The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
One of my current ‘favourite’ authors is Mick Herron. I only started reading his novels three years ago, at which point I discovered he has written several books. Indeed it was back in 2010 when he published Slow Horses, the first in a series of spy stories under the umbrella heading of the Slough House series. The books are based on the adventures of a group of MI5 agents, lead by Jackson Lamb, who have been exiled from the main agency as a result of one failure or another, and sent to serve out their time at Slough House (thereby reducing the risk they might do something other than keep quiet and stay out of trouble). Jackson Lamb is a wonderful creation, a very smart and devious agent, apparently a slob, but actually enjoying himself with his raggle-taggle band of ‘disasters’, a group of people he manages to involve in some exciting off-the-books espionage activities. If spy stories with a different slant appeal to you and you haven’t read this series, give Slow Horses a try: They’re a great read!
As it happens, Mick Herron gave some background to his books in The Guardian a few years ago (2 November 2016). He had this to say about Jackson Lamb: “Which isn’t to say that I was unaware of his literary antecedents. The most obvious of these, to my mind, is Reginald Hill’s Andy Dalziel. Fat Andy – whose gargantuan appetites allowed him to swallow whole every scene in which he appears – is crime fiction’s Falstaff, a glorious Rabelaisian monster. Hill was a master of the form, and his Dalziel, however larger than life he seemed on first appearance, grew in stature with every book, becoming as human and fully rounded as any literary creation has been. Similar growth isn’t in Lamb’s future, even if I were half the writer Hill was. Instead, Lamb is the tent pole figure, the one keeping everything else up, and doesn’t appear to need a backstory; just snippets here and there that hint at the messy compromises and bleak insecurities of an undercover agent’s life.” Hold on for a minute, I was just about to recommend the Dalziel books, but just in time I remembered that this is meant to be about a rather different character, Alec Leamas.
Herron’s comment in that Guardian interview about messy compromises and bleak insecurities took me back to those two writers who were to establish modern spy stories on the popular fiction map with their books back in the 1960s. One was Ian Fleming, whose charismatic hero James Bond (007) had first appeared a decade earlier in Casino Royale, in 1953. However, dashing heroes were soon to be accompanied by novels focussed on somewhat grittier, darker spies, less charismatic and more to be pitied as creatures of miserable and suspicious world, largely ignored in a context of bureaucratic indifference.
This was given impetus in 1963, when that other writer I was remembering, John Le Carré, explored a tawdry, uncomfortable spy world in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, a short, spare and confronting book. Alex Leamas was an agent in a world far from Fleming’s Bond, a spy caught up in nasty international subterfuge and complex relationships, struggling to deal with a world characterised by unclear and worrying ethical dilemmas, while weighed down by unwanted personal sacrifices, a failed marriage, uncertain liaisons. Unlike charismatic 007, and far from being able to sweep some sexy agent from either side in the spy games into his arms, poor old Alec Leamas was among the many in that clandestine territory whose lives seemed to end with their dying or being abandoned or merely left miserable and poverty-stricken.
Alec Leamas had been a disillusioned British agent at the end of the Second World War, who had gone on to fail in his undercover role as head of the West Berlin office of the British Secret Service. As his network began to collapse, Leamas returned to Britain, losing his final colleague as he tried to get out. Leamas knew he’d reached that point in his profession where failure meant the end of his career. He wanted to go on extended leave, but the head of ‘The Circus’, the fictional nickname for MI6, offers him one last mission before retirement. The reader is left to wonder if this was yet another secret service trick. Use a close-to-disgraced agent for a highly risky espionage attempt, given it’s an almost certainty he will fail. If he does, the failure will be personal, leaving the Secret Service blameless. After all, they’d tried, hadn’t they.
Leamas is to make his way to East Germany , as a defector, with the task of discrediting a key enemy party member. In a way that Le Carré describes with grubby realism, nothing is what it seems, and the mission becomes complicated by Leamas’ complex cover story, and an underlying worry that he wasn’t really committed to the task he’d been given. The book is uncomfortable, raw, and while it is full of insights into spy tradecraft, it is even more revealing about the complex amorality of spying itself. The process of being seen as a discredited agent, in a downward spiral , is brilliantly done. As you read his apparent descent into alcoholism and vagrancy, it is easy to believe it’s all true. However, and very necessarily, there are occasional moments when you read what Leamas is thinking, just enough there to remind you this is all part of an elaborate plan.
The adventure begins once he’s disgraced and back in Europe. He’s taken over to East Germany by his new ‘friends’. Le Carré is a master of dialogue and the series of interrogations between Leamas and his handlers is brilliantly written. You feel you’re in the room with this disreputable gang, and you keep slipping back into believing that Leamas really has gone over to the other side. Indeed, Alex’s responses are described so well you soon begin to believe in this man: he can use recollections and forgetting perfectly, just enough remembered to make sure he appears to be ‘telling the truth’, and just enough confusion to remind us that he is supposed to be a drunken failure, thrown out by the British Secret Service, and left to drown his sorrows.
Slowly Leamas gets the acceptance of his new friends. It’s a masterpiece in double deceit, nicely captured at one point when Leamas reflects on his role:
“Aware of the overwhelming temptations which assail a man permanently isolated in his deceit, Leamas resorted to the course which armed him best; even when he was alone, he compelled himself to live with the personality he had assumed. It is said that Balzac on his deathbed enquired anxiously into the health and prosperity of the characters he had created. The qualities he exhibited to Fiedler, the restless uncertainly, the protective arrogance concealing shame were not approximations but extensions of qualities he actually possessed; hence the also slight dragging of the feet, the aspect of personal neglect, the indifference to food, and an increasing reliance on alcohol and tobacco. When alone he remained faithful to these habits. He would even exaggerate them a little, mumbling to himself about the iniquities of his Service.”
With just enough of these tantalising internal reflections Le Carré has you firmly in his grasp.
There are two other themes that make this such an outstanding novel. There was a tradition that spy stories had as their heroes men (seldom women) who were young, good-looking, fearless, incredibly skilled in any and every form of self-defence and fighting, and, above all, masters of intrigue, cryptography and the game of ‘real life chess’. Leamas was a middle aged, second-rate operative, seemingly prone to mistakes, and with barely enough tradecraft to survive. He certainly wasn’t the glamour spy of most fiction. If spy novels had been changing, Le Carré was writing at a crucial point in the change process, with the disasters of the Cold War looming over storytellers. He took the genre and shook it firmly. Espionage stories have never been the same.
On the other hand, Le Carré was writing a novel, and it had to catch the readers’ attention. Would they be satisfied with the complex double game that underpinned the story? Many would, but there are other kinds of drama. He adds in a key character to provide another complexity. Liz Gold is a love interest for Leamas, but she’s also an idealist, a communist sympathiser easily drawn in to the complex situation, a rather gullible and pitiable figure, with just enough allure to briefly catch Leamas’ attention. As with other elements of novel, there’s as much duplicity here as in all the areas of his life, adding extra tension, attraction and regret, a nice final touch to the story.
That Le Carré’s story was so realistic shouldn’t have been a surprise. If readers had but known at the time, Le Carré was born David Cornwell, and David had served in British intelligence from the late 1940s, during his time completing National Service, (compulsory for young British men at the time). Stationed in Austria, he took part in the interrogation of defectors from East Germany. Back in England, after studying at Oxford, he joined MI5, first as a source on Communist student groups, and then working for the agency full time. While he was at MI5, as Le Carré he began writing (it was a service requirement that he used a pseudonym,). In 1960 he transferred to MI6, attached to the embassy in Bonn, only to be compromised in 1963 when Kim Philby, a double agent, revealed the details of many British MI6 staff, including Cornwell.
After some initial speculation, critics and reviewers were quick to point out that Le Carré was an ‘insider’. Fifty years after its publication, he wrote about the book and its reception. At the time, its success was unanticipated, heralded as ‘the real thing’. But then Le Carré goes on to comment:
“And to my awe, add over time a kind of impotent anger.
Anger because from the day my novel was published, I realized that now and forever more I was to be branded as the spy turned writer, rather than a writer who, like scores of his kind, had done a stint in the secret world and written about it.”
Sixty years after its appearance, it is still the case that Le Carré is seen as an ex-spy who happened to write novels. Why can’t we accept that like every other novelist he drew on what he knew? However, he was and is more than that. He’s an exceptional novelist, using the world of espionage to write compelling stories about relationships, interpersonal indebtedness, and the costs of living a life where it is hard to distinguish between truth and convenience.
In the years since The Spy Who Came In From the Cold was published, many have looked back and suggested that once his books started being published, he would soon have been outed whether he wanted to be or not. The author John Le Carré knew too much! But his closeness to the real life of espionage had another consequence. He wasn’t interested in the glamour and excitement that Fleming depicted. The Times book reviewer complained at the time of the book’s publication that was “too much description and not enough action”. His firsthand knowledge, grim atmosphere, and complex morality all lent the novel an air of realism, making it stand apart from the imaginative exploits of other spy fiction. It was truly a turning point for the genre, but equally refreshing was the abandoning of those dashing heroes of many typical spy stories. Leamas is genuinely one of British spy fiction’s most hopeless and pessimistic characters.
When Richard Burton was cast as Leamas in the 1965 film adaptation, it was a masterstroke. While 007 on screen was the smooth, panther-like Sean Connery in his early 30s, Leamas was to be seen as middle-aged, worn out by the toll his work had taken. Burton had the right kind of slightly dilapidated face, perhaps the result of the actor’s hell-raising lifestyle and drinking and he offered the perfect realisation of Le Carré’s intent. “The story of The Spy was really a story of loneliness…” Le Carré suggested in a 1974 interview. Through the stark narrative, readers are exposed to the duplicitous nature of Cold War power struggles, where allegiances shift, and trust is a rare commodity. For Le Carré, loneliness and spying go hand in hand, simply because no one can be trusted, and Burton looked the part. A sometimes great actor, he made himself Leamas.
What are we to make of this strange genre. Ian Fleming’s books are traditional yet well-executed. This is the spy as the dashing master of disguise and intrigue, able to find his way into the secrets of others (and the bedrooms of beautiful women). This is all about excitement, narrow squeaks, major triumphs. It is also a world of ‘classical’ values, a British spy dealing with nefarious villains from across the globe, although often European, given this is the part of the world that fosters spies who are almost like us, but actually bitter enemies. It’s schoolboy stuff, goodies and baddies: the really good stories are well told, and the action convincing. This is the stuff for adolescents to dream about, imagining the thrills and successes.
On the other side are the books about people like Leamas. This isn’t the stuff of dreams about success, brilliant insights and plans, and achievement against the odds. This is about messy, unclear, demanding and demeaning work, spies riddled with uncertainties about themselves, what they are trying to do, and constantly expecting to be uncovered, whisked away to some dark and miserable prison and shot for their trouble. Certainly not an attractive career prospect! Strangely compelling, nonetheless.
Pert of the reason for the success of this side of the genre is that it is closer to the reader’s life. Everyday stuff is often hard work, activities frequently humdrum and often disheartening, the rewards might be acceptable but the experiences aren’t exciting. In this genre the reader can see themselves, but also reach out and almost touch the possibility of success. Life is tough, dangerous, and almost everyone is against you. You can’t even be confident about your friends: they may not be real friends, and their ambitions might push you aside anyway. And yet. And yet, there is that lingering hope that a mission might succeed, just as a work task might deliver. These spies might be a bit clever than you, might be able to shoot more accurately, even run faster, but they’re not that different.
There’s the choice: glamour or grit. Glamour is for the movies, and we all know that what we see on the screen is nothing more than celluloid success, ephemeral and easily lost. Film stock burns quickly, and the image of the glamour spy is similarly short term, easily forgotten, burnt up as quickly as that furtive cigarette you told a partner or a parent you never smoked. Leave glamour to the credulous and enjoy that content only to the extent you guess how the next trick will be realised, the next disaster averted. Light entertainment.
Grit is closer to home. It’s like watching Saturday Night and Sunday Morning again. Albert Finney was uncomfortably convincing as the slightly amoral, ever hopeful but doomed young man in that film: despite drinks at the pub and darts, you know he won’t escape the drudgery of life. He works on the shop floor in a bicycle factory and, with luck, he might make it as a supervisor, but he’s going to get married, settle down, and lead a boring life. He’ll dream of other possibilities for a while until, like Alec Leamas, it’s all too late. We’re not ‘entertained’ by films like Saturday Night or The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, we’re absorbed by the fact they’re so believable.
John Le Carré made clear the sordid side of spying in a book was as much about the sordid side of life as anything. Leamas tries, explores, sometimes succeeds and often fails. He does what many readers aspire to do, to have one last successful venture and end a career in a blaze of glory. What Le Carré does is to hit you firmly on the head. Spying like James Bond is the stuff of dreams, but Alec Leamas is like you and I: he’s a small player caught up in world where no-one really cares about him. Occasional moments of small triumph, fleeting opportunities to do something good, but nothing special, outstanding or unique. I found his account dark, realistic, and quite simply outstanding. If only I could write a novel that was even one tenth as good.
