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

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.

re-read Tinker Tailor and Honourable Schoolboy this year in anticipation of the movie and will catch up with Smiley's People later. i don't doubt that Le Carre sides with the Foreign Office, inasmuch as he sides with anybody, and his writing on the former colonies (not all former at the time of writing I guess) irks a little. i think his anxiety isn't about Communism so much as it is about a lack of moral underpinning for either ideology, the smallness of the difference. but i suspect his attitude towards the title character in Honourable Schoolboy is a lot more sympathetic than mine

xxp yeah i think we shd try to keep the thread spoiler free until after the movie's been out for a few weeks

idk how long they're going to make this, but it seems like it would make for a nice 160 min film and they could keep most of the story intact imo.

ciarin hinds! this is gonna OWN you guys!!

I'm already pissed at the two month delay between UK/US release...

i was excited about all this before! but still!!!!

good long Sight And Sound piece about the BBC version from the issue after Guinness' death in 2000
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/86

Very nice. Nearly got emotional towards the end.

I'm watching the 1980 miniseries now thanks to this thread and -- well, it's okay. Wry, clever, etc.

'okay'? you're dead to me.

What's changed?

wry and clever seem like good things, although Lord Soto, you seem to use them slightly dismissively, I think? but there's also an aesthetic of dullness which is fastidiously observed, which also is the main motivation of the mole - I think that's the mini-series's success. I liked this from that sight and sound piece where it said 'Much of Guinness’ skill in realising Smiley lies in this streak of pious reproach.' What's interesting is that the mole shares that reproach, in an impious way. It's actually a battle between two people, very different, who believe the same thing in many ways. In the tv series they manage to contain the difficulties of the novel within the relative simplicity of the performances and direction. That's probably why it's so well liked.

incidentally, one of the things that appeals about the original adaptation is to see any form of acting as an intent to decieve - the end of Ricky Tarr's interview is a good example. Any sort of traditional attempt to evoke sympathy, or conventional way of behaving is seen as unlikely and duplicitious. Only a weird English intensely class-conscious reticence, a hangover from the Empire appropriation of Stoicism is seen to be at all trustworthy in a code sense - I suspect that's the meaning of class in le Carré: code.

Gary, Collin, Tom Hardy...There's no way my pussy is leavin that cinema dry.

JoJo12522 2 days ago 5

no way my cumberpatch is leaving that cinema dry

radio drama fans may enjoy these lecarre adaptations with simon russell beale playing smiley -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/smiley-season/

"not available" for replay but you may have ideas about tracking them down elsewhere. beale is superb i think; he sticks pretty close to guinness but that's a good thing. in some ways i think radio is a better medium for adapting these books than television

(or cinema)

btw what do the lecarre hedz here make of his newest one? i thought it was tremendously entertaining, kind of a portmanteau of all the great things about lecarre