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Tinker – Tailor – Soldier – Spy
Have you ever felt on that rare occasion that watching a movie before reading the book was helpful? No? Have you ever read a book by John Le Carre?
First, there’s that British humor and language, like ‘bob’, instead of meaning @kentforrester‘ s dog, it means moolah, money. It dives from there into the deep, dark, dangerous cavern of espionage. I love spy stories, especially non-fiction. I have several Robert Baer books, and others from the cold war to the present time. Yet I’ve noticed Le Carre books everywhere lately, library sales, book store discount tables and movies popping up. I try reading them and my brain starts to whirl. In “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”. the reviews warn “this is not for the quick action reader”. He slowly builds the characters to where they become personal, and then methodically unfolds the plot, shifting from present to past and back again (from that quirky British perspective). A third of the way through I shelved it, frustrated. Then the movie was on last night…
The movie version boasts a stellar cast with some of my favorites like the great chameleon, Gary Oldman, playing the veteran spy and main character, George Smiley. He’s supported by Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, and others.
My husband sat down and said, “After twenty minutes of watching the movie, I still have no clue what’s going on.” That’s what I thought about the book, then the movie began to cohesively come together. I grabbed the book off the shelf and took up where I left off and read these words:
“Operation Witchcraft No. 4 – source Merlin – 60 pages: It was an immensely technical Soviet Foreign Service appreciation of the advantages and disadvantages of negotiating with a ‘weakened’ president. The conclusion, on balance, was that by throwing the president a bone for ‘his own electorate’, the Soviet Union could buy useful concessions in forthcoming discussions on multiple nuclear warheads. But it seriously questioned the desirability of allowing the United States to feel ‘too much the loser’. If Merlin maintains the standard, I would venture to predict that we could buy anything there is to have in the American agency’s shop.’
The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal instantly came into mind, followed by Uranium One…
Not to ruin the story, but the top echelon of the British spy agency become suspect. Only a few old souls, including resurrecting veteran retired spy George Smiley, can be trusted. Mueller investigation anyone?
La Carre was an actual spy. It’s been said he coined the term “mole” to describe a person who infiltrates and steals government secrets. Headlines are warning of deep fake news from foreign sources to influence our country’s elections and stability, socialism is the new talking point from the former Democratic Party, upcoming European elections with populists are running hot, China is tightening the noose of control around the world… we only have scratched the surface of seismic world events now unfolding.
From the book: “Divide and rule, that’s the principle at work these days. Personalities who should be helping to fight Communism are all at one another’s throats.”
I don’t think John LeCarre, after reading his bio, is a conservative from an American perspective, or understands the challenges that our current president inherited, and is facing on the global stage. Fascism is a statement that he used in a recent comment to describe Trump as well as to the current political tremors in Poland and Hungary. The traditional hard red line with socialism, fascism, communism on one side and democracy with true freedom on the other have become blurred. In fact, the definition of many things that have become inverted. How big a leap is it from socialism to fascism to communism?
Is love of God and country by defending traditions, borders, creating prosperity through free enterprise, and seeking to share these with a world the definition of a fascist country? Do identity politics usurp reason and compromise, causing further division? Divide and rule. Paging George Smiley…
Have you read John Le Carre? What is your favorite spy novel or author? Is truth mimicking fiction these days, as in “I never thought I’d live to see the day when…”, and how so? What do you see on the horizon politically in 2020?
Published in Entertainment
There is a list of terms here that might help.
Also, it’s best to know about the Cambridge Five and Philby to see where Cornwell was coming from in his book.
Le Carre is better than most, but his Cold War era books all contained a tiresome “we are just as bad as they are” element. In his books since the end of the Cold War, he revved up his anti-Americanism to insufferable levels. I quit reading his stuff after The Night Manager.
Had to go through the book synopsis and some of the character synopses to be sure. I read this book sometime before 1981. (It was my brother’s copy that he left around.) I don’t remember finding it slow or difficult at the time.
I loved everything up through The Perfect Spy. I love the new one, the Peter Guillam one – Legacy of Spies.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People. I have read them all many times; they are like Shakespeare – I know the story, I know who dunnit. But the enjoyment is in watching it all unfold, being there in the emotion of the thing. He is an extraordinary writer.
Liked The Russia House. The Little Drummer Girl makes me angry.
The early ones – Call for the Dead, A Small Town in Germany, A Murder of Quality, The Looking Glass War, etc. – wonderful.
There’s a whole middle section I don’t know well; he got so pissed off and went on a tear. The Night Manager, The Constant Gardener, The Tailor of Panama, others.
He did do the “we’re just as bad as they are” routine, but I didn’t mind. There are people who feel that way, and I didn’t mind hearing them out. It was depressing, but he writes so beautifully that I couldn’t put it down. I didn’t mind hearing that side, so I could understand why some of these poor bastards could do the things they did.
The Smiley books, that series, take some work to figure out. But once you get it, get “the shape of Karla’s clever knot”, so to speak, you will want to read them over and over, to walk yourself through it all again. Each time it gets clearer; you see it unfold, maybe like Smiley sees it unfold.
I tried twice to get through the movie, and each time, the many scenes of people walking through hallways or entering doorways, only to take up yet another trek through even more hallways, left me feeling some excitement was certainly lacking. I like nuance as much as the next person, but this was more than I could bear.
Some movies from his other books were fulfilling. “The Constant Gardener” comes to mind.
The New York Times mentions a new book is about to be released:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/books/john-le-carre-new-novel-2019.html
Tinker Tailor is terrific but in the late 70s LeCarre went completely off the rails. He’s gone so far Left he is unreadable. You mentioned he doesn’t understand the challenges the current president inherited – it’s worse than that; he has disdain for America, though to be fair it is less than the disdain he has for Israel.
I have had the same experience with Le Carre as you-I’ve tried several and gave up on each after the first few chapters.
Alan Furst is my current favorite.
WFB’s spy novels are lots of fun, but definitely not as complex as La Carre’s.
Be sure to watch the two BBC miniseries (tinker, tailor, soldier, spy and Smiley’s People) starring Alec Guinness. Twelve hours of superb television.
My problem, (is it a problem or why I enjoy him) is not unlike my problem with post war liberals, not modern leftists, they’re to be taken seriously only as a threat to civilization, but post war liberals have a profoundly different grasp of our world than do conservatives. The Soviet agents and our own seemed similar in Le Carrie because people given power and protection from the people over whom they exercise power in his view behaved similarly and through time rot similarly. The differences aren’t in the people but are the differences between bottom up ordered chaos and top down efforts to impose order, which is what Le Carrier missed as did most people in the post war world.
While what we call the far left are dishonest abusers of truth for power and abusers of power for more power, post war liberals actually thought they had a greater understanding of power, life, and reality than what at the time was old school shrinking ordered chaos. They bought into Keynes or Keynesian like world views and dismissed Hayek, or didn’t bother to read or try to understand the latter. The differences are profound. The differences are why the Anglo Saxon world, perhaps by accident and good luck, produced so much innovation and wealth which the world could at best imitate. With time we all seem to drift away from ordered chaos because it’s so hard to articulate and defend and top down attempts to impose order seem so natural even though they end, at least so far so sadly.
Do you think that is the general consensus from the British population or beyond?
I much prefer Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon books now, though I’ve fallen behind of late.
My favorite example of a movie and book complementing each other is The Right Stuff. I read the book first, and it made the movie so much better.
I also read 2001 A Space Odyssey before seeing the movie. The movie itself is very weak on plot, and the book does fill in some gaps.
I binge-read them all in 2018. Need moar!
I cannot claim to speak for all Brits but I would agree that Le Carre is probably a good guide to how our left-ish intelligentsia think about America. Though to be fair they are symbiotic with the American left and the two kind of feed off each other…
Hollywood/TV is probably the biggest influence for the majority.
Same here. LeCarre is a brilliant wordsmith, who crafts beautiful sentences. But over time he allowed his Leftism to infect and ruin the reading experience.
My favorite? I’d say Tom Clancy. I don’t know if you would call him a spy novelist, per se, but most of his major characters spent at least some of their careers’ in the CIA so I think he qualifies.
True, though the internet is helping redress the balance. Our shared language means you can be a fan of Steven Crowder’s show whether you are from the US, UK, Canada, Australia… Going the other way I can’t believe all Paul Joseph Watson’s and Sargon of Akkad’s subscribers are just British. Moving up the intellectual food chain I notice Thomas Sowell gets quoted more often by politicians and commentators.
Technological advances and – hopefully – free trade post Brexit should accelerate the process.
Avidly second the recommendation(s) offered by Basil Fawlty in comment #9: The BBC miniseries versions of Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People, both starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley, are definitive and are also tour-de-force tele-cinematic works. Bernard Hepton’s portrayal of Toby Esterhase — in both but especially in Smiley’s People — was almost as astonishingly good as Guinness’s seemingly effortless characterization of Smiley himself.
Yes yes yes. I loved the Tinker Tailor movie, but I know the plot through and through. My girlfriend at the time, an English Lit teacher, was hopelessly lost, and gave up after the second time through, not understanding what just happened or why anybody was doing what they did.
The 6-hour treatment is a much better idea, they explain what it is Smiley is figuring out much better. And the performances are top-notch.
The BBC also made a mini-series out of The Perfect Spy, which was very good.
I recall reading at least part of a Le Carre book, many years ago, and it didn’t click with me. I don’t recall the reason, but moral ambiguity between us and the Commies would not have influenced me favorably.
I liked Tom Clancy best in the genre.
Robert Ludlum was pretty good, though I mostly read his work as a teenager.
I liked Patrick Robinson, who wrote a series of Navy-related spy-type action books starting with Nimitz Class and Kilo Class.
All of the authors you mentioned I see on the shelves of all my clients (I’m a property manager) at their beach residences. I am gathering here that more than one person struggles with LaCarre – I’ll stick with the story – now that I can link George Smiley with Gary Oldman and finish it. I have a couple Bred Thor books but they are overly violent…I like the cerebral, deciphering qualities of outwitting the enemy….
The Spy Museum in DC is being moved to new headquarters. They have a good review of material.
If I’ve read the book first, the movie is always a let-down. If I watch the movie, and then read the book, I get to be pleasantly surprised at how much more enjoyable the book is.
I’m probably better of skipping the films altogether. Or in the case of Harry Potter, skipping the entire franchise.
Very good points – but watching the LaCarre movie pulled it together for me. At the end, the outcome was surprising, like watching all the tinkers, taylors, etc. fall from grace lately here, latest being McCabe – really outrageous. The people you count on to weed out the bad eggs both inside and outside of an agency turn out to be rotten eggs themselves.
My husband and I watched the movie version a few years ago and, while I loved the exceptional performances from Gary Oldman and Colin Firth, I had no clue what was going on the entire movie and actually made us re-watch the last 30 minutes. This past year we both read the novel and then re-watched the movie. What a difference! The movie is actually phenomenal when you understand what’s going on! I will have to watch the mini-series version…
Yes! Maybe a woman’s brain works differently?! Ha ha!
I don’t want to repeat everyone, but would add two general comments regarding Le Carre’s novels and the movies/tv series that have been made from them.
Books. I’ve been reading Le Carre since the 1960s. From Call for the Dead (1961) through Single and Single (1999), they are superb (with the exception of the Naive and Sentimental Lover, a non-spy story). Yes, Le Carre doesn’t much like the West and especially America, but those books are a magnificent achievement, especially The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the Smiley trilogy (which I’ve read many, many times). The man can write and his plotting is a wonder to behold. And the jargon eventually sinks in (Arahant links to a Wiki entry that provides a nice glossary).
Sadly, by 2000, his books had become anti-American screeds, and I decided not to inflict the pain of reading them on myself. That is, until A Legacy of Spies, which hearkens us back to the early Cold War, and which resurrects one of my favorite characters, Peter Guillam.
Most of the good Le Carre novels are ready by Michael Jayston, the actor who played Guillam in the Alec Guinness Smiley mini-series. They’re wonderful.
Bottom-line: Le Carre’s pre-2000 novels are the best spy novels ever written. They transcend the genre.
Movies/TV. I enjoyed the Gary Oldman novel, but it doesn’t stand up to the Alec Guinness version. Guinness is a perfect George Smiley, and the mini-series format allows the characters to develop. Further, they televised Smiley’s People as well. These are to the spy novel what HBO’s Band of Brothers is to the WWII story.
Finally, I thought the mini-series version of The Night Manager was A+. When I was finally able to get Bertie Wooster out of my head, Hugh Laurie is a great bad guy.
Thank you Tabula – wow! I happened to also pick up The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as well as the above at a sale table at Barnes & Noble. Wonder what his newest novel will hold. Thank you for your very enthusiastic analysis. I wish they would put the series on PBS – we’re not plugged into the Netflix or other where you can download anything – we need to get up to speed on that.