JOHN LE CARRE'S LEGACY OF SPIES

Peter Guillam is living a calm retirement at the family homestead in Brittany when he is summoned back to London, and reminded of his ‘lifelong duty to attend’ his former masters at MI6. At the Stalinist monolith that now houses the Intelligence Service, he is asked about an Operation Windfall, and learns that the children of the agent Alec Leamas and the English woman, Elizabeth Gold, are in the process of suing the Service, and him, for causing their deaths at the Berlin Wall.

What follows is Guillam’s account both of his interrogation and his remembrance of the events of another operation, concerning an agent, code named Tulip, who was part of a network in East Germany run by his friend Alec Leamas, the best agent he ever knew. Both take place amidst the growing realisation that MI6 has been penetrated at a high level by a Russian mole.

Just as much as Guillam is giving us a legacy of any number of spies, so John Le Carre is presenting his own legacy of spies, a reflection on the secrecy and building of false characters and pretend emotions that are so much a part of his own trade as a writer, as well as those of spies. The two stories, the hunt for information about the past by the service and Guillam’s own recollections which he keeps as much as possible secret, particularly his own emotions, just as he had to do when he was an active agent, and with just as much distrust of where emotions might take him. The two stories intersect, but they also move away from each other, not least because of the way the business has changed. This is symbolised by the buildings: the stark facelessness and crushing architectural weight of Artillery House against the ramshackle Circus, or the safe house still run Millie McCraig; or by the face these modern bureaucrats are unable to do a simple effective search or cope with what used to be called, in the days before electronics, tradecraft.

The story is LeCarre as sharp as ever, in fact, it’s as if the old LeCarre has been, like Guillam, ‘recalled to life’ as Dickens would have had it. But what makes it work is the contrast, the way the service has itself changed positions, and the way the operations are revealed so skillfully through a combination of truth and lies, as in all of LeCarre’s best work. Those familiar with The Spy Who Came In From The Cold will have some idea of where it is all going, and a much better picture of some of the later details of the story, whereas those aware of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy will know the deeper background of what is going on. Neither is necessary, of course, but the awareness adds depth. In this sense, we might consider A Legacy Of Spies a valedictory work, as anyone who saw LeCarre’s interviews around publication might surmise.

There is the paradox of age. Guillam appears to have been born in 1931, like LeCarre himself, and LeCarre's house in Cornwall is a sort of mirror image of Guillam's in Brittany. Guillam is writing his story sometime around 2010, which would make him 79, still fit and active and full of sharp-edged memory. But how old Jim Prideaux, Millie McCraig and yes, George Smiley are is a matter of some debate, and they all seem as sprightly as ever. But remembering LeCarre’s own age as he writes this novel, those who make age a sticking point may well be missing the point.

Because it is Smiley’s appearance, at the end, which strikes the note of legacy the strongest, and the nature of what the current agents might call a ‘mission statement’ might surprise some readers, because of its overtly telling stance aimed at modern Britain’s politics. But behind it is the memory of the tragedies, the lost lives, the miscalculations involved in all those years of playing the game. Smiley’s legacy may have been a failure to actually leave a lasting legacy, and LeCarre is sensitively aware that neither Smiley nor he were granted the perspective to see the long term effects of what their business accomplished, or didn’t. LeCarre’s work has been a marker in the world of spy fiction for almost six decades, his peak still barely matched. This novel reminds us of his legacy, and becomes a major part of it.

A Legacy Of Spies by John LeCarre

Penguin £8.99 ISBN 9780241981610

Note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

THE IMITATION GAME: OSCAR'S 'BASED ON A TRUE STORY' CATCH UP II

What it is about Bletchley that drives the British crazy? Another Oscar nominee 'based on a true story', The Imitation Game provides yet another rejoinder to the British obsession with criticising Hollywood's playing with historical fact while ignoring British films which are every bit as 'economical with the 'actualite'. As I watched The Imitation Game, waiting for Kate Winslett to cycle through one of the shots, I recalled that in Enigma the traitor turned out to be a Pole. Except no Poles were allowed to work at Bletchley, even though the Poles had provided the Brits with an Enigma machine; they were banned because Johnny Foreigner can't be trusted to keep secrets like good old chappies from the right schools and Oxbridge.

The Imitation Game is structured as a thrilller: can Alan Turing and the Famous Five solve Hitler's puzzle in time to win the war? In order to make this thrilling, some truths need to be bent. Turing's inspiration, of looking for the words, like 'Heil Hitler' that appeared in every message was something that had been part of the decoding process since almost the beginning. And of course it wasn't simply a handful of people in one quonset hut watching while Turing built his computer; there were thousands of people engaged in the process at Bletchley Park.

But as the title implies, The Imitation Game isn't really a thriller. It's about Turing himself, as the ultimate enigma, and his own Imitation Game, his hidden life which saw him arrested for indecency in the early Fifties, and given drugs to chemically castrate him. Which is a story worth telling, and which has been told in a number of biographies. But the film traps itself in a morbid fascination with the appeal of victimhood, which forces it to twist Turing and his work to fit its framework of injustice.

There need to be obstacles in Turing's way, besides the obvious mechanical and mathematical ones. Hitler isn't villain enough for this film. The real villain has to be Alastair Denniston, transformed from a cryptographer himself who apparently ran his unit well, into a Colonel Blimp figure ignorant of the work his staff was doing and more obsessed with bringing down Turing than Hitler. Which is a shame, because the opening sparring between Charles Dance as Denniston and Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing is great, and could have been the basis of some dramatic tension without creating a cardboard villain.

In this film Turing has the double curse of being both gay and geek. Although Cumberbatch has a few Sherlock Holmes moments early in the movie, he has to be portrayed as being completely asocial (despite a dress sense which only disappears after he's drugged); the real Turing apparently could be quite gregarious. Although the film is sympathetic to Turing, it revels in stereotyping him: twice in the film Turing in effect commits treason: after the war by telling his whole story to the Javert-like detective who's convinced he's a spy, and during the war by hiding the fact that John Cairncross is a Soviet spy. Of course Cairncross, the infamous Fifth Man, never worked with Turing, ergo, Turing never was blackmailed by him, ergo Hollywood must have slipped this into the script when no noble Englishman was looking.

The conceit of the film, in turning Turing's paper titled The Imitation Game into a metaphor for his self, is a good one. He 'thinks differently', and a parallel is drawn between the man and his thinking machine. But in his naming the machine Christopher, after his lost early love, and his breakdown at the thought of losing what by movie's end is his only friend, takes him completely overboard. What's touching is the way Turing learns early to cover up his emotions, when the headmaster tell him his friend is dead, and he realises he never knew Christopher was even ill. Yet it's just as much English public school stiff upper lip as English closeted homosexuality. But just maybe the two are connected. But as young Turing says to Christopher, all speech is really in code, and in that is the core of what this film ought to have been about.

Turing was victimised, of course, but he also lived an active life (we never see a moment of gay affection in the entire movie; in fact its iconography is more concerned with the love story between Turing and Joan Clarke, played by Keira Knightly who looks as out of place in the 1940s as she does doing higher mathematics, although she does jut her jaw on cue). It was Turing who reported the burglary of his house to the police, not imagining it would lead to his own prosecution. And though the film says Turing committed suicide after finishing his court-ordered drug treatment, he in fact died a year afterwards, and there is some debate about whether his death were accidental rather than suicide.

It is right that Turing should be elevated to the position of a national hero, and that the prosecution and persecution of homosexuality should be condemned. The movie is strongest precisely at the moments Turing seems most human: when he realises immediately upon breaking the code that it cannot be used immediately to save lives. That one of the team has a sailor brother whose life is endangered that day is the kind of clunky fictional liberty one allows in a film, but it's a lazy way to add to dramatic tension. Still, there are liberties and there are liberties, as a 1940s bishop might have said to an actress, or indeed an actor. Bend the reality of Bletchley to make the chase of code-breaking more exciting, that's the way the game is played. But bend it to insist on Turing as a helpless victim, and reduce him to tears (it reminded me of Cumberbatch's Peter Guillam in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; he's left crying there too, as Guillam is given a gay backstory that seems to exist only for that teary payoff) and that's unfair, and indeed unheroic. The Imitation Game is structured and written (by Graham Moore, based on Andrew Hodges' book) cleverly, and directed by the Norwegian Morten Tyldum with the same visual panache and sense of movement that made Headhunters so enjoyable. Within its own terms works well; it's just a shame its terms are so limited by its agenda.