Smiley Happy People

Books read this week: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy 7/10 (John Le Carre)

It is a strange thing how some works have such a titanic impact on the collective consciousness that they undercut their own references: before reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I hadn't heard the nursery rhyme, but I had of course heard of the book. It's the first in Le Carre's Karla trilogy, and a very good (although scarcely cheerful) look at espionage at the height of the Cold War. It's something of a curiosity to me: a glimpse into what life was like in a large bureaucracy before computers. Most of the time is spent tracking and stealing files and notes, in a way that just doesn't happen today: everything is on a network, so a comparable thriller today would have far more hacking, and far less tense walks through shabby libraries.

I also find it peculiar how local in space and time the espionage genre is: really, all the great espionage novels are set during the cold war, and most of them in the 60s and 70s, and they were pretty much all written by British intellectuals who were in intelligence during the Second World War. It's not as though there haven't been other periods where there's been a lot of undercover shenanigans and great power antagonisms: Francis Walsingham ran a first class intelligence network, and there was a lot of spying during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (handled well in O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, but not the main focus). And even just looking at other combatants in the Cold War, the Americans had plenty of well educated spies during WWII, and presumably not all of them stayed on afterwards (I would guess the USSR was similar, but given the Soviet government's institutional paranoia, I doubt they'd have let anyone reveal anything about espionage tactics and strategy, even in novel form, so the lack of good spy novels there isn't that surprising).

The closest thing the US has to a spy novelist is Tom Clancy, and he's too stupid to write a great spy novel: the essence of a good spy novel is an understanding of psychology - your's and your opponent's, and to do that you really need to both respect and to understand the other side. This is, I think, the crux of the issue: the prevailing view in the USA was always that the US was Right, and the Soviet Union was Wrong and that was All Right. Such a black and white view doesn't really lend itself to the study of the other side's point of view: if you enemy is the devil, you can be confident that everything they say or do is evil, because, well, they're evil. This makes for good action films, and poor spy novels. By contrast, there's been a tendency in British literature to respect a worthy opponent for a long time: you can see this in Owen and Sassoon's poetry, which always has more contempt for the generals behind the line than for the soldier's on the other side of No Man's Land, and also in Wellington's respect for the French army, but the best example has to be Kipling: partly because he is a very good poet, but more because he is the poet that best personified the jingoistic late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the generation that claimed an empire and then watched it's children die in the mud and blood at the Somme, Passchendaele and Ypres. It is precisely because Kipling was such a cheerleader for the British empire and invading, well, anywhere Britain hadn't got round to invading yet, that it's notable that he does respect the other side: in his "Fuzzy Wuzzy" (which I'm not going to pretend isn't racist, because it really is) he describes the Sudanese as "A First Class Fighting Man": I can't imagine Clancy (who occupies a similar position as author best representing the pro-invading countries we've never heard of position) writing a similarly positive portrait of the martial qualities of a Taliban fighter (and after all, the Sudanese Kipling is talking about were the army of the first modern Islamist movement).