Well, maybe this concerto plan of mine--getting to know the five Beethoven piano concertos--just wasn't a good idea. Or maybe this just isn't the right time for it. It's not you, I say to the second concerto, it's me.

I listened to it once inattentively, then three times attentively, or as attentively as I could. And it just never touched me. There's nothing wrong with it, nothing I dislike; I just fail to respond with anything more than a mild and somewhat detached interest. I heard it in a way similar to the way I have sometimes heard certain progressive rock bands or tracks: it's interesting, it doesn't bore me, but it doesn't really engage me, either. (Sorry, I can't think of an example, but I know it has happened.)

I mentioned when I wrote about the first concerto a  weeks ago that I had heard a little of it on the radio and thought it was Mozart, but with something a bit different about it, and discovered when I checked the radio station's log that it was Beethoven. Now I wonder if I was mistaken about which Beethoven it was, because this one, which was actually composed before #1, seems even more like Mozart than the other. There are a couple of bits in the last movement--I can't tell you exactly where or what they are--that may have been the things that seemed un-Mozartean to me. 

Well. Be that as it may, I am saying farewell to this concerto for the time being. Perhaps I'll run across it sometime in the future and find that I really like it. In some of the progressive rock instances I've mentioned, I later came to like the music quite a lot. So that may happen. But now I'll move on to the third and see what happens.

The first thing that strikes me about this poem is that I don't know how "Arbuthnot" is to be pronounced. ARbuthnot? ArBUTHnot? Is the "not" even fully pronounced or is the "o" sort of squeezed out, swallowed, as if it were "n't"? I do not know, and these things bother me, in this case every time I think about the poem.

But I have carried on reading it in spite of that glitch.

Arbuthnot was a well-known figure in the intellectual circles in which Pope moved, and also physician and close personal friend of Pope--see his Wikipedia entry for more information. It was mainly in his capacity as friend and literary sympathizer that Pope addressed this poem to him. I should perhaps emphasize "sympathizer," because the poem is all about Pope, not Arbuthnot, and is basically a 419-line complaint. 

(I just noticed that though the poem is in heroic couplets, 419 is an odd number. Something is wrong here. Is there an unrhymed line in there somewhere? A triple rhyme? Or is the line numbering wrong? That seems unlikely, as I have the poem in an anthology and also in a Best of Pope volume, and the line count is the same in both. Perhaps I'll investigate further. Or perhaps not.)

What is Pope complaining about? Initially, the crowd of litterateurs of the second rank or lower who want something from him--his criticism, which will be followed by requests for his assistance; his influence with publishers or theater managers; sometimes also or instead, his money. 

Fire in each eye, and papers in each hand,
They rave, recite, and madden round the land.

They invade his residence at Twickenham:

All fly to Twit'nam, and in humble strain
Apply to me, to keep them mad or vain.

A long list of the pests, their particular entreaties, and Pope's unhappy and witty responses follows.  Who is worse, the critics who denounce his work, or the poets who want him to read theirs?

A dire dilemma! either way I’m sped,             [i.e. to the grave]
If foes, they write, if friends, they read me dead.
Seized and tied down to judge, how wretched I!
Who can’t be silent, and who will not lie.
To laugh, were want of goodness and of grace,
And to be grave, exceeds all power of face.
I sit with sad civility, I read
With honest anguish, and an aching head;

Less witty and more venomous is what follows: the settling of scores with literary enemies who have injured and insulted him. Some of these are explicitly named, some masked behind a classical reference, like this one:  

Let Sporus tremble—What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass’s milk...?

And that's only the beginning of a dozen or more lines vilifying Sporus. This is pretty harsh, whoever "Sporus" is meant to be, but downright vicious once you've been informed by a footnote that (1) Sporus was a boy, "Nero's favorite sexual partner" and (2) the reference was meant for Lord Hervey, confidante of Queen Caroline. I wonder that some sort of action, legal or other, was not taken against Pope; perhaps because there was too much truth in the characterization? (Here's Lord Hervey's Wikipedia entry, for context if not definite judgment.)

The contemporary non-academic reader--myself, for instance--is probably not very interested in the quarrels themselves, the personalities or the substance. Little of this would be of anything other than historical interest apart from the quality of the writing--the skill and power of expression, the virtuosic handling of the couplet, whether in epigrammatic pairs or sustained thought over a dozen or more lines. Only if one is interested enough in 18th century literature to be interested in Joseph Addison does one care that "Atticus," who gets twenty or so lines of snark for his domination and manipulation of a literary circle which did not include Pope, is Addison, who at one time had been Pope's friend. That information is not required for appreciation of the scorn in which Pope holds a critic who will

Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.

"Damn with faint praise," like many trenchant bits from Pope, has passed into broad usage. I find myself doing it more often than I would like, and have been on the unhappy receiving end of it a few times (though as far as I know never from malice, but rather kindness bordering on pity, which may feel worse). 

Pope's work is in many ways not what the average reader of our time would think of as "poetry." There is nothing romantic (in either sense) about it, no reaching for the sublime or transcendent, no metaphysics, no existential angst, no who-am-I-and-what's-it-all-about-anyway--no introspection, really, of the kind and degree that we begin to find in the poetry that came less than fifty years later.

The passions are certainly there, but are straightforward and down-to-earth--exasperation, indignation--directed at straightforward and down-to-earth causes: the passions of a satirist, in short, which Pope was above all else. What we have in him, as in other 18th century writers, is what was known as "wit," which was something deeper than what we now usually mean by the word: not a gift for clever humor, as in "witty," but  rather a combination of sharply intelligent observation with great skill of expression, as Pope himself explained it in "An Essay On Criticism":

True wit is nature to advantage dress'd,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd,

And "nature" was not, as we usually mean, the natural non-man-made world--"the environment," but the whole natural order of things, including human nature.

Denunciation of the bad is at least an implicit acknowledgement of the good. But only toward the end of the poem is there a turn toward an explicit defense of it, where Pope defends himself as a friend of virtue, honors his parents, praises Arbuthnot (finally!) and wishes him well--and not too soon, for Arbuthnot died within weeks of the Epistle's publication. 

After all that invective, let's have a touch of the poet's generosity, closing with a brilliant and touching expression of the position, the love, and the duty of child toward elderly parent:

O Friend! may each Domestick Bliss be thine!
Be no unpleasing Melancholy mine:
Me, let the tender Office long engage
To rock the Cradle of reposing Age...

With, I think, a hint of the Resurrection. 

I don't listen to the radio very much, but sometimes when I'm making the ten-mile drive into town and don't want to bother picking out music to play from my phone, I press one of three presets on the radio. The three stations are: the one that claims to be "alternative," but doesn't really go very far in that direction; the Classic Raahhhk station; and the local classical+NPR station. It doesn't usually work out very well, partly because I switch away from the first two whenever a commercial or a song I don't like comes on, which is frequently, only to find that the grass is just as brown. And whatever's playing on the classical station is either already in progress or, if I catch the beginning, won't be finished before I get where I'm going. Or maybe I won't get either the beginning or the end. And then after 3pm the annoying ladies of NPR take over.

One day a few weeks ago I jumped to the classical station and found a piano concerto in progress. "That's one of the Mozart concertos," I thought, though I had no idea which one; to tell you the truth, they...well, I'd better not say they all sound the same, but most of them are quite similar, unless you're comparing a very early to a later one. But then it took a turn which of course I can't describe but which seemed rather off the beaten Mozartian path.

I was very curious about its identity, but when I got to where I was going the piece was still in progress. Happily the station posts its log on the web, so when I got back home I was able to find out what it was: Beethoven's first piano concerto.

Well, that was intriguing, and now I wanted to hear the whole thing. Moreover, I decided that the time had come for me to get to know all five of the concertos. I'm not sure I had ever before heard the first three, and it has been many years since I heard the fourth and fifth. I've had for years, but never listened to, a set of the five played by Alfred Brendel with the Chicago Symphony conducted by James Levine. Where it ranks in the opinion of connoisseurs I don't know, but I thought surely it must be at least respectable.

So. I enjoyed this work but it isn't going to be a great favorite. The first movement begins with the martial or processional Beethoven which is the Beethoven I am not very fond of. In general I found the entire first movement continually interesting, especially the exciting cadenza, but not deeply engaging. The second movement is slow and pretty, as expected, but didn't strike me as especially memorable. But the third--oh man. It's a joyful blaze. It has an instantly memorable tune which I sort of want to call a riff, and is almost treated that way, recurring frequently. I don't know how often I'll go back to the entire work, but a few days after hearing the entire work several times I went back and listened to the third movement alone--twice. It's that much fun. 

I also revisited the second movement, and found that hearing it in isolation instead of as a lull after the lengthy and vigorous first made it more appealing. It's really quite beautiful. It was like meeting a quiet and mild-mannered person in a crowd and not getting a very strong impression of...well, I was going to say "him or her," but really in that figure I'm envisioning a woman, if only because the movement is pretty and graceful, and men are not pretty and graceful. So, her--and later on conversing with her alone and finding that she's more charming and interesting than you had thought from that first impression. (I think I've used that analogy before, but I can't remember where. I'll attribute that to old age.) 

But about my initial idea that what I was hearing on the radio was Mozart: I can't figure it out now. I don't know which part of the concerto I heard that day in the truck, but in general it doesn't sound much like Mozart to me, though it was written only four years after Mozart's last piano concerto, #27 (1795 and 1791 respectively). In hope of getting some notion of what I might have been hearing, I listened to #27, and I don't hear much resemblance to the Beethoven. So...I don't know. 

On to the second concerto. Which by the way was written before the first. 

Peter Hitchens, writing in The Lamp a year or two ago, asserts that le Carré was "Britain’s greatest novelist of the late twentieth century." (I would provide a link to the piece, which is a review of a volume of le Carré's letters, but I'm pretty sure it's subscriber-only). I have too little acquaintance with contemporary fiction to have a respectable opinion on the matter, but Hitchens's view strikes me as entirely plausible.

I am, however, qualified to say that le Carré is a very, very good novelist, and one I've admired for a long time. I think my enthusiasm began with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the early 1970s. But I was aware of his reputation before that: my father subscribed to a long-defunct men's magazine called True--or maybe TRUE--and a condensed version of le Carré's first big success, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold appeared there in 1964. I do remember noticing it, but as far as I recall I didn't read it, or if I did sample it I didn't get very far: I was sixteen and mainly read science fiction.

Tinker was a rare experience: an intricate and powerful page-turner of a narrative with subtle and profound exploration of character and theme. Moreover, for me and apparently many thousands of others, the "secret world," as le Carré refers to the people and practices of espionage, is in itself fascinating and even alluring--perhaps not a healthy thing. I read his earlier books, and over the next fifteen or twenty years others that followed Tinker. They were all worth reading, and they all had as both practical and metaphorical foundation the Cold War. With the fall of the Soviet Union there was reason to wonder whether le Carré's work would continue to fascinate.

He continued to publish novels right up until his death in 2020. But the last one I bought, picked up secondhand years after its 1995 publication, was Our Game. And it sat unread on a shelf until a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself looking at that bookcase with an eye toward freeing some space, asking myself if I really needed all those le Carré titles--nine of them--and what the chances were that I would ever re-read any except two or three of them. Specifically, shouldn't I just go ahead and put Our Game in the stack of things to donate to the Friends of the Library? But why not read it first? It's not very long, compared to some of his books.

To the book, then: the first thing an Anglophone Christian reader notices--the first thing I noticed, anyway--is that the narrator is named Timothy Cranmer. As le Carré's work is often religion-conscious (though not religious in any sense), that choice of last name seems unlikely to be insignificant: Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) was one of the leaders of the English schism under Henry VIII and Edward VI. This Cranmer is a former member of the English espionage establishment, forced into retirement at the end of the Cold War because his career as an anti-Soviet spymaster constitutes a body of knowledge and a set of skills now "surplus to requirements," as the English say, for the role of the secret services in the new order. He is well-situated, having inherited a very nice country house and vineyard, supplemented by a goodly amount of money which we are given to understand is an under-the-table pension, or perhaps a theft, from the service--"the Office," as Cranmer calls it. And though he is surely at least fifty years old he has acquired a young, beautiful lover, Emma, who lives with him. Both she and Cranmer are somewhat familiar types in le Carré's world: the aging or aged and world-weary spy is almost a stock character, and a young, beautiful, and rather lost woman appears often.

Cranmer has spent much of his career "running" a double agent, Lawrence ("Larry") Pettifer. As  all readers of spy fiction know, with double agents there is always uneasiness, at minimum, about who the agent is really working for. Pettifer is a charismatic fellow, and he and Cranmer are close, in an almost romantic sort of way. They have remained close since their release from the Office into the everyday world, to which Pettifer is having trouble adjusting, and Pettifer is a frequent visitor, with obvious designs on Emma.

As the story opens, Emma has recently, and with little explanation, left Cranmer. And now Pettifer has disappeared. On a rainy Sunday night, when Pettifer has not been heard from for over a week, Cranmer receives a visit from two policemen who are pretty sure Cranmer must know something about Pettifer's disappearance, and suspect he may have had some hand in it. The Office is worried, too, and more than worried: Pettifer seems to have been involved with the theft of thirty-seven million pounds from the Russians.

This may all be connected to Ingushetia, which is a very small country in the Caucasus, located between South Ossetia to the west and Chechnya to the east, and the home of the Ingush people. I'm only mildly embarrassed to say that as far as I can recall I had never before heard of it. We all know of Chechnya, thanks to the Boston Marathon bombing and other events newsworthy in the West, and I had at least heard the names of North and South Ossetia. Like those, Ingushetia is part of the northernmost reach of the Islamic lands. With the end of the Soviet Union, and the consequent freedom of ancient enemies to go to war with each other, Ingushetia is (in the novel--I don't know about real life) under attack by Chechnya and Ossetia, with the permission and sometimes assistance of Russia. 

Pettifer's Soviet handler, Konstantin Checheyev (Cranmer's opposite on the Soviet side), who of course believes that Pettifer is his agent spying on the British, is not ethnically Russian, but Ingush. Ingushetia has just recently (the year is 1994) been half-freed from Russian/Soviet control, and Checheyev, like Cranmer and Pettifer, is not sure what he should be doing now. He has long resented a sort of glass ceiling for his ethnicity in the Soviet government, and doesn't think he has much of a place in Russia. And his native land is in trouble. It appears that he may be behind the theft of the thirty-seven million pounds, and that Pettifer is probably involved.

Does Pettifer's disappearance have something to do with the theft, with Checheyev, with the Ingush? Is he alive or dead? If dead, did Cranmer kill him? Cranmer has reason to think he may have--their relationship is difficult. If alive, where is he, and is Emma with him? 

Cranmer needs to know the answers, and in the process of seeking them finds himself pursued by the British police and by the Office. And the story of detective work, spycraft, and intrigue that follows is a good one, but a smaller one than many of his earlier works. It's smaller in word count, and it carries less resonance with the big questions: questions peculiar to our time, to the decayed and corrupt condition of the West, especially of England; to the Cold War and the moral dilemmas and psychological pressures involved in fighting it; and to the broader and more universal philosophical principles to which those point. The Cold War novels treat all those in more depth and with more power than does Our Game. And if le Carré is indeed a major novelist, which I'm inclined to think he is, it is those that most strongly make the case for him. But none of that means that this isn't a good story.

It follows that if you don't know le Carré's work, this is not the best place to start. For that purpose I would suggest either The Spy Who Came In From the Cold or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The first is shorter, with a sharp dagger of a plot; the second is more expansive and more character-driven. I'm restraining the impulse to say more, in fact to say a great deal, about those and the related books. But aside from the fact that my topic here is only the one book, there's much too much to say in a brief review--there's material for a lengthy article, perhaps even a book, which very likely someone has written. 

What about that Cranmer business that I mentioned? Well, it strikes me that this new Cranmer resembles the old one in that he is in the process of making his exit from an institution which has defined his life and his world. What will become of him? Of it? What will take its place in his life? And what will be his place within that? Old Cranmer died for a new faith (though of course he insisted that it was the old one made pure). What will become of New Cranmer? It would be bad manners for me to say; you'll have to read the book to find out.

And should I keep my copy of Our Game? Well, I probably won't read it again, and I could make use of that shelf space for something more permanent. Probably it should go to the Friends of the Library. It would be a happy find for someone.