Reading group: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carre

Neither John nor I had ever had any inclination to read this famous book - voted one of the 'All-Time 100 Novels' by Time magazine - an espionage fiction that would inevitably, we felt, foreground plot over psychology and language which are our main interests in fiction. However, one great thing about our group is that it forces you to read books you otherwise wouldn't (and thus opens you up to insights you would otherwise not have had), and so when Ann suggested it we agreed, and I got on the train to London, dutifully powered up my Kindle and started reading, only to find myself instantly immersed.

Set in the year of the completion of the Berlin wall (and written very soon afterwards), the story opens as Alec Leamas, head of British secret service operations in Berlin, is waiting at the checkpoint to receive his last remaining operative escaping from the East, only to have to watch him gunned down as he tries. With all of his operatives now assassinated by the East Germans, Leamas is recalled to London and, motivated by personal revenge, agrees to pose as a defector in a British plot to take out the head of the East German secret service, the vicious ex-Nazi and anti-semite Mundt.

Although the book is written as I expected in a spare, almost functional prose, to my surprise I was immediately taken by the seedy early-sixties atmosphere it conveys, as was John. It's an atmosphere of oppression immediately striking one as entirely political, conjuring as it does a sense of the moral uncertainty and bankruptcy that are central to this tale, and which feels entirely authentic and a far cry from the slick glamour of James Bond. After his return to London, Leamas is summarily 'let go' by the security service with little pension and appears to be on a disaffected downward spiral, taking to drink and ending up in jail. Although I was clear that this was all a plot to attract the attention of East German secret service recruiters, the omniscient narration keeps the reader at a remove from Leamas's interiority, and much information about his actions and motives is withheld from us. Therefore, since I didn't know the plot (unlike most people, I guess - I haven't seen the film, either) when the narration tells us that Leamas 'looked confused' in conversation with his East German recruiters, I wasn't clear whether this was part of the act that he was putting on for their benefit, or whether he was really confused, and as a result as I read I felt a little critical of the handling of the narrative voice. By the end of the book I knew which it was, and am more inclined now to feel that by withholding information and creating such confusions for the reader the book formally enacts the political tricksiness and moral slipperiness of which Leamas will turn out to be a victim and for which it indicts not just the East German state but the British.

All of us in the group agreed that this is why the book was groundbreaking, contrasting strikingly with the Us-and-Them ideology of conventional thrillers. Ann had opened the discussion by saying that she wasn't quite sure about the book, but seemed to become more positive as the discussion went on. Mark, Clare and Jenny really loved it. John, however, had failed to go on reading it because of the lack of psychology and interiority - characters chiefly portrayed via their appearance (often including the fifties/sixties spy-novel stereotype of hat and mackintosh) - and an utter absence of emotion in the narration. He also objected strongly to the sexist portrayal of Liz, the young woman with whom Leamas gets involved (and whose passive and over-amenable character I felt didn't exactly fit with her political activism as a member of the local branch of the British Communist Party). Mark defended this last as being 'of its time'. I said I did feel a certain lack in the matter of psychology: the only psychology really was about who was manipulating whom. I conceded however that in a way that was the point: what the book is about, as I think Ann said, is the psychopathic psychology of governments which makes the psychology of individuals irrelevant. It operates not on a psychological but on a political level that is entirely relevant to political events today, and I was very happy to have (finally) read it as such. (And it is, after all, emotive in the end).

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here.

Reading group: Lullaby by Leila Slimani

Mark is the member of our group who has always been the most adamant about resisting hype when considering novels, and I might have expected him to be deeply suspicious of this internationally best-selling novel by a beautiful young woman who has featured on the cover of Elle. However, French-Moroccan Leila Slimani has the distinction of having been appointed by President Macron, after the success of this novel, to the job of promoting French language and culture (he even offered her the job of Culture Minister), which indicates the likelihood of a seriousness of purpose in Slimani as a writer. In addition, Mark had found that all the mothers at the school gate were reading the book avidly and enthusiastically recommending it. Above all, it won the Prix Goncourt. In the light of these recommendations, and especially interested in the theme of racial mix promised by the similarly French Moroccan mother in the book, Mark suggested it for the group, and we all happily agreed.

The book concerns the murder of the mother's two small children by her nanny, Louise, who then tries to slit her own throat. Slimani has said that it was inspired by a real-life case in Manhattan in 2012, and the Louise of her book is named after the British au pair Louise Woodward who was convicted of the manslaughter of a child in her care.

We know the outcome right from the start - the book begins (sensationally):

The baby is dead. It took only a few seconds... The broken body, surrounded by toys, was put inside a grey bag, which they zipped shut. The little girl was still alive when the ambulance arrived. She'd fought like a wild animal. They found signs of a struggle, bits of skin under her soft fingernails. On the way to the hospital she was agitated, her body shaken by convulsions. Eyes bulging, she seemed to be gasping for air. Her throat was filled with blood. Her lungs had been punctured, her head smashed violently against the blue chest of drawers.

With the outcome already revealed and the shock-horror seemingly already exhausted in one fell swoop, one might expect that the following retrospective narration - which begins with the need of the parents Myriam and Paul to appoint a nanny - would be either an examination of the psychology of the perpetrator or a charting of cumulative clues as to the hidden violence that would finally emerge (or both), and a convincing portrayal of the situation leading up to the murder. In fact, none of us felt we had any of this. Even though there are sections purporting to be from Louise's point of view, none of us felt we got a grip on her character. There are sections from the parents' point of view but they appear to have little sense of any accumulating danger, as does the reader, since the portrayal of Louise seems merely inconsistent. In fact, we found it difficult even to envisage her physically. Early on we are told that she looks calm and 'imperturbable' and young for her forty years of age, and in the parent's household she has massive energy, doing excessive and unasked-for cleaning and caring for the whole family; at other times we get the impression of someone fearful, downtrodden and waif-like and even lacking in energy. It's not at all clear whether this is intended as a psychological contradiction or a calculated  deception. Initially we got the sense of someone wholesome-looking, but later (and only later) it's made clear that she has always worn garish makeup to the house. The sections from her point of view, which presumably show her true psychology and situation (she is divorced, poor, living alone in a squalid room) portray her in the waif-like state, which makes it difficult to believe the apparently self-motivated energy she expends on the family.

There are potentially sinister moments, but there seems uncertainty in the presentation of their significance. The parents come home to find a binned chicken carcass resurrected on the kitchen table, but it's never clear what this indicates. Is this Louise's calculated comment on the parents' middle-class wastefulness, meant to shock and disquiet them, or does it just indicate something psychologically strange about Louise? If the former, why is it immediately followed by a bout of unnecessary excessive cleaning and cooking, since this last, we are slowly beginning to realise, is her way of ingratiating herself to make herself indispensable to the family? There is little to indicate what's going on psychologically in this seeming contradiction. She makes up the infant Mila's face with her own garish makeup, a 'vulgarity' which shocks and angers Paul, but Paul overlooks it in the end, and for us it wasn't made to seem sinister enough to indicate any tendency that would lead to the shocking ending. At one point Mila bites Louise, which Louise keeps from the parents, using this later to blackmail Mila into silence when eventually the parents notice bite marks on their children. Yet the children adore her, and she, we are told, loves them. Eventually evicted from her flat for non-payment of the rent, she moves into the family's apartment while they are away, unknown to them, and puts on Myriam's clothes. At this point you can see that she may be desperate and that she feels that her job with the family is her only salvation. This is the rationale behind a scheme she thinks up to enable a romantic evening for the parents so that they will have sex (and a consequent baby for her to care for when the other two children go to school). Since we hadn't actually been convinced of such disconnection from reality on Louise's part, this seemed to us just a pretty preposterous plot development, and we were unconvinced that the failure of the ruse (the parents ended up not having sex) was enough to lead to the murders very soon afterwards. It is true that Louise has a strange uncaring attitude to her own adult daughter whom she hasn't seen for years, but she has had glowing references from a previous family - 'the perfect nanny' - and a lot of the time she seems to love the two children she is now caring for - indeed, in a scene just before the murder takes place it is explicitly stated that she loves them.

Maybe there are psychological subtleties and ironies in the original French that failed to carry through to the English translation, but we felt it unlikely and were very disappointed by the book. Mark was also disappointed that it did not address the racial issues he expected it to. Myriam's French-Moroccan identity is never an issue (she is characterised merely as a typical liberal middle-class Parisian). All of the other nannies in the neighbourhood are immigrants, but Slimani has said that she made Louise a white Frenchwoman because she wanted to make her an outsider on any every level: Louise has nothing much to do with the other nannies, and their immigrant status merely serves to emphasise her isolation and oddness.

She is certainly odd, but only, we found, in the sense that her character seems impenetrable and/or inconsistent. Presumably, the reason for the book's wild success is due to its striking subject matter alone - the working parents' worst nightmare - and we felt it was a sorely missed opportunity on a literary level.  Our discussion didn't last long, and Mark concluded by saying we'd been sold a pig in a poke.

Our archive discussions can be found here and a list of the books we have discussed, with links to the discussions, here.