The Reluctant Cowboy
Nearly two decades ago, in Call for the Dead, John le Carre introduced us to George Smiley and began, along with Len Deighton, a reformation and exaltation of the spy novel as a literary genre. In Smiley's People, the latest and last of Smiley's labyrinthian confrontations with his Russian counterpart Karla, le Carre both completes an epic story and reveals the temporal limits of his chosen form.
Smiley has been with us for so long now that it is difficult to appreciate the huge change le Carre wrought on what had generally—and rightly—been considered an escapist genre….
[Compared to James Bond's "cowboy" idealism and disdain for organizational processes], George Smiley—"breathtakingly ordinary" in the words of his regularly unfaithful wife—was a shock. Or would have been, had he been much noticed. But Call for the Dead did not sell well in America; a country glumly struggling against accepting the routinization of charisma was simply not ready to see bureaucracy transformed into poetry. For that, after all, is what le Carre turns out to have set himself as his task.
He was a good writer when he began. His early description of the Secret Service chief as "a cloak and dagger man malgre lui, wearing his cloak for his masters and preserving the dagger for his servants," is as economic as algebra. And he has become a better writer over time. Less reliant on hardware than his only peer—Deighton—le Carre conveys certain stages of self-doubt with Conradian precision….
It is this affair with doubt, this search for a meaning, that has made le Carre more novelist than entertainer. Yet his one "serious" novel, The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971), is an embarrassment. Among its many faults, it lacks what for le Carre has always been the one hope for delivering meaning from entropy; the systematic sifting of knowledge into an organized pattern. Such is bureaucracy's honorable role in a universe where intuition is no longer trustworthy….
In le Carre's masterpiece, Tinker Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), Smiley is merely the protagonist; bureaucracy itself is the hero…. Without the structure bureaucracy imposes on the random accumulation of facts that assail us on a daily basis, there is indeed only "perpetual chaos."
But le Carre has, in intervening books, turned the screw further; his hero, like all great literary figures, is revealed to have a tragic flaw. The arrangement of facts, in the patterns imposed on them by the routines of organization, turns out to have the appearance not only of order, but of truth. And the honorable man—which Smiley is—must act in accordance with truth, becoming a prisoner in the process. The apparently value-free system subtly transforms itself into an ideology as constricting as the "absolutism" which Smiley ascribes to his long-time nemesis. In the penultimate Smiley novel, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), the gap between logical and ethical truth suddenly yawned, and Smiley plunged into the gaping crevice. Fatally misled by the force to which he had given his truest fealty, Smiley retired.
In Smiley's People his position is ambiguous …, his retirement has put him forever outside the organization which nurtured him. So too, has politics. A Labour government eager to pursue detente has limited the Secret Service's ability to provide even its truncated version of truth. The real-world forces that propelled Smiley to the top of the fictional heap as the glint faded from the cowboys' eyes have combined to render his beloved bureaucracy literally unbelievable.
Smiley, thrown back on the intuition he had learned to distrust, is hopelessly out of place….
[In] Smiley's People it is the fact of action rather than the action of facts that gives meaning to life. Thus, though the characters are familiar and the plotting is as deft as ever, this is a new sort of novel for le Carre, and there are moments when Smiley's aloneness threatens to plunge it into the plodding morasses of the classic "armchair-detective" genre. He is a most reluctant cowboy.
In the event, Smiley's reluctance turns out wise, for his triumph over Karla is—as he and le Carre know—illusory. The novel's denouement, flat in isolation, is the necessary conclusion of the story le Carre has been telling for 20 years. In the context of history—its and ours—Smiley's People is a painfully affecting valediction not only to Smiley, but to the age in which he flourished.
Geoffrey Stokes, "The Reluctant Cowboy," in The Village Voice (reprinted by permission of The Village Voice; copyright © News Group Publications, Inc., 1980), Vol. XXV, No. 2, January 14, 1980, p. 33.
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