![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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 )
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 )
