Two Francs Fifty

Hotel Bellevue Palace in Bern

In 1948 a sixteen-year-old English boy walked into the Hotel Bellevue Palace in Bern and bought a ticket for the thé dansant. It cost two francs fifty. Mothers brought their daughters to those afternoons, and he described the arrangement, sixty years later, as a stud market. He had no money and no prospects and no chance at all.

They wanted the sons of rich textile barons.

He was in Bern because he had run away. His mother had vanished when he was five and his father had turned out to be a petty crook and a swindler, so at sixteen he fled abroad to learn German. Germany itself was out of the question so soon after the war, and he later said that choosing Bern instead was rather like going to New Orleans to learn French. He enrolled at the university, where the registrar marvelled at his lack of qualifications. He waited tables in the station buffet to pay for it. He is said to have washed elephants for Circus Knie. His room stood next to the Tobler factory and smelled permanently of chocolate.

And on Christmas Day, in a church in Bern, officials from the British consulate approached him. That is where David Cornwell became a spy. He called Switzerland the cradle of his writing, kept a chalet at Wengen once the money arrived, and returned to the Bellevue for the rest of his life.

Thirty years after the thé dansant, he checked George Smiley into that same hotel to run the operation that finally broke Karla. It is the best joke in the whole trilogy and almost nobody notices it.

The argument with Forsyth

It is worth setting these books directly against Frederick Forsyth, because the two men wrote about the same profession in the same decades and believed opposite things about it.

Forsyth’s faith is in procedure. Get the passport right, get the rifle right, describe the end-user certificate accurately, and the reader will supply the anxiety. His hero is a dossier: birth, training, service record, what he did and what it cost. The institutions in his novels are slow and vain, but the machinery basically works, and the individual defeats it by being better at the machinery.

Le Carré believes the machinery is beside the point. In these five books the catastrophe never arrives through equipment. It arrives because a man slept with a colleague’s wife. Because an ageing chief cannot bear to be told he is finished. Because a service would rather protect its reputation than find its traitor. Because of vanity, boredom, snobbery, the need to be admired, and the ordinary human appetite for being somebody.

The mole in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is not caught by a code-break or a satellite. He is caught because a sacked, middle-aged man sits in a rented room with a pile of old files and remembers who was sleeping with whom, and who was promoted when, and which committee was invented to keep which question from being asked. Karla’s own verdict on such bodies, relayed by Smiley with evident pleasure, is that a committee is an animal with four back legs.

And the betrayal of a country turns out to run straight through a bedroom. Bill Haydon takes Ann Smiley to bed partly because he wants her and partly because a cuckolded George will not see clearly. National treason and a domestic humiliation are the same act, performed once. That is the whole le Carré proposition. Things go wrong because people are weak, frightened, greedy and in love with the wrong person, and no amount of tradecraft will fix that, because the tradecraft is operated by the same people.

The small fat man

Smiley is short, plump, myopic and badly dressed, in expensive clothes that never fit. He blinks. He is pompous out of shyness. Rising from a chair leaves him winded and he emits a small noise before moving off. He is a scholar of minor seventeenth-century German poets, a subject of no use to anybody, and he is the best intelligence officer in Europe.

His one physical signature runs through all five novels: he takes off his spectacles and polishes them on the fat end of his tie. He does it in the middle of destroying a colleague. He does it in triumph. Le Carré notes that this leaves his face so naked that one senior secretary had to fight down the urge to go and shelter him. In The Honourable Schoolboy, now running the Circus, he unconsciously subscribes to his own legend by polishing his spectacles distractedly on the fat end of his tie in front of the entire staff.

He has been cuckolded by his wife serially and publicly, including by the traitor he unmasks. He is sacked, recalled, used and sacked again. And he is admired by the people he fights, which le Carré found delightful in life as well as fiction: he liked to report that Yevgeny Primakov, later head of Soviet intelligence, collected his novels and identified with George Smiley, of course.

What makes him a moral figure rather than a sad one is that he knows exactly what he is doing to people, and does it, and does not forgive himself. He is not the honest man in a corrupt service. He is a decent man who has learned to use other people’s weaknesses professionally, and who understands that this is the same skill his enemies have.

Two cities

London in these novels is the institution. The Circus is an Edwardian mausoleum at Cambridge Circus with a scruffy throne-room on the fifth floor. Whitehall is a jungle with marshy by-paths. Roddy Martindale sits at his luncheon table at the Garrick trafficking in misinformation and making jokes about George carrying his horse up the hill. There is a house in Bywater Street, Chelsea, where Ann is usually not, and where her telephone sits by the fire because she liked to lie beside it in case anyone rang. London is lunch, class, gossip, and men politely ruining one another.

Bern is the opposite, and it is where le Carré chose to end the thirty-year duel.

Smiley flies in under the workname Barraclough and takes the Swissair bus from Zurich. He had considered small hotels and safe flats, but Toby Esterhase argued for the Bellevue, because it has several exits, it is central, and it is the first place anyone would look for him and therefore the last place Karla would. Walking into the great hall, Smiley feels he has stepped aboard an empty liner far out at sea. His room is a tiny Swiss Versailles with a Bartlett print above the twin beds and fog making a grey wall at the window. In the bar an elderly pianist plays hits from the Fifties that had been Ann’s favourites and, he supposes, his own. He eats cheese and drinks a glass of Fendant and thinks: now is the beginning, and there is no shrinking back.

Then at ten he walks into the old city, which he loves. Cobbles, air smelling of roast chestnuts and cigars, the ancient fountains coming at him out of the fog, the medieval houses standing like the backdrop to a play he has no part in, the arcades and their doorways tall enough to ride a horse through. On the Nydegg Bridge he stops and looks down at the water and thinks of a line of Hesse, about the strangeness of wandering in fog, where no tree knows another.

That paragraph is the entire series. An ageing man, alone, in a foreign city he loves, on the night he is going to win, thinking about how nobody knows anybody.

And then the operation, out in Elfenau, Bern’s diplomatic quarter, run from an orange Volvo with local plates in which a watcher’s wife dandles a child as camouflage and recites the sights in indignant Swiss German: there is the crane, Eduard; now the bear-pit, Eduard; look, Eduard, a tram. What they are after is Anton Grigoriev, Commercial Counsellor at the Soviet Embassy, who has been quietly paying for a young woman at a Swiss clinic through an account at a bank in Thun, opened under the name Glaser.

The young woman is Karla’s daughter, and she is mad. The most disciplined ideologue in Moscow Centre, the fanatic who has beaten Smiley for thirty years and who has no personal weaknesses at all, has been embezzling from his own service to keep a sick child alive in Switzerland. He is not brought down by a satellite or a cipher. He is brought down by love, and by a nervous adulterous diplomat in Bern who talks too much.

Where to begin

Not in publication order. Start with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), which is where the character becomes what everyone means by Smiley, and which is probably the best English novel about institutions ever disguised as a thriller. Then Smiley’s People (1979) for the ending, if you can bear to skip ahead.

Go back afterwards for Call for the Dead (1961), which is slight but contains the origin of everything, including Ann, and a German agent Smiley recruited before the war and must deal with after it. A Murder of Quality (1962) is not a spy novel at all; it is Smiley as a detective at a public school, and it is the one you may skip.

That leaves The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), which readers abandon more than any of the others. It is long, it belongs mostly to Jerry Westerby, and it moves to Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Read it anyway. It is the only book in which we watch Smiley actually running the Circus, and its real subject is what winning costs the winner.

If you have not read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, read it alongside these. Smiley is only at the edge of it, but it supplies the moral weather everything else is set in.

Then, at the end of the last book, Karla crosses a bridge in the snow and drops a cigarette lighter on the cobbles as he passes. It is Ann’s lighter, which Smiley gave him years ago in an Indian jail. Smiley considers picking it up and finds there seems to be no point. His people weep and applaud him. Guillam tells him he has won, and Smiley says: “Did I? Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did.”

And then, from long habit, he takes off his spectacles and polishes them on the fat end of his tie.

A boy with two francs fifty who could not get a dance grew up and put that man in that hotel and gave him one night of fog on the Nydegg Bridge before the end. No tree knows another. Every time.

Go to the meeting.