thriller

Glasnost Pilgrims: John le Carré in the late 1980s

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.  

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A Perfect Nemesis: John le Carré in the 1970s

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.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)

Book covers have changed since the 1960s, haven’t they?

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.

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Dubious Crusades: John le Carré in the 1960s

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.

Featured image: detail from ‘Three Faces of Europe’, 2 January 1950 https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/vault/1950/01/19500102/38/1550.jpg Author: Chapin, Robert M.

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.

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I’m Finally Reading… Ruth Rendell

Or, the housing arrangements of psychopaths

A Demon in my View (1976), The Face of Trespass (1974), Dark Corners (2015)

My first knowledge of Ruth Rendell was probably of seeing her name on library paperbacks around the house when I was a kid. I didn’t read her stuff until many years later after reading some glowing endorsements of her by authors I like. The only title of Rendell’s available that day on my library audiobook app was one called A Demon in My View. So I went ahead and downloaded it. That was back in March; by August I had read three out of her many dozens of novels published across nearly fifty years. I’ll give a run-down of each of the three, in the order in which I read them.

I should add that I listened to these novels as audiobooks, performed by Julian Glover (A Demon in my View) and Rick Jerrom (The Face of Trespass and Dark Corners), who both do a great job.

By the way, the reviews below contain some spoilers.

A Demon in My View

I was hooked on this story, right from the fucked-up start to the ironic and satisfying finish. A Demon in My View is about a man who once terrorised his fictional London suburb as a serial killer, but who has settled into a safer middle age by getting his kicks repeatedly ‘murdering’ a mannequin who lives in the neglected cellar of his shared, rented house.

The killer is a despicable sadist but Rendell manages to get us into his head, convinces us to feel an iota of sympathy for the wretch. He was raised by an aunt who judged him because he was born outside wedlock. There is something pitiable in his uptight, timid, neurotic narrative voice. But this timidity is the flip side of his murderous compulsions; he has a drive to feel power over others by causing fear and pain. The most horrifying example is the flashback scene involving the baby, which nobody who reads this book will ever forget until the day they die.

The whole story revolves around the tension between his hidden world and the intrusive realities of a shared housing arrangement. What we’ve got here is a story that’s fundamentally about housing, a theme that is important in all three books of Rendell’s that I have read.

The story is firmly rooted in its time and place, not in a way that dates it but in a way that enriches it. A new flatmate moves in; he has a very similar name to the secret serial killer, which provides all kinds of opportunities for confusion and subterfuge. In the 1970s, when this story is set, the post was crucial to people’s social lives and communications, and the only phone in a shared house word likewise be a shared one. The new arrival is really our main narrator and protagonist, but the long agony and final comeuppance he inflicts on our serial killer is unintentional and indirect.

Here is a writer, I thought, who can keep me in suspense, craft a believable social and cultural world, invest me in the practical limitations of comms in the 1970s, and horrify me with a rounded portrait of a human monster.

The Face of Trespass

The Face of Trespass is about a young writer living semi-feral in his friend’s cottage on the wooded margin of London while his girlfriend, a married woman, tries to convince him to murder someone. The story is bookended by a brilliant introduction and conclusion which involve a completely different cast of characters but which provide a resolution to the story. The day is not saved, but at least we get a significant consolation at the very end and from an unexpected source.

Murder is of course not relatable. But Rendell surrounds it, links it intimately, with things that are closer to our everyday lives. There’s lust, greed, envy. Again, housing. Scarcity of funds. An elderly mother living in another country and slowly dying; linked to this, a stepfather with emotional baggage and a language barrier.  Aunts and old school friends. Pets. Obligations.

Apart from the aforementioned bookends, we stay in the point of view of the main character, the struggling young writer. Everyone reading The Face of Trespass will be able to see clear as day how our main character is being set up. I found this a little frustrating; we hate protagonists who are fools, who walk blithely into trouble. But in the end all was forgiven. Rendell’s playing a deeper game. The girlfriend is out to set him up – that’s obvious. What’s not so obvious (though all the clues are there) is (spoiler alert) how he will get out of it in the end.

Even more so than in A Demon in my View, seventies comms are central to the novel; much of it revolves around people waiting by phones.

One surprising highlight of this novel is the stepfather. I don’t know if I would pick up a book based on some blurb about a stepfather-stepson relationship. But the murder/mystery/thriller genre here serves as a vehicle for an amusing and, in the end, quietly moving sub-plot.

Dark Corners

Dark Corners was Rendell’s last novel, written decades after the other two above. It is still very good and gripping, but rougher around the edges.

At one point in the novel the main character, again a writer, laments that the characters in his work-in-progress all speak like they come from the middle of the century. This must be Rendell’s little dig at herself; the characters speak and often act like they just walked out of the much more affordable London of A Demon in my View. Modern things like the internet are mentioned a lot, but usually bracketed with some comment like, ‘Johnny supposed that this was the way things were these days’ – as opposed to thirty years ago, before Johnny was born.

Like The Face of Trespass, pets and vets come into it. But it’s housing that’s at the heart of the novel, in ways that highlight how the issue has changed radically since the 1970s. The landlord in A Demon in my View is a rather greasy and selfish character; the landlord here is a struggling writer renting out the upstairs of his late Dad’s house so that he can work full-time on his novel. But his tenant proves to be far more trouble than he’s worth. He refuses to pay the rent and refuses to move out.

Meanwhile a rudderless young woman finds her rich friend dead, and proceeds to occupy her apartment and wear her clothes. But impersonating a rich person, like taking in a tenant, proves to be more trouble than it’s worth. In this case, that’s putting it mildly: she is brutally abducted and held for ransom.

These two characters are a few degrees of separation from one another and only meet toward the end, in a very fateful encounter.

Again, the literal setting is London – and there’s a powerful sense of place – but on a deeper level the setting is the human mind struggling with fear and longing. Rendell’s home turf is psychology. As in A Demon in My View, we see the murderer from the inside out, and he is wretched and pitiful. Unfortunately, like The Face of Trespass but more so, we have a struggling writer who spends a chunk of the novel just frustrating us with his passivity and short-sightedness.

There is a third, and subordinate, storyline about a retired man who rides buses for fun (Yes, a third storyline. All three of these books are very slight, but it’s amazing how much is crammed into Dark Corners). This storyline is fun, but its culmination is the retiree very suddenly foiling a terrorist bomb plot. Rendell has this humane side that allows her to write stories where a modest older man becomes a hero thanks to his eccentric hobby, and that is satisfying. The problem is that the bombing has nothing to do with anything else in the novel, and has no impact on subsequent events.

This is one of many strange improbabilities and coincidences that, to my mind, constitute gaps in the fabric of the novel. It’s all the more obvious when compared to how tight-knit the other two books are. It appears the novel is kind of about coincidences – stories criss-crossing in a Pulp Fiction kind of a way. Coincidence played a role in the others, but to a lesser degree, and with more subtlety, and to better effect.

Dark Corners is readable and satisfying, but rough and flawed. In addition to its other virtues, it is rough and flawed in interesting ways.

First and foremost, these were gripping thrillers that passed the time for me while I did chores or drove. But the contrasts between the younger writer and the older, between the younger London and the older, added a great deal to the experience for me.

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