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

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

the best bits are everyone scrambling to find magnus after he's disappeared

the really extended le carre memoir is rather less engaging, at least until magnus gets to eastern europe, and even then

i watched the tinker tailor miniseries over last night and this afternoon. really enjoyed it, exactly my kind of spy fare, nice and slow too. obviously i might have waited and gone to the cinema to watch the new adaptation in a week, but i have a feeling that i'll probably enjoy it less if it's a bit more glamorous or what have you, which won't be hard.

After rewatching the original I can't imagine it being improved on, but I'll see it for the new cast. Will see the BBC Perfect Spy as well but like others I found the book really forgettable.

I don't know if something like Smiley's can be made now, detective story plodding along at amiable old man's pace.

'Connie's for the shredder George. The leech tries to fool me.'

ok, quite a chunk to roll out here: runnng order of larger sections is tarr, karla, sam collins, max, jerry westerby, haydon recruits prideaux

the reinterrogation of rikki tarr and smiley's tale to guillam about his one meet with karla are the book's plateau of moral-highgrounding for smiley: there's a small element of plot advancement and backstory infill but they're mainly given over to smiley's technique as an interrogator, at his best now in the approaching evening of his life, and not at his best trying unsuccessfully long ago to persuade karla to save his skin and defect -- key to both, his success with tarr and his failure with karla, is smiley's kindness and humanity (implication: our foes are ideologues and fanatics and this is the flaw that will end them) (a prayer more than a fact, you might say: certainly not immediately relevant to what actually ended the USSR, though this hadn't yet happened in 1974 and jlc was hardly alone in not seeing it coming)

(and yes, it's true that tarr gets thumped some more -- morality is messy! -- and also true that wily smiley is more approving of tarr's canny self-interest and truth-witholding than callow guillam)

then there's a bit with little bill roach having nightmares and being ill ftb the divorce-bogey is a-comin for jim and a section where smiley and lacon meets the minister (which is irredeemably borng necessary tale-business and i have to clap my jaw not to skip: it's extremely short so jlc feels the same, obv)

collins/max/westerby: again, minor elements of plot advancement and backstory infill in all three -- basically smiley seeks them out and quizzes them, the first two as per info discovered in his research -- but the real point of the three encounters is moral colour, i'd say... to give a live sense, as supplied by outsiders to the story, of the chaotic feel inside the circus during control's last project (collins); of the feel of prideaux's operation, max (a czech DP) being with him for the early, less troubled reaches; and, most likeably (jlc likes alkies and writes them pretty well), the feel in the world immediately beyond and outside the circus at the crucial time (westerby is a jobbing sports journo who supplies the service with information he happens on, less an agent than a sympathetic conduit)

you very much feel with all three that they're present in this story for the one scene, to tell their tale and supply their colour-perspective and depart our necessary attention.
collins and westerby are arguably the better characters, certainy more memorable, if not especially deep -- max is a bit exile-by-numbers (there's an incredibly similar character in smiley's people whose name i forget: the max in smiley's people being smiley himself!), tho his role is largely to impress on the reader how a non-communist czech might feel about all this stupidity (=very pissed off); westerby of course also goes on to be somewhat rebooted in (and as) the "honourable schoolboy", which if i recall accurately wears the character beyond thin in a context jlc isn't well-suited to portray (post-colonial hongkong and south east asia in the late stages of the vietnam war) -- collins is also brought back, for smiley's people, in a faintly demeaning role

and then there's the trip back to old documents, and a reread of the young hayden introducing the young prideaux to the service: interesting little bit of spite and uncharacterstic semi-virtuoso tradecraft on jlc's part -- the young hayden writes (i) like a posturing fey student, and more ambitiously (ii) like a clever young man very infected by kipling's sense of rhythm and irony and pseudo-cynical masked self-certainty. The kiplingism is good -- pertinent bcz philby was named for kipling's kim, and culturally smart, bcz only a rightwing student or someone flirting with or pretending to be same would still be being kipling-esque as a pose in 1937-38. The primary plot takeaway is the hayden-prideaux relationship: which remains essentially masked.

Seems to me by the end of the collins section, one of the main suspects has begun to scream out at the reader. But it's very hard indeed at this late stage to reconstruct virgin-reader status.

^^^spite bcz this is the first time we see hayden clear -- ie not through a haze of hero worship and/or hurt fury -- and there's no way he pulls either trick on the reader, with the prose we get to read; except you can't help also thinking "no fair, d00d was still a student! hope no one ever judges ME on stuff i wrote as a student ect ect"

also there's a nice little sketch of the boho-bolshevik student party hayden and prideaux, lifted wholesale as far as i can tell from a similar one in dorothy sayers' strong poison (i'll look this up)

(ok it's less like the sayers than i remember -- the actual phrase i thought he'd lifted was :"a wildly proletarian coffee was served, to the accompaniment of a dreadfully democratic bun" <-- i'm certain this is from sayers somewhere, it's very wimsey-ish, but it's not in this particular scene)

(and again, the idea that it's hayden doing the lifting is astute: sayers a very popular novelist in the 30s)

The kiplingism is good -- pertinent bcz philby was named for kipling's kim, and culturally smart, bcz only a rightwing student or someone flirting with or pretending to be same would still be being kipling-esque as a pose in 1937-38. The primary plot takeaway is the hayden-prideaux relationship: which remains essentially masked.

ah that's it: lawrence of arabia. they more than once compare haydon to lawrence. philby's pater was, if i recall correctly, very much an irl lawrentian figure.

st john philby was an empire dude who became militantly anti-brit and pro-arab, yes (possibly initially in response to the partition of mesopotamia etc after WW1): think he was more desk-bound than lawrence, tho (but who wasn't?)

i thought lawrence liked a bit of desk-binding himself nudge nudge

ok, u guys are way too into this. they're spies, fuck em.

i read spy who came in from the cold, and next up i will read ttss and smiley's people. am i making a sequencing error here?

smiley is in 'honourable schoolboy' between TTSS and smiley's people. otherwise you're good i think? he's not much in 'looking-glass war', but can't remember where that goes.

lgw is either before or after SwciftC -- set much earlier than TTSS

he's also in a weird prep school whodunnit, a murder of quality, which i really don't recommend, unless the thursgood passages are your FAVOURITE BIT in ttss

re Richard Burton, let's just say he was in more good movies than Samuel L Jackson.

they seem to stand mostly alone and i'm not bothered about the canon. i just don't want to make some crashing error that ruins a future book.

LGW is good but kinda boring so theres no real reason to read it if youre just doing greatest hits

and yeah you should read honorable schoolboy after ttss, even tho its the temple of doom of the karla trilogy

ie, it's the best?

Well, how are you with drunks wandering around Southeast Asia?

have we ever done an indiana jones poll

i should read honourable schoolboy before smiley's people? (yes, i am just doing greatest hits)

xpost -- Yup:

Rank the Indiana Jones Canon

yes, and it was wrong

so wrong, lao che