I.
David Cornwell, writing as John Le Carré, published his first novel in 1961, when he was 30 and I was 15. More than any other fiction writer of consistent popularity and literary merit that I know of, he was the consciousness and conscience of the post-World War II world. At the time of his death on December 13, 2020, 59 years and 25 novels later, he was still going strong. His last two novels, A Legacy of Spies and Agent Running in the Field, are as boldly and insightfully critical of the individual psychological underpinnings of modern geopolitical crime and doublethink and as subtle in their literary virtuosity as any of his earlier works. Throughout, he has thought and written effectively and affectingly about the Cold War, the collapse of British and the rise of American imperialism, the tragic face-offs in the Middle East and the Caucasus, the gang rape of Africa and imperial kleptocracy, all while never giving up hope in the young as a cause worth fighting for. Silverview, published posthumously, limns a future of quiet affection and multicultural strength, if we’re willing to pay the price in honesty now.
Perhaps analogous to the American composer John Williams, who leapt from Holst’s The Planets to Star Wars, Le Carré frustrates conventional literary criticism at a number of levels. And although one’s initial impression is that for him the balance point between story and form always tilts to story, this impression can be deceptive. From his earliest novels, his prime achievement has been the destabilization of the spy/thriller form, particularly the notion and position of the hero, the destabilization of the classic mystery/thriller narrative form, and the undermining of the expected passivity of the reader.
Little Drummer Girl (1983) was his first foray much beyond the world of the British Secret Services (though persistent post-Holocaust anti-Semitism in both West and East is a recurring theme in his early work) and was followed three years later by A Perfect Spy, the most formally complex, mature and personal of his novels to that point. These works prompted a flurry of book-length critical activity 1985-87, which, with the few others published subsequently, vary in academic focus and depth.1
Probably the most useful of these critical works is Tony Barley’s Taking Sides, particularly the introduction and first chapter. Although the number of Le Carré’s novels now available has more than doubled, these two sections remain both useful and relevant. They include a reasonable summary of the ways that Le Carré can be examined as a writer, the specifics of his challenge to the spy/thriller genre, and Barley’s final question: has Le Carré’s work developed through the years. By this, Barley appears to mean ideologically. He seems troubled that despite Le Carré’s strong and repeated challenges to Cold War Western ideas about Stalinist communism, Le Carré fails to overtly acknowledge the class struggles—as Barley repeatedly puts it—inherent in these events and attitudes. Like posing the same questions of the work of George Orwell, these are fair questions. However, again like Orwell, across the range of Le Carré’s work, his disgust for traditional British upper class behavior and thinking—as experienced, clearly and uniquely, from both inside and outside—is obvious. One regrets that Barley was not able to include A Perfect Spy in this work, as it may have tempered his analysis.
Le Carré is most sure-footed ethically, politically and artistically on north/central European axes, even when these are relatively hidden, as in Little Drummer Girl, his exploration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Those few of his post-Cold War novels that venture farther—the Caribbean/Central America (The Night Manager; The Tailor of Panama) and central and east Africa (The Constant Gardener; The Mission Song)—can feel labored, more the result of careful research, righteous anger, and an array of usual suspects than the cries from the heart that characterize his earlier work. That said, the last of these, The Mission Song, (2006) is something of an outlier. Whatever one makes of the balance of its twenty chapters, the opening two chapters of The Mission Song are an artistic tour-de-force that is well worth close reading: not just an outlier in Le Carré’s work but operating in a whole new artistic valence.
II.
Even ignoring the tonal implications of the crisp anaphora in the second sentence of The Mission Song, “My friends…my enemies,” the most remarkable thing about these opening pages is the voice of its first person narrator, Salvo. Le Carré only used a first person point of view in four of his previous nineteen novels (though twice in his subsequent five, the last two), only once as the voice of the book’s protagonist, and never as a non-English narrator. With the oddly archaic diction and syntax that emerge quickly through the subsequent paragraphs, the off-hand recitation of the personal and communal horrors of Salvo’s childhood is deeply unsettling and can be off-putting.
One of Le Carré’s gifts is for setting the human stage of his novels, and he is perfectly capable of doing so in a more familiar, genre-friendly, manner. We emerge, for example, from the quite conventionally staged passages of pages 16-17 with no doubt as to who Salvo and Penelope are and to the state of their marriage. On the other hand, opening with up to several pages of gently ironic summary prose is a Le Carré technique that goes back to his earliest novels and is still being deployed effectively in the opening of Our Kind of Traitor.
This is something quite different, and I believe that it is a specific reference to one of the first novels ever written in German, Grimmelshausen’s Simpilissimus or Tales of a Simpleton, first published in 1664. The events of its opening passages are hauntingly similar to those of The Mission Song, and Simpilissimus goes on to chronicle the devastation of central Europe in the Thirty Years War as its protagonist wanders across the landscape as orphan, apprentice, soldier, householder, and eventually, scarred and cynical hermit.
Though Le Carré had more than enough experience with the English “independent” and “public” school system as a student and then as a teacher, his intellectually formative study and work years were spent in Switzerland and Germany. His specialty was 17th century German poetry; and the novel Simplissimus appears as an object-image in at least two of his other novels, always associated with central characters and the most important relationships. I believe that evoking the voice of Simplissimus in these opening passages—it never appears again with quite this force—is a specific reference to a period in European history where human agency reduced the population of Central Europe from 40 million to 4 million people over a period of several decades, and that he intends this reference to wake up the sensitivities of those for whom clan warfare among savages may be pitiable but has no direct meaning.
Le Carré then goes on to raise specters from the genocidal mass graves of a millennium of north-western Europe history in terms that even Americans can’t ignore. In a rapid-fire array, Salvo (“Salvador”—savior—or “salvo”?) describes his father as a bog-Irish Roman Catholic born in 1917 when his father was in France in World War I as a Royal Ulster Fusilier (that is, at a time when his countrymen were actively rising against English rule and refusing to fight for Britain in the Great War). Taken as a set of staccato nouns, images, and references, “bog Irish”, “Irish Roman Catholic” “Roman Catholic” are, in the lexicon of British insults, just about as low on the social scale as one can get. (The Early Modern English persecution and disenfranchisement of Catholics persists, I believe, to the present day in the odd remnant that the heir to the British crown cannot marry a Catholic.) These then move on to interweave with national and cultural memories of poverty, famine, repression, betrayal, rape, and colonial pillage (all the way back to the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 and then the 12th century invasion of Ireland by the Norman English kings that resonates all the way to the present—via Ulster and the 20th century “troubles”, the latter largely supported, as is generally agreed, by private American Irish Catholic money and gun-running). Salvo’s father in his turn escapes from World War II (whose holocaust included large numbers of Catholics and gypsies) to Leopoldville—now known as Kinshasa—Leopold being a direct reference to the Belgian king whose rule witnessed the slaughter of six million Congolese in the first decades of colonization.
All of this is cast, of course, as Salvo’s personal history, in the process, justifying Le Carré choice of a biracial narrator, making artistic choice not only convenient but inevitable. Then, at the bottom of page 15, the story emerges, a little shell-shocked, into “bomb-scared London,” and through these next pages and into Chapter 2, Le Carré reminds the reader of the harrowing weeks of mid-July, 2005, when the London Underground was bombed, killing 56 and wounding another 700 people, and of the subsequent multi-stage bombing foiled two weeks later. London of course is not a stranger to bombings. Successive waves of Irish Republican Army bombing campaigns afflicted the city throughout the 20th century. But this was London’s first experience with brown suicide bombers, and Salvo’s descriptions of this moment in history are not only vivid but make his attempt to retreat into a protective world of invisible sound even more imperative.
Withal, the last six pages of Chapter 1 shed the antiquated diction of the opening and provide a reassuringly generic set of social-comedic scenes at an upper-crust London party that, among other things, provide key plot points, glued solidly into conventional “real-time” between the twelve minutes of Aunt Imelda’s watch and, as Salvo puts it: “…shortly after 11 p.m. British Summer Time of the night before and continuing up to the moment of my departure one hour and thirty minutes ago.”
In the intervening scenes, Salvo makes no direct assessment of the state of his marriage, but the images presented leave little doubt as to the irony of Penelope’s name—don’t call her Penny—or Salvo’s perceived status as “spearman” –bearer of your barbaric weapon of choice. In the second part of this sequence—presented to Salvo and to the reader as first as tactile, “a force twelve heart attack,” and then auditory, not visual—Salvo takes the call from Mr. Anderson, Salvo’s Charon into the secret world: the hero is permitted his ritual first refusal of his quest, which is of course overridden. Then, in the final words of the chapter, in the classic way of Dickens who needed not just to get someone to turn a page or brush down a screen but to buy next week’s magazine, we get “the hook”: Salvo’s new relationship with the nurse Hannah.
III.
Then, unnervingly, we are once again thrust back into summary narrative with the introduction of the “portents, auguries, fetishes, or magic white or black.” These quickly evolve into “recorded signals” that usher in a chapter whose images and language recalls the Shakespeare critic Stephen Booth’s notion of “strenuous impertinence” or “conspicuous irrelevance,” moments in the plays in which a speech lifts out of the text into the realm of pure poetry. Like poetry, the images and themes of this chapter are presented as much in auditory as in other sensory images, in effect an artistic augury of the frame of the novel, the most important moments of which occur via what is overheard rather than in more conventional images.
The first two “recorded signals” are themselves rich in theme and image, some obvious, some less so. In the first, in a moment that is sublime and ridiculous, and, importantly, as much heard as seen, a “little gentleman” faces down a sextet of loud, boorish upper-middle class (or at least aspiring to be so) suburbanites in Salvo’s neighborhood trattoria. This moment becomes an unlikely, but to Salvo recurring, image of the heroism of the small man, the “brave freedom fighter.” The audible imagery and the social comedic “black” humor of the scene and its importance for Salvo ring absolutely true. However, the book that the brave little gentleman has under his arm infuses a wealth of personal and historical references into the scene that are perhaps less obvious. Like Roman Catholics in England, Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector—that is, dictator—of Great Britain through its briefly king-less period, 1648-1660, is a currently conventionally much-distained blip in English history (re-enactors—and the repeated adjective “stalwart” for the husbands in the trattoria hints at this—particularly among the aspirant classes much prefer playing Royalists than Parliamentarians) without which British constitutional monarchy would probably never have come into existence. This is then a very direct reference to the issues that will be evolving over the course of the novel. The popular historian Antonia Fraser is also Lady Antonia, daughter of Francis Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, (and the widow of playwright/ actor Harold Pinter). The Pakenhams converted to Catholicism when Fraser was a child and were known, especially her father, for their liberal reformist social activism. Cromwell, as well as being an anchor of Parliamentarian reform in England (though, as dictators do, he tired of parlers—talkers—in the end), also allowed the return of those English Jewish families expelled by King Edward I (who was also the first to mark Jews with yellow armbands) four hundred years before.
The other signal event associated with Cromwell is his order to slaughter all surviving prisoners of war after the Siege of Drogheda during his invasion of Ireland in 1641—a marked violation of his own historically relatively enlightened practice of “decimation”, that is, killing only every 10th prisoner. Historians differ as to why he did this, and explanations range from his being a psychopath (an understandably Irish view) to fury at seeing so many of his own soldiers dead as he rode into the captured city (what might be called the Shakespeare/Agincourt/Henry V argument for the same order) to the need to make a statement about the inadvisability of resistance (again, what one might call the Harfleur/Henry V argument). So, again, via what can seem like a minor (though repeated) passing reference, Le Carré has thrust the reader into consciousness of another vivid (and certainly persisting in the collective Irish and therefore to some extent Irish-American) historical memory of an event of European internecine violence. And has done this just before he introduces Hannah, her dying Rwandan patient, and her vividly caregiving and forgiving attitude toward this patient.
One curious last note about this “first signal” is not unconnected with the repeated reference to the ambivalent history of the Lord Protector. Fraser interprets Cromwell as a simple country gent (as Lord Protector he asked that his portrait be painted “warts and all”) with an unanticipated gift for military organization and command, and who as an adult had some kind of what we would now call a “born again” experience—some kind of personal experience of the Divine presence—which left him with a complex and un-self-appeasing conscience.2 This notion of the conscience-driven man caught between the jaws of means and ends in dangerous and world-changing times is arguably the dominant theme—more important even than the anatomy and physiology of betrayal—of the writing of John Le Carré.
Through seven of his first nine novels, this ethical nexus is centered in the character of George Smiley, Le Carré ’s single most interesting and durable fictional creation, indelibly visualized by Alec Guinness in the 1979 and 1982 BBC miniseries scripted from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People3), whose last known address, 9 Bywater Street, Chelsea, is just across the nearest Thames bridge from the scene in the trattoria, and whose physical description and possible-to-imagine behavior is exactly that of “the little gentlemen.”
We are not to imagine that the little gentleman is actually George Smiley. (Smiley’s career is sufficiently fixed into Le Carré’s fictional time-world over the course of the eight novels in which he appears that he would be in his mid-nineties at the time of The Mission Song.) But we are meant to remember Smiley’s enduring role as the ethical asymptote in Le Carré ’s fiction. Smiley is never the innocent. He is not like Avery in The Looking Glass War or Charlie in Little Drummer Girl (a reference, by the way, to Brecht’s play about the Thirty Years War, Mother Courage) or Perry in Our Kind of Traitor or Salvo, naïfs caught up in forces beyond them. He emerges fully formed, like Athena from the skull of Zeus, at the age of 51 in the opening paragraphs of Le Carré ’s first novel—like The Mission Song, several pages of summary prose—dumpy, toad-like, expensively ill-dressed, the butt of endless jokes by his wife’s aristocratic “set”, cuckolded, divorced, and deeply emotionally wounded, the purposeful and obvious antithesis in every possible way to James Bond. In the final action scene of the novel, he struggles with an old friend from his student days in Germany, now his mortal Cold War enemy:4
…discovering in himself the energy of madness, [Smiley] pressed Dieter back still further towards the railing of the bridge while Dieter, off balance and hindered by his weak leg, gave way. Smiley knew Dieter was hitting him, but the decisive blow never came… Dieter was falling, falling into the swirling fog beneath the bridge, and there was silence. No shout, no splash. He was gone; offered like a human sacrifice to the London fog and the foul black river lying beneath it… “Dieter,” he cried in anguish; “Dieter!” He shouted again, but his voice choked and tears sprang to his eyes. “Oh dear God what have I done, Oh Christ, Dieter, why didn’t you stop me, why didn’t you hit me with the gun, why didn’t you shoot?”
Over the course of Smiley’s nine appearances in Le Carré ’s novels, five as protagonist5 and four as a secondary or linking character,6 his confrontation with the ongoing ethical dilemmas of means and ends ranges from this kind of solitary and heart-rending anguish to more distanced but no less deeply felt assessments among his colleagues. In The Honorable Schoolboy, a member of his high-ranking team is trying to distance them from the “collateral damage” torture-death of a British Hong Kong banking official whom they had ordered their local operative to “burn” (black-mail) for information (about the man who, the reader assumes, then ordered the torture-death of the banker):
“The ploy went as planned. The response was simply—” [Smiley] began again. “The response was more than we expected. Operationally, nothing is amiss. Operationally we have advanced the case.”
“We’ve drawn them, dear,” Connie said firmly.
De Salis blew up completely. “I insist you do not speak as if we were all accomplices here. There is no proven link and I consider it invidious that you should suggest that there is.”
Smiley remained remote in his response: “I would consider it invidious if I suggested anything else. I ordered this initiative. I refuse not to look at the consequences merely because they are ugly. Put it on my head. But don’t let’s deceive ourselves.”
One must be familiar with the character of Smiley in this and previous scenes and novels to fully understand how nuanced and painful Le Carré intends the reading here to be—a different character, a different actor, could read these lines quite differently. And one can make the argument, as critics have, that Le Carré’s intention here is ambiguous; that Smiley can only be interpreted as absolutely correct in those last five short sentences quoted above; and that, over the course of the three novels collectively known as The Quest for Karla,7 by using his Soviet opposite’s same methods of personal manipulation, however painfully consciously he does so, Smiley ultimately lessens himself and the force of his moral stance.8
Le Carré only lets up on Smiley once, in late age, with A Secret Pilgrim (1990), which is dedicated to Alec Guinness. Ned, the first-person narrator of the novel, the not un-sympathetic career spy sidelined at the end of The Russia House (1989) and now exiled to training new recruits, has invited Smiley to address a graduating class. Smiley’s last word to the assemble students is:
“All I’m really saying, I suppose, is that if the temptation to humanity does assail you now and then, I hope you won’t take it as a weakness in yourselves, but give it a fair hearing.”
IV.
Salvo’s second “recorded signal” begins in within the protective frame of his chosen virtual and auditory worlds, “after a four-hour stint in the Chat Room protecting our great nation,” a world which then suddenly transforms into intense visibility as he sees the boys on the bridge—the same bridge, as it happens, from which George Smiley forced his one-time friend in the scene quoted above—taunting the younger boy impaled below by his fear. Salvo himself becomes terrifyingly visible as a young, brown, running man through “bomb-frightened” London. Only the wonderful London bobby seems sane and perhaps a minor promise that, like nursing and clean water and getting the trash picked up, there is hope in good humor and the basic procedures of civil life:
And on the [median strip], one benign policewoman directing traffic. “You mustn’t talk to me, darling,” she says as she semaphores.
“Did you see three kids fooling here just now? They could have died.”
“Not here, darling.”
“I saw them, I swear I did! There was a small kid stuck against the wall.”
“I’ll have to book you in a minute, darling. Now bugger off.”
Salvo is “recording” now, though, and the image of “that frozen child” stays with him even through his retreat into the terrifying neutrality of his expertise as he interprets for a Dutch consortium whose only need for his services, one can imagine, has to do with the prices of African blood diamonds.
The last lines of this “second signal” portion of the chapter tidily return us to the story’s “real-time” and, presumably, what will be the third portent, the third augury, the third recorded signal.
None of which, as it happens, occurs with conventional prose and certainly not genre-fiction signposting. There is no mention of the third signal, only the line of time-break asterisks and a launch into present tense. And a hitherto unprecedented star-burst of poetic language and insistent prose rhythm. The opening three syllables—the opening three words that form the subject of the sentence—are difficult to scan. Three spondees? An amphibrach? These are then followed by a perfectly iambic pentameter predicate, Shakespeare’s meter, the native meter of the English language. Followed by the second sentence, syntactically twinned to the first by their verbs “have pointed me/have told me” and by that sense of metric power, but in this case even more difficult to scan conventionally—only that one feels and hears the rhythm without being confident in trying to tack on classic metric labels. And then a glimmering cascade of vowel sounds: “only a pair of dying man’s knees between us, this degree…”[italics original]. The harrowing opening scenes of centuries of European mayhem seem to be dissolving gently into the rhythms of shared language, a reconciling of Salvo’s troubled heritage.
Over the subsequent pages, as Salvo describes the scene at the dying man’s bedside, the reader has the feeling of somehow, magically, lifting out and away from the signs and smells of death and dying into some fresh new place, of green mountains and soft rain in the face, even as, by the bottom of page 30 and on to page 31, Hannah, through Salvo, describes the harrowing of the Eastern Congo and, in effect, its potential for salvation (so unlike Salvo’s Irish grandfather’s brethren):
At his bedside sits a young Congolese woman called Hannah who has been brought up to regard Jean-Pierre and those like him as the sole perpetrators of her country’s misery. Yet does she turn her back on him? –does she summon a colleague or consign him to the yawning Grace? She does not. She calls him this poor Rwandan man and holds his hand.
Again, although the primary thrust of this moment is connotative, yes, we are meant to be reading for content, its generative power is auditory. These lines, like this section of this chapter, beg to be read aloud, beg, like their content, to be heard.
This oratorio of content and sound carries through the final two pages of the chapter as Salvo describes his and Hannah’s love-making. Salvo’s previous voices are gone out the window. Gone are the echoes of 17th century Germany. Gone is the clipped diction of modern London. Long syntactically ecstatic sentences interweave with slightly breathless fragments. The final paragraph, with its harmonics of the classic Le Carré technique of exposition through interrogation, bound gleefully beyond even the conventions that Le Carré has established for himself over his previous 40 years of writing and could be sung to the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, ending in the wonderfully comic “Heavens above, look at the time.” The final two sentences, translated, Salvo says, from the Swahili, have that same glorious and ultimately hopeful blending of just slightly unfathomable sound and rhythm, Africa and Shakespeare singing:
“Salvo,” she said. “When your father and mother made you, they must have loved each other very much.”
V.
Modern novelists are perfectly capable of kicking their readers in the teeth. That is a bit of a given. But I read these opening two chapters as a contract with the reader, a contract that Carré has been drafting through four decades of his fiction writing but into which his consciousness of Africa and of African culture appears to have brought something new. Something from which he is not willing to distance himself to satisfy post-modern straight-jackets—who says what is cultural appropriation? In the character of Salvo, at least in these opening pages, he appears to be suggesting not just a solution but a “salvation”, a salvation predicated in an overt poetic sensibility working in concert with his long-time ethical sensibilities. The message to all of us, however, Salvo included, is, keep your ears open.
1. See Aranoff M, for a usefully comprehensive list through the late 1990’s
2. He demanded of Parliament that his New Model army actually be paid instead of having to foraging from people unlucky enough to live in a contested area; and he won battles over Royalist forces by having sufficient command over his troops that they didn’t stop fighting to loot the enemy’s baggage carts. His famous statement about military recruitment is: “I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain that knows what he fights for and loves what he knows than that which you call a Gentle-man and is nothing else.”
3. One cannot overstate the spring-tide syzygy between the George Smiley of Le Carré novels, the screenplays of Tinker Tailor and Smiley’s People (particularly the latter, which Le Carré wrote), and Alec Guinness’s portrayal of Smiley. Nothing else touches the emotional complexity and ethical dilemma embodied by this character in Le Carré’s work. Guinness was twenty years older than Le Carré, but the childhoods of the two men were similarly marginalized and oddly classless, both were extremely intelligent and had that gift for theatre—one became an actor and the other a spy and then a writer—that is, like medicine in America, the one sure engine for an outsider’s rise into the upper classes.
4. “[Smiley] hated mass-media, the relentless persuasion of the twentieth century. Everything he admired or loved had been the product of intense individualism. That was why he hated Dieter now, hated what he stood for more strongly than ever before: it was the fabulous impertinence of renouncing the individual in favor of the mass. When had mass philosophies ever brought benefit or wisdom?”
5. Call For The Dead, A Murder of Quality, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honorable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People
6. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, The Looking-Glass War, The Secret Pilgrim, A Legacy of Spies
7. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honorable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People
8. Aranoff, p29