The end of the Cold War also led to the demise of the spy genre. Now it looks like the 11/XNUMX terrorist attacks may be reviving the genre, although this time the bad guys are Muslim terrorists and the dark alleys are desert trails
Joseph Finder
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it seemed that even before the clouds of dust had dispersed, the obituary for the spy novel had already been written. With the end of the "Evil Empire", spies seemed to be something that was lost on him, and like them the winding narrative of the spy agent about the secrets of the profession, safe houses, moles, collection points and the like. All that changed on September 11th. Here again, America has real enemies and a great sense of anxiety permeates everywhere, which will surely spawn a new era of espionage thrillers.
"We woke up," said Frederick Forsyth, whose 1971 documentary-style thriller "The Day of the Jackal" - about an English cold-blooded killer hired to assassinate Charles de Gaulle - allowed millions of American readers to "relive" the Kennedy assassination but with a different outcome. . "Now there will be a series of novels based on the New World and the technologies of the New World, and the war against terrorism, which will be compared to the war against communism," he added.
The stories surely already exist and expect to be used - a secret meeting in Prague between one of the terrorists and the head of Iraqi intelligence; A shabby-looking apartment on Marienstrasse in Hamburg, which was under the surveillance of the German authorities for a long time and which was discovered to be the hiding place where the terrorists planned their attack. It's literally material that seems to have been taken straight from the pages of Eric Ambler, the stuff from which the spy books of the 1930s were drawn. "This is a time of clear heroes, clear villains," said Daniel Silva, author of the book "The Unlikely Spy." I think that a certain amount of important literature will be written on the subject - the secret world is a perfect place to expose the human being and see it in its depths, to observe a person in its most basic element".
Yet the spy thrillers of the twentieth century focused on villains who, whether fascist or communist, were distinctly modern, even if they lined up on the wrong side of modernity. But that is no longer true. "Our opponent today has a different mental world," Forsyth said. "The KGB men were Slavs, but they were also Europeans, and there was a mutual understanding between us and them. Here we have a completely different enemy."
This poses a problem for writers, as it is easier to understand the reality and motivations of an enemy who looks like you. George Smiley, John Le Carre's chief spy and Carla, his great and eternal enemy from the KGB, whom he was never able to defeat - in their brilliant ability and their abstinent and tough devotion, they are mirror images of each other. "But now the Gentiles are religious fanatics, true believers, who are almost completely incomprehensible to us," said a senior CIA spy corporal. "And the back alleys are no longer paved with gas-lit cobblestones with Lyme (the mysterious and evil character behind the scenes in Orson Welles' The Third Man) standing in the shadows. Now these back alleys are sand paths, which you run into because of camels."
Furthermore, the best spy fiction thrives on ambiguity and ambiguity. Who is right and who is wrong, who is cynical and who is a true believer, these are questions that the reader has to answer for himself. But the terrorist attacks of 11/XNUMX have left Americans more impatient than ever with what they see as a lack of moral certainty. "There can be ambiguity in the current situation," said Robin Winks, a historian at Yale University and author of the book "Cloak and Gown," but I think now readers want an unequivocal account of the good guys versus the bad guys.
The problem is that such clarity is not necessarily fertile ground for the best literature. In fact, the opposite is true. For example, the novel "Agents of Innocence" by journalist David Ignatius, was widely admired among intelligence professionals for its authenticity. The plot closely followed a real case of a "deal with the devil" in the seventies, between the CIA and Abu Hassan Selma, who headed "Black September" and who planned the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. In such an alliance, which will no doubt change many times in the war on terror, the best outcome may often be the least evil.
The spy novel was actually born in an atmosphere of total paranoia, reminiscent to a large extent of the current one. According to Winks, the inventor of the modern spy novel is John Buchan, author of "The Thirty-Nine Stairs" (1915) - a paranoid vision of German spies in the English countryside. Britain at the beginning of the century was a place full of anxiety, scared of assassinations, secret and missile anarchist communication plans, foreign terrorists of all kinds, predictions. It was a society that felt itself under siege.
Others believe that the real father of the genre is Joseph Conrad, who wrote "The Secret Agent" in 1901 about the terror of foreign terrorists in London. Another possibility is Erskine Childers, whose book ""The Riddle of the Sands" published in 1903 talked about exposing a planned secret naval invasion of Britain.
In any case, the roots of the spy thriller lay in the fertile ground of common cultural anxieties. The thriller was a way to deal with a company's obsessions, as one does in one's dreams.
After the British Secret Service was established in 1909 and espionage became a profession, if not exactly a respectable profession, espionage stories turned major geopolitical tensions into something concrete that could be grasped. Some of the best spy fiction was printed in the XNUMXs, when Ambler ("Epitaph for a Spy," "A" Coffin for Dimitrios) and Graham Greene ("Gun for Hire," "TheConfidentialAgent," "This") weaved marvelous plots about the rise of fascism and the cartels of The weapons manufacturers - the "merchants of death" as they were called - who, according to many at the time, were the ones who, with their manipulations, pushed countries into war.
In this literature of paranoia, the hero-spy was a striking symbol: secret keeper and confidant, both betrayer and betrayed, deceiver and deceiver himself. The symbiosis between the real and fictitious spies reached its peak at the beginning of the Cold War, when the chief spy, CIA director Alan Dulles, began providing plot ideas to the writer Helen McInnes. For those who craved more overt escapism, there was Ian Fleming's ever so popular James Bond - the worldly, corporate man, licensed to kill, in possession of copious amounts of caviar, champagne and bits, battling genius-criminal-sadistic minds with predatory claws and islands private.
As the Cold War continued, a new generation of spy novelists emerged to distill the anxieties of the West in the face of the dawn of the entire enterprise. Writers such as John Le Carré and Len Dayton provided a new line of characters - anxiety-ridden and "burnt-out" warriors of the protracted twilight struggle, who could play the game and draw, but never win. This is the feeling that the Cold War began to evoke.
"The spy novel began to teach us certain subtleties of the Cold War," said Thomas Powers, who wrote the book "Richard Helms and the CIA Who Kept." the Secrets: The Man "The authors of spy thrillers were among the first to understand that the story wasn't all about good guys versus bad guys, that there was a difference between the Cold War and the war against fascism. The spy thriller taught us this before most of the public as a whole was up to it."
Le Carré's dark book, The Spy Who Came Back from the Frost, and later his George Smiley books, were actually anti-espionage novels. They emphasized the hypocrisy and symmetry in tools and means between the two sides; the vicious bureaucratic infighting; the apparent accidental inhumanity and cruelty, which were in the possession of "collateral damage"; The victory of the art of espionage over the mind. La Carre's feet were world-weary and the taste of every victory they could have tasted like ashes.
Then the evil empire crumbled, and the world just didn't seem so scary anymore. But now America once again feels under siege by a foreign enemy lurking in the shadows, and a new generation of storytellers will surely arise to provide fever dreams and hallucinations meant to induce catharsis, using the mythological figure of the secret agent to help readers cope with the anxieties of the time. And while the struggle will continue, there may even be stories of self-doubting heroes, thwarting plots and then disappearing in sorrow and grief into the gray mist. The raw material of these writers has always been fear, and now the air is compressed with it.
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