John le Carré Series: 'The Night Manager'

Warning: the following review contains spoilers for 'The Night Manager' (both the novel and TV adaptation).

"Now that the West had dealt with rogue forms of communism, I wanted to ask, 'How was it going to deal with rogue forms of capitalism?'”

John le Carré wrote the above statement in the afterwood of his 1990 episodic novel, The Secret Pilgrim, which precedes The Night Manager and bifurcates his work into mid- and post-Cold War halves.

The Night Manager, published in 1993, is the first of le Carré’s novels to reckon with these rogue forms of capitalism – in this case, the illegal arms trade and South American drug cartels, as aided and abetted by UK and US foreign policy. Jonathan Pine, a British former soldier and the titular night manager of a Zurich hotel, infiltrates the inner circle of “the worst man in the world”: international arms dealer Richard Roper. He is part of a sting operation (christened “Operation Limpet”) run by an underdog faction of British intelligence (Roper himself is rumored to have ties to top MI6 officials). Pine holds his own grudge against Roper, who ordered the death of his lover, Sophie, when Pine was the night manager of the Queen Nefertiti in Egypt. Sophie once gave Pine documents incriminating Roper, which Pine passed on to MI6, not knowing the consequence would be her murder (at the hands of Roper’s associate Freddie Hamid, the hotel’s owner). It haunts Pine throughout the novel, and it is his raison d'être. Le Carré’s maxim from The Looking Glass War (1965) still stands: Love is whatever you can still betray.

Despite a shift in focus, the novel retains a lot of what I’ve come to love about le Carré’s work. Fortunately, it’s a lengthy novel (the Penguin edition I’m coveting for my collection runs 564 pages), so my preferred topics are there in spades: petty bureaucratic politics portrayed within mundane office meetings and oblique conversations between espiocrats, thorough operational setup and dense prose that doles out a withholding plot piecemeal. A miniseries seemed a natural choice for an adaptation, and in 2016 Susanne Bier directed a six-episode Amazon production, starring Tom Hiddleston as Pine and Hugh Laurie as Roper. Unfortunately, David Farr’s adaptational changes flatten and streamline the rich, complex source material into something closer to the Daniel Craig-era Bond movies.

In adapting the novel, Farr transposes the story from 1991 to 2011, a deeply swagless era. Everyone looks like they’re in an H&M ad; it’s hard to take a le Carré protagonist seriously when they’re wearing v-neck tees, henley shirts, and zip-up hoodies. I’m definitely being glib — it’s ultimately a minor quibble, and my desire to see the characters more dripped out arguably goes against the de-glamorization of spying inherent to le Carré’s work. Nevertheless, the aesthetic difference between these two decades shifts the whole vibe of the source material. The look has a notably digital gloss and is more than a little lifeless. With the temporal shift also comes a political one — the cartel angle is swapped for post-9/11 preoccupations, the Arab Spring and a consortium of Middle Eastern weapons buyers, complete with the 'we’re not in the West anymore' yellow filter for the scenes set in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey. 

That visual shorthand for the Middle East is emblematic of the reductive shortcuts taken in this adaptation, all of which rob the novel of its density and nuance. The show never leaves you in the dark, never forces you to infer, never lets you wonder the way le Carré’s books do. It exposits itself to the viewer constantly. Characters look at a document for a few seconds and immediately divine its most important meaning before quipping about it. There’s nothing inherently wrong with cleverness — that’s a part of being British — but here it’s more Marvel than charming. When Roper is introduced in the first episode, Angela Burr (Olivia Colman) and her second-in-command Rob Singhal (Adeel Akhtar), Pine’s handlers who manage Operation Limpet, talk about him in that 'Umm, he’s right behind me, isn’t he?' register.

“Rob, come here…”

“Ironlast?”

“Yeah. He’s back.”

At one point Burr tells Pine,

“Jonathan, you need to be the second worst man in the world.”

Cut to: Hiddleston in a leather jacket atop a motorcycle, because that’s just how bad boys roll.

Despite all attempts, Hiddleston as Pine is simply not as interesting when compared to Roper or his cheeky lieutenant Lance “Corky” Corkoran (a scene-stealing Tom Hollander). Hiddleston’s fresh, youthful face inhabits Jonathan’s strong moral compass and consummate professionalism convincingly, but his performance lacks the requisite charm a hotelier should have. His apologetically polite mannerisms and tight smile come across as awkward and unconfident, making it hard to believe the way he insinuates himself into Roper’s circle. When he threatens Caroline (Natasha Little), the wife of Roper’s financial director, he says:

“Careful, Caro. Sun’s hot out there.”

But his delivery is so flat and unconvincing that you and Caroline would both be forgiven for not taking the threat seriously. He comes across as strained and unnatural. As Roper tells him:

“You’ve never relaxed a day in your life.” 

Hiddleston’s performance pales in comparison to the very arch Hugh Laurie and Tom Hollander. Laurie as Roper is an unexpected delight and really hams it up, putting all sorts of lovely flourishes on his rambling dialogue (the way he says “etcetera” during a dinner scene still sticks in my mind). As in the novel, he’s intensely personable, but here he is also more noticeably malevolent, and Laurie chews the scenery on both sides. Tom Hollander’s Corky, meanwhile, is on the shortlist for World’s Sauciest Man, constantly pushing Pine’s buttons as Pine slowly supplants him in Roper’s entourage. The homoerotic undercurrent between him and Pine is one of the ways in which the show manages to evoke the actual qualities of le Carré’s work. 

Behind the scenes of the operation, we’re introduced to a slew of intelligence bureaucrats who are either supporting or working against Operation Limpet. Leading the charge against Roper is Angela Burr, gender-swapped from the novel’s Leonard Burr. Secretly in league with Roper and working to undermine Burr and Pine is Geoffrey Dromgoole (named Geoffrey Darker in the novel, portrayed by Tobias Menzies). Caught between the two is Rex Mayhew (called Goodhew in the novel, played by Douglas Hodge). I’d argue that the surname changes of the latter two characters are one of the show’s few concessions to subtlety. 

Dromgoole and Mayhew are shallowly rendered but serve their purpose fine enough here. Olivia Colman as Burr is inspired casting, but Burr from the novel’s near-constant state of righteous indignation and fury is replaced by a meek and conciliatory, albeit tenacious, disposition. She’s not pushy or blunt or annoying the way that Burr is, which is what makes him such an excellent counterpoint to Jonathan. Burr’s strongheadedness comes from a desire to combat the evil men like Roper do, but this watered-down version of Burr merely offers a trauma dump about Roper testing a weapon on children in Kurdistan as their reason for hating him. While certainly a resonant reason, it’s another one of those lazy shortcuts to meaning. 

Le Carré’s novels have always portrayed intelligence work as a sordid, soul-corrupting affair, and after the Cold War, he increasingly critiqued the interventionist policies of the West in the Global South. Though the show’s bureaucratic skirmishes do illuminate the intelligence machinations behind this, the dialogue leaves a lot to be desired. The shallow human pettiness that drives this evil doesn’t feel nearly as present as it does in le Carré’s writing.

Two scenes in the penultimate episode do underscore the destructive, barbaric nature of the arms trade itself; one is a climactic weapons demonstration on an empty village previously cleared out by Roper, where he and his fellow merchants of death revel in the playground of carnage they’ve constructed. The next night, however, Pine comes across a boy and his father with a dead body in tow. These were villagers who were told to leave before the demonstration — the body is that of a woman who was too old to leave. The two villagers go to confront Roper and are killed offscreen. In this way, it’s Burr’s Kurdistan story come to life, and is the show’s most uncompromising indictment of the arms trade. 

The finale, however, undoes any goodwill created by the previous episode, which is the series’ strongest (that being said, I felt very little goodwill toward the show anyhow). The Pine vs. Roper thread is closed in the same obvious, unsubtle way the rest of the show operates in. Pine finally gets revenge for Sophie by recruiting members of the Muslim Brotherhood via a hotel cook he knows from the Queen Nefertiti. Together, they kidnap Freddie Hamid (David Avery) and Pine drowns him. The show was never aiming for realism, but even this feels far-fetched and from a pulpier genre. It also feels very last minute because the show doesn’t show how Pine is constantly tormented by guilt over Sophie’s death — her murder takes place in the first episode and isn’t really touched on until the final episode, whereas in the novel her presence is unceasing and colors his every thought and action. 

Meanwhile, Roper is arrested by local authorities, and the last we see of him is Hugh Laurie throwing a tantrum in a barred transport cage, kicking and screaming “No! No!” It’s literally cartoonish. This is quite opposite from what happens in the novel: after Pine is found out, he is tortured by Roper until Burr blackmails one of Roper’s associates (Sir Anthony Bradshaw, a corrupt aristocrat from The Secret Pilgrim) into releasing Pine in exchange for Pine going free. The establishment remains corrupt and it’s a lot more bitter than sweet. For le Carré, that’s as happy as endings get. In the show, Burr blackmails Dromgoole and his outfit to cut off support for Roper, so both her and Pine get their happy ending.

It all plays into an uncritical view of the intelligence establishment, reinforcing the idea that an institution’s few bad apples can be defeated by its do-gooders, ignoring any systemic roots that would realistically keep that corruption alive.

It’s a perspective that is the antithesis of le Carré’s work.

For some reason, nine years after the original six episodes, The Night Manager has been renewed for two more seasons. The second season will focus on Colombian drug cartels (which is what the novel’s focus was). Hiddleston will return (bleh), as will Colman (who has done nothing but great work since) and Alistair Petrie (I can’t imagine what role Langbourne will play, but I do like Petrie as an actor). I’ll certainly be tuning in out of completionist compulsion, but with great skepticism. 

If you’re looking for a serious critique of rogue forms of capitalism profiting off of murder in the Global South, I can’t plug Andreas Fontana’s 2021 film Azor enough. I have seen it five times this year and subjected some very patient friends to it, and with any luck I will have converted more #Azorheads before the year is over. I plan to write a full-length piece on it for this series after reading le Carré’s Single & Single (the film also shares a lot in common with his novel A Small Town in Germany). Up next in the series: a look at John Boorman’s 2001 adaptation of The Tailor of Panama, le Carré’s homage to Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. It stars former Bond actor Pierce Brosnan, and I am cautiously hoping that means there will be some playing against type or subversion of his Bond persona.

-Nick