Spying

The le Carré effect

Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, A Small Town in Germany, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People, The Little Drummer Girl and A Perfect Spy by John le Carré

Many people, many readers, feel very strongly about George Smiley. They think fondly of him, possibly more fondly than they think of his creator, John le Carré. When in 2011 an adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came out with Gary Oldman as Smiley, there was comment, there was debate. Can we imagine such a role taken on by such a man? they said. We’ve already seen a Smiley we like. And the actor who played him is gone.

They did not like it — Smiley now made a character whose prevailing trait, before his intelligence, is greyness. A man of small, minute gesture. An incline of the head. A slight opening of the mouth. Is this kind of affected subtlety what is merited, what is desired, in a protagonist such as his?

A pause for a moment as we recollect the origins of the character. Smiley comes into his own, is at his most dramatically interesting, in the Karla trilogy — Tinker Tailor, as I have said, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People — the latter a perfect book. But who was he first, and what function did he serve?

In Call for the Dead, and also in A Murder of Quality, we get a sense. Smiley is always the same overtly fussy, overweight, ageing man whose tailors rob him blind for inferior, ill-fitting wear. He is always a tragic cuckold. And he is always dangerous beyond appearances, a fine practitioner of tradecraft and, when called to service, ruthless, even brutal, in pursuit of what needs to be done.

In Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, Smiley is also a detective. Pulled from his daily routines, his own sun setting, he is set strange problems to solve. A man he interviewed, suspected of espionage, turns up dead. Suicide is naturally suspected. But it will require legwork — it will require guile — to see through the mystery with which Smiley is confronted. In the following book, there is a problem at a school. Smiley hears about it through the correspondence columns of a nonconformist magazine, edited by a colleague of his. Thus he departs to a place called Carne, to seek out what there is to be found.

These books are overlooked, even by fans. They’re read but dismissed as trifles, preliminary works in anticipation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, the one that put le Carré on the map and sold so many copies it could not be ignored. A book I consider, myself, angry and malformed. Worth reading, no doubt. But no exemplar. (Other books of the same period are, because less praised, easier to forgive. The Looking Glass War we at least know is a deeply black dark comedy, misconceived in its own way but tonally clear. The Naïve and Sentimental Lover the product of a personal life, a sense of self, in a state of collapse. An embarrassing work, one I’m glad not to have written — although I did have to read it — but one the reader at least can understand.)

Some critics consider the big, emotional, textually impressionistic works like A Perfect Spy and The Little Drummer Girl to be le Carré’s best, and I do not agree. The Little Drummer Girl is psychologically disregulated. In the world created by its characters, its behind the scenes orchestrators, there is nothing but the pretence and the lie. For Charlie, the actress scooped up to play her part in this monstrous production, it is torture, it is self-suicide and self-possession in one; it is the theatre of the real. For some readers, myself included, it’s pure histrionics. A Perfect Spy is so plainly truthful (see the description of the election campaign, the hustings) it is almost hard to take — beautiful though some of it is. A seven-hundred page novel I can accept. A seven-hundred page memoir disguised as a novel, less so. A Small Town in Germany as an intriguing book of the diplomatic tribe, building to as tense a conclusion as any book published around the same time. It was at one time my favourite of le Carré’s.

But we are talking of Smiley, at least for a moment, and we must think of how le Carré created him, how the character was first used. The first two novels are mannered and neat. The style is, while not being difficult, a little ornate. (Barring some amusing moments, like Smiley’s attempting to explain to his confused superiors what an espresso bar is — they who make their horrible instant coffee on gas rings in the office.) The plot moves effectively. It has many fine portraits not only of individual characters, but of types of people, with all the assumed, omniscient authority that a man of le Carré’s educational (and his father’s larcenous) background could easily deploy.

Possibly, if bestsellerdom had not come to le Carré so urgently, so unexpectedly, he would have turned out neat little mysteries like this. One a year, like John Bingham, a colleague of le Carré’s, already did. None of the glitz, none of the seven-hundred page monsters: no Penguin Modern Classics. But there are other compensations to smaller jobs well done. It may not have been a bad thing.