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

from memory the book (in the book) is left at the shop bcz he doesn't want to be carrying it round and after he meets and drinks with martindale he's crossly too late to pick it up as he meant to and is instead going to call them and ask for it to be posted?

this sounds slightly different to the tv version

grimmelshausen is an interesting hinted if unexpanded glimpse into his mind (le carre was also a germanist and presumably knows it as a consequence)): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplicius_Simplicissimus

Love this line in the first smiley chapter describing his reaction to something foolish martindale says:

“The monstrosity of this, reaching Smiley through a thickening wall of spiritual exhaustion, left him momentarily speechless.”

In the TV show he spots Guillam, says to the bookseller "do you know I rather think that we might trust this to the royal mail, after all" and asks for a back entrance

It's worth pondering because a piece of this quality is simply fun and rich enough to ponder

Episode V

This time around, having read THS, Ackland really packs in all the Westerby detail and tics, it's a lovely little role and a lovely performance in it

Esterhase interrogation is far better in this, obviously, a real catharsis and Hepton hits all his spots very nicely too

Ackland’s performance really is something else. that compelling mixture you get in the book - both vivid social/class type and person. le carré v good at snobbery (and its victims like westerby).

A victim of his lack of aggression as opposed to his status, as performed here I think

But perhaps I'm missing things here, I thought he was quite posh but shamblingly, disappointingly so as I recall him in THS- is he meant to be a cut below the top dogs in the circus classwise here?

Again, how much of this is stewed versions coming together as projection or how much is deliberate subtext agreed between director and actors is possibly moot, but Esterhase was the wrong person, as far as the TV version has it, to send back to Jerry to squash his Czech report.

Fits with his being (as suggested by Smiley) the lapdog inclusion in the gang of four Witchcraft privileged, the one useful for errands, the one most eager, but certainly Ackland's Westerby bridles at being savaged by this clotheaten specimen- driving him to write the letter to Smiley

The second-best moment of actual direction so far- the camera remaining at the bar when Jerry and George sneak off into the corner to conspire

"clotheaten" not right, tbf, but not the stuff of any of the other title pieces certainly

A victim of his lack of aggression

yes absolutely. it's not a class thing, but an *in-class* thing.

Tbh I've watched one each night the past five nights and

i. everything bar the most recent has already faded back into the roiling, bubbling mix of novel/film/series

ii. not unrelated, I could watch those first four starting right now again and enjoy them as much and, I think, see different things in them than I did last week

the richness is almost too much in real time

i played them last night because i couldn't sleep.

incidentally, just on this bloody book. i'd forgotten that in the novel, Smiley, irritated at Ann's spending, decides to *sell* his copy of Grimmelshausen at the bookseller. he bumps into Martingdale before he gets there, and leaves the Grimmelshausen at the club, the realisation of which later causes him, after a bout of peevish muttering, to burst out sopra voce 'oh damn, damn, damn' in the street. in the series, this is completely detached from any cause, other than an overplus of sadness, frustration, self-loathing, irritation, age and boredom.

one thing regularly seen in the series, and can now be considered historical documentary evidence - the easy camaraderie of cigarettes.

Ah we've only bloody been watching the six episode version ffs

Have to do the full one again after christmas

wait what do you mean “the full one”?

Int the UK miniseries 7 eps?

the original UK version is 7 eps, the us version is 6 eps (i guess to fit US schedules? #whoknow)

ah right. is it cut or are the episodes just edited to different lengths?

maybe they leave it as a cliffhanger

lol

In the United States, syndicated broadcasts and DVD releases compress the seven UK episodes into six, by shortening scenes and altering the narrative sequence.

i had no idea. good excuse to watch it again tho.

Yep the new year week I reckon we'll do it all over again.

Interesting to spot what changes were made and then speculate as to why smiley allowed them

Fuck me I've only seen the six ep version and I didnt know anything else existed

tbf it's just another hour of clips of alec guinness polishing his glasses

Can never get enough of that.

I've also only ever seen the 6 episode version. Now I feel like I didn't truly understand it.

I have very distinct memories of my parents watching this when I was little. I recall being very disturbed when I caught the scene where the kid spies Jim changing and sees those bullet wounds.

if prideaux doesn't cream a flaming owl with a quidditch bat who can say this even makes sense

Is it true that all the scenes that were cut from the US version took place at Hogwarts?

karldemort

have been going through the book again:

They reached what seemed to be a hamlet but there were no lights, no people and no moon. As they got out the cold hit them and Guillam smelt a cricket field and woodsmoke and Christmas all at once;

my first impression was that this just doesn’t work; how can you smell a cricket field at midnight in winter? a space, a smell and a festival all in one. but i do know what he means, you’re smelling the atmosphere of a place. you can smell a cricket field because the pressure of cold and and damp and air is different when you pass near the flat, mown surfaces of a cricket field. and i don’t think that christmas here means mulled wine, dried fruits, pine and cinnamon but more that recurring rhythm of the time of year (“tis the year’s midnight and it is the day’s” to quote for another festival) creating a memorial sense of christmas in the blood.

let's lanch this fvcker

The smell of cricket, formula

(Smell of life) - (smell of sex)

let's lanch this fvcker

― mark s, Sunday, 29 November 2020 12:17 bookmarkflaglink

it's iNteRsTIng because one of the things about le carré is how good he is at managing his material environment, a thing at which lancho is very bad. and there are fairly regular points through his early novels especially, where in doing so he seems to capture some shabby-poetic essence of England (and England specifically), which is presumably required in some sense to create as a background flavour that sense of a fading of empire and the class of people to whom that empire belonged. I can never quite decide whether le carré is a good writer, a very good writer, or a very competent one, but that ability is definitely in the 'very good' category, as is his portrayal of class, and his ability to manage the drama of information stored in plain buff files and how that information intersects with people's lives and feelings.

the honourable schoolboy, which i've just started, having only read once before as a teenage, and *eventually* liked, starts very badly though, and his more recent novels are just barely ok imo.

What always fascinates me about Le Carré is the way his stories are primarily told in flashback. There's very little present-day action, it's always the after-action report, the sweeping-up, which gives it all an overwhelming sense of futility and is thoroughly unromantic, too, a direct counterweight to the romanticism of the typical "spy novel" where One Man is going to Save The World. The world is not going to be saved in a Le Carré novel. The main emotional note is "Well, that could have been a lot worse." Which is probably part of what makes his books so attractive to middle-aged men, at least subconsciously if not consciously — the feeling that it all went wrong a while ago and there's nothing really to be done now, but at least you can see clearly what happened.

Which is probably part of what makes his books so attractive to middle-aged men, at least subconsciously if not consciously — the feeling that it all went wrong a while ago and there's nothing really to be done now, but at least you can see clearly what happened.

oof. brutally otm

I'm 48 and didn't start reading Le Carré until about five years ago, so...I speak from experience.

Lol excellent points imo

Watched the movie last night, suffers *badly* in such proximity to even-the-yank miniseries

I think lecarre is a good writer of his own experience and that experience he can understand- and he earns a lot of points here for having a very interesting breadth here.

He's very good in what fizzles describes above, establishment-of-establishment, almost

Dreadful on women, almost impossible to imagining him writing anything about actual youth as opposed to missed-opportunity youth nostalgically.

The cynical but personal pov is still one worth defending I think

it's absolutely thru the wayback-machine scrim but JLC can do "youth" after a fashion (aka long-ago pastiche youth, to be mildly cruel abt it)

(quote my own detailed read way upthread to save time):

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.

…

― mark s, Friday, 9 September 2011 11:30 (nine years ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^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)

― mark s, Friday, 9 September 2011 11:44 (nine years ago) bookmarkflaglink

"(nine years ago)"

ffs

Yes I read those good not bad posts and the thread entire during this week, tho I've not (yet) moved on to a re-read of the book tbf

have only read The Honourable Schoolboy once as an adult and might well reread it soon too, but my default take is it's far and away the weakest of the Karla Trilogy and uncomfortably close to Boys Own territory at times - tho it occurs to me this might be part of the point that i overlooked on first reading it.

I read it after having gone through all discussion on this thread, watching/reading TTSS and watching Smiley's People and although there's parts that dont work brilliantly there's also certainly elements that the writer is casting a cold eye on rather than inviting us to gad along approvingly

i very much dislike the honourable schoolboy but to be honest i really only much like spy came in from the cold and TTSS, plus smiley's ppl once you recognise it's pure compensatory fantasy (tho in its favour it has lots of excellent toby action)

I think lecarre is a good writer of his own experience and that experience he can understand- and he earns a lot of points here for having a very interesting breadth here.

it's impossible to imagine a book like A Perfect Spy being written by someone who is not themselves an English person who has traveled throughout German-speaking Europe and Mitteleuropa.

this is kind of "why don't the eagles just take them straight to the volcano", but on my last reread i wondered: why don't they just set up the crash meeting to flush out hayden at the camden lock house as soon as they find out it exists (about 1/5 of the way through the book)?

Smiley hasn't worked out how the safe house allows Gerald and his handler to operate at that point?

one does not simply WALK into camden lock!

right but there's tons he doesn't know when he eventually sets it up (including who gerald is!) xp

it's impossible to imagine a book like A Perfect Spy

fuck it was the perfect spy i read as a teenager and ended up enjoying not the honourable schoolboy, which is remaining more or less bad (less bad in fact - the first few chapters are truly execrable).

this is kind of "why don't the eagles just take them straight to the volcano", but on my last reread i wondered: why don't they just set up the crash meeting to flush out hayden at the camden lock house as soon as they find out it exists (about 1/5 of the way through the book)?

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Monday, 30 November 2020 17:21 bookmarkflaglink

I also wondered this. but if they crashed it when one of the *others* (there are three of them, and alleline) was there, then they would be none the wiser.