Barbara Frey
John LeCarré, A Small Town in Germany (1968)
April 12, 2011
1968, the Cold War in deep chill. Bonn, West Germany, an imaginary capital with neither history nor allegiance; about to become the stepstool to the greatest repeating of history ever dreaded. Superlatives be damned! We’re talking about neo-Nazism! There aren’t enough exclamation points in all of English literature to amplify the wellspring of hope on the one side and of nervousness on the other. An English Embassy in the seat of allied power of un-unified Germany where a politician, a madman, a messiah! (depending on how you regard him) is causing a stir all ’round the FDR. Just when things were going so peachy – the reparations had been awarded, the landscape rebuilt with modern edifices, the sweeping under the rug of past offenses (of persons unprosecuted either by reason of not enough evidence or of need in the rebuilding) complete, the economy booming – the German Miracle! For God’s sake, why would Nazism be rearing its ugly head? But, says the neo-messiah in front of an adoring, earthy, working-man’s, ‘all the Bob Cratchits had come out to the rally’ crowd: “what was so very wrong about Nazism that it should be punished eternally with the whole world’s hostility?” (Oh, well yes, admittedly, the persecution of the Jews was wrong as he’d like the record to show.) Quoth the protagonist, Alan Turner “Birnam Hills had come to Dunsinane.” He, the slovenly, obviously well-read security officer, er, cleaner sent from the London Foreign Office to find out what the spy inside the Embassy had stolen and of its importance. Turner, a mess of a man in the midst of his own personal troubles, which seem to aid in his driving nature to search out the spy, observes the tiniest morsels of information gleaned in his few days there in Bonn. He not only elicits the willing secrets of the other players in the story he has access to, but unearths the duplicitous nature of international intrigue at the highest levels comparing said intrigues to those gambling methods used by the lowliest of bookies.
With little to start, save a list of missing files and access to the missing man’s room, Turner begins his very unsubtle interrogation technique on the Embassy’s security chief Rawley Bradfield. Indeed, Turner’s interrogative style is impressive – moving the book at a fast and furious pace of information gathering. Contrast that with the oft-repeated, cloying metaphors of Bonn’s lingering, ever-pervasive mist: “It is all doubt. All Mist. The mist drains away the colours. There are no distinctions, the Socialists have seen to that. They are all everything. They are all nothing.” Turner, and the reader, are quick to note that the path steered by Bradfield is a lark. A spy novel does read like a spy novel – intrigue at every corner, trust no one, look out for the obvious. This one is no different, except that I hadn’t actually read one before.
John le Carré is one of the best in the spy novel genre, having honed his subject matter as an employee of both the MI5, British Security Service and the MI6, British Secret Intelligence Service. Le Carré is internationally famous for his spy novels, most notably, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). A Small Town in Germany lands between the two chronologically, but is not given the renown of the other two, nor of his later works. Many of his books have been made into feature films with wide distribution.
In the introduction to A Small Town in Germany le Carré states that the book actually started out as a “black comedy about British political matters,” but ended up as a “political ghost story.” This is not difficult to understand: Once one becomes interested in Cold War theatrics, and presumably one so close as he to the living diorama, nay drama? one is easily engrossed and all the more inquisitive on the subject. As am I, in UST’s International Studies, Germany and all that entails is captivating and seemingly without an end in sight to its matter. The British comedy aspect is apparent in this book. So much so, that some of the less than obvious colloquial references are missed by the American reader, but the literary references are ample and appreciated.
To even the most casual observer of the spy genre, the formula is basic: Someone, unknown to someone else, has taken off with something, of some unknown value to do something treacherous that will destroy the safety and sanctity of a nation or even the world. After the Dreyfus Affair in France in 1894, when that ne’er-do-well, Alfred Dreyfus was accused (now known, wrongly) of passing French military secrets to the Germans, and the notoriety that followed the case, the interest to the general population was noticed and the spy genre emerged. In the early part of the twentieth century novelists, such as James Fenimore Cooper, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad and John Buchan wrote of espionage, intelligence, strategy and invasions, each in their own fashion. The genre took off followed by the writers of World War- and Cold War-era intrigue and culminating, most famously in the James Bond series of a dapper, well-heeled British spy, connoisseur of gadgets and ladies. The Cold War, was a large and prosperous source of subject matter for spy writers. The Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc and the war’s atrocities left lots of information to glean. The public’s West vs. East thirst that was prurient for more conquering, even fictional, gave writers plenty to milk. No doubt, the American and British governments stoked the writers and studios to keep the propaganda alive.
In most recently written spy stories, there are likely to be colossal fight scenes with martial arts maneuvers (expertly managed by the protagonist, no less), guns, explosions, high-risk chases – the whole gamut. Le Carré is not that kind of storyteller. His is more clues, evidence, intuition and psychology. As in, the big “WHY: why would a lowly functionary steal off with this information, why would no one ever suspect him, why would he have dug out information that had been placed in the dead file room for destruction, why would someone we’ve known for twenty years turn on us? It is not only of the suspected spy that the why question is asked, but also of the investigator himself as in: why am I not getting into his head yet, why am I so loyal to my job that I’ve ruined my marriage, why am I not trying to defect? So the reader of le Carré’s novels is more interested in not only reading about a topic, but of the moralistic and personal tax a situation may have on the characters and less interested in the physical reflexes of a masculine pulp read.
I don’t think I enjoyed this book as much as I thought I would, then again, maybe I did. I expected the writing to be superb, which is was (except for a couple of bothersome typos in the text). I expected the Cold War information to be well researched and credible, even if fictitious, and it was. I expected richly drawn characters, which they were, although some had manifestations so extreme in their actions and personalities that it seemed a stretch; the women were all (three) portrayed as fools (very misogynist, I think); and there were lots of references to the homosexual nature of men who were not homosexual (another misogynist device or maybe just a testosterone-fueled insult). What I didn’t like were the constant analogies of the mist to the situations or the rat-a-tat, full-on, blame and retort two-sided conversations which often muddled who was saying what. All in all, I think I disliked it enough that I may have to read more of le Carré’s novels and some spy novels of other authors to make certain that is a genre unworthy of my bookshelf. ;-)