Fictionalising the Cold War: No James Bonds here

By Mark David  

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At the moment I've just seen the TV-series The Company. This wasn't ground breaking television, but it did a great job of visualising the cold war. The Company is a three part miniseries part being in East/West Berlin that was particularly atmospheric. Berlin in the fifties, East Berlin still a wreck from the war, it's all there. But before getting into a thread about The Company I want to backtrack a bit and explain the reason for my interest in this series.

I admit it, the Cold War fascincates me. Nowadays it seems any crime or mystery thriller revolves around the role of that little handheld computer we call the smartphone: GPS, tracking people, discovering messages revealing secrets. Television predominantly. The problem for fiction is, it often ties the story down to a series of often-seen incidents we have seen so often before. You know, where the protagonist gets that just-in-time sms or receives a tip off as he walks past the house where the bad guy lurks, or the police task group following someone to an area coordinating their position from the ubiquitous three sender-masts on the mobile grid, closing in for the kill. Yawn. It was interesting the first time around ...

Perhaps one of the main reasons I trashed the 21st century for the twentieth. It just seemed to make so much sense. No phones. Characters in extremis, cut-off from the outside world. I loved the idea of fictionalising the cold war because it's possible to go back to a time when agents and the victims of deception really were on their own. No online ... anything. No safety rope. No contact. Nada. Other than themselves and what an individual can pull from the mass of grey matter unencumbered by appointments, friend requests or surfing the net for the not-quite-essential info about the latest reality TV-show.

A Reference of Past

Perhaps another reason is I grew up under the cold war. It is a part of my psyche as much as JVC v. betamax, Video Killed The Radio Star and MTV. I was born of the radio age but grew up in the video age and have seen the entry and subsequent changes to society brought about by any small-packaged electronic device that ever came into existence. Except those used in the world of spies.

I decided to go with the flow on this one - use what you know, I told myself. And what is better than the knowledge of the way the world used to work, polished into understanding by the comfort of historical distance? I wanted something without mobile phones. I wanted isolation. And intrigue spiced with deception.

I'm currently developing the back plot of The Elements that involves experts in the shadows. Puppet masters who successfully nurture a psychology of fear and deception. I keep looking around for good fiction that has captured this in the way I want to but admit I have to look hard.

No James Bonds here

Who has ever heard of James Jesus Angleton? Otherwise known as 'Jim.' Well I had. Because of writing what I'm writing. This guy is total legend. The archetypal master of subterfuge, deception and counter deception. He was the one man who could navigate through the wilderness of mirrors. The man who collected and analysed thousands of small unrelated little pieces of information. He was the only one who knew the picture could only come into focus by relating these pieces to each other. 

It was about finding those relations. So the spy became the detective as well, except Angleton knew he was working against masterminds as chess masters - and the analogy is made in the last part of the 3-part series. The masters of the all-powerful KGB creating worlds within worlds for the CIA and MI6 to get lost in. 

One of the reasons - of many - for writing a cold-war based series was my interest in writing about the effect on the players of a hidden game of masters. The Company features real people, in particular Michael Keaton's portrayal of James Angleton was well conceived and executed. The gaol master too. Sleep deprivation. Perception of the game by just thinking it through. Year by painstaking year.

The Way It Was

Keaton comes real close to the kind of feel I've been looking for. If they could have gotten hold of Willem Dafoe - who really looks like Angleton himself - with the same depth Michael Keaton then the series could have been complete ... The thing is, The Company really brought the audience under the skin of ...  not knowing what the f*** was going on. Because that was the way it was. 

So much fiction these days dots the eyes and crosses the t's it seems like the creators regard their audience as children. I find very little that satisfies my ever-hungrey appetite for prime-quality fiction these days. The Company did that. Nothing is what it seems to be. Who can you trust? Who is the mole? We were kept guessing to the end. And even afterwards, provides a very good platform for reflection.

The point of this blog is to make a simple point that I think it's very okay to let the reader or watcher make up their own minds as they wander within the wilderness of mirrors. 

Nordic Legends & Beliefs 1: The Norse and afterlife

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The Norse and the afterlife

Introduction

One of the most important objectives for me developing The Elements is that each book is not regarded as ‘just a continuation of a story’. The Element themes is one way of creating something unique in a larger whole. As are the shift in which character comes to the fore. Just as importantly, and in many ways the raison d’étre though, is the unique blend of setting - and ‘thrust’. By thrust, I mean that core framework of ideas, historical precedents and beliefs of the characters past and present. This first of a series of blogs explores the background for He Who Favors Fire, is concerned with the mythological backdrop of Nordic mythology, coupled to local legends and the beliefs of some local characters with a thing or two to say about. This is the first of 3 blogs looking at Nordic Legends and Beliefs.

One only has to drive around Denmark, Sweden and Norway to find ancient places, bogs of sacrifice, burial mounds, runestones - all commemorating the dead. The concept of Nordic death was something very different than a Christian, Jewish of Islamic one. Death was part of life: In many ways, it was a society based on a system of belief concerning the dead and the gods who ruled the realms between which man passed in life and death. 

The late iron-age people of Scandinavia well before and in Viking times believed each tree, each rock had a spirit attached to it. These beliefs only died with Christianization and continued reputedly until as late as the 18th century. Some of these beliefs can still be glimpsed today in those sagas left to us, words transcribed into books. Books providing inspiration for fantasy; fantasy feeding fiction. Delve a little deeper and a whole world awaits discovery. 

Nordic Beliefs & Landscape

For the Norse, the concept of the afterlife was a very real part of the lives of people for whom superstition was a way of life. This was a world that has fostered places and creatures in nothing less than Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings  - the landscape being the embodiment of the seasons, darkness and light. Cold and isolation. The grave is often described as an abode for the dead, and it was also the location of rites. The tradition of putting out food and beer on the tumulus has survived into modern times, in some parts of Scandinavia. This tradition is a remainder of the ancestor worship that was common during early Norse culture. If the dead were taken care of, they would in return protect the homestead and its people, and provide for its fertility.

The Cult of the Ancestor

The ancestor worship of the Norse had at its core that part of the soul stays in the underworld, representing the person in spiritual form, becoming an ancestor. The living are able to communicate with the ancestor at any time in a person’s lifetime. This common to the pre-christian Germanic world-view where the boundaries between the soul and the environment of which it is part are not separate.

The journey to the underworld

What was a central aspect of the belief of the Norse was a tradition of belief concerning the journey of the deceased  - a voyage to the realm of the dead, a realm which could be situated inside a mountain, on the other side of the sea, in the heavens or in the underworld. We can only speculate since the sagas that have come down to us, mostly from Icelandic sources, are only fragmentary. Scholars do not have any answers to the question whether the dead would remain for some time in the grave and later depart for the realm of the dead, what the purpose of the grave goods was, or if the ship in the barrow was to transport the deceased to the realm of the dead.

The boat and the afterlife

We do know that the tradition for ancestor worship and the afterlife was a rich part of the bronze-age peoples trading and partaking in rituals all along the Swedish-Norwegian coastline. This is evident in the many - now inland - rock carvings, that at that time in the Bronze Age would have been inland coastal waters, a shallow fjordland of rocky promontory and trading settlements. The veneration of the ship and the symbological journey can still be seen today in the various sites in Sweden and Norway still there though the waters have now receded and the ocean level lower now compared to the bronze age. 

In succeeding centuries the sea level continued to drop, leading to the emergence of larger swathes of land coinciding with deteriorating climatic conditions, and a subsequent period of hardship. Hardship and isolation replaced the days of plenty and it was not until the beginning of the 1st millennium AD that Scandinavia resumed contact with the rest of Europe. This period - the pre-Viking to Viking Age - was the Golden Age in the period AD 400 to the end of the Viking period in the eleventh century. 

The use of ship-burials featuring stone settings go back to 1000 BC. continuing well into Viking times and only ceasing with the spread of Christianity and the tradition of burying in graves in the ground, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Viking Ship grave. Island of Gotland. The Baltic

In the next blogs in this series I will explore legends concerning the dead that have provided core source material for the development of the Prolgue to the series, Beyond The Light Of Reason  where a murder is committed resembling the rituals of old, part of a complex puzzle involving a mysterious painting of the past and dark forces in motion.

These blogs are work in progress.

Links
Links: Norse mythology org
Tanum: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/557

Elements Scenes 2: Sweden & Tiveden

By Mark David  

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My journey into writing The Elements began with a trip to Sweden. Sweden is not the country of extremes I naïvely thought it was. Or so I thought I thought it was. 

My first impression of Sweden was driving North from Copenhagen. Skåne is flat and very much like Denmark - neat, orderly. The flag was different but the landscape was nearly the same, just bigger. Then we arrived at the belt where the open landscape stops and the real Sweden begins: The land of forest, shade. Boulders and rock. And moss. 

Isolation

Books dealing with characters in isolation could almost be a genre it itself. It's seeing a place and sensing the power of isolation that is the difference. I happened to be in Sweden in the fall and was struck by the vibrance of this season in that typical Swedish landscape: boulders left from the ice age and trees covered in moss, the scatter of dry leaves. Isolation. nature. Here was a setting for characters removed from the comfort zone of their ordinary lives, a place for things to happen. That was just the beginning. 

Returning home I then began a process of research. Little did I know this was something to consume myself and my life for the next seven years. The next summer holiday was directed to a place that could take all those ingredients I discovered in the beech forest of Sweden and elevate it to the next level: This place was Tiveden, the area outlined in the pale blue circle. The little lake there in the middle of the circle is lake Unden; not so little.

Tiveden is a place like no other. It is the country just to the right of lake Unden - a bare-boned nature stripped of all the comfort found in wild overgrown places. Not desolate. Radical, I would call it. Tiveden is a radical place with a radical history: Places of sacrifice. The heart of it known as Trollkyrka, or Troll Church Mountain. A radical place that just demanded a radical story. He Who Favours Fire opens at Trollkyrka with an opening I guarantee is as extreme and violent as the place it takes place: Troll Church Mountain.

Tiveden struck me and my family as the perfect place to begin The Elements - the concept had grown in the meantime to a full-blown mystery thriller though the writing had barely begun. Tiveden is very rugged - like no other place I've ever been to before. So began the process of crafting by scene visiting. This country blew me away. 

The time I was there in the summer in a sweltering 32 degrees C. Hiking with nothing but shorts and my leather aussie-hat I nearly fainted, falling over from heat stroke. All the while, thinking 'what would be like to caught out here in a storm ...'. Then I remembered my previous visit to Sweden in the fall. Tiveden in the fall. That was it: He Who Favours Fire had found it's home. 

But this was just the beginning. It was researching the history of this place that really made an impression beginning a process of story-weaving based on little known but historically accurate legend-digging that makes He Who Favors Fire an original mystery-thriller. 

By Mark David  

Elements scenes 1: Stevns Fort, Øresund strait Denmark

By Mark David  

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In the research undertaken for a late cold-war spy-thriller series called The Elements, one of the most unique places I have had the pleasure to visit is the cold war Stevns Fort complex. Stevns Fort was built in response to the development of the Cold War and the threat of Soviet invasion.

A visit to this place is an experience like none other: A guided tour is a must. This was the front line and is a great visit for anyone interested in these things. No optical illusions here, the tunnel really is that long. And there's more than one. 

Visiting this place was very similar experience visiting the tunnels of the Maginot Line. But that was in the days before I got my first digital camera. Entry to the complex is afforded through the central entrance bunker. A deep stair takes the visitor to the cold depths that was the heart of the cold war in Denmark - the front line between East and West. 

The fort opened for the first time in 2008 and was built during the cold war in the years 1950-1953. It consists of an above ground radar and armoured battery and an underground tunnel complex carved out of the chalk cliffs of Stevns Klint.

The fort had a main armament of 4 150mm canon in two turrets that had previously been mounted on the german battleship Gneisenau from the second world war. These are still in mint condition.

The Gneisenau. 

The turrets seen in the recent picture above the battleship are the secondary turrets on the sides of the Gneisenau from world war II still in working order today. The main turrets of the Bismarck class battleship can still be seen at the wartime battery in Norway.

The two turrets are armed from the magazines located deep in the chalk tunnels directly below them, with hoists and vertical shafts still in operational condition. 

Each gun has an operational radius of 23 km making it possible to reach the Swedish coast and even the Køge bugt bay south of Copenhagen, due north of Stevns Klint Fort.

The guns are in mint working condition and were used for training at the close of the cold war. On the picture below the German origins of the canon are evident in the writing and stamps of origin. 

Command and radar station covering the Øresund stair, monitoring and registering all passing ship traffic. 

It was rumoured that intelligence concerning the sailing of missiles fromt the Soviet Union giving rise to the Cuban missile crisis was first identified and notified from Stevns Fort. 

 Rumours must be false however, since these ships did not sail through the Øresund but further West up through Storbælt strait between the islands of Denmark.

The experience of walking the tunnels is the really what a visit to Stevns Fort offers the visitor - opening out through the cliff face to the ocean beyond.

The green is algae growing on the cold damp chalk walls. It does not pose a health risk being a normal condition for places underground like this.

Sleeping quarters for the personnel at a time of alert.

As an anecdote - the blast proof steel doors below were removed from a wartime German bunker and rebuilt into the Stevns Fort.