Abstract
Toby Manning’s John le Carré and the Cold War explores six of le Carré’s 1960s and 1970s novels, arguing that, contrary to critical consensus, these works reaffirm the social, economic and political status quo of contemporary Britain. The study employs an immanent approach, seeking to uncover ‘textual anomalies that reveal contradictions within consensus thinking’ (p. 6) in order to challenge three firmly established notions about le Carré’s Cold-War oeuvre: first, that it depicts a moral equivalence between East and West; second, that it is critical of the cynicism and ruthlessness of the British state; and third, that it provides a nostalgic view of a Britain in decline (p. 5). To address these notions, Manning divides each of his analyses into three subjects – the enemy, the state and the nation.
Far from advocating moral equivalence, Manning demonstrates how le Carré ultimately condemns the Cold-War enemy, communism. To le Carré, as in Western contemporary discourse, communism is defined by ‘domestic repression, international expansionism and murderous brutality on both fronts’ (p. 7). Britain’s actions in these novels are explicitly perceived as defensive, aimed at protecting its citizenry from the communist aggressor (pp. 8–9). This condemnation is illustrated, for example, in the depiction of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and its operatives in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). The iconography of the novel, Manning argues, ‘bespeaks an intransigent Eastern communism’ (p. 54). The Berlin Wall, in particular, becomes an emblem of ‘repression and power for their own sakes’ (p. 54). Even Fiedler, the supposed ‘good communist’ of the novel, is shown to be an ideologue of totalitarianism, an ideology that is anathema to Cold-War consensus (pp. 56–57).
Critics often point to an anti-establishment strain in le Carré’s work, indicating a harsh critique of the state. Yet Manning reminds readers of the dual meaning of ‘establishment’: the term denotes both the state apparatus and the social group that dominates it (p. 12). Le Carré’s protagonists, George Smiley chief amongst them, hail from this social group and serve the British state up to the restoration of the status quo ante (p. 13). Rather than criticising the establishment, then, these novels frequently reaffirm the tenets of its ideology. Manning identifies le Carré’s criticism in the rhetoric of anti-statism underwriting his body of work, which is directed at the bureaucratic mechanism. Bureaucracy is consistently seen in these novels as mechanical instrumentalism suppressing individualism, whose supposed totalitarian tendencies are more akin to communism than to Western liberalism (p. 35). These tendencies engender anxiety regarding the means the state employs to achieve its goals, such as duplicity, exploitation and indifference to the loss of life. The dialectics of these anti-statist sentiments and the ultimate reaffirmation of establishment ideology are embodied in the character of Smiley: his empathy and humanity allow him to express moral misgivings regarding the state’s means while he simultaneously endorses its actions for the greater good (p. 72).
In addition to his illuminating discussions on le Carré’s renderings of the enemy and the state, Manning seeks ‘to locate the citizenry and landscape… the commoners and the commons of Britain, the organic corpus of the nation’ (p. 15). The search begins with Smiley. He is widely accepted as a national avatar, representing Britain both literally, as an agent of the state, and figuratively, as an embodiment of the nation. Yet he is not a man of the people, he is a gentleman of the establishment. By positing the aging, overweight spy as a British Everyman, the novels render ‘public schooling, Oxford education, informal recruitment to the secret service, membership of an exclusive gentleman’s club and marriage into the aristocracy “ordinary”’ (p. 44). The presence of the working class in these novels is often marked by dilapidated, decaying and grey landscapes. These depictions evoke those of communist locales, and not by accident. As Manning explains, the class struggle in Britain, operating as an analogue to international rivalry, ‘is effectively the Cold-War’s home front’ and is a key tension in every novel explored in his study (p. 16). The nation, Manning concludes, is primarily utilised ‘to depict and endorse an establishment-dominated, hierarchical, class-stratified country’ (p. 193).
Apart from its considerable merits as a work of literary criticism, the book also offers an examination of the cultural history of anti-communism, specifically its British perspective. This examination does much to explain the historical and cultural context of le Carré’s novels, spotlighting such elements as the activities of the Information Research Department (IRD), Britain’s propaganda unit. As an example of the manner in which its historical context informs le Carré’s work, consider the concept of ‘classlessness’. The moderate social shift achieved by the post-war Labour government, through the establishment of the welfare state, progressive taxation and expansion of white-collar work, was being applauded by the early 1960s as having created a broad ‘classlessness’ (p. 62). Le Carré’s representative of this new British modernity is Alec Leamas, the protagonist of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, who is ‘an amalgam of working and middle class’ (p. 64). Manning deftly shows how, despite its protagonist’s social position, the novel still promotes the preservation of the old class system through Leamas’s actions supporting the establishment and his ultimate demise (pp. 64–66). In addition to showing how history infuses le Carré’s novels, Manning demonstrates how these works endow the Cold War with an ideological framework, formulated as communist expansionism and conspiracy against Western decency and defence, an iconography epitomised by the Berlin Wall and a paranoid, secretive and anxious mood (p. 3).
Through its insistence on revealing the ‘faultlines’ hidden in these works, its contrarian approach to long-held critical views and its emphasis on locating these novels within their historical–cultural context, Manning’s study proves to be an important contribution to le Carré scholarship and to criticism of espionage fiction as a whole. Its significance lies also in laying the foundations for future research. One such course may be to expand Manning’s discussion on the reciprocal relationship between history and literature beyond its British confines. As the United States spearheaded the Western struggle against communism during the Cold-War era, operating both overtly and covertly in different areas of the globe, from Cuba to Vietnam, it would be interesting to investigate the dynamics between its historical and cultural context and spy thrillers. This could be particularly fascinating in relation to the two pre-eminent American authors of the genre, Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy, whose most popular novels were written during the 1980s, just as the Cold War was slowly drawing to a close.