By exploring a world where deception is currency and loyalty is a luxury, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963) forced its readers to confront uncomfortable truths about the morality of the Cold War. More than sixty years after its publication, the novel retains its power.
The novel follows Alec Leamas, a British spy nearing the end of his career. After his last operation fails, Leamas is seemingly dismissed from the service and descends into alcoholism. In reality, this is a ruse to make him attractive to Communist intelligence. Leamas is recruited by the East Germans and begins feeding them information, ostensibly to take revenge on his former employers. However, it’s revealed that Leamas is part of an elaborate plot to protect a high-ranking British mole. The plan succeeds, but at significant personal cost to Leamas and Liz Gold, the innocent woman (and devoted communist) Leamas loves.
Leamas is not the dashing spy from an Ian Fleming novel. He’s a disillusioned man who is physically and morally exhausted. The novel’s pervading tone mirrors this fatigue: cold, begrudging dialogue; dirty locales spanning England, Holland, and Germany; and the inner turmoil of a man who has lost the ability to discern truth from lies, even within himself.
The novel’s relentless cynicism is perhaps its most striking feature. Le Carré strips away any notion of moral superiority in the Cold War. The West, represented by British Intelligence, is shown to be just as pragmatic and willing to sacrifice individuals for the “greater good” as their Eastern counterparts. They’ll even collaborate with former Nazis if it serves their ends. This moral equivalence is jarring.
Interestingly, the novel’s one prominent female character, Liz, stands in stark contrast to this cynical world. She’s like the inverted femme fatale of detective fiction, a good-hearted woman whose only flaw is loving Leamas too much. Her communist ideology is portrayed as naive. But her ability to find joy in life’s simple pleasures is also innocent and far from a flaw. She represents what has long since been extinguished in Leamas.
At its core, the novel is about self-deception. Leamas crafts an elaborate lie to convince others he’s fallen out with British Intelligence, but in doing so, he must also lie to himself. This self-deception is so complete that by the novel’s end when Leamas chooses to die on the Communist border with Liz, we realize that any “real” Leamas has long since ceased to exist.
The book overtly engages with Christian ethics. “But [Christians] believe in the sanctity of human life,” a communist tells Leamas. “They believe every man has a soul which can be saved. They believe in sacrifice.” This belief should short-circuit the pragmatic utilitarian calculations of the West. But Leamas isn’t a believer, and neither are his bosses. They know the doctrine but deny its power.
Leamas’s self-deception resonates with the self-deception of non-believers. Christian apologists can rightly claim that atheists are engaged in a form of self-deception about their inherent knowledge of God. So, too, does le Carré suggest that everyone in the world of espionage lies to themselves in some way. The result is a kind of moral and existential schizophrenia that cannot last. There is no way to come in from that cold.
While spying itself isn’t presented as inherently unethical (after all, even the nation of Israel employed spies), the novel asks if there’s a way to do it well in the secular ruins of the 20th Century. The men who pull Leamas’s strings – Control, Smiley, Mundt – play God with people’s lives. They’re idolaters in a sense, asserting their autonomy over history. But what they create is not a better world; it’s something akin to hell.
In this light, the novel shows spy fiction as something like modern thought experiments on the story of Judas. Like the treacherous disciple, espionage requires the exchange of ends for means and demands that, if necessary, you lie to those closest to you for a greater cause. But unlike Christ’s sacrifice, there’s no redemption here, no eucatastrophe that turns disaster into triumph. Instead, we’re left with a bleak portrait of a world that exposes the toll of living in a world of lies.
Experiments in Criticism 