The Bureau and spy fiction

I’ve been watching The Bureau, a French spy thriller that takes a sort of Mad Men approach to the genre. 

The main storyline follows anti-hero spy Guillaume Debailly, codename "Malotru" (Mathieu Kassovitz, director of La Haine), who self-destructs after returning home to Paris by contacting a former lover from his time undercover in Damascus. A secondary storyline follows Marina Loiseau, codename "Phénomène" (Sara Giraudeau), a deep-cover operative. I can’t help but think of Loiseau as a Peggy Olson type, but whereas Elizabeth Moss’ Olson was a genuinely naïve woman growing cynical as she acclimated to life in a man’s world, with Loiseau the naïvety is almost always an act, a ploy to further penetrate the world of Iranian seismology or Israeli spy recruitment. Tertiary storylines usually explore geopolitical hotspots like the Kurds in Rojava or the world of Russian hacking. 

What makes the show so compelling is it’s procedural nature. We go deep into the actual work of spycraft. More le Carré than James Bond, we get a world full of meetings, conference calls, maps and charts. And yet somehow the tension has a way of ramping up higher than most Bond films ever reach.

From a recent New York Times article: 

From the start, one of the show’s most dominant features has been its impeccable sense of restraint. … the plot’s engines are patience, negotiation and seduction — Rochant wanted the series to hew as close as possible to the way the General Directorate for External Security (the French equivalent of the C.I.A.) operates.

“Eric’s obsession was plausibility,” (guest director) Berger said. “The show might not be real, but it’s plausible.”

Rochant drew a sharper distinction. “It’s the big difference with ‘Homeland,’” he said. “They opted for the strongest dramaturgy at the expense, maybe, of realism.”

For the actors, that often meant trying not to noticeably act. The characters’ hushed tones and calm demeanors stand in stark contrast to the Big Acting that creeps into many thrillers, even ones as relatively low-key as “The Americans.”

“Éric’s mantra on set is ‘Do as you would in real life,’” said Florence Loiret-Caille, who plays Marie-Jeanne, a Malotru handler who then climbs the ranks. “I’d say, ‘But boss, I’ve never run a crisis room! I don’t understand a word I say!’”

The show’s spycraft seems to consist of creating routines and breaking them in creative but plausible ways, then observing (and occasionally forcing) your enemies to do the same. So it’s territory rife with symbolism, where actions as mundane as going for a jog take on greater meaning. My favourite bits are always when they use innocuous websites to send messages back to their headquarters while under observation. A simple online review claiming that a product is defective or an innocuous reminder to oneself in a notes app that’s known to be monitored become absolutely thrilling.

                                 ***

I think there’s a possibility for the left in the spy thriller that’s been overlooked. We tend to think of the spy thriller as a reactionary genre, which it is, but in a way that can be revealing. The naïve Tory patriotism of the James Bond franchise tend to age very poorly. What ages well is the realpolitik of the le Carré school. 

One of the most absurd and reactionary spy franchises has to be the SAS novels of Gerard de Villiers. The series follows the globetrotting adventures of Austrian prince slash CIA agent Malko Linge. Half of any SAS novel consists of product placements and outright pornographic descriptions of sex, while the other half dives into insanely well-researched geopolitics. In one of the more than 200 novels in the franchise, de Villiers accidentally outed the CIA station chief in Madagascar when he forgot to change the man’s name and important details like how the guy worked in a fourth floor corner office at the American embassy. de Villiers also predicted the assassination of Anwar el-Sadat and the capture of Carlos the Jackal, among other things.

I put the question of leftist spy thrillers out on twitter, which you’d think there’d be a ton of good examples of, considering how there’s so much left leaning crime fiction. But people kept mentioning le Carré. I think he would laugh at being called a leftist, but it’s true he’s able to show the world in a way that cuts through the jingoism and ideology of the capitalist state.

My problem with any realpolitik outlook in spy fiction is that it usually ends up justifying the might-is-right approach to world affairs, but it has a point in that that is how world affairs are carried out. Countries and corporations are self-interested actors with no use for the idealistic myths used to keep their populations in line. It’s great at diagnosis, but I think a leftist spy thriller should at least take a stab at prescription.

There is some leftist spy fiction, but not enough as far as I’m concerned. Jean-Patrick Manchette’s posthumous Ivory Pearl doesn’t live up to his earlier thrillers and it’s something of an indictment that his notes for the back half of the novel are more interesting than the part that he finished. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy is better, but it’s not quite spy fiction. Still, I always had the sense that if he’d got to finish his planned ten book series, it would have been more spy fiction that detective mystery by the end. Larsson’s starts to feel out the territory of the spythriller, with the plotline about Lisbeth Salander’s Russian half-brother edging towards the geopolitical. Larsson has a better approach to the material as a leftist, I think. Instead of globetrotting between Cold War hotspots as in Pearl, Larsson used the structure of a whodunnit to teach millennials about the assassination of Olof Palme, one of the last social democrat world leaders, as well as about the problem of modern neonazis that plague Sweden. (Sometimes I joke that Larsson’s unfinished research into the Palme case bought him an untimely death by means of the CIA/SÄPO/Apartheid South African heart attack gun, but that’s an issue for another post.)

Others on twitter mentioned Three Days of the Condor, Parallax View, the works of Eric Ambler, Jan Guillou’s Carl Hamilton series. Though I can't assess them on this because I haven’t read then yet (though I’ve had Ambler’s novels on my kindle for a while now and should read them soon). I suppose there’s also that Soviet spy thrillers of Yulian Semyonov, Seventeen Moments of Spring and TASS is Authorized to Announce…, but again I haven't got around to reading them yet.

I guess my problem with these examples of a left leaning spy thriller is none of them live up to my preconceived ideas of what such a thing should be. I guess the answer to that problem would be to take a stab at writing my own spy thriller, but it’s an idea I can’t really take seriously despite having a few pages of notes I’ve gathered over the years. Every time I’ve tried I found it difficult to blend a fantastic world of espionage with a quotidian, realist world within which it would nestle. One mode or the other––espionage or realism––I think I could handle, but it’s that setting of the two together that The Bureau does so well that I find hard to emulate. So for now I’ll keep studying the problem, taking notes and consuming spy fiction, blending in without being noticed, until the day I’m ready to break my routine in a creative but plausible way and try again, take another stab at it.