Should I Read... A Perfect Spy?
And can an autobiography be a spy novel?
One of the cheesiest, most mawkish additions to a movie belongs to Forrest Gump. It’s a movie that, on paper, already sounds like a middle-of-the-pile undergrad screenplay: “A guy with a disability goes places and does things.” The movie itself, of course, resists its aimless premise and exudes magic in nearly every scene. And the feather serves to laugh at how much Forrest Gump is pulling it off. Look, we’ll put a feather floating through the air in the movie to symbolize fate. Because we can.
Anyway, thanks to some felony heartstring pulling, the feather is one movie device I think about in daily life. As in: what if I could leave an object somewhere and follow its path? Whom would be affected? How? Assuming it doesn’t wind up on a shelf forever, or the landfill, I’d like to leave A Perfect Spy on a park bench—and in many ways, the book is a lot like Forrest Gump. It seems straightforward, but the simplicity is a clever guile.
Another movie device I think about is the painfully under-executed Sliding Doors. Its premise is that a woman lives two lives: one where she makes her subway, then finds her boyfriend cheating on her; another where she misses her subway, and the boyfriend gets away with it. You probably have some Sliding Doors moments, which are decisions so major that they cleave your possible life outcomes. (Mine, I think, would be: What if I went to Columbia instead of Chapman for film school?)
You can’t know how many subways someone missed. Or how many of those seriously mattered in the grand scheme of things… or can you?
A Perfect Spy will captivate fans of biographies and spy novels at the same time. Moreover, the novel is a masterpiece because John le Carré exorcises his own trauma by distancing himself from it via fiction. If the late master were to speak about his life in plain fact, something true might get lost. Attempts to analyze ourselves always go awry at some stage. If the late master were to write pure fiction, the story would have too much invention to relate to our lives. (Like if Forrest were actually a cyborg or something.)
We relate to Forrest and Mr. le Carré because the sentimentality is not designed to make us feel good. Forrest Gump could have been a saccharine box of chocolates. Instead most viewers recognize that the goodness in Forrest is a shield. Forrest at the bus stop, in his adorable cream suit, is all that separates us from Vietnam, the heroin-addled 70s, and a racist world on fire. It feels safe to go back into the past with Forrest as a guide; we wouldn’t accept the itinerary without him.
Similarly in A Perfect Spy, you will find a story that is, on the surface, achingly sad. You will find so many turning points where the protag’s life could have been normal. But now he is a spy gone off the grid, holding innumerable vital secrets, and the only way to find him is to analyze his past. How his con artist father molded him, inadvertently, into the perfect spy.
You’ll turn page after page because he is a figure too realistically pure to ignore.
Why is this your favorite book?
Because it used to be Infinite Jest, until optometrists billed me for the eye rolls.
No, I kid, but it actually is. As an aspiring author, I feel the constant nagging of my book’s future in my nether-brain. You want to tell an honest story, one that has zero consideration of how much it will sell or attention from agents. You want to entertain but slip a non-preachy moral thesis in the subtext. You want the book to be about your life but not your life itself. My frequent roadblock is that the characters end up being a therapy session of my own life, which leads to homogenous storytelling.
So I keep removing direct traces of my life. Nothing I’ve ever shown to people could absolutely connect to one person or another. (Though there have been loud rumblings to the contrary.) And by the end, I have… plot devices? Funny/action-filled set pieces floating on their own, an archipelago of story? I still work laboriously to find a work that exists independent of myself.
In short, A Perfect Spy is the book I wish I could write.
Some works are incredibly overt in drawing from the author—hello, Phillip Roth. Some are morbidly embarrassing diaries—Steph Meyer. None strike the balance of novel and confessional like A Perfect Spy. First picking up the book, I thought I might do that thing where I read the tea leaves of an author’s mind. David Foster Wallace must have sensed readers would do that in IJ. And but so he overwhelmed the senses with supersonic detail; you’d go insane before you solved DFW.
Le Carré does not seem to fear being analyzed. Surprisingly, even though I’d read several of his books, I forgot to analyze him within the first twenty pages. His inimitable cadence is like fighting off a sleeping pill. He pulls you back into the dream time and time again, even though you might (desperately) want to understand the author. He isn’t being defensive; the less you analyze the autobiographical nature, the more investment you have in the story. And only by absorbing the story do you absorb him.
So I’m in the dream for good. And wow, what a yarn. (Chuck Palahuniak’s Rant comes to mind here, as the story is told almost entirely through others’ narration.) It’s like eavesdropping on the houses around the world which must contain spies. And in these houses, the spies and ex-spies are freaking out. Not only do they want the information (i.e. Magnus Pym) to be secure, they know Pym is Le Carré’s Jason Bourne of people apt to be found without consent.
What’s missing in Jason Bourne, which admittedly I saw and did not read, are people who care about him being found. Jason made some allies along the way; most met an untimely end, but some lived long enough to be generally concerned. Le Carré, as you’d expect, elevates his text far, far beyond a Ludlum novel through complex psychology. The conflict of finding Pym is the driving force; however, much of the novel is devoted to guilt, regret. Signs they should have seen. The list of people who let down this good soul is a CVS receipt.
As in the words of Batman, they mourn, “He was the best of us.”
All I remember about John le Carré is that one movie with Gary Oldman that I kinda fell asleep in, and I think most of the plot happened with like eyebrow raises? What makes him the true master of spy novels?
You would be referring to Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. While I am a huge fan of his novels—and I liked the movie quite a bit—readers might get the wrong impression about the book from its theatrical telling. To just see the movies, you might think the books are also a “blink and you’ll miss it” affair. That one kernel of information will balloon into a huge twist several chapters later. That’s not entirely untrue, but it’s also not what the books mainly are. They are subtle, yes, but detailed beyond any work in its genre.
“More detailed than Tom Clancy?! The man gave a submarine lecture to the U.S. Navy!”
On a technical level, Clancy has him beat. Le Carré alone has the ability to blend the world of spy and civilian with such aplomb that anyone—anyone—can engage with his stories. I don’t care if you read Sue Grafton and get day drunk at Boca Raton Beach Club on a Wednesday. They say that the sign of expertise is if you can explain a highly complicated subject to a child. Well, it’s not a stretch to imagine Le Carré could have a child using “kompromat” organically in a few minutes’ time.
Probably as soon as you read “spy novel”, your mind reached a conclusion about whether or not you’d read this book. Probably, for the ‘no’ crowd, you’re still reading because you enjoy these weekly e-mail blasts—and much appreciated. But I would ask that you put aside your notions of a spy novel with le Carré. Unlike Clancy, you won’t put down the book and feel prepared to operate an Ohio-class SSBN. Unlike a Bond novel, you won’t wade through gin and misogyny to reach the implausible end.
Le Carré novels seek to crack the most uncrackable people on earth, full stop. The characters live in a world of constant contradictions; in this world, they must uphold a system of honor that actively tries to kill them. They are given the teeniest, tiniest space to care about other people, to care about themselves. They live their lives in this subatomic speck with great heroism and remorse. I just can’t describe how much I’ll miss le Carre’s work. I really can’t.
A Perfect Spy is the apotheosis of the genre because, for once in an authentic way, anyone can inhabit the background of a spy. Most spy novels take a leap that creates entertainment but leave the reader’s frame of reference in the dust. Le Carré writes these stories often; my runner-up is The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, where a spy is excommunicated for so long that one wonders if he really is an alcoholic falling for a librarian, etc. But A Perfect Spy is a total departure from the would-be Gary Oldman vehicles. One gets the sense that le Carré truly was scared to go into these dark corners. I picture him sitting at his typewriter, contemplating the mortal cost of writing this novel. (Which takes years, P.S. Full ones. Plural, as this ex-screenwriter discovers.)
Hold up. This dude actually lived out the novel?
More or less, yeah. His excellent, eponymous biography corroborates a shocking amount of the novel. If Bond, Clancy, et al aren’t your bag, I honestly can’t blame you. Fleming is far more thoughtful and complex than the movies belie; but they are, in the end, still Bond stories. And the genre just seems to go on downhill from there.
Since I confessed to being pretentious, I might as well state here that I am also a completist. If I really like a book, I will read (or make plans to read) everything else they wrote. Thus I feel okay saying this would be one of the best books F. Scott ever wrote. The story felt way more like This Side of Paradise than Moonraker.
The most Fitzgeraldian turn comes from the secondary characters. Magnus, as the titular ‘perfect spy’, does not assign blame. He just wants a release that no one can offer—not even death, for the other side is no guarantee. He recounts his childhood, being shipped all over, being caught up in endless schemes, friendships made and torn apart again. He does not ask for sympathy. He parses information not for us, but so that the final product will announce who he is. When such a sympathetic person wants the answer, the onus falls upon any decent person there to listen. The ending of It’s a Wonderful Life is also a fair comparison.
Overall…
Look, I’m at a bit of a rubicon. If I don’t wrap it up here, I will have a monograph about this book before August. (By the by, any comments about recs being too long and/or short are warmly welcome. The site’s still learning to walk.)
I will just say that A Perfect Spy is a triumph. The phrase “Only ____ could have written ____” gets tossed around like an entry-level resume. This novel actually deserves that plaudit because A) John le Carré was better than every other spy author by a lot, B) His was the only background to ever intersect with such literary talent, and C) The obvious: only John le Carré could write this roman à clef about John le Carré.
So you have a rare novel, indeed. But lots of things are rare.
Read this book for a masterclass on the tentacles of self-deceit.
Read if “He who fights monsters…” is an instant hook for you.
Read because we make versions of ourselves that demand a victor.