Both fascinate us, and not because they are, in genre terms, ‘crime novelists’. Crime fiction may be good literature: think of Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Still, Hammett and Chandler are good literature of an indubitably local type. Of the United States, naturally, of life in small towns or of the intrigues of the capital cities. Simenon and Le Carré, on the other hand, are good European literature. They feel closer to us.
Both have something willfully grey about them. The characters they manipulate are opaque: Commissioner Maigret and Le Carré’s George Smiley are both intelligent, but of a vulgar, stodgy nature. They never intervene in exotic affairs; we see them amid the sorrow and tedium of everyday things, as people who abhor these things with the curious resignation of those who have no choice but to dwell among them. And their settings, far away as they may be, form part of a more restricted horizon than may be apparent at first.
The world of Simenon’s characters is the former French Empire. That of Le Carré’s is the residue or ghost of the former British one. With time, the thread of the French colonies gets lost, and thenceforward, the scope of Simenon’s novels shrinks progressively: they speak only of a mansion, a town, a small city, some neighborhood. Perhaps even simply of a family, a street, a pension – in this way, they are vast and microscopic as the novels of Balzac.
The British Empire disintegrates as well. But Le Carré’s world narrows and expands at the same time. It expands: things happen in Hamburg and Moscow and London and Paris simultaneously, or else in Hong Kong and Moscow and London and Peking. Everything is directed, registered, observed, controlled from different places. Everything has echoes elsewhere, leaves its traces on everything else. At the same time, the world grows smaller: its vastness is encapsulated in a small number of offices with telephones, telexes, and dossiers.
Maigret and Smiley are moral figures par excellence: Le Carré and Simenon are, above all, observers, moralists. Their morality is skeptical, pessimistic, opposed to that faith of Sherlock Holmes’s in a limited set of behavioral precepts founded on an unshakeable universe. Le Carré’s novels may be read as apologetics for a very specific historical and social world. Here we must speak again of Balzac, because the impression these two authors give is, at its heart, the same one we get from Balzac: of the repetitive, circular, monotonous, exasperating, vulgar, and predictable presence of evil in human affairs.
Perhaps this is why, like Balzac, Simenon and Le Carré shine in their descriptions of circumstances and surroundings. From the physical environment, from the atmosphere, they create a metaphor of the natural world. And this makes them poets, if a poet is, as Goethe allegedly says, a person who thinks in images. Images of sorrow: streets of somber, dusty cities where we feel alone.
8 May 1980