Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (novel, miniseries, and forthcoming film to be directed by Tomas Alfredson)

ah man RIP. a hard writer to love, and oddly variable, given that one of the hallmarks of his *good* writing is a high level of competence, and the first part of The Honorable Schoolboy is very bad as i found out to my cost the other week. But he had a great knack of catching class, and the cadences of speech, and types, and shabbiness. and organising his world. Smiley via Guinness is a great creation.

reading about le carré’s father in the obits i get the more or less obvious answer that rickie in the perfect spy was indeed based on a real person.

I've never read him and don't do much fiction these days, but I loved both BBC adaptations and have read books on the Cambridge crew and Maclean etc.. anyway I've found an 11 gb audiobook complete works of Le Carre just so it's an option.

Nice

RIP, when he was good he was very, very good

Caught his "evening with" live filmed event in the cinema last year and he was very impressively with it, didnt expect this news for some years yet

not that I'm encouraging anyone to do anything naughty, but this Le Carre torrent that I couldn't possibly link here from au*iobo*kbay.nl has lots of unique hard to find content on it like lots of his radio plays and lots of video interviews as well etc.

RIP big man.

fizzles, re: rickie

S.L. David, you’ve spoken about your childhood, your outrageously criminal father, how you were sent to boarding school when you were 5, the lies that permeated everything. How did all this come to play when you were recruited by MI5?

J.L.C. The truth, in my childhood, didn’t really exist. That is to say, we shared the lies. To run the household with no money required a lot of serious lying to the local garage man, the local butcher, the local everybody. And then there was the extra element of class. All my grandparents and all my aunts and uncles were entirely working class — laborers, builders, that sort of thing. One of them worked up telegraph poles. And so out of that to invent, as my father did, this socially adept, well-spoken, charming chap — that was an operation of great complicity. And I had to lie about my parental situation while I was at boarding school. I only mention these things because they’re the extremes of what can warp an Englishman.

B.M. What you’ve just described — is it the root of your fiction? Your ability to think yourself into someone else?

J.L.C. Absolutely. I mean childhood, at my age, is no excuse for anything. But it is a fact that my childhood was aberrant and peculiar and nomadic and absolutely unpredictable. So if I was in boarding school, I didn’t know where I would be spending the holidays. If my father said he was going to come and take me out, it was as likely as not that he wouldn’t show up. I would say to the other boys, I had a wonderful day out, when I had really been sitting in a field somewhere.

(from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/books/review/john-le-carre-ben-macintyre-british-spy-thrillers.html)

lol I just heard the old nugget that George Smiley "was also played by Alec Guinness" on radio 4

that's why they earn the big bucks

thanks caek. although in some respects it’s quite painful to read the perfect spy uses in some respects uses the talents born of duplicity that le carré defines in a writer, except with magnus pym it’s pathological, there’s a chaos not far beneath the highly controlled surface. it’s interesting to consider whether in le carré’s world writing has the same basic but rearranged composition as spying.

there’s certainly an element of fantasy pym weaves around himself, and it’s a fantasy with nesting dolls of god the father, his actual father, and pym himself as a perfect figure at the centre of people’s lives. but of course unlike god, neither rickie nor pym can actually be that, as humans. in some respects perfect spy is as organised as tinker tailor soldier spy in its control of what you find out when and it’s ability to peel back very hard to define and abstract layers (information flows, psychology) in a dramatically satisfying and clear way. (even if many critics found that process in fact quite obscure - i don’t think they’re right).

https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2012/nov/12/salman-rushdie-john-le-carre-archive-1997

the time he pwned Rushdie and dead Hitchens in the Graun letters page, very low bar but he comes across as a much more principled and better human being than either of them dickheads.

Rushdie wheels out George Smiley to accuse me. Smiley, if he stood for anything, stood for tolerance, compassion, humility, self-doubt and a respect for the beliefs of others. Above all he was a man of compromise. Rushdie and Hitchens would do well to brush up on him. Until that happy day, I hope their letters will be required reading for all O-level students of cultural intolerance masquerading as free speech.

Listening to the BBC radio version of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold now, it's easily my favourite of his books, and has just occurred to me that it has a lot in common with A Scanner Darkly, another favourite.

Very entertaining letters. It's funny when JLC wonders of SR and CH: 'But will the friendship last?'.

Tributes are really coming in now.

RIP to the greatest chronicler of our trade. He made it ok to be human, to hav a soul and conscience, in the intelligence field. It was ok to have a heart when an operation went south, an asset died, a colleague betrayed us. He was beloved on both sides of the pond. https://t.co/aa3oxNYqxo

— Marc Polymeropoulos (@Mpolymer) December 13, 2020

"both sides of the pond"

jlc is cancelled now

I think I've read everything up to The Secret Pilgrim, and nothing since. Are there JLC novels from the last 30 years that are worth reading?

the last one (at least, the smiley redux one) was... not good imo, but like you haven’t read others outside that.

A Legacy of Spies was not the last one, apologies.

Good except the ending, imo, but was going to wait a decent amount of time for that conversation.

Listening to the BBC radio version of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold now, it's easily my favourite of his books, and has just occurred to me that it has a lot in common with A Scanner Darkly, another favourite.

Wow, good call about A Scanner Darkly, I hadn't thought of that. I just rewatched the X-Files episode that's a take on The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,, "The Pine Bluff Variant," and they really do a good job with it imo.

there are two BBC radio adaptations of Tinker.. I'm listening one which is labelled V2, perhaps the 2nd one - but anyway it's a 7 parter and is very good.

the other one I've not listened to is split into 3 eps. I wish the BBC would still do radio drama of this quality.

Bernard Hepton does a decent George Smiley and he was also in the TV adaptation as Toby Esterhase.

I'm watching the TV adaptation of The Night Manager at the moment, and it's absolutely gripping. No spoilers please.

The Night Manager (the movie) is good; the Amazon Prime version of The Little Drummer Girl is even better.

night manager, the constant gardener and most wanted man were all perfectly fine adaptations of what are IMO more conventional (and less ambitious) thrillers of his.

Conventional suits, often enough

We watched ep 1 of the BBC Tinker Tailor (Guinness) series last night. Forgot I somehow had it on bluray

Enjoying it so far
*furtive glance*
*stares*
*puts on glasses*
*furtive glance*

Could we poll 'best at putting on/taking off glasses'?

Guinness as Smiley, David Caruso in CSI, uh.

I wish I wore a tie so I could take my glasses off and clean them on the end like Smiley.

I want thick George Smiley lenses to magnify my inscrutable gaze

I'm midway through the BBC series (first ever watch). The scene with Connie is tough in the book but Beryl Reid takes it to a whole other level. Heartbreaking.

Could we poll 'best at putting on/taking off glasses'?

Guinness as Smiley, David Caruso in CSI, uh.

Worst - David Bowie in "The Man Who Fell to Earth" or Derren Nesbitt in "The Prisoner" (Episode: "It's Your Funeral").

"Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theater for the larger worlds we inhabit.” - John Le Carré

Few can capture the intrigue of espionage as masterfully as #JohnLeCarre. Many will remember this literary giant's life and works for generations to come. pic.twitter.com/gCjX6s1KQU

— CIA (@CIA) December 14, 2020

RIP. I read and liked at least a half dozen of his books, but literary giant? Naw.

You missed a comma.

He was literary, giant.

His casket is actually two regular-sized caskets glued together at the ends.

gr8 post m8

I hastily abandoned the BBC radio production of Smiley's People after 5 minutes because as much as I admire Simon Russell Beale as a very fine actor, his voice just isn't right as George Smiley. But maybe I'll return to it another time.

the foley for wiping your glasses with your tie is rubbish tbf

from elsewhere:

One of my professors was the student of the don at Oxford who recruited John le Carré into MI6. I love le Carré's books so I was really intrigued by this, and asked him if he ever got recruited to MI6.

To my surprise, he said yes. But it was done in a very le Carré-esque style. My professor had an interview with MI6 which he thought he bombed, and then didn't hear back from them, confirming his assumption... until he got a completely out-of-the blue job offer from an obscure UK government agency that involved lots of travel to Norwegian fisheries. He told me with a smile that it wasn't until he turned down the offer that he realized that he had gotten the MI6 gig, but he failed the final test!

Shortly before filming began, Alec Guinness asked author John le Carré to introduce him to a real spy to aid him in preparing for his role. Le Carré invited Guinness to lunch with Sir Maurice Oldfield, who served as Chief of the British Intelligence Service from 1973 to 1978. During their meal, Guinness intently studied Oldfield for any mannerisms or quirks that he could use in his performance. When he saw Oldfield run his finger around the rim of his wine glass, he asked whether Oldfield was checking for poison—much to Oldfield's astonishment, as he was only checking how clean the glass was.

there's that great scene in TTSS where Guinness/Smiley asks the waiter to allow the wine to chambre rather than pouring it immediately, I can't remember whether he also examines the glass though?

he does not. but the nuances of expression and gesture eg when smiley tastes the wine, or guillam irritably tells the waiter to just leave it there, are perfect in that scene as elsewhere.

"sir this is a wimpy's'"

grudging lol

Brian Cox is dependably great in the gripping radio play of The Spy Who Needed Some Lemsip.. but although he is barely in it so far I still can't accept SRB as the voice of George Smiley was a good choice.

alec guiness slyly looking actual real spy maurice oldfield up and down and thinking "well i can do better than THAT"

playing smiley from now on forever is going to be mimicking guinness and claiming you didn't

Bernard Hepton (who was from Bradford) does an excellent job of the voice at least.

feel like 'love to ann!' should have become a meme

otm