HYDERABAD:The rather immense human propensity for self-delusion, or even what psychologists would term “wish-fulfilment”, can also influence fiction, even its variant seeking to appear realistic. Heroes (and heroines) are expected to be attractive, brave and so on, mental attributes dispensed with or delegated (to supporting characters), and good and evil delineated. The espionage genre offers a good example.
Even before James Bond – who in his cinematic avatar began to exemplify what TVTropes calls spy fiction’s “Martini Flavoured” brand – spies/secret agents like John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, Dennis Wheatley’s Gregory Sallust and the like were clean-cut and/or debonair and on the “good” side morally. Though W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden, Desmond Cory’s Johnny Fedora or the Bond of Ian Fleming’s novels, display a darker and morally ambiguous view, they do not dispense with hedonism, amorous dalliances and so on.
It was only in the 1960s, along the glittering celluloid adventures of Bond, that spies began to be depicted as they were liable to be – and not what we thought they were. John Le Carre and Len Deighton – deemed the trinity of late 20th century spy fiction writers (along with Fleming) – showed spies not as dashing or sharply dressed.
And then their protagonists were also liable to be jaded, jealous and under-appreciated or shabbily-treated even though polite, self-effacing but, more importantly, efficient. The duo also show how the spy trade involved multiple layers of betrayal, duplicity, deception and moral ambiguity and compromises –that overshadowed the protagonists’ personal lives too – and as much intra- and inter-service rivalry than matching wits with the opponents.
But even more than Deighton’s unnamed, working class “hero” (Harry Palmer in the film versions) introduced in “The Ipcress File”, it was David John Moore Cornwell, alias Le Carre, who, with George Smiley, showed what modern spying is. While this was due to him being a former spy, Le Carre not only popularised existing espionage stock phrases but also coined new ones, which even spies began using. “Mole” and “honey trap” are the best-known.
Le Carre admitted he created Smiley as a foil to Bond, a character whom he deemed an inaccurate and damaging version of a spy. And the two characters couldn’t be more different. On one hand, Bond is a rakish, ruthless and Casanova-like man of action, while Smiley is short, bespectacled, indifferently-garbed, oblivious of luxuries, serially betrayed by his young and beautiful wife and only stands by his habit of using his tie to wipe his spectacles.
Appearing in nine of Le Carre’s two dozen-strong oeuvre, Smiley ambled on in “Call for the Dead” (1961). After detailing his World War II activities (his superiors noting he had “the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin”), it comes to the present, where he is now at a low-level position in the “Circus” .
After someone he has just probed commits suicide, Smiley resigns and launches an independent probe. Finding it was murder, he digs on to unearth the East German spy ring responsible’.His next appearance is in ‘A Murder of Quality’ (1962), which is more a murder mystery than an espionage novel. After a hiatus, he reappears to star in ‘The Karla Trilogy’, beginning with ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’ (1974), where we learn tensions between the Circus’ head, Control, and his number two leads to factions springing up and after an operation spectacularly fails, both are eased out. However, when a top bureaucrat overseeing security operations learns of a Soviet mole, it is Smiley he summons to detect the traitor.