Fanatics and Absolutists: Communist Monsters in John le Carré’s Cold War Fiction

Toby Manning

Abstract John le Carré’s Cold War espionage novels were heralded as a realist antidote to the Manichean, good vs. evil simplicities of Ian Fleming and John Buchan. Rather than creating British gentlemen unmasking foreign grotesques, le Carré was held by critics and media commentators to have demonstrated a moral equivalence between the Cold Warring sides. To the contrary, le Carré retains a subtle Manicheanism, and creates British heroes just as gentlemanly as Buchan’s, who do battle with Eastern monsters, dehumanised by Communist ‘ideology.’ This reflects contemporary anxieties about a British ‘way of life’ felt to be under threat from expansionist Soviet Communism from without and post-war social reorganisation from within. In Call for the Dead (1961) Communist villain, Dieter Frey, is a ‘Satanic’ multiple-murderer who is cathartically executed by George Smiley. Into the mouth of GDR Communist, Fiedler, in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), le Carré puts a ‘monstrous utilitarianism’ regarding human life. With Soviet master spy, Karla, le Carré created an enemy of mythic monstrousness for Smiley to battle in a 1970s trilogy of novels. Implacable and brutal, Karla is an inhuman ‘fanatic,’ a lethal merger of ‘ideology’ and ‘evil.’ That Karla never speaks a word throughout the trilogy enhances his monstrosity, while also crucially silencing his political rationale. Modern twists on this monstrosity occur in the way neo-Nazi spymaster Mundt in The Spy and Nazi war criminal Karfeld in A Small Town in Germany (1968) both transpire to be on the British side. We see this twist also in the mirror imaging of Smiley and Karla in Smiley’s People (1980). But British monstrosity is seen only as a copy of – and defence against – a Communist original. Although the British state is defended as much as decried, perhaps the unambiguous defeat of these Communist monsters in every novel is an indicator of political insecurity in both le Carré and Cold War British culture.

Key Words: le Carré, Manichean, spy, villain, Cold War, Soviet, Communism, ideology, socialism, evil.

*****

1. Cold War as Monstrous Conflict John le Carré’s novels arrived in the early 1960s, at the chilly peak of the Cold War, midway between the Berlin Crisis (1961) and the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962). Starting with Call for the Dead (June, 1961) le Carré’s espionage novels charted thirty of the forty-four years of the Cold War, both reflecting and representing an unprecedented period in world history, in which political conflicts 44 Fanatics and Absolutists ______not only expanded to become global, but magnified to threaten the very existence of that globe, via nuclear war. We might say then that the very concept upon which the Cold War stood – mutually assured destruction – was fundamentally monstrous. Le Carré’s novels performed a very clever feat: they took these huge, global, political events and existential fears and replayed them on a smaller, accessible, human scale, without sacrificing an ounce of drama. His heroes are, ‘Just folks, another nebbish from next door caught in the grind’ as one contemporary commentator put it.1 So le Carré’s breakthrough novel, internationally bestselling phenomenon, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), could be seen as the Cold War writ small, whereby one British citizen, Liz Gold, a mousy, impoverished librarian, is deliberately sacrificed for strategic political gain. Liz’s older secret agent lover, Alec Leamas, talks of the ‘ordinary, crummy people like you and me,’2 the ordinary people whose lives were put on the line for political imperatives via the daily threat of nuclear war. As such, le Carré’s novels were heralded as a realist antidote to the romantic fantasies of spy writers like John Buchan and Ian Fleming, whose work still dominated the field. 3 In a typical review, Patrick Gaffney in The Scotsman declared of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold:

There is a chilling authenticity about it: one feels that here truly are the monstrous realities behind the news paragraphs which record the shifts and tensions of the Cold War.4

There is a tension in the very language Gaffney uses here: a pull and push between adventure story dramatics and journalistic sobriety; a tension that, yes, suggests the banal everyday monstrousness of nuclear deterrence, but which also suggests that this new ‘realism’ was perhaps not quite the departure from the derring-do of Buchan and Fleming that is being declared. Le Carré’s Cold-War realism was claimed by reviewers – and is still claimed by journalists and critics –5 to reveal a moral equivalence between West and East, to represent a break from the Manichean, good vs. evil simplicities, saints versus monsters world-view of the Bond books – and of British government propaganda. But le Carré’s most famous spy, recurring hero George Smiley, is quite as much Britain’s heroic champion as is Bond, just reduced to more realistic scale: bespectacled, short, always out of breath, but intellectually brilliant and fundamentally decent. Smiley may be dowdier of dress and less gifted with girls than Bond, but Smiley is just as gentlemanly a hero as 007. Smiley even lives, according to fictional legend, just across the King’s Road from his more glamorous rival and neighbour, Commander Bond, in, naturally, a quieter, less flashy part of Chelsea.