Smiley's People

Table of Contents

 

JOHN LE CARRÉ, the pseudonym for David Cornwell, was a member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964. His third novel,
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, became a worldwide bestseller. He has written twenty-one novels, which have been published in thirty-six languages. Many of his books have been made into films, including
The Constant Gardener
;
The Russia House
;
The Little Drummer Girl
; and
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
.

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First published in the United States of America by Franklin Library 1979
Published in the United States of America by Alfred A. Knopf 1980
Published in Penguin Books 2011

 

Copyright © David Cornwell, 1979

Introduction copyright © David Cornwell, 2000
All rights reserved.

 

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., and to Faber & Faber Ltd. for permission to reprint a verse by W. H. Auden.

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

ISBN : 978-1-101-53529-5

CIP data available

 

 

 

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JOHN LE CARRÉ

 

 

 

 

S
miley’s People
is the third and final novel in what became a trilogy recounting the duel of wits between George Smiley of the British Secret Service, which I called the Circus, and his rival and alter ego, code name Karla of the KGB, which I called Moscow Centre. The first novel of the trilogy was
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy;
the second,
The Honourable Schoolboy
. My grand ambition was to write not just three but a whole scad of them—ten or fifteen—describing an epic stand-off between my two protagonists that would cover every corner of the globe and collectively constitute a kind of
Comédie Humaine
of the cold war, told in terms of mutual espionage.

Spying, in all its different forms, was after all what the cold war had for a battlefield, and the spies were its ground troops. Hot wars like Korea and Vietnam might come and go, but spying was a continuum. The obsession of the two great economic systems with each other’s identity, intentions, strengths, and weaknesses had produced by the 1970s a state of mutual watchfulness and paranoia that seemed to know no bounds. Each side was ready to pay any sum, take any risk, tell any lie, to gain a seeming intelligence advantage over the other. Neither seemed able to grasp the utter sterility of this situation. It is no wonder that, when the players were finally able to look at one another’s cards, it tuned out that each had vastly exaggerated the other’s strategic capability. In that sense, the quest for intelligence took on at its worst an almost mythic form, with the spies not so much required to report the truth about the enemy as paint him in a form monstrous enough to keep the alarm bells ringing for all eternity.

And at the heart of this war of fantasies lay the war between intelligence services of the opposing Blocs themselves—surely the most sterile, the least productive, and the most addictive of all the games spies play, since it neither enlightens nor benefits the real world which gives them their daily bread, and turns the basically very simple trade of espionage into a never-ending maze of mirrors to which only professionals are admitted, and nobody looks the wiser. Along the way, I had preachier notions I wanted to slip into my great
oeuvre,
provided I could find a way to dramatise them, even seditious ones—the moral corruption that the cold war was leaving in its wake in the Western as well as the Communist world, for instance; and how the cold war’s cult of lying was permeating every area of Western public life so that in this country alone there was scarcely an organ of government, from the parish pump upwards, that couldn’t invoke the spectre of national security to disguise its bias, incompetence, and corruption. And Smiley would be my champion, my mouthpiece, my knight errant. And my readers would listen to him where they wouldn’t listen to me. Because he was a better man than I was, and part of a grand story. And if Smiley on the insistence of some secret loyalty board of American-inspired witch-hunters was one day hauled before a kangaroo court of his peers—such things happened in those days—and charged with harbouring sympathies incompatible with his secret work, then my readers would rush to his protection and send his accusers packing. In my head I had a lot of this stuff planned, and more of it in notebooks.

So what stopped me from fulfilling this grand design?

In part, Smiley did. The older I became, the more I wanted to write about younger passions and a changing society. There had been a time when Smiley had been my proxy father, almost my father confessor. But as my knight errant he cast too old an eye on the world. Where he saw change, it pained him. And where his corrosive eye and brave past had once provided me with a voice and a disguise, I was beginning to find these very assets a liability. Smiley was still my hero, but he had got above his station. He was too patient for me. His radicalism was the thinker’s, not the doer’s. Ultimately, whatever his misgivings, he always knuckled down and did the job, even if he had to leave his conscience outside the door. Which meant he and the reader had the best of both worlds. Alec Guinness’s superb portrayal of him only added to my problems. When
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
was first shown on the BBC, the only independent channel in those days obligingly staged a strike and for six precious weeks the entire British viewing public had to choose between BBC1 and BBC2. In consequence, we were pulling in audiences of up to eleven million for each episode, and the series became a kind of public institution, with endless chat on the radio about who understood how much or how little of the plot, and George Smiley briefly became a kind of myopic national hero, solving crossword puzzles that defeated the rest of us.

The problem went further than that. George Smiley, whether I liked it or not,
was
from then on Alec Guinness—voice, mannerisms, the whole package. And I
did
like it. I liked it enormously. Once in a writer’s life, if he’s lucky, an actor plays one of his characters to perfection. And Alec did that. He was as good at being Smiley as Cyril Cusack was at being Control in
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
. Better. On the other hand, I didn’t at all enjoy the fact that Smiley had somehow been taken over by my public. It was a thoroughly odd sensation, and not at all a pleasant one, when I went to get my character back after Alec had finished with him, to discover that I had been given used goods. I think I even felt a little bit betrayed.

Another thing that held me back from my great design was a drastic change in my writing methods for which to this day I can’t quite account. Writing
Tinker, Tailor
had been a static exercise. I sat in Cornwall and scribbled. Though the story had scenes in Hong Kong, Delhi, and Prague, I had visited none of those places in order to write the novel. I had fed off my memory and imagination, and got away with it. Perhaps for this reason, when I came to write
The Honourable Schoolboy,
I took to the road in a very big way indeed. Basing myself in Hong Kong, I shot off to north-east Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Taiwan in quick order, and wrote, as it were, from the stirrup. Along the way, I tasted hot warfare for the first time, though mercifully very little of it, and by the time I’d seen what I set out to see, I was beginning to regard Smiley and Karla as superfluous baggage.
The Honourable Schoolboy
was kindly received, but I still believe it might have been a better novel without their presence.

 

For all these reasons then,
Smiley’s People
was intended to be a requiem for the old spy, and to me that is what it remains. Smiley popped up again in
The Secret Pilgrim,
but only in a retrospective rôle. To provide him with a good send-off, I assembled all the usual suspects: Peter Guillam, Toby Esterhase, Connie Sachs, and, of course, the old fox himself, code name Karla. The grand finale takes place in divided Berlin. Where else could I choose? In
The Spy Who Came In from the Cold
it was at the Berlin Wall that Smiley was heard shouting at Alec Leamas not to go back for the girl Liz. For his last act, Smiley would return there, and in his heart beg Karla not to leave the East. Smiley wins, Karla loses. But at what cost to both of them? Facing each other, they are the two no-men of no-man’s-land. Karla has sacrificed his political faith, Smiley his humanity.

I always remember the words of a Berlin comedian when, against all prediction, the Berlin Wall did finally come down. “The right side lost but the wrong side won.” He meant, I suppose, that having defeated Communism, we are left with the problem of how to tackle our own greed, and our indifference to human suffering in the world outside our own. I’ll bet you that George Smiley, if he is still with us, is still agonising over the answer.

T
wo seemingly unconnected events heralded the summons of Mr. George Smiley from his dubious retirement. The first had for its background Paris, and for a season the boiling month of August, when Parisians by tradition abandon their city to the scalding sunshine and the bus-loads of packaged tourists.

On one of these August days—the fourth, and at twelve o’clock exactly, for a church clock was chiming and a factory bell had just preceded it—in a
quartier
once celebrated for its large population of the poorer Russian émigrés, a stocky woman of about fifty, carrying a shopping bag, emerged from the darkness of an old warehouse and set off, full of her usual energy and purpose, along the pavement to the bus-stop. The street was grey and narrow, and shuttered, with a couple of small
hôtels de passe
and a lot of cats. It was a place, for some reason, of peculiar quiet. The warehouse, since it handled perishable goods, had remained open during the holidays. The heat, fouled by exhaust fumes and unwashed by the slightest breeze, rose at her like the heat from a lift-shaft, but her Slavic features registered no complaint. She was neither dressed nor built for exertion on a hot day, being in stature very short indeed, and fat, so that she had to roll a little in order to get along. Her black dress, of ecclesiastical severity, possessed neither a waist nor any other relief except for a dash of white lace at the neck and a large metal cross, well fingered but of no intrinsic value, at the bosom. Her cracked shoes, which in walking tended outwards at the points, set a stern tattoo rattling between the shuttered houses. Her shabby bag, full since early morning, gave her a slight starboard list and told clearly that she was used to burdens. There was also fun in her, however. Her grey hair was gathered in a bun behind her, but there remained one sprightly forelock that flopped over her brow to the rhythm of her waddle. A hardy humour lit her brown eyes. Her mouth, set above a fighter’s chin, seemed ready, given half a reason, to smile at any time.