June 11, 2015

Finest Hour 101, Winter 1998-99

Page 43

Price, Thomas: “Popular Perceptions of an Ally: the Special Relationship in the British Spy Novel,” Journal of Popular Culture 1994, (28) 2: 49-66.


Historians of the English-speaking world during the first half of the twentieth century will continue to run into Churchill because he had a greater opportunity than any other person to do both good and bad things. Because Churchill injected his personality into almost everything he did, said and wrote, he has invited the praise and blame of historians in the 1990s, as he did with his contemporaries.

Churchill’s call for a “special relationship” between Britain and America after Germany was defeated was motivated by a desire for a closer, more intense connection in order to counter the Soviet threat. On the level of grand politics, that relationship culminated in the Thatcher-Reagan partnership which expanded beyond merely an anti-communist barricade to an ideological economic challenge to the entire socialist world. The Churchill-Roosevelt and Thatcher-Reagan special relationships were at the grand politics level, but leaders need followers just as followers need leaders. Public opinion in Britain and America generally supported their leaders because public perceptions—its images and stereotypes, “pictures in our mind” as Walter Lippmann said—were created that supported the special relationship concept. These pictures can be categorized as four disparate images of allies: Perfidious Albion, Crusader, Corporate Takeover and Corporate Merger.

Historians played an important role in developing public perceptions, but the public’s conditioned mood was also significantly created by one of the most popular genres of fiction: the spy story. Three spy novelists, all immensely popular in both Britain and the United States, wrote books which created pictures in the public mind of the special relationship: Ian Fleming, John le Carre and Len Deighton.

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The Perfidious Albion image, such as affected the relationship between Charles de Gaulle and Britain over NATO, might have been John Charmley’s view of the British-American relationship, but it was not one of the images portrayed by these novelists. The other images, however, can be identified in their stories.

In most of Fleming’s stories about James Bond, there is little discussion of the policy connections between Britain and the United States. It is usually unspoken, showing up in the joint operations between allies. The strongest allied relationship is personal, between Bond and C.I.A. agent Felix Leiter. Both Bond and Leiter are crusaders; their cause is right and the enemy is evil. However, in his last novels, Fleming shows an uneasiness with the special relationship and a suspicion that a Corporate Takeover is imminent.

In le Carre’s novels the Americans seem so vastly different from the British in societal mores and actions that they might have appeared from another planet. The resentment to American control of their British counterparts is never far from the surface in le Carre. There are few Americans whose personal relationships with the British can even be remotely characterized as friendly and exhibiting respect. The image of America as ally in le Carre is one that goes from non-entity in the early novels to an unfriendly Corporate Takeover in the later ones. The threat to the British way of life ceases to be Communism; it is now the threat from the Americans.

Len Deighton’s heroes spend considerable time in America or with Americans, but he says very little about American society and values. Americans are there to work with, and then get on with life. Deighton’s image of the Americans as an ally appears much close to the friendly Corporate Merger than to the hostile Corporate Takeover.

Churchill’s call for a “special relationship” to embark upon a crusade against Communism created many pictures in the public mind. Some were painted by historians; others were painted by novelists. All had a variety of consequences, many unintended, and many still influential today.

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