Other Writing
Fantasies of clandestinity
Times Literary Supplement #4610, April 9, 1991

Wesley K. Wark, editor;
SPY FICTION, SPY FILMS, AND REAL INTELLIGENCE
225pp. Cass. £18. 0714634115

Perhaps one of the most fearful consequences of the end of the Cold War is what it seems to be doing to the spy novel. The Soviet Union, for so long the bogeyman, is no longer available; and Berlin, the great twilit back-lot of Cold War intrigue, now crawls with tourists carrying Camcorders.

In desperation, quite a few authors of thrillers and espionage fiction have begun to turn to dreary Third World settings, small-time drug barons, Mexican potentates, and the like. Many aficionados no doubt find it dispiriting to contemplate a coming generation of thrillers set not in Berlin or Moscow but Qatar, Dubai, Cartagena or Kuala Lumpur - forsaking the burnished parqueted halls of the Lubyanka for tents with mosquito netting. As Alan Bennett has written recently, "The trouble with treachery nowadays is that if one does want to betray one's country there is no one satisfactory to betray it to. If there were, more people would be doing it." It is no wonder we have begun to read obituaries of the espionage novel.

Useful evidence in this regard is provided by Spy Fiction, Spy Films, and Real Intelligence, a collection of essays that explore a number of facets of spy fiction; the contributions of the philosopher J. J. MacIntosh and the historian D. Cameron Watt are particularly valuable. Ordinarily one might expect such a book to be unintentionally entertaining; it can be amusing to observe the unease with which some academic critics approach Trivialliteratur, as the Germans call it. The more popular the stuff is, the more they feel compelled to dress it up in cumbrous critical garb - "Transgression, Textuality, and Historicity in The Eiger Sanction" and so on. But there is nothing that egregious here. This is, I am rather sorry to say, a sound, intelligent collection, written by critics who apparently enjoy spy fiction and have put quite a bit of thought into it. They may be forgiven their occasional longueurs.

The modern spy thriller, as these essays remind us, arose amid, and out of, Edwardian-era fears of the German naval threat (beginning with Erskine Childers's The Riddle of the Sands, in 1903) and has ever since drawn upon whatever threat happened to be ambient. The publication of Childers's novel excited widespread British fears about an impending German invasion and in time became required reading in the War Office. This and the thrillers that followed, including the yarns of E. Phillips Oppenheim and William Le Queux (whose 1909 novel Spies of the Kaiser set off alarms throughout England about German espionage) and certainly that great progenitor of the modern political conspiracy novel, G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), exerted influence far beyond their literary interest because, as Wesley K. Wark points out in his introduction, like all spy novels they allow readers to experience a "fantasy of clandestinity." Employing "apparent realism", they seemed to provide the "true", "inside" story or history that had been concealed by governments or historians, a "counter discourse", as the historian Dominick La Capra has called it. The spy novelist, since the genre's inception, has always been shameless in appropriating history.

Consequently, many spy thrillers provide us with a plausible evocation of an alternative reality. John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) offered a chilling vision of German spies nestled cosily in the heart of bourgeois England, in a coastal villa, operating against an enervated, torpid society that could be saved only by the vigorous, regenerating efforts of a frontiersman and amateur agent, Richard Hannay (as David Troller argues in his thoughtful essay "The Politics of Adventure"). And Geoffrey Household's great Rogue Male (1939) gave readers a hero who had attempted to assassinate Hitler for personal, not political, reasons. Household, Ambler, Greene (in his "entertainments") and numerous other thriller writers of the pre-war period drew upon the murky grey threats - presumably engendered by international capitalism, shadowy pan-European cartels and "merchants of death" thought to be manipulating events - to create stories of warning and alarm much like their granddaddy, The Riddle of the Sands. Still, as Eric Hornberger points out in "English Spy Thrillers in the Age of Appeasement", the espionage novels of the 1930s shared the prevailing societal impulse to avoid tackling fascism in any serious way. Much later, Richard Condon's spy farce The Manchurian Candidate (1959) evoked an America menaced by a lunatic right wing, in which a brainwashed Communist sleeper agent could be directed to assassinate a presidential candidate. (This prefigured the Kennedy assassination by barely four years.) Seven years after the real Kennedy slaying, Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal - in which a supremely cold-blooded Englishman is hired to assassinate De Gaulle - enabled us to re-enact the traumatic event, but from the point of view of the assassin, a colourless, barely delineated, and therefore frightening character-and to stop him. (All thrillers, after all, are inherently conservative and aspire toward the restoration of the status quo.)

Most of the best-known post-Second World War spy thrillers were in fact political thrillers, wholly or in part - appropriately for the age of political assassinations, covert warfare and war waged by proxy (necessitated by the nuclear balance of terror). The extraordinary popularity of the suspense thrillers of Robert Ludlum, all of whose plots rely on a steadily escalating revelation of conspiracy at the highest levels, probably owes much (in the United States, at least) to the Watergate scandal and the resulting public loss of faith in the presidency and just about every other institution of government. They were (and are) ideal actings-out of the generalized suspicion that, if you lift up a rock of statecraft, something nasty will be crawling underneath.

Spies themselves became largely discredited in the period after the maturation of the Cold War. The spy novels of recent vintage generally considered "best" or most "serious" are inevitably morose, bleak, wearily existential - le Carré, Graham Greene, and their host of imitators- and are thought to "transcend the genre" largely because they rebuke the sterile mechanics of espionage that make them possible. They tend, as J. J. Macintosh observes here, to be anti-spy novels, condemnatory of spies and of the whole damned business. Yet one could plausibly maintain, instead, that what we were really seeing was merely a change in affect: that this new pose of jadedness, whether le Carré's anomic spymasters or Len Deighton's disaffected petty office workers at London Central, with their failed marriages and their ratty briefcases, was just a more sophisticated, if covert, way to glamorize the spy trade. The true insider now is knowing to the point of ennui.

These days, the spy thriller draws more than ever upon our need for revelation, which is hardly anything new. Consider the following typical passage from Tom Clancy's immensely popular "techno-thriller" The Hunt for Red October:

The outward-moving water carried the clapper into the pipe, which had a fifteen-centimeter inside diameter. The pipe was made of stainless steel, two-meter sections welded together for easy replacement ..... Total pressure jumped momentarily to thirty-four hundred pounds. This caused the pipe to flex a few millimeters. The increased pressure, lateral displacement of a weld joint, and cumulative effect of years of high temperature erosion of the steel damaged the joint.

This sort of stuff, though it may read like an MS-DOS manual, is catnip to a lot of readers. (No surprise that Clancy's fourth novel, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, was serialized in Popular Mechanics.) But it is not so dissimilar to great swatches of Melville's prose in Moby-Dick or Typee or Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast. What is at work here is a phenomenon, elucidated by Neil Harris in his book Humbug: The art of P. T. Barnum, which he calls the "operational aesthetic", a useful term describing our delight, in an age of emerging industrialization and technological progress, with knowing how things work, with information, how-to-ism, technical manuals, details, fact. In an age when machines seem more important - and certainly more powerful - than people, we've all become connoisseurs of fact-porn.

As Wesley Wark notes, "Each new generation of spy fiction proved intent on propelling itself away from the sorts of historical dynamics employed by its predecessors". Whatever happens in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, I would put my money on yet another generational shift in espionage fiction: the spy novel, which long predated the Cold War, will most certainly outlive it.