The original spyrunner

Le Carré’s real villain always was the British establishment.

When John Le Carré wrote his Smiley novels, the Soviets were still the enemy of those who called themselves the “Free World”. Even in those days of black and white, Le Carré wrote stories that, though competently crafted, were more about the spies than about their games. Most of us probably snorted over Mad magazine’s “Spy versus Spy” cartoons long before we picked up these bestsellers and we find it hard to take Le Carré’s early plots seriously. You could tie yourself into knots trying to keep straight who was a garden-variety mole and who was a double agent.

The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is strangely and unnecessarily emotional. Yes, it’s a dirty game, and spies do sometimes come to like their opposite numbers. And one rather expects a love story in the centre of a spy novel, like caramel in a bonbon. But does it have to be quite so sticky? In this novel a waif of a librarian stumbles into the big boys’ games and she predictably ends up dead.

The Little Drummer Girl takes the spy-waif theme to the point of tedium. It is hard to believe that an entire intelligence agency would suffer so much heartache over a single agent, no matter how blonde she might be.

In his later novels Le Carré is less gloopy and more enraged. If you still feel occasional twinges of Anglophilia, pick up The Night Manager, where the villain, an arms dealer, inspires all shades of hate: “Tall, slender and at first noble… A face to play cards against and lose. The stance that arrogant Englishmen do best, one knee cocked, one hand backed against the colonial arse.” The hero here, Jonathan Pine, does his job meticulously and creatively, but his passion for this particular assignment comes from personal feeling. The dealer has killed Pine’s lover.

But if you have read this far in Le Carré’s career, you know that his real villain always was the British establishment itself. There is contempt for the entire class in his spot-on rendering of the inane dialogue of agents, criminals, diplomats, any kind of Englishman at all. In The Night Manager, the British government and intelligence agencies are all happy partners in selling arms to terrorists.

The scenes are lush, the action is taut, and we race along until, in the last few chapters, our tyres spin in the mud. When this book is made into a film with Brad Pitt, it will no doubt end in a bang, with someone, whether arms dealer or espiocrat, twisting in the wind. But for now the story peters out, rather. No criminal is prosecuted or even humiliated in the papers, and no bureaucrat loses his job. Instead, all we are supposed to care about is the rescue and rehabilitation of our hero and his new lover.

In The Constant Gardener, Le Carré trains his guns on the pharmaceutical industry’s crimes in Africa. Tessa Quayle, a lawyer married to a diplomat, though dead and rotting at the start of the novel, is possibly Le Carré’s first fully vertebrate female character. Before her death, she had reported the wrongdoings of a multinational drug company to just about every department of the British government. Tessa’s husband Justin is the constant gardener of the title. During his short-lived marriage, he had let his wife play the radical while he carried on with his diplomacy and pottered about the garden. In his own words, he failed her. He realises she has been killed by the drug companies or the foreign service. This incurably civil servant, an entirely ineffectual character (think Ralph Fiennes, because that’s exactly whom the film producers fixed on), must now fight to protect the evidence she had gathered and make it public.

In the film the foreign secretary who has connived in Tessa’s murder is exposed in front of hundreds of spectators and the press at Justin’s funeral.

The book is not so pat. A foreign secretary is embarrassed by questions raised in Parliament, some protesters get on television, and the drug company is named in a legal case that will go on for years. Good fiction, after all, would not lie to us. n

Latha Anantharaman is a freelance writer and editor based in Palakkad