Karla’s Choice - a John le Carré novel, by Nick Harkaway

“In the early spring of nineteen sixty-three, there was a rumour — unconfirmed and a little scandalous — that George Smiley might almost be happy.” (p. 26)

I was going to ask for this for Christmas and then couldn’t wait: a new le Carré novel despite the author no longer being in the field, and a new adventure for spymaster George Smiley, for all he long ago retired.

Whereas Silverview (2022) was written by le Carré and finished after his death by his son, the novelist Nick Harkaway, this is an entirely new novel by Harkaway. Or rather, it isn’t, because it’s been devised to fit neatly between two of the old classics, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). As well as owlish George Smiley, it features lots of familiar characters from both those books — such as Control, Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam, Bill Haydon, Alec Leamas, Connie Sachs and Ann Smiley — and makes subtle play with the fact we know what is to be befall some of them in events to come.

Of course, this isn’t a new phenomenon. People other than Arthur Conan-Doyle were writing Sherlock Holme stories while Doyle was still alive. Kingsley Amis wrote Colonel Sun (1968) four years after the death of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. New stories continue to be written about Bond and Holmes and whoever else, some continuing their adventures into the present day, other working as period pieces, looking back to the time when the original adventures were set. (See, to choose an example entirely at random, Sherlock Holmes and the Great War.)

That’s the big point of difference here: le Carré was grappling with the contemporary world, all gritty, cynical realism. Karla’s Choice is a historical novel, conjured as much from depictions of the previous books on TV and in film. It is a pastiche.

I think it’s a good one: it feels authentic and I suspect would work well if you (re)read the Smiley novels in order, inserting this one into place. The familiar characters are well captured, Harkaway acknowledging in his both author’s note and acknowledgements the debt he owes to the various actors who’ve realised the characters on screen. At the same time, new characters, whose fates we can’t be sure of, are also nicely delineated and feel in-keeping.

In the opening pages, Harkaway accepts that the very idea of a new Smiley novel not written by his dad will be unthinkable to some. He then invites us to see, with him, how well he’s achieved his aim. That’s clever: co-opting us, perhaps even seducing us despite ourselves. We become part of the game.

And that matches the plot. Susanna Gero, a Hungarian refugee with a new life in London working for a literary agent, answers the door of her office to a strange man — who has orders to kill her boss. Susanna’s quick-thinking and brave response leads to attention from the Circus, and soon she’s embroiled in the secret world. George Smiley should not be involved as he recently retired, following the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. But he and Susanna find that once ensnared with the ‘grey mistress’ of the service, it is all-but impossible to escape…

As well as authentic, it’s an enjoyable, engaging story — and, in its last section, extremely tense. The period setting with Smiley in his prime works better, I think, than seeing the character living on agelessly into the modern age, almost but not quite giving his view on Brexit, as per le Carré’s A Legacy of Spies (2017). 

But at the same time something is lost in making Smiley a figure from history. There’s no longer that tantalising sense of this all being real and now and incredibly relevant, of le Carré using a fictional spy story to raise the curtain a bit on what's really going on. 

There’s one moment where we come close, an echo of today in this echo of the past. As the stakes get ever higher, Smiley considers what difference it will make to the wider world if he is successful in besting his opposite number, the Russia spymaster known as Karla. 

“Would Moscow abruptly suffer a shortage of brutal and brutalised men, thinking to make good whatever sinkholes were in them by destroying the West? By finally achieving Peter the Great’s ambitions and standing Russia at the pinnacle of the world? Would the Cold War, with all its terrible arsenals and its power to compress and unshaped ordinary lives, come to an end? Would the nuclear demon go back to hell, and the fear of a Russian land invasion sweeping everything before it, not stopping until it reached Normandy and Lagos and Palermo, fade into history because Karla fell to Smiley’s unknightly lance?” (p. 220)

And then, in the end, there is the choice Karla makes that gives the book its title. It is not what Karla does but the thought of how Smiley will need to respond that is what resonates.

See also me on:

• Titanium Noir (2023) by Nick Harkaway
• Silverview (2021) by John le Carré and Nick Harkaway 
• A Legacy of Spies (2017) by John le Carré
• The Mission Song (2006) by John le Carré
• The Constant Gardener (2005 film version of 2001 novel by John le Carré) 
• The Secret Pilgrim (1990) by John le Carré
• Smiley’s People (1979) by John le Carré
• Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy (1974) by John le Carré
• The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) by John le Carré
• The Looking-Glass War (1965) by John le Carré

Spook Street, by Mick Herron

I've been listening to this, the fourth of Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, a little behind the run of the TV version and it's been fascinating to see the differences.

The attention of the security service is taken up with a terrorist bombing in a London shopping centre. River Cartwright, the nominal lead of these adventures, is worried about his elderly grandfather, a retired former spook and legend in the service who is suffering from the early signs of dementia. The "Old Bastard", as he is affectionately known, thinks someone is out to get him and is determined to strike first - which is bad news when River goes to visit...

It's difficult to say more without getting into spoilers. But what I can talk about here is what the TV version changes. A sequence in the book in which a character ends up in the Thames is completely excised - I am assume for being impractical. In the book, someone gets off a train to find the authorities waiting to arrest them; on TV there follows an elaborate chase.

Generally, the changes on TV are to give characters more agency: in the book, one character thinks about doing something with a gun and is then taken by surprise; on TV, they do the thing thought about and then take action in response to the surprise something. Another character doesn't simply retire but finds out how they've been wronged and puts it right. River, meanwhile, puzzles out what's going on rather than being presented with the answer.

I'm not sure the TV version makes such a point of the relationship between River and the character Bertrand, which in the book has a huge impact. But on the whole, I can see how the changes make the TV version more action-packed and visual, people doing things to drive the plot(s) forward.

There are some pretty major revelations here for at least one of the principal characters. Effectively, for the first time in this series, we end on a cliffhanger. It will be interesting to see where things go next, and how much these revelations skew what follows...

See also my posts on the previous books in the series: Slow Horses, Dead Lions and Real Tigers.

Real Tigers, by Mick Herron

This is the third of the, to date, eight Slough House novels (following Slow Horses and Dead Lions). Again, the TV version - which I saw first - is a pretty close adaptation, though as always the things that are different are intriguing.

The failed, disgraced agents exiled to Slough House plod on with their lives. But when Catherine Standish is kidnapped, River Cartwright is instructed to steal the vetting file on the Prime Minister from MI5 headquarter, the Park. Yet this mission is not all it seems. Leading figures in the service and government and making plays for power...

It's a fast-moving, twisty adventure full of memorable characters and nice subversions of what we expect - indeed, at one point River and fellow agent Louisa Guy note that their battle with villains right by a working railway line should have ended with someone being squished by a train, as it's the kind of thing that happens in fiction.

But then there's the way the book uses the fact that it's fiction. In the second book, a non-existent cat prowls the floors of Slough House, providing a perspective on each room and its occupants. Here, the observer passing unseen through the same building is a ghost - but we learn this person is a ghost now but they were alive when they journey up the stair. It's a thrilling moment as we realise what's going on, followed by a typical bit of dark humour from slovenly Jackson Lamb. I can see why this isn't in the TV version; it specifically works in prose, with a third person omniscient narrator able to see beyond the grave.

The other big difference is that the TV version includes a pretty big role for James "Spider" Webb from the previous two adventures, whereas in the book we hear about but don't see him. And the TV version includes stuff that is setting up the next story - the TV version of which concludes this week. I'd love to know more about the mechanics of adapting these books, the choices made to suit the strengths of TV, the things done for more prosaic, practical reasons.

We can also see Mick Herron revising his creation as he goes. I said that first novel makes little effort to obscure the real-life character on which MP Peter Judd is based. Here, alongside Judd's continuing ambitions for power, we get fleeting references to "Boris", so the two men coexist. We didn't know when we were well off.

Oh, and Seán Barrett is a great choice of reader for the audio versions of the novels. I knew him from Father Ted and from voicing Captain Orion in Star Fleet and Tik-Tok in Return to Oz. But he's had the most amazing career, such as playing Timothy opposite Patrick Troughton's St Paul in the BBC's Paul of Tarsus (1960). A picture of him taken during production of Dunkirk (1958) was used on the cover of the Smiths' single, Who Soon is Now?

Dead Lions, by Mick Herron

How do you bring an audience up to speed on the story so far?

I posted in April that the surviving episode of children's adventure serial Garry Halliday (from 1960) begins with a minute-long recap, showing stills of 10 different characters and detailing multiple twists. As I said, we can compare that to the opening moments of a rare, surviving episode of soap opera Compact (from 1962), where there's no narrated recap but everything we need to know is relayed concisely in the opening scene.

The second Slow Horses novel bring us up to speed from the perspective of an imaginary cat stalking the offices of Slough House floor by floor, describing the disgraced intelligence operatives working there. That includes the two new characters replacing characters killed in the first novel. It's a bold conceit for a series grounded in the grubbily, boringly and compellingly real and could fast become wearying. But, kept to just an introductory sequence and used to delineate the distinctive features of each of the main characters, I think Mick Herron gets away with it.

The sequence ends with a pen portrait of slovenly Jackson Lamb on the top floor who would, if the cat really existed, throw it out of the window to its death. The point is that Lamb is quicker and more ruthless than he might appear, and in the story that follows his long experience and cynical perspective mean he's the one intelligence operative not to be fooled...

Once again, the TV version - which I came to first - is a very close adaptation of the book, the main difference that a final confrontation with a baddie involves young River Cartwright in the book and Jackson Lamb on TV. River was the protagonist of the first book and TV series, but we're already seeing the focus shift. It's the same phenomenon, I think, as Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation or President Bartlett in The West Wing. Each was originally envisioned as a kind of guest star who'd appear infrequently to offer wise counsel, while the focus was on the ordinary staff getting into scrapes and adventures. The issue, I think, is that the authority of such characters exerts something like gravitational force, and the more a series continues, the more it is drawn to that power.

The novel ends with another tour of Slough House, this time from the perspective of a mouse. It's effectively the punchline to a book-long joke. I wasn't at first sure whether this was another hypothetical creature but it turns out to be real - and prompts Jackson Lamb to wonder if they need a cat.

Slow Horses, by Mick Herron

River Cartwright is a nepo baby in MI5, his grandfather a retired top spook. But River cocks up a big operation and, in disgrace, is assigned to Slough House with all the other service failures — the so-called "slow horses". There, he's given such menial jobs as listing the contents of a journalist's rubbish bin... But then a young man is kidnapped by extremists and the slow horses might be his only hope of surviving.

The TV version sticks closely to this thrilling, dour and often funny spy caper so I knew pretty much what was coming. A few things are different just because the book is set around the time of publication in 2010, in the shadow of the then-recent 7/7 bombings in London.

That made me think about the context of the references to real people, such as Russell T Davies being named in a newspaper masthead (p. 28) — presumably in a story about what he was up to immediately post-Doctor Who. On another occasion, we're told that the head of Slough House, Jackson Lamb, resembles and could be played by Timothy Spall (p. 32), which is jarring now Lamb has been brought so soddenly to life by Gary Oldman. 

These references add verisimilitude to the grubby, kitchen-sink reality. But that only makes it all the odder when Herron draws so closely from a real person to describe a fictional cabinet minister:

"Peter Judd. PJ to his friends, and everyone else. Fluffy-hair and youthful at forty-eight, and with a vocabulary peppered with archaic expostulations — Balderdash! Tommy-rot!! Oh my giddy aunt!!! — Peter Judd had long established himself as the unthreatening face of the old-school right, popular enough with the Great British Public, which though him an amiable idiot, to make a second living outside Parliament as a rent-a-quote-media-whore-cum-quiz-show-panel-favourite, and to get away with minor peccadilloes like dicking his kids' nanny, robbing the taxman blind, and giving his party leader conniptions with off-script flourishes. ('Damn fine city,' he'd remarked on a trip to Paris. 'Probably worth defending next time.') Not everyone who'd worked with him thought him a total buffoon, and some who'd witnessed him lose his temper suspected him of political savvy, but by and large PJ seemed happy with the image he'd either fostered or been born with: a loose cannon with a floppy haircut and a bicycle." (p. 187)

This amiable bungler — played by Sam West on TV — turns out to be more right wing and ruthless than he first appears. He's ambitious, too, with his eye on further power. Well, we've been there, done that now.

There are a lot of machinations here, the security service riven with people plotting and counterplotting, betraying their friends to further their own careers or to cover their behinds. Management and "joes" learn to apply one of two protocols to any given situation:

"Moscow rules meant watch your back, London rules meant cover your arse." (pp. 253-254)

Here, London rules are most in play. In fact, save for the kidnapping in Leeds, River visiting his grandfather just outside Tonbridge and a sequence in Epping Forest, this is all set in London. Like le Carre, the focus is on activity here, carried out by our people, rather than external antagonists. There's something of The Sandbaggers about the whole thing, too: a focus on spycraft as office job that makes it suit a TV budget.  

Some small things are different from the TV version, such as details in prose being rendered in dialogue on screen. The TV version includes flashbacks to elucidate Catherine Standish's past but doesn't show us River Cartwright's childhood or some of the other history shared with us in the book. The kidnapped young man is, on TV, held in a house on an anonymous street; in the book it's the more definite Roupell Street near Waterloo, a place I know very well having once worked just round the corner. (And, er, from the Dalek battle there, too.)

But more than anything, knowing the TV version made me conscious of how frequently Herron uses ploys to hold our attention. There are continual cliffhangers, sometimes contrived by telling events out of chronological order, withholding bits of information or suggesting that one thing has happened then — a few pages later — revealing something else. In some cases, these ploys wouldn't work on TV where we can see what's happening, such as when Herron delays telling us the gender or ethnicity of particular characters, then makes that a surprise.

These methods make for a compelling read, though much of the trick here depends on the reader not knowing what will happen next. I wish I'd read this before I saw the TV version and need to hurry up reading the next ones in the series so I can get to later books unspoiled.

Is that you, Maureen?, by Jeremy Swan

This is a sharp, funny memoir by someone behind a glut of much loved children's TV, including Jackanory, Rentaghost and Round the Twist. It's available for pre-order and published on 29 July but I got to read it early so as to compile the index.

Swan's life and career makes for an extraordinary, enjoyable read. How fantastic to learn that the producer of Galloping Galaxies also worked on The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Working on this has been a pleasure; but the fact I worked on it excludes me from offering a review.

So, instead, an observation as a stable mate. I particularly enjoyed the way that, by chance, this new book overlaps with others already published by Ten Acre Films. Swan worked closely with Biddy Baxter and got sacked from his one day on early Doctor Who. He took the BBC's directing course and remained good friends with Andrew Morgan, who directed two of Sylvester McCoy's adventures in time. And he worked with several people who feature in my book on David Whitaker, such as producer Chloe Gibson.

• You can buy Is that you, Maureen? from the Ten Acre Films website.

Love and Let Die, by John Higgs

I really enjoyed this wide-ranging ramble through Bond, the Beatles and the British psyche. It charts the interweaving histories of the Fabs and 007, not just in their 1960s heydays but up to the present and beyond, exploring disparities and connections, and how our interpretations have changed. In detailing shifts in what Bond and the Beatles mean, it's a history of our changing mores and anxieties. It's a fun and provactive read - a book about connections that really connects.

"That's as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs," quips Sean Connery's Bond in Goldfinger (1964), a moment before someone hits him. Yet less than a decade later, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and ex-Beatles producer George Martin provided the soundtrack for Bond movie Live and Let Die (1973). I've long thought this was evidence of seismic shifts in contemporary culture over a very brief period, but not got much further that that. This is the territory Higgs dives into in his book, with lots of fresh insight and stuff I didn't know, for all that the subjects are so familiar.

How strange to realise that I've been part of these historical changes. I was at university in the mid-1990s when the Beatles enjoyed a resurgence in things like the Anthology TV series, and well remember debates had then about who was best: the Beatles or the Stones. How disquieting to realise, as Higgs says, that we don't make that comparison any more, without ever being aware of a moment when things changed.

Higgs is also of his (and our) time in rejecting ideas that I can remember used to hold considerable sway, such as that John Lennon was the 'best' Beatle, or the band's driving creative force. As the book says, there's growing recognition of what the four Beatles accomplished together rather than as competing individuals. There's something of this, too, in the way Higgs positions Bond to the Beatles. Initially, they're binary opposites, Bond an establishment figure Higgs equates with death, the Beatles working-class rebels all about life and love. By the end, it's as if they synchronise.

This might all sound a bit highfalutin but the insights here are smart and funny. As just one example, here's what Bond's favourite drink reveals about who he is.

"Bond's belief that he knows exactly what the best is appears early in the first novel Casino Royale, when he goes to the bar and orders a dry martini in a deep champagne goblet. Not trusting the barman to know how to make a martini, he gives him specific instructions. 'Three measures of Gordon's, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it's ice cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon-peel.' When the drink arrives, he tells that barman that is is 'Excellent,' then adds, 'But if you can get a vodka made with grain instead of potatoes, you will find it still better.' Most people who have worked in the service industries will recognise a customer like this." (pp. 242-3)

Amazing - Bond as an umarell! 

I especially like how free-wheeling and broad this all is. There's stuff on shamanic ceremonies from the ancient past, stuff on Freud and the fine art world and Putin. At one point, Higgs talks about the damaging effects of fame in disconnecting a rock star (or anyone else famous) from everyone else.

"Drugs and alcohol appear to mask this disconnect, but in reality, they exaggerate it - cocaine in particular acts as fascism in powdered form. It erodes empathy and keeps the focus on the ever-hardening ego." (p. 294)

It probes the less palatable bits of popular history, grappling head on the complexities of our heroes' objectionable behaviour and views. Our heroes are not always good people, yet by framing this all as a study of how attitudes and culture have shifted, the book avoids making them all villains. 

I nodded along to lots of perceptive stuff, like the thoughts on why Spectre (2016) didn't work precisely because it used screenwriting structures that usually do well in other movies. But I'm not sure Higgs is always right. He argues that a derisive response to a particular CGI sequence in Die Another Day (2002) led to a serious rethink by the Bond producers, which included sacking Pierce Brosnan. I suspect a more pertinent reason was that - as I understand it - Brosnan injured his knee while filming the hovercraft chase and first unit production had to be postponed while he underwent surgery. That would have been expensive and an ongoing risk for an ongoing series of action movies. The fantasy of a Bond who is, over 60 years of movies, always in his prime, must square up against the practicalities of ageing. And that's in line with what Higgs argues elsewhere.

But I don't make this point to criticise. It's more that I found myself responding to the book as if it were a conversation, inviting the reader to engage - and argue. Most potent of all is the final chapter. Having delved so deeply into the past, the author maps out how Bond should develop from here. Yes, absolutely, a younger, millennial Bond who'll appeal to a new generation, and one big on fun and consent, and whose partners don't all die. But also -

[Thankfully, Simon is dragged off-stage.]

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

On 21 June 1922, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is called before the Emergency Committee of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs in Moscow. He's identified as the author of Where Is It Now?, a poem published in 1913 and considered by some to be a call to action after the failed revolt of 1905. But despite these credentials, the count is also an aristocrat, was out of the country during the revolutions of 1917 and is deemed to have "succumbed irrevocably to the corruptions of his class" (p. 5). He is placed under house arrest in the Hotel Metropol and remains there for years...

But he does more than just survive; he flourishes.

This is an extraordinary, bewitching novel - a man out of his time in a fast-changing new order, his old-world values at odds with the officiousness of modernity. Rostov is a charming, suave protagonist, able to assist and advise a broad range of those he encounters in the hotel, building up friendships and even a family. It's a story of one man against the odds like so much thrilling spy fiction - and there's a feeling of le Carre throughout, which I mean as high compliment. (Rostov likens himself more to Sam Spade in the film version of The Maltese Falcon). 

Yet what really makes this work is that it's often so playful and fun. The reader is just another in the line to fall for Rostov's charm. And then, in the last section, there's a direct threat to Rostov and someone he holds very dear, and it all gets much more suspenseful, to the very last page.

A Gentleman in Moscow was the last novel my late father finished reading - while in hospital for almost the last time - and the last book he recommended to me. Reading it has been a little like a conversation with him, not least because I can see why he'd have liked it so much. There's something of my dad in Rostov, and his wit and worldview. For all this novel enthralled me, it's taken a while to finish, in part because I've been busy on other things. But now, on completing it, I realise I lingered - a book, and connection, I didn't want to put down.

The Sandbaggers: Think of a Number, by Donald Lancaster

I've long been on the look-out for this original novel based on the ITV spy series The Sandbaggers (1978-80). A chum lent it to me last week and I've whizzed through the 125 pages. It's a pacey, gripping shocker, all gruff men being cross about their nasty, dirty world.

The plot involves a phone call from Switzerland, a Russian agent called Lekarev asking for help from SIS director of operations Neil Burnside, the central character of the TV series and a man usually behind his desk in Whitehall. Against his own better judgment, Burnside is sent out to Switzerland to meet this Russian agent who may want to defect - but who may be up to something else entirely.

It becomes clear that Lekarev is a very senior Russian agent, one of the so-called 'Numbers'. In fact, he's number 50, with responsibility for infiltrating the British Government. He knows which members of the Cabinet are actually Russian agents. Rather than allow this to come out, the Russians want him dead - and so do the British. And since Lekarev might say something to Burnside, orders are issued to kill Burnside, too. His own underling, Willie Caine, is dispatched to do the job.

But what is really motivating Lekarev and who are the third party, prepared to shoot people in broad daylight?

Over the years, I've read various reports of this novel, variously critiquing its logic or how much it matches the TV series. I think Donald Lancaster - a pseudonym for thriller writer William Marshall - has done pretty well matching the grim mood but in a location beyond the modest budget of the show. (This was my brief when I wrote a tie-in novel for Primeval.)

By sending Burnside out on a mission, Lancaster ups the stakes with the effect that this feels a bit like a series finale. Right to the end, I couldn't see how Burnside could possibly get out of his predicament - or Lancaster save him without cheating. But the solution is ingenious and I just about buy it.

What's harder to buy is the idea of a Cabinet full of Russian agents who in turn dictate the orders given to SIS. The TV show made an asset of keeping things mundane and drab and boring, tension conveyed by people anxiously waiting for telephones to ring. Think of a Number is much more in Bond territory with this high-level conspiracy. And then it does little with it: we're meant to believe that, while not part of the conspiracy, Burnside's superiors go along with their orders and the imposed death sentence. It's trying too hard; it's too daft.

Putin's People, by Catherine Belton

This extraordinary, meticulously researched book is an essential read just now. Belton charts the rise and rise of Vladimir Putin from his early days in the KGB to the present day (or 2020, when the book was published), to show where everything going on at the moment came from. There's a lot to take in: the scale of the kleptocracy, the astonishing sums of cash involved, the huge number of people caught up in it.

There's a lot on Russian links to Donald Trump, going back many decades, and lots on Putin's long-standing interest in Ukraine. There's lots on Russian support for Brexit and the corrosive effect of "black money" in London. What a lot of damage has been done; the horror of it all is exhausting.

Silverview, by John le Carre

Julian Lawnsdsley has set up a bookshop in a small town, escaping from the evils of the City. One potential customer is a peculiar old man who claims to have been a friend of Julian's father - though Julian's father was meticulous in keeping records and there's no reference to this man. The old man, Edward, has a modest proposal for Julian: to establish in the basement of the shop a club, a society, a Republic of Literature. Oh, and there are maybe some errands that perhaps Julian could help with...

As always, le Carre quickly ensnares us in his world of secrets, conflicted loyalties and keenly observed detail. How deceptively easily he makes it look. There's wry humour and that awful sense of loss - this is all familiar territory, comfortingly unsettling. However, this, le Carre's last novel and published posthumously, is also noticeably slight: 207 pages in relatively large type. Perhaps Julian volunteers a little too easily to help Edward. Perhaps there's something overly convenient, too, in the way he's so quickly taken in by Edward's family - tested by Edward's wife, bedded by Edward's daughter. Perhaps it doesn't add up to a whole huge amount that we've not seen before.

But perhaps none of that really matters one jot. It's good; it's arresting; it's a last taste of this world. Towards the end, when things close in on Edward, it all gets suitably tense. There's the constant sense of horror under the surface. And it's full of haunting moments: an interview with a married couple where they know it's more that just an idle chat; posh dinner with a dying woman; a meeting amid bird life and the ghosts of Cold War at Orford: 

"'We are famous for our bird life here, actually, Julian,' he announced, with proprietorial pride. 'We have lapwing, curlew, bittern, meadow pipit, avocets, not to mention duck,' he declared, like a headwaiter reciting the day's specials. 'Look now, please. You hear that curlew calling to her mate? Follow my arm.'

Julian made a show of doing so, but for some minutes he had been able to follow only the horizon: the remains of our own civilisation after its destruction in some future catastrophe. And there they stood: distant forests of abandoned aerials rising out of the mist, abandoned hangars, barracks, accommodation blocks and control rooms, pagodas on elephantine legs for stress-testing atom bombs, with curved roofs but no walls in case the worst happens. And, at his feet, a warning to him to stick to marked paths or reckon with unexploded ordnance." (p. 159)

In fact, it's all about ghosts: the legacies of old wars, old trauma, old connections and betrayals. There's also the ghost of the author, of course - or authors plural. Le Carre's son Nick Harkaway gave a moving interview last year about completing the book in the absence of his late parents. And there's another ghost for me; this is the first le Carre in a long time that I've bought for myself, not borrowed from my father. The loss is keenly felt, but communing with these spirits one last time I am more than anything grateful.

James Bond in the Lancet

The new issue of medical journal Lancet Psychiatry includes my essay, "Was it obvious to everyone else that I'd fallen for a lie?" on James Bond, and also Len Deighton and John le Carre. I wrote it before I'd seen No Time To Die.

You need to be signed up to read the whole thing, but the teaser first paragraph goes like this:

"When actor Sean Connery died in October, 2020, media coverage focused on his success as the secret agent James Bond. The franchise is still going strong, with Bond now played by Daniel Craig and No Time To Die, the latest film, now in cinemas. That enduring appeal is partly due to the movies consciously keeping up with the times and reflecting contemporary trends. Yet Connery's Bond films are still screened on prime-time TV in the UK; remarkable, given that the first of them, Dr No, is nearly 60 years old and invidiously features White actors made up to look Asian. The best of Connery's Bond films, Goldfinger (1964), was even back in cinemas at the end of 2020. They are exciting movies, and sexy and fun, but their persistence is down to something more profound. The world of espionage portrayed by mid-20th century writers was deeply concerned with scientific and political issues concerning individuality, identity, and the human mind..."

Simon Guerrier, "Was it obvious to everyone else that I'd fallen for a lie?", Lancet Psychiatry vol 8, issue 12, pp 1040-1 (1 December 2021)

The Ipcress File, by Len Deighton

I'm immersed in the world of Harry Palmer at the moment for a thing I'm writing. That's included finally getting round to The Ipcress File (1962), the novel that inspired the brilliant film.

The book is surprisingly different, including trips to Beirut and a Pacific island to watch the testing of a nuclear bomb. Harry Palmer isn't even in it, as the anonymous narrator tells us on page 34:

"Now my name isn't Harry, but in this business it's hard to remember whether it ever had been."

In the film, Palmer is played by Michael Caine, a Londoner born in 1933. Not-Harry in the book is from Burnley - completely changing how he'd sound - and perhaps a decade older, as we're told he was in the fifth form in 1939.

Despite the excursions abroad, the plot is basically the same, with the same mix of drab bureaucracy and imminent danger of death. There's the brilliant twist when the agent escapes from incarceration and discovers it's not been quite what it seems - which is so good I don't want to spoil it here, nearly 60 years after the book was first published.

But my general feeling is that the book is a poor relation to the film. The screenplay condenses the story, reducing the scale but making more focused, quicker-moving and sharper. Even minor characters in the movie are memorable - such as Tony Caunter's non-speaking American agent, a big guy with a distinctive glasses, a plaster over the bridge of the nose. The two men who stand out, I think, are the ones who are kind to our narrator in his hour of need. (He makes sure to pay them for their kindness.)

So I'm a bit surprised by the cover line on my battered second-hand copy of the book from 1995 the Sunday Times calling Deighton, "The poet of the spy story." Surely that's a better description of le Carre, whose prose is so much more beautiful than this clunky stuff. It's fine, it's fun enough, it's got some great moments... But the film is witty, stylish, and so classy that it holds its own against Bond.

The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman

The middle chapter of The Book of Dust is thrilling, rich and downright weird. Since reading volume one - La Belle Sauvage - I've gone back to Northern Lights and reread most of The Subtle Knife (which my son has now pinched), as well as been avidly glued to the TV version. Given that immersion in this fantastical universe, I can report that The Secret Commonwealth is Pullman at his best, the story so compelling that I raced through the hefty tome of 687 pages in just a matter of days.

It's set 20 years after the events of La Belle Sauvage and eight after those of the His Dark Materials trilogy, with Lyra Silvertongue nee Belaqua now a grown-up. Shockingly, she and her daemon, Pantalaimon, are not getting on - when their bond gave the original trilogy such emotional power. We keenly feel their separation, while for those in this world it is utterly scandalous, physically repulsive, that they can be apart. The sense is that they have been changed, psychologically and physically, by the trauma they have been through in previous books. Pan, shockingly, sneaks off without Lyra - something most daemons would find impossible - to explore nocturnal Oxford, where he witnesses a murder...

Lyra and Pan go to report this to the police, but Pan recognises a policeman as one of the murderers. Other figures of authority are also a problem: the new Master of Jordan Collage evicts Lyra from the rooms she's lived in since childhood, and threatens to expel her from the college entirely; there are new people at and gathering power within the Magisterium - one of whom has personal reasons for wishing revenge on Lyra. And far away in the east, something is going on to damage the trade in certain derivatives of roses (yes, really) that suggests the emergence of another, ruthless power...

With the stakes so highly set against her, and an adventure that begins in the locality of Oxford but then jaunts across the world, it feels like Lyra is in a spy novel, and a good one - le Carre or James Bond, but with magic. The characters and situations are vivid and arresting, with plenty of twists and shocks along the way. The atmosphere is tense and bleak through ought. Pullman also develops the mechanics of his world: we see all kinds of exceptions to the normative, binary human/daemon relationship - the daemon who falls for another human, the people who buy and sell daemons, the man who insists that daemons aren't really there. In each case, it's more than just a fun idea; Pullman explores the resulting emotional devastation. How brilliant to make the intricacies of such fantastical relationships so moving.

Whereas I felt La Belle Sauvage lost its way in its second half, The Secret Commonwealth sustains the pace and excitement, while at the same time covering lots of philosophical ground as per previous books. It's as deep but less talky, I think, and also palpably angry, with stuff to say about fake news, restrictions on academic freedom, the parochial nature of reporting and politics. There's a lot, too, on the cruelty of families and the kindness of strangers. I wonder how consciously Pullman is addressing readers of Lyra's age or thereabouts, the now young adults who first read his books as children: how much is this a rant, and how much a rallying cry?

There's one thing I really wasn't keen on: the fact that Malcolm Polstead, protagonist of La Belle Sauvage, is in love with Lyra - who he knew as a baby. Yes, she's now 20 and could be a consenting adult, but I didn't feel comfortable about the balance of power between this Oxford tutor and this vulnerable student who has so much on her plate already. I really hope they don't get together in book three.

But I also can't imagine that Pullman would do anything so simple as that... I wish he'd hurry up and write it.

The Secret Life, by Andrew O'Hagan

I was given this 2017 book after chatting with a friend about Andrew O'Hagan's 60,000 word essay on the Grenfell fire, which brilliantly conjures the lives so awfully lost and then not-so-brilliantly identifies heroes and villains. This book is subtitled "Three True Stories" and in two of them O'Hagan trails in the wake of extraordinary individuals, reporting on what seem to be pivotal movements in history. In between these instalments, he charts his own experiment in matters of identity - and it's altogether different.

First, there's "Ghosting", his account of being employed to ghost the autobiography of Julian Assange, the efforts involved to produce a 70,000-word manuscript, and then why that never got published. It's all really peculiar, and few of the people involved are very likeable, but O'Hagan is good at the small but telling details:

"During those days at the Bungay house I would try to sit [Assange] down with a new list of questions, and he'd shy away from them, saying he wasn't in the mood or there were more pressing matters to deal with. I think he was just keen to get away from [his then residence] Ellingham Hall. I had the internet. I made lunch every day and he'd eat it, often with his hands, and then lick the plate. In all that time he didn't once take his dirty plate to the sink. That doesn't make him like Josef Mengele, but, you know, life is life." (p. 34)

That casual sense of other people being there for Assange's convenience illuminates much of the story. The sense is of Assange talking big and then not delivering, or at least not caring about details, or how that lack of care might affect and damage other people. O'Hagan signs off with his last meeting with Assange, when the book is clearly not going to happen.

"It was a Friday night and Julian has never seemed more alone. We laughed a lot and then he went very deeply into himself. He drank his beer and then lifted mine and drank that. 'We've got some really historic things going on,' he said. Then he opened his laptop and the blue screen lit his face and he hardly noticed me leaving." (p. 99)

His involvement with Assange leads to him being recommended to Craig Wright, the man who, under the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, invented bitcoin - or did he? In "The Satoshi Affair", O'Hagan recountsWright's efforts to go public and then decide otherwise - just like Assange. Again, it's a fascinating account of what seems a major moment, one that raises issues about identity, our relationship to technology and the truth, and O'Hagan has a ring-side seat throughout. As with Assange, there's a lot of money at stake and a rather glamorous, showbiz lifestyle being lived - but Wright is another sad, trapped figure racked by indecision and doubt. We'd sympathise with his predicament if we didn't see what it costs everyone else around him.

Between these two accounts is "The Invention of Ronald Pinn." It begins in Camberwell New Cemetery, O'Hagan remarking on the number of young people's graves. He identifies one, Ronald Alexander Pinn, who died in 1984 aged 20, but otherwise roughly O'Hagan's own age, and decides to use the dead man's birth certificate to create a false identity. In doing so, he's inspired by recent revelations about undercover policemen from the Met's Special Demonstration Squard using such identities:

"In several of the cases, officers kept their fake identities for more than ten years and exploited them in sexual situations. To strengthen their 'backstory', they would visit the places of their 'childhood', walking around the houses they had lived in before they died, all the better to implant the legend of their second life." (p. 102)

So that's what O'Hagan does, touring the places Pinn would have known, researching his life, speaking to people who knew him - and then using that to build up an alternative life. He then wants to see what can be done with such a false identity, and goes on to buy white heroin, cannabis and Tramadol, and counterfeit money. He investigates but apparently doesn't buy guns, as if moral scrupples stop him going that far. But who was he paying for the drugs and fake money, and in giving them money what else was he tacitly financing?

These are not victimless crimes. Living in south London, I'm very conscious of the links between the drug trade and knife crime, the lives of children blighted - and ended - by the supply chain. As a bereaved parent, I had a visceral reaction to what O'Hagan did with the name of some mother's son. He's an unapologetic tourist, blithely enjoying a stroll through other people's misery and grief.

At the end of his account, he finds the mother of the real Ronald Pinn and we realise that she must have provided much of the biographical detail given earlier. But it's telling that this is where his account finishes - we don't hear what her son's death did to her, or what she thinks of what O'Hagan has done with her son's name. O'Hagan is, like Assange and Wright, caught up in the thrill of his own story and seems to spare no thought for those hurt along the way.

Transcription, by Kate Atkinson

This is brilliant. In 1950, Juliet Armstrong is a BBC radio producer working in Schools (the department always has a capital S). But ten years before, she worked for the government, transcribing recordings of a group of Nazi sympathisers - as well as doing some more active spy work. We cut back and forth between the two roles as a dark secret from her past threatens to return and engulf her...

As a radio producer who still does a lot of transcribing myself, it all felt brilliantly authentic - for all Atkinson says in her afterword that she made so much of it up. In all the best ways, it has the feel of le Carre - with the language of moles and dead-letter drops. Juliet is just one of many in the book to move from MI5 to the BBC without quite leaving the former.

"There was a subtle - and perhaps not so subtle - emphasis in Schools on citizenship. Juliet wondered if it was to counter the instinct towards Communism." (p. 178)

But the spy plot and moral uncertainties are just part of the appeal. The detail of ordinary life is all perfectly conveyed and compelling. When one of Juliet's broadcast programmes includes an actor clearly saying "fuck", it has just as much drama - and awful consequence - as any of the war stuff. 

It's a wrily funny read, one constant theme Juliet's frustrated sex life. Her perspective full of pithy observations as she moves through the large cast of vividly drawn characters, many burdened with tragedy but doing their best to get on.

"How little it takes to make some people happy, Juliet thought. And how much it takes for others." (p. 231)

Amid all this activity, this life, are some deftly placed clues to what's really going on - such as one character's caual thieving - which I didn't think to put together spot until very late. It's especially clever because often we're ahead of Juliet, spotting one character's sexuality before she has to have it explained. Only in the last section do we realise what the book is actually about. In fact, the one jarring moment is when Atkinson acknowledges that with a wink at the reader:

"Come now, quite enough exposition and explanation. We're not approaching the end of a novel, Miss Armstrong." (p. 315 - 14 pages from the end)

The final revelation only makes me want to read the whole thing again straight away. It's so deceptively simple, such a pleasure to knock through, so rewarding at the end. A joy.

A Legacy of Spies, by John le Carre

"I, who was taught from the cradle to deny, deny and deny again - taught by the very Service that is seeking to drag a confession out me?"
John le Carre, A Legacy of Spies (2017), p. 161.

This is an extraordinary lap of honour, almost a pastiche of le Carre by le Carre himself, the sort of thing in anyone else's hands we would call fan fiction.

It returns us to the world of the Circus and George Smiley, not seen since The Secret Pilgrim (1990), but it's really revisiting the events that led to The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) - le Carre's third novel, and the one that made his name. Along the way, we catch up with characters and events from his two other most successful Circus novels - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) and Smiley's People (1979). In fact, since this new book is recounted by Smiley's loyal underling, Peter Guillam, I had Michael Jayston's voice in my head (he played Guillam in the BBC adaptations of those latter two novels; Benedict Cumberbatch played Guillam in the more recent Tinker Tailor film.)

A friend had read and enjoyed this new book without knowing any of this history. I'm now eager to reread those other books to see how well it all fits together. It feels seamless, the only glaring thing being Smiley himself - recruited as a spy to the Circus in 1928 or 1937, depending which book you refer to, but still alive and in good health whenever this new, modern-feeling book is set. It is very contemporary, and though the word "Brexit" isn't used, George tells us he is and always was a European, and is horrified by the idea of England on its own as a "citizen of nowhere".

Yet given the age Smiley must surely be, the only concession to the passing of time is that he no longer wears a suit. The one character to have died since we last visited this world is Smiley's nemesis Karla. Jim Prideaux is still working at the same school as he was in Tinker Tailor, more than 40 years ago.

The story sees Guillam called back to London because there's likely to be a parliamentary inquiry into the events of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. He is reticent, but slowly we unpick what happened - a little ahead of the investigators he is speaking to. There's a real sense of menace in the jovial lawyers who seem ready to hang Guillam out to dry, and in the character of Christoph - a man out of revenge. It's an absorbing read, full of well drawn characters and telling detail. Indulgent, but perfectly done.

The Spy Who Loved by Clare Mulley

This life of SOE agent "Christine Granville" - born Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek in Poland in 1908 - took a while to get in to, not least because it's so dense with meticulous research. There is lots on the frustrations and false starts of a life running messages under Nazi noses, on the bureaucracy and "office politics" of rival intelligence factions, and on her tangled love life.

Peppered with good moments, it then really picks up once the firm (as SOE was known to its employees) finally gives Christine something to do, dropping her blind (without help) into France. She's brave, resourceful and charismatic, and it's thrilling to be at her side in the thick of the action. The odds against her and her comrades make these chapters utterly compelling - particularly the Nazi attack on Vercors, and Christine's attempts to rescue comrades when they're arrested and sentenced to death. Later, the Warsaw Uprising is just as deftly conveyed - Christine wasn't there, but we're haunted by the dreadful events just as she was.

We feel Christine's righteous anger when artillery is not dropped to the desperate resistance fighters in Vercors and Warsaw, despite repeated and urgent requests. There's also her justifiable fury at being constantly overlooked - a mix of sexism, xenophobia, Antisemitism and office politics. After the war, despite distinguished service and the support of such figures as Lord Selbourne - who appealed directly to the Home Secretary on her behalf - Christine was still denied British citizenship. In fact, says Mulley,

"it now turned out that Christine's service to Britain was irrelevant, because she was not a man. 'A married woman is disbarred, under the present law, from obtaining naturalisation independently from her husband...' a rubber-stamping official explained. Without evidence of [her husband] Jerzy Gizycki's death or a valid dissolution of his and Christine's marriage, the Home Office simply saw 'no point in considering whether she could be regarded as eligible in other respects'. Over six million Poles had died during the war, there were few official records, and Christine was in any case disbarred from returning to Poland because of her service for the Allies, but her marital status was more important than her war record. It was a low moment for Home Office policymakers."
Clare Mulley, The Spy Who Loved (2013), p. 289.

She felt the firm had also let her down, failing to find her suitable work after the war. She's a restless woman of action who doesn't fit easily in peacetime, and SOE was itself closed down at the end of the war. Christine didn't exactly help herself - she was spiky and rude, and refused to take on administrative or secretarial duties - but it's hard not to share her anger.

"'I am rather tired, after six years of more or less active service with the firm,' she wrote bitterly, 'of being treated as a helpless little girl.'
Ibid., p. 294.

We follow her efforts to find a place for herself post-war: a spell farming in Kenya; visiting a friend in Germany but too disquieted about being in enemy territory; working on passenger liners. And then too quickly it's over - shockingly, awfully, in July 1952 Christine was murdered by a jilted admirer.

Mulley is also good at picking through the accounts of Christine's life, weighing up their claims. She spells out the case for Christine having inspired Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale - written a few months before Christine's death. It seems quite convincing an idea until Mulley then unpicks it: there's no strong evidence Christine actually ever met Ian Fleming.

An epilogue detailing how Christine's friends tried to protect her reputation after her death is concise and moving. Mulley then offers a note on how she went about collating this story - from an extraordinary range of sources.

But the book then ends on a sour note, with one appendix speculating on why Christine never had or seemed to want children, and then another other giving more detail about her murderer. They're surely appendices because they don't fit with what's gone before, and there's a feeling of prurience, even disrespect to the difficult, brilliant agent who deserved something more.

See also: Nevil Shute's Requiem for a Wren

Dr on Today yesterday

Yesterday, the Dr was up early to get to BBC Broadcasting House, where she was a guest on Today and talked to John Humphrys about Different Perspectives: Archaeology and the Middle East in WWI - a Heritage Lottery Fund project looking into the lives and stories of great archaeologists who became spies during the war.

The Dr was there representing the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, and was interviewed alongside Dr Roderick Bailey, a historian specialising in unconventional warfare in the world wars.

You can hear the segment 2:41:15 into the Today programme of 14 November 2016.

James Bond, 1654

Via a tweet from my chum Farah earlier in the year, I learnt of A Firework for Oliver (1964) by John Sanders. Brother Tom tracked down a copy via the wonder that is Abe Books.

It's a thrilling spy story about a top English secret agent, Nicholas Pym, on the trail of a deadly new superweapon that's being developed by an implacable foe.

The trail leads him into the heart of Europe, and into the arms of a tough but beautiful lady with a tragic past... It's James Bond except for being set in the 1650s, Pym an agent of the Protectorate and the plot aimed at killing his boss, Oliver Cromwell.

From the off, there's an enticing line in dry wit and understatement.

"Pym gave the man in the plain dark suit [his boss, Secretary of State John Thurloe] a cold grin. 'You said something about meeting fire with fire. So be it! Let them find me alone. I am an officer on special service who might know something. They won't kill me at once, without trying to find out what that is. Make it easy for them. Let my face be seen!'

Mr Thurloe leaned back as far as his high-backed chair would allow. A bland expression wiped the anxiety from his face. In an impersonal voice he said: 'Two special envoys from the States-General are arriving in Gravesend in connection with the Anglo-Dutch peace treaty. It will be an occasion for public rejoicing. They dock tomorrow afternoon. You will attend as an additional aide to Lord Clayton, the Protector's brother-in-law, who will be there to greet them.' He picked up one of the pile of dispatches on the oak table and began to read it. Without looking up, he said: 'Don't bother to wear a hat.'"

John Sanders, A Firework For Oliver (1964 [76]), pp. 43-4.

It's a neat reversal to set a spy story under the Puritan regime: instead of Bond boring on about fine food and drink, Pym is scathing of glamorous living. That said, he's no prude - enjoying sex out of wedlock and hardly blinking an eye when the mission takes him to a posh Parisian orgy.

Like Bond, this is a thoroughly male world and perspective - woman can be clever, resourceful and beautiful, but they're still largely at the mercy of men. At one point, Pym just happens to call on a beautiful lady while she's having a bath - and fighting off a comrade who won't take no for an answer. When Pym steps in and knocks the man unconscious, she is suitably grateful...

Pym, though, is not a womaniser. It's good that he's only interested in one woman in the whole adventure; it's not quite so good when she's the only major female character in the book. There are few minor ones, too.

Like Bond, Pym is an ordinary but competent agent with lashings of common sense, an able guide through the shady political world in which he deals. If there's a lot of exposition - not all of it subtly done - the book is good at establishing the setting and politics. I love that the superweapon involved is - to us hundreds of years after the event - quite a minor advance but promises to offer an army a distinct advantage.

Like the best of Bond, the book is a series of dramatic encounters, many of them visually arresting. There are last-minute escapes and coincidences, not all of them entirely credible. But the book rattles along at a frenetic pace, and we soon learn that anyone who spends any time near Pym is unlikely to see out the day.

Where it's different from Bond, apart from the period setting, is that it's also very funny. By yet more fiendish contrivances, on several occasions Pym has to thump his baffled superiors if he's to thwart the enemy. And, having set up a Pyrrhic victory that's very like Fleming's Bond, there's then an unexpected, happy ending.

A bit clunky and contrived, this is a thrilling, fun adventure - and I'm delighted to learn just the first of a series.