Sometimes Ian Fleming’s 007 James Bond novels are roped into this ‘new era’, although the first novel in the Bond series was published almost ten years earlier, and the classification is spurious. I suggest it has more to do with publishing industry and media hype than any real connection between the three authors.
What le Carré and Deighton have in common is that unlike previous spies in novels, their heroes are, in a sense, anti-heroes, figures who exist outside the Establishment and don’t (like Bond) belong to ‘a club’, and at the time — the onset of ‘the Swinging Sixties’ with its ‘satire revolution’, the evolution of ‘kitchen sink drama’ and ‘the rise of the working class’ — were superficially very much of their age.
Actually, those four descriptions are themselves more media hype than much else, but then let’s face it, at heart the publishing industry is as much about making money as every other industry.
Yet in other respects the two writers differ, largely because of their distinct backgrounds: le Carré was educated at public school (although his father was a conman so his childhood was anything but conventional) and Oxford, and was remorselessly middle-class. Deighton was ‘working class’ — his mother was a cook and his father was a chauffeur — he did his national service ‘in the ranks’, then went to art school and had various jobs, including as a BOAC flight attendant, before he began writing.
A far as knowledge of spying is concerned, Le Carré and Deighton also have a differnt take. Carré (in his real identity of David Cornwell) had actually worked in the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and MI5, and brought to his novels and — more intricate — plots a degree of verisimilitude. On the other hand, the apparent professional acquaintance the secret intelligence world that is spuriously present in Deighton’s work is just Deighton putting his imagination to work.
On a literary level, a further difference between the two is that le Carré (who died a month or two ago in December 2020) was essentially a novelist and a writer who examined aspects of human behaviour and psychology, whereas there is no such depth in Deighton at all. Deighton wrote ‘thrillers’ and, as far as I can see, had not intention of trying anything more multi-dimensional, whereas, in a sense, the ‘thriller’ aspect of le Carré’s work is incidental. Finally, le Carré was far more of a stylist than Deighton (who is over 90 but still alive). Although Deighton can keep a narrative functionally rolling along, his pallet is far narrower.
As for Berlin Game itself, I have not read great deal of Deighton’s work, but I had high hopes for Berlin Game, and I was disappointed. There’s not really too much to the novel, to be frank. It is all a little too narrow, and much of it is unconvincing, despite the apparent ‘professional jargon and slang’. The attempts to come over as ‘an insider’s perspective’ eventually come across as a little ridiculous.
Deighton tries, but fails, to create worlds into which we might get a glimpse, whether it is the internal operation of MI6 or the supposedly intimate knowledge of Berlin, its people and attitudes of a man who was raised in city. Neither attempt quite comes off.
His cast of characters is also a little sparse, both in London’s MI6 HQ (it boils down to four or possibly four and a half men and women, not including the first-person narrator) and in early 1980s Berlin. His ‘plot’ is thin and amorphous (although I suppose in response to that last claim someone might insist that ‘in the world of spying nothing is neat and tidy’, although if I did get that response, I would point out that first and foremost Deighton is telling a story, and its imperatives surely take precedence).
Why, too, does Deighton opt for a ‘first-person narrator’? Using that technique does make things easier for the writer, and although it also presents one or two technical difficulties, the advantage it gives a writer makes it an attractive technique to many of them.
The trouble is that all too often having a character tell a story invariably poses the question (for this reader at least): why, exactly, is this man/woman doing so? What is the ultimate point? When the technique works (as it does in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita) there is always a reason, and that is precisely why the technique works: recounting why something happened ‘to me’ in this way is an intricate element of the fabric of the story.
When, as in Deighton’s Berlin Game, the first-person narration is merely adopted because it makes writing easier, it simply doesn’t work (or at least not for this reader): why does Bernard Sansom, the hero of Berlin Game and two other novels in a trilogy, bother if he has no reason to tell us, which apparently he does not? Like it or not, that is important, and if the question is left unanswered, a novel fails in at least one respect.
I am also left a underwhelmed by Deighton’s other technique: the bulk of this novel consists of conversation. That can work or it cannot. In Berlin Game it does work to a certain extent, but it always makes a work look too thin if those conversations are too functional and pedestrian.
A skilled writer might in what a protagonist says be able to give insight into her or his character, personality and motivation. That just isn’t the case in Berlin Game. For all his attempts at delineating the various characters, the remain stubbornly two-dimensional. Nice try but no cigar.
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