When
first broadcast in September 1979, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
was greeted with opposing voices as "turgid, obscure, and pretentious"
or as "a great success." It is in keeping with the ambiguous nature
of John Le Carré's narratives that one can simultaneously agree
with both formulations without contradiction. As Roy Bland, paraphrasing
Scott Fitzgerald observes: "An artist is a bloke who can hold two
fundamentally opposing views and still function". The obscurity
is a consequence of the themes of deception and duplicity at the
centre of the narrative: to those who, like Sir Hugh Greene, prefer
the moral certainties of Buchan's version of British Intelligence,
Le Carré's world will not only be difficult to follow but morally
perplexing. On the other hand, the success of the serial was not
only demonstrated by good audience ratings but by general critical
acclaim for the acting, a judgment ratified by subsequent BAFTA
awards for best actor (Alec Guinness) and for the camerawork of
Tony Pierce-Roberts. Ambiguity persisted in America where the serial
won critical acclaim when shown on PBS but failed to be taken up
by the networks.
Although
Le Carré published his first novel, Call For the Dead, in
1961, and his first major success The Spy Who Came in from the
Cold (1963) was turned into a film in 1966, Tinker Tailor
Soldier Spy was his first venture into television. He rejected
the project of turning it into a film because of the compression,
but felt the space afforded by TV serialization would do justice
to his narrative. He was also impressed with the skill of Arthur
Hopcraft's screenplay which extensively reordered the structure
of the novel to clarify the narrative for a television audience
without violating its essential character (Hopcraft for example
begins the narrative with the debacle in Czechoslovakia which only
begins to be treated in the novel in chapter 27). Le Carré was even
more taken by the interpretation of Smiley provided by Alec Guinness,
so much so that as he was writing Smiley's People he found
himself visualizing Guinness in the role and incorporated some of
the insights afforded by the actor in the sequel to the trilogy.
A trivial example will stand for many. During the production of
Tinker Tailor, Guinness complained that the characterizing
idiosyncrasy of Smiley, polishing his glasses with the fat end of
his tie, cannot be done naturally because the cold weather in London
means that Smiley will be wearing a three piece suit, thus a handkerchief
has to be substituted. At the end of Smiley's People Le Carré
includes a teasingly oblique rejoinder:
From long
habit, Smiley had taken off his spectacles and was absently polishing
them on the fat end of his tie, even though he had to delve
for it among the folds of his tweed coat. (emphasis added)
The story of
Tinker, Tailor has an archetypal simplicity reminiscent of
the Odyssey: the scorned outsider investigates the running
of the kingdom, tests the loyalty of his subjects and kin by means
of plausible stories before disposing of the usurpers and restoring
right rule. In Le Carre's modern story the elements are transposed
onto the landscape of conflicted modern Europe in the throes of
Cold War.
A botched espionage
operation in Czechoslovakia ensures that Control (Head of British
Intelligence) and his associates are discredited. Shortly after,
Control dies, George Smiley his able lieutenant is retired and the
two are succeeded by Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Percy Alleline,
Bill Haydon, Roy Bland and Toby Esterhaze. Six months later Riki
Tarr, a maverick Far Eastern agent, turns up in London with a story
suggesting there is a mole (a deeply concealed double agent) in
the Circus (intelligence HQ, located at Cambridge Circus). Lacon
of the Cabinet Office entices Smiley out of retirement to investigate
the story. Smiley gradually pieces together the story by analyzing
files, interrogating witnesses and trawling through his own memory
and those of other retired Circus personnel, notably Connie Sachs
(a brilliant cameo role played by Beryl Reid) until he finally unmasks
the mole "Gerald" at the heart of the Circus.
The mood of
the story, however, is far from simple. Duplicity and betrayal,
personal as well as public (Smiley's upperclass wife is sexually
promiscuous, betraying him to "Gerald") informs every aspect of
the scene. While the traitor is eventually unmasked the corrupt
nature of the intelligence service serves as a microcosm of contemporary
England: secretive, manipulative, class-ridden, materialistic and
emotionally sterile. Thus, if the Augean stables have been cleaned,
they will be soon be soiled again. This downbeat tone accounts for
the serial not being taken up by the American networks and marks
it off from the charismatic spy adventures of James Bond, but it
also accounts for its particular appeal to British middle-brow audiences.
The
spy genre is virtually a British invention: although other countries
produce spy writers, the centrality of the genre to British culture
is longstanding and inescapable: John Buchan, Somerset Maugham,
Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, Frederick Forsyth, Len Deighton as well
as John Le Carré have all achieved international success for their
spy stories (not to mention television dramas by Dennis Potter (The
Blade on the Feather) and Alan Bennett (An Englishman Abroad
and A Question of Attribution). To account for this obsession
with spies we only have to consider the political circumstances
of Britain in the twentieth century: a declining Imperial power,
whose overseas possessions have to be ruled and defended more by
information than by outright physical force; an offshore island
of a divided Europe; seeing itself threatened by German, then Soviet
military ambitions. Perhaps even more significant than these external
threats are those from within. A ruling class which maintains its
grip on power by exclusion--a public school and Oxbridge educated
elite hold a disproportionate share of positions of power in Cabinet,
Whitehall, the BBC and government institutions--is liable to marginalize
or demonize those who openly challenge its assumptions. The result
is liable to be subversion from within--a tactic fostered by the
duplicitous jockeyings for power of rival gangs in the enclosed
masculine world of the public schools. The symbolic and emotional
link between the world of the public school and that of the circus
is established in Tinker Tailor by Jim Prideaux. The injured
and betrayed agent teaches at a prep school after his failed Czech
mission and enlists the aid of a hero-worshipping pupil as his watcher.
Thus the fictions that Le Carré invented have their counterpart
in the real world and tap familiar English fears and obsessions.
In the same year, 1979, that saw the serialization of Tinker
Tailor, the BBC also produced two documentary series Public
School and Spy reinforcing the connections with Le Carré's
work. "The Climate of Treason" concerned itself with speculating
about the Fourth Man of the Burgess, MacLean, Philby double agents
within MI5. On 15 November 1979 Mrs Thatcher identified Sir Anthony
Blunt, adviser of the Queen's Pictures and Drawings as the Fourth
man who had been recruited by the Russians in the 1930s. Le Carré's
novel was read as a fictionalized version of these events.
The
success of Tinker Tailor lies in the realism, not only of
character portrayal--and the acting of Alec Guinness has achieved
as definitive a performance as Olivier's Richard III or Edith Evans
as Lady Bracknell--but of the way in which intelligence institutions
work. But the claim for realism must not be pressed too far: Le
Carré has admitted that the vocabulary used was invented: babysitters,
lamplighters, the Circus, the nursery, moles--though he was also
amused to discover that real agents had begun to appropriate some
of his vocabulary once the stories were published. Moreover, much
intelligence work is bureaucratic and boring: Smiley's reflections
turn the drudgery of reading files into a fascinating intellectual
puzzle which, unlike the real experience, always produces significant
information.
At the symbolic level, however, the portrayal of the workings of
bureaucracy is authentic: bureaucracies serve those who govern by
gathering, processing and controlling access to information. In
a world increasingly governed by means of information, those who
control it have power and wealth, so that the resonance of Le Carré's
story will carry beyond the cold war setting that is its point of
departure.
-Brendan
Kenny
Bloom, Harold. John Le Carré. New York: Chelsea, 1987.
Bold,
Alan Norman. The Quest for Le Carré. New York: St. Martin's,
1988.
Lewis,
Peter. John le Carré. New York: Ungar, 1985.
Monaghan,
David John. "Le Carré and England: A Spy's?Eye View." Modern
Fiction Studies (West Lafayette, Indiana), Autumn 1983.
