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@silverviewss
overly specific question for the premier lecarréhead on tumblr: do you have any le carré recs for characters who find themselves unable to walk away despite all their efforts? could be walking away from a system, a relationship, a worldview, a subculture (perhaps one would argue that the occupation of a spy somewhat functions as one) etc
GEORGE SMILEY
like, for real, the entire thing about george smiley is that in every single book there is a moment where he looks through the service, sees the rot, and then decides to continue doing his job. straight up in smiley's people, he's on the brink of an epiphany about this when karla finally defects and then veers away from it:
He looked across the river into the darkness again, and an unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and possess him and claim him despite his striving, calling him a traitor also; mocking him, yet at the same time applauding his betrayal. On Karla has descended the curse of Smiley’s compassion; on Smiley the curse of Karla’s fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other’s frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man’s-land.
He thought again of Vladimir and Otto Leipzig and the dead Kirov; he thought of Haydon and his own life’s work ruined; he thought of Ann, permanently stained for him by Karla’s cunning and Haydon’s scheming embrace. He recited in his despair a whole list of crimes—the tortures, the killings, the endless ring of corruption—to lay upon the frail shoulders of this one pedestrian on the bridge, but they would not stay there: he did not want these spoils, won by these methods.
And then he does exactly nothing, goes on to train the next batch of spies in The Secret Pilgrim and then in A Legacy of Spies does a turn as a sentimentalist for all their various compromises, including the straight up eventual murder of Liz Gold, because it was all for Europe. Classic net zero information / growth you know?
Peter Guillaume is also in the same boat, though he manages to be more naive than Smiley and therefore successfully achieve the cognitive distortions needed to position themselves as heroic - or at least to remain self-interested, though he never surrenders his loyalty to the Service entirely.
I recently finished reading Single & Single, in which Oliver Single is incapable of walking away from his horrible showboating father. TBH, any le Carre where a bad dad is involved will almost certainly have a man who is haunted by the bad dad and torn between love and disdain and incapable of fully walking away from him / being disloyal to him. In Single & Single its sort of fascinating, because Oliver Single does betray his father, but at the same time tries to save his father from the consequences of his betrayal and protect him from it. Keep in mind that his father is essentially running a money laundering operation for cocaine smuggling and other violent racketeering, so its not exactly like his father is a dove.
Those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head!
Hi again~I really need to ask your opinion on Bill Haydon: What could be his internal and external conflict? What are his values and beliefs? How his development changes in TTSS? What was his backstory? And anything on his relationship with Prideaux will really help me. Thank you 100x times in advance!
Hiya!
Bill is a mess to analyze, tbh. All the lies that spies tell of themselves are doubly compounded in his case, and as we never get in his head it’s hard to know how he sees himself. His backstory is the easiest, I think: he comes from pretty blue-blooded stock (cousins with Ann, who is certifiably a Lady), and I think it’s mentioned that he has sisters and that his domineering father (whom Ann called “The Monster”) was a judge. So he probably did the usual boarding schools pretty much all the way up, and then Oxford, where he met Jim and they fell together.
I personally read Bill as a frustrated upper-class aesthete, of sorts, who seeks some freedom from his father through art but who is objectively not actually a very good artist (certainly not enough to ever make a living as an artist). At the same time, I don’t think he was politically wild or extreme at Oxford; he at least played at being politically conservative despite the whole artist thing. He falls into the secret service because he has an aptitude for expert lying/deception/living multiple lives and because it’s a way to serve your country. Almost immediately he and Jim get drawn into WWII that way, which is a huge break in normalcy in a lot of ways.
At some point (according to what Bill tells George it’s the Suez Crisis in the 1950s) Bill’s disillusionment with his father turns into a general disillusionment with Britain as a whole. George’s thoughts on the matter are that Bill, like George himself, was bred to rule the British Empire, and by WWII it had become clear that there would not BE a British Empire anymore (India got its independence not long after the war, for example, and in the Suez Crisis Britain lost a lot more bargaining power and it was becoming clear that the US was the new superpower on the scene). Bill claims that he became “aesthetically” disillusioned with that and with the dangers of the US as a superpower and decided to serve the Soviets at that point, but I personally don’t think Bill was ever a true-blue Communist in any real way; I think “aesthetic” disillusionment is a polite way of saying that Bill saw the world he had been bred as an upper-class Englishman to believe in (the British Empire, ruling the waves, yadda yadda yadda) completely slipping away and the place he had been implicitly promised in that empire (by virtue of his birth and schooling) completely disappearing and so he basically was like “well then fuck you too, Britain, I never liked you anyway, I’ll go help the enemy then.” He sees Britain becoming impotent post-war, feels as though he was entitled to better, and says “fuck it.” Also, Bill has a certain streak of drama and playacting in him and I think it would have appealed to him to be the center of everything, directing the chaos around him, even if no one else knew that he was doing that.
To a certain extent the sympathetic part of me thinks Bill got drawn in over his head. Over the years Bill commits awful treason, treason that directly and indirectly leads to the injury and death of a whole bunch of other Circus operatives as well as the non-British civilians who served in their networks. George thinks at some point that “treason is a habit like any other” or something like that, and I think that’s a pretty good way of describing how Bill continues to do what he does, even as it escalates to sacrificing the person he ostensibly loves the most (to the extent that a spy wrapped up in 20 different selves at all times is capable of love); he’s addicted to the game, to the sense of sneaky power it gives him, maybe even believes that everything will be okay no matter what, that he will escape to the Soviet Union when his time has come, and so he just kind of elides over all the chaos and harm that happens to others (humans are great at deluding themselves and justifying their actions no matter what, of course). Testify sort of reminds him of the danger, I think, in that it’s Jim getting blown and then Jim who potentially nearly dies, only to be hauled out after all by Karla (who is the one in control here, really, and not Bill, despite Bill’s probable lies to himself that he has more control than he really does). Nonetheless, Bill keeps on trucking, because really, what is he going to do? If he stops serving the Soviets they’re not just going to let him drop quietly off the map, and the British aren’t going to just warmly welcome him back into the fold if he’s all “I was serving the Soviets for 10+ years but I’m better now, lol!!!!! What’s up guys!!!” He’s never going to be able to do anything but straddle the crack between the two worlds once he’s started, and I think his sense of pride also won’t let him consider backing off.
Values and beliefs in general, I’m not sure. What are anyone’s values and beliefs in the Circus? Serving the country probably factored in at one point for many, particularly those drawn in during WWII, but that only goes so far, and I think it gets lost after a while in all the different lives they begin to live. I think Bill has a strong streak of self-love (not necessarily greedy acquisitive selfishness, but love of himself above most other things) and vanity and a certain artistic flair. Consciously he does what he does for the power it gives him, the drama it allows him to soak his life in, the sense of control he has (note that the actual power or control he has is probably not quite what he might like to think). It makes everything that much more vibrant and alive, to be living multiple lives, serving two sides, and balancing them constantly, and he avoids thinking of what will happen if and when that wave he’s riding collapses. Unconsciously, I think Bill has a desperate need to feel in control, to feel important, to get attention from the outside world that he was not able to get from his domineering/cold father or from his mediocre art and that he feels slipping away as Britain continues to fall after World War II and becomes less and less important on the world stage. So he’ll make his own niche to serve, of two worlds, and damn the moral consequences (which are murky to begin with in the world of espionage, even if you’re not a double agent).
He and Jim are almost officially canonically lovers, at least during the youth/Oxford period. Whether that sexual/romantic aspect carried on into their later years is more uncertain. I think they got a lot from each other regardless, blurring the boundaries between artist/desk jockey and athlete/fieldman throughout their lives until the end. Bill’s vibrancy and charisma attracted a lot of people to him, whereas Jim’s steadiness is attractive as a grounding point for Bill. Jim is also a remnant of a time in his life when Bill was not entirely duplicitous, when the war hadn’t happened yet and they could all still dream that their bluebloodedness alone would be enough to ensure their places in the world, ruling an empire in some way or another. When Bill allows Jim to be sacrificed in Testify, it’s the beginning of the end for a lot of things, and symbolically in some ways Bill’s last break with recognizeable British upper-class humanity and fellowship. And to me personally it is so beautiful that, amidst all the professional amorality involved and the question of who can judge Bill, the answer is Jim, a very personal answer; Bill has blurred the lines to make it hard to separate the jolly personal man from the horrendous professional crimes he contributed to, the man from the nation he betrayed, so of course it has to be Jim, who was betrayed both personally and professionally in the deepest of ways (by his lover), who judges and kills Bill (an act I consider simultaneously revenge and mercy, keeping Bill from the Soviets).
Anyway, this is meandering as hell, and I apologize for that! Hopefully at least some of what you wanted is in here. The reality is that Bill is intentionally impossible to judge for certain, a forever-cipher of all sorts of concepts without a resolution, in many ways a theme/concept/question more than a full character, so all we can ever do is speculate.
psychoanalyzing bill
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the biggest difference between show bill haydon and book bill haydon is that the show is far more comfortable with implying that bill is an unrepentant and wholly dedicated acolyte of the communist Cause ideologically, completely Fine with being a tool of karla, hence why he is mostly pretty smug until he realises his political choice has intruded upon his private life. his speech against capitalism and disillusionment with western democracy is played completely straight. but as we know, book bill is ideologically suspect; jlc implies that he is probably only acting out of a spurned sense of ambition in keeping with his thwarted british imperial desires and he sees the soviet lifeboat as the one to jump towards: if the british cause is failing he can be at the forefront of the new empire and hopefully bolster britain’s reputation along the way. he is anti american because of america hogging the limelight on the world stage that britain england once occupied. plus its aesthetics lol. that being said jlc obviously leaves a certain level of ambiguity around this reasoning, teasing personal and familial motivations*, but on the whole bill is a genuine patriot to the end, and stalls when he is cast by smiley as karla’s pawn. the 2011 film goes the opposite direction and makes bill almost ideologically unaware, an artist who has got himself in too deep, and accordingly they play up his schoolboyish charm and naïveté. ultimately, i’m not completely satisfied with either portrayal and it makes me wonder how dan stevenson’s take will play out in the legacy series— especially so because the last few ink factory productions have been decontextualised relative to their sources, but legacy is a novel that entirely relies on context
*without going into how much of this is intended as smiley’s view of bill’s character, or how far smiley is potentially projecting onto him, given that jlc has established bill’s tendency to reflect the patriotic aspirations of other characters
the thing about jlc is he is a sherlock holmes fan
anyway smiley/karla - holmes/moriarty parallels or something
this one’s more of a stretch but role of a proxy agent with a memorable alias -> chain of investigation that leads to exposing larger operation led by shadowy figure. this trope isn’t inherent to doyle but you get me
again not an exact parallel, but possible influence
"So what's your name, George? Sherlock Holmes dogging his poor old Moriarty? Captain Ahab chasing his big white whale? Who are you?" Smiley did not reply.
Damn you, George Smiley. Damn you and all who sail in you.
the thing about jlc is he is a sherlock holmes fan
dan stevens as haydon seems in line with what they were doing in the karla’s choice book (said by person who has not read that book)
sometimes you just happen to find articles with the most unhinged titles on jstor
even more jlc tradecraft exhibition - notes for the little drummer girl
even more misc karla trilogy notes from the jlc tradecraft exhibition. this time on jerry westerby and karla
more drafts from the tradecraft exhibition, this time for a perfect spy
ft bob gottlieb being funny in the last one ‘this part reads like pure memoir’ we get it
tinker tailor soldier spy ms/draft pics from the tradecraft exhibition
ft some character notes on jim prideaux:
USSR
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