The purpose of this article is to express some personal thoughts about spy novels and the experiences of characters within the fictional espionage world, finally bringing a central focus onto John le Carré’s George Smiley. This seems to be an apt moment to do so as the most recent James Bond film No Time to Die is released at last, at much the same time as John le Carré’s final novel, Silverview hits the bookshelves.

A whistlestop tour of early English espionage literature seems to present us with several themes that have carried on through the ‘Golden Age’ of the Cold War in the early 1960’s and into more modern works. Joseph Conrad’s seminal The Secret Agent, for instance, presents us with a down-at heel, desperate and grubby London where Verloc the pornographer, employed by the Russian embassy, tries to blow up the Greenwich observatory with tragic results. In many ways this thread of almost squalid realism is the most successful, for it leads through Somerset Maugham (the Ashenden stories) and Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Tailor of Panama etc.) to the convincingly credible world of John le Carré, George Smiley and his colleagues at The Circus.

On the other hand, Erskine Childers in The Riddle of the Sands presents us with a couple of daring amateurs (though Carruthers is a minor official in the Foreign Office) who manage to thwart the Germans through cunning, luck and derring-do. Passing onto John Buchan’s Richard Hannay – the gifted amateur of The Thirty-Nine Steps who becomes more professional in Greenmantle as he enters the Great Game – a confrontation already explored by Kipling in Kim. The idea of the amateur becoming involved in espionage is given a darker twist by Eric Ambler most famously in The Mask of Demetrios and Epitaph for A Spy – which has striking similarities with the early Smiley title, A Murder of Quality.

The third approach, which became the most popular of all, is in many ways the least ‘realistic’. This is the world of the debonair, high-living agent with a taste for the best in food and champagne, an irresistible allure for beautiful women and a license to kill. This is, to begin with, best exemplified by Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora series.

Both Somerset Maugham and Greene served on the edges (at least) of the real intelligence services – hence the confidence with which they present their worlds and the characters who inhabit them; Maugham in the First World War and Greene (overseen by Kim Philby) during the build-up to and early years of the Second World War. It was the Second World War that seems to have revolutionised the spy novel, however, though the Cold War that followed soon after it was to turbo-charge the entire genre. Writers such as Ian Fleming and Dennis Wheatley served in the Forces – Fleming in the Navy and Wheatley, having been commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the First World War but invalided out after Passchendale, worked in the Cabinet Office during the Second World War and was commissioned Wing Commander in the RAFVR. Both men were at the edges of the Anglo-American network with William Stevenson (code-name Intrepid) and ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan whose Office of Strategic Services (the Central Intelligence Agency after 1947) used the kind of cloak and dagger equipment later made famous by Fleming’s ‘Q Section’. A department notably absent from Smiley’s world.

This war experience did not seem to affect Wheatley’s louche hero Gregory Sallust. Sallust’s main undercover work in any case is against SS Obergruppenfuhrer Grauber, though in company with the beautiful Erica von Epp, Countess Osterburg. It has famously been observed that ‘Before James Bond there was Gregory Sallust’ but the two are not all that alike, though the style in which their stories are written is similarly serious and direct. Johnny Fedora is also seen as a precursor of Bond, though Cory’s style is lighter than Fleming’s or Wheatley’s; it has more in common with John Creasey’s John Mannering, The Baron or Leslie Charteris’ more playful stories of Simon Templar, The Saint, both of whom did occasional undercover espionage work. One other series deserves mention here – though made for TV with the books coming later. This is Danger Man (Secret Agent in America) where Patrick McGoohan famously stole a march on Sean Connery by introducing himself, in 1960, ‘Oh yes. My name is Drake. John Drake’. Then he took off on a series of adventures so successful that McGoohan was offered the part of Bond, only to turn it down, in order to pursue his own cult classic, The Prisoner.

One element joining almost all of these novels and series together is their focus on the secret agent. Reasons for this are obvious. It is the agent who has adventures, often in exotic locations, who solves problems, confronts danger and generates suspense all of which, of course, grip the reader. As does, it seems, a touch of envy for the freedom, the lifestyle, the moral certainties of this version of the world (not to mention the sex and latent sadism). As the narrator observes in the opening lines of Live and Let Die, ‘There are moments of great luxury in the life of a secret agent.’ There certainly are in Bond’s life. He appreciates and has access to all the best things the post-war, austerity smitten reader of the early 1960s could desire, which he enjoys to such an extent and with such familiarity that Sebastian Faulks in Faulks on Fiction characterises him as a snob. (He begins to suspect Red Grant the SPECTRE assassin in From Russia With Love, remember, because he orders red Chianti with turbot). And Bond’s enemies are clearly despicable – Dr No, Hugo Drax, Auric Goldfinger, Mr Big, SMERSH, Red Grant, Rosa Klebb, SPECTRE, Ernst Stavro Blofeldt; every one as clearly in need of destruction as Gregory Sallusts’s brutal Nazi enemies.

Almost immediately, however, different types of agent began to appear; the militantly lower class, worldly wise cynic Harry Palmer kicked off Len Deighton’s best-selling series with The Ipcress File; and Adam Hall’s introspective, martial art-loving Quiller (The Berlin Memorandum) who, like Palmer, worked for a rather more modest agency than Bond appeared to do – and in both cases an agency with far less clarity of good and bad, black and white, than the world M sent Bond into with his Walther PPK and the latest kit from Q Section.

Bond’s footloose upbringing, following his father (a rep for Vickers armaments) and his Swiss mother round Europe between the wars until his parents’ death (aged 11, in a climbing accident), his two halves at Eton College in Windsor (aged 12ish) before being sent down, his terms at Fettes College in Edinburgh and his time at the University of Geneva allow him wide social access, as well as a flat in Wellington Square, Chelsea, a faithful housekeeper (May) a supercharged Bentley (destroyed by Hugo Drax in Moonraker before a brief flirtation with Aston Martin) and a salary approaching £60,000 in today’s money. But he also has first-class travel all over the world and unlimited expenses while on his missions. To be fair, however, there is nothing quite comparable on a social level to the standing afforded Smiley by his marriage – such as it is – to Lady Ann Sercomb (Call for the Dead). Smiley who, though he starts out in a dreary flat in Knightsbridge, ends up in 9, Bywater Street, a 3-minute walk from Bond’s flat in Wellington Square. But Smiley, crucially, is a different kettle of fish altogether; and if Quiller and Palmer work in the grey areas, politically and morally speaking, Smiley is a creature of the deep, dark shadows.

In calculated contrast to the sort of agent Bond represents (think H. Poirot v S. Holmes), Smiley is short, fat, myopic, unattractive, academic – a man of learning rather than of action. Crucially, a ‘handler’ rather than an agent. The product of an ‘unimpressive’ public school and an equally ‘unimpressive’ Oxford college, his first love is obscure C17th German poetry but he is tempted away from this and a proposed fellowship at All Souls college by his tutor Jebedee who sends him for an interview by a recruitment panel for the Secret Service (named The Circus because of its offices in Cambridge Circus in the heart of London’s West End); and, of course, by the beautiful, aristocratic but flighty Lady Ann.

It is a fascinating exercise to read all nine Smiley novels in order; to see him come and go as le Carré experiments with him as a character and as a member – finally a master – of the chillingly believable milieu he, his friends and his enemies inhabit. His corpulence, his clothes – ill-fitting to allow room for expansion – his nervousness (all very much on show in Call for the Dead in which he looks into the death of a man he apparently drove to suicide) are little by little left behind, though Lady Ann is always on hand when we need to feel sympathy for him. He is first presented as a member of the Circus and never really leaves it – even when ‘retired’ on more than one occasion. Peter Guillam and Mendel the policeman are there from the start as well. Smiley more clearly assumes the character of a detective in A Murder of Quality (as compared with Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy where the unfortunate innocent Joseph Vadassy is mistaken for an agent and must discover the identity of the actual agent in order to save his own life – like Smiley, using many of the tropes of the murder-mystery in the process).

Then Smiley has a walk-on part in perhaps the greatest spy story of the time – conceivably of all time – The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. He and Peter Guillam are distantly involved in the tragic assignment undertaken by Alec Leamas, acting under orders of the head of the Circus, Control – a mission that will come back to haunt them later. The Looking Glass War shifts to a more satirical tone (cf Our Man in Havana) as Leclerc and Haldane who run The Department – a once-famous relic from happier War days but now finding itself sadly superannuated in the new world order of the early ‘60’s – mount a pointless mission based on flawed intelligence in order (largely) to stop The Circus proving them and their Department to be surplus to requirements. An old, out-of-touch agent, Leiser is ineffectively re-trained and then sent into East Germany, where his lack of tradecraft makes him easy meat for the Stasi. When he does not come out again, Smiley, now second in command at The Circus, is dispatched by Control to pull as many chestnuts out of the fire as possible. But alas, by no means all of them are recoverable, starting with Leiser and yet another innocent – his girlfriend. Le Carré later said he wrote the story to reflect the reality of spywork as it really is.

It is at this point, it seems to me, that le Carré decided to shift gear, especially with regard to Smiley. This may have been a reaction to negative reviews of The Looking Glass War or something that had been simmering longer in le Carré’s mind after the unmasking and defection of The Cambridge Spies – most famously Kim Philby. Smiley steps once again into the limelight, and this time he stays there for the three great books that comprise the Karla trilogy. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, he is summoned out of enforced retirement resulting from the failure of Testify, a mission that led to the capture and torture of Circus agent Jim Prideaux. The man who summons him is Oliver Lacon the under-secretary with oversight of intelligence who has become convinced that there is a ‘mole’ right at the top of the new team running The Circus. The new, more powerful, quietly but doggedly determined Smiley painstakingly unmasks the ‘mole’ with the help of Guillam, Connie Sachs and Mendel amongst others and in so-doing discovers that the traitor has been working for Karla, Smiley’s opposite number in Moscow Centre. In The Honourable Schoolboy which follows directly, Smiley, now head of The Circus (rather than Control who is dead) sends Jerry Westerby eastward to uncover the source of Karla’s funds in an attempt to disgrace and perhaps even ‘turn’ the Russian masterspy. In London, he is surrounded by his regulars, Lacon, Guillam, Mendel, Connie Sachs but in Hong Kong things do not go as planned and the CIA move in. By the end of the book, Smiley is out in the cold again, though Peter Guillam wonders whether that was all part of Smiley’s plan. And Jerry Westerby is dead. In Smiley’s People, however, the hunt for Karla goes on. Although the novel opens well away from Smiley and his people, circumstances soon cause him to be summoned back and he becomes unusually active, travelling around Europe turning a series of indiscretions by Karla into a case sufficiently powerful to cause his defection. In the end, as he observes his old enemy crossing from the East to the West as he defects, Smiley feels no sense of victory or even achievement. Simply a terrible sadness that the pair of them and the causes – governments – that they have served have been responsible for so much death, tragedy and grief. In so doing, Smiley seems to speak for le Carré and for his view of the Cold War not to mention the Cold Warriors who fought it. Everything was risked; everything was lost by all too many of them, and nothing appreciable or worthwhile was gained.

After another appearance as guest speaker at the passing-out ceremony at the spy school ‘The Nursery’ at Sarratt, organised by tutor, Ned York, in the episodic The Secret Pilgrim, Smiley takes his final bow in A Legacy of Spies. This tells how Peter Guillam (who narrates it all himself) is summoned back from retirement in France to answer some hard questions during a review of Windfall, the mission that led to the fatal shooting of Alec Leamas and Liz Gold. Now, it seems, Leamas’ son is suing the government for his father’s death and the new men in the new SIS HQ are looking for someone to blame. In this later novel le Carré makes it plain (as it has been hinted time and again in earlier work) that it is often people who are counted as colleagues or even friends who turn out to be the most dangerous enemies after all. The review turns into a witch-hunt with Guillam first in line for the stake and the fire. On the very edge of destruction, Peter is fortunate to track down the elderly Smiley long in peaceful retirement ‘off the grid’ – contentedly alone – on the edge of the Black Forest where he can wander in the woods and contemplate his obscure C17th German poetry. But where he also maintains sufficient powerful contacts to call off the wolves that were hunting Peter.

So, what are we to make of the evolution of George Smiley? The first, and in many ways the most important, thing is that he does evolve. None of the other characters we have discussed (except perhaps for Verloc) really changes, no-matter how many books they pass through. Next, the character that Smiley evolves into resonates in a way that few of the alternatives do; the cynical world of self-serving infighting that he inhabits looks all too modern, though it is presented as existing in the 1970’s. The ‘friendly fire’ of ruthless territoriality and back-stabbing between warring government departments, is all-too often more destructive than enemy action. The innocent, the relative amateurs like Liz Gold, Leiser, his girlfriend and Jerry Westerby are collateral damage, simply consumed like cannon-fodder. The brutal irony that it is invariably the good deeds, the moments to true humanity, that get punished. If Leamas had left Liz Gold at the foot of the Berlin Wall, he would have survived. But he went back for her and died. Even Karla is trapped and ‘turned’ because he is trying to help and protect his daughter. Smiley personifies all this but does so with unsettling self-knowledge and a clear view of the tragic pointlessness of it all. As Peter Guillam observes, perhaps with Smiley in mind, ‘A professional intelligence officer is no more immune to human feelings than the rest of mankind. What matters to him is the extent to which he is able to suppress them.’ A fitting epitaph for the greatest spy of them all, perhaps.

Peter Tonkin is the author of The Wine Dark Sea and Tom Musgrave series of novels. His most recent book is Shadow of the Axe.

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Image credit: Krimidoedel, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons