Before Jackson Lamb, George Smiley and James Bond, there was Ashenden
Just like Maugham, Ashenden has the perfect cover. As a successful writer, he goes to Geneva to write his new play, “a comedy”, as he tells a lumpenly suspicious Swiss policeman, “and a light one at that”. Although Switzerland was neutral, the authorities there took a dim view of spies. He'd been sent to Geneva, “knowing the risks, to do work of a certain kind”. Recruited and run by The Colonel, or R, a man with “hard, cruel eyes... and a cunning, shifty look”, he was very much on his own.
John le Carré once said that Maugham was “the first person to write about espionage in a mood of disenchantment and almost prosaic reality”. Yet although they lack le Carré's moral outrage, or the casual, luxury-steeped ruthlessness of Bond, the Ashenden stories mix languid charms with a steely core. You won't find fist fights and care chases, killer centipedes and high-tech gadgets.
But it's Ashenden himself who fascinates, wearing both cynicism and compassion equally. He spends as much time fretting about being unable to turn the hot water tap of his bath with his toe as he does worrying about the consequences of his actions. He arrives for trains hours in advance, suffering from “that distressing malady known as train fever”. And is reassuringly normal, too.
Just like the world in which he works, he can be morally ambiguous: “Ashenden admired goodness, but was not outraged by wickedness.” Such were the necessities of a British spy. Yet the tales are at once funny and moving, grim and glamorous, shot through with pathos and bathos. “How much easier life would be if people were all black or all white,” he wonders, “and how much simpler it would be to act in regard to them!” But this is real life. And death. And nothing ends neatly.
Tom Parker Bowles is an editor-at-large at Esquire. This piece appeared in the March-April 2019 issue of the magazine
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