Something rotten in the state of...

[rthstewart]

So, let’s see…

Big Bang is at 41,000 words (including a glossary and cast of characters so that you can keep track of how a Sten is different from a Bren).  I’m guessing maybe 10,000 words left?  Granted, that's a BIG bit to do in a week for a rough draft but I actually have a pretty coherent outline and as I’m following an order of battle, it’s not, as things go, a huge challenge.  So I say now.  Gawd.  A war story.  I'm such an idiot.

I’m assuming that the H&M update got hit by ff.net being down or something -- possibly something.  Thanks so much to those who did persevere against the site problems and comment!  In less chipper news, I have been called out in two separate things on ff.net for harassment and flaming.  I responded to one and didn’t bother with the other.  My thanks to those who have assisted/weighed in/provided moral support.

A burning question.  Why is my world not full of the new Upstairs Downstairs and the promised relationship between Alex Kingston/Emilia Fox  aka River Song/Morgause?  Why?  Why?  Where is the fic?  Where are the gifs?  WHERE WHERE?  Show me NOW.  Cross over madness I tell you.  This is the sort of thing that drives me to the sort of infringing conduct that is not age appropriate.

intrikate88 has been doing some terrific Once Upon A Time Fic  exploring Belle and Rumpelstiltskin so do check that out.

Which brings me to the related issue that I have finally seen Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  It was a typical and very grown up sort of thing – a late matinee with Important People in the audience and no one under the age of 30.   I dearly love Le Carre’s book and it and Conant’s The Irregulars inspired a lot of TQSiT and my TSG AU.  I enjoyed the film and Oldman plays a very, very cold Smiley.  It’s a good adaptation in a 2 hour film.  The challenge is that so much of Smiley is internal and he reveals practically nothing to others.  That can get dull in film.  Le Carre is not great with his women characters and the film I thought provided a critique of that – we never see Lady Ann’s face.  She could be anyone.

It seemed every respected British male actor working was in the film, except maybe Alan Rickman and Jim Broadbent.  So the eye candy was excellent.

Some spoilers – if you don’t know who the mole is, you might not want to read.

When the UK folks starting seeing this film, there was a lot of discussion about the frank homosexuality – the Bill/Jim relationship, Bill’s comment about the boyfriend he has on the side, and Peter Gilliam’s relationship.  Peter is a change – in the book he has an exotic live in girlfriend named Camilla.  Bill, however, is quite true to the book in that regard.  The book is very clear that, Bill Haydon is bisexual which I suppose is something of a surprise given that the book was written in 1974.  Yet, Le Carre is telling of a sort, the story of the Cambridge 5 and Blunt and Burgess were both homosexual. Smiley is very non-judgmental about it.  Other are aware of it with a “ahem, yes, well, Haydon always was a bit of an artist” and “I hadn’t realized he and Prideaux were that close.”  In the book, it is never condemned.  It is ignored, shrugged off, swept under the rug, “just one of those things” that young men do and some never grow out of. 

Within the context of the book, I’ve always seen it more broadly, underscoring the depth of Haydon’s treachery – he betrays everything, everything, not just King and Country but everything that loves him and everything that claimed him as one of their own.

Something the book captures beautifully and the film wholly ignores is Connie Sachs’ line in the book “Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. .. All gone.”  This was in the BBC adaptation but not the film and the whole  idea of post-War England as a fallen Empire is absent in the film.

And that’s the lens through which I’ve always seen Haydon – trained to rule the waves, the later day Lawrence of Arabia, “set” as Lady Ann describes him, a distant cousin related to ministers, a product of class, breeding, education, and sex (including yes, at some point, sex with other boys or men in public school and/or university).  Haydon is a traitor not just to England, but to everything that makes an Englishman the right sort of Englishman. 

The Irregulars talked about this a little, how the SOE’s recruitment was based upon getting people “just like us.”  Conant writes:  "Desperately shorthanded, the BSC recruited brains and talent where it could find them, often making only a cursory background check. They brought in friends, family members, and personable colleagues like a club voting in new members, the only qualifications being evidence of a certain confidence and imagination and the assumption of shared values….”  It then quotes from a chap named Bickham Sweet-Escott (I might have mixed up the order there)

It’s silly, I know, as an American, to try to get at those shared assumptions though this is how I’ve always seen the book since I read it some 20 years ago.  Haydon betrays those shared assumptions Conant writes of and everyone knows it in their heart of hearts.  This is what allows him to go on for so long.  They cannot bear the enormity of it all.  It’s better to just sweep it under the rug and look the other way than to acknowledge Haydon’s rejection for everything he is and all that they all hold dear.

I’ve been thinking about this as I worked on the NBB and read about some of the horrendous disasters of the SOE in France and the Netherlands and the destruction of the Prosper network of Francis Suttill.  Suttill wasn’t a double agent but he was very much in the mold of Lawrence, described as a modern day Ivanhoe, very romantic and a terrible spy who was completely outplayed by the Gestapo and Abwehr who did not play by the same code of honor that a British gentleman did.  I’m not really going there in the story, except by reference, but now have Asim/al-Masri, a true outsider on the inside, observe to Mrs. Caspian:  “They are brilliant but they are also naive and they frequently operate, as much of the British intelligence community does, under the regrettable assumption that men of a certain breeding and education are, by virtue of that breeding and education, loyal and competent.”

Yes, it’s 20-20 hindsight, but the ideas in Tinker Tailor of Haydon as a traitor to the very fabric of the right sort of English gentleman is something I’ve enjoyed playing with, in all my American naiveté.