George Smiley: A Spy Like Us

 

It’s a green time for the espionage genre (at least to me: I read more spy novels these days than I do the other genres.) Another James Bond film romps across screens to friendly applause on that venerable figure’s 50^th cinematic anniversary. TV and cable networks are streaming spy sagas on all channels, most notably Homeland and the first season of The Hour.

Last year saw a remake of John le Carré’s great novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, an outwardly unnecessary project that I first greeted with arched eyebrow and slitted eyes, my monocle swinging free in full-blown Colonel Blimp mode. (“Really? Must we? Was something wrong the first time?”)

In the end though, the new version was embraced by most everyone, including me, without dimming the dour glow of the original BBC miniseries. Both versions stand fast under repeated viewings, the new one re-visioning the original in surprisingly fluid fashion, but still knitted to the first by the fine sensibility of the novel’s author. (Maybe now there will be a film of Tinker’s sequel, The Honourable Schoolboy.)

And really, who wants to get snared in a grey, useless tangle over who was the better George Smiley: Sir Alec Guinness or not-yet-Sir Gary Oldman? Clearly, these gentlemen don’t. Pardon me while I clean my glasses and gaze out the window at a passing lorry.

The debate regarding Mr. Smiley vs. Mr. Bond is more charged, but the argument—genre fiction as literary endeavor vs. genre fiction as commercial endeavor—is one that I, in best English restraint, feel cautious about: Do I support mindful boredom or mindless pleasure? Do the two never meet?

Besides I haven’t read Fleming’s Bond since I was a bug-eyed, horny teenager under the bedcovers with a flashlight during summer nights in Central Texas. I have started reading Casino Royale and it’s an okay and likable entertainment so far. Ian Fleming clearly writes with a pleasing smile up one side of his face but there are startling lapses. For one, take this perilously dangly modifier:

“As a woman, he [Bond] wanted to sleep with her, but only when the job was done.”

(A-HA! So that was what Daniel Craig was insinuating in Skyfall’s torture scene with Javier Bardem?)

Really, though, I like much better the brown suits and gray shadows inhabited by John le Carré’s George Smiley. Smiley lives in a truly secret and much more treacherous realm, a world perilous to both body and soul, than does James Bond.

Bond’s body—whether He is Woman or not—faces much greater dangers, obviously. As for his soul, well, it has a well-lacquered veneer—scratch it and you find more veneer. He doesn’t live in the world so much as react to it on behalf of our reactionary little-boy souls. He’s a spy in knee pants. (He’s also more of a commando type; Ian Fleming organized and ran commando operations from London during World War II.)

Bond is fun, even delightful, in portions and sequences, rarely as a whole, regular meal. I agree with The New Yorker critic Anthony Lane: You can walk out of Goldfinger, make a sandwich, and come back without missing much. (Some, like Die Another Day, can be walked out on for a leisurely four-course meal, Pierce Brosnan or not.)

Walk out on Tinker, Tailor, you miss that raised eyebrow, that shrug, that tells you everything.

From what I’ve read, John le Carré was, unlike Fleming, an actual field agent, in his case during the Cold War. We can thank to le Carré’s experiences for bringing us a George Smiley who acts like someone who knows what he’s doing, someone we would rely on.

Very few of us are James Bond. But most of us are Smiley.

Smiley is the spy you and I would be if we were spies. He responds as any one of us would when caught in life’s everyday intrigues—the lies and evasions we tell and are subject to, whether we like it or not; the small incongruous gestures that are meant to hide, but instead reveal, and vice-versa. As spies deal with the slippery world, so do the rest of us at times.

To see the world through Smiley’s eyes is to be drawn to look closer, for more than just whether a hair laid across a desk drawer has been sprung, or whether the label of the Dom Perignon faces out instead of where you left it, at three-quarters.

There are intricate subtleties of gesture and language, of intonation, of dress that need close watching. There are memories to be pored over and sifted, stories to be told, compared, broken down, then reassembled carefully, and told again. Smiley is the one to do it, though, as slippery fellow spy Toby Esterhase reminds us, he has “too many hats on his head.”

To James Bond, it’s almost always clear who’s good and who’s bad; who’s with him and who’s against him.

As real spies know, sometimes it’s different. Sometimes it’s a little complicated.

For George Smiley (and other loners in the le Carré’s universe) a spy’s life is not action-packed and simplistic, but a slow, porously grained, sometimes grimy, lonely, and painful, taut with suspicion. Most of them don’t even carry guns, much less invisible ink pens with chambers for bullets and the means to be rejiggered into a jet pack. Smiley would likely break a hip if he attempted a karate kick. I know I would.

This human vulnerability makes the dangers more real in le Carré’s books. In the seven novels of his I’ve read, death mostly leaps from ambush; a soft-nosed bullet to the face; a sniper’s bullet from the back, from torture.

I first read le Carré’s classic The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in the late 1970s, shortly after Peter Straub’s Ghost Story revealed to me the literary possibilities of genre fiction. For me, Spy was a stunning, thrilling, and emotional experience. Many others agreed, among them two other masters of the genre.

“The best spy novel I have ever read,” Graham Greene blurbed on the back of my paperback copy.

 “The best spy novel anyone has ever read,” Eric Ambler replied underneath.

Spy wasn’t just a smart, well-told story; it was a beautiful, poetic book, poignant and tragic. Alec Leamas felt real to me, down to the seams on his raincoat and the sweat on his face, real to one who knew next to nothing of real espionage, in a way I never recall feeling with Mr. Bond. Le Carré could have been conjuring the whole thing out of a hatful of rabbits, but it didn’t feel that way to me for a minute.

I did not follow up on his subsequent or earlier novels immediately, but dropped them in from time to time over the years. Some of course, I responded to more than others, particularly his very first, Call for the Dead (which also featured Smiley’s first appearance), The Night Manager, and, of course, Tinker Tailor.

I found some of his books a little frustrating, his allusive, indirect style more obfuscating and coy than intriguing and enlightening. He seemed to be practicing a literature of avoidance and indirection, especially with action scenes (not for him Richard Stark’s brutal “he-shot-him” flair.) A Small Town in Germany, for example: I recall its supposedly explosive ending as being fogged in by winding, indirection.

Last year, I decided it was far past time to return to le Carré and read the epic The Honourable Schoolboy  and enjoyed it completely, especially the opening in Hong Kong with its hard-partying Cold War burnouts, and Jerry Westerby’s hair-raising journey through war-ravaged Southeast Asia.

A week ago, I finished Smiley’s People (the last of “The Karla Trilogy”), and found it a rich portrait of the ending of the Cold War and the passing of the generation of agents who fought in it, a modern, urban Ride the High Country  for aging Cold Warriors:  A story about people on both sides who fought in the trenches but then found themselves cast aside as history rolled on.

Though Smiley’s People  was published nearly a decade before the Berlin Wall fell, le Carré already saw the handwriting on that very wall, for both the Soviet Union and the agents on both sides—all Smiley’s people, including the elusive Karla--who met and did battle in its secret world.

I then excitedly turned to the 1982 BBC adaptation, starring the peerless Sir Alec Guinness as Smiley. It’s impossible to praise Guinness’s performance too much, even at the expense of Gary Oldman. With his calm, almost Santa-Clause-like demeanor, Guinness combines both great authority and great tenderness; a sense of ruthless, fortitude (at one point Smiley takes the alias “Standfast”) and sense of sad horror at the world he finds and what he has to do to work in it. Smiley is a prismatic character in the novels and Guinness work in the series calmly carefully captures each facet.

Genre fiction is often, and fairly, criticized for being nothing more than its plots. But le Carré is one of those writers who have shown that it can be more, that the Fiction of Action can reveal truth about the human experience and the world we live in, just like “real” literature. Those who do the dirty work of the world do have an inner life, sometimes remarkably like ours.

Le Carré is by no means the first writer to recognize this, but he’s damn near about the best there is.

[CUTTING BACK: I’ll be appearing here less frequently for the time being. My regular business has been showing an uptick and so time must be set aside to bring my upcoming novel Butchertown to its roaring close, hopefully for mid-2013.

But worry not . . . Burchfield will return.]

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author
 

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

The 50 Percent Theory

 (Spoilers Ahead)

During last week's rant against the ubiquity of crap fiction in the world of e-books, I mentioned a “50 percent theory” that I recall encountering in The New Yorker awhile ago: That when we say we love an author’s books, what we really mean is that we love, say, around half of them.

This week, in true hyper-textual fashion, I thought I’d explore that idea by reviewing a less-than-excellent book by a favorite writer of mine, one of those listed-and-linked on the side of this page.

My hapless victim is the fine and highly regarded historical spy writer, Alan Furst, the author of the splendid Night Soldiers, the first volume in his continuing saga about World War II, anti-Nazi resistance movements. Furst is considered, rightly I think, a successor to genre pioneer Eric Ambler, along with Graham Greene and John le Carrê (though I think less so in le Carrê’s case).

I’ve been reading the Night Soldiers series in order and Kingdom of Shadows, which I’ve just finished, is his sixth, published in 2000. Of the six, I think this one counts as one of that other 50 percent of his, along with Dark Star and World at Night.

Furst lays out the story of the European resistance in clever fashion by portraying, novel-by-novel, resistance movements in individual nations (starting from Bulgaria in Night Soldiers, though he allowed that narrative to sprawl, quite wonderfully I thought).

Since I read Night Soldiers, I’ve found Furst’s work follows the outlines of the 50 percent theory, in checkerboard fashion. Night Soldiers was followed by the forgettable Dark Star, which was followed by the eye-opening and stirring The Polish Officer. (The Poles fought the Nazis a lot harder than you think, even as they were being crushed and betrayed 360).

The Polish Officer in turn was followed by World at Night, a frustrating, desultory story of Jean Casson, a Parisian film producer who is tugged back and forth by various subterranean factions before and during the early days of Nazi occupation.

Despite its elegant, indirect and painterly evocation of Parisian alleyways and cafes, its lackadaisical character’s dance with espionage made for a lackadaisical book. Things aren’t helped by Jean’s sudden melodramatic dive overboard into the English Channel, fully dressed; the kind of stroke works fine in a movie like Casablanca, but seems arbitrary in a novel.

Casson’s heart remains as elusive as the secretive world he spends much of the book trying to avoid, but not as intriguing. Jean Casson is the callow, reluctant hero, struggling with the decision whether or not to join the Resistance. Good enough, but the impacts of outside events on him never seemed to come to life. I never felt touched by the war raging inside Jean. He seems to be dressed a in a finely tailored but hollow suit.

However, I’m glad to say, Casson filled out that empty suit in Furst’s next adventure, Red Gold, a breakneck, harrowing thriller of Casson’s adventures after he commits himself body and soul to the Resistance. Here, Casson comes live as a dashing though still-ambivalent hero, thanks to relentless, hair-raising, sometimes horrific, encounters with both German occupiers and treachery from other Frenchmen. I closed that book with an admiring shudder and admiration for the bravery it must have taken to stand up to the Nazis. Like the best war stories, it gave me to feelings of both excited admiration for its heroes and gratitude that I didn’t have to live through it.

But now I come to Kingdom of Shadows. Here, the 50 Percent Theory again seems useful. This time, we’re with the Hungarian segment of the Resistance, starting in March 1938, when Hitler’s evil forces—with some assist from Stalin--were gathering and the whole world seemed willing to give way before his stew of manipulation, deceit, and proud-faced bullying.

We experience this world through the eyes of Nicholas Morath, handsome Hungarian nobleman, sometime playboy, and patriot who’s living in exile in Paris. Morath is resolutely anti-Nazi, willing to do his utmost to serve his country. Unlike Jean Masson, Morath feels no doubt about joining the good fight. Unfortunately though, thanks to Hungary's fraught internal politics, he’s never sure whose side he’s working for, pro- or anti-Fascist.

Morath rapidly finds himself wandering that mirrored hall so often found in the house of spies. Even his boss (and close uncle) Count Polanyi, has no idea if their high-minded actions are helping their side or playing into the hands of the crypto-fascist Hungarians. One hand never knows what cards the other holds and everyone is at dangerous cross purposes, except, unfortunately, the bad guys. No one seems able to tease out the tangled threads of espionage.

By itself, this is an exciting, emotional scenario about the dilemmas people can encounter in trying to do the right thing in a baffling world. And there are bursts of excitement and suspense.

But Kingdom of Night feels like a cold, distant book. Its fog obfuscates more than it beckons. Furst writes in a style that evokes place and time, filled with lovely details and pithy observations that feel poetically right: At one point he mentions a Paris café located “between a butcher that sold halal meat to Arabs and kosher meat to Jews” while, at another point, an old man describes life as being like “licking honey off a thorn.” Wonderful!

Unfortunately, the telegraphic style Furst employs--short punchy sentence fragments meant to flash like lightning, to stab and reveal--often conceals more than reveals, pushes away more than pulls in. Its jabs and hints seldom illuminate, piling into muddled shards of mirror glass.

And, like Jean Casson in World at Night, Morath is a remote man, his inner world out of reach, thanks in part I think, to Furth’s narrative style. His fragmentary sentences add up to a fragmentary mosaic of the hero.

It’s in this aspect, I think, that John le Carrê may be a better writer than Furst. While le Carrê’s people sometimes become entangled in winding sentence webs, they eventually knit together and come alive in their nuances, in their torment and ambivalence about the grim business they’re engaged in and the impact it has on their souls (and le Carrê’s people do have souls, as rounded and fully seen as anywhere). They are bound strongly to each other and the world they work in.

Furst’s characters sometimes seem like collections of attributes that only unify under the kind of duress they face in his best works. When they’re at rest, when the world is only impinging on them or confusing them, they’re less interesting, and so are novels like Kingdom of Shadows.

But don’t let that stop you from delving into the world of Alan Furst. Just don’t start with Kingdom of Shadows. Start with Night Soldiers. Believe me, after that, you’ll want more, and you won't mind that other "50 percent."

As for my own work,  I know I'll be behind the critical 8 ball myself someday; that moment when I realize that my efforts have fallen short and that I've not delivered the book I wanted to deliver. But like any other successful writer, I can't let that dread stop me.


(Re-edited 5/27/12)

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Photo by author.

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Strong Opinion

I guess I won’t be moving into that chateau on Lake Como next door to George Clooney anytime soon.

I mean, I’d sure love to have genre writer James Patterson’s money. But I doubt I’d enjoy having to keep up his fertility rate. When I think about his huge output, I hearken back to my early years spent lugging fifty-pound boxes of paper around San Francisco law firms. O simple joys of youth!

Those of you who read The New York Times may have seen the article last week describing the new paradigm for ultra-super-bestselling genre authors like Patterson. Nowadays, writers are now being pressed to produce—I might not call it writing, precisely—two books a year. Plus short stories.

“The culture is a great big hungry maw,” said Lisa Scottoline, another mega-best-selling thriller writer, “and you have to feed it.”

(Full disclosure: I haven’t read either Mr. Patterson’s or Ms. Scottoline’s work.)

This requirement is said to be a feature of the e-book era. With readers now able to download anything, anytime they want, it’s believed that an author has to stay in the reading public’s pupil 24/7. This is based on the theory of signal-to-noise ratio, which, in a certain frame, makes a good deal of sense, at least economically.

This has led me to think again about what kind of readers I want to reach.

Most habitual genre fiction readers want escape, clean and simple. Perhaps they’ll tolerate a thematic nod to their value systems, whether “conservative” or “liberal,” and some pop-psychobabble, but beyond that, the vast majority of genre fiction readers want nothing thematically challenging, innovative, or overly offbeat, no matter how entertaining it might otherwise be.

Then, there is an apparent minority of picky readers, like me. As someone said to me, there’s reading to escape and there’s reading to grow. And while I prefer novels that take me into other worlds, I like it when the journey not only alters my sight and gives me new perspectives, it illuminates the world I’m in now, that touches on the “human condition.” I read to both grow and be entertained.

Most genre novels and stories aren’t nearly so ambitious as to bridge those two landfalls, but a remarkable number can. I count John le Carrê, Peter Straub, among others, as examples. It takes time to write books like these. That’s the table I want to sit at as a writer. And so, I can’t hope to write two books a year. At least good ones, as I understand them.

Back in the old days, of paperback originals and hardcover novels that would made their real big score in paperback editions, genre masters like Rex Stout and Luke Short would craft a book a year, maybe two if they were feeling frisky or the butcher was giving them the hairy eyeball. Maybe they weren’t Hammett-level innovators, but they were unmistakably talented, gifted writers, who nevertheless, must have grown bored churning out the same book with the same formula or characters year after year.

Believe me, at times, I can hear Rex Stout’s fingers falling like a lead hammer on the typewriter keys and his heavy sighs as he types “The doorbell rang” for the one-thousandth time; I can sense when the champagne rapport between Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin loses its fizz; or I’m almost sure that Stout used almost the exact same mystery plot ten books ago, except the murder weapon was a pitchfork instead of a harpoon and . . .  well . . . .

After a while, an understanding develops. No writer—literary or genre--writes only good books. All my favorite writers have written novels that fall short for me.

One critic—I think a New Yorker writer--recently wrote that when we say we love a writer, what we mean is that we love, at most, fifty percent of his work. So long as you sense an author’s always striving to be his Best Self, that other fifty percent--well, no one’s a genius all the time and those valleys can make the peaks look all the grander. And if that fifty percent dross starts drifting toward ninety, you gently close the door and search elsewhere.

Snobby as I am, I’m also a literary anarchist. By this I mean, I can like anything . . . so long as it’s good, whether it’s the best Luke Short western or the eye of Vladimir Nabokov’s young poet opening to the world while gazing out over 1930s Berlin. The reality is that there are more good books than I will ever be able to read.

So, I’m wondering, just what is it that fans of Mr. Patterson and Ms. Scottoline expect to get with their high productivity demands? I’m not talking about literature, either. Having to grind out two full novels a year, means there’s hardly enough time or space for craft or professionalism. Whether you’re Lee Child or Thomas Pynchon, it takes time to write a decent book. Followed by a nice vacation.

Remember the hubbub over the length of time George R.R. Martin took to finish his latest Song of Ice and Fire epic, Dance of Thrones? Some of Martin’s “fans” were--no “upset” is too mild a word—pissed off with scalding, flaming vomit that the next book had failed to be completed by their timetable. “We demand that you pander to us! We demand a stinking, unreadable tower of shit!”

Neil Gaiman was right: “George Martin is not your bitch!” I second that motion, as do most of us writers. The only sin is writing lazily, writing badly (and releasing it), writing like you don’t care, writing to keep your “fans” from condemning you on Facebook.

Now, James Patterson fanboy, come sit on my knee so ol’ Grandpa can dispense some advice: You know, while waiting a year or so for Mr. Patterson to write and publish another novel, why don’t you take a breath, broaden the ol’ horizons and read some other genre writers?

There are plenty of worthwhile books worth your time. I will even boldly suggest you read my (IPPY prizewinning) Dragon’s Ark, while you wait for Mr. Patterson to write a good book. I mean that’s what you really want, isn’t it? A good James Patterson book?

I know I don’t want, for example, a bad Peter Straub book. I know that if I start sleeping on the doorstep of his Manhattan brownstone and fire-bombing his Twitter account with demands for Ghost Story XXII, he’d be well within his right to tell me to go have airborne relations with rolling holed pastry.

I don’t say this because I worship the dust around Mr. Straub’s feet. I say this because I do what he does. And it’s hard to do well. I can do it badly, I can publish a napkin a day, but I don’t want to and the kind of readers I want—those fussy readers--don’t want me to either. They’ll want the best I have to give and that’s what I’ll try to do, even though I fully know I won’t always be able to.

I took four years to write (IPPY Award Winning) Dragon’s Ark. I’m first to admit that’s too much time for such a book. Happily, I’ve absorbed the lessons I learned so that my next book Butchertown, started in August of last year, is galloping like a thoroughbred and should be out by the end of this year—a little more than a year and, even more importantly, done with my very best effort.

While you’re waiting, look at that long list of writers on the side of this page. They’re good writers, all of them. Some of them are Olympian highbrows, some of them first-rate entertainers, writing artful, sophisticated tales of adventure, suspense, and hair-raising horror and thrills. New or old, they deserve your valuable reading time. There’s no hurry. You’ll never read all their work and you don’t need to.

As for James Patterson and Lisa Scottoline, I hope they have time to enjoy their chateaus, wherever they are.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.