Deadly return
Imbued with global anxieties, the spy novel is the perfect vehicle for this post-truth era, writes Penny Fielding
The most famous spy on the big screen gives his identity away by always ordering the same drink, and introducing himself by his real name: “Bond. James Bond.” It doesn’t seem like the best strategy for surviving in the secret world. But most fictional spies are more accomplished and less visible. You could pass John le Carré’s George Smiley on the street, and he can appear both as a ruthless runner of double agents and, in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, a “kindly, worried little man”.
To do their job properly, spies don’t want to be noticed. And in any case, perhaps they are more like us ordinary working people than we might think. Perhaps we read spy fiction because it reminds of the way secrets are built into the bureaucracies that govern our everyday lives. The spies we meet in literature are often workers themselves, labouring in the faceless institutions that employ them. In The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, the British “Circus” faces the East German “Abteilung” (mening “Department”). The secret agency in Adam Hall’s Quiller novels is even called the “Bureau”. Spies are kept in the dark by their spymasters and rarely understand the full extent of the operations in which their job skills are exploited. No wonder that Karl Marx believed that the ruling principle of a bureaucracy was the secret.
Yet the best spy novels grip us by inserting bursts of violence or trauma into our everyday world. Mick Herron’s Slough House series features a collection of failed spies, relegated to an “administrative oubliette of the intelligence service”, yet their dull office-bound lives are punctuated by terrorism and explosions.
The spy novel is catching up in popularity with the detective novel; but there is a difference between them that tells us something about the way we use literature to plot our responses to the world. Detectives solve murders, close cases. They patrol local, identifiable places – Sherlock Holmes and London,