My memory tells me it happened like this: I was watching TV; it was 1979. The programme was a new drama serial, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, about the search for a mole in the British secret service – and if “mole” was a part of my vocabulary then, it would have been from reading about this very programme. My parents were in their usual chairs. I can’t remember who else was in the room, or whether it was a weeknight, or what time of year it was, but I do remember that during the opening scene we watched the characters assemble for a meeting. One – who would turn out to be Bill Haydon, as played by Ian Richardson – entered carrying a cup of tea, on top of which he’d balanced a saucer, to prevent spillage. “That’s a strange way of carrying his tea”, my dad said. “I bet he’s the traitor.”
Memory also tells me that by the time the second part of the drama was screened I had read the novel, and knew who the mole was, and if an unconventional manner of carrying a cup and saucer wasn’t explicitly cited as indicative of treachery, it probably counted as circumstantial evidence. This was a world of nuance, after all. But knowing the ending spoilt nothing, and I stayed hooked throughout the ensuing weeks, soaking up the drama’s atmosphere, its muted palette, the grubby world of Le Carré’s Circus, so distantly removed from the glitzy shenanigans of James Bond. And when it was over, the books remained.I already had somewhere to put them. My teen years were when I compiled my mental library, without knowing that’s what I was doing. I still carry it everywhere – it puts my seldom-used Kindle to shame – and if its shelves are loaded with titles I’ll never take down again (My Friend Flicka, Daddy Long Legs), they also contain enduring touchstones (Emma, The Pat Hobby Stories, Sweet Thursday). Four decades on, John le Carré is unique among my schoolboy shelvings in that he’s alive and working; his new novel, Agent Running in the Field, is currently high on the bestseller lists. He’s the only one to have aged at the same rate I have – the others are forever fixed in time – and the only one to have published a masterpiece that I read as it came out: A Perfect Spy (1986). But it’s the trilogy of the 70s that lodges most firmly in my mental library: The Quest for Karla, comprising Tinker Tailor (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979).
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The Honourable Schoolboy’s plot bestrides the “Far East” but begins in London’s dusty corners, with gossip. Le Carré’s world is rife with bitchiness and rumour, with espionage carried out among the filing cabinets: we’re in the world after the fall now, hearing “the last beat of the secret English heart”. The Service is broken, Bill Haydon’s damage has been done, and a photograph of Karla – his Moscow Centre paymaster – hangs in George Smiley’s office. Meanwhile, Connie Sachs, Russia gazer, is taking backbearings – “walking back the cat”, as Robert Littell later dubbed it – to find out what Karla knew, what he hadn’t known, and what he hadn’t wanted the Circus to know he knew, or didn’t know. In Le Carré’s hands, these cats’ cradles of doublethink and counter-bluff are mesmerizing, not least because readers can recognize their own talents in this element of tradecraft – trawling through paperwork, finding gaps, making connections: we can do that! We could join the Circus! And we’re familiar, too, with the forlorn realities of office life: petty cash and expense slips, pointless meetings, too many cups of tea, and steamed-up windows on winter afternoons.
I say familiar, but I was years from office life at the time, and though I now recognize this background of failure and despair as being achingly redolent of Britain in the 70s, my schoolboy self in his hammock surely can’t have done. And yet I think it was part of what fascinated me, as it does now. Failure has become a leitmotif of the author’s – prominent even in those novels written during more optimistic times – and to be one of Le Carré’s people means accustoming oneself to it; accepting that every triumph knocks hollow and every mole uncovered reveals the devastation done to the lawn. Which is why it never ceases to thrill to read that, “from these quite dismal beginnings … George Smiley went over to the attack”.
Attack begins with recruitment, and Le Carré has to do a certain amount of retro-fitting to bring the honourable schoolboy, Jerry Westerby, into play. He’s no longer the faintly ridiculous figure that appeared in Tinker Tailor (“‘Too much wampum not good for braves,’ Jerry intoned solemnly. For years they had had this Red Indian joke running, Smiley remembered with a sinking heart”), and his ability to undertake an operational role relies on his not having been exposed by Bloody Bill Haydon. “On balance it seems he never got around to blowing the Occasionals”, Smiley tells Westerby. “It’s not that he didn’t think you important enough, it’s simply that other claims on him took priority.” Well, perhaps. But Haydon was in play for decades, and surely he had time to give Moscow Centre the inside leg measurements of anyone who passed through Cambridge Circus, let alone the names of those irregulars known to pick up arms when called. But it’s a required twitch on the narrative strings, the addressing of what would otherwise remain an unanswered question, and it’s more than justified by the satisfaction of having a minor character move centre stage. “You point me and I’ll march”, Westerby tells Smiley in a moment that, for me, captures all that’s most stirring, and most worrying, about responding to the call of duty. For his marching orders will take him far from the life he’s been living, the familiar bid for freedom that drives Le Carré’s men.
Westerby’s lot, mind, didn’t sound so bad to my teenage self: living on a remote Italian hillside – where was Lucca, anyway? – dragging a sackful of books around; hiding from a past choked with romantic damage; banging away on a typewriter as he chased a doomed novel. At the time, that pretty much amounted to my ideal existence. But he marches, and while the operation is technically a success, it comes at great cost. Jerry Westerby, it turns out, does question his orders, and his eventual act of self-determination allows Smiley – and the Circus – to be gazumped. The spoils go to the Cousins, as the Americans are termed in Le Carré’s world, and the lesson is clear: our allies can be more treacherous than our foes. With Karla, at least you know where you stand.
Westerby’s downfall, of course, is brought about by love. Or, put another way, by a woman. This is standard fare in Le Carré’s novels, where – the occasional Connie Sachs apart – women exist to provide sex and comfort, or to offer a grail-like vision of courtly love, or to lead poor men round by the nose. Or all three. Often, they’re deemed to “belong” to someone else: a villain, a trickster, the worst man in the world; or they’re Ann Smiley, who “belongs” to almost anyone else, as a way of punishing herself for not being good enough to “belong” to George alone. Examples abound in Le Carré’s world, the most egregious being Legal Judith in Absolute Friends (2003), whose trajectory careens from that of unattainable perfection to the willing lover to exposure as shallow, status-obsessed and tarnished beyond redemption. But at least she’s given a name, or half of one, unlike “the orphan” in The Honourable Schoolboy, whose main role – sex and comfort aside – is to make poor Jerry feel guilty, a burden he carries long after he’s jettisoned the actual woman on the way to the airport. “When she got out she didn’t even say goodbye: just sat beside the road like the trash she was.” “Trash” isn’t Le Carré’s word; it’s one he puts in the mouth of the local postmistress. But it lingers, and leaves a taste. Did I not mind this, first time round? As I say, re-reading can be uncomfortable.
When the BBC’s Smiley’s People was broadcast in 1984, I watched at least some of it on a tiny portable black-and-white TV in the kitchen of a student house in Oxford. As with Tinker Tailor I’d read the novel, so the story held no surprises. The thrill came from watching Alec Guinness once more completely inhabiting the role of Smiley.
And inevitably it’s Guinness I see when I pick up the book again, and am sucked into the narrative. Smiley is summoned to a murder scene – an old spook has been gunned down on Hampstead Heath – and watches while a chatty police Superintendent rifles through the dead man’s pockets. One Paddington Borough library card; one box Swan Vestas matches partly used; one bottle tablets, to be taken two to three times a day; and one receipt for the sum of thirteen pounds from the Straight and Steady Minicab Service of Islington, North. “‘May I look?’ said Smiley, and the Superintendent held it out so that Smiley could read the date and the driver’s signature, J. Lamb, in a copy-book hand wildly underlined.” This might be a good moment to mention that one of the main characters in my own spy novels is called Jackson Lamb.
I don’t keep a record of every book I pick up, but I can state with some certainty that the last occasion on which I re-read Smiley’s People was 2010 – I know this because I mentioned having done so in an article I wrote in August of that year. By that time I was working on the second of my Lamb novels, and I had no memory of having borrowed his name from this source. Which didn’t mean that such petty larceny hadn’t occurred; it simply meant that, if it had done, it happened subliminally. And so, browsing the novel again, I looked for clues as to why this name might have lodged in my mind. J. Lamb’s subsequent appearance is brief, taking up little more than a page, and if there’s little in his physical presence that brings his partial namesake to mind – “He had brown Afro hair. White hands, carefully manicured” – he does carry the aroma of stale cigarette smoke, a grace note my own Lamb has been designed to reprise at full volume. And at least one character trait rings familiar: Smiley has questioned the minicab driver under the pretence of having booked his services. Interview concluded, Smiley says, “You can tell your firm I didn’t turn up”. “Tell ’em what I bloody like, can’t I?”, J. Lamb replies, and drives away almost before George is out the car. And perhaps that’s it. Like a secret message tucked into a cigarette packet, and hidden on Hampstead Heath: “J. Lamb. Very rude man”.
Le Carré, then, has been important to me for almost all my reading life, and my writing one, too. Whether or not I borrowed J. Lamb from the pages of Smiley’s People, the opening chapter of my novel Dead Lions (2013) is certainly in debt to that book, with one old spook tracing the final movements of another. And the cadences I occasionally adopt as feeling just right for spy fiction betray his influence. “Seasoned Park watchers later said that the affair really began in Fischer’s” reads the opening of my novella The Drop, and if I didn’t have a copy of The Honourable Schoolboy propped open at my elbow when I wrote it, I might as well have done: “Afterwards, in the dusty little corners where London’s secret servants drink together, there was argument about where the Dolphin case history should really begin”.
What Le Carré does feels just right to me; feels like how a spy novel should be written. The shadow he throws as an elder statesman is matched by the light he casts on the terrain, and while there will always be other espionage novelists, the degree to which I admire them depends on how much they invoke the feelings I had when I first encountered his work. So I hope he’d recognize the occasional borrowed rhythm, and a subliminally pilfered name or two, as part of the bridge-building writers do; bridges on which, when conditions allow, exchanges might take place. For, as Le Carré’s work has always shown, in dark times walls are built, but bridges are what matter.
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