The spy who spied on spies
By Richard LockeJune 30, 1974
About the Archive
John Le Carrel's new book—his seventh in thirteen years—is a thoroughly enjoyable English spy novel about the discovery of a double agent at the highest level of the British Intelligence bureaucracy. It reconfirms the impression that Le Carré belongs to the select company of such spy and detective story writers as Arthur Conan Doyle and Graham Greene in England and Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald in America. There are those who read crime and espionage books for the plot and those who read them for the atmosphere; the former talk of “ingenious puzzles” and take pride in “pure ratiocination”; the latter think themselves more literary, worry about style and characterization, and tend to praise their favorite writers as “real novelists.” Le Carrel's books —like those of the six authors just mentioned—offer plenty for both kinds of readers.
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” is fluently written; it is full of vivid character sketches of secret agents and bureaucrats from all levels of British society, and the dialogue catches their voices well. The social and physical details of English life and the day to day activities of the intelligence service at home and abroad are convincing. Unlike many writers Le Carre is at his best showing men hard at work; he is fascinated by the office politics of the agency since the war. He even has a go at such “novelistic” effects as interlocking themes of sexual and political betrayal. Yet the plot is as tangled and suspenseful as any action fan could require, and the inductive skill of the diffident, intellectual hero should bring joy to the hearts of the purists. The scale and complexity of this novel are much greater than in any of Le Carrel's previous books. It marks a happy return to the spy genre for Le Carre; his last book, “The Naive and Sentimental Lover” (1971), was a pretentious romantic story about a businessman, a writer and the woman they share—an inept psychosexual portrait of the bourgeois and the bohemian soul.
Le Carrel's career has been erratic from the start. Unlike most genre writers, he has never simply cranked out books according to a formula. His first two novels—a modest spy story, “Call for the Dead,” in 1961 and a rather poor detective story, “A Murder of Quality,” in 1962 —gave little sense that Le Carre would ever amount to very much. But his third book—“The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” in 1963—was manifestly the work of a strong and original popular novelist and was greeted with enthusiasm by such British worthies as C. P. Snow, J. B. Priestley and Graham Greene (who called it “the best spy story I have ever read”). The book became one of the great international best sellers of the 1960's and was the first thriller to dominate the American best seller lists for an entire year. Le Carre was established as an accomplished, intelligent genre writer as far from Ian Fleming as Ross Macdonald is from Mickey Spillane. His next book, “The Looking Glass War” in 1965, also sold well but it was distinctly less exciting, more of an atmospheric short story than a novel, for all its length. “A Small Town in Germany” in 1968 sold less well but is a most impressive popular novel; yet after it Le Cane abandoned the genre to write “The Naive and Sentimental Lover,” a book that failed with both critics and public.
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” is a full recovery, which in many ways consolidates Le Carrel's career. Its hero is a character whom Le Carre has used in almost every book, sometimes as the hero, sometimes in minor role. Now he is more carefully developed than ever before.
George Smiley is a pudgy, middleaged secret agent who seems “breathtakingly ordinary.” He's a quiet, be spectacled Oxford man with an interest in 17th‐century German literature, an embarrassed or abstracted air, considerable physical awkwardness, and ill‐fitting though expensive clothes. He is married to a glamorous, intelligent, aristocratic wife who (as at the start of every novel) has run off with one of her many lovers.
Smiley is thus an anti‐James Bond, an unheroic, frequently cuckolded secret agent who looks like a shy and miserable clerk in an old London bank. In fact, of course, Smiley is the finest secret agent in the world; his pathetic demeanor conceals a brilliant mind and stout heart. Smiley is one of the last English gentlemen —not a strutting parody of the clubman, like Bond, or a foppish and conniving political type, but an honorable, decent fellow who hasn't much hope or comfort in the postwar world. He is the sorry witness of national decline, epitomized by the service: “The inspired amateurism of a handful of highly qualified, underpaid men had given way to the efficiency, bureaucracy and intrigue of a large Government department.”
The dramatic and sociological possibilities of such a hero are considerable, and in his new novel Le Carre certainly makes the most of them; but in his first two books he could barely see them: the novels stumble along quite artlessly, the prose is undistinguished. Instead of using Smiley as a means of criticizing the Establishment in its conduct of the secret service—as he does in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—he first made Smiley a docile employe, then took him entirely out of the service and, somewhat hesitantly, put him up against the snobbery of an English public school.
In “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” Le Carre created a new hero, Alec Leamas, as a means of expressing an angry revaluation of the profession of espionage and the conventions of its fiction. Smiley appears only once, as a prissy little man, a part of the Establishment, fixing things up after Leamas has gone to jail. Leamas, by contrast, is an aggressive field agent, not a desk man; he is very strong, “built like a swimmer,” quick to anger, cynical, “not quite a gentleman—a virile, middleaged angry young man who suggests more of James Bond's cold physical competence Smiley's bumbling intellection.
In the end, after multiple twists and turns of the plot have revealed that Leamas's boss is as filthy as his East German enemies, Leamas declaims the ostensibly anti‐romantic message of the book: “What do you think spies are: priests, saints, martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” The British use spies “so that the great moronic mass you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need [them] for the safety of ordinary crummy people like you and me.”
There's clearly more than a little adolescent corn in this—an easy romanticism of the sordid, a selfserving protestation that really honest people (like Leamas) who truly care about individual lives and the harmony of ends and means are simply not fit for this filthy world. There's a strong dose of moral snobbery and self‐pity in Leamas's final self‐sacrifice for love. But it is of just such vigorous cliches that strong popular fiction is made. Leamas's aggression and physical activity seem to have brought Le Carre to life: the prose is quick, the dialogue right on pitch, the plot complex but highly charged, the background on life in England and Germany and on the methods and routines of the intelligence service is detailed and convincing. When Le Carre had used Smiley as his hero, he had not been able to release the operatic energy of this book at its best (and worst).
“The Looking Glass War” continued and deepened the critique of the intelligence service Establishment, but Le Carre was trapped within the point of view of a young, weak and naive hero quite unlike Leamas; the only active character in the book is a doomed, outmoded field agent—a Danzig Pole desperate to be accepted as a real English gentleman. Le Carre goes into impressive and loving detail about the deluded old men of an inefficient sub‐department of intelligence. Smiley appears in this book as an ominous representative of a rival agency, a member of the evil but realistic modern espionage Establishment, effective but devoid of honor and idealism.
“A Small Town in Germany” was much more successful because it set a brutal, lower‐class interrogator (who does resemble Leamas in many ways) against a cross‐section of the Establishment (the British Embassy in Bonn) and had him chasing a seemingly insignificant fellow who has a touch of Smiley's pathos turns out to have more brains, morals and political ideals than the bosses. The portrait of the city and of the Embassy and its employes is the best sustained description Le Carre achieved before his new book. The use of historical details and the sense of German political during Britain's bid for entry to the Common Market ‐are ambitious and well done. The plot is strong but relatively simple, a straight line: find the defector, expose hypocrisy, all in a few days.
In “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”intellectual authority. He is the best man, responding to the call of duty: to spy against his former colleagues. Le Cant has learned a lot since he first created Smiley; he now can handle complementary heroes and intertwining plots. The story of Jim Prideaux, a strong field agent like Leamas who was shot in the back in suspicious circumstances abroad, counterpoints Smiley's research activities with melodramatic foreign adventures. In yet a further reclamation of old territory, Le Carr6 also sets the subplot at a public school, which is much more vividly portrayed than that in his second novel. His characterization too has become much richer: we meet Cabinet ministers, Whitehall officials, aides, journalists, old office hands; and there is an extremely dextrous off‐stage portrait of Smiley's faithless wife. Le Carré has never presented so much detail about the intelligence Establishment, and he moves easily from past to present, from adventure to research and induction, and keeps one guessing right to the end which of the five top men is the double agent./ Smiley has become humanity at its decent English best; the glamour of the Empire has faded, but he quietly carries on.
Le Carre's originality and distinction as a popular novelist lie in his use of the conventions of the spy novel for purposes of social criticism. In his introduction to The London of “The Philby Conspiracy” (1968), Le Came remarked that the career of the double agent Kim Philby—who is a protype of the double agent in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”—illustrates the “capacity of the British ruling class for reluctant betrayal and polite self‐preservation.” The British secret services are “microcosms of the British condition, of our social attitudes and vanities.”
It is the late Victorian fantasy of “the inarticulate supremacy of the English gentleman” that is expressed in the traditional British spy novel. The genre grew with the British Empire; Stevensonian boy's novels of adventure in exotic places came to express a grandiose political and racial delusion—from Kipling's “Kim” (1901) and John Buchan's “The Thirty‐Nine Steps” (1915), through W. Somerset Maugham's ostensibly cool and antiheroic “Ashenden: or, The British Agent” (1928) and Eric Ambler's “A Coffin for Dimitrios” (1939), right down to the camp, compensatory fantasies of dying Empire in Ian Fleming's James Bond series (1953–1965) and the hardboiled killers of Len Deighton's “The Iperess File” (1962) or Frederick Forsyth's “The Day of the Jackal” (1971).
In none of these books do the authors worry about ends and means and class inequities. Since “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” Le Cane always does. He employs the techniques and conventions of these spy novels and is obviously concerned with the management of suspenseful effects—there are plenty of pursuits and disguises and escapes in his books—but he also draws upon the great tradition of English social realism, especially that part which in many ways begins with Dickens's “Bleak House” in 1853. In that novel Dickens uses a detective to help re solve the action: Inspector Bucket of the London Police brings the questing heroine to the symbolic center of England—a dark graveyard in a London slum from which a smallpox epidemic and a network of deadlocked legal and sexual claims have spread out like ripples in a filthy well until they touch all of British society.
This symbolic and melodramatic kind of social criticism was continued in Henry James's “The Princess Casamassima” (1886) and Joseph Conrad's “The Secret Agent” (1907), in both of which the political spectre of anarchism was introduced. By the 1930's and 1940's Graham Greene could draw on this tradition to write chiaroscuro thrillers in which sordid crimes and rotten ideologies are portrayed as emblems of man's fallen condition; “The Confidential Agent” (1939) and “The Ministry of Fear” (1943) employed both the conventions of the spy novel and the critical possibilities of the Dickensian mode in order to express Roman Catholic theology. In much the same wa}f, Norman Mailer in “Barbary Shore” (1951) mixed these traditions to present an ideological debate about socialism.
Since 1960 the newspapers have been full of major spy stories: the U‐2 overflights, the Philby conspiracy, the dangers of the Profumo affair, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Latin America, the rise of domestic surveillance and agents provocateurs. the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, the resignation of Willy Brandt. Le Carre's novels perfectly express the moral and political disillusion such revelations evoke in citizens of democratic countries who have long prided themselves on their “open societies.”
At one point in “A Small Town Germany” a character repeats the old saw that a diplomat is a gentleman who lies for his country. Le Carre's novels show us that such gentlemen are actually unprincipled fools and kna% s quite given over lying to their countrymen, their protheir wives and themselves. The professions of diplomacy and espionage have very nearly become the same; the distinctions between the creation and execution of foreign policy are quite dangerously blurred. The “great game,” as Kipling called the maintenance of the British Empire by espionage in “Kim,” is no longer the sport of “inspired amateurs” or a “secret elite” who insure the beneficent rule of the all‐wise British Lion. The lion is mangy, the Empire has crumbled, the agents have all gone to seed or become brutes and traitors available to the highest bidder or dangerously prone to political and ideological delusions.
However, are not Le Carre's novels, even at their best, falsely comforting? For all their angry social criticism, they always offer us the pleasures of imagining the world as it was portrayed in the good old‐fashioned English novel of class and character, manners and morals: the surface details of the physical and social world are clearly seen; people's looks and voices are immediately categorized and brightly reproduced; the plots are complex, suspenseful, full of historical details, but they are always triumphantly concluded, all mysteries and ambiguities neatly resolved. The psychology is straightforward; motives tend to be unmixed; the tangles of sex and family life are simplified.
Le Carre's novels appear to dispel the romantic illusion of a strong, noble British Daddy who knows best: but is not George Smiley essentially but good old British Daddy all the same? Leamas dies a violent death, Smiley lives to rejoin his wife and spy another day; but in both cases they perpetuate national stereotypes. Quite inadvertently Le Carre's novels reinforce the sodden liberalism they claim to condemn. They are nostalgic and given to self‐pity; they offer two‐dimensional models of human experience, melodramatic or sentimental answers to political dilemmas, and the simplistic and self‐comforting suggestion that good men (and readers) should give up politics for lost and—like the victimized boy Candide—go cultivate their gardens. Le Carre's books repeatedly express a horrified, morally outraged but essentially naive retreat from the full imagination of politics and society. His novels thus bear only superficial resemblance to such complex and ironic spy noveli as Kurt Vonnegut's “Mother Night” (1961), Anthony Burgess's “A Tremor of Intent” (1967) and—on the grand scale—Thomas Pynchon's “V.” (1963) and “Gravity's Rainbow” (1973). In those books human experience is intrinsically problematical, often absurd; in Le Carre's books everything works out. When Le Carre tried for depth in his last novel, he failed; modernism and the ironies of the literary novels of the 1960's are beyond him; but when, as in this new book, he shows the surface of experience in that good oldfashioned way, he is thoroughly entertaining.
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