The Ambler paradox

Last night I finished reading Judgment on Deltchev, Eric Ambler’s first postwar novel and a masterpiece of plotting, tension, and especially foreshadowing. (Seriously—if I ever teach creative writing in any capacity, I will assign this or another of Ambler’s early thrillers to teach foreshadowing.) It also has many of Ambler’s sharp, wry observations.

Here’s one from near the end. The narrator, Foster, an English playwright commissioned to report on a show trial unfolding in an unnamed Balkan country, finds himself entangled like many another Ambler protagonist in the preexisting schemes of people much more nefarious and capable than he is. Gradually he becomes a pawn.

In a passage foreshadowing some of what is to come, Foster notes that the Stalinist puppet regime, later, will scapegoat him, condemning him as an agent of British intelligence (among other things), an accusation he finds painfully hard to deny:

With the newspapers it was not difficult; I did as I had been asked and referred them to the Foreign Office. With friends and acquaintances it was less simple. It is, I find, extraordinarily embarrassing to be described in print as a member of the British secret service. The trouble is that you cannot afterwards convince people that you are not. They reason that if you are a member you will still presumably have to say that you are not. You are suspect. If you say nothing, of course, you admit all. Your denials become peevish. It is very tiresome.

A bit of coy reverse psychology suggests itself but is both dangerous and unattractive for the fundamentally honest man:

Probably the only really effective denial would be a solemn, knowing acknowledgment that there might be some truth in the rumour. But I can never bring myself to it. Foreign Office or no Foreign Office, I have to explain what really happened.

There’s a threshold of secrecy and paranoia beyond which all denials are confirmations. This kind of ambiguity offers security for the professional but proves an inescapable trap for the passerby who blunders into this world. It’s a dangerous place for the mind and soul. Witness the conspiracy theorists who go down the rabbit hole deep enough to get into this everything-proves-my-theory mindset. Per Forster, “it is very tiresome.”

It is also a great device for creating irony and tension. Ambler’s thrillers are built on the overlapping realities of the professional intriguer and the bourgeois amateur, and his characters, ordinary people tainted by their contact with these other worlds, have to live with the paradox that their good-faith denials sink them deeper in suspicion. More than one of his narrators uses the telling of the story to try to clear their name and strike back at critics.

The first of Ambler’s novels that I read was The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios) early last year. Here’s a similarly trenchant set of observations I quoted from that book at the time, and here’s my full review. Back in the spring I also read and reviewed The Levanter, which features another strong dose of the paradox.