Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

"I’m a little suspicious of the ‘dark gothic 70s’ view, as I call it. The received wisdom should be challenged. It was clearly a time of anxiety and paranoia. But that atmosphere always assumes exaggerated form in newspaper leaders and magazine articles, because people like gothic things. You can find them in any decade if you want to write a gothic book. Even in the 90s, not a particularly dark time. But I find the darkness in le Carré particularly interesting because it’s quite melancholic. It evokes a sadness about Britain and the establishment at that time. There’s a sense of the world closing in. He really captures that in the book. There’s a clear sense that the opportunities for the British elite, broadly described, are narrowing in the 70s. A lot of its gothic atmosphere comes from the fact that if you were writing for a newspaper or the intelligence services, then the empire is no longer an arena in which you can operate. It was the first decade without that imperial scope and the possibilities afforded by the EEC were not yet apparent. These were bleak years for the elite. For many people not part of it, opportunities opened up in terms of what they could buy, things they could do, sexual mores. Many were quite positive about the 70s so there was quite a distinction between the two groups. That doesn’t mean the elite’s pessimism should be discounted. It had a very powerful influence, making the gothic the dominant flavour of the media at the time, particularly in newspapers. Le Carré really gets the sadness of that. But I like the way his spies are also quite cynical about the political right. They would probably side with the right but they are not stereotypical, Wilson-bashing spooks. They are a little more nuanced. Yes, to a degree. Certainly, Wilson was undermined by people in the intelligence services, as has now been documented in the official history of MI5. But bear in mind that it kept files on a huge number of people in the 70s – almost as many as the Stasi kept in the former East Germany. They had files on all kinds of trade-union activists, including Peter Mandelson and Harriet Harman, and other centre-left figures. So there was certainly a sense in which the spooks were on the side of the right-wing fringe. Actually, most people I looked into who were active on that fringe weren’t closely connected with the intelligence services. They were people more associated with the fringes of the Tory party, anti-tax groups or ratepayer-rights organisations. Or they were libertarian students. Just as I think there’s too much gothic in our view of the 70s, there’s also too strong a sense of the ‘spooky 70s’. Much of the interesting politics on the right had nothing to do with the security services. But people’s attention is always drawn in that direction. I wouldn’t want to give them a monopoly of control over the fringe-right."

"Absolutely. The Spy Who Comes in From the Cold is this short, driven, linear narrative. It just happens and it plays out. But it doesn’t really give you the architecture of my father’s world of espionage. It’s just a brutal incident. Whereas Tinker, Tailor is far more baroque and meandering. It goes all over the place and introduces you to this entire world of The Circus, George Smiley, and all the players around him. Obviously there was Sir Alec Guinness in the role, and then there was Gary Oldman. There have been extraordinary audiobook readings—most recently Simon Russell Beale. As a standalone, Tinker, Tailer is an absolutely top-grade detective story. It’s all about this process I talked about, the archaeology of truth. There has been a gasping crisis or a deep fracture in how the world ought to work, Smiley comes along, and little by little he brushes away the dust, the misdirection, the obfuscation and he holds up the truth and says: This is what happened, here it is. There’s an actual ‘I expect you’re all wondering why I called you here this evening’ reveal. It’s classic. People don’t always realise that, because the theatre of espionage is very strong. But in the end that crime-investigation-solution shape is what stops you from getting lost in the book, and it’s incredibly elegantly executed, in a completely different way to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold . It meanders, it conceals, it shows you one thing but tells you another. You don’t realise that you know things. It’s just an extraordinary piece of writing, something that has been incredibly successfully adapted. Inevitably these would be the two books that I mention first, because they are the benchmarks of my world at the moment. Karla’s Choice comes directly after The Spy Who Came in From the Cold . George Smiley is unhappy with what’s happened. He’s retired. Then Control, who—as I re-read the books—increasingly comes across as an extraordinarily malign spider in the middle of the Circus web—wants Smiley back, and he wants him back now, and for him to do as he’s told. He contrives a situation where Smiley does come back to investigate what appears to be a quite minor issue. But of course it balloons and brings Smiley, ultimately, into a situation where he is uncovering the existence of, or the rise of, Karla, who becomes a kind of arch nemesis in Tinker, Tailor , eight or nine years later in the chronology of the books. In Karla’s Choice , you get to see the evolution of that, the first clash between them, without compromising the mystery of either Smiley or Karla. It’s like the moment at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark , where they put the Ark of the Covenant in a box, they put the box in a warehouse, and you see the trolley going down. All I wanted to know when I saw that final sequence was: what was in the other 10 million boxes? What other mysteries are hidden in that warehouse? I love that. With Karla and with Smiley, anytime you reveal something, what it has to make you feel is that there are now ten more things that you need to know to understand what you just find out. The mystery has to be deepened every time. Or else it’s like the moment when you see the shark in Jaws and you think, oh. I wish I’d shut my eyes for that. Yes. This was a post-facto realisation that I had. I had this moment when I asked myself whether I could write the book. I sat down and wrote little bits of Smiley and it became quickly apparent that it was a very small adjustment in my thinking that was required to find a voice that was authentically mine, but also read as authentically Smiley, authentically The Circus. I won’t say ‘authentically my father’s voice,’ because, interestingly, people go back and forth about that. Some people say this feels like ventriloquism, some people say, actually this feels like Nick. That’s an argument I’m delighted for everyone to have without me. I’m the last person who’s going to know the answer to that question. I was born in 1972, and my dad used to read the books aloud to my mother as part of the writing process as he wrote them. He’d write by hand, then he’d sit there with a sheaf of 30, 40, 50 pages in his hand, or maybe with her typed version, and read them back to her. Sometimes he would read and you could see her eyebrow twitch, and his pen would come out and go scribble, scribble, scribble. There was a real interplay. As the years went by, that became more and more acute. As I was acquiring language, I was getting an hour and a half, two hours of Smiley every day, basically. So when I came to do this, it’s in me. It was really a question of going back to a very simple sound in my head, and finding that that was recognisable to people reading."

"This is beautifully written. But more than that, it is really about counterintelligence taking pieces of information which send you off on a hunt. It is no different than the hunt for Bin Laden, where they took isolated fragments of information and tracked him down. And this is what you see in Smiley. He takes bits of information to find the mole. Anyone who has been on a mole hunt, or watched one from the outside, will say this is the way it goes. And le Carré has the ability to add drama and colour. The Cambridge Five were such a fascinating group. The handler went back to Russia and was executed, but that is another story. For classic espionage in a little town in Germany, you can’t do better than le Carré."

"This is an example of the meticulously supreme thriller. John le Carré really is the master of the form, and any list of thrillers has to include that book. It’s a very emboldening book for thriller writers, because it teaches you not to underestimate the understanding of your reader. They can be pushed and pushed. It is an incredibly intricate plot and yet, if you write it well enough, as he does, readers will stay with you. There are various leads that point in the direction of a traitor at the very top of the British intelligence tree. Our hero George Smiley, who has recently retired from his senior post in British intelligence, is brought back to find out who it is. It is brilliantly daring because much of the action is in the realm of shabby offices, manila envelopes, brown files and the mundane wheels of 1970s British bureaucracy, rather than James Bond-style action. Yet it is a brilliant book, and wholly absorbing. It is completely evocative of its era, and the plot is complex and intricate in a way that intelligence at that level actually would be. It is an amazingly satisfying read and just a perfectly constructed book."