The Looking Glass War

"The first thing to say is that it did not enjoy huge success on publication. It came out after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , which was le Carré’s real breakout book. He’d written a few before, but that was the one that was a massive global bestseller and made him a household name, both here and in America. If you read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold , it’s a fairly bleak, rather tragic book. But le Carré felt that in spite of its reception, some people hadn’t really got the book. They thought that it was a heroic story, whereas he felt that it was a story about the futility of a lot of espionage work. So he wrote The Looking Glass War , almost as a corrective for those who had seen heroism in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. So The Looking Glass War is a very, very bleak story. Again, it’s darkly humorous, but the humor is buried quite deep under this bleak tale of a completely incompetent intelligence operation that is mounted by a small intelligence service in Britain. It’s not MI6, it’s a second-order organization that in le Carré’s novel had survived World War Two and is trying to prove its relevance in a post-war world. I think it may be le Carré’s best work. The bleak emptiness of the motivations really says something about the cynicism of the world of espionage, particularly, perhaps, in the early period of the Cold War . There was a brutality to it and a coldness to the way that spymasters in places like London carried these operations out. A lot of people were betrayed in operations that had no real utility at all. In terms of the specific events in The Looking Glass War that may have a historic resonance, there are a couple: One is a very strange story from 1956 when a Russian ship was visiting Portsmouth Harbour. Although it was the early years of the Cold War, it was a quasi-diplomatic visit, certainly not a hostile one. A man called Buster Crabb—who had been a heroic Navy frogman during World War II but was long since retired and probably no longer in great shape—was sent on a strange mission, which to this day no one’s quite sure what on earth the purpose really was. It was basically a suicide mission, and his body was discovered later. It caused a bit of a diplomatic incident. But as a futile, pointless venture that cost the life of the operative but seemed to gain nothing for Britain, it was emblematic of this rather chaotic and amateuristic period of the early Cold War. So that’s one of the possible inspirations for le Carré’s novel. There were others in the early Cold War. For example, agents were sent to Albania —where the Cold War was still a hot war—with no sense that they had any chance of achieving anything. It’s almost as if they were being sent to their death to make a point on a global scale. I think it was these futile and costly operations that seem to have inspired le Carré in writing this book. There are resonances of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which came later. The threat that such a thing might happen was always on the minds of Western leaders and their intelligence services. To my knowledge, the specific high-level threat that’s alluded to in the book probably wasn’t there, but it’s a very believable one. It’s something that intelligence agencies would have wanted to keep an eye on. Yes. There’s a wonderful bit where, because this secondary intelligence service has managed to get its toe into the door of bigger operations, the head of the service gets a slightly different car to be driven around in. The endless bureaucratic jockeying for position and the turf wars are based on reality because they happen constantly to this day and in all humanity. In that sense, a book about bureaucrats scheming is endlessly relevant. We see it in the writing of Mick Herron and Len Deighton . A lot of espionage fiction takes that side of things and brings it to the reader."