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major_clangerThe Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John Le Carré, 1963)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (dir Martin Ritt, 1965)
A Legacy of Spies (John Le Carré, 2017)
‘Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, has retired to his family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London are to be scrutinised by a generation with no memory of the Cold War. Somebody must be made to pay for innocent blood once spilt in the name of the greater good.’
From that advance plot summary, I expected A Legacy of Spies to be a follow up to the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or its immediate sequels. In fact, it turns out to be a quasi-sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Le Carré’s third novel but the one in which he broke out into mainstream success. I say ‘quasi-sequel’, because A Legacy of Spies revisits, and even to an extent retcons, the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and indeed can to a substantial extent be seen as a prequel, setting up some of the important plot points and filling in some key events between that book at Le Carré’s first novel (and introduction of George Smiley), Call for the Dead.
I’d never actually read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, although I’d long ago seen a plot summary that revealed the key twist. (So, by the way, does this review, hence the cut below.) I read A Legacy of Spies when it came out, saw that it referred back heavily to the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold so then read that, and then out of curiosity watched the 1965 film, which currently features on Netflix’s list.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (book)
I won’t spend too much time on the original novel; if you’ve read it, you’ll know how good it is. If you haven’t – well, rather than have it spoiled, I suggest that you go and read it yourself. It’s short by modern standards, very readable, and although the underlying plot is complex (as much as I can say without spoilers) everything is clearly explained.
(Spoilers from here)
For O-level English Literature we studied books with a ‘moment of truth’, where the central character, at a key point in the plot, realises that his assumptions about his life are deeply flawed and must be abandoned. (In case you’re wondering, this included Nineteen Eighty-Four and Decline and Fall). The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a superb example of such a book: at the conclusion of the Party Tribunal set to hear the case brought by East German deputy spymaster Fielder against his boss Mundt, Leamas realises that the plot sold to him by Control and Smiley, by which he was to fake is own ruination and defection so as to plant evidence that Mundt was an agent for the Circus, was itself a monumental deception. Mundt is working for the Circus, and Leamas’ mission was always meant to fail, so as to discredit Fieldler, who was on the point of exposing the Circus’ top agent. But on top of this there is an even worse truth he realises: not only has he been set up, but that his lover Liz Gold has been manoeuvred into unwittingly compromising him, so as to add the final veneer of credibility to the plot. And there is one more moment of truth at the very end, as he and Gold try to make their suspiciously easily-arranged escape over the Berlin Wall, for when Liz is shot as she climbs after him, he realises that Mundt – and perhaps others – never intended there to be any loose ends.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (film)
The 1965 film is for the most part a very faithful adaptation, eliding rather than omitting or changing the plot. In the book, for example, we see Leamas’ humiliating demotion to the Circus’ banking department and his subsequent dismissal for peculation – all part of Control’s plan to give Leamas both a grievance against the Service and a reason for knowing about Rolling Stone, the programme for paying large sums of money to an especially well-concealed agent. The film jumps straight from Leamas accepting Control’s proposal to him turning up at the labour exchange as a hard-drinking jobseeker, with his spell in Banking being discussed during one of his later debriefings with Fiedler. Similarly, the fateful Party Tribunal at which Mundt so spectacularly turns the tables on Fiedler is presented in full in about twenty minutes of screen time, but all the essential elements are there,
The casting is excellent. Richard Burton justifiably got an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Leamas, and compellingly depicts both a man who is putting everything into playing the role of someone used and abused by his superiors, and then a man who has found out that he is in fact being used by them in a way he never imagined. Michael Holdern, Robert Hardy and Sam Wanamaker play the succession of progressively more important handlers Leamas passes through, until he is in the hands of Fiedler, played by Oskar Werner as devoted, ambitious but oddly affable; Werner makes it quite plausible that Fiedler wants to know Leamas’ motivation simply out of genuine curiosity as to what drives him to apparent treason. And then there is Fieldler’s boss and nemesis, Mundt. Peter van Eyck apparently spent much of his career playing Nazis or ex-Nazis (like Mundt) and from this film you can see why; he has few lines, but his malevolent glare dominates every scene he is in.
For the film, Liz Gold was renamed Nan Perry, apparently because the film-makers thought that Burton couldn’t say ‘Liz’ without audiences thinking of his then wife Elizabeth Taylor; her Jewishness, a significant point in the novel, is also dropped. Gold/Perry is played by Claire Bloom, who with Hardy’s recent death is the only one of the main cast still alive (she recently played the woman hinted to be the Doctor’s mother in ‘The End of Time’, and Queen Mary in The King’s Speech.) Her best performance is at the tribunal, as she struggles to protect Leamas whilst not knowing what he is meant to have done, or even what the tribunal is about or who is on trial. In a slight change from the book, Gold/Perry is shown as trying not to admit the name of the ‘friend’ of Leamas who came to see her rather than innocently volunteering that it was one George Smiley, but – evidently realising the level of surveillance she has been under and the trouble she is in – she is finally pushed into revealing it.
And then we have Smiley himself. For viewers familiar with either the Alec Guinness or Gary Oldman depictions, Rupert Davies’ portrayal will be a little disconcerting (it does not help today’s viewers that Davies looks disconcertingly like the Go Compare man.) Evidently wanting to focus on Control and Leamas, Ritt very much de-emphasised Smiley’s role from that in the book, to the point where he seems to be little more than Control’s convenient minion for meeting with or watching Leamas and Gold/Perry. Given that the audience wouldn’t have been expected to be familiar with Call for the Dead, in which Smiley is not only introduced but is the main character, it’s understandable that his secondary (although still significant, especially if you know the character’s background) role in the novel would be simplified. Even so, he is there at the end, calling to Leamas to come over the Wall. And that is itself is a small but perhaps telling change from the novel, in which he has literally the last words of dialogue:
He heard a voice in English from the Western side of the Wall:
‘Jump, Alec! Jump, man!’
Now everyone was shouting, English, French and German mixed; he heard Smiley’s voice from quite close:
‘The girl, where’s the girl?’
It is plainly not Smiley who calls to Leamas to jump; not only is his voice separately identified, but you can hardly imagine Smiley shouting “Jump, man!” In his foreword to the current edition of the novel, William Boyd interprets this as Smiley not calling out to Leamas, but instead checking if the final stage of Control’s plan has come to pass – that Gold, her usefulness at and end and her head full of secrets, should die as part of Leamas’ escape, and that this final realisation is what drives Leamas to return to her body and his own death. The film instead has Mundt’s henchman, having just shot Gold/Perry for the evident purpose of ensuring that she doesn’t leak the truth of Mundt’s own treachery, calling to Leamas to go back to his own side. Lemeas’ return to his death is shown as devotion to his lover, the one person he had left to believe in.
A Legacy of Spies (book)
A Legacy of Spies is set in, or at least near, the present day. It’s narrated in the first person by Peter Guillam, now in quiet retirement in France. This is an unusual narrative style for Le Carré; evidently he felt that even his usual third-person view, which in his case often goes into great depth as to a character’s inner thoughts, inadequate to depict the layers of deception crucial to the plot. For, as the investigation by the current leadership of MI6 (as the Circus is now plainly identified as) unfolds, we see Guillam pondering not only what version of the truth to tell those questioning him, but what version of the truth he has previously told others, told himself, or been told by those who he trusted.
I mentioned that the setting is contemporary, or near-contemporary, and that leads to one of the mild quibbles I have with A Legacy of Spies. Documents quoted in it have dates expressly placing the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1961 and 1962, and Guillam’s own recollections of his early life suggest that he was born around 1931. (This makes him rather young in hindsight for his role in the events of that book, but it was written before Le Carré revised Smiley’s timeline so as to avoid him being unreasonably old during the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.) No contemporary dates are given in A Legacy of Spies, but Guillam refers to events of fifty years ago, and so one assumes it is set around 2010. If so, then Guillam is around eighty, but he is not written as an old man – indeed, Le Carré almost lampshades this, having one of the current MI6 officers comment on how well-preserved he looks. Nonetheless, from this and other references its feels as if A Legacy of Spies would sit more comfortably if set in the mid-90s – the one reference that definitely dates it as post-1994 is that Guillam has to go to Vauxhall Cross (or “Spyland Beside the Thames” as he dismisses it) to meet his former masters.
The catalyst for this recall is the emergence of both the son of Alec Leamas and a hitherto-undisclosed daughter of Liz Gold, who have – thanks to the former’s investigation of old Stasi files – uncovered at least one version of the events of their parents’ deaths, and are seeking to sue the British government. Summoned to give his insight into what happened, and why there is an almost complete dearth of documentation in old Circus files, Guillam has to revisit not just the events of Leamas’ contrived defection, but also the circumstances leading up to it. In doing to, the true nature of A Legacy of Spies emerges: it contains what is in effect a novella set between Call for the Dead and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but which relies on knowledge of the full plot of the latter
For the big twist of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is that unknown to Leamas – former head of station in Berlin – Mundt is an agent of the Circus after all. Yet when we last heard of him in Call for the Dead he had fled the UK after trying to kill Smiley. How was he turned? This is alluded to briefly in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as a theory of Fielder’s, but it is the inner novella within A Legacy of Spies – the tragic story of Source TULIP – that tells of this, and how it led to Operation WINDFALL, a covert clique within the Circus that, as one of Guillam’s questioners points out, carefully excluded Leamas. As long-hidden documents emerge, Guillam has to increasingly consider just how far he deceived himself all those decades ago as to what the true endgame for Leamas would be. And at the end of the book there is an encounter that any reader remotely familiar with Le Carré will have been waiting for, when Guillam seeks out the one person who knows the history of the Circus best.
A Legacy of Spies is highly recommended, although if you’ve not read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold I’d strongly suggest reading it beforehand. And once you’ve done so, look out the 1965 film, which stands up very well indeed.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (dir Martin Ritt, 1965)
A Legacy of Spies (John Le Carré, 2017)
‘Peter Guillam, staunch colleague and disciple of George Smiley of the British Secret Service, otherwise known as the Circus, has retired to his family farmstead on the south coast of Brittany when a letter from his old Service summons him to London. The reason? His Cold War past has come back to claim him. Intelligence operations that were once the toast of secret London are to be scrutinised by a generation with no memory of the Cold War. Somebody must be made to pay for innocent blood once spilt in the name of the greater good.’
From that advance plot summary, I expected A Legacy of Spies to be a follow up to the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy or its immediate sequels. In fact, it turns out to be a quasi-sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Le Carré’s third novel but the one in which he broke out into mainstream success. I say ‘quasi-sequel’, because A Legacy of Spies revisits, and even to an extent retcons, the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and indeed can to a substantial extent be seen as a prequel, setting up some of the important plot points and filling in some key events between that book at Le Carré’s first novel (and introduction of George Smiley), Call for the Dead.
I’d never actually read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, although I’d long ago seen a plot summary that revealed the key twist. (So, by the way, does this review, hence the cut below.) I read A Legacy of Spies when it came out, saw that it referred back heavily to the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold so then read that, and then out of curiosity watched the 1965 film, which currently features on Netflix’s list.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (book)
I won’t spend too much time on the original novel; if you’ve read it, you’ll know how good it is. If you haven’t – well, rather than have it spoiled, I suggest that you go and read it yourself. It’s short by modern standards, very readable, and although the underlying plot is complex (as much as I can say without spoilers) everything is clearly explained.
(Spoilers from here)
For O-level English Literature we studied books with a ‘moment of truth’, where the central character, at a key point in the plot, realises that his assumptions about his life are deeply flawed and must be abandoned. (In case you’re wondering, this included Nineteen Eighty-Four and Decline and Fall). The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a superb example of such a book: at the conclusion of the Party Tribunal set to hear the case brought by East German deputy spymaster Fielder against his boss Mundt, Leamas realises that the plot sold to him by Control and Smiley, by which he was to fake is own ruination and defection so as to plant evidence that Mundt was an agent for the Circus, was itself a monumental deception. Mundt is working for the Circus, and Leamas’ mission was always meant to fail, so as to discredit Fieldler, who was on the point of exposing the Circus’ top agent. But on top of this there is an even worse truth he realises: not only has he been set up, but that his lover Liz Gold has been manoeuvred into unwittingly compromising him, so as to add the final veneer of credibility to the plot. And there is one more moment of truth at the very end, as he and Gold try to make their suspiciously easily-arranged escape over the Berlin Wall, for when Liz is shot as she climbs after him, he realises that Mundt – and perhaps others – never intended there to be any loose ends.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (film)
The 1965 film is for the most part a very faithful adaptation, eliding rather than omitting or changing the plot. In the book, for example, we see Leamas’ humiliating demotion to the Circus’ banking department and his subsequent dismissal for peculation – all part of Control’s plan to give Leamas both a grievance against the Service and a reason for knowing about Rolling Stone, the programme for paying large sums of money to an especially well-concealed agent. The film jumps straight from Leamas accepting Control’s proposal to him turning up at the labour exchange as a hard-drinking jobseeker, with his spell in Banking being discussed during one of his later debriefings with Fiedler. Similarly, the fateful Party Tribunal at which Mundt so spectacularly turns the tables on Fiedler is presented in full in about twenty minutes of screen time, but all the essential elements are there,
The casting is excellent. Richard Burton justifiably got an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Leamas, and compellingly depicts both a man who is putting everything into playing the role of someone used and abused by his superiors, and then a man who has found out that he is in fact being used by them in a way he never imagined. Michael Holdern, Robert Hardy and Sam Wanamaker play the succession of progressively more important handlers Leamas passes through, until he is in the hands of Fiedler, played by Oskar Werner as devoted, ambitious but oddly affable; Werner makes it quite plausible that Fiedler wants to know Leamas’ motivation simply out of genuine curiosity as to what drives him to apparent treason. And then there is Fieldler’s boss and nemesis, Mundt. Peter van Eyck apparently spent much of his career playing Nazis or ex-Nazis (like Mundt) and from this film you can see why; he has few lines, but his malevolent glare dominates every scene he is in.
For the film, Liz Gold was renamed Nan Perry, apparently because the film-makers thought that Burton couldn’t say ‘Liz’ without audiences thinking of his then wife Elizabeth Taylor; her Jewishness, a significant point in the novel, is also dropped. Gold/Perry is played by Claire Bloom, who with Hardy’s recent death is the only one of the main cast still alive (she recently played the woman hinted to be the Doctor’s mother in ‘The End of Time’, and Queen Mary in The King’s Speech.) Her best performance is at the tribunal, as she struggles to protect Leamas whilst not knowing what he is meant to have done, or even what the tribunal is about or who is on trial. In a slight change from the book, Gold/Perry is shown as trying not to admit the name of the ‘friend’ of Leamas who came to see her rather than innocently volunteering that it was one George Smiley, but – evidently realising the level of surveillance she has been under and the trouble she is in – she is finally pushed into revealing it.
And then we have Smiley himself. For viewers familiar with either the Alec Guinness or Gary Oldman depictions, Rupert Davies’ portrayal will be a little disconcerting (it does not help today’s viewers that Davies looks disconcertingly like the Go Compare man.) Evidently wanting to focus on Control and Leamas, Ritt very much de-emphasised Smiley’s role from that in the book, to the point where he seems to be little more than Control’s convenient minion for meeting with or watching Leamas and Gold/Perry. Given that the audience wouldn’t have been expected to be familiar with Call for the Dead, in which Smiley is not only introduced but is the main character, it’s understandable that his secondary (although still significant, especially if you know the character’s background) role in the novel would be simplified. Even so, he is there at the end, calling to Leamas to come over the Wall. And that is itself is a small but perhaps telling change from the novel, in which he has literally the last words of dialogue:
He heard a voice in English from the Western side of the Wall:
‘Jump, Alec! Jump, man!’
Now everyone was shouting, English, French and German mixed; he heard Smiley’s voice from quite close:
‘The girl, where’s the girl?’
It is plainly not Smiley who calls to Leamas to jump; not only is his voice separately identified, but you can hardly imagine Smiley shouting “Jump, man!” In his foreword to the current edition of the novel, William Boyd interprets this as Smiley not calling out to Leamas, but instead checking if the final stage of Control’s plan has come to pass – that Gold, her usefulness at and end and her head full of secrets, should die as part of Leamas’ escape, and that this final realisation is what drives Leamas to return to her body and his own death. The film instead has Mundt’s henchman, having just shot Gold/Perry for the evident purpose of ensuring that she doesn’t leak the truth of Mundt’s own treachery, calling to Leamas to go back to his own side. Lemeas’ return to his death is shown as devotion to his lover, the one person he had left to believe in.
A Legacy of Spies (book)
A Legacy of Spies is set in, or at least near, the present day. It’s narrated in the first person by Peter Guillam, now in quiet retirement in France. This is an unusual narrative style for Le Carré; evidently he felt that even his usual third-person view, which in his case often goes into great depth as to a character’s inner thoughts, inadequate to depict the layers of deception crucial to the plot. For, as the investigation by the current leadership of MI6 (as the Circus is now plainly identified as) unfolds, we see Guillam pondering not only what version of the truth to tell those questioning him, but what version of the truth he has previously told others, told himself, or been told by those who he trusted.
I mentioned that the setting is contemporary, or near-contemporary, and that leads to one of the mild quibbles I have with A Legacy of Spies. Documents quoted in it have dates expressly placing the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1961 and 1962, and Guillam’s own recollections of his early life suggest that he was born around 1931. (This makes him rather young in hindsight for his role in the events of that book, but it was written before Le Carré revised Smiley’s timeline so as to avoid him being unreasonably old during the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.) No contemporary dates are given in A Legacy of Spies, but Guillam refers to events of fifty years ago, and so one assumes it is set around 2010. If so, then Guillam is around eighty, but he is not written as an old man – indeed, Le Carré almost lampshades this, having one of the current MI6 officers comment on how well-preserved he looks. Nonetheless, from this and other references its feels as if A Legacy of Spies would sit more comfortably if set in the mid-90s – the one reference that definitely dates it as post-1994 is that Guillam has to go to Vauxhall Cross (or “Spyland Beside the Thames” as he dismisses it) to meet his former masters.
The catalyst for this recall is the emergence of both the son of Alec Leamas and a hitherto-undisclosed daughter of Liz Gold, who have – thanks to the former’s investigation of old Stasi files – uncovered at least one version of the events of their parents’ deaths, and are seeking to sue the British government. Summoned to give his insight into what happened, and why there is an almost complete dearth of documentation in old Circus files, Guillam has to revisit not just the events of Leamas’ contrived defection, but also the circumstances leading up to it. In doing to, the true nature of A Legacy of Spies emerges: it contains what is in effect a novella set between Call for the Dead and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but which relies on knowledge of the full plot of the latter
For the big twist of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is that unknown to Leamas – former head of station in Berlin – Mundt is an agent of the Circus after all. Yet when we last heard of him in Call for the Dead he had fled the UK after trying to kill Smiley. How was he turned? This is alluded to briefly in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as a theory of Fielder’s, but it is the inner novella within A Legacy of Spies – the tragic story of Source TULIP – that tells of this, and how it led to Operation WINDFALL, a covert clique within the Circus that, as one of Guillam’s questioners points out, carefully excluded Leamas. As long-hidden documents emerge, Guillam has to increasingly consider just how far he deceived himself all those decades ago as to what the true endgame for Leamas would be. And at the end of the book there is an encounter that any reader remotely familiar with Le Carré will have been waiting for, when Guillam seeks out the one person who knows the history of the Circus best.
A Legacy of Spies is highly recommended, although if you’ve not read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold I’d strongly suggest reading it beforehand. And once you’ve done so, look out the 1965 film, which stands up very well indeed.
