thoughts on John le Carré

Given that I posted my review of his first novel, Call for the Dead, just a few days ago and he has now passed away I should say something about John le Carré. And maybe something about modern spy fiction.

He’s not my favourite spy writer and I don’t think he was quite as ground-breaking as he was sometimes made out to be. Moral ambiguity, pessimism, the psychology of the spy and the madness of the spy game had already been explored by writers like Graham Greene and Eric Ambler. I did think however that when it came to depicting the utter deadening futility of the whole enterprise le Carré had few if any peers.

While his most admired works were The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (and they were rightly admired) I personally think his masterpiece was The Looking Glass War, published in 1965. It concerns a bunch of British spies whose glory days were World War 2 and they have never really moved on. Unfortunately they’re still running a department of the British Secret Service and when they try to pull off an ambitious operation it goes horribly, tragi-comically wrong. A great book.

His name always seemed to be linked with that of Len Deighton although I think they were really very different writers. There’s something rather tragic about le Carré’s most enduring character, George Smiley, a brilliant spy with a very subtle mind whose personal life is one long exercise in futility. And to some extent you could say the same about his professional career as a spy master. Deighton’s unnamed spy, created at almost precisely the same time, is sometimes left wondering why he bothers but there’s nothing tragic about him. He’s the sort of guy who will do OK. He’s a survivor. Deighton is ironic and cynical. Le Carré can be pretty cynical as well but le Carré still believed that the British, however incompetent they might be, were the good guys and the Russians were the bad guys. Deighton on the other hand always seems to be having fun and seems to regard life with amused but tolerant cynicism.

Le Carré and Deighton can both be seen as belonging to the gritty realist cynical school of British spy fiction and in the 60s and 70s they were certainly the two giants in that field.

I’ve reviewed all the volumes of le Carré’s Karla trilogy - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People as well as The Looking Glass War.

And, as points of comparison, I’ve reviewed Deighton’s Horse Under Water, Billion Dollar Brain, An Expensive Place To Die and and Spy Story as well as Greene’s Our Man in Havana and Stamboul Train and Ambler’s Uncommon Danger and Judgment on Deltchev.

I should add that I've also reviewed the excellent BBC TV adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and their TV version of Smiley's People.

Eric Ambler's Uncommon Danger

Uncommon Danger (published in the United States as Background to Danger) was the second spy thriller written by Englishman Eric Ambler (1909-1998). It was published in 1937. Ambler is one of the most important figures in the evolution of spy fiction. During the 1930s Ambler and Graham Greene revolutionised the genre. In place of hearty British heroes like Bulldog Drummond Ambler gave us innocents caught up in the dangerous world of espionage. Not quite bumbling amateurs - Ambler’s protagonists are usually reasonably intelligent men but they find themselves hopelessly out of their depth and they must either sink or learn to swim.

The protagonist of Uncommon Danger is a half-Irish half-French reporter named Kenton. Kenton is a free-lancer. This is financially a rather precarious profession and his weakness for gambling makes it even more precarious. Not for the first time in his life he is broke. He heads for Vienna, hoping to borrow some money from an acquaintance who owes him a favour. On the train he encounters a man named Sachs who makes him a tempting proposition - all Kenton has to do is to carry a package over the frontier ands for this very simple task he will receive six hundred marks. Sachs claims to be a Jewish refugee and claims that the package contains securities. Kenton is not a complete fool and it is obvious to him that the story Sachs has been spinning is a tissue of lies from start to finish, but he needs those six hundred marks.

This simple task soon becomes very complicated, with people getting killed. And it’s obvious that there are several groups of people who want that package and they don’t mind how many more people they have to kill.

At this stage Kenton has no idea what is going on but when he’s struck a vicious blow over the head, is kidnapped and then tortured he figures that the people doing this things are probably bad guys. But is the other group tying to get the package the good guys or just another faction of bad guys? Are there any good guys? Are they spies or counter-spies or common criminals or something else?

The package is not just a McGuffin. The nature of the contents of the package is crucial in determining Kenton’s actions. Kenton is not a particularly political person and not even a particularly moral person but there are some things that do offend his moral sensibilities enough to cause him to dig his heels in and even risk his life. Kenton has reached the point in his life when he cannot evade responsibility.

For Ambler espionage and politics were very much entangled. In this story the confrontations between fascism and socialism and liberal democracy form an essential part of the background but there’s more to it than that. Politics is a game that is not played only by politicians - it is also played by Big Business and their ethical standards are even lower than those of politicians. There are also old-fashioned territorial disputes between nations. In this case a long-standing quarrel between Romania and the Soviet Union, complicated by internal Romanian politics. The players in the game that Kenton has stumbled into include oil tycoons and Soviet spies.

As in all of Ambler’s early work it would be a mistake to assume that the Soviets are necessarily going to be the bad guys and it would be an even bigger mistake to assume that respectable British businessman are going to be the good guys. Of course whether the various players are good guys or bad guys they’re all out to advance their own interests so Kenton is not at all sure if he can trust any of them.

This is an Eric Ambler novel so the fact that Kenton has been caught up in the world of spies does not mean that he is instantly transformed into James Bond. He’s a reporter. He is not a tough guy. He is afraid of guns. He does his best. Being a reporter who has spent his career covering central Europe he does at least have some understanding of politics and considerable understanding of human duplicity. Occasionally he even manages to keep a step ahead of the professional spies but he makes lots of elementary mistakes and he has no hope of survival without some help from people who actually know what they’re doing.

This was 1937, a very troubled time. Austria’s future is uncertain. Anschluss hasn’t happened but it’s on the horizon. Poland and Czechoslovakia are engaged in desperate diplomatic manoeuvrings. Everyone is trying to join an alliance, or escape from one. No-one knows whether alliance with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union would be the safer option. Codreanu’s Iron Guard are awaiting their opportunity in Romania. And for ruthless industrialists there are opportunities for profit. They’re more unscrupulous even than the politicians.

The plot is complex and devious but Ambler doesn’t get bogged down in details. He’s more interested in the psychology of espionage and betrayal than in the minutiae. And he keeps the excitement level high. Terrific entertainment. Highly recommended.

Eric Ambler's The Night-Comers

Eric Ambler (1909-1998), along with Graham Greene, had started to move the British thriller in a dramatically different direction during the 1930s - towards a much more unglamorous and more realistic style. Instead of wealthy playboy adventurers or professional spies Ambler’s heroes were very ordinary human beings unlucky enough to find themselves caught up in espionage or international intrigue of some sort.

Steven Fraser, the hero of Ambler’s 1956 novel The Night-Comers, falls into this category. He is an English engineer who has spent three years on a dam-building project in the Republic of Sunda. Now his contract has expired and he looks forward to retuning home to England. Unfortunately a few days before he is scheduled to leave a revolution breaks out and through pure bad luck he manages to be right in the middle of it.

A book set in a fictional country will need to provide the reader with some background information. Ambler wisely disposes of this necessity right at the beginning. The short version is that the mostly Moslem Republic of Sunda (which is clearly meant to be Indonesia) has won its independence from the Dutch after being occupied by the Japanese during the war. The new revolutionary government soon discovers that actually governing is a lot more difficult than leading a revolution. Among other things the new government has hundreds of surplus officers who were very useful for a guerilla movement but are an embarrassment and a danger to an actual government. Half the country is in the hands of a rebel army.

Steven Fraser’s big piece of bad luck was borrowing an apartment in the capital from an Australian pilot. The apartment just happens to be in the building that houses the capital’s main radio station (in fact its only radio station). Obviously if a coup were to take place the radio station would be one of the first places the reels would need to capture, and of course that’s what happens. Worse is to come. The rebels agree to spare Fraser’s life is he can repair the generator in the basement for them. He tries to explain that although he is an engineer he’s not that sort of engineer but his explanation falls on deaf ears. He’s just going to have to find a way to repair that generator.

The coup is messy and confused, as such affairs are apt to be. Whether it’s a revolution or a counter-revolution depends on which side you’re on and Steven Fraser would prefer not to be on either side. His situation is complicated by Rosalie, a Eurasian girl with whom he has been so to speak thrown together. She’s in an even more difficult situation, Eurasians being less than popular in Sunda. Steven Fraser doesn’t really owe her anything but he finds that he can’t simply abandon her. In fact it never occurs to him to do so. He’s not a particularly brave man but sometimes you have to do fairly brave things even if you don’t really want to.

Ambler was not especially interested in action. His novels certainly have suspense, often very effective suspense, but action is not the central focus. Ambler is more interested in the reactions of his characters to dangerous and stressful situations and in the relationships between the characters. 

In this novel the key relationship is that between Fraser and Major Suparto. The company building the dam had been forced to employ a number of the surplus ex-officers mentioned earlier. Most of these officers are both corrupt and entirely incompetent, as well as being violent and unpredictable. Major Suparto is a little different. He is efficient and genuinely useful. There is also a grudging respect and even perhaps affection between Fraser and Suparto, based largely on the fact that neither man reacts to the other in the way that the other initially expects him to. Major Suparto is however also ruthless and entirely unsentimental so there is no guarantee that this grudging respect will be enough to keep Steven Fraser alive if his continued survival becomes inconvenient to Major Suparto. And this may well be the case given that Suparto is very much involved in the coup.

There are typical Ambler themes in this story. There’s betrayal and there’s loyalty and it’s not always clear when one ends and the other begins. There are people who believe in things and they can be rather dangerous. There are people who don’t believe in things and sometimes they can be dangerous as well. There are people who know what they’re doing, others who think they know what they’re doing and others who just try to survive.

There are no real heroes or villains. Mostly there are people who do things because they seem like good ideas at the time or they just don’t see any real alternative. 

Ambler takes no particular political position. There are two sides engaged in a civil war and neither side is very admirable, but then neither side is completely contemptible either. Perhaps Major Suparto is right in believing his country was not ready for independence and is not capable of governing itself but that given time perhaps they will learn. In which case all one can really do is to try to ensure that it will be given time. Ambler’s view of the world is brutally realistic. All sorts of ideas are wonderful in theory but real life rarely conforms to our theories. Sometimes the best we can hope to do is to muddle through. If we try to create a perfect world we can end up making things much worse. It’s a realistic view but Ambler is neither cynical nor nihilistic. Sometimes we do manage to muddle through.

There are major racial, cultural and religious tensions in Sunda and Ambler deals with such issues in an even-handed, clear-sighted and unsentimental manner. There is a cultural gap between a European like Steven Fraser and a Sundanese like Major Suparto which makes genuine understanding difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. Steven Fraser accepts that Suparto does not see the world in quite the same way a European sees it. Major Suparto accepts that Steven Fraser does not see the world in quite the same way an Asian sees it. Since they both accept this reality they can at least reach a partial understanding. Rosalie, being half-European and half-Sundanese, might be expected to have the advantage of being able to see both points of view but in practice she’s caught uneasily between two worlds and is at home in neither. 

Ambler’s world is a world of endless shades of grey. It’s not that there’s no right or wrong or no good evil or evil, it’s just that the lines dividing such concepts tend to be rather fuzzy. The people you have to watch out for are the ones who see the world in clear-cut terms of black and white. Ambler’s outlook is by no means as bleak as this might suggest. The various characters in this novel are all very imperfect people but sometimes they surprise you by behaving more nobly or more humanely than you expect.

The Night-Comers is a fine example of the later Ambler style, a complex and absorbing and rather cerebral thriller but still very entertaining. Highly recommended.

Eric Ambler’s The Mask of Dimitrios

Eric Ambler’s 1939 novel The Mask of Dimitrios (published in the US as A Coffin for Dimitrios) is a true classic of the crime/espionage genre. 

Charles Latimer is a mild-mannered writer of detective stories on holiday in Istanbul. He makes the acquaintance of the head of the Turkish secret police, Colonel Haki, who happens to be a fan of crime fiction. Colonel Haki shows him the body of a real murderer, a mysterious man known as Dimitrios who has been sought by the police in half a dozen countries over the course of the preceding two decades. Latimer becomes obsessed by the idea of doing some real detective work on his own initiative, trying to untangle the truth about the life and crimes of Dimitrios.

Latimer’s amateur detective work takes him to various European cities, where he meets an assortment of shady but fascinating characters who have been associates of the dead criminal. Dimitrios has dabbled in white slaving,  drug dealing, robbery, political assassinations and espionage. Latimer’s quest turns out to be more interesting than he expected, but also a lot more dangerous. 

Although Dimitrios is dead, he dominates the book, as Latimer slowly pieces together the details of his lively but violent career. Latimer is a great character as well, in a book that abounds in colourful characters like the enigmatic Mr Peters. 

It’s a stylish, gripping and highly entertaining tale, brilliantly plotted and executed with tremendous elan. An absolute must-read.

Eric Ambler’s Cause for Alarm

Although Eric Ambler’s Cause for Alarm appears as part of Pan’s Classic Crime series it’s really more spy thriller than crime thriller.  On the other hand, being published in 1938, it has the right period flavour for this community.  Although Ambler was English the mood is closer to the cynicism and corruption of Hammett and Chandler than to English crime writers of that time.  The British writer to whom Ambler is sometimes compared is Graham Greene, and the world Ambler scribes in this novel has more than a hint of Greeneland about it.  While Hammett and Chandler focused on cynicism and corruption at the level of city politics and local criminal activities, Ambler focuses on international politics and big business.  

Cause for Alarm concerns a British engineer working in the Milan office of a British engineering firm, who becomes involved in shady government contracts and espionage.  He would make a perfect hero for a 1930s Hitchcock movie, being basically honest and decent but also rather naïve.  In fact this book would have made a great 1930s Hitchcock movie!

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) was, more than any other writer, responsible for popularising the gritty realist school of spy fiction. Epitaph for a Spy is the most famous of his early thrillers while Judgment on Deltchev is a good example of his later style.

Ambler’s style is crisp and pleasing, and he creates a very effective atmosphere of suspense and suspicion.  This leads up to an extended and very exciting chase.  Being the 1930s, the chase naturally involves trains, and you really can’t go wrong with a chase involving trains in the 1930s.  This is a very entertaining novel, with some very pertinent and still very relevant political aspects to it.  Highly recommended.

Eric Ambler's Judgment on Deltchev

Englishman Eric Ambler (1909-1998) was one of the most important 20th century writers of spy fiction. While writers like John le Carré have been praised for introducing a greater degree of realism and grittiness to espionage fiction Ambler was in fact the pioneer of the realistic spy novel.

His novels Epitaph for a Spy, The Mask of Dimitrios and Journey Into Fear are quite rightly considered to be classics of the genre. Ambler’s postwar novels have received less attention, for reasons that have more to do with politics than with the quality of his later work. Like so many intellectuals in the between-wars period Ambler was attracted by socialism and was sympathetic to the Soviet Union. The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 brought  him to his senses and he became increasingly anti-communist.

Judgment on Deltchev was published in 1951 and was the first of Ambler’s post-war spy thrillers. The plot was inspired by the notorious show trials in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, used by Stalin to destroy any and all opposition.

Ambler’s thrillers almost always feature amateur spies, usually very reluctant ones. In this case an English playwright named Foster has been sent to a Balkan state now under communist rule (and Soviet domination) to cover the trial of a man named Deltchev. Deltchev had been the leader of the Agrarian Socialist Party. The country is now ruled by the communist People’s Party. Deltchev is the most credible opposition figure and so he must be destroyed.

Foster understands that the trial will be a mere sham and he also understands that foreign journalists like himself will be severely limited in what they can say about the trial, at least until they have left the country (by which time it will be too late). He has been assigned a kind of minder, a shabby and thoroughly unprepossessing individual named Pashik. Pashik’s own views on the trial are unknown. Pashik makes sure that his views on every important subject are unknown. He intends to be  survivor.

Foster finds himself drawn into a bewildering web of plots and counter-plots. He makes the mistake of allowing his personal feelings to influence his actions. He knows that Deltchev’s wife and daughter are manipulating him for their own ends, he knows the People’s Party government is manipulating all the foreign journalists for their own ends, and he knows that Pashik is playing his own game. Foster had been naïve enough to believe that the issues were simple, and that Deltchev is an innocent victim about to become a martyr. But the more Foster finds out the less he understands. It becomes disturbingly apparent that some of the charges against Deltchev may have some foundation in truth, and that Deltchev may in fact have had links with the notorious Officer Corps Brotherhood, a shadowy organisation accused of fascist leanings and believed to be responsible for countless assassinations.

Now Foster finds himself a pawn, but in whose game?

Ambler’s approach to spy fiction is slightly reminiscent of Graham Greene’s, with a similar flavour of betrayal, failure, corruption and cynicism. Pashik could quite easily be an inhabitant of Greeneland. Despite its darkness Judgment on Deltchev is also highly entertaining with considerable suspense and a plot with enough twists and turns to satisfy any aficionado of the spy novel. Ambler’s spy stories are to a large degree character-driven but he certainly did not neglect either plotting or atmosphere.

An important work by one of the grandmasters of the spy story. Highly recommended.

Eric Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy

Eric Ambler’s 1938 novel Epitaph for a Spy is a perfect example of his distinctive approach to spy fiction. Ambler’s heroes were not professional spies but ordinary people caught up in the dangerous web of espionage. They do not thereby metamorphose into brave and noble heroes. They remain ordinary people, struggling desperately to survive, blundering through as best they can.

Josef Vadassy is a man without a nationality. Born in a part of Hungary that became part of Yugoslavia after the redrawing of national frontiers in the wake of the First World War, he had moved to Britain and then found himself unable to obtain either a valid Hungarian passport or a valid Yugoslavian passport. He was unable to obtain British citizenship either. Moving to France to take up a teaching position in Paris merely complicated his problem. The French authorities were willing to allow him to stay but made it clear that if he left the country they would not permit him to return.

Vadassy earns his living as a teacher of languages. It’s not such a bad life. The pay is not over-generous but he is content to live simply. He has his hobby. He is a keen photographer and has been able to save enough money to buy a rather fine (and rather expensive) Zeiss camera. He has also been able to save enough to take a holiday, in the French Mediterranean seaside town of St Gatien. The Hôtel de la Réserve is comfortable and the food is excellent.

Then misfortune strikes, through an unlucky accident. He had placed his camera on a chair and someone took it by mistake, leaving their own camera behind. An identical Zeiss Contax camera. He finds all this out when he puts a film in to be developed at the local pharmacy and is arrested. The film contains photographs of sensitive naval installations at Toulon. He is now accused of espionage. He’s a rather timid man but eventually persuades the man from the Sûreté that he is not a spy. He is not out of the woods yet though. Now he must play the spy himself, helping the Inspector to catch the real spy.

This real spy must be one of the guests. Vadassy, being a complete amateur, has only the haziest notions of how to go about finding a spy and not surprisingly he manages to suspect just about everyone and for all the wrong reasons. What he doesn’t know is that the Inspector from the Sûreté hasn’t been entirely truthful with him and the situation is not quite what he believes it to be.

Ambler’s approach to the spy novel is to concentrate on tension rather than action. If you expect sex and violence in your spy fiction you’ll be very disappointed. Ambler’s style is closer to Somerset Maugham’s (in his superb Ashenden, or the British Agent) - successful spycraft is more about knowing how to manipulate people rather than gunplay or fist fights. A talent for duplicity and a flexible approach to morality is more valuable than physical prowess. Sadly Josef Vadassy is essentially a fairly decent straightforward sort of chap and therefore not at all suited to espionage.

Ambler is also far more interested in the psychological dimension than in plotting. It doesn’t really matter who the real spy is, the focus is what happens to a very ordinary man when he suddenly finds himself in the nightmarish twilight world of espionage and counter-espionage. The important question is not so much whether Vadassy will find the spy but rather whether he can survive this ordeal, and preferably survive it without entirely abandoning his humanity or his own sense of morality.

The photographs of the naval installations are what Alfred Hitchcock used to call a McGuffin - they’re entirely unimportant in themselves and simply serve to drive the plot.

This is a slightly more cynical brand of spy fiction than the type of story that dominated the field in the first few decades of the 20th century, the type perfected by writers like John Buchan and Sapper. It’s not as extreme in its cynicism as the type of spy fiction that would emerge in the 1960s but it does mark a definite step in that direction.

Ambler’s books were significant also in marking a move away from noble and heroic figures like Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay. Ambler’s amateur spies simply muddle through to the best of their limited abilities.

While earlier fictional spies like Maugham’s sometimes dislike the things they have to do they still believe their work is necessary. Ambler and Graham Greene created a new type of spy fiction where the heroes no longer have that sort of certainty and often don’t even really understand what is going on. They are caught up in a web from which they cannot escape. Few writers ever mastered this type of story to the same extent as Eric Ambler.

A great book that entirely deserves its status as one of the classics of the genre.