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

Reading some of the stuff about TTSS, and the nods that Smiley - though loyal, and diligent – is suffused with a sense of distaste and guilt about the whole game reminded me about The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, where - as an incidental character - he is responsible (albeit perhaps inadvertently) for the betrayal and eventual death of Nan. In TSWCIFTC he's still very much part of the machine – though it's never referred in the Smiley trilogy, maybe his role in Nan's death haunts him.

Equus is an unnecessary filming of a middling play, true. Zulu is good, obv, as is Virginia Woolf and Villain and probly Absolution if you're in the mood.

Prideaux is Le Carre's good chap to contrast to all the shifty bounders - maybe including Smiley - in the rest of the novel. I suspect Le Carre thinks he's the hero in some ways, but at least he comes across as kinda decent, unlike Westerby in The Honourable Schoolboy who occupies the same role but is mostly a fucking dick imo.

the one time i tried to watch Villain it was interrupted by the start of the first gulf war!

i've been wrong so often on this thread i hesitate to ask but - burton is zulu??

i also forgot abt the medusa touch, which has some of the some atmos as the tv version of TTSS, funnily enough - britain on the cusp of thatcherism, resigned middle aged men in suits, london as a place of emptiness (morally, geographically)

nah Burton's not Zulu i've just mixed him up with Stanley Baker in my head, common mistake round our way. pretty sure Baker did a movie on similar lines to Villain that's superior, too

Not "The Criminal", the title's similar but the film isn't!

Probberly "Robbery"?

think it might be Robbery yeah

yes, TTSS puts prideaux early and central and adores him, and we're meant to also (in real-life company, prideaux would be an intolerable chauvinist bore, mind you) (albeit largely as cover): we know that something happened to him, not exactly what yet [as of p.162] except he was shot in the shoulder in czecho <-- smiley doesn't really know much of it at this point [p.162] either

one thing i'm finding it VERY hard to do is read as if i don't know who the mole is: obviously i've known for something like 30 years -- jlc treats him with kids gloves AND lampshade hangs wildly all about him; that's to say smiley is overly bothered in effect by how the story is treating gerald (this is largely what bothers me about the ann stuff i think: the extent to which it's ONLY distractional sleight-of-hand -- one thing guinness manages no better than jlc is making the smiley-ann marriage remotely believable, actually, even tho siân phillips makes ann believable; in a sense we keep reading i suspect because we want to crack this mystery, but are left basically clueless) (as clueless as smiley, yes, DO YOU SEE, but that's a bullshit move, really )

the entire novel is smiley's atonement for the death of nan, yes: a long and elaborate proof that nothing nasty he ever formerly had responsibility for was actually really his fault, it is all totally at karla's door

All the way through the tv show, right up to the last episode, I presumed Ann was going to turn out to be some elaborate beard :/

haha elaborate beard = zardoz.jpg <-- if boorman had filmed it

re proof: trust the tale not the teller: jlc/smiley is convinced by his own argument, i think, but the reader -- attentive to the situational method, when it's on and when it's flawed - is not

you're quite right that Ann as a character and Smiley's relationship with her is pretty badly handled, it hadn't occured to me that this might be just cos she's a structural device. JLC wants to deepen Smiley more than he achieves it perhaps.

tailor of panama is as alfred describes

btw, le carre writes a little bit about the philby connection in the introduction to the most recent (american?) edition of the book--you can see on google books here: http://goo.gl/zerJ5

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yes, TTSS puts prideaux early and central and adores him, and we're meant to also (in real-life company, prideaux would be an intolerable chauvinist bore, mind you)

Yeah, pretty much -- but it is telling he's told about/talked about through the eyes of an impressionable and desperate-for-connection awkward kid. That's about the only kind of character who could outright adore him.

one thing i'm finding it VERY hard to do is read as if i don't know who the mole is

As mentioned above I was glad I'd forgotten who it was, and though I had a pretty sure idea at some point it wasn't locked down -- and I was too happily lost in the general machinations to worry further.

haha one of the suspects -- will try and keep hans moleman's REAL NAME redacted for ned -- refers to the relevant americans as "puritan fascists" = a pretty good description of the deeply lunatic angleton

has anyone itt read HARLOT'S GHOST? <--- n.mailer on much the same territory

yeah i read Harlot's Ghost when it came out, was never certain whether Mailer intended a sequel and fervently hoped he didn't. it's one of Mailer's best imo, and the obliquity of the narrator's experiences, his permanent exclusion from the meaning of any of his work, is better than JLC's Sherlock-isms i think, tho i prefer le Carre's milieu and his characters and his style, mostly.

just finished the second guillam-in-the-circus section, where he gets called to account for self before the FOE ARRAYED IN PLAIN VIEW -- this is even better than the first one, because it's all about guillam keeping a bead on what he isn't meant to know

i'm not a huge fan of guillam-the-character, obsessing abt his flute-playing hippie gf -- perhaps bcz the gap between michael jayston's version and jlc's renders his inner life somewhat wonky (this is much less true in smiley's people, where jlc had once again adapted the character to its on-screen portrayal, and guillam is married with a kid in paris) -- but these scenes are tremendous for nerves, tension, not knowing what will happen next etc, someone interloping in a very familiar space, having to seem who he ordinarily is when he no longer is, being himself (very aware that he's out-of-the-loop and appropriately testy about it, yet at the same time not so capable they spot he knows something he oughtn't) (a modelled microcosm of HANS REDACTED MOLEMAN'S inner life, in fact; nice work)

the section before, smiley plunging deeper and deeper into the files, woke up towards the end when he moves off reminiscence into parsing actual secret files he'd never before viewed: finally being a desk-bound research agent, intelligence office as historian-critic, if you like, picking up clues via finance, location and his target suddenly becoming human and throwing a long-ago-and-far-off tantrum

by the way did anybody see David Hare's Page Eight the other week cos I was away from ILX and i desperately wanted to know if anybody else thought it was a bit pish

'Stuff Happens' by David Hare.

scroll down a bit

(xp) Me. Pish seconded.

during his reminiscences, smiley actually develops a THEORY about HANS REDACTED MOLEMAN, the person who will turn out to be the mole, not that smiley realises this yet (OR DOES HE?) and how moleman relates to all those around (genderspoiler) him -- that they're all botched copies of him, and that he can only be himself jigsawed out of all those round him... and actually guillam, in thought and behaviour under foe's gaze in the circus, seems to attest to the accuracy of the theory, at least re situational judgment and self-handling and stance (he's being very junior squishy smiley inside, re his gf)

again: nice work, there's a lot of "hall of mirrors" stuff art work here, which is the intelligence world philby and angleton created

xp hare is pish incarnate

not that i saw this particular manifestation

that thread pretty much sums up my reaction except not enough explicit analysis of Hare's kinda painful longing for women half his age. i can relate to that, but i wouldn't write a bad 90 minute spy opera for the Beeb just to get it out of my system

they shd've cast James Bolam in the Nighy role and pitched it as a new Beiderbecke Affair sequel

i can only watch nighy when he's covered in wet CGI tentacles: and plus pirates of the caribbean iii is a better takedown of blairite geopolitics than anything hare has ever written or will

hare is pish incarnate

4-4-2 or 4-2-4 or whatever it was, remember that one?

D. Hare is a SIR?!??! How? When? Was it Blair that did it?

i thought he'd refused!! oh well

knighted in 1998 apparently, must've fallen out over the absence of a life peerage afterwards

nothing says "thorn in the side of the Establishment" like a gong, tho

i thought about two-fifths of 'page eight' was pretty good tbh

kim philby kbe kgb

kim wasn't going for the "thorn in the side of the Establishment" look during his working life, tbf

kim's gong was a king zog-related OBE apparently -- also he was named for the kipling character, in a novel which is entirely about ambiguity of cultural identity

one of the oddities of jlc's approach is that you never actually learn about ANYTHING concrete a network achieved in the real political world: i realise there's a fiction-reality problem here, re claims he can make and maintain plausibility, but the effect is to keep the entire back-and-forth hermetic, as if actual real-world politics is left entirely untouched by anything anyone here, karla, control, MOLEMAN, smiley, has ever done...

which to be honest i believe it was: it's like advertising, you have to do because everyone else does it, but its net effect is zero

well in that intro above he says that the service shd've been dismantled after Philby, a view he sort of expresses in the Smiley books too iirc, so maybe le Carre agrees with that

also i guess it's difficult for anybody now to plausibly argue that the Russians wd've rolled the tanks into West Germany if not for our intelligence agencies

i was surprised by that actually: i seem to recall him saying something along the lines of "you can take the moral temperature of a country by reference to its intelligence services", and this does seem to be more or less what smiley believes -- but connie certainly says something more along those lines, that this is all an absurd post-imperial indulgence, the little boys with their little toys (she loves her boys and she loves the game but she has no deeper moral view of it)

his view may well have evolved a little though, over the ensuing 35 years!

haha one of the suspects -- will try and keep hans moleman's REAL NAME redacted for ned

Hah, no need to keep it hidden from me -- I reread the book and rewatched the series last month -- but given there are people on the thread who might not have done and will be coming into the movie cold (as it were)...

it was really easy to guess the mole in the TV show because (vague spoilers) there are only four suspects and one of them is too unsympathetic and two of them are too peripheral.

in the show at least the moral-temperature line doesn't seem to imply that the intelligence service is super vital to a country, just that it's a reliable expression of its character.

i read harlot's ghost too -- probably mailer's best novel and yeah seems to have a similar approach to finding out something about a country by analyzing the thoughts/fears/dreams of its secret service.

the idea of a secret service as a nation's -- or that nation's ruling class's -- dreams of itself is great, i think: and jlc intermittently gets this on the nose -- but (like hare) he's totally bamboozled by thatcherism and murdoch and america and "the 60s" (all connected without going the full carmody), and his dream is set (in his ifction) like ten years after its (irl) sell-by-date

smiley's people -- which is in most ways way more of a fantasia -- actually grips this better, because its central characters are actual-real baltic exiles, so "isolates trapped in the amber of loss" is always going to be the Real they're battling

the full carmody

better man than me wd have a field day with Photoshop here

"its central characters are actual-real baltic exiles" -- also they're dead mostly! key to a good handling of yr sell-by-date :\

xpost Harlot's Ghost is simultaneously a terrific book and deeply unsatisfying - and for the same reason. He presents spying as, one presumes, it must be - where only a little of the operation is ever known. It makes it feel realistic, but because you only ever get bits of plot you long for a bit more flesh to make sense of it all.

Best US spy novel I've read was Robert Littell's The Company, a fantastic, panoramic sweep over the empire of James Jesus Angleton - Philby and all. Has all Le Carre's detail, but with added paranoia in the form of Angleton, and nice interaction between fact and fiction. Some of Charles McCarry's novels are very good on the absurdity and unintended consequences of spying.

just finished the second guillam-in-the-circus section, where he gets called to account for self before the FOE ARRAYED IN PLAIN VIEW -- this is even better than the first one, because it's all about guillam keeping a bead on what he isn't meant to know

i'm not a huge fan of guillam-the-character, obsessing abt his flute-playing hippie gf

yes 100%. also this scene explains alleline -- the tv show iirc sort of misses alleline and bland. they just aren't much in it. but the cellist gf is worse than ann and they were right to drop it from the show.

that same "hippie/artist girlfriend" type turns up in a perfect spy

haha my very dim memory of my response to "perfect spy" is thinking fuck this you dick this isn't a thing: but i don't at all recall the thing i was abreacting so aggressively against

also haha at history mayne translating "flute-playing hippie gf" as "cellist"!!! d00d yr exes are showing

it has a couple redeeming moments, but i have no idea what phillip roth was thinking

miniseries is pretty cruddy too