The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963, UK) was John le Carré’s third novel. It’s also probably his best known. (Incidentally, how are you supposed to capitalise it? I’ve always left prepositions and articles without initial capitals, but it looks weird for this title.)
This post will necessarily include spoilers.
Alec Leamas runs a network of agents in East Germany for MI6. He is based in West Berlin. The novel opens with the chief agent of that network, an East German government official, attempting to cross into the west at Checkpoint Charlie as his cover is about to be blown. He doesn’t make it. Leamas returns to London and is given a series of make-work jobs. He hits the bottle. His life enters a downward spiral and he’s eventually let go. He ends up working at a Psychic Research Library, whatever one of those might be, where a young woman takes pity on him, and falls in love with him.
But all this was a ploy. Control, and George Smiley too, had arranged for Leamas to hit rock-bottom so he might prove an attractive target to the Soviets. And when they approach him, Leamas is happy to tell them all he knows for money. The plan, however, is not for Leamas to give the Soviets misinformation but instead to drop sufficient clues to cause them to doubt a senior East German intelligence officer called Mundt. (For some reason, the East German intelligence services is called the Abteilung throughout the book, which just means “division”, and not the Stasi; and while there may have been good reason for it in 1963, it feels a bit odd.)
But the plan goes awry. Leamas is flown to East Germany to stand as witness against the intelligence officer his, er, intelligence was intended to bring down. This culminates in a court-room scene, in which justice is not especially evident — hardly surprising given the location — where Leamas provides more than enough to consign Mundt to death. Only for the young woman who’d fallen in love with Leamas, the young woman from the Psychical Research Library, to appear before the court — she’s a member of the Communist Party and had been invited to East Germany — to appear and inadvertently reveal that Leamas’s downfall had been manufactured and his testimony all part of a plot to discredit Mundt.
It is only as the tribunal is in its final stages that Leamas realises the whole thing was planned that way from start to finish. His testimony was supposed to be subverted. The East German intelligence officer actually is a Western intelligence asset, and the plan had been to accuse him and then demonstrate the plot to unmask him was a, er, plot.
Arrangements are made for Leamas and the girl to be escape from East Germany, but both die in the attempt. On the last page of the novel, le Carré hints the young librarian was not, as depicted, an innocent caught up in the plot, but one of its chief players.
I’ve probably explained it badly. In a nutshell: Leamas pretends to be on the skids so he can convince the Soviets Mundt is a British asset, only for Leamas’s girlfriend to turn up and show up Leamas’s story as false… meaning Mundt must be loyal to East Germany. Except he isn’t because, as Leamas realises, the plot to frame him was actually designed to fail.
When compared with Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels — Fleming too worked in intelligence, although only during WWII— and Fleming was a best-selling author throughout the 1950s, it’s easy to understand why the bleakness of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold proved such a refreshing change the book became a best-seller. Le Carré’s first two novels had been a complex but low-key spy-related murder-mystery, and a public-school set murder mystery, and while both were well-received, they were only spy novels by association. Le Carré was an actual intelligence officer, but he wasn’t writing from experience. As he repeatedly said, his employers wouldn’t have approved his novels if his books had born any relationship to reality. They were pure fiction.
But they were spy fiction of a type not previously encountered, especially The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Bleak, prosaic, featuring ordinary people, involved in plots they were ignorant of, manipulated by people toward ends they didn’t understand… It’s easy to see why it proved popular.
Le Carré’s career went from strength to strength after The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. A film of the novel, starring Richard Burton, was released in 1965. Fleming’s first novel was a best-seller, but he had plenty of contacts in the British establishment. It was only when James Bond was picked up as a newspaper cartoon strip in the Daily Express in 1958 that Bond became a cultural icon. The first 007 film followed in 1962; there have been twenty-seven to date. George Smiley has a way to go yet to match Bond, and that’s after nine novels over a 45-year period, a TV series, and a handful of movies of varying degrees of success. True, 007 is now a character based more on a string of movies than the written word — the last Bond movie actually based on a Fleming novel was Goldfinger (1964, UK), after that they used the titles but often completely rewrote the stories — you can blame Roald Dahl for that.
Much of the commentary surrounding The Spy Who Came in from the Cold stresses the complexity of its plot. Except, it’s not all that complex. For 1963, perhaps it was. But in the present day, its twists and turns are not so difficult to navigate. What remains impressive, however, is the way le Carré moves from character to character yet still manages to keep back enough information not to spoil the plot.
I’ve always esteemed le Carré even though he’s an author I’ve only really read when suffering from a lack of other more preferable reading material. But a bunch of his books were recently made available at a discounted price as ebooks — and I always love me a good bargain — but these I knew would be books worth reading, so I decided to do a minor completist-type thing on them.
So now I have to buy the books that weren’t included in the promotion.
