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

Yeah stepping back to Honourable that one is a strange cul-de-sac and I'll be happy to not revisit it, as those issues and more all sound like they'll just swamp it completely.

A different other, a different...context. Who is the le Carre of today and could there be one? There's plenty of room for it I figure but the stakes and cultural contexts are surely shifted.

Would the le Carre of today necessarily write about espionage? I tend to think not, actually, and my attention turns somewhere like Mieville.

one thought: today's spooks are engaged in a much less insular game, primarily working to undermine enemies with less qualms about killing civilians. the job is less arcane in this respect?

there's little to no Ireland in le Carre that i can remember. is that because a) different department or b) literary/other reasons?

xpost -- Mieville is actually who I was thinking of earlier in terms of vague points of thematic comparison so I'm glad I wasn't alone!

isn't le carre the le carre of today?

(haven't read any of his recent books but they sound solid from reviews/interviews)

looks like the whole Ricky Tarr subplot is going to be a biggish chunk of the film judging from that last trailer. that's what i was hoping for; it's clearly (in the mini series) the most glamorous, Bond style action movie element of the story. gonna be great this!

xpost -- Fair point! I do wonder how much of that might be lingering affection; at the same time you'd think that an even more morally grey world would be up his creative alley by default.

i don't really want TTSS to be glamorous or Bond-style tbh

I'm not worried about that, exactly? To me, the irreducible piece of the story is about disaffection and the semi-conjugal relationship between an employer (gov't) and an unenthusiastic functionary (Smiley) of that employer. In other words, I think TTSS exists in the space between ironic detachment and lingering affection.

FWIW I thought 'Let the Right One In' was a sad hash of a movie, and wasted the heck out of Michael Nyqvist.

the american version was better

nonetheless this film looks tite

i didnt think LTROI was "all that" but i have a hard time believing this guy can make a bad movie with that cast

i agree max. i think the source material is interesting enough (both as le carre intended it, and as a cultural artifact) to carry the movie a long way. i wonder what a contemporary version of 'spy who came in from the cold' would look like, too?

i reread TSWCIFTC recently. a LOT less editorializing than you got later. really dry. doubt you could improve on the original film.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/09/26/article-1062713-0002CCDB00000258-980_468x352.jpg

^^^ beautiful composition in this movie

yeah after rereading both SWCIFTC and TTSS this summer i think the the spy who is the better book. so cold!

http://imageshack.us/f/849/tinker1.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/f/545/tinker3.jpg/

Promising review for sure, some of the specific details in particular.

Watched The Spy Who Came In ... on TV the other day, and it is one of the most perfect spy movies, because it's so unremittingly downbeat. None of the other big name attempts at "realist" spy movies in the 60s ever allowed themselves to be so unglamorous. (Although Richard Burton? Hmmm. Well, I guess you need a star, but he's no one's idea of an upper-mid-level bureaucrat.) Brilliant supporting cast - Michael Hordern, in the picture above, is perfect as the gay agent.

And, the way power games are played, they way everyone dismisses the person immediately below them at the first opportunity: Robert Hardy dismisses Hordern; the first East German agent dismisses Hardy; Fiedler dismisses the first East German agent. Each of those scenes is pretty well identitcal, and perfect for it: beneath it all, everyone is just a jealous jobworth.

that's funny that that's Michael Hordern; I mistook him for Noel Coward!

score: http://www.tinkertailorsoldierspymusic.com/

us release pushed back to dec 9 (uk release still sep 16)

Argh.

:|

it was already late nov i think, so that's not the end OTW.

also don't worry i will tell you all about it here

ahhhhhh owned much USA?

I guess I'll be busy watching the other 300 releases that are squeezed into the last quarter of the year.

only listened to a bit of that score but it's making me miss the Wolfman/X-Men themes they've been using in the trailers. :/

5/5 in Empire is a very good sign, they still only give out a handful of those each year.

just caught 'the spy who came in from the cold', ithappens otm upthread.

The problem with Le Carré as a writer is that he had his characters more or less perfectly formed 50 years ago, and he hasn't really felt any need to alter them since. So for the past 25 years his novels have been filled with people who no longer exist, with the attitudes and tics of a generation before them. So no matter how precise the plotting, the peopling of the novels lets them down. Reminds me of Mark Lawson rofling on Late Review once in the late 90s about a PD James novel that had the young hispters heading to the destination du jour on a Sunday lunchtime: the carvery at the Strand Palace Hotel. That's exactly the kind of thing Le Carré would do.

But pretty much everything up to A Perfect Spy is peerless. That's where I think the datedness starts becoming apparent, though there are still pleasures aplenty over the past quarter century.

Have been reading Eric Ambler recently: you can see Le Carré paid close attention.

http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/299193_252049231502725_211101195597529_742007_3099184_n.jpg

le carre's extreme weaknesses are (1) women and (2) america: he doesn't remotely understand either, and his fiction only really works when neither functions as actor or agent

the trapped-in-a-lost--era comment is interesting: it puts him far closer to the territory of wodehouse than SWCiftC looks as if it's going to be: but of course one era's ultra-realism is always a later's mannerism

his cities are very close to unpeopled: partly this is achieved (as a realism) by much of it happening in the wee hours, in liminal spaces

(a good comparison, and maybe an indicator of where "our generation's" le carre might be looked for, is stephen frears's "dirty pretty things")

re bond: in smiley's people, the mostly off-page story of otto leipzig, the "magician" -- womaniser, charmer, etc -- is an acknowledgment of the presence of bond-esque characters in a smileyverse, and how they end up...

hyped all over the shop at Venice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2011/sep/05/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-venice-video

I am suspicious of the British film community hyping something that was brilliantly dramatized 30 years ago as the "event" of the year.

to be fair it's not an adaptation of something boring from the 19th century, shakespeare or sycophantic shite abt the royal family, of course it's on a par with aliens landing on the white house lawn or something

Morbs can you remember whether people moaned about the hype over the remake of The Maltese Falcon?

lol, but the first 2 versions were not definitive.

I am suspicious of the British film community hyping something that was brilliantly dramatized 30 years ago as the "event" of the year.

― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius), Monday, September 5, 2011 8:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

ehhh british film critics tend to hate british films, this is pretty well attested

you can't expect this to supersede the original, but the original did not follow the novel that closely

"British" film with a hot Swedish director tbf

film will be delivered in pieces that you have to assemble yourself do you see

"the original did not follow the novel that closely" -- it was quite faithful, wasn't it? i don't recall any very significant changes

well, it's told in a different order -- prideaux's mission e.g.

not actually going to read any reviews till i've seen it anyway

but i think the characters are 'different-as-in-better' in the series too, which is a different qn maybe

oh, right, yes, hadn't thought of the narrative order

i saw the series first, then read the book, supplying the characters from the series, pretty much -- i think toby is maybe the one who fights hardest against the TV casting; smiley is smaller and podgier than guinness in description but you read it and think le carre must have made a mistake when he says stuff like that...

s&s just arrived and i see the feature-writer is john sutherland, who -- whatever else he is -- is surely NOT a paid-up member of the "British film community"

(whatever else he is = he's a retired prof of eng.lit. and a very readable literary journalist, but he has no footprint that i can think of discussing TV or movies: has he been in S&S before? he's usually interesting and like henry i will read this after i've seen the film -- but i'm slightly fascinated by the politics of S&S choosing him as the figurehead feature-writer/commentator, esp.as was likely decided before anyone had seen the film)

he does have long-term le carré form.

yes, right, that makes sense: his academic specialism is victorian lit, i think, but he writes about popular and semi-popular fiction also, which vic lit gives you a pretty good angle on

actually i have that issue squirrelled away somewhere, if that's its cover!