The Unique Power of Nuanced Spy Novels

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The woman across the table had a favor to ask of me. We were sitting in a windowless conference room on the basement level of the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley; I was there to do research for my new novel, and she was among the employees meeting with me to answer my questions about the agency. She was an in-house psychologist, warm but intimidating, with decades of experience at the CIA. When I told her that the spy at the center of my novel was a woman, she seemed glad at the news. But then came the request. Please, she said, with an acerbic tone: “Just don’t make her a promiscuous headcase.”

I nodded and told her that wasn’t my plan. Normally I would have been offended by the implication—it’s my job as a novelist to create characters who go beyond cliché—but she had good reason for the request. I knew exactly the type of character she was talking about, the corner that female spies so often get painted into: the unhinged Mata Hari, the woman who uses sex as her primary weapon.

The CIA regularly meets with people like me, novelists and screenwriters, to fight back against the flatness of their fictional pop culture counterparts. The psychologist wasn’t trying to claim that everyone who works at the agency is necessarily a good person. The CIA, she explained, is Little America. It includes the morally upright, the blatantly sociopathic, the ruthlessly power-hungry. It includes doctors, janitors, scientists, bureaucrats. It includes women who aren’t promiscuous headcases, but who also aren’t necessarily sympathetic or admirable. It includes women with families, women without families, women who are ambitious, women who are tired, women who love their jobs, women who hate them.

Fictional female spies ought to reflect that reality. I absolutely agree with that, but the more I thought about that conversation, the more I saw that there might actually be a moral dimension to this. It’s not realism for realism’s sake. Realism is necessary because the people of this world—the women of this world—wield an enormous amount of power. And that power, despite its secrecy, ought to be scrutinized. The public ought to be wondering, poking, prodding, asking questions about the aims of these institutions. And if the drawbridge isn’t going to be lowered to the public, then sometimes fiction is the best way to get inside.

***

Quick: name the most iconic fictional female spies of the last century. How many can you come up with? Not that many, right? And most of the spy stories that do feature female spies were written and created by men. We’re undoubtedly making progress: I’m thinking of recent novels like Need to Know by Karen Cleveland, American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson, or State of Terror by Louise Penny and (maybe you’ve heard of her) Hillary Clinton. Still. When there are so few of these women in this world, is it any wonder that the range of depiction seems limited?

I love the idea of more heroines: strong, independent, take-no-prisoners women who might lead a little girl to think, I could do that someday. I loved seeing Lashana Lynch play the fierce Nomi in the latest James Bond movie, No Time to Die. Nomi is quick on the draw, firm with her convictions, a confident and totally badass heroine.

But what about the women whose convictions are less firm? Who have doubts about their heroism? Who aren’t entirely sure about the goodness of their actions? Who occupy that murky gray space of uncertainty: the space where, like it or not, most of us actually live?

It’s not really possible, in this day and age, to write about spy fiction without invoking John le Carré. (When he died in late 2020, I received several “thinking of you” text messages from various friends, which is how I know my personal brand is strong.) It makes me deeply sad to think that there are no more le Carré novels to come. And, especially, to know that we have reached the end of the road with my favorite character of his, George Smiley.

Le Carré famously conceived of George Smiley as the anti-007: his meek demeanor, his rotund physique, his habit of polishing his eyeglasses with his tie. James Bond was the ladykiller; Smiley couldn’t even keep his wife from straying. But I’ve always preferred Smiley. He got under my skin in a way Bond never did, because he, unlike 007, is allowed to transcend type. He is allowed to contain multitudes. He is admirable, and pitiable, and tough, and foolish. He causes a reader to wonder whether the categories of “good guy” and “bad guy” are actually worth anything at all.

The result of this nonheroic nuance is that I, a non-spy, can actually put myself in this spy’s shoes. I find myself beginning to think like Smiley and his colleagues at the Circus: performing the same moral calculations, harboring the same queasy suspicions. What does it all add up to, at the end of the day? The power of a cliché-transcending character like this, a character who feels indisputably real, is that, even when the book is finished, the spell remains. The questions stay with me. They affect the way I see the world, long after I’ve forgotten so much else of the story.

But as much as a character like this allows the asking of universal questions, he is still a character rooted in a specific milieu. He’s a middle class Brit, an Oxford graduate. I’m not saying that it’s impossible to bridge the gap, that a non-middle-class non-Brit can’t share a deep identification with Smiley. Of course she can; this is what fiction does! But Smiley, like any real person, brings his own experiences to bear. He moves through the world as a specific person with specific qualities, which inevitably affect the way he sees the world. In the end he is limited, as we all are, by his own subjectivity.

***

On the day of my visit to CIA headquarters, I was given a tour of the museum, which displays noteworthy relics of the last half-century. The boots worn by one of the Navy Seals at Abbottabad; the flight suit worn by the originator of the U2 program; the miniature cameras and microphones used by Russian defectors. These are the clear wins, the victories to which the agency proudly and publicly points. But the losses are just as real. The last thing I saw, on my way out, was the white marble wall in the lobby. On the wall, a star is carved for every employee killed in service. Some of their names are listed in a ledger; many remain anonymous. Even vaster are the losses they don’t choose to highlight: those beyond our borders who have been killed by drones, who have been subjected to enhanced interrogation, who have seen their governments destabilized by coups.

There are people in that building who would tell you that, yes, this whole thing is a painful equation, but at the end of the day, it’s worth it. That the work makes the world a safer place. Bad things are done for the sake of something good. But there are also people in that building who don’t believe such things. If the CIA is Little America, then it includes those who question the ethics of the equation; those who participate in it nonetheless.

The best characters in fiction move into your mind, infect you with their perspective. I carry it with me, the memory of what it feels like to be them, to see the world through their eyes, even if we have nothing in common. Lambert Strether; Dorothea Brooke; Sethe and Denver; Natasha and Pierre; and, of course, George Smiley. But it ought not only be through the eyes of Smiley—the eyes of men—that we see this world. Like the psychologist at the CIA, I’m tired of the woman as the promiscuous headcase; as the efficient helpmeet; as the nagging worrywart. These cliches aren’t just bad writing. They keep us from accessing the reality, from questioning those secretive realms of power. It’s time for more women to start crossing that drawbridge.

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