thoughts on John le Carré

Given that I posted my review of his first novel, Call for the Dead, just a few days ago and he has now passed away I should say something about John le Carré. And maybe something about modern spy fiction.

He’s not my favourite spy writer and I don’t think he was quite as ground-breaking as he was sometimes made out to be. Moral ambiguity, pessimism, the psychology of the spy and the madness of the spy game had already been explored by writers like Graham Greene and Eric Ambler. I did think however that when it came to depicting the utter deadening futility of the whole enterprise le Carré had few if any peers.

While his most admired works were The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (and they were rightly admired) I personally think his masterpiece was The Looking Glass War, published in 1965. It concerns a bunch of British spies whose glory days were World War 2 and they have never really moved on. Unfortunately they’re still running a department of the British Secret Service and when they try to pull off an ambitious operation it goes horribly, tragi-comically wrong. A great book.

His name always seemed to be linked with that of Len Deighton although I think they were really very different writers. There’s something rather tragic about le Carré’s most enduring character, George Smiley, a brilliant spy with a very subtle mind whose personal life is one long exercise in futility. And to some extent you could say the same about his professional career as a spy master. Deighton’s unnamed spy, created at almost precisely the same time, is sometimes left wondering why he bothers but there’s nothing tragic about him. He’s the sort of guy who will do OK. He’s a survivor. Deighton is ironic and cynical. Le Carré can be pretty cynical as well but le Carré still believed that the British, however incompetent they might be, were the good guys and the Russians were the bad guys. Deighton on the other hand always seems to be having fun and seems to regard life with amused but tolerant cynicism.

Le Carré and Deighton can both be seen as belonging to the gritty realist cynical school of British spy fiction and in the 60s and 70s they were certainly the two giants in that field.

I’ve reviewed all the volumes of le Carré’s Karla trilogy - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People as well as The Looking Glass War.

And, as points of comparison, I’ve reviewed Deighton’s Horse Under Water, Billion Dollar Brain, An Expensive Place To Die and and Spy Story as well as Greene’s Our Man in Havana and Stamboul Train and Ambler’s Uncommon Danger and Judgment on Deltchev.

I should add that I've also reviewed the excellent BBC TV adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and their TV version of Smiley's People.

Graham Greene's The Basement Room (AKA The Fallen Idol)

The Basement Room is a 1935 short story by Graham Greene and it’s best known for being the story on which Greene based his screenplay for Carol Reed’s superb 1948 film The Fallen Idol. The Basement Room is available in an edition along with Greene’s The Third Man.

A young boy named Philip lives in a large house in Belgravia. He has limited contact with his parents but that doesn’t worry him, because he has Baines. Baines is the butler. Baines is very fond of the boy. For his part Philip hero-worships Baines who regales him with stories of his adventurous youth in Africa (some of the stories may even be true). It would all be wonderful, except for the presence of Mrs Baines. Mrs Baines rules the household and has little time for boyish nonsense.

What Philip doesn’t realise is that Mrs Baines is as much a nightmare to Baines as she is to him. You see Baines has a lady friend. Which is a big secret that Philip must not tell Mrs Baines.

Philip is seven years old and he’s just beginning to discover life. And he doesn’t like it at all. The rules seem to be very complicated and there’s a lot of unpleasantness. Grown-ups don’t really seem to be all that happy. Grown-ups also have a lot of secrets and it’s very confusing for a young boy when he becomes privy to some of those secrets. Secrets can be very dangerous things. Keeping secrets can be dangerous and not keeping them can be dangerous also.

It’s a neat little story with a nice little sting in the tail. And it's recommended.

The film version most follows the short story until it gets to the end which has some subtle but actually very significant changes. It’s a fine short story but the film version is much richer.

You can find my review of the film version, The Fallen Idol, at Classic Movie Ramblings.

Graham Greene’s The Third Man

The genesis of Graham Greene’s The Third Man is rather interesting. In 1948 The Fallen Idol, directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene, had been very successful at the box office. Since it also proved to be a happy collaboration it’s no surprise that Reed and Greene were anxious to do another movie together. That movie would eventually become The Third Man, one of the greatest movies ever made. But at the time he agreed to do the film Greene had only a single sentence scrawled on the back of an envelope - the mere germ of an idea about a man who is surprised to see an old friend named Harry Lime pass him in the street - surprised because he’d attended Harry’s funeral a few days earlier.

Greene was an excellent screenwriter but felt that he could not write a totally original screenplay. He preferred to adapt one of his stories or novels. Since in this case he had no story to adapt he would have to write one. So he sat down and wrote a story. Now he had something on which to base a screenplay. The story (a bit more than novella length) was never intended to be published. It was merely a quarry from which he would mine the materials for his screenplay. When the film was released in 1949, to international acclaim, his publishers persuaded him to allow the novella to be published.

It is of course essentially a first draft of a story. The completed screenplay differed from the novella in a number of ways. In his preface Greene is at pains to point out that the changes were not forced upon him. Once he sat down to write the screenplay he realised that some changes would be needed and he made them. He did not however revise the novella, which is what makes it so interesting. You can see the way that Greene’s ideas about the story evolved. The changes are actually not all that great. Greene was naturally a very cinematic writer and most of the scenes in his books lend themselves to film.

But the subtle changes are interesting. In the book the central character is Rollo Martins, an English writer of pulp westerns (the fact that he is an Englishman who has never set foot in America is part of the joke). In the movie he becomes Holly Martins, an American writer of pulp westerns. The Rollo Martins of the book is in some ways even more of a failure in life than the film’s Holly Martins, although perhaps marginally less naïve and marginally less self-righteous.

The only condition producer Alexander Korda imposed on Greene and Reed was that he wanted the background to the film to be the four-power occupation of Vienna (the city being divided into British, French, American and Russian zones). This was no problem - the war-ruined city dominated by corruption, with almost everyone involved in some kind of black market, was ideal Greene territory. This is very much Greeneland.

Many of the most memorable scenes in the movie are here in the novella - the encounter on the Ferris Wheel, the chase through the sewers - and while they’re better in the film they work extremely well on the printed page.

Greene felt that the film was better than the book and he was right but the book is still in its own way classic Greene and it’s still pretty good. When comparing the novella and the movie you always have to keep in mind that the story was right from the start intended to be filmed. The novella is essentially an extended rather literary film treatment. So the set-pieces naturally work better in the movie - Greene was creating scenes that would have more impact on the screen than on the page.

Greene was fascinated by themes of betrayal but it’s interesting that both The Third Man and The Fallen Idol deal specifically with the betrayal of illusions, and our reluctance to believe that our illusions are being betrayed. Even more specifically, they deal with the betrayal of childhood illusions. Harry Lime was the boyhood idol of Rollo/Holly Martins. Letting go of the illusions of childhood is part of growing up so logically Martins should finally grow up when he realises that his hero is a fraud and a monster. But this is a Graham Greene story so things are not necessarily going to work out so neatly. Nothing works out neatly in Greeneland.

The Third Man was published in an edition that also included the short story The Basement Room on which the film The Fallen Idol was based. My review of the film version of The Third Man can be found at Classic Movie Ramblings.

The Third Man is essential reading for fans of the film and for Graham Greene fans. Highly recommended.

Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana

Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana was published in 1958, providing another example of Greene’s ability to set his stories in places that were just about to hit the headlines (in 1959 Castro came to power).

Our Man in Havana is a spy story. It is the cynical, humorous and absurd tale of Jim Wormold, not exactly one of the shining lights of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Mr Wormold lives in Havana. He sells vacuum cleaners. He is moderately successful but unfortunately he has a daughter. That’s not unfortunate in itself but the daughter, Milly, is at the age at which daughters become very very expensive. Even worse, Milly has now conceived a passion for horses. She must have one. There is simply no way Mr Wormold can afford the upkeep on a horse as well as a daughter.

So it seems like a stroke of good luck when Mr Wormold is approached by Hawthorne. Hawthorne works for MI6 and he’s in the process of setting up an espionage network in Cuba. Hawthorne believe that a vacuum cleaner salesman is the perfect cover for a spy. Mr Wormold knows nothing of the world of espionage and has no interest in politics but the $150 a month plus expenses that Hawthorne offers him interests him quite a bit. So Mr Wormold becomes MI6’s man in Havana.

Initially Wormold is a bit worried by the fact that he nothing about the world of spies and knows nothing about recruiting agents but then he realises that it doesn’t matter. The network of agents he’s supposed to recruit don’t have to actually exist. The information he sends back to London doesn’t have to be real. It just needs to sound convincing. Pretty soon he has a whole network of imaginary agents and he’s sending off detailed reports to London with lots of disturbing information, none of it rel. He’s even sent them drawings of high-tech weaponry at a new top-secret military installation. The fact that these sophisticated weapons look a bit like parts of a vacuum cleaner somehow gets overlooked in all the excitement.

The head of MI6, C, is convinced that Wormold is  the most valuable agent they’ve ever had. The more fanciful his intelligence reports become the more certain C is that they must be true.

Things are going very nicely for Mr Wormold. Until somebody starts trying to kill his agents. Which is very disturbing since those agents don’t actually exist. Fiction is becoming reality.

Graham Greene of course had been a real-life spy for the British. He knew the incompetence and stupidity of MI6 at first hand. He knew that much of the intelligence provided by spies was simply fantasies concocted by the spies. The more intelligence you provide the more likely it is that the intelligence agency for which you work will continue to pay you. The intelligence doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be the sort of thing that the intelligence agency wants to hear.

Greene had converted to Catholicism in 1926. After the Second World War, and probably not coincidentally after his stint with MI6, Greene’s politics became steadily more leftist although it’s important to keep in mind that he was an old school leftist with nothing in common with the leftism of today. And while his Catholicisjm seems to recede into the background a little it’s also important to remember that he saw no conflict whatsoever between left-wing politics and Catholicism.

When he wrote this novel Greene seems to have been going through one of his upbeat phases (he was prone to frequent bouts of extreme depression). Wormold is more sympathetic than most Greene protagonists (you can’t really call any of Greene’s protagonists heroes). He’s a timid little man but he’s not a hopeless alcoholic and he hasn’t given in to despair or nihilism. He knows little about raising children but he’s managed to be a reasonably good father. He’s a nice guy. He isn’t very honest but he has no wish to do any harm to anybody. He thinks the espionage stuff is all very silly but if MI6 are foolish enough to pay him money he’ll take it. Even when he gets himself into deep trouble he doesn’t give in to despair. Whether he can extricate himself from the mess might be extremely doubtful but at least he’s going to try.

Despite the fact that Wormold never does any actual spying Our Man in Havana manages to be an enjoyable and exciting spy thriller. It’s also superb satire, and very funny. Greene’s contempt for spies is palpable and as in The Quiet American there’s an awareness of how much harm can be done by bungling intelligence agencies but it’s combined with genuine amusement.

A wonderful book. Very highly recommended.

Graham Greene's Stamboul Train

I’m not sure what Graham Greene would have thought about being included in the category of vintage pop fiction, but given that Stamboul Train was one of the books he himself classed as “entertainments” as distinct from his serious novels he might not have minded that much. The intention of the 28-year-old Greene with this novel was to write something successful enough to put his literary career on a firm footing, and it did just that.

Published in 1932, Stamboul Train has the perfect setting for a thriller - the Orient Express.  Its claims to being a thriller are perhaps a bit tenuous, but it does include a murder and a failed revolution, and there are some tense thriller-like moments towards the end.

Greene’s real focus is on the characters, in particular on five of the passengers on the train. Dr Richard Czinner is a failed revolutionary. Carleton Myatt is a rich Jewish businessman. Coral Musker is a chorus girl on her way to Constantinople to appear in a show. Josef Grünlich is a thief and a murderer. Mabel Warren is an alcoholic lesbian newspaper reporter.

Since this is a Graham Greene novel, they are all failures in one way or another. All of them fear betrayal. They either fear being betrayed, or they fear betraying others.

Dr Czinner has replaced the religious faith of his youth with socialism, the ultimate substitute religion. Of course, as it always does, it proves to be an unsatisfactory substitute. Dr Czinner is quite capable of loving abstractions like “the poor” but one feels that he has never actually loved a human being as an individual. He believes he is on his way to lead a revolution, but the revolution has already failed. Now all that is left to him is the possibility of a last grand gesture. Like most grand gestures, it ends up being futile and pathetic.

Carleton Myatt is painfully aware of his Jewishness and is always expecting to be snubbed. He has the opportunity of finding something approaching love, but will he have the courage to accept it?

Coral Musker receives an offer that will offer her financial security, but she also is so afraid of betrayal that she is reluctant to accept.

Josef Grünlich is the only one who doesn’t fear betrayal. He betrays everyone.

Mabel Warren goes through a series of infatuations with heterosexual women. In this way betrayal is guaranteed. She does not comprehend love, but she is very familiar with, and very comfortable with, hatred. It is the force that drives her.

Betrayal drives the plot as well as the characters, and it gives the story the right sort of paranoid feel for an espionage thriller. Given Greene’s rather dark view of the human condition espionage always provided him with ideal subject matter.

I’ve always been a sucker for mysteries or thrillers that take place aboard trains and Greene uses this setting very effectively.

Stamboul Train is a neat little spy thriller that can be thoroughly recommended.