美国国家公共电台 NPR In 'A Legacy Of Spies,' John Le Carré Goes Back Out In 'The Cold'

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

Smiley is back. George Smiley, that is, the spy at the center of some of John le Carre his most popular books. For the first time in 25 years, le Carre has written a novel featuring Smiley. It's called "A Legacy 1 Of Spies," and it's a kind of prequel to "A Spy Who Came In From The Cold," which is the book that made le Carre famous and changed spy novels forever. Here's NPR's Lynn Neary.

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE 2: George Smiley is the best known of John le Carre's characters. He's the main player in many of his books, most notably 3 "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy." But in his new novel, le Carre goes deeper into Smiley's past, examining the role he and his cohorts played in "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold," a story of betrayal and deception 4 that ends badly at the Berlin Wall.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Mr. Leamas, go back, please - to your own side, Mr. Leamas.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)

NEARY: In "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold," says journalist and spy novelist David Ignatius, le Carre opened up the world of spying, revealing tactics that were often morally questionable 5. And Smiley was always a different kind of spy. He was not the dashing, womanizing James Bond kind of spy. Quite the contrary, says Ignatius, Smiley was...

DAVID IGNATIUS: A rumpled 6, almost professorial student of German manuscripts. His wife was unfaithful to him. He lived in this little house on Bywater Street. He was always described as owlish.

NEARY: And there was something else that set Smiley apart from other fictional 7 spies. Smiley had a conscience. Alex Berenson, author of the John Wells spy series, says Smiley was always clear about the price that had to be paid for victory in the world of espionage 8.

ALEX BERENSON: He is very much, you know, the quiet man pulling levers. And yet at the same time, you have a feeling that he's not a wizard, that he's very much consumed by the moral problems of the world that he lives in.

NEARY: The world Smiley lives in is Britain's famed intelligence service, which le Carre dubbed 9 The Circus, and the war they are engaged in is the Cold War, the struggle for dominance between East and West. In this scene from the BBC adaptation of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," Smiley tries unsuccessfully to persuade a high-level Russian official to defect.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY")

ALEC GUINNESS: (As George Smiley) I'm not offering you wealth or smart women or your choice of fast cars. I know you haven't any use for those things. And I'm not going to make any claims about the moral superiority of the West. I'm sure you can see through our values just as I can see through yours in the East.

NEARY: The Cold War was still in high gear when "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold" was published, but the certainty of the 1950s was starting to give way to the upheaval 10 of the '60s. Le Carre's Cold War, says David Ignatius, was never a simple case of East versus 11 West.

IGNATIUS: It wasn't black and white. It wasn't the good guys against the bad guys, as we'd felt in the '50s. It was more complicated than that. Yeah, and espionage, which is always about shades of gray, it's always about deceit and pretending to be something different from what really is, and here was John le Carre painting a world in grays very movingly.

VALERIE PLAME: He captures that perfectly 12.

NEARY: Valerie Plame, formerly 13 with the CIA, now an author of spy novels. Plame says pop culture doesn't usually get espionage right, but le Carre gets close. He understands the loneliness of the job and the moral ambiguity 14 that comes with it, especially when recruiting spies from the other side.

PLAME: I mean, you are asking someone to do something that you would never do yourself, which is betray your country and to pass highly classified information. There might be very good reasons for it, but nevertheless, you recognize these are other human beings, and even though sometimes they're not very pleasant, they - they're taking a huge risk in entering a relationship with you, a clandestine 15 relationship.

NEARY: The terrain 16 that le Carre often mines is the damage that is done when the clandestine relationship goes wrong. That's at the heart of his new book, "The Legacy Of Spies," and "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold." In a scene from the film adaptation of that novel, the spy Alec Leamas realizes that he and the woman he has recruited have been used by his own side.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (As character) What rules are you playing?

RICHARD BURTON: (As Alec Leamas) There's only one rule - expediency 17. Mundt gives London what it needs so Fiedler dies and Mundt lives. It was a foul 18, foul operation, but it paid off.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS: (As character) Who for?

BURTON: (As Alec Leamas) What the hell do you think spies are? Model philosophers measuring everything you do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They're not. They're just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards 19, like me.

NEARY: Le Carre takes us back to that scene in his new book. The story begins when Peter Guillam, one of Smiley's disciples 20 at The Circus, is brought out of retirement 21 and threatened with a lawsuit 22. He's being held responsible for the deaths of Leamas and his recruit at the Berlin Wall many years ago. David Ignatius.

IGNATIUS: It's a kind of core moment, I think, for any le Carre reader. So we go back to that moment and those characters, and we discover why were they at the Wall. What was the operation about? What were they running? What did they think they were doing?

NEARY: Weaving past and present together with flashbacks and secret documents, le Carre traces a series of events and mistakes that put both agents and their recruits in harm's way. Looking back on it all, Smiley concludes it was futile 23. Ignatius disagrees with Smiley, and he thinks le Carre does, too. For all the moral ambiguity, Ignatius believes that le Carre admires the spies he created and the part they played in the Cold War.

IGNATIUS: And you do feel, I think, in this book a sympathy for them. You may have questions about the war they were fighting. You may have questions about the tactics they used. But whatever you think about the Cold War, you decide with le Carre that you love the people who were the fighters.

NEARY: Spy novels of today are dealing 24 with a very different world. In his forthcoming novel, "The Quantum Spy," Ignatius writes about high-tech 25 espionage. Alex Berenson's spy is a convert to Islam and works for the CIA. His enemy is ISIS. But Berenson says le Carre's influence lingers.

BERENSON: It's easy to fall into the trap of, this is the other, these people are just a bunch of barbarous head-choppers. And, look, there is some truth in that. But they have a story, too. They tell themselves a story, too. And, you know, le Carre, he dealt in a world of gray. My world is more black and white, but there's plenty of gray in it, and I always try to remember that.

NEARY: And that, perhaps, is the legacy of a spy novelist. Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.