After the War was over . . .

The spy novel is an essential literary genre of our present imagination. Like other popular forms at different times, it seems to sum up more of our anxieties than it quite admits. The ghost story in Edwardian England was popular because it focussed a strain of passionate morbidity; the detective story is essentially a 1930s genre, entertainment for a time in search of solutions.

Spy novels continue their obsessive grip on our imagination, even after the end of the Cold War, because they demonstrate, like a formal dance, some of the most haunting philosophies of indeterminacy and mutually shifting positions. They are dramas of philosophical and scientific ideas; dramatisations of game theory and of chaos theory, schools of thought which focus on the idea that observation changes the thing observed, that behaviour and motivation are not pure things but driven by second-guessing, and second-guessing the second-guessing of other factors. The delirious escalation of the best spy novels – and I would put the best of le Carré up with James Buchan’s magnificently baffling Heart’s Journey in Winter – asks, over and over again, ‘What does he know? What do I know about what he knows? Is he behaving or performing?’ Their agents are the figures in locked cells in that fundamental image of game theory, the Prisoner’s Dilemma, waiting for the moment when they can break free of the unknown control of the other players in the game, unseen and unknowable.