We used to fear the unthinkable. Now we're more worried about the unthought-through |
At the ripe old age of 97, the death of the Cold War espionage writer, Len Deighton, just days ago, came as a different kind of shock.
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News of his passing felt somehow subsidiary to a bigger revelation - until last week, Deighton had still been among us.
You knew with John le Carre because he had continued publishing. His last title, Silverview, was released posthumously in 2021.
Deighton, though, the breakthrough author of the Ipcress File (1962), among many, had stopped writing spy fiction three decades ago, retreating to quietude. Apparently, he took a holiday and decided he liked it.
Fame wasn't his thing. He was everything Donald Trump isn't. Talented, studious, restrained, and impeccably subtle.
These qualities infused his characters - espionage being a secret, thankless business - ruthlessly so. It despises headlines and shuns recognition of any kind. Deighton leaned into that (mostly) observing once that nothing destroys a writer like praise.
His work evinced his principles, too. He had what these days would be an unfashionable distaste for violence and decided it would only appear in his stories where required and never as the answer to his characters' problems.
Both authors wrote about human beings by juxtaposing their quotidian struggles with relationships and secrecy and bureaucracy, against big forces, genuine personal danger and crippling moral choices.
Each author knew that the space between their paragraphs was vital - it was where the reader did their end of the work. This, too, matched the atmosphere and tradecraft central to the spy genre where information was invariably thin, dubious and old.
In hindsight we can see the period, both in its fictional evocation and in its history, as marked by profound existential peril, balanced off, albeit, by a useful degree of inertia.
Fractious Cold........