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are_youreadyHi all, sorry I haven't been around as much. I got involved in a new hobby (doll customization! At some point I'll post pictures of my Victor(ia) Frankenstein and her monster) and then I was traveling.
I'm currently in Wales visiting my girlfriend, and I keep fingering her copy of Absolute Friends. I made fun of it with her for a while because it's plastered all over with absolutely glowing reviews from various sources and, well, look. Let's be frank. I've read Absolute Friends three times. I love the shit out of it. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "good."
I enjoy Absolute Friends because it is a (subtextual) romantic tragicomedy, a self-parody of le Carre's wider body of work more biting than any satire another person could come up with (and I'm still unsure whether this was intentional), and, perhaps most importantly, a feelgood antidote to A Perfect Spy. But it's not the kind of dark, politically wavering, emotionally nauseous thriller le Carre usually comes out with. It's a silly romp about having lots of sex and playing gay chicken in an anarchist free love commune in the sixties, with some spy stuff tacked on at the end to justify it being a le Carre novel. I sometimes wonder what his body of work would look like if he hadn't been burned with The Naive and Sentimental Lover (his only out of genre novel, a romance, universally panned).
Anyway, this post was inspired by a quote on the cover of Absolute Friends from The Times: "This is vintage John le Carre."
It really, absolutely isn't. There is a divide as sharp as a razor between his Cold War and post Cold War era novels.
His Cold War era novels are full of nervous, nauseous moral uncertainty. His protagonists are political agnostics desperately wishing they'd found God or Karl Marx (he makes no distinction) instead of living the senseless lives they lead. Every book ends with a certain ambiguity: he isn't quite willing to condemn his own side or the Soviets, and when he does condemn, his recriminations land on both in equal measure; he wishes he was a Communist but doesn't actually agree with or even really understand communist beliefs that well; he feels a certain nigh-Orientalist (and I would say this is the correct term, given that the sort of foreigner fetishism he displays in works about, e.g., Germany smoothly transfers onto Jewish, Arab, and African people when those groups appear in his books) attraction to Communists themselves, even though, or perhaps because, they always seem to lose.
In his post Cold War novels, he still feels this attraction to the Other, sympathy for the loser and suspicion of his own side, but he's much more ideologically sure of himself. He knows the Iraq War is wrong, and he has no questions about the atrocities of Western countries. His protagonists in these later novels are often not spies, and they rarely commit the kinds of wrongs that his earlier ones did. Perry Makepeace certainly never pushed an old friend off a bridge in the rain, and Toby Bell is a straight heroic character who isn't particularly torn about going against his own government, to throw out some examples. I can't pretend I've read his whole post Cold War bibliography, as I vastly prefer the earlier stuff, but I've read enough to see patterns.
The turning point is actually pretty easy to identify. I would argue that it's in The Secret Pilgrim (1990), where le Carre has George Smiley state, matter of factly, that espionage is pointless, and the final scene of the book is essentially the protagonist, after a lifetime of fighting the Cold War, realizing as he's retiring that the real villains were the capitalists all along. You could argue that the transition begins in The Russia House (1989), but it's cleaner cut in Pilgrim, imo.
Whether this change is entirely the result of the end of the Cold War is arguable. The naive answer would be to say yes, obviously, of course it was, but the thing is... le Carre published A Perfect Spy in 1986. His words on that book were: "Although I've never been to a shrink, writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised me to do anyway." There were distinct changes in his authorial outlook before and after writing it. In particular, his later books are a lot less self-hating and unsure. The moral ambiguities of the earlier books were tied up in that self-hating, unsure outlook, and they're somewhat lost in his later work.
So where does Absolute Friends fit in?
It was written in 2004, and the moral surety in the parts of the book set later is a hallmark of his post Cold War work. Even the parts set earlier are fairly unambiguous; there isn't a whole lot of conflict when they're screwing around being anarchists in Berlin, and when the book does eventually become a spy novel, the lines are fairly clear cut: Teddy's British masters are trying to do right by him and Sasha, Sasha's Soviet superiors are fucking him over, and Americans are inherently evil.
However, this lack of ambiguity in the spy parts is mostly because Absolute Friends almost never takes the global perspective - Teddy isn't interested in the goings on of the rest of the world, he just wants to help Sasha and his other loved ones.
While le Carre seems to have always believed that this was the best way to live one's life, all his other main characters don't tend to live by this philosophy. They're full of revenge and politics and amoral intellectual curiosity, all of which lead them to ruin. Love, of course, does lead Teddy to ruin, but essentially only because le Carre seems to have gotten sick of writing the book; this is why Absolute Friends' ending feels so odd and abrupt. Le Carre basically agrees with Teddy, and despite his occasional mistakes and regrets, he's well set up for a happy ending, something he's denied only because johnboy wanted to stay on brand. Teddy is spared ambiguity not just because, in the end, le Carre's politics are much more locked down (Gulf War Bad) but because his primary motivator is love, not politics.
The only other le Carre protagonist who shares this purity of purpose is... Magnus Pym.
In fact Absolute Friends is almost a blow by blow rewrite of A Perfect Spy, if it were a lighthearted sitcom and not an extremely disturbing psychological thriller. The achronological narrative, not one of le Carre's favored devices, only really dominates in APS and AF. The focus on Teddy's childhood, supremely unusual given that le Carre tends to ignore protagonists' backstories, is only paralleled in APS. The details of his childhood - constant moving, absent mother, idolized, racially othered nursemaid with a tragic backstory (for Magnus, she is a German Jewish woman whose family died in the holocaust, for Ted, she is a Pakistani Muslim woman whose family died during partition) who dies horribly, and of course, a disgraced father whose documents he inherits, though Arthur Mundy is no Rick Pym, fortunately for Ted. Teddy even, like Magnus, has his father's given name as a middle name.
Then there are the relationships. Spending an unreasonable amount of time pining over a lesbian whose name starts with J (I've forgotten the name of Sefton Boyd's sister, it may also actually be Judith). A first marriage which falls apart because of spy shit. A second marriage to a much younger woman. Ted and Magnus are also the only le Carre protagonists whose children take up significant space in the narrative. The only one who even comes close is Jerry Westerby, but he's far less invested than Magnus or Teddy, and far more estranged. The only other ones who canonically have children, as I recall, are Ned and Leamas. Leamas' children aren't named, unless you consider A Legacy of Spies canon, which I don't except when it suits me, and Ned's son Adrian exists in one throwaway line. Teddy's life centers around his two sons, and Magnus's little memoir is explicitly addressed to his son.
And then, there's. Well. Sasha and Axel. I've already talked about The Man, and Sasha and Axel are both The Man, but they're a lot closer than just both being instances of The Man. They meet Magnus/Teddy while they're students. They play mentor to Magnus/Teddy, and lead Magnus/Teddy into Leftism. They part for the first time from Magnus/Teddy unwillingly and violently. This is where they begin to be opposites, not counterparts. Teddy saves Sasha where Magnus betrays Axel, and Teddy's Jack Brotherhood (Mr Amery) gets nothing from him about Sasha. Later, Sasha is Teddy's mole, while Magnus is Axel's, though they both live lives entwined with each other's. Both Axel and Sasha's fathers were Lutheran pastors. However, Axel idolized his father, a socialist persecuted by the Nazis, and Sasha hated his, a Nazi. Both pairs of men share a deep bond of love, though obviously Magnus and Axel's is much more fraught. Teddy and Sasha's has its share of grief and resentment, though; Sasha did pretty singlehandedly ruin Teddy's first marriage, and in fact most of his other relationships with women.
Essentially, Absolute Friends is a happy rewrite of A Perfect Spy. What that means in autobiographical terms is unclear; AF could be just as autobiographical as APS but focusing on different aspects, it could be a rewrite of his own youth so things turned out better, or it could be an intentional rewrite of the fiction of APS. My money's on a little bit of all of them, favoring the last one.
But in literary terms, the fact that Absolute Friends straddles the eras a bit (having mostly the mentality of the post Cold War era, while being majority set during the Cold War), along with the fact that it is so closely entwined with the book that forms a divider between those eras, makes it somewhat relevant to le Carre's whole body of work. Absolute Friends is not "vintage John le Carre," but its close connection to his earlier work is a lot of what makes it enjoyable. In any case, if one wishes to analyze le Carre's body of work, it's worth reading.
I'm currently in Wales visiting my girlfriend, and I keep fingering her copy of Absolute Friends. I made fun of it with her for a while because it's plastered all over with absolutely glowing reviews from various sources and, well, look. Let's be frank. I've read Absolute Friends three times. I love the shit out of it. It is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "good."
I enjoy Absolute Friends because it is a (subtextual) romantic tragicomedy, a self-parody of le Carre's wider body of work more biting than any satire another person could come up with (and I'm still unsure whether this was intentional), and, perhaps most importantly, a feelgood antidote to A Perfect Spy. But it's not the kind of dark, politically wavering, emotionally nauseous thriller le Carre usually comes out with. It's a silly romp about having lots of sex and playing gay chicken in an anarchist free love commune in the sixties, with some spy stuff tacked on at the end to justify it being a le Carre novel. I sometimes wonder what his body of work would look like if he hadn't been burned with The Naive and Sentimental Lover (his only out of genre novel, a romance, universally panned).
Anyway, this post was inspired by a quote on the cover of Absolute Friends from The Times: "This is vintage John le Carre."
It really, absolutely isn't. There is a divide as sharp as a razor between his Cold War and post Cold War era novels.
His Cold War era novels are full of nervous, nauseous moral uncertainty. His protagonists are political agnostics desperately wishing they'd found God or Karl Marx (he makes no distinction) instead of living the senseless lives they lead. Every book ends with a certain ambiguity: he isn't quite willing to condemn his own side or the Soviets, and when he does condemn, his recriminations land on both in equal measure; he wishes he was a Communist but doesn't actually agree with or even really understand communist beliefs that well; he feels a certain nigh-Orientalist (and I would say this is the correct term, given that the sort of foreigner fetishism he displays in works about, e.g., Germany smoothly transfers onto Jewish, Arab, and African people when those groups appear in his books) attraction to Communists themselves, even though, or perhaps because, they always seem to lose.
In his post Cold War novels, he still feels this attraction to the Other, sympathy for the loser and suspicion of his own side, but he's much more ideologically sure of himself. He knows the Iraq War is wrong, and he has no questions about the atrocities of Western countries. His protagonists in these later novels are often not spies, and they rarely commit the kinds of wrongs that his earlier ones did. Perry Makepeace certainly never pushed an old friend off a bridge in the rain, and Toby Bell is a straight heroic character who isn't particularly torn about going against his own government, to throw out some examples. I can't pretend I've read his whole post Cold War bibliography, as I vastly prefer the earlier stuff, but I've read enough to see patterns.
The turning point is actually pretty easy to identify. I would argue that it's in The Secret Pilgrim (1990), where le Carre has George Smiley state, matter of factly, that espionage is pointless, and the final scene of the book is essentially the protagonist, after a lifetime of fighting the Cold War, realizing as he's retiring that the real villains were the capitalists all along. You could argue that the transition begins in The Russia House (1989), but it's cleaner cut in Pilgrim, imo.
Whether this change is entirely the result of the end of the Cold War is arguable. The naive answer would be to say yes, obviously, of course it was, but the thing is... le Carre published A Perfect Spy in 1986. His words on that book were: "Although I've never been to a shrink, writing A Perfect Spy is probably what a very wise shrink would have advised me to do anyway." There were distinct changes in his authorial outlook before and after writing it. In particular, his later books are a lot less self-hating and unsure. The moral ambiguities of the earlier books were tied up in that self-hating, unsure outlook, and they're somewhat lost in his later work.
So where does Absolute Friends fit in?
It was written in 2004, and the moral surety in the parts of the book set later is a hallmark of his post Cold War work. Even the parts set earlier are fairly unambiguous; there isn't a whole lot of conflict when they're screwing around being anarchists in Berlin, and when the book does eventually become a spy novel, the lines are fairly clear cut: Teddy's British masters are trying to do right by him and Sasha, Sasha's Soviet superiors are fucking him over, and Americans are inherently evil.
However, this lack of ambiguity in the spy parts is mostly because Absolute Friends almost never takes the global perspective - Teddy isn't interested in the goings on of the rest of the world, he just wants to help Sasha and his other loved ones.
While le Carre seems to have always believed that this was the best way to live one's life, all his other main characters don't tend to live by this philosophy. They're full of revenge and politics and amoral intellectual curiosity, all of which lead them to ruin. Love, of course, does lead Teddy to ruin, but essentially only because le Carre seems to have gotten sick of writing the book; this is why Absolute Friends' ending feels so odd and abrupt. Le Carre basically agrees with Teddy, and despite his occasional mistakes and regrets, he's well set up for a happy ending, something he's denied only because johnboy wanted to stay on brand. Teddy is spared ambiguity not just because, in the end, le Carre's politics are much more locked down (Gulf War Bad) but because his primary motivator is love, not politics.
The only other le Carre protagonist who shares this purity of purpose is... Magnus Pym.
In fact Absolute Friends is almost a blow by blow rewrite of A Perfect Spy, if it were a lighthearted sitcom and not an extremely disturbing psychological thriller. The achronological narrative, not one of le Carre's favored devices, only really dominates in APS and AF. The focus on Teddy's childhood, supremely unusual given that le Carre tends to ignore protagonists' backstories, is only paralleled in APS. The details of his childhood - constant moving, absent mother, idolized, racially othered nursemaid with a tragic backstory (for Magnus, she is a German Jewish woman whose family died in the holocaust, for Ted, she is a Pakistani Muslim woman whose family died during partition) who dies horribly, and of course, a disgraced father whose documents he inherits, though Arthur Mundy is no Rick Pym, fortunately for Ted. Teddy even, like Magnus, has his father's given name as a middle name.
Then there are the relationships. Spending an unreasonable amount of time pining over a lesbian whose name starts with J (I've forgotten the name of Sefton Boyd's sister, it may also actually be Judith). A first marriage which falls apart because of spy shit. A second marriage to a much younger woman. Ted and Magnus are also the only le Carre protagonists whose children take up significant space in the narrative. The only one who even comes close is Jerry Westerby, but he's far less invested than Magnus or Teddy, and far more estranged. The only other ones who canonically have children, as I recall, are Ned and Leamas. Leamas' children aren't named, unless you consider A Legacy of Spies canon, which I don't except when it suits me, and Ned's son Adrian exists in one throwaway line. Teddy's life centers around his two sons, and Magnus's little memoir is explicitly addressed to his son.
And then, there's. Well. Sasha and Axel. I've already talked about The Man, and Sasha and Axel are both The Man, but they're a lot closer than just both being instances of The Man. They meet Magnus/Teddy while they're students. They play mentor to Magnus/Teddy, and lead Magnus/Teddy into Leftism. They part for the first time from Magnus/Teddy unwillingly and violently. This is where they begin to be opposites, not counterparts. Teddy saves Sasha where Magnus betrays Axel, and Teddy's Jack Brotherhood (Mr Amery) gets nothing from him about Sasha. Later, Sasha is Teddy's mole, while Magnus is Axel's, though they both live lives entwined with each other's. Both Axel and Sasha's fathers were Lutheran pastors. However, Axel idolized his father, a socialist persecuted by the Nazis, and Sasha hated his, a Nazi. Both pairs of men share a deep bond of love, though obviously Magnus and Axel's is much more fraught. Teddy and Sasha's has its share of grief and resentment, though; Sasha did pretty singlehandedly ruin Teddy's first marriage, and in fact most of his other relationships with women.
Essentially, Absolute Friends is a happy rewrite of A Perfect Spy. What that means in autobiographical terms is unclear; AF could be just as autobiographical as APS but focusing on different aspects, it could be a rewrite of his own youth so things turned out better, or it could be an intentional rewrite of the fiction of APS. My money's on a little bit of all of them, favoring the last one.
But in literary terms, the fact that Absolute Friends straddles the eras a bit (having mostly the mentality of the post Cold War era, while being majority set during the Cold War), along with the fact that it is so closely entwined with the book that forms a divider between those eras, makes it somewhat relevant to le Carre's whole body of work. Absolute Friends is not "vintage John le Carre," but its close connection to his earlier work is a lot of what makes it enjoyable. In any case, if one wishes to analyze le Carre's body of work, it's worth reading.
no subject
on 2019-01-24 02:29 pm (UTC)god this type of thing makes me thankful I'm not an author, even though it was a childhood dream -- to have evidence of my psyche, of me working through my personal shit over decades, in various warped permutations of myself... fucked up. to be known is to be vulnerable and all that
ANYWAY it makes for fascinating reading about other people though !! good ole johnboy.
no subject
on 2019-01-24 03:35 pm (UTC)https://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/magazine/john-le-carre-has-not-mellowed-with-age.html?action=click&module=RelatedCoverage&pgtype=Article®ion=Footer i reread this and it helps
no subject
on 2019-01-24 03:53 pm (UTC)oh man that article is a trip:
--"His eyebrows, so thatchy and animated that they seem ready to leap off his forehead and start nibbling the shrubbery, rose as he turned toward me, his blue eyes alight, and happily declared, “At least they aren’t hunting that poor goddamn thing with drones.”" HAH jesus
--his dad was a famous con man ??? wow
--"His enormous success also made it hard for him to make friends in his new profession. “I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn’t struggled. I couldn’t suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of those guys were struggling to make a couple of thousand pounds a year.”" lmao
--"“Whereas Alec had no identifiable sexuality at all — the few times he had to lean in to kiss someone on-screen, you really looked away — Oldman has this clear sexuality and authority,” he said. “He played the part like a coil spring, patiently waiting to unwind — to explode really.”" ??? what part of that sounds like Smiley
--“They are under strict orders,” he said, “to speak up if they think I am not writing well any longer, because at this point I could write the telephone directory and get money for it.” HAH wow
no subject
on 2019-01-24 04:02 pm (UTC)yeah, that article is wild. "it's sexy that george fucks now" - david john moore cornwell, 2013.
and yeah, his dad being a famous conman is like. that's The Thing. it's the Thing he writes about. his dad is the focus of his childhood trauma and the conman thing is deffo a part of it; he credits that for becoming a spy. please read aps, or dont actually bc its fucked up, but you know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Spy
did you read the part where he pisses in front of an effigy of george w bush, because that's simultaneously the wildest thing in this article and the most instantly believable
no subject
on 2019-01-24 04:13 pm (UTC)what if...... instead of APS, I reread Absolute Friends? ;-) lol nah i'll probably get around to it someday.
no subject
on 2019-01-24 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2019-01-26 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
on 2019-01-26 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
on 2019-01-26 02:52 am (UTC)