A (by now, somewhat belated) New Year's Resolution

I was going to say I'd try and write a post for this blog once a week, but by this point I've already failed that one. I've never been very good at making (never mind keeping) New Year's Resolutions. When I look at some of the bloggers I follow, I feel genuinely impressed by the amount they manage to write for their blogs, and can't help wondering where I'm going wrong. No, I think if I am to make a resolution, it should be to stop stressing when I don't have the time or the energy to write something. I've no idea if anyone is even reading this. Even my wife seems to have lost interest! Nobody is putting any pressure on me to write anything for this blog. I'm not going out of my way to get attention. And I've got enough challenges in the rest of my life away from this blog. So really, I should just concentrate on writing when I can, and enjoying it when I do.

Still, there are a few things I wanted or meant to write about last year:

Marina Warner, The Lost Father: A truly magnificent historical fiction which, in it's final few pages undermines the very notion of historical fiction, of history as a stable narrative. The romantic fiction of an Italy which was still mired in a peasant culture, or a politically committed narrative of left wing agitation? In trying to tell her a story of her family's history, the narrator finally ends up stranded between the two, uncertain if everything she's written, which constitutes the bulk of the novel's telling, is just gilding a fiction, the story her mother preferred over what may have actually happened. It was one of the best novels I read last year, and these few words barely scratch the surface of what makes it so great. Even if it is a romantic fantasy, it still contains plenty of the changing social history of the lives of ordinary women in Italy over the 20th century, as well as Felliniesque fantasy, and a language which is as stoical and resilient as the lives of the characters it describes. The past feels more real than the present day framing sequences.

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Alan Wall, China. I actually started a post on this, back in September, and I still intend to finish it. Soon, I hope.

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Caryl Phillips, A New World Order & Cambridge: The introduction to Phillips' collection of journalism is fascinating, seemingly as it is coming out of a cultural moment before the twin towers fell in New York. Looking over the various events and cultural figures covered in his book, Phillips imagines a future when the migrant, the stranger, the other is instinctively accepted and acknowledged as an equal. The 'New World Order' of his title. A cautiously optimistic vision of the positive side of globalisation. Without digging it out of the pile I can't check the exact reference, but I hope I'm not misrepresenting Phillips. He doesn't seem like a writer who ever settles for the easy or complacent answer, and I'm sure he expressed what I'm trying to express with more nuance than my clumsy attempt at paraphrasing. Thinking about the last decade or so, it's hard to escape the conclusion that things haven't quite worked out like that. Certainly in this country migrants have become the favourite bogeyman of the right and a fair chunk of the left. Married to an immigrant who was born outside the EU, I know from first hand experience just how hard the political establishment wants to make it for such people to settle here, even if they're married to a British citizen. We're probably (hopefully) in a far more fortunate position than many, and yet it still feels like we're currently running along a bridge as it crumbles behind us, desperate to reach safety.

Another theme which emerges from a number of these pieces is that of identity and its relationship with roots. Phillips rightly objects to a British cultural identity which would exclude him and others from a similar or parallel background. The book is organised in a way which reflects his own personal sense of his divided roots, slpit between Africa, the Caribbean, Britain and America. It's a neat retort to a British national identity which is in any case so often unstable. The only point I found myself wanting to make in response is that it is possible to feel excluded from a British identity even if you're white and come from a family which has lived in Britain for centuries. For whatever reason, I've never had a sense of roots or continuity within my own family. If I look at the photos of my grandparents in middle age for instance, I only feel a distance of the historical moment they were formed by and lived in. I've finally reached a point in my life where I feel I could actually speak to my parents and both sides would be able to hear the other. Only one of them is already gone, and the other very ill.

And if I look to literature for a cultural identity, I still feel excluded there, even if literature is really the only home that I have. Perhaps it's simply because I've lived in the North of England for most of my life, and perhaps its because of the books I happened to bumped up against as a reader, which is always partly down to chance. My first loves were science fiction and fantasy, but whatever genre you read, the bulk of our literature here, whether popular or literary has come from the South East of England, particularly London. Yes, I know we've had regional fiction since at least the 18th century, but that in itself makes my point. In the ways in which it's produced and sold to a reading public, its structured and related to its opposite, the metropolis, London.

Of course, this is a white man's lament, even if I may have an ancestor who came from Ethiopia. I couldn't compare whatever sense of loss or absence I possess with the far more challenging experience of growing up in Leeds as a black man of Caribbean descent in the 1970s. I grew up in a later decade, part of the dominant culture.

Cambridge is the fiction to go alongside the non-fiction, colliding a young woman out of Jane Austen with the degrading reality of slavery, the exploitation on which much of prosperous British 18th century society was built. It's mostly narrated from her perspective, but also in the voice of the educated slave Cambridge who comes to fascinate her but whose fate ultimately alienate her from any chance of seeing the slaves as fellow human beings. It was probably impossible for a woman of her background in the 18th century to make such a leap, but you can see the beginnings of such a struggle between the lines of her writing. Phillips is scrupulous fair to both his narrators. His Austen-like protagonist isn't uniquely horrible, although she can be unpleasant at times, and Cambridge isn't unrealistically heroic. They're both people living in circumstances not of their choosing, trapped by the attitudes bred in them by their historically contingent experience. This isn't a fiction which looks back on the past merely to moralise about it, because what would be the point of that? I think most people who might read a literary fiction about slavery have probably already made up their minds on the issue. The climatic moment of violence employs EM Forster's Marabar Caves device to depict the clash between the two cultures, left deliberately vague. Neither perspective allows us a clear view, so we're left suspended with a vision of people who have all been brutalised by a cruel social reality.

It's probably not ironic that I remember Cambridge's name over hers when his name is the title of the book. Of course, Cambridge isn't his name. Or rather it's only one of the names he possesses during his narrative.

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The Box of Delights. Appropriately, I rewatched the BBC adaptation from 1984 in the run up to Christmas, this time in the company of my wife. When I first watched it as an adult a few years ago I was a little disapointed, able to see all the faults, but perhaps because I was watching it with my wife, this time I found myself enchanted anew.

If I had to make a list of the half dozen or so things that formed me and my tastes when I was growing up, this would be on my list. You see what I was saying above? It's English, and despite the exterior scenes being filmed in Scotland, it's cultural setting is clearly the South East of England. As a child I was enchanted. As an adult I can see the story doesn't really hang together, being a jumble of magical scenes and stuff which never really coheres into a consistent plot. It's full of this 'stuff which kids will like'. A car which transforms into a jet. Magical flight and transformation. Mythical beings. All of which makes sense of the ending which so many people seem to see as a disapointment. If it feels like a dream then perhaps it's only right and proper that Kay Harker should awake at the end. It's the second of two stories John Masefield wrote about the character (the first, The Midnight Folk wasn't made into a radio and TV show that marked the imagination of generations, and I've not read it either), so perhaps his awakening from at the end is also a waking into adulthood, leaving magic and wonder behind.

But does the lack of coherence matter? For me as a child (and now as an adult), what holds my attention is the feel of the magic. His brief meeting with the Roman soldiers adds nothing to the plot, but its necesary because Kay is encountering the matter of Britain in his dreams and travels, and you wouldn't have had the British Empire without the experience of the Roman one. The fact that the police inspector is so unrealistically useless is simply part of the charm. The special effects may feel clumsy and dated, but that's all to the good. If they really are remaking it as a film, then you just know the special effects will make extensive use of CGI, and they will almost certainly fail to capture the ellusive quality of the magic which they managed in 1984. The animation has a painted, even sensuous quality. The talking animals, the existence of which Kay accepts without much surprise, are clearly people in cumbersome masks. It all points towards the theatrical quality which so much British TV used to have. Dressing up and putting on a play. I rather miss all that. And Patrick Troughton is Cole Hawkins. They can't improve on that.

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Edmund De Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes. A friend was raving about this a few weeks before Christmas and then the following week at work I had to catalogue about 60 or so books relating to Japanese art and culture. I lost count of the number of times I must have typed the word 'netsuke'. So clearly the world was pushing me to make this the book I read next. And it really is worth raving about, a beautifully written account of the different times and places this collection of 250 netsuke occupy as it is passed through five generations of the Ephrussi family. I was impressed by his refusal of nostalgia, the easy miteleuropean fantasy of a lost inheritance which the story could so easily have been. Yet a real anger still comes through in the account of what has been lost and stolen.

The narrative repeatedly bumps up against antisemitism. First, it's Charles Ephrussi's experiences in turn of the century Paris, when all his former friends turn on him following the Dreyfuss affair. Even the fact that Charles is apparently viewed as the lesser of the two models for Proust's Charles Swann from A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu by some scholars starts to have the whiff of anti-semitism once you see the evidence laid out. The story then moves to Vienna between the wars when the collection is given as a wedding gift to Victor. And we all know how that story eventually ended. The collection was only saved by an extraordinary act of bravery performed by one of their former servants under the very noses of the Nazis. By this point in my life I've read and seen more than enough about the Nazi period of twentieth century European history. I've even visited the Holocaust museum in Israel. And reading about it yet again still has the power to shock. Even in the present, when De Waal arrives in Vienna to carry out his research he notes that the synagogue is being guarded because of feared attacks following the recent election in which the far right party did well. That story didn't end in 1945.

De Waal completely transforms his family saga through his attention to objects, these beautiful things which passed through so many hands, and which have survived the destruction wrought by history. its a privilaged family, both in the fantastic wealth they once possessed and the rich objects they owned, and in the artistic links to poets and painters, the references in Proust and Musil. It's a form of privilage, art, which is never lost even when the wealth is gone. His grandmother may have lost everything, but she still had her correspondence with Rilke, her knowledge and taste. These are the things which make privilage feel innate.

The Scarlet Pimpernel...& the pleasures of cheap print.

Sir Percy Blakeny, as the chronicles of the time inform us, was, in this year of grace 1792, still a year or two on the right side of thirty. Tall, above the average, even for an Englishman, broad-shouldered and massively built, he would have been called unusually good-looking, but for a certain lazy expression in his deep set blue eyes, and that perpetual inane laugh which seemed to disfigure his strong, clearly cut mouth.

It's seems silly to criticise Baroness Orczy for demonising the French revolution and idealising the aristocracy. That's surely what you would expect from a novel like this. And the writing seems to anticipate such criticism somehow. There's an arch tone of voice, particularly in the earlier chapters, a theatricality throughout, particularly in the hero's impossibly successful disguises, which alerts you to the fact that this is history as a charade, as costume drama. The climax strains credulity with the stupidity of the French revolutionary soldiers. The twenty strong 'League of the Scarlet Pimpernel' are all noble young men enjoying themselves, just as they would at hounds, or some similar sport, performing their daring exploits largely for the fun of it. It's history played as a game.

Being familiar only with a vague outline of the character, it was interesting to see just how much of the story is actually more a romance, concerned far more with the feelings of Lady Blakeny than anything else, for all that it contains it's fair share of adventure.

I almost certainly wouldn't have read it if I hadn't come across a cheap paperback from the 60s in a charity shop, with a wonderful painted cover. The kind you don't really get anymore. The vivid red of the Pimpernel's coat dominates the composition. The materiality of the text added to the nostalgia of the story's love of the aristocracy. Compare Baroness Orczy with Sabatini. If it came to the quality of the writing I'd probably choose Sabatini over Orczy. He's got just a better command of language. Yet my copy of Captain Blood is the most recently republished Vintage edition. It's wonderfully designed, but the form doesn't match the charm of the adventure story. It should be old, preferably printed in a time before I was born, because that's where the adventure story belongs for me. It's surely for precisely that reason that the British covers to the Captain Alatriste series evoke older pulp conventions. Form matches content, only it can never quite match the real thing because it's too obviously the product of nostalgia. The old pulp covers weren't trying to evoke anything, other than attempting to sell you the book. Trying to evoke the idiom is fine, but there's always an air of self consciousness about it. This 1960s cover for The Scarlet Pimpernel simply is.

I'm also fascinated by the other titles recommended at the back. I've never read Naomi Mitchison or Geoffrey Trease, but both sound intriguing. Clearly there was this whole tradition of historical fiction which has rather faded from view now, perhaps through the rise of a more self-consciously meta fictional historical fiction over the last thirty years. I'm not talking about historical romance here, which has clearly continued to flourish despite whatever literary fashion might have to say. I'd put Henry Treece in the same grouping, a writer I have read.

Best of all though is the description quoted for Elizabeth Goudge's Linnets and Valerians, quoted from The Observer:

Four children (Mother dead, Father in India). Scholarly bachelor uncle decides - with aid of wise old gardener-factotum - to educate them. But beware of Lion Tor, and the mist when it takes strange shapes over Weeping Marsh. And where is Lady Valerian's lost explorer husband?

I love the peremptory tone of it, the faint echo of the opening of Bleak House. The assumptions of the reviewer. It comes straight out of the Empire. "Thrilling stuff" no doubt; you needn't read the book, just let the breathless précis do all the work of the story.

I've always loved these advertisements for other other writers, other books, which used to appear in the back of the book. The promise of more books beyond the one you've just finished. It's something else I don't think we get so much any more, unless it's adverts for more books by the same author as the book you've just finished reading.

The promise of more books beyond the one you've just finished reading. Or the book you're still reading, if you've flicked to back while still only half way through. It's the promise that this wonderful adventure that is reading and that is never going to end.

This Weeks Comics

Actually, by this point The Winter Men appeared some years ago. It's probably superior to any of the comics I might have bought in the past few weeks. Haven't managed to get to the comic shop for a while. Another Amazon review:

Brett Lewis & John Paul Leon – The Winter Men 

“My little friends, I thought I would have more time to tell you how thing ended up. But perhaps for now I will just tell you the good parts..."

For anyone following this when it was originally serialised, it must have seemed unlikely that it would have ever reached the end. Originally supposed to run for a full 8 issues, it was bounced from one DC comics imprint to another, subject to delays, cut down to 6 issues, then struggled to publish a total of 5 issues before the final extra sized special appeared over two years later. Presumably as a result of all these behind the scenes wranglings, the final chapter in this volume feels rather compressed, the exquisite pacing on display elsewhere dropped in the rush to get the story over as elegantly as possible in the space remaining. Just the good parts...

Kris Kalenov, the central character and narrator in many tightly packed caption boxes, is a recognisable type in these sorts of stories. The lone man, weighed down by some unconfessed violent past, capable of more feeling than he allows the world to see, unexpectedly honourable, and who is caught up in a series of ever escalating events, manipulated by others.

"Like many Russians, I was meant to be poet. But one does not eat good intentions. So...I have become some other things."   

One of the most striking things about this comic is its language, which wonderfully evokes the landscape of post-soviet Russia through its cadence and inflection. I've no idea if Russians actually talk like they do in The Winter Men, but writer Brett Lewis has clearly done his research, and it certainly feels authentic. Especially as the narrative sometimes feels less interested in the post-Watchmen superhero plot with which it is ostensibly concerned (most particularly in that awkward final chapter), and more with bleakly funny anecdotes of daily life. In this respect the strongest chapter in the whole book is probably the fourth, where we simply follow Kris and his compatriot Nikki the Gangster on their ordinary 'biznis' over the course of a single day.

What draws your attention to the language is not just how fine it is, but also the fact that there's so much of it, piled up in multiple caption boxes. There's a density of information both verbally and visually on almost every page with usually as many as 6 or more panels. That none of this ever becomes excessive or overwhelming is equally a testament to the layout and design by John Paul Leon with his wonderfully gritty and expressive artwork. The detail with which he overloads his pages perfectly complements the dialogue's verbosity in constructed an overcrowded landscape for the characters to inhabit and move through. And then in the odd scene where dialogue does fall away, he's equally capable of carrying the full force of the narrative.

Given its troubled production schedule, it seems only too appropriate that the collected edition already appears to be out of print. Although it was probably the superhero element that got it published in the first place, that's actually the weakest element of the book, but only really takes over in the flawed final chapter. It works far better in the early chapters where it functions more as a metaphor for Soviet nostalgia. Otherwise, The Winter Men is a fascinating and bleakly funny portrait of post Soviet Russia and violent men which is worthy to sit next to Jack Womack's Let's Put the Future Behind Us, another American book which is both fascinated and appalled by the complex reality of a country struggling to comes to terms with its Soviet past and a present of capitalism and brute market forces.

I wanted to place this here, next to my last post on LeCarre, because although The Winter Men is a very different kind of work, it shares a few things in common with LeCarre's general worldview and approach. Brett Lewis is similarly attentive to the rhythms of speech deployed by his violent characters.

A final few thoughts on LeCarre:
One of the things I didn't find space for in my earlier posts was to talk about LeCarre's similar use of language and command of idiom. He really is superb at capturing nuances of class and culture through speech. The moment which most obviously comes to mind is at the end of The Secret Pilgrim. In his final chapter Ned tells us of how he's sent to have a chat with a British arms dealer. This delightful individual has been selling weapons to a dictator and the Secret Service would rather he didn't. Ned scrupulously records the response he is given to his admittedly condescending request, carefull to record every inflection and gramatical error. His condescention comes from an over confidence bourn out of an assumption of the Service's authority and the respect in which it is surely still held. Instead he is subjected to a monologue occupying several pages in which he is disabused of any remaining innocence that he might have that he doesn't belong to a dying class and institution. It's a small masterpiece of post-Thatcherite arrogance and insolence. But the way in which Ned and be extension LeCarre frames it in the text not only makes it clear just how much reality is excluded from his well plotted and structured texts (The Secret Pilgrim, with it's structure of episodes linked only by their narrator and the history of the post war Brittish secret service possibly pushes furthest against the form of the spy story of any of LeCarre's fiction), but also retroactively frames the overarching narrative of Smiley and his colleagues as a fall from Eden.

That's not to say that LeCarre ever idealises the Brittish upper class whose rule had by 1993 been displaced by commerce and Thatcherism. On the contrary, he's highly critical in everything he writes about that class. But there's also a nostalgia throughout LeCarre's work for a more stable and known world. Some of my thoughts about this have been stimulated by having finished reading The Tailor of Panama last month. It's perhaps not quite as strong as its obvious model, Greene's Our Man in Havana which moves with a swiftness LeCarre's expansive texts lack, but still fine entertainment, with a marvellous portrait of the Jewish tailor and fantasist Harry Pendel. In their different ways the detailed histories of both Pendel and his nemesis, the British secret agent Andy Osnard both hark back to older worlds of Englishness. The past overshadows both characters to an intense degree, a common LeCarre trope. Pendel also demonstrates some awareness of how these tropes of Englishness are always at least in part constructed, since his whole life is built on a lie. His success at marketing himself as a tailor is based on his manipulation of a fantasy of nostalgic Englishness. Even his real past in the old Jewish East End starts to take on an elements of the fantastical, since it is now equally receding into the past, recorded only by Pendel's nostalgia. Just like Greene's earlier novel, The Tailor of Panama exposes just how much fiction is resent within the world of the Secret Service, but it's equally good at exposing how unstable is this fantasy of Englishness.


Postscript:
And now I shall cease writing about LeCarre and try to catch up with some fo the posts I've wanted to get to for the last few months. I've not had enough time to devote to this blog as I would have liked over the last few months, and that is unlikely to change any time soon, but we shall see how I do.

Honourable schoolboys...(more on Le Carre)

I've long thought that The Honourable Schoolboy must be the perfect title for a Le Carre novel. At least it was for that period of his career when he was addressing both the Cold War and the post imperial decline of Britain. When Smiley takes charge of the Circus at the beginning of the second novel of the 'Karla' sequence he's a positive force for change coming in and shaking things up in an institution previously in decline, a metaphor for just what Le Carre imagined the British state then needed (of course, the new broom for the malaise of British politics in the mid-70s eventually turned out to be Thatcher, a solution which I don't imagine Le Carre liked very much).

In his Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson suggests of the actor James Fox that he 'has mined the uneasy ground on the fringes of the English upper class'. So many of Le Carre's characters seem to come from a similar place, that hinterland between the upper middle class and the actual aristocracy. They're people you only have to look at to know they've been to the right schools, even if it's only a minor public school. The kind of sad and faded institution featured in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, clearly drawn from Le Carre's own experience of teaching at such an institution. It's more than that though, they're also characters marked by their schooldays, the way that some of us are. You could look at most of the cast of Tinker, Tailor and easily slot them into suitably cliched roles at their schools. 'The best days of my life...' is a cliche that conceals as much as it reveals. Perhaps it's a consequence more common for those who have attended public schools, a form of institutionalism.

It's interesting to note that the two characters clearly marked as coming from a different cultural place are Ricki Tarr, a working class thug eventually manipulated by everyone, and Toby Esterhase. Esterhase's name may link him with the real life aristocratic Esterhazy family, but he's still obviously not quite 'one of us', the weak link in the upper circle who run the Circus in Tinker, Tailor. Marked as an outsider because of his foreignness. Ricki Tarr is a character that the new film definitely gets better than the old BBC series, if only because Tom Hardy is just better in the role than Hywel Bennett was back in 1979.

It was the casting of Colin Firth which put me in mind of the David Thomson quote above. Watching the trailor, because I knew the story and characters, I could guess exactly who was cast as who. The casting of Firth as the bisexual, upper class traitor Bill Hayden is almost too obvious. Perhaps you can't associate him with the upper class in quite the same way as Thomson does with James Fox, but coming after I last saw him as King George in The King's Speech, it has a fascinating echo. King George must now rank as one of his defining roles, along with Darcy in the BBC Pride and Prejudice. Both characters are representative of a British establishment, fundamentally honest, patriotic, upstanding. It's fascinating to place this portrait of corrupt Englishness against these two earlier roles, have them echo each other, the contrasting surfaces of the British establishment.

a find at work

And what a wonderful find!

I currently work part time for a bookseller, sometimes packing books, and sometimes cataloguing them. On Wednesday I was mostly working on the category of rural homes and country houses. Most of them are coffee table books really. Stuffed full of pictures of luxury homes you'll never be able to afford. Aspiration-porn. Interiors art-directed to within an inch of their life.

But this? This is a coffee table book with pretensions. It's a tour of the English country house, including the former homes of famous people from history such as Jane Austen. It's littered with literary quotations, many assigned pride of place on their own page.

And the cover? Whoever art-designed this is some kind of genius. The animals sitting down to enjoy their wine and food amid aristocratic squalor. Clutter. It sits somewhere in the same neighbourhood as Lewis Carroll. The Goons. The Beatles when they went psychedelic. The Bonzos. Maurice Richardson's The Exploits of Engelbrecht. English Surrealism.

Quotes...Thomas More

Writing in 1516, Thomas More gets to the heart of one of the major problem with our country's present political life:

So there you have a group of people who are deeply prejudiced against everyone's ideas, or at any rate prefer their own. Suppose, in such company, you suggest a policy you've seen adopted elsewhere, or for which you can quote a historical precedent, what will happen? They'll behave as though their professional reputations were at stake, and they'd look fools for the rest of their lives if they couldn't raise some objection to your proposal....And yet we're quite prepared to reverse [the] most sensible decisions. It's only the less intelligent ones we cling on to like grim death. I've come accross this curious mixture of conceit, stupidity, and stubborness in several different places. On one occaison I even met it in England.

Utopia, trans. Paul Turner

"...the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin.": John LeCarre & George Smiley

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.