Bowler Hat or Raincoat? Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - Celia Rees

I have my own reasons for a renewed interest in spy fiction (of which more at another time) but even if it was not one of my current pre-occupations, I would be looking forward to seeing the movie version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

I remember when John Le Carre's book was first published. I was a big fan then and I still am. I have my original hardback copy, a little battered with the paper beginning to brown around the edges, and I have my copies of his other spy novels, the paperbacks faring less well, I fear, but I would not part with them, because they are of their time.

John Le Carre is one of those novelists who write within a genre but transcend it. His name is always high on the list of writers who should have won the Booker but who were denied the prize through literary snobbery. I admire his style and his inventiveness, his consummate plotting and his characterisation, his knowledge and insight into the workings of the particular world he depicts. What interests me now are the perspectives involved. This is not a historical novel but in some ways it reads like one.

Kim Philby's defection happened ten years or so before the book was published, so the novel is already dealing with events that slightly precede the writing of it, but shift the perspective to now and the world Le Carre is writing about, although it is within many people's memory, has all but disappeared. The contrast between Alec Guiness's bowler hatted Smiley and the rumpled raincoated Gary Oldman is an interesting one and tell us much about the perception of times past, even recent times past, from the point of view of a different present.

The BBC series starring Guiness was broadcast in 1979, far closer to the period described in the book, and is therefore likely to be a more accurate depiction, although paradoxically, it seems dated to our eyes. This is a world of Cambridge spies, gentlemen's clubs, Civil Service mandarins and old school ties. To really appreciate the shift to the present, we only have to look at a contemporary series like Spooks. It is not just the electronic gadgetry, which would have seemed like science fiction in the 1970's, and the unimaginably different threats, but the position of women in senior posts, the racial mix of the operatives, their social origins, the casual way that they are dressed, all of these things show us the distance that we have travelled.

These changing depictions offer interesting perspectives and insights to anyone wanting to write about the recent past. Society has changed since John le Carre wrote Tinker, Tailor, the period he depicts has receded into history. Post Glasnost, his novels looked hopelessly dated, now they can be appreciated as accurate depictions of the Cold War period of the middle to late 20th Century.