The spy who came in from the Cold War

For John le Carré aficionado ARMINTA WALLACE, super-spook Smiley had been filed away as a beacon of perfection, never to be touched or tampered with. So when she heard of a big-screen remake of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy', she wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry

I DON'T KNOW IF The Honourable Schoolboywas the first John le Carré novel I ever read. I do know I decided it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. The bottle-green 1977 paperback is still on my bookshelves alongside my battered school Bible, veterans of numerous de-clutterings and – far more dangerous in my house – absent-minded clearings-out.

Which is entirely appropriate because as far as I was concerned, The Honourable Schoolboybelonged in the same literary league as the King James Version. It was stylish and gnomic and rarely made sense: but that was okay, because once you gave yourself over to those rolling, muscular sentences, you could sink and it still felt like swimming.

By the time Alec Guinness brought Smiley to the telly in the autumn of 1979, my le Carré cup was running over. And in the years since, Smiley was filed away as a beacon of perfection, never to be touched, tampered with or even, if the truth were told, revisited. So when I heard rumours of a glossy big-screen remake of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, I wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry.

The TV series had, after all, been such a product of its time and place. In a fortuitous bit of post-Cold War product placement, its screening coincided with the unmasking of the keeper of the Queen’s pictures, Anthony Blunt, as a spy. And it’s hard to believe now, but in those days we knew so little of what went on behind “the Iron Curtain” that images of clunky Trabants and Czech villages seemed exotic and daring.

For the most part, however, the BBC's le Carré adaptations – Tinker, Tailorwas followed in 1982 by Smiley's People– are anything but exotic. It was decided not to film The Honourable Schoolboybecause much of it is set in Hong Kong, and they couldn't afford Hong Kong. Too exotic. Too daring.

So the locale is mostly London. It's always raining or snowing and the interiors are funereal, lit only by flickering gas fires and faintly fluorescent bars in tea-coloured corridors. Monosyllabic men – they were nearly all men – in civil service suits smoke pipes and address each other with plummy chumminess: "dear boy" and "old dear" and "oh rot, darling, frankly". Mad Men, it surely isn't. Or even The Hour,which recently revisited the 1950s and found them peopled by gorgeous, well-dressed men and women.

In the wake of The Hour, watching the original series of Tinker, Tailoris a distinctly unsettling experience. It's still stylish, with plenty of superb detail – including a startlingly good original score, by Geoffrey Burgon, which nobody ever mentions. But it's not perfect. You have to peer through a lot of murk. Plus, it ambles along at a pace which makes Inspector Morselook like a Bournemovie by comparison.

Tinker, Tailoris best remembered, of course, for That Performance by Alec Guinness. He appears to have swallowed the Smiley novels whole, then gives the man back to us piece by piece, episode by episode.

Re-reading the books, I’m surprised by how often Smiley is either barely there, or totally absent. Old Smiley would love this, they’ll say. Or: let’s get Smiley back from wherever-he-is. Sometimes, someone else is narrating the book, with Smiley just casting his – admittedly considerable – shadow over the story.

The Looking Glass Waris a bleak tale of inter-departmental rivalry which Le Carré has always said is his most realistic book by a mile but which, interestingly, is one of his least popular. Smiley figures in some early conversations, but doesn't makes his real entrance until chapter 22. A Murder of Quality, by contrast, has Smiley trotting off to the countryside to solve a murder mystery with all the innocent glee of a Miss Marple. The benign Smiley of that novel is replaced in The Looking Glass Warby a ruthless fixer who abandons one of his colleagues in an East German apartment building black hole and leaves another on the floor. In tears.

And these are colleagues. People who don’t know Smiley very well tend to describe him in terms of his deceptively mild appearance – “owlish”, a “frog”, a “teddy-bear”. His creator disagrees. Smiley, he writes, has “the cunning of Satan and the conscience of a virgin”. It’s all part of the hall-of-mirrors world of the spy thriller, where friends turn out to be enemies and an enemy can be your only real friend.

Le Carré himself is, of course, one of the great double acts of the literary world. His real name is David Cornwell. He really did work as a spy in Berlin in the late 1950s. He was among those whose cover was “blown” by Kim Philby; he got his own back by casting Philby as Bill Haydon in the Smiley books.

And then when the Cold War ended, instead of retiring in disarray, as expected by the literary critics, he produced a series of furious broadsides at the inequities of the capitalist system whose triumph his characters fought (and, often, died) to bring about.

The new movie will take us back to the earlier, more buttoned-up le Carré. But will it destroy our affection for Smiley and his people? I suspect not. In fact, I'm smiling already at the prospect of this glossy new Smiley. Director Tomas ( Let The Right One In) Alfredson knows a thing or two about telling a story while allowing the past to haunt the present. Having done a mean Dracula and a super Sirius Black, I reckon Gary Oldman will make a pretty good Smiley. There are further good omens in the presence of Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Strong, Toby Jones and Tom Hardy in the cast. Even le Carré has a cameo role at an MI6 Christmas party, standing next to a spy dressed as Hitler. Bring it on, old dears. Bring it on.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spyopens on Friday