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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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Liz as a character seemed incredibly naive - maybe, again, a sign of the times. I wasn't..."
I agree that the librarians seemed stereotyped and I just couldn't believe in Liz as a character, or in her relationship with Alec. I also agree with you, RC, that the love seemed to be in there largely because it was necessary for the plot.
This was a point where I couldn't help but compare with Greene. I also thought the central love relationship in the Human Factor wasn't as convincing as in some of his other novels, but it was still a lot more believable than Liz and Alec for me.
I didn't find the relationship between Liz and Leamas particularly convincing, but I did believe in Liz as a character. She was lonely and very naive, desperately wanting someone to care for. When she told him she was a Communist and he wasn't horrified, she thought he was special. I felt Leamas should have had more sense than to become physically involved, especially with work to be done, but I guess he was lonely too.
Nigeyb wrote: "I have reached the part in John le Carré: The Biography which covers the publication of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold.The book's original title was The Carcass of..."
The change in title definitely provides more room for interpretation. His original title gives some insight though on what his focus was when writing the book. Nice piece of information to know. Thanks NIgeyb!
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Although I enjoyed this, I also really liked the first two books very much. Was it really such a step up? In style, and story, perhaps - but I wouldn't say it was my favourite out of the first three novels.
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'The Spy' certainly caught the mood of the times, as it was published around the same time as Kim Philby, Profumo, and George Blake, and this was a big part of its enormous success.
In the JLC biog, I have now read about its huge success in America. It really was massive at the time.
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It is also possible that Liz could see something of the real Leamas underneath the adopted slob persona, which would make her perceptive, not naive.
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That's an interesting point Val.
Leamas certainly had some good qualities, and he also sincerely loved Liz.
Perhaps they both recognised things in each other that made them fall in love.
Why did Leamas fall in love with Liz though? Perhaps it was her innate goodness that was reflected in her politics. Liz Gold is an ordinary civilian who is also a member of the communist party. She is a member of the party because she believes this is for the greater good of society.
Perhaps Liz reminds Leamas of human warmth, affection and tenderness, and prompts him to remember the small pleasures of life.
However, Leamas, must remain aloof, impartial and unsympathetic to be an effective spy. He must stay outside "in the cold". Until Leamas meets Liz Gold he is the consummate spy.
Ultimately his inability to protect Liz leads to the devastating final scene.
Nigeyb wrote: "Ultimately his inability to protect Liz leads to the devastating final scene."As regards the fate of Leamas himself, yes, although there is also his realisation of what his mission really was and the part Liz was set to play in it. That was not affected by whether they fell in love or not and might have been sufficient to disillusion him, so that he did not want to carry on.
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I think we're allowing spoilers now. If not...
SPOILER ALERT
Do not read any more unless you are OK about learning about a key plot point.
Nigeyb wrote: "Ultimately his inability to protect Liz leads to the devastating final scene."
Val wrote: "As regards the fate of Leamas himself, yes, although there is also his realisation of what his mission really was and the part Liz was set to play in it. That was not affected by whether they fell in love or not and might have been sufficient to disillusion him, so that he did not want to carry on. "
I can't remember now. Is Leamas aware of the bigger picture at the end? Does he work out what has happened? Or, does Smiley tell him?
Either way, Leamas does not save himself but, in an act of love, chose to stay with Liz. To be beside her as she dies. This consequently leads to his own death, in which he imagines “a small car smashed between great lorries, and the children waving cheerfully through the window”
I concluded it is because of Liz, and through his own death, Leamas is finally able to "come in from the cold"
How do the rest of you interpret the ending?
Leamas realises what is going on at the end of the tribunal "And suddenly, with the terrible clarity of a man too long deceived, Leamas understood the whole ghastly trick." For me, that was the most striking moment of the book, his moment of revelation, more than the ending which felt almost inevitable
I saw the ending as not love in the romantic sense, more Leamas reconnecting with his humanity, and making a final choice in consequence. Liz's fate was his final disillusionment with the work he'd given his life to.
I read it the same way Pamela. Mainly because I was never able to believe that Leamas was really in love with Liz. But he definitely seemed disillusioned by his assignment and I think he felt responsible for Liz. His final act seemed more like atonement to me than an act of love.
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I didn't really think of it as suicide but that he felt he owed it to Liz to be with her. Technically I guess that makes it suicide since I'm sure he knew he would die but I felt it was more a rejection of the heartlessness of his profession. I also felt that he had affection for Liz but not necessarily love.
I saw it as a deliberate act, that he knowingly chose death. The final reference back to the time when he nearly had the accident suggests that is the case, as it was associated with the comment about the elation felt by the condemned man who knows he is going to die.
I could go back and check, but does anyone remember how many children were in the car which he imagined crushed between lorries?The lorries are the opposing sides in Cold War espionage, and I think the children are Liz, Leamas and Feidler.
Val wrote: "I could go back and check, but does anyone remember how many children were in the car which he imagined crushed between lorries?.."Four children
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Leamas, betrayed, hoodwinked, terminally fatigued, is in a state of existential despair at the end of the novel. The opportunity to escape means nothing to him – but it does mean everything to him that the girl he is with, Liz Gold, innocent, unwittingly drawn into the Circus's plotting – should escape. Leamas knows unequivocally at the end of the book that he is going to be betrayed again (there is a crucial, easily missed, detail about a car leaving when it is not meant to) but he tries all the same to thwart that betrayal. If only he can get Liz back to the west – that is all that matters to him – he's indifferent to his own fate. So he tries to get Liz over the Wall. My reading of the last page of the book is that the British Secret Service (who have used Liz as brutally and pitilessly as they have used their trusted agent Leamas) always intended that Leamas should escape – should come in from the cold – and that Liz should die on the Wall. She knows too much: free in the west, she would be too much of a liability. A disaster, in espionage terms. She is duly shot as she tries to climb over – but Leamas still has the opportunity to make it to freedom.
George Smiley, off-screen mastermind of this devilish brew of bluff and counter-bluff, is waiting for him. Leamas hears Smiley shout: "The girl, where's the girl?" But what Smiley wants to know is not whether the girl is safe but whether the girl is dead. That is the key implication (or so I read it) – that she's never coming over and was never meant to. Leamas suddenly understands this – it is the final betrayal he suffers – and he climbs back down to the east and meets his death.
Two factors hinge on this bleak interpretation, both requiring that the reader remember clues planted early in the novel. First, the very last sentence of the book must seem baffling to the vast majority of readers: "As he fell, Leamas saw a small car smashed between great lorries, and children waving cheerfully through the window." This sentence recalls a moment of reflection some 140 pages earlier in the novel. Leamas sees it as a kind of epiphany, a revelation, that occurred while he was on an earlier mission and was driving too fast on an autobahn and almost collided with a small car with four children in the back. The near accident traumatises him and the comment is made that "men condemned to death are subject to sudden moments of elation; as if, like moths in the fire, their destruction were coincidental with attainment." In the very last sentence of the novel Le Carré directs us back to these few paragraphs in order to provide the necessary full catharsis.
Second, the concept of a "spy who comes in from the cold" seems to be fairly easily understandable – namely that the years of a spy's double life are over, that there is an end to the unceasing watchfulness, the interminable daily duplicity: he (or she) can come home. Le Carré uses the phrase in this sense in the novel but also supplies us with another reading of it very early on in the narrative, putting the words in the mouth of "Control", the head of the Secret Service, as he briefs Leamas on his mission. "We have to live without sympathy," Control muses. Then adds: "That's impossible, of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really. I mean . . . one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold . . . d'you see what I mean?"
So, "coming in from the cold" also means displaying a fundamental human empathy, of living with sympathy for others. It means the very opposite of being "hard". The paradox at the end of this superb, tough, highly sophisticated novel is that Leamas, in refusing to come in from the cold as a spy, does in fact come in from the cold as a person. His destruction is coincidental with his attainment. In his deliberate orchestration of his death he shows that he is a human being.
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Val wrote: "The lorries are the opposing sides in Cold War espionage, and I think the children are Liz, Leamas and Feidler. "
You could be right Val. See William Boyd, above, for how the accident harks back to an earlier point in the book.
Pamela wrote: "Four children"Thanks Pamela. Now I have to work out who the forth one is: Karl? innocence? any feeling Leamas might have had that this job is worth doing?
Atonement gets my vote.In the cold war era surely 'spies' on the front line were expendable and knew it, yet they still joined and took assignments, yet that itself doesn't make it suicide.
Maybe he was a spy or nothing and having tried nothing it didn't appeal to Leamas.
Or maybe just maybe Liz was the nothing he deep down needed in come in from his cold.
Val wrote: "Pamela wrote: "Four children"Thanks Pamela. Now I have to work out who the forth one is: Karl? innocence? any feeling Leamas might have had that this job is worth doing?"
And there was a stupid-looking father driving the car too.
If he had really left the service his life would have been a lot less bleak than the fiction he was living in order to fulfil his part in the mission, even if only so he wasn't recruited by the 'other side'.
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In the very last sentence of the novel Le Carré directs us back to these few paragraphs in order to provide the necessary full catharsis.
(see above)
Exactly how I read it Susan.
Susan wrote: "I felt fairly certain, as I read it, that Leamas chose to die."I agree, the only question is whether Liz's death in particular or his realisation of quite how dirty his own side 'play the game' is the stronger factor in his decision.
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Ultimately it is his inability to protect Liz which leads to the devastating final scene. Was he driven by love, or self-disgust? I'm still erring towards his being driven by love for Liz, but perhaps we all see what we want to see.
As Susan says above, there are compelling arguments in favour of both possibilities - and maybe it's even a combination of the two?
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William Boyd says in the same introduction that Nigeyb quoted from earlier, that originally he saw the escape attempt as a mistake:
"Operationally and procedurally this seemed to me a huge error. My feeling was that an agent of Leamas's vast experience and worldliness would surely be aware that such a means of escape was riven with jeopardy. Yet he goes along with it and pays the price."
Boyd changed his mind about this on subsequent readings, for the reasons explained in the passage from his introduction which Nigeyb quoted, but I don't think Leamas's despair and suicidal impulses stop this being a problem in realistic terms.
If Leamas is so determined to save Liz as Boyd says, surely he would be aware that this means of escape is highly likely to lead to her death too.
Since she is a British citizen there on an exchange, I suspect her death would be likely to have led to a huge row even at the height of the Cold War, so surely Leamas could have pointed this out and tried to insist that he would only go along with them for himself if she was allowed to go home normally?
Another possible reading is that he recognises they are both going to be killed - Liz asks him how she can be allowed to survive knowing what she knows. But in that case, again, why does he go along with it?
I also find the whole idea of Liz going on the exchange visit in the first place rather an unlikely plot twist!
Judy wrote: "I also find the whole idea of Liz going on the exchange visit in the first place rather an unlikely plot twist! "It is set up by Smiley and Ashe, although Liz doesn't know that Smiley is involved at the time.
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She has, then Smiley says his bit and Leamas realises that was the intention all along.
I'm very behind! Apologies! I think I'll try to start reading this next week and then will read the rest of the posts. : )
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This thread is now spoiler-tastic in the latter stages
Looking forward to your sagely musings Roisin
I've skipped the spoilers. Will read once started. I just finished A Murder of Quality.
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Roisin wrote: " I just finished A Murder of Quality."
What did you think of A Murder of Quality?
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I must admit, like you, I enjoyed the first three very much but regard The Spy Who Came In from the Cold as a step change. The moment when John le Carré went from good to great.
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Absolutely.
The only thing I feel I should add now, is that the Karla Trilogy are more like The Spy Who Came In from the Cold than the first two novels. That said, you do get a lot of Smiley in them.
Have you read The Looking Glass War yet? I'd be interested to know what you make of that one. It's number four in the series.
In the introduction to the edition I read, John le Carré bemoans the critical roasting it received. Seems people at the time took against it because it was so different from The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. John le Carré felt he'd earned the right to do something a bit different.
Here's some of what he says in the intro...
After the success of 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold' I felt I had earned the right to experiment with the more fragile possibilities of the spy story than those I had explored till now. For the truth was, that the realities of spying as I had known them on the ground had been far removed from the fiendishly clever conspiracy that had entrapped my hero and heroine in The Spy. I was eager to find a way of illustrating the muddle and futility that were so much closer to life. Indeed, I felt I had to: for while 'The Spy Who Came In from the Cold' had been heralded as the book that ripped the mask off the spy business, my private view was that it had glamourised the spy business to Kingdom Come.
So this time, I thought, I'll tell it the hard way. This time, cost what it will, I'll describe a Secret Service that is really not very good at all; that is eking out its wartime glory; that is feeding itself on Little England fantasies; is isolated, directionless, over-protected and destined ultimately to destroy itself.
I thought it was brilliant, but could see why it is less acclaimed than The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. George Smiley only has a bit part in this book, however his perceptiveness and awareness help the reader to understand what is happening.
In essence, 'The Looking Glass War’ is a tale of haplessness: “The Department” is a small, increasingly irrelevant legacy of WW2, populated by deluded staff, which makes the novel painful to read. It’s exactly what he set out to write though: a more truthful novel that captured the internal politics, the little Englander mentality, and the complacency of the mid-60s UK intelligence service.
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It is just a matter of too many books, too little time, at the moment. However, I will carry on with Smiley - perhaps on Audible, as I enjoyed listening to The Spy.
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Tania wrote: "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."I finished this yesterday, and this is how I feel. Even if it is the point, it made it less than enjoyable for me. Not my sort of book at all, though I'm glad to have read it. I don't have much to add to the discussion... It was honestly a bit of a slog to get through for me. :/
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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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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The book's original title was The Carcass of the Lion. It was Victor Gollancz who came up with the title The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which John le Carré accepted. Gollancz also suggested that it be published under a new author name, as it was so different to (and significantly better than) JLC's first two books. JLC rejected this idea.
It was the best seller of 1963/64.
Part of its success was the belief that it was an accurate reflection of the intelligence world - its ruthlessness and double crossing. Especially when compared with the likes of Ian Flemming and his goodie/baddie world. Many critics felt it was, finally, a book comparable with (the brilliant) Ashenden, or the work of Eric Ambler.