I felt the shadowy presence of George Smiley in the Regal Theatre in New Delhi's Connaught Place in the late seventies in one of my periodic escapades from the provincial town that was Aligarh, where I was pursuing research in Physics to earn a Ph D degree. The movie was The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. Richard Burton played the role of secret service agent Alec Leamas. On the verge of his retirement, he undertakes to pass himself as a defector to get into East Germany, where he is expected to incriminate a German agent named Mundt. In Germany, he finds himself in a complex trap set by George Smiley, the Head of the British espionage service and mastermind of this devilish brew of double cross. The movie was based on a book by John Le Carre.
The movie is devoid of the dashing dare-devilry that one associates with spy-craft as interpreted by well-known spies like James Bond. The film was a stark depiction of reality, almost a documentary. To understand the plot, you had to follow convoluted explanations, cryptic references and dropped names. The film shows the extent of deceit, cynicism, and corruption in the spy game.
The first Smiley book I read was "Smiley's People", the final instalment of the epic fight between Smiley and the Russian mastermind Karla. The book opens with the murder of the Russian emigre Vladimir, one of "Smiley's People" in the Hampstead Heath. This compels Smiley to return from retirement to investigate the killing. The trail leads him to Karla in Moscow Center who was spending secret government funds in conspiring to smuggle his problem child into the West. By the end of the book, Smiley blackmails him to defect to the West by threatening to expose his fraud. At his moment of triumph, watching Karla cross the bridge in the East German border to surrender, Smiley reflects on the price he paid in terms of lives and careers sacrificed in the service of British Intelligence. It is a story of revenge, of the methodical way Smiley traps and takes down his adversary. The book portrays the moral cost of waging the Cold War in its most visceral manner. Le Carré's plots evolve in the manner of a Greek tragedy, events moving inexorably towards the final denouement. Betrayal was the sublime theme, to which he returned again and again.
Smitten by the book, I started a serious reading of all Smiley novels starting with Call for the Dead, where Smiley is introduced as a “breathtakingly ordinary” man. He works in the "Circus,." This is what e Carré calls the British Intelligence apparatus, located in London's Cambridge Circus. A suspected East German spy under Smiley's investigation dies and there is pressure to bury the incident under the rug as a suicide. The book ends with Smiley solving the puzzle and a deadly encounter at the Battersea Bridge in London. The very first chapter of his very first book is titled "A Brief History of George Smiley", making one of the most memorable characters in modern fiction emerge fully formed. Smiley finds retreat in German literature even as he battles deception, betrayal, and murder. The slim book was published in 1961 when the author was just starting his work as a spy for MI6 in Bonn.
In A Murder of Quality, published in 1962, Smiley is asked by a former colleague, Ailsa Brimley to investigate an odd letter from the wife of a junior master at Carne School, a boy's school. Smiley begins his enquiries into the close-knit society of the school and soon begins to find that things are very different from how they appear. The book is more a murder mystery than a story of espionage. It brings out the recurring theme of the Smiley stories, the rot and decay of the British institutions.
The Looking Glass War was a satire on spy stories which put off the readers by its depiction of a disastrous intelligence failure. le Carré observed that the reason for rejection was the public perception that "the spies can do no wrong." Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy re-invents George Smiley as the Circus gets compromised by the presence of a Russian "mole" (a word coined by Le Carre). Smiley returns from retirement to search for the mole. This novel exquisitely details the way Smiley backtracks into old intelligence files to follow the clues and nail the truth hidden among apparently insoluble puzzles.
The Honourable School Boy opens with George becoming "Control"-head of Circus-after his success in TTSS. The story is set in exotic Southeast Asian locations during the chaos of the American withdrawal from Vietnam. Smiley's probing gaze turns there for a chance to expose Karla by exposing his secret funds. Sharing the spotlight is Jerry Westerby, who was called back from retirement.
In The Secret Pilgrim, Smiley surfaces after a gap, though in a roundabout manner. The novel's narrator, Ned York uses Smiley's recollections as a starter. Le Carré uses this episodic style to fill in gaps in the Circus narrative. It resembles The Looking Glass War and is rife with satire.
After nearly 20 years, Le Carré reappears with A Legacy of Spies. The story happens in the British Intelligence's glamorous new headquarters in London. The narrator is Smiley's assistant Peter Guillam, summoned from retirement in France for an enquiry into the operation that led to the death of Alec Leamas in 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold'. Guillam has to spar with devious characters who pretend to be his friends. Betrayal is again at the core of the story. A Legacy of Spies tells us that our friends may often be our most dangerous enemies, misdirected by their convictions about the justifiability of the means to achieve their objectives. Smiley's presence looms over the story. Guillam must employ George's methods and follow the steps that led to Leamas's death. In the end, Guillam tracks Smiley to Freiberg in Germany for one final round of questions. Guillam wants Smiley to explain, "Why did we do the things we did." Smiley's response embraces the entire series of books. This was the last of the Smiley books.
George Smiley is an antithesis of the more popular British spy, James Bond. Quiet, self-deprecating, mild-mannered, and middle-aged, he lives by his wits. There is an odd description of Smiley by a policeman in "Smiley's People": "An Abbey ... made up of all sorts of conflicting ages and styles and convictions". He excels in the art of bureaucratic manoeuvring rather than gunplay. He is certainly not a bed-hopper; in fact, it is Smiley's wife Ann who deceives him. In "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy", Le Carre describes Smiley as a "brilliant spy and inadequate man".
Smiley, with his prodigious memory and a deep insight into human frailties, is a spymaster of exceptional competence. Highly sagacious and incredibly perceptive with a strong moral conscience; he also understands the grisly aspects of his calling. Though retired, Smiley maintains an extensive range of aides and support staff. His fidelity to them extracts genuine respect and loyalty. He is described as a short, fat man, dressed in expensive but badly fitting clothes.
Le Carré's storytelling benefits from his tradecraft knowledge drawn from his British intelligence experience. John le Carré was the cover name preferred by David Cornwell for his fiction works. He continued to do his research on each book, visiting locations and meeting contacts in the covert world. All these make Smiley the most "believable" fictional spy. A legion of fans agrees. They know his odd mannerisms, where he lives in Chelsea that he dresses badly and forever pines for the love of Lady Ann.
Le Carre passed away in 2020 at the age of 89. The following year, George Smiley completed sixty years in fiction. This and the immobility forced on me by the COVID lockdown period were adequate reasons to revisit the venerable British spook. To have an overview, I watched the BBC serial "Smily's People" available on YouTube with a screenplay by Le Carre. This was followed by a more leisurely re-reading of all the Smiley books on my Kindle.
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