I don't know quite when I became so interested in spy dramas. Certainly as a middle-schooler and teenager I watched James Bond movies, but these are really just action movies with pretty unrealistic and ludicrous premises. James Bond belongs, I think, more in the realm of comic book superheroes. I think I could trace my interest to spy stories either with the release of Magic the Gathering's original "Ravnica, City of Guilds" set, which gave my favorite color-pairing the sinister and clandestine-to-an-extreme House Dimir, or perhaps it was actually the 2011 film adaptation of John Le Carré's most famous book starring Gary Oldman.
Watching the movie with my parents, my dad said it was good, but not quite as good as the miniseries starring Alec Guinness. Well, I finally got around to watching that miniseries, which is actually available on YouTube (though I have no idea if it is there legally - perhaps the people who hold the rights to it don't really care).
Anyway, this version tells the story over the course of four hours, compared to the film's more conventional two hours or so, which does leave more room, of course, to flesh things out. I'll be honest, though, there are a few scenes that feel a bit clumsy - there to serve up exposition in a pretty bald-faced way.
I, of course, already knew the story, having seen the more recent version. But it's a pretty good story: essentially, it's a mystery. George Smiley learns there is a mole (a term invented by Le Carré, or at least popularized by him, in this book) at "The Circus," the fictional headquarters of MI6. Smiley's late mentor, known only by his chosen code name of Control, had been trying to figure out which of the top officers at the Circus was working for the Soviets, but on an ill-fated mission he put together to try to figure it out, everything went wrong and it led to a scandal that exacerbated his existing health issues, leading ultimately to his death. Smiley, who was in fact one of Control's suspects (though one guesses in a sort of "covering all the bases" manner - after all, the people you trust the most are the ones that are best position to betray you) takes up the task of figuring out who it is.
The story has a lot of moving parts: the air is hazy with interpersonal drama and career ambitions. Again, trust is the most difficult thing to establish because, of course, the intelligence trade functions entirely on trust - and deceiving others into trusting you.
One of the really interesting things about Le Carré's fiction (perhaps more brutally centered in his debut novel, The Spy who Came in From the Cold) is how, as high-stakes as it feels to hope that Smiley can prevail and catch the mole, we're also reminded time and again that the Western powers are using all the same methods that the Soviets were (I'm sure that some historians will quibble with that, but at least everyone was/is doing things that would not be considered morally great.)
Again, the story is structured a bit like a mystery, gathering evidence and figuring out what, exactly, has happened, and how, and why.
But there's also this constant nagging doubt: the crux of the Soviet plot is that they've created a fake source of intelligence for the British that purports to be actually be an agent for the Brits within Soviet intelligence who is feeding intel to the UK - an agent codenamed Merlin, whose intelligence is codenamed Witchcraft. "Merlin" is given low-value intelligence, "chickenfeed" so that he can, ostensibly, convince his Soviet superiors that he's getting stuff out of the Brits while he's giving the Brits "gold dust." But, in fact, it's exactly the opposite: the mole in British intelligence sending back high-value intelligences while the value of Witchcraft gradually diminishes into chickenfeed and outright falsehoods. Indeed, there's even a suggestion that the entire plot isn't even there to get British intelligence, but to give the Brits something big they can exchange with the CIA for American intelligence, which the mole will then pass along to the Soviets.
In other words: there's no real "end goal" here, just a lot of careful positioning and laying the framework for future advantages.
Intelligence work, it would seem, at least in this era of the Cold War, was deadly and dangerous with benefits that were profoundly abstract.
Of course, the centerpiece of this story is George Smiley. Smiley is sort of the ideal spy - someone who is constantly observant, careful with his words, and has almost no real weaknesses to exploit, except for one pretty major one.
See, I think one of the things that Le Carré conveys with his fiction (at least in the little exposure I've had to it) is that the best spies are the ones that can minimize their humanity. But as we see in this story, people are still human, and that means that all the little imperfections and vulnerabilities that come with being a real human being make the spy game a particularly tough one to play.
In Smiley's case, it's his fraught marriage - my interpretation is that he loves his wife Ann, but they're basically separated and she has a constant parade of affairs with other men. Smiley fully understands that his marriage is the point of attack that his enemies can use, but knowing that doesn't make it go away. Others at the Circus have broader vulnerabilities, but no one is a robot, even if that might make them a better spy.
While the novel is 52 years old, so it's somewhat old news, I don't want to actually spoil it for those who haven't read it or seen the adaptations.
This miniseries does have the "UK television budget from the 70s" degree of production value, of course - high, I'm sure, for the time and those categories, but the 2011 film certainly looks way slicker. I would also, frankly, argue that as amazing as Guinness is, the film probably has the stronger ensemble, with such actors as Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Ciaran Hinds, Mark Strong, John Hurt, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, and of course Gary Oldman, who I do think is something of an heir to Guinness' chameleonic acting range.
Indeed, I suspect part of what got me in the mood for spy stories has been the new season of Slow Horses (which I think is a big improvement over the previous one. For posterity, the current season is its 6th). Slow Horses is fun, though I don't think it's nearly as smart as the Le Carré stories that influenced it. Still, it's fun to see Oldman playing a character who is in some ways the spiritual equivalent to George Smiley but in others ways his complete opposite.
One thing that's funny for me to consider is just how old everything looks, but then to consider that I was born less than a decade after this series came out. I do think there was a bit of a technological leap in the 1980s (probably a bigger one in the 1990s,) but it's remarkable how analog the technology was just seven years (or twelve if we're talking about the novel) before I was born. That said, I obviously don't have a ton of memories until the very tail end of the 80s. One of the ways in which a show like Slow Horses doesn't feel that much like these Le Carré stories is that, being set contemporarily, so much of the intelligence game is done in the digital world (because so much of life is done in the digital world, he wrote on a blog on the internet). People have to lock books away in safes or use razorblades to cut pages out.
If Le Carré wrote his fiction simply to process his experiences working in intelligence, that makes sense. If he wanted to basically send out anti-recruitment literature for anyone considering getting into such a field, that would also make a lot of sense. While I find this fiction compelling, I also feel very grateful that I've never stepped even close to this world, because I do really value having interpersonal relationships with people I don't need to worry about trusting. Again, it's a story in which normalcy and humanity is a liability. Really puts the Cold in Cold War.
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