Smiley’s People (1979) – Le Carre – first half

Fifteen pages in I can tell that I am going to have a LOT of thoughts about this book.

Many of these are regarding parallels between the Trump Adminstration’s manner of speaking and the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

Watching the TV Series at the same time:

I noticed a few weeks ago that the BBC TV series for Smiley’s People is here on YouTube right now! So my new plan is to re-watch the BBC series at the same time I’m re-reading the book!.

Characters vs Cast:

• The book Wiki lists the Characters
  • e.g.: Otto Leipzig – “The Magician”, Estonian small-time crook who works with Vladimir
  • or: Oleg Kirov alias Oleg Kursky – an agent deputed to find a suitable legend for Karla’s daughter
• The tv Wiki, lists the Cast, which is the same book characters along with people who are playing them:
  • e.g.: Vladek Sheybal as Otto Leipzig
  • or: Dudley Sutton as Oleg Kirov

For the first, “Small time crook” sounds so trivial compared to how Otto fits in Madame Ostrakova’s imagination (“the Magician!”).

For the second, Oleg Kirov is a minor character in the drama, but the bit about ‘Karla’s daughter‘ in the book description is something we puzzle about for most of the story, so it is a bit of a spoiler for this point.

The 2000 (new) Introduction:

As another side note, Le Carre (real name David Cornwell) wrote a new introduction to this edition of Smiley’s People in 2000. It is a perfect little gem of quality prose itself!

The neatest part is how much he loves Alec Guiness as Smiley (“an actor playing one of his characters to perfection“).

Then comes the downside:
Guiness played Smiley so well that the public kind of took him over.
He wasn’t Le Carre’s character any more.

• This happens to me all the time at the other end of the media food chain:
  • Toby Esterhase for instance will forever be Bernard Hepton in my imagination.
  • Ian McKellen IS Gandalf … Nobody I know would challange that! 🙂

Le Carre also says that he intended for there to be 10 or 15 Smiley books, “covering all corners of the globe, constituting a kind of Comedie Humanaine of the cold war“.

(He’s way too fancy for me, I don’t even know what that is, but it sure sounds cool!)

Episode 1, Chapters 1 – 5

We open with a memorable and sympathetic character, Madame Ostrakova!

As discussed above, the visual medium rules for us casual readers:
She is forever burned on my heart and mind as being the actress who plays her, Eileen Atkins!

Anyway … she is waiting for the bus to take her home from work when she is approach by a creepy, obvoiusly Soviet-type dude. He tells her the Soviet Union would like to reunite her with the illegitate daughter she had with “the Jew Glickman“, who she took up with after her husband “the traitor Ostrakova” was banished from the Soviet Union.

She knows this is utter bullshit, but she can’t let go of the chance that she might see her daughter. She doesn’t know what to do.

There’s an almost legendary person known to the emigre’ community as The General. She tracks down his address in London and sends him a letter.

He writes her back and say to wait for a visitor who has the other half of a torn postcard.

The General was known to be an incorrigible ladies’ man. The secretary where he had a desk in London clearly had had a thing with him. She was so good-looking that I looked her up. She was Ingrid Pitt, a semi-famous actress in the 60’s and 70’s. Her biggest hits were vampire movies. Simply from the fact that her dowdy blouse looked like it had pillow stuffed in it I now have a little bit of a thing for her..

The other postcard half is slipped under her door the next night. Ostrakova talks the night away with the courier who she calls the Magician!

Some kind of trade-off happens on a ferry in Hamburg. Something is being delivered to the General via a not real bright Estonian long distance trucker named Villem.

Chapter 3 – Smiley gets summoned by the police to Hampstead Heath to view a body that turns out rto be the General (I hate this part, the General was cool!).

The Superindent of Police is there. Clearly he was told by unseen powers to bring Smiley in and give him the run of the place.

Smiley asks to see his face. It was gross enough to make the policeman retch! (see a few paragraphs below)

Chapter 4 – Smiley goes straight to an un-named “safe house” to meet one of the really hatable civil service types that Le Carre despises, Lacon Strickland and a likeable young fellow names Mostyn

Smiley’s stirring defense of the General is really fascinating:

• .Born Estonian
• Changed his name from Voldemar to Vladimir to join the Russian Army.
• “Fought like a lion with the Russians against the Germans.

Chapter 5 – Mostyn tells the story of the General’s last day.

We eventually find that he was shot with a soft-nosed bullet in the face, which I guess looks really disgusting, hence the retching above..

The video is much better on the General’s last evening and the minutes before he was shot …. which makes sense since those are more cinematic events.

I do appreciate that BBC did NOT show the actual murder. American TV would have made a bloody spectacle of it. One second the General is hobbling through the woods to get away from whatever was out there, then the next second the police chief is leading Smiley to his covered body. That’s the way to do it!

The book gives a lot more details on the dialog at the safe house.
Whatever happened to the General is unknown to them.

Episode 2, Chapters 6 – 10

Chapter 6 – Madame Ostrakova is living her normal live in Paris. The bad guys waylay her on the way home from work and run her over with a car.

It was striking how closely the TV scene followed the book descruption.

• One man had been pretty much exactly 30 feet behind her for a ling time.
• Now there is another man on the other side of the street keeping pace with her.
• Now guy 1 comes up to be next to her, and guy 2 cross the street to be on her other side.
  • There was a detail that guy 2 was walking in the gutter so he be next to her, and they faithfully did that on the TV!
• Now there is a car matching their pace.
• They grab her.
  • The car speeds up.
  • She belts one of them with the heavy iron she was carrying for just this purpose.
  • They throw her in front of the car.
• We leave her badly injured and go back to England …

Chapter 7 – Back in London, Smiley searches The General’s shabby flat on the top floor of his building.

Not much to show for it. He does recover a taxi receipt whose amount indicates a long trip taken two day ago (unusual on the General budget).

On the way out he asked the postman for any mail for that apartment (“save you a walk up the stairs“). There is a brown envelope postmarked Paris.

Chapter 8 – Smiley goes back to Paddington to re-trace the General’s last steps.

This was another very cinematic scene (i.e. perfect for the screen).
Smiley poring over the pathway looking for anything the General might have stashed when he knew he was in danger.

And it pays off! He spies a crumpled packet of Galoise cigarettes high up in a tree.

“High up” to Smiley, who is short 🙂
It was within easy reach for the General. After some struggles, Smiley’s gets it.

Next Smiley wants to run down that taxi receipt. Clever fellow, he calls the taxi company and asks for that driver specifically for an important fare immediately.

When the driver shows up, Smiley lays 10 pounds on him to tell him where he took the General.

Chapter 9 – Smiley gets his car and drives himself out to the place … in the Charlton area of Southeast London which seems like a depressing, grimy place.

The address was an Orthodox church on a street with the memorable name Battle of the Nile Street. You bet they kept a cool name like that in the TV show!

In the book we get learn how Smiley feels about cars:

He’s there to meet another Estonian. We’ll call him by his birth name Villem. He is of course the fellow that did the hand-off on the ferry in Hamburg way back in the first episode.

He’s a big-hearted young kid who just wants to please everybody. Now that he’s home, he wants to please his older wife, who calls him William and just wants him to be a good Englishman and stay the heck away from Smiley and the General and all that dangerous foreign intrigue.

The other thing that recommended him to the General is that he drives a long-distance shipping truck that makes regular trip to the Continent!

Over the next 20 pages Smiley teases it out of him that he was in Hamburg two weeks ago.

So Villen sort of ties the first third of the book together.

• Madam Ostrakova gets accosted by a KGB guy who gives her negative of someone he says is the daughter
• She later gets a visit from someone she calls the Magician.
• He tells her to write the General.
  • She does and Smiley snags the letter!
• Separately, something described as “the second of two events that brought Smiley out of retirement” happened.
  • It was an odd tableau where a young fellow left a bag oranges on a specific seat on a ferry in Hamburg, left the area, then came back 2 minutes later and pick the bag back up.
• More we bounce to England, where the General turns up dead on Hampstead Heath, pretty leary a KGB hit.
• Smiley investigates and eventually ends up at Villem’s.
  • He was of course the young man witht he bag of oranges.

Chapter 10 – Smiley’s next stop is the Free Baltic Library.

The Baltic States were absorbed by the Soviet Union during WW2 and regained their independence in 1991. Here in 2000’s they are just three cute little countries in a row next to Russia on the Baltic Sea, but back in the middle of the 1900’s, having the Soviet Union NOT gobble them up was a big part of the whole Cold War drama!

Here we meet Mikhel and Elvira, an odd couple if ever there was one!

She pretty clearly had a thing going with that old dog the General. She’s devastated by his murder. As an aside, Elvira makes a dowdy old librarian’s outfit, a lacy blouse buttoned to the neck, sexier than I would have thought possible.

She is actress Ingrid Pitt. I just looked her up. I think I looked her up last time I watched this a decade ago! I am enchanted by her.

Smiley has a lot of dark thoughts that maybe Mikhel is the one that sold the General out over Elvira and got him killed. So he grills him pretty hard! It wasn’t much fun for Mikhel, but he does give Smiley a lot of background information:

• The General didn’t have a passport
• Since he couldn’t travel he used good ole Villem to do his messenger work. This of course could cost Villem his sweet upwardly mobile job, and which is why Villem’s wife hates them all for asking.
• The General wanted maps of major cities of the Baltic area, which includes Hamburg.

Episode 3, Chapters 6-

Chapter 11 – Madame Ostrakova is home from the hospital and holed up in her apartment with her husband’s ancient gun in her lap. She is a wonderful character! She intends to survive this.

Chapter 12 – Smiley goes back to the Savoy, where he had stashed Vladimir’s treasured cigarette packet.

He takes it home. There is a very entertaining few pages where he develops the photographic negative himself while thinking about the professional film shops (“10 minutes away”) under contract with the Circus who could have deveoped this film much more quickly and with better quality, but Smiley is old-school. You get none of that detail in the video version of course!

Then for some reason, his wife Ann, who we have heard about for so many books, calls him out of the blue, … because she’s feeling lonely and wants company.

This brings up a lot of complex feelings for our hero.

In case you’re not up to speed here, this is Book 3 of a trilogy of books about Smiley and the strange world he lives in. The first book, Tinkor, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was about Smiley being betrayed my his mentor and boss Bill Hayden … who was his best friend and mentor (and of course…) and also Ann’s lover.
It was a really good book, and a pretty good movie!

[For the record, the second book, The Honorable Schoolboy was also a good book, but not did not become a BBC series. Wiki said it’s Hong Kong location was too expensive.]

The Ann thing made him have a lot of negative thoughts about what he’s up to here.

After he calmed down he got down to the business of studying the General’s photos that he just developed. They are of two European-type fellows having sex for money with two young, healhy-looking girls. One fellow is big and kinda flabby,. The other is a little guy, ferret-y.

For some reason Smiley starts daydreaming about the time they had Karla prisoner in Germany. Smiley’s job back then was to chat with prisoners whose time was up and were scheduled to be handed back to the Russians, so see if they might want to work for out side when they went back.

Episode 3 Chapters 6-

Chapter 13 – Smiley visits Toby Esterhase.

p 170 “you trying to pin me down George”
“I suppose I am. Yes.”

172 Toby’s work name is Hector … Smiley wants to know why the General said “is Hector no good?”
172 “Fear is information without the cure”.
176 Smiley says something that pisses Toby off (possibly on purpose)
“eyes, cheeks coloured,, the sleeping Hungarian in him was wide awake“
177 We hear about Otto Leipzig – “the Magician“. He will turn out to be the little guy in the picture.

Another fellow called Kretchmer comes up, few pages later. He is NOT the big guy in the sex picture, rather he is the guy who was taking the picture! Kretchmer runs a sex club in Hamburg called the Blue Diamond. Smiley will go there.

Chapter 14

But first! Smiley drives out to visit Connie Sachs, retired spy, and a brilliant, weird person.

200 He’s mining her brain for recollections of little Otto Leipzig and fat Oleg Kirov (the other guy in the sex picture).

Chapter 15 – Smiley and Connie get to the bottom of it!

208 These little phrases. like “a waiter’s anger“. Smiley’s thought that more than once when he was thinking about the little guy (Leipzig)’s feelings about the big guy (Kirov). So evocatibe in a strange way.

215 origin story for Karla’s mistress (Tatiana’s mother)

“He found her as a child, wandering a burnt-out village in the war.
Adopted her, fell in love with her.” …
“Educated her, played Daddy, played lover, played God.”
Then he bumped her off.

Why?

“She went soft on the revolution. Wanted the state to wither away. He told her to shut up, she wouldn’t. He had her shoved in the slammer. It made her worse“.

216 “There was a child“

217 A don at Leningrad University was ordered to take on a special child Tatiana. She was raising hell but couldn’t be touched because her daddy was a big deal. She tried to seduce him (the Don), told him “Daddy had Mummy killed for showing insufficient faith on the historical process” (Love that!).

He ran into a bullet.

That’s it for Connie. But sh’s basically given us a road map for the rest of the book!

Chapter 16 – Smiley hops a plane for Hamburg.

He meets Herr Kretchmer at his club and brings him the sad news that the General has been killed. They both agree that Otto is in danger also. After some sparring he tells Smiley how to find Otto on the houseboat where he is living.