le carre: the thing he's actually good at (possibly)

I probably shouldn't revive this thread b/c it's kinda perfect as is, but I watched the Tailor of Panama the other night and it's good shit. It reminded me a lot of the Wire's serial killer plot, esp. when the powers that be start running with the lies because everyone's got something to gain. It might be unrealistic but it's def. believable.

Pierce Brosnan's anti-Bond asshole character is great.

I enjoy his books a lot, though the more you read the more predictable his plotting gets. He's a very interesting stylist for a 'genre' novelist.

love the smiley books / tv series.

Absolute Friends, his most recent but one, was actually very good.

Mark S: like harold pinter i wd basically far rather he was working for the side i'm not backing) (which given his background perhaps he is...) -- this is funny!

I'm watching the mini-series soon. How's "The Russia House" (the movie)?

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (the mini) is awesome, even if Patrick Stewart didn't get any lines (he just sat there and looked Russian).

It even helped to fill the Wire void...not in all ways obv., but 50 minute episodes, totally continuous, lots of subtle intrigue that is probably completely boring if you're not invested in it, etc.

A favorite of mine as well -- been years since I watched it, be interesting to give it another go-round.

oh man so good!

alec guinness is so great in it. and the storytelling... so subtle, so smart.

what about smiley's people? anywhere near as good?

Don't have so much time for his later output, but his sixties spy novels are unbeatable, especially The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Also Small Town In Germany and Looking-Glass War.

what about smiley's people? anywhere near as good?

I liked it but individual scenes stick more in the memory in comparison (said scenes however are fantastic -- I find myself remembering the line "I insist on Moscow Rules!" a lot, as I do Smiley's later response, "Moscow Rules, old friend...")

By the time you get to the film version, credit for The Tailor of Panama should probably go to Graham Greene. (I had totally forgotten that this film existed at all; I wound up seeing it in the theater, not knowing the source, and actually spent the whole time going "but wait, this is just the plot of Our Man in Havana!")

film version of which stars alec guinness, right?

i only read smiley's ppl.

xp and yes it does

our man in havana = not on netflix ;_;

By the time you get to the film version, credit for The Tailor of Panama should probably go to Graham Greene. (I had totally forgotten that this film existed at all; I wound up seeing it in the theater, not knowing the source, and actually spent the whole time going "but wait, this is just the plot of Our Man in Havana!")

-- nabisco, Wednesday, April 9, 2008 3:18 PM (37 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

well i don't think anyone was trying to hide the fact that the book was inspired by our man in havana.

the 'tinker tailor' series is yoga flame

He is great for general rubbishness of the espionage world, and for painting them as being like a slightly more important section of the civil service.

He can't write women characters, though I think weirdly he might have got worse at this over the years rather than better.

I thought Absolute Friends was a bit meh... enjoyable enough while you read it, but afterwards I thought "what was that all about?".

Yeah Slocki I know it wasn't "hidden," I just had no idea about it, so I spent part of the film going "weird, this is a lot like ... wait, this IS ..."

Point being that this:

I watched the Tailor of Panama the other night and it's good shit.

... makes me go, you know, "that's more to Greene's credit than Le Carre, I think."

or john boorman i guess.

the exposition in Tinker that alec guinness does soundlessly, with nothing more than a pat of a jumper, a sigh and a shuffle of papers, is astounding.

the more i think about it the more i realize alec guinness is the best actor ever, pretty much

I love Alec Guinness, his range is incredible. It is so funny that there are people who think of him solely as "that guy from the Star Wars films".

There are?

Well, Star Wars nerds.

also, Americans

kenobi descendants

Mark S: like harold pinter i wd basically far rather he was working for the side i'm not backing) (which given his background perhaps he is...) -- this is funny!

― the pinefox, Monday, March 31, 2008 5:10 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark

hmmm

I recently finished his "A Most Wanted Man", which was OK. The first book by him I've read since, I think, "Our Game". Anyone else think The Constant Gardener was the best Le Carre film adaptation?

no.

so is A Perfect Spy worth finishing?

is the bbc series worth watchin

shd i read Spy Who Came in From the Cold b4 watching the acclaimed '65 film?

dmac if you mean Tinker, of course da fuck

My mom was watching The Night Manager over the weekend. She enjoyed it to the full; the bits I saw were about what I would expect.

no i mean perfect spy

tinker amazing

spy who came in from cold well worth reading imo, very boiled down and terse

before the movie.... hmm hard to say which spoils which

id prob lean toward watching first.

Really don't like Burton's performance in Spy Who Came in From the Cold - blustery and grandiose where the film is low-key and grimy. Visually parts of it remind me of Polanski's Repulsion, also shot in London in the same year.

itching to start a len deighton >>>>>>>>> le carre thread (holding back till i've read more than one-and-a-bit deightons)

I've only read the first Len Deighton novel so far but I don't really see them as a >>>> situation, doing different things.

Spy Who Came In From The Cold is a great read

everyone is doing different things, since when doesn't ilx compare them anyway?

*shakes head puzzledly*

shd i read Spy Who Came in From the Cold b4 watching the acclaimed '65 film?

yeah def, they're both great - altho i agree with ward to some extent on burton's performance

the movie does a great job of bringing the dingy dreariness of postwar london, which is palpable in the book, to the screen

i need to watch the bbc tinker tailor again

that final scene in the first episode where alec guinness' dotty-old-man act drops and the inner steel catches the light for the first time gives me the chills, just an amazing peformance

huh, i see a gif of that moment has just been posted in the thread for the tinker tailor movie

great minds etc

it is iirc ilxs favourite moment in history

and rightly so tbh, arguably the pinnacle of human civilisation

(ian fleming is better on women!!) (i'm serious!!!)

otm

Hopefully not a challops, but I think once you've read Spy and Tinker, there's not much point reading the rest, they're just inferior variations.

(*Haven't read Looking Glass or A Small Town though)

that might be fair, and if i were in the mood id wonder if theres a thread idea in there to explore whether theres a novelist it doesnt hold true for?

or even that subset of writers whose works in the main take place in a consistent world of recurring characters

unfair i think to the early books (looking glass, small town, spy/cold) but sadly true for the ones that i've read post-smiley's people

Can you recommend a good non-Harry Palmer Deighton to read?

i am enjoying yesterday's spy but haven't quite finished it -- will report back when i've read a couple more!

(deighton never actually names harry palmer in the books iirc, the name comes from the films: the central first-person character in yesterday's spy is also unnamed, except for a wartime pseudonym, and answers direct to dawlish, so might actually be HP -- certainly he makes sense as a character if you read all his lines with a michael caine accent and delivery… but wikipedia says this reading is contested if not exploded and deplored)

Max on Smiley books

http://www.vulture.com/2017/09/best-john-le-carre-george-smiley-books.html

I preferred The Honorable Schoolboy to Spy or Tinker FWIW

Read Spy Who Came In From The Cold some months ago, saw the film adap for the first time last night; both met high expectations. I dunno, that's about as gritty as Burton gets (esp in the context of the glossy crap he has doing around then with Liz, Woolf excepted) and he's excellent.

There's an extraordinarily good 39-minute interview with le Carre on the Criterion disc of the film (2008) where he's spot-on about how Burton's movie-star largeness "fills up" the identity of his character, while Alec Guinness was sufficiently elusive and recessive that you still had room to speculate on the essence of Smiley. Here's clips:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXGAqE5odXg

lovely, thks

He's probably also dead-on in identifying Cyril Cusack ("a REAL Irishman") as Control being the most brilliant casting.

Spy is my favorite Burton performance for the way Leamas' rage and depression sustain his coat-trailing performance of rage and depression

as a good genre novel translated into a good movie, only The Maltese Falcon comes to mind as comparably faithful

watching the 1969 looking glass war now

its good

Christopher jones is pretty extraordinary

james dean playing del toro playing ricki tarr

i mean it spends too long on trippy idyllic hiker stuff and everything after the border crossing is far too on the nose but i wanted a cynical method-examination of the middle mamagement of the cold war and yep thatll do on a friday night

I finished SILVERVIEW (2021) - JLC's posthumous and last novel (unless even more material awaits?). It's quite short, only 200 or 250pp. It carries an Afterword by JLC's son, an author, who says that his father had asked him to finish his unfinished work after his death but that he'd then found that the MS needed almost no addition. I'd wondered this while reading - whether I should take this work as truly finished, or flawed by debility and in some way incomplete. Apparently it's to be viewed as properly finished.

It centres on a bookseller, one Julian Lawndsley, who's moved to the coast of East Anglia (is it Suffolk or Norfolk? Unsure) to open a new shop having left his life in the City. He's befriended by a mysterious elderly gent, Edward Avon, who wants to use the bookshop to set up a 'Republic of Literature' space. He previously used the antique shop next door to sell off expensive china. Edward's motives in all this are covert: he really wants to use these shops as routes to send messages to a contact who can pass on secrets about UK foreign policy, to a woman he knows and cares for, Salma. She lives in London and is the partner of a Middle East / Palestinian activist. Edward's motive for this is that he was in Bosnia in the mid-1990s and saw a Muslim village massacred. This has made him more sympathetic to Middle Eastern causes.

The secrets Edward is passing on come from the covert work of his wife, Deborah, who lives in the big house nearby, Silverview. Deborah is a dedicated and veteran UK intelligence officer and only recently (?) found out that Edward was stealing secrets. This plot seems to be gradually detected by a current UK intelligence officer, Stewart Proctor, in a) a trip to an East Anglian nuclear bunker (?!) near Silverview. b) a trip to interview two former intelligence officers who tell him about Edward's background, c) receipt of a letter from Deborah, delivered by hand by Deborah and Edward's daughter Lily at the start of the book. I assume that this letter tells Proctor about Edward leaking the secrets. Unsure. Proctor thus closes in on the East Anglian town, abducts Julian and makes him sign some official form (here the picture of UK security services becomes sinister), has a document for Edward to sign to try to let him off lightly, but the final drama is that Edward escapes, via the back of a postal van, and we never know where he ends up.

Is that the plot? It's my impression of it, but it wasn't very present in my mind as I was reading - it only drops into place around the end, for me. The political tendency of the plot would seem to be, if anything, a) it's understandable that Edward is concerned for Middle Eastern causes, b) the UK state is quite scary in how it pursues people.

The brevity of the book means that some plot events happen too fast. When Julian meets Deborah for the first time he is talking to her and complimenting her as if they've known each other for a while. Meanwhile Lily, who's also literally never met Julian before, is already grasping his hand under the table. This isn't really explained. It's not very surprising that Julian and Lily get together by the end, but the speed of their intimacy seems excessive.

A feature that some people might like, but I sadly don't much, is the dialogue, in which people are always swearing at each other in a frank, bluff, middle-class way. It's a tone that implies a lot of pre-understanding, knowingness, as well as exasperation. The f-word is used a lot. I think JLC was better off when, say 60 years ago, he wasn't allowed to use this word. The conversational tone he relies on here becomes a mannerism.

The bookshop setting allows W.G. Sebald to become a motif in the book. Julian doesn't know much about books. Edward tells him he should stock Sebald; multiple copies of THE RINGS OF SATURN arrive (though JLC rarely uses the definite article in the title); a copy of the book is used in classic spy-fiction manner as a way to be identified at a rendez-vous (perhaps Sebald would have enjoyed this?). Edward takes Julian to Orfordness, a location from the book, so the two books converge in a sense, and in his description of the place, JLC echoes Sebald's. Thus Sebald goes from being just an incidental motif to being somewhat more deeply connected. Well, RINGS also describes atrocities in Europe similar enough to those that Edward witnessed, that altered his world-view - so the connexion has some genuine logic.

My struggles with the novel's plot are illustrated by the fact that, looking back through it, I see that I was mistaken to say that Edward's contact was Salma. That's the woman he knew in Bosnia, but the mysterious woman he knows in London is Ania. I can't quite reconstruct how Ania entered his life.

Oh that's my friend Ania, didn't know she worked for the Palestinians! Good on her.

This bookstore plot seems pleasantly eccentric.

I'm somewhat less enthused by the politics here - "Middle Eastern causes" quite a nebulous conceit and Edward's solidarity springing from seeing a massacre in Bosnia, as opposed to anything closer to home/the nations the UK is geopolitically aligned with, feels like an odd sort of displacement.

I think I agree on the last point. I don't get why Bosnia should spur Edward to anything, whereas lots of UK or Western foreign policy might.