extremely bad spy fanfiction

I'd like to start using this site again. I've made a neocities (link forthcoming; it's currently so under construction that it doesn't even have my info on it yet) and I plan to link the two together. Perhaps I can convince several of my friends to create Dreamwidth accounts and we can all comment on each other's posts. Really bringing stuff out of the Discord and back into the (public) forum. That would be nice.

Also, I hope to maybe start running a Supernatural rarepair fanwork exchange! Which means that Dreamwidth will probably be a useful resource. Fingers crossed.

Now, if you know me somewhere other than Dreamwidth, then you know that I have... mixed feelings... about adaptations of le Carre novels. "Unadaptable" is the word I'd use to describe most of his books, and the only adaptation that I've seen that's good because it's faithful to the source, rather than being good for other reasons, is the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People Miniseries from 1979 and 1982. And even those are not completely faithful; they sacrifice a lot of George Smiley's characterization, and the intricate relationship networks in the book, to preserve the overall spirit. And that's not to mention how half the dialog (especially in Tinker Tailor) is just people quoting paragraph long excerpts of the books at each other; those miniseries are incredible as both adaptation and as art, but they don't make very good television if you haven't read the books.

But I do enjoy many adaptations of le Carre's work. They're often not very good adaptations, either because they don't understand the spirit of the work or simply throw the source material out the window. But they can be good movies, tv series, radioplays nonetheless. At best, works like these add to the source material, suggesting sides of characters we've never seen, or other ways the chips could have fallen had things been a little different.

One such adaptation is The Deadly Affair (1966), which is an extremely loose adaptation of Call for the Dead, with the notable change of not technically starring George Smiley, Peter Guillam, or Ann Smiley: due to issues with copyright related to The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1965), these characters' names are changed to Charles Dobbs, Bill Appleton, and Ann Dobbs. There are a lot of other changes, but we'll dig into those in a moment.

Now, if you were to ask someone what book is John le Carre's masterpiece, they would probably give you one of three answers: The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or A Perfect Spy. I'm going to go ahead and toss out Spy Who as a candidate: it's a good book, and it made him famous, but it's a rocky, amateurish novel, lacking a lot of the depth, realism, and character complexity which makes his other work good. Control is a supervillainous sociopath, Mundt is the same, Leamas is a hard-boiled soldier with a heart of gold and no real aspersions cast upon his masculinity or his character. It's a very romantic idea of how the world works, one which does not tend to prevail in le Carre's other novels, and one which make Spy Who far less interesting than it could be.

So, the contest is between Tinker Tailor and A Perfect Spy. If we're saying that a masterpiece is the pinnacle of an artist's career, the one thing he's spent his life striving towards, the logical conclusion of his body of work, then of course that would be A Perfect Spy. I think this is fairly self explanatory, but I'll give a bit of exposition anyway: the brutal honestly of the autobiographical aspects of A Perfect Spy was something le Carre had been taking baby steps toward for years, and a lot of the tensions that had thrummed under the surface of all his previous work burst to the surface in A Perfect Spy. It's also his most literary novel.

But if a masterpiece is not the logical conclusion of a body of work but rather the best example of that body, the best illustration of what le Carre does well, and what only he can do... I would argue Tinker Tailor fits the bill better. A Perfect Spy may be a fantastic book, but although it takes the rest of his work to its logical conclusion, it isn't actually very much like the rest of his work. If my first experience with le Carre was A Perfect Spy, and I wanted more works in that vein, the only even remotely similar book he has is The Little Drummer Girl, and even The Little Drummer Girl is more like the rest of his work than it is like a Perfect Spy. (I am not dignifying Absolute Friends with a mention here because it absolutely, if you'll excuse me, does not deserve it). Whereas Tinker Tailor is an example not just of good writing in general but of le Carre at his best: tragic, satirical, sympathetic, tortured, poetic, loving, vicious, inexpressible; deeply interested in his characters and their moral and emotional struggles, unwilling to cede an easy moral victory even to characters who win an inevitable material one, using the barebones plot of the simplest thriller but hanging an intricate web of shadowed relationships and unspeakable emotions around those bones until the bones don't matter at all.

So I would say that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is, at least arguably, le Carre's masterpiece. And in this essay I will explain how said masterpiece is partly based on a loose adaptation of another of his own novels.
( Spoilers for Tinker Tailor, Call for the Dead, and The Deadly Affair below )

 I really do think any le Carre fan who enjoys knowing weird shit about their idols or taking cheap affectionate potshots should read this article.

 I've been thinking about The Prisoner lately. Got reminded of it today because I was scrolling my read page and somebody was filling a bingo, one of whose squares was titled "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling." I have no idea what the prompt means; however, that is the title of an episode of The Prisoner. 

I keep thinking about the purpose of fandom, as I see it, because I cannot for the life of me imagine a narrative transformative work for The Prisoner that could possibly be good, and I'm trying to tease out exactly why that is. I think it's because the prisoner is fundamentally surreal and allegorical; it has no reality. The people inside it are not people and they were never meant to be. The purpose of transformative fiction - as I see it - is to flesh out the bare bones we see on television and on the page, fill in gaps the author left, intentionally or not. However, in a surrealist work, that fails because it's, well, all gap. Transformative fiction hangs itself on the skeleton established by the canon, in terms of world and of character - if the point of the canon is that nothing is real and people are archetypes, then how can transformative fiction function?

This poses another question as well, which is, barring the obvious exception of Spock, who is very much a person, the characters in Star Trek: The Original Series are just as archetypal as the ones in The Prisoner, the world is nearly as surreal, and the plots are just as if not more allegorical. In fact, I would consider Star Trek and The Prisoner to be kindred shows in many respects. But Star Trek feels more real to me, and I don't think this is just because it has thirteen movies and six spinoff series aggressively de-surrealizing it. This seems like a stupid question with an obvious answer but I'm having trouble putting it into words: why does Star Trek (TOS) fanfiction work?

Also, I do sometimes come across TOS fic that falls flat to me because it fails to respect the nature of the work in the same way any attempt to write fic of The Prisoner would, but this is only a subset of TOS fic, so what the hell? Caveat: I have not read TOS fic in three years.

More one sentence fics from the same bingo card, pegasuswrites told me to do Smiley/Karla this time.

( Read more... )

Hi all, I'm too goddamn lazy to figure out how to navigate prompt communities while I'm in a fandom basically all by myself, however, I am stealing their ideas. I generated myself a bingo card here and I'm going to do five one sentence fics to make a Bingo! I might do this again with a different Bingo on the same card.

This is gonna be Smiley/Mendel, for maximum nicheness.

( Read more... )

 Now, Johnboy has... let's call them archetypes, in his work. Perhaps "idiosyncratic personal tropes" is more accurate. The most important of these, I would argue, is an archetype I like to call The Man. Now, The Man is a character, but his relationship to the protagonist is also an aspect of the archetype. He is a limping dark eyed slender diminutive charismatic Byronic attractive sexually ambiguous promiscuous suffering-under-the-state ex-lutheran or atheist Jewish German true-believing zealous socialist, but he is also most importantly the protagonist's fraught friend-nemesis. Now, there are different levels of that: Sasha is Teddy's friend who is also kind of a dick and keeps dragging Teddy into dumbass bullshit; Karla is George's nemesis who intentionally ruined his marriage and polluted the Circus and who George is obsessed with in a way that can sometimes reasonably qualify as hatred, at least in Smiley's People.

I would consider Axel H. in A Perfect Spy to be the most accurate depiction of the archetype of The Man, and I generally consider him to be the basic template which all other iterations deviate from. He was written later than most other iterations, true, but the combination of 1) the fact that he carries the most "The Man" archetypal traits of any of them, 2) the fact that his arc seems to kind of be what the others were portraying with the details changed, and 3) most importantly, the heavy autobiographicality of A Perfect Spy, cause me to still consider him to be the template.

Among other things, taking Axel as the template helps to explain Smiley's relationship with Karla.

( Spoilers for both APS and the Karla Trilogy ahead )