John Le Carre is a serious novelist.
The secret of spy novels and movies is that they describe ordinary people doing universal things, however exotic is the setting and the premises are and that the people act outside the law. People can’t escape from or suspend their human nature evgen if they think they are beyond the restraints of the law. A good or even exemplary item of that is available in Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” where an anarchist wanders around London with bombs wrapped around him under his coat feeling comforted that at any moment he could explode himself. That seems bizarre or crazy until the reader recognizes that this is a kind of freedom. The anarchist has freedom to destroy himself which is an ultimate freedom because his control over it is absolute and without the constraint of others, purely subject to personal will. All people want to some extent to do what they want, to say fuck you to the world however ugly it may be and that gets externalized in the image of that anarchist.
John Le Carre follows that tradition. He turns the life of the spy, the suspiciousness, the hidden clues, the artifice of seeming like a normal person, not just as a metaphor for a way of life turned on its head, but a true account of how ordinary people operate despite their outlandish and very peculiar profession. The same life of deep suspicion and danger, of double dealing and impending doom, holds to all of our lives and so emerging from a spy story leaves a residue of suspicion and fake appearances even though most people most of the time people think of one another as true to their appearances, whether a spouse or a colleague, for however why not, people just trying to manage to get through the day and their hopes and dreams easily visible. But sometimes we linger with the dark side, the world a place of Satan, whereby people might any moment stab you unless you are on the lookout of their stratagems, always wary of the worst.
The miniseries “The Night Manager” based on the novel by John Le Carre and co-produced by his sons is remarkably true to the spirit of Le Carre and the Cornwall brothers had producer titles in another film adaption of a Le Carre novel, “The Little Drummer Girl”, perhaps also because a Le Carre novel lends itself to a moni-series, and maybe because Florence Pugh is a more intriguing actress than Diane Keaton was in the theatrical length film version of that novel. The Le Carre miniseries are to be especially commended in that the adaption of the Foundation series where a son ofIsaac Asimov collaborated, turns Asimov into something very different from what it was, a rigorously realistic view of the future becoming science fantasy, what with spells and magical things. For shame. It must have been for the money except that when “I, Robot” was made into a movie, it had as its premise that the robots had become malevolent rather than that they would follow the three laws of robotics whereby they would never harm people except to protect people. Filmmakers preferred as more accessible a disaster movie rather than a story of scientific progress.
Here are some of the ordinary discoveries to be found in the first episode of the miniseries “The Night Manager”. The hero is apparently mild mannered and a necessarily deferential night manager of a hotel. He is soon enough to be discovered as decisive and quick witted who sees through things and later on that he had been to war, how he arrived at this career is mysterious. He remains in contact with the English intelligence community. A tart turns out to be a patriot who supplies secret information to the English. An intelligence operative takes outside a bureaucratic turn to rectify an intelligence and political wrong. And so is the case with most people who have peculiar and unhidden histories and are not suited to type.You don’t know what another person is even if they are candid or act as if they are candid or think they are candid.
The night manager also finds that there are matters he cannot control despite his prussience. He is bereft by that just as we all are when life seems to take control of us rather than respond to our needs. That is what seems to have happened when Smiley was retired out of the service for reasons obscure but to return in an underground role because something in the British spy agency has gone amiss, an unlikely event in that old CEOs of corporations to come around to retake their companies, though that did happen with Henry Ford II who reenergized the company when he took over. That is a bit too much dramatic justice, just like Karla turning himself into Mi5 so as to help his disabled daughter, Smiley having turned the table on his arch and honorable nemesis. Everyone dreams of such justice in real life just as everyone fears being in over too deep.
It turns out that the night manager is not just patriotic or principled. He has a personal stake at going deeper into artifice, He had become emotionally attached to the tart he had not been able to protect. Personal animosity and revenge are in the cards as do we all when we have mixed feelings about applauding and vying with colleagues. The same thing happens in “Tinker, Tailor”: where the turncoat to the Soviets is killed by a fellow British spy who had been betrayed in an operation and may have been his lover. In a very old story of wartime, Jonathan, who had definitely been David’s lover, dies in battle defending his father Saul’s kingship as that was challenged by David’s guerilla army. Personal and public motives get into conflict as well as they can support one another. Brothers can fight on opposite sides of a civil war.
The first episode of the night manager was a well crafted dark drama climaxing with a murder. The second episode is also well crafted opening with a set piece on how the rich and powerful live. The arms dealer speed boats from a Mediterranean luxury spot with his family and entourage to another posh place for an elegant luncheon where he is allowed to be teased by his benefactors, though there was ever present at the luncheon a security guard, while there were many security guards with the Corleones, in both Long Island and Lake Tahoe Moreover, Roper, the arms dealer, does not mix business with pleasure but the two godfathers do that on their festive occasions, and neither allow teasing, only obedience and, to some of his loyal people, generosity. There are brief but visually rich scenes of posh snow in Switzerland and posh sun in the Mediterranean just as famously David :Lean did snow in “Dr. Zhivago” and sand in “Lawrence of Arabia”.
Then there is a flashback where the night manager is recruited into undercover work, his controller telling him that he will get into the world of arms dealing that he thinks from which he will never emerge. All he is tied to, the reader realizes, is that he is tied to his own tenuous identity as a secret agent. His first act as an undercover operative is to steal money from a hotel safe so as to document that he can be recognized by those who look into him as being a thief. Then he disappears to become a small town gangster. All of this is quite plausible in that his life as a night manager with a military background might have easily followed the trajectory into theft and other crimes. His being what he seems to be is what he is aside from his secret agenda, which is true of all of us, everyone or most of us disguising our private ambitions and tastes with the veneer of our cover identities as the dutiful spouse or occupation holder, waiting forever to go into a phone booth and emerge out of our tights. The same is true of all Christians, all claiming to be also the better person of ourselves because of our tie to the image and actuality of Jesus, comparing our ordinary selves to our shrouded inner selves. You don;t need to be a Christian to manage that trick. It happens whenever people tie themselves to their ambitions to be a scholar or manage a supermarket rather than a bodega. Le Carre is getting to the heart of things. A short time later, he has to beat up people and be beaten up so as to create the illusion of which side he is on, but that does mean has to beat people and be beaten. The brutality is real but different because of the reason for doing that and that is what really matters, like Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida who finds Troilus a girl friend but only seems to be a panderer because he has good intentions.
In the third episode, Jonathan Pine, the secret agent, finds himself in a gilded cage, in Roper’s compound where there are no end of pleasures and affection so long as one is under Roper’s thumb, and one of the pretty girls there becomes to much and so after a birthday [arty for her and receiving a lavish gift, hangs herself so as to be free of the tyranny. Pine is like Conrad in that he is comfortable until for a moment someone might uncover his carefully constructed cover stories and then be tortured until he dies. An unenvious luxury, a kind of hell, while in the upper world on an adjacent island, his controller looks on through binoculars. Will she be able to rescue him, she the true goddess of the pantheon? The religious allusions become more prominent, thre main characters describing the meaning of life. And so on, images and plot twists elaborating a spy story about how spying is like and unlike the real world to other grand themes that make Le Carre a full novelist rather than a subgenre which provides just some mystery and suspense and exotic geographic and occupational settings.
A shortcoming of “The Night Manager” as a novel and as a miniseries is that the archvillain as an arms dealer so wealthy and powerful that he can kill individuals with impunity just as he allows wars with multiple casualties to occur so that he can become fabulously rich. That seems to me jejune an excuse fir a plot when the Cold War had ended and Le Carre had already worked the Arab Israeli War, which seems never to end. Those had both been rich in textures that Le Carre delved into. The clever Israelis had to contend with the principled and remorseless Palestinians, the West, for all of its shortcomings, morally superior to Soviet politics and proceeds. But looming over the arms dealers is Undershaft the arms producer in “Major Barbara” who builds model tows and supports the Salvation Army, and so a vehicle of progress rather than destruction, the decision to make war being the prerogative of politicians rather than industrialists, even if Eisenhower did glower about the “military industrial com[lex” though only as an afterthought when he was leaving office.