The Spy in Your Novel

In 1963, a thirty-year-old ‘diplomat’ – in fact, a junior-ranking member of the British secret services – wrote a book.

The book was about spying and it was more or less the opposite of Bond. Unglamorous in the extreme. Intelligent. Laceratingly cynical.

The young man who wrote it was in a state of (in his words) ‘intense, personal stress’. The novel was written very fast and ‘in extreme privacy.’ Now, for obvious reasons, any book written by members of the British secret services has to be vetted before publication and, again for obvious reasons, those services weren’t about to let any deep secrets be exposed. So, contrary to a lot of press commentary over the years, it was only the young man’s lack of experience and access that allowed his book to be published at all. Although he was technically a spy, he was junior enough that he knew more or less nothing about his own profession.

But the book was published – and it was a sensation. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold became an international bestseller and is frequently cited as being among the 100 Best Novels.

If you want the gist of the story, it’s something like this:

Alec Leamas believes that he’s on a secret mission to destroy the brutish Mundt, head of the East German secret service. In order to do that, he poses as a double-agent, is interviewed by the #2 East German spy – a good and idealistic man named Fiedler – and imparts scatters information that would tend to implicate Mundt as a double-agent working on behalf of the British.

Except – it’s more complicated.

Because the man running the British operation (George Smiley), pays off Leamas’s mortgage and gets his communist-inclined girlfriend to join an exchange of party-members to East Germany.

To Leamas’s surprise, the girlfriend pops up to (innocently, but completely) destroy his testimony. So if Leamas is lying, then why is he here at all? It must be that Leamas has been sent to East Germany in order to frame Mundt, so the East Germans now realise Mundt must be loyal to them, right? They happily arrest Fiedler, who will probably be shot. So, the British operation looks like it’s failed completely.

Except – it’s more complicated.

Because why did George Smiley pay off Leamas’s mortgage – a sure signal to the East Germans that Leamas was still a paid-up British spy?

Hmm. It must be that George Smiley wanted to destroy Leamas’s testimony. And why would he want to do that? Well, since the destruction of Leamas’s credibility in East Germany resulted in the death of Fiedler and the protection of Mundt, it must be that actually Mundt was a British double-agent after all. The whole purpose of the operation – to which Leamas was not privy – was to destroy Fiedler, who all along had suspected Mundt.

Got that?

Well, yes and no. The brilliant thing about any really good spy story (or any tangled crime story) is that as you read it, you follow the logic and everything makes sense. But as soon as you put the book down, the logic has a habit of disappearing. If a friend asked you, half an hour after you’ve finished reading to explain the plot, you’d struggle to do so.

The reason for that struggle is that you’re being asked to keep track of logic-chains like these:

Leamas realises that Smiley pretended he wanted to destroy Mundt (who was pretending to work for the East Germans, but was really working for the British), so Leamas – who thought he was lying about payments to Mundt etc – was in fact telling the truth.

That’s head-exploding. It’s a big part of the cost of reading the book (the mental effort), and a huge part of the reward.

Now all this seems like maybe it’s only of interest to people who write spy thrillers and perhaps crime thrillers. But it’s not, it’s not!

It’s of interest to YOU.

Why do we read books at all? I mean: it’s all made up, right? Alex Leamas didn’t exist. Lizzie Bennet didn’t exist. Harry Potter (sorry, kids) isn’t real.

A big part of it is simply this:

Humans aren’t particularly honest.

That dishonesty might be big and consequential. (Fiedler does or doesn’t get shot, depending on how Leamas does his job.) Or it might be minor: you saying “Yes, I’m fine,” when you’re definitely not.

Dishonesty might happen in the context of actual or potential violence (as in spy stories.) Or it might arise in the context of actual or potential romance.

It might be wilful, careful, pre-planned dishonesty (anything to do with George Smiley.) Or it might be utterly inadvertent (for example, Jane Austen characters confused by their own emotions: Lizzie Bennet saying she definitely isn’t attracted to sexy Mr Darcy, for example.)

This dishonesty – or, rather, the gap between explicit and implicit, surface and hidden, text and subtext – is of passionate importance to us as humans.

Let’s say you’re dropping your kids off at the school gate and the head-teacher asks you to alter something about (let’s say) the way you deal with your child’s homework. You’ll unquestionably walk away trying to figure out if there was subtext there. Not quite on the level of “does he/she think I’m a crap parent?” perhaps, but you’ll be searching to see if there was a concealed reproach. You’ll check out your own actions to see if you can see a flaw. You may well ask other parents to see what they do. (Are you the only one who’s been singled out in this way? If so, what does that mean?)

We carry that behaviour into fiction. It’s instinctive. I think it’s probably true to say that fiction trains us. That is: the more we read, and the more we think about our reading, the more sophisticated we become at parsing these real-world encounters.

But it’s also true that the real-world habituates us to fiction. The more we deal with these issues of subtext in the world, the more we bring those same practices into reading.

A huge part of the pleasure of fiction lies in precisely this kind of puzzle-solving. Why is Lizzie so insistent that she isn’t attracted to the handsome, rich Darcy? Surely because she partly is. In Where the Crawdads Sing, there’s a courtroom-style mystery in play, but there’s also a coming-of-age emotional unveiling at play. Both mysteries are compelling, but there’s probably more long-term depth and interest in the latter.

And that takes us right to one of the central puzzles of fiction. The more we make the reader work, the more they like it.

Some sorts of work are bad, of course. If your sentence is unclear and your reader has to puzzle out your meaning, that’s a fail. If you let that happen too often, the reader will just put the book down and never pick it up again.

But giving complicated and multi-layered data to a reader about your characters? That’s perfect. That’s when your reader gets highly involved, teasing your clues apart like a hungry gossip.

I’ve gone on too long as it is, but next week I’ll take a look at some examples of complicated clue-giving – some challenges to a reader’s capacity to figure things out.