This 21-part Radio 4 series from 2009 adapted eight of the nine novels featuring the character of George Smiley (and the missing installment, A Legacy of Spies, wasn't published until 2017, which was well after this series had finished). Smiley, played throughout by Simon Russell Beale, is the continuity character that links the stories together, but he isn't the main character in all of them, only half.
Call for the Dead is the first story in the series, and it serves to introduce us to Smiley and the Secret Service by way of the more familiar format of a murder-mystery. It's just that the murder happens to involve spies and gets investigated by a spy. There's nothing outstanding about the plot itself, and it doesn't have the depth that le Carré's later books would develop, although from the resolution we can already see that happy endings are not his style. Nevertheless this is a good story and a good start to the series.
The secret world of spies and espionage can't even be said to link all of the books, since the second,
A Murder of Quality, is a straight murder-mystery that is entirely separate from that world, and in which Smiley, although the protagonist who investigates the murder, could have easily been replaced by any other amateur detective, so little does he resemble the character he would become by the end of the series. This is easily the least essential of the Smiley stories, although a guest appearance by Geoffrey
"Masters" Palmer adds some interest to the audio version.
Speaking of guest appearances, in the third and fourth stories Smiley is essentially making a guest appearance in those, since he's hardly in them, and the central roles are taken by one-off characters.
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the first in the series to really feel like a typical le Carré, with his bleak, grey-on-grey Cold War (only partially developed in Call for the Dead) arriving fully formed here at last. Brian "Great Commanders" Cox plays Alec Leamas, a spy who goes back to Berlin for one last job. I don't want to give any spoilers, but you can probably guess why he's not in any of the subsequent books...
Cox is great, and makes this one of the better installments in the series in spite of the relative lack of Smiley.
Next up is The Looking Glass War, which tells the story of pointless bureaucratic feuding and incompetence within British Intelligence as Leclerc (Ian "Evil Emperor" McDiarmid) refuses to cooperate with Control so as to maintain his department's independence from "the Circus," which leads to him mounting an intelligence operation in East Germany using techniques from the Second World War... techniques that are 20 years out of date. With inevitable results. If it sounds like a farce, it kind of is, but there's nothing comic about it.
I wasn't familiar with this one prior to listening to the audio, and it occupies a strange space coming in between two of le Carré's most famous books. It's not that it's bad, but it is definitely inessential (though not to the extent that A Murder of Quality was), with its main contribution to the ongoing story of the Circus being to give us more scenes with Control prior to the events of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
The 'Karla trilogy' follows, and is in many ways the main event. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is le Carré's most famous novel for good reason, although I personally wouldn't call it his best because it doesn't stand up to repeat visits as well as others - particularly Smiley's People - do, probably because it is so heavily dependent upon the mystery of who the mole is, and once you've read/seen/heard it once, it loses that power.
It is also the version with the most adaptations, having both TV and film versions. This audio drama, in three one-hour parts, is of comparable length to the film (and less than half the length of the TV series). I would consider this to be the purer adaptation of the two, since the film took more liberties to show off the 1970s period setting, but it has its flaws too - I would suggest that the actors playing Peter Guillam and Oliver Lacon did not have distinctive enough voices for their important roles, which at times made it confusing to follow who was speaking. This is a complaint you couldn't level against Brian Cox or Ian McDiarmid, or, for that matter, Simon Russell Beale.
Suffice to say the TV series remains, by far, the best adaptation.
The middle of the trilogy, The Honourable Schoolboy, sees Smiley once again take a secondary position in one of his own stories, with Hugh Bonneville playing the lead role of Jerry Westerby (a character who appears in the novel of TTSS, but was omitted entirely from the preceding radio play, so the character appears as if from nowhere at the start of this one, instead of having been already established as one of Smiley's agents). While it's understandable that the BBC didn't make a TV version of this with Alec Guinness, since the mostly East Asian setting would have either been too expensive for them to do justice to or else necessitated making major changes to the plot (which was heavily tied to topical events in the setting), I've always felt it was a real shame that they didn't complete the trilogy.
The TTSS film also wasn't followed up by their making this as the sequel, leaving this radio version the only adaptation I'm aware of. Possibly as a result of being less familiar with it than with the books either side of it, I enjoyed this a lot, and it is probably my favourite of the radio series. The novel is long and at times quite hard to follow and to keep track of all the various plot strands, but this managed to condense it down to three hours duration and still managed to keep the plot clear, without sacrificing much in the way of minor characters or subplots.
Or maybe my relative unfamiliarity with it just meant I didn't notice in the same way I did with Smiley's People.
Ah, Smiley's People. The TV series is one of my favourites of all time, so the audio version was always going to have a tough time living up to that. The TV series also has an almost insurmountable advantage of being virtually twice as long, with six episodes to the radio series' three. But even trying to be as objective as possible, I still don't think this holds a candle to the TV version.
It starts pretty well, and there are one or two moments where I would go so far as to say the audio version, with its willingness to have Simon Russell Beale monologue Smiley's thoughts to us, more closely approximates the original book than the TV series managed. I'm thinking particularly of the scenes when Smiley is fleeing Germany - the TV series doesn't quite get across that Smiley is in fear of his life and is using his life's experience of tradecraft to shake off murderous pursuers.
I think the main problem is how rushed the second half feels, as though they have spent far too much of their time on the set up that there isn't enough time left to do the payoff proper justice. The burning of Grigoriev by Smiley and Toby Esterhase is the absolute highlight of the TV series, a wonderful scene played perfectly by Guinness, Bernard Hepton and Michael Lonsdale. I wanted to get some of that same experience out of this, but it wasn't there because it was too rushed, too condensed.
I will give credit to Sam Dale as Toby Esterhase. He's no Bernard Hepton, but he's a decent Toby Esterhase nevertheless. (Toby, in case it wasn't clear, is one of my favourite characters.) It was a shame that he was one of the minor characters that they did have to omit from The Honourable Schoolboy.
As for how Simon Russell Beale compares to Alec Guinness... it's harsh, because Guinness was an almost impossible act to follow (ask Gary Oldman), but Beale falls way short. To give an example, when Smiley tells Claus Kretzschmar that the tapes his friend Otto died to protect are "an embarrassment" to Karla, who ordered Otto's death, and that the tapes will "do worse than kill him," when Guinness says that, you believe him. His Smiley can be ice cold when he needs to be. Beale's Smiley never quite manages to reach that same level - he's fine when playing pathetic or unassuming to get opponents to underestimate him, but not in those rare moments when Smiley shows his steel.
Another character who was enjoyably memorable in the TV version was Saul Enderby, Smiley's successor as head of the Circus, where he was played by Barry
"Kaiser Wilhelm" Foster. Here his role is much diminished (although he did also appear briefly in
The Honourable Schoolboy) but is given some life by the distinctive voice of James Laurenson, best known to me for playing Major General Ross in
Sharpe.
Laurenson is one of several actors who played different minor parts throughout the series, giving it an ensemble feeling not unlike that of
An Age of Kings. Here the ensemble also includes Stephen
"Travis" Greif.
The final story in the series is The Secret Pilgrim. Following the climax of Smiley's People was always going to be hard, but this doesn't try to top it, instead being more like an extended epilogue to the series. It consists of a number of linked short stories, only a couple of which directly involve Smiley, the rest focus on Ned (Patrick Malahide), one of Smiley's protégés. These vary in tone quite considerably, from some of the grimmest le Carré has produced (I'd maybe skip episode two if you're squeamish, as the lack of visuals will, if anything, make the horrific scenes even worse in your imagination) to darkly comical. It's a winding-down of the series, not a big finish, and I wouldn't blame anyone for stopping after reaching the end of the Karla trilogy.
Given the failure of TV and film to (so far) deliver on a more complete Smiley experience, this series serves as a worthwhile attempt at bringing the novels to life. I would say that Call for the Dead, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and The Honourable Schoolboy are the best of them - the latter in particular is definitely worth checking out.
You may find you enjoy the whole of the Karla trilogy more than I did, especially if you're not already familiar (perhaps over-familiar) with the Alec Guinness TV adaptations. But if you're not at all familiar with the TV series, it would be criminal of me not to recommend you prioritise watching those.
