Espionage in British Fiction and Film since 1900: The Changing Enemy by Oliver S. Buckton, and: Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film by Phyllis Lassner (review)

The English writer Graham Greene famously grouped his early fiction into two categories: “novels” and “entertainments.” He reserved the first designation for books he judged to be serious works of literature, contemplative Catholic novels like The Power and the Glory (1940). The second category included escapist narratives, spy thrillers such as The Ministry of Fear (1943). Greene eventually abandoned this distinction, realizing perhaps that his best books troubled easy categorization, but a similar dichotomy has stigmatized modern spy fiction since its inception at the turn of the twentieth century, and the genre has been relegated to (at best) the ranks of the middlebrow and largely excluded from academic discourse. When full-length treatments of espionage fiction began to appear in the last quarter of the last century, they tended to offer themselves either as genre studies, thereby reinforcing old hierarchies of literary value, or as theory-driven assaults on the very division between so-called high and popular forms of art.

Happily, literary critics today no longer feel obliged to justify or defend their interest in spy stories and thrillers, and the twenty-first century has seen a number of significant contributions to the field, including Allan Hepburn’s Intrigue: Espionage and Culture (2005), Timothy Melley’s The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (2012), and Erin G. Carlston’s Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and Liminal Citizens (2013). What unites these, as well as the two studies under review, is a refusal to treat spy fiction as a genre in a vacuum, as an escapist medium divorced from the concerns of the “real world”; rather, contemporary critics recognize that espionage narratives have something important to say (and show) about culture, history, politics, race, gender, sexuality, and the experience of modernity in general.

Oliver S. Buckton’s Espionage in British Fiction and Film since 1900 is an ambitious and comprehensive analysis of the most significant spy novels and movies of the last century. Subtitled The Changing Enemy, Buckton’s study traces how espionage fiction both registers and shapes our conception of the hostile other, from German invaders in the years leading up to the First World War to Islamic extremists in our own time. Phyllis Lassner’s Espionage and Exile: Fascism and Anti-fascism in British Spy Fiction and Film focuses on how espionage narratives from the 1930s through the Cold War respond to the threat of authoritarianism and bear witness to the moral and ethical dilemmas arising from war and displacement. Writing against Michael Denning’s claim that the political content of espionage fiction is simply a “cover story” for formulaic adventure plots (1987, 2), Lassner, like Buckton, argues that spy novels and films both complement and challenge supposedly objective, journalistic accounts of current events. In our era of “alternative facts,” these studies offer insight into other ways that fiction plays a role in shaping public opinion and national policy.

The “spy story,” Buckton observes, “has long served as a significant barometer of the political attitudes and, at times, contradictory cultural assumptions in Britain and, indeed, many other parts of the world” (xii). More specifically, he argues that spy fiction (including cinema and television) mediates a nation’s perception of the “enemy” at any given period. Through a process of “faction”—a term Buckton borrows and adapts from historian Nigel West (2004, 122)—espionage narratives “interweave sometimes far-fetched plots together with contemporary political realities to create compelling stories and dynamic protagonists, such that the reader cannot always discern what has been invented and what taken from the headlines” (xiii). Consequently, our understanding of international relations, global conflicts, and competing ideologies is, to some degree, a product of fantasy. In advancing...