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

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.

found this while trying to find the source for the philip roth quote that perfect spy is the greatest english novel since the war https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/specials/lecarre-perfect.html.

i like this bit:

Mr. le Carré's model is Charles Dickens. He has skipped over John Buchan, W. Somerset Maugham, Wilkie Collins et al. and gone to the master, who died writing ''The Mystery of Edwin Drood.'' (A sad piece of work that would doubtless have been even sadder had it been finished.) ''A Perfect Spy'' has names like Jack Brotherhood (a true-blue Brit), Sir Makepeace Watermaster (a cleric), Syd Lemon (a cockney), Mr. Willow (a schoolmaster) and Pym himself, described in a line of dialogue by Magnus as ''Pym. Like Pip.'' Mr. le Carré is exceptionally good at creating vivid minor characters, laying false trails, spiraling the narrative instead of setting it out in a sort of linear step one, step two fashion, and at playing with the tension of withheld information, techniques we associate with Dickens. He knows how to drop an ambiguous word or phrase into the narrative as a sort of code word, or key, with which to illuminate subsequent action - ''Poppy'' in ''A Perfect Spy,'' ''Recalled to life'' in ''A Tale of Two Cities.'' It's a credit to both writers that these technical devices can travel so far and still work so well, particularly since, at bottom, the writers have such different preoccupations.

I finished the book last night and started the mini-series. I feel mired in the exhaustion of it all - the end of Empire, Smiley's fatigue, the fact that barely anyone actually bloody sleeps. The final scene of the book is I guess sort of hopeful (where is Immingham?), but if anything it made me think of Watertown.

This is very much by the by but I picked up on a few references to Jekyll and Hyde (it's directly referenced early on; a character is called Poole [like Jekyll's butler] and there was something else later on); I wondered if it was a nod to the weight of carrying secrets and secret desires around, and the impact it has on the psyche (soul, in Stevenson's cosmology). Something about Prideaux digging in the dark was profoundly Hydean as well. Anyway, what a book.

isn't poole in fact smiley's pseud? (maybe not, i shd not trust my perfect memory of this book that i've read 209387987 times)

Ah, I think you're right. Googling doesn't help - just brings up that Cornwell was born in Poole, which...

when i walk down to the pier i can see Immingham on a good day

isn't poole in fact smiley's pseud? (maybe not, i shd not trust my perfect memory of this book that i've read 209387987 times)

in the book Alleline says “like the harbour” (appropriate for his naval background), but in the series the joke is made more explicit and he spells it out leading to an amusing “oh for god’s sake” expression from bill haydon.

nothing disorientated me more in the film than the toby jonesification of alleline

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2A2g-qRIaU

loved the film when it came out, i started watching the miniseries bc of this thread and darraghmac is v otm upthread with "the richness is almost too much in real time". I have to actively fight the urge not to stop and watch every scene twice to absorb every little bit of everything.

Yep!

I'm already looking FWD to a boozy, pud-filled resitting Xmas week

First ep of smiley's people this eve

Very different beast, but very good tbh, better than i remembered

Cant recall, but somebody here no doubt will, whether lecarre has said when it was that he started to write smiley-as-guinness, and if it couldve been early enough to affect smiley's people or not (i think hardly, there cant be much room for overlap chronologically)

Smiley of BBC SP is a clean, sharp and alert looking hound i must say. Even granting that this tale is not at all alike to TTSS in character (despite having surface similarities) im not sure that george in the SP novel has any of this reinvigorated air.

The series, two episodes deep now, is good though- better than i had remembered, more of (if not completely, ofc) a straight detective story but pieced together with care, and performances are again very rich.

Guinness, and i cant help feel the change is in smiley here, tbh, as well as having bering to a spa and a gentlemans outfitter) isnt as good, i think. Perhaps theres not the same quality of stuff to *react* to in this one, his best work in TTSS is generallyy when others are speaking.

When he and michael gough are fencing after the generals death i couldnt shake the persistent thought that they were one half already of an excellent wind in the willows cast

Otto leipzig is extraordinary, absolutely thieving the camera in every shot and motion.

a perfect spy is an odd book, although at the same time it does what it says in the title, bringing together in extremis a set of characteristics that go to make up the perfect spy, and then looks at the psychology and background which might create that being ('too perfect' is of course the implication). i do remember feeling it was slow moving when i picked it up many years ago, but that it came together to quite a compelling pitch of intensity. i'd *probably* still hold to that, while dialling up the slow-moving and the 'compelling' down a bit.

it's interesting that the dominant paternal figure is called Rick/Rickie, who comes out of a Baptist family. as with Ricky Tarr there is a relationship between a father figure, and loosely held, but intensely felt relationship to religion. Rickie is both an impossible figure of wild caricature - a gloriously successful spiv and crook, who spends all his time defrauding people with 'Faith,' the government, post-war widows etc, seen through the worshipping eyes of his son. and it's difficult in some respects to know whether this figure is also providing an insight to pre and post-war society, which i'm sure le carre is equipped to do, but Rickie's enormousness, his grandiose and repeated successes and failures seem too implausible. too much a function of the child's mind to perform that role maybe. i genuinely don't know whether there were examples of Rickie, at that level of repeated success, in post-war society, so maybe he's based on a real person or type.

Just seen that Le Carré has died. I wasn't a huge fan until relatively recently but I used to go on holiday in Sennen every year and would sometimes walk into St Buryan, hoping for a glimpse but nowt. RIP.

Was just coming here to break the news that yer man has died.

ah man RIP. a hard writer to love, and oddly variable, given that one of the hallmarks of his *good* writing is a high level of competence, and the first part of The Honorable Schoolboy is very bad as i found out to my cost the other week. But he had a great knack of catching class, and the cadences of speech, and types, and shabbiness. and organising his world. Smiley via Guinness is a great creation.

reading about le carré’s father in the obits i get the more or less obvious answer that rickie in the perfect spy was indeed based on a real person.

I've never read him and don't do much fiction these days, but I loved both BBC adaptations and have read books on the Cambridge crew and Maclean etc.. anyway I've found an 11 gb audiobook complete works of Le Carre just so it's an option.

Nice

RIP, when he was good he was very, very good

Caught his "evening with" live filmed event in the cinema last year and he was very impressively with it, didnt expect this news for some years yet

not that I'm encouraging anyone to do anything naughty, but this Le Carre torrent that I couldn't possibly link here from au*iobo*kbay.nl has lots of unique hard to find content on it like lots of his radio plays and lots of video interviews as well etc.

RIP big man.

fizzles, re: rickie

S.L. David, you’ve spoken about your childhood, your outrageously criminal father, how you were sent to boarding school when you were 5, the lies that permeated everything. How did all this come to play when you were recruited by MI5?

J.L.C. The truth, in my childhood, didn’t really exist. That is to say, we shared the lies. To run the household with no money required a lot of serious lying to the local garage man, the local butcher, the local everybody. And then there was the extra element of class. All my grandparents and all my aunts and uncles were entirely working class — laborers, builders, that sort of thing. One of them worked up telegraph poles. And so out of that to invent, as my father did, this socially adept, well-spoken, charming chap — that was an operation of great complicity. And I had to lie about my parental situation while I was at boarding school. I only mention these things because they’re the extremes of what can warp an Englishman.

B.M. What you’ve just described — is it the root of your fiction? Your ability to think yourself into someone else?

J.L.C. Absolutely. I mean childhood, at my age, is no excuse for anything. But it is a fact that my childhood was aberrant and peculiar and nomadic and absolutely unpredictable. So if I was in boarding school, I didn’t know where I would be spending the holidays. If my father said he was going to come and take me out, it was as likely as not that he wouldn’t show up. I would say to the other boys, I had a wonderful day out, when I had really been sitting in a field somewhere.

(from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/books/review/john-le-carre-ben-macintyre-british-spy-thrillers.html)

lol I just heard the old nugget that George Smiley "was also played by Alec Guinness" on radio 4

that's why they earn the big bucks