Welcome to LITERARY COUNTERPARTS, a book review series in which I compare two books. This month:
•Ursula K. Le Guin—The Other Wind
•John le Carré—The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
Topics:
•Caught between a Rock and a Hard Place
•The Larger Implications
•The Even Larger Implications
Disclaimer: I didn't choose these novels because the last names of both authors begin with "Le." I didn't even notice that until just now.
CAUGHT BETWEEN A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is a spy novel starring a spy I came to think of as "Poor Leamas." Poor Leamas is caught between a rock and a hard place from page one. The rock is the British Intelligence Agency, and the hard place is the Russian/East Berlin Intelligence Agency. Poor Leamas is asked by the Brits to pretend to defect to the Russians so he can smear the reputation of a pesky Russian spy. It's a very hard place, and this is a very serious book whose seriousness walks straight into melodrama. Nonetheless, it effectively depicts the slow crush of a man who is stuck between these hard places. If you are familiar with Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, which is used to measure the relative hardnesses of minerals, let's say that Poor Leamas is stuck between a rock of hardness 4 (fluorite) and a "hard place" that is also hardness four. But Poor Leamas has only hardness 3 (calcite).
The Other Wind deals with a larger frame than the individual, focusing on the difficult international situation in the fantasy realm of Earthsea, the setting of several books Le Guin wrote between 1963 and 2001. In Earthsea, dragons and people used to be the same kind of creatures—but dragons went west, and humans went east to found the Kargaad Empire. Inbetween West and East some humans got stuck and created their own in-between culture. However, being between the Dragons and the Kargaad Empire would one day be the equivalent of being between a Rock of Mohs hardness 6 (Feldspar) and a Hard Place of an equivalent approximate Mohs hardness.
THE LARGER IMPLICATIONS
In
...In from the Cold, Poor Leamas is hired by his UK spy boss to enact PLAN A against
the Soviets. But Plan A turns out to be a disaster, and you wonder
what's going to happen to Poor Leamas. However it
turns out that the "Plan A Disaster" was (spoiler) planned all along, and that
Poor Leamas was an unwitting pawn in a larger operation: PLAN B.
Discovering this does not get Poor Leamas out from between the earlier-mentioned rock and hard place, but it is a satisfying moment in the book where you
realize that everyone has been betrayed.
I was in a suspicious, paranoid mood after finishing
...In from the Cold. Not only are people not who they seem to be, but their real motivations are cloaked even deeper. Everyone has both agenda and counteragenda like a puppetmaster manipulating a marionette who is in turn manipulating a sub-marionette.
I started wondering, as a good spy should, about the motivations at work in the writing of
...In from the Cold. Just who was this "John le Carre´" and what were his aims in writing such a bleak, airless novel? I shortly learned that "John le Carre´" is the false identity of a man named David Cornwell. Cornwell was, for years, in the British secret service section known as MI5. He's the third writer I've known to be in this group. The other two are children's writer Roald Dahl and spy writer Ian Fleming (inventor of James Bond).
Awhile back my wife read a book about Roald Dahl in which it was mentioned that Dahl and Fleming were propagandists for British intelligence during their own involvement with MI5, producing writing geared to increase public approval of British espionage. I don't think
James and the Giant Peach was among these, but other stuff. Clearly, James Bond fits.
I was puzzled about le Carre´, though, precisely because
...In from the Cold makes the secret service out to be such a scummy enterprise, the British Intelligence Agency essentially responsible for murdering a Jewish communist so they can protect a murderous anti-Semitic communist secret agent who has gone over to the British side. Poor Leamas and his girlfriend end up as collateral damage in accomplishing this, and the book employs an extended "Rock and a Hard Place" metaphor: a bunch of kids getting crushed between two big trucks. The trucks are the two ideologies—Russian Communism and British Democracy—and espionage is the bloody mess of innocents between (of Mohs hardness 1—talc).
Then I remembered a quote from near the end of the book, one of Poor Leamas' last speeches. The "they" here are the heartless, amoral espionage networks of the two countries.
"They don't proselytize; they don't stand in pulpits or on party platforms and tell us to fight for peace or for God or whatever it is. They're poor sods who try to keep the preachers from blowing each other sky high."
Now, I don't know if this book was supposed to be propaganda. If it is, it's pretty sophisticated—but I think there's an argument to be made that a book like
...In from the Cold does have the effect of elevating espionage to the position of "necessary pressure release valve to the unbending ideology of the State (Mohs hardness 8—topaz)."
THE EVEN LARGER IMPLICATIONS OF THIS
When I was a kid, maybe eleven years old, I realized something about action movies—that everything hinges on the universal human fear of death. If people weren't afraid of dying, then every plot of every action movie ever made would fall apart.
Last year I read an essay by George Orwell in which he maintained that the greatest threat to modern human civilization was the decline in the belief in the immortal soul. That observation stuck with me—that we've become neurotically actuated by a desperation to avoid death.
Le Guin treated this issue in one of her Earthsea books that I read awhile back—
The Farthest Shore.
The Other Wind proves a continuation of this theme. In the novel, sorcery has created a kind of false afterlife in which people wander around in an unappealing city surrounded by a fence. This is the rock and hard place of the humans who find themselves living between the Western Dragons and the Eastern Kargaad Empire.
Also, it is considerably more horrific than
...In From the Cold, because we're not dealing with our puny mortal existence, but with our sprawling, eternal afterlife. Here we have a thriller novel whose suspense element isn't limited to life only, but includes the ever after.
Once I'd read these two books, I was starting to feel that I, as a reader, was stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, I pressed against the possible cultural manipulations of
...In from the Cold, which caused me suspect questionable authorial motives, and that apparent themes are just a Plan A intended to go awry and lead me straight into the Plan B of accepting the necessity of all of the shitty things we do to one another. On the other hand,
Other Wind suggested that the ultimate theme of death itself should be accepted as a way to mitigate the very desperation that causes our inhumanity in the first place.
The pressures grew greater, until I began to suspect that I was caught between a rock of hardness 10 (diamond) and a hard place of equal hardness (10—another diamond!).
There are only two things that can happen when a person is thus caught. If the rock of hardness 10 comes together perfectly parallel with the hard place of hardness 10, you are crushed. But if they should come together in a way that is not perfect—if there is some irregularity—you might just get squeezed right out from between them like a grape seed sliding between a pair of teeth (which are ~5 on the Moh's hardness scale). For instance, if one of the books is essentially a cheesy spy novel, maybe it will slide off to one side. And if the other is a slightly boring rumination that's less compelling that some of the books that preceded it in the same series, it might slide off a little to the other side. And—
fwip!—out you will spring, a little grape seed so soft you cannot even be rated by Moh. And you have survived because of it.
*
Thanks for reading LITERARY COUNTERPARTS. These two books have received the official Literary Counterparts stamp, and will now be returned to their native thriftstore habitat.
