John le Carré and Philip Larkin - Failure and Incompetence

'Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.' (Philip Larkin) 

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Failure and incompetence, particularly in areas of leadership, have been on my mind a lot lately. As Great Britain lurches from one crisis to another - largely taking the Cheshire Cat approach of 'I knew who I was this morning but I have changed a few times since then' - I've found it difficult to pay attention to the daily onslaught of political lies. Indeed, it sometimes seems that this government, rather than viewing the concept of gas-lighting as a criticism, have instead placed it right at the heart of their political strategy. What depresses me most, though, is that they are getting away with it. Which means, it's actually only incompetence that's doing the rounds at the moment. Failure that leads to ministers and prime ministers falling on their swords, is simply ignored. Instead, we get to hear its laughably catch-all antonym 'world-beating' over and over again.   

The perfect complement to this has been found in re-reading my favourite John le Carré novel, The Looking Glass War. Strangely, it's not regarded as one of the writers strongest works. Maybe it might now find a space to shine. It is a tale of rival government agencies and the devastating consequences of misplaced pride coupled with limited power. An incompetent agent is sent over the border into East Germany on a piece of flimsy intelligence and things inevitably fall apart. Chances to abort the suicide mission are ignored and those pulling the strings tell themselves comforting lies that tear apart the lives of others. George Smiley, looking on from afar, is eventually dispatched to keep the fallout to a minimum.

'Smiley. George Smiley!'

With his strange and haunting charisma, I adore George Smiley. When he's not present - as with The Spy Who Came In From the Cold he only occupies a handful of pages in this novel - you begin to crave his awkward yet calming and erudite presence. And not just to bring the sordid proceedings to a cynical close - I won't spoil the ending too much - but also in an earlier moment where he senses the opportunity to temporarily put the drab business of espionage aside and embark on a fulfilling conversation in his area of intellectual speciality, the esoteric poets and playwrights of seventeenth-century Germany. In these little sketches, you get that gloriously Smileyesque sense that the wider world and its catastrophic rumblings are not really for him. Give me a Smiley spy over James Bond any day. 

It shouldn't need saying - actually it should be shouted from the rooftops - that John le Carré might be this country's greatest living writer. Genre snobs might turn their noses up at an oeuvre dominated by spies, but they are making a terrible mistake: great writing is nothing to do with range. Not that he needs much defending: there are very few naysayers when it comes to him being regarded as writer of the highest quality. What doesn't get mentioned as much, though, is a poetic sensibility that can stop you dead in your tracks. The following passage from The Looking Glass War is a case in point. It's 1963 and the former workplace and address of the hapless agent Fred Leiser needs vetting.       

The row of villas which lines Western Avenue is like a row of pink graves in a field of grey; an architectural image of middle age. Their uniformity is the discipline of growing old, of dying without violence and living without success. They are houses which have got the better of their occupants, whom they change at will, and do not change themselves. Furniture vans glide respectfully among them like hearses, discreetly removing the dead and introducing the living. Now and then some tenant will raise his hand, expending pots of paint on the woodwork or labour on the garden, but his efforts no more alter the house than flowers a hospital ward, and the grass will grow its own way, like grass on a grave.

Perfect bedfellows. Although in separate rooms.

Reading this passage again, I'm struck by how the houses on Western Avenue bring to mind the poetry of Philip Larkin. The great English poet of failure, inadequacy, boredom, deprivation and disappointment has a prose soul-mate in le Carré. I think of Larkin's 'Afternoons' or 'Home Is So Sad' or, perhaps 'Talking in Bed'.   

Talking in bed ought to be easiest 

Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

The wider, inanimate world is indifferent to our little lives. And perhaps the present moment, ridden with anxiety about viruses and politics, means I should avoid reading Larkin or le Carré (or certainly the latter's early novels). Both deal with a time when the country faced inwardly as people lived out their 'lives of quiet desperation'. And to escape from all this banality and pursue death and glory seems to be the motivating force for Fred Leiser, the third-rate spy and former occupant of le Carré's 'Western Avenue'. It is also the motivation for a faded governmental department to have one final fling. Indeed, as shabby low-key rabble-rousers patrol the Kent coast and international law is taken to the shredding bin, that inwardness has made its unsightly return. You might want to believe that the leaders have a plan. Le Carré lets you know that they do have a plan. It's just a fucking terrible one.