Journey Into Fear – Eric Ambler, 1940 ★★★★½

A Phony War Gets Real

Popular in its day, Journey Into Fear deserves credit for helping popularize a more sophisticated type of spy novel. Reading it reveals something else, a stock-taking exercise just after the beginning of World War II when it seemed Europe might step back before beginning in earnest the century’s worst conflagration.

Eric Ambler’s message reads like a warning: Be ready for a rough ride, and be strong.

They called it “the Phony War” or “the Sitzkrieg.” After successfully invading Poland and dividing the spoils with her new ally the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany seemed content to wait for the Allies to make the next move. Great Britain and France did very little, standing pat behind the “impregnable” Maginot Line. No doubt they felt no hurry given how much slaughter and ruin the previous world war had left.

In this lull, Ambler wrote a novel about a British armaments engineer sent to Turkey to help secure a major weapons sale for his employer. The war was hardly a year old when Journey Into Fear was published, making it in addition to an early spy novel one of the first notable World War II novels ever printed.

Yet at the outset the war seems hardly to matter to our capitalist protagonist, Graham. “For him, the war meant more work; but that was all,” the third-person narration explains early on. He’s too old to be called to serve, and believes he is in no danger of being hurt by the conflict unless a bomber drops its payload near where he works, a remote possibility given his white-collar situation.

Yet the war is coming for him, more quickly and in closer quarters than he expects. After a couple of flashback chapters establish his dangerous situation, the story begins in earnest with Graham aboard a cranky Italian steamer, Sestri Levante, making a slow journey across the Black Sea to Nice. The Turkish secret policeman who put him on the boat, Colonel Haki, has explained in the face of Graham’s stubborn disbelief that it is for his own good. Haki’s case: A dead Graham is valuable to the Germans, as his work outfitting guns and torpedo tubes for Turkish naval vessels might well cement Turkey as a British ally. As Graham’s voyage begins and his unease deepens, he realizes he is not only truly alone but surrounded by people he doesn’t really know. Who can be trusted? This becomes a major, persistent theme of Journey Into Fear:

You couldn’t get away from danger. It was all about you, all the time. You could live in ignorance of it for years: you might go to the end of your days believing that some things couldn’t possibly happen to you, that death could only come to you with the sweet reason of disease or an ‘act of God’: but it was there just the same, waiting to make nonsense of all your comfortable ideas about your relations with time and chance, ready to remind you – in case you had forgotten – that civilization was a word and that you still lived in the jungle.

Ambler was a leftist and sympathetic to Marxist argument as he demonstrates in the form of an amiable secondary character named Mathis who speaks forcibly in favor of socialism and against war as capitalist tool. At the time of the book’s writing, many leading communists actually opposed war against Germany, given its opportunistic alliance with the Soviet Union.

So when Ambler’s narrative questions early on the routine rally-‘round-the-flag arguments articulated by sketchy Turks and gives us a lonely voice of reason in the form of an old German scholar who is one of Graham’s fellow passengers, you expect that maybe the book might come out and push for peace. Instead, it goes forcibly in the other direction. Graham is a man in trouble, already wounded when the novel opens (just lightly grazed, perhaps in the same way that Great Britain was in early 1940), who needs to fight his way out of a survival situation that becomes more harrowing with each passing chapter.

If Journey To Fear is a political treatise disguised as an adventure story, which I think it is, the disguise is quite involving. Ambler creates an ambiguous situation of mystery set in a confined setting that happens to be a no-man’s land (Italy was still a neutral party at this point in the war). As Graham becomes more worried about his safety, particularly when an apparent assassin comes aboard, he looks for help wherever he can, particularly in the ambiguous affections of Josette, a Hungarian dancer travelling with a hostile Spaniard named José who is apparently her cuckolded husband. Daily meals and bridge games in the ship’s passenger salon become a kind of smoky battleground for Graham to gather intelligence on his fellow travelers and affect a brave if shaky front.

There are moments of violence, but for the most part Journey Into Fear scores in the direction of establishing and deepening tension. Ambler sets the tone in the Turkish prologue, with Graham’s visit to Colonel Haki’s office, Graham entering “with the growing conviction that he was involved in a nightmare and that he would presently wake up to find himself at his dentist’s. The corridor was, indeed, as bare and featureless as the corridors of a dream. It smelt strongly, however, of stale tobacco smoke…”

A 1943 Hollywood adaptation of Journey Into Fear featured Orson Welles as Colonel Haki, here as in the book a man of mystery and grim humor. A lot of Welles' Mercury Theater cohorts who worked on Citizen Kane were involved in the production. [Image from tmc.com]

Like many a British crime novel of the period, Journey Into Fear soon settles into a kind of locked-room mystery where the room is actually a ship. There is a decent amount of humor; Graham’s stateroom adjoins that of Mathis and his wife, who are overheard arguing about everything, including Graham himself. Josette seems rather amused by Graham’s confession that his life is in danger, as if it were some ploy to get her in bed. Not that she sees anything wrong with that. When Graham protests that he is a married man, she tells him to stop being so British about things and come to the point.

All the time, questions of morality and ethics are floated, as if suggesting the cards of life have been irreversibly shuffled. This has relevance to Graham’s own situation dreading his own impending murder, but also to more global concerns.

“José says that if a person really needs to do something he will not trouble about what others think of him,” Josette says at one point while she and Graham discuss having an adulterous affair. “He says that it was people who were safe and well fed who invented good and evil so that they would not have to worry about the people who were hungry and unsafe. What a man does depends on what he needs.” After all, she adds, doesn’t Graham’s own line of work make him a murderer in the end?

A more starkly relativistic viewpoint is expressed by the German scholar, Haller, who dismisses the idea of “eternal truth.” “The statement of an eternal truth is a prayer to lay a ghost – the ghost of primitive man defending himself against what Spengler calls the ‘dark almightiness,’” Haller states.

In such a moral morass, it is no wonder Graham wonders whether he shouldn’t just abandon his return to the Allied side and find a safe haven wherever he can find it, an option actually offered to him late in the book. After all, wasn’t that the lesson of World War I, a war fought to end all wars which created a lost generation instead? It’s a terrific bit of suspense in its own right – the whole novel turns on the question of not only who can one trust, but how and why – and also brings into sharper focus the question of whether making a stand in time of war for what one feels is right is at best an egotistic conceit and at worst a kind of evil-compounding folly.

To see such a situation brought to bear in a novel not only written but published within a nation doing battle for its own survival is a bracing thing. Of course, it is done for what amounts in the end to morale-boosting effect, but still, it is hardly something one expects. If Journey Into Fear can be called wartime propaganda, it is propaganda of a very high order.

Ambler’s style is very matter-of-fact, leaving the philosophy to the characters while he keeps the plot in hum with Graham’s efforts at self-preservation. Each chapter unfolds in a deliberate manner. He ponders how his choice of where he sits at the passengers’ mess table impacts the impressions of the others sharing his voyage. He sniffs out the apparent assassin, who wears about him a heavy odor of roses no doubt suggesting a funeral. He uncertainly fingers his pistol, then scrambles to locate a replacement.

All the time, we are reminded Graham is not particularly bad off. “You have advantages over the soldier,” Haki tells him. “You have only to defend yourself. You do not have to go into the open. You may run away without being a coward.”

In fact, running away successfully proves Graham’s test of bravery. It’s a wonderful bit of irony.

Journey Into Fear may be a tad slow for thriller readers used to Nelson DeMille. The ending is a bit abrupt, and somewhat confusing, though I think Ambler intended for there to be a bit of anti-climax. When you are invested in making a point about what separates men from monsters, or from being what one character calls “apes in velvet,” you don’t want to leave readers with everything too neatly sown up. Still, the ending does feel unnecessarily jambled.

That said, Journey Into Fear is great adventure fiction, and good fun. You can come away as I did with a pro-war takeaway, or with an entirely different impression, and it’s not going to impact the entertainment value to be had. As a spy novel, it’s very much of its time, yet very much for the ages, too.