Lord save us from Le Carré

Thank the blessed Lord it’s over. Not Brexit, or Theresa May’s flailing and spastic governance. I’m talking about John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl, which has been serialised on the BBC on a Sunday evening, just when people want to watch something interesting.

I watched it with the missus, and by episode two decided I would much rather spend my Sunday evenings assaulting my own head with a claw hammer. But we persisted with this expensively shot garbage because we are a married couple and therefore think it right and proper to engage in joint activities and stick with them regardless of how distressing and unpleasant they may be — such as watching The Little Drummer Girl or having sexual intercourse.

I have heard Le Carré referred to as ‘Shakespearean’ — and that is true, insofar as his plots are concerned. Much like the plot of Hamlet, say, Le Carré’s are so wildly improbable as to be beyond comprehension, utterly divorced from the real world and the way in which people behave. (The amount of credulity required to swallow the plot of The Little Drummer Girl would be beyond even the most stupid follower of Momentum, I would suggest.) And because Le Carré, a spy writer, is all about plot, what is there left for us to enjoy? Characterisation? Not a chance. The characters are ciphers for the author’s fashionably baleful view of the world, in which the cynicism of the Soviet Union is matched by the cynicism of the West, to the degree that it is impossible to tell them apart and there are no goodies or baddies. And yet this too is a crass simplification.

Nor would we read Le Carré for humour. Americans are often derisive of the British affection for the comic novel, from Wodehouse via Bradbury to Tom Sharpe, those confections in which everything is geared, sometimes laboriously, towards the next chuckle.