I tend to think that the greatest plot I’ve ever encountered in fiction is that of John Lé Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. And, though there are bursts of action — kidnappings, adultery, an execution, and a foreign agent shot in the back — much of that is only alluded to, off screen, or in flashback. The real goings on are quite muted, mostly just people in shabby rooms, talking. But the talking they are doing is the most beautiful object ever made, the most beautiful shape, action. These very particular people with a heavily coded, multifaceted language all their own, speaking the most incredibly action packed dialogue, meaning several things at once, making incredible threats and insinuations, plotting, passing along rumor, doubling, tripling, squaring, cubing subtext and its potential readings… I wrote somewhere once that Tinker Tailor is the greatest book about office politics because in a large way that is all that it is about, except the power plays and backstabbing from nightmare coworkers all happens within an office that is right then dealing with the greatest intelligence catastrophe in history. Global history is at stake. The cold war is on the line. Often in the conversation between two old friends on whom all depends.
Of course Tinker Tailor was inspired by the real life drama of Kim Philby’s unmasking as a Russian double agent, resulting in his eventual defection in 1963, a story that Ben McIntyre wrote an incredible book about called A Spy Among Friends. A new ITV series takes flight from McIntyre’s book to imagine the drama, and conversations around Philby’s flight to the USSR, in his exchanges with his best friend and MI6 colleague Nicholas Elliot who was sent to Beirut where Philby was then living to extract a confession, to debrief him. In part, the new show actually follows the format of Tinker Tailor, placing Elliot in the role of mole hunter George Smiley trying to ferret out the truth (and the Beirut scenes play a bit like Smiley’s visit to Haydon at Sarratt, to debrief him, and extract confessions). And this echo of form, I think is quite interesting: is Tinker Tailor, the wholly fictional story inspired by Philby’s case, so profoundly wedged into our brains as the ultimate spy story, that the imaginative retelling of the real story is even influenced by its shape and structure? Or is it just me, that sees the narrative chimes everywhere, and, well, is that actually a different way of saying the same thing? What is different, in the case of A Spy Among Friends, is that the whodunnit is already solved. Elliott knows that Philby is the traitor going in. His real project then is to conduct an elaborate scheme to protect his service, his friends, and, crucially, his own job, legacy, and even liberty as he is briefly suspected as a collaborator of a traitor. So, here again, two deeply connected friends, best friends, for 23 years, taking it on themselves to negotiate the most incredible intelligence rift of the century.
And well, wow, the resulting show, created and written by Alexander Cary, may be the best thing I’ve seen since… Taboo? The Hour? It is incredible.
I regularly think that Guy Pearce, who plays Philby, is one of the most underrated actors alive, so I wasn’t surprised at how incredible he is. But Damien Lewis who plays Elliott blew me all the hell the way away (maybe because I never saw his first show with Cary, Homeland? I dunno). Damien Fucking Lewis. Wow.
An epigraph, from EM Forster, kicks things off and announces quite clearly what we are in for. “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,” Forster wrote, “I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” And so sets up the main conflict between Philby and Elliott, and also the tension that binds them, as both members of the old boys club of English Aristocrats. Maybe main theme of the show itself is the ubermenschen style ideology that these sorts of guys (the old boys who inhabit MI6 — “the ruling class” as Philby refers to them here) are taught to believe of themselves, that they are outside of the reach of morality, beyond the confines of nationality even. Above the law, the country, and even ideology (communism, capitalism, etc) itself. At the end of the day, as it is suggested by the (fictional) MI5 officer brought in to debrief Elliott after his seeming failure to apprehend Philby in Beirut, the aim of this class of character is “to preserve the status quo,” to maintain loyalty to the tribe of old chums, above all else. Even if that means enabling a traitor, or letting him go free, as she then believes Elliott to have done re Philby. “Because I'm trained [that,] in, shall we say, exigent circumstances, [I ought] to consider myself above the law,” Elliott says, explaining, perhaps somewhat facetiously. “Because all of us at SIS have been raised since the year dot to believe we belong to a higher order. A different set of rules.”
If colonialism and empire are the real machinery of this sense of superiority, the apparatus by which they affected what they believed to be their supremely ordained right to rule (“to rule the waves; born to Empire,” as Connie Sachs describes her boys of The Circus, at least during the war), if the belief that they are above it all ultimately ends with oppression of others and extractive capitalism, it announces itself in language. The clearest indicator of class for an Englishman of the midcentury, and why Elliott immediately interrogates the Durham accent of his debriefer, Mrs Thomas. For Elliott, language is a weapon, a mask, a cudgel, an identity. It is code, it is class itself, the demonstration of values, of wit, of one’s upbringing (which is to use more code). Elliott uses language to manipulate, to hide, and even to trap and expose Sir Anthony Blunt, the art consultant to the Queen, former MI5 man, and also KGB spy.
“I don’t believe you have ever had a slip of the tongue,” someone says to Elliott midway through the series as we begin to realize that Elliott has also used language to hide his own acuity, that he has really been in control all the while, Kaiser Soze-style, and leading us and everyone else astray.
God, I want so badly to talk about the language of the show, the writing, the jousting, the joking. Even the way they finally do not use language, at the funeral for Philby’s beloved mother, when the obvious American is all gauche and emotional as we Americans are, Elliott simply gives Philby a flask of whisky, communicating a kinship and understanding and comfort in precisely the way these old chums would have been taught was the way. Phew, this show is so good. I could go on and on, but I already feel like a bore and don’t want to take any thunder from the experience of the language the first time through — or even the second. It moves pretty quickly, this show, and some of the transition, revelations or epiphanies might become clearer on a rewatch.
As would the incredible set direction, and the photography (particularly incredible in the episode “Vodka”). And the suit that Lewis wears as Elliot back in London. The whole week, if I’m not mistaken, he wears a navy peak lapel double breasted suit with something more pinstripe than chalk stripe, with a white shirt, gold cuff links and these very slim crimson and cranberry colored silk ties. It is an incredible costume and one that my nerdiness compels me to point out is precisely what Alec Guinness’s George Smiley wears in the end of the Tinker Tailor series from 1979. But I could also go on about all the wonderful little chimes between these two stories. Like Bill Haydon complaining in Tinker Tailor that what he’ll miss most once he defects is the cricket, and Philby too is here shown as interested mostly in watching a match before he goes and checking scores once he’s gone.
Of course having just been there, and gone looking for Philby’s apartment on Rue Kantari while I was there, the Beirut bit intrigues me. As did the ruin of the Saint George itself while I was there, this site of so much intrigue and fanfare during the late 50s and early 60s. Philby did famously haunt the bar of the Saint George during his five years in Beirut, during which time he worked as a foreign correspondent for The Economist (and then as a casual, freelance agent for Elliott who’d been made MI6 station chief there), showing up at the bar around noon for a few drinks with Sam Brewer perhaps, the New York Times correspondent whose wife Evelyn eventually married Philby and was living with him on Rue Kantari on the rainy night in 1963 when he defected. The bit in the show about Philby falling asleep in a lounge chair by the pool of the hotel, where he is given a beer for breakfast (with a coaster on which is written a warning that the time to defect is imminent) fits in with what has become a kind of trope, about spies, about foreign correspondents, and about Beirut. John Hamm’s character also sleeps off a binge in a lounger by the pool in the film Beirut. And the pool of the Saint George is the only part that is open (a property dispute has sort of trapped the building itself in limbo since the civil war, but a swim club is operational), and guess what this nerd did while visiting?
Anyway, as I say, I could go on, but I think I’ll just go watch the show again.
What else have I been watching. 1899, the new show by the guys who made Dark, is fun in a Lost sort of a way. Oh and White Mischief, which has been a nightmare to get ahold of for the past several years, is now on Prime. Anything else good on?