A Small Town in Germany
Adam's Notes for February 20, 2025
A shorter post this week, an update on my slow, years-long project of reading/re-reading the works of John le Carré. I’ve been going through them at the rate of roughly one a year since just before the pandemic. I’ve been trying to do them in order, but I read his last two novels in the years they came out, and I’ll probably skip the next two books: The Naïve and Sentimental Lover is the weird roman à clef about his affair with a friend’s wife, and instead of re-reading Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy I’ll probably re-watch the Alec Guinness miniseries, a fave.
A Small Town in Germany
Carré didn't care for this one when it first came out, but came around on it years later. Carré was writing a warning about how the post-war world was already starting to forget the evils of Nazism, but at the same time Carré loved German culture, and didn’t want the book to seem anti-German. He certainly didn’t have an easy task.
Alan Turner, an official from the British Foreign Office, is sent to the British embassy in Bonn, West Germany to investigate the disappearance of Leo Harting, a minor officer who has gone missing along with a number of secret files. Turner’s superiors are against the investigation, mostly because it might throw a wrench in Anglo-German relations, which are reaching a crisis point: Britain needs Germany’s help to join the Common Market, and that means they’re willing to overlook the Nazi past of the rabble-rousing politician/industrialist Klaus Karfield, who is getting all the local oafs riled up with right wing rhetoric.
Turner is a classic Le Carré protagonist: constantly on the receiving end of jibes about his inadequate class background, and so obsessed with Harting that even though we never meet the man, we feel we come to know something of the him just from what Turner pieces together.
You should be able to guess Harting’s motives well before the reveal (he’s not a Soviet defector, but rather it’s revealed he’s half-Jewish and old enough to remember the war, drops a button on the table whenever he wants to fight… He’s not a Holocaust survivor, he managed to move to England in time to avoid the worst of the Nazi regime, but after the war he was part of a British team that discovered 31 bodies that had been experimented upon with poison gas and autopsied, which he manages to connect to Karfield). And yet there’s a good complication to deny any easy answers (because he’s an embassy employee, if Harting actually killed the politician with the Nazi past, he’d stir up an international incident, indeed the West Germans spend most of the novel thinking there is an actual British assassination attempt underway). The stuff about the Common Market rings a bit hollow now, especially when the otherwise rational Alan Turner becomes hysterical about the loss of sovereignty it represents, saying that once Britain joins, they’re only steps away from joining the American gold standard and the Warsaw Pact.
The page-turner fundamentals are there, and that’s what matters.
I liked the whole thing about Harting always trying to gift hairdryers to curry favour with women. It’s one of those little details that Le Carré is so good at. Innocuous to the witnesses but clearly something of a modus operandi when the protagonist/reader is made to consider it. Also I liked the whole reveal about where Harting was spending his time before disappearing. I guess I shouldn’t spoil it, but it’s as close as Le Carré can get to a cool Bond villain layer and yet at the same time utterly mundane. One of those neat little things that makes you want to explore old buildings. And it fits with Le Carré’s stated aim of the book, to write “what I might best call a political ghost story.”
Previously:
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A Small Town in Germany was my favorite Le Carré for a very long time. I loved its misty melancholy tinted with boredom feel. I inhaled the atmosphere. It's what I remember today, way more than the plot. Then I read The Honourable Schoolboy when it came out and I switched allegiances!
Le Carre was a corrective to James Bond; he knew how espionage really worked, and he didn't try to prettify it the way Fleming did. Besides which, he was able to adapt his style and approach to changing global sociopolitical conditions, which is very hard to do.