E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES

YOU'LL NEVER WRITE A BOOK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN

February 20, 2004
By D.K. Holm

Spy Games

With his donnish spies and grubby world of inwardly divided and disillusioned patriots, John Le Carré is one of my favorite novelists but his books have eluded thoroughly successful film adaptation. Le Carré has achieved a delicate balance: he is a genre writer, but esteemed universally as a serious novelist, not just a carpenter of spy thrillers. It's a status that Raymond Chandler, for example, always wanted for himself but which only occurred posthumously, when the Library of America collected all his stories and novels (and one screenplay) into its burgeoning uniform set of American masters. The best Le Carré adaptation remains TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY, made for British television and madly loved by PBS-style audiences the world over. Readers of my DVD column here at MoviePoopShoot may recall that I waxed gloriously nostalgic about TINKER TAILOR some months ago.

True aesthetic movie success has eluded him. THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL was badly miscast. THE TAILOR OF PANAMA was also slightly miscast and a little arty and was taken hostage by Pierce Brosnan sending up his James Bond persona. Before that 2001 release, the previous Le Carré book to be filmed was THE RUSSIA HOUSE in 1990 (DRUMMER GIRL was in 1984 way before that), but by then the Cold War was over and the prevailing lamentation brought up in reviews of his subsequent novels was that Le Carré was a Cold Warrior novelist with nowhere to go and nothing new to write about. Yet if you take the long view of Le Carré's novels since his last "officially" pure "Cold War spy novel," THE SECRET PILGRIM, the author has roamed the world finding new and interesting things to observe, be outraged over, and write about: arms dealing in THE NIGHT MANAGER, the break up of, and internal warfare in, the new Russian in OUR GAME, American incursions into Latin America in THE TAILOR OF PANAMA, international finance in SINGLE AND SINGLE (I haven't read that one yet), and drug cartels in THE CONSTANT GARDENER (about to be filmed with Ralph Fiennes under the direction of Fernando Meirelles). Each of these books is born of a passion, indeed anger at the state of the world, as he perceives it. And since TAILOR OF PANAMA, they have ended bleakly, with small figures unable to stem the tide of imperial aggression. In fact, TAILOR OF PANAMA, THE CONSTANT GARDNER, and now, ABSOLUTE FRIENDS, comprise a rough trilogy of lone, compromised men going up against the forces of international dominance and gaining a meager insight before their lives are snuffed out. They can be a little hard to take.

I don't envy the screenwriter who might take on the task of adapting ABSOLUTE FRIENDS to the screen. If he loves Le Carré and wants to do justice to the work, he's going to be hard pressed to limit the narrative to two hours. Even worse, the book offers a challenging narrative structure that on the surface appears unconquerable.

ABSOLUTE FRIENDS tells the story of one Ted Mundy, an Englishman roughly in his 50s. As the book opens he is a tour guide at mad King Ludwig's castle in Germany. He lives with a Muslim woman from Turkey and her son. But there is something mysterious about his past. Most recently he is in flight from creditors, thanks to a failed language school in Heidelberg. But before that Mundy was a double agent, pretending to be a traitor to the English but in fact helping his old friend Sasha smuggle out secrets from East Germany to the Western powers. But with the fall of the Soviet Empire, they lost their jobs, so to speak. And even before that, Mundy and Sasha were left wing friends in Berlin at the height of the radical movement, dreaming of revolution.

In the '80s, after the fall of the Berlin wall, and the necessity for their commitment to spying done, the two friends lose track of each other. But one night, after a long absence, Sasha approaches Mundy at Ludwig's castle with the offer of another "religion" to believe in, one that will replace their old radical leftism from the '60s, and their newfound covertly expressed patriotism in the '70s and early '80s.

ABSOLUTE FRIENDS is structured unconventionally. It starts out with some scene setting and a summary of Mundy's current situation, and then leaps into a flashback that takes up the next two-thirds of the novel, basically recounting Mundy's life from DNA to now. Le Carré has done this before, in A PERFECT SPY, but that really was a fictional biography. Here it is a major flashback, and interesting as it is, the reader occasionally wonders when Le Carré is going to return to the initial premise. By the end of the book, however, the reader realizes that Le Carré his brilliantly played his hand. Without giving too much away it is safe to say that without the long, detailed account of Mundy and Sasha's many lives, the news and media accounts of them that make up the last chapter would not be so heartbreakingly petty and misguided. In its way, the whole book is a buildup to that last chapter, which is an indictment of the media as a tool of imperialist obfuscation.

One of the things I like about Le Carré's novels, besides the fine prose and the frequently stunning metaphors, is his sense of time. There are two kinds of novels in the world. There's the novel of stasis, and there is the novel of action. Most "literary" fiction consists of novels of stasis. Passive and angry heroes decry everything they see around them, or thin privileged women slowly descend into madness or battle their mothers, but all done without the benefit of plot as we usually know it. Genre fiction consists of novels of action (except for the static behemoths of science-oriented science fiction writers like Greg Bear). If a murder mystery, say, contains reflection it is offered up in the funny metaphors of Chandler and John D. MacDonald.

Unusually, Le Carré writes novels that blend stasis and action. You experience this weird push-pull as you read along, eager to know what is going to happen next and usually fearing it from your position of squirming suspense; yet at the same time, Le Carré elegantly digresses: into the minds of his characters, into politics, into essays on the settings where his characters brood, into sweet authorially biased essays on the state of the world. The digressions don't detract from the action, and the main narrative line is heightened by the observations. This sort of dual sense of literary time is a marvelous trick, and I can't think of another novelist who does it, except maybe Proust.

You can see the challenge that this structure poses for the screenwriter. Will the audience sit for a long flashback that, in a conventional movie, would last about 75 minutes, especially when, in faithfulness to the author, the screenwriter, hews to the original set up? In a movie, I think not. But the book could be successfully adapted. Only in a different medium. I think that ABSOLUTE FRIENDS would be most successful as a four hour TV miniseries. The first hour would comprise Mundy's current situation and what it consists of, ending with the arrival of Sasha; the second hour would consist of their radical Berlin years; the third hour would cover their spying game; and the last hour would be the pay off, the new scheme that Sasha is trying to lure the suspicious Mundy into, and its disastrous results. Done at this length, the little details that loom large in the final chapter, the misinterpretations of Mundy and Sasha's lives and motivations, would have an almost Proustian sense of return, of lives lived and then remembered over a long stretch of time. It could be almost magical.

There is a rich panoply of characters in Le Carré story. First there is the sympathetic Mundy and the irascible Sasha, who replay a constant dynamic in Le Carré's novels, that between a somewhat bumbling but earnest ordinary man with extraordinary qualities, and a charismatic leader and sexual athlete (that was the contrast between George Smiley, the main character of TINKER TAILOR, and his departmental nemesis, Bill Haydon). There are also two other interesting characters in their orbit. First there is Amory, Mundy's British handler, a kind, cautious, if cynical foot soldier in the Cold War who is perhaps the most bitterly used victim of the plot's machinations. And then there is Jay Rourke, the American CIA agent who has to vet Mundy for any taint of remaining leftism before clearing him for double agency. Rourke is a boisterous, irrepressible Ugly American not unlike the character that Joe Don Baker played in the British mini-series EDGE OF DARKNESS. Together they form the four corners of a cunning scheme that links the shambles of the '60s and the struggle against the Soviet empire with the new world order and its far more controlling globalization and lethal spinmaking.

NEXT TIME: Peter Biskind on the '90s, and Natalie Portman!

E-MAIL THE AUTHOR | ARCHIVES