LE CARRÉ ADAPTATIONS BEST SERVED WITH PATIENCE.
THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL PROVES THE BEST JOHN LE CARRÉ ADAPTATIONS RISK BEING BORING
In certain obvious respects, John le Carré’s The Little Drummer Girl was ripe for adaptation. It concerns the adventures in espionage of Charlie, an aspiring young English actress recruited by an Israeli spy agency as clandestine bait to ensnare the elusive Khalil, a Palestinian terrorist responsible for dozens of recent high-profile assassinations throughout Europe. It involves a sophisticated, enigmatic intelligence officer, Kurtz, who conducts this operation with virtuosity, and a debonair secret agent, Joseph, “a new gorgeous man” with “a motionless sentinel’s face,” as he is described by Charlie, his partner and fraught paramour. But most of all, it summons on the page a world of danger and secrecy whose every shadow conceals a rousing threat. “It exploded much later than intended,” the novel begins, startlingly. “Several defunct wristwatches, the property of the victims, confirmed the time.” This air of studied alarm bristles in every sentence.
On the other hand, The Little Drummer Girl is more than 500 pages long, an overwhelming majority of which contain little in the way of conventional action or even legible incident. The contours of the story describe an exhilarating drama. But those contours are revealed to the reader slowly and obliquely, in episodes for which its relevance to the narrative can be difficult to apprehend in the moment.
In this, the book is entirely characteristic of its author. Though he writes spy novels, and is therefore accorded the prestige of a journeyman who slings genre fiction, John le Carré is a writer of seriousness, and his work is distinguished from that of American contemporaries like Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum by subtlety and depth. His books demand patience. They are deliberate and unfashionable. Never glamorous. Always complex. On paper they seem ideal for adaptation — but on paper is perhaps where his stories should remain.
Of course, you cannot keep producers from an attractive property, no matter the difficulties that may be presented in realizing it. And so arrives to television this week a new adaptation of le Carré’s novel of geopolitical intrigue and adolescent reconnaissance, a six-part cable miniseries co-produced by the BBC in the UK and AMC in the United States and directed by Korean auteur Park Chan-wook.
Reviews so far have been mildly favourable. Critics have praised the direction and the ensemble cast, which includes Florence Pugh, Alexander Skarsgard and Michael Shannon. Less favourable has been the audience reception. It seems people find the series hard to understand. “BBC viewers desert The Little Drummer Girl over ‘confusing’ plot,” reads the headline of a recent article in the Telegraph. In England it’s been on for three weeks now. In that time its audience has shrunk 40 per cent.
“As is true of all of le Carré’s work,” the show’s screenwriters, Michael Lesslie and Claire Wilson, told the Telegraph in response to the complaints, “he doesn’t sacrifice intelligence for entertainment.”
This is not strictly true. Le Carré’s novels do abound in intelligence — the prose crackles with wit, the themes cohere with seriousness, and more to the point, the machinations of the plot remain obscure enough throughout that readers will feel le Carré trusts their alertness and perception. But le Carré is an entertainer. His novels, while slow and often intricate, remain principally thrillers, and from them one derives enormous amounts of delight and pleasure. Reading a le Carré novel, one trusts the governing authorial presence. On screen, you need the same patience. You need to trust that in time all will be clear.
Because le Carré has been adapted so widely and so often — 16 times now between film and television since The Spy Who Came in From the Cold became a celebrated hit in 1965 — this problem of reconciling his literary merits with the demands of the screen has been addressed already a great deal. Sometimes an acceptable solution has been compression: in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the film version by Tomas Alfredson and starring Gary Oldman that earned acclaim when it was released in 2011, virtually every action, event and line of dialogue survives the leap from book to screenplay, only truncated or hurried through to make it fit into a film that runs two hours. But while it loses little of the narrative, it sacrifices something more ineffable — namely the novel’s melancholic sobriety, in large part a product of le Carré’s strict, measured pace.
This pace is better retained by the famous Tinker Tailor miniseries produced by the BBC in the late 1970s, starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley and soon followed by a sequel, Smiley’s People, which is the finest adaptation of his work to date. These adaptations are so effective for the somewhat counterintuitive reason that they are “bad” television: never glamorous, always complex and faithful not simply to the intricacies of Smiley’s ploys to capture the nefarious Russian mastermind Karla, but to the moments of repose and reflection Smiley indulges frequently mid-pursuit, reckoning with past traumas or weighing the moral implications of the course he is to pursue. In a sense, then, the BBC take on Tinker Tailor is superior to the film version for one obvious reason: it’s longer.
It has the time to affect le Carré’s patience, and indeed to risk making a bad television show.