Pansies and nettles (and there is pansies. that's for thoughts.)

(continued)

Operation Testify and Jim Prideaux

-Where the novel begins with Jim Prideaux showing up at Thursgood’s school after being repatriated, both the series and the film begin with him having the meeting with Control that led to Operation Testify. This meeting does take place in the novel as well, but it isn’t revealed to the reader until Smiley finds out about it, which happens quite late in the novel. This bit of rearranging makes perfect sense; in the novel, we’re primed to think there’s something non-specifically mysterious about Jim, and willing to keep our suspicions on hold until he turns up later. Trying that kind of pacing trick in a film or series simply wouldn’t work; by the time his role in the overall spy plot had become clear, we’d have forgotten about him and wouldn’t have the option of flipping back to remind ourselves.

-In the film, we (and Smiley, and presumably Peter and Control as well) are led to believe that Jim Prideaux died during Operation Testify, so that a major clue that Testify was connected to the mole comes in the form of a payment made to him after his supposed death. In both book and series, it is known from the start that he was shot in the back but survived; the suspicious fact is that he wasn’t properly debriefed after he was repatriated. It’s kind of a “fridge logic” moment, but there’s something less than convincing about money being paid to Jim after he was officially dead, under his usual workname, in such a way as to leave a record; it makes the mole look sloppy and careless. The lack of a debriefing after Testify makes more sense; it’s a much more subtle discrepancy, and while it is still a bit suspicious, it could be explained away as being the result of the change of leadership at the Circus, and the fact that Testify was an embarrassing failure.

-In the film, there’s no real clue as to how Jim Prideaux figured out that a) Bill Haydon was the mole; b) he’d been caught; and c) he was being held at Sarratt. It’s likely that he would have been able to figure out that if there really was a mole, it had to be Bill — although that’s a lot clearer in the novel than either the series or the film — and (c) presumably would follow from (b), in that he would have known that if Bill was caught, he’d be at Sarratt. But how did he know that he’d been caught? It’s not at all clear. In the book, and to a lesser extent the series, it’s strongly implied that after Smiley came to Jim and found out about “Tinker, Tailor”, Jim went to London and followed him until the night they managed to trap Bill. Indeed, in the novel it’s also clear that Smiley feared for Bill’s safety and tried to persuade the Circus to guard him carefully, and although he doesn’t spell it out even in his own thoughts, it seems obvious that his reason for this was that he suspected Jim had followed him and was waiting for a chance to strike.

-On that subject: book, series, and film all deal with Bill’s death differently. In the book, Bill is found dead on a bench on the grounds at Sarratt, his neck broken (in the same way that Jim broke the neck of an owl in Thursgood’s school earlier on); it’s suggested that he was lured out by a note left in the pocket of a suit he had had sent out for cleaning. Thus it is implied — not stated — that it was Jim who killed him, and that Bill went out knowingly to meet him. In the series, we see Bill going to the bench with an air of trepidation, and we see Jim speaking to him, and breaking his neck; he doesn’t resist, or try to avoid Jim, and his death comes across as an execution. In the film, Jim shoots him from a distance with a sniper rifle after a brief exchange of glances, a tear falling from his eye as he does so. On balance, I think I like the series’ version best. It’s got a kind of bittersweet intimacy. If you ever wondered whether these two men loved each other, that final scene removes all doubt: not only did Jim love Bill, but Bill (in his way) loved Jim, and when he realised that he had betrayed that love, and been caught in his betrayal, he paid the price of his own free will.

-The scene with Jim breaking the neck of the owl is omitted from the series. I don’t know why they kept it in the film, considering that Jim doesn’t break Bill’s neck in the film so it doesn’t serve the same foreshadowing function. It’s also dealt with differently in the film than in the book: in the book, he catches the owl and takes it outside, and the boys look at the body afterwards and deduce that Jim broke its neck; in the film, he breaks its neck in front of them.

-There is much more detail in the book than in either the series or the film relating to Jim’s time at Thursgood’s school. The book begins and ends with sections from young Bill Roach’s point of view, and Le Carré perfectly captures the awful bind Roach gets caught in, as a sensitive child who perceives that Jim has been badly let down by someone in his life and wants to help, but can’t really do anything about it, but feels guilty anyway. There’s also a lot more detail in Jim’s characterisation generally: in the film we get Jim’s loyalty and courage; in the series we get some of his gruffness; but only in the novel do we see his passionate, exaggerated patriotism and his anti-intellectual bias.

-It’s explicit in book, film, and series that Bill is bisexual; it’s not made completely unambiguous in any version of the story that he and Jim were lovers, but it is suggested most strongly in the book, and least strongly in the film (so that at least some viewers came away thinking that the implication may have been unintentional, or purely subtextual).

Ricki Tarr and Irina

This is probably the biggest, most obvious change from book to film (the series follows the book very closely here). Film!Ricki has a very different personality from Book!Ricki; he has none of the latter’s bluster and bravado, none of his duplicity or thuggishness. Needless to say, we don’t get any hints of his background, which is complicated — in fact, most of the book’s characters have complicated life stories that don’t survive the transition to the screen.

The film handles his revelations about Irina differently from both book and series. In the book and series, Ricki is being guarded at Lacon’s house when Peter calls on Smiley and drives him there to hear Ricki’s story. (We don’t find out how Ricki contacted Lacon, or whether he contacted Lacon directly at all.) In the film, Ricki calls Lacon, tells him (off-screen) that there’s a mole, then disappears for a while before showing up at Smiley’s house to tell him about Irina. It’s not clear in the film whether Irina genuinely had information about the mole. In fact, it looks possible that she didn’t (though she may have had other useful intelligence; we don’t really find out), and Ricki made up the business about the mole for the telegram to the Circus. Thus it wasn’t until Tufty Thesinger was killed and Irina was taken away by Moscow Centre that he realised there actually was a mole.

By contrast, in the book and series, Irina definitely knew there was a mole, and knew his codename (Gerald, which is not mentioned in the film), and knew he was being run by Karla, and also knew the name of someone who had been involved (in a peripheral way) in feeding intelligence to him. This was the information Smiley asked Connie Sachs to corroborate; he wouldn’t have known what questions to ask if not for Irina’s diary. Irina, in fact, gets quite badly sidelined by the film. In the book and series, when Ricki meets her she is reading aloud from the Bible; she has quite strong religious feelings, which is part of why she wants to get away from Boris and from the Soviet Union. Irina and Ricki’s relationship in the book and series is really interesting. It’s left ambiguous as to whether or to what degree Irina loves Ricki himself rather than what he represents, which is not just freedom in the West, but the chance for an honest life. It’s equally ambiguous as to whether Ricki loves Irina or is just using her — at first it seems like the latter, but then Ricki’s guard reports that he’s been talking about Irina, planning to make a life with her; and when Smiley hears that Irina has been shot by the KGB, he tells Peter not to tell Ricki.

In the film, Irina’s own beliefs and feelings don’t get an airing. She barely even speaks. She is abused by Boris, and Ricki tries to offer a way out… and that’s all. This part of the story is handled very well, with great economy and visual flair — the Rear Window-like setup of Ricki watching multiple rooms from across the street with a telephoto lens is particularly clever. Yet reducing Irina to an abused girlfriend looking for a rescuer both flattens her character and drains some of the colour from the background conflict between East and West.

The trouble with making a film about a conflict that’s already ended is that you can get trapped by hindsight into forgetting how difficult and fraught it was while it was happening; the collapse of the Soviet Union looks inevitable now that it’s twenty years in the past, but it didn’t look inevitable in 1974. It was possible in 1974 to believe that maybe the Soviet Union would bury the USA, or that the simmering tensions would result in an eruption of overt hostilities. And so, when writing a story about the Cold War while it was actually happening, a thoughtful author like Le Carré would of course try to offer insight into why an agent of the “other” side might want to defect, rather than taking for granted that naturally they’d want to switch to our side because our side is obviously better.

(Though I suppose you could read Film!Irina’s plight as a metaphor for the plight of the people of the Soviet Union, with Boris representing the Communist Party. That might be stretching it a bit.)

In fact, this points up a problem with adapatations of novels in general and this novel in particular: Irina in the book and series has her own story, and while we don’t get to see all of it, we’re left in no doubt that it’s happening, off-stage, and has been for some time. Le Carré is brilliant at this kind of thing. There is barely a tea-lady or a receptionist in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy who doesn’t have a personality, an attitude, a life of his or her own. (See, for example, Alwyn the effeminate Marine who mans the desk of the Circus archives, or Mrs McCraig the disapproving Presbyterian who looks after the Witchcraft safe house.) This kind of detail is very, very difficult to fit into a film without overbalancing the main plot. A lot of it was sacrificed even in the series, which had a much broader canvas and could take the time to linger over minor characters.

But returning to the differences: Unlike in the film, in both the book and the series, Ricki has a common-law wife (unnamed) and a daughter called Danny. As well as wanting Irina to be brought out of Moscow, he also wants Danny and her mother to be safe, though he handles that end of things by himself. He does this by performing a complicated three-card-monte game with false passports to make it seem that they’ve gone in one direction while actually sending them somewhere else, so that both Moscow Centre and the Circus will look for him and his family in the wrong places. This, of course, adds an extra layer of complexity to his relationship with Irina, because he has no intention of dropping Danny’s mother.

In the book and series, this maneuver of Ricki’s gets noticed by the Circus and Peter gets called in to a meeting just as he’s finished stealing the Testify file from the Circus archives. At this point, Ricki has been AWOL for months and is officially listed as a defector, so for his common-law wife and child to show up as travelling to England is distinctly suspicious. In the film, Peter’s not stealing the Testify file but the duty roster for the night Testify took place, and Percy is suspicious because Ricki Tarr’s own false passport has shown up in Paris, along with a substantial sum of money in his bank account. This makes Peter believe that Ricki is a plant from Moscow, and the talk of the mole is just a pack of lies. In fact, the money is a ploy by either Karla or the mole, intended to throw doubt on Ricki’s testimony.

(A further small difference is that in the film, Boris is killed in Istanbul while Irina is being taken back to Moscow, and Irina is shot in front of Jim Prideaux as part of his torturous interrogation. In book and series, Smiley hears of the execution of two men and a woman in Moscow some time after Jim is repatriated, and deduces from the circumstances that they were Irina, Boris, and Irina’s informant.)

George and Ann Smiley

Ann Smiley is a great deal less prominent in the film than in either the book or the series. In the book, she never appears on-page, but is so often in Smiley’s thoughts and appears in so many of his flashbacks that her character comes across very strongly. In the series, she is referred to frequently by the people Smiley meets — in fact, almost every person he runs into says something along the lines of “so, how’s Ann? Still cheating on you?” — and appears on screen for a brief scene at the end of the last episode — a scene invented for the series. In the film, she is only ever seen from behind or the side; we never see her face, and she never speaks. That’s not the only way she gets sidelined: since the film lacks the insight into Smiley’s thoughts we get from the novel, and the frequent references to Ann by the people he meets, she simply casts a smaller shadow than in the book and series.

This has two unfortunate effects: it gives a different emphasis to Bill Haydon’s affair with Ann (and Smiley’s reaction to it), and it somewhat detracts from the point (or at least, one of the points) of Smiley’s story of the time he met Karla. In the book, Smiley’s attitude to Ann’s infidelities is not entirely consistent. He’s angry and unhappy, but also resigned; he doesn’t really have much hope that she’s ever going to be faithful, and he more or less puts up with the situation as it is. What’s more, he’s oddly protective of her even in her infidelities; during the affair with Bill, he withdraws to give her room, but soon perceives that she is deeply unhappy for some reason he can’t figure out. The line used is “he knew that somehow Bill had hurt her deeply, which was the sin of sins”. The narrative is ambiguous as to what this means, exactly, but I think this is Smiley speaking, and I think he is expressing a kind of indirect, slightly confused anger at Bill for hurting Ann. I mean to say: fond as he is of Bill, and much as he might be expected to hate Bill for sleeping with Ann — and does! — he hates him more for making her unhappy.

(This kind of subtlety is typically lost in book-to-film adaptations, because there is just no good way to convey it in a visual medium.)

Alec Guinness’s Smiley has a slightly more mobile face and more range in his voice than Gary Oldman’s. But in general, Smiley comes across as much more volatile and more emotionally alive in the book than in either the film or the series, because we are privy to his secret thoughts, and we know when his quiet politeness is masking some deep irritation or sorrow or resentment (which is to say: almost always). At the same time, every incarnation of Smiley has a gift for saying the right thing to the right person, in such a way as to deflect anger and fear and cut to the heart of the matter at hand; but it is only from the book that we understand how calculated all this is, how much of Smiley’s apparent compassion or gentleness is motivated by a purely pragmatic desire to root out information as efficiently as possible. Above all, Smiley listens. His great strength is his willingness to hear what people have to say without imposing his own emotional filter on it.

Which brings me to the crux of the story:

Bill Haydon

In the transition from book to series, and even more so in the transition from book to film, Bill Haydon shrinks. His motivations — always mysterious — become rather simple in the series, and completely opaque in the film. Most of all, unlike the film or series, the book conveys a strong sense of how central Bill was to the Circus and what a long shadow he cast; how fond everyone was of him, how much they admired him, what strong loyalty he inspired. At the climax, when Smiley and his people finally learn that Bill is the mole, Smiley thinks to himself that of course it was Bill, and didn’t he know, deep down, that it couldn’t have been anyone else? And yet because of his incredibly strong position in the Circus, both in terms of his official status as head of London Station and the warmth regard in which he was held, there had been a sense that it couldn’t possibly be him. It couldn’t possibly be him, and it couldn’t possibly be anyone else.

Perhaps one of the main reasons why this sense of Bill’s centrality and importance gets played down in the series and film is so as to preserve some of the mystery. There’s a Law of Conservation of Attention in storytelling: if we’re told there are four suspects and 80% of our attention is directed at one of them, it’s not very satisfying if it turns out to be one of the others, and so you can tell who’s most likely to be guilty from how much screen time they get. In the film, Bill still gets far more screen time than the other three, but not so much that a viewer would automatically assume he was the mole (at least, I didn’t). In the book, the attention ratio is much more strongly skewed towards Bill — but then, in the book, there is so much extraneous stuff going on (stuff that got cut in the adaptations) that it isn’t obvious that all the information about Bill is relevant to the investigation.

The opening credits of the 1979 series show a set of matryoshka dolls, each outer layer being removed to reveal an inner doll looking angrier than the last — until the final doll is revealed, with no features at all. This image comes from Smiley’s reflections after Bill is found out; Smiley thinks of Bill as a set of nested dolls, with the innermost doll’s face being seen only by Karla. In the book, Bill is an artist — this comes up briefly in the film, too, though it’s raised in a slightly confusing way; it isn’t absolutely clear that the painting he gives to Ann is one he painted himself — and, in his own way, a patriot. He is full of ideas and theories, constantly shifting from one position to another; and it becomes clear in the end that all of this dancing around is not hiding some clear, simple, ideological commitment, but a void at the heart of Bill’s personality, like the faceless doll in the centre of the matryoshka set. Oddly enough, the shrinkage that Bill suffers in the adaptations is as nothing compared to the shrinkage that occurs in the book as the outer dolls are opened, revealing nothing on the inside. If Bill had an ideological bias, it was a purely negative one — not a belief in the USSR or in communism so much as a hatred of America and the vulgarity of Western capitalism (certainly nothing so other-regarding as compassion for exploited workers). His affair with Ann was a smokescreen, his art was (to judge from the comments about it) always second-rate; his loyalty to England is a purely emotional impulse that has no practical effect; there is almost nothing about Bill that isn’t fake. The one exception is his relationship with Jim, which is laced with deception but does have something true at its core, perhaps because it began before he was deeply enmeshed in the Circus, and long before he was recruited by Karla.

The danger of the spy’s life, it would seem, is that his deceptions may become so vital a part of him that they sap all the energy away from his real life, so that when they are discarded, there is no person underneath. As the Sondheim song has it, “sometimes when the wrappings fall, there’s nothing underneath at all”. That is Bill’s tragedy: by the time Jim came to kill him, there really was no “him” to kill any more.

Having been fiercely impressed with the film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy when it came out last year, I recently watched the 1979 television adaptation, with Alec Guinness as Smiley, and was blown the hell away, to an extent that surprised me. Given how much I loved the film, it was almost shocking how much better the series was; the broader canvas of a 6-hour TV series gave the writer the room to be more faithful to Le Carré’s original with all its twists and turns, and to let the story breathe. The pacing is legendarily slow, leisurely, thoughtful, and yet the series is completely gripping from beginning to end: it sucks you in like little else, and the long stretches in which not much happens only serve to heighten the tension and suspense. Having seen the series, I read the novel, and realised there were yet more elements of the story that the TV series hadn’t used, layers of characterisation that were not transferred from page to screen.

It is a policy of mine to watch film versions before reading original novels, wherever possible. This is partly so that I can judge the films on their own merits, and partly because novels are almost always richer than films, so that reading the novel first results in disappointment with the adaptation because of all the things that the adaptation leaves out, while watching the film first gives me the chance to be delighted and surprised by the very same things. I feel that I experienced the different versions of the story in exactly the right order, so that it grew richer and more complex with each encounter.

As written by Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a very complex story, with dozens of characters and many nested flashbacks, as well as a lot of scenes and sequences where the reader is expected to infer what is not stated explicitly. Both sets of adaptors had a formidable job before them. It intrigued me to note the different choices they made, and in my usual analytic way, I started cataloguing them. Herewith the results of my catalogue, ordered roughly from least to most important.

Needless to say, this entry contains major spoilers for all three versions.

Very small differences

-In the film Toby’s name is pronounced “Esterhaus” or “Esterhas”, while in the series it’s pronounced “Esterhazy”.

-There’s an error in the film which may or may not be deliberate: when Smiley picks up his post, he puts aside letters addressed to “Mrs Ann Smiley”. But Ann is from an aristocratic family and is properly addressed as “Lady Ann”. Probably this was changed to avoid confusion, because Smiley is definitely not an aristocrat and Ann is considerably more marginal in the film than in either the book or the series.

-The characters’ relative ages get muddled a great deal by both film and series. As far as I can tell, the ages go something like this (oldest to youngest):

Control – Connie – Smiley – Bill & Jim – Toby – Percy – Peter – Ricki

The thing that surprised me about this when reading the novel was realising that a) Bill and Jim were undergraduates together at Oxford, and so must have been very close in age — I had somehow got the impression that Bill was older; and b) Percy is significantly younger than Smiley, young enough that he “missed the War”.

-The Christmas party scene was invented for the film and does not appear in either book or series. It’s a fine invention, which pulls together a number of elements that were threaded throughout the book — Bill’s affair with Ann and Smiley’s discovery of it, Bill’s relationship with Jim; most of all, it conveys the way things used to be in the Circus before Control was pushed out, the sense of friendliness and camaraderie between the people working there, all undermined by Bill’s duplicitousness.

Locations

-In the book and series, Operation Testify takes place in Czechoslovakia, in the woods near Brno. In the film, it takes place in Budapest. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because Toby Esterhase is Hungarian, and there is a short scene in which he is seen speaking Hungarian over the phone at the Circus; the screenwriters might have decided to relocate Testify in Budapest to make the viewers’ suspicions fall on Toby.

-In the book, Ricki Tarr meets Irina in Hong Kong; in the series, he meets her in Portugal; in the film, he meets her in Istanbul. I can’t imagine the kind of work a director would have to do to recreate the Hong Kong of 1973. I also can’t imagine that it would be worth it, since there’s not much about the Irina sequence that’s location-specific.

Supporting characters

-Peter Guillam in the novel has a girlfriend, who causes him quite a bit of anguish; even though she never appears on-page, she’s very vividly sketched. In the series, we see no hint of him having any kind of sex life at all. In the film, he has an unnamed male lover whom he breaks up with after Smiley tells him he should assume he’s being watched. It’s a poignant moment, and works rather well as an indicator of the kind of personal price the agents of the Circus have to pay for their involvement in The Great Game, which is presumably why it was added — perhaps, also, to compensate for the loss of scenes and story elements contributing to that theme in the novel (of which more later).

-There’s a lot less detail on the characters of Percy’s inner circle; much less on Bill (of whom more later), and noticeably less on Roy and Toby. In the book (and less prominently in the series), Roy is a former socialist academic who still maintains some left-wing ideals; Toby is a curious character, a sharp-dressed polyglot with something of the conman about him, longing to be an English gentleman. In both book and series, Toby comes across as shifty and vaguely sleazy and obsequious, ambitious but not really bold enough to get what he truly wants, and very much aware of the fact that he’s being passed by younger and more able men. In the film, he seems more pathetic and cowardly than anything else.

-Connie in both book and series is a rather more colourful character than she is in the film. Even in the film she is eccentric, but in the book and series she’s positively dotty, an elderly alcoholic with a penchant for twee, childish turns of phrase and fits of odd nostalgia and melancholy from which it’s hard to shift her. Smiley is fond of her but also finds her rather irritating.

-Tufty Thesinger is not killed in the book or series.

-Two characters are conflated for the film: Sam Collins and Jerry Westerby. In fact, the character in the film with the name “Jerry Westerby” is basically Sam Collins from the book, and the actual character of Jerry Westerby is nowhere to be seen in the film. (That is: “Sam Collins” in the book and series is identical with “Jerry Westerby” in the film apart from his name.) I don’t know why they did that rather than just using Sam Collins and calling him Sam Collins. The Jerry Westerby of book and series is an alcoholic, formerly a Circus employee, now a sports journalist, an old friend of Smiley’s who passes on information he picked up from a Czech soldier about the presence of Russian forces in Brno on the night of Operation Testify.

(to be continued)