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

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

halfway thru my rewatch of SMILEY'S PEOPLE (1982)

i stick by my judgment (based mainly on the book tho i have watched the TV version also) that the project is basically an exercise in wish fulfilment (le carré's on behalf of smiley) and that this makes it a lesser proposition as a novel and as "art"… BUT there's something extremely beguiling and unusual abt the visual journey we take, not just across the class spectum of london, from baywater to hampstead heath to wherever it is willem lives (they say but i forgot), but simiiarly contrasting reaches of germany, france and switzerland (fancy and bleak, urban and rurual), including many travelling shots along various autobahns and autoroutes and funny little lanes, plus whichever ferry it is that willem shows the oranges to otto on. the oddest scene is the hippy-punk encampment by the lake, which is like something out of cormac mccarthy lol. agent max meets mad max in a liminal nowhere between the two germanys ("ours" and "theirs"). and it's full of the language of magic -- a character is called the magician, the sandman is making a legend for a girl…

it's not exactly picaresque -- bcz the quest is extremely focused and rigorous -- but it is somehow very dreamlike, as a nostalgia for what pynchon once called "the zone" (that space where the routine post-war rules and bureaucracies had not yet returned to enforce themselves), except this zone is perhaps smiley's own when young, a british agent speaking german secretly at large in occupied europe during the war, at once constrained by all manner of terrors and utterly (existentially) free, free to make his own context. the others keep anxiously repeating his own words back at him: when the whistle blows go home, never dabble in unfinished business post-retirement, yet here he is in a pitiless scrunched-up ecstasy of breaking that rule and many others. and bernard hepton as toby esterhase is just a joy alongside him, just so happy to see it all working so perfectly (again: wish fulfilment) and to be so fully part of it himself… he's loving it!

yeah

both series do such a good job of capturing a world that is just completely gone now, it's almost like visiting an alien planet

rereading it while on my hols and i think you could spend the rest of your life iterating across series, book and movie and enhancing yr comprehension/appreciation of the plotting and little dances that are going on at each stage - i cannot think of a work that seems to me so organic across interpretations in this fashion but this may be a personal experience

look

there's no chance- none at all?- that karla hooks smiley to delhi?

none at all?

Is it unique in the density of possible interpretation?

I doubt that

Is it great because of the way it refuses to give you a clear-cut interpretation?

Yeah for sure definitely

tbf he could probaby just buy a lighter in moscow

too capitalism

the other fundamentally unclear question is whether anne has info on haydon, the nature of some of her conversations with smiley are pretty unclear on exactly what is and isnt being said

this i definitely agree with (she doesn't really care about all the boys and their spy games)

"is he better at spying than you, georgie boy?" is one of the weirdest moments

george smoothing his chest like a proud donald duck

quiet vanity is maybe the one attribute i'd comfortably attribute to Smiley

Prideaux's stab of "Proud of your memory, aren't you?"

The TTSS TV people are supposed to be adapting the Fractured Europe books, curious how that will turn out

The TTSS people are still alive?

they still love england

"is he better at spying than you, georgie boy?" is one of the weirdest moments

george smoothing his chest like a proud donald duck