George Smiley
George Smiley OBE is a fictional character created by John le Carré. Smiley is a career intelligence officer with "The Circus", the British overseas intelligence agency. He is a central character in the novels Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley's People and Karla's Choice, and a supporting character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Looking Glass War, The Secret Pilgrim and A Legacy of Spies. The character has also appeared in a number of film, television, and radio adaptations of le Carré's books.
Le Carré created Smiley as an intentional contrast to James Bond, a character who he believed depicted an inaccurate and damaging version of espionage. Short, overweight, balding and bespectacled, Smiley is polite and self-effacing and frequently allows others to mistreat him, including his serially unfaithful wife; these traits mask his inner cunning, excellent memory, mastery of tradecraft and occasional ruthlessness. His genius, coupled with other characters' willingness to underestimate him, allows Smiley to achieve his goals and ultimately become one of the most powerful spies in Britain.
The Guardian has called him "the sort of spy believes it ought to have: a bit shabby, academic, basically loyal, and sceptical of the enthusiasms of his political masters."
Description
In contrast to most other fictional spies of the era, Smiley is described as being short, overweight, balding and middle-aged, and he is frequently compared to either a toad or a mole. Whereas cinematic adaptations tend to depict him in dark three-piece suits, the novels describe his clothing as being "really bad", with other characters remarking that he "dresses like a bookie"; characters and narration clarify that this refers to his clothes being very loose and baggy, the result of his tailor taking advantage of Smiley's ignorance of men's fashion to charge him more money for the extra fabric. He wears thick, round glasses and tends to clean the lenses on the 'fat' end of his tie while contemplating something of great significance; the gesture is frequent enough that other characters consider it to be something of a trademark.The American scholars Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen identified Smiley as the fictional spy most likely to be successful as a real spy, citing le Carré's description of him in A Murder of Quality:
Polmar and Allen wrote that Smiley's banal qualities together with his intelligence and a talent for intrigue made him ideal as a spy even though he was very far from the popular stereotype of what a spy should be like. Smiley's wife Ann calls him "breathtakingly ordinary", which Polmar and Allen wrote was an advantage for a spy, the very nature of their profession which requires them to be as inconspicuous as possible. In 1980, le Carré defined Smiley's politics: "I think he stands where I stand; he feels that to pit yourself against any 'ism' is to strike a posture which is itself ideological and therefore offensive in terms of practical decency. In practice almost any political ideology invites you to set aside your humanitarian instincts". The world of espionage presented by le Carré in his novels was a world where lies, betrayal, intrigue and paranoia were the norm for both sides, and much of the appeal of Smiley was that of a moral man trying his best to stay decent in a profoundly amoral world.
Age
Although Smiley ages through his appearances over a half-century, Le Carré has frequently retconned elements of his backstory so that he exists on something of a floating timeline. In his initial appearance in 1961's Call for the Dead, Smiley is somewhere around 55 years of age; changes to his birth year in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, set between 1973 and 1974, make him about 58 during the events of that story. He ages into his sixties during the subsequent two novels, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, the latter of which depicts him in declining physical health as he grows older and heavier. However, although no reference is made to his age in 2017's A Legacy of Spies, set in 2017, he does not appear to be substantially older than he was in his last appearance, although he should be at minimum 102 years old during the events of the book. This has led Dwight Garner of The New York Times to observe that Smiley is "one of those ashen Englishmen, like the poet Philip Larkin, who seem to be permanently 60 years old."Early life
Although Smiley has no concrete biography beyond that offered briefly at the beginning of Call for the Dead, le Carré does leave clues in his novels.Smiley was born to middle-class parents in the South of England in the early part of the 20th century, and spent at least part of his childhood in Germany near the Black Forest. He attended a minor public school and an antiquated Oxford college of no real distinction, studying modern languages with a particular focus on Baroque German literature. One July, while considering post-graduate study in that field, he was recruited into the Circus by his tutor, Jebedee.
Smiley underwent training and probation in Central Europe and South America, and spent the period from 1935 until approximately 1938 in Germany recruiting networks under cover as a lecturer. In 1939, with the commencement of World War II, he saw active service not only in Germany, but also in Switzerland and Sweden. Smiley's wartime superiors described him as having "the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin". During this time, he met and recruited Dieter Frey, who would go on to become an East German intelligence operative running the intelligence circle that was the main plot point of Le Carré's first novel, Call for the Dead.
In 1943, he was recalled to England to work at Circus headquarters, and in 1945 successfully proposed marriage to Lady Ann Sercomb, a beautiful, aristocratic, and libidinous young lady working as a secretary there. Ann would soon prove herself chronically unfaithful, engaging in numerous affairs and occasionally leaving Smiley entirely, though she always returned to him after the initial excitement of the separation ended. In the same year, Smiley left the Service and returned to Oxford. However, in 1947, with the onset of the Cold War, Smiley was asked to return to the Service, and in early 1951 moved into counter-intelligence work, where he would remain for the next decade. It is reported with a reference to the real life Gouzenko affair that "the revelations of a young cipher clerk in Ottawa had created a new demand for men of Smiley's experience". In 1945, Igor Gouzenko, a Soviet cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, defected and revealed a widespread Soviet spying network in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada that came as a considerable shock to the leaders of western nations. During that period, Smiley first met his Soviet nemesis, Karla, in a Delhi prison. Karla proved impossible to crack, though an increasingly desperate Smiley inadvertently revealed his own weakness – his affection for his wife, Ann – during the interrogation. After he offered Karla the use of his cigarette lighter – a gift from his wife – Karla stole it, keeping it as a symbol of his victory over Smiley. The incident would continue to haunt Smiley for the remainder of his career.
In the novels
The early novels
Smiley first appears in Call for the Dead, le Carré's 1961 debut novel. After an introductory chapter documenting Smiley's wartime bravery, the narrative moves to 1960, which finds the formerly heroic Smiley working a menial intelligence job, security-clearing civil servants. After a man he interviewed apparently commits suicide in despair over being a suspected communist, Smiley resigns from the Circus in disgust; the revelation that the man's death may in fact have been a murder spurs Smiley to launch an independent investigation with the help of his prôtégé, Peter Guillam, and police detective Oliver Mendel. Smiley's investigation uncovers that the "suicide" was in fact a murder perpetrated by an East German spy ring operating in the UK and being operated by one of his own former agents, whom he accidentally kills in a physical altercation. Although the Circus offers him his job back as a reward, Smiley declines, instead leaving England for a tentative reunion with Ann, who had earlier left him for a racing car driver. Smiley spends much of the story bemoaning the loss of the talented agents who were his mentors prior to the war, and their replacement by such talentless bureaucrats as the current head of service, Maston, who is widely, if secretly, mocked.It is while pursuing a sedate life of scholastic research in German literature at a university in the West Country that he is called upon to investigate a murder at a fictional public school in le Carré's next novel, A Murder of Quality.
Smiley next reappears as a minor but pivotal character in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third novel. Smiley is revealed to have come back into the service of the Circus as the top aide to Control, Maston's mysterious successor as the Circus' chief. It's revealed that, following the events of Call for the Dead, Smiley and Guillam succeeded in turning Mundt, the sole survivor of the spy ring, into a British double agent, and sent him back to East Germany. Fearing that Mundt's cover is about to be blown, Smiley and Control manipulate agent Alec Leamas into posing as a defector and sending him to Germany under the assumption that he is going to orchestrate Mundt's death. Along the way, Smiley learns that Leamas blew his own cover to his girlfriend, a nineteen-year-old communist sympathiser named Liz Gold, and arranges to incorporate her into the plot. Although Liz's unwitting role ultimately ensures the mission's success, it also results in her death, prompting a grief-stricken Leamas to give up and let himself be shot dead at the Berlin Wall as Smiley attempts to extricate him.
Smiley plays a small but pivotal role in The Looking Glass War, le Carré's fourth novel, occupying the "North European desk" at the Circus. He appears sporadically throughout the book as a liaison to The Department, a military intelligence agency, which attempts to surreptitiously conduct a dangerous and unnecessary operation without the Circus' knowledge. Smiley's appearance here is notable in that War is the only book of the series to depict his and Control's personal relationship in great detail. The climax of the novel bears witness to Smiley's ruthlessness, as he is dispatched by the Circus to end the Department's operation and force the abandonment of a Department employee to ameliorate the damage they have caused.
Smiley does not appear in either of le Carré's next two works, only one of which dealt with espionage.