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

final tranche of liveblogging! as before SERIOUS SPOILERS FROM HERE ON IN, DO NOT READ IF YOU HATE THE ENDING GIVEN AWAY; also, tl;dr

So now -- at quite a lick -- we pass towards turning the molerunning system against itself to unmasking denouement to aftermath, as the events set running by the coming into consonance of the backstory and the present-times narrative intrude on smiley's intended conclusion

waiting in the safehouse for it all to kick off is good strong anticipatory mood-music -- including a nice turnabout scene where mendel watches the actual circus itself from across the road at cambridge circus (i once spent 20 minutes wandering around there trying to decide which building he can have been watching from, as he needs simultaneously to be able to see the circus itself, including the roofs above and behind the pepperpot tower over new compton street AND the theatre)

the unmasking that follows is a pretty effective portrayal of anti-climax; serious as the implications are, the action itself is borderline farce, powerful men reduced to flapping nobodies, petulant or stunned or totally withdrawn or (in p****'s case) apparently just clueless. except for t***, the secondary suspects -- who turn out just to be dupes -- were never fleshed out beyond cartoon level; b**** especially remains a cipher. And the actual real mole retreats into stoic bored passivity: this above all i suspect shapes the sense of anti-climax; he doesn't act like a villain, or protest innocence; he doesn't act like "himself" as we've watched him throughout the tale, so we're robbed of something, even if it's hardly clear what (perhaps routine poirotism)

smiley debriefs hans redacted moleman and discovers -- more or less nothing: turns out, denuded of the various stages the mole has fashioned for himself, there's nothing at the heart... the final russian doll turns out to be hollow: moleman gives a cliched political speech one day (jlc doesn't even bother giving it all, on the excuse that smiley isn't really listening -- treated as craft and deliberate style decision, you'd have to note that any mid-level brit stalinist on the stump in 1970, when there were still a LOT of them, could have given a less crappy account of the ideals moleman claims to be upholding; we also get to find out that his lovelife is mean and lame; that his paintings are no good any more; that's there's nothing there

(talking about moscow, smiley says that they won't humiliate great britain over this, because it's in their interests to allow their foes to seem worth taking on: so what does this observation say about smiley himself, and the lifefacts beneath the molereveal?) (i'm reasonably sure jlc is aware of this irony of course: indeed that it fits into his whol OH THE HUMANITY litany, which smiley tends to ventriloquise for him)

and then, in the last few pages, the basically horrid and squalid surprise conclusion: when Redacted B redacts Rredacted A: as i said (an age ago upthread) i saw the TV version before i read the book, so this was no kind of shock -- i'm doing my thin best to keep it at least a little spoiler-proofed just in case, because i'm interested in how it comes across to virgin readers (even though we are somewhat in CHRIST ON THE CROSS SPOILERS territory here).

Another very deliberate irony: a key consequence of this conclusion ensures that Redacted B loses moral high ground firmly established (over Smiley et al) as Smiley heard his tale earlier in the book. (The post-it note sentence here having been: "Why did he choose the same order for their names? Smiley wondered.") <-- ans = because they were more of a rigmarole than we at the time supposed; as now at last emerges... final very bitter irony; also final OH THE HUMANITY thumb-on-the-scale if this is an element yr allergic to...

Which it may well be: I don't want to belabour it, but my threefold reading of "method is morality" seems to me finally to hover over the characters we're encouraged at the end to be thinking of, and through: MOLEMAN obv, now forever an enigma; prideaux, broken and betrayed, and back at thursgood's, learning to forget; and smiley himself, also much betrayed (tho honestly ann's behaviour is NOT a parallel with moleman's if yr actually sane)... and of course, since all three are characters jlc has put a lot of time and love (and some hate) into, which is he saying is most him also? He far too obviously hopes smiley; he far too obviously fears moleman. And Prideaux is masked when visible; and most himself when not? Are novelists street agents or desk agents?

(he's a miner's son and the closest to a working-class contributor to the central

oops, i forgot to finish the footnote: as per discussion far far above, suspect SOLDIER is a miner's son who became an academic, and thus the closest to a non-middle-class contributor to the central tale

also forgot this:
HANS REDACTED MOLEMAN UNMASKED "also took it for granted that secret services were the only measure of a nation's political health, the only real expression of its subconscious." <-- actual quote on p306, 11 pages from close

So I was wrong, it's not JLC saying this, and nor is it his oft-times pained and sententious mouthpiece smiley, it's the defeated villain in his rambling foolishness. So does this mean JLC absolutely does NOT think this, and indeed thinks it ridiculous to think this? ah-hum: well that is the conundrum really... how much does JLC see himself in the villain as yearning wish fulfilment ("AT LEAST HE HAS A BELIEF SYSTEM!") and how much does he think the villain's ideology is would-be-ideology is absurd bad-artist self-delusion and no wonder he ends up defeated etc etc.

Of course we can all be right here, since a novel is not a maths problem: it doesn't have an "answer"

how much does he think the villain's ideology is would-be-ideology is absurd bad-artist self-delusion and no wonder he ends up defeated etc etc.

well, im pretty sure jlc-the-man isn't a communiss. but i think he probably agrees with gerald about 'the state of britain' today a little. the pigs-in-clover society, sucking up to the US -- that stuff.

the full half-carmody!

'a small town in germany' is really hard to fathom, politics-wise. one of the villains, karfeld, is a populist german nationalist politician, but i don't think jlc ever calls him a 'neo-nazi', and there's even some business about him wanting to make an alliance with the SU? in a totally non-communist way. many of his supporters are young people, though, and they don't seem to be particularly nazi neither. wonder if they relate to the hippies in 'smiley's people'.

tbf i don't think this is about politics-as-grand-narrative-ideology, it's about national and individual praxis: which the individuals and nations grab at labels for, of course, but what interests and concerns him is how people treat other people, not so much how they tribalise this <-- so far so wishywashy liberal maybe, hence his constant flagellation that he can't lay hold of an aggregate formulation, and conflcted envy of those who can

gerald's self-disclosure at the close is intentionally a chaotic unself-aware adolescent mess: even if gerald would describe himself as a marxist or whatever, JLC doesn't allow him the dignity of passing the description on to the reader...

found this quite interesting http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/11/jacqueline-durran-tinker-tailor-suits

lol/sigh @ sartorial spoilers

ha yes so sad to learn that ricky will wear a REDACTED jacket

moleskin jacket

been watching the tv version and i wonder if it doesn't really nail the most ingenious thing about the plot, which is

- they don't want tarr to come back and spill the beans, not bc they're in on the plot but bc the reality is also their 'cover story'

wait who is "they" in that sentence?

You know, them.

anyway i love love love the tv show but am still at maximum psychage for this weekend

they = three of them and alleline

well two of them and alleline, one of them IS actually in on the plot (unless it's alleline)

but yes, the ones not in on it think tarr's information will spills the beans in moscow central

and to be honest despite having read and reread the book a trillion times i only "understand" this fact, i don't really "get it": it makes my head sing

one of them IS actually in on the plot (unless it's alleline) or ALL OF THEM

have any of the brits read malcolm gladwell's essay on spies/intelligence?

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/10/100510crat_atlarge_gladwell

im generally not a gladwell fan but its an interesting piece that gets at some of what le carre does in TTSS and APS

i did not realise btw that paul greengrass cowrote spycatcher

via

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/55264000/jpg/_55264721_28-32.jpg
"A book called Spycatcher written by the former Assistant Director of MI5 Peter Wright, reveals intelligence secrets and is banned in the UK. Entrepreneurs get a ticket to Calais, a boxful of books and a pitch in the street."

Saw the film this morning. Very good in parts. Inevitably loses much of the book's essence - the revealing of the story through lengthy conversations disappears, of course. What's slightly irritating is that while this is fine when you go to, say, Ricki Tarr in Istanbul actually being in Istanbul, it's a bit jarring when Smiley says something, he gets a reply, and you (and he) are then left to infer the rest of it all ...

Also, opening scene in Budapest has passers by going into the metro. They are black. Does anyone know if Budapest had a sizable black population in 1973? It stuck me as a bit unlikely. And, as with all films set in the early 70s, the wigs are terrible.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/135000/images/_139152_peter_wright300.jpg

p.wright's tradecraft^^^ would give toby esterhase the horrors

has anyone actually read spycatcher? it's out of print afaict

it's on amazon for a penny (well, +p&p heh heh)

Peter Wright was mad, of course. Part of the Anglo wing that supported James Jesus Angleton's paranoid tendency in the CIA.

Wow, Chapman Pincher is still alive (he's 97) and still publishing (as of 2009)!

haha. i have a book by him. for a project like. unread. a long-fermenting project.

"suspected Harold Wilson of having been a Soviet agent"

wtf. what's the story there?

caek your local bookshop will probably give you a copy of spycatcher for free if you inquire pleasantly

caek, the story is that people who work for intelligence are many of them MASSIVE IDIOTS.

Nothing is more dispiriting hilarious than the gap between Le Carre's portrayal of the spy world, as full of tormented craftsmen of watchful intelligence (in all senses) and the actual oafish twerps and lunies that inhabit the service: how far distant do you have to be from common sense, the real world, actual history as it actually unfolded and etc to remain committed to the belief that Wilson was in the pay of the Soviets.

isn't that story backwards? i thought it was the case that wilson was convinced of a vastm subterraneanm & largely nonexistant mi5 conspiracy to discredit him

ctrl-h 'm' ','

people like bron waugh not entirely ironically kept that rumour going

xxp ha yes it sounds pretty much delusional cranky stuff rather than "truth is stranger than fiction" stuff

unfortunately my local bookshops all sell books in german but i will find it somewhere.

max ty for the nyer link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_conspiracy_theories

got his own wiki category

The vastness was mistaken, it was a small aggressive faction, and it was MI6 not MI5, but the fact of it was real. There's a pretty good book about it all by Robin Ramsey and Stephen Dorril called Smear!, also long out of print. Good source also for the general cluelessness of the intelligence services in relation to Northern Ireland in the late 60s and early 70s.

great sub head

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/01/ian-jack-chapman-pincher-fleet-street

it's from e p thompson, the urinal line

oh he says that

On the madness of a real spy, this is a good read by a good journalist:
http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Warrior-Angleton-Master-Hunter/dp/0671662732

caek i can send a copy if you want? i just found three in the back room + i am pretty sure there is a whole box of them somewhere

Much has been written about Harold Wilson and MI5, some of it wildly inaccurate. But as far as I am concerned, the story started with the premature death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963.

this man is a marvelous bibble.

Here's how the Wilson theory came about, from Philip Knightley's LRB review of the Mangold biog of Angleton:

In 1962 Angleton’s office family was joined by Anatoly Golitsyn, a KGB officer who had defected the previous year in Helsinki. The two men quickly formed a professional rapport. Golitsyn, a heavy Ukrainian, had hard-line views about the ruthlessness, single-mindedness and Machiavellian cunning of the KGB, against which the flabby Western intelligence agencies were doomed. These views coincided with those of Angleton and when Golitsyn eventually revealed the KGB’s master conspiracy plan, Angleton was all too ready to believe it.

There were two KGBs, Golitsyn said. The West was doing battle with the external one and thought it was coping. But there was another, deeper KGB which was running a long-term operation to destroy the West. The reasoning of the second KGB went as follows. It was useless to devote resources to detecting and catching Western spies sent against the Soviet Union. The West would simply send more. A much better way was to gain secret control of the West’s major intelligence service, the CIA, by recruiting moles among its officers and by sending false defectors. These false detectors could feed the CIA wrong information about the Soviet Union and the moles could report on how this information was being received. Gradually the CIA’s perception of reality could be distorted to suit Soviet aims and the CIA would, in effect, come under Moscow’s control. Once this happened, all the Western spies in the Soviet Union would be of no use whatsoever. The KGB would be running the intelligence world.

Golitsyn claimed that this operation was already under way and that Western intelligence was riddled with Soviet moles. He was too clever to claim that the limited access he’d had to KGB archives before he defected enabled him to name these traitors, but, he said, if allowed to look at the CIA’s files he would be able to identify suspicious characteristics which would point to possibly guilty men. Angleton was convinced, and over the years, thanks to Angleton’s influence in the Western intelligence community, Golitsyn saw the files of the CIA, Britain’s SIS and M15 and France’s SDECE and DST. It must be said that Golitsyn had some successes in providing clues that helped identify such spies as the Admiralty clerk William John Vassall; Georges Paques, a French officer in Nato; and Hugh Hambleton, a Canadian professor. But although he insisted that there must be moles in the CIA, he never found one. Instead, over the years, his list of suspects in the West became more and more outrageous. They included Harold Wilson, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, Armand Hammer, Averell Harriman, Lester Pearson and Henry Kissinger. They also included every Soviet defector who had come after him. These men had been sent, Golitsyn said, to discredit him because the KGB knew how dangerous he was to their master plan.

Karla's deployment of Golitsyn was masterly.

The vastness was mistaken, it was a small aggressive faction, and it was MI6 not MI5, but the fact of it was real. There's a pretty good book about it all by Robin Ramsey and Stephen Dorril called Smear!

Ramsay/Dorril a funny pair - I called up a stack of Lobster magazine from a library once - odd combination of slightly flakey mind-control cia stuff with super-detailed Clockwork Orange plot tracing, and odd analyses of 70s/80s policy. Wouldn't mind going through them again - & I keep meaning to read books by one or the other of them.

oh, just ordered Knightley's The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist and Whore. Looked like it might be interesting.

one of the Lobster guys used to be Hull-based iirc - never sure how much was brilliant investigative reporting and how much was internal psycho-geography at its furthest out