[Smiley - no James Bond stereotype LIKE the…]

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Smiley - no James Bond stereotype LIKE the series of novels which preceded it, Smiley's People (now dramatised twice weekly on BBC TV) draws heavily on almost universal imagery to evoke its picture of decline, demoralisation and decay.

Unlike his innumerable artless competitors in the field of spy fiction, John Le Carré refuses to construct mechanical plots as a flimsy framework upon which episodes of sexual titillation and brute violence can be crudely hung.

His novels offer no larger-than-life James Bond-style heroes, licensed to kill stereotype enemy agents and slay suitably submissive women.

Le Carré offers us none of the depressingly routine fantasies involving the kidnap of US Presidents or the machinations of megalomaniacs plotting to rule the world with stolen nuclear weapons.

The world of Smiley is one of much more low-key manoeuvres and intrigues, through which the various intelligence networks with their parallel dispositions of agents. doubleREEs. basches mer and FRIES arE BEDErs! ==3005 firearms and fists: but they are supplemented by vast banks of files, endiess scraps of information on the recent and distant past. The past in every way hangs over the present and shapes events - in ways we only gradually come to understand.

Yet there is no. hint in Le Carré's novels of the vast array of modern technology now at work gathering information and intelligence - the spy sattelites, the vast banks and electronic bugs which channel an endless flow of information to a host of centres for processing.

In this respect Le Carré's picture is distorted - and lags behind that offered by authors like Len Deighton. But Le Carré's purpose is different, and his anachronisms are deliberate.

Deighton's characters are over-sketched in to lend credibility to his plot: Le Carré's plot provides scope to explore the characters and their world.

The overwhelming tone of regretful, almost nostalgic gloom and comfortless confusion which dominates the novels is no accident: Le Carré is reflecting the crisis and decline of an era of British imperialism and its values.

His main characters know themselves to be doubly ourcas: spies and ==lea: left-overs from pas Is üe1 serous! it daries. are renaire out into our world only with false names and passports.

The background to the self doubt and confusion of his characters is typically cold, dark, decaying or rain-swept. It is with such lingering imagery that le Carré's novels join a tradition of literature reflecting profound unease at society and morals in periods of transition.

In the midst of the 19th century, Alfred Lord Tennyson voiced his fears of the rapid changes taking place around him and the impending collapse of the traditional straight-laced morality and social structure treasured by the prosperous middle and ruling classes. His lengthy reworking of the Arthurian legend - Idylls of the King - sold in its tens of thousands to the Victorian establishment.

Since then there have been other, more pessimistic views of the world and its ways, equally redolent of a nostalgia agined elden one, intor come certainty and stability. The symbol of the last survivor, the beleaguered individual at odds with a troubled and decaying world, has been widely utilised.

In Le Carré's novels it is Smiley and his handful of old hands at the 'Circus' who find themselves cast in the role of notso-heroic last-ditch defenders of the values of British imperialism.

They face mounting odds. They are up against the decline of Britain as a world power in the post-war period; the repercussions of the moral crisis which drove a whole chunk of the British middle classes into the arms of Stalinist politics in the 1930s - with its real life impact in the Burgess, Philby, Maclean and Blunt affairs; and the passing of a whole generation of old reactionaries from the period of the Russian revolution, whose circles of emigrés have offered suitably murky surroundings for the operations of both British and Soviet intelligence.

In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley weeds out the 'mule' artfully placed at the centre of the Circus by Moscow spymaster Karla. The new novel sees Smiley brought out of retirement to face a final showdown with Karla.

Perhaps it is this which makes this novel less satisfying than its predecessors.

Le Carré has said that: 'The central theme was already complete before 1 began. This i was to be Smiley's confrontation with Karla that would destroy them both... It was to be a moral Reichenbach Falls with no happy moment when Smiley returns to his bee-keeping" • (Radio Times).

But Smiley's strength has been that he was not a super-sleuth in the style of Sherlock Holmes (who had his final struggle with his arch-enemy Moriarty when they both tumbled into the Reichenbach Falls): that the answers he had were never quite complete.

By providing a decisive vulcume to his contest with Karla, Le Carré in a way breaks the spell he has sc thoroughly woven. For the first time his characters are made obviously to conform to a preconceived 'plot' oi moral theme - and be come just character in ¿ novel.

Needless to say none o the characters is politically in tune with readers of thi paper: nor indeed is Lf Carré. But the story i: crafted in such a way as tr distance the author from al of the pronouncement: made: he asks us to exper ience the characters rathe than accept, admire o completely identity wit them.

Few will wish themselve to be the plump, ageing short-sighted, unassertiv and emotionally cripple George Smiley - and few er still will identify with th other characters involved.

And if Karla and hi Soviet retinue are depicte in slightly more pejorativ terms, the Cold War echoe in this novel have no direr connection with politici life as we know it.

On TV or in the novel it great escapist stuff - wit plenty to get your intellec ual teeth into. And fi those who always look for political message, remem er the anguish of Smile and his ilk is in part due 1 their sense of the slacker ing hold of imperialist ide logy. That should prom not pessimism but hope f the future!

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Thursday

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by Harry Sloan

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