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

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.