Coming In from the Cold War
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers &Writing COMING IN FROM THE COLD WAR BY PEARL K. BELL D uring a cold war, when battles are fought by spies instead of soldiers, spy novels, particularly those written in response to the...
...Toward the end, Control seemed to go mad, obsessively pursuing a secret, slippery demon through old Circus files, and mounting a dangerous and perhaps pointless operation in Czechoslovakia that ended in fiasco and disgrace for the British...
...Above all, there must be no clues that might alert the mole to Smiley's implacable purpose as he hacks at the dead mound of the past...
...Suddenly, though...
...His formidable intelligence and cunning are all but indispensable to the Circus, as Secret Service headquarters in London is called by its familiars...
...George...
...When the last subterfuge and final mask are torn away and we learn the name of the mole, we are startled, deliriously enthralled by our amazement, but we are not shocked, our feelings are not touched...
...The mechanics of Smiley's manhunt are the essence of Le Carre's ensnarement of our attention...
...And because of their historical perspective, they can register a skepticism and moral ambivalence, even outrage, about many aspects of espionage that would have been unthinkable to Ian Fleming and Helen Maclnnes, the straight-and-true descendants of St...
...He would rather die than disown the political system to which he was committed...
...Not only has his beautiful vixen of a wife run off yet again with a vulgar young lover, but he has for some months been "separated" from the Circus...
...Karla remained silent and immobile throughout Smiley's arguments, and the lesson of his silence was etched on the Englishman's mind forever...
...Indeed, the grandiloquent unbelievability and superhuman heroics of Ian Fleming's 007 notwithstanding, the James Bond books, unabashedly pro-American and anti-Russian, could not have been written in any other period than the 1950s and early '60s, years that still permitted a pared-down simplicity of opposition between the two monoliths of East and West...
...j^^^e Carre casts some light on this mystery in Smiley's account to a younger colleague of a meeting he once had with Karla, a high Moscow Centre official...
...to draw high-toned moral profundity from the exhausted seediness of Alec Lea-mas, the spy who came in from the cold, is to misrepresent and distort Le Carre's extraordinary achievements as an original and mesmerising writer working within the strict boundaries of a difficult genre...
...He moves into a seedy, anonymous hotel, and there, each evening, a man from Whitehall arrives with files and records to be read that night so they can be returned to their place by morning...
...Finally, why is Smiley, a tired and jaded man who seems beyond caring about the ideological opposition of East and West, driven to carry out the Whitehall assignment with such obsessive dedication...
...To distort his admittedly unconventional view of British Intelligence, seeing in it a symbolic representation of Larger Issues...
...This is as close as Le Carre will take us into Smiley's reasons for being a spy...
...Smiley is summoned by Whitehall to undertake a desperately secret and urgent task of investigation...
...Gradually, Le Carre leads the reader deep into the labyrinthine world of the Circus, into its webs within webs of aliases and seductions, into the ruthlessness and duplicity, the terror and cruelty and betrayal that comprise the infernal machine of espionage...
...For hours Smiley pleaded with the man to defect, since his return to Russia after a bungled espionage job would almost surely mean execution...
...One takes up Le Carre's books not for his style, though he writes with exceptional grace and wit...
...Smiley is assigned to "clean the stables" by inching his way slowly and painfully through the past in order to arrive at the mole's identity...
...With the end of the War, Smiley ruminated in Call for the Dead, "the inspired amateurism of a handful of highly qualified, underpaid men had given way to the efficiency, bureaucracy and intrigue of a large Government department...
...But I would rather be my kind of fool than his, for all that...
...In a world politically split, with neat Schrecklichkeit, into Us and Them, the spy novel boomed with hectic inventiveness...
...There is no terror so consistent, so elusive to describe, as that which haunts a spy in a strange country"????And has with considerable dismay seen the Service itself go through unbelievable metamorphosis...
...And the good news is that after The Naive and Sentimental Lover, a recent limp venture into "straight" fiction, he is back at the very top of his form...
...In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (Knopf, 355 pp., $7.95), Le Carre has returned to the same cast of espionage professionals he used in some of his earlier spy stories, and he is especially happy in resurrecting George Smiley, the "incongruous spy," a short, fat, quiet man who "appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes...
...Writers &Writing COMING IN FROM THE COLD WAR BY PEARL K. BELL D uring a cold war, when battles are fought by spies instead of soldiers, spy novels, particularly those written in response to the exigencies of everyday political life, seem to flourish...
...His revered and eccentrically brilliant chief????known only by the code-name Control????has recently died...
...Why did Control send Jim Prideaux into Czechoslovakia on a wild-goose chase...
...It is myopic and unjust to link Le Carre with high art: The criteria for judging literary fiction are simply irrelevant to his superb entertainments and can only muddle a reader's pleasure...
...The very archetype of a flabby Western liberal...
...I behaved like a soft fool...
...not for his delineation of personality, though many of his characters are drawn with a lively eye for their singular eccentricities and foibles...
...And this is exactly as it should be...
...However far-fetched and implausible, it nonetheless touched a raw nerve...
...In contrast to the razzle-dazzle adventure tales of those authors, neither of whom harbored the faintest doubts about good and evil or which is which, Le Carre's books appear to be enriched with the insight and subtlety of a complex literary sensibility????or, at the least, a muckraking insider's view of Intelligence work as a very dirty game, a brutal contest that leaves no one on either side clean or unbloodied...
...In Tinker, Tailor, the time is the present, and the Smiley we encounter is depressed, aging and defeated...
...For it is the plot that matters in a spy novel, not its moral resonances...
...and certainly not for his pseudoprofound comments on the moral implications and underlying rot of Intelligence work, which he offers with extreme reticence and veiled, slyly mocking solemnity...
...On occasion, with radical shifts in the Service balance of power, Smiley has been put on the shelf?but never for long...
...Its improbable parts are enclosed in a scaffolding of plausibility, yet they cannot, must not, be real...
...As a result, the novels of John Le Carre, who is unarguably the most brilliantly imaginative practitioner of the genre today, are "historical" novels even when they are ostensibly set in the present...
...Recruited into the Secret Service by his Oxford tutor before the War (not unlike election to a good London club), Smiley has pursued his hazardous subterranean career all over the world...
...and it is all, in fact more than, we need...
...For a spy novel is not catharsis but fun, and it is not to be confused with tragedy...
...Rather, Le Carre is a master craftsman of ingeniously plotted suspense, weaving astoundingly intricate fantasies of discovery, stealth, surprise, duplicity, and final exposure...
...As Kingsley Amis has acidly pointed out, this seeming philosophic detachment renders Le Carre acceptable and "true" and "realistic" to highbrows who would ordinarily disclaim any interest in a writer of mere thrillers...
...Through a devious chain of revelation, it has been learned that one of the top five men in British Intelligence is a "mole"????A double agent recruited many years before by Moscow Centre...
...Straightforward adventure stories make them feel guilty, and they must laboriously extract from the episodic mayhem some classy metaphors "about modern society and the human heart...
...Yet Le Carre's genuine strength is precisely and strictly that of a first-rate spy novelist...
...After Control's death the new brooms?efficiency-expert monsters of self-inflated pomposity, marvelously caricatured by Le Carre????sweep Smiley, the dead man's close friend and longtime ally, out of the Circus altogether...
...Self-effacing, scholarly, a man of refined taste and conscience who would always rather be reading German poetry, Smiley is, almost despite himself, an uncommonly able espionage officer who can be chillingly brutal (as in The Looking-Glass War) or carry out a vicious double-cross of his own agent (as in The Spy Who...
...Who is the mysterious Russian traitor known as Merlin, whose military information is being paid for so prodigally by the Treasury...
...But as history moved beyond confrontation between the two superpowers to a more diffuse, amorphous, constantly shifting arena of multiple antagonisms and unpredictable alliances, the spy novel itself changed from a hyperbolic reflection of a comprehended world to a rather poignantly anachronistic echo of a world that is gone...
Vol. 57 • June 1974 • No. 13
