Park Chan-wook’s adaptation of the Le Carré classic sees the Korean auteur take The Night Manager’s globetrotting appeal and better it with gripping espionage
I ’ve realised that I have the same problem with John le Carré thrillers as I did with The Americans: I don’t understand where reality leaves off and fiction begins. You should have seen my face when it was confirmed for me that there really were – ARE!?!!? – Russian sleeper agents strewn across the US, ready to overthrow the evil of capitalism the moment the fax came through. I mean, it’s insane. But, apparently, true.
I’ve always shelved spies in much the same category as King Arthur. Some tiny grain of truth somewhere along the way providing a storytelling opportunity too good to miss and here we are: a mythology so irresistible that we are happy to cleave to it as fact. I no more think of James Bond as a glamourised, ironised take on reality than I think of Spiderman as a Hollywood version of real arachni-heroes. He’s just another offshoot of the tale we tell. As for Philby and Co – well. I vaguely presumed that they were people who had forgotten what lies they told at their entrance interviews and that the situation just kind of ran away from them after that.
Espionage. Counterespionage. Where would you find the energy, the motivation? People don’t really get that worked up about their countries, do they? Ah, but here is where even the thickest carapace of ignorance must begin to crack and let a little light shine in. Because, of course, as even the most unwilling of us have learned over the last few elections and referendums, they do.
And the most potent example of it is at the heart of the latest Le Carré adaptation. The Little Drummer Girl, whose six-part run began on Sunday night (brought to us by the same people who gave us The Night Manager two years ago, though its lavish, stylish direction comes courtesy of Korean auteur Park Chan- wook) begins with a bomb exploding in the house of an Israeli attache in West Germany, missing him by chance but killing his eight-year-old son.
