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

For ilplexers, i got the seven part TTSS up and recognised

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ly0nx

amazing interview with George Blake here, his faux-niaf insistence that he was assured by the MGB and believed no harm would come to MI6 ops he gave up to the Soviets is quite amusingly beyond belief!

just saw the alfredson movie yesterday-- read the book a few weeks ago, just after le carre died (just before he died i read TSWCIFTC). in the usual mania i also just rewatched the miniseries, which i can be seen years upthread making some completely uninteresting remarks about. (you can get a pixelated 7-episode version without much hassle from the internet archive btw.)

was extremely impressed by the movie adaptation's level of compression but one does miss, well, all of the dialogue, which it rightly recognizes it must jettison more or less completely and replace with Cinema. thus oldman despite playing the same character as guinness and despite doing a guinness impression is playing a completely different part, leaving to inscrutable silence and the apparatus of the movies what the book and series use smiley's long elliptical superficially good-natured conversations to portray. (also-- and this is not really a "procedural" so it's okay-- p much all of the clues and files and details we are privy to alongside smiley in the other versions are replaced in the movie by a single recorded line played over and over, like in the conversation, until smiley is suddenly like omg!!-- but it is admittedly a thematically resonant line, on a number of levels.) a v good movie tho i think. the only things i really disliked were the wyndam-earle-ass chess pieces.

this is a wonderful thread obv. some tentative jabber for the pile, every word a spoiler but with direct mole-identity stuff hidden:

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

i think? the answer to this?? or part of it??? is that he has identified esterhase as polyakov's fake agent-- the person the circus thinks moscow thinks is the mole-- and thus assumes the real mole is someone else. but i'm not sure how he figures that out, unless it's just a hunch based on his old colleagues' various wheelhouses. on the "flight-to-the-front" tip this may as u say simply be his one big moment of risk. his most haydenesque moment if you like: the solo initiative. veryyyyyyyy dashing. very audacious. exactly the kind of reckless action prideaux (thinking of bill?) miserably discovers there is no chance of convincing his russian interrogators he took.

anyway, a constant motif i like is english magic: witchcraft. merlin. “don’t go fey, george.” “he’s built by the same firm that did stonehenge.” think it connects to the empire stuff: the dream of power someone like alleline wants to revive, a dream that’s also of personal glory, aristocratic rapture. “well, he’s already got his own wizard; the odd commissionaire seems modest enough domestic staff.” (can't remember if this one is in the book but it's a good richardson delivery. domestic staff!)

in this context you might wonder if smiley the alleged anti-bond isn't as much a piece of self-inserted authorial wish-fulfillment as 007, only rather than a fantasy of unsunset empire he's an incarnation of the consolatory virtues-- wisdom, patience, historical consciousness-- with which a greek nurses his ego under rome. but this is neatly (inevitably!) complicated because these are reader-virtues, not author-virtues, and smiley in this story is actually a reader-substitute-- the reader's best self, the most attentive, the quickest to draw associations, reliable with quotes ("proud of your memory, aren't you?")-- and not an author at all. even when (as above) he acts, it is in the service of a closer reading.

the author-figures are karla and gerald. like smiley they keenly understand motivation and character; unlike smiley they use them to create something. "it would be beautiful in another context," smiley says of the big secret-- this is meta-authorial selfpraise. karla is a distant and abstracted character-- practically the cartesian demon-- but gerald has shades of iago: he may have begun his work for any number of venal reasons, but by the time he is done the only motive sufficient to explain the achievement is perverted creativity. admiring the painting with which ann apologized for sleeping with him: "this is new, isn't it? oh, i fancy this." yet (again like iago-- who at least does everything himself) he is also a pathetic figure: he has poured out all his genius into the construction of this pointless betrayal. when the play he has starred in is over there is no him left. his actual art, like his life, has been emptied. he has perceived and manipulated impotence in others (smiley, control, alleline, britain) in a futile effort to escape it himself. now finally: "you don't break, exactly," prideaux tells smiley about torture, or is it age; "you just run out of stories to tell."

so much for gerald and the false promise of glory-thru-art, but the story hardly suggests reading will save you. there is some talk upthread about whether the movie ending is "triumphant". mark s partly nailed it i think--

justification of "now i am here and i have no idea if i wanted that" in mise-en-scene terms: given his known tastes in decor and etc (which we know from seeing the tasteful olden-times interiors of his house), he is sat in front of that screamingly 70s orange wallpaper, less swallowed and obscured (his favoured state) than horribly exposed

--except it's not wallpaper. it is soundproof baffling. this comes v close on the heels of prideaux harry-and-the-hendersonsing bill roach, the pupal smiley, out of his trailer. he tells him to "join the others". it's this line that was on my mind as a seemingly triumphant hero was re-sealed into a featureless hermetic cell, back inside the empty center of everything.

you can rightly say, but dissonant counterthemes aside the emotional structure of the movie is very plain: at the beginning a man is cuckolded and fired and at the end his wife comes back and he sits in the big chair. (the final sequence and the opening credits are practically mirror images. cinema!) but the entire mechanism of the story-- the trick-- is: facts that appear to mean one thing actually mean the opposite. ("all the facts are known," esterhase keeps saying, accurately; he has the same problem as the man codenamed lapin, who doesn't know it means rabbit.) as this truth is presumably much on smiley's mind it's not far-fetched to imagine that his final pre-credits thought as all the witchcraft of cinema colludes around him to convey YOU HAVE WON is "have i lost?"-- or maybe something more like the little not-in-the-movie exchange between the awful school principal and his mother: "well, that's one excuse for absence he can't use again." "not at all, mother! it's quite the reverse!"

oh and i like that the first words of the book are the truth is... and the last words are ...a dream

Beautiful post

Really enjoyed those posts yeah

In the miniseries george can probably deduce esterhase as running boy (but not clear him of *knowledge* of betrayal) based on the change in tone overnight to jerry westerby's story- showed that the former was a follower

Esterhase name comes up again as knowing control's tinker/tailor codenames after speaking to prideaux- nothing concrete here except it would appear to 100% confirm esterhase is at least in line of receipt of info from karla

At that stage its maybe just a case of having more power to coerce toby in getting the safe house location

The Curiously Specific Bookclub podcast does Tinker, Tailor: https://curiouslyspecific.com/2021/04/30/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy/

(It's a podcast that tracks and visits geographical places in various literary texts.)

bbc4 re-showing the original series starting on saturday

nice. My torrented copy of it died with last hard drive.

Excellent!

Reading The Honourable Schoolboy for the first time, the energetic tone is a bit of a surprise vs. TTSP or The Spy Who Came In... - upthread description as a Boy's Own adventure seems OTM.

Well well well if it isn’t a long essay I wrote about the marriage of George and Ann Smiley simply because Brandy requested it https://t.co/Ywdfpf4BxN

— Rosa Lyster (@rosalyster) August 23, 2021

I liked that

Is the Secret Pilgrim good? I've never gone later than Smiley's People with Le Carre.

perfect spy is better imo, but is not a smiley book.

I enjoyed the Brandy Jensen article. I wonder where masochism fits into the picture with Smiley - his relationship with Ann, foremost, but also his job, serving the sadistic mother of the state. Though it's hard to say exactly where Smiley's jouissance is ever apparent. Nina Coltart said that one aspect of masochism is 'making the best of a bad job', which seems to fit with Smiley's deep-set melancholia.

Jaded sense of duty fits better than masochism, i think?

I was listening to a Kim Philby anecdote read from the Alan Bennett diaries the other day. A female acquaintance sees Philby trying it on with a young woman on the couch at some exclusive members club. Then 10 minutes later she notices him on the same couch trying it on with a young guy and catches eyes with him and admonishes him with "Kim, you are so fickle". He replies " Well fortunately my dear, often a bit of fickle leads to a fuckle".

Yeah I get no masochism in Smiley because no pleasure - just duty as a structure in a meaningless world

I think jouissance is more complicated than being merely about pleasure. One question implicit in that article is why does Smiley keep coming back? If one way of framing masochism is commitment to the Other's enjoyment then that seems at least one way of explaining Smiley's sense of duty in all of his relationships - beyond mere automated behaviour.

No that's fair but I don't think JLC gets jouissance at all and for me Smiley has always been old, tired, maybe his pictures and literature are a passion but he's super jaded and clings to the least worst philosophy he can imagine

Le Carre tries very hard to elide most of the gayness out of the Cambridge spy ring

Hahaha, yes. And agree that Smiley seems like a character born old and enervated. He might as well be a flag-bearer for Paul Gilroy's post-colonial melancholia.

Still love this book obv

JLC is always so entirely at sea outside purely european affect that i can't see smiley intersecting with any of gilroy's actual concerns

i mean yes he can sketch an unbearably hot interrogation cell in delhi but if we stepped momentarily outside the prison the disbelief wd instantly stop suspending

(also the anne piece isn't actually by brandy jensen, she commissioned it) (i continue to think the anne stuff just doesn't work)

(viz the piece is a brave attempt at rescuing JLC's competence w/a woman character but it doesn't convince me)

I am finally watching TTSS for the first time ever.

I read the book a very long time ago so I'm finding it difficult keeping everyone's names and surnames straight.

I'm enjoying how mostly it's about office politics.

the TV series or the film?

tv!

when i was wincing about the terrible writing in Blake's 7 the other night i thought "maybe all Brit TV writing was rubbish back in the 70s" but then I remembered TTSS and thought "naaaah there's no excuse"

Liveblog pls

The seven or the six part version?

Ive the former on plex fyi

I don’t know actually, I’m still on Disc 1 (ep 4). Total running time “315 minutes approx” apparently. Comes with a doc called The Secret Centre.

Is your plex, uh, “open for business” deems?

Yep its my ilxname

tracer thinks he's downloading material from deems but in reality deems is now downloading far more valuable material from tracer

anyone read silverview yet?

tinker tailor soldier spy if it was adapted today pic.twitter.com/mngv3KRIjB

— the banks are out of money (@mrgracemugabe) July 26, 2020

🧵Meet Maria Adela Kuhfeldt Rivera, widow, jeweller, and socialite. The love child of a German father and a Peruvian mother, born in Callao, Peru, and abandoned in Moscow by her mother during the 1980 Olympic Games. pic.twitter.com/wHo6qSmKik

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) August 26, 2022

The investigation had blown the lid on a glaring hole in the GRU’s tradecraft: for nearly a decade, the GRU had furnished their spies with consecutively numbered passports, allowing investigative journalists to uncover other spies by simply tracing such batches of numbers. pic.twitter.com/kbPI3E06mi

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) August 26, 2022

https://static.simpsonswiki.com/images/thumb/c/c3/D%27oh.jpg/200px-D%27oh.jpg

pareene barely tweeting any longer is depriving us all

(rally Trump voice) And they're very unfair to me at the Circus (boos). No good at the Circus. George SMILEY. Slimy Smiley. (boos intensify) Ann is a very lovely woman of course

— 'Weird Alex' Pareene (@pareene) October 12, 2022

lmao

Young guy at work just watched this for the first time and was raving about it.

'love to ann'

Slimy Smiley lets his cousin cuckold him. We don't like cuckolds do we folks?

Failing NY Times keeps falsely reporting about the KARLA COLLUSION HOAX, my meetings with Karla have been perfect and wonderful, nobody can find anything wrong with them

https://theap.substack.com/p/the-honourable-schoolboy

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/john-le-carres-search-for-a-vocation

an awful lot of footage of middle-aged men smoking in dingey rooms.

― 'virgin' should be 'wizard' (GamalielRatsey), Friday, 20 November 2009 19:00 (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

i rewatched TTSS (1979, tv version) over the last two nights and this was my takeaway also (added comment: some superbly cut suits also)

is the duncan jones who plays bill "jumbo" roach bowie's kid? nowhere i googled said no so i choose to believe yes. almost everyone except @sirpatstew has now left the building so karla wins again IMO (exceptions: guillam, lady ann and JOSS ACKLAND at a sprightly 95)

odd seeing london captured at the moment i first arrived in it, a world and time away: cambridge circus in particular somewhat changed (mostly apparently filmed from a high window in the palace theatre and NOT imo the building that i believe le carré had in mind: obscured by trees but i believe the "pepperpot tower" which housed control's lair is in the top right of this image )

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

― mark s, Saturday, 10 September 2011 17:46 (eleven years ago) bookmarkflaglink

^^^me 11 years ago (discussing the book)

well the TV show tidies this issue up extremely neatly in the westerby section btw -- i'd have to check if it follows the book here (quite likely, which means i missed it in my ilx-blogged deepread) (also quite likely): it's evident in toby's sharply shifting reaction to westerby's info (one day pleased, the next day fake-furious) that he's not fully in the loop and thus cannot be the mole lol what else did you think i'd be hiding

yes i think my last tv series watch slotted that into place for me- that person's positioning as the errand boy gave a view of them as out of that loop