books: investigating john le carré (non-spoilery)

[cimorene]

Since the release of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy we've watched two more le Carré adaptations, The Little Drummer Girl (with Florence Pugh, the lovely Alexander Skarsgård, Michael Shannon) and before that The Night Manager (with Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie, Elizabeth Debicki, Tom Hollander, Olivia Colman).

I was remarking that all three of them were really good and I wondered how they compared to the books. Neither Wax nor I had ever read a single member of the spy thriller genre (though I can think of lots of film examples of it that have interested me going back to Inspector Gadget as a little kid and watching Get Smart with my dad when I was 8 or 9). After that my curiosity about the literary vs media genre was piqued and it was inevitable, so I looked up le Carré's bibliography.

I wanted to start with one I hadn't seen so it wouldn't be spoiled, and I picked The Looking Glass War, which was the first novel le Carré wrote after his 3rd novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, became a runaway bestseller and catapulted him to superstardom, enabling him to quit his day job. It's essentially tragic and definitely sad, but it's also built sort of like a comedy of errors and the mixture of tone is wild (and prevented me from being too bummed). ALSO it unexpectedly had Cold War Finland as the setting for significant events a few times and it's the first time I've seen a portrayal of something happening in Finland written by a non-resident that I could find no fault with. (Not saying this is a surprise, given le Carré's foreign service background, but I give props where due.)

Next I went for Our Kind of Traitor, which was filmed in 2016 starring Ewan McGregor, but which I haven't watched. I enjoyed reading it - say, somewhere around 4/5 for enjoyment - but the plot structure was a bit unorthodox and the end was very abrupt.

Then I was curious whether the things I'd noticed about both of these were characteristic or outliers, so I read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (filmed in 1965 with Richard Burton and never since; I doubt I'll watch it). It was exciting, vivid, engrossing, fun, etc, and more obviously similar to TTSS than either of the other two (5/5, for sure - I couldn't go lower without a much finer scale. Maybe the 90th percentile somewhere). I can definitely see why it was a runaway success (and I can also both see that his protagonist was intended as a flawed anti- (semi?)hero but that he was easily read by the general public as a hero, to le Carré's reported disgruntlement). It did have some very dramatic pacing shifts, but nothing like the other two.

So I've decided I'll read the Karla trilogy as well, although not immediately (TTSS, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People).

Comments

[aurumcalendula]

I think TTSS and Smiley's People are my favorites of what I've read so far of Le Carre's works so far. I've heard the 1979 TTSS miniseries is good, although I haven't gotten around to watching it yet.

[cimorene]

I haven't read very much of them to know what I'm comparing them to, and most notably I haven't even read TTSS, though from the movie it looks like it could be my favorite. I enjoy le Carré's little artistic moments and philosophical moments and particularly caustic moments, and London and the bureaucracy seem to be the best targets for eliciting these. Plus there tends to be a good mixture of likable and unlikable characters.

[sara]

I really like LeCarre, and once you've read the Karla novels (including the last one, which only came out within the last few years), you may find it rewarding to read more about Kim Philby -- his autobiography is basically the ne plus ultra of unreliable narrator stories, and then there's another fairly recent history called something like My Friend The Spy or something...I have a copy around here somewhere but I'm unable to lay hands on it right now. I listened to Hoffman's history The Billion Dollar Spy last summer and that's also very interesting to contrast with LeCarre.

Basically, the upshot here is that some of LeCarre is fictional, and some of it is not, and some of the history of 1960s and 70s Cold War spying is even bigger and weirder than the novels!

[cimorene]

Yes, I saw a bit about that on Wikipedia! I may read some of the more meta works after I've read a more representative group of spy stuff.

[msilverstar]

IJWTS that the book is "A Spy Among Friends" and a fascinating perspective on the Karla novels.

[mirabile]

I'm kind of an odd man out, but my favorite Le Carre novel is The Naive and Sentimental Lover. It's very autobiographical, which is partly why I like it, but also very different from his other work.

He is an awesome person as well as a great writer, imo.

[cimorene]

Yes, I noticed that he had a couple of not-spy stuff works! I'll see how I feel about reading those after a few more genre works.

[msilverstar]

I read Le Carre back in the day, and love the Smiley books and the dim dark British miniseries of them. My dad was really into that so even took a course at Cambridge on the spies, so I'm nostalgic about them too.

I tried to watch the Hiddleston Night Manager series, but after being all anti-Bond it turned into something a lot like Bond (angstier than the movies) and that bugged me.

[cimorene]

Yeah, that one did seem pretty different so far. I see these sort of dude-getting-too-obsessed-with-woman incidents throughout his books though, so I can see how the adaptational choices about what to emphasize and so on could have been what tipped it.

I'm sort of curious about the miniseries after reading the book.

[msilverstar]

The miniseries is fabulous, incredibly faithful version of the books.

(Meant to say that Bond books were much angstier than movies)