"The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" by John Le Carre

 The classic Cold War espionage story written by a master of the trade.

Following the collapse of the spy network that he has been running, Alec Leamas retires from the British Secret Service. His life spirals downhill through a succession of meaningless jobs, his disillusionment numbed with whisky. Even new girlfriend Liz can't reach him. After he hits rock bottom, in prison, he is courted by the East Germans and agrees to tell them his secrets. But things aren't as they seem. This is a game of bluff and double bluff, of trick and be tricked. And as things collapse towards a disastrous conclusion, there is still one more twist to the story.

It is narrated in the 'omniscient' third person past tense (with occasional authorial glosses) but the reader only has access to the thoughts of the principal characters, Leamas and Liz. This keeps the narration tightly focused.

But I think the main reason why this novel stands head and shoulders over most of its genre is that Le Carre takes time to build up the characters and the settings and that he keeps everything so everyday and therefore so believable. Despite his vast experience and his repertoire of skills, Leamas is no James Bond (although Ian Fleming's original Bond is more vulnerable and grittier and credible than his film alter ego). This is real world spying and the reader can imagine themselves in the role and identify with Leamas without falling into fantasy. 

The other separation between this and its many imitators is the morality question. I compared this with Rip Tide by Stella Rimington (in real life a spymaster) in which the action is performed against a backdrop of 'us' and 'them': whatever we do is good and whatever they do is bad. But Leamas operates in a world where he can scarcely justify his actions even to himself (he seems mostly motivated by anger and hate). It's a seedy, sordid world of deception which corrodes the souls of the often pathetic actors who play in it. And it is perfectly matched to the background: the pathetic fallacy reigns supreme.

This makes this novel is one of the greatest spy stories of all time. The film starring Richard Burton is superb too.

Stylistically, it fits well with its near contemporaries: the work of Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and John Osborne etc: the 'kitchen sink' dramas and novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Selected quotes:

• “He developed small dishonesties, borrowed insignificant sums from secretaries and neglected to return them, arrived late or left early under some mumbled pretext. At first his colleagues treated him with indulgence; perhaps his decline scared them in the same way as we are scared by cripples, beggars and invalids because we fear we could ourselves become them.” (Ch 3)
• “Liz wanted to weep at the crabbed delusion of their dreams.” (Ch 5)
• “They hated him because he succeeded in being what each in his heart longed to be: a mystery.” (Ch 6)
• “Ashe was typical of that strata of mankind which conducts its human relationships according to a principle of challenge and response. Where there was softness, he would advance; where he found resistance, retreat.” (Ch 6)
• “He had the drunkard’s habit of ducking his mouth towards the rim of his glass just before he drank, as if his hand might fail him and the drink escape.” (Ch 7)
• “Liz made a rather exaggerated shrug, the kind of overstressed gesture people do make when they are excited and alone.” (Ch 16)
• “It was like mid-week evensong when she used to go to church - the same dutiful, little group of lost faces, the same fussy self-consciousness, the same feeling of a great idea in the hands of little people.” (Ch 19)
• “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.” (Ch 25)
• “It's far more terrible, what they are doing; to find the humanity in people, in me and whoever else they use, to turn it like a weapon in their hands, and use it to hurt and kill ...” (Ch 25)

October 2024; 240 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God