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Le Carre's
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold:
A Structuralist Reading
B. K. MARTIN
'Superbly constructed, with an atmosphere of chilly hell' - that was J. B. Priestley's view of John Le Carre's 1963 novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. l^ Now if we agree that the novel is 'superbly constructed' (as we well may), what exactly are we agreeing to? And what is the relationship between the 'construction' and the hellish 'atmosphere'? Or are 'construction' and 'atmosphere' two separate qualities in the book?
The present paper attempts to explore these questions by means of certain structuralist theories and methods, especially those of A. J. Greimas. The discussion will focus on applying stucturalist ideas to a reading of Le Carre's novel, but it seems necessary at the beginning to sketch a least the general outlines of some of the theories of the structuralists. 2
We may begin with the distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic made by the Swiss linguist F. de Saussure. 'Synchronic' refers to elements or factors present in the system of a language at some particular time (in practice, very often the present time). 'Diachronic', on the other hand, refers to elements and factors in a language system at two or more points in its historical development; the diachronic point of view implies historical comparisons in the study of some phenomenon. This synchronic!
I refer to chapters and pages in the Pan paperback edition of the novel (1964). For convenience, the title will be abbreviated as The Spy. The Priestley quotation is part of the publicity material for the Pan edition. 2 'Structuralism' is a rather loose term commonly used to refer to the work of a group of theorists and critics who in fact often differed from one another. For accessible accounts of the structuralist 'movement', see Robert Scholes, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1974); Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); and Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1983). All these books provide bibliographical material. For A. J. Greimas, see Semantique structurale (Paris: Larousse, 1966); Du Sens (Paris: Seuil, 1970); and A. J. Greimas and J. Courtes, Semiotique: Dictionnaire raisonne de La tMorie du langage (Paris: Hachette, 1979).
diachronic opposition can be extended from linguistics into the study of narrative forms. 3 Now the oldest spy story in Western fiction known to the present writer is in Book X of Homer's Iliad; it tells of a secret night expedition by two Greek chieftains, Odysseus and Diomedes, against the camp of their Trojan enemies and of how they killed a Trojan spy, one Dolon. A very old English spy story tells about the Anglo-Saxon king Athelstan and his enemy Olaf Cuaran in the year 937 AD. It goes like this. 4
Athelstan was defending his realm of England against the Viking Olaf. Seeing that a decisive battle was at hand, Olaf decided that he would spy on the English in person. He took off his own royal garments, disguised himself as a minstrel, and entered the English camp. So well did he play and sing there that Athelstan requested the 'minstrel' to entertain him and his generals while they ate; and as Olaf did that he took careful note of everything he could see. When the meal ended, Athelstan dismissed the 'minstrel' with thanks and a gift of money. But Olaf felt he could not accept money from an enemy under false pretences, and so he buried it in the ground as he returned to his own army. A man who had once been in" Olaf's service noticed this strange action of the supposed minstrel. He realized who the minstrel really was and informed King Athelstan. Athelstan demanded to know why he had not been told in time to capture his enemy. The man replied that in time past
3 To illustrate the distinction between synchronic and diachronic, we can take the word spy. As a substantive, sense 1 of spy is given in the Oxford English Dictionary as 'One who spies upon or watches a person or persons secretly; a secret agent whose business it is to keep a person, place, etc., under close observation; esp. one employed by a government in order to obtain information relating to the military or naval affairs of other countries, or to collect intelligence of any kind'. OED defines espionage as 'the practice of playing the spy, or of employing spies'. These two definitions are synchronic definitions of the words as they are used in English at the present time. But OED also tells us that spy was borrowed into English from French, and was in use by about 1250 AD (it replaced a native English word, sceawere). In the fourteenth century, spy could also mean 'an ambush', a sense which it no longer has. Espionage is also borrowed from French, but does not appear in English until 1793, the time ofthe Revolutionary wars. Data of this kind, which is fascinating enough, is called diachronic. 4 The Iliad as a whole is dated to about 700 Be; Book X, the Doloneia, may be a later addition. The story of Olaf and Athelstan is told by William of Malmesbury; William died in 1142, but had access to older sources. The paraphrase of his story is based on a version given in C. E. Wright, The Cultivation of Saga in Anglo-Saxon England (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939).
Bond has a kind of upper-class romanticism, and Len Deighton a kind of non-chic wryness; and through his American heroes Charles McCarry expresses and endorses a sober and dutiful stoicism. So if John Le Carre has created 'an atmosphere of chilly hell' in The Spy, then that is one of the ways in which he has realized the potentialities of the espionage novel in his own fashion.
Two further structuralist principles have been successfully trans- posed from linguistics into the study of narratives. One is the idea of binary opposition, that is to say, distinguishing linguistic units in terms of their having mutually exclusive properties. Phonology provides classic examples. In the making of speech sounds, for example, the vocal cords either vibrate or they do not. This principle enables us to distinguish the voiceless plosive Ipl in pay from the corresponding voiced plosive Ibl in bay, and to make use of the distinction in communication. Examples could be multiplied indefi- nitely. The binary principle is a fundamental aspect of language, and it can be extended from phonology to grammar and to the study of meaning. 6 The other general principle is that within the system of a language, each element acquires its significance and value from being a part of the system. No element stands free, independent and self-sufficient. Each element in a language system has a relational value; it gets its definition from all the other elements in the system, and in turn it helps define them. That is one reason why this present paper is seeking to explore what the relationship may be between 'construction' and 'atmosphere' within the 'system' which Le Carre has created in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
Circus and Abteilung and the Semiotic Square
Many of the structuralist ideas outlined above are combined in A. J. Greimas's device of the 'semiotic square'. (Its design also owes a good deal to the Square of Opposition of traditional logic. ) It is best to set it out immediately in a slightly simplified form and to offer a few comments on it before going on to see how it may help us understand the 'construction' of The Spy.?
Contraries
S .( - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - -> S
1 ~ Contradictions ~ 2
S2~ ~SI
Sub-Contraries 6 See, for example, Geoffrey Leech, Semantics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), ch. 6. 7 This slightly simplified figure is based on Greimas-Courtes s. v. Carre semiotique.
The abstract terms in the square are labelled'S', which stands here for 'seme' as an element of meaning. None of the semes can be fully understood by itself; each contributes to the meaning of the others. By convention Sl is usually taken as a 'positive' value, and Sz is opposed to it as a contrary and as differing from it in some quality. One can say that ~l and Sz are a binary pair with some mutually exclusive feature. Sl is the contradiction or negation of S , and Sz is thecontradiction or negation ofS (^) z' SlandSz are opposea to one another as a pair of sub-contraries. This description does not bring out the full subtlety of the square, but one can see that each term depends on all the others for its value within the system. The square itself is of course an abstraction, a schematic map of relationships, analagous perhaps to the rules of grammar which state that nouns enter into certain relationships with verbs. It is now time to apply the square to Le Carre's novel and to see what may result. How might term Sl' which is conventionally a 'positive' term, be realized in the construction of The Spy?
It seems clear that the principal character in The Spy is the British agent Alec Leamas. The book begins and ends with him. He appears in almost every chapter, and on the whole the reader sees what he sees and hears what he hears. In the few chapters where Leamas is absent, events still revolve around him and he remains the focus of attention (as in ch. XI and ch. XV). This perspective encourages the reader to sympathize with Leamas and with what he may stand for in the world that the novel creates.
Leamas belongs to the closed world of 'the Circus'.^8 We are given to understand that he has been with the Circus for most of his adult life, beginning with war service against the Nazis (p. 77). He has little life outside the Circus. His marriage has broken up, and he has few possessions. The most important people in his world are his
superiors like Control, his colleagues like De long, and his agents
like Karl Riemeck. Leamas leads the very specialized life of a senior intelligence officer.
In fact from page to page The Spy often reads like an 'espionage procedural'. The plot shows in detail the procedures by which Leamas goes under cover, how he is approached by the opposition and passed up their hierarchical chain, and how the process is
8 'Circus' is a term used in town-planning to refer to a circular range of houses, a completed 'crescent', as it were; a number of 'circuses' were constructed in London in the eighteenth century. The novel supposes that some such organization as SIS has its headquarters in Cambridge Circus. 'Abteilung' is simply German for 'Department'.
The contraries Sl and Sz help define ~ach other; neither can be understood without the other, any more than the word 'left' has meaning without the word 'right'. Given that Sl and Sz are the major contEaries, the sub-contraries which are their negations will be Sl and Sz, 'Non-Circus' and 'Non-Abteilung'. These labels are super- ficially clumsy and perhaps even alienating, but the relationships between the main terms and the negatives will prove crucial for both the 'construction' and the 'atmosphere' of The Spy.
In a novel, it is not mandatory that each term in the semiotic square gets equally full realization, and in fact 'Non-Abteilung' is not represented very fully. It comprises citizens of the DDR who are outside their government's intelligence apparatus. Some in fact have connections with it in various degrees, such as the officials of the Tribunal and the complacent, anti-Semitic Commissar of the gaol (ch. XX and ch. XXIV). Others are completely ordinary people like Frau Ebert and her family in Leipzig. Liz Gold is amazed at the similarity between Party meetings in London and those in Leipzig, and Frau Ebert plainly has no desire to become involved with powerful officials of her own government (ch. XIX).
Ordinary people are also represented in the scenes set in Britain, and once again there is a spectrum. Corresponding to the Commissar in ch. XXIV there is the Governor of the London gaol where Leamas serves his time, though this man's prison with its unruly IRA songster seems more humane than the soundless labyrinths in the East. We have cranks in London like Miss Crail, we have nasty people like Ford the grocer, and we have decent people like Arthur in the trilby hat (p. 40). All these are Sl' 'Non- Circus'.
The most important S figure in this set is Liz Gold, the Jewish librarian and Communist Party member in London. More will be said about her later; all that need be remembered now is that she is drawn into the world of espionage as the book progresses. Leamas thinks of Liz Gold from time to time, but he also has a number of other images of ordinary people in his mind, and these images are distributed in the text with some emphasis and pattern. As Leamas listens to Control on the subject of 'hardness' and 'sympathy', he recalls the Luftwaffe bombing refugees near Rotterdam twenty years before (p. 19).9 A second image is of a girl casting bread to
9 The bombing of Rotterdam by the Germans on 14 May 1940, killed about 1, people and left about 78,000 homeless. It was regarded as one of the great horrors of the first year of the war, and is commemorated in a sculpture by Zadkine.
seagulls on the beach, near the seaside villa ironically named 'Le Mirage'. To Leamas she represented a simplicity and a faith in ordinary life which he had never been allowed to have (p. 100). The third image is of a little car Leamas once saw caught in the fast lane of an autobahn near Karlsruhe. Children were waving cheerfully from the back window, but the car was caught in the torrent of hurtling giant lorries (pp. 113-4). Leamas thinks of this car and the children in it as he goes East into the cold, and it reminds him of the helpless Dutch refugees. It seems to be the last thought in Leamas's mind when the Vopos shoot him dead. The semiotic square, in its first application, has grouped characters who appear in Le Carre's The Spy, and it shows how each term or group of characters helps define the others and in turn is defined by them. The square is also more than Aristotelian logic or some kind of narrative algebra. By its oppositions it suggests currents of tension, as if a cast were assembled on a stage, ready to enact a drama; and while the most obvious conflict is between Circus and Abteilung, it will be argued that the most important tension is between Sand S, between the secret world (whether Circus or Abteilung) and the world outside it. In any case, though the semiotic square may be a dramatic tableau, it is not in itself a plot.
Plot For the analysis of plot, Greimas supplies a different set ofterms, which also make use of the idea of binary opposition. He developed these terms from the proto-structuralist work of Propp and Souriau. lO
The first paired set of terms are labelled Subject and Object. The opposition between them is essential to 'Quest' plots. In such plots, someone (a Subject) desires something (an Object), and sets about getting it. An 'Object' may be defined as any desirable value within the world of a particular fiction; it may be a person or a thing, an abstraction or a concrete thing. Quests in this general sense provide the plots for innumerable narratives, especially those of the popular and traditional kind. Myths, folktales and legends provide familiar examples. Jason, for example, quests for the Golden Fleece; folktale heroes and heroines seek the Water of Life; King Arthur's knights set out to seek honour, fame and the Holy Grail. Quest
10 See V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. L. Scott, rev. L. A. Wagner (Austen: University of Texas Press, 1975); Etienne Souriau, Les deux cent mille situations dramatiques (Paris: Flammarion, 1950).
reward and can come in from the cold. The mission is to transfer certain information to the Abteilung. In the course of it, Liz Gold gives Leamas her love; there is no need to detail all the forms of transfer of values in the book. It is important, however, to see that none of the acts of 'communication' which Leamas takes part in is entirely untainted and genuine. Control holds back the real truth about Leamas's mission, and Leamas never gets his reward. The information passed to the Abteilung is false. Peters does not keep his promises about the course the interrogation is to take (p. 122). Liz Gold is proud of the love she gives to Leamas; he seems ashamed (p. 37). The final pair of binary opposites which can help generate plots is perhaps auxiliary, but important none the less. These actants are Helper and Adversary, and their roles do not need elaborate explanation. In The Spy the Abteilung is the Adversary to be defeated; and various Circus members are working to help Leamas from behind the scenes, from Elsie in Accounts (p. 24) to Mr Pitt of the Labour Exchange. Without her knowing it, Liz Gold is also enrolled as a Helper in Leamas's mission.
Yet while Le Carre makes use of all these ancient roles in his modern novel- Subject vs. Object, Sender vs. Receiver, Helper vs. Adversary - he complicates their interrelationships enormously. Leamas 'taking a swing at Mundt' is both a solitary Quester and Control's Helper; and Control as Sender does not tell Leamas the full truth about either role. In Germany, Leamas thinks he is helping Fiedler discredit the Adversary Mundt, but in fact he is helping Mundt destroy Fiedler. Smiley and Guillam come as 'friends of Alec' to help Liz Gold in ch. XI, or so they say. In fact they want to make her their Helper in a conspiracy of which she understands nothing, and they are the enemies of her love. As for Leamas, the deceptive and contradictory roles in which he becomes enmeshed prove intolerable to him in the end.
While the plot is unfolding, however, Leamas appears for the most part in the guise of a solitary Quester, playing out a difficult game alone. Now in Quest plots the principal interest lies in the Quester's performance - in his strength, his courage, his endurance, his cunning, and in how he mobilizes all his heroic qualities in order to reach his goal. Indeed there are times when Leamas as Quester has to fight, but his main resource in the novel is cunning. He affects the drinker's shuffle (p. 94); he stubbornly maintains that if the Circus had had a high-level agent in East Germany, he would have known (p. 99). He skilfully follows
Control's script, being difficult, confusing the Abteilung with detail, letting them deduce what Control wants them to deduce (p. 114). To achieve his end, Leamas as Questermustdeploy all the cunning of Odysseus, the legendary 'man of many wiles'. It would be tedious to catalogue all the deceptions which Leamas wittingly or unwittingly performs in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. To chart these deceptions, and others, we may once more apply the idea of the semiotic square. The abstract terms may now be given the following values:
Sl Being Sz Seeming
Sz Non-Seeming Sl Non-Being The major contrari~s Sl at.!d Sz may be taken as the domain of truth; the sub-contraries Sl and Sz are the domain of falsehood: Sl and Sz are the domain of secrecy; Sz and Sl are the domain of lies. ll^. Before we attempt to apply this schema to the chief figures in The Spy, we need to remember two things. The first is that the reader's perspective changes and becomes enlarged as the plot unfolds. For most of the novel's course, the reader is encouraged to share Leamas's perspective (though one realizes that Leamas knows more about Control's plans than is revealed to the reader from page to page). By the end of ch. XXIV, however, Leamas has discovered the truth about the operation and revealed it to Liz Gold: that Mundt is a British agent who has to be protected. Besides this, we need to remember that the novel does not present mere abstract ciphers, but rather 'characters' with certain believable and individualized characteristics. This applies especially to Mundt. He is described as a killer, as a very distasteful man, 'ex Hitler-Youth and all that kind of thing'. There is a physical description of him to match (pp. 14, 22, and 166). Still, we can plausibly say that Fiedler actually is what he seems to be, namely, a loyal Abteilung officer (Sl and Sz); and whatever we feel about counter-intelligence operatives or the secret police, there is a certain integrity and authenticity about Fiedler as the novel presents him. Leamas also judges Peters to be an authentic pro- fessional. The other main figure who is what she appears to be is of course Liz Gold. Control, however, plans to attack Fiedler in the Abteilung while not seeming to do so; and that is tile deeply secret plan which even Leamas is not to know (Sl and Sz). Within the
11 See Greimas-Courtes, p. 32.
in a last realization of the semiotic square. The values of the abstract terms will now be taken as follows:
S1 Sympathy
8 zNon-Hardness
Sz Hardness
81 Non-Sympathy
We can sax that the values S1 and Sz share a quality of commit- ment, while S1 and Sz are the domain of detachment. At least in this novel, ~1 and (^8) z are qualities that you find in ordinary life, whereas Sz and S1 are properties of 'the cold'.
The positive term 'Sympathy' is most clearly represented in the affectionate and vulnerable Liz Gold (S1)' To her antithesis Mundt (Sz), she is merely 'trash' (p. 225). For Mundt is a 'very hard man', as Control reflects; and he has a 'blank, hard face' (pp. 14, 56, and 166). 'Non-Sympathy', which is here term S11 may be recognized in Peters, the man who interrogates Leamas at 'Le Mirage' and later takes him East. His face is said to be grey and without expression; it is a face which is unlikely ever to change. Peters is a dispassionate, professional intelligence agent, and there is something in him which accords with Leamas's own temperament. Mutual respect can exist between the two men, but neither will feel anything like Liz Gold's 'sympathy' for the other. 'I can do without the good will,' Leamas tells Peters. 'You've got a paid defector - good luck to you. For Christ's sake don't pretend you've fallen in love with me' (p. 75).
Control, on the Circus side of the war, could not hold his place without a degree of hardness which he dissembles in fussy, upper- class mannerisms. Such a man must do his work with dispassion, but it is not quite the dispassion of a Peters. In Control's view, the espionage professional soon passes outside the register of love and hate as they are understood in the ordinary world. 'All that's left in the end is a kind of nausea; you never want to cause suffering again' (E' 23). This view can perhaps be characterized as a 'Non-Hardness' (Sz) which belongs partly to the world of the cold, but yet in its recognition of human feelings belongs partly to the normal human world. Contiol has the attitude appropriate to the high government official who performs his duty, and it is an attitude which he shares with Fiedler, though the styles and ideologies of the two men are very different (d. pp. 134 and 174).
The main formalities of the structuralist reading of The Spy have now been completed. You can say - and it has been said - that the literary stucturalism of the sixties and seventies was too abstract and
too schematic, and that Greimas was perhaps too Aristotelian and perhaps a little too close to Propp and Souriau. 12 On the other hand, there are things to be said in defence. The structuralists were trying to work out a 'grammar' of narrative at the level of langue, as it were, and this grammar would bear to actual narratives the same sort of relationship that the rules of ordinary grammar bear to the sentences of parole. At least there was no hidden mystique about structuralist procedures. The theories were set out, and anyone could attempt to prove, improve or disprove their validity or their applicability by experiment.
In any case, the method of operating with binary pairs seems quite appropriate for exploring the 'construction' of Le Carre's The Spy because the novel itself is clearly full of strong and even theatrical contrasts. It begins with Leamas at the Berlin checkpoint. A white line on the road marks the boundary between East and West, 'like the base line of a tennis court' (and perhaps suggesting, on the st<cond page ofthe novel, that a formal game is to be played out). To the East, barriers, searches and controls. In the West, tense policemen in a sandbagged emplacement. On either side the Berlin Wall stretches away into the distance. It is dusk. The boundaries of time and space intersect as Leamas waits. At last Riemeck comes in the gathering dark. Just as he is about to cross the line, he is caught in the brilliant beam of a searchlight and killed.
Similar theatrical stylizations can be found throughout The Spy. Mundt with his blonde hardness is very like the standard Germanic 'heavy' of popular fiction; the Commissar in ch. XXIV is his female counterpart in 'hardness'. On the other hand, Control with his knitted cardigan and his petulance about coffee is as much a caricature as Ian Fleming's M in the James Bond books, though in a different key. As the power struggle in the Abteilung develops between near-Nazi and Jew, Mundt arrests Fiedler, then Fiedler overthrows Mundt, and then Mundt triumphs again in a series of coups de theatre which culminate in 'court-room drama', complete with surprise witness. In the Tribunal chapters, all the principles confront each other within the same four walls: Circus and Abteilung, British and Germans, truth and lies. It is all as improbable as the idea of a king dressing up as a minstrel and spying on his enemies while they eat their dinner. Yet the most improbable scene of all occurs in ch. XXIV. There, the anti-Semite conspirator
12 See E. Meletinski in the French translation of Propp, Morphologie du conte, trans. M. Derrida and others (Paris: Seuil, 1970), pp. 220-30.
Questo modo di retro par ch'incida pur 10 vinco d'amor che fa natura; onde nel cerchio secondo s'annida ipocresia, lusinghe e chi affattura, falsita, ladroneccio e simonia, ruffian, baratti e simile lordura. Per l'altro modo quell' amor s'oblia che fa natura, e quel ch'e poi aggiunto, di che la fede spezial si cria; onde nel cerchio minore, ov' e '1 punto de I'universo in su che Dite siede, qualunque trade in etterno e consunto.' (Inferno XI 52-66) 'Fraud, which gnaws every conscience, a man may practise upon one who trusts in him or upon one who reposes no confidence. This latter way seems to sever only the bond of love which Nature makes; wherefore in the second circle hypocrisy, flatteries, sorcerers, falsity, theft, simony, panders, barratry and like filth have their nest. By the other way both that love which Nature makes is forgotten, and that also which is added to it and which creates a special trust; therefore in the smallest circle, at the centre of the universe and the seat of Dis, every traitor is consumed eternally.'
With Dante, then, we may say that deceit and fraud are things against nature, for every human being owes natural friendship to every other by reason of their common humanity. Yet fraud exists, and it is practised in two main ways. The first way is against those who repose no special trust in one; and this is a simple severance of the bond of love which should join human beings, whether they live West or East. Such fraud and deceit are filthy enough ('lordura'), but the second way is worse. This is fraud against those who have given to others their special trust (as Leamas gave trust to Contol and Liz Gold to Leamas); this is a 'forgetting' or obliteration of the love which Nature has made and which human beings may enrich. According to Dante, this is so hateful to God and man that it must be punished in the lowest regions of hell where cold bites more than fire.
The most fundamental opposition in The Spy, then, is between those people who in some degree accept and remember the natural bonds of love l5^ and those who sever those bonds and 'forget' them;
15 Presentations of love (and also of treachery) can be found in other novels by Le Carre. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, for example, there is love between two men; in The Honourable Schoolboy there is love between two brothers; in Smiley's People and A Perfect Spy love between parent and child. In A Small Town in Germany, a British government is said to be ready to make a deal with neo-Nazis.
between those who live by 'sympathy' - Control's word; Dante's is 'amor' - and those who live by 'hardness'; between those who 'are' what they seem and those who mask themselves in endless 'seeming'. To live in the secret world of the cold, one must sever the bonds of humanity and nature and become enmeshed in an infernal web of lies and deceit and treachery. Given this point of view, we can see that Control is imprisoned in a dispassionate deviousness and Fiedler in a philosophy which authorizes rational murder (pp. 134-5). Peters has a grey, expressionless face which will never change. Leamas comes to understand the freer and fuller life that love may bring, but cannot escape to it. When he tries to escape, he is killed. Karl Riemeck made the same 'mistake' (p. 208). Not for nothing is The Spy filled with images of demarcation lines, enclosed spaces, gaols and walls which are barriers against 'sympathy'. The secret world makes its own hell on earth and imprisons and punishes itself there. It is not so much the descriptions of mean streets and shabby flats and Berlin ruins that create the 'atmosphere of chilly hell' in The Spy, but rather the mental and moral deformation of humanity which is held up to us on almost every page; it is the 'construction' of the novel which creates its 'atmosphere'. In a deep sense (the kind of sense that structuralist analysis tries to find and describe), Le Carre's The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is not a novel about spying at all, and that is one ofthe things which raise the book above the level of a popular entertainment. It is a statement about 'sympathy' and the bond of love which Nature makes. All the espionage apparatus is a device to show what love is, by setting out in complex detail its contraries and negations. University of New South Wales
