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John le Carré

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John le Carré World Literature Analysis

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John le Carré does for the spy novel what Raymond Chandler did for the detective novel in works such as The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940). Le Carré demonstrates how a popular genre can be used to explore serious issues in a realistic manner. His first two novels, though they are impeccably written, are rather inhibited and conventional detective-type novels. It was with the publication of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, that he found himself as a writer.

Before le Carré’s time, most spy thrillers featured impossibly patriotic, courageous heroes who were always getting involved in violent action. The hero’s country was always right and the other side always wrong. The hero used ethical methods and acted in self-defense, while the villains could be counted upon to use murder and fiendish physical and psychological torture. One of the rare exceptions was W. Somerset Maugham’s intellectual spy-hero, who appeared in a series of short stories collected under the title Ashenden: Or, The British Agent (1928). These realistic stories attempted to show spies and counterspies as real human beings. Other exceptions to the stereotypical romantic spy thriller, and another major influence on le Carré, were the thrillers or “entertainments” of Graham Greene. Greene’s brooding, paranoic Stamboul Train: An Entertainment (1932; published in the United States as Orient Express: An Entertainment, 1933), A Gun for Sale: An Entertainment (1936; published in the United States as This Gun for Hire: An Entertainment, 1936), and The Confidential Agent (1939) still make excellent reading after more than half a century. A third important influence on le Carré was Joseph Conrad, who was known primarily as an author of sea stories but turned out one memorable spy story in his novel The Secret Agent (1907).

The best representative of the romantic spy-heroes before le Carré’s time is the famous James Bond. While the Bond stories such as From Russia, with Love (1957) and Dr. No (1958) have given readers and filmgoers many hours of escapist entertainment, even their own author, Ian Fleming, never took them seriously. Le Carré had plenty of exposure to the unpleasant realities of espionage in his years of government service. Just as Raymond Chandler wanted to show how real cops and real crooks talked and acted, le Carré wants to show how real spying is conducted and what sort of people are involved. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, le Carré reveals to the reading public what Phillip Knightley has called “the sordid world of espionage with its easily bought loyalties, loose morals, mind-boggling complexities, and, if it were not for its murderous consequences, comic inanity.”

That novel is impressive in its characterization and apparent authenticity; however, it still has unmistakable traces of the old-style spy thriller, with its action-oriented hero taking on the whole Communist world single-handedly and throwing his life away in a final romantic gesture. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was only le Carré’s third novel. He had started writing fairly late in life; he was still struggling to find the right creative groove. It is obvious from his writings that le Carré’s own personality is more cerebral than athletic and that his experience as a secret agent must have involved more organizational work than derring-do. He finally found the right formula for his spy fiction by focusing on the character of George Smiley and giving Smiley a formidable counterpart on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

Smiley is the least heroic hero ever featured in genre fiction. The character...

(This entire section contains 4920 words.)

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he most closely resembles is the sedentary, hyper-intellectual Sherlock Holmes. While James Bond was appropriately portrayed on the screen by the handsome, dynamic Sean Connery, George Smiley was portrayed equally appropriately by the pudgy, soft-spoken Sir Alec Guinness. While James Bond is a man of action, Smiley is definitely an intellectual. Bond is an extrovert and Smiley is an introvert. Bond likes high-powered cars and exotic weapons; Smiley does not like to drive at all and never carries a gun. Bond is famous for his affairs with beautiful women, while Smiley is extremely shy with both men and women and is married to a woman who is outrageously unfaithful. Bond represents the kind of man the average male reader would like to be, while Smiley represents the kind of man the average armchair spy suspects himself to be.

The Quest for Karla (1982)—a trilogy consisting of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), and Smiley’s People (1980)—represents the high point in le Carré’s career. Besides George Smiley, the three novels contain other memorable characters. The Lenin-like Karla becomes one of fiction’s great characters even though he remains offstage until the last chapter of the third book. The rivalry between these two strong-willed, brilliant antagonists resembles nothing in literature so much as the classic rivalry between Sherlock Holmes and Professor James Moriarty (“The Final Problem,” 1894). It took an author with le Carré s intelligence, creativity, and insider knowledge to capture in fictional form the essence of the worldwide ideological, propagandistic, diplomatic, economic, technological, and military struggle called the Cold War. With the spy-heroes of Conrad, Maugham, Greene, and Fleming, the reader is confined to the agent level of espionage; with le Carré, the reader is admitted to the highest levels of spying and diplomacy.

A Perfect Spy reads like an addendum to The Quest for Karla, dealing with a minor theater of the Cold War but focusing with revealing autobiographical detail on the personality of a British spy turned traitor. The hero, Magnus Pym, resembles George Smiley in being a man who relies on his brain and his powers of persuasion rather than on brawn and athletic ability. A Perfect Spy reveals the psychological stress experienced by the British, as well as the Europeans in general, and even members of the developing world, as they were crushed between the enormous economic, military, and ideological pressure being exerted by the United States and the Soviet Union, with the threat of nuclear annihilation facing humankind for more than forty years.

What made le Carré’s spy novels so engrossing was that they were set in the Cold War years, and the stories he told and the issues he raised were current and relevant and resonated with the reader. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, le Carré turned to other topics, and not always as successfully as in his Cold War novels and in the struggle between Karla and Smiley. The Night Manager (1993) centers upon a criminal conspiracy, and The Tailor of Panama is closer to Graham Green than to earlier le Carré in its non-Cold War and non-nuclear concerns, while The Constant Gardener depicts the greedy ambitions of the pharmaceutical industry and allied political and business interests. In Absolute Friends (2004), the moral ambiguity of the Cold War novels has vanished in the author’s harsh political critique of America’s war in Iraq. These later novels are readable, but they do not always reach the same level of psychological complexity and involvement that le Carré achieved in his earlier novels.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

First published: 1963

Type of work: Novel

A British spy deliberately disgraces himself in order to get recruited as a double agent by the East Germans in a story of multiple betrayals.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold begins with a dramatic nighttime scene in which a British spy is shot down while trying to escape from East Germany. Alec Leamas, a British agent, harbors hatred toward Hans-Dieter Mundt, second in command of the Abteilung (East German intelligence service), who is responsible for the extermination of Leamas’s entire spy network. Back in England, Leamas is recruited for a sting operation against Mundt. Leamas is dismissed from the “Circus” (a special department of the British Intelligence Service) and pretends to go through a period of moral disintegration in order to make himself seem like a good candidate for recruitment as a double agent. During this period he meets Liz Gold, a shy, lonely librarian, who falls in love with him. She happens to be a member of the British Communist Party but is more interested in personal relationships than in causes.

Leamas is approached and agrees to betray his service for a price. He is taken into East Germany, where he meets Jens Fiedler, a brilliant Jewish intellectual deeply committed to Marxist-Leninist ideology. Fiedler is Mundt’s chief rival in the Abteilung. Leamas disingenuously feeds Fiedler rehearsed information intended to make it appear that Mundt has been working for the British. The zealous and ambitious Fiedler accuses Mundt of treason, and a trial is staged with Leamas as the star witness. Leamas, however, learns that George Smiley and his associates at the Circus have been clumsily covering up his tracks in England. For example, it is brought out by Mundt’s defense that Leamas had “friends” who paid his overdue rent and other bills.

Then Gold is called as a surprise witness. She has been lured to East Germany on a bogus tour for members of the British Communist Party. She reveals that men calling themselves friends of Leamas came to her apartment and gave her money. One had identified himself as George Smiley, well known to the Abteilung as a highly placed member of the British Secret Intelligence Service. Leamas cannot understand how Smiley could have been so clumsy but begins to realize that the whole scheme was concocted to make it appear that Fiedler has been involved with the Circus in a conspiracy to destroy Mundt. That is exactly what the court decides is the truth. Fiedler is arrested and is certain to be executed as an agent provocateur. Mundt, a neo-Nazi and longtime British mole, is totally exonerated and obviously destined to become the most important figure in the Abteilung.

Leamas will probably be executed. Gold is heartbroken; she feels responsible for betraying her lover. The disgusted Leamas tells Gold: “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” Here le Carré is spelling out the theme that would serve to structure all of his future spy novels. In the Cold War, both sides are equally despicable. Human values are being outraged by the ideological clash of communism and capitalism.

Mundt proves the correctness of these conclusions by releasing Leamas and Gold and providing transportation to the Berlin Wall. Here is an echo of traditional spy novels, featuring daring escapes from enemy territory under a hail of bullets. Le Carré, however, deliberately violates the conventions of the genre by allowing hero and heroine to be caught in spotlights while trying to scale the Berlin Wall and dying within sight of freedom.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

First published: 1974

Type of work: Novel

George Smiley is brought out of forced retirement in a desperate attempt to uncover a traitor in the British secret service.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the first novel in a trilogy that came to be called The Quest for Karla. The novels are set in different parts of the world but have in common the British protagonist George Smiley and the Soviet antagonist known only as Karla. Oddly enough, Karla actually appears only at the very end of the last novel; yet his powerful personality, his unbending will, and his fanatical disregard for human feelings are felt throughout the approximately one thousand pages that make up these three books. The novels were inspired by the most famous case of treason in British history. Kim Philby, an upper-class, Oxford-educated intellectual who rose to the top echelon in the British Secret Intelligence Service, defected to Russia and was discovered to have been a mole—a double agent who had been revealing ultrasensitive information to Moscow Centre for decades. What made Philby’s treachery even more devastating was that he had been in close contact with the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Washington, D.C., and was in a position to betray vital American secrets as well. This treachery poisoned relations between the secret services of the two allies. The British and Americans were unable to have confidence in their informants or operatives anywhere in the world.

In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley is brought back out of semiretirement on a mission of the utmost urgency and confidentiality. It has been learned through a Soviet defector that Moscow Centre has a high-placed mole in the Circus who has been taking orders directly from Karla for years and has been systematically sabotaging the Circus. The mole has caused loyal employees to be fired and probably has been responsible for hiring agents who are working for Moscow Centre. Since Smiley has no way of knowing whom he can trust, he has to act as a counterspy against his own organization. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy contains little overt action. Smiley spends most of his days and nights examining musty files, trying to trace people’s movements and link them with significant events. He is greatly aided by one of le Carré s most interesting characters, Connie Sachs, an arthritic, asthmatic old lesbian with a brilliant mind and a photographic memory.

The shy, self-effacing Smiley discreetly interviews various individuals and eventually finds a pattern of activities that enables him to identify the mole. He sets up an elaborate trap to lure the traitor to a safe house for a supposedly secret meeting with a Soviet agent. When the highly regarded Bill Haydon appears, he is caught red-handed and confesses that he has been the Soviet mole since his undergraduate days at Oxford. It is common knowledge within the Circus that Haydon had an affair with Smiley’s aristocratic wife, Ann. Smiley is horrified and outraged by the realization that Haydon initiated the affair on Karla’s orders because Karla considered Smiley his most dangerous opponent and wanted Haydon to obtain confidential information through the unsuspecting Ann Smiley. George Smiley is reinstated and becomes acting head of the Circus with the awesome responsibility of repairing all the damage that has been done throughout the years.

Jim Prideaux, one of the men whom Haydon betrayed, murders this former friend and superior while Haydon is being held in custody. As a character, Prideaux exists in order to provide some physical action in this otherwise highly intellectual plot; however, his role is tangential to the story and mostly covered in flashbacks. On the other hand, in the sequel, The Honourable Schoolboy, le Carré attempts to create a role for a vigorous, sexually active young hero while retaining the sedentary Smiley in the vital role of master planner.

The Honourable Schoolboy

First published: 1977

Type of work: Novel

George Smiley, now head of the Circus, sends an agent to war-torn Asia to capture a Soviet mole in the Communist Chinese government.

In The Honourable Schoolboy, le Carré moves to a different theater of the Cold War, the Far East. Smiley learns that Karla has a mole in Communist China supplying him with information. Capturing this mole would help revive morale within the Circus and also help repair its relationship with its counterparts in the United States. It would also damage relations between China and the Soviet Union and secure badly needed information about what is going on inside mainland China.

Smiley sends a young agent named Jerry Westerby to Hong Kong to obtain information about a secret bank account into which Karla has been funneling American dollars for years. Westerby, posing as a journalist, spends much of his time drinking and womanizing. His investigations take him to various theaters of one of the bloodiest wars in history. Guerrilla armies in Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, aided and abetted by the Chinese communists, are trying to topple the established governments, which are being held together only by massive military and economic support from the United States. The descriptions of military action, streams of fleeing civilians, the total demoralization of the population, and the collapse of the Western presence on the Asian mainland represent some of the best writing le Carré has ever done.

In this novel, le Carré makes his anti-American sentiments more obvious than in any of his other works. He deplores the way in which the Americans are obliterating ancient cultures with napalm and other explosives dropped indiscriminately on innocent civilians. Le Carré is popular with American readers in spite of the fact that he has never treated American characters kindly and has never been successful in portraying them.

Westerby discovers that the mole inside China is Nelson Ko, brother of a powerful Hong Kong businessman named Drake Ko. On Smiley’s orders, Westerby begins leaking such sensitive information that Drake realizes he must get his brother out of mainland China before he is exposed. Unfortunately, Westerby falls in love with Drake Ko’s English mistress, Elizabeth Worthington, and nearly foils the entire Anglo-American plot by trying to make a private deal with Drake to exchange Nelson for Elizabeth. Westerby is killed by the Americans. Nelson is captured and taken to the United States for interrogation. Smiley’s operation is successful, but he has been double-crossed by his own associates in the Circus, who have colluded with their American counterparts to force Smiley out and replace him with Saul Enderby, a stupid aristocrat who toadies to the CIA.

While the plot abundantly illustrates le Carré’s favorite themes of betrayal and dehumanization, The Honourable Schoolboy is weakened by being broken into two widely separated points of view: that of Westerby in Asia and that of Smiley in England. When Smiley comes to Hong Kong in the final chapters to participate in the capture of Nelson Ko, it is an awkward attempt to tie the two separate plotlines together for artistic neatness. In Smiley’s People, however, le Carré finally writes the perfect spy novel by making George Smiley both the thinker and the doer, the intellectual and the man of action, all in one central hero.

Smiley’s People

First published: 1980

Type of work: Novel

George Smiley organizes a complex multinational espionage operation to force his archenemy Karla to defect from the Soviet Union.

Smiley’s People brings to a satisfying conclusion the battle of wits that has been going on between Smiley and Karla for many years. Smiley is called out of retirement to help the Circus investigate the recent murder of a former Soviet army general living in exile in London. The general had been in contact with a Russian woman living in Paris who had recently been approached by Soviet agents with an offer to allow her daughter to leave Russia and move to France. Smiley deduces that the general was assassinated because the old man suspected that Karla was only using the woman’s daughter to create a false identity for some young woman he wanted to send to France. Smiley goes to the European continent to investigate. Smiley appears as a major or minor character in many of le Carré s earlier novels, but Smiley’s People is the first book in which the reader is able to develop a full appreciation of his talents as a secret agent. He is in grave danger because Karla can have people murdered by agents in any country of the world and would certainly eliminate Smiley if he suspected that the British secret service agent was trying to unravel his secret.

Karla had an illegitimate daughter named Tatiana who is now in her early twenties. Tatiana is a schizophrenic, and Karla has had her secretly moved from Russia to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where she can receive better treatment. The nuns who operate the sanatorium know virtually nothing about her. Karla sends money to pay for her treatment via a minor official named Grigoriev. Karla must keep this a dark secret because his enemies in the Kremlin could destroy him if they could show he was using the Soviet diplomatic and espionage apparatus to further his purely personal interests. Smiley gets damaging information about Grigoriev’s adulterous affairs and forces him to become a double agent, promising him safe asylum in Australia. Through the terrified Russian diplomat, Smiley sends a confidential letter to Karla, offering him a carrot-and-stick proposition: If Karla will defect to the British, he will receive asylum and Tatiana will continue to receive high-quality psychiatric care; otherwise, Smiley will expose him. Karla will be executed, and his daughter will become a charity case without money, friends, or even an identity.

At the appointed deadline, Smiley and his assistants wait in the fog. If Karla crosses the bridge into West Berlin, it will be the greatest triumph in the history of the Circus. They will be able to learn everything about Soviet internal and external affairs. Suspense mounts as minutes tick by. Finally Karla, disguised as a working man, crosses the bridge, hesitates, and then delivers himself into British hands.

Characteristically, Smiley is not exultant. He feels ashamed for using Karla’s genuine paternal love to destroy his archenemy. One of le Carré’s major concerns in all of his novels has been the destruction of human values by the clash of godless ideologies. Smiley realizes that he has not really defeated Karla because he has not proved that Western values are superior to those of Communism. Furthermore, Smiley cannot help but reflect that Karla destroyed his relationship with Ann, condemning him to a life of loneliness, and that in a sense Karla destroyed Smiley as a human being long before Smiley was able to do the same thing to Karla.

A Perfect Spy

First published: 1986

Type of work: Novel

A high-ranking member of the British diplomatic corps reveals in a lengthy confession that he has been a double agent for many years.

A Perfect Spy is the most autobiographical of all le Carré’s novels. Since many of the facts about his life are obscure, it is difficult to determine exactly how much of the novel is factual and how much has been fabricated for dramatic effect. The central theme probably comes close to the truth about the author: His father was the most important influence in his life. Rick Pym, the father of the hero Magnus Pym, closely corresponds to what is known about le Carré’s own father. It was through Rick that Magnus learned how easy it is to deceive people if it is done with charm and on a lavish scale. Both the fictional and the real father expected the most of their sons but set for them bad moral examples.

In the novel Magnus Pym is a high-ranking diplomat who secretly manages espionage operations in foreign countries. He creates great alarm in government circles by disappearing without informing his wife about where he is going. The suspicion is that he has defected to the Soviet Union, in which case all the undercover agents behind the Iron Curtain who were known to him would be in immediate danger.

Pym is actually living in a private home on the Devon coast with an old woman who has no knowledge of his true identity. Miss Dubbers mothers him, and he treats her with kindness and generosity, revealing that he is a good man who had been led astray by circumstances beyond his control. His relationship with his landlady is central to the story. Like le Carré himself, Pym lost his mother at an early age and, because of his loveless childhood, was never able to relate to people in a normal manner.

Pym is writing an elaborate confession and suicide note in the form of a letter to his own son. This letter makes up much of the novel. He reveals how he began to take delight in secretly betraying people even as a boy in boarding school. His whole life has been a pattern of winning people’s confidence, learning their secrets, and then betraying them. His only real friendship appears to have been with the brilliant Axel Hampel, whom he met while attending a university in Switzerland. Their relationship comes suspiciously close to being overtly homosexual, the type of thing at which le Carré often hints in his works but that he never explores in detail.

Eventually Axel becomes a spy for the Eastern Bloc, operating out of Czechoslovakia. He and Pym hit upon the scheme of exchanging secret information to advance their careers, and both are spectacularly successful for years. Then their superiors on both sides begin to deduce the truth. With the British secret service closing in on his pathetic foster home, Pym puts a pistol to his head and pulls the trigger.

The convoluted story leaps backward and forward in time and shifts to several different viewpoints, most notably that of Jack Brotherhood, Pym’s older, father-figure friend who is trying to track Pym down. In addition to being made up of many lengthy flashbacks, the story leaps about geographically, with scenes taking place in England, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and the United States. It is le Carré’s most autobiographical, complex, experimental, and ambitious novel. It is only partially successful because it departs from the conventions of the espionage genre to some degree but does not do so completely; it is neither mainstream nor genre fiction.

The Constant Gardener

First published: 2000

Type of work: Novel

After his social activist wife is murdered in Africa, a British diplomat pursues the reasons for her death.

Justin Quayle is a British diplomat, a member of Her Majesty’s foreign service, stationed in Nairobi, Kenya. Middle-aged and upper-middle-class, Quayle personifies Britain’s traditional political and social establishment, and while conscientious enough in his professional duties, he devotes his free time to his garden, cultivating temperate flowers which grow well in Kenya’s highlands. His much younger wife, Tess, is the opposite, a crusading lawyer who is very much the antiestablishment figure. Empathizing with the majority of Africans—poor and black—she is deeply committed to social justice. With Arnold Bluhm, a Belgium African doctor, she discovers that a major Swiss pharmaceutical firm, amorally pursuing profits, had, in connivance with other business interests and the Kenyan government, embarked on a campaign to distribute Dypraxa, a new antitubercular drug, to Africa’s poor. The drug, while promising in the long run, has been released without sufficient testing and even with willfully inaccurate tests, and Africa’s poor are to be the guinea pigs. Too many political and economic interests are threatened by Tess and Arnold’s exposures, and they are brutally murdered. Justin is apparently intentionally unaware of the extent of Tess’s involvement, spending his time tilling his garden.

British officials, such as Sandy Woodrow in Kenya and Sir Bernard Pellegrin in London, while superficially sympathetic to Justin’s loss, do not want to jeopardize Britain’s political influence or economic position in Africa and refuse to become involved in Tess’s murder. Instead, they publicize the claim that Arnold, who was black, had murdered Tess, a white woman, in a fit of sexual passion, although in reality there was no sexual relationship and Arnold was probably homosexual.

Upon his return to London after Tess’s funeral, Justin is advised to take a long leave, get some counseling, and recover from the trauma before accepting a new assignment. Instead, he makes the commitment to cultivate Tess’s garden and discover where her campaign had led and what it had unearthed. He flees England with a fraudulent passport, first traveling to Italy, then to Germany and western Canada, and finally returns to Kenya, generally only a step or less ahead of the economic and political powers that have reasons to prevent his quest from succeeding. He does unearth the several conspiracies that led to Tess’s death and mails his findings to sources in Britain, but when he visits the site of Tess’s murder, he, too, is murdered. Whether his findings are going to have any ultimate effect on exposing the nefarious medical-economic-political bureaucracies and conspiracies is doubtful. After all, this is a le Carré novel, and his novels rarely have happy endings.

Le Carré is a brilliant writer, and his ability to take the reader into a place or capture the essence of a character in a few words is one of his strengths of The Constant Gardener. In addition to his portrayals of Justin and Tess, le Carré captures the duplicitous ambitions of Sandy and his wife, Gloria, Justin’s diplomatic colleagues in Nairobi. The author’s sense of place, such as the slums of Nairobi or an establishment London club, are uniformly excellent. However, the characters and the plot lack the murky moral ambiguities of his earlier Cold War works. Instead of the complicated amorality of many of his earlier figures, here people are either saints, such as Justin, Tess, and Arnold, or villains, many of whom are opportunists and self-servers, such as Woodrow or corrupt politicians both in London and Kenya. In this work, which reads as much as investigative journalism as a novel, an angry le Carré wears his idealism on his sleeve. In an era of increasing globalization, corporate corruption is a legitimate issue, particularly when the poor and the powerless are victimized, but many of le Carré’s “constant” readers found this novel less compelling than his Cold War efforts.

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John le Carré Long Fiction Analysis