The Aubrey/Maturin series

I read the whole Aubrey/Maturin series, basically straight through in a few weeks' time, something like ten years ago.  (Yes, it was the movie that made me aware of them.)  It was one of the most engrossing and enjoyable reading experiences I've had, one of those experiences of utter literary transport that I live for.  But it took, as I say, weeks out of my life:  the books are impossible to put down once you start one, and each one ends, not on a cliffhanger, but on the barest of resolutions of only the most superficial of the plotlines, so that you have to get twenty or thirty pages into the next volume before you feel able to even pause for a while.  So I haven't reread them since.  But now I'm halfway through the series again.

And I'm reading them far too obsessively to blog them individually, or even collectively in a coherent fashion.  Let me make just two observations.

First, the obvious one (given what I've just written).  The twenty completed volumes are, taken together, a masterpiece of popular fiction.  And I use that latter term guardedly:  they're popular fiction in that they inhabit a recognizable genre, and consciously, intentionally offer many of the traditional pleasures of popular fiction, compulsive readability not least among them.  But they're deep beyond any of the censure that may still (but probably doesn't anymore) attach to the term "popular fiction."  The prose is not just beautiful but challenging;  the characterizations are as subtle and complete as anything I've encountered in literature;  and the themes are as thoughtful and thought-provoking as you could ask for.

To wit (and this is my second observation):  I think the books' big theme is Tories vs. Whigs.  Not in the narrow sense of the two parties that dominated British parliamentary politics at the time of the Napoleonic Wars:  certainly those parties are mentioned by name, and some of the issues over which they argued are brought in.  But this is done with O'Brian's characteristic subtlety, so that for a reader like me who's not an expert in the period it's easy to miss them - an occasional mention of rotten boroughs suggests a great deal, but doesn't spell much out.

Because what O'Brian's more interested in is Toryism and Whiggishness as temperaments, as fundamental approaches to life.  Conservative vs. liberal, to use today's terms.  Broadly speaking he gives us Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy as an example of the Tory approach - Aubrey embodies the Navy's adherence to tradition, to tried-and-true ways, and its abhorrence of innovation (the word itself is used as a term of opprobrium on several occasions in the books).  Stephen Maturin counterbalances him as an example of Whig values, I suppose - being Irish-Catalan, he's never described in terms of English politics, but he embraces innovation, scientific theory, progress on all fronts.

What lends these broad tensions resonance is the series' Napoleonic Wars setting.  Maturin and many other characters who find themselves now fighting Napoleon privately find the values asserted by the French Revolution appealing:  Maturin was a revolutionary in his younger days, and opposes Napoleon not because he's French, and not because he threatens England, but because he betrayed the Revolution's ideals.  The books therefore become an ongoing, unresolvable, but strenuously argued debate over questions of authority and how it should be constituted and exercised.

What makes the books so satisfying, however, is O'Brian's penchant for complicating every character he sketches.  We become accustomed to the idea of Aubrey as the conservative naval officer who learned to sail by instinct and is content to do things the way they've always been done because they've always been done that way - because tradition is its own authority - but then in middle age he suddenly develops a passion for mathematics, for understanding the theoretical basis for his sailing instincts, and in fact we realize that he spends just as much time bucking tradition as buckling under to it.  He thinks of himself as a Tory but in many ways he's a Whig.  Meanwhile Maturin is a vocal opponent of Naval conservatism, ridiculing all its old ways with a variable degree of affection, but in his own profession as physician he's an unquestioning adherent of bloodletting as a virtual panacea;  on a less comic note, we're often reminded that, despite his revolutionary youth, he has an aristocratic background and is no more a friend to democracy (another word always used derogatorily in the books) than is Aubrey. 

What O'Brian is giving us in these books, then, is characters caught between fundamental human impulses toward stasis on the one hand and change on the other, at a moment when each impulse has been given clear historical manifestation, when the positions have become polarized to the point of bloodshed, but characters who themselves refuse to become polarized, because they themselves are not comfortable at either pole.  They are, actually, perfectly Cold War books, and I think I love them for a lot of the same reasons that I love Le Carré's George Smiley books.

John Le Carré's The Little Drummer Girl (1983)

Obligatory first reaction, which I'm probably undercutting more than I mean to with this self-ironizing remark:  this book could have been written today, almost thirty years later, and not many of the details would need changing, and that's a disgrace.  Well, all of the details would need changing:  but not the overall arc.  And since Le Carré's genius is in the details, I guess it's better to retract that first claim entirely.  This book is not just about the heartbreaking intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  It's about the details of where that conflict stood in the early '80s, and how it was thought about by certain Western Europeans.  And for that, when you read it today, it's an education.

But like everything else I've read by Le Carré so far, this so far transcends the political and historical specifics of its subject matter as to make me all but forget that, oh yes, it's also about a young woman who gets caught up in the post-Munich '72 cycle of attacks and reprisals.  Because what resonates most about it is its portrait of a young woman who is so disenchanted with her home country, so disillusioned about her own background, so sick of her self, that she's all too eager to allow herself to be enchanted, illusioned, and healed by the Other.  Whatever Other presents itself, apparently.

In that, this book struck me almost as a modern retelling of Waverley - one of my favorite books, although I seem to have never blogged it yet.  That, too, is about innocent idealism and those who would take advantage of it;  but if anything, Le Carré is more evenhanded than Scott.  He doesn't have Scott's conservative faith that it would be an unqualified good for the girl to grow up and out of it.  Indeed, this book rivals Darkness at Noon in the rigor with which it makes us see the logic of both sides' positions.

The spymaster - or rather, one of them, the one known alternately as Becker and Joseph - also turns out to be a fascinating psychological study.  In Smiley we got a portrait of the spymaster as inertial force, somebody who, in the end, is struggling because he's always struggled, and because he's being struggled against, but whose ideological foundation has long since crumbled away;  in Joseph we get spymaster as psychologist.  Not as analyst, but as someone whose job it is to help the patient into and through transference - to be for the patient (the agent) whatever the patient (the agent) needs him to be, in order to create the patient as true agent.  To get Charlie to do what he needs her to do, Joseph has to let her fall in love with him.  In the hands of a lesser spy novelist this would be James Bond territory - sleep with a woman and she'll do whatever you tell her - but here we get glimpses of just how much it's taking out of Joseph to treat another human being like this. 

John Le Carré: Smiley's People (1979)

The missus' reading of the film version of the first book, suggesting that we could suspect Smiley himself of being the mole, turned out not to be tenable in the book itself.  But she was on to something, of course, because by the end of the third book, the parallels between Smiley and Karla are almost painfully inescapable, and at the end of the third book we're forced to think that, for all intents and purposes, they're no different.  Or maybe Smiley's worse. 

In other words, this book is just as full of that intoxicating Cold War pessimism as the first two were.  Stings like whiskey going down.

But of course what Le Carré gives us is more than just trenchant commentary on the Cold War.  What we realize at the end of this book, when the man we all assume to be Karla (itself an assumed name) walks out of East Berlin, is that this enemy, this nemesis, this namesake for the trilogy, has been entirely unglimpsed until now.  All we've "seen" of him is a single encounter, shrouded in mystery, buried in the past, given to us only in Smiley's deadened memory.  Everything we (i.e. the Circus) "know" about him is speculation - worse, deduction.  Karla is as much as anything a construction of our minds, based on ambiguous clues and tortured logic, and suspicion.  Which isn't to say any of it is wrong - after all, he does come walking out of East Berlin, and he does have Ann's lighter - but a correct guess is still a guess.

Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Derrida:  all the ontological nyets that haunt the modern solipsistic consciousness.  Le Carré gives them all to us in Smiley and Karla.  But the genius of it is that this isn't a piece of navel-gazing, ennui-ridden literature - following Vonnegut's advice, the characters all want their own glasses of water - there are stakes here.  It matters whether or not the cat is dead.  The popular fiction nature of it demands it, but more than so does the urgent emergency of the modern world (that's why the second book is so important).  Smiley, or Karla, ponder silently in London or Moscow, and another bomb goes off in Vientiane. 

John Le Carré: The Honourable Schoolboy (1977)

The old BBC adaptations of these books skipped this volume, and it sounds like the new film series will too.  I guess I can see why, if you see the project as a star turn for Smiley/Alec Guinness/Gary Oldman.  Smiley's certainly a major character in this book, but he doesn't dominate it like he does the first and third books of this not-really-a-trilogy.  Here he divides our attention with a field agent, Jerry Westerby.  Who's almost as interesting a character in his own right - Le Carré's people are just as compelling here as they were in Tinker, Tailor.

But really Westerby is just a vehicle, a set of eyes, to get us, the reader, into the field.  The first and third books are mostly armchair spycraft - almost all the work takes place in Smiley's head.  Here we're thrust out into the world.  A world that's falling apart:  Southeast Asia in the wake of the US debacle there.

That's the overriding impression this book leaves with me.  Actually most of the field agenting parts of the book take place in Hong Kong, which gets echoes of the war but not much else, but it's the tour of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand in the last third of the book that really sticks with you.  We don't actually see many Americans - they're conspicuously absent, busy getting airlifted out of embassies.  Nor do we really see much of the actual killing fields.  We get a lot of bombs, random bullets, junkies, casual corruption, and violence just around the next bend.  In other words Le Carré is giving us the feeling of touring a war zone, rather than fighting in it.  That's scary enough, and allows us to preserve something of the journalist's objectivity (back when there might have been such a thing).  No room for obfuscation:  look at what the US did.  Look at the world we made.

John LeCarré: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)

One thing I was wondering about when I came to the book from the movie was whether Smiley in the book could possibly have the same sheer presence as in the movie.  It's not all Gary Oldman's performance, although it mostly is;  it's also, in the film, a matter of writing and mise en scene.  I mean, we've been watching this guy for fifteen minutes, it seems like, in scene after scene, totally riveted by him, before we finally hear a peep out of him.  The film presents Smiley as this intensely inward-turned guy who rules the room through the strength of his unprepossessingness.  It's a trait made for film, where you can convey this without having to state it.  How do you convey it in a book?

And it's true that the Smiley of the book isn't a cipher in the same way the Smiley of the film is;  in that sense, the reading of the film that I advanced is untenable in the book.  We inhabit Smiley's point of view for most of the book, and if LeCarré is cagey about telling us everything in Smiley's mind at any given time, at least I felt that we were getting enough of it to be assured that Smiley isn't a mole.  Not that the moral ambiguity is lessened much - LeCarré just brings it in elsewhere, through more extensive internal monologues by various characters, or characteristically fitful dialogue.  In some ways the book's moral ambiguity is richer, because we know more about Haydon, about Guillam, about Alleline, and of course about Smiley.

But LeCarré's Smiley still has something of that silent domination - it's clear the filmmakers got it from the book.  It's just constructed in different ways.  At one point he's described as sitting like a Buddha - so LeCarré is telling us how to perceive him.  Elsewhere we just see the effect he has on people - his primary interrogation technique is silent waiting, and we can see how it makes the other party talk.

And in other ways LeCarré's Smiley is even more interesting.  In the film, as I say, I found him dominant from the first scene he was in, even though on another level I was conscious that we were "supposed" to see him as a rumpled, nebbishy old man.  In the book, through giving Smiley some of the feebleness of age (occasional forgetfulness, etc.), and more than that through letting us see his thoughts at every step, his doubts, his petty reactions, we actually feel him as a rumpled, nebbishy old man long before we start to sense his inner steeliness.  It's effective.  It makes the book a character study, as much as anything - a collection of character studies, really, as we get to know Prideaux, Guillam, and a few others almost as well as we know Smiley.

I think I'm hooked.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Saw this last night.  That it was playing in our area's one and only art house rather than one of the 40-odd screens of multiplexity we have nearby is an indictment of this country in this century:  there's nothing particularly artsy, off-putting, or weird about this movie.  It's just made for grown-ups.  And it's not in 3-fucking-D.

What it is, is a thoughtful, subtextful, perfectly poised film that thinks about the Cold War, about ideologies and aesthetics, about history and politics, and about personality repression.  Okay, so I've never read any John LeCarré, and I never saw the miniseries of this, so:  this is all I know about it.  But it does a better job than anything else I've seen or read of capturing the paranoia, the cynicism, the soul-twisting compromises, of the intelligence racket, and by extension of the whole Cold War era.  If you lived through it in America (and I came up during it), you know that.

This is what I mean.  Walking out of the theater, Mrs. Sgt. T pointed out to me that you can read the final scene, Smiley alone in the soundproof room, triumphant, as meaning that he was the mole all along.  Like I say, I've never read this;  I gather that might be heresy from a standpoint of the books.  But she's right:  this movie can be read that way.  Everything makes just as much sense if you assume Smiley is the mole as it does if you assume he isn't.  And that's the emotional, philosophical, artistic truth of spy fiction.

And yes, Gary Oldman's performance is amazing.