The Night Manager: John & Daphne & Corky & Rebecca

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 13^th 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.