Shownotes Transcript
This episode is sponsored by Indeed. You never think about hiring until it's urgent, right? In the last few months, we've grown as an organisation, and with more traction and projects comes both excitement and the need to grow our team. Hiring can feel like a full-time job, but not with Indeed. In no time, you'll find qualified candidates who understand your vision.
Because when you're building something great, you don't just need help, you need the right help right now. So when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's Sponsored Jobs helps you stand out and hire fast. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster.
And it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs.
When we recently used Indeed for a job vacancy, the response was incredible. With such a high level of potential candidates, it was so much easier to hire fast and hire well. Plus, with Indeed's sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts, and you only pay four results. How fast is Indeed? In the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide.
There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash intelligence squared.
Just go to indeed.com slash intelligence squared and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com slash intelligence squared. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.
Right now at the Home Depot, shop Spring Black Friday savings up to 35% off select appliances plus free delivery from top brands like Samsung. Get tech you can trust to simplify your daily routines. From all-in-one washer dryers to smart refrigerators with Family Hub, upgrade your kitchen and laundry with trusted technology from Samsung, ranked number one in customer satisfaction. Get Spring Black Friday appliance savings and free delivery now at
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Conor Boyle. For the Sunday debate this week, an archived listen pitting two masters of Cold War fiction, or at least that's what they claimed, against one another. Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond vs. John le Carré, author of Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy, and many others.
The works of spy novel author John le Carré, often occupying the murky worlds of intelligence gathering between the Cold War superpowers of East and West, still feels timely today, as the world considers what to do with another tyrant in the Kremlin. Le Carré is also the subject of two new books out this month,
a private spy and a secret heart. Ian Fleming was the creator of the world's favourite spy, of course, James Bond. And in 2016, we gathered a panel of expert speakers and great actors to debate which spy master comes out on top. Here's our host, the author and critic, Erica Wagner, with more.
I'm really delighted to be here tonight. When we will see whether our conversation remains as martini ice cool as one of our authors tonight or grows as smoking gun hot as the other. For this evening, we will be pitting against each other the two giants of espionage, Ian Fleming and John le Carré. In one corner...
Ian Fleming, Goldfinger, Dr. No, Casino Royale, super spy James Bond always leaves us both shaken and stirred. In the ring with him, John le Carré, tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, Smiley's people, the night manager, a perfect spy, books where betrayal of the realm and of the heart are on top of the menu.
Try to imagine British culture without 007 or Blofeld, without George Smiley, Control or Carla. It's impossible. And yet tonight we are going to have to choose between them.
You will have been polled as you entered the hall, and you'll have the chance to vote again at the end of the evening when you've heard the arguments and seen the spectacular performances of our actors. So who's going to be putting their cases tonight? For Ian Fleming...
we have Anthony Horowitz, author of over 40 books, including the best-selling teen spy series Alex Rider, which has sold around 19 million copies worldwide and was made into a major feature film, author of the Sherlock Holmes novels The House of Silk and Moriarty, and of course commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate to write the James Bond sequel Trigger Mortis, as well as a new 007 novel.
For John le Carré, we have David Farr, screenwriter, playwright, and director. He's the man who wrote the BBC adaptation of John le Carré's The Night Manager, starring Tom Hiddleston and Olivia Colman, and that was a worldwide sensation.
His big screen directorial debut, The Ones Below with Clément's Poesie and David Morrissey, was released earlier this year, and I've just had the inside information that it's been nominated for an Evening Standard Award. To illustrate their arguments, our speakers will have four wonderful actors at their disposal who will be bringing the works to life.
Please welcome Simon Callow, one of the country's most celebrated stage and screen actors, as well as an acclaimed biographer. Leslie Manville, BAFTA-nominated film and theatre actress, who won the 2014 Olivier Best Actress Award for her performance in Ibsen's Ghosts.
Matthew Lewis, who starred as Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter films and most recently in Happy Valley and Ripper Street. And finally, Alex McQueen, star of The Thick of It, The Inbetweeners, Peaky Blinders and Woody Allen's You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger.
So before we really get into the meat of the argument, I just want to ask each of my advocates tonight, really very briefly, how they first came to the work that so impassions them. David, do you want to tell us? Yes. It's down to my father who's here tonight. I was about 12, 13, and I was about to go to bed one night. I remember it really clearly because he just said, oh, you might want to stay up for this.
And I watched Smiley's People on the television. And it blew my head off. And being a bookish type, I went basically straight to the books which were on the bookshelf and kind of read quite a lot of them in quite a short period of time in a somewhat obsessive way. So it's down to my father, and I'm very grateful to him for that.
An enduring passion, then. And how about you, Anthony? I can actually show you the answer, because here it is. This is the book that my mother gave me when I was ten years old. It's Dr No. And if you look carefully, you can see my little hand, a ten-year-old handwriting, writing my name on the cover of it. I was at a very oppressive and unpleasant and abusive prep school in North London...
And it was scary. And then this came in. Is there any reason, is there any doubt that it would change my life completely? This was sort of, you know, somebody told me there was another world out there and there were women and sex out there as well. Yeah, just the cover is really rather funny. On the cover, of course, you can see Honey Child Ryder, who years later would have a spiritual son by the name of Alex Ryder. So this book really did change my life.
Well, now, we are really going to hear how lives were changed and whether your minds will be changed. So I would like to start with you, Anthony, to advocate for Ian Fleming. Thank you. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you.
I'd like to start by saying what a great pleasure it's been to meet David tonight and that I was a huge fan of his adaptation of A Night Manager. Curiously, I'd have said it's the most Bond-ish of all the Le Carre novels. It was certainly given the James Bond treatment by the BBC all the way down to those opening credits so reminiscent of Maurice Spinder and none the worse for that.
I'm also a great, great admirer of Le Carre. You won't hear me disparaging him this evening. I was very glad, actually, to see a Times report a couple of years back, the 50 greatest writers since 1945, and there was Le Carre, deservedly, at position number 22. LAUGHTER
Ian Fleming was actually our eight places higher of 14. I had to tell you that. Two great writers, though, and who is the greatest? Well, for me, it's easy. I admire the cold, treacherous, dark, convoluted world of Le Carre. I mean, you could almost call it Fifty Shades of Grey, but I love the warmth, passion and sheer fun of James Bond. For you, the audience, it would be more difficult.
Have any of you, I wonder, or all of you, have you read an Ian Fleming novel? I'm sure you all at least will have seen one of the films. It's an extraordinary fact that one in three people on this planet have apparently seen a James Bond film. Twelve novels, two collections of short stories, 26 films that now gross a billion dollars a time. And because of the films, everyone knows Bond, even though six actors, seven including David Niven, have played him.
And when there's going to be a new James Bond, the whole world stops. Will it be Tom Hiddleston? Will it be Idris Elba? Good idea, by the way. It doesn't matter. It's still James Bond. Let's consider the tropes that we know so well. The black tie, the dry martini, shaken not stirred, the moorland cigarettes, that wonderful number so evocative, 007, the license to kill, and what is apparently the most loved line in all of cinema, the names James.
James Bond. Well, of course, Fleming wrote all of them. Without Fleming, no Bond, no film franchise. So although Eon Productions did bring great things to the party, John Barry's music, Ken Adams' set designs, let's also remember they brought some of the worst things too, the terrible jokes, the stupid gadgets, John Cleese. LAUGHTER
The best films, as any Bond fan will tell you, are the ones that are closest to the books. In Order, Doctor No, From Rush We Have Loved, Goldfinger, and, to be fair, Daniel Craig's wonderful debut in Casino Royale, which everyone loved because it was a return to Fleming. Nonetheless, I'm here to talk more about the books than the films. 40 million of them sold in Ian Fleming's lifetime. It was said that only Homer's Odyssey sold more than a million copies while he was alive. Homer and Bond. In 1961, an American film,
A good American president, JFK, put it in his list, put Russia With Love in his list of top ten favourite books. In sales terms, Fleming sold 40 million, the figure is now 100 million and counting. And just to put that into perspective, Le Carre, with 23 novels, almost twice as many, 75 million. Close, but no cigar. LAUGHTER
How do we define greatness? Let's start with great timing. 1952, seven years after the war, austerity ratcheting, Burgess and Maclean have just betrayed us, we're in fear of communism, the atom bomb, Britain feels second rate, there's no sunshine, no travel, no glamour, and as Philip Larkin pointed out so famously, sex hasn't yet been invented.
And then along comes James Bond. I'll talk about his character more later, but let me say it once. He was no Bulldog Drummond, no Richard Hanna. He was utterly different to what had gone before. Colder, harder, more morally ambiguous. Not a superhero, actually, in the original book of Casino Royale. He was the first modern spy, cutting away, you might say, for those who were going to follow.
Charlie Hickson put it very well in an article he later wrote the Young Bond series. Fleming was a radical. He had witnessed a new breed of heroes in action. The commanders and special agents of the SOE who may have been for the most part upper crust and well educated but were also tough and ruthless, cold-blooded killers. They were the inspiration for Bond. You couldn't do things the old way anymore. Great timing, great language.
Don't let anybody tell you that Ian Fleming was a pulp writer. In the first extract we're about to hear, Simon Callow is going to read from Her Majesty's Secret Service, the moment when Bond meets Tracy, the girl he will later marry and, spoiler alert, lose. Listen to the voice in this extract. Feel the atmosphere that Fleming sets up in Royal Leser. And then when the moment of danger comes, see how adroitly addressed it is. Simon. The sea was now gunmetal below a primrose horizon.
A small westerly offshore breeze, drawing the hot land air out to sea, had risen and was piling up wavelets that scrolled in, whitely, as far as the eye could see. Flocks of herring gulls lazily rose and settled again at the gulls' approach, and the air was full of their mewing and of the endless lap-lap of the small waves.
The soft indigo dusk added a touch of melancholy to the empty solitude of sand and sea. Now so far away from the comforting bright lights and holiday bustle of La Reine de la Cote Opale as Royale Les Eaux had splendidly christened herself, Bond looked forward to getting the girl back to those bright lights.
He watched the lithe golden figure in the white one-piece bathing suit and wondered how soon she would be able to hear his voice above the noise of the gulls and the sea. Her pace had slowed a fraction as she approached the waterline and her head, with its bell of heavy fair hair to the shoulders, was slightly bowed in thought perhaps or tiredness. Bond quickened his step.
until he was only ten paces behind her. "Hey, Tracy!" The girl didn't start or turn quickly round. Her steps faltered and stopped, and then as a small wave creamed in and died at her feet, she turned slowly and stood squarely facing him. Her eyes, puffed and wet with tears, looked past him. Then they met his. She said, dully, "What is it? What do you want?"
I was worried about you. What are you doing out here? What's the matter? The girl looked past him again. Her clenched right hand went up to her mouth. She said something. Something Bond couldn't understand from behind it. Then a voice from very close behind Bond said, softly, silkily, Don't move or you get it back of the knee.
Bond swirled round into a crouch, his gun hand inside his coat. The steady silver eyes of the two automatics sneered at him. Don't you love them? APPLAUSE
Don't you guys love that sneered? But you see, that's the thing about Fleming. His language is so wonderful. You know, in Thunderball, Bond stays in a room-shaped room with furniture-shaped furniture. Or from Russia with Love. It's so lovely. I wish I could write like that. From Russia with Love, regret was unprofessional. Worse, it was Death Watch, Beetle of a Soul. Over and over again, he entertains us with his language skills. Once, Goldfinger says, once his coincidence, twice his happenstance, but three times his enemy action.
And I have to ask, did Le Carré ever write a sentence with such a smile?
Look at the great titles from Russia With Love, You Only Live Twice, Live and Let Die for Your Eyes Only. Nobody writes titles like that either that have passed into the language. And the great set pieces, every book has them. Bond tied down with that circular saw, it was a laser in the film, coming up between his legs. The game with Ulrich Goldfinger, the golf game where Goldfinger cheats and Hugo Drax cheating in Moonraker. The Suicide Garden in You Only Live Twice. And little nuggets that the whole world knows, The Girl Painted Gold, Orbit.
The next thing Bond knew was that it was three o'clock in the morning.
He knew it was three o'clock because the luminous dial of his watch was close to his face. He lay absolutely still. There was not a sound in the room. He strained his ears. Outside, too, was deathly quiet. Far in the distance, a dog started to bark. Other dogs joined in and there was a brief hysterical chorus which stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Then it was quite quiet again.
The moon, coming through the slats in the jalousies, through black and white bars across the corner of the room next to his bed. It was as if he was lying in a cage. What had woken him up? Bond moved, softly, preparing to slip out of bed. Bond stopped moving. He stopped as dead as a live man can. Something had stirred on his right ankle.
Now it was moving up the inside of his shin. Bond could feel the hairs on his leg being parted. It was an insect of some sort. A very big one. It was long, five or six inches, as long as his hand. He could feel dozens of tiny feet lightly touching his skin. What was it?
Then Bond heard something he'd never heard before. The sound of the hair on his head rasping on the pillow. Bond analyzed the noise. It couldn't be. It simply couldn't. Yes, his hair was standing on end. Bond could even feel the cool air reaching his scalp between the hairs. How extraordinary. How very extraordinary. He had always thought it was a figure of speech. But...
Why? Why was it happening to him? The thing moved on his leg. Suddenly, Bond realized that he was afraid, terrified. His instincts, even before they had communicated with his brain, had told his body that he had a centipede on him. Bond lay frozen.
He had once seen a tropical centipede in a bottle of spirit on the shelf in a museum. It had been pale brown and very flat and five or six inches long, about the length of this one. On either side of the blunt head, there had been curved poison claws. The label on the bottle had said that its poison was mortal if it hit an artery. Bond had looked curiously at the corkscrew of dead cuticle and had moved on.
The centipede had reached his knee. It was starting up his thigh. Whatever happened, he mustn't move. Mustn't even tremble. Bond's whole consciousness had drained down to the two rows of softly creeping feet. Now they reached his flank. God! It was turning down towards his groin. Bond set his teeth. Supposing it, like the warmth, the...
Supposing it tried to crawl into the crevices? Could he stand it? Supposing it chose that place to bite?
Bond could feel it questing amongst the first hairs. It tickled. The skin on Bond's belly fluttered. There was nothing he could do to control it. But now the thing was turning up and along his stomach. Its feet were gripping tighter to prevent it falling. Now it was at his heart. If it bit there, surely it would kill him. The centipede trampled steadily on through the thin hairs on Bond's right breast up to his collarbone. It stopped.
What was it doing? Bond could feel the blunt head questing blindly to and fro. What was it looking for? Was there room between his skin and the sheet for it to get through? Dare he lift the sheet an inch to help it? No, never. The animal was at the base of his jugular. Perhaps it was intrigued by the heavy pulse there.
Christ! If only he could control the pumping of his blood. Damn you! Bond tried to communicate with the centipede. It's nothing. It's not dangerous, that pulse. It means you no harm. Get on out, into the fresh air. As if the beast had heard, it moved on up the column of the neck and into the stubble on Bond's chin. Now it was at the corner of his mouth.
tickling madly. On it went, up along the nose. Now he could feel its whole weight and length. Bond softly closed his eyes. Two by two, the pairs of feet moved alternately, trampling across his right eyelid. When it got off his eye, should he take a chance and shake it off? Rely on its feet slipping on his sweat? No, for God's sake! The grip of the feet was endless.
He might shake off one lot, but not the rest. I think in that reading you get exactly what I love about Ian Fleming. It's a suspense and a danger, but always with that smile attached to it too. And of course, Dr No is just the first of a fantastic gallery of villains and rogues. And as a writer myself, a writer for young people, I only wish...
I could have created as many wonderfully memorable villains as Ian Fleming did, and I wish I had more time to do other than just read a list of them. Goldfinger, Oddjob, Rosa Klebb, Donovan Grant, Ernest Stavro Blofeldt, Le Chiffre, Irma Bunce, Garamanga, the man with the third nipple and the golden gun, Spectre, Smirch. I mean, these are so known to all of us. And when I think of Le Carre, yes, his villains are good too. Carla, Munt, Hayden, Richard Roper, but...
But do we really know them? Let's meet one of his greatest villains in one of those moments that Fleming does so well where Bond is tied down, as I mentioned earlier, with a circular saw or a laser, whatever you want to remember, and he's in the power of Goldfinger. And, of course, Goldfinger has to talk. Alex, Leslie and Matthew are going to read one of the most famous passages in the entire canon. A voice, Goldfinger's voice, flat, uninterested, said... Now we can begin.
Bond turned his head towards the voice. His eyes were dazzled by the light. He squeezed them hard and opened them. Goldfinger was sitting in a canvas chair. He had taken off his jacket and was in his shirt sleeves. There were red marks around the base of his throat. On a folding table beside him were various tools and metal instruments and a control panel.
On the other side of the table, Tilly Masterton sat in another chair. She was strapped to it by her wrists and ankles. She sat bolt upright, as if she was in school. She looked incredibly beautiful, but shocked, remote. Her eyes gazed vacantly at Bond. She was either drugged or hypnotized. Bond turned his head to the right. A few feet away stood the Korean.
He still wore his bowler hat, but now he was stripped to the waist. The yellow skin of his huge torso glinted with sweat. There was no hair on it. The flat pectoral muscles were as broad as dinner plates and the stomach was concave below the great arch of the ribs. The biceps and forearms, also hairless, were as thick as thighs.
The ten minutes to two oil slicks of the eyes looked pleased, greedy. The mouthful of blackish teeth formed an oblong grin of anticipation. Bond raised his head. The quick dart hurt. They were in one of the factory workrooms. White light blazed round the iron doors of two electric furnaces. There were bluest sheets of metal stacked in wooden frames.
From somewhere came the whir of a generator. There was a distant muffled sound of hammering and behind the sound, the faraway iron pant of the power plant. Bond glanced down the table on which he lay, spread-eagled. He let his head fall back with a sigh. There was a narrow slit down the centre of the polished steel table. At the far end of the slit...
Mr Bond, the word pain...
"'comes from the Latin pena, meaning penalty, "'that which must be paid. "'You must pay for the inquisitiveness "'which your attack upon me proves, as I suspected, to be inimical. "'Curiosity has killed the cat. "'This time it will have to kill two cats. "'For at fair, I must also count this girl an enemy. "'She tells me she's staying at the Bruges. "'One telephone call proved that to be false.'
Oddjob was sent to where you were both hidden and recovered her rifle and also a ring, which I happen to recognise. Under hypnotism, the rest came out. The girl came here to kill me. Perhaps you did too. You've both failed. Now must come the peener. The voice was weary, bored, agitated.
I've had many enemies in my time. I'm very successful and immensely rich, and riches, if I may inflict another of my aphorisms upon you, may not make you friends, but they greatly increase the class and variety of your enemies.
That's very neatly put. Goldfinger ignored the interruption. If you were a free man, with your talent for inquiry, you'd be able to find round the world the relics of those who've wished me ill or have tried to thwart me. They have, as I say, been many of these people. And you would find, Mr Bond, that their remains resemble those of hedgehogs. Squashed.
Upon the roads in the summertime. Very poetic simile. By chance, Mr. Bond, I am a poet in deeds, not in words. I am concerned to arrange my actions in appropriate and effective patterns. But, by the way, I wish to convey to you that it was a most evil day for you when you first crossed my path.
And admittedly, in a very minor fashion, thwarted a minuscule project upon which I was engaged. On that occasion, it was someone else who suffered the pina that should have been meted out upon you. An eye was taken for the eye, but it was not yours. You were lucky. And if you'd then found an oracle to consult, the oracle would have said to you, Mr. Bond, you have been fortunate. Keep away.
From Mr. Ulrich Goldfinger. He's the most powerful man. If Mr. Goldfinger wanted to crush you, he would only have to turn over in his sleep to do so. Thank you.
At the end of the day, what are we here to talk about? What is the definition of greatness that makes a writer great? Kingsley Amis talked about James Bond as a reimagining of the Byronic hero. He comes from a tradition of Heathcliff and Rochester. Melancholic, dark, brooding, enigmatic. But here is the point I want to leave with you. And very, very few authors share this.
James Bond transcends the books in which he finds himself. He is bigger than fiction. I think only two authors come to mind who have done the same. Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes and maybe J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter, where somehow the character enters our bloodstream, enters our DNA. So although George Smiley is definitely a fascinating character, Bond is almost part of us. He has become part of our national identity. He actually summarises the world and the time in which he lived.
And I'd just like to take you, finally, back to the Olympics of 2012. Do you remember the Queen parachuting out of a helicopter watched by 900 million people around the world? Now, who escorted her to that helicopter? It couldn't have been George Smiley. It could only have been Bond. Thank you.
When you think about super successful businesses that are selling through the roof, like Heinz or Mattel, you think about a great product, a cool brand and brilliant marketing. But there's a secret. The business behind the business making selling simple for them and buying simple for their customers. For millions of businesses, that business is Shopify.
Upgrade your business and get the same checkout as Heinz and Mattel. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash promo, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash promo to upgrade your selling today. shopify.com slash promo. At Capella University, you can learn at your own pace with our FlexPath learning format.
Take one or two courses at a time and complete as many as you can in a 12-week billing session. With FlexPath, you can even finish the bachelor's degree you started in 22 months for $20,000. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. Fastest 25% of students. Cost varies by pace, transfer credits, and other factors. Fees apply.
This episode is brought to you by Greenlight. Get this, adults with financial literacy skills have 82% more wealth than those who don't. From swimming lessons to piano classes, us parents invest in so many things to enrich our kids' lives. But are we investing in their future financial success? With Greenlight, you can teach your kids financial literacy skills like earning, saving, and investing. And this investment costs less than that after-school treat. Start prioritizing their financial education and future today with a risk-free trial at greenlight.com slash Spotify. greenlight.com slash Spotify.
Wow, this house is cute. But can I really get in the game in this economy? I do have savings and I am responsible-ish. I should bury it. I'm being wild. But what if I'm not being wild though? Could I actually score a... Kick off your home buying journey with Zillow's new buyability tool. It makes it easy to find out what you can afford so you can get off the bench and on to the playing field with confidence. Check your buyability only on Zillow.
Business taxes. We're stressing about all the time and all the money you spent on your taxes. This is my bill? Now Business Taxes is a TurboTax small business expert who does your taxes for you and offers year-round advice at no additional cost so you can keep more money in your business. Now this is taxes. Intuit TurboTax. Get an expert now on TurboTax.com slash business. Only available with TurboTax Live Full Service.
Well, a very admirable performance from Anthony. But in the world of spies, anything can happen. And so let's hear from David advocating for John McCary. Thank you, everyone. And thank you to Anthony for a fabulous, pugnacious effort. A quick reminder...
A quick reminder, we're not judging most famous movie character of the 20th century. We are judging the greatest spy novelist of the 20th century. It's very, very hard to disassociate James Bond the movies from James Bond the character. I want to leave that with you. It's an important part of my argument. We begin my argument in late 1977...
A Russian émigré has been found on Hampstead Heath, dead. Vladimir, or the General. We join George Smiley, ageing, plump, short, short-sighted, more likely to be seen with an umbrella in his hand than a beretta, in his search for truth. His search for his nemesis, the KGB counterintelligence officer, Carla.
One stop on Smiley's search is the Oxfordshire home of Connie Sachs, Smiley's ex-MI6 colleague and dearest friend. No longer with the agency, she has the best memory in Britain, but she's drinking herself to death. It was a house of day and night at once. At the centre, on a pine table, littered with the remains of toast and marmite, an old oil lamp.
shed a globe of yellow light, intensifying the darkness around it. The gleam of blue rain clouds, streaked by sunset, filled the far French windows. Gradually, as Smiley followed Connie's agonisingly slow procession, he realised that this one wooden room was all there was. For an office, they had the roll-top desk, laden with bills and flea powder. For a bedroom...
The brass double bedstead with its heap of stuffed toy animals lying like dead soldiers between the pillows. For a drawing room, Connie's rocking chair and a crumbling wicker sofa. For a kitchen, a gas ring fired from a cylinder. And for decoration, the unclearable litter of old age. Connie's not coming back, George. She called as she hobbled ahead of him.
Wild horses can puff and blow their snivelling hearts out. The old fool has hung up her boots for good. Reaching her rocking chair, she began the ponderous business of turning herself round until she had her back to it. So if that's what you're after, you can tell Saul Enderby to shove it up his smoke and pipe it.
She held out her arms to him, and he thought she wanted him to kiss her. No, not that, you sex maniac. Batten onto my hands. He did so, and lowered her into the rocking chair. That's not what I came for, Conn.
I'm not trying to woo you away, I promise. For one good reason, she's dying. She announced firmly, not seeming to notice his interjection. The old fools for the shredder and high time too. The leech tries to fool me, of course. That's because he's a funk. Bronchitis, rheumatism, touch of the weather, balls. The lot of it, it's death. That's what I'm suffering from.
The systematic encroachment of the big D. Is that booze you're toting in that bag? Yes. Yes, it is. Oh, goody. Let's have lots.
Just a reminder, you can support Intelligence Squared and get even closer to the world's most brilliant minds by signing up for Intelligence Squared Premium. Head to iq2premium.supercast.com or see the link in the description to get started. And Apple folks, we've got you covered too. Hit subscribe for some bonus extras on your podcast app. Thanks for all your support.
So, when John Le Carre is the spy who came in from the cold, came out in 1963, the New York Times said that in one novel, the espionage novel had changed more in one novel than it had in the previous 50 years. He went on to say that whereas Bond was basically Bulldog Drummond with a sex life, Le Carre's novels were completely revolutionary. What did the New York Times mean by this?
How did it find Le Carré so extraordinary? Well, firstly, we can say this. Le Carré knows his espionage world. He knows it better than anyone else because he worked in it, and he worked in it in detail. He was first recruited as a teenager in Switzerland, and then joined properly in the 50s, MI5 and then MI6. His characters are based on his own life to some extent. We have evidence that possibly Smiley was based on his own boss, John Bingham.
The traitor Bill Hayden was possibly based on the traitor Kim Philby. He knew these people. There's a realness and a toughness to Le Carre's world. It's quite a different sphere of novel writing in my view. Fleming for me is a wonderful cartoonist. That's what he is. Bond is a superhero. He's the ancestor of so much of modern Hollywood's taste for that.
And that's why Bond, as a moody character, is wonderful and continues to succeed. He fulfills our fantasies. But Le Carre knows that no such solutions are possible. He has tasted the reality of post-war Europe and knows that no number of Aston Martins and martinis can solve them. Le Carre's world is seedy, it's ugly, it's evil and it's banal, yes. But moral problems, as we know in our world, do not come in black and white. They do come in grey.
Far from being glamorized, the spy in Le Carre is dragged down into some level of degradedness, compromise. He is desensitized. Many of the practitioners in the novels are incompetent. And those like Smiley, who are wonderfully efficient and brilliant, are in their private lives utter failures. So, yes, it's real. But I think that's not enough to defeat Fleming. And I would accept that because Fleming knows his world too.
I would argue that Le Carre is a truly great novelist, and that this may take decades, possibly centuries, to truly come through, because, strangely, he writes in the espionage genre. The reason he's a great novelist is that he delves into the human soul. He takes risks, big existential risks. For him, writing is a matter of life and death. At stake is the soul. And perhaps to understand this better, let's talk about why spy novels intrigue us all, why we're all here, why we love them so much.
Yes, they tell great stories, there's action and all of that, but deep down for me, the spy novel is basically all of our lives writ large. We're all seeking to find out who we are. It's a simple question of identity. Who are we? What masks do we present in our lives to even our closest loved ones, to ourselves, to our parents, to our colleagues?
How do we use ourselves? What legends do we create? What double agents do we need in our own souls? And that's what Le Carre writes about. When people ask me about The Night Manager and why it did well on TV, and they say exactly what Anthony said. Was it the Bondian treatment to the beginning, the credits, and was it the fast cars and the beautiful villa? To some extent, yes. We love escapism and we need some of it. But the real truth that story sticks, the reason that story sticks, is Jonathan Pine is a man who has no idea who he is.
He goes through five or six different names in that journey. He keeps experimenting with who he is. People try and fix him and identify him. And no one can. Tom Hiddleston was wonderful as that, brilliant, because he was blank. He was unclear. He didn't know. That sucks us in. That's a genuinely thrilling fictional idea. And that's what Le Carre does in a way that no one else has ever done. Perhaps the best simple line in that book is, who are you, Jonathan? So
So Le Carre's ancestors are not Bulldog Drummond and the big cartoon figures that Bond follows on from, but Graham Greene, the great, great early 20th century spy novelist, if you like, who went way beyond spy novels into deep existential questions. The characters of Harry Lyme and Scobie and Thomas Fowler in The Quiet American, he was my favorite novelist when I was a teenager. And Le Carre, like him, inhabits that crepuscular world of shadows, danger, existential risk.
And beyond that, I want to quickly mention, this is getting a bit heavy, Joseph Conrad, who sits deep, deep behind Le Carre, a great and difficult but wonderful novelist.
Le Carre names several characters in his books after Conrad. That's not a coincidence. There's a homage going on there. Axel, we'll hear from Axel later. Perhaps famously, we have Kurtz from The Heart of Darkness, because Le Carre fundamentally is interested in the journey into the heart of darkness. But unlike Conrad's, Marlowe in The Heart of Darkness, for those of you that have read it, Marlowe goes into the East Congo jungle to find his Kurtz,
Le Carré's Heart of Darkness is in London. It's in Berlin, in Cold War Berlin. It's in this sort of place. It's in the clubs where deals are done, the Athenaeum. It's in the living room. It's in the bedroom, very crucially. And it's in our heart. Because he's a great novelist and those are the questions he's asking.
So, the Conradian search for truth in the heart of darkness. What I'd then go on to say, and we're about to get to our second reading, is this is often done through a search for the other. If you think about Le Carre, and the first reading was part of that, someone's always seeking someone else. So, famously, Smiley is seeking Carla.
Lemus seeks Munt in Spy Coming from the Coal. Ternus seeks Harting in A Small Town in Germany. Pine goes after Roper. And in A Perfect Spy, Magnus Pym seeks Axel. Or does Axel perhaps seek Magnus Pym? In each of these stories, the heart of darkness is the soul of the other. And at its very heart, Le Carre is seeking through his writing his own soul, his own self, what Conrad called the secret sharer.
The person who knows us better than we know ourselves. This is a fundamentally beautiful idea. Very European, I think. And then Le Carrier is a very weird mixture for me of the British cool, the great storyteller,
and a very strong, deep European thinker. He did, after all, spend his formative years in Switzerland reading a hell of a lot of German literature, and it comes through. And it's not something I think to be ashamed of. People might call it highbrow. I don't. I just think it's serious, and it's beautiful, and it makes for great, great writing. We're dealing with great and deep ideas around doubles and selves, existence, metaphysics, Freud, Kafka, and Dostoevsky. I genuinely think, not in all his novels, but in the great...
six, eight, ten that I can think of, he's at that level. And one of my favourite characters in this regard is Axel, the Czech agent who befriends and is recruited by British intelligence officer Magnus Pym in possibly one of the great Le Carre masterpieces, A Perfect Spy.
But who is recruiting who? In this scene we're about to read, Axel meets Pym in a safe house in the Alps. Pym has betrayed Axel when they were young. And listen how Axel uses this as a way to forge a deep connection in the English agent's soul. Then Axel began speaking, kindly and gently, without irony or bitterness. And it seems to me that he spoke for about 30 years.
because his words are as loud in my ear now as they ever were in Pim's then, never mind the din of the cicadas and the cheeping of the bats. Sir Magnus, you have in the past betrayed me, but more important, you have betrayed yourself. Even when you are telling the truth, you lie. You have loyalty and you have affection. But to what? To whom?
I don't know all the reasons for this, your great father, your aristocratic mother. One day maybe you will tell me, and maybe you have put your love in some bad places now and then. He leaned forward, and there was a kindly, true affection in his face.
and a warm, long-suffering smile. Yet you also have morality. You search. What I'm saying is, Sir Magnus, for once, nature has produced a perfect match. You are a perfect spy. All you need is a cause. I have it. I know that our revolution is young and that sometimes the wrong people are running it. In the pursuit of peace, we are making too much war.
In the pursuit of freedom, we are building too many prisons. But in the long run, I don't mind, because I know this. All the junk that made you what you are, the privileges, the snobbery, the hypocrisy, the churches, the school, the fathers, the class system, the historical lies, the little lords of the countryside.
The little lords of big business. And all the greedy wars that result from them. We are sweeping that away forever. For your sake. Because we are making a society that will never produce such sad little fellows as Sir Magnus. He held out his hand. So, I've said it. You are a good man. And I love you. And I remember that touch always.
I can see it anytime by looking into my own palm, dry and decent and forgiving. And the laughter from the heart as it always was once he had ceased to be tactical and become my friend again.
I mean, beautifully read. Thank you. And that for me is just a key passage. It's so incredibly moving. At the same time, it's a flagrant piece of recruitment by a communist of an English guy who hasn't got a clue who he is and is putty in his hand. There's real love there at the same time as there's recruitment and business being done and...
there's an absolutely acute analysis of all the ills of British society that still ail us to this day. That's what he does, and it's all in one paragraph, and it's all voiced by this fabulous Czech character. It's beautifully done, and it moves me deeply. The Perfect Spy, I think, is probably, it's definitely his most personal book. For those that don't know so much about Le Carre, he has a remarkable father character in his life, and Perfect Spy is
a kind of masked version of that. A father who loved and betrayed him, essentially a swindler and a deeply affectionate man. And that haunted sense of the person you love most is the person you know least well is right at the heart of Le Carre. And I think it's something that we all fear and feel in different ways sometimes.
in our lives as we travel through the strange mystery of existence. That's where he is. It's where Conrad was. It's where Green was. What fascinates me about Le Carre is that even when the Cold War finishes, and of course, fundamentally, he's most well known as a Cold War novelist, but he still manages to pursue those same preoccupations. If you think about The Night Manager, for all that it's set in, it couldn't be more different to a Cold War novel. It's villas, it's fast cars, it's money.
Fundamentally, it's the same story. Pine seeks a surrogate father, someone he can love. His father is dead in this version. He seeks the surrogate father of all people. He finds it in the man who he seeks revenge for the killing the woman he loves. That's the classic Le Carre dilemma, if you like. And it doesn't work...
nor indeed the drama, unless that love exists between the two men. It's a love story, and in fact most of Le Carré's books are love stories, very often between men. There's a kind of intellectual homoeroticism going on very often, which is dangerous and exciting. But fundamentally it's about the double agent that we carry inside of us all through our lives.
And I feel that long after Fleming put down his somewhat dilettante pen and picked up his golf clubs or whatever he did, Le Carre will always continue to write because he has to. There's a compulsion in him. He's like Balzac, who rather adorably, as he was dying on his deathbed, said, do look after my characters. And it's the same obsession that Le Carre has. You can imagine him saying to his sons, please make sure George Smiley's all right.
In his later books, he's plumbed whole new worlds with lots of research. We all know The Constant Gardener, probably from the film. Mission Song, Our Kind of Traitor. He's always been scrupulous in research. He always is committed politically. And I think as an older writer, that becomes something that matters more to you than when you're young. But the greatness, in all honesty, is not that. The greatness is due to his inexorable search inside his own heart, to him as a writer and as a man and as a moral human being. And
And for that, I think there is greatness attached to that. That in all honesty, I don't see him in Fleming. I see a stylist. I see a wonderful cartoonist. I see a great, skilful writer of action. I think that the movies have blessed him and made him more famous than his writing skill is due, if I was to be honest. Let's finish with Smiley and go back to that house in Oxfordshire. So, the great, plump, bespectacled searcher for truth, the wounded lover, the seeker of his nemesis Carla, George Smiley is deep in conversation with Connie,
A bit more drink has been drunk and we're further down the line. Connie ran on wildly, describing clues that led nowhere, the sources that vanished at the moment of discovery. It seemed impossible that her racked and drink-sodden body could have once more summoned so much strength. Oh, George, darling, take me with you.
That's what you're after. I've got it. Who killed Vladimir and why? I saw it in your ugly face the moment you walked in. I couldn't place it, but now I can. You've got your Carla look. Vladdy had opened up that vein again, so Carla had killed him. That's your banner, George. I can see you marching. I'll take me with you, George. For God's sake, I'll leave hills. I'll leave everything. No more juice, I swear.
Get me up to London and I'll find his hag for you, even if she doesn't exist, if it's the last thing I do. Why did Vladimir call him the Sandman? Smiley asked, knowing the answer already. It was a joke. A German fairy tale Vladdy picked up in Estonia from one of his kraut forebears. Carla is our Sandman. Anyone who comes too close to him has a way of falling asleep. Ha, ha.
We never knew, darling. How could we? In the Lubienka, someone who had met a man, who'd met a woman, who'd met her. Someone else knew someone who'd helped her to bury her. I mean, that hag was Carla's shrine, George. And she betrayed him. Twin cities, we used to say. You were, you and Carla. Two halves of the same apple. George, darling. No, George, darling, don't, please. She had stopped.
And he realised that she was staring up at him in fear. That her face was somehow beneath his own. He was standing, glaring down at her. Hillary was against the wall. Stop! Stop! He was standing over her, incensed by her cheap and unjust comparison. Knowing that neither Carla's methods nor Carla's absolutism were his own. He heard himself say, No! Connie!
and discovered that he had lifted his hands to the level of his chest, palms downward and rigid, as if he were pressing something into the ground. And he realised his passion had scared her, that he had never betrayed so much conviction to her or so much feeling before. I'm getting old. He muttered and gave a sheepish smile. He relaxed, and as he did so...
Slowly, Connie's own body became limp and the dream died in her. The hands which had clutched him seconds earlier lay on her lap like bodies in a trench. It was all bilge, she said sullenly. A deep and terminal listlessness descended over her. Bored Emmy Greys crying in their vodka. Drop it, George. Carla's beaten you all ends up. He foxed you.
Made a fool of your time, our time. She drank, no longer caring what she said. Her head flopped forward again, and for a moment, he thought she really was asleep. He foxed you, he foxed me, and when you smell a rat, he got bloody Bill Hayden to fox Anne and put you off the scent. With difficulty, she lifted her head to stare him one more time. Go home, George.
Carla won't give you back your past. Be like the old fool here. Get yourself a bit of love and wait for Armageddon. She began coughing again, hopelessly, one hacking wretch after another. So that's my pitch for Le Carré. Wonderful storytelling, fabulous characters, women who aren't in bikinis, deep emotion and a wonderful search for truth.
This novel alone puts Le Carre for me in the pantheon of great European writers. It's a modern journey into the heart of darkness with an umbrella. Thank you. So before we move on to a little bit of conversation and then questions from all of you, I'm going to read out. You were all polled, of course, as you came in.
So even though I have my doubts about predictive voting polling these days, I am going to read out the figures here. So before the debate, 32% of you were voting for Ian Fleming. 43% of you
were voting for John le Carre, leaving 25% undecided. So there's a big possible swing vote in there, okay? So 32% for Fleming, 43% for le Carre,
25% to play for. So let's bear that in mind. Now I'm going to turn to both of you. I mean, one thing that strikes me thinking about these two writers and the characters they've created is Bond and Fleming, perhaps James Bond...
is a doer and Smiley and Flemings and John le Carre's characters are thinkers is that a fair characterization or do you want to argue with that
I think Arbonne does have his introspective moments too. The beginning of Goldfinger, for example, is a very famous moment when he's sitting at the airport in Miami reflecting on a mission he's just been through and he wonders whether it was worth it and whether he should have done it. And there are stories like For Your Eyes Only and Living Daylights are two that spring to mind in which he actually questions M's judgment and talks about the whole business of killing and murdering
whether he's on the right side. Casino Royale, as I began by saying, he's no superhero in that book. He has great moments of doubt. He has great moments of introspection. Later on, he even thinks about resigning in a couple of books. So he does, yes, he is definitely a man of action, but it would be wrong, I think, to say that he isn't without thought processes too.
And how does that sit with you? Do you feel there are disadvantages? Clearly, and that's not to judge either one. They are different types. One of the great pleasures of the Smiley as a character is when he has to run. It's always written with huge humour, but he does do it.
It doesn't come naturally to him. It doesn't come naturally to him. He's always described as a frog, isn't he? He's constantly described as a frog. And frogs, they're good at bounding, and Smiley can't do that, so he has to run. So, of course, his mind is his weapon. Bond's body is primarily his weapon. Equally, of course, they're both more shaded than that. I don't think...
I don't want to suggest that by just being an action hero, Bond therefore is by inherently less interesting. I don't think that's the case. It's simply that for me, there are bigger issues going on emotionally and metaphysically in Smiley's search. And not just Smiley's search, but I think that's a big difference, of course, is that, you know, Fleming is Bond.
and the carrier is not Smiley. A perfect spy perhaps would be a great example, possibly his greatest novel. Smiley's not in it. So I think one has to remember that.
I wouldn't be doing my job here tonight as the chair if I didn't address the issue of women in the works of both of these writers. You mentioned rather dismissively, you know, there's only women in bikinis in Bond. Perhaps that's a little bit unfair. But is that an issue in both of these writers' works? Do you want to start off this time?
Well, I would say they're both very male writers. And Le Carre's deepest preoccupation, I think, is probably the father-son preoccupation, which leads to the male, what I call, you know, homoerotic, intellectually homoerotic relationship with one man to the other, the alter ego, the double, the secret sharer. That's his great preoccupation. I would say that right from the beginning in Call for the Dead, which is not, it's his first novel, it's actually a wonderful short novel, it's fabulous,
And I don't want to spoil the story, so I've got to be careful for those that haven't read it. But there is a fabulous Jewish émigré character, female, deep complexity, filled with all the same kind of yearning and haunted quality that Connie Sachs has, that Leslie did so well. So I think there are different types of character. I would defend Le Carre on that. But it is absolutely true that his central preoccupation is a male-male preoccupation. That's his biggest theme.
With Fleming, it's a male-female preoccupation, clearly. I mean, Bond... Bond loves women. Women love Bond, and both of them love guilt-free sex. I don't see anything wrong with that, curiously. And again... I'm talking about depth of characterisation, though, Anthony. Not other kinds of depth. Do you want me to... Am I being asked to psychoanalyse pussy galore? Um...
I don't think that was Fleming's aim in these books. I mean, Fleming is an entertainer, and I think in a sense that's what this discussion is about. Is it possible to be great without having to sort of bring up the ghosts of Dostoevsky, Freud and Kafka, for example? LAUGHTER
Is it possible to be great and to be greatly entertaining, to provide people, particularly in the 1950s when there was so little of this glamour, with this vision of joy and perfection in relationships? There is sex in the books. There is not a great deal of depth to these women, but...
I think despite their odd names, they do have a sort of a psychological veracity. All of them are damaged in some ways. All of them need Bond inevitably, but they need healing. And that, I think, is what Bond brings to all the way. He is never cruel to a single woman, well, apart from Irma Bunt and Rosa Klebb, in any of the books. And I think that is an important aspect of it, that the relationship is always a very healthy one, but at the end of the day, it is fun.
I would say to everyone in this room, does greatness mean that it has to be difficult and dark and...
authoritatively sort of profound. And I would respond to that by saying what I love about Le Carre is that he isn't difficult. I mean, Conrad is difficult. I love him, but he's difficult. Le Carre's not. You can read Spive, who came in from the cold, in a day. You can actually read it in a day, and it's a great novel. So I think that what I think the great gift of Le Carre for me is the Englishness of ease and fun. And I think he is fun. I mean...
I agree, there's a lot of darkness in there. But he is funny. There's a nice line in Spy Who Came In From The Cold, just to give you a little example. He describes this rather large German woman as being like an aunt of his who beat him for wasting string. And I like that line. That's a nice line. That's just funny. In a way, it's a little bit Fleming-y, you could say. So there is Fleming in Le Carre, and Fleming came first. So I wouldn't... I think Le Carre would tip his hat to Fleming very much.
But I think what he does is he marries, it's a European-British thing, he marries European seriousness with British joie de vivre. There is more European seriousness than British joie de vivre. There is fun.
And more words, of course, because the books get longer and longer and longer as his career continues. But Fleming wrote in quite a relatively condensed period of time, didn't he? I mean, he didn't... I think he didn't go into that later period of life, as far as I understand it. Well, you actually asked about what he did at the end of his life. He died in the course of...
He didn't take up golf, as you suggested, whilst writing The Man with the Golden Gun. He was plagued by ill health throughout his life, and he actually died before he could finish the final polish, which it is suggested that King Cleomis may have had to do a little polishing on the very last Fleming novel. It's time to reveal the final vote. I haven't looked at this. So just a reminder that before the debate, we had 32%.
for Ian Fleming, 43% for John Le Carre, with an undecided, quite a lot of a quarter of you, 25%. After the debate, Fleming is at 38%. Le Carre is at 60%.
And only 2% of you were undecided. So I think strong arguments, but it's hard to argue that John le Carre has pulled solidly into the lead. I'm terribly sorry, Anthony. But what a wonderful evening. So thank you all for participating. It remains for me to thank David and Anthony, of course, and our moderators
panel of actors. If your kid thinks, I'm not a math kid, think again. With Mathnasium, every kid can be a math kid. At our learning centers, we customize math instruction for each student, so advanced kids get challenged and struggling kids get better. Visit Mathnasium.com to find a location near you.