The Spy as Hero: Le Carré and the Cold War

Abstract

The novel of espionage or counterespionage has flourished, for obvious reasons, in the period of Cold War and détente, achieving at its best a high degree of technical sophistication; but its literary status remains largely unacknowledged. The authors of spy thrillers are for the most part entertainers, in Steven Marcus’s sense of writers ‘who [do] not press upon us the full complexities of life, who [do] not demand from us a total seriousness in making moral judgments, and who [do] not necessarily bring to bear on experience a mature and searching intelligence’.1 Yet this description is less dismissive than it sounds. The claims of such art merit serious consideration in literary-psychological if not in literary-moralistic terms; and the spy thriller can also become, like romance, the medium for an obliquely rendered criticism of life. Le Carré, the supreme exponent of the genre, uses it to explore the varieties of experience exploited more or less successfully by his fellow-practitioners. Like them, he provides us with exciting, disturbing, therapeutic fantasies of action and intrigue; but in his best work he also engages with political, moral and psychological complexities, demonstrating the capacity of entertainment art to transcend its own self-imposed limitations.KeywordsMoral JudgmentSexual InfidelityCreative WriterSecret ServiceSecret AgentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.