Spy Novels: Deighton, Le Carre, Rimington, Brookes

James Bond was, in a phrase at the time, the man all men wanted to be and all women wanted to have. I have fond memories of a small book that described how to be Bond, based on what could be gleaned from the novels. It covered everything from weapons and cars to breakfast, and I learned to cook scrambled eggs because of it. James Bond is not a spy. Spies gather information. James Bond blows s**t up. He is a special forces operative, based on idealised versions of some of the men and women in the Special Operations Executive in WW2.

Bond is the forerunner of Jason Bourne and Jack Reacher. Simon Templar, created in the 1930's by Leslie Charteris, may have been a forerunner. Templar was in turn more suave and volatile than that ultimate man's man Richard Hannay from the 1910's. Stella Rimington, who should know something about spies, has a number of novels featuring Liz Carlyle which are really thriller-procedurals, and I was prompted to over-think all this by Adam Brookes' Spy Games and Stella Rimington's At Risk recently. 

Both are cracking good reads, but neither is a spy novel.  The English-language spy novel came from two seeds: Len Deighton's 1962 The IPCRESS File, 

and John Le Carre's 1963 The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. 

Neither Harry Palmer (Deighton) nor Alex Leamas (Le Carre) are anything like Bond. Leamas is a washed-up, cynical operator, and Palmer is working off a prison sentence for black marketeering while in the Army. The organisations they work for are not well-equipped military operations, but fumbling bureaucracies run by barely competent ex-public schoolboys playing little one-upmanship games. Their Russian counterparts are, by contrast, ruthless and endlessly efficient and effective, yet still the bumbling Brits win, more by the native wit of the hero than anything else. It's a vision of the UK at the time: a country ruined by war, run by amateurs, and surviving on the maverick talent of a few individuals. 

Deighton says he did not intend to create an anti-hero - though casting Michael Caine decided otherwise - and none of his central characters are intended to be role models. George Smiley is a cuckold with a taste for antique books and seemingly no other pleasures, someone to avoid being at all costs.

By the 1990's both Le Carre and Deighton were writing slightly different books: less angst about the ideas of loyalty, patriotism and betrayal, more about business-like deception, double-dealing and plot twists. Who could blame either? Their earlier themes were pretty intense, and also of the time.

In the dim reaches of my memory is a remark by General Norman Schwarzkopf to the effect that the 1960's and 70's saw the US Armed Army at its lowest morale and readiness, full of "embittered drunks", and his story is of how his generation of general officers brought it back to a decent condition. My guess is that much the same could be said of many of the institutions of the West, from the intelligence organisations, through the universities, to many private-sector companies. The socio-economic circumstances that made the disillusioned spies of Deighton and Le Carre passed - the recovery started in the 1980's, as did the polarisation of Western countries into their public (left-wing) and private (non-political) sectors - and the spy novel faded away

Sales figures alone mean we must acknowledge the slapstick comedy of Slow Horses, which is a Le Carre tribute: barely competent people saving the world despite themselves, lead by an irascible outcast. The intelligence organisations - now called Five and Six (which is awful insider slang even if it is real) - are efficient and the technology works - except when the plot requires it to fail. Some of the staff may be pompous, creepy or miss something important, but they are only dodgy if it serves the plot, and then only in the way criminals are: they have broken a law, a technicality, not a fundamental bond of trust in their soul with their society. Le Carre's Bill Hayden was a bisexual philanderer and a traitor - to Le Carre the bixsexuality is a single remark at the end of the story, to a post-80's writer it would be a feature of story. There are women in central roles, with varying degrees of sass and snappy put-downs for any man who isn't their boss who dares patronise or ignore them. Rimington's Liz Carlyle is works too hard, is a terrible housekeeper, but a good bureaucrat, going along to get along. Adam Brookes' lady spies are keenly aware of status and fight for theirs.

There is and has been a continuing campaign of treachery and treason in all Western countries since the 1980's, the trahison des clercs whose values have departed too far from those of the ordinary working man and woman, who regard taxpayers as mere economic fodder for their projects, and voters as sheep to be manipulated as needed. Sadly, Five and Six do not work for the taxpayer and the voter and the NHS patient... they work for the traitors.

I'm too old and too slow to turn that into some kind of spy story. Maybe one of you young whipper-snappers might give it a shot?