puff 193 Petit's The Human Pool

Chris Petit's The Human Pool is another triumph. The other or at least the other one that I have read being Psalm Sunday the book that argues that the conflict in Northern Ireland was, at one point at least, between MI5 and MI6.

The Human Pool is a slow burner. Its construction is a strange, rambling structure at which I sometimes had to force myself to look. Certain floors in this building seem to have been missed. The Nuremburg Doctors' Trial and the Code of Medical Ethics that followed are not given prominence. And yet that is the point or at least one point on which this book might have swung quite clearly.

Bluntly, the book is hard to get into and sometimes hard to follow.

This rather large thing aside, the book is brilliant. The scope of experimentation on pools of hmans with drugs, is set out. The context that Petit offers for this is, yawn, the world of the spy. Spies for the Eichmann, spies for Dulles, for OSS, the SS the MIs and on- spies for hire.

I woke up to the idea that all this occurred in a very twentieth century disollution of the human personality. End games as identity changes. All happening in the names of wider, sometimes final solutions.

Some funny little thoughts throughout the book: the notion that a great leader will come out of the area above Iraq, how important was Dulles..or the Reichfuhrer...where is Five in all of this human-pool-for-the-testing-of-drugs-business, where is Six...


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