, he would say that, wouldn't he?


* Unexciting details *

The new edition of Eastern Approaches is published by Penguin Books, 576 pages at a cover price of £8.99. You can, of course, find it more cheaply on the net - £6.29, for example, if you don't mind contributing to the likelihood of Amazon eventually becoming a monopoly.


* Recommendation *

Eastern Approaches is a rattling good read. If this is a slightly old-fashioned expression, well, it's a slightly old-fashioned book, but none the worse for it. Indeed, it stands the test of time remarkably well. Even if the period it covers is now history, it's a fascinating period of history and Maclean played a most interesting and active part in it. On top of that his style, charm and good humour all make Eastern Approaches well worth reading.


© Also published under the name torr on Ciao UK, 2009

Summary: A rattling good read