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While the Spy craze of the 60s is long behind us with only the property that ignited that boom, Bond, James Bond, still commands the attention of popular culture — that phrase always implies to me that there is an unpopular culture. Stories of spies and espionage continue to be written and produced. In my opinion there is a spectrum upon which stories of the covert services are told and the ends of that spectrum are anchored by the authors that towered over the field during the height of the ‘spy boom’, Ian Fleming and John le Carré.
Ian Fleming created James Bond, the first novel, Casino Royale, written just before Fleming’s marriage with the author plucking the character’s name off a birding book because he felt the name had a grey forgettable quality to it. While that originating novel had a few not too spectacular gadgets and battled the spy services of the Soviet Union not global criminal empires it wasn’t long before those elements were introduced, then became mainstay tropes of Bond’s adventures. Bond’s stories are adventures, filled with colorful characters, beautiful willing women, fantastic technology and always with clear heroics both in the nature of the threat and the heroic people fighting evil, unredeemable bad guys. (We will set aside that in Casino Royale Bond in the confines of his private thoughts muses on the ‘sweet tang of rape’ an aspect of the character that was mercifully never translated to the screen.)
John le Carré, real name David Cornwell, crafted espionage fiction that very much reflected the real world. His characters were not the fantasy of ‘gentlemen spies’ but working people trying to do their best in a system that in order to achieve its goals often employed the same despicable tactics of the enemy until recognizing one from the other became nearly impossible. Disillusionment is a common theme in le Carré’s work, work which questioned whether our methods define us no matter the nobility of our ends. What gadgets exist in le Carré’s world are ones that actually exist or at the very least are very possible, here you will not find powerful electro-magnets that can pull boats to you from yards away. Heroes often find at the end of the missions not that they have triumphed over evil but rather that they have employed evil, often for questionable results. It is a world so thoroughly gray one wonders if any color can be found anywhere.
The explosive success of the Bond movies dictated that swarms of spy thrillers would flood the screen chasing that sweet, sweet box office money. Most of these, The ‘Matt Helm’ and ‘Flint’ movies sit quite comfortably near the Fleming end of the spectrum, attempting to dazzle the audience with derring-do and fantastic gadgets. Len Deighton’s ‘Harry Palmer’ series mixed the style of Fleming’s fantastic plot with le Carré’s cynicism placing this series near the middle of the spectrum. Get Smart the successful spy parody series is clearly at the Fleming point, if not far beyond it. It would be difficult to imagine a similar program for le Carré’s style of fiction, after all how funny can a parody of the dark, cynical, and morally gray world of le Carré be?
Slow Horses, currently adapted into a quite successful series on Apple TV, hews closer to le Carré than to Fleming, there is a distinct lack of gadgets, and the world the characters inhabit very much mirrors the gray and morally questionable world that is found in works such as The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, but overlaid with a modern ironic sense. Here there isn’t the common mistake of confusing cynicism for wisdom, but rather a recognition of the flawed world, the flawed systems, but an understanding that beyond all that somethings are right and somethings are wrong.
I find this spectrum a very handy method of classifying espionage fiction, how likely it is to resonate with me. It’s even applicable at the espionage genre is adapted in all sorts of new and exciting way, such as Charle Stross’ Laundry Series which clearly take it’s parody aspects from Fleming with all sorts of fantastical gadget, combined with a sharp satire of office and corporate culture while battling Lovecraftian forces beyond comprehension.
The spy trope is alive and well, even if we don’t have as many as we used to and its pleasing that we still get both our glorious heroes inspired by Fleming and dark cynical take that follow le Carré.
