Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy -- the passable movie from the terrific book

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a film directed by Tomas Alfredson, based on the 1974 novel by John le Carrie.

The new Tinker Tailor movie, based on the John Le Carrie novel, is absorbing and passably entertaining, especially if you've recently read the novel (as I did), or saw the brilliant seven-part PBS series twenty-five years ago (as we did). It's dense with murky circus interiors and damp gray street scenes. Gary Oldman as George Smiley is a little too prim and reserved for me. The guy barely registers a raised eyebrow through the whole film.

The plot is about Smiley's mission to uncover the mole in British Intelligence, the mole responsible for sending information to the Russians (this is the cold war, late 60s), and for drumming out Smiley himself and his boss, Control. It should be exciting. It almost is. With so little time -- just over two hours -- and a long list of characters, it's difficult for the movie to hook us into the emotional lives of the characters. The screenwriters do a good job of compression, but you can only do so much. Cinematically, I found the scenes of Smiley in his cheap hotel room too similar to the other interior scenes in their grayness -- we don't very much distinguish the emotional and physical environment of Smiley and his team from the other interiors.

If you haven't read the novel or seen the old series, you might be baffled by the whole thing. I'd like to hear from someone without those background experiences.

I'd also like to hear what current veterans of the British Intelligence services think of the movie. Were the internal competitive politics so ridiculous?

The book is terrific. So was the old PBS series with Alec Guiness. If you experience either of those after seeing the movie, you'll see what you're missing.

And Quiet Flows the Don -- the great book hardly anybody has read

And Quiet Flows the Don, by Mikhael Sholokhov (originally published 1934, Vintage edition 1989)

Some forgotten college professor must have mentioned this novel to me once, and I've remembered the enigmatic title ever since. And I've read mentions about the book in other Russian books or books about Russia. Years have gone by. Finally, we saw a used Vintage softcover edition in the Bryn Mawr book store, in Cambridge, and I bought it. After thirty pages, I could hardly put it down. It's a great book.

A brief summary. The story follows a group of Don river Cossack villagers in the years 1910 to 1920. The books is divided into chapters titled, Peace, War, Revolution, and Civil War. Gregor, a young Cossack, is the central character, but the list of characters is long. In peace we see the Cossacks working their farms, engaging in village trysts and petty village conspiracies. In war, the army life and battle scenes are almost Tolstoyan in their expanse. In civil war, the political confusion is overwhelming -- which side to be on, the Reds or the Whites? At any moment, one's life depends on the answer. And does your answer change from moment to moment?

I was struck by the sense of reality Sholokhov conveys. Village life is mean, dirty, vulgar. Love and light are hard to find. The Cossacks are no less cruel to each other than they are to the Germans and Austrians they fight in the war. It's hard to find characters to like. Many times, when I'd close the book for the night, I thought, "This must be the way it was. And this must be the way it is".

Only in the characters Bunchuk and Anna do we meet characters we might like as people, sympathetic lovers with some sense of gentleness (though they're each ready to machinegun the enemies of the revolution). Yet, these two are also the most wooden characters in the book; they seem to stand for something other than themselves. When Anna expresses her hopes for Socialism, it's hard to know what to think:

"And won't life be beautiful under Socialism! No more war, no more poverty or oppression or national barriers--nothing! How human beings have sullied, have poisoned the world!...Tell me, wouldn't it be sweet to die for that?" p. 480

She is meant to sound sincere. Yet this is not quite a full human being talking any more.

Solzhenitsyn mentions Sholokhov, and the novel. Apparently, he and others have challenged the book's authorship. Several critics have said that before Quiet, Sholokhov had written nothing approaching this literary scope and value, and that he could not be the author. I don't know much about that argument. As a side note, I think Solzhenitsyn must have been inspired by Sholokhov (or whoever is the author) -- Solzhentisyn's war and battle scenes have an immediacy, style, and rhythm similar to Sholokhov.

How did Sholokhov survive as a writer, even to be honored by Stalin, given some of the novel's depictions of the Red Army? He shows the Red officers to be just as venal and cruel as their White enemies. We witness Red army atrocities. While other writers were imprisoned or murdered by Stalin for the smallest rebellions and infractions, how did Sholakhov succeed to become a Soviet literary hero?