Judas Horse by April Smith

“FAN is an invisible group of anarchists that operates behind the façade of Free Animals Now–bland enough to attract the liberals and provide a front for the hard-core element. Interchangeable in tactics with ecoterrorists like ALF and ELF, the level of violence in their attacks is on the rise. They used to glue locks and liberate research animals; now it’s firebombing. There are dozens of unsolved cases in the Northwest attributed to FAN–which some investigators argue does not exist at all, but is a cover for a mixed bag of disenfranchised extremists.”

Here’s the synopsis of April Smith’s novel Judas Horse :

Fiction: FBI agent Ana Grey goes undercover and infiltrates a “hard-core anarchist group” operating “behind the façade” of FAN (Free Animals Now). She befriends the group members in order to expose illegal activities of the group and also to solve the murder of fellow undercover agent Steve Crawford.

The plot made me think of the case against Eric McDavid (who just got a whopping 19-year sentence):

True (Not Fiction): The FBI paid ‘Anna’ a chunk of money to infiltrate anarchist groups. She befriended McDavid and two other anarchists–they eventually ended up in a rented cabin in N. California (wired by FBI). They discussed using Direct Action to create property damage, and Anna even gave McDavid the recipe with which to make explosives. If anyone waffled about the plan, Anna pushed, needled and implied they weren’t ready for the big time.

Hmmm….

April Smith’s novel Judas Horse begins with the discovery of what remains of FBI undercover agent Steve Crawford’s body in a remote area of Oregon. Agent Ana Grey is approached to pick up Steve’s assignment, and after a short stint in ‘undercover school’ in Virginia, Ana–who’s now Darcy DeGuzman–is off to Oregon. Infiltrating the group is easy-peasy, according to the author. It just takes a fake identity (which includes a phony arrest) and a tatty copy of Singer’s Animal Liberation, and bingo, Ana…errrr, I mean Darcy is in like Flint.

Seems the “anarchists” hang out at a Portland neo-nazi bar (did the author mix up neo-nazis with punk?), and they may finance their operations with a meth lab. Darcy, who comes across as a bit of a bimbo, has no problem kissing up to the ‘hard-core’ anarchists who consist of:

Julius Emerson Phelps (a loony, out-of-shape former FBI agent). Doughnut-chomping Phelps has delusions of grandeur no doubt instigated by his obsessive devotion to Apocalypse Now. He demands to be called “Allfather” and plans “the Big One.” Not only is Phelps a total loony but he’s also a sadistic bastard.

Megan–an aging hippie who decorates herself with silver jewelry and has a misplaced desire to practice amateur psycho-therapy on Julius. It doesn’t seem to be working.

The other two in this motley crew are two damaged teenagers.

Yes, people. These four make up our “hard-core” anarchist group, but they sound fairly soft-core to me. One scene made me laugh. While anarchists are planning an action in which non-violence is stressed, Darcy complains about the “nonviolent action” by stating that she is “tired of empty gestures.” She wants and pushes for action. Translation: “hello, I’m an FBI agent. Welcome to entrapment.”

The author avoids any reference to anarchist beliefs with the excuse, that according to Agent Galloway: “Anarchists don”t care about the issues….Don’t feel as though you have to spout the rhetoric. The cause is never the cause.” So we should probably be grateful for small mercies.

The book has an acknowledgment page thanking various FBI agents for their help. Figures.

But apart from the pathetic, weedy would-be anarchist group, something far more disturbing is the fictional inclusion of several injuries caused by animal rights groups (”three employees injured by shrapnel”). The book states FAN is “interchangeable” when it comes to “tactics with ecoterrorists like ALF and ELF.” FAN is showed as operating not only with a careless disregard for the possibility of human injury, but an almost gleeful hope that people will get hurt, and at one point, Phelps even orders a murder. These sorts of irresponsible leaps pander to the wave of inaccurate green-scare oriented information. I shudder to think how many people are going to read this book and come away with the mistaken impression that ALF and ELF go around ordering hits, blowing up buildings and people in the process.

But all those complaints aside, while the book offers a wildly inaccurate portrayal of anarchists, the book makes several interesting points. Over time Ana becomes morally confused about her mission. For example, she works with FAN to save horses from the meat factory only to discover that a nasty, greedy, weasely BLM official is faking purchases to the public, selling the wild horses to a slaughterhouse, and lining his pockets with the profits. Ultimately the FBI is seen as a morally bankrupt, horribly corrupt, and corrupting agency, and by the end of the novel, Agent Grey’s FBI career may well be in the toilet….

The Long Exile by Georges Simenon

“He was a petit-bourgeois down to the cut of his jacket, the knot of his tie, and his manner of speaking–the epitome of provincial France, but transported suddenly to the other side of the world, and surrounded by people who, if one looked at them closely, were like supernumerary actors in some exotic stage spectacle. “

George Simenon’s novel The Long Exile is the story of two young anarchists who become fugitives and flee from France to South America following the murder of a wealthy Parisian.

The Long Exile, with shades of Conrad and Graham Greene, is an excellent book, but its central figures Charlotte Godebieu and Joseph Mittel are problematic characters as anarchists. Joseph Mittel, a tragic, frail figure is the son of anarchist and Bonnot gang member Mittelhauser. While the state was unable to convict Mittelhauser of involvement in the Bonnot gang due to insufficient evidence, he is arrested during WWI for “passing state secrets to the enemy” and there commits suicide “having opened up the veins in his wrists with the handle of a spoon which he had sharpened on the edge of his plate over several days.” Still a child, Mittel is subsequently abandoned by his mother, and he later alters his name and is more or less adopted by the French anarchist community. Mittel, whose life story is similar to some of the details of the life of the French film director Jean Vigo, has TB, lived in a sanitarium, and worked in a film company. While Mittel doesn’t really espouse anarchist beliefs, it’s the only world he’s ever known, and anarchists are the only people who’ve ever helped him–finding him employment, and a place to stay. Without the anarchist community, Mittel realizes he would have starved.

Charlotte Godebieu, however, is an entirely different case. In reality, she’s a prostitute, a thief, and a blackmailer who’s learned that a veneer of anarchist beliefs lends a certain romanticism to her behaviour. Charlotte brags about her exploits and her sketchy beliefs, exaggerating details as she draws a crowd of male admirers. She justifies the blackmail and murder of her former employer as necessary in order to finance the publication of the newspaper La Liberte, but even Simenon doesn’t seem to take Charlotte’s proclaimed anarchism seriously. With Charlotte, the author creates a portrait of a very unpleasant character who steals from her own impoverished family.

With help from an anarchist bookseller, Mittel and Charlotte manage to get passage on a ship sailing to South America, captained by the renegade gun-running Mopps. Mopps very quickly becomes obsessed with Charlotte even though he has no illusions about her character: “She’s totally devoid of feeling. She gives herself because she has no choice, or because there may be something in it for her. She thinks of nothing but making herself appear interesting, and when she saw I wasn’t impressed by her freethinking notions, she dropped the subject.” Even though Mopps decides that Charlotte is “no better than a trollop,” he still becomes her lover.

On the long voyage to South America, the other crew members ask Mittel if it’s “true” that he’s an anarchist, and then the next question is whether or not Mittel has “ever thrown a bomb.” When Mittel replies “never” they are clearly disappointed and ask “what’s the point” of being an anarchist if you don’t throw bombs? While the crew is initially a little nervous about Mittel, he soon gains everyone’s respect and Captain Mopps’ affection.

At one point, Mittel admits to himself that “he was no anarchist, but that he was the son of an anarchist, and this made him a kind of aristocrat among aristocrats. He was forced to attend all their meetings as an example to the younger generation.” He feels as though there’s “no escape” for him, and that no matter where he travels “there were anarchist, groups, cells, only waiting to grab him and do him honor” as the “son of a French Martyr.” While Simenon’s use of the word “aristocrat” is jarring when describing Mittel’s position in the anarchist community, this is the author’s attempt to describe the anarchist community’s view towards the son of a deceased comrade. Simenon doesn’t seem to take Mittel’s complaints about the pressure from the anarchist community quite seriously. Mittel is seen as a sympathetic, yet weak lost character who lacks any ability to make decisions about his own fate. At several points in the novel, he remarks that he had “no choice” about his life, and indeed even his exile to South America with Charlotte is something that simply happens.

Charlotte and Mittel eventually land in Columbia where Mittel takes a job working in a remote mine that supposedly yields a large amount of gold. Trapped here with Charlotte and a Belgian geologist who may or may not be insane, Mittel becomes involved in a murderous scam and experiences human greed and corruption through his brush with a group of corrupt businessmen. Mittel’s weak character leads him into trouble when he’s finally forced to take a stand in the warring business community of Buenaventura.

Escaping from Columbia and the intricate politics of rival business interests, Mittel and Charlotte travel to Tahiti to join Mopps. Here Charlotte manages a bar for ex-pats, and Mittel who’s left to observe Charlotte’s flirtations and affairs, begins to mull over his life….

A surface examination of Simenon’s protagonists may lead us to the hasty conclusion that Charlotte and Mittel embody all the negative stereotypes of anarchism. But Simenon does not seem entirely unsympathetic to anarchism in this novel. Indeed Simenon’s creation of Charlotte and Mittel as anarchists exemplify the idea that all sorts may be attracted to anarchism, and that as the son of an “anarchist martyr” Mittel carries a legacy that no one is likely to forget. Even though Mittel is not involved in Charlotte’s crime, he immediately is linked to the murder by the press. Furthermore, Simenon makes it perfectly clear that while Mittel and Charlotte are labeled as anarchists for different reasons, neither of the characters are, in fact really anarchists at all.  Charlotte’s acts of theft, blackmail and murder are arguably les reprises individuelles–acts committed by an Illegalist (although Simenon doesn’t go into such theories), but any such claim drops the minute Charlotte leaves France. Mittel at first sees Charlotte as a “militant anarchist” while he is “halfhearted at best” but by the time they are stuck in Columbia he realizes that they “are just a couple of pathetic little people.” While in the beginning Mittel admires Charlotte’s force of character, he later admits that she committed murder “not so much from devotion to the Cause as from bravado, because she wanted to prove she was something better than a servant.”

Black Rain by Georges Simenon

“If things go on like this, take it from me, there’ll be a revolution.”

Author Simenon was an extremely prolific writer–producing over 200 novels and 150 novellas in his lifetime. He is perhaps best known for his Maigret series. However, many of his novels falls into the romans durs (”hard novel”) category, and these psychological novels are–I think–the best of Simenon’s works. The novella Black Rain does not seem to fall into the romans durs category–it’s not hard-edged enough for that.

Black Rain is a reconstruction of a child’s memories. The narrator, Jerome, now an adult, recollects a specific period of time, when as a 7-year-old boy he lived with his mother and father in a small town in Normandy. As the son of shopkeepers, Jerome lives over the shop with his parents, and their collective lives are run by routine. Jerome is a solitary child, and his imagination is captivated by another little boy who lives nearby. The other boy, Albert, lives with his grandmother in a room above the seed merchants’ shop. Although the boys have never spoken to each other, Jerome, now an adult, can remember childhood moments when he saw Albert’s face “flattened against the window” staring out at him.

Jerome’s life of strict routine alters when his parents invite the corpulent and unpleasant Aunt Valerie to move in. Aunt Valerie is mired in a legal wrangle over a house she owns. Aunt Valerie hints that perhaps Jerome’s parents will eventually inherit the house, and this elusive promise acts as the stimulus for Jerome’s father to invite Aunt Valerie into their home. So Aunt Valerie moves in, takes over Jerome’s room and immediately begins dominating the household.

These are troubled times. The anarchist Francisco Ferrer is executed in Spain and news of his death reaches Normandy–a region already plagued with strikes and social unrest. Then the news breaks that the police are searching for Albert’s anarchist father, and the town seems to split in two–those who want him hunted down and killed, and those who sympathize. Aunt Valerie falls into the posse mentality while Jerome sympathizes with the poignant vision of the sickly Albert. Jerome tries to make sense of it all, and at one point asks his Aunt “what’s a strike?” She replies “it’s when workers won’t work anymore,” and “they throw things at policemen and go about with razors hamstringing horses.”

This well-structured novella charts Jerome’s memories of that period–recalled now in his adulthood and laced with his mother’s fragmented “falsified” memories and explanations. Jerome is just an innocent bystander in all this, but as children often do, he magnifies both his responsibility and his ability to affect events. Simenon shows, brilliantly, how traumatic incidents that occur in childhood–even if they are merely observed–can haunt us for the rest of our days.