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

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!

& watching the mini-series for the first time on the advice of this thread. usually not keen on this sort of spy-stuff(*), but totally wrapped up, gamaliel otm love all the smoking in shabby rooms.

(*dunno why - never suited my sensibility - possibilities: a) no inner life, so I can't engage with psych ambivalence of Greene tradition b) Total disconnection from brit heroism, playing field/empire mythos, so no interest in people navigating the grey lagoon of its decline c) complicated plots with lots of double-dealing confuse me, & I just assume everyone is working for everyone else, which makes it a bit dull and tiring).

TTSS is great as an objectification of that feeling we all have re: everybody we work with is a back-stabbing cunt

just started watching this myself, thoroughly engrossed already.

i really love how the tv version kind of starts off on this note of smiley being this totally out-of-the-loop outsider who is "too old for this shit", and then he sits down with the british agents at the estate house to meet with the spy-on-the-run, and he takes off his glasses and puts them back on and gives this dude a look which says in an instant that he's the smartest and toughest dude around and it's like "oh shit."

this bit was tremendous!

think i otm'd that the first time round but yeah. now that isn't in the book, and couldn't be.

i started watching this last night because of this thread as well, and after the first episode i came back here specifically to big-up that scene and realized it had already been done, and now it's been done three times, so i guess we have consensus on alec guinness polishing his glasses.

also thought the monologue by the exiled head-of-research woman w/ the dog was great.

(the one in ep. 3.)

tragically, The Fast Show's George Wily sketch appears to be unavailable on Youtube.

he does in fact polish his glasses in the book -- i just looked -- but le carre is not unreasonably playing the long game on this re smiley=awsumz card and "his eyes had a soft, naked look which was embarrassing to those who caught him at it"

guinness def plays the character steelier, and plus guillam thumps tarr several times

also lacon's daughter falls off her pony in the the book

haha yes i remember that bit. she is described sort of unkindly too. "fat" or "plump" or something.

was so overjoyed during delhi flashback when russian mastermind spy stepped into the light and was played by whom he was played by

Somewhere, some nerd has written some sort of slashfic implying that said character is actually Locutus out to spy out Earth in advance of First Contact.

its funny cause iirc hes credited in every episode, and i kept waiting for him to show up, and then i kept waiting for him to have a line, and then i kept waiting for him to reappear, and, well.

great beard.

shame the new version probably won't end with St Paul's Cathedral boys' choir.

hoping it won't begin with the stuff at the prep school

yes i am rereading the book (again): i don't much like the thursgood stuff, it's too cutesy, and the encountering martindale scene is an incredibly clunky exposition move, smiley spends the whole chapter being "i am annoyed at you telling me all this stuff i already know (but too polite and sad and lonely to say so)"

i am happy (just starting chapter three) to defend the position that the TV version is a lot better than the book

don't think it's outrageous to say that Le Carre has flaws that the TV series improved on, or to say that his writing itself is kind of filmic, but the good filmic bits are the bits that avoid any of the Boy's Own last days of the Raj cobblers he likes to indulge in.

a few pages further in, i'm prepared to forgive him the martindale exposition stuff, it's a kind of a graceful sacrifice of the novelistic high ground to ensure that the guillam/tarr sections that straight away follow aren't tainted by too much necessary backstory that isn't directly tarr-related

inc. a nicely blunt bit of lampshade hanging: "an extraordinary feeling passed over him: that he was living the day twice, first with martindale in the club, now again with guillam in a dream"

in tinker tailor soldier THING news, i want tarr to be blair

mac= smiley, obv and garry = percy
childs = hayden, norris = bland, clark = prideaux

fuchs = guillam

Why is it described as a miniseries? Because it's not American and therefore doesn't last for centuries and have thousands of episodes that life's too short to bother watching?

answered yr own question i think

Just looked at the cast of the original "miniseries". Thorley Waters! George Pravda!

bennings = lacon

really struggling with toby!

seven eps (ie a lot less than a full season) and self-contained story never intended to generate further episodes = mini-series by US usage

Think Hywel Bennett is underrated in the original. Can't think of another actor who's gone from youthful adonis to aged ogre quite so spectacularly.

i am happy (just starting chapter three) to defend the position that the TV version is a lot better than the book

not a hard position to defend!

the other adonis-ogre:

http://i2.listal.com/image/499583/600full-david-hemmings.jpg http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39597000/jpg/_39597403_davidhemmings_pa_story203.jpg

i just read "night soldiers" by alan furst on the recommendation of a friend and boyyy did it make me appreciate JLC a lot more, despite having gotten pretty annoyed with him a couple months ago after tearing through his best few books and finding that the rest weren't nearly as good

http://www.terrynorm.ic24.net/photo%20hywel%20bennett%20young.jpg http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsB/tve1340-19960912-1345.gif http://www.horrorphile.net/images/the-thing-blairthing1.jpg