I first met John le Carré, in a literary sense, when I was too young to understand him. I was always that kind of reader, listening at keyholes, trying to discern what the right kind of people thought was “good.” I somehow heard that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a classic and instantly rushed out to the nearest Barnes & Noble to snag a copy (with my mother as chauffer and primary source of funds, no doubt). I tried to read it and found it full of snide asides that failed to charm me and references I wouldn’t understand for another 15 years. I laid it aside.
Then, a few years ago, a very ordinary miracle occurred. I was looking for something to watch and ran across AMC’s adaptation of le Carré’s novel The Little Drummer Girl. That adaptation happens to star Florence Pugh, one of my favorite actresses, and Alexander Skarsgård, one of my favorite actors. It also happens to have been directed by Park Chan-Wook, one of my favorite directors. It is the only television series he has ever directed and is not the type of subject matter I would have expected him to be drawn to, as he is primarily known for works in Korean (Snowpiercer being a major exception). To me, a find like this constitutes a miracle. I inhaled the series and then ran out to the nearest bookstore to find the novel, this time under my own steam. I read the book straight through in two days, heart pounding with all the fervor of a religious convert.
This is all an extremely long-winded way of saying that John le Carré is a very good writer. His early novels are more straightforward mysteries, owing much to Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers (A Murder of Quality feels at times like a sister novel to Gaudy Night). As his novels progressed, however, they began to focus more and more on spycraft. The elements that went over my head at 12 are precisely those things that make his novels so compelling, namely a deep suspicion about humanity as a whole combined with a deep affection for and understanding of individual humans. Ex-spy George Smiley, his most famous protagonist, is a kind of human metonymy for this concept. In le Carré’s second novel, he writes,
It was a peculiarity of Smiley's character that throughout the whole of his clandestine work he had never managed to reconcile the means to the end. A stringent critic of his own motives, he had discovered after long observation that he tended to be less a creature of intellect than his tastes and habits might suggest; once in the war he had been described by his superiors as possessing the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin, which seemed to him not wholly unjust.
Le Carré’s early work is famously concerned with the Cold War. He is, in this way, similar to his semi-contemporary Ian Fleming. Both le Carré and Fleming served as intelligence officers at one point in their separate careers and both wrote novels focused on British men who had seen the horrors of World War II and now faced the wasteland of post-war Europe. For Fleming’s Bond the Cold War sometimes seems like a blessing - something to do besides drink, womanize, and remember. For le Carré’s Smiley, the Cold War is a war, with all the attendant horrors attached. Perhaps this is why the Bond brand has struggled so much to make the leap from post-Cold War to whatever comes after the end of history. Goldeneye, the 1995 Bond movie that introduced Pierce Brosnan to the role, explicitly deals with the anomie associated with being a spy (and being in a spy movie) that doesn’t have an easy Red Villain to baffle. “For England James?” his brother-in-arms turned villain asks Bond in the final battle. “No.” he responds, “For me.”
Unlike Bond post-Fleming, le Carré never struggled to write a novel that wasn’t about the Cold War. His stand-alone novels, including those written after 1991, address the moral minefield of spycraft with the same ethical fervor as his pre-1991 novels. The Little Drummer Girl is about the Israel-Palestine conflict in the 1970s; The Night Manager is about illicit arms trading. No matter the setting, le Carré has always wanted to understand the alchemy that results when an imperfect but good man or woman comes into contact with human evil. Post-war British writing often evinces significant nihilism (it is the primary tasting note in Fleming); le Carré’s characters know that something still has to matter, whatever that might be.
There have been many good adaptations of le Carré’s novels; I have already mentioned my favorite. But what led me to back to le Carré recently is actually a new adaptation of a novel by someone else. Apple TV has recently released Slow Horses, an adaptation of the first novel in Mick Herron’s Slough House series. The series follows Jackson Lamb, an acidic, disgusting, washed-up spy who presides over Slough House, the place MI-5 sends officers who have royally fucked up. When a real threat no one wants to deal with arises, the slow horses of Slough House pull out their patriotism and throw themselves into the breach. “They’re a bunch of fucking losers, but they’re my losers,” Lamb snarls at his superiors in their defense. Lamb is played by Gary Oldman, who, surprise surprise, famously played George Smiley. The series is redolent of le Carré in many other ways, almost to the point of feeling at times like a pastiche. Herron is surely a talented writer in his own right, but this is a house built on le Carré’s foundations. Still, it is a very good house and very well worth watching, especially as, given le Carré’s death in 2020, we need other writers to take up his mantle. We may be beyond the end of history, but the questions le Carré posed about human good and evil have clearly not lost their relevance.
I was just waiting to get to the end of this piece so I could recommend Mick Herron's books. I was so happy, therefore, to see you get there ahead of me! Le Carre is too gloomy for me, who also tried him too early. However, Herron's snark and oddball characters, along with great plots, are so much fun.
By the way, I discovered you when I tried the Opera for Everyone podcast and you were adding literary flavor to Rossini's Lady of the Lake. That led me here and I've really loved your pieces. In fact I wound up having a very nostalgic conversation with my daughter about the episode of Lost you covered. We had so much fun talking about the show that we might rewatch season one (at least). It does fall apart somewhere along the line but it is a fun ride to that point.