Sir Nigel Irvine, the Anti-George Smiley?

In the discussion of the works of John le Carré it is something of a cliché to discuss the principal protagonist of his first two decades as a writer--the short, fat, academic, cerebral, emotionally complex and frequently conflicted (and much-betrayed by his glamorous wife) George Smiley as an "Anti-Bond," all the way down the line the opposite of the most famous of fictional spies. However, recently revisiting the works of Frederick Forsyth I was surprised to find in his creation Sir Nigel Irvine an "Anti-Smiley."

Like Smiley Sir Nigel is a British intelligence officer of brilliance who eventually rises to the post of head of the Service. Like Smiley he did not seem much of a "catch" in his youth, but nevertheless ended up marrying a sought-after aristocratic beauty. However, in contrast with Smiley Forsyth stressed the young Nigel Irvine's physical heroism, telling of how as an eighteen year old soldier he was wounded at Monte Cassino and pleaded to return to the frontline when his superiors reassigned him to intelligence. In contrast with Smiley his marriage to a glamorous woman who would ordinarily never have chosen him is, if not unmarred by tragedy, a happy one--Lady Penelope as devoted to Nigel as he is to her a half century on. In contrast with a Smiley capable of flinching from success at the moment of a great triumph for his knowing all too well the lives he has destroyed, Sir Nigel suffers no doubts or pangs of conscience as he manipulates other people, and even precipitates violence on a mass scale, ever the ruthless master puppeteer. (After all, as one actor who played Sir Nigel on the screen remarked in another role that is more responsible than any other for his measure of fame, "If you will the end, you must will the means.") And in contrast with Smiley, who is the central figure in a tale of an Establishment out of its time as its class, social order, Empire and the whole way of living and thinking associated with them decline, Sir Nigel represents an elite quite confident of its still mattering in the world, certainly to go by his continued importance in the affairs of the world even long into retirement, and comfort in such company as the "Council of Lincoln."

Looking back this seems very much a reflection of the outlooks of the two authors, and the modes in which they worked. Both men had been involved with British intelligence during the Cold War, and both made their literary names writing about it--but a le Carré was interested first and foremost in a class of people, the British elite from which its Establishment was drawn, a group the oddities of le Carré's background made him in but not quite of, with the subject of espionage a way to approach them as a subject, and the treatment, accordingly, not making it into the action-adventure stuff of a Fleming, but grappling with the changes in British life in the post-war era through its less glamorous reality in a way rather more in the tradition of a Conrad or a Maugham. By contrast Forsyth was a writer of much more conventional thrillers of nationalistic sensibility who eagerly embraced the Thatcherite vision of the country as in its fashion still a superpower led by an elite more than a match for any other in the world--and indeed in telling his tales stressed the "big picture" so much that I suspect that many of those reading what I call his "security state epics" scarcely took notice of Nigel amid all the goings-on, especially before his much more central positioning in Icon. Still, should they have done so they would have seen Forsyth explicitly clarifying that he had been even more thoroughly the master of the situation than the reader was led to believe during the course of the story, as Forsyth took great satisfaction in not just the cunning but the ruthlessness of his answer to Smiley.

Of course, both these writers' heyday is long past--and those of you reading this post probably ran across it at least in part because so few bother with the thrillers of a few decades ago (the "half-life" of the genre very short indeed). Still, my guess is that if Philip Roth is wrong about novel-reading going the way of "reading Latin poetry in the original," it is le Carré's books that will prove the more enduring, the grasp after life and truth after all continuing to engage even after tastes in popular entertainment have changed.