Remember when I said I’d eventually add some non-classics to the list? Still working on that!
When most people think of spies, they think of James Bond or Ethan Hunt from the Mission: Impossible series: daring, suave men with gadgets galore and sex appeal out the wazoo who do battle with bad guys who practically wear black hats wherever they go, so easily recognizeable is their “badness”. It’s strange, then, that a man who was practically a contemporary of the creator of James Bond, Ian Fleming, could write books which portray spydom so… differently.
George Smiley is in many ways the antithesis of the James Bond style spy. He is middle-aged, overweight, and more than a little bit nebbishy. In fact, he uses his natural unobtrusiveness as a way to keep people from ascertaining his true motives. Where Bond sleeps with at least 2 women every movie, Smiley can’t even keep one from cheating on him – in fact it is her philandering that for quite a while makes him unable to solve the central mystery of the book. At the same time, though, you get the feeling that in the real world the average spy is far, far closer to George Smiley than James Bond. In fact, if anyone really behaved like Bond in real life, they’d probably be killed during their first mission.
The spywork itself is also massively different from what you’d expect it to be. Rather than engaging in high-speed chases and shoot-outs with half of the Soviet Army, the work performed by Smiley and his associates involves a lot of interviewing people without letting them in on your real motives for interviewing them, sneaking documents in and out of secure facilities using simple bluffs and pre-arranged phone calls rather than magnetic suits and high-powered pen-lasers, and figuring out, using clever blackmail schemes, who can and cannot be trusted. There is an old adage in the military that their job is 99% boredom punctuated by small periods of sheer terror. Not to make the book sound boring – it is a slow burn but it is extremely tense throughout – but Tinker, Tailor advises the reader that this is the paradigm of the spook as well.
I want to avoid giving away too many spoilers here but I do find it interesting that the man LeCarre probably used as inspiration for the villain in this piece – the double agent Kim Philby, who in real life ran off to the Soviet Union in the early 60s and lived a long if reportedly not entirely happy life behind the Iron Curtain after he was found out – was also one of the men that Ian Fleming used as inspiration for James Bond. It’s not just an interesting bit of trivia, I don’t think; this fact highlights the difference between what we think about spying and what spying actually is.
The other thing that sucked me into this book and kept me turning pages – aside from the great writing, of course – is the moral ambiguity. How is it even possible, you ask, to include large gray areas of morality when you’re fighting against a people a former President of this country called “the Evil Empire”? Well, what you don’t do is make the Soviets at all sympathetic. Instead, you show the Circus – LeCarre’s name for MI6 – as being corruptible, underhanded, and a bit too preoccupied with the ends to worry overmuch about the means, and then to top it off you show the hero of the story commit a couple of absolutely astounding lies of omission. These people are still heroes because they’re still far better than the folks they’re fighting against but at the same time the book does not leave you wondering why, if we’re so great and they’re so bad, we were barely winning the Cold War at the point in time in which the novel was written.
So… if you’re looking for a spy thriller that’s more about realism and less about stuff blowing up, then this is a great book to read. Just don’t expect to come out of it thinking WESTERN CIVILIZATION RAH RAH RAH I LOEV MERKA (in fairness, the “cousins” barely figure into this story; the hubris displayed throughout is almost entirely on the part of English people).
A Book A Day, That's All We Ask 