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

Cumberbatch has his work cut out being half as good as Michael Jayston i think, the relationship between Guillam and Smiley (in the series) was so brilliant; a strange but believable warm funny buddy movie vibe they had going on. age gap between Cumberbatch and Oldman seems much wider but that's just nitpicking.

smiley's age sort of oscillates in the books

which are, secretly, awful

which book first?

i think i'm gonna spend like a million hours at the beach today

the eight (?) books w/ smiley are his best, i think, esp. spy who came in from the cold and "the karla trilogy" (ttss/honorable schoolboy/smileys ppl). the first couple smiley books are "minor" but fun (one is not really even a spy book). the last two are also good but a little more... well theres less action, among other things. apparently looking-glass war is the most "realistic" of le carre's books, which makes it kind of boring.

perfect spy is overrated i think. most of the 90s/2000s stuff that ive read is okay but never quite reaches the smiley heights. tailor of panama is fun.

chronologically youd want to start with "call for the dead" but i think youre better off going w/ spy who came in from the cold

thx dude

"little drummer girl" is good too i thought but i havent read it in 5 or 6 years

*shakes head sadly at thomp*

lol max you're a heavy le carré stan.

heh well like i said i just went on a binge so its all fresh in my brain

Yeah, the first Smiley books are basically crime and detection novels - good examples of them tho, with a strong feeling for dialogue and atmosphere, which once again in many ways is a decayed rural and city version of Golden Period detection thrillers. Find it hard to get behind Smiley's People, either the book or the execrable TV version. Agree w' max about the Looking-Glass War and Perfect Spy certainly.

also i have some of it wrong--looking glass war comes *before* the karla books. and secret pilgrim barely has smiley in it. (hes a minor character in swciftc and lgw too)

Call for the Dead (1961)
A Murder of Quality (1962)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) (Edgar Award 1965, Best Novel)
The Looking Glass War (1965)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
Smiley's People (1979)
The Secret Pilgrim (1990)

lol wikipedia otm

btw one of the great things about the original british miniseries is that patrick stewart plays karla and has... no lines

lol wikipedia otm

― Lamp, Thursday, June 30, 2011 11:38 AM (46 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hee hee i should learn to check wikipedia b4 shooting my mouth off

p sure, iirc, that the scottish city of dundee was used as background to substitute for eastern bloc city in the itv adaptation of ttss (memories of underdevelopment).

there's some later books with smiley as cameo / framing device i think? i dno

GR i was hoping i would really enjoy the tv show of smiley's ppl when i got around to it, oh well.

i think, generally, le carre is very good when he is writing about civil servants sitting in dilapidated british offices, being depressed. when he has to deal with the fact that these civil servants make decisions which involve things happening not in dilapidated british offices, like in other countries, or to people who aren't dilapidated british civil servants, then he is not very good.

i mean, i feel like even in the good books there's at least three chapters where he might as well just have written the phrase JUST LOOK AT THE HUMAN COST JUST LOOK AT IT over and over

hm, i think youre right that his real strength is his inside knowledge of the kind of awfulness of british bureaucracy (& i think he can be good at linking that to british society/class/culture, though i am not british so maybe hes horrible at it). i dont know how i feel about the bits that take place outside of 'the circus.' certainly stuff like that kind of ruins 'the constant gardener.'

For a while, my idea of Britain was based on Tinker Taylor (a dark, dusty world made of bow windowed houses, dimly lit office corridors and teapots) - but probably I was just an impressionable kid.

he's a bit passively oxonian, i guess? lots of "oh these horrid brutalist buildings" in one of them

i don't know, i don't remember them that well. are there any actual working-class people in any of his books? i feel like there barely are, like the actual world is sighted in a dim half-light outside the death-in-life of being a public schoolboy for your entire existence

xp.

something about a rugger boot stamping on all human aspirations forever

i don't know if there are any "actual" working-class people in the books? there are no, uh, miners, or whatever. but he's class-conscious! "a perfect spy" is kind of about this, actually: the way code-switching in the complicated british class system lends itself to being a spy.

it seems like almost all of the field agents in the books are... lower-middle-class? while the bureaucrats are the public schoolboy types. i think le carre plays with that a little bit. if nothing else he is kind of anxious about the possibility that communism is right.

but i should shut my mouth. i remember the common people thread.

I have seen the trailer. It features the line "We are not so very different, you and I". Fail.

yeah i loved the trailer, but is that not a line for a superhero film or something?

yes, that was terrrrrrible.

thomp, I think he's pretty good at seediness in the early novels - London thugs, pub crooks, that sort of thing. He's no Patrick Hamilton or Julian McLaren-Ross obviously, but he's pretty good nevertheless.

xpost -- Well, both Oldman and Hardy are in it, they're just warming up for Nolan.

max you are doing very well for an american; what you say about the dynamic between the field agents and the bureaucrats rings true, but it's a while since i read any of them

but i don't think he is very anxious about the possibility that communism is right; i'm not sure he's even anxious about the possibility it exists, to be honest. i don't know. having someone actually say "we are not so very different, you and i" is plainly facepalmish on the part of the scriptwriter, but tbh that phrase could probably also just be printed in place of at least seven chapters of any one of his major novels, so

heh

could also be one of those lines you only ever hear in the trailer used as a kind of short-hand. Se7en has a classic example of this; Freeman says to Pitt in a car ride on his first day on the job "I'll tell you who your friends and enemies are". line doesn't appear in the actual film.

"this is a movie about spies...british spies"

"trust ... no one."

"trust ... no brit".

"in a world where EVERYONE'S a suspect..."

wonder if they considered ewan macgregor for the role of smiley.

used bookstore didn't have any of the recommended ones except tinker tailor so i got that

Still the best I think gbx.

Not sure le Carré gives a hoot about communism either way - I think he's more interested in the mechanics of defection. Woah I was going to make some detection/defection gag there, but it wouldn't have been right. Will say that what marks out the early novels is the indifference to English society. This is what we're trying to protect? Again, something in Tinker Tailor that seems to come from the early novels, which both sides share, is the indifference and cynicism to England, patriotism, civic duty. Is this hard-boiled, English style? Not sure. Class stuff - well, the whole Oxford/Cambridge thing is part of the idea, right? Intellectual game-players, pawn movers etc. But not sure it's a class thing. In terms of the characters it's just a muscle + brains thing.

I'm talking exclusively about the earlier stuff here - I think that he moved more and more towards ambiguity of side-taking throughout his career, which should make his later novels more interesting than perhaps they are.

i suppose when i was thinking about le carre and communism i was partly thinking of a perfect spy, which is the most recent ive read and which i think displays a real ambivalence in re: ideology. though maybe i am misunderstanding that ambivalence as sympathy, instead of indifference! certainly i think le carre is sympathetic to the defectors and certain of the communist agents--not karla or mundt, but poppy and fiedler--moreseo than he is to most of the british characters. smiley excepted.

if nothing else he is kind of anxious about the possibility that communism is right.

i think he's a bit concerned that it works, or at least parts of it does, whereas the british elite is rotted out. im not sure it matters that it's rotted out by communism (nominally), because the rotters are frivolous, overgrown schoolboys.

this trailer looks dope. iirc i think that "we are not so different, you and i" line comes from the karla interro and smiley is trying to gain his trust and confidence and it totally doesn't work, which makes the line contextually a lot better.

'the looking-glass war' is grim and weird and features a tragic and super-homoerotic friendship.

This thread just sent me back to the BBC adaptation which I've got. what's great about the remake is that it gives a chance to see the difference between the construction of character and contextual atmosphere then and now. Will Smiley still have his Corot? His Dresden china, Adam dresser and carriage clock? Will they still say guinea for money? Will it be damp and cold the whole time? How will they smoke? Properly or with that non-inhalation/exhalation that tends to be done nowadays? What about the rented rooms - its wallpaper and furniture? Will Smiley buy/have books? (His German Romantic poetry iirc). Will Control still only love Surrey, Lord's and the Circus? Does that triumvir mean anything any more? The mannerisms! They seem rich and clear in the austere setting of the BBC adaptation. Looking at what the refashioning says about what artistic creation thinks about us, what we look like from the perspective of the source material, what we've lost, what we've replaced it with, is always fascinating, but there's every opportunity of seeing it unusually clearly with something like this I reckon.

tom hardy looks like he nails ricki tarr based on the five seconds i saw of him.

this looks good

i've never read any le carre either

max otm, hm otm, omar on the money about the Karla interrogation. and without trying to spoiler, Smiley's reflection on that small difference is a serious piece of his character development

I hope they can manage moments of poetry such as 4:53-6:47 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk16G4walQ4

Second only to the very opening scene for me.

omar on the money about the Karla interrogation

I suspected as much (thus my comment way earlier -- the reason why I like the line, as omar notes, is in the context of how things DON'T work).

Are we going to have to be spoiler-free here for a while or...

they should just have Patrick Stewart play Karla again

I would be more than fine with that.