AND, AS all the other reviewers will say about A Perfect Spy, a perfect title. When Mountjoy says to Jack Brotherhood that the trail of the wife of the defector has been lost and that it ‘sounds a bit of a muddle’, Brotherhood thinks: ‘No. It is not a muddle. To make a muddle you must first have order. This is inertia, this is normality. What was once a great service has become an immovable hybrid – half bureaucratic, half freebooter, and using the arguments of the one to negate the other.’
The great service is that of British Intelligence. In the James Bond stories this is dedicated to the tracking down and eliminating of great and impossible evils. Chez le Carré ends are less important than means, and means are all we hear about. Squareland is not Flemingland or Greeneland. There are no large threats to the safety of the Free World, and the only morality is that of the public school.
Magnus Pym, a counsellor at the British Embassy in Vienna, goes missing. He is called back to England for the funeral of his father Rick, and then he holes up in a Devonshire boarding house where he writes his memoirs. These take the form of a long letter addressed partly to his son Tom and partly to Jack Brotherhood, the secret service man who drew him into espionage when he was little more than an honourable schoolboy and is now pursuing him. When Pym lay down his pen he evades his captors by shooting himself. This seems a pity. He has disclosed the narrative talent of a le Carré, and his defection to the Czechs has done little harm.
Why do defectors defect? Lederer the American attempts an explanation to Brotherhood: ‘If defection is a self-renewal, it requires also a rebirth… Know why so many defectors defect?… It’s in and out of the womb all the time. Have you ever noticed that about defectors – the one common factor in all that crazy band? – they’re immature. Forgive me, they are literally motherfuckers.’ We are not supposed to expect wisdom from the CIA, only gobbledygook, technical excellence, and mistrust of the Brits. We can ignore the womb theory, but Lederer is right about the immaturity. What Pym needed was a father.
He had a father, Rick Pym, conman, black marketer, floater of unsound companies, self-styled colonel or baronet according to need, robber of widows and orphans, lover of lovelies and bubbly, whose cheques to pay his son’s school fees regularly bounced, wholesale exile but a loving father. He dies in the arms of a couple of raddled whores and a small villainy pursues him literally to the grave. He had sold his head for medical research and £100, and a man comes to claim it. Magnus Pym buys him off with a cheque that does not bounce, then he circuitously takes his more expensive head to Devon and his memoirs.
The big point about Magnus is that he has a capacity for love and an even stronger need to be loved. In Berne as a boy, conducting one of his father’s grandiose and doomed enterprises, he is inducted gently into the lowest possible echelons of the Firm, which feeds a need for loyalty. He also makes a friend of a certain Axel, a Czech battered by the Nazis, and develops a different kind of loyalty. When Magnus, first while doing his National Service, later as a fully accredited Intelligence agent, finds the two loyalties in conflict, it is the human factor (to invoke Graham Greene) that prevails. But that is perhaps too simple a way of looking at it.
A more plausible way is hinted at in Pym’s words to his son. He sees himself as a ‘bridge’ between his own disreputable father and a cleaner and freer life which will have no dubiety about loyalties. Rick Pym, rogue as he was, used the language of uplift to disguise villainy, and even stood for Parliament as a Liberal. He was full of Kipling’s ‘If’ when addressing Magnus (the name itself is an inflated sham, deflated by a priest who calls Magnus Parvus). Magnus has carried on his father’s conmanship at a higher level, though without harming anyone, and effected a purge of his sinful house. His defection has been conducted with a rogue’s smoothness and has carried notional treachery from Central Europe to the great citadel of Washington. And, at the end, he has not really been found out.
Admirers of John the Square will find where what they have learned to expect and to admire – the long bumbling high-level meetings of Brits and the cousins, the authoritative details of Intelligence technique, the bared souls of operatives and their wives, a gallery of people we wish we could like but would run a mile from meeting. When love is really the main theme, it is a pity that there is nobody who is lovable. But the Intelligence services were probably founded to accommodate the unloved. The details about the look and taste and smell of things in Vienna, Berlin and London are as vivid as ever. Mr le Carré’s talents cry out to be employed in the creation of a real novel.
A Perfect Spy is a perfect selling title, and we can expect this book to head the bestseller lists all over the world, but especially in the United States. The general belief among American litterateurs is that we, the British, excel in the spy novel, but that all the rest of our fiction is desperately lightweight and parochial. The very bulk of this book – 463 large pages – is an American recommendation, as is the lack of ease with which the reader gets into it. In other words it has the appearance of the difficulty of real literature and, when bought, cannot be read through in a sleepless night: it can go on the shelf and be continued later. Thus American bookbuyers, who like their purchases to have the durability of furniture, will not feel cheated. It is, finally, somewhat disturbing that the greatest postwar contribution of the British to world myth should be the figure of the traitor. The defector is the hero of such popular fiction as Mr Greene’s The Human Factor and Bryan Forbes’s The Endless Game, with Mr le Carré’s new book somewhere in the middle. He is there in fiction because we have had him in real life. We used to produce missionaries and explorers and learned private investigators; now we produce defectors. The popularity of A Perfect Spy will help to keep this historical truth alive. It will also sustain the myth that the only literature the British can produce on a world scale is sub-art about spies.
Observer, 16 March 1986
Review of A Perfect Spy by John le Carré
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1986)