Simon Bradshaw

The 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)

( Discussion of crucial bits of plot )

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.

  

About 18 months ago I reviewed James Goss' novelisation of City of Death, Douglas Adams' Fourth Doctor / Romana story set in Paris. It had never featured in the Target Books line of adaptations, because Adams would not consent to anyone else turning it into a novel, and the BBC wasn't prepared to pay him anything like his going rate to do so. In the end, Goss did what I felt was a pretty good job of capturing Adams' style, and the result worked very well as a stand-alone book, even if it did have to try to deal with some of the stranger aspects of the plot.

Douglas Adams wrote two other Who scripts. Shada famously fell victim during production to an industrial dispute, although a cobbled-together version exists (I've not seen it). The Pirate Planet, by contrast, is well-remembered for its audacious central conceit and for Tom Baker and Bruce Purchase (as the Captain) engaging in what TV Tropes refers to as Ham-to-Ham Combat.

Well, Goss evidently did a good enough job with City of Death to get the gig of adapting The Pirate Planet, and as he explains in his afterword he was able to visit the Douglas Adams archive at St John's College, Cambridge, which turned out to hold not just the original draft script but also an earlier story treatment by Adams that much of The Pirate Planet drew upon. Goss' novelisation is based to a substantial extent on these, and so whilst it is very recognisably the story we saw on television it is fleshed out and sometimes unfolds a little differently. In some respects this is because the page doesn't suffer the budget limitations of the 1970s BBC, so for example scenes set in Zanak's main city actually feel as if they're in a crowded metropolis where it periodically rains diamonds rather than one small set with half a dozen extras and a few fake gems scattered on the floor. Another scene extensively rewrites and expands the third-episode cliffhanger to give a very different explanation of how it was resolved that gives far more agency to Romana.

Adams wrote The Pirate Planet shortly after writing The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and even on watching the TV series the similarities come across. Goss turns this up even further for his novelisation, adding point-of-view scenes in which characters - notably the long-suffering Mr Fibuli - reflect on the absurdly comic horror around them in a very HHGTTG style.

Goss' novelisation came out last Friday; I downloaded the Kindle version and started reading. Even though I knew how the story turned out, the combination of Goss' respectful pastiche of Adams' style and the new elements of plot was captivating enough that I finished that evening. I promptly wanted to remind myself of the original series so S and I bought it on iTunes and watched it last night. Even with the constrained budget and limited special effects, it still works very well, and the playoff between Mary Tamm (as keen young - for a Time Lord - graduate Romana) and Tom Baker is delightful. On reflection, that order was probably best, as it meant I read the book with only vague images of the TV episodes in my head and so my imagination was unconstrained by some of the more painfully low-budget aspects of them. (As the BBC's own archive page on the story admits, the Mentiads spend a lot of time marching across fields to get from A to B in a rather Pythonesque manner).

(Netflix streaming, 8 x 45-min episodes released en bloc.)

Recently we were treated to Deutschland 83, a Cold War spy drama that attracted much praise for its evocation of 1983 Germany in a positive nostalgia-fest of music, fashion and cars for anyone who remembers the era. Now we have Stranger Things, a drama that is a veritable hymn to every horror/sf film, tv series or book set in early 1980s small-town America.

(Odd trivia point: the events of Stranger Things take place over a few days in November 1983, at almost exactly the same time as EX ABLE ARCHER and thus the final couple of episodes of Deutschland 83.)

Stranger Things has been described as very much a homage to the works of Steven King, John Carpenter and Stephen Spielberg, although the work it very much put me in mind of was Dan Simmons' Summer of Night, with a group of pre-teens faced with supernatural horror in a Midwest town. Without giving too much away, Stranger Things sits closer to the sf rather than supernatural end of the horror axis, although it's careful not to explain everything (and there is certainly plenty of scope for a second season.)

Winona Ryder is superb as Joyce Byers, mother of Will Byers - one of the group of D&D-playing proto-nerds the show centres on - whose disappearance drives the plot. Her depiction of someone who's fully aware that her behaviour looks just like paranoid psychosis, but doesn't care because she know's she's right, is as compelling as it is horrifying. Of the young actors, all are excellent; I'm sure many of the show's fans recognise elements of their younger selves in the characters of Mike, Dustin and Lucas, whilst the show's real breakout role is 12-year-old Millie Bobbie Brown as 'El', the near-mute, shaven-headed girl whose appearance is as mysterious as (and quite obviously connected to) the disappearance of Will. Combining an intensity beyond her years with an awkward naiveté, she perfectly conveys a character struggling to cope both with an outside world she has never experienced and abilities she barely understands.

Stranger Things isn't perfect. The sets for the more sf/horror elements of the show vary from impressively well-realised to looking all too much like Doctor Who of the era it's set in, and for a show that is so dense with reference to horror movies of the era you find yourself shouting at some of the characters "Haven't you seen Alien?" But I can forgive Stranger Things that, as I forgave Deutschland 83 its habit of making its central character the beneficiary of some of the most unlikely turns of good luck so as to get him out of the scrapes the plot dropped him in to. Both series are as enjoyable both for the evocation of an era as for their plots, and if I'm in the ideal target audience for Stranger Things then certainly so are many of my friends. If you've got access to Netflix, give it a go - but be prepared to binge, as you won't want to be waiting to find out what happens next.

(Warning: cut-text discussion contains spoilers up to the end of S4 of Person of Interest)

This was a Christmas present to myself, so S and I sat down to watch it last night. I've long been aware of C:TFP but had never actually seen it; my interest was reignited by seeing a comment from Jonathan Nolan that it had been one of his inspirations for Person of Interest, which we've very much enjoyed.

As S noted, C:TFP suffers a bit if you see it now by having been so influential that it's been endlessly imitated, and the plot was probably far more original and striking (at least to non-sf-readers) when it was made. War Games and The Terminator are just two films that followed in its footsteps, with Skynet's apocalyptic future arguably being a vision of what would have happened if Colossus/Guardian had followed through on its threat to offer, as an alternative to "the peace of plenty", "the peace of the unburied dead."

Some of the plot points are indeed surprisingly modern. Colossus' exponential self-development can now be seen as an early depiction of the Singularity, and it's interesting to note that this starts before Colossus is put into communication with its Soviet counterpart Guardian. The visual depiction on a map board of Colossus' attempts to re-route its blocked link to Guardian also feels surprisingly modern given the film's age, although early experiments with ARPANET had just begun. And once Colossus/Guardian begins its constant surveillance of Dr Forbin, its point-of-view shots are clear inspiration for those of The Machine in PoI.

So, given the influence of C:TFP on PoI, are there any pointers going forward for the latter?

( SPOILERS for Seasons 3 and 4 of PoI )

Doctor Who: City of Death, James Goss (2015)

City of Death is often picked as one of the better Classic Who stories, thanks to the (at the time unusual) location shooting in Paris, the quality of the script as heavily - and frantically - rewritten by Douglas Adams, and the performance of Julian Glover as Count Scarlioni, alias Scaroth, self-described last of the Jagaroth. Unusually, it never got a novelisation, because it was unthinkable that anyone but Adams could write it, but Adams felt obliged to hold out for something proportionate to his usual advance, which was far above what was usual for such a book, and so it never got written.

That's now been rectified via James Goss' novelisation, although 'novelisation' doesn't really do it justice; it's based on the original script, script notes, elements of earlier drafts and even the original story Adams heavily adapted, allowing Goss to explore or develop ideas that were jettisoned or abbreviated for time. Goss also interpolates some nice continuity touches and references to other Who stories (he ties in Pyramids of Mars to nicely explain something we see), and gives a very interesting take on Scarlioni/Scaroth. It's potentially a risk to go inside the head of a character only seen in the third person on screen, but Goss, building on Adams' script notes, succeeds quite well.

How well Goss succeeds in capturing Adams' writing style will be something for each reader to decide. He doesn't try to pastiche it, but rather to write in what one might call an Adamsesque style. Judge for yourself:

( spoilers if you've not seen the serial )

For my part I felt Goss does a very good job of capturing the quite distinctive tone of City of Death and the result is very readable; I may even re-watch the serial in light of doing so.

Following Iain Banks's untimely death I resolved to push my unread book pile to one side and re-read (or in some cases read), in order of publication, his Culture books. For reference, these are:

Consider Phlebas (1987)
The Player of Games (1988)
Use of Weapons (1990)
The State of the Art (1991) - short stories, three Culture-related.
Excession (1996)
Look to Windward (2000)
Matter (2008)

Non-spoiler summary: Having watched the trailers several dozen times, I fear I had assembled in my head a rather better movie from which they drew than the one I actually saw. Prometheus is visually stunning, intense, at times shocking (it must have scraped its '15' rating) and with excellent performances from Noomi Rapace and Michael Fassbender, but it also suffers from thin supporting characters, dubious plotting and, above all, a seeming confusion as to what sort of movie it wants to be. Worth seeing, but hardly the all-consuming behemoth of awesome that the buildup has led us to expect.

( LOTS OF SPOILERS )

When Angels Wept: A What-If History of the Cuban Missile Crisis got onto my reading list as the winner of the 2010 long-form Sidewise Award for alternate history. What-ifs about Cuba in 1962 are not exactly unknown (e.g. Stephen Baxter's H-Bomb Girl, although that's more than just a pure counterfactual) but Eric Swedin presents his as a history of the events of 1962 as written by a historian in the mid-1990s.

( Spoilers, not that you can't guess what ends up happening )

I well recall the film Thirteen Days doing a remarkable job of depicting the politico-military manoeuvring during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and conveying the feeling that the leadership of both sides was desperate to avoid escalation but could not back down. When Angels Wept is a frighteningly believable depiction of how, in a world where matters unfolded only slightly differently from in our own, the balance could so easily have tipped into escalation beyond anyone's ability to control. Although not a novel in the usual sense, it was a worthy winner of the Sidewise Award, and I'd commend it to anyone interested in alternate history or the Cuba crisis.

Very, very funny if you have any experience of fandom, and like most Pegg/Frost films you lose track of the in-jokes and references. Hardly highbrow, but it left darth_hamster and me in stitches.

Laika, Nick Abadzis



Graphic novel, 208pp, £10.99.

( A very good story, made only more poignant by knowing the ending.  )