A First Response to 'The Night Manager' on TV

Hoping against hope for some intelligent TV, I switched on the BBC���s new version of ���The Night Manager���, David Cornwell���s early 1990s book about a wicked arms trader, and attempts by idealistic spooks to destroy him. I can say without equivocation that the credits were great. I���m not so sure about the rest.  I���ll get back to that in a moment, but first,  a necessary digression.

I have a pretty good memory of most of David Cornwell���s major books (I tire of calling him John Le Carre, his pretentious pen-name). In fact, I know ���A Small Town in Germany���, his best book by far, almost by heart, having read it so many times. I���d say much the same of the equally brilliant but very different ���Spy Who came in From the Cold��� and his ultimate self-explanation and political and moral credo, such as it is,  ���Tinker, Tailor, Soldier,  Spy���.

I think what he is saying (and he made me see history differently) is that the Cold War *is* (or was) a true struggle of good and evil in which Britain often stood for an old-fashioned chivalrous decency in a world that worshipped strength alone.  But that those at the very heart of it, especially the all-seeing, all-knowing, morally compromised and lawless the spies, have become such steely, ruthless warriors, and have come to admire each other so much in a sort of mutual worship of each other���s cleverness, that surprisingly  little separates them in morals or method, and in the end they are capable of almost becoming each other. But that by doing so, they become treacherous as individuals, dangerous to anyone close to them and generally miserable and too disullusioned to live as normal people.

I think that���s it. But I���d welcome other theories.

  ���The Looking Glass War��� is also well worth several re-reads, an examination of the absurd way in which so much of official Britain has lived pathetically and disastrously in the past (really since 1939, though ever more so since 1945).

I have never been able to re-read ���A Perfect Spy���, which seems to me to be pretty close to autobiography,  though I enjoyed it greatly when I first read it. Perhaps it is because the central theme of it, if you know it at the beginning, spoils it for you if you start again at the beginning. I enjoy The Russia House, though it���s unsatisfactory,  because of its Moscow and Peredelkino sections, which were obviously quite well-researched in the Russian capital when I lived there, and so provide nostalgic moments for me.

I also think its central premise, that the Soviet nuclear arsenal didn���t really work that well, may have been true. You can see why a lot of people wouldn���t want that to get out, and it duly doesn���t. But I think it���s also the first book in which his growing bitterness towards some aspects of the USA begins to show. I won���t call this anti-Americanism, because he must and does know better. But it sometimes looks a bit like it, in the form preferred by snobbish, affronted English clubmen.

I never could be bothered with ���The Na��ve and Sentimental Lover���. Cornwell writes about spying and spies, and should stick to it.  He seems to be utterly baffled by women.  And his post-Cold War books seem to me to have marked a long and unavoidable decline, which I wish  he hadn���t allowed to happen. He should have stopped long ago. I can barely recall what the intervening books have been about, just that I was disappointed by their failure to keep up with changes in manners, language and culture, which have accelerated wildly since 1990.

So, back to ���The Night Manager��� . Provoked by the BBC���s modernisation, I hunted out my own copy, which turns out to be an American airport paperback,  vintage 1993. I���ve written nothing in it and there���s no dead boarding pass or railway ticket, which I often use as bookmarks, to indicate where or when I read it. It was a time of almost incessant flights and train rides up and down the USA, anywhere anything was happening that couldn���t possibly have happened in England (there are fewer such things now). I'm sure it got me through a couple of long, solitary flights, and changes of plane at Pittsburgh, my hub of choice.

I can recall the appealing descriptions of the great joys of solitude, something Cornwell plainly experiences but which most people either never undergo or won���t admit to. And there���s some annoyingly memorable stuff about a wig purchased by a member of the hotel staff.  But beyond that, it���s almost completely gone.

I���d only note one thing. The BBC, for all its modernisation of the plot to incorporate the 'Arab Spring' and its sex-changes of a major character (this doesn���t, in my view, work with Burr, a bloke in the book, played by a pregnant Olivia Colman in the TV series) has stayed true to the heart of the story.

Which is this: That in the name of idealistic love for his fellow men, the supposed hero has *deliberately* betrayed a living, breathing woman, and caused first a savage beating of this person, and then her dreadful, punitive murder - results which seem to have surprised him.

Apart from being an allegory of modern British ���ethical��� foreign policy (have you noticed that the USA is now bombing the people in Libya who we helped to overthrow Gaddafi?) , there could be no better illustration of William Blake���s great maxim: ���He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars: general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.���