Reading the 20th Century discussion
This topic is about
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
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The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré (April 2018)
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Instead, it is Alec Leamas, an undercover British spy who takes centre stage, in this bleak tale of duplicity and manipulation.
I'm looking forward to discussing this magnificent novel, and discovering how the rest of you react to it.
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This was definitely darker than the previous two books; although it is clear, from the first novel, that Le Carre is not out to glamorise espionage.
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Next up for you then is 'The Looking Glass War'
Here are all of John le Carré's magnificent George Smiley books....
Call for the Dead (1961)
A Murder of Quality (1962)
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963)
The Looking Glass War (1965)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
Smiley's People (1980)
The Secret Pilgrim (1991)
A Legacy of Spies (2017)
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974)
The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)
Smiley's People (1980)
They are really what it's all about
The others are all worth reading but mainly for completists like you and me
My experience is that the more Smiley appears, the better the book.
That said, although Smiley doesn't appear much in 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold', it is still great.
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"What do you think spies are: priests, saints, martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives."
The person responsible for this bitter rant is Alec Leamas, the deadpan fiftysomething protagonist of John le Carré's 1963 novel The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
We will refer to it as The Spy from now on, for brevity's sake, but it's worth starting any current assessment of the novel with something of a thought-experiment.
The Spy is set in the early 1960s before the assassination of John F Kennedy, before the real advent of hippies, the pill, the Vietnam war, the "swinging sixties" and all the familiar counter-cultural baggage that goes with it. Its tone, if anything, is dourly 1950s, its colours grey, its weather depressing.
It's worth remembering that rationing in Britain finally ended in 1954; that the second world war was a fresh memory (Leamas is a veteran); indeed, that anyone in their 70s would be a survivor of the 1914–18 war, the first world war. The action of the novel takes place half a century ago. It belongs to an entirely different world from the one we know today.
And yet, and perhaps this is the first remarkable comment to make about The Spy, its cynicism is resolutely de nos jours. One forgets just how unsparing the book is, how the picture it paints of human motivations, human duplicities, human frailty seems presciently aware of all that we have learned and unlearned in the intervening decades.
The world was, on the surface, a more innocent, more straightforward place in the early 1960s: there were good guys and bad guys and they were easy to spot. One of the shock effects of reading The Spy when it was published must have been the near-nihilism of its message. It is unremittingly dark – or almost so – and this fact, I believe, lies at the root of its greatness.
Rest here (though wait until you've read the book before clicking as it gets v spoilerish)...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
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I'm nearly finished now. It feels quite bleak and I'm getting confused as to who works for who. Of course I realise this is the point.
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It's worth remembering that rationing in Britain finally ended in 1954; that the second world war was a fresh memory (Leamas is a veteran); indeed, that anyone in their 70s would be a survivor of the 1914–18 war, the first world war. The action of the novel takes place half a century ago. It belongs to an entirely different world from the one we know today.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imYGd...
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Without that first generation of British Rockers and the Skiffle scene to inspire them and show them it could be done, The Beatles would not have happened.
That said, I do agree with Mr Susan, that things had got quite safe and stale and The Beatles were a much needed shot in the arm.
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I have now finished, so could try to find the film. I find I have little attention span for film or TV, (odd, as I can sit and read for hours), but it's sometimes easier if I know the story.
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I felt, too, as others have said, that this felt earlier than the 1960s - I struggled to imagine Mary Quant and mini-skirts co-existing in the world of the book!
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Roman Clodia, certainly this book felt late fifties to me, rather than the Sixties. However, undoubtedly, for most of the population, this was their experience and so it rang true.
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And as for the ending, well, as you say, we should wait another week or two before discussing that, but there is one ambiguous point that it might be interesting to discuss.
And in between, a a complicated tale of deadly triple-bluff perpetrated by the British Secret Service against the German Democratic Republic. JLC handles the unspooling web of motive with exemplary poise and it is obvious he knows of what he writes.
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold was a game changer. The genre was changed from the moment it was published.
Will there be a separate spoilers thread? Have not read it yet.
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I'm also going to read this, will be starting at the weekend.
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carissa wrote: "While reading I kept wondering who would want to be a spy?! What an awful job. You really would have to believe/have a philosophy of some sort, no? "
I often have exactly the same thought. The handlers must have really understood individual psychology as the motivations would be so different from person to person.
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Nigeyb makes an interesting point about the handlers. One book I really enjoyed was M: Maxwell Knight, MI5's Greatest Spymaster
. He was extremely interesting as he was very involved with both the far left and the far right and is widely thought to be the man who tipped of William Joyce (Lord Haw Haw) to leave the country, as he was about to be arrested, at the start of the war.
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'M: Maxwell Knight, MI5's Greatest Spymaster' by Henry Hemming
...every time I read about Maxwell Knight, who comes up quite frequently in the books I read, I think I must read a good biography as he is such a fascinating sounding individual.
'M: Maxwell Knight, MI5's Greatest Spymaster' sounds just the job...
'Fascinating... Hemming has done a superb job' - Ben Macintyre, The Times, Book of the Week
Maxwell Knight was a paradox. A jazz obsessive and nature enthusiast (he is the author of the definitive work on how to look after a gorilla), he is seen today as one of MI5's greatest spymasters, a man who did more than any other to break up British fascism during the Second World War – in spite of having once belonged to the British Fascisti himself. He was known to his agents and colleagues simply as M, and was rumoured to be part of the inspiration for the character M in the James Bond series.
Knight became a legendary spymaster despite an almost total lack of qualifications. What set him apart from his peers was a mercurial ability to transform almost anyone into a fearless secret agent. He was the first in MI5 to grasp the potential of training female agents.
M is about more than just one man however. In its pages, Hemming reveals for the first time in print the names and stories of seven men and women recruited by Knight, on behalf of MI5, and then asked to infiltrate the most dangerous political organizations in Britain at that time. Until now, their identities have been kept secret outside MI5. Drawn from every walk of life, they led double lives—often at great personal cost—in order to protect the country they loved. With the publication of this book, it will be possible at last to celebrate the lives of these courageous, selfless individuals.
Drawing on declassified documents, private family archives and interviews with retired MI5 officers as well as the families of MI5 agents, M reveals not just the shadowy world of espionage but a brilliant, enigmatic man at its centre.
Matt Charman, Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Stephen Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, and Mammoth Screen, producers of Poldark and Victoria, are producing a big budget TV series based on the book.
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I read this many years ago and had good memories of it. Having finished my re-read I can say that I found it an excellent novel. The drabness of daily life at the time comes through. I would like to discuss Leamas and his underlying motivation further but will wait until everybody has finished it.
Reading the 20th Century
Books mentioned in this topic
The Looking Glass War (other topics)The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (other topics)
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (other topics)
A Murder of Quality (other topics)
John le Carré: The Biography (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
John Le Carré (other topics)John Le Carré (other topics)
Eric Ambler (other topics)
John Le Carré (other topics)
Ian Fleming (other topics)
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Our theme for April 2018 is the 1960s and this discussion starts on 1 April 2018
The winning title was The Spy Who Came In from the Cold by John le Carré
In this classic, John le Carré's third novel and the first to earn him international acclaim, he created a world unlike any previously experienced in suspense fiction. With unsurpassed knowledge culled from his years in British Intelligence, John le Carré brings to light the shadowy dealings of international espionage in the tale of a British agent who longs to end his career but undertakes one final, bone-chilling assignment. When the last agent under his command is killed and Alec Leamas is called back to London, he hopes to come in from the cold for good. His spymaster, Control, however, has other plans. Determined to bring down the head of East German Intelligence and topple his organization, Control once more sends Leamas into the fray -- this time to play the part of the dishonored spy and lure the enemy to his ultimate defeat.
This discussion thread will open on 1 April 2018