Morphet, JR;
(2015)
Enrolling the anti-establishment: working class agents in the early spy fiction of Len Deighton and John Le Carre.
In:
Proceedings of Spying on Spies: Popular Representations of Spies and Espionage.
Spying on Spies Conference: London, UK.
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Abstract
Many of the most prominent spies of the 1950s (whether the real-life defectors Burgess and MacLean or Ian Fleming’s James Bond) came from within the British 'Establishment': living and working in heritage London and British embassies abroad, their lives were characterised by international travel, elite consumerism and social networks that made them part of the ruling elite. In contrast, the 1960s introduced a different reality, the new suburban spies – living in a bungalow in Ruislip like the Krogers (of the Portland Spy Ring) or in Bickley like George Blake, their convictions in 1961 showed how they had undertaken much of their spying activities in plain sight, including passing secrets on suburban railway stations. This chapter will trace how these concerns manifested in a new wave of spy fiction, specifically in the works of le Carré and Len Deighton. These first novels – such as Le Carré’s Call for the Dead (1961) and Deighton’s The Ipcress File (1962) – created the iconic outsider characters of George Smiley and Harry Palmer, who found traitors not in exotic locations but embedded unnoticed in suburban locations, and who pursued the foreign enemy in districts such as Wood Green or Walton on Thames. Equally, in contrast to the glamorous lifestyle portrayed in Bond's world, this new suburban spy fiction foregrounds the white collar reality of the professional spy trade, with irksome petty bureaucracy and organizational infighting prominent in such narratives, and Smiley and Palmer as much irritants to their own organizations as they are successful spies. Consequently, this paper will examine the ways in which these novels relocated spy fiction both physically (in disrupted suburbia) and in the genre (through the use of social realism), and in doing so will link the spy novel of this era to broader literary trends such as John Osborne and the angry young men.
| Type: | Proceedings paper |
|---|---|
| Title: | Enrolling the anti-establishment: working class agents in the early spy fiction of Len Deighton and John Le Carre |
| Event: | Spying on Spies: Popular Representations of Spies and Espionage |
| Location: | Warwick University at the Shard |
| Dates: | 03 September 2015 - 06 September 2015 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://sosconference2015.wordpress.com/ |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > The Bartlett School of Planning |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1514369 |
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