Material Metaphors

Le Carré’s métier was the materialization of metaphor, as in the title of his 1963 breakthrough, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. The Eastern Bloc’s climate was an absolute gift for Western moralists.

Combining the methodically realist with the romantically mythic, le Carré rendered the liminal spaces of frontiers, borders, walls, and watchtowers simultaneously physical, psychological, and political. British master-spy George Smiley and his Soviet Moriarty, Karla, are figural folk heroes in modernist fairy tales. Indeed, in le Carré’s fabled lexicon of “moles,” “scalphunters,” and “lamplighters,” a “legend” is the deepest of agent cover stories.

The name “le Carré” was itself cover for David Cornwell, whose father, Ronnie, was a trickster, shapeshifter and legend-maker, a Kray Twins associate who sent his sons to public schools (while regularly defaulting on the fees). David was, hence, insecurely invested in Britain’s social and political status quo from the off.

The experience of informing on left-wingers at Oxford and then of teaching at Eton served as apt apprenticeships for Cornwell’s stints at MI5 and MI6. Cornwell burgled Communist Party headquarters for one and snooped under diplomatic cover for the other, yet still found time to write. As an inside-outsider to the establishment, le Carré’s observation of Britain’s governing class was far sharper than that of Ian Fleming — though like many satirists, le Carré was as seduced as scandalized by his subject.

Characters like the waspish, ruthless Control in The Spy or harrumphing “Cockney Belgravia” Saul Enderby in Smiley’s People (1979) are as riveting as they are reptilian. Yet the likes of Smiley, dashing fieldman Peter Guillam, and sozzled data-hoard Connie Sachs are reassuring precisely because of their “born to rule the waves” entitlement.

If Sachs rather disproves the widespread view that le Carré can’t “do” women, whether he actually liked them much is another matter. Female inconstancy is a recurring metaphor for political betrayal in these books (which was rather rich given Cornwell’s own lifelong inconstancy).

What commands loyalty in le Carré is the nation. Smiley has “a deep love of England” (never Britain), a domain of rolling downs, public school playing fields, Oxford college rooms, Whitehall corridors, and elite gentlemen’s clubs. This establishment space is what le Carré’s spies are defending from the depredations of communism. Symbolically, however, they are containing a socialism that, amid Cold War social democracy, was the metaphorical mole constantly threatening to emerge into the political light.

Containment: Le Carré’s ’60s Novels

Le Carré’s debut, Call for the Dead (1961), is a warning about communist infiltration in the aftermath of Britain’s late ’50s Cambridge spy scandal. Yet the novel asserts that danger lurks not just in the elite civil service from which Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess defected, but in democratic suburbia, too.

What’s striking about le Carré’s approach is his lack of interest in ideology: communism needs to be contained, not explained. East German Dieter Frey, as he mutates from Smiley’s wartime ally to his peacetime enemy, becomes an embodiment of pure evil, meaning that communism, here, as in Western Cold War ideology, is defined by inhumane means rather than idealistic ends. Liberalism isn’t an ideology in le Carré’s work either, but a “way of life,” exemplified by the tubby, perennially polite, representatively “reasonable” Smiley.

If the Swinging Sixties film adaptation The Deadly Affair (1966) was a mismatch for the genteel original novel, Smiley’s climactic murder of Frey is even more incongruous, exposing the violence behind liberalism’s proclaimed mildness. The difference between Smiley and his Chelsea neighbor, James Bond, is that Smiley frets about his use of force.

“Who was then the gentleman?” Smiley despairs after dispatching Frey. Yet it is such handwringing that “resolves” this contradiction, appeasing liberalism’s guilty conscience. This will be Smiley’s function throughout these novels.

Ends and means are the central theme of the best-selling The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963). Combining the urgency of the thriller with the spaciousness of the literary novel, The Spy manages to be both intricately modern and iconographically mythic. Le Carré deployed the Berlin Wall here both as suspenseful plot mechanism and symbol of political despotism, while the ends/means dilemma is alternately dramatized and debated.

However, the novel’s widely acclaimed “realism” is a double bluff — a myth — since only liberalism is granted idealistic ends to fall short of. Communism’s means and ends are identical in the cynical Stalinism of East German spymaster Fiedler: the pursuit of power. When snakelike charmer Control is revealed to have exploited and endangered bluff boozer Alec Leamas — two roles played to perfection by Cyril Cusack and Richard Burton in the 1965 film version — such is the drug of liberalism that Leamas defends Control’s plot to his Communist girlfriend, Liz (Claire Bloom).

The subsequent death of Liz at the Berlin Wall is also, therefore, a sacrifice for the liberal cause — that’s why Smiley is waiting on the Western side: to lend moral endorsement to amoral state action. The repressed would return, however, with the revisionism of le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017) and his son Nick Harkaway’s Karla’s Choice (2024) — evidence of liberalism’s guilty conscience.

Le Carré somewhat fumbled his follow-up, The Looking Glass War (1965), another account of liberal idealist exploitation, which caught but couldn’t capture the tensions of 1962’s Cuban Missile Crisis. The novel’s flaws — wordiness, plotlessness, drabness — derived from le Carré’s dismissal of thriller conventions; yet he was unable at this stage to make nonevents eventful or bureaucracy heroic. A homoerotic 1970 film adaptation did its best to sex things up, with mixed results.

Le Carré hedged his bets with 1968’s A Small Town in Germany. While its central figure, Turner, is a Leamas-style working-class hero, the plot is a sequence of interviews with bureaucrats and hot dates with the registry files. However, these flawed novels, alongside an ill-fated “literary” venture, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), were the necessary steps towards le Carré’s first masterpiece.

Détente: Le Carré’s ’70s Novels

Cambridge spy Kim Philby inspired the communist “mole” in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), despite having defected to the USSR a full decade before the novel’s publication. No contemporary critics connected this hauntology to their own historical moment, when a wave of industrial militancy had just brought down a Conservative government and carried a radicalized Labour Party to power.

Le Carré’s excision of working-class characters from Tinker is striking, as is the luminosity of the establishment “England” that Smiley is saving from the leftist threat. While the novel begins and ends at a dilapidated prep school, British dowdiness is now romanticized, lending national decline an aura of mythic grandeur. Smiley is Britain’s representative in all senses: integrally decent, an overweight “flabby liberal,” no longer at the top table but with a few tricks left in the old fox yet.

The terrific 1979 TV adaptation hence found public resonance as Margaret Thatcher came to power on promises of national renewal. Yet even in a novel about leftist infiltration of the liberal state, ideology is again absent. Despite being described as “a fanatic,” the mole’s controller, Karla stays malevolently silent throughout his sole appearance in the novel. The only motivation the unmasked mole Bill Haydon can muster is dislike of America — entirely eliding Philby’s anti-fascist motivation for becoming a communist agent in the 1930s — before he, too, is silenced with an efficient finality entirely at odds with Britain’s real-world historical fumble.

With Philby still alive and well and adorning stamps in Moscow, Thatcher’s 1979 unmasking of the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Anthony Blunt, as the Cambridge spy ring’s “fourth man” enacted a symbolic resolution of the leftist threat. It also lent real-world bona fides to the Tinker TV series, which fulfilled the same resolving mythic function.

Like The Looking Glass War, 1977’s The Honourable Schoolboy is a “lost” bestseller — poorly reviewed, twice passed over for adaptation, and repudiated by its writer. Set in the dog days of the Vietnam War, this sprawling Far Eastern adventure is Graham Greene on steroids and sleeping pills alternately.

With The Honourable Schoolboy exemplifying what Paul Gilroy calls “postimperial melancholia,” chumpishly charming Jerry Westerby scours the postcolonial periphery for Karla’s Eastern mole, while the sun scenically sets on the “vanishing world” of empire. With its Hong Kong high life, Mekong Delta hideouts, and close encounters with Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the novel’s hallucinatory realism would make for a fantastic film.

Back at the imperial core, Smiley struggles to control the wayward Westerby and the amoral American “cousins” alike (le Carré clearly felt about America much as Haydon did). Despite this division of liberal contradictions on national lines and le Carré’s ongoing repression of communism as a belief system, British decolonization and American anti-communism were entirely compatible ends. Crafted at a time when the Left was surging globally, The Honourable Schoolboy now stands as a document of a very different “vanishing world” to the one it was valorizing.

The Second Cold War Novels

With newly elected neoliberals Thatcher and Ronald Reagan ratcheting up Cold War tensions, the eras of détente and social democracy were over — this, in the words of Connie Sachs, was “the new thing.” Smiley’s People concludes le Carré’s Karla trilogy with a resolution to the ends-and-means dilemma whose sheer ruthlessness was entirely of a piece with Second Cold War hawkishness.

When Smiley is summoned from retirement by complacent bureaucrat Oliver Lacon, symbol of a debased social democratic state, the wily spymaster identifies an emotional chink in Karla’s armor. Smiley pursues the trail across England and Europe, before finally unearthing the daughter Karla has secreted in a Swiss sanatorium, whose vulnerability Smiley exploits to engineer her father’s defection.

Yet when Karla crosses to the West at Berlin’s Bridge of Spies, Smiley fears his political enemy is now his moral kin — they are “no-men in no-man’s-land” — and that, with scruple sacrificed, the West’s victory is pyrrhic. This is a case of Smiley fretting again, because the novel’s reverent retrospect claims the victor’s spoils without compunction: Smiley’s scheme isn’t just secret service legend but case study. What’s more, that victory isn’t just mythic in representing the Cold War enemy’s strategic defeat by the West, but in literalizing the liberal shibboleth that the political is purely secondary to the personal.

This denial of ideology comes to its logical conclusion in le Carré’s magnum opus, A Perfect Spy (1986), where the spy-novel trappings are mere upholstery for what’s less a psychological thriller than an Oedipal drama. After the death of his con-man father, British agent Magnus Pym goes to ground, prompting his secret service handlers to panic and presume his defection. Yet amid all the novel’s hunting, ideology is its haunting, for the revelation of Pym’s lifelong double agency is now merely a metaphor for entirely personal betrayals and loyalties.

There is no Control pulling levers and “muddying pools” here, no Smiley offering liberal absolution, just perennial lone-wolf Pym trying to make sense of his “legend” and lay the ghost of his fabled father to rest. Le Carré was performing a similar maneuver with the ghost of Ronnie Cornwell — but also laying the entire Cold War to rest.

As so often with “apolitical” moves, le Carré’s project here is profoundly political. A Perfect Spy prepares the ground for liberal democracy’s declaration of the end of history — and ideology — upon the collapse of the Berlin Wall three years later. This was a myth too, of course. But if le Carré’s Cold War novels reveal anything, it is the potency of myth as a political mechanism.