John Le Carre has himself rather given the game away, apparently
suggesting that his most famous character, George Smiley, would now be "keeping bees somewhere" in retirement. Smiley may exist at the centre of Le Carre's masterful depiction of the shadowy world of the British Intelligence community, a depiction often praised for it's accuracy and realism, but Smiley's fictional existence seems to owe more to Sherlock Holmes, whose fictional retirement Le Carre consciously alludes to, or Hercule Poirot. Characters who exist somewhere outside of history, subject to revised time lines, never really aging. Although we do finally get that in
The Secret Pilgrim, written in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, a fictional summing up of the period, of the kind of spy stories which could be told then, and of the depressing reality which for Le Carre always lies behind any fanciful depiction of the world of espionage. With the Cold War over, critics seemingly thought Le Carre had lost his great subject (and that may be true for all I know), but it was certainly appropriate that it should have marked the final appearance of his signature character, one final performance before the curtains were closed on that moment of history.
Yes, I am a fan, ever since I was dazzled by Alec Guiness in one of the BBC's handful of contributions to the claim of 'Greatest TV Show'. They did a follow up, adapting
Smiley's People, when for budget reasons they couldn't make
The Honourable Schoolboy, which I've still never seen. No, after seeing
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time, I turned to Le Carre's original novels. Alighting first on a copy of
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (in which Smiley only has a cameo), before backtracking to the very beginning and working my way through, concentrating on Smiley and the boys in the Circus, one of Le Carre's wonderful coinages for secret service slang. With my eagerness to read every thing Smiley appears in, I missed that
The Russia House is actually a Circus novel too, connected by the character of Ned in
The Secret Pilgrim, so I ended up reading those two the wrong way around.
First appearing in two rather conventional whodunits, Smiley has only minor roles in Le Carre's following two novels as he established himself as a major writer of espionage fiction, before eventually reemerging in
Tinker, Tailor at the centre of the 'Karla' trilogy. The whodunnit plot is transposed from the quest to catch a murderer to a need to discover the double agent within the service (the 'mole', another Le Carre coinage actually appropriated by the real secret service), 'Karla' the ultimate nemesis, head of the Soviet service, an obvious double for Smiley who haunts the narrative, only occasionally glimpsed. The final novel in the sequence,
Smiley's People, like
The Secret Pilgrim, always seemed to me to be taking place in a narrative space located somewhere 'after', a belatedness, as if all of the previous conventional narratives of spy fiction have already taken place, leaving only a sense of loss which haunts both novels. The waste of the secretive world.
Given my regard for the TV
Tinker, Tailor, it's perhaps not surprising that I wasn't initially overly bothered about seeing the new film. It's not that I resented their making a new version, more that I just couldn't see the point, when we've already got an adaptation which is pretty much perfection. And with seven hour-long episodes in which to elaborate the complex plot, two hours would inevitably squeeze the narrative. But we purposefully took a needed day off on Wednesday and ended up catching an early evening performance. It's a testament to the director and screenwriters that the narrative never feels cramped. Many of the fabulous cast are largely reduced to little more than cameos, yet all manage to impose themselves on the material. It's clear who everyone is from even the smallest scenes. And the set design is immaculate in it's evocation of the vanished post war world of the early seventies.
In fact, I'd suggest it's almost too immaculate. It's a film that almost feels as though it's been directed by its main character. Everything, every lingering camera movement is so precise, the gloomy cinematography just so. Important scenes are often elided, seen only obliquely, the faces of several characters remain hidden from the viewer. Everything feels so very controlled, buttoned down. Compare one adaptation with another, and it's clear that for the TV series, made in 1979 only a few years after the novel was written, it simply can't be nostalgic for the Cold War period since for its makers and audience the Cold War was present day reality. I'm old enough to remember the last years of the Cold War period, born in the same year the TV series was produced, my brother and I were woken up in order to be sat down in front of the TV footage when the Berlin Wall fell. "Watch this! It's History!" we were admonished. The film captures something of my imaginings of the period just before I was born. Growing up there were enough reminders of it around, particularly in official buildings, whereas the TV series just
is the time before I was born.
In fact, the film is haunted by that earlier adaptation (really, how could it not be?). It borrows some of the alterations to the novel's plotting, whilst adding a few of it's own. As good as Gary Oldman is as Smiley (and he is excellent), he's not who I would have chosen for the role. It's a trivial thing, but he's just too tall, whereas the character of the novels and Alec Guiness's performance is short and a little fat, dressed in clothes which never quite fit him. Oldman looks a little outsize at several points, where Alec Guinness' Smiley disappears into himself, rather like a mole (the animal) at times. And Oldman surely borrows from Guinness for aspects of his performance and speech patterns. Which is not to say that he doesn't bring things to the character which are absent from Guiness's earlier performance. I read somewhere that Le Carre himself has observed that he gives a much clearer sense of the cruelty Smiley is capable of, his rather passive aggressive nature.
What I love about Smiley is that sense of buttoned down emotion. It's that peculiar kind of Englishness which celebrates failure and buried feelings. Which is also what elevates him slightly into the realms of the fantastic: his complete devotion to his work, the contradiction of a person who is brilliant in one aspect of their life and a failure in another. For
The Spectator Smiley is a "brilliant spy and totally inadequate man", an obvious allusion to the infidelities of his beautiful, aristocratic wife Anne. It's a rather reductive and stereotypical evaluation of masculinity, indicative of a stereotypical heterosexual panic about definitions of maleness. And Smiley is a very unsexual character, contrasted with the predatory and bisexual Bill Hayden, modeled on Kim Philby, who cuckolds Smiley. Arguably, in their different ways, the sexuality of both characters is threatening to the sort of rhetoric the
Spectator is displaying.
A more charitable reading of the
Spectator quote would be that the secretive world of espionage is destructive of any human relationship. It's a theme which runs through much of Le Carre's Cold War fiction, and interestingly it's also what the film adaptation plays up. That it is more explicit about the homosexuality of several characters is no doubt a sign of the respective eras in which their adaptations were made. But the film's makers go further, portraying Smiley's trusted Lieutenant Peter Guillam as a gay man who late in the narrative brakes off what appears to be a loving relationship in order to protect himself in the secretive world in which he opperates. It's certainly in keeping with what little I know of the world of British intelligence which, like the theatre, appears to have been something of a haven for gay men pre-Wolfenden and legalisation. But it also makes the narrative focus much more about the spy's personal lives.
In the TV series, Smiley's cuckoldry is an open secret, everyone eludes to it, but nothing is stated. Nothing is even seen until Ann returns to him for a final scene in which Smiley attempts to confront his wife with her infidelity with Bill Hayden. In the film we have several flashbacks to a perfectly tacky early 1970s works Christmas party, in which Smiley spy's as a peeping tom on Ann and Hayden. Another flashback gives him a near confrontation with Hayden in which Smiley arrives back from Germany to find Hayden in his home, almost catching the erring pair. Far more emphasis is laid on the friendship between Hayden and Jim Prideaux through the repeated appearance of a photograph of the two of them in younger days that by the end it almost feels more like a love story which dare not speak its name than a spy story.
It's interesting. This is one of the great English Cold War novels, and I can't help but feel that the film subtly depoliticizes it. Whilst the earlier TV adaptation can't be nostalgic for the Cold War, that isn't to say that it isn't nostalgic for another earlier period of Britain's history. When Smiley visits Connie Sachs in the TV series Beryl Reid has a line where she laments her 'boys' who were raised to rule an empire. The TV series is in part an imperial lament, if far from an uncritical one, since these are real live 'boys' who are getting hurt as a consequence. In the film, Kathy Burke does suggest things were simpler during the Second World War, but the empire goes unmentioned. Her most memorable line is when she mischievously suggests to Smiley that she feels rather 'unfucked' whilst two undergraduates are making out on a sofa in the room next door. More sex, and less politics.
One of the changes I really liked was the scene where Smiley tells Guillam about his one meeting with their ultimate enemy, the Soviet spy chief Karla years previously in Delhi. In the TV series we get yet another flashback, with Karla played by a silent and impassive Patrick Stewart. In fairness, this was some years before he was Jean-Luc Pickard, but I never quite understood why they had such a major Shakespearean actor in such a tiny role. I think I understand it now. It's a tiny role, so it needs a well known actor than at least many of the audience will be familiar with in order to give the character solidity. In the film, Karla is an absent ghost, haunting the narrative. Oldman however narrates Smiley's slightly drunken account of his meeting with Karla in a powerful scene, but we remain in the narrative's present, the camera fixed on his attempt to act out their absent encounter. There is a flashback, but it only gratuitously reveals to the audience something hidden from the characters, that Karla was present at the shooting and capture of Jim Prideaux with which the story opens, revealed only through his still possessing the lighter which Ann once gave to Smiley. It heightens the doubling of Smiley and Karla which is present in the novel, but still denies him any real presence.
I don't think any of this is wrong. The destruction of human relationships which Le Carre's fiction finds the world of espionage guilty of is ultimately a criticism of that world. For Le Carre, politics often feels like little more than an excuse for people to behave wickedly. The makers of the film aren't betraying the novel. It's just an interesting change of emphasis, reflective perhaps that now we are more nostalgic for the supposed moral certainties of the Cold War (not that Le Carre's depiction of the Circus ever really gives us moral certainties), than we are for a lost empire. But it also reflects a modern tendency to privilege personality and personal feelings over politics. The only real misstep in the film is the final scene where Smiley finally sits down triumphantly as the new Control, contrasted with a montage of the film's minor characters who have all lost something. Where in the TV series it was nothing more than an administrative meeting in which Smiley softly informs his chastened colleagues that he will now be taking over as 'acting head' of the Circus, here it's transformed into a victory. This is a subtle betrayal of Le Carre's fictional world, where any victory ultimately feels like failure.
If I compare the two adaptations and still come out thinking that the one is a masterpiece whilst the other is just a really well made film, then that's also because I think that it gets the balance between the personal and political right. Perhaps at the end of the day it only comes down to the fact that I saw the TV series first. Still, I'm glad I saw the film, and I'll be delighted if it's success means we get adaptations of the other two volumes of the trilogy. The BBC couldn't afford the cost of filming in Hong Kong for the
The Honourable Schoolboy. And I really must get around some day to watching the BBC's
Smiley's People. I've read a few of Le Carre's non-Circus novels. His most autobiographical,
A Perfect Spy, is as good as if not better than the 'Karla trilogy'. It's themes of nostalgia and betrayal are in a similar orbit. I've not yet read enough of his post-Cold War fiction to know if Le Carre lost his great subject with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Even if he did, then he still created one of the great fictional characters reflective of that era. I think that's more than most writers manage.
