Hacker Cinema
The Russia House
1990 · Film · 118 min
Directed by Fred Schepisi
Barley Scott Blair, a Lisbon-based editor of Russian literature who unexpectedly begins working for British intelligence, is commissioned to investigate the purposes of Dante, a dissident scientist trapped in the decaying Soviet Union that is crumbling under the new open-minded policies.
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3 comments on Hacker News
His style and pace is a lot different than the modern genre writers like Vince Flynn, Lee Child, and even Ludlum (though Ludlam was of similar age) which excel at fast plot driven stories. A lot of Le Carre's stuff is from the '60s and '70s, and I'm not sure how well it actually ages. (I haven't read him since 1990ish, and I've been wanting to read the Tinker series, just never got past the first chapter.)
I remember that even the movie version of The Russia house was a little slow, and it came out on the tail end of the cold war era.
The article makes me think of the movie The Russia House. It still has an excessively Mary Sue ending but parts of the movie are probably a better portrait of how this sort of thing really works than your typical James Bond flick.
This is not the sort of thing anyone should do to add a dash of excitement to their boring existence, though one comment here suggests "playing spy" for titillation is a shockingly common motivation for such cases.
What I liked about "they spy who came in from the cold" was the pacing. Its small. "a small town in germany" is similary small, as is "the looking glass war" which has a nice quality that its really about inter-service rivalry more than the fieldman.
Peter Wright "spycatcher" made me think this stuff is more true than not. UCL (london) is next door to the kind of grey curtained (bomb-proof chain mail apparently) anonymous doors and blocks which we are told once housed outlier farms of the more elite services in the seventies. The big place down on the Thames up-ended all this, as did GCHQ's remake.
(Duncan Campbells writing on how the british state listened in pervasively to all telephone calls in the days of the microwave backbone up the spine of the UK is also worth reflecting on)
The atmosphere of the remake of 'tinker tailor' was really good. the grimy, flare-trouser, italian-design feels of the place was spot-on for time. I am less sure it was spot-on for what the secret services were like inside, but it felt like it should be: its what we want to believe. I've stayed in those grotty kings-cross hotels, they are alas, all too true.
I love all his books, but the later ones are frankly bloated. He's returned to small. His biography about his amoral father ("the perfect spy" is of course about the same family dynamic and probably has echoes of reality all through it) but you can't call autobiography novels, so thats out.
I thought "the russia house" was a better film adaptation than "the little drummer girl" and I thought "the night manager" was terribly adapted. All three are much the same as books I find.
"the constant gardener" is in some ways, the most depressing. I think it very probably speaks more truth than we would want.