To the day – the 12th of September 1963 – John Le Carré’s "The Spy who came in from the cold" hit bookstore shelves. To celebrate, I decided to finally get round to reading it. It’s been labelled many things, including ‘the definitive spy story’ or ‘the best spy story ever written’, and in many ways forms as the signature John Le Carré novel. It took me a few years and two attempts to get around to reading it, but then again my first attempt was hampered by my own impatience. Older and wiser, I've finally taken the vaunted steps into this dark world. Plot Synopsis In the height of the Cold War,and the shadows of the iron curtain, the British Intelligence hatch a plan to entrap a high level German officer. The plan though, involves a Trojan-horse like operation that may result in them knowingly sending one of their own agents to his death. Target When I first attempted to read this I was still a teenager, and couldn’t get to grips with the initial pacing. So the target is a more mature reader. But you grow accustomed to the pace as well as the style of the narrative – as certain things occur in an atypical timeline, learning of conversations and events that have already happened, to punctuate and better explain events in the present. Once you’re in the groove though, the pages will turn quite swiftly. “... I chose le Carré. God alone knows why, or where I had it from.” Bottom Line Painted by the dull colours of his time in the service, David John Moore Cornwell – pen name John Le Carré – had to forcibly retire from British Intelligence (MI5/MI6) in the 60’s because of the success of “Spy”. British tabloids somehow got hold of his true identity and the rest is history. Most of the great authors of the era tend to have some inside knowledge of the game (Robert Ludlum had his sources and friends within the CIA, Frederick Forsyth used his journalistic research skills for ‘The Day of the Jackal’), so the gritty and cold realism of his third novel seemed too good to be true in many respects. True enough, the world had never seen a book like it. It was, and still is the antitheses of the Spy novel we’re used to; namely the glossy, quirky, action packed and romanticized 007 archetypes. There are no gadgets or posh locations here, its all stark and in shadows, or alternatively, cold blinding and all exposing light. What struck me was the way Cornwell describes characters and makes the ‘grey area’ of the spy world so apparent. Seldom do you find a villain so grating and sinister simply by the nature of the description of the character’s physical appearance. The antihero is a man you wouldn’t ordinarily like… and that is essential to the tormented beauty of this story – it’s simply about people, who happen to find themselves on opposing sides of a wall. They may of course have different values, opinions and beliefs, but when you disregard the dividing lines, it’s hard, or impossible to tell them apart and decipher the good from the bad. Of course the pace does quicken, but it's more of a tightening, and the tension in the climatic scenes is unparalleled. If you enjoy this genre, then of course it goes without saying that this is a must read, a ‘must own’ even. It is a cold hard hammer of a spy story. Sometimes we do a thing in order to find out the reason for it. Sometimes our actions are questions not answers. Plainly put, there are two sides to every story, or genre… in the spy world, there’s the two polar opposites as mentioned above, and then there’s everything in between. It speaks volumes that in modern culture producers, filmmakers and storytellers have seemingly sought to find the balance or blend between the two worlds of espionage. Even Timothy Dalton aimed to dirty things up with a darker and grittier James Bond in his 1980’s incarnation, a dynamic that has been taken to heart in the latest Daniel Craig version, all to keep up with the times, with a wiser audience to cater for. David Cornwell set a trend, and continued it with his subsequent George Smiley novels, and that is a hallmark. It may not have been Cornwell’s first release, but this was the one that got him noticed in a big way, it was the one that made him… Film: The Spy who came in from the Cold was adapted for film starring Richard Burton as the fatigued and burnt out Alec Leamus and Rupert Davies as George Smiley. In 2011 we saw the release of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” with Gary Oldman playing Smiley. David Cornwell’s sons have been spearheading the new wave of film adaptations with "A Most Wanted Man" to be released later this year (based on the Le Carré novel of the same name) starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The timing of the latter release earmarks it for award season attention. The trailer – Coming Soon! There's also a sequel to Tinker Tailor in the pipeline. The films have also rekindled the interest as book sales have spiked, with new and younger audiences drawn in to rediscover a literary legend and his collection of genre defining works. The 23rd and latest John Le Carre novel: 'A Delicate Truth'; view the Book trailer below. This of course all this, stories, novels and films, tell of a very amoral world, where men and women hold themselves to higher or simply a standard removed from everyone else, a world constantly aware of the puppet strings, the walking wounded – it is cold and dark and unromantic, yet for the larger population it intrigues us to no end… suffice is to say, we’d rather read about, and watch it on the silver screen than actually live it. But, for those who do, us novelists (me in my infancy as it is - I do aim to emulate the greats - and this is timely inspiration) try to tell their stories, amplify their voice in whichever way we can, and to take a line form the book, (because sometimes that voice is hard to hear, the message either plainly simple or incoherently convoluted in the grey stage of world politics and economics, and war) “Once she had cried out, and there had been no echo, nothing. Just the memory of her own voice.” Visit Author John Le Carré's official site at www.johnlecarre.com For an in depth interview to get a deeper sense of Cornwell the man, his personal life and what he’s up now in all his 81 year old glory, follow the link to an interview conducted by Dwight Garner for the New York Times earlier this year. We get to hear his thoughts on the modern Spy world as well as his sentiments about modern media and politics, even his views on the film Zero Dark Thirty. Article: John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age "A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world"
0 Comments
Answering the question of who is the more evil, sadistic and sinister villain between Raoul Silva and Anton Chigurh... Why? - Because I can. I can't do this however without saying that I'm a big fan of this man, to the left, who has rightfully been described as one of the best actors of his generation, and weighing up pretty well against those in the 'best actors of all time' phantom category. The Best or scariest villainous characters are made even scarier when you toss them into the hands of a sublime actor (take a look at Hannibal, The Joker, Christopher Walken, hehe). To Javier Bardem then, and his two most infamous characters in English cinema. The Contenders: Anton Chigurh - A trained coldblooded Assassin who also happens to be a psychopath (he has tendencies akin to a sociopath, but I'd see him more as a slightly controlled Psycho, but I digress, he fudges the line... click here to compare the two types) Raoul Silva - aka Thiago Rodriguez, former top spy for MI6, now a vengeful sociopath. What they have in common (apart from Bardem):
What's different:
The answer: Creepy, evil, sadistic or just plain nightmare inducing; if you lucked out and somehow crossed paths with someone of either persuasion, then pray you rather meet Anton Chigurh... Why? - Because he's more likely to kill you quickly, via bullet to to the head, or chest. Raoul Silva then is the worse of the two, simply because he's more likely to toy with you and make you feel some of his pain - which is considerable. He's also likely to kill your spirit before he takes your life, slowly... It's a rather interesting dynamic, I thought so anyway. Chigurh has something of a skewed philosophy on life; that he is simply a tool - holding himself to the idea that he is somehow set apart from the rest of humanity, and that good or bad, your fate has already been decided. If he moves in a certain direction, he's likely to kill most he encounters, with an exception every now and then - to be decided by chance, in the form of a coin toss. Cormac McCarthy wrote the character to represent how nonsensical violence is - Chigurh then, is the personification of violence. Silva has no such philosophy - it's kind of like when a human killing machine has been broken on the inside, and somehow restarted with a reset guidance system, targeting its 'creator', with a will to break her ("M") in a similar way. If there is one thing he abides by though, however shrouded in his demented ways it may be, it is in the principal of 'survival of the fittest' - physical wreck's they may be, but he and James Bond are the last two, and hence strongest, rats remaining... (queue chewing sounds) Javier Bardem quotes On his work: Your work cannot come from your vanity…it’s more about, how do I help this story by portraying the character as it needs to be, on every level, for this story to be told?…As actors we have the room to express as many sides of our nature as we are able or willing to show. There is no danger in that…you can get lost, of course. You have to know how to come back. The difference between a person with mental problems and an artist is that only the second one has a two-way ticket. On Anton Chigurh's hairdo: From the haircut and all that? It’s funny, because I saw that photo and I didn’t pay attention to the haircut because it was more of the way he was dressed as well as anything, but I guess they [Coen Brothers] pay attention to the haircut. So, I went to the trailer and they cut it and I saw it and I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ But that helped a lot actually, because in a way he gave this reality to the character this dimension of being very methodical. Everything is in place. It’s kind of mathematical. Like perfectly structured which is the way I thought the character should be. Perfectly clean. I thought this could help, but not for my private life though. On Raoul Silva, and being cast and working on Skyfall: [I had to] put the person [watching] in an uncomfortable situation, where even James Bond could not resist. Watching the trailer for No Country for Old Men just remind me of how brilliant this film is - and why I own the DVD... Few would pick him, I know, and yes, there have been so many before me who’ve embarked on this topic, though most have done so in jest. Firstly, I am a very big fan of Daniel Craig, but for the sake of this article, I’ll regard his era as a sort of stand-alone franchise… Let me dive right in as to why I think Timothy is the one; of all the pre-millennial bonds, he was probably the only one, apart from maybe Sean Connery, who could throw a legitimate punch. I say this because all the others looked very staged in their action sequences. I’ll give Sean the benefit of the doubt because for that time period it was acceptable – it seemed more about the ‘threat’ of violence than the actual partaking in it, and the style of filming was very different back then... From a purely “agent-world” perspective, the lesser known Dalton provided the most legitimate turn, whereas the others were quite obviously actors playing a role. Connery had all the looks and swag to make the character iconic on the silver screen, but in terms of James Bond being an action man, agent and super spy, Dalton is the real deal. Let us not even touch on the farcical Roger Moore era (okay the early few were good, but he hung on – or they hung on to him – for far too long). Floating down a river in a fake crocodile – REALLY! Everything became too comical and spoof-like, and then there was his age: he just looked too old to do anything (believably) worthwhile fro Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Can anyone confirm whether or not Lazenby’s Worchester Sauce is named after the actor? Where Pierce Brosnan went wrong was in that scene in Tomorrow Never Dies, where he’s controlling his car with his mobile phone (though truth be told he could claim to be the victim of time appropriate script writing and the explosion of the technological age) – resulting in the Achilles heel of the story: an over reliance on technology and cliches. I actually enjoyed that film mind you, although Golden Eye was better (those were the best two of the Brosnan era – forget the other two where they took Bond to a new low with non-actresses Halle Berry and Denise Richards; great to look at, but seriously lacking talent wise). The thing of it was though, that Brosnan’s era suffered from a similar syndrome to that of the Moore era – getting caught up in unrealistic, sometimes farcical, and generally generic storyline habits. They’d find a formula and drone it out until there was nothing left to be had. (*even Brosnan has come out and said in hindsight he's somewhat embarrassed by some of his later turns, in light of Daniel Craig's steely version) Getting back to Dalton though; Eva Green mistakenly claimed (in an interview for Casino Royale obviously) that it was the first time we would see blood on James Bond’s face. But of course Timothy Dalton’s Bond can lay a legitimate claim to that, although Craig is a lot grittier and dirty, I still think Dalton tried to do with Bond, what Craig is doing now… it’s just that his production crew weren’t on the same wave length. So, the reason I say Dalton is the best, is because he was the first who attempted to draw closer to the character penned by Ian Fleming. After all, the reason many weren’t, or aren’t a fan of Timothy is because his was the atypical Bond, the first to wear a suit without a tie… it was brash, and perhaps a little too brazen for some of the fans of the more old fashioned ‘swirl your Martini and lean on the bar’ style. He was seen more in the company of the British SAS and has been referred to be R. Moore as hands-down the best actor (talent wise) to fill the role. Although his two films had there faults, as many do, I believe, for these reasons above, that Timothy Dalton’s – his version at least – was the best Bond, preceding Daniel Craig – the first real hard edged/nosed agent, with just a dab of suave. The Bond Vacation [courtesy of L.A Stretch Limos]:
|
[Banner illustration by Joel Kanar]
WRITING
|