Let us say we call it “an ordinary novel”: not breathtakingly ambitious and with a host of memorable characters and a big deal moral and philosophical meaning, like “War and Peace” but any number of satisfying and entertaining tales that involve a few distinctive characters, a setting with atmosphere and some plot twists that are surprising and illuminating and where the strands are more or less tied together in te ending, even if some are not. Add some set pieces, like falling in love or turning a spy into a double agent and a reader has got his or her money’s worth, a distraction into another world not too far from our own. Even if exotic, and having had an experience which adds to the reader’s sense of life even if not very specifically. Even extraordinary novels are like ordinary ones in providing those pleasures, from the time when Robinson Crusoe was stranded on an island and the reader wondered how he would manage it--very well indeed-- all the way through English and American literature where a reader at the end of Bellow's “Herzog” whether or not he liked the title character. Even “Ulysses” had the hero wander across Dublin for a day doing the qquantidion and spectacular things he did never mind the fancy linguistic theatricfs. I wanto look in this way to John Le Carre’s “Agent Running In The Field”, the last published of his books before he died. (I reviewed favorably a few months ago his posthumous novel, “Silverview”)
By the time of “Agent Running In The Field”, Le Carre was far beyond the interest in using spying as a metaphor of life. People continue to engage in tradecraft to allow themselves to manage their own lifes. They keep sometimes elaborate secrets; they rehearse conversations which will be to their advantage when the conversation will take place; they know who to trust and who not to trust. They know who to trust and who not to trust and what extra money to keep in your shoe when a rainy day arises’ ever vigilant when the jig is up, when your profession is a fraud or your wife is two timing you or a friend betrays you. That is a more complicated life than is imagined by the social psychologist and anthropologist Erving Goffman who thought people wanted approval and so arranged their presentation so as to make people admirable. To the contrary, spies and spy writers are into a higher level of duplicity; not to fake but to be different so as to play the edges/ One of his best examples is in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” , his masterpiece when the arch British agent who spied to the Russians seduced George Smiley’s wife so that Smiley is distracted by the real Russian agent because Smiley so hates him that he will be distracted. Clever ruse and as he says to Smiley when he is revealed as the main spy, nothing personal, just spycraft and anything goes. In spying and in life, as Green and Conrad had it, and even in Shakespeare without the spying part, just the malevolence of Iago.
Carre moves instead to the spycraft itself, to the things spies do to get their results whereby agents are revealed or turned, how debriefings operate. How elaborate are the ways to stage manage a meeting so as to be well microphone and choreographed. And they are not very good at managing their profession. They have accumulated all the cliches of mental illness to assess heir enemies and their friends. They rely on close observation of remarks made and demeanor so as to intuit what is going on in another person’s head. They keep elaborate surveillance and transcripted recordings to reveal points otherwise missed when a paragraph long email would cover the gist of the meeting. They are not so perfectly schooled and prepared that they can get fooled and their judgment is sp [ppr that they miss a bigger fish because a smaller one comes into view. The Service is in shambles,even in that the stellar lights have no culture or taste and their elaborate meals are heavy on the wine imported from France and crumblies and the like as a substitution for real hors d'oeuvres. It is playing at being James Bond without a decent suit to wear.Spies and spymasters violate the diplomitist’s injunction never to go far into motivations, only what his opponent is in fct doing.
How did Nat, the hero, find himself to be retired from the service in his middle years, regarded as good at turning spies but not much else? It could be that lesser people are promoted over him or that he has a middle level university education or for some other shortcoming as a spy that would not keep him to the top. Nat may be a bit diffident but hardly disqualifying. His loyal wife knows his capacities and has followed Nat to Eastern European embassies as part of his work. Carre makes clear that Nat’s boss is an oaf whose wife has political connections Nat skills are definite and Carre trots out the tricks Carre has produced for years that make the reader fascinated with spycraft and so this book is a manual of how to do that work. Nat gets people to acknowledge facts they would rather not disclose, not at all sure what they are revealing, but part of a larger pattern. He is able to convince double agents to remain loyal to the British Security Service and to turn people into becoming double agents. Most of all, (spoiler alert) Nat finds that the spy he had befriended and had adopted as the son he never had was to be delivered into the shadow life of a double agent for his misdeeds, Nat once again being obedient to his superiors. The reader is very sad over this inevitable betrayal but Nat finds a way to extricate his people from the mess, though a few threads are left dangling, but never mind, the service has become wretched and there is nothing to do but be free of it. For a long time, the story has one red herring after another and some reviewers are taken to be Carre’s answer to Trump, Ed having unearthed a document that is truly outrageous. But it is no plan to oust the Trump government. Rather, it is in agreement about American-British tariff arrangements should Brexit come to pass, nothing for a reader to get a twit about. The climax is so deftly put that fast upon the emotion of despair is the one of triumph, the real accomplishment that the Secret Service is an empty vessel and Nat and his fellows are well rid of his and their allegiance to it. Trumpism is a passing fad but the state of England is much more in peril, a theme Carre has worked on for many decades.
There are two formulas for explaining the ordinary novel, including most of the major ones, even if most ordinary novels are not as grand or as penetrating but nevertheless entertaining and informative. An ordinary novel presents a slightly exotic setting, whether a neighborhood of New York or a ranch in Montana, fills it up with life and action, and then unsettles it with a surprise of its elements, through the plot or the characters or the situation; war for “Gone With the Wind”. love for Jane Austen, or higher duplicity in Carre’s spy novels.The setting is exotic even if familiar in that the reimagination of the setting, through its descriptions, makes the place akuvee and new again, so that Bellows’ “Dangling Man” makes Broadway in the Upper West Side of Manhattan a place with new contours even if you lived there, as I did, for half a century. Having experienced that place as the one given by the author, and examined its themes and meanings, the reader then refers, or can refer, or can’t but help refer, to the larger context that is so obvious that the reader might not have noticed it until completing the novel. That is the totality of the engagement, what all the parts add up to. An easy version of that is “Vera” the streaming police procedural, where one comes to appreciate neither the character of the detective, much less the details of a particular murder investigation, but the isolateed homes in a windy Northumberland town. The experience is to have been engulfed by its atmosphere. The Sir Peter Whimsy stories are of the same sort. Whatever the story, there is something engulfing which is more than the story. In one of novels about Sir Peter, he learns that he marries a woman who has ha a long time affair with a different man. It is a shocking rejection of the double standard, prevalent in the Twenties and Thirties. Sir Peter just says that it is no different than marrying a widow, perfectly acceptable, whatever her private life had been with her now dead husband, but otherwise blemished for that previous relationship not to have been sanctified. So there is an overall setting, which in Dorothy Sayers’ telling, is the evolving way moral life takes place in that period and which takes hold with us as worth taking away. Le Carre does the same thing in “Agent Running In The Field”. We are fascinated and fed up with spycraft, the shortcomings of being and doing a spy, but after that exotic set of themes and meanings are done, the novel is looked to as a whole, as to what you take away from it, and the sense the reader gets is that England nd not just the secret service is in shambles, that it doesn’t know its purpose, now that the cold War is over and that england is about to exit brexit. So the larger matter or encompassing tone is what was called for a hundred and fifty years ’‘The state of England’ problem, back to Disraeli or early Dickens rather than the later Dickens with his existential themes. What is england/ can it persist or become, as Tony Blair quipped, an Elizabethan theme park. I don't think so, Brits are a very resourceful people even if somewhat off putting people, what with their multiple mannerisms.. But LeCarre is right to wonder how Britain will be put on the right foot.
A second formula for reading an ordinary novel is not like the first in thinking how deeply to go into the text to emerge with a clear view of the whole of the matter, but rather how the ordinary novel transforms people so that they are different from now they commenced the exercise and so have in some sense learned something out of the story so that the reader will take differently the meaning of events than they might interpret them differently because of that experience even if for a moment, soon to evaporate or become the accumulation of fictional and real experiences that allow a bit of a residue. Here are some easy examples, this time of war stories rather than mystery stories. John Wayne is the protagonist in “Sands of Iwo Jima”. He is Sgt. Striker who shepherds his men through their travails. And then suddenly he is shot dead by a stray bullet during a lull in the action. How are his soldiers to respond? They might moan or feel aggrieved. Instead, they silently pick up their gear and move on to their next assignment. What the movie has prepared the audience to do is to be accustomed to war and that anything may happen and that you just carry on, which is what the John Wayne character would have expected. Watching the movie has hardened an audience to the war of violence and so you don’t feel sorry for yourself or your peers even if, when emerging from the movie you would prefer not to have been through that experience in real life, however the bravery it reveals. A second war movie makes the same point. Gregory Peck plays the title character, “Captain Horatio Hornblower” who has had to allow Virginia Mayo stay aboard a ship of the line and so they endure a major action together. They separate, her to her husband and Hornblower to attend to the child he has to deal with because his wife died. Later on they meet and get along very well. Nothing quaint or cute. Her wife died in the war and the baby daughter needed to have someone to raise her. Not that they are not loving, only that practicalities prevail as happens in wartime settings . The movie shows death is gruesome and people do what you have to do even if at the malt shop afterwards everyone is lovey dovie. The same is true of “Agent Running in the Field”, a spy movie, after all,a kind of war movie. Nat and his wife have been so abused, humiliated and betrayed by their lives as spies that the reader comes to think they will be well rid of it and do the unspeakable of betraying their creed, a premonition not offered at the beginning of the novel, before they have burdened their stories. The reader changes and so is made ready to receive a surprise denouement, wiser than one was on the first page. That is the art of the novel, to make the reader change while it is happening, willing to consider new things, and it happens even in not very good novels. It is mgic and has been so for a very long time.