"Adapting a novel for the cinema presents unique problems - it's not at all the straightforward process people assume, particularly if the novel is as complex and cerebral as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."
You could indeed argue, as my friend Bill did on Facebook, that even the celebrated 1979 BBC serial, which had seven one-hour episodes to play with, nevertheless struggled to convey fully the labyrinthine complexity of the novel. Having stayed up all night to watch it, Bill said:
"It's classic TV drama - meditative, but tense, and subtle. Great to see all that tobacco smoke and 70s grimness. It's vividly realised but, still, I miss the atmospheric detail and the interiority that only the novel can give."
The first Le Carré novel I read, The spy who came in from the cold, is a book that I recommend to anyone who is grappling with the nuances of office politics. That's one of the many strengths of Le Carré - he takes apart the mental machinations of every individual player, and expertly rolls out the consequences on the game at hand. The dynamics he reveals are specific to the fictional situation - Le Carré is brilliant at context-building - but there is also something universal that transcends Secret Service operations during the Cold War, for example.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is certainly demanding on the audience. At a superficial level, I couldn't help but wonder, about 45 minutes into the film, how today's cinema-goers will react to this beige, hazy, grainy portrayal of a bunch of washed-up forty-something males going about their deceptively mundane business. More problematic though is the complex unwieldy plot that resists the confines of a two-hour dramatisation. There are no handy little sub-plots to cut out (an ex-BBC friend told me that when the serialisation of Martin Chuzzlewit was being planned, he overheard a colleague say "We're just going to cut out the whole of the American section") because the narrative is too tight for that, and particularly in the first half, the scene-changes are frequent as the narrative is forced to represent all the multiple agendas, suspects and possibilities, which are fundamental to the story.
For all that, there are big bold splodges of brilliance which I will remember for a long long time. My favourite scenes mostly involve the flashback to the Circus in its heyday (unanimously deemed to be World War Two). At a raucous Christmas Party at the Circus, Santa Claus is substituted by a Vladimir Lenin look-alike, dressed in scarlet red of course, and giving every impression of being an annual ritual. The whole party erupts into a joyous rendition of the Soviet Union national anthem. Everyone in the room, including the female eye candy (I assumed them to be translators, transcribers or secretaries) was absolutely word perfect.
The incongruity of Cold War Western spies fervently embracing Soviet culture was, to say the least, striking. It was only when the gramophone needle dropped on La Mer by Julio Iglesias that I truly understood the significance. In an espionage drama centrally concerned with betrayal, you have a group of operators who can only survive the deadly demands of Cold War fieldcraft by steeping themselves in every single aspect of enemy language and culture. La Mer reminded me of a time when I eagerly devoured all things francophone. I even bought my first copy of Le Monde at the age of 12 (at WH Smith in Manchester's Arndale Centre).
The central paradox of espionage is neatly encapsulated in that rapturous scene in which the enemy's anthem is sung so joyfully and sincerely that it could easily be the opposing side - Karla's team over at the Kremlin. It's hard not to grow to love a culture that you are deeply acquainted with. You could even argue that such expert knowledge is impossible without that underlying passion in place. The scene prepares the audience for the final betrayal, the end-point of the film, and maybe injects some sympathy into a character (no spoilers here - I'm following William Boyd's good example) who sees only a grinding decline in Western culture (a sentiment echoed elsewhere in the film), and who has been fatally exposed to something seductively foreign.
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