The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

"It’s also, on some level, the glummest. It runs on rails from its inception to a point of crisis from which there is no return. And it’s really beautifully and brilliantly executed in its inevitability. It’s totally bleak, yet at the same time there is a feather of victory in it as well. It’s a really extraordinary book. The stage play is coming now, the first time any of my father’s books has gone to the West End stage. That’s also extraordinary, because while watching the play you have this complicity: at any moment in a piece of physical theatre you could, in theory, stand up and stop what’s happening. You’re never going to, but you could, then when it arrives at this inevitable conclusion you feel responsible. It’s really powerful on stage. If you mention le Carré, most people will say: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. They’ll talk about Richard Burton and, if they’re of that generation they will remember the book coming out. It was definitive for a moment. Like you said, it was the anti-James Bond. Before The Spy Who Came in From the Cold , you had spies who were, for the most part, glamorous people. There was a wash of wartime spying, extraordinary people like Noor Inayat Khan , who parachuted into occupied France and worked with the Resistance behind the lines. Sadly she was eventually caught and executed. But these figures had that gloss of glamour. Then came the 1960s, and there was a growing sense in the UK that the empire had fallen, and it turned out that some of the time we may have been ‘the baddies,’ you know? So there was this extraordinary reflection, and the revelation that the heroes of empire, or the heroes of democracy, might have been flawed, broken, desperate people looking for a place to put their faith. Then it came down to the wire: Are we the goodies or are we not? And the answer is, well, do we behave like the goodies? It’s an extraordinarily live-issue book. Yes, and heaven help us, moral crisis is definitely a 21st-century conversation."

"I think it sets the standard for all spy literature. It’s very hard to improve on The Spy Who Came in from the Cold . It’s the classic le Carré recipe of compromised individuals trying to find their way through a labyrinth of deception and self-deception and he’s set a standard there that no one’s really quite equalled. I think it’s very telling that the greatest writers of spy literature have all themselves been spies: Somerset Maugham , John le Carré, Ian Fleming, Graham Greene. And le Carré exemplifies the fact that spying and fiction-writing are not very different things. In both of them, the central element is to create a false world, and then try to lure either the reader or the enemy into it. That’s what The Spy Who Came in from the Cold does, and it’s about the moral confusions that come from this extraordinary capacity for self-deception and deception. Yes, that’s exactly right. They are brilliant psychological works; they’re not just adventure stories. They are glimpses into the darker corners of the human heart and human motivation, and that’s the ultimate role of the novelist."

"This novel shows a very different kind of world and service. It is a grainy monochrome world with amoral spymasters moving pawns about the board in this grim Cold War era. These are gripping psychological novels as much as anything else. The novel has Smiley in it but the central figure is Alec Leamas, who is a hard-bitten veteran whose duty to the Service conflicts with his relationships and his humane side. He has to work in an amoral value-free world. This is at the far end of the spectrum from James Bond, but it also says a lot about the bureaucracy of the Service. The decisions made back home in what le Carré calls ‘the Circus’ – head office – are really important and you don’t see so much of this in the James Bond books. Le Carré’s book is from a moment in history when you have this monolithic kind of Soviet enemy with the West defying it. And you have spymasters on each side who have perhaps more in common with each other than their own fellow countrymen. And there is a little bit of that, too, in the real story, I am sure."