January Meme: Favourite Spy Text
makamu wanted to know my favourite text dealing with spies other than The Americans, and I’m torn. On the one hand, I have a continuing deep fondness for the tv show Alias, and not just because it has one of my all time favourite characters in it (as a villain/occasional ally), Arvin Sloane. I like most of the ensemble, even the two seasons I have fundamental issues with (3 and 5) also contain elements I really like (the third season has some of the best Bristows (both Sydney and Jack)/Sloane scenes in them, the fifth remains the only example of a show I can spontanously think of where the fact that the leading actress got pregnant was written into the storyline in a way that really worked with the character she played, didn’t take from her agency one bit, and advanced the show’s general themes. As has said by someone other than me first, Alias is at its heart a twisted family romance, and Sydney’s complicated relationship with her parents is at its core, so for her to, in the final season, become a parent herself (and also a mentor of a younger agent, which allowed the show to keep Sydney involved with its trademark action scenes - via mentoring and comm link - in the months when Jennifer Garner wasn’t capable of participating in them physically) really brought things full circle.
But still, Alias isn‘>t my choice here. Nor are Bond movies - any Bond - which I have a soft spot for as well, and in a few cases outright love. But they’re not my favourites. No, my favourite is a book. Not a Le Carré novel, much as I appreciate the tropes he brought to the genre, several of his characters, and a great many of his positions. (I don’t know what it is that keeps me going from like to love with Le Carré’s books, with the arguable exception of his collection of autobiographical essays, The Pidgeon Tunnel.
My very favourite text that deals with spies is the novel Es muß nicht immer Kaviar sein („It doesn’t have to be caviar“) by Johannes Mario Simmel. It wasn’t his first novel, but it was the one which made him famous and remained one of his most popular novels when he was a bestselling writer in the German-reading world for decades. And it’s both a spoof of the spy genre and a witty entry in it, not to mention a neat take on the Schelmenroman, „trickster novel“. Does it have flaws? You bet. Despite it’s late 1930s - 50s setting, it’s very much a 1960s novel in terms of gender depiction, with our hero being irresistable to women and most of the female characters being all emotion. (The novel's hero isn't a hypocrite about his lack of monogamy, though; when he finds out his girlfriend at a time also has an affair with another guy and wants to keep them both, he goes with it.) Also, while Simmel himself was as anti-Nazi as you can get (his father was Jewish, and most of his paternal family was murdered as a result) and in his more serious novels often uses rich West German or Austrian industrialists as villains who have a bloody Nazi past, you could argue that the way he allows his trickster hero, Thomas Lieven, to avoid getting blood on his hands even when he’s temporarily forced to work for a branch of the German secret service (not the Gestapo) is cheating.
All this being said, I still adore this novel. Why? Because it’s hilarious, deeply humanist and committed to its pacifism. Our hero, Thomas Lieven, starts out as a German banker (of a private bank) working in London (he left Germany just before the Weimar Republic ended), fond of good food (he’s a passionate hobby cook) and women. When he’s tricked by his evil compagnon into going back to Germany under a pretense, the plot is set in motion, as his partner has framed Thomas who ends up arrested, told he only can avoid prison if he agrees to go back as a spy, then, as soon as he is back in England and reports just this, disbelieved and forcibly recruited as well, and when he’s taking off to France to avoid spying for either nation, he only can stay there for a few months before the French secret service who believes that with two secret services after him, he really must be hot stuff as an agent, forcibly recruits him as well. And that’s before WWII starts, at which point our hero decides that if he wants to make it out of this madness alive, he really has to be one step ahead of each secret service. The fun of the novel lies in Thomas outfoxing each secret service (well, most of the time; each at some point gets a hold of him for longer, too), seducing and persuading people not by using weapons (he actually does manage to avoid killing anyone, of any nation, though there’s one occasion where he realises that his actions have enabled others to kill), but by his cooking skills, charm and wit. In between, Simmel provides us with heist plots, code decyphering, double and triple identity adventures, prison breakouts, recipes printed in full which infected a lot of the novel’s readers with the urge to cook (including my teenage dad, who drove his mother crazy by insisting to prepare a salad a la Thomas Lieven), lots of suspense and a hero whose conviction to survive is only matched by his determination not to kill other people, including those who try to kill him. (He’s fine with screwing them over and/or landing them in prison, though.)
Simmel includes some historical characters - for example Josephine Baker, whom Thomas is appropriately smitten by and awed of, and who saves his hide at one point after the Deuxieme Bureau, having tricked by him twice, really wants to kill him -, but most are fictional. The various upper hierarchy spy handlers, be they English, German, French or American, pre, during or post war, tend to be depicted as a neurotic, self-important bunch whom one is not sorry to see conned. (Though you can tell our author likes the French best because the French spies more often than not have a sense of humor while the others do not.) (Oh, and the scene where Thomas gets trained as a secret agent is a great spoof of toughing-up-the-hero-montage scenes in its own right, not least because what he learns is not what his trainer wants him to learn but the opposite. For example, they want him to renember his cover identity when suddenly woken up at night, but but he learns is to use ear plugs; instead of learning to make a meal out of mice when sent into a survival camp, he thinks ahead and smuggles delicous food with him, and so forth.)
There was a German movie version which I never watched much of because it was a let down from the start, with Thomas changed into a naive innocent stumbling around instead of a trickster planning his cons deliberately (that’s German 60s cinema for you), but not an English language one, despite the novel making such a big splash when it first got published and remaining an enduring bestseller, which doesn’t surprise me in the least. The very premise goes against every Anglo-American WWII era pop culture cliché, and even if Thomas Lieven was changed from a German living in Britain to an actual Brit (or American), that would still be true. Also it wouldn’t work. Take the part where he for plot reasons gets a list of various Allied agents and their contact passwords in his possession. That he doesn’t want the Gestapo to end up with the list is a given, but he doesn’t want to hand it over to either the French (whose list it originally was) or the English, either, because, as the narration tells us, it’s not Hitler who would get killed if he did, but a lot of his countrymen. So he provides representatives of all three secret services with faked lists while destroying the original one. If you want to argue that pacifism, great cooking and refusals to kill don’t defeat brutal dictatorships, I’m with you, but I still like that this fictional person stuck to his not-guns in this enduringly entertaining favourite text of mine dealing with spies.
The other days
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