The Topeka School is about a teenage boy who thinks he’s learning to be ‘a man’, when in fact he’s learning a load of rubbish that he’s going to have to unlearn. The author Ben Lerner barely fictionalises his youth in the 1990s in Topeka, Kansas. His fictionalized self, Adam Gordon, gets drunk in the basements of large but creepily identical houses with his social circle, the kids of affluent professionals who have never walked anywhere in their lives, throwing absurd gang signs at one another before a beat-down.
The story always feels focused even as the narrators (Adam, his mother and his father) range over topics as diverse as psychiatry, the Westboro Baptist Church and permanently drunk US diplomats and their families in 1950s Taiwan. These diverse component parts orbit around a sudden act of violence at one of those drunken basement parties, and around the themes it brings up.
We see brief snapshots of the life of Darren, a kid Adam’s age who appears to have a serious learning disability. Darren imagines that he has survivalist skills because he owns a knife collection and hides a stash of chocolate bars in the bushes. If he was black, Lerner reminds us, Darren would be in mortal danger from the cops, and if he were a girl, from sexual predators. On the other hand, Darren occupies a strange place in his social world and becomes semi-ironically popular with his peers. But the opening scene is a flash-forward to Darren being held in a police station after an unspecified crime, so we know things are not going to end well. In a touch I found moving, the adult Darren still drinks hot water as his preferred beverage – a habit that goes back to his childhood when his parents would be drinking coffee and he would want to join in. The hot water reminds us that he was once a cute kid with loving parents.
Adam is a debating champion. Lerner describes his competitions as a kind of bizarre ritual, ‘the white noise after the end of history.’ In fast-talking babble, teenagers in suits demonstrate by flawless logic that welfare payments will lead to overloaded court systems, which will lead to civil collapse, which will lead to nuclear holocaust – ‘almost every plan, no matter how minor, would lead to nuclear holocaust.’ For Adam, the debating has its healthy and unhealthy sides: it is at once a way to express himself artistically and a socially-acceptable way for him to be aggressive. When I did debating, ten-plus years after Adam and on the other side of the Atlantic, it was not this bad. But all I’ll say is, I ran into more than one character like Adam’s smarmy young debating coach, whose methods of argument prefigure online trolling.
But, the author reminds us, even before the 24-hour news cycle and Twitter storms, people were overloaded with disorienting babble every day. The strange ritual of the debaters is no worse than the rapid-fire ‘terms and conditions’ at the end of TV and radio ads. This is one of many political-social insights which Lerner shares with us, as he traces in the 1990s the incipient trends which are going supernova in our own time.
The central question is how a boy turns into ‘a man,’ whatever that means. Various adult men serve as role models for Adam. But then there are ‘The Men’, the adult male strangers who would ring his family’s house regularly to threaten and harass his mother, a well-known author (based on Harriet Lerner, author of The Dance of Anger). Adam’s obvious contempt for ‘The Men’ (his mother figures out a clever way to prank them back) does not compensate for the fact that they really scare him. Make your best attempt to psychoanalyze the strange flashback in which Adam, while still a small child, encases his penis in chewing-gum. Like a lot of other things in this deeply intriguing novel, neither he nor his parents, a poet and two shrinks, can quite figure it out.
The Topeka School, 2019, FSG Originals
Note: I wrote this review two or three years ago, then lost it in a folder and lately stumbled on it. I can report from this vantage point in time that the novel stayed fresh in my mind even though my review didn’t.
The most obvious fact about the stories of John le Carré is the one that goes unaddressed explicitly until The Secret Pilgrim (1990): these are stories primarily about what the British call ‘the officer class’. We do not entirely neglect the ones who are actually doing the spying (lamplighters, scalphunters, etc) and we are quite interested in the agents and assets (the Joes). But the figure around whom the typical story revolves is the British (often half-British) upper-class male intelligence officer. His job is to groom and cultivate spies, which involves exploiting the vulnerabilities of people, getting them to risk being tortured and shot, and generally treating human beings as a means to an end.
Another feature of le Carré’s work, very apparent in the 1980s, is that many of his characters are stark mad. In order to be attracted to this work, it helps if the intelligence officer is one of the psychological walking wounded, and by doing it he gets even worse. The le Carré character is not usually motivated by his political convictions but by his neuroses.
This is not as cynical as it might seem (John Le Carré is never as cynical as he might seem) because the neuroses themselves are not always entirely ignoble.
Today’s cover image: a 1988 postage stamp celebrating Perestroika (Reform) in the Soviet Union
The novels I’m about to talk about involve a new level of introspection compared to what went before. But ‘optimism’ is the other word that springs to mind. Even though it’s a weary and qualified optimism, and it turned out to be wrong, it’s still genuine and it really animates these books.
A Perfect Spy (1986)
The 1980s marked a personal milestone for le Carré: he wrote A Perfect Spy, a great semi-autobiographical novel that we can file under ‘things men do sooner than go to therapy.’ I’m not just being glib there, he pretty much admitted it in this interview.A Perfect Spy is not even a little bit optimistic, but I think that once le Carré got it out of his system he felt a lot better about everything.
A British diplomat and intelligence officer named Magnus Pym disappears. Is he in mourning for his late father, or going through a personal crisis, or defecting across the Iron Curtain? While his wife and his boss and the whole Anglo-American spook apparatus are running around trying to find him, we flash back to before his birth, to a Baptist church in rural England in the 1930s, where a teenage boy named Rick Pym is brazenly conning his entire community out of their money.
The novel really comes to life from this point on. Rick (father of the present-day missing diplomat Magnus) is a shameless cliché-spewing con artist whose act encompasses his entire being and sucks in all those around him. He is a kind of king to a nomad tribe of fellow crooks and their ‘lovelies’ who travel all around Britain blackmailing, cheating and partying. He goes to people’s deathbeds to talk them out of their life savings and leave their families with nothing; he sends his son abroad on a mission to find some chimerical treasure; he’s a black marketeer during World War Two; he runs for parliament; he aspires to stay one step ahead of his ‘temporary problems of liquidity’ and take his place among ‘the highest in the land.’
Superficially Magnus is not like Rick. On a deeper level, it’s a different story. To those who know the grown-up Magnus, he seems to be a charismatic, capable person. Like his father, lying is as easy as breathing to him. But the lie is true for him, in the moment. The flashbacks take us from Magnus’ second trimester to the present day, and from the moment he is old enough to talk we see him giving himself fully to whoever happens to be standing in front of him, whether it’s a Catholic priest, a student communist leader, an MI5 officer, a Czechoslovak spy, or a long succession of unfortunate women. Figuring out just where he is in the middle of all his bizarre words and actions is what’s so engrossing about the novel.
The first edition cover. I liked the first edition covers from the 60s and 70s, but the 80s ones are not great.
How easy it is for the morally disoriented child of the criminal underworld to find a niche in the world of espionage. How comfortable he finds it there, how much like home. Until all his mutually irreconcilable commitments begin to catch up with him.
I’m a bad liar and anyway it rarely occurs to me to lie. I have great alternative weapons in my arsenal such as fudging, saying nothing, and hiding behind irony. So outright liars are intriguing to me. Their customs and ways and motivations are to me as remote as those of ancient peoples or uncontacted indigenous tribes. Though he’s strange, Magnus is also sympathetic. Our sympathy comes from understanding the gap between his public persona and what a deeply vulnerable person he is inside.
I think I was supposed to disapprove mightily of his great transgression of British patriotism but it seemed to me no worse than anything else anyone else does in any le Carré novel. I thought he was a much better human being than his father. I felt let down by the ending, but I can’t see where else it could have gone. This is a powerful story, better than anything else of le Carré’s that I’ve read.
The Russia House (1989)
Barley Blair is a good man with a straightforward, wholesome psychology. How did he find his way into a le Carré novel? Ah – maybe he’s another innocent who’s about to be chewed up and spat out by the spook world. Then again, maybe not; could go either way. Which is what kept me reading to the end.
Blair runs a small publishing company that he inherited from his father. The father was a pre-1956 communist, but of this Blair only inherited an affection for all things Russian. Well, most things Russian; not the secret police or the nuclear missiles. The new period of glasnost and perestroika – reform and openness – under Gorbachev has allowed Blair to visit book fairs in Moscow and make friends in Soviet literary circles. When he gets drunk after a visit to Boris Pasternak’s dacha, an intense (and also drunk) Russian man approaches him with an enigmatic request.
The meaning of this encounter only becomes clear much later. Katya, a young single mother who works in Soviet publishing, gives Blair a strange manuscript which he takes home. It turns out to be full of secrets about Soviet superweapons. Not the kind of secrets you might usually find in a spy thriller, such as how terrifying the Soviet nuclear arsenal is, but secrets about how useless their targeting systems are, how badly the tests are going. Strangely enough, when Blair brings the information to the western spy agencies, they seem a lot more threatened to find out their enemy has feet of clay.
The dissident rocket scientist sees himself as a doomed revolutionary. He meets Blair on the grounds of the Smolny Institute in St Petersburg, a suggestion, backed up by dialogue cues, that in their mission he hopes to channel the spirit of the October Revolution.
The Russia House has a lot of the staples of le Carré – dismal office politics that are somehow compelling, hypocrisy, tension, danger and darkness. But it stands out. The main character is a white male Briton, but he’s not an intelligence officer. He’s a poor ‘Joe.’ Most importantly, it is not about exploring this man’s neurosis. Blair is not a saint, but his motivations are straightforward and good: he wants his country to have a friendly partnership with the Soviet Union, to which end he wants to expose how fake the threat of nuclear war is; and meanwhile he is falling in love with Katya. This is a book about following a decent character who’s taken on himself a dangerous mission, and watching how he holds up under terrible pressure.
Soviet Russia has been this shadowy threat for decades in le Carré’s writing. Finally he takes us there in this book. What’s it like? There is a memorable scene set in a dysfunctional hospital; we see through Katya’s eyes a culture of informal and unedifying trade in goods and favours; fear of surveillance and arrest hangs over our characters. Blair secretly thinks Pasternak was over-praised and he is beginning to doubt that the great dissident writers he has been seeking actually exist. A complex and human Soviet Union emerges from this book.
The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
When I read the blurb of The Secret Pilgrim I thought it sounded self-indulgent and inessential, so I didn’t bother to read it for years. That was a mistake, because once I started it I was gripped, and flew through it.
The novel begins in the then-present day, with the end of the Cold War. Our old friend George Smiley has retired for real this time (I promise) and has been absent from le Carré novels for over a decade. (In A Perfect Spy and The Russia House there is not so much as a reference to him or, as far as I can make out, to anyone mentioned in his previous stories). But he returns to give a talk to a class graduating from some kind of spy school. The narrator is their teacher Ned, an aging former intelligence officer (and a secondary character from The Russia House – so there it is) whose career spanned the Cold War. Smiley’s talk turns into a very late night of slightly boozy reminiscences and reflections.
Smiley will say something like, ‘But of course, one mustn’t think we spies are in the business of protecting the country. The basic immorality of what we do is an acid gnawing at our souls and at the heart of democracy.’ At which point Ned will describe Smiley looking apologetically into his glass of brandy before adding, ‘But of course, as long as human nature is what it is, we must always have spies. To deal with situations like…’ He will glance at Ned – ‘…that business in Cluj-Napoca in 1976.’
At this point, narrator Ned will cut in. ‘But I hardly heard what he said. I was already back in Cluj, and I was staring into Elena’s eyes. To this day I don’t know whether she betrayed us, or we her. I suppose it hardly matters…’
There will follow a self-contained novella, fifty or a hundred pages long, describing some tragicomic bungle or ambiguous triumph. There are nine or ten of these episodes all told, spanning a period from the 1960s to the 90s, each one a cracking read in its own right, but each one adding a little to the portrait of Ned himself, and each one addressing itself to the question of Ned’s own journey in life, his search for a sense of purpose. The cause which seemed purposeful and defined at the dawn of the Cold War has by the 1980s dropped him into a reeling, disorientating world where he is surrounded by mental illness.
The framing narrative with Smiley is very strong too. I’ve poked fun, but Smiley’s reflections make for very good reading. And for the Smileyologists out there, Ned’s little episodes feature many characters from Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy – Esterhase, Haydon, etc.
Some episodes are more serious, some less so. There is a heartwarming story about a strange favour Smiley did for someone back in the day, and an absolutely harrowing account of an ex-priest and child abuser who spied for Nixon’s bombing campaigns against Cambodian villages, then got tortured by the Khmer Rouge. My favourites are some of the lower-stakes stories. There is one about a con artist from the Eastern Bloc who convinces the west that he is a patriot and martyr.
I must mention that there is a run-in with a character named Britta, who is eerily similar to her namesake in the sitcom Community (2009-2015). Is this where they got the name? Dan Harmon doesn’t seem like a John le Carré guy. I never felt this way about Britta in Community, but this Britta really is the worst. OK, second-worst after the Cambodia guy.
The second-last episode shows Ned interviewing Frewin, an eccentric civil servant who has been anonymously denounced as a spy. Despite Frewin’s extravagant delusions, he is astute enough to see that he and the spiritually lost Ned have a lot in common, such as a growing disgust with capitalism, the very system Ned set out to defend all those years ago. The final episode hammers the point home. Ned meets a posh and utterly amoral arms dealer. Ned has to ask himself whether this evil man represents everything he has spent his life protecting. Smiley in his after-dinner remarks takes up this theme as well – for example he suggests that the new recruits should spy on the Ozone Layer.
The Night Manager (1993)
Honourable mention here for The Night Manager, which I did not finish. This one is about a hotel worker who sets out on a mission to take down an evil arms dealer. I found the opening compelling and wanted to see how it would all turn out, but the main character set about making a ‘legend’ for himself (ie, living out a fake life to create a verifiable cover story), and he took too long at it.
Conclusion
Communism is defeated, le Carré suggests, so now it’s time to turn our fire on the excesses of capitalism: on environmental destruction, labour exploitation, imperialism and war profiteering. He didn’t want to destroy capitalism (more’s the pity), just tame its excesses. His hope that people in Europe and North America would take on capitalism en masse anticipated the anti-globalisation movements and the Occupy protests. But like his hopes for Russia, his vision of a kinder and fairer capitalism has definitely not been realised.
Le Carré took his own advice, even if too few others did. In his last few books he took on capitalism and empire with increasing sharpness. That’s what I’m going to write about in the next post.
Facebook and Instagram have put forward a rationale for the plagiarism they are doing in order to develop AI tools.
From theGuardian.co.uk: ‘According to Meta’s defence, there is “no economically feasible mechanism” for AI developers to obtain licensed copies of the “astonishingly large volume” of books needed to train AI.’
Well, if there’s no feasible way to do it, then just don’t steal the books. You can just not do it.
‘Meta “would have to initiate individualised negotiations with millions of authors”…’
That sounds very difficult. It also sounds like Meta’s problem, not ours. So again, how about, don’t do it?
It continues:
‘…a process which “would be onerous for even a few authors; it is practically impossible for hundreds of thousands or millions.”’
They are complaining that unless governments just give them permission to steal it all, it’s ‘practically impossible.’ Word of advice: if the thing you want to do is incompatible with paying authors for using their work for your profits, then it’s a bad thing and it should be practically impossible.
When you get familiar with 1970s John le Carré, you start to realise (and you don’t mind) that many of his novels fall into a comfortable pattern. It goes like this: Smiley (usually it’s Smiley) goes to a place and talks to a person, and the person is compelled to reveal some of the mystery; Smiley goes to another place and talks to another person, and some more of the mystery is revealed, from another angle so that these revelations only barely overlap with those of the last interview; Smiley goes to another place… and so on. Generally the person reveals to Smiley more than they wished, without Smiley resorting to torture or even threats. You begin to realise that the spy story is only a narrative vehicle to bring us to these places and to meet these people. The real story is the unique personality of Connie Sachs and the eccentric shabbiness of her home, or the paranoia of a mercenary pilot hiding in the Southeast Asian jungle, or the domestic life and peculiar speech patterns of an Estonian émigré activist, or the physical and mental scars which a teacher living in his caravan is barely able to hide.
Ostensibly Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People are a trilogy about an epic duel between two spymasters: the ‘flabby liberal’ Smiley, redeeming a western world that surely doesn’t deserve him, and the ‘fanatic’ Karla, Smiley’s perfect foil, the dark lord of Moscow Centre. Actually le Carré does not milk this set-up. Like the xenomorph in Alien, Karla looms large but we barely see him and we do not hear him speak. If le Carré had tried to deliver on this set-up, the battle of the great arch-spooks, he would have faltered. Moral certainty is not what fuels his stories. This loose trilogy ends up being something quite different from what we might expect.
In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley and his allies are outside the Circus, waging a secret war against its leadership. The story opens with Smiley in the wilderness and his ally Control fallen from power and deceased. The old guard have been ousted by a clique of four senior spies. Smiley is summoned back from retirement and told that one of the four is a Soviet undercover agent, and he is tasked with discovering which one.
Compared to those tight thrillers of the 1960s, this one is deeper and wider. The places to which we follow Smiley and the people he meets tell a story of their own, not a spy story, but one of cowardly and foolish apparatchiks pursuing their own prestige at the expense of the organisation. The traitor in the leadership is only a part of a broader context where those around him are willing to buy what he’s selling and not look too closely. This corrupt operation is called Witchcraft, and that’s fitting because like the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the enemy agent works to ‘win us with honest trifles and betray us in deepest consequence.’ Our apparatchiks hope that the honest trifles will impress the Americans. Meanwhile their real operations are being foiled, their real networks broken up, their real agents and officers eliminated.
Still from the movie Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011, dir Tomas Alfredson). I love this adaptation of the novel. They found ways to tell a very talky, indoorsy story in a powerful visual way. I especially love the focus on analogue and janky 1970s technology. My only nit-pick is that it’s bad that, like the BBC in the previous TV adaptation, they cast as George Smiley a guy who isn’t stout at all.
So why should I personally care if there’s a Soviet mole in British intelligence? That sounds like their problem. Smiley bypasses my cynicism. I care about this bad institution because he cares about it. He is faithful to an unfaithful wife and to a ruling class whose bankruptcy is known to few better than him. He is broad-minded, melancholy and conscientious. His lack of cynicism must not be mistaken for innocence. No criticism I could make of the institution and the cause that he serves (MI6 and liberal-democratic capitalism) would really shake him, or cause him to hate me.
When I read this: c 2013
Locations: England, Hong Kong, Czechoslovakia
Why read it? George Smiley takes down a traitor in the very highest ranks of the Circus, in the process waging a secret struggle against its leadership.
Memorable moments: There are parts with action and danger, but the most memorable are the most understated: the encounters between a young schoolboy and the wounded Jim Prideaux, a victim of the traitor.
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
The Honourable Schoolboy is a radical departure for a le Carré book. Most of his novels are heavy on office politics and upper-class angst and light on exciting adventures in the field. If an agent leaves Britain at all, he will go to nowhere that wasn’t once ruled by a Habsburg or a Hohenzollern. Smiley is either retired or in a humble position.
But in The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley is now unchallenged in the top job in the Circus, with his allies in the top positions around him. He sends an agent abroad – for once, not to Mitteleuropa but to Southeast Asia. What follows, over a long page-count, is a panorama of violent conflict and imperial collapse in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand, plus intelligence skullduggery in and around Hong Kong.
Don’t worry: as well as dull fare such as car bombs and peasant revolutions, we have plenty of exciting office politics. The Honourable Schoolboy has the distinction of being the only novel where Smiley occupies the top job in the Circus, and we get to see how him and his allies run things.
It’s a gripping and exciting read that I flew through in spite of its length. Unfortunately I remember it far less well than others I read around that time.
Again from the 2011 Alfredson movie. Esterhase, Haydon, Alleline, Control, Smiley and Bland in their soundproof room on the Fifth Floor. In The Honourable Schoolboy, most of this lot are in the doghouse. The main character is Jerry Westerby, played by Stephen Graham in the 2011 movie.
When I read this: c 2014
Locations: England, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, China
Why read it? A more action-oriented and exotic take on le Carré’s formula. The only novel where Smiley controls the Circus.
Memorable moments: Connie Sachs at the top table formerly occupied by Alleline, Haydon and co. being her eccentric self, complete with a dog which, because she is a communist train-spotter, she has named Trot.
Smiley’s People (1979)
This novel opens with Smiley once more on the outside, once more abandoned by his wife, and this time drunk and more depressed than usual. He is called back in to investigate the murder of an Estonian émigré general, and he discovers that the murder is linked to an intrigue which might be exploited to bring about the downfall and defection of his arch-enemy Karla.
The is classic le Carré and classic Smiley: we follow his waddling progress through interview after interview, distinct character after distinct character, the parts building up to our understanding of the whole. The promise of a final reckoning with Karla keeps us turning the pages, and the texture and humanity of le Carré’s world rewards us for doing so. If you’re here for the rankings, take note: this is my favourite of these three novels.
The basic moral conflict doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny, though. Smiley has to defeat Karla by using his own methods against him – how tragic. Only he doesn’t, does he? We don’t see Smiley pulling out anyone’s fingernails. Karla’s agents do terrible things in this novel but the worst thing Smiley does is a little blackmail. Using Karla’s love for his daughter against him doesn’t seem that bad, actually, because the daughter is not harmed in any way.
This ties into what I had to say about the 1960s le Carré books: the moral equivalence between East and West, sometimes hinted at, is never confirmed and often denied.
From the opening credits of the BBC adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (John Irvin, 1979)
When I read this: c 2022
Locations: England, Germany, Switzerland
Why read it? The final reckoning between Smiley and Karla. Smiley himself goes overseas on a dangerous mission to trap the Soviet spymaster.
Memorable moments: The climax of the operation revolves around a scene in which Smiley and co corner a Soviet diplomat, Grigoriev, and convince him to hand over the information crucial to trapping Karla.
In the previous post I talked about James Bond. Comparisons between Smiley and Bond decline in relevance past a certain point because Ian Fleming abandoned the Cold War pretty early in the series, and the movies abandoned it even earlier. Before the 1960s are out, Bond is doing collabs with his Soviet counterparts to take down the international crime agency Spectre.
Le Carré and his Circus stuck grimly with the Cold War right to the end. But they moved with the times. Le Carré’s novels from the 1980s are, I’ve come to think, his best. The Gorbachev period brings out more moral uncertainty and soul-searching than ever before. Next post I’ll talk about three of these brilliant Glasnost-era books.
Then again, season 2 of Andor is coming. If I have things to say about that, I’ll have to clear the decks here and return to le Carré in a few weeks.
David Cornwell began writing fiction (under the pen name John le Carré) while working as a British intelligence officer in Central Europe in the middle of the century. Talking to Channel 4 in later life, he said that during this espionage work he was never himself in any danger. The interviewer asked a good follow-up question: whether he had ever placed anyone else in danger. Le Carré replied, with a stony expression, that he would rather not say. The camera lingered on his face and we could read there what we read in his books: the troubled conscience of a spook. I have surprised myself by reading an unlucky number of the novels in which this man wrestled with his conscience. That is, half of the 26 novels he published in about 60 years. Some of these I’ve read, others I’ve had read to me by the excellent Michael Jayston thanks to Borrowbox and public libraries. If those thirteen novels skew toward his best works, and I think they do, then I’m in a pretty good position to give some recommendations. Over this and the next few posts I’m going to give my short review of each one. I’ve tagged this post ‘What are the best John le Carré books.’ But my regular readers may have noticed that I don’t go in for scoring books out of 100, or even ten or five, and I’m not keen on rating them like athletes. It would take me twenty seconds to tell you the five le Carré novels that, right this minute, I imperfectly remember liking best, according to my tastes and opinions at the time I read them, for what that’s worth. But these are all very good books. It would be more purposeful to write a little about each one and what I thought about it. At the end of each post I’ll offer some gestures toward rankings and recommendations. If you want to know which le Carré book to read, and if you’re going to take my word for it, take a few thousand words while you’re at it.
Call for the Dead (1961)
Original cover. Note that Mr le Carré is still a ‘crime novelist.’
Le Carré’s first novel was a murder mystery and not really an espionage novel. But Call for the Dead introduces his most well-known character, George Smiley, a quiet and retiring senior spook (literally – like Iron Man, he retires at the end of every novel only to show up again in the next). We begin by learning that his beautiful wife has run off with a race-car driver, and by seeing his stoicism in the face of this betrayal. Smiley’s humility conceals his sharp mind and dogged will. As the novel opens, he has been running security checks on a civil servant named Fennon, only for that Fennon to turn up dead, apparently by suicide. Smiley is not fooled – Smiley alone is not fooled – and he starts unravelling a case that involves East German spies. It is a short, sharp story that’s well-paced and populated by compelling characters.
Many features that will become familiar in le Carré’s world here resolve themselves out of the mid-century murk for the first time. Communism appears as an illiberal, violent and underhanded force. But it’s not some cosmic evil from outside space and time. Of our three characters who are (or used to be) communist, all have good motives. The civil servant Fennon took part in hunger marches with Welsh miners; his wife Elsa is a holocaust survivor who is enraged to see former Nazis creep back into power in West Germany; Frey is a dedicated anti-fascist who used to be an agent of Smiley’s during the war. Smiley doesn’t hate his adversaries. Rather, he feels a pained and partial self-recognition when they reveal themselves. Smiley sees more of himself in them than he sees in his own pompous and parochial superiors. How is it different from later le Carré? There is no real critique of Britain’s intelligence services, no forays beyond the Iron Curtain. All in all, we are in cosier territory here.
When I read this: c 2023 Locations: London Why read it? John le Carré’s first novel; George Smiley’s first appearance; an accomplished thriller. Memorable moments: When Smiley arrives home to find an East German spy opening the door for him, only quick thinking and a cool head save his life.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was written when the Berlin Wall had just been built, and it captured the zeitgeist powerfully, going on to wild commercial success. Alec Leamas is a burned-out, hard-drinking spy whose agents have all been exterminated by East German intelligence. He returns to London where Control (leader of the intelligence agency known as ‘The Circus’) enlists Leamas for one last solo mission. While Call for the Dead was a traditional murder mystery, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has a brow-furrowing plot revolving around spy agencies bluffing, double-bluffing and triple-bluffing each other. As the novel goes on it gets more claustrophobic and paranoid. It’s not a spoiler to say that Leamas has been lied to by Control (and by Smiley, who puts in a few appearances). The villain Mundt returns from Call for the Dead, and Fiedler, a principled and well-intentioned Jewish communist working for the Stasi, channels familiar energies (perhaps an echo of Frey, though to a more tragic end here). Towards the end Control’s real agenda is revealed as devastating and ruthless. If you ever catch yourself feeling too warm and fuzzy about George Smiley, remember what he did to Alec Leamas and Liz Gold. Gold is a young woman Alec Leamas meets when he’s busy building his legend prior to his final mission (A ‘legend’ in this context is a kind of espionage method acting – the cover story which a spy not only concocts but lives and documents in order to fool the other side.) Soon Leamas learns something surprising about his girlfriend. She tentatively begins to explain ‘I believe in history…’ and he bursts out laughing. ‘You’re not a bloody communist, are you?’ She has no idea her boyfriend is a wounded cold warrior, so she’s a bit confused at his amusement, but she’s relieved that her political affiliation doesn’t scare him off. That’s a good moment, with irony flying in all directions, but I think le Carré’s depiction of Liz is patronising overall, and it’s a weakness of the novel. I get that she’s supposed to be the innocent in all this, but she’s way too innocent. She actually dislikes everything about being in the Communist Party apart from the peace marches. Her party comrade is simultaneously a gay man (portrayed without sympathy), and a lech toward her. She tolerates all this and more for reasons that are not clear. A more streetwise Liz would have been just as sympathetic but more believable – someone who, like Leamas, has made ethical trade-offs to pursue what she believes is right.
When I read this: c 2011 Locations: East Germany, London Why read it? The novel that made John Le Carré’s name and launched his career; his first spy novel proper, introducing his dark and morally dubious portrayal of the world of espionage Memorable moments: The story begins and ends with desperate people making a break for it at the Berlin Wall – whose construction was recent news at the time this book was published
The Looking Glass War (1965)
The Looking Glass War is a brutally unglamorous story. It revolves around The Department, a distinct intelligence organisation overshadowed by George Smiley’s ‘Circus.’ The Department has been reduced to a small staff without much funding, with its Director Leclerc wallowing in a perverse nostalgia for the days of World War Two, when he used to regularly send young men to their deaths. When an East German defector brings hints of a missile build-up, Leclerc embarks on an escalating series of risky operations to verify the data. Our main characters fear an imminent re-run of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but beneath their fear they really want to believe it’s true. Because, what a coup for The Department! They feel they deserve this. For most of the book we don’t know if we’re in the midst of a cock-up or a conspiracy. At the climax, we follow an agent on a quixotic mission beyond the Iron Curtain. But mostly the conflict is office politics, the cause is nostalgia and bureaucratic prestige, and the subterfuge is inter-agency rather than international. For example, the Department has to borrow radios from the Circus, without letting them know anything about the intel they have or the operation they are planning. If the Circus get wind of it, they will take over. Le Carré is good at making office politics compelling, at describing one self-important bureaucrat witheringly through the eyes of another equally self-important bureaucrat. He appears to loathe the upper tiers of British society, but he speaks effortlessly in their voice.
The most memorable character besides Lelclerc does not fit into the familiar British-officer-class mould at all. This is Fred Leiser, a Polish immigrant who played a heroic role behind enemy lines for The Department during World War Two. Leiser has no stake in the intelligence world anymore; he has settled into civilian life. But the Department convince him to come back and risk his life on a mission into East Germany. I was pretty horrified at how this poor guy is groomed and flattered and tricked. At the same time Leiser is a strong-willed, rather arrogant character who actively chooses to do this, and for all the wrong reasons. Le Carré had evidently learned how to portray a guileless innocent.
And if we’re going to talk about themes that will be big later making their first appearance here, consider The Department as a metaphor for post-imperial Britain. In later novels we see The Circus itself in the same position as The Department, with the CIA as the bigger counterpart from whom it is trying to secure resources, but also to keep its petty secrets and barren intrigues.
When I read this: c 2023 Locations: Finland, West Germany, East Germany, London Why read it? A more tragicomic take on the dark underworld of intelligence; all the troubling morality of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold but with murkier stakes. Memorable moments: We are subjected to a scene of haunting dismalness when Avery visits the flat of his colleague who has died mysteriously while on a mission; later, we have the humorous tension between Fred Leiser and the sergeant who is training him.
Honourable mention here for A Small Town in Germany (1968), which I tackled in 2011 or so but didn’t get far into. It concerns a fictional and (then) near-future student movement in Germany which espouses an inchoate mishmash of left and right politics. I think I was put off by the author’s dismissal of the student radicals. I remain curious and might tackle it again.
Summing up… (and my favourite of these three novels)
The basic pitch of early le Carré was that he was selling a more unvarnished truth about intelligence – Forget James Bond, he seemed to say, this is the real deal; none of that moral complacency, none of those innocent assumptions about right and wrong. In its place the vision offered by early le Carré is that the West is benevolent and the East is malevolent, but that in the struggle the West has regrettably lost sight of its principles, and in terms of methods the two sides are equally devious and cruel.
Except not really, because in le Carré novels we see the Stalinists doing much worse things than we see the imperialists doing. Even leaving that aside, though, isn’t that vision complacent in its own way? The idea of Britain and the United States as basically benevolent and good forces in the world, in contrast to the wicked Soviets, is not really compatible with my own understanding of the broader history. I know what the Soviets did in Hungary. But men of Leamas, Smiley and Guillam’s vintage ran gulag archipelagos in Malaysia and Kenya. The Soviets imposed dictatorships in Eastern Europe, and the capitalist countries imposed their own on their side of the Iron Curtain, for example in Greece. The Stalinist states were certainly cruder in their repressive methods than, say, the British state when operating on British soil upon white British subjects. But the Soviet bloc was basically conservative and defensive, not expansionist or aggressive. So the reality is murkier still than we see in early le Carré.
The paranoid multi-layered duel of deception in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is very powerful. But of these three novels, I most admire The Looking Glass War. Its tragicomedy and its basic theme of utter delusion ring truer to me given the above points.
Le Carré’s novels of the 1960s were tight and focused. They were thrillers in cheap covers that I imagine you could carry in your jacket and read on the London Underground. In the 1970s, which I’ll look at next week, Smiley’s chilly and foggy world expands to an epic scale. These early novels have plenty of tension, humanity and power, but they are apprentice pieces by comparison with what is to come.
Last month OpenAI boss Sam Altman announced that his company had created an AI tool that could write a short story. You know the most depressing thing about this news? Sam Altman did not wake up one morning and, just on a whim, ask his software to write a story. His company worked really hard to get it to write a short story. No doubt some tech worker missed a kid’s birthday, maybe even birth, in order to work long hours on it. They plagiarized and polluted for it. Getting an AI that could write a short story was something they had to pursue.
Here’s the thing: even if it was easy and cheap and green, why would anyone want a machine that can write a short story? Is there a shortage of people who can write stories? Is writing stories a chore, like washing clothes or cutting grass? Are people crying out for relief from the burden of being creative?
I made it clear enough last week that I think this Gen AI thing does have limited uses (“a moderate productivity booster in certain situations”, as my commenter, The Director from MilitaryRealism.blog summed it up). I’m not qualified in any very technical fields like engineering, logistics or programming, but I’ll add that I can see potential uses that could be important.
Writing is more my area; I have an English degree and I’ve worked in teaching and libraries. So I don’t hesitate to say that short fiction is a glaring example of something that’s not a useful application of Gen AI by any measure.
Full disclosure, I haven’t read the AI-written short story. I read a lot, but I don’t happen to have a Gen-AI-short-story-shaped gap in my reading.
To illustrate this post, more cringe-inducing AI imagery from social media pages purporting to be about history and mythology
It’s not inevitable
The Guardian got some writers to react to the short story written by the machine. Most of the reactions ranged between ‘Wow, this is actually pretty good’ and ‘I fear for my livelihood.’ Kamila Shamsie pointed out that GenAI will reproduce and reinforce all the biases, all the racism and sexism etc, in its ‘training materials.’ For Nick Harkaway, the story is an ‘elegant emptiness’ and being moved by it is like a bird falling in love with its reflection in a window. He emphasises that ‘none of this will just happen. These are policy choices, and the end result will be the result of a conscious decision.’
That’s what the hype-mongers want us to forget, isn’t it?
The future promised by Gen AI is one where nobody is paid to do anything creative or educational; instead, computer programmes owned and controlled by a few billionaires create flat, uncanny versions of what humans used to create. For some reason we are all supposed to be excited about this. But whether you feel excitement or dread, either way you are making the mistake of treating the whole thing as inevitable and natural.
Actually, there are humans making decisions and investments at every link in the chain here. And some, like CD Projekt Red, are making decisions unfavourable to the spread of AI in creative industries.
I don’t think AI is going to put writers out of a job. The vast majority of us are already out of a job. Tech bros claiming to have made a programme that can do what we do, and expecting us to be pleased about it, is just the latest in a long line of insults, and far from the worst.
I say ‘far from the worst’ because I don’t think these AI tools are about to revolutionise the publishing industry, any more than they have revolutionised any of the other things they were supposed to revolutionise. It will mess with a lot of people’s livelihoods and it will muddy things up for a while. But it will not be a game-changer. The wave may leave behind puddles but it will recede. So I don’t believe the tech bros’ dystopia will happen.
GenAI will probably carve out and retain certain niches, for better or for worse, in the publishing industry. But a machine can’t actually write a story. There’s a few basic category errors at work here.
Another one found in the wild. See if you can spot the warrior who has jumped 200 metres into the air.
Why can’t a machine write a story?
First, the ‘AI’ that exists today is not some sentient machine-mind (‘alternative intelligence,’ in the disappointing words of Jeanette Winterson). Maybe some day we will have that, and our android cousins will write their cyber-Iliads, which will be very cool. I’ll be the first in line. But that’s a whole different thing. I saw someone in a comment section gushing that ‘we have taught sand to dream.’ But what we have now is just glorified predictive text. Whether in written or visual or musical form, it just shows you the lowest common denominator of what’s already out there in the culture.
Second, writing is about expressing your feelings and communicating your thoughts and experiences. A computer doesn’t have these things. It can imitate the way humans express them, provided a bunch of rich people decide to devote stupendous sums of wealth to making it do so. But again it’s not the same thing.
What if the computer’s imitation gets so good we can’t tell the difference? And aren’t some human writers also basically hacks, unoriginal, etc?
First, every writer does not have to be Arundhati Roy for the point to stand that a computer can’t be Arundhati Roy. Stories are rooted in material reality and our experiences of it. No training materials or prompts can produce something like The God of Small Things, which is viscerally a story of its time and place.
Or imagine if The Grapes of Wrath had been written using pre-existing ‘training materials.’ It would have portrayed the Dust Bowl refugees as incendiary vagrant criminals and the cops as brave defenders of civilisation.
Even if the imitation seems to be perfect and seamless, the above points will tell. Stories are not pure exercises in form. They are aboutthings. The most important ones are about things nobody has written about before. Even science fiction and fantasy stories are about themes and feelings that really exist.
Instead of Steinbeck’s wonderful and evocative descriptions of the human impact of the Dust Bowl, we would get ‘Chapter 2. The Dust Bowl took place in the 1930s and was caused by a number of factors. First…’ Front cover image from 1939. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Folktroubadour
AI in Gaming
I first became familiar with the phrase ‘Artificial Intelligence’ in relation to games. AI is what tells the mercenaries in Far Cry to search the jungle for you systematically when you hide. It’s what tells the hostile army in a Total War game to oppose your cavalry with spears. AI is what’s breaking down when your little villager takes a shortcut past ten enemy catapults, or when a Nazi stands out in the middle of a Norman field waiting for you to shoot him.
You’d think GenAI would have massive applications in gaming. But so far it’s been a real damp squib in that sector.
Recently PCGamer reported on a wild example. Basically, Microsoft made a demo based on a game called Quake 2 using Gen AI. The project used three megawatts of energy – the output of tens of thousands of solar panels. All that, for what? An incoherent, uncanny experience that looked vaguely like Quake 2 and that gave players motion sickness. For context, Quake 2 (that is, a version of Quake 2 that is the full game and that actually works and doesn’t make you nauseous) was made over 25 years ago by a team of just 13 people.
Something to think about: if they had managed to remake a part of the game exactly as it was with AI, that would have been hailed as a triumph. But… Then we’d just have a game level that already exists.
How do I explain this for people unfamiliar with games?
Imagine if I rewrote one chapter of Killing Floor by Lee Child, and presented it here on The 1919 Review expecting your adulation. But in my rewrite, the names of the characters change every other paragraph, and the font somehow gives the reader a headache. I rewrote it by listing every time a particular word is used then arranging the words according to arcane predictive rules. And, somehow, it took the entire output of a nuclear plant just to power the special laptop I used to do this.
Screenshot from Deus Ex (2000), which predicted this like it predicted everything else. Ion Storm & Eidos Interactive
That’s the essence of the Quake 2 situation, as best I can explain it using books as a comparison, but to be fair (and as I’ve made clear above), GenAI has actually produced more polished results when it’s confined to text.
In both cases the same questions arise: what is the purpose of this? How can the results (good or bad or just trifling) possibly justify the expense and the effort and the pollution? Why are we all expected to indulge Big Tech even when the project into which they are pouring so much wealth is largely unnecessary where it is not actually harmful?
GenAI is in many ways like crypto: the tech bros have invented a new toy and they demand that everyone takes their toy seriously. They demand that we sacrifice the future of the planet in order to sustain their toy. This toy is at the heart of an investor frenzy. They promise that when their toy has taken over the world, it will right all the wrongs it has done along the way (crypto, we were told, will actually save energy by putting all the banks out of business, thus reducing their emissions to zero; in the same way, we are told that AI will actually come up with clever ways to save energy.)
In other ways GenAI is not like crypto. It actually has utility, even if you agree with me that this utility cannot on balance be justified. It can be a lot of fun. It can make it easier to write emails. Its potential in technical fields is an open question.
But it has no utility in writing stories or developing videogames. It’s actually difficult to wrap your head around how stupidly wasteful and contrived such projects are. Even if that wasn’t the case, and even if the results were decent, it’s not worth one single artist losing their livelihood.
‘It’s going to change everything,’ people said, and even though they said it more often with dread than with excitement, it appeared they accepted it as inevitable.
When Generative AI became headline news a little over two years ago with the launch in late 2022 of ChatGPT, it was not simply oversold. It was hyped to within an inch of its life. Two years on, it has not revolutionized the way I work or live – thankfully. I’ve read about some ways that it’s useful and a lot of ways that it’s making the world a worse place. But in this post I want to pause and give you a full catalogue of how Generative AI has actually affected my life, as a snapshot of where the AI Revolution stands from the point of view of one individual in April 2025.
Of Bots and Men
At work I use a program called Canva and in early 2023 it drew my attention to its AI image generator, which I had a great time playing around with for a while. ‘Of Mice and Men but Lenny and George are Robots’, ‘World War Two in space’ and ‘alien spaceship in County Westmeath’ were all fun. People look doughy and uncanny, and machines look like they were drawn by someone even less mechanically literate than me, and the whole thing looks like the first three results in a Google Image search have been mashed together indiscriminately. It looks as uncreative and unimaginative as it is. But it’s fun, and I could plausibly claim that it was work; I wasn’t messing around on the job, I was upskilling to rise to the occasion of the AI Revolution. It is fortunate that I had that excuse in my back pocket, because all my colleagues could see ‘battle of Stalingrad with lasers’, ‘atom bomb on Dublin’ and other brainsick adolescent creations whenever they looked at the drafts folder. All in all, I can vouch for Generative AI as a fun toy.
As an aside, in the two years since, it’s possible this tool has gotten worse. In 2023 it gave me photorealistic rusty hobo robots in a Steinbeckian dust bowl scene; today it gave me cute robot mice.
Gen AI is all about writing prompts. But two years on it feels like we humans are the ones being prompted. Tech companies are nagging us to use the AI tools they’ve spent so much money on, usually in contexts where I don’t want or need to. If I tap my phone screen the wrong way, it invites me to use AI tools to help me do internet searches. No thanks, I’m fine. Right now as I write this, over on the margin of this computer screen, WordPress is inviting me to use AI to generate a title, featured image and feedback for this post. The good people at WordPress don’t appear to understand that I’m writing because I enjoy writing.
Ned Beauman, in his 2022 novel Venemous Lumpsucker, was referring to this kind of thing when he wrote about an ‘almost libidinal desire to relinquish autonomy.’
My wife uses AI at work, for actual work. She uses it to write formal emails, and I’ve seen the results, and I think that’s a great use for these AI tools. I understand that there are other things like this, where AI can do boring jobs quickly. So as well as being a fun toy, it help you write the kind of letters there are already templates for online.
Tsunami of Slop
In fairness to Generative AI, it has significantly changed social media, in that it’s polluted my feeds with stupid, tasteless, uncanny or offensive imagery, sometimes accompanied by text riddled with inaccuracies and written in AI’s characteristic style of pseudo-intelligent noncommittal blandness. As far as I can see, two particular online constituencies have seized on Generative AI. The first group is anti-refugee protesters, who make hideous posters for their events and fake photographs to rile people up. The second group is Facebook pages about history and archaeology. They illustrate their chatbot-written posts with, say, a picture purporting to show Brian Boru at the Battle of Clontarf – but Clontarf has been transformed from flat coastal fields to high foggy crags, and Brian Boru looks exactly like the Witcher. Or a Viking ship landing on the Irish coast – in the shadow of a ruined Norman castle that couldn’t have been built, let alone fallen into ruin, for another 400 years. One image I saw in my news feed claimed to be of Dublin. The buildings and quays looked Dublinesque, but they were all in the wrong place. Now what I think is that the image was designed to provoke me into pointing out in the comments that, say, Grattan Bridge was missing, or that Bono’s hotel is upside-down. I resisted the urge but I could see that thousands of people had already commented. There is probably a whole category of AI post now that’s just correction bait. Again, AI is prompting us now, not the other way around.
It doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a good way to maximise engagement – far more effective than, for example, posting something funny or good or clever.
While all this social media stuff is ugly and tacky, it’s at least interesting, in a Black Mirror kind of way. And image generators can be fun, and it’s nice to have software that can write the less enjoyable type of email. That’s it, really.
Maybe my experience is typical of a sizeable layer of people, maybe not. But if we make a rough balance sheet of the AI Revolution based on my experience, then it definitely wasn’t worth burning all those fossil fuels for.
Tune in next week for my thoughts on the question, ‘Can a machine write a story?’ And to finish off this post, here’s a small sample of the tsunami of slop that’s come down my news feed these last two years.
The Lacuna is a 2009 novel by Barbara Kingsolver about a young Mexican-American man, Harrison Shepherd, growing up in the early 20th Century. During his fictional life, spent back and forth between Mexico and the USA, he encounters real events and people, such as when he sees the Bonus Marchers beaten and gassed off the streets of Washington DC in 1932, makes friends with Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo in Mexico City, and back in the US finds himself in the firing line of the McCarthy Red Scare.
It’s a great novel that deserves all the praise and prizes that it got. In this brief post I want to zoom in on one interesting feature: its depiction of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Trotsky, who lived in exile in Mexico city from 1937 until his murder in 1940, occupies a prominent place in the story. His depiction is something I’m going to praise but also criticize.
Kingsolver, who cut her teeth writing about miners’ strikes, treats the workers’ leader Trotsky with great sympathy. He appears to Harrison as a short, strong man with the dignified appearance of an older peasant, who is passionate about animals, nature and literature as well as politics. He employs Harrison as a secretary and, when he stumbles upon the young man moonlighting as a writer, gives him precious encouragement. An exile from Stalin’s Soviet Union, Trotsky is more melancholy than angry. Harrison is a witness to Trotsky’s murder and is haunted by the experience.
As an example of how she depicts Trotsky, in his affair with Frieda Kahlo (they did the dirt on their respective partners, Natalia Sedova and Diego Rivera), Kahlo comes out looking a lot worse than him. Harrison is Kahlo’s friend and confidante, and he judges her more harshly, probably because he knows her better; Trotsky is up on a pedestal and largely escapes judgement.
Trotsky, Natalia Sedova arriving in Mexico, escorted by Kahlo
Kingsolver is interested in Trotsky but far more interested in Kahlo. We see Kahlo’s sharp edges, we are invited to judge her at times. But I guess this is because the author decided to make her a central character, to spend more time and energy on her. Trotsky gets comparatively less attention from the author, so we get a simpler picture of him. This is all fair enough. But this leads the novel into some avoidable missteps.
Self-portrait by Frida Kahlo
Funerals
It’s not impossible that Trotsky would have employed Harrison as a secretary. Harrison is a veteran of the Bonus March, a supporter of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ (understood by him to mean democratic workers’ power) and a member of the leftist artsy milieu in Mexico City. Harrison is also young, and Trotsky was more politically tolerant toward younger comrades. But Harrison is, for all this, not very knowledgeable about or active in politics. I think Trotsky would have sooner entrusted such a key role to members of his own organisation, the Fourth International.
The 1932 ‘Bonus March.’ Jobless veterans camped out in Washington DC were subjected to a violent military crackdown.
So it’s a very strange moment when Harrison asks how Stalin and not Trotsky ended up in charge of the Soviet Union. This should be something which Harrison already knows about and has developed opinions about, if he’s living and working in a trusted position in Trotsky’s household.
It’s a problematic moment in a bigger way, too. The real Trotsky wrote entire books about Stalin’s rise to power, so we know what he would have said. The explanation he gives in The Lacuna is wide of the mark. Trotsky, earnest and visibly pained by the memory, tells Harrison that he missed Lenin’s funeral because of a devious prank by Stalin. And so Stalin took centre stage at the funeral, and so, in this version of events, he became the sole possible successor to Lenin. I remember being told this by my school history teacher as an aside, as a touch of pop-history anecdote material, but I haven’t come across it anywhere since. Maybe it’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t answer the question.
And it’s definitely not the first answer Trotsky would give. In real life, Harrison would want to put the kettle on and pull up a comfortable chair before he asks Trotsky how Stalin ended up in power. Trotsky would not have spoken of personal intrigues; he was far more partial to grand socio-economic analysis and theoretical debates. If you open up his key book on the subject, The Revolution Betrayed, you can see this in the title of the first chapter; it’s not ‘Stalin: Devious Bastard’ but ‘The Principle Indices of Industrial Growth’.
A mural by Diego Rivera depicting Tenochtitlan. Harrison’s stories are set in the same era as this painting
Yeoman farmers
In another strange scene, Trotsky laments the latest news from Russia: now Stalin is going after the ‘Yeoman farmers.’ But Stalin had started in on the ‘Yeoman farmers’ (kulaks) in earnest from 1929, and this conversation is happening around ten years later! In the early 1930s forced collectivisation and the ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ led to famine and terror on a huge scale. It was one of the most traumatic episodes in Soviet history and Trotsky wrote about it at the time. It wouldn’t have been news to him by the time he was in Mexico. In any case by then there were no kulaks left.
Trotsky in The Lacuna seems to regard these ‘Yeoman farmers’ as a key constituency whom nobody should mess with. This wasn’t the case. While Trotsky condemned Stalin’s onslaught on the peasantry and national minorities, he would still have used the derogatory term ‘kulaks’ rather than ‘Yeoman farmers.’ He saw the kulaks as a problem (though he advocated gradual and peaceful solutions) and earlier (in the mid-1920s) he condemned his opponents, including Stalin, for enacting policies that enriched and empowered this social layer.
‘pedantic and exacting’
In 1938 Trotsky’s son and close comrade Leon Sedov died in Paris, likely poisoned by Soviet agents during a routine surgery. In a powerful obituary, Trotsky expressed regret over his own often difficult personality:
I also displayed toward him the pedantic and exacting attitude which I had acquired in practical questions. Because of these traits, which are perhaps useful and even indispensable for work on a large scale but quite insufferable in personal relationships people closest to me often had a very hard time.
A more rounded novelistic portrayal of Trotsky would show us this ‘pedantic and exacting’ side, which was not a figment of Trotsky’s imagination – and perhaps his own occasional pang of regret over it. As his secretary, transcribing his extensive writings, Harrison would not only experience on occasion this ‘very hard time’ but would read practically every word Trotsky wrote. Someone as raw and open as Harrison would (rightly or wrongly is of no concern here) see some of Trotsky’s writings as ultra-principled or hair-splitting. This would especially be the case in the late 1930s; the extermination of all his allies and supporters back in the Soviet Union left Trotsky isolated, debating with the few survivors over questions which had no easy answers.
Trotsky with Ramón Mercader moments before the assassination. From The Assassination of Trotsky (1972, dir. Joseph Losey)
It’s believable and accurate that Harrison would encounter Trotsky and see a kind, curious, haunted man. But since he lived with him for a few years, he would see that like many great leaders and writers, Trotsky had his more negative personal traits. A more nuanced Trotsky, like the multi-faceted Kahlo we come to know in The Lacuna, would be all the more sympathetic for our having seen various sides of him.
Years ago I started but did not finish a Lee Child book, Killing Floor. The things I remembered most vividly from that book, more than a decade later, were the eggs and coffee. Why did I return, all these years later? A few reasons, but most of all because I wanted to see if the eggs and coffee still tasted the same.
You see, people compare Lee Child to Ian Fleming. Both phenomenally successful and violent page-turners, obviously. But the similarities run deeper. James Bond and Jack Reacher are not really about violence, or even sex. A large part of the appeal is travel, food and drink. James Bond flew to glamorous places and pickled his insides with fancy wining and dining. (I had to put down You Only Live Twice half-way through because the entire novel to that point was travelogue). Jack Reacher buses and trudges through un-glamorous places – close-to-home, bleak, dirty places – now and then dropping into a diner to order some eggs and a litre of coffee.
Now I’ve read three Jack Reacher novels in three months (that’s fast for me). Here they are, in the order that I read them:
The Midnight Line (2017), Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding (Jack Reacher finds a class ring from his officer training school in a pawn shop, and sets out on a quest to find its owner)
Killing Floor (1997), Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding (twenty years and twenty books before The Midnight Line, Jack wanders into a small town only to be arrested and accused of a murder)
One Shot (2005), Lee Child (Five people are gunned down by a sniper in a city. The man arrested for the crime asks for one Jack Reacher – who’s already on his way)
What first piqued my interest was learning that the author is actually English. So it’s an English guy writing these familiar and jaded descriptions of the underbelly of the US heartland. That adds a layer of interest to every sentence. Why is he doing this, how is he getting away with it, and how is it so good?
Child doesn’t describe the taste or texture of the eggs or coffee in pornographic detail (It’s usually something like, “He had some eggs. They were good. The coffee was good too.”) But the food descriptions still get readers in the door. Can’t explain why, but I always feel rewarded when Reacher consumes his mundane fare.
Here follow more generalisations about Lee Child based on the three books I’ve read.
There are always cars. I’m car-blind – when an author tells me what kind of car it is (“a big coup deville” or a “large domestic model” or a “tan Buick”) it means nothing to me, and I don’t know what a given make or model is supposed to signify. But I know that James Bond cars are always that decade’s version of “fancy and expensive” while Reacher’s are more down-market. Reacher always borrows a few cars in his adventures and the reader gets to drive that particular car vicariously. The car stuff mostly goes over my head but I like how he drives across the States describing the natural and social scenery as he goes; transport is a medium through which to read the landscape. The circles described by irrigation booms are like marksmanship targets. A Georgia prison is described almost like the fortress of some evil sorcerer. In Midnight Line a truck driver briefly becomes a laconic therapist to Reacher.
Reacher always finds a way to have sex without it seeming shoehorned in. It might be central, it might be a sub-plot or it might be a coda, but it’s got to be in there. Reacher manages this while clearing a low bar that James Bond doesn’t: he’s not awful to women. He actually likes them, without a hint of contempt, and they like him.
This is good going for Reacher, when you consider that he regularly goes three or four days without changing his underpants (but we are assured that he uses “a whole bar of soap in the shower,” a defense which I find endearingly juvenile). If he carries a toothbrush, can he not carry some folded briefs and socks, maybe in his inside jacket pocket? But I guess Child is wiser not to get into all this.
I’m not a total novice to this kind of book. I’ve read Point of Impact (1993) by Stephen Hunter – the novel on which the movie Shooter is based. It’s a near-contemporary of early Lee Child and a cracking read. But the main character is an asshole. Not just to women, but also to men who talk too much (‘like a woman’).
Swagger and Reacher are both alienated from society (a character as lethal as them, while also being a boy scout, would be just unsettling). But Swagger is bitter, the distillation of a kind of post-Vietnam War resentment. Reacher starts off by telling us he’s angry that a president he didn’t vote for is cutting funding to the coast guard, an echo of his own redundancy – but he’s not bitter and he doesn’t retreat to his cabin in the mountains. He is alienated from the state and thinks the cherished myths of his society are bullshit. But he loves his country, and not in an abstract sense. He likes plenty of its people, its nature, the towns and cities and the vitality that flows on its highways. It’s a machine and he takes quiet delight in how well he understands its workings. Like what city a fugitive will be in after X number of days, what type of hotel he will stay in, and what false name he will adopt.
The stories always end with Reacher and his hastily-assembled team of allies assaulting the warehouse (or mansion or snowplough depot) where the bad guys are holed up. There will be not more than half-a-dozen action scenes before that, punctuating the story with thuds and cracks. My gruesome favourite was when he stalked five guys through a house in Killing Floor. But it has to be established that a guy is very bad before Reacher kills or maims him in a crunchy way; if the guy is only sort-of bad he only hurts him in a crunchy way.
One of the conventions of this genre relates to texture. Supposedly we are here for the murder mystery. But that’s not enough. In between the murdery and mysterious bits there are the moments where we are given access to insider information about interesting things like forgery, prescription drug abuse or guns. But even that’s not enough. In between all that, we want to follow the protagonist through a whole lot of relatable everyday life stuff like car rentals and jean sizes. The battles, puzzles and lore, in order to seem real to the reader, must be connected by a tissue made of the same stuff as our real and tangible world. The headbutts have to go crunch, and the narrator has to seem like an insider, but most importantly the eggs and coffee have to taste right.
The 1919 Review 
