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Sep. 14th, 2023 11:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI read John le Carré's Our Game last week on a recommendation and a whim, and have been thinking about it intermittently ever since.
The protagonist of this one is Tim Cranmer, who has recently retired into the countryside to make mediocre wine near where his friend Larry teaches at university. Tim and Larry of course are both also, of course, ex-spies, put out to pasture with the end of the Cold War. Larry was a dramatic and idealistic double agent, and Tim was his cool-headed handler, the man who recruited him, and gave him everything he needed, and ensured that at the end of the day he always remembered what side he was actually supposed to be on. They have been intimately entwined for most of their lives, and at the time the story begins, the police have just come knocking on Tim's door to ask him about Larry's disappearance.
This kicks off Tim's obsessive, off-the-books quest to find out what has actually become of his [best?] [friend?] and all the money that Larry seems to have possibly collaborated with his former Soviet handler to steal from the Russian government For Some Reason. And then Tim will ... do what about it? and why? great questions! with no good answers!
If you are perhaps thinking all this sounds a bit homoerotic: Tim is asked about this at intermittent points throughout the book! 'ha ha,' he says whenever he is asked, 'how funny, no, I assure you, Larry is very straight.' Oh, well then.
"So why did he take the veil, as you call it?" she asked.
Her question filled me with a deep tiredness. If you don't know now, you never will, I wanted to tell her. Because he was footloose. Because he was a soldier. Because God told him to and he didn't believe in God. Because he had a hangover. Or hadn't. Because the dark side of him liked an airing too. Because he was Larry and I was Tim and it was there.
Unlike the le Carrés that I've read before, this book is a claustrophobic two-hander -- or more accurately a three-hander, if you take into account Tim's much-younger girlfriend Emma, who [like Larry] is a creative and idealistic person that Tim, who claims no ideals and believes in nothing, has made much of supporting; who is a person but also a foil and a reflection -- or perhaps most accurately of all a one-hander, because the actual Larry and Emma are both in the book much, much less than Tim's feelings and ideas about Larry and Emma and all the things he's projecting onto them. We're deep in first-person narration here, and Tim is not telling us everything, and even when he thinks he is he's absolutely not reliable about it.
About a third of the way through the book, Tim tells us that in fact part of the reason he's so desperate to find Larry is ... he killed him! Or thinks he killed him. He's actually not sure if he killed him. He's hoping he didn't kill him. Later, he finds the coat that he remembers tearing into shreds during the quote-unquote murder, whole, in Larry's closet. Timbo is Going Through It.
I got into a discussion with one of my coworkers while reading this book about whether le Carré was a nihilist and a misanthrope, or [my position] a nihilist who in fact quite likes people, which makes it worse. The absence of a cause, the void at the heart of the work of espionage, is profoundly central to this book -- we're in 1995 now, the Cold War is over, and everyone has to live with what they did for the sake of ensuring several terrible superpowers can now live together in commercial amity, at the expense of various others. Tim starts out the book scoffing at Larry and Emma's ideals and their search for meaning, for some kind of ethical stand to make in an unethical world, but his own hunt for Larry is more or less the same kind of search for meaning. & I don't think le Carré thinks there's any meaning to be found anywhere, but he does have profound empathy for the searchers and all the terrible mistakes they make along the way.
The protagonist of this one is Tim Cranmer, who has recently retired into the countryside to make mediocre wine near where his friend Larry teaches at university. Tim and Larry of course are both also, of course, ex-spies, put out to pasture with the end of the Cold War. Larry was a dramatic and idealistic double agent, and Tim was his cool-headed handler, the man who recruited him, and gave him everything he needed, and ensured that at the end of the day he always remembered what side he was actually supposed to be on. They have been intimately entwined for most of their lives, and at the time the story begins, the police have just come knocking on Tim's door to ask him about Larry's disappearance.
This kicks off Tim's obsessive, off-the-books quest to find out what has actually become of his [best?] [friend?] and all the money that Larry seems to have possibly collaborated with his former Soviet handler to steal from the Russian government For Some Reason. And then Tim will ... do what about it? and why? great questions! with no good answers!
If you are perhaps thinking all this sounds a bit homoerotic: Tim is asked about this at intermittent points throughout the book! 'ha ha,' he says whenever he is asked, 'how funny, no, I assure you, Larry is very straight.' Oh, well then.
"So why did he take the veil, as you call it?" she asked.
Her question filled me with a deep tiredness. If you don't know now, you never will, I wanted to tell her. Because he was footloose. Because he was a soldier. Because God told him to and he didn't believe in God. Because he had a hangover. Or hadn't. Because the dark side of him liked an airing too. Because he was Larry and I was Tim and it was there.
Unlike the le Carrés that I've read before, this book is a claustrophobic two-hander -- or more accurately a three-hander, if you take into account Tim's much-younger girlfriend Emma, who [like Larry] is a creative and idealistic person that Tim, who claims no ideals and believes in nothing, has made much of supporting; who is a person but also a foil and a reflection -- or perhaps most accurately of all a one-hander, because the actual Larry and Emma are both in the book much, much less than Tim's feelings and ideas about Larry and Emma and all the things he's projecting onto them. We're deep in first-person narration here, and Tim is not telling us everything, and even when he thinks he is he's absolutely not reliable about it.
About a third of the way through the book, Tim tells us that in fact part of the reason he's so desperate to find Larry is ... he killed him! Or thinks he killed him. He's actually not sure if he killed him. He's hoping he didn't kill him. Later, he finds the coat that he remembers tearing into shreds during the quote-unquote murder, whole, in Larry's closet. Timbo is Going Through It.
I got into a discussion with one of my coworkers while reading this book about whether le Carré was a nihilist and a misanthrope, or [my position] a nihilist who in fact quite likes people, which makes it worse. The absence of a cause, the void at the heart of the work of espionage, is profoundly central to this book -- we're in 1995 now, the Cold War is over, and everyone has to live with what they did for the sake of ensuring several terrible superpowers can now live together in commercial amity, at the expense of various others. Tim starts out the book scoffing at Larry and Emma's ideals and their search for meaning, for some kind of ethical stand to make in an unethical world, but his own hunt for Larry is more or less the same kind of search for meaning. & I don't think le Carré thinks there's any meaning to be found anywhere, but he does have profound empathy for the searchers and all the terrible mistakes they make along the way.
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Date: 2023-09-15 06:22 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2023-09-16 06:42 am (UTC)Having just read a post mortem collection of his letters and some years ago his self edited collection of autobiographical writings, my own impression - in as much as I have one of a man who said about himself “I’m a liar . . .Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as novelist. As a maker of fictions, I invent versions of myself, never the real thing, if it exists” is "neither"? He cared way too much about both British and global developments to be a nihilist. (Brexit and Trump made him both incandescent with fury - well, happens to many of us, but many of us don't have Le Carré's gift with words - which doesn't show itself only in his later novels but in the articles and statements he issued, including changing his citizenship to Irish (which he could courtesy of one Irish grandmother) after a life time as an Englishman in his last year of life because he was so disgusted. And before that, there's John Le Carré vs Big Pharma, where again he didn't just stick to novels but actively supported (financially and publicity wise) activits. You don't do that if you're a nihilist, you don't get that angry and active if you don't still believe it's possible to affect change.
Otoh, I think the whole liking people thing worked better for him in the abstract (i.e. as an author, with fictional people) than in practice towards actual people. Not that he didn't have life long relationships, only a few of which he screwed up, but (unsurprisingly after a very fucked up childhood), young him comes across as something of a trial (old him agreed on this), and middle age him could be self righteous to an unpleasant degree at times before he got over it.
But again: this is a second hand impression based on letters edited by his children and self edited autobiographical writings by a master wordsmith, so who knows.
Strictly speaking of him as a novelist and leaving David Cornwell completely out of John Le Carré, I always thought that what he lets Smiley tell Peter Guillam in Legacy of Spies about why he did the things he did works as a kind of humanist-despite-all-cynicism credo:
"For world peace, whatever that is? Yes, yes, of course. There will be no war, but in the struggle for peace no stone will be left standing, as our Russian friends used to say. (...) Or was it all in the great name of capitalism? God forbid. Christendom? God forbid again. (...) So was it all for England, then?" he resumed. "There was a time, of course there was. But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I'm a European, Peter. If I had a mission - if I ever was aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was to lead Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.
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Date: 2023-11-01 02:10 am (UTC)I know this post is from over a month ago but just wanted to wander back and say I read this over the past couple weeks based on this post and it really is fascinating, le Carré's brain is such a place! I think this has to be the most profoundly solipsistic book I've ever read, the fact that Larry literally exists ONLY through Tim from start to finish is JUST. A LOT. Cranmer was the box that Pettifer came in, I rehearsed: but that was because I kept thinking that the grave was my own—TIMBO, this is So Insane and utterly [god complex megalomania] and yet so completely the kind of thought one would expect a spy handler to have.
Also RE: If you are perhaps thinking all this sounds a bit homoerotic I have to say, having read this book I still just could not possibly tell you what Tim actually feels about Larry as a human being rather than a concept or a mirror for himself! He says to people that he loves him, but I'm truly not sure that he does, any more than he actually loves Emma, as opposed to the idea of her that he has in his head. Pathologically obsessed with Larry and the consequences of their mutual career, absolutely, but actually loving him?? I DON'T KNOW, TIM.
Thanks so much for writing it up!!