Flight of Eagles (1998)
141 views
Skip to first unread message
Jack Lowry
Jul 13, 2009, 9:11:00 PM7/13/09
to Unofficial Jack Higgins Homepage
The Cliché has Landed
Some thoughts on Flight of Eagles (1998) and Jack Higgins’s Good War
By Jay Rothermel
______________________
Today Jack Higgins produces a series of vile, aesthetically lazy and
self-satisfied political thrillers about a vigilante security force of
the British government hunting-down fifth-columnist UK Muslims
supporting “terrorism.” This is the popular novel version of racist
poisons peddled at a higher level by born-again empire-lovers like
Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.
Higgins made his fortune (literally and figuratively) with a series of
World War Two thrillers. Pillars of Hell (1963) and A Game for Heroes
(1970), the earliest, were dress-rehearsals for larger canvases and
the international bestsellerdom of The Eagle has Landed (1975) and the
fine Storm Warning (1976).
It is no secret that every Higgins novel repeats a few action beats
and choice dialogue sets from earlier, stronger Higgins novels. For
instance, the World War Two thrillers invariably feature scenes of
Himmler and Hitler and other members of the Nazi High Command trying
to steal a professional march on one-another. UK and U.S. leaders
like Churchill and Eisenhower are shown as thoughtful and energetic
men who immediately see the importance of supporting a Higgins hero’s
mission.
Decent chaps, really. Higgins’ Churchill never talks about nerve-
gassing and strafing Arabs or how a cabal of rich Jews runs the world;
Eisenhower never talks about employing Gestapo officers to police the
post-war German labor movement. These are mere historical facts.
Higgins naturally finds it more acceptable and profitable to flatter
readers with a little loyalty to the Washington, D.C. High Command.
It is always better, regarding the Allies and World War Two, to “print
the legend.”
* * * *
Flight of Eagles celebrates a supposed nobility of RAF and Luftwaffe
officers during the Second World War. Published in 1998, it is Late
Higgins, the repeater and re-processor of successful and favored
scenes from earlier novels. For Higgins the honor of army and flying
officers serving on the UK, U.S. or German side is beyond question.
His Gestapo officers are usually B-movie plot devices, but the honor
of the traditional officer caste, even the Wehrmacht, is sacrosanct.
To embody this, Flight of Eagles presents us with twin brothers: Max
and Harry Kelso. The sons of a U.S. World War One ace and a German
noblewoman, they are favored by fortune with good looks and family
wealth. Max will fly for Goering’s Luftwaffe after following his
mother back to the Fatherland. Harry will fly first as a Yank in the
RAF, and later in the war in the USAAF. Both are gifted fighter
pilots, inheriting the preternatural skills and killer instincts of
their late father.
Higgins keeps Max untainted by fascism while depicting his service to
the rule of a German bourgeoisie which fascism alone kept in power
during the tumultuous social upheavals of the Great Depression.
Admired and honored as a hero of the nation by Hitler himself, Max and
his aristocrat mother have no use for National Socialism or the
ruffians and parvenus and former chicken farmers who lead the NSDAP.
Both Max and Harry become, on their respective sides in the conflict,
heroes of the Battle of Britain. Because Germany lost the war and the
Nazis today are rightly seen as villains of the first water, Higgins
is obliged to allow Max to express his contempt for the Third Reich
while at the same time acting “nobly” and heroically – as any officer
must, irrespective of the state they serve.
Writing about opposite sides in a war by depositing a brother on each
side of the conflict is cliché beyond the dreams of cliché. In Flight
of Eagles Higgins heightens the sheer level of absurdity he has
created by stripping the plot of any dramatic complication. One
brother sees first-hand the rise and fall of the Third Reich, but
exhibits no hint of curiosity about the cause of such events. The
other brother, thanks to wealth and family connections, is privy to
the inner workings of Washington, yet shows no desire to understand
those workings. Higgins clearly wants to get his characters out of
the way of the thriller plot’s iron necessities. The twist ending is
similarly undercut by hasty scene building and this lack of
complication earlier in the novel.
Flight of Eagles begins as a brother versus brother story set against
the backdrop of war. These chapters Higgins quickly dispenses with as
he crushes the second half of the novel into a mangle of Secret
Operations Executive (SOE) derring-do. Here the novel intersects with
a thriller series Higgins developed almost a decade before: Night of
the Fox (1987) and Cold Harbour (1990) featured commandos and spies
operating out of the village of Cold Harbour on England’s Channel
coast. They carried-out secret missions in northern France at the
behest of Churchill, historically a roman candle of bad military
ideas. Higgins and his characters, of course, would never say a word
against him.
A strength of Flight of Eagles is its depiction of lifeboat rescues of
downed fliers in the English Channel near the Cold Harbour locale.
Higgins is clearly passionate about the Lifeboat Service, and lavishes
special attention and care in these scenes. Several of his previous
World War Two thrillers also featured dramatic lifeboat rescues, most
magnificently in Storm Warning (1976). He captures the laconic
confidence of men and women working together in crisis in these
scenes, just as he leaves the rest of the novel to fend for itself
aesthetically.
The almost pornographic vulgarity of Nazi politics is brought home in
Flight of Eagles in a few scenes. We are treated to conspirators
against the Reich being hung from meat hooks on loops of piano wire in
a scene reminiscent of one in the 1988 TV miniseries of Herman Wouk’s
novel War and Remembrance.
Like all figures who emerge as leaders in fascist movements, Nazi
officials were spiritless middle class nonentities (“men from
nowhere”) who gave the loyalty of their outraged sense of self to a
pragmatic leader parading as a world-historic messiah. Higgins’
portrait of Himmler perfectly captures this. Surrounded by trappings
of Aryan myth and dressed in a martinet’s regalia, here is the small
forgotten farmer, crushed by Versailles and enraged by Weimar, haunted
by the prospect of proletarianization, suddenly and because of his own
cunning brought to a seat at the Round Table of infamy.
In Flight of Eagles Higgins portrays Nazis in general as monstrous and
villainous fools using Europe to sate their absurd psychological
appetites. In this way he makes appear more human their opposite
numbers from the U.S. and UK. Allied leaders and their agents are the
embodiment of honest good sense. SOE leaders Dougal Munroe and Jack
Carter are driven by a moral superiority and vigilante instrumentalism
in carrying-out Churchill’s vainglorious command to “set Europe
ablaze.” Eisenhower makes an appearance, flattering the reader’s
vanity for admiring Harry Kelso’s accomplishments as an air ace.
Because Flight of Eagles is a historical thriller and not history,
Eisenhower’s true career as an architect of Wall Street aggression
against the toiling populations of Europe and Asia goes unmentioned.
As with most Higgins thrillers, the everyday pleasures crowd around
the margins: an ageless teddy bear uniting past and present; steak and
kidney pie at Cold Harbour’s Hanged Man pub; young lovers dancing the
evening away before the long arm of coincidence spoils it all
forever. Food and drink are always plentiful on both sides of the
English Channel in Higgins’ World War Two thrillers. Officers are
wounded, burned, and lose psychologically suggestive limbs at a high
rate and toss it off with aplomb. Women love them and wait for them.
High ranking officers wait, too, to hear in the watches of the night
if their feints and plots against the enemy have succeeded or blown-
up.
Jack Higgins was one of the first to realize World War Two could be
strip-mined by political thriller writers, just like the Cold War.
The lurid frisson of fictional characters intersecting with the likes
of Himmler and Canaris in novels like The Eagle has Landed was the
final step in capitalist media’s aesthetic working-over of war as a
commodity subject. The voyage from Eric Maria Remarque and Ernest
Hemingway to Alastair MacLean and Jack Higgins took only one
generation.
Throughout the dozen World War Two political thrillers he has written,
Higgins has kept his attention focused primarily on the region around
southern England and northern France, with only a few side-trips to
Berlin. Anti-colonial struggles in Asia during the war, and the
imperialist war in Asia itself, find no place in Higgins. Stalingrad
in a Higgins war thriller is simply a place where one of his German
officers became a little more disillusioned with the Hitler brand of
command. The great showdown between German imperialism and the
dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the USSR has no
relevance in Higgins.
To call this set of political priorities “Eurocentric” is to suggest
Higgins might be able to play a more progressive role as a novelist,
but has chosen not to. Of course this is absurd. Novels by Jack
Higgins and his compeers are part of the finely woven ideological mesh
of capitalist (not European) rule; the novels celebrate the necessity
not of European but imperial violence and the arrogance of its
managers and operatives. They play an important part in rationalizing
social castes and professional layers associated with that rule.
Higgins has no time for rank and file workers, in or out of uniform:
they decide nothing. The few proletarians in Flight of Eagles are
employed as a faceless and nameless lifeboat crew.
* * * *
In the battle waged against defeatism by Washington, London, Paris,
and Berlin today the World War Two thrillers of Jack Higgins are no
less important, have no less value, than do the writings of overtly
political apologists for bourgeois right like Christopher Hitchens,
David Horowitz, and all the myriad “humanitarian
interventionists” (Susan Sontag, et al) giving their own brand of left-
cover to Wall Street’s wars.
Such wars have their casualties. The devolution in aesthetic quality
in Jack Higgins’ novels can be said to have begun around 1997, and
coincides with their political devolution. After the 1996 novel Drink
with the Devil, any authentic political air completely escaped.
Higgins moved from his own genre “brand” of IRA and post-IRA thriller
to a deliberately mid-Atlantic amalgam of Washington-London Tom
Clancyism, where both UK and US secret operatives worked together
against International Terrorism. After 2001, the terrorists became
explicitly Arab Muslims living in the UK and the Middle East. At the
absolute reactionary nadir of this work, Dark Justice (2004), a mosque
and Middle Eastern charity in London are portrayed as organizing
centers of Islamic terrorist groups. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have
no greater ideological partisan today.
Another clear sign of devolution in subject matter, scale, and simple
quality in Higgins’ output is the fact that Flight of Eagles was his
last World War Two thriller. These thrillers usually emerged every
few years, surrounded by more typically contemporary political
thrillers about Northern Ireland. For Higgins fans and thriller fans
they were an especial source of interest, even if later additions fell
short of the satisfactions of The Eagle has Landed and Storm Warning.
Sadly, Higgins left behind the fertile ground and artistic strengths
of his finest period when he enlisted in Bush and Blair’s Long War.
__________________________________
Some thoughts on Flight of Eagles (1998) and Jack Higgins’s Good War
By Jay Rothermel
______________________
Today Jack Higgins produces a series of vile, aesthetically lazy and
self-satisfied political thrillers about a vigilante security force of
the British government hunting-down fifth-columnist UK Muslims
supporting “terrorism.” This is the popular novel version of racist
poisons peddled at a higher level by born-again empire-lovers like
Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.
Higgins made his fortune (literally and figuratively) with a series of
World War Two thrillers. Pillars of Hell (1963) and A Game for Heroes
(1970), the earliest, were dress-rehearsals for larger canvases and
the international bestsellerdom of The Eagle has Landed (1975) and the
fine Storm Warning (1976).
It is no secret that every Higgins novel repeats a few action beats
and choice dialogue sets from earlier, stronger Higgins novels. For
instance, the World War Two thrillers invariably feature scenes of
Himmler and Hitler and other members of the Nazi High Command trying
to steal a professional march on one-another. UK and U.S. leaders
like Churchill and Eisenhower are shown as thoughtful and energetic
men who immediately see the importance of supporting a Higgins hero’s
mission.
Decent chaps, really. Higgins’ Churchill never talks about nerve-
gassing and strafing Arabs or how a cabal of rich Jews runs the world;
Eisenhower never talks about employing Gestapo officers to police the
post-war German labor movement. These are mere historical facts.
Higgins naturally finds it more acceptable and profitable to flatter
readers with a little loyalty to the Washington, D.C. High Command.
It is always better, regarding the Allies and World War Two, to “print
the legend.”
* * * *
Flight of Eagles celebrates a supposed nobility of RAF and Luftwaffe
officers during the Second World War. Published in 1998, it is Late
Higgins, the repeater and re-processor of successful and favored
scenes from earlier novels. For Higgins the honor of army and flying
officers serving on the UK, U.S. or German side is beyond question.
His Gestapo officers are usually B-movie plot devices, but the honor
of the traditional officer caste, even the Wehrmacht, is sacrosanct.
To embody this, Flight of Eagles presents us with twin brothers: Max
and Harry Kelso. The sons of a U.S. World War One ace and a German
noblewoman, they are favored by fortune with good looks and family
wealth. Max will fly for Goering’s Luftwaffe after following his
mother back to the Fatherland. Harry will fly first as a Yank in the
RAF, and later in the war in the USAAF. Both are gifted fighter
pilots, inheriting the preternatural skills and killer instincts of
their late father.
Higgins keeps Max untainted by fascism while depicting his service to
the rule of a German bourgeoisie which fascism alone kept in power
during the tumultuous social upheavals of the Great Depression.
Admired and honored as a hero of the nation by Hitler himself, Max and
his aristocrat mother have no use for National Socialism or the
ruffians and parvenus and former chicken farmers who lead the NSDAP.
Both Max and Harry become, on their respective sides in the conflict,
heroes of the Battle of Britain. Because Germany lost the war and the
Nazis today are rightly seen as villains of the first water, Higgins
is obliged to allow Max to express his contempt for the Third Reich
while at the same time acting “nobly” and heroically – as any officer
must, irrespective of the state they serve.
Writing about opposite sides in a war by depositing a brother on each
side of the conflict is cliché beyond the dreams of cliché. In Flight
of Eagles Higgins heightens the sheer level of absurdity he has
created by stripping the plot of any dramatic complication. One
brother sees first-hand the rise and fall of the Third Reich, but
exhibits no hint of curiosity about the cause of such events. The
other brother, thanks to wealth and family connections, is privy to
the inner workings of Washington, yet shows no desire to understand
those workings. Higgins clearly wants to get his characters out of
the way of the thriller plot’s iron necessities. The twist ending is
similarly undercut by hasty scene building and this lack of
complication earlier in the novel.
Flight of Eagles begins as a brother versus brother story set against
the backdrop of war. These chapters Higgins quickly dispenses with as
he crushes the second half of the novel into a mangle of Secret
Operations Executive (SOE) derring-do. Here the novel intersects with
a thriller series Higgins developed almost a decade before: Night of
the Fox (1987) and Cold Harbour (1990) featured commandos and spies
operating out of the village of Cold Harbour on England’s Channel
coast. They carried-out secret missions in northern France at the
behest of Churchill, historically a roman candle of bad military
ideas. Higgins and his characters, of course, would never say a word
against him.
A strength of Flight of Eagles is its depiction of lifeboat rescues of
downed fliers in the English Channel near the Cold Harbour locale.
Higgins is clearly passionate about the Lifeboat Service, and lavishes
special attention and care in these scenes. Several of his previous
World War Two thrillers also featured dramatic lifeboat rescues, most
magnificently in Storm Warning (1976). He captures the laconic
confidence of men and women working together in crisis in these
scenes, just as he leaves the rest of the novel to fend for itself
aesthetically.
The almost pornographic vulgarity of Nazi politics is brought home in
Flight of Eagles in a few scenes. We are treated to conspirators
against the Reich being hung from meat hooks on loops of piano wire in
a scene reminiscent of one in the 1988 TV miniseries of Herman Wouk’s
novel War and Remembrance.
Like all figures who emerge as leaders in fascist movements, Nazi
officials were spiritless middle class nonentities (“men from
nowhere”) who gave the loyalty of their outraged sense of self to a
pragmatic leader parading as a world-historic messiah. Higgins’
portrait of Himmler perfectly captures this. Surrounded by trappings
of Aryan myth and dressed in a martinet’s regalia, here is the small
forgotten farmer, crushed by Versailles and enraged by Weimar, haunted
by the prospect of proletarianization, suddenly and because of his own
cunning brought to a seat at the Round Table of infamy.
In Flight of Eagles Higgins portrays Nazis in general as monstrous and
villainous fools using Europe to sate their absurd psychological
appetites. In this way he makes appear more human their opposite
numbers from the U.S. and UK. Allied leaders and their agents are the
embodiment of honest good sense. SOE leaders Dougal Munroe and Jack
Carter are driven by a moral superiority and vigilante instrumentalism
in carrying-out Churchill’s vainglorious command to “set Europe
ablaze.” Eisenhower makes an appearance, flattering the reader’s
vanity for admiring Harry Kelso’s accomplishments as an air ace.
Because Flight of Eagles is a historical thriller and not history,
Eisenhower’s true career as an architect of Wall Street aggression
against the toiling populations of Europe and Asia goes unmentioned.
As with most Higgins thrillers, the everyday pleasures crowd around
the margins: an ageless teddy bear uniting past and present; steak and
kidney pie at Cold Harbour’s Hanged Man pub; young lovers dancing the
evening away before the long arm of coincidence spoils it all
forever. Food and drink are always plentiful on both sides of the
English Channel in Higgins’ World War Two thrillers. Officers are
wounded, burned, and lose psychologically suggestive limbs at a high
rate and toss it off with aplomb. Women love them and wait for them.
High ranking officers wait, too, to hear in the watches of the night
if their feints and plots against the enemy have succeeded or blown-
up.
Jack Higgins was one of the first to realize World War Two could be
strip-mined by political thriller writers, just like the Cold War.
The lurid frisson of fictional characters intersecting with the likes
of Himmler and Canaris in novels like The Eagle has Landed was the
final step in capitalist media’s aesthetic working-over of war as a
commodity subject. The voyage from Eric Maria Remarque and Ernest
Hemingway to Alastair MacLean and Jack Higgins took only one
generation.
Throughout the dozen World War Two political thrillers he has written,
Higgins has kept his attention focused primarily on the region around
southern England and northern France, with only a few side-trips to
Berlin. Anti-colonial struggles in Asia during the war, and the
imperialist war in Asia itself, find no place in Higgins. Stalingrad
in a Higgins war thriller is simply a place where one of his German
officers became a little more disillusioned with the Hitler brand of
command. The great showdown between German imperialism and the
dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of the USSR has no
relevance in Higgins.
To call this set of political priorities “Eurocentric” is to suggest
Higgins might be able to play a more progressive role as a novelist,
but has chosen not to. Of course this is absurd. Novels by Jack
Higgins and his compeers are part of the finely woven ideological mesh
of capitalist (not European) rule; the novels celebrate the necessity
not of European but imperial violence and the arrogance of its
managers and operatives. They play an important part in rationalizing
social castes and professional layers associated with that rule.
Higgins has no time for rank and file workers, in or out of uniform:
they decide nothing. The few proletarians in Flight of Eagles are
employed as a faceless and nameless lifeboat crew.
* * * *
In the battle waged against defeatism by Washington, London, Paris,
and Berlin today the World War Two thrillers of Jack Higgins are no
less important, have no less value, than do the writings of overtly
political apologists for bourgeois right like Christopher Hitchens,
David Horowitz, and all the myriad “humanitarian
interventionists” (Susan Sontag, et al) giving their own brand of left-
cover to Wall Street’s wars.
Such wars have their casualties. The devolution in aesthetic quality
in Jack Higgins’ novels can be said to have begun around 1997, and
coincides with their political devolution. After the 1996 novel Drink
with the Devil, any authentic political air completely escaped.
Higgins moved from his own genre “brand” of IRA and post-IRA thriller
to a deliberately mid-Atlantic amalgam of Washington-London Tom
Clancyism, where both UK and US secret operatives worked together
against International Terrorism. After 2001, the terrorists became
explicitly Arab Muslims living in the UK and the Middle East. At the
absolute reactionary nadir of this work, Dark Justice (2004), a mosque
and Middle Eastern charity in London are portrayed as organizing
centers of Islamic terrorist groups. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have
no greater ideological partisan today.
Another clear sign of devolution in subject matter, scale, and simple
quality in Higgins’ output is the fact that Flight of Eagles was his
last World War Two thriller. These thrillers usually emerged every
few years, surrounded by more typically contemporary political
thrillers about Northern Ireland. For Higgins fans and thriller fans
they were an especial source of interest, even if later additions fell
short of the satisfactions of The Eagle has Landed and Storm Warning.
Sadly, Higgins left behind the fertile ground and artistic strengths
of his finest period when he enlisted in Bush and Blair’s Long War.
__________________________________
Jeremy Duns
Jul 14, 2009, 3:10:55 AM7/14/09
to unofficial-...@googlegroups.com
Very interesting analaysis, Jack - thanks. I've not read any of Higgins' more recent novels so I can't comment on its alleged vileness or racism, but I found a lot of your other points very astute and thought-provoking.
All the best,
Jeremy Duns
--- On Mon, 7/13/09, Jack Lowry <jayr...@cox.net> wrote:
G.M.Beumer
Jul 14, 2009, 4:51:58 PM7/14/09
to unofficial-...@googlegroups.com
> Today Jack Higgins produces a series of vile, aesthetically lazy and
> self-satisfied political thrillers about a vigilante security force of
> the British government hunting-down fifth-columnist UK Muslims
> supporting “terrorism.” This is the popular novel version of racist
> poisons peddled at a higher level by born-again empire-lovers like
> Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.
>
> self-satisfied political thrillers about a vigilante security force of
> the British government hunting-down fifth-columnist UK Muslims
> supporting “terrorism.” This is the popular novel version of racist
> poisons peddled at a higher level by born-again empire-lovers like
> Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis.
>
Thank you for you nice and thorough analysis of his later work. I since
long miss the vague and more complicated people found them selves on as
in his earlier novels such as "Cry for the hunter" and "The
confessional".
His black and white depiction of everything Arab or middle east also
slightly annoyed me. His last novels became a bit to one dimensional.
This was the reason I absolutely loved "Death run". Not because it has a
lot more dimension to the story but because it was a big step away from
the drag.
What always surprises me is that "Dean Dillon" is his most popular
character ever, growing in popularity while his reputation grows more
Bond-like. Even a novel as "A prayer for the dying" features a better
cast in my opinion. From true villains to very fragile and innocent
girls but, fortunately, with some grey levels in between.
Last but not least: my apologies to everyone for not keeping the website
up to date. I have been extremely busy with other things but it seems
that in the future I have some time to update the site again and -at
least- get it up to date with all the books. Anyone who wants to provide
content is more then welcome to help me out with that.
Happy reading!
Gert Beumer
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages