Zusammenfassung Abstract Barbara KORTE the Fading of the Hero In

Home , Adam Carter, Harry Pearce, Lucas North, Spooks (series 1), Spooks (series 10), Spooks (series 2)

http://www.interferenceslitteraires.be ISSN : 2031 - 2790

Barbara Korte The Fading of the Hero in the Spy Genre A Case Study of Spooks (BBC 2002-2011)

Zusammenfassung Spionagefiktion suggeriert typischerweise, dass das Heldentum von Geheimagenten prekär ist. Spione lügen, betrügen und töten, und ihre moralische Fragwürdigkeit wird treffend mit dem britischen umgangssprachlichen Ausdruck ‘spook’ erfasst, vom Ursprung her ein Synonym für ‘Geist,.Gespenst’. Aufgrund ihrer moralischen Fragwürdigkeit haben Spione und die Fiktionen, die sie darstellen, eine besondere Affinität zur Idee des ‘verschwindenden’ Heldens und Heldentums. Spionagefiktion projiziert einen Heroismus, dessen Bedeutungen und Manifestationen prekär sind, der erscheint und verschwindet, der in bestimmten Augenblicken aufleuchtet, dann aber wieder verblasst. Der Artikel zeigt dies zunächst für das Spionagegenre per se, dann in einem Close Reading von Spooks (2002-2011), einer von der BBC produzierten Fernsehserie über den Sicherheitsdienst des Vereinigten Königreichs. Die Länge und (Dis-) Kontinuitäten serieller Narration ermöglichen ein komplexes Erzählen und widersprüchliche Charakterzeichnung, einschließlich der Möglichkeit, dass heroisierte Figuren einen bedeutungsvollen und verstörenden Wandel erfahren. Dies erreicht einen Höhepunkt in der neunten Staffel von Spooks, auf die dieser Aufsatz seinen Fokus legt; hier durchlebt der Held einen Wandel seiner Moral und Persönlichkeit , der angesichts seiner früheren Geschichte und der Kenntnisse, die die Zuschauer über ihn aufgebaut haben, nicht vorhersagbar ist. Abstract Spy fiction typically suggests that the heroicity of the secret agent is, at best, an insecure one. Spies lie, deceive and kill, and their moral shadiness is aptly captured in the British colloquial expression ‘spook’, originally a synonym for ‘ghost’. It is this shadiness through which spies and the fictions that depict them have a special affinity to the idea of ‘fading’ heroes and heroism. Spy fiction projects a heroism whose meanings and manifestations are unstable, that appears and disappears, that may shine in some moments and fade in others. This is shown first for the spy genre per se and then in a close reading of the long-running television programme Spooks (2002-2011), produced by the BBC about the United Kingdom’s Security Service. The length and dis-/continuities of serial narration enable complex storytelling and contradictory characterisation, including the possibility that heroised characters undergo significant and disturbing change. This reached a peak in the ninth season of Spooks, on which this article focuses, where the series’ male hero at the time undergoes a shift in morality and personality that is unpredictable from his earlier narrative and the knowledge the viewers have accumulated about him.

To quote this article: Barbara Korte «The Fading of the Hero in the Spy Fiction. A Case Study ofSpooks (BBC 2002-2011)», in: Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 22, « Un-Fading the Hero. Reconfiguring Ancient and Premodern Heroic Templates in Modern and Contemporary Culture», ed. by Michiel Rys & Bart Philipsen, September 2018, 167-178. Comité de direction – redactiecomité Anke Gilleir (KU Leuven) – Rédacteur en chef - Hoofdredacteur Beatrijs Vanacker (KU Leuven) – Secrétaire de rédaction - Redactiesecretaris Elke D’hoker (KU Leuven) Lieven D’hulst (KU Leuven – Kortrijk) David Martens (KU Leuven) Hubert Roland (FNRS – UCL) Matthieu Sergier ((UCL & Factultés Universitaires Saint-Louis) Myriam Watthee-Delmotte (FNRS – UCL)

Conseil de rédaction – Redactieraad

Sascha bru (KU Leuven) Michel Lisse (FNRS – UCL) Geneviève Fabry (UCL) Anneleen Masschelein (KU Leuven) Agnès Guiderdoni (FNRS – UCL) Christophe Meurée (FNRS – UCL) Ortwin de Graef (KU Leuven) Reine Meylaerts (KU Leuven) Jan Herman (KU Leuven) Stéphanie Vanasten (FNRS – UCL) Guido Latré (UCL) Bart Van den Bosche (KU Leuven) Nadia Lie (KU Leuven) Marc van Vaeck (KU Leuven)

Comité scientifique – Wetenschappelijk comité

Olivier Ammour-Mayeur (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle -– Gillis Dorleijn (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Paris III & Université Toulouse II – Le Mirail) Ute Heidmann (Université de Lausanne) erensmeyer Ingo B (Universität Giessen) Klaus H. Kiefer (Ludwig Maxilimians Universität München) ernaerts Lars B (Universiteit Gent & Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Michael Kolhauer (Université de Savoie) inckes Faith B (Worcester College – Oxford) Isabelle Krzywkowski (Université Stendhal-Grenoble III) ossier Philiep B (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen) Mathilde Labbé (Université Paris Sorbonne) ruera Franca B (Università di Torino) SofianeL aghouati (Musée Royal de Mariemont) eballos iro Àlvaro C V (Université de Liège) François Lecercle (Université Paris Sorbonne) helebourg Christian C (Université de Lorraine) Ilse Logie (Universiteit Gent) ostadura Edoardo C (Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena) Marc Maufort (Université Libre de Bruxelles) reighton Nicola C (Queen’s University Belfast) Isabelle Meuret (Université Libre de Bruxelles) ecker William M. D (Oklahoma State University) Christina Morin (University of Limerick) de ruyn Ben B (Maastricht University) Miguel Norbartubarri (Universiteit Antwerpen) elabastita Dirk D (Université de Namur) Andréa Oberhuber (Université de Montréal) elville Michel D (Université de Liège) Jan Oosterholt (Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg) ominguez César D (Universidad de Santiago de Compostella Maïté Snauwaert (University of Alberta – Edmonton) & King’s College) Pieter Verstraeten ((Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)

Interférences littéraires / Literaire interferenties KU Leuven – Faculteit Letteren Blijde-Inkomststraat 21 – Bus 3331 B 3000 Leuven (Belgium) Contact : [email protected] & [email protected] Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 22, September 2018

The Fading of the Hero in the Spy Genre. A Case Study of «Spooks» (BBC 2002-2011)

Introduction Spy fiction has been noted for its hero-sceptical bias and its potential for critical inquiry into heroic discourse and the cultural meanings of heroism. Since the genre emerged around 1900, its peaks of popularity have coincided with times when the social significance of heroes and heroism was (and is) most strongly contested.1 There are instances of the heroic spy – James Bond being an obvious example – but spy fiction seems more typically inclined to portray its protagonists and their deeds from a sceptical point of view and in a manner that de-heroises rather than heroises them. It reveals the flaws and fallibility of its spy characters and the moral ambiguity of what they do even when they act for the greater good of their country. Spy fiction suggests that the heroicity of the secret agent is, at best, an insecure one. It is tainted by the necessity to lie, deceive and even kill, and this is grounded in reality: As Ernest Volkman points out, espionage “is regarded as a serious crime in every nation, almost universally punishable by death”.2 The moral ambiguity of spies and spying is captured in a British colloquial expression for the secret agent: The word ‘spook’, originally a synonym for ‘ghost’, points to the shady quality of spies and their deeds, and it is this shadiness through which spies and the fictions that depict them have a special affinity to the idea of ‘fading’ heroes and heroism. It is the aim of the following pages to explore this affinity and to show how spy fiction typically projects a heroism that is precarious, whose meanings and manifestations are unstable, that appears and disappears, that may shine in some moments and fade in others. This will be shown first for the spy genreper se and then in a close reading of one example: the long-running television programme Spooks (2002-2011), produced by the BBC about agents of MI5, the United Kingdom’s Security Service. The origins of spy fiction are in (British) literature, but today the

1. While much has been written on the history of espionage fiction, the following surveys are of particular relevance in this respect: John Atkins, The British Spy Novel. Styles in Treachery, London, Calder, 1984; Lars Ole Sauerberg, Secret Agents in Fiction. Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Len Deighton, London, Macmillan, 1984; John G. Cawelti & Bruce A. Rosenberg, The Spy Story, Chicago, Uni- versity of Chicago Press, 1987; Michael Denning, Cover Stories. Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987; Clive Bloom (ed.), Spy Thrillers. From Buchan to le Carré, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1990; and Jost Hindersmann, Der britische Spionageroman. Vom Im- perialismus bis zum Ende des Kalten Krieges, Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995. For a survey of the genre’s engagement with heroes and heroisms see Barbara Korte, Geheime Helden. Spione in der Populärkultur des 21. Jahrhunderts, Göttingen, Wallstein, 2017. For a general discussion on anti-heroes and post-heroic scepticism in modern culture see Victor Brombert, In Praise of An- tiheroes. Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature 1830–1980, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999. 2. Ernest Volkman, The History of Espionage. The Clandestine World of Surveillance, Spying and Intelligence, from Ancient Times to the post-9/11 World, London, Carleton, 2007, 7.

167 «Spooks» genre manifests itself in a range of media and with their different aesthetics. This includes television,3 and while the focus of this article does not permit me to do justice to Spooks as a significant piece of British television culture, it will be pointed out that one element of its televisuality, seriality, is crucial for the particularly effective way in which Spooks presents heroes and heroism as transitory phenomena that ‘fade’ in and out of its narratives. In its ten-year run, Spooks switched between lead characters with different heroic contours, and it also presented striking changes within one and the same character. It is in such moments of transition and turn that the programme’s critique of the ideas and ideals of heroism is most prominent. Before this is discussed further, it is necessary to take a brief look at the spy genre and its general stance towards the heroic.

The Spy Genre and Precarious Heroism As Tzvetan Todorov claimed in an influential article, genres codify the “dis- cursive properties” of a society and stand in a relationship to its “dominant ideology”; they are part of a culture’s meaning-making structures and processes.4 In the more recent jargon of formalist cultural studies, specific literary forms and media formats can be seen as ‘affording’ certain kinds of cultural and sociopolitical meanings; they enable certain ways of making sense of the world rather than others.5 It is an affordance of the spy genre – with its clandestine operations and morally blemished protagonists – that it throws light on the ambivalences, contradictions and transgressions of the heroic and can so function as a fictional space where the heroic and its cultural meanings undergo critical scrutiny. This had become a trade- mark of the genre by the time of the Cold War, and it has survived until the present. Spy fiction habitually asserts that spies should not be trusted and shows that their loyalty is doubted even within the services for which they work. Paradoxically, secret agents protect their society by violating its laws and fundamental values, even if these are values in which they themselves believe. The spy’s dilemma is increased by the fact that their methods are the same as those employed by the people they fight. From a legal point of view, we can say therefore that “one of the more start- ling aspects of law, as depicted in spy fiction, is that it appears to permit certain state actors – those ‘licensed to kill’ – to commit the most serious crimes; acts hailed as necessary and even heroic, rather than deserving of punishment”.6 Because of this transgression, Jerry Palmer refers to the secret agent as a typical “insider-out- sider” of their society,7 while Lars Ole Sauerberg compares the secret agent with a hangman: The fictional secret agent has a function quite similar to that of the public executioner: he does the dirty work so that society can maintain its harmo-

3. See, for example, Wesley Wark (ed.), Spy Fiction, Spy Films, and Real Intelligence, London, Frank Cass, 1991; Wesley Britton, Beyond Bond. Spies in Fiction and Film, Westport, Praeger 2005; and Oliver S. Buckton, Espionage in British Fiction and Film since 1900. The Changing Enemy, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015. 4. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Origin of Genres”, in: New Literary History, 1976, 8, 159-170, here 162-3. 5. See Caroline Levine, Forms. Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 2015. 6. Rosanna Cavallaro, “Licensed To Kill. Spy Fiction and the Demise of Law”, in: San Diego Law Review, 2010, 47, 642-680, at 645. 7. Jerry Palmer, Thrillers. Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre, London, Arnold, 1978, 25.

168 Barbara Korte

ny. […] But from the realization that punishment or secret-agent activities are sometimes needed for society to continue its existence, it does not follow that hangmen or secret agents are generally admired persons. On the contrary, most people shy away from them because they have blood on their hands. The fictional secret agent is an unclean person: his resort to violence, lega- lized violence at that, separates him from his fellows. [...] He is a person who represents society’s double standard of morality: the end is honourable but the means are not. The end must be attained, but the provider of the means, the secret agent, pays for society’s guilty conscience by being kept out in the cold.8 The secret agent – at least in presentations that aim to be more credible than the James Bond stories – can never fully embody the hero triumphant; nor can spy heroism be of a purely exemplary kind.9 That the ethical dilemma inherent to espionage constrains the possibilities of heroisation in spy fiction and encourages a hero-sceptical bias is nowhere more poignant than in the character of Alec Leamas in John le Carré’s classic of espionage fiction, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1962). Leamas, who becomes a pawn in the Cold War game between East and West, works in the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, one of the head officers of which are not ashamed to admit that “since the war, our methods – ours and those of the opposition – have become much the same. I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?”10 Leamas himself has no illusions about the secret service and his own dirty practices: “What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?”11 At the end of the novel, Leamas manages to save at least his personal integrity in a final and fatal act of resistance against his profession. Realising how recklessly he has been exploited and betrayed by his own service, he climbs down on the Eastern side of the Berlin Wall, knowing that he will be killed. Leamas’s choice of death can be considered a final act of moral heroism, but even this moment is dimmed because it is staged as a very unspectacular moment. Lea- mas’s life fades out with a few prosaic impressions: “As he fell, Leamas saw a small car smashed between great lorries, and the children waving cheerfully through the windows”.12 One last time, this exit from the narrative confirms the overall anti- heroic image the novel establishes of the spy.

The Fading of Heroes and Heroisms in Spooks Just as le Carré’s genre classic emerged from the world of the Cold War, Spooks is a product of the early twenty-first century and participates in this period’s

8. Lars Ole Sauerberg, Secret Agents in Fiction, 113f. On the dubious reputation of the secret services and their role in politics as explored in literature and film see also Eva Horn’s comprehen- sive study The Secret War. Treason, Espionage, and Modern Fiction, Evanston, IL, Northwestern Univer- sity Press, 2013. 9. On exemplary heroism see Geoffrey Cubitt & Allen Warren (eds.), Heroic Reputations and Exemplary Lives, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000. 10. John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, London, Penguin, 2014, 18. 11. Ibidem, 243. 12. Ibidem, 253.

169 «Spooks» divided opinions about the heroic.13 The series was produced and first viewed at a time – the war-on-terror decade initiated by the attacks of 11 September 2001 – when heroic discourse saw a significant revival in the United Kingdom as well as the United States. To a certain extent, Spooks reflects the decade’s public appreciation of the soldiers who risked their lives in the overt war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of those who helped to save the victims of terror attacks at home. Tying in with such appreciation, Spooks does not refrain from showing its field agents performing brave and self-sacrificing acts of heroism. In the programme’s ten-year history, they responded to all kinds of threats facing Britain in the first decade of the new millennium, and in all instances the worst could be prevented because the men and women of MI5 performed their duty. In this respect, Spooks has even been charac- terised – unjustly and too superficially – as “slick prime-time secret agent drama” with male leads “who come closest to the James Bond action-hero mould”.14 At the same time, however, the programme never completely abandoned the hero- sceptical sentiment that had dominated the latter half of the twentieth century, and it could hardly avoid responding to growing criticism of the more dubious anti-terrorist measures in which the secret services were involved, for example the illegal detention and torture of prisoners in secret camps, or new security tactics that infringed on the public’s personal and human rights. Spooks often shows its characters concerned about unethical acts they have to perform,15 and a hero-sceptical mode was also encouraged by the programme’s disillusioned look at the country whose security these characters are meant to guarantee. Its very first episode placed great emphasis on the fact that it is the task of MI5 to “defend the realm”, but the ethics of this realm are as doubtful as some of the acts by which it is defended: Spooks regularly exposed dubious practices in British politics and the British media; it criticised the UK’s ‘special relationship’ to the US during the war on terror as well as its uncomfortable arrangements with post-Soviet Russia; it pointed to tensions in inter-ethnic relations and criticised the negative outcomes of neoliberalism, especially after the financial crash of 2008. With such scrutiny of the state of the nation Spooks perfectly exemplifies the claim that television is “a repository for meanings and a site where cultural values are articulated”,16 and its attention to (precarious) heroism is an integral part of this articulation.

13. Considering the length of its run, Spooks has attracted comparatively little critical attention. It has been analysed for its portrayal of counterterrorism (C.W. Erickson, “Thematics of Counterterrorism: Comparing 24 and MI-5/Spooks”, in: Critical Studies on Terrorism, 2008, 1, 343-358) and its negotiation of contemporary anxieties (Paul Cobley, “‘It’s a fine line between safety and terror’. Crime and Anxiety Redrawn in Spooks”, in: Film International, 2009, 7, 2, 36-45). The series has also been noted for its lack of authenticity in its portrayal of MI5 (Nick Wilkinson, “Spookmania and the Media”, in: British Journalism Review, 2009, 20, 47-52), its portrayal of the nation under threat (Felix Thompson, “Coast and Spooks. On the Permeable National Boundaries of British Televi- sion”, in: Continuum. Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 2010, 24, 429-438) as well as its treatment of Britain’s Muslim community during the war on terror (Peter Morey, “Strangers and Stereotypes. The Spooks Controversy and the Framing of Muslims”, in: Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2010, 46, 529-539). For a survey see also the entry for Spooks in Alan Burton, Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 362-364. 14. Felix Thompson, “Coast and Spooks”, 434. The male agents Spooks portrays are more damaged by their profession and more emotionally affected by what they have to do than the James Bond mould permits. Furthermore, Spooks is not exclusively male-centred and its presentation of action heroism includes at least some of its female characters. 15. See for example season three, episode five, where an agent is ordered to kill a renegade scientist, or season six, episode one, where two agents have to plant a bomb in a train in Tehran and cause the death of many innocent people. 16. Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz, Television Studies, Malden, MA, Polity Press 2012, 22.

170 Barbara Korte

The social critique of Spooks, its function as a morality play for its time, would deserve more attention. So would its place in the wider context of twenty-first- century “complex” serial television and its general inclination to portray dark characters with complicated arcs:17 characters who are difficult to engage with because they are morally deficient or even amoral, and who also often embody unsure and damaged versions of masculinity.18 For reasons of space my subsequent discussion will have to be restricted to Spooks as a spy programme and its negotiation of ‘fading’ heroism within this specific genre context. Despite its moments of action heroism and heroic sacrifice,Spooks ’s overall presentation of the heroic is as conflicted, contradictory and unstable as in other examples of spy fiction. As already indicated, the effectiveness with which such ‘fading’ heroism is staged in Spooks hinges essentially on seriality, and it is significant in our context that seriality is one of those characteristics of televisual poetics which, as Timothy Dant points out, provoke moral judgement in the viewers by directing their attention to contrasts and ambiguities: The form of television – the in-the-moment of liveness, the continual return of repeats, the postponement of completion with the serial, series and seasons – generates a loose and open poetics and it is able to do this because the audience are so satisfied with the aesthetic pleasures that they make up for the lack of closure, of final endings. […] If televisuality does not itself have any moral importance, what it does is extend the possibility of ambiguity in moral messages within a programme.19 The length and dis-/continuities of serial narration enable more complex storytelling and contradictory characterisation than a single novel or film that stand on their own, including the possibility that characters undergo significant change or are exchanged for others. Spooks gained a certain notoriety for how it regularly replaced and even ‘killed off ’ its field agents, often in ways that interfered with the viewers’ alignment with the respective characters.20 At the same time, this was an intervention in the viewers’ ideas of heroes and heroism because the succession of lead characters encouraged a comparison of their different heroic contours. Apart from such transitions between different kinds of ‘heroes’, Spooks also worked with drastic turns in the development of one and the same character, against the general tendency that “television characters are mostly stable figures, accumulating narrative experiences more than changing from them”.21 Both features became more elaborate when Spooks introduced story arcs for whole seasons (in the sixth year of its run) and so created a narrative complexity that brought the intricacies and instabilities of the heroic into even more prominent relief. This reached a peak in the ninth season, where the series’ male lead character at the time, Lucas North, undergoes a shift in morality and personality that is unpredictable from his earlier narrative and the knowledge the viewers have so far accumulated about him. This

17. See Jason Mittell, Complex TV. The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York, New York University Press, 2015, especially chapter 4 on “Character”. 18. For these trends in American television see, for example, Margrethe Bruun Vaage, The Antihero in American Television, New York, Routledge, 2016; Amanda D. Lotz, Cable Guys. Television and Masculinities in the Twenty-First Century, New York, New York University Press, 2014. 19. Timothy Dant, Television and the Moral Imaginary: Society through the Small Screen, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 85. 20. As Jason Mittell explains Murray Smith’s concept of alignment: “Alignment consists of two key elements: attachment, in which we follow the experiences of particular characters, and access to subjective interior states of emotions, thought processes, and morality” (Complex TV, 129). 21. Jason Mittell, Complex TV, 133.

171 «Spooks» extreme ‘fading of the hero’ – from hero to rogue – was a radical disruption of the viewers’ experience of a character with whom they had engaged for two full seasons, and many original viewers felt betrayed by this turn. The trajectory of this character was the overarching narrative for seasons seven to nine of Spooks. North, a former MI5 agent whose cover was blown while he was on a mission in Russia, returns to England and the Security Service after eight years of torture and imprisonment. Suspected at first to be a Russian mole, he becomes a trusted agent again – declaring his loyalty to MI5 emphatically at the end of his second episode22 – but is finally exposed to be a completely different person than everyone thought, thus taking the deception theme of the spy genre to extremes. Contrary to expectations that are raised by North’s seemingly traitorous behaviour during his first two episodes,23 he does not turn out to be a double agent for the Russians, but changes even more radically when he is revealed to have once been a criminal and will act criminally again in the course of his final season. The extremity of this trajectory is particularly prominent because it is made explicit in the dialogue. At the end of season nine Sir Harry Pearce, the paternal head of the team and their mentor figure (especially for Lucas North), announces the change in attitude made necessary by the unexpected development of his former protégé: I regret to have to inform you that as of this moment, our former section chief, Lucas North, is to be regarded as a rogue officer. […] The man we know as Lucas North. What does he think? What does he feel? What’s driving him? […] He’s highly trained. Fragile and desperate. […] This man was our colleague and friend. But have no illusions, he is now our enemy. (Season 9, episode 8) This decline of a character whose heroicity the series took great care to build up in the first place perplexes his former colleagues within the story as much as it challenges the viewers. The Lucas North character does not simply enter the series as its new main action hero. He has to be (re-)made as a character with heroic contours because his first appearance introduces him as both a victim and a potential traitor, creating an emotional response that hovers between sympathy and suspicion.24 While everyone is aware of what the returned agent must have suffered, his trustworthiness remains doubtful until the end of his second episode, when he is officially received back into the fold of MI5 and, in the further course of seasons one and two, re-establishes himself as an outstanding officer who saves his country in many dangerous situations. Nevertheless, his heroicity has another quality than that of other characters, and the logic of seriality means that Lucas North is compared in particular to his immediate predecessor, Adam Carter, the male lead of Spooks from its third season. The way the two characters cross, how their moments of disappearance and appearance intersect in the dramaturgy of Carter’s last and North’s first episode, calls for comparison. This intersection is staged very explicitly as a moment of transition: Against Pearce’s doubts, Carter immediately decides to give North a chance

22. “... that’s what I am. MI5. I was [...] MI5 all those years in prison, and I’m MI5 now” (season 7, episode 2). 23. These genre expectations are voiced by the head of espionage in the Russian embassy with whom North pretends to conspire against MI5: “You must live as though your friends are your enemies, your enemies friends” (ibidem). 24. For a discussion of the relationships between the archetypes of hero, villain (perpetrator) and victim see Bernhard Giesen, Triumph and Trauma, London, Paradigm, 2004, 6.

172 Barbara Korte and re-initiates him into the service and its high standards. He tells his dishevelled colleague to clean himself and gives him new clothes to replace the ones he wore during his years of imprisonment, thus symbolically passing on the hero’s mantle. However, the juxtaposition of the two characters makes it very clear that Carter and North fill the role of hero in different ways. Not only do they embody different versions of masculinity.25 Even more importantly in the context of spy fiction, the Lucas North character is a notably dark figure set against Carter’s brightness – not only in terms of the personal looks of their respective actors (Richard Armitage and Rupert Penry-Jones). In his first scene, North enters the series stealthily, seen at first only from a distance in an exchange of agents at night. This literally shady appearance stands in stark contrast to the disappearance of Carter: Having always been presented as a fundamentally good man – brave and selfless, trusted, loved and admired by his colleagues – Carter is given a spectacular hero’s death which takes place on a highly symbolic day that emphasises Carter’s identification with the realm he has lived to defend. On Remembrance Sunday, a day of commemoration dedicated to the dead of Britain’s wars, terrorists have planned a bomb attack on the day’s main ceremony, but MI5 decide that the commemorations must go ahead as planned because, as Carter phrases it, “no fanatic [...] is going to stop us from honouring our dead”. Befitting this patriotic statement, he himself dies honourably, saving many lives when he drives the car in which the bomb is hidden away from the ceremony. His life ends in the bomb’s explosion, the aftereffects of which are seen and heard all over London – the capital of the nation Carter has so often kept safe. The large explosion is shown repeatedly and from different angles to suggest the extent of the disaster which Carter’s sacrifice has prevented, while on the sound level one hears a bell striking the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of November, the moment when the First World War was declared to be ended. Sacrificing himself for others, like his grandfather did in World War I, Adam performs what is arguably the ultimate heroic deed. The close association of this deed with soldierly heroism, and the way Carter’s death is staged as a ‘public’ event, clears his final act of heroism of all moral doubt associated with the spy’s clandestine activities. After Carter’s death, the stage is clear for Lucas North, the dark hero, who enters the scene as a man clearly traumatised by his experience in Russia. While Spooks repeatedly shows its agents under post-traumatic stress, the Lucas North character retains a basic psychological fragility through all his three seasons. This fragility is accumulated, above all, in a series of flashbacks where he is seen during his imprisonment in Russia, being waterboarded, tortured with electric shocks and beatings, and trying to commit suicide. Furthermore, the episode in which he first appears shows how his prison experience is literally inscribed on his body. The moment when North cleans himself before Carter takes him along on a mission reveals that his body is not only malnourished but covered all over with prison tattoos (that will never be removed). These tattoos are difficult to decipher, not only because they are in different foreign languages, but also because of their

25. Both men embody modern masculinities that are contrasted with the patriarchal masculinity of their superior Harry Pearce. Both are also brave, athletic and know how to fight. In comparison, however, Carter is more in alignment with twenty-first-century ideas of hegemonic masculinity than Lucas North, a character who never loses the trauma and vulnerability he brings home with him from his time of imprisonment. The eighth season still includes several instances where North’s special sensitivity and fragility come to the fore. Furthermore, in contrast to Carter, who is shown as a husband and father, North has no family attachments and his love relationships remain unfulfilled.

173 «Spooks» pronounced symbolism. Some of them are specific to Russian prisons, while other images on North’s skin have obviously been selected by himself, such as a motif from a famous design by William Blake – an artist North admires because he “dis- trusted systems” (as the viewers learn in series 7, episode 2). North’s tattoos mark him not only as a man with a more complex intellectual life than his predecessor Carter, but also as a man who is hard to read, whom one cannot trust instinctively and who is not immediately relatable. It therefore requires Carter’s support – and a transfer from his heroic image – to establish Lucas North as the main heroic character of the coming episodes. Subsequently, North’s former status as a victim and his vulnerability make his reconstruction as a hero – his courage, his exceptionality as an agent, his sense of duty and his willingness to sacrifice himself – even more impressive. His heroic disposition is brought into relief not only by his actions but also by explicit comparisons to other characters and even in meta-heroic discourse. Already by the end of the seventh season, North has been established as a heroic character enough to credibly compare his own loyalty with the treachery of a vete- ran member of the team who is discovered to have been a Russian mole for the last twenty-five years: “I spent eight years in a Russian cell. Eight years. Because I stayed loyal to my country. [...] ‘Was it worth it?’ But yeah … it was. Because I look at you, with all your brilliance, and all your treachery, and I see everything that I ever fought against” (Season 7, episode 8). The sixth episode of the next season shows North working with an adolescent who is MI5’s informer in a terrorist group and asks ironically whether the agent would “come charging in to save” him should that become necessary. North answers this with an ironic quip (“Yeah, like the Lone Ranger”) but he demands serious heroic commitment from the boy (“Thousands of lives are at stake. Be there”), and he himself is present when the boy needs him, charging unarmed into a hall where the terrorists keep hostages. The character retains his image of a hero until the beginning of the ninth series, when – after he has once more helped to prevent a terrorist attack on his country – it is suddenly revealed that ‘Lucas North’ is a stolen identity and that the trusted agent is actually John Bateman, a former drug smuggler and, more devastatingly – especially for an audience in the war-on-terror decade – a terrorist responsible for a bomb attack on the British Embassy in Dakar during the 1990s that killed several people. In order to escape, Bateman had killed the real Lucas North, a friend who resembled him, and adopted his life, including the initial entry tests to MI5, which the false Lucas North then successfully completed. Deception and fabricated ‘legends’ are staples of spy fiction, but the turn of the Lucas North character takes these genre conventions to extremes, along with the expectations of continuity with which serial narration works. Serial narration requires a certain amount of variation in order to maintain interest in the narrative, and it offers plea- sure not only from repetition but also by surprise.26 But when a series changes its characters too radically in Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion, the break in internal story logic and character unity becomes vexing. The moment in Spooks when the character fa- miliar as Lucas North is addressed as “John” and asked what it has been like “being Lucas North”, is a shock because a character to whom the viewers have become attached appears to be destroyed with a single speech act. However, just as North’s heroic contour was established gradually, it is also permitted to fade out gradually,

26. See Jason Mittell, Complex TV, 52.

174 Barbara Korte engaging the audience with the deconstruction of a heroic image for the course of another whole season. The moment when Lucas North begins to disappear is presented in the final minutes of the first episode of season nine, when he has a fateful encounter with a former accomplice from Dakar: Vaughn Edwards is a deceptive and dubious character, a straightforward villain who embodies the total moral corruption against which North / Bateman will be struggling during his last season.27 The character also takes the false-identity theme of spy fiction to the peak of amorality because he impersonates different identities only in order to blackmail North and to obtain plans for a secret genetic weapon which he intends to sell to China. In the first scene that shows the two characters together, Edwards gives North a suitcase with traces from his former villainous life – a life which North seems to have completely repressed but which now comes to the surface again. Once more, this is a scene staged with particular care and symbolism as a moment of transition: Lucas North is confronted with his former dark self at night (echoing the night scene in which he made his first appearance), and with a vertical symbolism that foreshadows his fall as a hero: He is walking down the steps on the Thames Embankment (near the MI5 headquarters) while his nemesis Edwards is walking up with Bateman’s suitcase. This decisive moment in the arc of the North character not only disrupts his image as a ‘good’ spy who performs ethically doubtful deeds but is loyal to his service and his country. More essentially, it is a moment that marks the instability and potential deceptiveness of heroic identity. As Edwards pronounces in a later episode, North’s stolen identity of a heroic spy was always only an illusion: “You have a name, a life that were never meant to be yours. [...] You’re not a real person” (season 9, episode 6). This deconstruction of his (false) sense of self motivates North’s eventual decision to turn criminal again when Edwards appears to return something to him that seemed real before his life of lies began: the woman he loved as John Bate- man. The more North begins to imagine a new life with her, the more does the former criminal creep in and is the character willing not only to become a traitor but even to sell the plans for the secret weapon himself. In another poignant statement, Edwards repeats his verdict that North’s identity as heroic agent was a mere figment, and that he was really always only a killer: “You’re a killer, John, who fell asleep, dreamed that he was a hero. But now it’s time to wake up and remember the truth. The dream is over now. And the killer is awake” (season 9, episode 7). While the audience hear this judgement, they see in a flashback of the bomb explosion in Dakar how Bateman commits a very real act of terrorism, not only placing the bomb in the embassy but also building and exploding it himself.28 This scene is a last climactic moment of awareness not only for the viewers but North / Bateman himself, who is finally robbed of all illusions about himself, including the belief

27. See also the tendency observed by Jason Mittell that “[a]ntihero narratives regularly invoke relative morality, in which an ethically questionable character is juxtaposed with more explicitly villainous and unsympathetic characters to highlight the antihero’s more redeeming qualities” (Com- plex TV, 143). 28. The use of analepses for building a backstory for the Lucas North character is signifi- cantly inverted here. While earlier flashbacks to his time in Russia serve to establish him as a victim, the Dakar flashback described here presents him as a perpetrator, and this is all the more shocking because an earlier rendition of the Dakar scene in which Bateman places the bomb at Edwards’s command is now exposed as a lie.

175 «Spooks» that his earlier crimes as Bateman were atoned by his loyal service as North for MI5 and his sacrifices for his country.29 After this point in the narrative, John Bateman pronounces Lucas North dead, and Harry Pearce makes the “now our enemy” announcement to his team quoted above. What maintains the viewers’ sympathy for the character even at this point, and even though their expectations have been drastically disrupted, is how North / Bateman is shown to be suffering from the loss of his MI5 identity. He becomes more and more disoriented and emotionally unstable, torn between his desire for a new-old life and the loyalties he actually did develop as Lucas North. Indeed, some positive traits of the Lucas North persona seem never to fade out completely; Bateman’s badness is tempered with North’s capacity to feel with others and with the moral sensitivity he developed during the time of his service. The character’s double-bind is demonstrated in an episode (season 9, episode 6) in which he must protect a young female hacker, who playfully refers to him as “James Bond”. North has sympathy and respect for the woman who spent time in prison like himself, but when she notices that he is under pressure from his blackmailer, he lets her bleed to death after she is shot by her pursuers, although his first instincts are to save her life. The woman’s playful James Bond reference becomes a foil for North’s flawed behaviour, because James Bond never fails to protect the people in his care. When North lets the woman die, he acts selfishly, yet the shots of his face reveal that he knows how reprehensible his behaviour is. He even shows tenderness to the dying woman and tries to console her. He demonstrates a similar tenderness when he kidnaps his former colleague Ruth as leverage against Pearce, and a bomb he has allegedly hidden in a train station as a threat proves to be a fake, in notable contrast to Bateman’s real bomb in Dakar. All these instances allow the audience to assume that the more virtuous traits of the Lucas North persona have not been completely wiped out, and this is also suggested when the character finally meets his demise. When all of his plans for a new life have failed and he has become a traitor for nothing, North / Bateman wants revenge and lures Pearce to the top of a high- rise (where the real Lucas North once lived) in order to kill him. The panorama of London seen from the roof, with the iconic buildings of St Paul’s Cathedral and the City, serves as a reminder of Lucas North’s heroism as an agent of MI5 because this is the capital he so often helped to protect. It is thus a perfect setting for a final exchange between Pearce and his lost agent about (spy) heroism: “Are you John, the murderer?” Pearce asks, “Or are you Lucas, the man who gave up so many years to help so many people, saved so many lives?” The former Lucas North can only ans- wer these questions with “I am nothing”, thus echoing Macbeth – another heroic man who becomes evil and is aware of this.30 Pearce’s questions – which the viewers are also meant to ask themselves – draw attention to the fact that the borderline between heroism and villainy is thin – generally and especially in the spy genre. The Lucas North character, the most fragile and conflicted of Harry Pearce’s agents, raises the uncomfortable question to what extent his brilliance as a spy was rooted in the criminal energy he demonstrated as John Bateman.

29. As he says in his confession scene with Harry Pearce: “I tried to do all the good that Lucas would have done if he’d lived” (episode 9, season 7). 30. See Macbeth’s famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech (Macbeth, act V, scene 5), which ends with the words “signifying nothing”.

176 Barbara Korte

The disappearance of Lucas North from Spooks is therefore staged with marked difference from Adam Carter’s hero’s death. While Carter’s death appears to be the fulfilment of his unquestioned heroic disposition,31 the suicide of North / Bateman is the only way out for a man who has lost himself, and it resists closure emphatically. As described above, Carter dies spectacularly and in full view of the camera, but the death of North/Bateman happens ‘off-stage’, outside the range of the camera that stays on Harry Pearce, who is expecting to be shot when his former agent jumps from the roof. He and the viewers only become aware of this act of self-destruction when exclamations are heard from the street. Pearce then looks down from the building, but North’s dead body is not shown. Visually, even his death is an absence – and a particularly notable one, because Lucas North’s body, marked as it was by his tattoos, was always a prominent feature in the series. In the end, this body becomes a visual ‘nothing’, a lacuna to be filled with meaning and moral interpretation both by the characters within the action and by the viewers. The Lucas North character certainly does not die a hero – neither an action hero, nor a moral hero like le Carré’s Alec Leamas. The most positive reading is that this death is a final judgement of Lucas North on the criminal Bateman, and on the lie of his life as a spy. The way in which the Lucas North character disappears from the sto- ryworld of Spooks epitomises the moral dubiousness of the spy and the resulting precariousness of the spy as hero. The most shady of Harry Pearce’s ‘spooks’, he is also the character whose heroism ‘fades’ in and out of the programme’s narrative in the most intriguing and disturbing manner. As pointed out at the beginning of this article, a spy’s job is to serve their country, and although the effort to do this may be heroic, it also requires them to deceive other people and be willing to act against their and society’s moral principles and moral scruples. John le Carré’s Lea- mas is presented as a character who is fully aware of this dilemma but can preserve what is left of his moral integrity by letting himself be killed. The disappearance of the Lucas North character from Spooks is much more ambivalent and semantically open, and the visual absence of his dead body adds to the indeterminate and pro- vocative quality of his end. With this character, Spooks shows how a heroic identity that is carefully built up in the narrative can be turned at a stroke and then fade out in a manner that questions everything the viewers have seen and know up until that point. The end of Lucas North forms the (preliminary) climax to a serial narration whose repeated transitions between, and turns within, its hero figures expose heroism as a complicated, conflicted and volatile phenomenon. More generally, the North / Bateman figure with its split embodies the doubt cast by the spy genre on the concept of the heroic and illustrates how spy fiction provides an ideal frame for a critical inquiry into the meanings and evaluations of the heroic. Spooks activates this genre potential for the first decade of the twenty-first century: by using a complex televisual poetics that brings the intricacies of heroes and heroism to the fore, and by engaging with a contemporary discourse about the heroic that is divided

31. A comment by one of the other characters during Carter’s burial suggests that he has found the kind of death that suited his character: “Adam was going to die, Harry. To know him at all is to know that. It exhilarated him, gave him purpose.”

177 between admiration for certain kinds of heroes on the one hand (especially in the wake of the war on terror) and continued post-heroic scepticism on the other.

Barbara Korte University of Freiburg