rice probably

This pronunciation guide is from Où est le garlic? by Len Deighton (1965), the author of The Ipcress File. For anyone who hasn’t heard of The Ipcress File, or of Michael Caine for that matter, here. You’re welcome.

Now that we’re all properly briefed, we can appreciate the intricate genius of Len Deighton: the working man’s John le Carré, primogenitor of Harry Palmer and therefore arguably of Michael Caine’s career, military historian, and occasional cookery columnist for The Observer (London). Throw in his background as an utterly cool art student cat whose parents were ‘in service’ as a chauffeur and a housekeeper-cook, and we begin to get that whiff of early 1960s anti-establishment irreverence, a refusal to kowtow to the status quo that was all the more vicious for its subtlety.

So read this pronunciation guide with all that context informing your font appreciation and vowel sounds, and with Harry Palmer’s vocals reverberating in your cranium. It is pure frang-lays, the lingua franca of the bowler-hatted Brit abroad, priggishly bourgeois and culturally tone deaf. Deighton absolutely nails the plummy droning diphthongs and plodding stresses. Hi-bloody-larious.

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