Agent on his own behalf

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Agent on his own behalf , partly also published as Smileys People (English original title: Smiley's People ), is a spy novel by the British writer John le Carré from 1979. The seventh novel with the secret agent George Smiley is based on Dame, König, As, Spion ( Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , 1974) and Eine Art Held ( The Honorable Schoolboy , 1977 ) bring the so-called Karla trilogy ( The Quest for Karla ) to a close about Smiley's fight against his Soviet adversary with the code name "Karla".

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George Smiley, the disempowered chief of the British secret service MI6 , is called out of retirement. His former agent Vladimir, commonly known as the "General" and leader of a group of Estonians in exile , was murdered while meeting a contact from the " Circus " in Hampstead Heath . Both deeds and weapons bear the marks of the Soviet KGB . In order not to cause a stir, the ministerial official Oliver Lacon instructs the retired Smiley to "clean up", that is, to cover up Vladimir's connections to the circus. But Smiley begins to investigate on his own, because a message from Wladimir electrifies him: It's about the "Sandman" - Smiley's Soviet adversary Karla.

Over 20 years ago, as a young agent in India , Smiley tried to convince a Russian spy to defeat . To gain his trust, he revealed private problems with his unfaithful wife Ann and gave him her gift, a lighter with a love dedication. But his efforts were in vain, the young spy became "Karla", the head of the Soviet secret service, who exploited his knowledge of his British opponent by putting the mole Bill Haydon on his wife. To this day, Smiley, who has since separated from Ann, has not got over this betrayal.

Four years ago, when Smiley was hunting for a Soviet agent in Hong Kong , rumors surfaced that Karla too had a sore spot: the unhappy love for a woman he had murdered when she was unfaithful to him. Now he seemed to want to smuggle a young girl abroad, without the knowledge of the Moscow leadership, for whom her envoy Oleg Kursky was supposed to give her a cover identity . This put Otto Leipzig, a windy double agent , who betrayed the plans to his compatriot "General" Wladimir, who in turn carried them to the circus. But after Smiley's disempowerment, the track dried up because the new management under Saul Enderby did not trust the Baltic exiles. Vladimir did not get in touch again until four years later when Kursky put pressure on the Russian dissident Maria Ostrakova in Paris to smuggle a Soviet agent into the country under the name of her daughter Alexandra. Before he could reveal details of the plan, the "general" was murdered.

Smiley visits his old loyal friends: Connie Sachs, who is dying, provides him with important background information. With Peter Guillam, who was deported to the Paris embassy , he brings old Ostrakowa, who has already been murdered, to safety. Otto Leipzig, on the other hand, can only be found dead near Lübeck , murdered by Karla's agents. At least there is enough evidence in his estate of Kursky and Karla's involvement that Smiley receives the green light from Enderby for an operation as long as it is not carried out on behalf of the circus.

With the reactivated Toby Esterhase, who in the meantime hired himself out as an art dealer, Smiley went to Bern , where a young girl, whose real name was Tatjana, was housed as Alexandra Ostrakowa in a private psychiatric clinic. She is looked after by the Soviet commercial attaché Anton Grigoriev, who kidnaps Smiley and blackmailed him until he admits to acting on Karla's secret mission. The Soviet head of the secret service had secretly taken his mentally ill daughter out of the country because she was not receiving adequate care in the Soviet Union and she was threatened with persecution as a critic of the regime. Smiley visits the girl and then sends Karla a letter threatening to publicize her double game in the Kremlin . The only way to avoid the execution, after which no one would take care of his daughter, was to go to the West.

At the Berlin Wall , where the British spy Alec Leamas came to an end years earlier (see The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ), Smiley, Esterhase and Guillam are waiting for Karla's arrival, and he actually manages to cross the border. He drops Smiley's lighter on West Berlin soil and leads himself away from the British secret service. While Peter Guillam congratulates his old friend on his triumph, he knows only too well how much the two opponents have come closer in the end: It was Smiley's typical sympathy that brought the supposedly callous Karla down while Smiley was on the hunt on his adversary whose fanaticism took over.

Smileys finale

According to John le Carré, Agent forms the third and final act of the dispute between Smiley and Karla, which was not originally intended to be a trilogy . According to the writer's plans, the duel between the two adversaries should have been a great “ Comédie Humaine of the Cold War ” spanning the globe over a double-digit number of books. But already while researching Eine Kind Held , he got tired of the pair of opposites, whose appearance did not improve the novel from his point of view. He planned an agent on his own behalf as a requiem for Smiley, for which he once again called up all of his old companions in order to turn to other, younger heroes with the following books. Only once Smiley was in the secret companion ( The Secret Pilgrim reactivated, 1990), but acted in farewell to the Cold War merely as a "voice from the past."

Film adaptations

In 1982 the BBC produced a six-part television series directed by Simon Langton . Alec Guinness took on the role of George Smiley . Other roles included Beryl Reid , Eileen Atkins , Bernard Hepton and Michael Byrne .

expenditure

  • John le Carré: Smiley's People . Hodder & Stoughton, London 1979, ISBN 0-340-24704-5 .
  • John le Carré: Agent on his own behalf . Translated from the English by Rolf and Hedda Soellner. Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1980, ISBN 3-455-00817-8 .

literature

  • David Monaghan: Smiley's Circus. The secret world of John le Carré . Heyne, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-453-05629-9 , pp. 34-38, 54-57, as well as under the respective key words.
  • Tobias Gohlis : Novel and Reality . Epilogue to the edition of the Zeit- Edition political thriller . Zeitverlag, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8419-0162-0 , pp. 408-416 ( online ).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John le Carré: Foreword. In: Agent on his own behalf. Zeitverlag, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8419-0162-0 , pp. 7-10.
  2. ↑ Agent on his own behalf in the Internet Movie Database (English)