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A Perfect Spy Novelist: John Le Carre

Rascally Badger

El Capitan de la outro espacio
(He/Him)
I recently finished reading all of John Le Carre’s novels. I had been reading his stuff off and on for a decade, but it was only early this year that I made an effort to do a complete read of his oeuvre. Now that I’ve finished, I’ve written an overview of his 60 years of writing.

As I see it, there are 4 phases to Le Carre’s career. You could certainly break these down into more focused sections, but I think the four I have laid out do the best at getting a big picture look at his work. Le Carre returns to similar themes throughout his work that carry over across his career. He frequently deals with spies as disillusioned bureaucrats, with much more of a focus on the psychological toll of deception rather than Bond-esque action hijinks. Loyalty and betrayal play a big part in many of his works, especially in layers. Who or what a person is loyal to, and who or what they are willing to betray. Dealing in Cold War terms, is someone more loyal to the West and/or its ideals (those do not always or even frequently align), or to the people they interact with everyday. This obviously gets very complicated with spies, when they present one face to the world while secretly working for a different goal.

A theme that often coincides with that is male bisexuality or homosexuality. Le Carre’s protagonists often have homoerotic yearnings or homosexual relationships. Unusual in my experience, given the timeframe of his writing, is that there is little to no judgment in regard to that aspect of his characters. It is just another false face for a spy, to pretend to be in one relationship while engaging in or yearning for another.

On to these phases. The first is Le Carre’s early career, mostly his first handful of novels from the 1960’s. Here he seems to be searching for what works for him. You’ve got Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, which feature Le Carre’s most famous character, George Smiley, as a retired-ish spy in a couple of standard detective novels. They are spy adjacent, but are more Agatha Christie than later Le Carre. Le Carre then wrote a trio of spy novels, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Looking Glass War, and A Small Town in Germany. Cold is the template for much of what would come later. It is the quintessential Le Carre novel. It features a man recruited to be an agent in East Germany whose mission is not what he believes it to be and his conflicting loyalties and feelings of betrayal at the revelation of his mission’s true goal lead to an unraveling. Looking Glass Was is almost a parody; it’s about a WW2 intelligence agency that is desperate to retain importance at the outset of the Cold War turning a series of mishaps into a doomed mission. A Small Town in Germany didn’t stick with me, but it is about Western interests tying to use an ex-Nazi thug to turn things their way despite the damage he does in the short term and how their agent refuses to play along. Then his early period concludes with A Naive and Sentimental Lover, a novel which does not work and is about a well-to-do English man getting in a relationship with a hippy-ish couple that derails his life.

That novel was a failure, and after that Le Carre returned to the spies. The second phase of his career are the rest of his Cold War novels, up through A Secret Pilgrim in 1990. This is his most successful period. There are, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold aside, Le Carre’s most famous works, the Karla Trilogy, which include Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People. British spymaster Smiley faces off with his Soviet counterpart Karla. They are all great. Then Little Drummer Girl, which turns to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and is certainly more nuanced that I would expect today. A Perfect Spy is all about the unraveling of the life of a spy who may have been a double agent. Many think A Perfect Spy is Le Carre’s masterpiece. I’d vote The Honourable Schoolboy, but I see why that is the choice. The Russia House is just a perfectly acceptable spy novel. And The Secret Pilgrim is kind of a farewell to Smiley as the Cold War comes to an end. Not essential, but a good read.

Then you have his post-Cold War, pre-9/11 period. There are some really good books here, there is no loss in craft, but he feels a little lost. Corruption is the big theme here, with most of these novels dealing with post-Cold War operatives and informants now turning their positions into sources ways to get rich. The Night Manager is about an operation against a weapons smuggler. Our Game has an ex-spy getting involved with a civil war in the Caucasus. The Tailor of Panama is about corrupt agents in Panama maybe starting new US adventurism there. Single & Single is about a Western business who tried to make money off the New Russia getting into trouble when their business partners turn to straight organized crime. The Constant Gardener, which I believe is the crown jewel of this period, is about a diplomat whose wife was killed in Africa and him looking into the circumstances of her death, especially as they pertain to a corrupt pharmaceutical company.

Then you have the last phase, the post-9/11 novels. These are Le Carre at his angriest. There was always some ambivalence about how the West conducted themselves during the Cold War. He read the post-9/11 political climate accurately at jump and was wholly disgusted. It shows in his writing. He’s not happy with the British, and he has no fucking time for the US. Absolute Friends is about some unwitting leftists who are used by the CIA for a false flag operation to cajole Germany into aligning with US foreign policy after 9/11. The Mission Song is about a translator/interpreter unwittingly getting involved in a plot to do a coup in the Congo. A Most Wanted Man is about the British vetting a Muslim refugee before the Americans jump in for some extraordinary rendition. Our Kind of Traitor is about extracting a Russian oligarch who wants to give information about Russian organized crime. A Delicate Truth is mostly about Le Carre’s disgust with American Christian Evangelicals. A Legacy of Spies returns to Smiley one last time and deals with the fallout of some of Le Carre’s best loved novels. Agent Running in the Field is a perfect bookend to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, and features some unfiltered thoughts about Trump and Brexit (Le Carre was not a fan). Silverview, published posthumously, is slight and just kind of fine.

If I were to point out 5 essential Le Carre’s novels, I would say read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; The Constant Gardener; and Agent Running in the Field. I expect other Le Carre fans would protest about me leaving A Perfect Spy off the list. I get it, but if I’m being honest, that one didn’t work for me despite its reputation. The only book I’d suggest avoiding is The Naive and Sentimental Lover, which is Le Carre playing to his weaknesses.

Anyone else read much Le Carre? Have any thoughts?
 

zonetrope

(he/him)
I've read his first five novels plus Tinker Tailor, and I've seen the movie of that one once and the miniseries twice. So I only really have a sense of his early writing, but I loved what I read. His name is so synonymous with spy fiction that I didn't realize that there's nothing flashy at all about the intelligence work in his novels, it's all about the soulless drudgery and bureaucracy of it all. And you can see traces of his influence all over the place.

Thanks for this thread. It's making me want to dive in to some of the later eras you described.
 

Rascally Badger

El Capitan de la outro espacio
(He/Him)
To be clear, its not that there is no action. It is more that the action is usually a step or two removed from the protagonists. Or it is described to another person later.
 

Exposition Owl

more posts about buildings and food
(he/him/his)
I love Le Carré. Nobody has written better about the effects of living a lie (or indeed multiple lies). If you have access to Apple TV+, I highly recommend The Pigeon Tunnel, which is a feature-length interview with him.
 

Olli

(he/him)
I've read a bunch of Le Carré, including A Naive and Sentimental Lover, which I _thought_ was going to be a spy novel and was disappointed to find out it was not. I have some very mixed feelings about the author - he more or less invented a specific flavor of realistic spy fiction, and as far as I can tell, none of his many imitators surpass Le Carré in the craft. And it's a genre of fiction I really like, both as written and in film! At the same time, I often feel that his depictions of humans and relationships are oddly hollow or superficial. It's almost like the characters are either just collections of conflicting loyalties, barely controlled emotions and fatal weaknesses, or coldly rational manipulators and abusers - or both. I don't really know how to describe it well, but in contrast to the delicate machinations of various plots and counter-plots, the actual humans and their interactions feel kind of undercooked? But then, that is thematically very appropriate...

Regardless, I do really enjoy Le Carré's books, and I do intend on reading more of them. This thread gave me the impetus to pick up more to read!
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
I've read all of the Smiley novels except for A Legacy of Spies (it's on my to-read pile), and I've read The Constant Gardener and The Russia House. I like his work a lot, it feels like a good balance of intrigue and believability as far as spy fiction goes.
 

Teaspoon

(They)
I think the vibe that made him good at spy stuff is also why he was bad at People, i. e. All his characters are like math problems and once you add up their drives that's all they are.
 
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