Writers of my generation are comparing the BBC’s version of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy – the highpoint of the golden age of British television drama in my view
– against the new film. You can see the 1979 series now because rather magnificently, if not perhaps legally, someone has put it on YouTube. The film, which is also well worth seeing, is hours shorter and has less time to develop characters. Most strikingly, although it tries to
be faithful to the novel, the atmosphere is different in subtle ways. When the BBC adapted le Carré, we were still living in the novel’s world. Today’s film is historical
fiction. That it works, superbly in some scenes, confirms that the Smiley trilogy will survive well into the 21st century. A great story is one that new generations can reinterpret. On this test,
le Carré is a great writer, and literary editors have greeted the film’s release by offering him generous tributes. The best was by Boyd Tonkin of the Independent who explained the appeal better than anyone I have read by saying that le Carré had created a
world…
“…subject to its own laws and myths, arranged according to a logic and design that turns its back on civilian reality, the intelligence netherworld that Le Carré fashioned has
the quality of all great literary myths. As much as in Tolkien, Wodehouse, Chandler or even Jane Austen, this closed world is a whole world. Its claims to documentary authenticity, however strong,
hardly matter any more.”
Like everyone else, Tonkin says that le Carré understands betrayal because he worked for MI6 in the aftermath of Philby’s betrayal. English gentility prevents literary journalists from
adding that we also know that he committed an act that was a kind of treachery himself, not only against a fellow writer in Britain, but against authors struggling against religious censorship in
Iran and the principles of free speech, which had served him so well.
Voltaire complained of the “infamous trade of vilifying one’s colleagues” which “has made of literature an arena of gladiators.” He might have been writing of le Carré. When Salman Rushdie was in hiding from Iranian assassins, and bookshops, translators publishers had to live with the threat of murder because of their defence of the Satanic Verses, le Carré turned on them.
There was “no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity,” he said, apparently unaware that the law of the land he lived in specifically protected its citizens from assassination. Rushdie was not just guilty of insulting a great religion, but had put his greed before the safety of others. “When it came to the further exploitation of Rushdie’s work in paperback form, I was more concerned about the girl at Penguin books who might get her hands blown off in the mailroom than I was about Rushdie’s royalties. Anyone who had wished to read the book by then had ample access to it.”
Note the malice behind the accusation. I doubt if even Boyd’s colleague Johann Hari could have matched it. By insisting on publishing a paperback edition of the Satanic Verses, the wealthy Rushdie was putting his bank balance before the safety of poor clerks in the mailroom.
In one of his few public interventions from his life under police guard, (full exchange of letters here) Rushdie replied that workers in Penguin and in bookshops around the world had willingly put their lives on line to defend freedom of speech, and berating their managers if they showed signs of giving in to terror. Le Carré was taking “the philistine, reductionist, militant Islamist line that The Satanic Verses was no more than an insult” and anyone “who displeases philistine, reductionist, militant Islamist folk loses his right to live in safety. He says that he is more interested in safeguarding publishing staff than in my royalties. But it is precisely these people, my novel’s publishers in some thirty countries, together with the staff of bookshops, who have most passionately supported and defended my right to publish. It is ignoble of le Carré to use them as an argument for censorship when they have so courageously stood up for freedom.”
Today’s literary journalists do not talk about the attack on Rushdie – one of the most notorious incidents in the literary life of the 1990s – because they believe that respected writers must be decent people. Why? There is no reason to suppose that a novelist who writes well about treachery should be a wholly decent man. Indeed, you should be surprised if he were.
The German press is reporting a controversy about Günter Grass’s views on politics that makes my point for me. After 60 years, at least some Germans are noticing that they are occasionally offensive, usually delirious and always wrong. Spiegel said “It must have been some misunderstanding that turned writers who come up with pleasant stories into major political thinkers, into people who should give their advice on everything and anything possible — whether it’s climate change, the dark sides of globalization, world hunger or the Middle East conflict.”
The surprise is that anyone is surprised that Grass’s views on politics are idiotic or shocked when le Carré behaves like a bastard. The lives of some novelists are moral examples, but if all of them were angels, we would have nothing but morality tales. A few artists might make good politicians. But most are no more “unacknowledged legislators,” than most legislators are unacknowledged artists.
Comments