It always seems churlish to compare a writer’s new book unfavourably with earlier works and literary history is full of instances of apparently purblind hostility to writers who had left their own straight and narrow paths to experiment, enlarge their vision, chart new territory and so on. But it is also true that authors can become fixated on projects which serve their own needs more than that of any reader. Take Finnegan’s Wake for example- Joyce spent seventeen years and went blind producing a piece of brilliant but unreadable whimsy which is not a patch on his early short story, The Dead.

And so it is with John Le Carre, a writer who has redefined spy fiction by his unerring recognition of its conventions and galvanised them with acuity and wit. In recent years he has produced a number of works which show a troubling shift of emphasis. Admirers of Le Carre, and they are many and vociferous, prefer not to mention, for instance, his one excursion in fiction outside the spy genre – a novel with the unwittingly show-thethroat title, The Naive and Sentimental Lover.

He also dismayed readers further with his dreadful lapses into bombast in The Honourable Schoolboy, the second in the George Smiley trilogy which began with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and ended with Smiley’s People. It was only because the latter resumed the ruthless economy of earlier works such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, that everyone sighed with relief again.

Then The Little Drummer Girl showed Le Carre marching to a very dreary beat indeed. A book inflated with self-importance about Arab-Israeli issues that Le Carre would have done well to leave alone, it is confused further for being a rather unctuous bouquet to Le Carre’s sister, the actor, Charlotte Cornwell. It is conclusive proof that he can’t write about women and should never have tried. Stylistically, it verges on self-parody as Le Carre falls prey to fine writing and a documentary impulse that has him describing in excruciating detail every stone on the road to Damascus.

But since it is my intention to praise Le Carre and not to bury him let us turn to the writer at his best. The recent ABC-TV screenings of BBC productions of Tinker, Tailor and Smiley’s People are pertinent reminders of Le Carre at his most satisfying. Substantially faithful to the novels, screen writers Arthur Hopcraft (for Tinker, Tailor) and John Hopkins (for Smiley’s People) skilfully adapted the intricacies of the plot into fluent dialogue splendidly delivered by Alec Guinness, who has all but eclipsed the character of Smiley with his performance. He was assisted by actors such as Anthony Bate, Beryl Reid, Bernard Hepton and others in what must be one of the most impeccably cast TV productions in recent years.

If Le Carre’s achievement can be epitomised in a single book it is probably Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. For a start it concerns the workings of British intelligence up to the defection of Kim Philby – the period when Le Carre worked as a spook in Germany and elsewhere. He not only knew his subject first hand but he is, finally, and without irony, part of that passing world which he laments.
Tinker, Tailor is an elegy for British espionage. It-calls to duty George Smiley, secret servant of the secret service, or the Circus, as MI5 is known in the jargon of Whitehall intrigue. The Circus in the last days under its unnamed head, Control, is an image of Britain itself – it has passed into second-rate gentility, is riddled with infighting, irrelevant to the moment of world affairs and it is the singular task of George Smiley to put matters to rights.

The choices are clear – a future in collaboration with the ‘Cousins’, the CIA, and all that is flashy, expedient and transatlantic or the revival of Old Circus – aristocratic, donnish and haughtily amateur. Smiley’s people are the ones dusted off from retirement, disgrace and obscurity to retrieve order, prestige and the warrior spirit. They are the guardians of old England, the agents who share with Richard Hannay, Biggles and Bulldog Drummond a Brittanic allegiance to ‘the Great Game’, as Kipling described the maintenance of Empire by espionage. Their reward is the knowledge of unswerving purpose and the protection of the sceptred isle.

It is a paradox of the apparently gritty realism of Le Carre’s books that Smiley is as remote and fanciful a hero as that other incarnation of the unflappable British secret agent, James Bond. Smiley is the nemesis of cant, decadence and complacency, a Walter Mitty whose infallibility and courage are conceded by foe and colleague alike.

Even his Achilles heel- his wife, Lady Ann’s infidelity – is curiously dealt with. Ann Smiley is fascinated by her Frog Prince and she begs reconciliation. Smiley is a cuckold but this gives him an inverse dominion over his wife and in this we see revealed the deep vein of Ratty, Mole and Badger misogyny in Le Carre’s fictional world.

It is a world of men, a samurai society where bureaucrats and spies feud and strut and lock antlers in the late Victorian ethos of gentleman’s clubs. Women, in the puritanical values of the spy novel; are ‘honey traps’, Jezebels or, like the women employed by the Circus, churns, honorary males like Mo Delaware, tweedy and butch enough to sit at the top table or flighty eccentrics like Connie Sachs, Mother Russia, the sister of old Etonian spies and daughter of an Oxford don, himself a spy.

The intelligence community, like Britain itself, is tied up in old boy networks – Eton and Oxford – all of it dashing, aesthetic and unconcerned with lucre. Agents are recruited at bridge clubs and have jobs invented for them. The England they protect is the birthright of the Circus players. It is a profound irony of Tinker, Tailor’s Bill Haydon (and Kim Philby, the agent on whom he is based) that even when uncovered as a traitor, he remains old school tie, one of them. It took a darker, in fact homo-erotic, motive for Jim Prideaux to take his revenge on Haydon.

So much in Le Carre belongs to a time when choices were less vexed. Smiley and his kind were recruited to defeat the Hun, to become wranglers ( codebreakers ), fieldmen, burrowers, and owls for this England. So the novels manage to bypass Cold War rhetoric while nevertheless being essentially conservative, but because of that kind of mythic clarity in Le Carre this is rarely objectionable.

The issues are elemental: Keepers of secrets betray and are betrayed as they choose between duty and the heart. In this Smiley stands apart, scholarly, epicurean, celibate, he is Control’s chosen heir, valiant as Frodo, displaced by treachery and spite. And it is he who plays Arthur reuniting the squabbling knights,’the infidelities of his Guinevere serving only to enhance his integrity.

Smiley’s people are faithful, constant in a world without bearings. Smiley’s Circus is plain not facile, solitary not collectively bureaucratic – hierarchical and military. It favours poetic irony not jargon. It despises ambition and is Luddite- the eavesdroppers, soundstealers and radio men are as nothing compared to the pavement artists.

Le Carre’s remarkable achievement lies in the sparseness of his narrative and the deftness of his plotting. When he keeps closest to the conventions of the spy genre he is, paradoxically, most unconventional. Despite the conservatism everywhere present in his work it does not taint what are, fundamentally and powerfully, studies in integrity, wit and courage.

Which brings us to Le Carre’s latest novel, A Perfect Spy, (Hodder and Stoughton). Magnus Pym, career diplomat and-longtime spy has gone to ground after his father’s death. He is of course, pursued by all and sundry and the meandering plot is riddled with flashback to Pym’s private and secret lives.

The novel is a curious blend of confession and thriller that leaves one dissatisfied with it on both counts. Le Carre miscalculates that a bloated memoir about his own father, an unscrupulous but apparently charming conman who was imprisoned for fraud, can be interwoven with a conventional spy yarn. The tone of the writing is tentative, the portrait unresolved, the incident uninteresting. Le Carre cannot persuade us that the material is engaging because he has not fully persuaded himself.

In many respects, A Perfect Spy is more tiresome and disappointing than any of his previous work. It is as though Le Carre has spurned everything he ever knew.about making a spy novel work. The prose is mannered, lumpy and padded out and the narrative voice lapses into stream of consciousness that seems more for Le Carre’s therapeutic purposes than anything else. There are glimpses of the old Le Carre but they are precious few and serve only to highlight how turgid this once nimble prose stylist has allowed himself to become.

We should not hope for George Smiley to return or indeed be surprised if Le Carre cannot navigate the late 1980s. He was archaic before he began, the courtly vision of his late imperialist romances are of another time. It is because of that, that their intricate moral and emotional imperatives continue to satisfy the reader not as an escape from out own time but as a challenge and reprimand to it. For that reason the last thing anybody needs from John Le Carre is for him to try to be new-fangled.

“Le Carre’s spies- past, present and perfect” The Adelaide Review,No.28, July 1986, pp.8-9.