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

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

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

― caek, Friday, September 9, 2011 10:27 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, its the direct sequel to ttss, and i think it sets the stage for smileys people, which is much better

curses, just submitted the amazon order. thanks tho.

i don't think very highly of Honourable Schoolboy but it's an entertaining enough read (mostly) and belongs in the trilogy.

i'll say more on the prideaux debrief in a bit -- think i want to reread it, as it's point where backstory and current narrative finally get in step with one another -- but here's a note on jlc's tradecraft as regards location (mise en scene theory/pathetic fallacy alert)

the various tale-relating conflabs smiley has had have been in very different places -- some directly emanating from the person being quizzed, like connie's jericho flat or the casino sam collins now works at -- but in almost all he's been in effect the authority figure: the actual interrogator for tarr, callow guillam's guru when it's the karla backstory, the returned agent with ministerial backing... and the places do their work amplifying the way this inflects, from tarr's cramped hotel room (where he's more or less a prisoner for the time being) through to the curryhouse where he gently pumps jerry w (where in a sense they're equals -- smiley gives very little away -- and it's really only westerby's puppyish semi-lachrymose need for approval that undergirds the power relationship

but with prideaux, the setting is not a built room, public or private, furnished or functional-anonymous, but the wild hilly outdoors of the south west: as -- in effect -- demanded by prideaux; and smiley has no power he can really seriously bring to bear... prideaux could basically snap his neck with a single blow and hide smiley's body and who'd really be any the wiser?

jlc is good at compact and evocative descriptions of places: his london streets are very often real streets he's accurately portraying, and i imagine his countrysides are too (it's not a part of the UK i know); but he's also good at letting the sense of the space be a felt manifestation of the encounter -- the strength of the main part of the smiley-prideaux scene is that it's the first (and last) point in the book where things feel almost open-ended, so that you judge that prideaux chooses to spill

adding: it's not just that everyone's equal outdoors -- whereas indoors is always indoors somewhere, a building structure unavoidably embedded in an extant power structure -- but that prideaux the sporty man of action is more than smiley's equal here, and both know it, and placing himself here is the gesture of total vulnerability by which smiley elicits prideaux's trust

going to watch smiley's people tonight. i love the internet!

morbs i lost my giant awesome comp of kael capsule reviews can you send me yours now that you've internalized it

esterhase's italian schtick in the smiley's people adaptation is hilariously bad.

haha i love toby, he's easily my favourite character: his whole thing is "fluent in many languages, speaks none of them correctly"

smiley in the blau diamant, looool.

this is actually hilarious, toby keeps up with the faux italian voice the whole time. and everyone pronounces his name differently to the way they did in tinker tailor.

well faux hungarian i suppose. it's only from a few years after the original series.

Aye, the guy plays it Hungarian in SP, while he didn't in TTSS. I explained this away to myself by saying that he was putting on the plummy RP while at the top of the circus, bur went back to his natural inflection after the fall.

In truth though, all the actors who put on accents seem to do a particularly rotten job of it.

that's because they've been trained by toby!

anyway, the prideaux hilltop debrief:

it comes in three sections, first the circus where control laid out the operation, last the various cells where, operation blown up in everyone's face, hajek aka ellis aka prideaux tried to screen as much/many as possible for as long as possible, before he was (inevitably) broken; and in the middle, one of the climactic passages in a book full of wary spies moving through dangerous places: a seemingly utterly english agent rendering himself effectively invisible in czech streets stiff with watchers who know he's there

once again the sense of place is ever-present: jlc's tradecraft is, in effect, to heighten a character's watchfulness by a kind of transferred descriptionalism -- as if his own gift for conjuring up locale swiftly and effectively is a manifestation of the character's heightened observational level... to be told you're a "watcher" is a compliment of the highest order, so naturally jlc allows the reader to get to share this quality, or to feel they're sharing it

prideaux is described, physically, as "crooked" and even "fanged" -- as a jaggedly palpable, noisy presence in the world -- yet (like smiley) his deep gift is to become invisible in plain sight; invisible, moreover, to his professional peers/foes when they're most expecting it... this middle passage of his tale is a guide to this, a guide to the superb level of detailed observation and anticipation it requires... and, also i think, to underscore that the core being of this seemingly brusque military sporty type is an uttertly gentle quietness: watchfulness is the centre of his being (ditto smiley; ditto smiley's little child phantom bill roach)

there's a weird passage early on, put in the mouth of lacon and thus easily overlooked as point-missing blather: lacon raises the notion that "method is morality" and then projects onto smiley the assumption that smiley can't and won't accept this idea.

well, for starters it's an ambiguous formation: and it's easy to just assume -- this is lacon speaking, for one thing -- that's merely the situational ethos of the high-end civil service ("i do my job to the best of my ability, to aid my political masters, through every change of government: hence even if they're utterly in the wrong, i can be in the right")

but it might also mean "your morality emerges from the method you choose" (as contrast smiley's interrogation technique from the evil soviet one: smiley deploys far less thumping, if not none, and no electronic probes, hence is "better", as far as moralists are concerned)

and there's a third meaning, much subtler and in a sense subversive, i think, of the book's stated sense of good and evil (which does function as an argument between these first two readings): this is the notion that to be true to your method (your technique, your skill, your craft, the still zen of your art blah blah) is to be true to the world

and in this central passage -- when prideaux is being the best street agent in the book so far -- he is truer to the world than any of the botched or confused reasons why his operation has been set in place (by control, or though the deceived control by the mole, or by the clashing forces of world history, or what have you: every other level is botch, compared to prideaux in the middle passage of Operation Testify, its failure notwithstanding)

the point is, i don't think jlc dares put his trust in this reading: whether this is cause or consequence, he's just not that strong a writer -- he's a writer with strengths, and with flaws, and the flaws always muscle back in (one of his strengths, though, is that he can often deploy his flaws as masks; just as a good spy -- or more to the point a good thriller writer -- must be able to)

[i've actually finished -- the sections following this one are "unputdownable", his sense of pace and momentum at its best -- but i'll try and pace my blogging in haha homage]

Just to go back up to the points of it being a 'mini-' series as in I almost can't see that it would be pulled off these days -- imagine there would be certain pressures to make it far more of a prelude to 'Smiley's People' -- which I hate, never liked that Karla was caught, even if it never felt like a 'victory' -- and if it was to be made in five years time there would be a pressure to lenghten it to 10-12 eps and make it more 'wirey' somehow and lenghten the slow pacing (that's what a couple of people said about The hour which I've not seen).

julio yr a MODERNIST, you can't judge a book by whether its ending coincides with yr sense of just deserts! the book is a fantasia, like "hannibal", and its strengths (virtuoso set-pieces) and weaknesses (formless showcase as structure) derive from this i think

(or do you mean the TV series?) (which weirdly i only ever saw once -- i actually didn't realise it had been made till last year! -- and was distinctly disappointed by: possibly because the action requires it be filmed outdoors in various pretty euro-cities, so it comes across as "on the buses 2: a boulogne awayday") <-- unfair and will watch again

The TV series -- and TV is a v MODERNIST thing, of course.

I haven't read the book.

ps "formless" is entirely the wrong word there: what i mean is that the sequence of setpieces determines the structure, which takes the form of a showcase of technical virtues

b-but tv's modernism is a product of any given show's need to fit the overall demands of a network's programming needs, whether these be commercial or constitutional or even merely capricious! <-- controversial (but true)

also: tv's modernism is a quality of tv AS A WHOLE, not any little arty show stuffed into its maw

And 'Smiley's People' was also made into the TV mini-series.

Never got round to a jlc book as he has come across as faintly ridiculous. I think he probably based Smiley on himself if he didn't get out of it by writing bestsellers. 'it' = one of these former Mi6 fellas who waste away in their post central London bunkers, drink in hand, shutting every one out waiting for the day when they won't wake up. xxp = so TV is a bit like minimalism (the Philip Glass sort ;-))

no: p glass minimalism is a little arty show stuffed into music's maw

b-but tv's modernism is a product of any given show's need to fit the overall demands of a network's programming needs, whether these be commercial or constitutional or even merely capricious! <-- controversial (but true)

If I read this right then Smiley's people had to happen. I guess bad tv has to happen somehow.

I'm now reading the book, gentlemen. Thanks for the gentle shoving.

TV is a collage form
modernism is a collage form (hence etc)

the quality (or lack of it) of a given show considered in and of itself (including the "modernism" of a TV show if/when this applies, which isn't often but isn't never), which is to say any given element of the collage considered in and of itself, isn't a direct factor in the quality of the given collage form as a whole -- it depends how the collage element is being deployed (or "deployed", since this isn't an auteured decision really)

^^^think this mostly belongs on some other thread actually (which i then won't contribute to haha)

my guess is that jlc needed to write SP for reasons contained in TTSS: and that the TV "needed" to make SP-for-TV because of the success they had with TTSS-for-TV (ie among other things that it improves on the book); but that SP-for-TV -- while it tries to treat the new book exactly the way the earlier team treated the old book -- not only don't improve on the book, they massively amplify its weaknesses (which is because SP is a very different kind of book, despite superficial similarities, like same characters and same storyline)

(but will have to reread and rewatch to verify this guess)

back to liveblogging and SERIOUS SPOILERS FROM HERE ON IN, DO NOT READ IF YOU HATE THE ENDING GIVEN AWAY

as noted, the prideaux sections sees the backstory and the current story slide into consonant lock-step, which means that everything that follows derives its momentum from (i) waiting for that actual whodunnit reveal, and (ii) events and activity caused by the consonance of backstory and current story, and what it impels people to scurry about doing

so far so ho-hum, this is a spy thriller with a whodunnit theme -- the value if you like of what remains of the story is how (ii) can screw around with (i), to make it more than routine poiroteesque grandstanding, the brilliant detective explaining how everything fits and pointing the quiveringly melodramatic finger at hans redacted moleman

jlc does this very neatly, by moving the "explanation of how everything fits" early, to scare a suspect he appears already to have cleared into switching sides: i have to say despite close rereading i don't quite get why this particular suspect has been cleared, mind you -- which i think is a mark of jlc's own very cunning knot, whereby EVEN THOUGH SMILEY EXPLAINS HOW EVERYTHING FITS TOGETHER it doesn't make it much easier to go back and intricately re-examine any given plot point from the new perspective... because of course it's always a double-perspective, a hall-of-mirrors everything-pulled-inside-out-perspective, where such-and-such a cover-story as supplied by yr bosses in london (or moscow) is actually the REAL story

anyway, this particular scene features toby, who as i say is easily my favourite character: and one of the things i love is how smoothly he adjusts to this catastrophic new understanding, and switches sides: smiley's mastery of the story in more detail than most readers quite grasp -- meaning that we cede smiley and jlc an element of trust as to the precision, which we feel more than we apprehend -- is enough to turn toby; and -- even tho he's kind of victim of the scene, toby is actually granted a lot of professional respect, and not just for sleight-of-hand... it goes without saying that he's a mastercraftsman of lamplighting, babysitting, pavement artistry etc etc, whichever side he's being run by, or duped by. (Except not in fact "without saying": bcz it's relentlessly acknowledged and stressed.)

There's a term used in Smiley's People -- by toby descriptively of smiley's tactics after a certain point -- which it claims is untranslateable, and then translates faintly dodgily. It's from German military phraseology: flucht nach vorn -- and literally means "flight to the front", but in military context means something more like "escape via the Front", ie a defence against attack that consists itself of unexpected attack. But it also has more than a smidge of "leap into the unknown", again as a tactic.

Anyway, that's relevant to this scene -- smiley is getting things going by making his completed theory an engine of events -- but with the proviso (not yet filled in with clarity) that someone/something else is also active in this unknown. We've had as many hints -- just as we have with the actual identity of the mole -- but they're still masked, at least to careless and semi-careful reading. The giveaway is a single word.