British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire by Sam Goodman

Author:Sam Goodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2016-03-11T05:00:00+00:00

Le Carré describes the house in neutral, unobtrusive language indicating its drab colours and the presence of typical household clutter, such as the plants and lace curtains. The house is deliberately plain in order to remain inconspicuous; however, much like uncanny domestic space in The Human Factor, it is clearly an artificial construct, produced for the purposes of interrogation, a machine not for living in, but for extracting information. There is a sense of falsity and forcedness to the house in the language used to describe it, suggested by the ‘pseudo’ style of the furniture and the revealing name, ‘Le Mirage’. Such a name comments not only on the projection of ordinary domesticity the house is intended to relate but also the cordiality of Leamas’ KGB handlers and the authenticity of Leamas’ defection itself. The finality with which the pencil and pad of paper are mentioned reveals the true purpose of the house; to gather information via interrogation. Le Carré suggests that as the opposing espionage services are essentially the same there is little difference in the domestic spaces of their operatives. They are all productions of home that are rendered unhomely by their function and uncanny by their resemblance to lived spaces.

A further, and crucial, difference between le Carré and Fleming is that le Carré does not demonise Britain’s enemies in the same way Fleming does. Where Fleming uses deliberate exaggeration, and often physical deformity, to establish the moral degeneracy of his characters, le Carré is far more equivocal. Instead of the drama inherent to Fleming’s villains, le Carré’s novels suggest a banality to life in the service of Soviet espionage and in Soviet controlled countries not dissimilar to that of Britain and experienced by British agents. This suggestion of ordinariness is furthered by Leamas’ initial encounter with high-ranking GDR agent Fiedler in East Germany.

Having been initially interviewed by Peters, Leamas is taken to an unspecified location for further questioning by Fiedler. Le Carré describes how Leamas arrives at ‘a low farmhouse with walls of timber and whitewashed brick’ and is led inside.67 The interior of the farmhouse is described as being:

[G]ot up like a hunting lodge, part old, part new. The place had a neglected, musty air as if it had been opened for the occasion. There were little touches of officialdom … a notice of what to do in case of fire … and in the drawing room, which was quite comfortably done, dark, heavy furniture, badly scratched, and the inevitable photographs of Soviet leaders. To Leamas these lapses from anonymity signified the involuntary identification of the Abteilung with bureaucracy. That was something he was familiar with in the Circus.68

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