Mon 30 Jun 2014
Reviewed by Allen J. Hubin: JOHN le CARRÉ – The Russia House.
Posted by Steve under Reviews1 Comment
Allen J. Hubin
JOHN le CARRÉ – The Russia House. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1989; Bantam, paperback, 19890. First published by Hodder & Stoughton, UK, hardcover, 1989. Film: MGM, 1990 (Sean Connery, Michelle Pfeiffer).
The latest John le Carré tale, The Russia House, departs from the Smiley oeuvre but otherwise is in the usual le Carré vein. Nothing much happens in 353 pages, but the language is elegantly expressive, the principal character is beautifully rendered, the workings of the intelligence agencies (U.S. and British) are recounted with surgically satiric precision, and what moves the hearts of people is most poignantly expressed.
A manuscript of a novel, apparently penned by a Russian physicist, comes to failing London publisher Barley Blair via Katya, a woman associated with a Moscow book agency. And via British Intelligence, which intercepts the manuscript when Barley is missing — out drinking and womanizing, as usual — at the critical time.
The Intelligence boffins are in a gentlemanly frenzy over what the “novel” says about Soviet military capability and want Barley to go over and milk the physicist of every smidgen he contains. The Americans, whose frenzy is never gentlemanly, also come to have a part in the proceedings.
Strange what tools come to hand in the spying game; stranger still what their use may lead to….
Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 1989.
Editorial Comment: For my review of the film, go here.
June 30th, 2014 at 8:19 pm
From Perfect Spy on Le Carre experimented with spy novels that were more novel than genre much as he had in A Small Town in Germany. His one non spy novel had fared badly with critics (that’s being kind, it damn near ruined his career) so he never strays from the spy story even when he is in novelistic mode.
While I enjoy Le Carre, he is blatantly anti American, and while he did have intelligence experience it wasn’t much more than running post office drops for the embassy, a job given to the lowest man in intelligence at the embassy. His famous tradecraft is all made up, and while the Brits have a jaundiced eye towards us in intelligence matters the fact that the CIA charter was drafted by Ian Fleming does remain a sentimental tie.
We work more closely than Le Carre implies because he is also strongly anti-the intelligence establishment in his own country and has created a view of them that is as much a fantasy as a Roger Moore Bond movie. Unlike Le Carre’s world intelligence does work, the military and political types just don’t hear anything but what they want to hear.
Graham Greene was anti American as well, but he at least could draw a sympathetic American like Pyle in The Quiet American, something beyond Le Carre.
Writer John Bingham, himself a spy at a higher level than Le Carre ever achieved, and model for George Smiley, said of Le Carre’s work that it was inauthentic and that Smiley types were the first to defect, not the Bond types.
Le Carre’s world of intrigue is actually less authentic than Flemings, because Fleming wrote his fantasy from experience. All of Le Carre’s characters are Public School types out of a perverse take on Buchan. They do have their counterparts in the British intelligence community, but no where near as Machiavellian as fictional spies.
I love the sometime Mandarin language, and the man can plot, and the British intelligence community likes his portrayal of their world, but Le Carre’s world isn’t much more authentic than Middle Earth or Narnia. The real thing is scarier, more boring, more dangerous, and more labyrinth than anything in le Carre.
For authenticity try William Haggard or Frederick Forsyth — Le Carre is what people want to believe, not what really is.