Classics 2: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold - John le Carré

John le Carré is one of our greatest novelists, a writer of superbly crafted fiction with some of the most subtle and lucid characterisation in the modern lexicon. It could be argued, with considerable justification, that Le Carré’s masterpiece, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, is one of the most significant novels of our post-war age.

Unfortunately for le Carré, current corporate publishing prefers to define its books crudely by genre. The system may be effective in categorising the bulk of relatively mediocre work and in directing it to its appropriate readership. But more complex writers — whose work, by its nature, tends to defy definition and to span genres — inevitably suffer. This is hardly new. For many years after Jorge Luis Borges was first translated into English his work was categorised under “crime”, and several decades passed before Borges’ pre-eminence as a literary writer was acknowledged. Le Carré, perhaps recognising that he could easily waste a lifetime arguing in favour of a more logical categorisation (or de-categorisation) of his work, has simply maintained his distance from the workings of the publishing industry’s marketing divisions and continued to ply his trade.

Let us consider le Carré’s considerable claims to a greater worth than that of merely being a master of a “thriller” or “spy” genre.

His two first works, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality, gave clear indications of his brilliance as a writer and delineator of complex human character. His protagonist, the spymaster George Smiley, is a somewhat donnish and detached creation. Owlish in appearance, he is a largely benign figure, perhaps even a little absurd, but he is driven by unnamed demons of his own. His beautiful and faithless wife Anne is largely a self-inflicted wound, and the incongruity of the match remains a constant source of commentary amongst friends and colleagues (Anne’s father cruelly describes the short, fat, bespectacled Smiley as resembling “a bull-frog in a sou’wester”).

Smiley, like some of the great characters in literary fiction, makes various returns in later works. But he plays only a few brief walk-on parts (glimpsed standing in the mist or reading a book nearby in a café) in Le Carré’s third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It was written at a stage in le Carré’s life when his first marriage was breaking up and he was experiencing profound misgivings about his work in MI6. The first draft took five weeks, composed under the pressure of deep emotional crisis. There is, almost certainly as a result of le Carré’s own private crisis, a concentration of attention, a sense of boiling complex phenomena down to an irreducible core. Returning to re-read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold now, more than forty years after its first publication (in 1964), it is remarkable how short the book is, given the huge effect it has had on an international reading public. Even more now than when it was published, it seems to epitomise, more than any other novel of its time, the brutal realpolitik of the Cold War, the extreme polarity of the capitalist and communist systems. But the book also contains much more than a simple reflection of the then prevailing political realities.

At the heart of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a powerful but terrible political thesis. When a liberal democracy confronts a totalitarian system, in order to survive the liberal democracy may be forced to adopt some if not all of the ruthless methods of its opponent.

The central character, Alex Leamas, is a British spy of the old school, disillusioned, angry with himself and his spymasters. When the novel begins, Leamas witnesses the last of his agents, Karl Riemeck, being brutally killed on the border crossing of the Berlin wall. Leamas himself is already something of a burnt-out case. The killing of Riemeck by the Vopos, the East German border police, is a harrowing and evocative piece of writing, illustrative of le Carré’s power and economy:

The East German sentry fired, quite carefully, away from them, into his own sector. The first shot seemed to thrust Karl forward, the second to pull him back. Somehow he was still moving, still on the bicycle, passing the sentry, and the sentry was still shooting at him. Then he sagged, rolled to the ground, and they heard quite clearly the clatter of the bike as it fell. Leamas hoped to God he was dead.

“The first shot seemed to thrust Karl forward, the second to pull him back” appears counter-intuitive, illogical — two bullets fired from the same direction cannot push, then pull; it subverts the laws of physics. But the passage works simultaneously on another level, that of the victim. It evokes with perfect precision, in two almost cartoon-like images, the agony of the dying man.

There is a similar moment of economy when Leamas’ superior, Control, welcomes Leamas back to the Circus, the intelligence headquarters in London. Control is a donnish man who wears pullovers knitted by his wife, and is overly concerned about draughts. When they meet:

Control shook his hand carefully, like a doctor feeling the bones.

The relationship between the two men is almost exactly defined by that single sentence. Control attempts to assess how much fight is left in the burnt-out Leamas, whether there is perhaps room enough for one last operation. Graham Greene, reviewing the book, wrote that The Spy Who Came in from the Cold “is the best spy story I have ever read,” and Daphne du Maurier commented on its “atmosphere of chilly hell”. Le Carré’s skill of evoking a character or an atmosphere in a few, perfectly-chosen words is surely one of the defining skills of a great writer.

After greeting each other, Leamas and Control settle down to discuss the cause of the loss of their networks of agents in East Germany. The chief problem is a brutal new head of the Abteilung called Mundt, still only 42, who has introduced a level of ruthlessness which is callous even by the standards of East German intelligence. Control begins to set in motion the elaborate process which will end up with the murder of their chief enemy and tormentor. Leamas must appear broken down and disaffected, and open himself to being recruited as an East German agent. Part of the power of the novel is that Leamas’ subsequent descent into poverty, drink and ill-health, culminating in a prison sentence after Leamas assaults a local tradesman, is so convincing that the reader is almost compelled to believe that Leamas’ decline and fall is genuine and even inevitable. At the same time, the fiendish plot unrolls. In the process, innocent people will be exploited and expended by British intelligence with the same ruthless disregard for individual life as their East German rivals. Most shocking of all is the manipulation of Liz Gold, an idealistic young Jewish woman with communist sympathies who works at the same library where Leamas ekes out his drunken part-retirement. She falls in love with Leamas, and her emotions are touchingly sincere. Yet, even as she does so, her relationship with Leamas is used to construct Leamas’ background of radical alienation from his former intelligence roots. And Leamas will find he is also increasingly exploited as a pawn in the plot, loathing himself for his part in it but apparently driven forwards by an almost cynical loyalty to his own side.

After his fall from grace and his prison sentence, Leamas is approached and recruited by agents of the East German intelligence and eventually transported to East Germany for more detailed interrogation. Fiedler, Mundt’s assiduous and clever deputy, is his interrogator.  Unlike the brutal neo-Nazi Mundt, Fiedler is Jewish, intellectual, diffident, objective. Leamas begins to develop a grudging respect for Fiedler’s acuity and professionalism. In the course of these interviews Leamas gives his interrogator as much information about British intelligence as he remembers. Leamas’ evidence is carefully garnered and used by Fiedler to identify Mundt as a spy in the pay of British intelligence. With an almost obsessive attention to detail, British intelligence has deliberately constructed a trail of evidence which points to Mundt’s guilt as a spy, and though Leamas is drinking far too heavily to greatly care any more, he senses that the elaborate plot against Mundt is falling into place.

But when Mundt had been compromised and arrested by his own colleagues, Leamas finds to his consternation that East German intelligence, with typical thoroughness, has also brought Liz Gold to East Germany in order to examine more thoroughly the details of Leamas’s background. Liz appears for Mundt’s defence and, entirely unaware of her role, helps to discredit Leamas’ own evidence by attesting that after Leamas was sent to prison, his debts were paid by mysterious means. This suggests continued British intelligence collusion. Leamas is horrified by this apparent crudeness on the part of his British intelligence masters. Then, finally, he begins to realise the full Machiavellian horror of what British intelligence has achieved. Mundt really is British intelligence’s man, and the entire sordid machination, in which Leamas himself has played a central role, has been constructed to save Mundt’s neck from the increasing suspicions of his brilliant and assiduous second-in-command Fiedler. Liz Gold has been cynically used to destroy Fiedler’s case against Mundt. Instead of the arraignment of the traitor Mundt, it is the loyal and innocent Fiedler who goes to the firing squad.

This is confirmed when Mundt appears one night to release Leamas and Liz from their respective prisons and to give them curt instructions on how to flee to the West. Leamas and Liz attempt to escape over the Berlin wall. They are discovered in the course of crossing the wall — probably betrayed by Mundt himself, in an after-shadowing of the opening scene when Riemeck was killed. The searchlights come on, and Liz is shot by one of the border guards. Peering back at her, Leamas sees from her posture and the angle of her broken neck that she is clearly dead. Under the glare of the lights Leamas is faced with the opportunity of escaping with his own life. A babble of English, German and French voices call out of the darkness for him to run while he still has the chance. But Leamas chooses instead to return to the fallen body of his lover. The novel ends with the same, precise, searing economy which characterises the rest of the book.

They seemed to hesitate before firing again; someone shouted an order, and still no one fired. Finally they shot him, two or three shots. He stood glaring around him like a blinded bull in the arena. As he fell, Leamas saw a small car smashed between two great lorries, and the children waving cheerfully through the window.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is far more than a masterwork in its genre. It encapsulates, subtly parodies, and ultimately transcends the spy novel. More than any other “literary” novel of its time, it defines its era. The schizophrenic nature of the world in the four decades following the second world war, before the final fall of the Berlin wall, has never been so clearly, subtly or rigorously evoked. On all criteria — moral and philosophical content, depth and subtlety of characterisation, the pared-down beauty of the writing — The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a literary classic.

It is hardly surprising, perhaps, that after completing it le Carré was never able to achieve another spy novel with quite the same power. Subsequent work, also set within the framework of the cold war, though written with the author's usual virtuosity and panache, sometimes seems almost a parody of his great masterwork. This is not a reflection on le Carré’s capabilities as a writer but merely a further demonstration of the unique force of his masterpiece. In later books like A Small Town in Germany and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy le Carré hit another fine vein of form, creating further astute commentaries on contemporary social and political life, shot through with superb characterisation and insight, though none of these works eclipsed the remorseless power of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold.

In 1971 Le Carré attempted a more conventional literary novel, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. This was widely ridiculed, and perhaps for the first time in his writing career le Carré suffered widespread critical disfavour. It was argued that the book, based on a triangular love story, demonstrated the author’s limitations to a particular genre. There is no doubt that le Carré was hurt by the reception. Although I too was surprised by the savagery of the reviews, I am afraid I am one of those who regard The Naïve and Sentimental Lover as a charming footnote in le Carré’s oeuvre. But at the same time I fiercely disagree with various commentators that this demonstrates his limitations. Writers, including the very greatest, utilise whatever structural form suits their particular talents. Shakespeare thrived within the magnificent rhetorical structure of Elizabethan drama, not least by exploiting fully the iambic pentameter, the “mighty line” developed by his contemporary Christopher Marlowe. Dickens the reformer was the master of the social novel. If the classical narrative plot, exemplified by the thriller or spy novel, happens to be the form which best brings forth le Carré’s unique talents, then so be it. We should all be grateful. Perhaps we should be more than grateful, since the spy story, reformulated and revolutionised by le Carré, is in many respects an unrivalled mechanism for investigating the deepest loyalties and interstices of the human heart.

E. M. Forster notoriously stated, “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I would have the guts to betray my country.” It is this terrain of ultimate loyalty, bound up so closely and intimately with individual identity, that le Carré explores with such obsessive passion and forensic skill.

Given this background it was hardly surprising that, not least as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, le Carré looked for broader fields. His more recent work has been consistently provocative and equally distinguished by subtle and complex characterisation. Novels such as The Constant Gardener and The Mission Song have shown him in vibrant form. Not unlike his great admirer the late Graham Greene, he engages full-heartedly with the prevailing political and social realities, whether these are the international drugs companies or third world tyrannies, and his novels continue to comment more effectively and profoundly on our modern world than perhaps any other living writer.

In a literary milieu which judged its authors with greater objectivity and rigour, there can be little doubt that le Carré would be a front runner for the Nobel Prize. Admittedly his cause - in a literary world which seems as obsessed with celebrity as the tabloid press - has not been helped by his own modesty and reticence. Le Carré has consistently withdrawn from entering his novels for literary prizes, and has refused a knighthood for his services to literature. There are those who believe that this is behaviour more consistent with a serious writer than our current gaggle of more image-conscious and publicity-seeking contemporary “literary” authors.

Born on 19 October, 1931, and now at the age of 76, le Carré shows no signs of either reducing his formidable output (his recent The Mission Song was his twentieth novel, and demonstrated that he was still on his finest form) or of seeking less controversial political subject matter. Instead he continues to work from his rural fastness in Cornwall and to entertain and educate us with his superb, intelligent, and powerful fictions. This is a writer who, ignoring the earthly blandishments of prizes, honours or even the calm of a distinguished and well-deserved retirement, obstinately refuses to come in from the cold.