A brilliant spy

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A blinding spy (English original title: A Perfect Spy ) is a novel by the British writer John le Carré from 1986. The life stories of the con man Richard Pym and his son Magnus Pym, an agent of the British secret service, are told, nested in one another heads an Eastern European espionage network during the Cold War and disappears without a trace after the death of his father.

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When Magnus Pym, resident of the British intelligence service in Vienna , does not return to Austria from the funeral of his father Richard, the British embassy is in an uproar. The venerable Jack Brotherhood which Pym was once recruited, feared that his star pupil overflowed might be and sees his own reputation at risk. But neither Pym's wife Mary, who had been Jack's lover before her marriage to Magnus, nor his son Thomas, whom Jack seduced into secret service activities at a young age, know where Pym is hiding. The British Foreign Office, in the person of Bo Brammels and his executioner Nigel, is playing for time and doing nothing to bring the foreign agents led by Pym and possibly exposed in Czechoslovakia to safety. Even when it becomes known that Pym has stolen a "burnbox" with secret documents and his service pistol from the embassy, ​​her first priority is to keep the shame a secret from the CIA partners , whose agent Grant Lederer Pym has long been under the cover of theirs spied on family friendship.

Pym has gone into hiding in a small guesthouse in a coastal town in south Devon , where he feels a sense of home after his unsteady life. In a long letter to his son, he tells of his youth in the shadow of his dominant father Richard, known as "Rick", a charmer and impostor who has run windy business all his life, lives big and cheats on everyone, but always everyone Can evade conviction. From his youth on, Pym has lived with lies and learns to lie to everyone, but he feels shame and longs for a good cause for which he can sacrifice himself. This makes it easy for Jack Brotherhood to recruit the young student in Bern to serve his fatherland. In his first act, Pym betrays his only friend, Axel, a German from Karlsbad who hides in Switzerland after the Second World War , to the immigration police .

Years later, when Pym is doing his military service in divided Vienna, he meets Axel again, who now lives in Czechoslovakia and works for the local secret service. In order to make amends for his betrayal of his boyfriend, Pym lets himself be recruited by Axel and spies from then on as a double agent for Brotherhood and Axel, whom he nicknamed "Poppy" because of a bouquet of poppies he gave him . His private life also consists primarily of the fulfillment of duties. He does not marry his first wife Belinda or his second wife Mary out of love. Thanks to the controlled information from Axel's sources, Pym climbs up in the British secret service until, at the height of his career as deputy resident in Washington, doubts arise about his agent network, which in fact consists mainly of Czechoslovak double agents. Pym is deported to Vienna. With the decline of his career coincides with the decline of his father, who in old age has lost the ease of his impostures and who only lives from the support of his son.

The death of his father is a liberation for Pym. Finally he finds the strength to break out of his dutiful life between the surrogate fathers Brotherhood and Axel, who are both intensely looking for him. A remark by Axel about Pym's mother, who allegedly lives in Farleigh Abbot and who is in fact his maternal landlady, leads the British secret service on the trail of the pension where Pym stayed. But he has now settled his estate and shoots himself with his service revolver before Brotherhood and Mary who has arrived can intervene. In a postscript to his son, he describes himself as a bridge that Tom has to cross in order to get from his grandfather Rick to life.

Autobiographical background and genesis

Jost Hindersmann described A Blinding Spy as "a kind of fictional autobiography " le Carré. Just as Magnus Pym was only able to write about his life after the death of his father, le Carré had to wait for his father Ronald "Ronnie" Cornwell to die before he could write about his own life. In addition to Rick Pym, the fictional projection of le Carré's own father, other characters in the novel are also based on real people from le Carré's life, such as Annie Lippschitz, known as "Lippsie", his German nanny Annaliese Lieschwitz. In the figure of Alex, two fellow students from Bern named Alexander Heussler and Horst Nözholt merge, whereby le Carré restricted that the author's traits should also flow into each novel character. Like Magnus Pym, le Carré had his first contact with the British secret service in Bern and ran errands for MI6 . During his time with the domestic intelligence service MI5 , he became a protégé of Maxwell Knights , who is considered the model for the James Bond figure M and who inspired the character of Jack Brotherhood in le Carré's novel.

Since 1959, le Carré struggled in vain with the literary treatment of his life's theme, the relationship with his father Ronnie. Characters like Aldo Cassidy's father in The Vigilant Dreamer , Jerry Westerby's father in A Kind of Held or Charlie's father in The Dragonfly show features of Ronald Cornwell. In 1979 le Carré planned to write his father's memoirs , and four years later he tried a play that did not get beyond the first act. Eventually he returned to his familiar genre and wrote an autobiographical novel in the guise of a spy novel. The narrative style is distant, characterized by slight amusement, and repeatedly divides the narrator into the first and third person. Le Carré didn't just want to portray Rick as the villain and Magnus as his victim. In an interview, the author stated that Magnus had to surpass his father in the severity of his deeds in order not to feel sorry for himself. He was only able to get closer to his father's topic when he had said goodbye to his "surrogate father" George Smiley , the hero of many le Carrés novels with the characteristics of his mentors at university and in the secret service. The working title of the novel was Agent Running in the Field . About The Burn Box , A Man With Two Houses , A Spy With Excellent Manners and The Love Thief the final title A Perfect Spy came about shortly before the start of printing .

interpretation

Double agents are a central theme in le Carré's novels, from double agent Leamas in The Spy Who Came Out of the Cold to the search for the mole in Dame, König, Ace, Spion to the smuggled actress Charlie in The Dragonfly . However, a dazzling spy takes the issue of duplication to extremes. Magnus Pym works as a double agent for his two agent leaders Brotherhood and Alex, who each serve a part of Pym's personality and, put together, replace the absent father Rick. While they become two surrogate fathers for Pym, his son Tom again copies his father's life path and lets himself be tempted to spy on his parents. There are also numerous doubles for Pym's mother, from surrogate mother Lippsie to the landlady of the small guesthouse, to which Pym eventually retires. Grant Lederer, the American agent, is in turn a double of his British counterpart Pym. This is described by Alex as someone who is composed of many individual pieces. The entire novel is a search for the truth about its protagonist, which ultimately becomes blurred in its complexity and ambiguity.

The world of espionage served le Carré as a microcosm for Europe during the Cold War . While the East sacrifices individuality for the benefit of the collective, the West destroys individual individuals to protect individuality. In such a world, total loyalty lies in betrayal. The agents seek a coherent self in a service that demands their dismemberment. For a single great goal - whether patriotism, freedom or duty - the agents have to live multiple lives. In A Blinding Spy , too, love is no longer able to unite people with itself, unlike in many earlier works by le Carré. Pym's life is a series of betrayals with which he tries in vain to make amends for the one, all overriding betrayal of his friend Alex. By writing down his life for his son Tom, he tries to put himself together as a unified personality, as a parting gift, as it were. When his story is over, he kills himself and with it the "perfect spy". It is a last-ditch attempt to gain control over your life, to create yourself by killing yourself, to take revenge on time by placing yourself outside of it. By killing the father (of Tom) by the son (of Rick) he hopes to give life to his own son.

reception

The American writer Philip Roth described Ein dazzling Spy shortly after its publication as "the best English novel since the war" ("the best English novel since the war"). Writer and critic David Denby reiterated Roth's assessment in 2014. Anthony Burgess , who in an earlier review disagreed with the novel A Kind of Hero had anything to do with literature, had to admit that A Blinding Spy “has the semblance of intricacy in real literature ", Yet he demanded:" Mr. le Carré's talents cry out to be used in a real novel ”. Eric Homberger spoke out against such a separation of genre literature and “real literature”, since le Carré only uses the formulas of the genre as a pretext for a serious investigation of the central issues of the present: “Le Carré uses the espionage thriller to 'real 'To write novels. ”Based on the book title, Frank Conroy described le Carré as the“ perfect spy novelist ”.

The novel was filmed in 1987 by the BBC as a seven-part television series with Ray McAnally , Peter Egan and Rüdiger Weigang in the leading roles.

expenditure

  • 1986 German language first edition, translated from English by Rolf u. Hedda Soellner, Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, ISBN 3-462-01771-3
  • 1989 paperback, Munich: Heyne, Heyne-Bücher Nr. 7762, ISBN 3-453-02898-8
  • 2002 New edition as part of the Le Carré Complete Edition, Munich: List, ISBN 3-471-78087-4
  • 2003 Taschenbuch, Munich: List, List-Taschenbuch 60392, ISBN 3-548-60392-0

In addition, licensed editions for the Bertelsmann Club (1988) and Deutscher Bücherbund (1988).

literature

  • Eric Homberger: John le Carré . Methuen, London 1986, ISBN 0-416-40450-2 , pp. 98-104.
  • Susan Laity: "The Second Burden of a Former Child": Doubling and Repetition in "A Perfect Spy" . In: Harold Bloom (ed.): John le Carré . Chelsea House, New York 1987, ISBN 0-87754-703-3 , pp. 137-164.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jost Hindersmann: John le Carré. The spy turned writer . NordPark, Wuppertal 2002, ISBN 3-935421-12-5 , p. 21.
  2. ^ A b Joseph Lelyveld: Le Carré's Toughest Case . In: The New York Times, March 16, 1986.
  3. ↑ Adam Sisman: John le Carre. The biography . Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , item 614, 1609.
  4. ^ John le Carré: The pigeon tunnel. Stories from my life . Ullstein, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-550-08073-9 , pp. 11-12.
  5. ↑ Adam Sisman: John le Carre. The biography . Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , item 2647.
  6. ↑ Adam Sisman: John le Carre. The biography . Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , pos. 8598-8654.
  7. ↑ Adam Sisman: John le Carre. The biography . Bloomsbury, London 2015, ISBN 978-1-4088-4944-6 , item 8727.
  8. ↑ Susan Laity: "The Second Burden of a Former Child": Doubling and repetition in "A Perfect Spy" , pp 137-143.
  9. ↑ Susan Laity: "The Second Burden of a Former Child": Doubling and repetition in "A Perfect Spy" , pp 144-149, 160-161.
  10. ↑ David Denby: Which Is the Best John le Carré Novel? . In: The New Yorker, August 6, 2014.
  11. ↑ "the appearance of the difficulty of real literature", "the appearance of the difficulty of real literature", "Mr le Carré's talents cry out to be employed in the creation of a real novel". Anthony Burgess: Defector as Hero . In: The Observer of March 16, 1986. Quoted from: Eric Homberger: John le Carré . Methuen, London 1986, ISBN 0-416-40450-2 , p. 103.
  12. ^ "Le Carré uses the spy thriller to write 'real' novels." Quoted from: Eric Homberger: John le Carré . Methuen, London 1986, ISBN 0-416-40450-2 , p. 104.
  13. ^ "He is a perfect spy novelist." Frank Conroy: Sins of the Father . In: The New York Times, April 13, 1986.
  14. ↑ A Perfect Spy in the Internet Movie Database (English)