Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Flushing Out the Mole

"Poor George. Life's such a puzzle to you, isn't it?"

Ah. You know how I’ve been saying that yes, Tinker Tailor is bloody good, the acting is superlative, the slow pace is excellent and the whole thing is superb but not quite in the very first rank? Well, I’ve changed my mind. Sometimes it’s the impact of a final episode that can fully drive home a multilayered and complex subtext, and this final episode is both extraordinary in itself and defines the entire series. I suspect also that there are all sorts of scriptural references I’m not getting.

Yes, this is the episode where the mole is unmasked,  and the first ten or so minutes are a suspenseful whodunit, but that’s over quickly. Gerald is caught, he’s Bill Haydon, and suddenly the world is entirely different. The whole senior echelon of the Circus are summoned to hear the tapes of Haydon speaking to his handler, and you can see from the previously supercilious Percy Alleline that he’s utterly defeated. The tables have turned, and the outcast Smiley suddenly commands the room, a situation that lasts for most of the episode. Toby in particular is suddenly very, very oleaginous.

We see where Jim Prideaux has gone- he’s watching as Bill is taken to a camp and, quite obviously, roughed up. Everyone is shocked that good old Bull, outgoing, patriotic, the “laughing cavalier” should be a traitor. But Ian Richardson is extraordinary in explaining his motives to Smiley- they all started at the Circus when they were “golden with hope”, and Bill gradually came to hate America for its callousness towards its own poor, presumably meaning its cruelly inadequate welfare system and its lack of a decent health system- but was the Soviet Union any better? America may never have had an NHS, but neither did the USSR. Bill, though, with the cynicism of the defeated idealist, comes to see, as early as the Forties, that Britain is a fading, irrelevant power. None of this explains his motives satisfactory but that, in itself, makes him seem real.

Even his affair with Ann was directed by Karla- he was to “join the queue” to make any suspicion from Smiley feel like a personal thing. And yes, he shafted his old partner Jim. He is a traitor in every way. But he’s an unsavoury character in other ways- he tries to pay off not only a girlfriend but a “boy” who is “a cherub but no angel”. I assume we’re not talking over sixteen here. Brr. This was hardly approved of in 1979 but there was perhaps more of a tolerance for a kind of public school pederasty that makes the flesh creep.

Fittingly, Bill is killed by Jim amongst lax security, the traitor meeting a fate far more merciful that the traditional one at Tyburn but denied a melancholy, vodka-soaked exile. And Smiley is left master of all he surveys, his words conveying absolute authority as he explains he’s been “asked to look after things for a while.” But this is nicely undercut when we meet Ann, played by the splendid Sian Phillips, who is openly having relationships and living free and apart, treating George as an innocent friend to be patronised. And that’s Smiley; man of the world and yet not so, a fascinating character, one very much worthy of the great Alec Guinness.