All posts tagged George Smiley

The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré (1990)

I had begun my quest idly – you may say frivolously – much as one might pick up an old copy of the Tatler in one’s club. (p.262)

The last of le Carré’s novels to feature tubby, unprepossessing, owlish cuckold George Smiley. It is a series of tales told in the first person by old British Intelligence man Ned (we never get his last name). He was in charge of the ‘Russia House’ wing of British Intelligence when the publisher/agent who he was managing, Barley Blair, went missing and defected for love (the story told in the novel, The Russia House.)

Partly as punishment for this foul-up, Ned is despatched to serve out his last years till retirement supervising the Intelligence training school at Sarratt. He invites Smiley up from his retirement in Cornwall to come and lecture the trainees, followed by whisky by the fire and reminiscences.

This is the frame narrative within which Ned proceeds to remember key moments in his career, starting in the early 1960s and proceeding up to the present – to the fall of the Berlin Wall and (the unthinkable) fact of senior Circus bosses being invited to Moscow to tour KGB headquarters! In light of the defeat of Soviet communism and the triumph of the West, Ned can’t help wondering all the failures and the betrayal were worth it.

1. Fat Boy and Panda One of Ned’s first assignments is to tail a rich Saudi prince, in London to finalise important arms sales. He quickly wins the nickname Fat Boy from the watchers, and his wife earns the nickname Panda for the dark rings round her eyes. It is a comic story, for the MI6 watchers following her soon realise that she is herself being tailed by a Middle Eastern man, and begin to panic whether it’s a kidnapper or even an assassin. Bit it turns out the Panda is a kleptomaniac, and this man is employed by her to hush up the outraged store detectives and pay for everything she’s walked off with stuffed into her handbag and up her sleeve.

2. Ben In training Ned is paired with Ben. They went to public school then Oxford at the same time, then both took commissions in the Army before joining British Intelligence. Ie their story is proof of the very narrow pool of like-minded, posh people who make up the Service. Ben is posted to Berlin. One day Smiley and a squad of searchers arrive at Ned’s place and start interrogating him. What’s going on? Ben has disappeared: kidnapped, gone over to the other side? And their main network in East Germany has been ‘rolled up’, betrayed, arrested. They know the pair were good friends and then, Smiley reveals, they have discovered a love letter to Ned from Ben. Turns out Ben was gay and in love with Ned, though Ned never knew. Ned remembers Ben had mentioned the old country estate of some cousins in the Western Isles of Scotland. Ned does a bunk, evading the watchers set on his flat, catches a train to Glasgow and then ferries out to the estate. Here he meets Ben’s aloof cousin – Stefanie – who, in this wild mountain scenery, he falls in love with on sight. Ben is out at the loch, fishing mournfully. Ned walks down and stands by him. After some manly silence Ben tells him the story: the boss at Berlin was an intimidating martinet, testing Ben again and again before his first meeting with the leader of the East German network. Ben, like a good swot, makes a set of prompt cards with complete details of all the agents, their names, address, passwords, secret codes. When the day for his first drop into the East and first meeting with the Top Agent arrives, Ben finds himself taking them with him in his jacket pocket. He has to get out of a not-quite-stationary car, pick up a bicycle, cycle to the rendezvous, lock it up, meet the Agent, exchange documents, back to the bike and unlock it, cycle back to a rendezvous with a different car. When he got back into this car, he realised the notes had all gone from his pocket. He had dropped them somewhere. East German agents must have found them and used the information to arrest the entire network, because by the end of that day the network had been betrayed. Distraught, Ben flew to London, then onto Glasgow, then the ferry boat to this Western Isle, where Stefanie cooks for him but leaves him to cope with despair at his ineptitude and failure. Soon afterwards, Smiley and his people arrive to arrest him. Ned returns to London, convinced he will be fired, and bewitched by the beautiful, artistic, remote Stefanie.

3. Bella and Captain Brand But Ned isn’t dismissed, he is sent to Hamburg. It is the early 1960s and Ned takes charge of Captain Brand and his circle of Latvian patriots, who run illicit missions along the Baltic coast. Brand is a big-hearted sailor with a drop-dead gorgeous girlfriend, Bella. As soon as Brand and crew have departed on a mission to drop agents on the Latvian coast, Ned and Bella are at it like rabbits. Le Carré gives slightly cringe-inducing descriptions of her riding him, going down on him, offering him her rear for his penetration etc etc. When the mission to Latvia goes badly wrong – the patriots are met with machine guns, several killed – Ned is summoned back to England, to the executives on ‘the Fifth Floor’ who are convinced Bella is the traitor and Ned finds himself defending her, despite his own misgivings. Smiley plays an oblique role, appearing to defend Ned and his instincts against Bill Haydon, head of European operations, who insists Bella is the spy who betrayed the mission. Three years later the events described in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy take place, revealing Haydon to be a high-level Russian mole, confirming that it was hearty sailor Brand who was the spy, all the evidence against Bella having been cooked up by Moscow Central to protect him. She is shipped off to a new identity in Canada, never to see Ned again.

4. The Professor Ned is posted to Munich and tasked with managing a Hungarian professor, Teodor, who claims to be running a Hungarian network. Ned is suspicious of him from the start, him and his unhappy, ex-actress wife Helena, especially when he almost immediately starts asking for a British or American passport. But Toby Esterhase, one of the main characters in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and who survived the Bill Haydon revelations, insists he is a great source for the Americans. When Ned checks with the Americans they say, No, we were told he’s a great source for you. Hmm. One night Ned gets a melodramatic phone call from the Professor. A Hungarian assassin – Latzi – has come to kill him, but couldn’t bring himself to do it, confessed, and is now in his house. Ned rushes over. The shamefaced middle-aged, meek assassin empties his pockets of gun, cyanide bullets, garroting wire etc and tells an elaborate story about being briefed and sent to kill the Very Important Professor. All three are whisked away to a safe house where they are interrogated by MI6 and the CIA. Eventually, the Professor and wife are given US passports and put on the next flight Stateside. But not before the wife, walking down by the lakefront with Ned, admits it’s all a con. The ‘assassin’ is an out-of-work actor they hired to make the Prof look important. Ned doesn’t tell.

5. Colonel Jerzy Oskar, an agent in Poland who had gone quiet, suddenly activates again, sending messages in all the right codes, using all the right procedures. London is sceptical but Ned insists on going over to find out for himself whether it still is the same man. He flies into Poland on a forged Dutch passport and travels to Gdansk to meet Oskar. Instead, it is a trap and he is picked up by a group of well-organised communist security men who immediately start beating him up, then take him to a big empty house where he is really systematically beaten, losing several teeth, getting cracked ribs, before passing out, then waking up chained to a radiator burning his back and getting beaten some more. He sticks to his story that he is a Dutch businessman and this is all a terrible mistake and eventually, reluctantly, the officer in charge of the beating, stocky pock-marked Colonel Jerzy, orders him released. He is helped to a bath, cleaned and put in new clothes, then Jerzy drives him to an isolated spot and orders him out of the car. Dazed and in pain Ned wonders if he is going to be executed and pushed in the river. But no. Turns out Jerzy wants to become a spy for the West! Amazed, Ned sticks to his line of being a Dutch businessman and the exasperated Jerzy says, ‘OK, Have it your way, I will send you good information via such and such a channel when you are safely back in the West. We take it from there, OK?’ And indeed Jerzy becomes a totally reliable, high-level agent, revealing much about Polish and eastern Bloc security plans for the next five years. Ned speculates at length about Jerzy’s motives, but he appears simply to be bored. In a post-script, after the Berlin Wall has fallen, Ned is watching a TV report about a Catholic cardinal holding a huge open-air mass and, to his amazement, witnesses the moment when, among the throng pouring round him, the cardinal spots a hesitant Jerzy. The cardinal makes straight for him and there is a moment of recognition between them before Jerzy kneels to be blessed. And in that moment Ned knows the cardinal is one of the many many Poles that Jerzy has tortured and interrogated.

6. Britta Ned is in Beirut, in the depths of the Lebanon civil war (1975-1990), hearing the AK47s firing nightly, and the occasional car bomb. He is tracking down a German woman agent known as Britta. Eventually he discovers she is being held in an Israeli camp in the Negev Desert. Ned flies out there and interviews her under the supervision of some typically tough Israeli security officers. Britta turns out to be a) she is stunningly beautiful (as so many of the young women in le Carré are) b) phenomenally indoctrinated in a kind of sexual liberation / terrorist Marxism, a creed which justifies throwing bombs onto buses in order to ‘waken the slumbering masses’ etc. She refuses to co-operate in any way and Ned, in his self-absorbed way, departs shaken that her fanaticism speaks to something in him which wants to rebel. — [The whole episode feels like an off-cut from The Little Drummer Girl which dealt so intensively with the same milieu.]

7. Hansen Like Ned, half-Dutch, Hansen is an extraordinary figure, a wanderer and trouble-maker who, as a youth, is sent to the Jesuits in the hope they’ll make something of him, and becomes a fully qualified priest before being despatched to Dutch South-East Asia. Here he becomes a languages and culture scholar before sinking into more familiar le Carré territory ie reports soon emerge of his sexual escapades in villages and cities, with men, women and children. Finally, the Head of Station in Bangkok reports he’s been spotted by a Chinaman in their pay. Ned flies out to meet him and spends a long night in a hotel room listening to Hansen’s extraordinary story – how he lived in a safe part of Cambodia, well embedded in a village, with a native wife and young daughter, radioing in targets for the American bombers to pulverise. The Khmer Rouge are active in the area and one day he returns to the village to find it completely empty. He follows the trail of corpses to the Khmer Rouge camp, is captured but vows to survive the torture in order to protect his teenage daughter. To his dismay, she is successfully indoctrinated by the Khmer and denounces him as an imperialist bourgeois lackey etc. Still, it is probably her intervention which prevents him being murdered when the Khmers up sticks and move on. But Hansen follows them and her, discovering she left the group, scouring South-East Asia and eventually discovering her in a brothel in Bangkok. She is numbed, almost lobotimised by her experiences, and only finds authenticity in servicing her clients. But Hansen gets a job at the brothel as a jack-of-all-trades so he can keep an eye on her and take her home safely at night. Ned offers him money to be resettled somewhere. Hansen, totally embittered by the awful job he did calling in a holocaust of bombs on innocent villages and the disastrous effect it’s had on Cambodia, says, ‘Keep your stinking money’, and Ned returns to the office a sadder and wiser man.

This is the most powerful and the most Catholic of the stories. The violence and the casual attitude to prostitutes and brothels and the Catholic self-dramatisation of Hansen telling his story remind me of Graham Greene and of his novel set in Vietnam and with a prostitute as a central character, The Quiet American.

8. Ken Hawthorne A retired soldier sends a letter to the Service which George is tasked to handle. His tearaway son, in prison, insists he is a British agent, briefly returned from Russia and hiding in prison as a cover. ‘Don’t contact me again, Dad,’ he says: ‘but listen, there’s a club of us spies and we meet every year and, if we’ve done well, they award us special cufflinks.’ Dad gets letters from his son in various hand-writings hinting at secret missions. Then he is murdered in prison and his mum and dad bury him. The dad writes the letter to MI6: was his son an agent? Smiley calls him in for a slow patient questioning, then goes away and ransacks the Circus’s raddled files. No. He wasn’t. He never had anything to do with the Service and is indeed the sadistic thug his criminal record suggests. But, in a gesture of sweet kindness, Smiley invites the parents for a second interview: insists his son was nothing to do with them; never undertook any missions for them; he can disclose no more. And silently hands the dad a pair of beautiful gold cufflinks. They leave with tears in their eyes. Ned later finds out the cufflinks were a present to Smiley from his adulterous wife, Ann.

9. Frewin An anonymous letter denounces Cyril Frewin, an anonymous operative in the Cipher Section, as a spy, linking him with Modrian from the Soviet Embassy. Ned goes to Frewin’s sad suburban semi and the novel gives us a lengthy verbatim account of his interview of Frewin: over twenty pages or so we see precisely how a clever man like Ned can manipulate and play on the psychological weaknesses of a sad loner like Frewin to get him to finally confess that, yes, he was a spy for Modrian. But more than that, the story shows how Modrian and the Russians skillfully and elaborately played on Frewin’s sense of isolation in order to befriend him, to identify the things he loves (classical music, educated conversation), to persuade him they are on his side, in order to exploit him, and slowly increase the level of information they ask Frewin to send them. Ned realises he is guilty of just as much psychological exploitation as Modrian and (we’re getting used to it by this time) feels soiled and sickened.

Was love an ideology? Was loyalty a political party? Or had we, in our rush to divide the world, divided it in the wrong way, failing to notice that the real battle lay between those who were searching, and those who, in order to prevail, had reduced their vulnerability to the lowest common factor of indifference? I was on the brink of destroying a man for love. (p.332)

There is an awful lot of pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-theological discussion of love and betrayal and love and fidelity and love and loyalty in these stories. Who knew that British intelligence agents spent so much time thinking about love?

Tone

The style is deliberately, overtly posh, an attempt – I think – to give Ned a distinct voice. Public school, Oxford, a commission in the Army, then a spell in the Navy, before the Secret Service, Ned is impeccably pukkah and so is the world he moves in. When he mixes with the 95% of the population who didn’t go to private school – Monty and his team of ‘watchers’ or mum and dad of Ken Hawthorne – he is nervously aware he is mixing with ‘the other ranks’, the ‘NCOs’, people who can’t write a decent letter or are intimidated in the presence of their ‘betters’.

As in previous Circus novels there is a tone of complacency typified by the use of ‘we’. Back in those days we all this… We revered those senior figures… We felt that Smiley… In those days we… etc. — Ned’s tone suggests a schoolmaster fondly recalling some of his more reprobate pupils, or a young master filled with awe and reverence for the old timers who embody the much-loved institution and its values. It is a tone of complacent self-justification, as if the ‘Circus’ and its internal squabbles is all that matters in the world.

After all, le Carré had a spell as a teacher at Eton. Eton. Is it possible to be more Establishment than that? And Ned’s role in the novel is as teacher or supervisor of trainee spies at Sarratt – so the patronising smugness of the old teacher – whoops, master – may be justified. Still, Ned’s tone often makes it seem as if British Intelligence was rather like a ramshackle public school, populated by eccentric, clever, spiteful masters, forever politicking among themselves and sending poor East European agents to their capture, torture and death. Oh well. Can’t be helped. Can I tempt you to another glass of this rather fine brandy?

Clive Bellamy, a gangly, mischievous Etonian, was in charge of Sarratt. (p.221)

Rumbelow (Station Head in Bangkok) spoke like an Etonian bookmaker. (p.225)

He put on an avuncular, friend-to-friend manner that reminded me of my preparatory-school headmaster. (p.318)

I continued writing to her from Tunbridge Wells but it became as difficult as writing home from [boarding] school. (p.334)

Even the enemy are seen in the same ‘what-ho, old Duffers eh, what a card’ public school tone of voice:

After my five years in the Russia House, Sergei Modrian was plain Sergei to me, as he had been to the rest of us: old Sergei, the crafty Armenian, head boy of Moscow Centre’s generously over-staffed residence at the Soviet Embassy in London. (p.274)

Head boy! Did the KGB see its operatives in terms of English public school positions?

At various points Ned has qualms and doubts and maybe the novel as a whole is meant to signify his ‘pilgrimage’ towards greater self-awareness and understanding of the role MI6 really played in these historical events. But it feels limited, like the master at a posh school who slowly comes to realise that maybe the senior staff aren’t the gods he was led to believe, and the mission to educate and civilise isn’t everything it was cracked up to be. But he doesn’t leave and he can’t leave, because deep down this is the only world, and these are only values, he knows.

Self-dramatisation

The ‘we we we’ is one aspect of the comfortable self-dramatisation. Ned takes the mickey out of himself for doing it, but carries on regardless making epic drama out of his life and work. The trip to see Ben in Scotland talks about the ‘Wagnerian’ setting and the ‘Romantic’ situation. In all the other stories he reaches for grand comparisons from European culture. It is typical that he refers to the revelation that Haydon was a Russian spy as ‘The Fall’, and the periods before and after as ‘Before The Fall’ and ‘After The Fall’. Typically bombastic. And it conceals the reality. There was no Fall, it wasn’t a legendary, mythic event. You idiots let a Russian spy rise to become chief British Intelligence’s entire East European spy network. He passed on every important secret which crossed his desk for 15 years or more. All because he was a jolly good chap, went to a good public school and Cambridge, had a ‘first-rate mind’ and so on and so on. The bombast – the comparisons with Wagner or the Bible or Don Quixote or Shakespeare – conceal the incompetence. No wonder the Yanks distrusted us.

Although, on a conscious level, the narrator analyses the career of spying as shabby and full of moral qualms etc, he actually describes it with grandiose and self-aggrandising comparisons, with a mock heroism that is so consistently present that it eventually turns into just heroism.

Like Quixote, I had set out in life vowing to check the flow of evil. (p.186)

Only Ahmed behind the counter who for a few dollars and a smile, would tell you the secrets of the universe. (p.200)

[Was he] a high-school war tourist on the hippy trail, searching for kicks in the city of the damned? (P.201)

The language, the comparisons, all as inflated as Milton’s Grand Style. On the same page he describes being in bed with his mistress, Monica, when he gets a call saying his mother’s been taken ill.

By an act of divine ill taste I was in bed with Monica when I took the call. (p.186)

‘Divine ill taste?’ Really? You think God had something to do with it? Isn’t it just an accident? In fact, does it matter at all where he is or who he’s with? No. Only to someone used to dramatising their every step as divinely fated or divinely tasteful would this be worth noting. He goes on to write of his mother’s death:

‘I was orphaned and elated all at once… At last I stood unencumbered before life’s challenges… And when I looked at myself in the mirror of the undertaker’s rose-tinted lavatory after my night’s vigil, I was horrified by what I saw. It was the face of a spy branded by his own deception.’ (p.187).

I think the expression is: Get over yourself!

Catholic melodrama

The tale about the Dutch Jesuit spy Hansen is the most powerful piece because of the intense description it gives of being captured and tortured by the Khmer Rouge. Le Carré, in my opinion, weakens it by having the very tough Hansen a) be a Roman Catholic priest b) be taken prisoner because he is on a religious quest to find his young daughter. Thus a story which is quite harrowing enough, piles on every possible opportunity to cast each event, from his torture to her assimilation by the guerrillas, as edge-of-the-seat threats to their immortal souls. Having recently completed reading all of Graham Greene’s novels, I’ve had enough to last me a lifetime of the self-obsession and overblown melodrama of literary Catholicism:

Hansen had glared into my face with eyes lit by the red hells from which he had returned. (p.217)

‘Once you have embarked upon the impossible concept of God, you will know that real love permits no rejection. Perhaps that is something only a sinner can properly understand. Only a sinner knows the scale of God’s forgiveness.’ (p.238)

Maybe. But it seems a certainty that once you come out of the closet as a Catholic novelist there is no end, literally no end, to the amount of sentences and paragraphs and chapters and novels you can fill with pseudo-theology and self-important attitudinising:

[Hansen was] in search of Marie, his pure love, the earth mother who was his daughter, the only keeper of his grace. (p.240)

With Marie to support him, he could bear anything. Each would be the salvation of the other. Her love for him was as fierce and single-minded as his for her. He did not doubt it. For all his loathing of captivity, he thanked God he had followed her. (p.242)

I am nourishing her from my own breast. I am her guardian, the protector of her chastity. I am her priest, giving her Christ’s Sacrament.

Once this tone of holy pretentiousness is broached it becomes catching. Chapter 11 starts with Smiley explaining to the young acolytes:

‘And some interrogations are not interrogations at all, but communions between damaged souls.’ (p.273)

The stories themselves are gripping and fascinating. The intellectual framework within which they’re cast – the self-dramatisation, the emphasis on love and redemption and grace and salvation and communion etc, give them a very strong flavour, a particular set of spices, which I think you either love or hate.

Stefanie, Bella, Mabel, Monica, Marie, Sally

Lots of nubile and sexually available or provocative young women in le Carré’s fiction:

Stefanie is the half-German artist cousin of his friend and incompetent Ben, who he falls for heavily but she ignores him and moves abroad. He carries a torch for her the rest of his life.
Bella is the scorchingly sexy girlfriend of beefy Captain Brand, who introduces Ned to championship sex.
Mabel is the dull English woman he actually marries and who likes curling up on the sofa in the evening with the Daily Telegraph (p.181).
Monica is a girl in the Service’s Industrial Liaison Unit who he has an affair with (p.186).
Marie is the Asian daughter of Hansen, the Jesuit priest-turned-spy, who he pursues across South-East Asia only to find her turned into a numb prostitute in Bangkok. Before he finds Hansen Ned is given a display of her skills. The way she turns, raises and wiggles her bare bottom provocatively at him (p.231) reminds the reader of the gorgeous Bella doing the same (p.100). Lucky Ned.

In chapter 11 he is having an affair with Sally, a tall, fair designer and ‘dancer’. Colleagues irritate him by asking after his wife; are they separating? Divorcing? He has become a mirror image of Smiley, who is faithful and quiet, betrayed by his wife, Lady Ann, taking serial lovers. Here it is Ned who appears to have the serial affairs, betraying his staid wife, Mabel. But in both models, a marriage is actually about betrayal and is another way to justify the tone of world-weary self-importance which dominates the book.

Out with the old…

Once you look, you realise every reference to George Smiley lays on with a trowel his wisdom, his insight, his patient deduction, the way he is ahead of everyone. In the last few pages he is referred to as sitting on a ‘throne’ as he talks to the students. Earlier we had heard of the cup and saucer he bequeathed to the secretary pool at the Circus being treated like a ‘chalice’. This is ridiculously overblown; makes it sound like an Arthurian romance. Smiley delivers a suitably vague and bombastic peroration about Russia – characteristically referred to as ‘the Bear’ rather than any detail of actual administrations, actual leaders, actual complex policies – we must help her join the community of nations etc. But his parting shot to the trainees is they must also be alert to the way we in the West have ‘given up too many of our freedoms in order to be free’. We must be watchful of our own society, as well.

Like the farewell speech of a much beloved headmaster. And so, amid sentimental tears and wise admonishments, George Smiley leaves the scene.

… and in with the new

But that isn’t the end. Instead, with only days till his retirement, Ned is sent on one last mission, to persuade an arrogant financier, a man who has built a fortune, bought a knighthood and a vast landed estate, based on business deals he did for the Service, to now stop selling arms and munitions to unsuitable nations (Serbia, central Africa).

Rich, replete Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw offers him champagne and tells him to fuck off. With dismay Ned realises these are the new breed, the completely ruthless, amoral international financiers who he has made the world safe for. Ned toys with telling him that, now we’ve defeated communism we have to set about defeating capitalism. But Bradshaw pounds on about how if he doesn’t sell the buggers arms someone else will and good luck to them. Business is business. This country’s going soft. Where there’s money to be made, he will make it. Ned fails, He has made the world safe for people like Bradshaw, and now it is over to them…

Credit

The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré, published in 1991 by Hodder and Stoughton. All quotes from the 1991 Coronet paperback edition, 1994 impression.

John Le Carré’s novels

Call for the Dead (1961) Introducing George Smiley. Intelligence employee Samuel Fennan is found dead beside a suicide note. With the help of a CID man, Mendel, and the trusty Peter Guillam, Smiley unravels the truth behind his death, namely he was murdered by an East German spy ring, headed by Mundt.
A Murder of Quality (1962) Smiley investigates the murder of a teacher’s wife at an ancient public school in the West Country, incidentally the seat of the father of his errant wife, Lady Ann. No espionage involved, a straight murder mystery in the style of Morse or a thousand other detective stories.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) Extraordinarily brilliant account of a British agent, Alec Leamas, who pretends to be a defector in order to give disinformation to East German intelligence, told with complete plausibility and precision.
The Looking Glass War (1965) A peculiar spy story about a Polish émigré soldier who is recruited by a ramshackle part of British intelligence, given incompetent training, useless equipment, and sent to his pointless death after murdering an East German border guard then blundering round the countryside before being captured. Smiley makes peripheral appearances.
A Small Town in Germany (1968) Political intrigue set in Bonn during the rise of a (fictional) right-wing populist movement. Didn’t like it.
The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) His most famous book. Smiley meticulously tracks down the Soviet mole at the heart of the ‘Circus’ ie MI6.
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) Jerry Westerby is the part-time agent instructed to follow a trail of money from the KGB in Hong Kong, which involves intrigue at various locations in the Far East. It is done on Smiley’s orders but the latter barely appears.
Smiley’s People (1979) The assassination of a European émigré in Hampstead leads via a convoluted series of encounters, to the defection of Karla, Smiley’s opposite number in the KGB.
The Little Drummer Girl (1983) A long and brilliant meditation on the Arab-Israeli conflict, embodied by Charlie, the posh young English actress recruited by Israeli intelligence and trained to ‘allow’ herself to then be recruited by Arab terrorists, thus becoming a double agent.
A Perfect Spy (1986) Long flashback over the career of Magnus Pym, diplomat and spy, which brilliantly describes his boyhood with his chancer father, and the long tortuous route by which he became a traitor.
The Russia House (1989) Barley Blair is a drunk publisher who a Russian woman approaches at a book fair in Moscow to courier secrets to the West. He is ‘recruited’ and sent back to get more, which is when things begin to go wrong.
The Secret Pilgrim (1990) A series of vivid short stories describing episodes in the life of ‘old Ned’, a senior British Intelligence officer now in charge of trainees at the Service’s base at Sarratt in Buckinghamshire. When he asks George Smiley to come and lecture the young chaps and chapesses, it prompts a flood of reminiscence about the Cold War, and some references to how abruptly and completely their world has changed with the collapse of Russian communism.
The Night Manager (1993)
Our Game (1995)
The Tailor of Panama (1996)
Single & Single (1999)
The Constant Gardener (2001)
Absolute Friends (2003)
The Mission Song (2006)
A Most Wanted Man (2008)
Our Kind of Traitor (2010)
A Delicate Truth (2013)

The Looking Glass War by John le Carré (1965)

‘All right,’ Haldane conceded. ‘We have our brief. But things have changed. It’s a different game now. In those days we were top of the tree – rubber boats on a moonless night; a captured enemy plane; wireless and all that. You and I know; we did it together. But it’s changed. It’s a different war; a different kind of fighting.’ (p.62)

Failure and misery

This novel has the unrelenting despair and misery of a Graham Greene book. Everyone is unhappy, incompetent, in failed marriages with wives who despise them, children they don’t understand, in unsuccessful careers, too old, living in the past, working for a superannuated organisation, slack, doomed to failure.

He went back to his room. There were times when he confronted his own image as a man confronts an empty valley, and the vision propels him forward again to experience, as despair compels us to extinction. (p.103)

The same wish-to-lecture as Greene. And the same subject: despair, emptiness, the horror of life.

The flat was in darkness. Standing before it, he tried to detect in the house, in himself, some trace of the sentiment, or affection, or love, or whatever it was that explained their marriage, but it was not to be found and he supposed it had never been. He sought desperately, wanting to find the motive of youth; but there was none. He was staring into an empty house. (p.151)

And the same easy equation of complex situations with half a dozen standard bromides about love and guilt.

He was terribly tired; the tiredness was like a physical despair, like the moment of guilt before making love. (p.212)

Like most of Greene’s editorialising, this sounds fine but, on inspection, is meaningless, as if the words ‘despair’, ‘guilt’ and ‘love’, ‘faith’ and betrayal’, are shiny counters which can be placed in any order to deliver a Grand Statement about the Human Condition.

‘Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.’ (p.196)

Greeneitis.

Competence and the thriller

If you can put aside the relentlessly depressed view of human nature, the novel has other themes.

It highlights the importance of ‘competence’ as a key concept in the thriller. From Sherlock Holmes to Jason Bourne the hero has a super-human ability to swiftly size up situations and seize the advantage. Despite le Carre’s reputation for the downbeat and realistic, George Smiley (p.32) does in fact perform the function of the omni-competent hero in the eight novels in which he is mentioned (part of the reason I don’t like the running gag about his glamorous wife, Lady Ann, having left him, is because it is so obviously a ruse designed to conceal the fact that Smiley is, beneath his thick glasses and badly-tailored clothes, as shrewd and all-seeing as Holmes.)

The Looking Glass War

In this novel le Carré goes out of his way to portray incompetence. It is set in a government ‘Department’, which had a clear brief during the War to gather intelligence but has now fallen on hard times, its staff dwindling, its agents taken over by the ‘Circus’, in whose shadow the resentful handful of remaining ageing bureaucrats dream up schemes to reassert their importance, led by a hesitant, small man named Leclerc. The old-timers with too much time on their hands reminisce about the War, and the plot boils down to an effort by these middle-aged dreamers to recapture the intensity, the sense of purpose and the excitement they felt, during the War.

Part one

In the brief first part we are introduced to Taylor, a boastful man sent by Leclerc to a remote airport in Finland. A commercial flight has been instructed to fly over East German airspace with cameras in the belly, presumably to look for military installations. Taylor is to meet the pilot and take receipt of the roll of film. The point of the entire section is to highlight Taylor’s incompetence:

he fluffs elementary security by telling his wife about the mission, and she has told their daughter (!)
he is tempted at every turn to impress the airport staff with how jolly important he is
instead of finding a quiet corner of the bar and waiting for the pilot to arrive, he hogs the bar and makes himself memorable by insulting the barman
when the pilot arrives he is himself flustered by having been intercepted by MIG jets, unhappy with the mission
and they exchange the roll of film and money in plain sight

By the time Taylor has realised he’s drunk, the last airport taxis have all gone and he sets off to walk through the heavy snow to the hotel. A car seen earlier loitering, accelerates up behind him and deliberately runs him over, killing him. The strong implication is this murder follows logically from the folly of the mission and the failure of Taylor to observe almost every rule of ‘tradecraft’.

Part two

Leclerc hosts a meeting of the ‘Department’. Le Carré forensically highlights the politics, the psychological combat, of the attendees. (Le Carré literally belittles Leclerc: he has small fists, a small head, struggles to assert himself.)

Leclerc tells them a mechanic who fled from the East brought photos of what appear to be the latest type of Russian missile being installed in secret locations in East Germany. The attendees are sceptical. They point out that their man who forwarded this ‘information’ – Gorton – has his contract up for renewal; maybe he invented it. (On page 167 Haldane, head of Research, finds similar photos which are known to be fake, but doesn’t inform anyone.) They are critical that Taylor, an overt courier, had been used for a clandestine mission (which explains why he was so puffed up and incompetent), but generally accept the conclusion that this could be a new Cuban Missile Crisis. –What comes over in spades is their collective sense of inferiority to the ‘Circus’, their resentment of the Foreign Office, their determination to prove themselves. All desperately downbeat and depressing.

This is one of the eight Smiley novels: he is not the main figure, as in Tinker, Tailor or Smiley’s People, but not quite as peripheral as in Spy. Once the Circus learns what the Department is up to, Control asks Smiley to lend a hand and keep watch. Smiley interviews Avery on pages 55 to 58. It is clear that he is appalled at his ignorance of tradecraft. Smiley gives him detailed instructions on how to ‘drop’ the film to an experienced courier. He reports back to Control and is tasked with keeping a watch on the Department’s activities.

Avery comes across as a young romantic fool. His trip to Helsinki to collect Taylor’s body is a disaster. Le Carré shows unrelentingly how your story must be perfect to the utmost bureaucratic detail or else the Consul, the Embassy, the local police, the coroner, the airline – someone, in the normal course of their duties, will stumble across any anomalies, and then start asking difficult questions. Avery is portrayed – like Taylor before him – as completely out of his depth. He cannot even manage burning Taylor’s letters and affects in his hotel room without staining the sink, leaving tell-tale traces, and making the hotel staff suspicious.

Wives

Depression and failure colour the entire book. Le Carré carries it deep into the characters’ private lives. The members of the Department fail to keep basic security by telling their wives what’s happening. Their wives don’t believe them or despise them. We meet:

Woodford the technician and his drunk weeping malicious wife, Babs – ‘she was a thin, childless woman’ (p.168)
Taylor’s wife, horribly distraught with grief, when told her husband has died ‘for his country’
Fred Leiser’s wife, drunk and resentful and suspicious: he’d rather spend the night with a prostitute than return to her
Young foolish Avery emerges as probably the lead character in the novel and we learn far too much about the sterile love-hate marriage with Sarah, who bitterly resents his secrecy and his new sense of puffed-up importance, and are mildly nauseated by the way both of them use their young son Anthony as a pawn in the endless arguments – ‘If it weren’t for Anthony I really would leave you’ (p.164)
Smiley thinks Control stays in town on Monday nights because he wants to get away from his wife (p.154)
and, of course, everyone knows about Smiley’s wife, the glamorous Lady Ann, and her serial infidelities

All relations between the sexes, in this novel, cause pain. Reading the many passages about relationships in this novel are like having toothache.

Part three

Back in Blighty, young Avery discovers there’s been more incompetence: since he had used his own name when visiting Helsinki to reclaim Taylor’s body, the irregularities in Taylor’s identity were noted and pursued by immigration police our end, who called on Avery’s wife in the middle of the night. As if that wasn’t bad enough, because he’d blabbed to her, she proceeded to tell the police all about Taylor and his secret mission. If they were police, that is…

Meanwhile, we are shown Leclerc adroitly handling the Whitehall system and getting permission and money to ‘send a man in’ to check the rocket rumours. We are shown Department buffer Woodford going to a shabby old club, the Alias Club, on Villier Street near Charing Cross, set up by veterans of the War, and asking about old contacts, trainers he could call up, plus does anyone know the whereabouts of the man they’ve chosen for the mission, the only man they have on the books from the old days who can speak German, a Polish emigré who fought with us during the War, Fred Leiser.

The novel describes the way old hands from the War are tracked down and set to work training Leiser for his top secret mission at a rented house in Oxford. But the whole flavour of the thing is bitter farce: they are all dreamers, deluded; they want the old days to return, the War years to restore a sense of purpose to their empty lives. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is downbeat, but the leanness of the narrative and the slowly-revealed depths of intelligence in the plot are invigorating for the reader. This novel is plain depressing. Everyone is deluded.

The training is described in minute detail. Maybe it is an accurate portrayal of espionage tradecraft circa 1960. Certainly the class consciousness is very 1960s. Leiser and the the trainers are sergeants and NCOs, not proper officer material, dontcha know. While Leclerc and Haldane swell into their officer-class sense of self-importance, Avery notices the trainers and the agent himself have ‘something of the backstairs’ (p.166).

In the East

The final forty or so pages, describing Leiser’s pointless ‘mission’ into East Germany, are vividly imagined and written, heart-stopping, terrifying: he sneaks across the night-time terrain, through the wire, suddenly killing the young border guard he encounters, then blundering through snow, through darkened villages, stealing a motorbike, asking questions and causing suspicion wherever he goes, leaving a trail a mile wide. The defining mistake is transmitting a radio signal back to his controllers for a solid six minutes, when the maximum for security purposes is two-and-a-half. After three the East Germans have detected it, and the remaining minutes allow them time for several receivers to pick him up and work out his location. They close in for the kill.

Control

It’s not as if the ‘Circus’ (the name all the characters use for British Intelligence due to its location on Cambridge Circus in central London) is much better. The Circus is well-informed about all these developments but let the Department’s crazy plan go ahead anyway, deliberately lending them antiquated radio equipment, fixing passports and papers. On pages 216 to 218 a conversation takes place between Control and Smiley in which the former seems to be admitting that they’ve set the Department up to fail; in other words, that they’re happy for this agent to be captured or killed if it leads to the disgrace and closure of the Department and the triumph of the Circus. ‘It’s not my fault they’ve taken so long to die.’ (p.218)

This exchange clinches one’s view of Control. He is nasty, amoral and manipulative (as he seems to have been in conceiving the plan which led to Liz and Leamas’s death in the Spy Who Came In From The Cold). But, worse, he comes over as doddery. He is portrayed as a querulous old man who detests the modern world and judges people as much by snobbery as on their merits.

I do detest the telephone (p.216)
Leclerc’s so vulgar…a silly, vulgar man (p.217)
God, how I loathe civil servants. (p.217)

Partly this looks forward to Control’s death just before the start of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) and everyone’s comments in that book that he’d lost it, become obsessed, should have been pensioned off etc. But on every page of this novel I thought, if this is a remotely accurate account of Britain’s intelligence services in the early 1960s no wonder the Americans were so supremely reluctant to share anything with such a shower.

Short

The narrator not only belittles the silly ‘Department’, its foolish plan and its ham-fisted incompetence, he literally belittles the characters. They’re always short, under-sized.

Leclerc Smaller than the rest, older. (p.29) Leiser laughed in a reserved way. It was if he could have wished Leclerc a taller man. (p.182) His small hands folded tidily on his knee. (p.202)
Leiser He was a short man, very straight (p.106) He was very much the small man just then. (p.184) As Leiser put on each unfamiliar thing… he seemed to shrink before their eyes. (p.187) … his small face was turned to her… (p.237)
Smiley Little sad bloke.’ (p.112)

Everything about the book is little and sad, including, by extension, England itself, its shabby pubs and seedy clubs, its streets full of prostitutes, its awful food and grim weather. The descriptions are beautifully precise. Le Carré’s prose is crisp and clear. But this is one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read.

He handed in his suitcase to the depository at Paddington Station and wandered out into Praed Street because he had nowhere to go. He walked about for half an hour, looking at the shop windows and reading the tarts’ advertisements on the glazed notice boards. It was Saturday afternoon: a handful of old men in trilby hats and raincoats hovered between the pornography shops and the pimps on the corner. There was very little traffic: an atmosphere of hopeless recreation filled the street. (p.149)

The movie

Made into a film starring Anthony Hopkins.

John Le Carré’s novels

Call for the Dead (1961) Introducing George Smiley. Intelligence employee Samuel Fennan is found dead beside a suicide note. With the help of a CID man, Mendel, and the trusty Peter Guillam, Smiley unravels the truth behind his death, namely he was murdered by an East German spy ring, headed by Mundt.
A Murder of Quality (1962) Smiley investigates the murder of a teacher’s wife at an ancient public school in the West Country, incidentally the seat of the father of his errant wife, Lady Ann. No espionage involved, a straight murder mystery in the style of Morse or a thousand other detective stories.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) Extraordinarily brilliant account of a British agent, Alec Leamas, who pretends to be a defector in order to give disinformation to East German intelligence, told with plausibility, precision and thrilling intelligence.
The Looking Glass War (1965) Depressing tale of a ramshackle wing of British intelligence left over from the War, whose members try to recapture the old glory when they receive a (dodgy) tip about missiles stationed in East Germany, and wangle the funding to give incompetent training, useless equipment and send to his pointless death, a hapless Polish émigré. A detailed and persuasive account of a dispiriting shambles.
A Small Town in Germany (1968) Political intrigue set in Bonn during the rise of a (fictional) right-wing populist German political movement.
The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) Smiley meticulously tracks down the Soviet mole at the heart of the ‘Circus’ ie MI6.
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) Jerry Westerby is the part-time agent instructed to follow a trail of money from the KGB in Hong Kong, which involves intrigue at various locations in the Far East. It is done on Smiley’s orders but the latter barely appears.
Smiley’s People (1979) The assassination of a European emigre in Hampstead leads, eventually, the defection of Karla, Smiley’s opposite number in the KGB.
The Little Drummer Girl (1983) A long and brilliant meditation on the Arab-Israeli conflict, embodied by Charlie, the posh young English actress recruited by Israeli intelligence and trained to allow herself to be recruited by Arab terrorists, thus becoming a double agent.
A Perfect Spy (1986) Long flashback over the career of Magnus Pym, diplomat and spy, which brilliantly describes his boyhood with his chancer father, and the long tortuous route by which he became a traitor.
The Russia House (1989) Barley Blair is a drunk publisher who a Russian woman approaches to courier secrets to the West. He is ‘recruited’ and sent back to get more, which is when things start to go wrong.
The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
The Night Manager (1993)
Our Game (1995)
The Tailor of Panama (1996)
Single & Single (1999)
The Constant Gardener (2001)
Absolute Friends (2003)
The Mission Song (2006)
A Most Wanted Man (2008)
Our Kind of Traitor (2010)
A Delicate Truth (2013)

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré (1963)

Who do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs? I’d have killed Mundt if I could, I hate his guts; but not now. It so happens they need him. They need him so that the great moronic mass that you admire can sleep soundly in their beds at night. They need him for the safety of ordinary, crummy people like you and me.’ (p.231)

This is a really brilliant novel: wonderfully conceived, powerfully imagined, expertly executed, clearly written. It was le Carre’s breakthrough novel, only his third, which established him as a major player and created an entirely new downbeat, realistic feel for spy thrillers.

Plot

Alec Leamas works for British intelligence as station officer in Berlin. When his network is ‘rolled up’ ie arrested by East German security, he returns to England, like all le Carré’s protagonists aware of his advancing age and wondering if he is over the hill. He is given menial duties working in the banking section of the ‘Circus’ (so-called because it is located in London’s Cambridge Circus) and called in for a special meeting with ‘Control’, who has a plan.

Leamas will undertake a daring mission. He will be dismissed from the Circus under a cloud to the accompaniment of orchestrated gossip that he’s been badly treated and tricked out of a pension. He will drink heavily, get himself thrown into prison, in every way appear to be disillusioned, and so make himself available to be approached by ‘the other side’. He will, in short, set himself up to be a defector.

And this is just what happens. He drinks heavily to cultivate the image. Bad mouths the Service which has given him a menial job in banking. Eventually the Service ‘lets him go’. He is unemployed. He drinks heavily. He gets a job at a library and falls in love with a Jewish communist librarian, Liz Gold. He drunkenly assaults a greengrocer, knocking him out, getting arrested and sent to prison.

Sure enough, as soon as he gets out he is approached by one Ashe, who offers to look after him. After some chat he is passed on to a tougher man named Kievers. This man ascertains that Leamas worked for the Service and is prepared to talk about it, and explains he will be taken abroad for a short while to earn money telling what he knows. He flies under a false passport to Holland where he is handed over to a more senior figure, Peters. This Peters offers Leamas £15,000 to tell everything he knows about the Circus. Leamas agrees and answers all questions over several days interviewing.

They are in the middle of the process when news comes that the authorities in Britain have put out an alert for him. At this point Leamas becomes genuinely afraid – this wasn’t in Control’s plan. Peters and his German minders say he must now be moved East for his own safety. They fly to Berlin and drive across the checkpoint into East Berlin. From there Leamas is taken to an isolated safe house amid pine forests and meets Fiedler, number two in the Abteilung, the East German secret police.

In long interrogations – really conversations – with Fiedler, Leamas reveals everything he knows about the Circus’s operations in East Germany: about his network, how it was run, who was paid what etc. In among all the true stuff, though, is the thread of disinformation – a set of misleading facts about secret payments he had to make via Scandinavian banks.

The point of the mission

It is this which is the core of Leamas’s mission: because the dates of the payments have been timed to match the dates of trips to Scandinavian countries by Mundt, the head of the Abteilung. In other words, the entire deception is designed to frame Mundt and give his number two, Fiedler, the evidence he needs to arrest and eliminate Mundt. Cunning.

At every stage Leamas plays it perfectly by being reluctant: pretending not to know that the dates tie up, then refusing to believe Mundt could be a spy since he, Leamas, ran the German network and would have known about him. Leamas’s ignorance and reluctance to go along with the notion of Mundt’s guilt are designed to encourage Fiedler’s belief in it.

Mundt in A Call For The Dead

NB It is useful to have read A Call For The Dead before this novel, as this is the same Mundt who appears as in that novel as the head of the East German Steel Mission to Britain. When the network is ‘blown’ he oversees the assassination of agents who risk further exposure.

a) Although these events are referred to in Spy, it is more powerful to have read and experienced them in the earlier book; it gives a stronger sense of Mundt’s brutality. b) It is part of Fiedler’s case against Mundt that Mundt was able to leave England so easily after his network was exposed because Mundt did a deal with British Intelligence, and ever since then has been a double agent, rising up in the Abteilung, sending information to London.

Reversals

The novel is perfectly paced. All the events unfold with a deep and pleasing inevitability, yet nothing is forced or hurried. There is a sudden reversal – Fiedler is still interrogating Leamas when their house is taken over by security guards working for Mundt, who has intervened to arrest Fielder and Leamas. The latter is badly beaten then begins to be interrogated by Mundt (who we finally meet, cold and calculating). But almost immediately there is a further switch, because Fielder had just sent a dossier of his case against Mundt to the Praesidium, who now release Fiedler and imprison Mundt.

The impasse must be resolved and so the Praesidium organises an investigation to be set in a court room, each side making its case. Fiedler argues compellingly against Mundt, listing the evidence which has led him to believe Mundt is a British double agent. However, Mundt’s lawyer then demolishes it: He all-too-accurately describes the Circus’s plot, the way Leamas was laid off, ran out of money poor, drank too much, assaulted the grocer – Mundt’s lawyer accurately describes this all as a scam, designed to lead to his recruitment by the Abteilung.

Up to this point he is describing events which could be interpreted either way. But then, in a dramatic coup, he introduces Liz, Leamas’s lover, the librarian, into the court. (In a parallel strand of the novel we had seen her be contacted by the British communist party and invited on a ‘goodwill visit’ to East Germany. It was all a ploy to enable her to be produced at the trial.) Here Mundt’s counsel extracts, from an obviously honest and reluctant witness, the fact that Liz knew about the assault before it happened, that Leamas said he had something he had to do, that he made their last night a formal goodbye (the day before he assaulted the grocer and went to prison) that, in other words, the whole thing was planned.

In further, damning, evidence, she reluctantly admits that she was visited by Smiley, who left a card and told her to get in touch if she had any problems or if she heard from Leamas; and that her lease was bought and sent to her, as if in payment for her aid.

Leamas listens in amazement. How incompetent of London! It is almost as if they were trying to undermine his mission, it is almost as if they wanted the mission to indict Mundt to fail, it is almost as if the whole mission was actually designed to incriminate Fiedler… at which point, Leamas realises with a shock… that Fiedler is right. That Mundt is London’s man. That Control and Smiley lied to him, and have used him and Liz as pawns in a deeper plot to discredit Fiedler – a genuine communist – because he was getting too close to Mundt – London’s double-agent.

Liz Gold

The narrative then follows Liz as she is taken from the court through miles of corridors of the vast prison for dissidents and intellectuals, has a dispiriting conversation with the zealous woman guard, and sinks in despair onto her bed… when the door of her cell is opened and it is Mundt, hurrying her along corridors, out of a door onto a gravel drive to the main gate, through it and up to a car and to Leamas. He leaves them.

This is a particularly effective passage because a) it skips quickly over events in the court room, which probably got a bit tedious b) it powerfully conveys Liz’s fear and bewilderment – for once we are not following the actions of a seasoned player of ‘the game’, we are feeling the devastating impact of this terrifying world on someone like us, the disorientation, the terror.

The Wall

Mundt has triumphed. Leamas and Liz are free. They get in the car and, as Leamas drives at speed back towards Berlin, he reveals the moral of the story. Because Liz is such a complete innocent, Leamas is able to explain the rationale of espionage from the ground up, how it is the logical extension of two conflicting ideologies, how it is infinitely superior to actual war, but how it has its own casualties, compromises, amorality. What did she expect? (See the quote at the head of this review.)

They pick up an agent at a pre-arranged place who guides them to the Wall and gives them precise instructions about how to climb over at a place where the wire has been cut. And so they walk to it and climb up and over as instructed except that, as Leamas pulls the girl up after him all the searchlights go on and there are shots. Liz’s body goes limp then falls. She and Leamas had discussed in the car how odd it was that Mundt was letting her go, an idealistic fool who now knows he is a top-ranking double agent ie she holds his life in her hands. Leamas realises Mundt planned to have her killed all along. And, in deeper disillusionment, realises his own side must have known it as well. And we don’t need to be reminded that Mundt is viciously anti-semitic and Liz was a Jew. The full horror of these people, of this world, of total expediency, hits us.

Leamas hears voices from the West telling him to climb over and down to safety. He hears Smiley’s voice ‘from quite close’. And, like the ageing, tired, and completely disillusioned man he is, Leamas deliberately climbs back down into the Eastern side, knowing what will happen, no longer wanting to live. And is shot dead.

The sense of psychological defeat, betrayal, moral squalor, is complete, and leaves an enduring taste in the mouth. The le Carré flavour.

Jewishness

Throughout the text characters show a sensitiveness to Jewishness which is strange to me. Maybe it’s Germany, with its special history, that makes it so prominent. But it is also important to the plot that Liz the librarian is Jewish, and that Fiedler, the number two, is Jewish. In the brief spell when Mundt’s men take over, before the Praesidium intervenes, Mundt is described as torturing Fiedler, and whispering ‘dirty Jew’, ‘filthy Jew’, in his ear. The woman gaoler in charge of Liz is similarly automatically, thoughtlessly anti-semitic. Leamas is not anti-semitic but immediately recognises someone as Jewish.

Maybe this ‘Jew awareness’ is one of the differences between 1963 and 2014 (when I’m writing), 50 years which have seen enormous immigration to all West European nations and the creation of truly multicultural societies. Maybe Jews were more noticeable in 1963, in a society almost 100% white and caucasian – whereas in 2014 any slight physical difference they (may) exhibit has been lost in the vast sea of racial/ethnic differences which now surrounds us.

Memories of the Cold War

This sensitivity to Jewishness is one aspect of the way this novel is now part of a vanished history. When I first read 1984 and Darkness At Noon in the 1970s, they scared me more than any horror story, they described an abyss into which all society, all humanity, could quite possibly fall, they described outcomes which might result from the political struggles of the time, from the power of communist and socialist parties across Europe even, potentially, from the power of the radical wing of the Labour Party.

It is not just that the Cold War ended and the West won. It is the way even the notion that one single ideology could conquer the world has evaporated. When this novel was published the world population was 3 billion. China, the USSR, all East Europe, Korea then Vietnam, Cuba and parts of Latin America, and a lot of Africa could be described as communist or at risk of becoming communist. Now the world population is over 7 billion and it’s not clear that any state is now genuinely communist. Although Islamic fundamentalism gives the West’s security services something to do, that sense that ‘one side’ will triumph has disappeared. There are now lots of anxieties, but they are to do with the economy, the environment, global warming, random acts of terrorism.

That one, bottomless, existential fear about the death of human freedom and the triumph of totalitarian communism which I remember from the 1970s and which was captured in novels like this, has disappeared like morning dew. It is impossible to explain it to my children. They have no idea what I’m talking about.

Dramatis personae

Alec Leamas – fifty-year-old spy, pretends to be a defector
Control – head of the ‘Circus’ ie British intelligence
George Smiley – peripheral to the plot, but appears at various moments, specifically when he visits Leamas’s girlfriend Liz Gold, to find out what if anything he’s told her communist party leaders about Leamas (he also witnesses Leamas beating up the grocer, and pays off Leamas’s landlord)
Liz Gold – naive, idealistic librarian and member of the Bayswater communist party
Ashe – effeminate, nervous German agent, who makes first contact with Leamas, hands him on to…
Kievens – who establishes that Leamas is prepared to defect
Peters – in Holland, debriefs Leamas at length
Jens Fiedler – number two in Eat German Abteilung, interrogates Leamas in a friendly collaborative way because he suspects his boss, Mundt, is an English double-agent
Mundt – head of East German security; cold, cunning, sadistic, he is in fact a British double-agent, and the whole point of Leamas’s mission turns out to be to protect him by discrediting Fiedler

Credit

The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carré, published 1963 by Victor Gollancz. All quotes from the 1981 Pan paperback edition.

The movie

The novel was made into a fantastically atmospheric black-and-white film, released in 1965, starring Richard Burton and featuring Michael Horden, Sam Wanamaker, Oskar Werner and Robert Hardy. It is as much a classic of the film world as the book is of literature. All the actors are immaculate. The direction, by Martin Ritt, is wonderful. The framing of almost every shot is perfect, many of the frames can be frozen and make classy still photos. Ritt has a fantastically good eye and a choice way of locating the camera, conceiving action, framing the shot. And at the heart of it is a towering performance by Burton, acting much older than his 40 years, looking and sounding a thousand years old.

Interviews

Le Carre has given innumerable interviews to the press and TV over the years.

John Le Carré’s novels

Call for the Dead (1961) Introducing George Smiley. Intelligence employee Samuel Fennan is found dead beside a suicide note. With the help of a CID man, Mendel, and the trusty Peter Guillam, Smiley unravels the truth behind his death, namely he was murdered by an East German spy ring, headed by Mundt.
A Murder of Quality (1962) Smiley investigates the murder of a teacher’s wife at an ancient public school in the West Country, incidentally the seat of the father of his errant wife, Lady Ann. No espionage involved, a straight murder mystery in the style of Morse or a thousand other detective stories.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) Extraordinarily brilliant account of a British agent, Alec Leamas, who pretends to be a defector in order to give disinformation to East German intelligence, told with complete plausibility and precision.
The Looking Glass War (1965) A peculiar spy story about a Polish émigré soldier who is recruited by a ramshackle part of British intelligence, given incompetent training, useless equipment, and sent to his pointless death after murdering an East German border guard then blundering round the countryside before being captured. Smiley makes peripheral appearances.
A Small Town in Germany (1968) Political intrigue set in Bonn during the rise of a (fictional) right-wing populist movement. Didn’t like it.
The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) His most famous book. Smiley meticulously tracks down the Soviet mole at the heart of the ‘Circus’ ie MI6.
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) Jerry Westerby is the part-time agent instructed to follow a trail of money from the KGB in Hong Kong, which involves intrigue at various locations in the Far East. It is done on Smiley’s orders but the latter barely appears.
Smiley’s People (1979) The assassination of a European émigré in Hampstead leads via a convoluted series of encounters, to the defection of Karla, Smiley’s opposite number in the KGB.
The Little Drummer Girl (1983) A long and brilliant meditation on the Arab-Israeli conflict, embodied by Charlie, the posh young English actress recruited by Israeli intelligence and trained to ‘allow’ herself to then be recruited by Arab terrorists, thus becoming a double agent.
A Perfect Spy (1986) Long flashback over the career of Magnus Pym, diplomat and spy, which brilliantly describes his boyhood with his chancer father, and the long tortuous route by which he became a traitor.
The Russia House (1989) Barley Blair is a drunk publisher who a Russian woman approaches at a book fair in Moscow to courier secrets to the West. He is ‘recruited’ and sent back to get more, which is when things begin to go wrong.
The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
The Night Manager (1993)
Our Game (1995)
The Tailor of Panama (1996)
Single & Single (1999)
The Constant Gardener (2001)
Absolute Friends (2003)
The Mission Song (2006)
A Most Wanted Man (2008)
Our Kind of Traitor (2010)
A Delicate Truth (2013)

A Murder of Quality by John le Carré (1962)

‘This is a critical moment in Carne’s development. Many public schools have conceded to the vulgar clamour for change – change at any price. Carne, I am pleased to say, has not joined these Gadarene swine.’ (p.67)

The snobbery latent in Call of the Dead comes out to dominate this, le Carré’s second novel. Why do so many English writers who went to public school seem unable to escape its influence and so often feel compelled to write about their wretched/happy experiences? Because it isn’t an education – it is an entire world, their world, an insular world of agreed attitudes and behaviours, which teaches them what to wear and how to speak and what to think, a world they can never escape.

Carne

This novel is set in a (fictional) private school, Carne, in Devon, where the ageing teachers drink the finest port, bitch about each other and lament the country going to the dogs, where the pupils are schooled in how to speak snob, how to identify plebs at a hundred paces and how to put servants in their place. Some of the parents and even (gasp!) masters are, to be perfectly frank, old boy, not quite up to snuff, if you know what I’m saying. One of them (it turns out to be the crux of the plot) went to grammar school! How ghastly!! The opening pages set the tone of the school and its pupils:

‘Mrs Rode’s quite decent, though – homely in a plebby sort of way…’ [pupil speaking]

‘He says emotionalism is only for the lower classes…] [pupil speaking]

‘My Pater says he’s queer.’ [pupil speaking]

Mr Terence Fielding, senior housemaster of Carne, gave himself some more port and pushed the decanter wearily to his left. (p.4)

‘What was his regiment, Terence, do you know?’ (p.5)

‘He’d never seen a game of rugger before he came here, you know. They don’t play rugger at grammar schools – it’s all soccer.’ (p.6)

‘I’m told her father lives near Bournemouth. It must be so lonely for him, don’t you think? Such a vulgar place; no one to talk to.’ (p.6)

‘The value of intelligence depends on its breeding.’ That was John Landsbury’s favourite dictum. (p.16)

‘His mother is a most cultured woman, a cousin of the Stamfords, I am told.’ (p.59)

‘I’m never sure about funerals, are you? I have a suspicion that they are largely a lower-class recreation; cherry brandy and seed-cake in the parlour… She would wear black crêpe on Sundays… Forgive me, but do the lower classes always do that?’ (p.99)

This isn’t a subtle code. The air of superiority which everyone in this tiny world gives themselves is rammed into your face from the first page. You – poor plebeian reader – are not of this exclusive world. You are admitted on sufferance.

(Maybe le Carré is satirising this world, but he is satirising it from within and is therefore implicated – in its aloofness, its petty cruelties, its unkindness, its ‘effeminate malice’ (p.55), its air of seedy failure, of moneyed stupidity, of well-dressed philistinism. His character Smiley, we know from the first novel, went to a public school and on to an Oxford college, and fusses about the right wine to drink and people’s accents and their suits.)

The plot

A teacher (sorry, master)’s wife sends a letter to an obscure Christian periodical, saying she fears her husband intends to murder her. The woman who runs the periodical single-handed happens to have worked in Intelligence during the War and ponders which of her colleagues could help out. More or less the only one left standing is George Smiley.

She used to think of him as the most forgettable man she had ever met; short and plump, with heavy spectacles and thinning hair, he was at first sight the very prototype of an unsuccessful middle-aged bachelor in a sedentary occupation. His natural diffidence in most practical matters was reflected in his clothes, which were costly and unsuitable, for he was clay in the hands of his tailor, who robbed him. (p.20)

What percentage of the population, I wonder, has a personal tailor? 1%? What percentage was it in 1962? More subtly mannered is the deployment of ‘for’ instead of the common English usage ‘because’. His frequent use of ‘for’ is a symptom of the Victorian prose or Biblical phraseology which le Carré is prone to slip into once he strays from direct factual description (‘For it is written, “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”‘). When he wanders from action and factual description into generalising about characters or settings, le Carré is sometimes in danger of sounding portentous (‘done in a pompously or overly solemn manner so as to impress’).

Everyone is notable

Inevitably, the letter-writing master’s wife comes from a notable family – the Glastons, don’t you know – ‘Stella’s grandfather was old Rufus Glaston, a Lancashire pottery king; he and John Landsbury’s father built chapels and tabernacles in practically every village in the Midlands.’

Inevitably, Fielding the senior house-master at Carne, is brother of a chap who worked for ‘the Service’. His retirement was mentioned in The Times, dontcha know?

Inevitably, Smiley met him once at Magdalen High Table, nice chap, not quite the same calibre as his brother, dontcha know.

— In this small, privileged world, everyone knows everyone else, a connectedness which is rooted in the public school system and extends beyond it to university, into the professions and the civil service, across the Army and down into the police force (always down into the police force: Smiley et al admire the police but they’re not People Like Us.)

Inspector Rigby looked at Smiley thoughtfully over his desk, and decided that he liked what he saw. He had got around in the war and had heard a little, just a very little, of the work of George Smiley’s Service. If Ben said George Smiley was all right, that was good enough for him. (p.31)

Of course, Rigby the local policeman is himself admirable, competent, efficient, clever. The police always are in le Carré, as they always are in real life.

Strongest and best

Because everyone in these texts just is jolly bright – clever man, good man, solid man, dependable chap, one of the brightest and best. Thus Smiley, who critics sometimes refer to as some kind of everyman, is exactly the opposite: he is routinely described in the novels as ‘the strongest and the best’ (p.23), the cleverest, the cunningest, the subtlest etc. which, if you take it literally, is quite an indictment of our ruling class and its shabby, shambolic intelligence services in the 1960s and 1970s.

Old school tie

This is the same old-school-tie world which Len Deighton sets about satirising in his spy novels, which are exactly comtemporary (Deighton’s début, The Ipcress File, was published the same year as this, 1962). Deighton’s protagonist is an insubordinate, joke-making NCO – fun, creative, witty, sexy – everything Smiley is not.

Le Carré was barely 30 when these first two novels were published and yet the main characters – Smiley and the CID inspector, Mendel – are on the verge of retirement. Le Carré seems happiest writing about late middle-aged men, slow, unfit, much given to drinking whiskey at home and claret at their club, tutting over the younger generation. A world away from the smart, cool world of Deighton’s fictions.

Old man

The air of toff-ish superiority, of snobbish knowingness implicit in a lot of le Carré’s prose is brought out if you add ‘dontcha know?’ or ‘old man’ at the end of sentences describing knowledge or expertise, and imagine the speaker wearing a monocle.

The seven-five from Waterloo to Yeovil is not a popular train, but it provides an excellent breakfast, dontcha know? (p.25)

The Sawley Arms is only full at Commemoration and on St Andrew’s Day, old boy. (p.29)

The dénouement

And the woman who was murdered? Far from being a hapless victim, she turns out to have been a monster who was blackmailing the flamboyant house-master Fielding because of some indiscretion with a boy during the war, mercilessly ribbing him till he could take no more. Le Carré steers suspicion at first towards the local loony lady who hangs out in the abandoned chapel on the moors – then onto the husband (after all the wife had been warning everyone he was about to do her in). But both are red herrings. The Master did it. All is revealed when Smiley invites him to his house in Chelsea, tells him the correct version of events and, as he makes a break for it, is arrested by the solid, honest Devon copper, Rigby.

Not unlike an episode of Morse, with its revelations of malice and blackmail among the oh-so-scenic cloisters.

TV adaptation

The novel was adapted for TV by Thames Television in 1991. Le Carré adapted the book himself, and it starred Denholm Elliott as George Smiley, with Glenda Jackson, Joss Ackland, Diane Fletcher, David Threlfall and a young Christian Bale.

John Le Carré’s novels

Call for the Dead (1961) Introducing George Smiley. Intelligence employee Samuel Fennan is found dead beside a suicide note. With the help of a CID man, Mendel, and the trusty Peter Guillam, Smiley unravels the truth behind his death, namely he was murdered by an East German spy ring, headed by Mundt.
A Murder of Quality (1962) Smiley investigates the murder of a teacher’s wife at an ancient public school in the West Country, incidentally the seat of the father of his errant wife, Lady Ann. No espionage involved, a straight murder mystery in the style of Morse or a thousand other detective stories.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) Extraordinarily brilliant account of a British agent, Alec Leamas, who pretends to be a defector in order to give disinformation to East German intelligence, told with complete plausibility and precision.
The Looking Glass War (1965) A peculiar spy story about a Polish émigré soldier who is recruited by a ramshackle part of British intelligence, given incompetent training, useless equipment, and sent to his pointless death after murdering an East German border guard then blundering round the countryside before being captured. Smiley makes peripheral appearances.
A Small Town in Germany (1968) Political intrigue set in Bonn during the rise of a (fictional) right-wing populist movement. Didn’t like it.
The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) His most famous book. Smiley meticulously tracks down the Soviet mole at the heart of the ‘Circus’ ie MI6.
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) Jerry Westerby is the part-time agent instructed to follow a trail of money from the KGB in Hong Kong, which involves intrigue at various locations in the Far East. It is done on Smiley’s orders but the latter barely appears.
Smiley’s People (1979) The assassination of a European émigré in Hampstead leads via a convoluted series of encounters, to the defection of Karla, Smiley’s opposite number in the KGB.
The Little Drummer Girl (1983) A long and brilliant meditation on the Arab-Israeli conflict, embodied by Charlie, the posh young English actress recruited by Israeli intelligence and trained to ‘allow’ herself to then be recruited by Arab terrorists, thus becoming a double agent.
A Perfect Spy (1986) Long flashback over the career of Magnus Pym, diplomat and spy, which brilliantly describes his boyhood with his chancer father, and the long tortuous route by which he became a traitor.
The Russia House (1989) Barley Blair is a drunk publisher who a Russian woman approaches at a book fair in Moscow to courier secrets to the West. He is ‘recruited’ and sent back to get more, which is when things begin to go wrong.
The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
The Night Manager (1993)
Our Game (1995)
The Tailor of Panama (1996)
Single & Single (1999)
The Constant Gardener (2001)
Absolute Friends (2003)
The Mission Song (2006)
A Most Wanted Man (2008)
Our Kind of Traitor (2010)
A Delicate Truth (2013)

1 Comment

by Simon on December 23, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Detective stories, Thriller

Tagged 1962, A Murder of Quality, George Smiley, John Le Carre

Posted by Simon on December 23, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/12/23/a-murder-of-quality-john-le-carre/

Call For The Dead by John le Carré (1961)

[Smiley] hated the Press as he hated advertising and television, he hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved has been the product of intense individualism. (p.138)

This, John le Carré’s first novel, introduces British intelligence officer George Smiley, who will go on to appear in seven subsequent le Carré books. The first chapter gives his biography – public school, Oxford, scholarly interest in 17th century German poetry, recruitment into the intelligence service, running agents in 1930s Europe – and contrasts his unromantic, intensely intelligent and scholarly character with that of his flamboyant wife, Lady Ann Sercombe, who he surprises everyone he knows by marrying – and then who surprises no-one at all by leaving him for a glamorous Cuban racing-car driver before the novel begins.

The plot

The British Intelligence Service receives an anonymous letter pointing out that Foreign Office staffer, Samuel Fennan, was a communist party member in the 1930s. Intelligence officer George Smiley is tasked with interviewing him and gives a standard and sympathetic interrogation while they stroll round St James’s Park, and concludes by telling him he has nothing to worry about. The next day Fennan is found dead beside a suicide note. Why?

With the help of a CID man, Mendel, and the trusty Peter Guillam, Smiley unravels the truth behind Fennan’s death, namely that he was murdered by an East German spy ring. Unknown to Fennan, his wife was a spy and had been copying the classified documents he brought home, then meeting with her controller to give him copies. Fennan wrote the anonymous letter accusing himself because he knew it would activate an enquiry, and call in Intelligence, at which point he would be able to air his suspicions of his wife. Following his interview with Smiley, Fennan had sent the latter a note inviting him to meet again for lunch. Presumably at this lunch he would have stated his suspicions – but someone saw him in St James’s Park with Smiley, thought (correctly) that he was about to reveal his suspicions – and murdered him.

The same person, later identified as a tall, blonde assassin, Mundt, is intruding in Smiley’s flat in Bywater Street, when Smiley arrives home after meeting Fennan’s wife. Smiley hears noises, rings the bell as if a visitor, notes the man who answers the door, makes his excuses and walks away – noting the numbers of all the cars in the street.

The CID man on loan to Smiley helps track one of these cars to a dodgy south London car salesman who, after a bit of pressure, admits to loaning out the car at regular intervals to a foreign gentleman. Smiley is inspecting the car in question in the dealer’s yard when someone attacks him savagely, beating him about the head. He comes round in hospital. A few weeks later the car salesman’s body is found in the Thames.

Throughout this time Fennan’s widow, Elsa, had claimed to Smiley that Fennan was the spy, and had been murdered by his controllers. She span an elaborate story about how Fennan was recruited on the Continent, and about his controllers, with lots of detail describing how messages were sent between them. But on closer investigation various details just don’t ring true, especially the letter from Fennan inviting Smiley to diner: why send it then kill himself? Smiley begins to suspect the wife. And when his people discover that the East German Steel Delegation was being run by a man named Dieter Frey, the pieces slot into place.

Because Smiley had himself run Frey as an agent against the Nazis during the War. Clearly he had survived the War and gone on to become an important figure in East German intelligence.

At the climax of this short novel Smiley uses his knowledge of Frey’s old procedures to send a (fake) emergency request meeting to Elsa Fenner. When she rendezvous with Frey in a crowded theatre, the latter realises it’s a set-up, that British Intelligence are on to him. He silently and shockingly strangles Elsa in the theatre, then makes his getaway through the exiting crowds and the foggy streets. But the persistent CID man tails him to a houseboat near the Lots Road power station, and it is here that Smiley meets him and, as Frey attacks and beats Mendel, charges into the fight, battering Frey and accidentally pushing him over the embankment wall into the oily, black Thames where he drowns.

Comments

All the components of le Carré’s fiction are here in this first, highly-finished novel. It is deeply imagined and eminently plausible, detailed in description of people and procedure, and agreeably jaded and world-weary in its analysis of human nature. What I didn’t like is the snobbery and the Lady Ann plotline.

Lady Ann Smiley appears in no fewer than eight le Carré novels, and the ongoing saga of his unfaithful wife follows him like a tiresome puppy. This runaway wife schtick always seemed to me too pat, too improbable – as portrayed she genuinely is too glamorous and exciting to have ever married a quiet, thoughtful nobody like Smiley – and it is a sullying of Smiley’s integrity. As if Conan Doyle tried to persuade us that Holmes had a hot little mistress on the side. It is inappropriate and not necessary. Smiley’s character, and the storylines, are better without her.

Snobbery In the early pages of the novel, as he skims through his biography, le Carré emphasises that Smiley went to an ‘unimpressive’ public school and an ‘unimpressive’ Oxford college – but the snobbery and elitism of this tiny world are present in the very need to demarcate him so much from the priviliged few who went to impressive public schools and impressive Oxford colleges. It is all part of their closed code. These people represent less that 1% of the population, and yet, to hear them talk, they are the only people who matter, they are Britain and the Empire etc. Some of the ‘best’ of them, of course, turn out very gratifyingly to have been vile traitors. (And Kim Philby’s treachery is the basis of le Carré best-known novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.) Le Carré may be satirising and condemning aspects of this tiny world – but he still speaks from inside it.

On a more superficial level, Smiley is just as comme il faut as James Bond: fastidious about eating at the ‘correct’ restaurants, and drinking the ‘correct’ wine with the ‘correct’ dish; noting the place in the elaborate class hierarchy of non-public school characters, the precise calibration of their accent, whether their trousers have a neat crease in them or not, and so on.

This book was published in 1961, just before the attack on deference and class consciousness which was, allegedly, a key achievement of that noisy decade ie we should maybe forgive its dated attitudes. Still, the continual drip-drip of the just-so restaurant and the florid chaps calling each other ‘old man’ and ‘old bean’ over the whiskey or the port, grate a little on the nerves of someone who didn’t happen to go to a public school, impressive or otherwise.

Resignation

Only a few chapters into the novel Smiley resigns. He is already portrayed as over the hill, superceded by younger, flashier men in a much-expanded Security Service and he is enraged by his boss’s attempts to smooth over the murder. Thus he conducts the majority of the investigation unofficially, with the key aid of the CID man and Guillam, who remains ‘on the inside’, and can use the Service’s resources. At the end of the novel his smooth boss – Maston – sends him a letter urbanely rejecting the resignation, understanding that he was ‘under a lot of strain’ etc etc, of course consider yourself still employed. Smiley sends back a rejection of the reinstatement and takes a flight to the south of France to be reunited with his wife. But we know he’ll be back.

Credit

Call For The Dead by John le Carré, Gollancz, 1961. Quote from the 1979 Penguin edition.

The movie

Call for the Dead was made into a movie in 1966 with the title The Deadly Affair, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring James Mason as the Smiley figure (renamed Charles Dobbs), with impressive support from Harry Andrews as the solid English copper Mendel, Simone Signoret as the spy Elsa Fennan and Maximilian Schell as the old friend-cum-spymaster Dieter Frey.

It is not a good watch because of the Mason character; instead of Lady Ann, the screenwriters have lumbered the Smiley figure with a wife half his age, and foreign, and instead of Lady Ann’s tactful absence, this woman is there whenever Mason gets home, and they have horribly intense and realistic rows.

As so often in his later films, Mason comes across as a very tortured soul and the intensity of these scenes with his unhappy young wife completely overshadow the espionage plot. The whole thing is shot in a virulent technocolour which makes everyone look as if they’ve died and been badly made up by a cheap undertaker, and, given the gloom of the characters and the constant rain and the locations in the crappy back streets of south London, it seems wildly inappropriate that the film has a bright and breezy bossa nova soundtrack.

The Deadly Affair movie on Amazon

Poster for The Deadly Affair

John Le Carré’s novels

Call for the Dead (1961) Introducing George Smiley. Intelligence employee Samuel Fennan is found dead beside a suicide note. With the help of a CID man, Mendel, and the trusty Peter Guillam, Smiley unravels the truth behind his death, namely he was murdered by an East German spy ring, headed by Mundt.
A Murder of Quality (1962) Smiley investigates the murder of a teacher’s wife at an ancient public school in the West Country, incidentally the seat of the father of his errant wife, Lady Ann. No espionage involved, a straight murder mystery in the style of Morse or a thousand other detective stories.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) Extraordinarily brilliant account of a British agent, Alec Leamas, who pretends to be a defector in order to give disinformation to East German intelligence, told with complete plausibility and precision.
The Looking Glass War (1965) A peculiar spy story about a Polish émigré soldier who is recruited by a ramshackle part of British intelligence, given incompetent training, useless equipment, and sent to his pointless death after murdering an East German border guard then blundering round the countryside before being captured. Smiley makes peripheral appearances.
A Small Town in Germany (1968) Political intrigue set in Bonn during the rise of a (fictional) right-wing populist movement. Didn’t like it.
The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) His most famous book. Smiley meticulously tracks down the Soviet mole at the heart of the ‘Circus’ ie MI6.
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) Jerry Westerby is the part-time agent instructed to follow a trail of money from the KGB in Hong Kong, which involves intrigue at various locations in the Far East. It is done on Smiley’s orders but the latter barely appears.
Smiley’s People (1979) The assassination of a European émigré in Hampstead leads via a convoluted series of encounters, to the defection of Karla, Smiley’s opposite number in the KGB.
The Little Drummer Girl (1983) A long and brilliant meditation on the Arab-Israeli conflict, embodied by Charlie, the posh young English actress recruited by Israeli intelligence and trained to ‘allow’ herself to then be recruited by Arab terrorists, thus becoming a double agent.
A Perfect Spy (1986) Long flashback over the career of Magnus Pym, diplomat and spy, which brilliantly describes his boyhood with his chancer father, and the long tortuous route by which he became a traitor.
The Russia House (1989) Barley Blair is a drunk publisher who a Russian woman approaches at a book fair in Moscow to courier secrets to the West. He is ‘recruited’ and sent back to get more, which is when things begin to go wrong.
The Secret Pilgrim (1990)
The Night Manager (1993)
Our Game (1995)
The Tailor of Panama (1996)
Single & Single (1999)
The Constant Gardener (2001)
Absolute Friends (2003)
The Mission Song (2006)
A Most Wanted Man (2008)
Our Kind of Traitor (2010)
A Delicate Truth (2013)

1 Comment

by Simon on December 23, 2014 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Film, Thriller

Tagged 1961, Call For The Dead, George Smiley, James Mason, John Le Carre, Maximilian Schell, Peter Guillam, Simone Signoret, The Deadly Affair

Posted by Simon on December 23, 2014

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2014/12/23/call-for-the-dead-john-le-carre/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged George Smiley

The Secret Pilgrim by John le Carré (1990)

Tone

Self-dramatisation

Catholic melodrama

Stefanie, Bella, Mabel, Monica, Marie, Sally

Out with the old…

… and in with the new

Credit

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John Le Carré’s novels

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The Looking Glass War by John le Carré (1965)

Failure and misery

Competence and the thriller

The Looking Glass War

Part one

Part two

Wives

Part three

In the East

Control

Short

The movie

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John Le Carré’s novels

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The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John le Carré (1963)

Plot

The point of the mission

Mundt in A Call For The Dead

Reversals

Liz Gold

The Wall

Jewishness

Memories of the Cold War

Dramatis personae

Credit

The movie

Interviews

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John Le Carré’s novels

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A Murder of Quality by John le Carré (1962)

Carne

The plot

Everyone is notable

Strongest and best

Old school tie

Old man

The dénouement

Related links

TV adaptation

John Le Carré’s novels

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Call For The Dead by John le Carré (1961)

The plot

Comments

Resignation

Credit

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The movie

John Le Carré’s novels

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