Last
night I dreamt I went to East Berlin again.
One of the oddest memories of the Cold War was my reading, at some point in the mid-80s during its Reagan/Gorbachev-instigated catharsis, a remark to the effect that Western capitalism was bound to triumph over Soviet collectivism because of the moral ascendancy of our cold war culture, and that decisive evidence for this perception was to be found in the literary excellence of the Cold War espionage thrillers of John le Carre. I’m not sure now whose proposition this was – possibly the late Roger Scruton, the idea certainly being batty enough – but it put me off the idea of reading le Carre at all until well after the War itself was lost and won. Then, of course, I began to understand what I’d been missing. And it certainly wasn’t validation of the moral ascendancy of capitalism’s values under American hegemony.
If we think
of le Carre as the magus of the cold war in fiction, it comes as a shock to
realise that those decades of low dishonesty only map onto and concern the
first half of his career. When the walls
came tumbling down in 1989/90, he’d just published his 13th novel The
Secret Pilgrim. But what to do when you find, at age 58, that the old world
has vanished, transformed into a new set of moral depravities? He could have chosen to keep his place in the
old world as a kind of curator of newly historicalised fiction of the Cold War,
preserved in looking-glass amber.
Instead he
chose to shed those ambiguities for the multi-polar complexities of the new world – peace dividend,
end-of-history and all. So there is a
sense in which The Night Manager published in 1993, as the dust of the
fallen walls was settling, is really his second first novel, his Numero Deux.
Given its
current (very enjoyable) re-invention as a glossy babes, bombs & Balenciaga
thriller, it's well worth re-examining the novel itself. For a ‘second
first novel’ there are two remarkable things about it.
One is the way
le Carre develops to an end-state his long-standing preferential option for the agent in the
field over the delinquent agent-runners safe at their desks.
The other
is an act of grand larceny from the work of another writer so spectacular that
it can only be an hommage, so well-hidden in plain sight that it has, so
far as I’m aware, gone completely unremarked. It’s this aspect that I want to examine briefly
here - and I should state at this point that what follows will puzzle anyone
familiar only with the 2016 TV adaptation, where the updating of the action to
the new millennium means that the unravelling of the plot follows quite
different physical & geographical arrangements from those of the book
(& non-coincidentally delivers a much less morally ambiguous resolution
than le Carre’s original).
In summary,
Pine/Quince/Birch’s penetration of Roper’s household and organization encompasses
a set of motifs each member of which has some sort of origin, back through the
looking glass, in a quite different novel by another writer. I need to stress here that I’m not suggesting
plagiarism of any sort. Something quite
different seems to be going on, and it is a rather wonderful puzzle, a sort of
letter-home to the lost world.
Let’s
consider –
· Pine/Quince/Birch’s house on the Cornish
coast is an emblematic place of refuge, self-discovery, memory and re-invention.
· A young naif finds herself installed
as chatelaine to an older, violent man. Jed is a trophy, powerless to control
the members of his staff & is effectively a prisoner of that man and his
household.
· The household is dominated by a chief
servant, Corcoran, whose loyalty makes him suspicious and contemptuous of the intruder
Pine.
· The revelation of the truth &
the resolution of the plot revolve around events that occur on a small boat.
These shards
of broken plot, re-arranged in the looking-glass imagination are authentic
motifs of the narrative of The Night Manager every bit as much as they
are of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. And the identification of the gay, alcoholic
inside-outsider Major ‘Corky’ Corcoran, Richard Roper’s deeply disturbed consigliere,
as a Mrs Danvers in drag is an exquisite piece of transformation. But what exactly was le Carre playing at with
this bit of literary exhumation & relic-adoration?
I have no
idea if he admired du Maurier’s work or knew her in life. Both of them, it is
worth recording, lived in coastal Cornwall and both seem to have had deeply
problematical relationships with their fathers.
Du Maurier died in 1989, a few months before the events that destroyed the
old world that was le Carre’s
imaginative kingdom.
If there’s
anything beyond that, I’d be guessing that in some respect we all carry around with
us memories of our own Manderley, the
lost Purgatory to which, once we have ascended from its summit, we can never
return. And that by vicariously invoking this land of lost discontent le Carre
may have been telling himself, probably subconsciously, that for him one life
as the chronicler of the moral choices of the Cold War was ended and could
not be returned to. Another, as the
chronicler of the moral choices of the multi-polar world had arrived. And this
meant an unencumbered critique of the newly-imposed ascendancy of the people just
then congratulating themselves upon having won the Cold War. The arms dealers of The Night Manager,
the drug-toting globalists of The Constant Gardener, and le Carre’s own
disavowal of Britain towards the end of his life by becoming a citizen of its original
colony, all suggest that he had nothing for the comfort of any of them. Scruton,
if it was indeed him, must have been profoundly disappointed. The rest of us can only rejoice.