John le Carré: great writer, great timing, great subjects
Alec Guinness in Smiley's People (Courtesy BBC)
John le Carré once wrote, “Spying was forced on me from birth much in the way, I suppose, that the sea was forced on CS Forester, or India on Paul Scott.” It’s a great line, but is it true?
The best tributes to John le Carré have all said that his real subject wasn’t spies. It wasn’t even the Cold War. His finest novels were always about something else. The decline of Britain, obviously. “Poor loves,” Connie tells Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. “Trained to empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away.”
His sense of timing was perfect. His first novel, Call for the Dead (1961) was published in the same year as the Profumo affair, soon after Suez. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) came out in the same year that Philby defected to Moscow and Burgess died. Tinker Tailor appeared on the BBC in the autumn of 1979. Mrs Thatcher exposed Blunt as a Communist spy a few weeks later. The Smiley novels coincided with the high point of Britain’s fascination with the Cambridge spies, but also with a palpable sense of British decline running through the 1960s and 1970s.
There were other great le Carré subjects. Friendship, betrayal and human relations. During the Christmas party scene in Tinker, George is cuckolded by Bill Haydon – note the look between Haydon and Jim Prideaux. “Thematically, le Carré’s true subject is not spying,” wrote Tim Garton Ash in The New Yorker in 1999. “It is the endlessly deceptive maze of human relations: the betrayal that is a kind of love, the lie that is a sort of truth, good men serving bad causes and bad men serving good.” His very first novel begins with the revelation that Ann had left George Smiley “in favour of a Cuban motor racing driver”.
Class is important as well. George Smiley attended a minor public school and an “unimpressive” Oxford college, just like le Carré (Sherborne and Lincoln College). He travelled, le Carré writes, “in the guard’s van of the social express”. Le Carré once wrote a piece called “A Writer and A Gentleman” (1968), in The Savile Club Centenary Magazine. Class runs through British writing about spies like lettering through a stick of rock. William Boyd once began a review of a book on Kim Philby thus: “The English can justifiably point to real and lasting achievements in three particular areas of human endeavour: dictionaries, bespoke gentleman’s tailoring and betrayal.” The clever line about “bespoke gentleman’s tailoring” makes you think of Smiley’s three-piece suits, but also of Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad, with all its well-observed references to Jermyn Street shirtmakers and shoes made at John Lobb.
Class, yes, but also shabbiness. The brilliant BBC adaptations of Tinker and Smiley’s People and the underrated film of Tinker, with Gary Oldman as Smiley, caught the mood perfectly. All those gloomy brown, dreary suits and old-fashioned technology. Not an ounce of glamour anywhere. A grim tribute to Callaghan’s Britain. It was a fascinating counterpoint to Ian Fleming’s Bond stories. What both had in common was a flattering reflection of Britain as a country that mattered in the world when it no longer did, except in medicine, science and the arts.
There’s something else. So many of the best recent British writers have been drawn to spies: Tom Stoppard, David Hare, William Boyd, Alan Bennett, Julian Mitchell. There have been fascinating essays and reviews on the subject by, among others, Julian Barnes and George Steiner. It is one of the great subjects of contemporary British literature. The Americans have Westerns, we have spies.
But of all these writers none has been filmed as often as le Carré. Good films, too, and great TV series. Ten films, six TV series. Only Graham Greene and Ian Fleming have been so perfect for the screen. Think of the performances: Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, James Mason in The Deadly Affair, Anthony Hopkins in The Looking Glass War, Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman as Smiley, and, most recently, Hugh Laurie, Tom Hollander and Tom Hiddleston in The Night Manager and Damian Lewis in Our Kind of Traitor. Many today have paid tribute to what a great writer le Carré was, but few have given due credit to the actors and the superb adaptations.
The death of John le Carré is an interesting reminder of all the things that make a great literary reputation. Good writing, certainly, and great characters, but also the right subjects at the right time which caught the mood of late 20th-century Britain. Not to mention catching the eye of TV executives and filmmakers.
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