Spies and Their Novelists

I read Allan Hepburn's Intrigue: Espionage and Culture soon after reading John LeCarré's masterful The Constant Gardener and seeing the equally masterful film adaptation of that psychologically intriguing and culturally scathing novel. The Constant Gardener provides clear testimony to the central focus of Hepburn's Intrigue—that is, the examination of how the spy-fiction genre has always been firmly anchored in the cultural issues of each particular novel's time and space. Just as LeCarré's brutal (and meticulously researched) indictment of the global drug industry in The Constant Gardener takes a huge shadow conspiracy and spots it in the bright light of a spy-fiction best-seller, so also does Hepburn's broadly theorized, cultural-studies–based literary criticism of the spy narrative genre spotlight the basic concepts of surveillance, abrogation of identity, loss of control over one's own body, and immersion in a ghostly landscape haunted by history.

Hepburn works earnestly to rearticulate the spy-fiction genre (and some of its most revered classic texts) in the terms of a wide-ranging application of critical theory. In Intrigue, the reader will be reacquainted with Robert Ludlum (The Bourne Identity), John Buchan (Greenmantle), Robert Harris (Enigma), Joseph Conrad (Under Western Eyes), Graham Greene (The Third Man), Elizabeth Bowen (In the Heat of the Day), John Banville (The Untouchable), John Barth (Sabbatical), Joan Didion (Democracy), Don DeLillo (Libra), and, of course, LeCarré and Ian Fleming in all of their mass culture ubiquity. Embedded in these valorized texts like the intricate codes and elaborate games of disinformation and diversion of the spy trade are the embodiments of so many of the ideas of late twentieth-century critical theory. Perhaps, in fact, spy fiction may be the most congenial literary landscape for the interpretive forays of such postmodernist approaches to reading as Derridean deconstruction, the Lacanian mirror stage, the Bakhtinian carnivalesque, certainly New Historicism, neo-psychoanalysis, and the powerful surveillance interests of Michel Foucault.

Of all the theoretical approaches that Hepburn so adeptly applies in Intrigue, certainly the most telling (and most historically appropriate) has to be queer theory. His reading of Banville's The Untouchable—undergirded by reflections on LeCarré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, Fleming's Goldfinger, and Frederick Forsyth's The Day of the Jackal in conjunction with the gay realities of post–World War II spy history—is a model of queer-theory literary discourse. "I'm going to take a Sunday cruise through the instances of queerness in history and narratives of intrigue" (192), Hepburn announces and then proceeds to do just that with such an adroit feel for convergences and intersections that a reader begins to see queer theory as, perhaps, the most beckoning portal into the secrets and mysteries of the spy-fiction genre that has yet been unearthed. Rereading some of these familiar spy texts through the fresh lens of queer theory carries a sort of Raiders of the Lost Ark sense of discovery that makes one wonder why we hadn't seen these texts this way before. Of course, Hepburn's homosexual Love Boat cruise through the HUAC Hearings (remember Whittaker Chambers?), to the Cambridge spies (Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and finally Sir Anthony Blunt), to the Profumo Affair is all the motive or influence that any reader needs to assure the credibility of any queer reading of late twentieth-century spy fiction. The gay body in all of its closeted duplicity and yearning to come in out of the cold of its culturally othered status befits the situation of the cold war spy perfectly.

If Hepburn's application of queer theory to the reading of spy fiction is one of the great triumphs of Intrigue, one of its strange omissions or conscious denials of the obvious is the relevance of the work of the premiere cultural historian of surveillance, Michel Foucault, to the spy-fiction genre. Hepburn mentions Foucault only twice in Intrigue, and both references are offhand and not concerned with the...