corollary

Entry #167

Listening to:

Pergolesi, Salve Regina in F minor. This piece is something of a filler in a CD that features Pergolesi's really famous piece, the Stabat Mater. This CD features the counter-tenor Andreas Scholl and is quite good. In the Stabat Mater he sings with Barbara Bonney, and having two such different voices works well. I don't know, though, if his part needed to be transcribed at all for his range.

Just read:

Colonel Frederick Bailey, Mission to Tashkent. This is another memoir from the world of spies and secret agents. Bailey was sent to the Tashkent area in early 1918 to find out what was happening there, and to try and convince the Communist authorities that they shouldn't allow their German and Austrian POWs to cause trouble for the UK in Europe or the Indian sub-continent. He quickly found life difficult because the British were simultaneously backing various White Russian campaigns in the Russian Civil War. Eventually, he has to go underground, and the memoir then describes how he evades capture and eventually manages to escape to friendly Persia.

Mission to Tashkent is not quite as enthralling as Between silk and cyanide. I think this boils down to a few factors. One is that Bailey wrote his memoir just after WW2, and Marks wrote his in the 1990s. The styles of the respective periods are inevitably a bit different. Bailey's story also suffers because he spends most of his time in varying degrees of ignorance about what's happening in the world. He has precious little contact with anyone he can trust and so there is very little in the way of conversation described. Marks, by way of contrast, worked in London, surrounded by people he could and had to interact with, and in a position where he naturally got something of an overview picture of the whole war in Europe.

Bailey's story does make the time and place come to life. Reading it, you gain an appreciation of how brutal and chaotic the revolution was, and how it was felt in a corner of the Soviet Union-to-be that it is all to easy to ignore.

To read next:

Graham Greene, Stamboul Train.