Patreon Letter: 31st August 2020 (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

Jackson here with the end of the month Patreon letter. I hope everyone is doing as well as they can, given everything. I am not, unfortunately. Tomorrow, my sister returns to her job as a school teacher as they open every school in the country to every pupil in the country. Millions of uni students are about to move into halls and covid transmission is about to skyrocket. It's cool to watch such an avoidable train crash play out in slow motioin so unavoidably. I'm terrified for my sister, I'm terrified for me, basically what this has meant is that the main thing I do these days is kinda stare at the wall and dissasociate. This anecdote has no real point as we are all, to varying degrees, impacted by this bullshit, and I have no solution nor conclusion other than to say that not going outside yet being terrified all the time fucking sucks bro. 

To keep myself distracted, in addition to the workload as usual, I have been reading more books. I suffer from severe OCD which for me means that, depending on the day and the episode at any given moment, it is almost impossible to focus on anything. It's hard to do anything for too sustained a period of time without somehow interlinking it with overwhelming and debilitating intrusive thoughts. It: sucks. It means gaming is usually the easiest thing to lose myself in, because while it still kicks up I can often lose myself in the satisfaction of the enjoyment of the motor functions of the play. Reading is the hardest thing for me, as I need the brain to be on at all times, when I'm doing it. I cannot read and try to ignore my thoughts, I need them present. Which is all to say that it is no small feat that I've been reading as much as I have the last few months. It has been tough to fight through, but it is a small victory for me, and I guess I'm proud. I feel a bit embarassed writing that out, but it's true and I'm allowed to take the Ws where they come, no matter how small.

As I bring up on every other Voip Life, I'm making my way through the John Le Carre novels. This, if you're curious, started by watching the movie "The Spy Gone North," a movie about a Korean spy, who as you can suspect goes North. It is a perfectly solid 4/5 spy movie, but I loved it so much that I was like okay I clearly eat up this genre, it is time to stop pissing about and go directly to the source. But seriously this movie owns, can't recommend it enough.

ANYWAY. I'm four books and two movies in to this journey (I'm hitting the adaptations as I go) which brings us to 1967, and I thought I'd do a slight check in. I would not normally do this but for those not keeping track for those at home that means I've read:

• Call for the Dead
• A Murder Of Quality
• The Spy who Came In From The Cold
• The Looking Glass War

And watched:

• The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965)
• The Deadly Affair (1967)

There will be some spoilers from here on out, so be on your guard if you wish to follow down this road.

I've mostly been having a fantastic time. I'm probably going to slow down a little as reading quickly is inherently diminushing returns. There are only so many times a book can end with a gut punch realisation of the extent to which ideals and individuals are crushed under the uncaring evils of a dying imperial state before you must simply watch fucking K-On! The first four books are all excellent but Call for the Dead is so perfectly within the template for every one of these stories that it inherently casts a shadow on the ongoing exercise in genre. I won't explain the plot, but just read this quote from the ending. It's every Metal Gear game, it's every one of these movies, it's the whole thing in three sentences.

"Dieter, mercurial,  absolute, had fought to build a civilization. Smiley, rationalistic,  protective, had fought to prevent him. ‘Oh God,’ said Smiley aloud, ‘who was then the gentleman …?’" 

Fuckin perfect. One and done. It's also every episode of Ghost in the Shell but instead of saying "who was then the gentleman" the Major says "suck my dick from the back." 

But despite the genre being inherently formulaic, all four books have been fantastic. I liked the latter two less in the act of reading them, yet they have both lived strong in my mind, which is really the actual test of a great book. The Looking Glass War is mostly a very boring book about intra-departmental meetings, but it is this purposely so, apparently released in response to the glowing reception to The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, where people thought it was a nostalgic longing for the better black and white days of The War.

This is a hilarious read on what happens in that book, which is the one I most want to talk about. It's his most well regarded book before Tinker, Tailor, and the movie adaptation is regarded as a classic in its own right. While reading the book, I found it less interesting and a clear step down from the prior entries. Both prior books focus on Smiley himself, who is an excellent character, a calm and compassionate spy who's compassion only makes him more evil. There's a very human hypocrisy at the heart of his character and it works really well, the physical embodiment of the polite, murderous British character. 

Cold leaves him behind to instead focus on Alec Leamas, a rougher and less intellectual character, which means less of Smiley's empathy for those oppressed people whose lives he destroys, and more earnest belief in spycraft not as an ideological crusade but a job. Leamas is a middle aged realist who does not think too hard. The majority of his plot concerns his relationship with a 22 year old woman in the British Communist Party who basically immediately hooks up with him and starts trying to win him over to her ideological cause despite meeting him in the middle of a deep cover operation that has required him to be drunk, dishevelled and violent. As such the book feels cheap, resting much of its emotional weight on this completely fanciful pure and naive young, beautiful woman who is nonetheless desperate to be the emotional sponge for a belligerent drunkard twice her age. It's not great.

Where the book has stuck with me however is in it's incredible ending. This one I will go into detail. The book concerns an operation for Leamas to defect and frame Mundt as a British Spy with false information, a former Nazi and leader of the East German secret service who opens the book murdering all the British agents operational in Berlin. The woman is Leamas' weak link, and Mundt brings her over in the middle of his own trial, exposing the falseness of Leamas' information and exonerating him completely. It doesn't just exonerate him, however, it also condemns to death a character called Fiedler, who has been Leamas' interrogator and is the East German second in command, a Jewish agent who brings these charges against Mundt. His scenes are the most compelling in the book, as he debates with Leamas the neccesity of spycraft, his belief in communism and his willingness to do violence for its success, and his disgust at the ability of western agents willingness to do the same violence yet possess no conviction, to convince themselves they have no ideology at all. As you can imagine, I ate this shit up.

As Mundt is exonerated, the true nature of the operation dawns on Leamas: the information he supplie dwas true. Mundt is a British agent. And the entire point of his charade wasn't to get revenge for his murdered comrades, but to set Fiedler up for execution and save Mundt's skin. This is the prototypical spy story ending, but it's executed with such pointed specificity that it has really stuck with me. It's not just that the state is uncaring and will throw the individual away - obviously that's true, Fiedler himself says so - it's that the British Government has sent a man to unknowingly murder an innocent, idealistic and above all Jewish man so they can save one Nazi's skin. 

If I had to pick one thing that's impressed me the most about Le Carre's work it is this, usually racial, specificity. These early books are so far extremely concerned with antisemitism, and not in sentiment but in structure, in the way the Allies used the Jews and threw them away, and now condemn many as Communists purely because of which power they ended up living under after the war. While the books conform to the generic formula that goes on for years, the tragedies are not generic. A lot of this fiction I've seen so far, which is mostly movies rather than novels - even many of the good stories I've seen - often erase the ideological tragedies for a more nihlistic story where the states are so big and unknowable, and the characters so intimate and small, that politics exist as this mysterious other, something that is irrelevant and fickle yet the reason the characters are dying. The Times, Jack! But so far these stories have been extremely specific in their disgust for the UK, an ideologically bankrupt dying empire with pretentious of civilty so empty as to be pure comedy, the country that works with Nazis and murders their surviving victims.

The movie loses a little of this bite, as is to be expected because it's a lot of bite. Not all of it, it's still a fine movie, but the lengthy debates between Fiedler and Leamas are truncated to a few short scenes. The woman's role is increased and the emphasis on Mundt as a Nazi is reduced. It's all still there, but the emotional centre shifted just enough to make the book a far superior work. What has made reading them so enjoyable is the prose style, which is both dour and taut, repressed and lyrical, basically I see immediately why he's the go to guy for these Sad Man Spy Stories. 

I will slow down a little now, but it's hard to say how much, because Le Carre slows down writing too, and as the gaps between books become bigger I become far more interested in them. I can't wait to get to the 80s, to the end of the Cold War and to the 21st Century novels. I'm really curious how the politics end up shifting. I assume they become worse because I just cannot imagine this kind of knife being kept sharp when you're a rich and successful ex-MI6 British Icon for like fifty fucking years. But we'll see.

Anyway that's me done. Sorry I rambled for so long about my spy books. I am become yer da. See you next month.

-Jackson