The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

Novel

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

John le Carre

I first read this book about twenty years back. It hit me like a bolt from blue. Till then I had not read any espionage book of such intensity. The book and Alec Leamas haunted my thoughts for long. Over the years I forgot the smaller details and the plot, but remembered the overall gloomy atmosphere of the novel which had so enticed me then. Yes, this I feel, is the most distinguishing character of the book. If there is a colour in the book it is grey, an all-pervading grey. John le Carre is unsparing in painting the frailties of his characters, the commonplace follies of all men and the ultimate futility of much of human scheming and endeavour.

Second unique facet of book is the way author has deglamourized the Spy. ‘What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors also, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play Cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives’ rants his protagonist in the book. His spy is not a tall, dark hunk jumping from a swanky car to a mean looking flying machine, muscles rippling and groins bustling, as comfortable with latest gizmos as adept at charming hare-brained beauties. In this book spies are tired middle age men, doing their job with as much expertise and indifference as a hospital doctor or a bank clerk. Here John le Carre is describing the chief of the British Intelligence, The Control, ‘He was shorter than Leamas remembered him…The same affected detachment, the same donnish conceits, the same horror of draughts, the same milk-and-water smile, the same elaborate diffidence…The same banality’.

This is a thinking man’s espionage story. There are no extensive descriptions of the plot and subplots and much is left unsaid. Author’s skill is in the ease with which reader can guess this. There is no ambiguity here and there are no two ways about what has been left out. Book describes with amazing felicity, a triple bluff planned by the British Intelligence when they infiltrate one of their old guards in to the communist east, in to the cold. The plot is superbly woven and masterfully told in an understated and pithy prose. In short sentences and brief descriptions author presents a clear picture of the scene and its people. Sample this, ‘The airport reminded Leamas of the war…Everywhere that air of conspiracy which generates among people who have been up since dawn of superiority almost, derived from the common experience of having seen the night disappear and the morning come. The staff…treated the passengers and their baggage with the remoteness of men returned from the front: ordinary mortals had nothing for them that morning.’

John le Carre’s intention seems not to narrate the intrigues and machinations of an espionage drama, but record the devastation that befalls a person who spends his life in the practice of subterfuge and deceit, how such a person becomes immune to the commonplace stimulations of an ordinary life. Cold, regarded in this sense, is a metaphor for many things. Other than the geographically and politically distinct east and its idiomatic use in ‘coming in from cold’, it also stands for the aloofness of detached spy who has become so inured to dissimulation in his life that warmth of human relations leaves him utterly unmoved. End of the novel sees Alec Leamas delivered of both these colds. Watching a girl standing on a beach who is throwing bread crumbs to the sea gulls, Leamas realises, ‘what it was Liz had given him, the thing that he would have to go back and find if ever he got home to England: It was the caring about little things – the faith in ordinary life…’

The deep insight into the mind of a spy and this sensitivity pervading the whole story; these are the things that set this book – and most of John le Carre novels that followed this – apart from other espionage fiction. One finds similar country in many Graham Greene books, ‘Our Man in Havana’ and ‘The Human Factor’ come to mind. I remember having read somewhere that this trend of realistic spy story was started by Somerset Maugham in his famous Ashenden Tales, wherein he fictionalised his experiences of First World War.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a devastating book. But in the wake of this devastation it leaves an enduring sense of satisfaction and contentment, might I say an incipient joy -which grows even after turning the last page of the book- at having glimpsed a theretofore unobserved facet of human nature.