6 ms·
I vastly prefer George Smiley to James Bond when it comes to spy-vs-spy fiction (though perhaps Mad Magazine's take on that genre is the best of all). Bond sto
by photochemsyn 4y ago
I vastly prefer George Smiley to James Bond when it comes to spy-vs-spy fiction (though perhaps Mad Magazine's take on that genre is the best of all). Bond stories consist mostly of one-dimensional heroes and villains and their empty-headed sidekicks, predictably shoehorned into some Disney-style morality play, all designed to improve the public image of the CIA and the MI5/6 (both of whom were very upset about Le Carre's take on the Cold War, and basically seem to have promoted Fleming as an antidote).
Usually, when people these days want an unambigous good-guys-vs-bad-guys storyline, they have to go back to WWII and the almost-universally despised Nazi regime. This is because there's a lot of uncertainly about who the 'good guys' were in the Cold War, or even if there were any. The Berlin airlift looks good for the West, but the effort to perpetuate French colonialism in Vietnam, not so much. There are at least a dozen similar examples on both sides, from eastern Europe (USSR not looking so good) to Africa and South/Central America (lots of bad behavior by the 'pro-democracy West').
John Le Carre famously portrayed the conflict as two giant gear wheels grinding against each other and destroying the lives of people unfortunate enough to get caught in the middle, and his doubtful self-questioning protagonist, George Smiley, though obviously devoted to the West, carries that theme well. Le Carre's "A Perfect Spy" and "The Russia House" are also some of his best works, with similar themes and central characters.
- kaveh808 4y agoAlso an excellent spy series: Sandbaggers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9c6MTFimTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9c6MTFimTk
- spitfire 4y agoThe sandbaggers was /fantastic/. For those who don't know, it's basically accountancy with violence.
- ahartmetz 4y agoYes, it's the best spy series together with the two BBC le Carré series. Le bureau des légendes is also similar to these three and just slightly worse IMO, and that mostly because of the weaker final season and an accumulation of implausibilities roughly starting in the middle (more series have that than not, sigh). But, for the most part, flawless acting. The Night Manager is cool, too, with a very satisfying ending. The Little Drummer Girl is also good, though there is some... uncommon? psychological stuff going on in the book that creaks even more in the series.
- mongol 4y agoI can admit I have not read Le Carre. But I have seen some movies and series, and I find them strange. It is implied the stakes are very, very high, but never is explained what exactly is at stake. Very puzzling.
- yodon 4y ago>It is implied the stakes are very, very high, but never is explained what exactly is at stake. Very puzzling. Is it rude of me to ask if you were born after about 1972 (so less than about 17 at the time the wall came down and the Cold War ended)? Le Carre's books, even the newer ones, are deeply embedded in a grand battle to the death between superpowers. He didn't bother to explain that in his books because at the time he was writing them his readers (and most of his original film audiences) understood that context and took it for granted. By about the age of 17, most people in those days had a very clear understanding of the stakes involved in conflict or war between super powers, including for example the Cuban Missile crisis when everyone in the world understood that tens of millions of people could be killed in the next 12 hours or so (if you're not personally familiar with the era, the movie Thirteen Days starring Kevin Costner is a powerful and engaging view into what was perhaps the height of the Cold War experience).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 4y agoPart of the point of le Carré is that the stakes aren't clear, and whatever they are, they're often not worth the shoddy business the Circus constantly involves itself in. The Cold War is a looming cataclysm, of course, but these fucking spies are just running around immiserating people in the (probably ill-founded) hopes that they're making the world in any way better, when really all they're doing is picking which organized crime family gets to run the heroin business in Laos. The work Smiley does might be incredibly important, or it might not be. He himself grapples with that ambiguity (and with his oscillating affiliation with the Circus), which is part of what drives the narrative. So the answer to your question here is basically like asking "who's the murderer" in an Agatha Christie book.
- bell-cot 4y ago> Bond stories consist mostly of one-dimensional heroes and villains and their empty-headed sidekicks, predictably shoehorned into some Disney-style morality play... Sounds like you've seen the Bond movies. Ian Fleming wrote the books. The relationship between those often amounts to "the movie used the book's title, and the name of the book's protagonist".
- adamc 4y agoWell, I haven't read all the books, but I read several in my youth (because they were around), and they were much, much worse than the movies.
- logical_proof 4y agoYou’re the first person I have heard that from. We’re there any plots in particular that you thought were worse (barring man with the golden gun as that was contrived and I am not sure if Fleming even truly finished it before his death)?
- JKCalhoun 4y agoSadly, the reader probably figures out "Moonraker" within a few chapters. In Fleming's "Goldfinger", Goldfinger is actually trying to steal the gold from Fort Knox. It was much more realistic to have him instead trying to destroy the gold to increase scarcity. Say what you want about the film "Live and Let Die" but reading Fleming trying to write "jive" was just embarrassing.
- adamc 4y agoThe one I remember best was "The Spy Who Loved Me", where the plot of the novel is about a woman in a cabin or something and the relation to the movie is... Zero. But it wasn't the plots that I thought were worse, but the writing itself.
- yamtaddle 4y agoYeah even my trashy-genre-fic loving friend who's read all or nearly all the novels says only a couple are OK, and IIRC he said only one was really decent enough that he'd recommend it to others, versus the films, of which he likes a bunch. And he likes some bad novels (as he'll readily acknowledge) and plenty of older "classic" genre fic, plus some not-so-trashy British classics (Austen, Dickens, et c), so it's not a recency bias, or difficulty with the settings, topics, author's culture, or writing style. Seems the film-makers largely agreed that it wasn't worth trying to preserve much from the books.
- tcmart14 4y agoI prefer Le Carre also, but probably more because Le Carre does grapple with there being no true higher morale ground between two competing sides and the realism of the characters. Bond is more of a fantasy where characters in the Smiley novel are more "normal." Bond always has the Bond girl. Smiley has a rather messy marriage even with a double agent having an affair with his wife. Smiley is not attractive or slim, he is overweight, wears glasses, and such.
- senthil_rajasek 4y ago"all designed to improve the public image of the CIA and the MI5/6 (both of whom were very upset about Le Carre's take on the Cold War, and basically seem to have promoted Fleming as an antidote)." Can you substantiate this claim? Are there actual sources that you can quote that the CIA/MI-5/6 did this?
- photochemsyn 4y agoThe links between Hollywood, the CIA and the Bond movies are pretty well-known and discussed, and it's hardly just the Bond movies. For example: https://priceonomics.com/how-james-bond-introduced-the-cia-to-1950s-america/ https://priceonomics.com/how-james-bond-introduced-the-cia-t... > "The agency’s director at the time, Allen Dulles, loved the Bond novels. Despite the derision most agents held for the series, Moran notes that he had a signed copy of each and every novel. Dulles and Fleming struck up a relationship that at times seemed mutually beneficial. Dulles peppered his public remarks with references to Bond, while Fleming dropped positive mentions of Dulles into the mouths of his characters." Given the climate of the era, anti-communist blacklisting in Hollywood and so on, it seems fairly obvious that the Bond movies were given a clandestine stamp of approval.
- narag 4y agoThis is because there's a lot of uncertainly about who the 'good guys' were in the Cold War, or even if there were any. Ends don't justify the means and there were very bad means in both sides. Probably I shouldn't be using past tense either. When there is an existencial threat to a whole country's way of living, I don't think you will find many nice guys in the game, more like those giant wheels. But I have no uncertainty over who are the very bad guys now and then. At all.
- tptacek 4y agoThis misses the point of the books. The question isn't whether the Soviets are morally equivalent to the west; it's whether foreign intelligence services were anything more than state-sponsored organized crime syndicates.
- narag 4y agoI wasn't talking about any book, that I haven't read anyway, just making a distinction, nitpicking if you prefer it that way, about a specific paragraph. In it, photochemsyn states that you don't know who the good guys were, citing different episodes of the cold war, comparing it to WW2, somehow suggesting that there's a difference because Hitler was clearly bad. But that's not how I see it. The "good guys" side of WW2 involved the URSS (and only because they were attacked, after breaking Mólotov-Ribbentrop) and at a least morally ambiguous measures like bombing civilians in Germany and Japan. So neither in the goals nor in the means I see so big of a difference.
- tptacek 4y agoBecause you haven't read the books, you've also missed the point of the comment you replied to, which is about the books.
- narag 4y agoNo, I haven't. The point of the comment is that Fleming provided a nicer narrative than Le Carré so it was prefered for political reasons. Fleming, in the article, pretty much says that he doesn't care much about politics, that he wrote for his own pleasure and the readers'. Saying that spy agencies promoted Fleming's work is unsubstantiated. I've seem weirder, like the CIA supporting abstract expresionists, but anyway it seems more likely that Fleming was successful just because it was entertaining. Le Carré was also very successful, so no need to create a war there.
- cgh 4y agoI think this is addressed in the article when he discusses "authors" vs "writers". Le Carre is the former and Fleming is unapologetically the latter.
- lelanthran 4y agoWhere does that leave Frederick Forsyth? I've always enjoyed his books[1] as sort of a "Spy thriller done right" antidote to Fleming's "Fantasy Spy Thriller". [1] I think "Cobra" was the last one I read, and enjoyed it immensely.
- Terretta 4y agoSee also: Alister MacLean "In 1963 MacLean decided to retire from writing, saying he never enjoyed it and only did it to make money." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alistair_MacLean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alistair_MacLean The retirement didn't take, he ended up producing more.
- emodendroket 4y agoI've read one of each and the Le Carre novel felt more or less as it could have been written today. The Bond story did not, even if I discount that it contained a hand-by-hand narration of a game of bridge.