James and le Carré (TLC, 3)

This is an entry in my “Twitter loci communes” series; read more here.

P. D. James and John le Carré are two of my favorite novelists. I’ve written about each of them before. A question occurred to me as I was reading le Carré’s Our Game this week, and that question reminded me of a question I asked on Twitter a couple years ago.

Here’s the first one, sincerely asked by one who lacks the expertise or breadth of reading to know a good answer:

If you wanted to chart the social, moral, and political changes wrought in England between the immediate postwar period and Brexit—not only the Cold War but the brave new world opened up by the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as by the fall of the Twin Towers—could you do better than reading every one of the novels written by James and le Carré?

Put differently: What would you be missing by using their novels as a window onto the successive societal revolutions that sprung up during the reign of Queen Elizabeth—or, say, between Winston Churchill’s final year in office and Theresa May’s first? I don’t mean to suggest that their work is comprehensive, much less to sound reductive. (For example, a writer like Zadie Smith comes to mind as adding something important they’re missing.) I more mean the question as a comment about the sheer expanse of James’s and le Carré’s respective powers of social observation, and the way in which the changing mores of the day reveal themselves in the little details strewn across the dialogue and narration of their stories.

That brings me to my second question, posed on Twitter in June 2019:

Of genre authors working in the second half of the twentieth century, who wrote the best English prose? On the Mount Rushmore, I think P. D. James and John le Carré are nonnegotiable. Who are the other two?

Addendum: By "genre" I mean the fictional sub-groups typically thought of as cheap paperbacks for thrills: crime, fantasy, SF. (Westerns are tough—I'll say no for now, though I'd allow a counter-argument.) Re time frame, I mean *flourished* in final 4-5 decades of 20th century.

In other words I'm framing the question this way because genre is often thought of as non-literary and thus not literature proper, and thus not deserving of literary analysis or praise. But some genre authors write gorgeous prose. Who are they?

While it’s still up, you should go check out the replies. There were a bunch, and some of the suggestions were fantastic. (Everyone seemed to agree with me about James; less so le Carré.) Some of the proposed names included le Guin, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Patrick O’Brian, Charles Portis, Shirley Jackson, Octavia E. Butler, Brian Jacques, Ishigiro, Ballard, Ligotti, Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delaney, and many more. The truth is that any Mount Rushmore is going to be subjective. But perhaps there could be loose agreement on (to switch metaphors) the bullpen from which one would call up this or that writer for the honor.

Late le Carré

The truth is that politics began to intrude itself into le Carré’s work more flagrantly. It certainly preoccupied him. The Brexit vote outraged him, and at the end of his life he petitioned for Irish citizenship, so that he might remain a European. “I think my own ties to England were hugely loosened over the last few years,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “And it’s a kind of liberation, if a sad kind.” This growing disenchantment could not help but leave its mark on his work. In his classic novels, politics is the background against which his figures act; in the later ones, politics itself is the subject matter, and his figures become the surrogates who act it out.

One of the reasons that the later books tend to blur together is in the sameness of their plots: an essentially decent but rather dim fellow is complicit in some sort of international conspiracy about which he is ignorant until he is enlightened through his encounter with a clear-eyed idealist, after which he tries to redeem himself with a selfless but typically futile act of heroism. Le Carré’s idealists were sadly generic: all-purpose human-rights lawyers or international doctors—types rather than individuals. This is the tragic irony of his career: having made his mark by introducing moral complexity and ambiguity into the spy novel, he ended by making cardboard cut-outs against whom James Bond seems like Hamlet.

—Michael J. Lewis, “The Cooling of John le Carré,” The New Criterion (June 2021). That seems a harsh assessment, but what comes before and after the essay is measured, fair, and deeply appreciative of le Carré’s art. I wrote about his second-to-last novel, A Legacy of Spies, when it came out in fall 2017. I enjoyed it, though my reaction was similar to Lewis’s, and only confirmed by what turned out to be le Carré’s last novel, Agent Running in the Field, which Lewis calls his “Brexit novel.” Le Carré was one of a kind, and his prose was always top notch, but his career was bifurcated by two 30-year periods: 1961–1989, and 1990–2019. A Perfect Spy (1986) is his masterpiece, or rather his crowning masterpiece, alongside The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and the subsequent Smiley/Karla Trilogy. But there are other jewels in the crown, both before and after the end of the Cold War, because the man did not know how to write boring sentences or boring stories. I think of him the way I do P. D. James: a master of his craft whose second-tier work runs circles around would-be competitors. And as with her prolific output, I look forward to finishing every single book that came from his pen in my lifetime.

On the historical present

David Bentley Hart's translation of the New Testament came under criticism for many things, but one of them continues to puzzle me: namely, his literal translation of the so-called "historical present." In his latest volume of essays, published just a few months ago, he defends his decision persuasively, to my mind.

What I'm left wondering, though, is whether biblical critics' disagreement with Hart is one of fidelity to the original sense or contemporary judgments of linguistic style. That is, do biblical scholars think the historical present ought to be translated in English past tense because "that is the sense in which it would have struck the ear of a native Greek speaker in 70 AD"? Or because "that is the style that native speakers of American English are used to in 2020"?

The question struck me while reading two novels this summer. One was Melville's Moby-Dick, published in 1851. The other was John le Carré's Agent Running in the Field, published in 2019.

Both novels toggle constantly back and forth (in, respectively, 170-year old American English and 1-year old Queen's English) between past tense and present tense, sometimes on the same page or even in the same paragraph, and always regarding events that have already happened, that is, events located in the past. "While he was speaking, the ship turned: and all of a sudden, I see the whale": that sort of thing.

So if it is the case that well-written and popular English novel-writing about "past" events employs the "historical present" style intermittently with the past tense proper; and if it is the case that ancient writers in Koine Greek, such as St. Mark, did the same; then why not translate it that way? Why not opt for the more literal translation (at least, that is, in translations that aim for formal rather than dynamic equivalence)?

There may be a good answer to that question. I just haven't stumbled across it yet.

On John le Carré's new novel, A Legacy of Spies

The first thing to say about the latest novel from 85-year old spymaster John le Carré is that it is slight. Trumpeted as a return to the world of characters that made him an international household name—to George Smiley, his allies and his enemies—it is indeed a quite literal trip down memory lane. The book is ostensibly the written account of Peter Guillam, now an elderly man nearly as old as le Carré, reflecting on his role in an affair from the late 1950s and early 1960s. The book uses the threat of a lawsuit against the British secret intelligence service as a plot device for revisiting the events leading up to and including the story told in 1963's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. It thus doubles as a sort of retrospective prequel, filling in gaps, painting George and his activities in even bolder shades of gray, and adding even more tragedy and pathos to the events of that book, as well as a sort of meta-commentary from David Cornwall, the man behind the pseudonym, on the ethics of spycraft, the humanity (or what's left of it) of his great hero Smiley, and how both Great Britain and Europe as a whole have fared since the Cold War.



The book asks: Can it be simultaneously true that it was right for spies—like Cornwall, like Smiley, like Guillam—to forsake so much of their humanity against so great a foe as the Soviet Union and that their eventual triumph proved empty, a victory for nothing so much as naked global capitalism? In losing the battle for their souls for the sake of winning a war, did they fail to see that a far greater war was at stake, one they lost anyway, thus giving away their souls for nothing? Or if they managed to keep their souls, to what end and at what cost?

These, like so much of le Carré's post-1990 output, are the questions animating A Legacy of Spies. Neither the narrative nor the retrospect is substantial enough to carry the profundity of their weight, but the questions land by sheer force of authorial will, and by the unquenchable loveliness of the prose, and of the lived-in quality of the world. (It's lived in, all right: Smiley's been a character in nine novels across 56 years. His apparent immortality not implausibly matches his creator's.) For example, the way in which the drama of the story comes from the (again, literal) children of those caught in the crossfire of Control, Smiley, and Guillam's work nearly six decades earlier is at once on the nose and fitting: those sacrificed on the altar of war—however cold—are not ciphers or symbols or merely joes but human beings with loves and lives outside of and beyond the fragile networks of information to which they temporarily belong.

One wishes Smiley's role in the book were not so similar to other recent exercises in nostalgia: the lost great man sought by his junior, discovered only at the end (see: Tron 2.0; Blade Runner 2049; Star Wars: The Force Awakens). The book does make me want to see Tomas Alfredson get on with adapting Smiley's People with Gary Oldman, then perhaps—perhaps?—doing some sort of double adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold paired with A Legacy of Spies, using prosthetics to age the principals in the latter. In fact, we now have three rough-and-ready Smiley trilogies: #1: Call for the Dead, A Murder with of Quality, and The Looking Glass War; #2: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, and Smiley's People; and #3: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Secret Pilgrim, and A Legacy of Spies. The first trilogy is middling, the second is the masterpiece, but the third stretches from 1963 to 1990 to 2017, maps onto the whole drama, denouement, and aftermath of the Cold War, and is book-ended by pained but non-cynical moral reflection on the tragedy of spycraft, using a concrete case study in the sacrifice of others "for the greater good."

What greater good? Le Carré isn't sure anymore, if he ever was. Regardless of the precise quality of his latest novel, it's a question worth pondering.