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

the miniseries is pretty amazing. i haven't read the novel. i just saw this bit of news, which is a little old but hopefully still accurate:

Tomas Alfredson signs on for 'Tinker, Tailor'

July 09, 2009 Fresh from the success of highly acclaimed vampire movie "Let The Right One In," award-winning Swedish director Tomas Alfredson has signed on as director on Working Title upcoming project "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy," the company announced Thursday. The new feature film adaptation of John Le Carre's seminal cold war best-seller is being produced by Working Title's co-chairmen Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, and marks their next collaboration with Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Peter Morgan ("Frost/Nixon," "The Queen") and will be exec-produced by Debra Hayward, Liza Chasin, John Le Carre and Peter Morgan. A 1970s British television series starred Alec Guinness as George Smiley the retired former British intelligence officer called in to track down the double agent within the spy agency.

this sounds awesome

been musing on the possible cast. i hope it's a similar set of dope brit character actors surrounding an old-school charismatic star.

Yeah both miniseries (including Smiley's People) are stellar. One of my favorite moments is in SP when Smiley finds the film using 'Moscow rules.'

i downloaded a torrent of the series but there are no subtitles during the lengthy bits where theyre speaking russian

ian mcshane for percy? ian mckellen as bill haydon?

love the book, love the miniseries. only problem with it is i cant remember who i lent it to.

interesting project, but i cant really imagine anyone doing better than guinness. that was a truly magnificent performance.

s1ocki otm

I have a hard time imagining that this could touch the miniseries, which was pretty much perfect.

i have a hard time imagining that i can't touch my miniseries as someone has borrowed it and i can't remember who :(

i hope this isn't a horrible travesty that makes me sad - because the original miniseries was so great.

alec guinness' performance is on another level in the miniseries, true. i think it's possible to make a good film of this and get everything into 150-160 minutes without rushing through. i have a good feeling about this one though i'm not expecting it to be a definitive take (that's already been accomplished obv.) i assume the choice of alfredson means they won't try to bourne things up too much.

Mmmf, something just occurred to me -- are they going to try and make this a period piece or are they going the contemporary route?

This could be interesting but I'd be concerned that the slow, twisty procedural of the book, which worked well on TV, mightn't transfer properly to a 2 hour movie.

the opening scene of the 70s 'tinker tailor', where the spies all sit down and smoke, not saying a word but speaking volumes, is prob my fave bit of telly ever, partly cos i used to work very near cambridge circus, seen in the very first shot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyBuUM6BRy0

Absolutely agree. One of my favourite pieces of television ever. I wonder whether the new film will also consist of an awful lot of footage of middle-aged men smoking in dingey rooms.

odd that they're redoing it, but love love love Alfredson and Morgan.

they should have done the middle book The Honourable Schoolboy instead, at least that one hasn't been taken yet :/

That one always was a little out of place, though. Don't get me wrong, it's excellent.

Yeah, I found Honorable Schoolboy to be a little odd and difficult to relate to.

Is it just me or do a disturbing number of his novels end with the protagonist just about to make it to safety when they are suddenly brutally gunned down?

Hahaha yeah

spoilers?

wonder how this is gonna work, really

but it'll be good to have gary oldman starring in a non-shit film for a change

don't count yr chickens etc

the tv show is veeeeerrrryyyy slllooooooowwww but that's part of the charm

michael bay to direct

the tv show is so insanely good

so slow and subtle

so awesome

the opening scene of the 70s 'tinker tailor', where the spies all sit down and smoke, not saying a word but speaking volumes, is prob my fave bit of telly ever, partly cos i used to work very near cambridge circus, seen in the very first shot:

― Ward Fowler, Friday, November 20, 2009 6:52 PM (9 months ago) Bookmark

otm

not mad on guinness's stuff when he was younger, tbh, but he totally shreds in this

yeah i was just thinking about watching this again. "smiley's people" is really good too.

i remember watching the tv show when i was abt 12 and liked le carré, i wanted to like it but it was too slow for me then

benedict cumberbatch hahaha just fucking cast bill nighy and make it a romantic comedy*

*[placeholder for explanation of how it already is]

wonder if they'll leave in the two female characters

i really love how the tv version kind of starts off on this note of smiley being this totally out-of-the-loop outsider who is "too old for this shit", and then he sits down with the british agents at the estate house to meet with the spy-on-the-run, and he takes off his glasses and puts them back on and gives this dude a look which says in an instant that he's the smartest and toughest dude around and it's like "oh shit."

mark strong just got cast, too. so it's him and oldman, firth, cumberbatch, hinds, ralph fiennes and tom hardy.

Holy shit. It might actually work.

Yeah, I found Honorable Schoolboy to be a little odd and difficult to relate to.

One big problem with that one was the woman character, who is as badly drawn as all Le Carre women characters (with possible exception of Connie). I do wonder sometimes whether Le Carre has ever met any actual women.

But I still totally love TTSS and SP.

he takes off his glasses and puts them back on and gives this dude a look which says in an instant that he's the smartest and toughest dude around and it's like "oh shit."

otfm

Absolutely the best moment of the whole series, I get chills just thinking about it.

not sure if this was mentioned but it's apparently retaining the cold war era for the setting.

Thank god for that.

man i gotta find my dvds of the show so i can watch it again

I have a hard time imagining that this could touch the miniseries, which was pretty much perfect.

― Moodles, Friday, November 20, 2009 11:44 AM (10 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i have a hard time imagining that i can't touch my miniseries as someone has borrowed it and i can't remember who :(

― 311 is a joek (s1ocki), Friday, November 20, 2009 11:57 AM (10 months ago) Bookmark

it's always in the place where you least expect it, like the amazon marketplace page of your friend or acquaintance.

Unwittingly I've only watched the compressed, US six-episode (instead of seven) version of the series. Apparently they've even jumbled the chronology of some scenes around. Anyone seen both?

oh shit, that's the version i've seen too (via netflix).

Basically I'm going to get and watch the original no matter how trivial the differences might be. Every scene could be longer. Feels like I can still taste the words exchanged between Smiley and Prideaux in the car, at the hotel, walking around the moors.

Kathy Burke as Connie Sachs

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1322727/Kathy-Burke-star-film-version-John-le-Carr-s-Tinker-Tailor-Soldier-Spy.html

gonna be great this i can feel it. god knows how they're going to squelch it all down to 2 hours. if they can nail the Ricky Tarr bit they've got the rest i think.

tom hardy playing ricky tarr fyi

super stoked for this... killer cast

boom

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2011/jun/30/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-traiker

love john hurt

holy shit i am pumped for this

Probably this is going to be good (Gary Oldman and John Hurt are great), but Smiley and Guinness for me are so inextricably linked that it is impossible to imagine a different actor in that role.

true, hope they pull it off

good to see benny cumby and tom hardy reteaming

Oldman looks the part in that trailer altho he's perhaps still too good-looking to be Smiley, also I can't quite tell from the trail if it's set in period or not, some of the shots look like it is but some don't. Anyway I'm pretty sure this will rock and I demand they do the full trilogy.

it's set in ~the past~ for deffo

'it's the male bridesmaids' - a blogger who gets it

every shot looks period to me

yeah consider me stoked. looks like exactly the right tone. still hard to get my head around a non Guinness/BBC version but hey.

Definitely could work, the brief bit of the Karla interrogation scene was solid.

oldman doing his best obi-wan impression

its still set in the 1970s according to wikipedia

i just rescreened this the other week and it put me on a le carre book/movie/miniseries kick. the miniseries for a perfect spy is kinda 'eh' (though i dont love the novel as much as everyone else does); smiley's people is pretty good but not as good as this.

sick trailer btw

pretty stoked for this based on the trailer, never seen or read any le carré.

i pretty much love anything with spies and the cold war.

dude!!

excited for this!

so many craggy-looking british dudes!

new board description

haha. oldman is so good. has he really never won an oscar?

'oscar' and 'good at acting' are pretty bad predictors of ea. other

yeah, i know. just the "gary oldman BAFTA winner - colin firth academy award winner" thing at the end struck me as wrong.

Psyched for this even though it can't possibly improve upon the mini-series.

yeah, just the condensing of everything to feature length makes me nervous. but looks like they nailed the vibe, judging from the trailer.

ha i don't think his (oldman's) bafta was even for acting? the bafta best actor over the past twenty years is an almost unalloyed cavalcade of mediocrity though, c-fuzz won it for king's speech AND for a single man

xpost

i don't even mind firth, but i'm sure even he would say that oldman's the better actor.

jim in glasgow this

never seen or read any le carré.

― Introducing the Hardline According to (jim in glasgow), Thursday, 30 June 2011 14:19 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i pretty much love anything with spies and the cold war.

― Introducing the Hardline According to (jim in glasgow), Thursday, 30 June 2011 14:19 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

is just crazy talk! you need to get some carré my friend

kinda can't believe i am doing trailer analysis but: the snippets of firth in this make him look great?, like it'll be a good fit for his perma-pensive face

i have also never read le carre!

and i love spy shit

Lord, man. Get reading immediately.

ned knows

the newest isn't bad at all, actually

'it's the male bridesmaids' - a blogger who gets it

:D

think my dad has all of them sitting in the book shelf as well, and i've read pretty much anything of promise in there.

like he has a big book with at least three novels in it.

bros u gotta read the smiley series

read. it.

I grew up with Le Carré books all around the house - my dad was/is a big fan of his early stuff (not to mention Eric Ambler - did someone ever make a movie out of Mask of Dimitrios?).

Not all of the Le Carré books are great, he got more verbose as he gained popularity, which I don't think was necessarily a good thing. However both The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are excellent.

Cumberbatch has his work cut out being half as good as Michael Jayston i think, the relationship between Guillam and Smiley (in the series) was so brilliant; a strange but believable warm funny buddy movie vibe they had going on. age gap between Cumberbatch and Oldman seems much wider but that's just nitpicking.

smiley's age sort of oscillates in the books

which are, secretly, awful

which book first?

i think i'm gonna spend like a million hours at the beach today

the eight (?) books w/ smiley are his best, i think, esp. spy who came in from the cold and "the karla trilogy" (ttss/honorable schoolboy/smileys ppl). the first couple smiley books are "minor" but fun (one is not really even a spy book). the last two are also good but a little more... well theres less action, among other things. apparently looking-glass war is the most "realistic" of le carre's books, which makes it kind of boring.

perfect spy is overrated i think. most of the 90s/2000s stuff that ive read is okay but never quite reaches the smiley heights. tailor of panama is fun.

chronologically youd want to start with "call for the dead" but i think youre better off going w/ spy who came in from the cold

thx dude

"little drummer girl" is good too i thought but i havent read it in 5 or 6 years

*shakes head sadly at thomp*

lol max you're a heavy le carré stan.

heh well like i said i just went on a binge so its all fresh in my brain

Yeah, the first Smiley books are basically crime and detection novels - good examples of them tho, with a strong feeling for dialogue and atmosphere, which once again in many ways is a decayed rural and city version of Golden Period detection thrillers. Find it hard to get behind Smiley's People, either the book or the execrable TV version. Agree w' max about the Looking-Glass War and Perfect Spy certainly.

also i have some of it wrong--looking glass war comes *before* the karla books. and secret pilgrim barely has smiley in it. (hes a minor character in swciftc and lgw too)

Call for the Dead (1961)
A Murder of Quality (1962)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) (Edgar Award 1965, Best Novel)
The Looking Glass War (1965)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
Smiley's People (1979)
The Secret Pilgrim (1990)

lol wikipedia otm

btw one of the great things about the original british miniseries is that patrick stewart plays karla and has... no lines

lol wikipedia otm

― Lamp, Thursday, June 30, 2011 11:38 AM (46 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

hee hee i should learn to check wikipedia b4 shooting my mouth off

p sure, iirc, that the scottish city of dundee was used as background to substitute for eastern bloc city in the itv adaptation of ttss (memories of underdevelopment).

there's some later books with smiley as cameo / framing device i think? i dno

GR i was hoping i would really enjoy the tv show of smiley's ppl when i got around to it, oh well.

i think, generally, le carre is very good when he is writing about civil servants sitting in dilapidated british offices, being depressed. when he has to deal with the fact that these civil servants make decisions which involve things happening not in dilapidated british offices, like in other countries, or to people who aren't dilapidated british civil servants, then he is not very good.

i mean, i feel like even in the good books there's at least three chapters where he might as well just have written the phrase JUST LOOK AT THE HUMAN COST JUST LOOK AT IT over and over

hm, i think youre right that his real strength is his inside knowledge of the kind of awfulness of british bureaucracy (& i think he can be good at linking that to british society/class/culture, though i am not british so maybe hes horrible at it). i dont know how i feel about the bits that take place outside of 'the circus.' certainly stuff like that kind of ruins 'the constant gardener.'

For a while, my idea of Britain was based on Tinker Taylor (a dark, dusty world made of bow windowed houses, dimly lit office corridors and teapots) - but probably I was just an impressionable kid.

he's a bit passively oxonian, i guess? lots of "oh these horrid brutalist buildings" in one of them

i don't know, i don't remember them that well. are there any actual working-class people in any of his books? i feel like there barely are, like the actual world is sighted in a dim half-light outside the death-in-life of being a public schoolboy for your entire existence

xp.

something about a rugger boot stamping on all human aspirations forever

i don't know if there are any "actual" working-class people in the books? there are no, uh, miners, or whatever. but he's class-conscious! "a perfect spy" is kind of about this, actually: the way code-switching in the complicated british class system lends itself to being a spy.

it seems like almost all of the field agents in the books are... lower-middle-class? while the bureaucrats are the public schoolboy types. i think le carre plays with that a little bit. if nothing else he is kind of anxious about the possibility that communism is right.

but i should shut my mouth. i remember the common people thread.

I have seen the trailer. It features the line "We are not so very different, you and I". Fail.

yeah i loved the trailer, but is that not a line for a superhero film or something?

yes, that was terrrrrrible.

thomp, I think he's pretty good at seediness in the early novels - London thugs, pub crooks, that sort of thing. He's no Patrick Hamilton or Julian McLaren-Ross obviously, but he's pretty good nevertheless.

xpost -- Well, both Oldman and Hardy are in it, they're just warming up for Nolan.

max you are doing very well for an american; what you say about the dynamic between the field agents and the bureaucrats rings true, but it's a while since i read any of them

but i don't think he is very anxious about the possibility that communism is right; i'm not sure he's even anxious about the possibility it exists, to be honest. i don't know. having someone actually say "we are not so very different, you and i" is plainly facepalmish on the part of the scriptwriter, but tbh that phrase could probably also just be printed in place of at least seven chapters of any one of his major novels, so

heh

could also be one of those lines you only ever hear in the trailer used as a kind of short-hand. Se7en has a classic example of this; Freeman says to Pitt in a car ride on his first day on the job "I'll tell you who your friends and enemies are". line doesn't appear in the actual film.

"this is a movie about spies...british spies"

"trust ... no one."

"trust ... no brit".

"in a world where EVERYONE'S a suspect..."

wonder if they considered ewan macgregor for the role of smiley.

used bookstore didn't have any of the recommended ones except tinker tailor so i got that

Still the best I think gbx.

Not sure le Carré gives a hoot about communism either way - I think he's more interested in the mechanics of defection. Woah I was going to make some detection/defection gag there, but it wouldn't have been right. Will say that what marks out the early novels is the indifference to English society. This is what we're trying to protect? Again, something in Tinker Tailor that seems to come from the early novels, which both sides share, is the indifference and cynicism to England, patriotism, civic duty. Is this hard-boiled, English style? Not sure. Class stuff - well, the whole Oxford/Cambridge thing is part of the idea, right? Intellectual game-players, pawn movers etc. But not sure it's a class thing. In terms of the characters it's just a muscle + brains thing.

I'm talking exclusively about the earlier stuff here - I think that he moved more and more towards ambiguity of side-taking throughout his career, which should make his later novels more interesting than perhaps they are.

i suppose when i was thinking about le carre and communism i was partly thinking of a perfect spy, which is the most recent ive read and which i think displays a real ambivalence in re: ideology. though maybe i am misunderstanding that ambivalence as sympathy, instead of indifference! certainly i think le carre is sympathetic to the defectors and certain of the communist agents--not karla or mundt, but poppy and fiedler--moreseo than he is to most of the british characters. smiley excepted.

if nothing else he is kind of anxious about the possibility that communism is right.

i think he's a bit concerned that it works, or at least parts of it does, whereas the british elite is rotted out. im not sure it matters that it's rotted out by communism (nominally), because the rotters are frivolous, overgrown schoolboys.

this trailer looks dope. iirc i think that "we are not so different, you and i" line comes from the karla interro and smiley is trying to gain his trust and confidence and it totally doesn't work, which makes the line contextually a lot better.

'the looking-glass war' is grim and weird and features a tragic and super-homoerotic friendship.

This thread just sent me back to the BBC adaptation which I've got. what's great about the remake is that it gives a chance to see the difference between the construction of character and contextual atmosphere then and now. Will Smiley still have his Corot? His Dresden china, Adam dresser and carriage clock? Will they still say guinea for money? Will it be damp and cold the whole time? How will they smoke? Properly or with that non-inhalation/exhalation that tends to be done nowadays? What about the rented rooms - its wallpaper and furniture? Will Smiley buy/have books? (His German Romantic poetry iirc). Will Control still only love Surrey, Lord's and the Circus? Does that triumvir mean anything any more? The mannerisms! They seem rich and clear in the austere setting of the BBC adaptation. Looking at what the refashioning says about what artistic creation thinks about us, what we look like from the perspective of the source material, what we've lost, what we've replaced it with, is always fascinating, but there's every opportunity of seeing it unusually clearly with something like this I reckon.

tom hardy looks like he nails ricki tarr based on the five seconds i saw of him.

this looks good

i've never read any le carre either

max otm, hm otm, omar on the money about the Karla interrogation. and without trying to spoiler, Smiley's reflection on that small difference is a serious piece of his character development

I hope they can manage moments of poetry such as 4:53-6:47 here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk16G4walQ4

Second only to the very opening scene for me.

omar on the money about the Karla interrogation

I suspected as much (thus my comment way earlier -- the reason why I like the line, as omar notes, is in the context of how things DON'T work).

Are we going to have to be spoiler-free here for a while or...

they should just have Patrick Stewart play Karla again

I would be more than fine with that.

re-read Tinker Tailor and Honourable Schoolboy this year in anticipation of the movie and will catch up with Smiley's People later. i don't doubt that Le Carre sides with the Foreign Office, inasmuch as he sides with anybody, and his writing on the former colonies (not all former at the time of writing I guess) irks a little. i think his anxiety isn't about Communism so much as it is about a lack of moral underpinning for either ideology, the smallness of the difference. but i suspect his attitude towards the title character in Honourable Schoolboy is a lot more sympathetic than mine

xxp yeah i think we shd try to keep the thread spoiler free until after the movie's been out for a few weeks

idk how long they're going to make this, but it seems like it would make for a nice 160 min film and they could keep most of the story intact imo.

ciarin hinds! this is gonna OWN you guys!!

I'm already pissed at the two month delay between UK/US release...

i was excited about all this before! but still!!!!

good long Sight And Sound piece about the BBC version from the issue after Guinness' death in 2000
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/86

Very nice. Nearly got emotional towards the end.

I'm watching the 1980 miniseries now thanks to this thread and -- well, it's okay. Wry, clever, etc.

'okay'? you're dead to me.

What's changed?

wry and clever seem like good things, although Lord Soto, you seem to use them slightly dismissively, I think? but there's also an aesthetic of dullness which is fastidiously observed, which also is the main motivation of the mole - I think that's the mini-series's success. I liked this from that sight and sound piece where it said 'Much of Guinness’ skill in realising Smiley lies in this streak of pious reproach.' What's interesting is that the mole shares that reproach, in an impious way. It's actually a battle between two people, very different, who believe the same thing in many ways. In the tv series they manage to contain the difficulties of the novel within the relative simplicity of the performances and direction. That's probably why it's so well liked.

incidentally, one of the things that appeals about the original adaptation is to see any form of acting as an intent to decieve - the end of Ricky Tarr's interview is a good example. Any sort of traditional attempt to evoke sympathy, or conventional way of behaving is seen as unlikely and duplicitious. Only a weird English intensely class-conscious reticence, a hangover from the Empire appropriation of Stoicism is seen to be at all trustworthy in a code sense - I suspect that's the meaning of class in le Carré: code.

Gary, Collin, Tom Hardy...There's no way my pussy is leavin that cinema dry.

JoJo12522 2 days ago 5

no way my cumberpatch is leaving that cinema dry

radio drama fans may enjoy these lecarre adaptations with simon russell beale playing smiley -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/smiley-season/

"not available" for replay but you may have ideas about tracking them down elsewhere. beale is superb i think; he sticks pretty close to guinness but that's a good thing. in some ways i think radio is a better medium for adapting these books than television

(or cinema)

btw what do the lecarre hedz here make of his newest one? i thought it was tremendously entertaining, kind of a portmanteau of all the great things about lecarre

New trailer, y'all:

http://movies.uk.msn.com/features/action-and-adventure/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-msn-exclusive-trailer

john hurt man.

this is really out in september? that is p soon

it'll be interesting to see if this is Peter Morgan-proof.

i forgot if you are pro/con peter morgan. also, is he as big of a Thing as the UK tends to think he is? i think he's a little of the julian fellowes school, tbqh

the film of Frost/Nixon was appalling.

he is def. a UK mythologist, and i think that in viewing frost/nixon film as a brit lampoon of american corruption there is ... something ... to be said for it. not that it's good, mind you.

unfortunately, he didn't understand Nixon.

"trust ... no one."

― tylerw, Thursday, June 30, 2011 5:44 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark

lol otm, 24 seconds in.

not sure what p.morgan has to do with this though?

ah, I looked at the first post where they said he'd be writing the adap -- wiser heads prevailed!

Still, I think this story is made for a longer form.

re-reading this right now. great.

Did a reread of Tinker Tailor over the last couple of days here -- first time I'd done so in a couple of decades. Very glad too (sticking to the no spoilers rule proposed upthread) that I had just forgotten who the mole was; I remember the actor in question from the miniseries but I'd forgotten which role he'd played, so the ending was a surprise all over again. A lot of what was enjoyably strange about the book to me has become a little less so now (thanks to actually going to the UK for visits, for a start) -- and I also remember the use of terms like 'lamplighters' strangely romantic and which remain so, something that turns the mundane into a little something else -- while above all else the sheer knife-edge tautness in a dingy setting remains intact. Related to that, from up above:

Not sure le Carré gives a hoot about communism either way - I think he's more interested in the mechanics of defection...Will say that what marks out the early novels is the indifference to English society. This is what we're trying to protect?

Which is very interesting in a reread: Le Carre's London, at least in this novel, often feels empty. It's as if it was nothing but a lot of buildings in which a few people can be found, a number of them containing multiple people (the Circus, a club or bar or two) but mostly containing two or three or even just one. As such it's one of Le Carre's sharpest gifts because he recognizes the reduction of the individual perspective to just that scope; if all you're focusing on is something small or something removed, the exact day-to-day surroundings of millions of people and all that entails makes no impact. At the same time it also makes me think of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books which are explicitly about a theme of a defective/decayed England in structure and form; London as a vast rambling castle like Gormenghast where people work in odd nooks and are seemingly removed from most non-work human contact beyond an offhand 'oh yeah, that' feeling. Meantime the softest side of the whole story comes from the scenes in the school where Prideaux is laying low as a teacher; I think the character of Roach is interesting in retrospect not merely as a way to introduce Prideaux without actually going into any detail about him but also to self-consciously contrast the world of the Circus with an unknowing, naive and unsettled perspective, shaped by divorce and family turmoil (in turn set against Smiley's own ruminations on Ann). But to return to the question of the school: its own circle of petty grievances and victories becomes at once a symbol of what's supposed to be 'protected' and what might not be worth protecting as it stands, a country idyll of sorts -- yet in the end the story begins and ends there, and through Roach's eyes.

Bits in the trailer do make me wonder more now about how the story is going to be shaped; I gather Istanbul stands in for Hong Kong, fair enough, but referencing things like a resultant nuclear war and more puts in a different kind of urgency to it. Still that could just be a quick trailer specific bait-and-switch. Reread did confirm there is a bit in the Karla interrogation scene where Smiley mentions or thinks something along the 'we are not so very different' line so hey.

Anyway, time to watch the miniseries again properly.

nice post, ned. just finished re-reading last night. honestly the thing that stuck out to me was the almost satirical elements of lecarre's depiction of the circus -- it's not quite Catch 22, but it's getting there?

Great post, Ned. I will admit I have never gotten around to reading this book, I should probably do this before summer ends.

It's great.

I can't imagine a movie being a quarter as good as the Guiness miniseries.

Although cast is pretty impressive.

Thanks all. Just rewatched the first episode today as well (the original seven episode series rather than the US-adapted six episode); if the movie by default can't maintain the slow, easy unfolding of the story then the TV version does point the way on how to simplify the book's in medias res structure. (I suspect the couple of shots in the trailer showing the heads of the Circus around a table is meant to mimic the opening shot of the miniseries, though unsprisingly the movie version feels rather more glamorous, just.) Also I'd forgotten that the TV version apparently substitutes Lisbon for Hong Kong but I'll wait to see what the second episode is like.

Seeing Guinness again in the role in full via that first episode really is a masterpiece. The antithesis of verbose, making every word count, with maybe the sole exception of when he's alone, venting and angry, and even that is clipped.

An advantage of the book is that while Smiley as a character obviously exists in previous books as discussed above, you really can take him straight from the start via the book etc., you don't need the earlier stuff though it does provide some context and background by default.

honestly the thing that stuck out to me was the almost satirical elements of lecarre's depiction of the circus -- it's not quite Catch 22, but it's getting there?

There's definitely a very dry humor at many points but Le Carre isn't even aiming for black comedy as such, it's more like "Well, it would be this, wouldn't it." On that front it's almost more like Beckett.

Well, I remember who the mole is, maybe cuz I watched the series 5-6 years ago.

Who is playing Karla?

Ironic that Oldman is not enough of an old man, technically... Also, on the iMdB it says he watched Guinness as part of his preparation! I've never heard of an actor saying something like that about an inherited role.

What about Ewan McGregor also watching Guinness?

xp to ned yeah, i don't think that is really lecarre's aim, but the absurdity of espionage/double agents/triple crossing/etc made it feel like a different author might've taken it in full satire mode.

well, McGregor was doing a bloody impression, plus he wasn't doing the *same* material.

My problem w/ de Niro's CIA film was that stuff is best played as dark comedy.

like Our Man in Havana?

"Who is playing Karla?"

Karla isn't in TTSS.

Hopefully Picard will play him again!

Not in the film? Cos he's in the book/BBC miniseries. xpost

picard has been practicing his steely stare.

Yeah, I don't remember seeing Smiley's People! Wikipedia says Stewart was in both.

it should be michael fassbender. or the other one.

xpost

smiley's people is a bit of a letdown after TTSS

I think he's only in Smiley's People.

In the mini-series.

yes Alfred, my fave spy films are probably Our Man in Havana and The In-Laws.

has anyone seen Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold?

I don't think he actually appears in the book either, but it's been years.

xp It's awesome.

he has one scene in TTSS

The Deadly Affair is unfortunately fairly weak. Don't bother with it.

xp It must be uncredited cuz he's not in IMDB.

which of the two series has the flashback where Smiley (Guinness w/ a dye job) is talking to Stewart in a cell?

xxxp: that's the one, right?

And I think he only has one scene in Smiley's People.

it's been years since I've watched The Spy Who Came In...; perhaps too dour for its own good. But Burton has his best role after George in WAOVW?

iMdB does not always have complete credits. And maybe PS was uncredited cuz he doesn't say anything?

both series are on PS's page:

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001772/

hope karla is in the new one. could be a secret cameo or s.thing. at least in the miniseries it's pretty important.

it's a pretty big part of TTSS (the book) -- can't see how they would leave it out?

it'll probably be shia lebeauoffff

patrick stewart plays karla in a flashback scene in the original tv series, but has no lines--smiley is telling guillam about the one time he met karla, in an indian prison. as in the miniseries, he doesnt "appear" in the book except in that story

I see Stephen Rea in the new film's credits, with no character name!

A slow percolating thought as well which is probably applicable to Le Carre's work as a whole is how little he evinces any interest in the general trappings of the regimes in question. Using Tinker Tailor as an explicit example, the most there is of an English structure as personified/incorporated is the figure of the Minister above Lacon, who is a cameo at best, as well as 'Whitehall' as general point of reference. Similarly both the Americans and Russians are discussed in generalities and the broadest of strokes. In part this approach is understandably contextual (why bother explaining what is already apparent), but, especially as history does change even in the short term, it reduces all the public faces of the regimes to grey, irrelevant background, with the logic of the systems themselves being the only driving force, as previously noted on the thread. If it reminds me of anything it's almost Orwell and 1984, only without even a Big Brother figure as a prop.

Peter Morgan is an exec producer on this film, which explains why bloody David Frost is in it.

different one! that was a head-scratcher.

there are two David Frosts?! What a plague.

xp

there is a little more than the logic of the systems tho, which is represented (to Smiley at least) by Karla. Smiley may not be able to articulate what it is that he's working to protect, but Karla is the personification of what he's protecting it from. that single meeting, and Smiley's humiliation by Karla - which perhaps he has never overcome, and which perhaps is more painful and formative than anything Ann does to him - comes to define the difference between Us and Them in his head. to Smiley at least, Karla is the monstrous product of a system that must be monstrous itself. how much the author or the reader shares that assumption may vary.

i wd say that The Honourable Schoolboy as a novel makes me question le Carre's detachment and sophistication a fair bit.

There's a logic to Karla's personification as you describe; at the same time he's not some Blofeld/Fu Manchu type but somebody equally beholden to his own bureaucratic ups and downs, falling out of favor with Moscow at points and ultimately creating his own private empire precisely to shield himself. Granted if the distinction between the systems is that one side fires/forcibly retires you when you screw up and the other one wonders whether shooting you or the gulag is better then your point is clear and I'd say you're correct that ultimately Smiley, however frustrated he is with much of his system, ultimately 'illusionless,' is immovable from a perhaps reflexive defense of a certain England -- or alternately a certain idealized English/aesthetic existence (his German poets, etc.; the bit of art crit that sneak in throughout the novel add to that function) -- as opposed to a seemingly unknowable set of concerns. (Which makes Smiley's People of interest in that it ultimately, contextually and more, 'humanizes' Karla, just.)

i think it starts off as 'Karla won't/is incapable of "playing the game"' and winds up at his having something of the nature of a very sophisticated machine in Smiley's imagination - his motivations, his calculations, are just about logically explicable to Smiley but the world that created him isn't? Smiley seems to have much less trouble understanding the mole for example, and as such his emotional attitude is clearer.

Then again, wouldn't that be the case, that we know something closer to home no matter what home is.

I wonder if time hasn't changed our thoughts about Russia as 'the other' in turn. Growing up in the seventies and well into the eighties I seemed to only hear about Russia as this place literally shut off from everything and weirdly isolated, a classic perception of trying to fit in a consistent take on a place with little experience to hand; for many Le Carre readers alive at that time it was probably similar. Of course Russia as place or as regime doesn't directly appear in the book at all, everything is at most secondhand.

compare his semi-loving portraits of south-east Asia in Honourable Schoolboy. which are part of the thing that makes that book feel more Boy's Own adventure and less cool distanced dissection.

time has undoubtedly changed our thoughts about Russia but only into a different kind of "other" i guess

Yeah stepping back to Honourable that one is a strange cul-de-sac and I'll be happy to not revisit it, as those issues and more all sound like they'll just swamp it completely.

A different other, a different...context. Who is the le Carre of today and could there be one? There's plenty of room for it I figure but the stakes and cultural contexts are surely shifted.

Would the le Carre of today necessarily write about espionage? I tend to think not, actually, and my attention turns somewhere like Mieville.

one thought: today's spooks are engaged in a much less insular game, primarily working to undermine enemies with less qualms about killing civilians. the job is less arcane in this respect?

there's little to no Ireland in le Carre that i can remember. is that because a) different department or b) literary/other reasons?

xpost -- Mieville is actually who I was thinking of earlier in terms of vague points of thematic comparison so I'm glad I wasn't alone!

isn't le carre the le carre of today?

(haven't read any of his recent books but they sound solid from reviews/interviews)

looks like the whole Ricky Tarr subplot is going to be a biggish chunk of the film judging from that last trailer. that's what i was hoping for; it's clearly (in the mini series) the most glamorous, Bond style action movie element of the story. gonna be great this!

xpost -- Fair point! I do wonder how much of that might be lingering affection; at the same time you'd think that an even more morally grey world would be up his creative alley by default.

i don't really want TTSS to be glamorous or Bond-style tbh

I'm not worried about that, exactly? To me, the irreducible piece of the story is about disaffection and the semi-conjugal relationship between an employer (gov't) and an unenthusiastic functionary (Smiley) of that employer. In other words, I think TTSS exists in the space between ironic detachment and lingering affection.

FWIW I thought 'Let the Right One In' was a sad hash of a movie, and wasted the heck out of Michael Nyqvist.

the american version was better

nonetheless this film looks tite

i didnt think LTROI was "all that" but i have a hard time believing this guy can make a bad movie with that cast

i agree max. i think the source material is interesting enough (both as le carre intended it, and as a cultural artifact) to carry the movie a long way. i wonder what a contemporary version of 'spy who came in from the cold' would look like, too?

i reread TSWCIFTC recently. a LOT less editorializing than you got later. really dry. doubt you could improve on the original film.

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/09/26/article-1062713-0002CCDB00000258-980_468x352.jpg

^^^ beautiful composition in this movie

yeah after rereading both SWCIFTC and TTSS this summer i think the the spy who is the better book. so cold!

http://imageshack.us/f/849/tinker1.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/f/545/tinker3.jpg/

Promising review for sure, some of the specific details in particular.

Watched The Spy Who Came In ... on TV the other day, and it is one of the most perfect spy movies, because it's so unremittingly downbeat. None of the other big name attempts at "realist" spy movies in the 60s ever allowed themselves to be so unglamorous. (Although Richard Burton? Hmmm. Well, I guess you need a star, but he's no one's idea of an upper-mid-level bureaucrat.) Brilliant supporting cast - Michael Hordern, in the picture above, is perfect as the gay agent.

And, the way power games are played, they way everyone dismisses the person immediately below them at the first opportunity: Robert Hardy dismisses Hordern; the first East German agent dismisses Hardy; Fiedler dismisses the first East German agent. Each of those scenes is pretty well identitcal, and perfect for it: beneath it all, everyone is just a jealous jobworth.

that's funny that that's Michael Hordern; I mistook him for Noel Coward!

score: http://www.tinkertailorsoldierspymusic.com/

us release pushed back to dec 9 (uk release still sep 16)

Argh.

:|

it was already late nov i think, so that's not the end OTW.

also don't worry i will tell you all about it here

ahhhhhh owned much USA?

I guess I'll be busy watching the other 300 releases that are squeezed into the last quarter of the year.

only listened to a bit of that score but it's making me miss the Wolfman/X-Men themes they've been using in the trailers. :/

5/5 in Empire is a very good sign, they still only give out a handful of those each year.

just caught 'the spy who came in from the cold', ithappens otm upthread.

The problem with Le Carré as a writer is that he had his characters more or less perfectly formed 50 years ago, and he hasn't really felt any need to alter them since. So for the past 25 years his novels have been filled with people who no longer exist, with the attitudes and tics of a generation before them. So no matter how precise the plotting, the peopling of the novels lets them down. Reminds me of Mark Lawson rofling on Late Review once in the late 90s about a PD James novel that had the young hispters heading to the destination du jour on a Sunday lunchtime: the carvery at the Strand Palace Hotel. That's exactly the kind of thing Le Carré would do.

But pretty much everything up to A Perfect Spy is peerless. That's where I think the datedness starts becoming apparent, though there are still pleasures aplenty over the past quarter century.

Have been reading Eric Ambler recently: you can see Le Carré paid close attention.

http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/299193_252049231502725_211101195597529_742007_3099184_n.jpg

le carre's extreme weaknesses are (1) women and (2) america: he doesn't remotely understand either, and his fiction only really works when neither functions as actor or agent

the trapped-in-a-lost--era comment is interesting: it puts him far closer to the territory of wodehouse than SWCiftC looks as if it's going to be: but of course one era's ultra-realism is always a later's mannerism

his cities are very close to unpeopled: partly this is achieved (as a realism) by much of it happening in the wee hours, in liminal spaces

(a good comparison, and maybe an indicator of where "our generation's" le carre might be looked for, is stephen frears's "dirty pretty things")

re bond: in smiley's people, the mostly off-page story of otto leipzig, the "magician" -- womaniser, charmer, etc -- is an acknowledgment of the presence of bond-esque characters in a smileyverse, and how they end up...

hyped all over the shop at Venice
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/video/2011/sep/05/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-venice-video

I am suspicious of the British film community hyping something that was brilliantly dramatized 30 years ago as the "event" of the year.

to be fair it's not an adaptation of something boring from the 19th century, shakespeare or sycophantic shite abt the royal family, of course it's on a par with aliens landing on the white house lawn or something

Morbs can you remember whether people moaned about the hype over the remake of The Maltese Falcon?

lol, but the first 2 versions were not definitive.

I am suspicious of the British film community hyping something that was brilliantly dramatized 30 years ago as the "event" of the year.

― incredibly middlebrow (Dr Morbius), Monday, September 5, 2011 8:12 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

ehhh british film critics tend to hate british films, this is pretty well attested

you can't expect this to supersede the original, but the original did not follow the novel that closely

"British" film with a hot Swedish director tbf

film will be delivered in pieces that you have to assemble yourself do you see

"the original did not follow the novel that closely" -- it was quite faithful, wasn't it? i don't recall any very significant changes

well, it's told in a different order -- prideaux's mission e.g.

not actually going to read any reviews till i've seen it anyway

but i think the characters are 'different-as-in-better' in the series too, which is a different qn maybe

oh, right, yes, hadn't thought of the narrative order

i saw the series first, then read the book, supplying the characters from the series, pretty much -- i think toby is maybe the one who fights hardest against the TV casting; smiley is smaller and podgier than guinness in description but you read it and think le carre must have made a mistake when he says stuff like that...

s&s just arrived and i see the feature-writer is john sutherland, who -- whatever else he is -- is surely NOT a paid-up member of the "British film community"

(whatever else he is = he's a retired prof of eng.lit. and a very readable literary journalist, but he has no footprint that i can think of discussing TV or movies: has he been in S&S before? he's usually interesting and like henry i will read this after i've seen the film -- but i'm slightly fascinated by the politics of S&S choosing him as the figurehead feature-writer/commentator, esp.as was likely decided before anyone had seen the film)

he does have long-term le carré form.

yes, right, that makes sense: his academic specialism is victorian lit, i think, but he writes about popular and semi-popular fiction also, which vic lit gives you a pretty good angle on

actually i have that issue squirrelled away somewhere, if that's its cover!

& watching the mini-series for the first time on the advice of this thread. usually not keen on this sort of spy-stuff(*), but totally wrapped up, gamaliel otm love all the smoking in shabby rooms.

(*dunno why - never suited my sensibility - possibilities: a) no inner life, so I can't engage with psych ambivalence of Greene tradition b) Total disconnection from brit heroism, playing field/empire mythos, so no interest in people navigating the grey lagoon of its decline c) complicated plots with lots of double-dealing confuse me, & I just assume everyone is working for everyone else, which makes it a bit dull and tiring).

TTSS is great as an objectification of that feeling we all have re: everybody we work with is a back-stabbing cunt

just started watching this myself, thoroughly engrossed already.

i really love how the tv version kind of starts off on this note of smiley being this totally out-of-the-loop outsider who is "too old for this shit", and then he sits down with the british agents at the estate house to meet with the spy-on-the-run, and he takes off his glasses and puts them back on and gives this dude a look which says in an instant that he's the smartest and toughest dude around and it's like "oh shit."

this bit was tremendous!

think i otm'd that the first time round but yeah. now that isn't in the book, and couldn't be.

i started watching this last night because of this thread as well, and after the first episode i came back here specifically to big-up that scene and realized it had already been done, and now it's been done three times, so i guess we have consensus on alec guinness polishing his glasses.

also thought the monologue by the exiled head-of-research woman w/ the dog was great.

(the one in ep. 3.)

tragically, The Fast Show's George Wily sketch appears to be unavailable on Youtube.

he does in fact polish his glasses in the book -- i just looked -- but le carre is not unreasonably playing the long game on this re smiley=awsumz card and "his eyes had a soft, naked look which was embarrassing to those who caught him at it"

guinness def plays the character steelier, and plus guillam thumps tarr several times

also lacon's daughter falls off her pony in the the book

haha yes i remember that bit. she is described sort of unkindly too. "fat" or "plump" or something.

was so overjoyed during delhi flashback when russian mastermind spy stepped into the light and was played by whom he was played by

Somewhere, some nerd has written some sort of slashfic implying that said character is actually Locutus out to spy out Earth in advance of First Contact.

its funny cause iirc hes credited in every episode, and i kept waiting for him to show up, and then i kept waiting for him to have a line, and then i kept waiting for him to reappear, and, well.

great beard.

shame the new version probably won't end with St Paul's Cathedral boys' choir.

hoping it won't begin with the stuff at the prep school

yes i am rereading the book (again): i don't much like the thursgood stuff, it's too cutesy, and the encountering martindale scene is an incredibly clunky exposition move, smiley spends the whole chapter being "i am annoyed at you telling me all this stuff i already know (but too polite and sad and lonely to say so)"

i am happy (just starting chapter three) to defend the position that the TV version is a lot better than the book

don't think it's outrageous to say that Le Carre has flaws that the TV series improved on, or to say that his writing itself is kind of filmic, but the good filmic bits are the bits that avoid any of the Boy's Own last days of the Raj cobblers he likes to indulge in.

a few pages further in, i'm prepared to forgive him the martindale exposition stuff, it's a kind of a graceful sacrifice of the novelistic high ground to ensure that the guillam/tarr sections that straight away follow aren't tainted by too much necessary backstory that isn't directly tarr-related

inc. a nicely blunt bit of lampshade hanging: "an extraordinary feeling passed over him: that he was living the day twice, first with martindale in the club, now again with guillam in a dream"

in tinker tailor soldier THING news, i want tarr to be blair

mac= smiley, obv and garry = percy
childs = hayden, norris = bland, clark = prideaux

fuchs = guillam

Why is it described as a miniseries? Because it's not American and therefore doesn't last for centuries and have thousands of episodes that life's too short to bother watching?

answered yr own question i think

Just looked at the cast of the original "miniseries". Thorley Waters! George Pravda!

bennings = lacon

really struggling with toby!

seven eps (ie a lot less than a full season) and self-contained story never intended to generate further episodes = mini-series by US usage

Think Hywel Bennett is underrated in the original. Can't think of another actor who's gone from youthful adonis to aged ogre quite so spectacularly.

i am happy (just starting chapter three) to defend the position that the TV version is a lot better than the book

not a hard position to defend!

the other adonis-ogre:

http://i2.listal.com/image/499583/600full-david-hemmings.jpg http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/39597000/jpg/_39597403_davidhemmings_pa_story203.jpg

i just read "night soldiers" by alan furst on the recommendation of a friend and boyyy did it make me appreciate JLC a lot more, despite having gotten pretty annoyed with him a couple months ago after tearing through his best few books and finding that the rest weren't nearly as good

http://www.terrynorm.ic24.net/photo%20hywel%20bennett%20young.jpg http://www.wearysloth.com/Gallery/ActorsB/tve1340-19960912-1345.gif http://www.horrorphile.net/images/the-thing-blairthing1.jpg

nothing i read after smiley's people was any good, though i see SP is less than halfway through his bibliog so far

halfway thru the tarr inquisition which is terrific -- except maybe the stuff that irina's is sposed to have written on toilet paper, which is a bit [insert plot-point here] [using lady] [consults manual of lady-fashioning]

yeah smiley's people is sort of the cutoff point for me too, though a perfect spy and tailor of panama have redeeming qualities/bits, and i havent read anything hes done in the last ten years. little drummer girl is the one that turned me off le carre. still dont know anyone whose written as many well-written/highly readable spy novels this side of graham greene

eric ambler and len deighton are both great when they're on

Can't think of another actor who's gone from youthful adonis to aged ogre quite so spectacularly.

Needs own thread?

went on a hunt to discover when exactly the story is set -- irina says the "ultra-reactionaries" are back in power in westminster (= ted heath presumably!) and smiley notes that the war is 30 years ago: TTSS was publiushed in 74, so that makes it 1970-73 i guess

anyway what i found instead was suggestions who characters were likely based on, which i'd never pursued before (caveat: i think jlc was always stayed coy, which is fair enough)

connie = milicent bagot <-- oddly sad about this, it diminshes connie not to be made up, somehow
smiley = maurice oldfield <-- unconvinced by this claim, think smiley is organically a fictional evolution
haydon = kim philby <-- this is interesting, and maybe more plausible, but it does strange things to the time line, basically extending/shunting a mid-50s story into the early 70s

but actually one of the strengths of the novel is the sense of stuff spilling from an earlier era into a later time: of half the characters as weird left-overs in an era they totally don't understand (jlc is always a bit hopeless actually depicting the modern world, less so at depicting the flailing melancholy of the middle-age not knowing how to negotiate it

http://girlspy.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/millicent-bagot.jpg http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7BLh-1UU7pU/Tl4Aid-9zyI/AAAAAAAATu0/ZT8_QRsxTro/s400/oldfield2.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jWsPQF94rz8/TZUVz5hbWJI/AAAAAAAADfo/B1rnWF95VXg/s1600/KimPhilby.jpg

are there any decent non-fic histories of post-war mi6? I'm always a bit suspicious – the 900pp one that came out last year looked a bit dull (& long). I want traitors + mind games + speculation + sociopathic lunatics messing shit up in bucharest

Said 900pp one just got turned back into the library here so I'm going to give it a read. Though presumably it will be fairly dull.

you gotta choose between books by spooks and books by conspiracy nuts for the most part i guess

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUj3uxm_F20

haydon's christ church gang of aesthetes hammers home the philby-haydon connection iirc

though a perfect spy and tailor of panama have redeeming qualities/bits

saw on the jacket of APS that philip roth says it is 'the best english novel since the war'. i haven't read it but still felt, steady on phil.

he must've missed that Tony Parsons joint

i've never seen the film version of Spy Who Came in From the Cold - any good? has richard burton EVER been in a good movie?

Plenty of praise for said film upthread.

ty, it seems like the kind of film that is given away free w the daily mail on a regular basis so i will scour the charity shops for a copy

dude... where eagles dare.

i've never seen the film version of Spy Who Came in From the Cold - any good? has richard burton EVER been in a good movie?

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, September 7, 2011 9:45 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

a) yeah it's great b) what tammy said

oh yeah duh forgot where eagles dare, even ingrid pitt is gd in that

i seem to remember reading a v sniffy piece in private eye abt that big, recent 900 page secret service history that woof and ned mention - sounded p compromised/'official', from what i recall. in the 80s (and earlier) you'd often see bestsellery bks abt MI5etc by ppl w wonderful names like Chapman Pincher and Fenton Bresler, wonder who (if anybody) are their equivs today (haven't really 'kept up' w/ the genre)

a v sniffy piece in private eye

surely not

i remember my dad bringing a copy of this back from his travels, seemed awfully exciting

nb i have never read it

copies of spycatcher actually add up to greater biomass than human beings at this point

a perfect spy is not the best english novel since the war

that would be the satan bug

Julie Burchill's Ambition imo

i think you're all forgetting a little something called The Rats

i dunno i think Lair is probly stronger also i was only half kidding about Julie B

Le Carre movie adaptations are a good thread.

I like in descending order:

The Russia House
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
The Tailor of Panama
Little Drummer Girl

never seen russia house; have no will ever to see drummer girl

gave tailor of panama a bad review in S&S -- i loved the tailoring (marking up and cutting) in the opening shots, which i assume was not being done by geoffrey rush's hands: it's now the only thing i can remember

spy who came in is good though: kitchen sink, really, except not set in the north obv

i read "the perfect spy" but remember nothing WHATEVER about it

and to continue my liveblog of TTSS:

after the school opening and the martindale exposition, the three successive actual-real thriller sections are pretty flawless: the tarr debrief, guillam cases the circus, and smiley visits connie -- there's a lot of storytelling going on in the first and the last, the only time this falters, as noted, is when tarr's reading irina's journal, he tells his own story well but jlc can't find a plausible written voice for her; and the connie section is probably one of the best things her ever wrote (maybe why he tried to top it in smiley's people); guillam in the circus is actually really a way to introduce the opposition as real people, the mcguffin to get him there is negligeable, and meant to be

i'm halfway through smiley's research-and-memory binge now, less successful i'd say, though it pulled one stunt of "reading so deep you forget where you are and being reminded of your surroundings with a start", where smiley does this and jlc causes you to as well, that was neat -- the setting, the crappy little hotel near paddington, is two notches too cartoonish and mimsy

haha i am actually sick of the ann counter-plot already

"there's a lot of storytelling going on" -- haha yes very insightful, i mean a lot of characters recounting stories (mainly tarr and connie obv)

I haven't read the Le Carre novel on which it's based but except for its stupid ending (which I can't even remember), The Tailor of Panama is good nasty fun.

i'd look up my review but that room has no working lightbulbs at the moment

think i tried to watch that as 'a john boorman film' which was probably the wrong way in

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_rEEjjIEeZFA/SMXo2VuSf_I/AAAAAAAAACk/0maUZiPz1po/s400/zardoz+head.jpg

"the gun is good, the penis is evil"

haha i like some of boorman's films a lot, but that^^^ will always come to mind first

ugh

has richard burton EVER been in a good movie?

― Ward Fowler, Wednesday, September 7, 2011 9:45 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L-9YmI0V1c

it was only when i listened to the boorman commentary track on the Zardoz DVD that i found out where the title comes from - (wi)zard(of)oz!

wha? im p sure it's in the movie. he goes to a library and sees the book

great movie imo

"there's a lot of storytelling going on" -- haha yes very insightful, i mean a lot of characters recounting stories (mainly tarr and connie obv)

― mark s, Thursday, September 8, 2011 12:48 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

yeah. i think 'small town in germany' is the most 'and then he met x who told him y'. but this has a bit of it.

anyway, i think the novel makes it a lot more abt prideaux, not just by starting with him, but by making his debrief to smiley sorta the climax. big build-up, and it goes on for a minute. by reordering the sequence -- we know what happened to prideaux from the jump -- the novel makes it less about prideaux's personal betrayal by gerald. going to watch series again though.

i like ASTIG though. kinda like a david peace who doesn't suck.

haha will have to rescreen zardoz, maybe i was distracted by connery's codpiece

can't really get behind equus as a good movie, btw - ts: anthony shaffer vs peter shaffer

it is a treat to have mark s liveblogging TTSS, also

Reading some of the stuff about TTSS, and the nods that Smiley - though loyal, and diligent – is suffused with a sense of distaste and guilt about the whole game reminded me about The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, where - as an incidental character - he is responsible (albeit perhaps inadvertently) for the betrayal and eventual death of Nan. In TSWCIFTC he's still very much part of the machine – though it's never referred in the Smiley trilogy, maybe his role in Nan's death haunts him.

Equus is an unnecessary filming of a middling play, true. Zulu is good, obv, as is Virginia Woolf and Villain and probly Absolution if you're in the mood.

Prideaux is Le Carre's good chap to contrast to all the shifty bounders - maybe including Smiley - in the rest of the novel. I suspect Le Carre thinks he's the hero in some ways, but at least he comes across as kinda decent, unlike Westerby in The Honourable Schoolboy who occupies the same role but is mostly a fucking dick imo.

the one time i tried to watch Villain it was interrupted by the start of the first gulf war!

i've been wrong so often on this thread i hesitate to ask but - burton is zulu??

i also forgot abt the medusa touch, which has some of the some atmos as the tv version of TTSS, funnily enough - britain on the cusp of thatcherism, resigned middle aged men in suits, london as a place of emptiness (morally, geographically)

nah Burton's not Zulu i've just mixed him up with Stanley Baker in my head, common mistake round our way. pretty sure Baker did a movie on similar lines to Villain that's superior, too

Not "The Criminal", the title's similar but the film isn't!

Probberly "Robbery"?

think it might be Robbery yeah

yes, TTSS puts prideaux early and central and adores him, and we're meant to also (in real-life company, prideaux would be an intolerable chauvinist bore, mind you) (albeit largely as cover): we know that something happened to him, not exactly what yet [as of p.162] except he was shot in the shoulder in czecho <-- smiley doesn't really know much of it at this point [p.162] either

one thing i'm finding it VERY hard to do is read as if i don't know who the mole is: obviously i've known for something like 30 years -- jlc treats him with kids gloves AND lampshade hangs wildly all about him; that's to say smiley is overly bothered in effect by how the story is treating gerald (this is largely what bothers me about the ann stuff i think: the extent to which it's ONLY distractional sleight-of-hand -- one thing guinness manages no better than jlc is making the smiley-ann marriage remotely believable, actually, even tho siân phillips makes ann believable; in a sense we keep reading i suspect because we want to crack this mystery, but are left basically clueless) (as clueless as smiley, yes, DO YOU SEE, but that's a bullshit move, really )

the entire novel is smiley's atonement for the death of nan, yes: a long and elaborate proof that nothing nasty he ever formerly had responsibility for was actually really his fault, it is all totally at karla's door

All the way through the tv show, right up to the last episode, I presumed Ann was going to turn out to be some elaborate beard :/

haha elaborate beard = zardoz.jpg <-- if boorman had filmed it

re proof: trust the tale not the teller: jlc/smiley is convinced by his own argument, i think, but the reader -- attentive to the situational method, when it's on and when it's flawed - is not

you're quite right that Ann as a character and Smiley's relationship with her is pretty badly handled, it hadn't occured to me that this might be just cos she's a structural device. JLC wants to deepen Smiley more than he achieves it perhaps.

tailor of panama is as alfred describes

btw, le carre writes a little bit about the philby connection in the introduction to the most recent (american?) edition of the book--you can see on google books here: http://goo.gl/zerJ5

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yes, TTSS puts prideaux early and central and adores him, and we're meant to also (in real-life company, prideaux would be an intolerable chauvinist bore, mind you)

Yeah, pretty much -- but it is telling he's told about/talked about through the eyes of an impressionable and desperate-for-connection awkward kid. That's about the only kind of character who could outright adore him.

one thing i'm finding it VERY hard to do is read as if i don't know who the mole is

As mentioned above I was glad I'd forgotten who it was, and though I had a pretty sure idea at some point it wasn't locked down -- and I was too happily lost in the general machinations to worry further.

haha one of the suspects -- will try and keep hans moleman's REAL NAME redacted for ned -- refers to the relevant americans as "puritan fascists" = a pretty good description of the deeply lunatic angleton

has anyone itt read HARLOT'S GHOST? <--- n.mailer on much the same territory

yeah i read Harlot's Ghost when it came out, was never certain whether Mailer intended a sequel and fervently hoped he didn't. it's one of Mailer's best imo, and the obliquity of the narrator's experiences, his permanent exclusion from the meaning of any of his work, is better than JLC's Sherlock-isms i think, tho i prefer le Carre's milieu and his characters and his style, mostly.

just finished the second guillam-in-the-circus section, where he gets called to account for self before the FOE ARRAYED IN PLAIN VIEW -- this is even better than the first one, because it's all about guillam keeping a bead on what he isn't meant to know

i'm not a huge fan of guillam-the-character, obsessing abt his flute-playing hippie gf -- perhaps bcz the gap between michael jayston's version and jlc's renders his inner life somewhat wonky (this is much less true in smiley's people, where jlc had once again adapted the character to its on-screen portrayal, and guillam is married with a kid in paris) -- but these scenes are tremendous for nerves, tension, not knowing what will happen next etc, someone interloping in a very familiar space, having to seem who he ordinarily is when he no longer is, being himself (very aware that he's out-of-the-loop and appropriately testy about it, yet at the same time not so capable they spot he knows something he oughtn't) (a modelled microcosm of HANS REDACTED MOLEMAN'S inner life, in fact; nice work)

the section before, smiley plunging deeper and deeper into the files, woke up towards the end when he moves off reminiscence into parsing actual secret files he'd never before viewed: finally being a desk-bound research agent, intelligence office as historian-critic, if you like, picking up clues via finance, location and his target suddenly becoming human and throwing a long-ago-and-far-off tantrum

by the way did anybody see David Hare's Page Eight the other week cos I was away from ILX and i desperately wanted to know if anybody else thought it was a bit pish

'Stuff Happens' by David Hare.

scroll down a bit

(xp) Me. Pish seconded.

during his reminiscences, smiley actually develops a THEORY about HANS REDACTED MOLEMAN, the person who will turn out to be the mole, not that smiley realises this yet (OR DOES HE?) and how moleman relates to all those around (genderspoiler) him -- that they're all botched copies of him, and that he can only be himself jigsawed out of all those round him... and actually guillam, in thought and behaviour under foe's gaze in the circus, seems to attest to the accuracy of the theory, at least re situational judgment and self-handling and stance (he's being very junior squishy smiley inside, re his gf)

again: nice work, there's a lot of "hall of mirrors" stuff art work here, which is the intelligence world philby and angleton created

xp hare is pish incarnate

not that i saw this particular manifestation

that thread pretty much sums up my reaction except not enough explicit analysis of Hare's kinda painful longing for women half his age. i can relate to that, but i wouldn't write a bad 90 minute spy opera for the Beeb just to get it out of my system

they shd've cast James Bolam in the Nighy role and pitched it as a new Beiderbecke Affair sequel

i can only watch nighy when he's covered in wet CGI tentacles: and plus pirates of the caribbean iii is a better takedown of blairite geopolitics than anything hare has ever written or will

hare is pish incarnate

4-4-2 or 4-2-4 or whatever it was, remember that one?

D. Hare is a SIR?!??! How? When? Was it Blair that did it?

i thought he'd refused!! oh well

knighted in 1998 apparently, must've fallen out over the absence of a life peerage afterwards

nothing says "thorn in the side of the Establishment" like a gong, tho

i thought about two-fifths of 'page eight' was pretty good tbh

kim philby kbe kgb

kim wasn't going for the "thorn in the side of the Establishment" look during his working life, tbf

kim's gong was a king zog-related OBE apparently -- also he was named for the kipling character, in a novel which is entirely about ambiguity of cultural identity

one of the oddities of jlc's approach is that you never actually learn about ANYTHING concrete a network achieved in the real political world: i realise there's a fiction-reality problem here, re claims he can make and maintain plausibility, but the effect is to keep the entire back-and-forth hermetic, as if actual real-world politics is left entirely untouched by anything anyone here, karla, control, MOLEMAN, smiley, has ever done...

which to be honest i believe it was: it's like advertising, you have to do because everyone else does it, but its net effect is zero

well in that intro above he says that the service shd've been dismantled after Philby, a view he sort of expresses in the Smiley books too iirc, so maybe le Carre agrees with that

also i guess it's difficult for anybody now to plausibly argue that the Russians wd've rolled the tanks into West Germany if not for our intelligence agencies

i was surprised by that actually: i seem to recall him saying something along the lines of "you can take the moral temperature of a country by reference to its intelligence services", and this does seem to be more or less what smiley believes -- but connie certainly says something more along those lines, that this is all an absurd post-imperial indulgence, the little boys with their little toys (she loves her boys and she loves the game but she has no deeper moral view of it)

his view may well have evolved a little though, over the ensuing 35 years!

haha one of the suspects -- will try and keep hans moleman's REAL NAME redacted for ned

Hah, no need to keep it hidden from me -- I reread the book and rewatched the series last month -- but given there are people on the thread who might not have done and will be coming into the movie cold (as it were)...

it was really easy to guess the mole in the TV show because (vague spoilers) there are only four suspects and one of them is too unsympathetic and two of them are too peripheral.

in the show at least the moral-temperature line doesn't seem to imply that the intelligence service is super vital to a country, just that it's a reliable expression of its character.

i read harlot's ghost too -- probably mailer's best novel and yeah seems to have a similar approach to finding out something about a country by analyzing the thoughts/fears/dreams of its secret service.

the idea of a secret service as a nation's -- or that nation's ruling class's -- dreams of itself is great, i think: and jlc intermittently gets this on the nose -- but (like hare) he's totally bamboozled by thatcherism and murdoch and america and "the 60s" (all connected without going the full carmody), and his dream is set (in his ifction) like ten years after its (irl) sell-by-date

smiley's people -- which is in most ways way more of a fantasia -- actually grips this better, because its central characters are actual-real baltic exiles, so "isolates trapped in the amber of loss" is always going to be the Real they're battling

the full carmody

better man than me wd have a field day with Photoshop here

"its central characters are actual-real baltic exiles" -- also they're dead mostly! key to a good handling of yr sell-by-date :\

xpost Harlot's Ghost is simultaneously a terrific book and deeply unsatisfying - and for the same reason. He presents spying as, one presumes, it must be - where only a little of the operation is ever known. It makes it feel realistic, but because you only ever get bits of plot you long for a bit more flesh to make sense of it all.

Best US spy novel I've read was Robert Littell's The Company, a fantastic, panoramic sweep over the empire of James Jesus Angleton - Philby and all. Has all Le Carre's detail, but with added paranoia in the form of Angleton, and nice interaction between fact and fiction. Some of Charles McCarry's novels are very good on the absurdity and unintended consequences of spying.

just finished the second guillam-in-the-circus section, where he gets called to account for self before the FOE ARRAYED IN PLAIN VIEW -- this is even better than the first one, because it's all about guillam keeping a bead on what he isn't meant to know

i'm not a huge fan of guillam-the-character, obsessing abt his flute-playing hippie gf

yes 100%. also this scene explains alleline -- the tv show iirc sort of misses alleline and bland. they just aren't much in it. but the cellist gf is worse than ann and they were right to drop it from the show.

that same "hippie/artist girlfriend" type turns up in a perfect spy

haha my very dim memory of my response to "perfect spy" is thinking fuck this you dick this isn't a thing: but i don't at all recall the thing i was abreacting so aggressively against

also haha at history mayne translating "flute-playing hippie gf" as "cellist"!!! d00d yr exes are showing

it has a couple redeeming moments, but i have no idea what phillip roth was thinking

miniseries is pretty cruddy too

the best bits are everyone scrambling to find magnus after he's disappeared

the really extended le carre memoir is rather less engaging, at least until magnus gets to eastern europe, and even then

i watched the tinker tailor miniseries over last night and this afternoon. really enjoyed it, exactly my kind of spy fare, nice and slow too. obviously i might have waited and gone to the cinema to watch the new adaptation in a week, but i have a feeling that i'll probably enjoy it less if it's a bit more glamorous or what have you, which won't be hard.

After rewatching the original I can't imagine it being improved on, but I'll see it for the new cast. Will see the BBC Perfect Spy as well but like others I found the book really forgettable.

I don't know if something like Smiley's can be made now, detective story plodding along at amiable old man's pace.

'Connie's for the shredder George. The leech tries to fool me.'

ok, quite a chunk to roll out here: runnng order of larger sections is tarr, karla, sam collins, max, jerry westerby, haydon recruits prideaux

the reinterrogation of rikki tarr and smiley's tale to guillam about his one meet with karla are the book's plateau of moral-highgrounding for smiley: there's a small element of plot advancement and backstory infill but they're mainly given over to smiley's technique as an interrogator, at his best now in the approaching evening of his life, and not at his best trying unsuccessfully long ago to persuade karla to save his skin and defect -- key to both, his success with tarr and his failure with karla, is smiley's kindness and humanity (implication: our foes are ideologues and fanatics and this is the flaw that will end them) (a prayer more than a fact, you might say: certainly not immediately relevant to what actually ended the USSR, though this hadn't yet happened in 1974 and jlc was hardly alone in not seeing it coming)

(and yes, it's true that tarr gets thumped some more -- morality is messy! -- and also true that wily smiley is more approving of tarr's canny self-interest and truth-witholding than callow guillam)

then there's a bit with little bill roach having nightmares and being ill ftb the divorce-bogey is a-comin for jim and a section where smiley and lacon meets the minister (which is irredeemably borng necessary tale-business and i have to clap my jaw not to skip: it's extremely short so jlc feels the same, obv)

collins/max/westerby: again, minor elements of plot advancement and backstory infill in all three -- basically smiley seeks them out and quizzes them, the first two as per info discovered in his research -- but the real point of the three encounters is moral colour, i'd say... to give a live sense, as supplied by outsiders to the story, of the chaotic feel inside the circus during control's last project (collins); of the feel of prideaux's operation, max (a czech DP) being with him for the early, less troubled reaches; and, most likeably (jlc likes alkies and writes them pretty well), the feel in the world immediately beyond and outside the circus at the crucial time (westerby is a jobbing sports journo who supplies the service with information he happens on, less an agent than a sympathetic conduit)

you very much feel with all three that they're present in this story for the one scene, to tell their tale and supply their colour-perspective and depart our necessary attention.
collins and westerby are arguably the better characters, certainy more memorable, if not especially deep -- max is a bit exile-by-numbers (there's an incredibly similar character in smiley's people whose name i forget: the max in smiley's people being smiley himself!), tho his role is largely to impress on the reader how a non-communist czech might feel about all this stupidity (=very pissed off); westerby of course also goes on to be somewhat rebooted in (and as) the "honourable schoolboy", which if i recall accurately wears the character beyond thin in a context jlc isn't well-suited to portray (post-colonial hongkong and south east asia in the late stages of the vietnam war) -- collins is also brought back, for smiley's people, in a faintly demeaning role

and then there's the trip back to old documents, and a reread of the young hayden introducing the young prideaux to the service: interesting little bit of spite and uncharacterstic semi-virtuoso tradecraft on jlc's part -- the young hayden writes (i) like a posturing fey student, and more ambitiously (ii) like a clever young man very infected by kipling's sense of rhythm and irony and pseudo-cynical masked self-certainty. The kiplingism is good -- pertinent bcz philby was named for kipling's kim, and culturally smart, bcz only a rightwing student or someone flirting with or pretending to be same would still be being kipling-esque as a pose in 1937-38. The primary plot takeaway is the hayden-prideaux relationship: which remains essentially masked.

Seems to me by the end of the collins section, one of the main suspects has begun to scream out at the reader. But it's very hard indeed at this late stage to reconstruct virgin-reader status.

^^^spite bcz this is the first time we see hayden clear -- ie not through a haze of hero worship and/or hurt fury -- and there's no way he pulls either trick on the reader, with the prose we get to read; except you can't help also thinking "no fair, d00d was still a student! hope no one ever judges ME on stuff i wrote as a student ect ect"

also there's a nice little sketch of the boho-bolshevik student party hayden and prideaux, lifted wholesale as far as i can tell from a similar one in dorothy sayers' strong poison (i'll look this up)

(ok it's less like the sayers than i remember -- the actual phrase i thought he'd lifted was :"a wildly proletarian coffee was served, to the accompaniment of a dreadfully democratic bun" <-- i'm certain this is from sayers somewhere, it's very wimsey-ish, but it's not in this particular scene)

(and again, the idea that it's hayden doing the lifting is astute: sayers a very popular novelist in the 30s)

The kiplingism is good -- pertinent bcz philby was named for kipling's kim, and culturally smart, bcz only a rightwing student or someone flirting with or pretending to be same would still be being kipling-esque as a pose in 1937-38. The primary plot takeaway is the hayden-prideaux relationship: which remains essentially masked.

ah that's it: lawrence of arabia. they more than once compare haydon to lawrence. philby's pater was, if i recall correctly, very much an irl lawrentian figure.

st john philby was an empire dude who became militantly anti-brit and pro-arab, yes (possibly initially in response to the partition of mesopotamia etc after WW1): think he was more desk-bound than lawrence, tho (but who wasn't?)

i thought lawrence liked a bit of desk-binding himself nudge nudge

ok, u guys are way too into this. they're spies, fuck em.

i read spy who came in from the cold, and next up i will read ttss and smiley's people. am i making a sequencing error here?

smiley is in 'honourable schoolboy' between TTSS and smiley's people. otherwise you're good i think? he's not much in 'looking-glass war', but can't remember where that goes.

lgw is either before or after SwciftC -- set much earlier than TTSS

he's also in a weird prep school whodunnit, a murder of quality, which i really don't recommend, unless the thursgood passages are your FAVOURITE BIT in ttss

re Richard Burton, let's just say he was in more good movies than Samuel L Jackson.

they seem to stand mostly alone and i'm not bothered about the canon. i just don't want to make some crashing error that ruins a future book.

LGW is good but kinda boring so theres no real reason to read it if youre just doing greatest hits

and yeah you should read honorable schoolboy after ttss, even tho its the temple of doom of the karla trilogy

ie, it's the best?

Well, how are you with drunks wandering around Southeast Asia?

have we ever done an indiana jones poll

i should read honourable schoolboy before smiley's people? (yes, i am just doing greatest hits)

xpost -- Yup:

Rank the Indiana Jones Canon

yes, and it was wrong

so wrong, lao che

i should read honourable schoolboy before smiley's people? (yes, i am just doing greatest hits)

― caek, Friday, September 9, 2011 10:27 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah, its the direct sequel to ttss, and i think it sets the stage for smileys people, which is much better

curses, just submitted the amazon order. thanks tho.

i don't think very highly of Honourable Schoolboy but it's an entertaining enough read (mostly) and belongs in the trilogy.

i'll say more on the prideaux debrief in a bit -- think i want to reread it, as it's point where backstory and current narrative finally get in step with one another -- but here's a note on jlc's tradecraft as regards location (mise en scene theory/pathetic fallacy alert)

the various tale-relating conflabs smiley has had have been in very different places -- some directly emanating from the person being quizzed, like connie's jericho flat or the casino sam collins now works at -- but in almost all he's been in effect the authority figure: the actual interrogator for tarr, callow guillam's guru when it's the karla backstory, the returned agent with ministerial backing... and the places do their work amplifying the way this inflects, from tarr's cramped hotel room (where he's more or less a prisoner for the time being) through to the curryhouse where he gently pumps jerry w (where in a sense they're equals -- smiley gives very little away -- and it's really only westerby's puppyish semi-lachrymose need for approval that undergirds the power relationship

but with prideaux, the setting is not a built room, public or private, furnished or functional-anonymous, but the wild hilly outdoors of the south west: as -- in effect -- demanded by prideaux; and smiley has no power he can really seriously bring to bear... prideaux could basically snap his neck with a single blow and hide smiley's body and who'd really be any the wiser?

jlc is good at compact and evocative descriptions of places: his london streets are very often real streets he's accurately portraying, and i imagine his countrysides are too (it's not a part of the UK i know); but he's also good at letting the sense of the space be a felt manifestation of the encounter -- the strength of the main part of the smiley-prideaux scene is that it's the first (and last) point in the book where things feel almost open-ended, so that you judge that prideaux chooses to spill

adding: it's not just that everyone's equal outdoors -- whereas indoors is always indoors somewhere, a building structure unavoidably embedded in an extant power structure -- but that prideaux the sporty man of action is more than smiley's equal here, and both know it, and placing himself here is the gesture of total vulnerability by which smiley elicits prideaux's trust

going to watch smiley's people tonight. i love the internet!

morbs i lost my giant awesome comp of kael capsule reviews can you send me yours now that you've internalized it

esterhase's italian schtick in the smiley's people adaptation is hilariously bad.

haha i love toby, he's easily my favourite character: his whole thing is "fluent in many languages, speaks none of them correctly"

smiley in the blau diamant, looool.

this is actually hilarious, toby keeps up with the faux italian voice the whole time. and everyone pronounces his name differently to the way they did in tinker tailor.

well faux hungarian i suppose. it's only from a few years after the original series.

Aye, the guy plays it Hungarian in SP, while he didn't in TTSS. I explained this away to myself by saying that he was putting on the plummy RP while at the top of the circus, bur went back to his natural inflection after the fall.

In truth though, all the actors who put on accents seem to do a particularly rotten job of it.

that's because they've been trained by toby!

anyway, the prideaux hilltop debrief:

it comes in three sections, first the circus where control laid out the operation, last the various cells where, operation blown up in everyone's face, hajek aka ellis aka prideaux tried to screen as much/many as possible for as long as possible, before he was (inevitably) broken; and in the middle, one of the climactic passages in a book full of wary spies moving through dangerous places: a seemingly utterly english agent rendering himself effectively invisible in czech streets stiff with watchers who know he's there

once again the sense of place is ever-present: jlc's tradecraft is, in effect, to heighten a character's watchfulness by a kind of transferred descriptionalism -- as if his own gift for conjuring up locale swiftly and effectively is a manifestation of the character's heightened observational level... to be told you're a "watcher" is a compliment of the highest order, so naturally jlc allows the reader to get to share this quality, or to feel they're sharing it

prideaux is described, physically, as "crooked" and even "fanged" -- as a jaggedly palpable, noisy presence in the world -- yet (like smiley) his deep gift is to become invisible in plain sight; invisible, moreover, to his professional peers/foes when they're most expecting it... this middle passage of his tale is a guide to this, a guide to the superb level of detailed observation and anticipation it requires... and, also i think, to underscore that the core being of this seemingly brusque military sporty type is an uttertly gentle quietness: watchfulness is the centre of his being (ditto smiley; ditto smiley's little child phantom bill roach)

there's a weird passage early on, put in the mouth of lacon and thus easily overlooked as point-missing blather: lacon raises the notion that "method is morality" and then projects onto smiley the assumption that smiley can't and won't accept this idea.

well, for starters it's an ambiguous formation: and it's easy to just assume -- this is lacon speaking, for one thing -- that's merely the situational ethos of the high-end civil service ("i do my job to the best of my ability, to aid my political masters, through every change of government: hence even if they're utterly in the wrong, i can be in the right")

but it might also mean "your morality emerges from the method you choose" (as contrast smiley's interrogation technique from the evil soviet one: smiley deploys far less thumping, if not none, and no electronic probes, hence is "better", as far as moralists are concerned)

and there's a third meaning, much subtler and in a sense subversive, i think, of the book's stated sense of good and evil (which does function as an argument between these first two readings): this is the notion that to be true to your method (your technique, your skill, your craft, the still zen of your art blah blah) is to be true to the world

and in this central passage -- when prideaux is being the best street agent in the book so far -- he is truer to the world than any of the botched or confused reasons why his operation has been set in place (by control, or though the deceived control by the mole, or by the clashing forces of world history, or what have you: every other level is botch, compared to prideaux in the middle passage of Operation Testify, its failure notwithstanding)

the point is, i don't think jlc dares put his trust in this reading: whether this is cause or consequence, he's just not that strong a writer -- he's a writer with strengths, and with flaws, and the flaws always muscle back in (one of his strengths, though, is that he can often deploy his flaws as masks; just as a good spy -- or more to the point a good thriller writer -- must be able to)

[i've actually finished -- the sections following this one are "unputdownable", his sense of pace and momentum at its best -- but i'll try and pace my blogging in haha homage]

Just to go back up to the points of it being a 'mini-' series as in I almost can't see that it would be pulled off these days -- imagine there would be certain pressures to make it far more of a prelude to 'Smiley's People' -- which I hate, never liked that Karla was caught, even if it never felt like a 'victory' -- and if it was to be made in five years time there would be a pressure to lenghten it to 10-12 eps and make it more 'wirey' somehow and lenghten the slow pacing (that's what a couple of people said about The hour which I've not seen).

julio yr a MODERNIST, you can't judge a book by whether its ending coincides with yr sense of just deserts! the book is a fantasia, like "hannibal", and its strengths (virtuoso set-pieces) and weaknesses (formless showcase as structure) derive from this i think

(or do you mean the TV series?) (which weirdly i only ever saw once -- i actually didn't realise it had been made till last year! -- and was distinctly disappointed by: possibly because the action requires it be filmed outdoors in various pretty euro-cities, so it comes across as "on the buses 2: a boulogne awayday") <-- unfair and will watch again

The TV series -- and TV is a v MODERNIST thing, of course.

I haven't read the book.

ps "formless" is entirely the wrong word there: what i mean is that the sequence of setpieces determines the structure, which takes the form of a showcase of technical virtues

b-but tv's modernism is a product of any given show's need to fit the overall demands of a network's programming needs, whether these be commercial or constitutional or even merely capricious! <-- controversial (but true)

also: tv's modernism is a quality of tv AS A WHOLE, not any little arty show stuffed into its maw

And 'Smiley's People' was also made into the TV mini-series.

Never got round to a jlc book as he has come across as faintly ridiculous. I think he probably based Smiley on himself if he didn't get out of it by writing bestsellers. 'it' = one of these former Mi6 fellas who waste away in their post central London bunkers, drink in hand, shutting every one out waiting for the day when they won't wake up. xxp = so TV is a bit like minimalism (the Philip Glass sort ;-))

no: p glass minimalism is a little arty show stuffed into music's maw

b-but tv's modernism is a product of any given show's need to fit the overall demands of a network's programming needs, whether these be commercial or constitutional or even merely capricious! <-- controversial (but true)

If I read this right then Smiley's people had to happen. I guess bad tv has to happen somehow.

I'm now reading the book, gentlemen. Thanks for the gentle shoving.

TV is a collage form
modernism is a collage form (hence etc)

the quality (or lack of it) of a given show considered in and of itself (including the "modernism" of a TV show if/when this applies, which isn't often but isn't never), which is to say any given element of the collage considered in and of itself, isn't a direct factor in the quality of the given collage form as a whole -- it depends how the collage element is being deployed (or "deployed", since this isn't an auteured decision really)

^^^think this mostly belongs on some other thread actually (which i then won't contribute to haha)

my guess is that jlc needed to write SP for reasons contained in TTSS: and that the TV "needed" to make SP-for-TV because of the success they had with TTSS-for-TV (ie among other things that it improves on the book); but that SP-for-TV -- while it tries to treat the new book exactly the way the earlier team treated the old book -- not only don't improve on the book, they massively amplify its weaknesses (which is because SP is a very different kind of book, despite superficial similarities, like same characters and same storyline)

(but will have to reread and rewatch to verify this guess)

back to liveblogging and SERIOUS SPOILERS FROM HERE ON IN, DO NOT READ IF YOU HATE THE ENDING GIVEN AWAY

as noted, the prideaux sections sees the backstory and the current story slide into consonant lock-step, which means that everything that follows derives its momentum from (i) waiting for that actual whodunnit reveal, and (ii) events and activity caused by the consonance of backstory and current story, and what it impels people to scurry about doing

so far so ho-hum, this is a spy thriller with a whodunnit theme -- the value if you like of what remains of the story is how (ii) can screw around with (i), to make it more than routine poiroteesque grandstanding, the brilliant detective explaining how everything fits and pointing the quiveringly melodramatic finger at hans redacted moleman

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 -- which i think is a mark of jlc's own very cunning knot, whereby EVEN THOUGH SMILEY EXPLAINS HOW EVERYTHING FITS TOGETHER it doesn't make it much easier to go back and intricately re-examine any given plot point from the new perspective... because of course it's always a double-perspective, a hall-of-mirrors everything-pulled-inside-out-perspective, where such-and-such a cover-story as supplied by yr bosses in london (or moscow) is actually the REAL story

anyway, this particular scene features toby, who as i say is easily my favourite character: and one of the things i love is how smoothly he adjusts to this catastrophic new understanding, and switches sides: smiley's mastery of the story in more detail than most readers quite grasp -- meaning that we cede smiley and jlc an element of trust as to the precision, which we feel more than we apprehend -- is enough to turn toby; and -- even tho he's kind of victim of the scene, toby is actually granted a lot of professional respect, and not just for sleight-of-hand... it goes without saying that he's a mastercraftsman of lamplighting, babysitting, pavement artistry etc etc, whichever side he's being run by, or duped by. (Except not in fact "without saying": bcz it's relentlessly acknowledged and stressed.)

There's a term used in Smiley's People -- by toby descriptively of smiley's tactics after a certain point -- which it claims is untranslateable, and then translates faintly dodgily. It's from German military phraseology: flucht nach vorn -- and literally means "flight to the front", but in military context means something more like "escape via the Front", ie a defence against attack that consists itself of unexpected attack. But it also has more than a smidge of "leap into the unknown", again as a tactic.

Anyway, that's relevant to this scene -- smiley is getting things going by making his completed theory an engine of events -- but with the proviso (not yet filled in with clarity) that someone/something else is also active in this unknown. We've had as many hints -- just as we have with the actual identity of the mole -- but they're still masked, at least to careless and semi-careful reading. The giveaway is a single word.

loving this liveblog

really couldn't get on w/ 'smiley's people: the tv series', barely watched some of it

karla getting caught felt truer than a bunch of other stuff going on there

the german hippies case in point

haven't seen Smiley's People since it was first broadcast, remember more or less nothing. Haven't read the book since then, either, and I thought I'd leave it for a while now.

i watched it last night with 8 cans of tennents and thought it alright. some of it is a bit hokey, lots of dodgy accents. in fact anyone doing an accent in it is terrible. but the plot itself is maybe a weak point. foiling your greatest nemesis in the easiest way possible, because he's being completely useless and sloppy.

may find it hard to avoid live-blogging SP also, since 'm now going to have to reread it, but i'll put it in its own thread

the german hippies are part of my favourite section of SP-the-book actually: everyone gets hippies wrong on film and on TV, one day i will write a book about why this is

i wonder if it is the same reason as david 'pish incarnate' hare's theory about same

it is identical but mine is better

final tranche of liveblogging! as before SERIOUS SPOILERS FROM HERE ON IN, DO NOT READ IF YOU HATE THE ENDING GIVEN AWAY; also, tl;dr

So now -- at quite a lick -- we pass towards turning the molerunning system against itself to unmasking denouement to aftermath, as the events set running by the coming into consonance of the backstory and the present-times narrative intrude on smiley's intended conclusion

waiting in the safehouse for it all to kick off is good strong anticipatory mood-music -- including a nice turnabout scene where mendel watches the actual circus itself from across the road at cambridge circus (i once spent 20 minutes wandering around there trying to decide which building he can have been watching from, as he needs simultaneously to be able to see the circus itself, including the roofs above and behind the pepperpot tower over new compton street AND the theatre)

the unmasking that follows is a pretty effective portrayal of anti-climax; serious as the implications are, the action itself is borderline farce, powerful men reduced to flapping nobodies, petulant or stunned or totally withdrawn or (in p****'s case) apparently just clueless. except for t***, the secondary suspects -- who turn out just to be dupes -- were never fleshed out beyond cartoon level; b**** especially remains a cipher. And the actual real mole retreats into stoic bored passivity: this above all i suspect shapes the sense of anti-climax; he doesn't act like a villain, or protest innocence; he doesn't act like "himself" as we've watched him throughout the tale, so we're robbed of something, even if it's hardly clear what (perhaps routine poirotism)

smiley debriefs hans redacted moleman and discovers -- more or less nothing: turns out, denuded of the various stages the mole has fashioned for himself, there's nothing at the heart... the final russian doll turns out to be hollow: moleman gives a cliched political speech one day (jlc doesn't even bother giving it all, on the excuse that smiley isn't really listening -- treated as craft and deliberate style decision, you'd have to note that any mid-level brit stalinist on the stump in 1970, when there were still a LOT of them, could have given a less crappy account of the ideals moleman claims to be upholding; we also get to find out that his lovelife is mean and lame; that his paintings are no good any more; that's there's nothing there

(talking about moscow, smiley says that they won't humiliate great britain over this, because it's in their interests to allow their foes to seem worth taking on: so what does this observation say about smiley himself, and the lifefacts beneath the molereveal?) (i'm reasonably sure jlc is aware of this irony of course: indeed that it fits into his whol OH THE HUMANITY litany, which smiley tends to ventriloquise for him)

and then, in the last few pages, the basically horrid and squalid surprise conclusion: when Redacted B redacts Rredacted A: as i said (an age ago upthread) i saw the TV version before i read the book, so this was no kind of shock -- i'm doing my thin best to keep it at least a little spoiler-proofed just in case, because i'm interested in how it comes across to virgin readers (even though we are somewhat in CHRIST ON THE CROSS SPOILERS territory here).

Another very deliberate irony: a key consequence of this conclusion ensures that Redacted B loses moral high ground firmly established (over Smiley et al) as Smiley heard his tale earlier in the book. (The post-it note sentence here having been: "Why did he choose the same order for their names? Smiley wondered.") <-- ans = because they were more of a rigmarole than we at the time supposed; as now at last emerges... final very bitter irony; also final OH THE HUMANITY thumb-on-the-scale if this is an element yr allergic to...

Which it may well be: I don't want to belabour it, but my threefold reading of "method is morality" seems to me finally to hover over the characters we're encouraged at the end to be thinking of, and through: MOLEMAN obv, now forever an enigma; prideaux, broken and betrayed, and back at thursgood's, learning to forget; and smiley himself, also much betrayed (tho honestly ann's behaviour is NOT a parallel with moleman's if yr actually sane)... and of course, since all three are characters jlc has put a lot of time and love (and some hate) into, which is he saying is most him also? He far too obviously hopes smiley; he far too obviously fears moleman. And Prideaux is masked when visible; and most himself when not? Are novelists street agents or desk agents?

(he's a miner's son and the closest to a working-class contributor to the central

oops, i forgot to finish the footnote: as per discussion far far above, suspect SOLDIER is a miner's son who became an academic, and thus the closest to a non-middle-class contributor to the central tale

also forgot this:
HANS REDACTED MOLEMAN UNMASKED "also took it for granted that secret services were the only measure of a nation's political health, the only real expression of its subconscious." <-- actual quote on p306, 11 pages from close

So I was wrong, it's not JLC saying this, and nor is it his oft-times pained and sententious mouthpiece smiley, it's the defeated villain in his rambling foolishness. So does this mean JLC absolutely does NOT think this, and indeed thinks it ridiculous to think this? ah-hum: well that is the conundrum really... how much does JLC see himself in the villain as yearning wish fulfilment ("AT LEAST HE HAS A BELIEF SYSTEM!") and how much does he think the villain's ideology is would-be-ideology is absurd bad-artist self-delusion and no wonder he ends up defeated etc etc.

Of course we can all be right here, since a novel is not a maths problem: it doesn't have an "answer"

how much does he think the villain's ideology is would-be-ideology is absurd bad-artist self-delusion and no wonder he ends up defeated etc etc.

well, im pretty sure jlc-the-man isn't a communiss. but i think he probably agrees with gerald about 'the state of britain' today a little. the pigs-in-clover society, sucking up to the US -- that stuff.

the full half-carmody!

'a small town in germany' is really hard to fathom, politics-wise. one of the villains, karfeld, is a populist german nationalist politician, but i don't think jlc ever calls him a 'neo-nazi', and there's even some business about him wanting to make an alliance with the SU? in a totally non-communist way. many of his supporters are young people, though, and they don't seem to be particularly nazi neither. wonder if they relate to the hippies in 'smiley's people'.

tbf i don't think this is about politics-as-grand-narrative-ideology, it's about national and individual praxis: which the individuals and nations grab at labels for, of course, but what interests and concerns him is how people treat other people, not so much how they tribalise this <-- so far so wishywashy liberal maybe, hence his constant flagellation that he can't lay hold of an aggregate formulation, and conflcted envy of those who can

gerald's self-disclosure at the close is intentionally a chaotic unself-aware adolescent mess: even if gerald would describe himself as a marxist or whatever, JLC doesn't allow him the dignity of passing the description on to the reader...

found this quite interesting http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/11/jacqueline-durran-tinker-tailor-suits

lol/sigh @ sartorial spoilers

ha yes so sad to learn that ricky will wear a REDACTED jacket

moleskin jacket

been watching the tv version and i wonder if it doesn't really nail the most ingenious thing about the plot, which is

- they don't want tarr to come back and spill the beans, not bc they're in on the plot but bc the reality is also their 'cover story'

wait who is "they" in that sentence?

You know, them.

anyway i love love love the tv show but am still at maximum psychage for this weekend

they = three of them and alleline

well two of them and alleline, one of them IS actually in on the plot (unless it's alleline)

but yes, the ones not in on it think tarr's information will spills the beans in moscow central

and to be honest despite having read and reread the book a trillion times i only "understand" this fact, i don't really "get it": it makes my head sing

one of them IS actually in on the plot (unless it's alleline) or ALL OF THEM

have any of the brits read malcolm gladwell's essay on spies/intelligence?

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/10/100510crat_atlarge_gladwell

im generally not a gladwell fan but its an interesting piece that gets at some of what le carre does in TTSS and APS

i did not realise btw that paul greengrass cowrote spycatcher

via

http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/55264000/jpg/_55264721_28-32.jpg
"A book called Spycatcher written by the former Assistant Director of MI5 Peter Wright, reveals intelligence secrets and is banned in the UK. Entrepreneurs get a ticket to Calais, a boxful of books and a pitch in the street."

Saw the film this morning. Very good in parts. Inevitably loses much of the book's essence - the revealing of the story through lengthy conversations disappears, of course. What's slightly irritating is that while this is fine when you go to, say, Ricki Tarr in Istanbul actually being in Istanbul, it's a bit jarring when Smiley says something, he gets a reply, and you (and he) are then left to infer the rest of it all ...

Also, opening scene in Budapest has passers by going into the metro. They are black. Does anyone know if Budapest had a sizable black population in 1973? It stuck me as a bit unlikely. And, as with all films set in the early 70s, the wigs are terrible.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/135000/images/_139152_peter_wright300.jpg

p.wright's tradecraft^^^ would give toby esterhase the horrors

has anyone actually read spycatcher? it's out of print afaict

it's on amazon for a penny (well, +p&p heh heh)

Peter Wright was mad, of course. Part of the Anglo wing that supported James Jesus Angleton's paranoid tendency in the CIA.

Wow, Chapman Pincher is still alive (he's 97) and still publishing (as of 2009)!

haha. i have a book by him. for a project like. unread. a long-fermenting project.

"suspected Harold Wilson of having been a Soviet agent"

wtf. what's the story there?

caek your local bookshop will probably give you a copy of spycatcher for free if you inquire pleasantly

caek, the story is that people who work for intelligence are many of them MASSIVE IDIOTS.

Nothing is more dispiriting hilarious than the gap between Le Carre's portrayal of the spy world, as full of tormented craftsmen of watchful intelligence (in all senses) and the actual oafish twerps and lunies that inhabit the service: how far distant do you have to be from common sense, the real world, actual history as it actually unfolded and etc to remain committed to the belief that Wilson was in the pay of the Soviets.

isn't that story backwards? i thought it was the case that wilson was convinced of a vastm subterraneanm & largely nonexistant mi5 conspiracy to discredit him

ctrl-h 'm' ','

people like bron waugh not entirely ironically kept that rumour going

xxp ha yes it sounds pretty much delusional cranky stuff rather than "truth is stranger than fiction" stuff

unfortunately my local bookshops all sell books in german but i will find it somewhere.

max ty for the nyer link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Wilson_conspiracy_theories

got his own wiki category

The vastness was mistaken, it was a small aggressive faction, and it was MI6 not MI5, but the fact of it was real. There's a pretty good book about it all by Robin Ramsey and Stephen Dorril called Smear!, also long out of print. Good source also for the general cluelessness of the intelligence services in relation to Northern Ireland in the late 60s and early 70s.

great sub head

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/01/ian-jack-chapman-pincher-fleet-street

it's from e p thompson, the urinal line

oh he says that

On the madness of a real spy, this is a good read by a good journalist:
http://www.amazon.com/Cold-Warrior-Angleton-Master-Hunter/dp/0671662732

caek i can send a copy if you want? i just found three in the back room + i am pretty sure there is a whole box of them somewhere

Much has been written about Harold Wilson and MI5, some of it wildly inaccurate. But as far as I am concerned, the story started with the premature death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963.

this man is a marvelous bibble.

Here's how the Wilson theory came about, from Philip Knightley's LRB review of the Mangold biog of Angleton:

In 1962 Angleton’s office family was joined by Anatoly Golitsyn, a KGB officer who had defected the previous year in Helsinki. The two men quickly formed a professional rapport. Golitsyn, a heavy Ukrainian, had hard-line views about the ruthlessness, single-mindedness and Machiavellian cunning of the KGB, against which the flabby Western intelligence agencies were doomed. These views coincided with those of Angleton and when Golitsyn eventually revealed the KGB’s master conspiracy plan, Angleton was all too ready to believe it.

There were two KGBs, Golitsyn said. The West was doing battle with the external one and thought it was coping. But there was another, deeper KGB which was running a long-term operation to destroy the West. The reasoning of the second KGB went as follows. It was useless to devote resources to detecting and catching Western spies sent against the Soviet Union. The West would simply send more. A much better way was to gain secret control of the West’s major intelligence service, the CIA, by recruiting moles among its officers and by sending false defectors. These false detectors could feed the CIA wrong information about the Soviet Union and the moles could report on how this information was being received. Gradually the CIA’s perception of reality could be distorted to suit Soviet aims and the CIA would, in effect, come under Moscow’s control. Once this happened, all the Western spies in the Soviet Union would be of no use whatsoever. The KGB would be running the intelligence world.

Golitsyn claimed that this operation was already under way and that Western intelligence was riddled with Soviet moles. He was too clever to claim that the limited access he’d had to KGB archives before he defected enabled him to name these traitors, but, he said, if allowed to look at the CIA’s files he would be able to identify suspicious characteristics which would point to possibly guilty men. Angleton was convinced, and over the years, thanks to Angleton’s influence in the Western intelligence community, Golitsyn saw the files of the CIA, Britain’s SIS and M15 and France’s SDECE and DST. It must be said that Golitsyn had some successes in providing clues that helped identify such spies as the Admiralty clerk William John Vassall; Georges Paques, a French officer in Nato; and Hugh Hambleton, a Canadian professor. But although he insisted that there must be moles in the CIA, he never found one. Instead, over the years, his list of suspects in the West became more and more outrageous. They included Harold Wilson, Olaf Palme, Willy Brandt, Armand Hammer, Averell Harriman, Lester Pearson and Henry Kissinger. They also included every Soviet defector who had come after him. These men had been sent, Golitsyn said, to discredit him because the KGB knew how dangerous he was to their master plan.

Karla's deployment of Golitsyn was masterly.

The vastness was mistaken, it was a small aggressive faction, and it was MI6 not MI5, but the fact of it was real. There's a pretty good book about it all by Robin Ramsey and Stephen Dorril called Smear!

Ramsay/Dorril a funny pair - I called up a stack of Lobster magazine from a library once - odd combination of slightly flakey mind-control cia stuff with super-detailed Clockwork Orange plot tracing, and odd analyses of 70s/80s policy. Wouldn't mind going through them again - & I keep meaning to read books by one or the other of them.

oh, just ordered Knightley's The Second Oldest Profession: The Spy as Bureaucrat, Patriot, Fantasist and Whore. Looked like it might be interesting.

one of the Lobster guys used to be Hull-based iirc - never sure how much was brilliant investigative reporting and how much was internal psycho-geography at its furthest out

thomp have messaged you via ilx

Rikki "caek" Tarr has sent a field report and needs debriefing.

uncensored liveblog now posted over at freaky trigger: do not read if you want to remain a molevirgin

the TTSS film would intrigue me more if it was done closer in tone to Burn After Reading

following up the "oafish twerps and loonies" angle

http://www.popstarsplus.com/images/DonAdamsPicture.jpg

in fact a searing expose^^^

as witness: p.wright's hat at last explained

http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/135000/images/_139152_peter_wright300.jpg http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/135000/images/_139152_peter_wright300.jpg

sigh, i mean:

http://0.tqn.com/d/diyfashion/1/0/e/T/-/-/Spy_vs_Spy_Cosplay_Comic-Con.jpg http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/135000/images/_139152_peter_wright300.jpg

Meantime:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/15/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-film-review

Agree with the Graun's review. Also, the film is very grainy a la Black Swan, which eccentuates the stifling fag-ash greyness of it. Having never read the book nor watched the TV adap, I had no cue about the outcome going in, but I was able to guess the mole purely by the casting.
Liked it though. It captures the 1970s well and without resorting to smother everything in brown, as so often happens.
Tom Hardy's wig deserves a Bafta for Best Supporting character.

saw it this afternoon, without having read the book or seen the miniseries - but i think i'd been somehow spoiler'd into knowing who the mole was already? it didn't matter much to my enjoyment, but i did wonder how the subtlety of the film would come across to someone with no foreknowledge.

tom hardy's wig was a marvel and a wonder; the national anthem scene was rather excellent.

the earlier scenes were for me slightly overshadowed by simon mcburney's nose in sharp profile, which made him seem like a character drawn by a cartoonist.