{"id":17333,"date":"2012-02-20T07:28:33","date_gmt":"2012-02-20T13:28:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=17333"},"modified":"2015-10-31T09:23:15","modified_gmt":"2015-10-31T14:23:15","slug":"tinker-tailor-once-more-tradecraft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2012\/02\/20\/tinker-tailor-once-more-tradecraft\/","title":{"rendered":"TINKER TAILOR once more: Tradecraft"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy<\/em> has to be counted a success ($64 million worldwide so far), and it may have brought new attention to John le Carr\u00e9\u2019s writing. The fact that some websites and Twitter feeds lured readers to my entry on the film<\/a>\u00a0(and thanks to all) suggests that people can enjoy a film even though major aspects of the plot escape them. Everybody loves a mystery, right?<\/p>\n

Regular readers won\u2019t be surprised to learn that I had originally written something longer about le Carr\u00e9\u2019s narrative strategies generally. Out of common human decency I cut the entry in half and focused on the film. But seeing the interest in what I\u2019d posted, I thought that there might be enough hard-core readers who\u2019d want to go down the rabbit hole again.<\/p>\n

So one more post, which reflects a little more on the film, while arguing that le\u00a0Carr\u00e9\u2019s development as a novelist offers a fascinating example of a writer trying out various methods of storytelling. Ideally, you should read this after reading my first post.\u00a0The next three sections don\u2019t spill any secrets, but if you want to avoid spoilers, stop at the section called \u201cBurrowing.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Going to ground<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

During the 1970s le Carr\u00e9 seems to me to have reinvented the dense, almost digressive plotting we associate with the nineteenth century British novel. A little narrative theory helps us understand his ongoing exploration of storytelling technique.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re used to thinking that a plot presents one or two major characters moving through the world. That movement yields adventures in the broadest sense: encounters with others, experiences that illuminate some aspect of life, conflicts both inner and outer. Our mental prototype of a plot, certainly in mainstream films, features a protagonist (or a couple) accompanied by lesser figures who become allies, helpers, lovers, rivals, and enemies.<\/p>\n

Le Carr\u00e9\u2019s first novels accord with our prototype, with the addition of those old standbys Mystery And Intrigue. Call for the Dead<\/em> (1961) and A Murder of Quality<\/em>\u00a0 (1962) are mostly straightforward detective stories. Although George Smiley is a secret agent, he’s forced to investigate crimes. Accordingly, he goes from place to place, suspect to suspect, and hears out their explanations and alibis. With The Spy Who Came in from the Cold<\/em> (1963), le Carr\u00e9 moves closer to an adventure plot, as we follow a protagonist in a linear succession of encounters. As is common in the genre, concealed information is sprung on us at various points, forcing us to recast what we thought we knew.<\/p>\n

It takes a mind as odd as that of Viktor Shklovsky, the great literary theorist, to point out that we can think of any longish narrative as the intersection among many stories. He believed that as a form the novel developed out of assemblies of shorter tales. He pointed to The 1001 Arabian Nights<\/em> and The Decameron<\/em> as examples of this sort of compilation\u2014long works built out of collected stories, enclosed within a bigger storytelling situation.<\/p>\n

When the novel became a distinct genre, Shklovsky thought, it continued this tradition. In essence, each novel makes a long story out of several shorter stories. But unlike what happens in the compilation format, the stories become connected to one another. Character A figures not only in her own plot, but in Character B\u2019s. This tends to hide the fact that separate stories are nestled within the overall architecture.<\/p>\n

Besides connecting all the sub-stories, the ordinary novel makes some of them very minor. Our simpler prototype relies on suppressing or compressing all the other story lines except the one involving the protagonist. Our protagonist meets lots of people, but some are given no background, others a bit, and still others a fair amount, but nobody\u2019s story can override the hero\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Shklovsky asks us to rethink our idea of the standard novel. It becomes not a straight-line path but a tangle of virtual tales that has been radically chopped down and ironed out. All the latent stories might be intriguing enough to sustain a plot in themselves, but for immediate purposes they must be subordinated to the fate of those creatures we call protagonists. In effect, Shklovsky suggests that every narrative can be thought of as an undernourished network narrative<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a tale of mystery and detection of course, hidden backstories of some of the characters come to light gradually. But severe selectivity still reigns, because the backstories bear on the protagonist\u2019s main goal: solving the mystery. When Smiley cracks a murder case or agent Leamas realizes that he has been deceived by his superiors, we understand other characters\u2019 lives in a new way, but they don\u2019t steal the stage from our hero.<\/p>\n

Still, Shklovsky notes, some storytellers have realized that secondary characters can claim the spotlight as well. At the limit, they can furnish new narratives, as in Wicked<\/em> and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.<\/em>\u00a0Henry Jenkins\u2019 idea of transmedia storytelling<\/a>\u00a0exemplifies this idea:\u00a0the ally in one tale can become the hero of another, perhaps on another media platform. But of course nineteenth-century novelists aimed to do the same thing within a single tale, building elaborate plots that would give us an ample sense of how the lives of many characters converge through chance or common purpose. Our Mutual Friend, Pot-Bouille,\u00a0<\/em>and War and Peace<\/em> try to accommodate a great many stories within their wide compass.<\/p>\n

I think that with the novel Tinker, Tailor<\/em> le Carr\u00e9 decided to try this option, to give the spy novel\u2014typically the province of the teasing linear plot exemplified in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold<\/em>\u2014the sense of a panorama surveying many characters\u2019 lives and perspectives and, still more broadly, the institutions that they serve.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Backchanneling<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a problem here: How to expand your plot to do justice to many characters\u2019 backstories and sidestories? Again Shklovsky provides useful hints, and le Carr\u00e9 tried many of the options he proposes.<\/p>\n

Shklovsky suggests that stories can be integrated in two basic ways. One is through framing. You the writer set a self-contained tale, or several tales, inside a bigger one. This is exemplified by The Decameron<\/em> and The Canterbury Tales<\/em>, as in the films that Pasolini made from these classic works. We can see this option at work in a movie like Dead of Night<\/em> (1945), in which guests at a country house party swap stories of the morbid and bizarre.\u00a0 Actually, le Carr\u00e9 tried this. The Secret Pilgrim<\/em> (1990), is virtually a collection of short stories framed by an aged spy listening to Smiley lecture at MI6\u2019s training school.<\/p>\n

Another option is what Shklovsky calls \u201cthreading,\u201d the principle that traces the consecutive adventures of a protagonist. This is the prototype I\u2019ve already mentioned. But Shklovsky suggests that by keeping the protagonist thread you can still expand the framed tales. In Don Quixote<\/em>, the adventures of the Knight and Sancho Panza hold their own interest, but they surround a string of embedded tales told by the people they meet. And sometimes those embedded tales are pretty long.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that le Carr\u00e9 sought ways in which he could expand his embedded tales without losing the main thread. For example, his novel following The Spy\u2026<\/em>, The Looking Glass War<\/em> (1965), splits the protagonist function up into three characters, their parallelism stressed by the section titles: \u201cTaylor\u2019s Run,\u201d \u201cAvery\u2019s Run,\u201d and \u201cLeiser\u2019s Run.\u201d There is an overarching rhythm to the action, but we have three distinct protagonists. It\u2019s as if the author is rehearsing, on a smaller scale, the shifting viewpoints that he will exploit in his longer fictions. The tripled protagonist also allows le Carr\u00e9 to present different standpoints on that center of spying operations MI 6, known as the Circus.<\/p>\n

The following book, A Small Town in Germany<\/em> (1968), is a return to a single protagonist and a straight detective plot, but now the mystery focuses on the bureaucracy behind espionage. Alan Turner, an embittered spy in the Leamas mold, is searching not only for a staff member missing from the British embassy in Bonn but also for some damaging files that have vanished. The drab routines of sorting, checking, and managing information become the object of scrutiny, and Her Majesty\u2019s civil servants are prime suspects. Le Carr\u00e9 had found a way to put burrowing at the center of his plot.<\/p>\n

After these efforts, in which Smiley barely appears, le Carr\u00e9 might well have felt ready to test his talents on a broader canvas. First came The Na\u00efve and Sentimental Lover<\/em> (1971), a satiric psychological novel about a businessman who becomes entranced by a novelist and his wife. The book, which runs over 400 pages, shows le Carr\u00e9\u2019s eagerness to stretch out. Just as important, I suspect, is its value as a laboratory for narrative experiments. Descriptions swell, and inner states are reported in detail. Instead of a roaming point of view, there are deep plunges into the main character\u2019s mind and senses through stream of consciousness, free indirect discourse, and a curiously omniscient voice, sometimes pitying and sometimes jocular. Compare the driving scenes in the opening lines of two books.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhy don\u2019t you get out and walk? I would if I were your age. Quicker than sitting with this scum.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll be all right,\u201d said Cork, the Albino coding clerk, and looked anxiously at the older man in the driving seat beside him.<\/strong><\/p>\n

(A Small Town in Germany<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Cassidy drove contentedly through the evening sunlight, his face as close to the windshield as the safety belt allowed, his foot alternating diffidently between accelerator and brake as he scanned the narrow lane for unseen hazards. Beside him on the passenger seat, carefully folded into a plastic envelope, lay an Ordnance Survey map of central Somerset. . . . For the attention of Mr. Aldo Cassidy<\/em> ran the deferential inscription; for Aldo was his first name. He drove, as always, with the greatest concentration, and now and then he hummed to himself with that furtive sincerity common to the tone-deaf. <\/strong><\/p>\n

(The Na\u00efve and Sentimental Lover<\/em>)<\/p>\n

The style seems to me unsure, but clearly the writer is moving beyond terseness toward something more enveloping and commentative.<\/p>\n

Returning to the espionage genre, le Carr\u00e9\u00a0hit upon another way to fill a big canvas. He resurrected that old formula, the supreme master-mind criminal pitted against our beleagured hero. The master spy isn\u2019t Mabuse or Fu Manchu but the Russian Karla, snug in Kremlin Centre, and George Smiley\u2019s efforts to flush him out are chronicled in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy<\/em> (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy<\/em> (1977), and Smiley\u2019s People<\/em> (1979). The mass-market omnibus edition of these runs to nearly a thousand densely packed pages. How did our author manage plots on this new scale?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Wrangling<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Chekhov says that if a story tells us that there is a gun on the wall, then subsequently that gun ought to shoot. . .\u00a0 In a mystery novel, however, the gun that hangs on the wall does not fire. Another gun shoots instead.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Viktor Shklovsky<\/p>\n

Some expansions are pretty evident. The Quest for Karla trilogy introduces many new characters, mostly people who staff the Circus or who are involved with the institution of espionage: from secretaries and \u201cscalphunters,\u201d the lonely and low-down agents assigned to menial bits of spying, to the very top, such as the Minister who oversees MI6 and Lacon the pliant civil servant overseeing the Circus. Some of these characters are in turn given private lives, with friends and lovers. The connections ramify.<\/p>\n

In addition, there are the civilians whose lives are touched by the Cold War chessgame. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold<\/em>, that demographic was represented by Liz Gold, Leamas\u2019 lover. But in the Karla trilogy we get a panoply of more or less innocent figures who are pulled into webs of plot and counterplot. And here le Carr\u00e9 does something quite shrewd.<\/p>\n

He tends to start<\/em> the novel with these characters, people at the very edge of the web. Smiley\u2019s People<\/em> opens with an unassuming Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9e living in Paris. She’s confronted by a Soviet agent telling her she might be permitted to see her long-lost daughter. What does that have to do with Smiley\u2019s cleaning the Circus stables after the mole scandal, or Smiley\u2019s loss of power after the Jerry Westerby misadventure? Positing enigmas at two or three degrees of separation, working inward across the web, le Carr\u00e9 lets the reader gradually sense the lines of force that lead inexorably to the principals.<\/p>\n

So le Carr\u00e9 grows his book not merely by expanding his cast. He finds a new balance between thread structure and framed stories. In Smiley\u2019s People<\/em>, perhaps the most orthodox entry in the trilogy, Smiley investigates the death of an \u00e9migr\u00e9 Soviet general, and this entails a fairly standard detective plot. The novelty comes in the fact that the participants Smiley questions are former agents whom he ran, or colleagues retired from the Circus\u2014his people. And what they tell him isn\u2019t rendered in compressed dialogue or summary. Their recollections spread out luxuriantly, claiming considerable interest in their own right, sometimes with only slight points of contact with the main plot, sometimes burying clues that Smiley must dig out.<\/p>\n

More intricate is The Honourable Schoolboy<\/em>, the longest entry in the Karla trilogy. It has two main threads: Jerry Westerby\u2019s efforts to trace money flowing from Moscow to Hong Kong, and Smiley\u2019s struggle to rebuild the Circus. The plot encapsulates the two main types of spy fiction\u2014indeed, the two types that le Carr\u00e9 had already mastered in his earlier books. While Jerry\u2019s plot is suspenseful adventure stuff, Smiley\u2019s plot is inquiry-oriented, like that in Ambler\u2019s classic Mask of Dimitrios<\/em> (1939). To stretch the canvas on a still bigger frame, le Carr\u00e9 makes\u00a0Smiley pass investigative assignments to other Circus personnel, like Connie Sachs and Doc di Salis (who get characterized in detail). Indeed, both main lines of action are filled out with rich and lengthy sub-stories. We can study the tradecraft of old Craw, majestic spy-journalist; the puzzling past of Lizzie Worthington, Drake Ko\u2019s mistress; and the enigmas around her lover Ricardo, either dead or flying heedlessly through an Asia in flames.<\/p>\n

The Honourable Schoolboy<\/em> also has a more layered narration than its predecessors. It switches point of view constantly, in the process virtually promoting Peter Guillam to the rank of Smiley\u2019s Watson. Most striking is the plot\u2019s ultimate narrating framework, a sort of institutional memory serving as recording angel. Instead of the all-knowing, somewhat condescending voice of The Na\u00efve and Sentimental Lover<\/em>, this narration is brisk and brusque. It defends Smiley against those in the intelligence community who, through shortsightedness or malice, misjudged his decisions.<\/p>\n

It has been laid at Smiley\u2019s door more than once since the curtain was rung down on the Dolphin case that now was the moment when George should have gone back to Sam Collins and hit him hard and straight just where it hurt. George could have cut a lot of corners that way, say the knowing; he could have saved vital time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

They are talking simplistic nonsense.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This opinionated, godlike narrating agency is never identified. It\u2019s one of the many signs that in the Karla books le Carr\u00e9 is reviving conventions of the triple-decker novel. And so he did; he bid to become our Dickens. (The larger-than-life father-son duo of A Perfect Spy<\/em> is perhaps his most extravagant exercise in this vein.)<\/p>\n

He echoes Wilkie Collins too. For mystery, never far from Dickens\u2019 concern, is central to Collins and le Carr\u00e9. Sustaining the reader’s interest through mystery seems not as important for our highbrow novelists now; it’s the province of “genre fiction.” But many of the canonical works of fiction and drama turn on secrets that are hinted at, then dramatically exposed (not only Oedipus<\/em> and Hamlet<\/em> but works by Henry James, Ibsen, Conrad, O\u2019Neill, Faulkner). On the first page of Crime and Punishment<\/em>, Raskolnikov thinks, \u201cWhy am I going there now? Am I capable of that<\/em>? Is that<\/em> serious?\u201d The question of that that <\/em>keeps us reading. You can argue that the modernist novel, with its fascination with time-juggling and stream of consciousness, found a sort of equivalent for the secrets, deceptions, and puzzles that drive classic tales. In any event, during the first decade of le Carr\u00e9\u2019s career, he began to explore the ways in which embedded stories can blossom into mysteries.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Burrowing<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In my original entry, I didn\u2019t straighten out the plot of Tinker Tailor<\/em>, but now, as the film nears the end of its theatrical run, I\u2019ll tell the novel\u2019s tale straight. Skip if you don\u2019t want it all ironed out.<\/p>\n

Bill Haydon, working for British intelligence, is in the pay of Moscow Centre and its head, Karla. He has been passing information to the Russians for years, but Control, the head of the Circus, is starting to get suspicious. He believes that one of his five top men is a mole. Karla entices Control into sending an agent, Jim Prideaux, to meet a Czech general supposedly going to defect. This leads to a spectacular failure\u2014Prideaux is shot and captured\u2014and allows Karla to install an ambitious dunce, Percy Alleline, in Control\u2019s position.<\/p>\n

Haydon is the best and the brightest, the flower of English manhood. Suave, easygoing, with an Oxbridge artistic flair, he is as debonair as Smiley is brooding and inscrutable. Haydon has strained his friendship with Smiley by conducting a brief affair with Smiley\u2019s wife Ann, but that episode was initiated by Karla to make Smiley reluctant to suspect Bill of bigger crimes. Haydon has already tempted Percy with the promise of a double agent, a cultural attach\u00e9 in London called Polyakov. Through Polyakov Karla feeds the Circus trivia, mixed with bits of good information, to the gratification of Alleline\u2019s inner circle\u2014Haydon, Roy Bland, and Toby Esterhase\u2014as well as Oliver Lacon and the Minister overseeing the bureaucracy. And the Americans approve.<\/p>\n

Upon Control’s forced retirement, his team is abandoned and he dies a short time later. A permanently damaged Jim Prideaux is brought back to a new life as French teacher at a minor boy\u2019s school. Smiley retires, while his wife Ann leaves to take up a string of love affairs.<\/p>\n

But when a raffish field agent, Ricki Tarr, reports on good authority that there is a mole at the very top of the Circus, Lacon asks Smiley to investigate sub rosa<\/em>. Smiley installs himself in a shabby hotel and with the help of a youngish colleague, Peter Guillam, and an old friend, Inspector Mendel, he starts patiently scouring the records. Following in Control\u2019s footsteps, Smiley discovers disparities, missing documents, and incompatible testimony. Eventually he is able to pressure Toby into revealing the location of the safe house where Alleline\u2019s cadre meets Polyakov.<\/p>\n

By inducing Tarr to send a message galvanizing the Circus\u2019 top brass, Smiley forces the traitor to hurry to meet Polyakov at their usual place. There Smiley, Guillam, and Mendel record Bill Haydon\u2019s incriminating conversation and play it back to the embarrassment of the inner circle. There remains a long epilogue, in which Bill, in detention, confides in Smiley and seems to have no regrets about sending his closest friend Jim Prideaux into a trap and months of torture. Jim has discovered the treachery of his dearest friend and, sneaking into the compound, kills Haydon. While Smiley, now occupying Control\u2019s seat of power, goes to the countryside for a possible reunion with Ann, Jim returns to his school, the object of the boys\u2019 adoration but also a morose, haunted man.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve tried to synopsize the action as a thread, in Shklovsky\u2019s sense, but I can\u2019t do justice to the novel’s exfoliating plotlines. We\u2019ve seen that a detective story basically presents the sleuth going from person to person, asking questions and getting information. Since Smiley is the protagonist, much of what I\u2019ve traced has to be discovered through testimony or flashbacks. As Shklovsky remarks, any mystery in a plot involves some play with time, either ellipsis (what happens in the gap?) or rearranged order (hiding crucial causes) or a late point of attack (so that we must go back to reconstruct why things are as they are).<\/p>\n

But your straight-line Q & A investigation can be pretty plodding. Check for yourself by trying to read one of the \u201cclassic\u201d detective stories by S. S. Van Dine. Forced to present official reports and characters\u2019 recollections, le Carr\u00e9 skillfully expands those into robust, extensive stories of their own, filled out with characterization, detail, and atmosphere. The recording-angel narrator moves easily from reporting the interrogations to summarizing past action and then to full-blown scenes rendered from the viewpoint of the witnesses.<\/p>\n

As in the later books of the trilogy, le Carr\u00e9\u2019s point of entry is oblique. Instead of starting with Smiley, principal investigator, it starts with Jim Prideaux\u2019s enigmatic arrival at the boys\u2019 school, and even that is presented at one remove, through the vantage point of Bill Roach, aka Jumbo, a hapless \u201cnew boy\u201d at the school. Only after that do we meet Smiley, hailed by the obnoxious gossip Roddy Martindale (a convenient expository device) who chats about the usurpation at the Circus. Soon Smiley is summoned to Lacon\u2019s home, where he and Peter learn Ricki Tarr\u2019s story of spying in Hong Kong and falling in love with Irina, the wife of a KGB spy. It\u2019s she that tells him of the mole in the Circus.<\/p>\n

Tarr\u2019s tale is the first embedded story, running four chapters. Once Smiley takes the assignment, relatively little happens in the present. His investigation carries him to his old Russia expert, Connie Sachs, and she recounts another block of information, about how her suspicions of Polyakov led her to be sacked from the Circus. Once Smiley is back at his hotel, he starts his reading, and for five chapters we get a big chunk of the past, including Smiley\u2019s discovery of Bill\u2019s affair with Ann. Smiley\u2019s homework is interrupted by a suspenseful string of scenes involving Peter\u2019s smuggling crucial files out of the Circus.<\/p>\n

Another embedded story soon follows: Over dinner Smiley tells Peter of his only meeting with Karla, many years before. Then, pursuing yet another clue, Smiley questions Sam Collins, the man on Circus duty the night Jim was ambushed. As in any good detective story, Bill Haydon seems to have an alibi (he heard the news at his club) and acts resolutely un-guilty, bursting into the Circus to take command and demand the return of his old pal Jim. Sam\u2019s embedded story to Smiley is followed by others, from the man who drove Jim into Czechoslovakia and from Jerry Westerby, who heard rumors that the military were waiting for Prideaux. Getting ever closer to the fateful incident that set the whole shuddering machine into motion, Smiley finally hears Jim\u2019s own version of what happened to him that night and in the months afterward.<\/p>\n

After so many extended stories\u2014recounted by witnesses, filtered through hearsay, written up in bureaucratic files, commented upon by the recording angel\u2014the plot launches into forward motion. Smiley and his colleagues set their trap, and there\u2019s a suspenseful set-piece spanning two chapters. Le Carr\u00e9 alternates among Tarr in Paris, Mendel watching affairs at the Circus, and Smiley waiting in the safe house to trap the traitor. There follows an equally crosscut epilogue, with Bill and Smiley\u2019s confrontations alternating with vignettes of other characters\u2014including a young woman, introduced for the first time, who seems to have borne a child by Bill. The book concludes with Smiley, waiting to meet Ann and meditating on what drove Bill.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Scalphunter<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In adapting a novel for the screen there is a natural temptation to dramatize the information supplied by narrative description in the original text by turning it into dialogue, but this is generally to be resisted. Where possible it should be translated into action, gesture, imagery. Much of it can be dispensed with altogether.<\/strong><\/p>\n

David Lodge<\/p>\n

Imagine trying to adapt this monster! Respecting the novel\u2019s construction would demand a cascade of flashbacks, long tales framed by Smiley\u2019s investigation. The seven-installment BBC series, scripted by Arthur Hopwood, took the simpler option of starting with a scene that is presented very late in the novel, in Jim\u2019s embedded story told to Smiley. The series opens with Control summoning Jim and sending him off to Czechoslovakia; Jim is shot and Control is cast out. Clarifying the string of events this way, and giving us a decent action scene early on, has its cost: Smiley doesn\u2019t enter the plot for nearly 23 minutes. Yet this construction does obliquely retain the portmanteau quality of the novel\u2019s concept, in which sustained blocks of action are allowed to stretch and breathe.<\/p>\n

Soon, as in the novel, the TV series gives us Ricki Tarr\u2019s story of his affair with Irina, presented as a discrete flashback. Then Smiley\u2019s trawl through the files is supplemented by his visits to Connie and others. Sometimes their recollections are dramatized in flashbacks, other times we simply watch them tell Smiley of them. Fortunately for the viewer, there are also scenes of Smiley bringing Peter up to date, and briefing Lacon on current discoveries. Because the BBC series was broadcast in weekly episodes, this sort of backtracking was necessary. And since Hopcraft had several hours to fill, the plotting could be somewhat spacious. Nonetheless, the book’s oscillating time scheme was somewhat flattened out, and the block construction\u2014main thread interrupted by inset stories\u2014was compressed. The inset tales didn\u2019t expand to their novelistic dimensions.<\/p>\n

The Tinker Tailor<\/em> film, of course, had to be much more squeezed down. I mentioned in the earlier entry that the screenwriters compared their structure to a mosaic, and I followed this out in my discussion of how the narration was elliptical and fragmentary, leaving out redundancies that are usually required in popular film. Many scenes are both spacious and laconic. The rhythm is slow, and we\u2019re given time to see and hear everything; but that \u201ceverything\u201d might be only a voice dimly overheard, or a doorbell, or an image that gives one piece of information.<\/p>\n

Take an instance I didn\u2019t pick out in the original post. In order to steal a file, Peter Guillam has arranged for Mendel to call him, pretending to be a garage mechanic.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The call provides a pretext for Guillam’s retrieving his bag from the security officer, so he can slip the file inside.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

George Formby\u2019s music-hall tune \u201cMr. Wu’s a Window Cleaner Now\u201d is playing on the garage radio. It\u2019s carried down the phone line to the call-screener at the Circus, who murmurs along with it as the call is recorded.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After the tense meeting with the Circus cadre, Guillam has apparently sneaked the file out. But on the staircase an offscreen voice softly sings \u201cMr. Wu\u201d before we see the source, not Guillam but Roy Bland. He descends slightly ahead of Guillam.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Guillam follows right behind, pausing and looking off nervously as Bland passes through the foreground.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The empty stretch of the staircase shot allows us to think that it’s Guillam offscreen, humming the tune he heard on the line, so it’s a surprise when Bland appears. We realize that he must have heard the call, or the recording.<\/p>\n

Another film would have cut away during Guillam\u2019s maneuver to show Bland and his colleagues listening to Peter’s fake conversation. That would have dialed up the suspense: Will they detect the trick? Instead, showing the lady on the phone lets us know that the call is being recorded. Only retrospectively\u2014and by a single piece of information that slips by\u2014do we realize that Bland has heard the conversation. Guillam is being watched closely.\u00a0There\u2019s a meta-message here too: By humming the tune, Bland lets Guillam know he’s overheard the call. Bland’s casual feint fits with the intimidation of Guillam that began when he was called into Percy\u2019s meeting.<\/p>\n

In all, the moment\u2019s oblique, ricocheting transmission of story information could easily be missed. (In the book, it\u2019s Bill who waylays Guillam and asks if he\u2019s seeing Smiley. \u201cGuillam\u2019s world, which was showing signs till then of steadying to a sensible pace, plunged violently.\u201d) The film’s script and direction have followed David Lodge’s suggestion of translating Peter’s sudden panic into images and sounds, but more laconic ones than we usually find.<\/p>\n

More broadly, the film\u2019s stinginess about supplying information extends to its protagonist. As I suggested in the first post, Smiley doesn\u2019t just solve mysteries\u2014he is one. What does he want? Oldman\u2019s dry, impassive performance bottles the shrewdness, sternness, and pain that Guinness let leak out in the series. It still seems to me that the film\u2019s Smiley is playing a waiting game; even the \u201cAha!\u201d moment near the climax, when he seems to have hit upon something, proves to be obscure.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After the montage parades the suspects and shows the shifting train tracks outside Smiley’s dingy hotel, the narration doesn\u2019t present the classic giveaway clue or blinding insight. Immediately we see Smiley, by force of will, bullying his superiors and Toby into giving him the information he needs to trap the mole . . . whose identity isn’t pinned down until the ambush. Smiley\u2019s emotion bursts forth only once more, in his confrontation in Haydon\u2019s cell. After a slight confirmatory smile (Prideaux, Smiley surmises, \u201cknew deep down it was you all along\u201d), Smiley asks if Karla ever considered letting Bill take over Control\u2019s post.<\/p>\n

Bill, angry: \u201cI\u2019m not his bloody office boy!\u201d<\/p>\n

Smiley, almost roaring, but with expression unchanged: \u201cWhat are you then, Bill?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Bill, after a pause, in a subdued, strangled voice: \u201cI\u2019m someone who has made his mark.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smiley exhales, the burst of energy gone, and turns slightly aside.<\/p>\n

Smiley’s outburst here is his most vehement utterance in the movie. By the epilogue, Smiley, still unsmiling, has assumed his place as Control\u2019s successor.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mole-hunters<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You have to let go of the idea of explaining it all to the audience. You have to make it so complex that the audience understands that they can\u2019t understand all of it. . . . We had to make it trustworthy and credible but also so complex that you couldn\u2019t penetrate it. . .\u00a0 but not so incomprehensible that it put people off.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dino Jons\u00e4ter, editor, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy<\/em><\/p>\n

More than most plot types, I think, a mystery story lures us into analysis.\u00a0Think of the endless fan probes into\u00a0Memento, Primer, Donnie Darko<\/em>, and the like. The secrets in the action, and the roundabout tactics of recounting it, invite us to think about narrative technique more abstractly than we usually do.\u00a0We’re encouraged to study how we’ve been misled. Analysis is a bit like detective work, but also like academic research. The analyst has a lot in common with Smiley and his patient burrowing into the files. He is, in the books, an amateur philologist and a scholar of German poetry.<\/p>\n

For many, the mysteries of\u00a0Tinker Tailor<\/em> have aroused an urge to analyze.\u00a0Jim Emerson has compiled a handy roundup<\/a>\u00a0of exceptional probes into the film. Some of my readers have filed perceptive reports as well. Filmmaker and teacher Stew Fyfe offers this:<\/p>\n

I agree that what they’ve done with the film is subtract most of the redundancy, with bits of information offered up only once. If you missed it, you missed it. I was surprised when Smiley actually told Ricki Tarr that he missed the chip in the door; that seemed like the movie was taking it uncharacteristically easy on the audience for a moment. It was kind of thrilling to see a film that trusts its audience to keep up with it the way this one does.\u00a0<\/strong>I wonder if they might have initially stripped more info out and then put some back in during the editing process. . . .\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The other thing that has struck me is how very legible the film is when you see it a second time. Most everything does indeed seem to be there, in frame, but the audience isn’t cued to be looking for certain things. Ann does have some slight reaction to Bill Haydon when he sits down at the party, if I remember correctly (something cues Smiley to turn and look at him). And it’s clear why Bland offers to accompany Guillam to lunch. \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Or performances take on a different meaning based on the information we have by the end of the film. It’s clear by the end that some sort of relationship was going on between Haydon and Prideaux, which makes Haydon’s conversation on the phone the night Prideaux was captured play differently the second time around. (The Haydon-Prideaux relationship was actually one thing that didn’t work for me the first time watching the film. The nature of their relationship hadn’t registered, so Prideaux’s act of shooting Haydon didn’t have the same emotional heft. The scene played much more strongly the second time I saw the film.)<\/strong><\/p>\n

I guess Smiley’s eureka moment is a little bit of a leap, but otherwise, it’s all there.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And here’s Ben Slater, a long-time le Carr\u00e9 admirer.<\/p>\n

I read the screenplay, officially online as part of Focus’s awards campaign (http:\/\/focusawards2011.com\/workspace\/ttss-screenplay.pdf<\/a>) , and it’s fascinating how much of the adaptation was \u00a0reworked and restructured in production.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The film was intended to open ‘cold’ with Prideaux’s mission. His meeting with Control – now the opening sequence – wasn’t till much later. The abortive mission and the Christmas party were intended to only be returned to once each, and yielded most of their secrets (Karla’s presence\/Bill and Ann) on the first go-round.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are myriad tiny and fairly dramatic changes – in the script Ricki Tarr’s first appearance is much more impactful, the killing of Bill is very different, etc. Some of these are changes Alfredson must have made during filming, others suggest a great deal of time spent re-arranging and re-sculpting the fragments of the plot in editing – trying to make the story flow as elegantly as possible. I imagine this was tough!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Interestingly, the bold decision to make Smiley silent for so long in the opening scenes seems to have been made in post. They simply cut all his first lines of dialogue. And Smiley’s closing line of the film was also shot and cut – “Shall we begin?”<\/strong><\/p>\n

It’s impossible to watch the film without running the novel and the TV series alongside it, and it struggles to compete in terms of narrative and character, but the real triumph is arguably the ambience of broken England it evokes – cigarettes, whiskey, bad burgers, bad skin and failed lives.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So mystery stories tease us into analysis. But they also flaunt some common characteristics of all storytelling. Encountering any tale, we always want to know what comes next, but we’re also curious about what was left out, or lied about, or presented in passing, or hidden in plain sight. The writer is the mole, and we’re the mole-hunters. As novelist Jane Smiley puts it:<\/p>\n

The most basic conviction of every novelist from Lady Murasaki on . . . is that things are not as they appear.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

My arguments from Victor Shklovsky come from various essays in Theory of Prose<\/a><\/em>, trans. Benjamin Sher (Dalkey Archive, 1991); the epigraph is from the essay \u201cSherlock Holmes and the Mystery Story,\u201d 110-111.\u00a0The David Lodge epigraph is from his \u201cNovel, Screenplay, Stage Play: Three Ways of Telling a Story,\u201d in Lodge, The Practice of Writing<\/a><\/em> (Penguin, 1997), 215. The Jane Smalley quotation is in her\u00a013 Ways of Looking at the Novel<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>(Anchor, 2006), 49. For more thoughts from editor Dino Jons\u00e4ter, go to “Cutting Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy<\/em>” on Creative Cow<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’ve signaled before the marvelous two-part interview<\/a> with le Carr\u00e9 for the CBC, but why not do it again? Since writing the last piece I also discovered a helpful interview with Tomas Alfredson and Gary Oldman at Film School Rejects<\/a>. I have other notes on the Hong Kong atmosphere of The Honourable Schoolboy<\/em> here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DB here: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has to be counted a success ($64 million worldwide so far), and it may have brought new attention to John le Carr\u00e9\u2019s writing. The fact that some websites and Twitter feeds lured readers to my entry on the film\u00a0(and thanks to all) suggests that people can enjoy a film […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,1,54,115],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-and-other-media","category-film-comments","category-narrative-strategies","category-national-cinemas-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17333"}],"version-history":[{"count":49,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32567,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17333\/revisions\/32567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}