The Spy Who Came In From the Cold by John le Carre
This is not the kind of novel I usually read. I associate John le Carre with mass market editions available on spinning racks at the airport, or the supermarket. You could call me a snob but I know my own taste well enough to know that if a book’s target market is prefaced with words like “mass” and “super” then it’s probably not for me. So snob it is. But I had just spent a month reading an academic non-fiction book (Sapiens) so I was in the mood for something breezy. Then le Carre died a few days ago and several obituaries said very nice things. I’ve never read him but the obituaries reminded me that I had enjoyed the television version of his novel The Night Manager. So I thought I’d give it a go.
The le Carre shelf at the local bookstore was fairly picked over so I clearly wasn’t the only reader with the same idea. I found a worthy hardbound edition of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold – a first edition actually, but the American printing, not the British, and no dust cover, so it isn’t worth anything. I paid $6.
It’s a little hard to give a plot summary. The tale is twisted. There’s lots of crossing and double-crossing. One of the principles of espionage, so I’m told, is that the work is split between many people so no one has more than a piece of the puzzle. Spy work requires lying and keeping secrets. And the novel is told the same way. You think the mission of the plot has been abandoned or failed, only to discover that having it look like a bust was actually part of the plan, or, what looked like success was actually a catastrophe. The story reads like a whodunnit, except that instead of one big mystery that gets resolved at the end, the story unfolds mystery after mystery with tiny pieces revealed as you go, like walking through a catacomb with a candle revealing only a few feet in front of you.
But here’s what I know. The central character is Alec Leamas. He’s a British spy stationed in Berlin. The opening scene takes place in Berlin at a checkpoint between East and West. The book was published in 1963 and the story takes places at that time. Alec, on the west side, is anxiously expecting a colleague who had been working as a double agent to make it across the border from the east. The colleague appears but he’s shot just short of the line. A woman he was with makes it through. Alec then goes back to England. Maybe he’ll retire. But he’s also offered a chance to do one more job. At first he seems to have declined the offer. He takes a desk job in the intelligence service to complete his pension requirement, then gets sacked for some minor embezzlement. He moves to a small northern town and lives off the dole until he gets a job cataloging books at a library. He has an affair with a co-worker at the library, although it’s hard to see why she should care for him. He drinks. He’s broke. He’s down on the world, down on people, and down on his luck. Then he hits a grocer in the face when the guy won’t extend him credit and he ends up in prison.
At this point I’m 50 pages into the novel and wondering when the spy stuff starts. And then it does.
Out of prison, in London, he’s befriended by a guy. Leamas makes it clear that he knows he was followed and the connection is no accident. The first guy introduces him to a second, then a third. Leamas realizes he’s being invited to defect to the other team. He says yes. He flies to Holland and starts to spill the beans. From there he goes to East Germany and spills more beans to yet another guy even deeper in the system. I’m not quite sure whether Leamas has really turned his coat at this point or not. He seems to speak freely. If he’s laying a trap it certainly isn’t clear how the trap will spring.
For a spy story there’s very little action. Both in Holland and later in Germany there are long sections that are nothing but interviews, two men in a room, usually with a drink at hand and a break for dinner. These aren’t interrogations under a hot light, and there’s no torture. Leamas is presumed to have switched sides. He’s cooperating. It’s a conversation. The tension doesn’t come from any derrying-do, no helicopter stunts or dodging bullets, but just from trying to figure out the story as Leamas tells it, and also why he’s telling the story so freely to people we keep thinking must still be the enemy.
At last we think we have the good guys sorted out from the bad and one of the spies appears before a tribunal with Leamas called to testify. Here I’ll stop. There are more twists. The girl from the library appears again. And then there’s a finale that nicely echoes the opening with a dangerous border crossing in Berlin.
The plot is tight and fast. All finally is revealed. There’s some nice moralizing about right and wrong, but not too much. The focus is on the spying itself, not whatever intel the spies might be stealing or what nefarious scheme they might be plotting or foiling. No innocent lives are at stake, only the spies themselves are in danger, and none of them are innocent. There’s some romantic myth-busting about the kind of people spies really are. The ending is conclusive, if not entirely satisfying.
I can’t say I’m a fan. But it was fun. I enjoyed it as much, and in much the same way, that I enjoyed watching The Night Manager: a diverting entertainment for a few hours.
On the same trip to the bookstore earlier this week, I also bought Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a quality paperback edition for $4. I’ll read that next.