For the spy novel
Rebus and Edinburgh, Morse and Oxford. And although they uncover grisly and discomforting truths about our society, they generally see that the guilty are punished and that order is restored. Spies are different. They drift around the world, unattached to specific localities, lurking in everyday situations. People are killed in spy novels, but the discovery of whodunnit is rarely the end of the matter. Spy novels deal in longterm plans and conspiracies, and the secret machinations of the state will continue long after the plot of an individual novels ends.
As fictional spies traverse the globe, spy fiction is imbued with global anxieties. Many political situations that we thought we had left behind in the 20th century have returned to haunt us – the rise of the far right in Europe, the attempted murder of Russians on British soil and the consequent expulsions of spies. In the case of the president of the United States, we are even entertaining the possibility of that most 20th century of spy techniques – sexual blackmail (and Russian sexual blackmail at that). Spy novels engage with our distrust of the state and growing uncertainty of how well governments can represent us. In our “post-truth” times, we are reading more and more espionage fiction and it shows us – without having to resort to conspiracy theories – that governments are things to be distrusted.
In an increasingly globalised world, spies test our understanding of who we are, and where we come from. Spies in early 20th century popular thrillers were intensely patriotic as they fended off fiendish invasion plots. Now we are not so sure. All spies have to pin them down is their loyalty to their country. Everything else can be disguised or betrayed.
Spies can adopt any identity they choose. Even Richard Hannay, that most heroic of John Buchan’s heroes, puts his success in The Thirty-nine Steps down to his ability to fade into any immediate situation and to forget his own identity. In Jeremy Duns’s Paul Dark series, the “hero” and narrator is a traitor with (almost) no loyalties whatsoever. As we follow his lies and manipulations we recognise that his treachery is his only consistency.
Since the end of the Cold War (if it ever did end), we can now find out more about the clandestine world that lurked just beneath newspaper reports of defections, spy swaps, and narrowly-averted nuclear incidents. Now, as secret archives are opened, we find that the history we thought to be true isn’t quite how we experiencedit. Wearediscovering more about the role of women spies and codebreakers. And in literary terms, we reassess a predominantly masculine genre in an area of history that has not been as male as the spy novel might suggest. New writers such as Stella Rimington (herself a former head of MI5), Aly Monroe and August Thomas are innovating the genre, as we recover the earlier work of, for example, Sarah Gainham and Helen Macinnes.
As we feel the ground of the past shifting under our feet, spy novelists are turning to revaluate this ground. Charles Cummings’ The Trinity Six revisits the Cambridge spy-ring in a very modern context. James Robertson’s epic historical novel of modern Scotland, And the Land Lay Still, returns to the SNP of the 1970s, partly through the jaundiced eyes of Peter Bond, sent by the government to spy on Nationalists including the poet Hugh Macdiarmid. History and fiction merge in multiple ways. What better genre to explore the way the past was fictionalised at the time than the novel of espionage?
Does spy fiction offer us escapist pleasure? Or allow us to believe that the seamy, treacherous world of spying is fictional? Or encourage us to look again at secret history?
These are all questions that we will address in the University of Edinburgh’s Spy Week festival of the fiction, films and history of espionage.