Cover Stories (Routledge Revivals)

Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller

Michael Denning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317634836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1987, this title tracks the spy thriller from John Buchanan to Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré, and shows how these tales of spies, moles, and the secret service tell a history of modern society, translating the political and cultural transformations of the twentieth century into the intrigues of a shadow world of secret agents. Combining cultural history with narrative analysis, Cover Stories explores the two main traditions of the thriller: the thriller of the work, in which bureaucratic routines are invested with political meaning; and the thriller of leisure, in which the sports and games that kill time become a time of dangerous political contests. Examining the characteristic narrative structures of the spy novel – the adventure formulas and the plots of betrayal, disguise and doubles – Denning shows how they attempt to resolve crises and contradictions in ideologies of nation and empire, and of class and gender.

1 Thrillers, shockers, spy novels

DOI: 10.4324/9781315757995-2

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: typologies of the spy thriller

Thriller, One who or that which thrills; spec. (slang or colloq.) a sensational play or story (cf. shocker) 1896 Pall Mall Mag ‘Full blown detectives … the sort you read of in the thrillers!’

– Oxford English Dictionary

What is a spy thriller? Eric Ambler playfully writes that ‘a spy story is a story in which the central character is a secret intelligence agent of one sort or another’ and concludes that by this very reasonable definition he has never written one.¹ And for most of modern criticism this would be a small proof of Ambler’s worth, a sign that he has disobeyed the genre, broken the rules, and written not spy novels but novels, perhaps even Literature (though at this writing Ambler, unlike Graham Greene, has not been so canonized). As the narrator of Ambler’s Cause for Alarm says: ‘Besides, who said that it was a spy story? It isn’t.’

One can sympathize. Too often work on genre attempts to answer the question ‘what is a spy thriller?’ degenerates into mere classification and the construction of static typologies. One critic, interested in precisely distinguishing the spy novel from the detective story, the police procedural, the roman noir, science fiction, and the exotic adventure story, usefully demonstrates the false problems and inaccurate classifications made by previous writers. Unfortunately, by mixing the construction of an ideal type and the refining of this type by empirical testing, he is left with a definition no different from and no more useful than Ambler’s off-the-cuff one: ‘a dramatic novel where the protagonist works secretly in the service of a state.’² We are left with a definition so abstract as to tell us almost nothing and yet so narrow as to exclude Ambler’s own work – work usually taken as one of the epitomes of the genre.

Nevertheless we do need a notion of genre before looking at a set of popular books which are produced as ‘genre fiction’; so perhaps we can recast the question. Instead of asking ‘what is a spy thriller?’ or ‘what are the elements necessary to make up a spy thriller?’ we could ask: ‘what does the reader expect when picking up a spy thriller?’; ‘what forms, formulas, and conventions appear in spy thrillers?’; ‘what meanings and ideologies are peculiar to these forms?’ For a history of genres and formulas, far from being a sterile typological exercise, can become a crucial mediator between the individual narrative and social history, between text and society. Indeed, Fredric Jameson has argued that there is a privileged relation between genre theory and historical materialism:

The strategic value of generic concepts for Marxism clearly lies in the mediatory function of the notion of a genre, which allows the coordination of immanent formal analysis of the individual text with the twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life … So generic affiliations, and the systematic deviation from them, provide clues which lead us back to the concrete historical situation of the individual text itself, and allow us to read its structure as ideology, as a socially symbolic act, as a protopolitical response to a historical dilemma.³

It is for this reason, to establish a mediator between the texts of John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, and John le Carré and the history of the British social formation, that I will begin by trying to outline the genre of the spy thriller and its formulas.

There are two main ways into the question of a popular genre, and I will call them, to begin with, the commercial definition and the formulaic definition. The first is the genre as it is defined in the marketplace as a particular sort of product; the second is its definition as a set of characteristic themes, stock characters, and conventional story patterns. The first, the commerical way into genre, is clearly very important to narratives that are produced primarily as commodities. These books are, in John Sutherland’s phrase, ‘categorized product,’ and can be distinguished not only from other popular fiction genres but also from those popular novels which, though often formulaic, are not really genre fiction, those novels that we tend to call ‘bestsellers.’

So someone looking for a spy thriller in W.H. Smiths will first find a rack of ‘thrillers’ which range across spy stories, masculine action tales, police procedurals, classic detective stories, and hardboiled private eye narratives. In the US these will be lumped under a general ‘crime fiction’ or ‘mystery’ rubric. Within this category, the genre of the ‘spy thriller’ appears not as a separate rack but as a few talismanic names endorsing the product, a canon of greats constructed by novelists, reviewers, and blurb writers. The offhand pontifical judgments quoted in book advertisements that Q.D. Leavis deplored in 1932 have developed into a fine art, and a cursory survey of spy thriller blurbs at a bookstore rack can give one more exact lineaments of the genre than many scholarly articles.

First, there is the unquestionable canon:

Of Eric Ambler: ‘Unquestionably our best thriller writer’ – Graham Greene

Of Graham Greene: ‘The inventor of the modern spy’ – Saturday Review

Of Greene’s The Human Factor: ‘Probably the best espionage novel ever written’ – UPI

Of Ian Fleming: ‘The most forceful and driving writer of thrillers in England’ – Raymond Chandler

Of John le Carré: ‘The premier spy novelist of his time, perhaps of all time’ – Time

Of le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: ‘The best spy story I have ever read’ – Graham Greene

Then, the reprints of the early masters:

Of Erskine Childers: ‘The Riddle of the Sands is regarded by many as one of the best spy novels ever written; certainly it was the first modern espionage story and remains a classic of the genre … it is a novel that will appeal to scores of readers brought up on the realism of Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John le Carré.’ – the Penguin blurb

Of John Buchan: The Thirty-Nine Steps set ‘a pattern for adventure writers ever since’ – Graham Greene

Of W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: ‘Ashenden is one of the two or three greatest spy stories ever written’ – the Avon blurb

And, finally, the rank and file:

Of Francis Clifford: ‘Not since Graham Greene was creating his adventures has there been a writer with such haunting quality.’

Of Len Deighton: ‘The Raymond Chandler of the cloak and dagger set’; ‘James Bond’s most serious rival’; ‘Without question the best since the days when Eric Ambler and Graham Greene were at the top of their form.’

Of Helen MacInnes: ‘The queen of spy writers’; ‘She can hang her cloak and dagger right there with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.’

Of Geoffrey Household: ‘In a class with Ambler, le Carré and Deighton.’

Of Gavin Lyall: ‘Belongs to that too small shelf which contains the works of Eric Ambler and Geoffrey Household.’

Of Charles McCarry: ‘In the tradition of the best espionage fiction, John Buchan to John le Carré’; ‘A new and very welcome talent’ – Eric Ambler

Of Ken Follett: ‘A Winner … Ranks with le Carré, Ludlum, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.’

Of Robert McCrum_ ‘Admirers of John le Carré should enjoy Robert McCrum.’

Though the reader may well be skeptical of this unending string of superlatives (and many more could have been added), advertising does have its rationality and the effect of these blurbs is to classify new books, to institutionalize veteran authors, and to create a certain horizon of expectation for reader and writer alike – in other words, to establish a genre. These blurbs are taken from the various apparatuses which surround the thriller: book reviews, anthologies, handbooks, essays by aficionados. And from these sources one can put together a brief history of the genre, a history that readers unconsciously absorb. Almost all commentators see the spy thriller as a predominantly British genre which finds its roots at the turn of the century: Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) is often taken as the first spy novel. From there the spy thriller is incarnated in the adventures of John Buchan’s Richard Hannay (particularly The Thirty-Nine Steps, 1915) and Sapper’s Bull-dog Drummond (1920s), in the ‘realism’ of Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928) and the early novels of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene (1930s), in the explosion of Ian Fleming’s James Bond in the 1950s, in the cynical and polished tales of John le Carré and Len Deighton (1960s), and in the massively documented ‘secret histories’ of Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett (1970s).

The problem with this sort of genre definition is that it conflates the impulse toward a star system in the mass market with the notion of a ‘great tradition’ in traditional literary criticism, producing a sort of paraliterary canon, an ideal order of master auteurs, devoid of any historical understanding. Indeed, all too many critics of the thriller have accepted this essentially commercial definition of genre because of its compatibility with literary-critical practice. Though I will be looking at the work of some of the leading auteurs of the thriller, the importance of genre study should be to situate their texts within the set of institutions – formula, style, reading public, publishing – which constitute a genre rather than to ratify a particular canon.

The second main way into genre is by defining its characteristic formulas and then constructing certain typologies.⁴ In most thriller criticism, this has led to two sorts of defining oppositions within the genre. First, there has been the almost universal distinction between ‘realistic’ and ‘fantastic,’ between the realism of Ambler and le Carré and the romance of Fleming.⁵ I will examine this pervasive commonsense opposition in the section on realism. The second opposition is made between types of protagonists, sometimes between amateurs and professionals, at other times between heroic adventurers and cynical or confused muddlers. With a simple combination, one can find heroic amateurs (Buchan’s Richard Hannay), heroic professionals (Fleming’s James Bond), confused amateurs (Ambler’s Charles Latimer or Josef Vadassy), and confused professionals (le Carré’s George Smiley).⁶ Similarly this sort of taxonomy can establish differences between spy thrillers (where the protagonist may or may not be a professional spy) and other genres – private eyes, detectives, policemen.

In more complex versions, certain conventional story patterns are isolated and classified. Tzvetan Todorov, in his essay ‘Typologies of Detective Fiction,’ makes a logical rather than an empirical or historical distinction between mystery plots and thriller plots.⁷ The mystery, he argues, consists of two superimposed stories: the story of a crime and the story of an investigation. In the purest form of the mystery, the classical detective story, the first story is the significant one but is absent. The second story, the present one, is the relatively transparent tale of how the first story came to be known. Moving across a spectrum to the thriller, there is a shift in emphasis from the first story to the second, and the crime becomes a mere pretext to a series of adventures and can eventually be replaced by a mission (a search or a quest). Todorov maintains that the two ends of this spectrum work on two different sorts of interest: the mystery, on curiosity which proceeds from effect to cause (from the corpse to revelation of murderer); the thriller, on suspense which moves from cause to effect (from villain with gun to daring escape). So what is interesting is not the absolute differences between commercially established genres – detectives, spies, private eyes, etc. – but the syntax of plot, the way the permutations of mission, hunt, and investigation are worked, the way the hunter/hunted dialectic is articulated in varieties of what we might call masculine romance.⁸ This is a plot to which we will return, heeding Julian Symons’s observation that ‘almost all of the best thrillers are concerned, in one form or another, with the theme of the hunted man.’⁹

Another way of defining the genre’s formula is not by type of hero nor by conventional story pattern but by characteristic theme, the particular vision of the world the genre projects. There are two main ways the spy thriller can be so categorized. First, the world of the thriller is one of international politics and intrigue, of multinational economic organizations. It is no accident that the genre first appears at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the imperialist stage of capitalism when the existence of rival imperialist states and a capitalist world system made it increasingly difficult to envision the totality of social relations as embodied in any single ‘knowable community.’ The novel of espionage is the tale of the boundary between nations and cultures, and the spy acts as a defender or subverter of the nation in the face of the other, the alien. The spy story appears in Britain in the wake of the heroic novels of imperial adventure and narrates the threat to the Empire. The spy became the figure for the fortunes of Empire in Britain, providing explanations for its decline and betrayal.

Indeed, one can see the spy novel in the terms that Georg Lukács, the marxist theorist and historian of the novel, used in his account of the modernist novel. Faced, in a period of imperialism and monopoly, with the inability to narrate the totality of social relations in the terms of individual experience, a number of short cuts were invented which magically reconciled individual experience with an increasingly reified and incomprehensible social order. Among these solutions Lukács identified the symbolists’ inflation of the meaningless everyday detail to epiphanic transcendence, and the naturalists’ aspiration to a complete positivist description and inventory of the social world. The solution invented by the spy novel was less complex and more ingenious: it kept a fairly traditional plot by making the spy the link between the actions of an individual – often an ‘ordinary person’ – and the world historical fate of nations and empires. History is displaced to secret conspiracies and secret agents, from politics to ethics. The secret agent returns human agency to a world which seems less and less the product of human action.

The other side of this ‘solution’ is that the spy thriller transforms an incomprehensible political situation (or a situation the knowledge of which is being repressed) into the ethical categories of masculine romance, the battle of hero and villain becoming one between Good and Evil, the forces of light and the forces of darkness. A number of writers on the thriller have noted this and I will attempt later to untangle the political codings of this ethical binary: are the political aspects of these books simply fillers for the more significant ethical opposition, or does this Good/Evil opposition have a political and ideological significance of its own?

These are some preliminary speculations on the thriller as genre; the difficulty with them is that they remain tied to a literary criticism which has eternal modes – romance, tragedy, melodrama, and so forth – into which new variations can be slotted without much consideration of the historical situation they respond to or the ideological functions they serve. At its worst this can lead to finding spy stories in Homer or seeing James Bond as a modern Lancelot.

So I would like to recast these two modes of genre study and foreground their kernels of history. Thus if the commercial definition of genre can lead to a star system crossed with the great tradition, it can also provide the beginning of a way of looking at what Terry Eagleton has called the ‘literary mode of production.’ And the various interesting typologies of heroes, plots and themes that critics have constructed can be put into motion by reinserting them into a particular historical situation. Indeed, we can add to John Cawelti’s somewhat neutral term, ‘formula,’ Fredric Jameson’s notion of an ‘ideologeme.’¹⁰ The term, an attempt to fuse narrative analysis with ideological critique, is less a solution than a reminder that themes and formulas in popular fiction never appear inertly, simply to be catalogued, but emerge as part of antagonistic collective discourses. Thus my aim in the following pages is to try to account for the social history of the thriller in terms of its relations of production and consumption, and in terms of the ideologemes articulated in its characteristic formulas.

Yesterday's spy: toward a history of the thriller

If genre remains an uncertain if necessary concept in the cultural study of popular fiction, history, which rescued us from static canonic and taxonomic notions of genre, is no less uncertain. Recent developments in literary theory have for the most part focused on ways of reading, on the intricacies of decoding literary messages, and have not fully addressed ways of thinking about the history of various types of literary production. An established mainstream literary historian who once wrote that literary history was the record of transcendent works now finds ‘transcendence’ a somewhat unclear historiographic concept but has little to put in its place.¹¹ And a leading marxist critic, in a book that revises the history of the novel, insists that ‘although literary history is here everywhere implied,’ his book should not ‘be taken as a paradigmatic work in this discursive form or genre, which is today in crisis.’¹² The history of popular fiction is in no less disarray.

For the m...