Instead of the common comprehensive look at the past year, I’m going to close with focused observation on one specific thing I did this year.
Read a lot of spy novels.
The tally.
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- Call for the Dead
- A Murder of Quality
- The Honourable Schoolboy
- Smiley’s People
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- Slow Horses
- Dead Lions
- Real Tigers
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- Secret Service
- Double Agent
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- Red Widow
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- Spies and Traitors
That’s over one third of my total books completed in 2024 😮. A few years ago, I stumbled upon the 2011 film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Then last year I read the actual novel by John le Carré, along with inhaling The Bureau, and enjoying Slow Horses. This year I went further down the rabbit hole adding novels from Herron, Bradby, and Katsu, topped off by Holzman’s historical piece. I’ve even got a local library hold on the DVDs for the BBC treatments of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People.
Ultimately, this turned into an expedition of precursors and successors for The Circus (le Carré’s fictional intelligence agency) and the Karla trilogy. le Carré, with a minor career in intelligence, was contemporaneous with Kim Philby. Philby’s treachery was branded into British culture and an inspiration for the traitor Bill Haydon in Tinker, Tailor…. According to Wikipedia when Philby was outed he took le Carré’s career with him. The Slow Horses tales have many echoes of the Karla trilogy and could even be viewed as the best modern update on le Carré’s oeuvre. Not to mention the humorous juxtaposition of Gary Oldman playing both George Smiley and Jackson Lamb.
Red Widow, from yet another intelligence agent, gets into the smothering paranoia at the CIA. A paranoia originated and fostered by James Jesus Angleton as documented in Spies and Traitors, due to Angleton’s own betrayal by Philby. The Bureau, of French origin, goes deep into the twisted psychology of spy work and even features a senior counter-intelligence officer with initials JJA.
The Karla trilogy is rightly lauded as great literature. The writing is extremely dense relative to modern novels but there are many brilliant passages. Even moreso, things that aren’t committed to the page often speak just as loudly as the written words. The plotting is supremely intricate but not overwhelming if one is focused. The climax of Smiley’s People has you holding your breath.
Now to my final observation. With a surface reading, George Smiley is the hero of the Karla trilogy and the soul of British perseverance. Gentlemanly, scholarly, and oft put upon, he is steadfastly loyal to England and The Circus. A legend of the service, he eventually “triumphs” over his opponent Karla.
Yet Smiley is actually a quite sad figure. In each of the Karla novels, he gets burnt by an extreme miscalculation or oversight on his part. He’s constantly betrayed by people on his side, including his own wife. His understanding of Karla’s motivations are completely wrong. The final victory is enabled by multiple strokes of good luck, accelerated by the venal incompetence of Karla’s underlings, and completed by appallingly underhanded methods.
At the end of the day, le Carré makes one wonder if the global intelligence apparatus is worth the fuss. Or is it just an interdependent collection of dirty, shadowy, self-preserving bureaucracies that actually achieve nothing.