Name: The Ipcress File
Rating: 4.166666666666667 (6 reviews)
ISBN: 9780007343027

Len Deighton

Len Deighton’s classic first novel, whose protagonist is a nameless spy – later christened Harry Palmer and made famous worldwide in the iconic 1960s film starring Michael Caine.

The Ipcress File

Tim Pendry

There is a history to my reading of this book. I read it and enjoyed it when I was quite young. I then saw the film with Michael Caine (1965) which I still think a classic and which I must have watched four or five times since. By the time I picked up the book again, I think I remembered it as the film! It isn't. Much as publicists might like to see them as one and the same thing. They are quite definitely not. The unnamed hero is only partly 'Harry Palmer'. The ambience and culture of the secret service in book and film are not the same. The military aspects are downplayed in the film. The bare bones of the plot are similar but the film is a complete re-envisioning of the text. Perhaps for budgetary reasons, the film never leaves London whereas the book not only finds itself in the Home Counties but the Middle East and Pacific. Oh, and there are Americans involved. Bond is aware of the constructive alliance with US intelligence and so is Deighton - very Macmillan era. The film and Greene's book is about a diminished and tired Britain defensively dealing on its own with the Eastern Bloc threat. Those publicists have also run the story that Deighton radically changed the spy thriller but I am not so sure (having re-read it now) that the book was quite so radical. The base line is that fantasy psychopath James Bond (1953 onwards) but we might look more closely at the sequence of events. 'The Ipcress File' comes out in 1962 in a rather uncourageous print run. The film of Dr No appears in the same year. John Le Carre's 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold' appears as a book in 1963. The film of 'The Ipcress File' appears in 1965 as does the film of Greene's book. Deighton's book presages Greene and the film of the Ipcress File to some extent but it is really a variation of the Fleming spy thriller but one wrapped up to some degree in the classic mystery in which everything is explained at the end and made more down to earth. I cannot say more realistic because there is not a great deal of realism in the novel. It is just far less of a male wet dream than Bond, less fantastic and (like all espionage novels) gives more illusion of realism (though less than Le Carre) than actual realism. The hero is older than Harry Palmer, travels to exotic places, does exciting military things, enjoys fine foods (though I can chuckle at Asti Spumante being glamorous half a century on), restaurants and a massive expense account. The female interest is as glamorous as any Bond girl. On the other hand, he seems to be working class (but is he, isn't he just 'Northern' middle class?). Harry does have a taste for fine food and coffee (albeit on a lower budget) but the office bureaucracy is more realistic and parsimonious than in the book. What may have happened is that Deighton moderated the Bond fantasy into a form of near-realism closer to the wartime thriller, translating this genre to the Cold War, and that this was sufficient for Harry Saltzman to seize on the interest in Greene's realism and create a post-Bond film. Between Bond's first film in 1962 and the two 'realistic' spy films of 1965. Deighton's book starts a process but it is Greene's that clinches the deal for a 'realistic' filmic redraft. This is not, however, to detract from the book - it is a solid spy thriller and effective period piece. But how good is it, especially since it was a first novel? Good enough but not quite as good as claimed. In his 2009 introduction to the book, Deighton makes an implicit claim to literary modernism and the unreliable narrator and I think he is right to do so. The truth is that the book suffers from a running low level incoherence which is only explained by an unreliable narrator telling a story and requires two full chapters of detailed explanations at the end in order to bring it to some sort of coherence (I was not fully convinced even then). Deighton can write but the novel appears to be an attempt to transfer the life of a young man in the advertising industry of the 1960s into the world of espionage. It brings us down to earth from Bond only to give us the aspirational loucheness of the business expense account. It reads as a series of very well done set pieces. Those on an American island base preparing the ground for a nuclear test are probably the best but also the most Bond-like. Lebanon (again not in the film) gives us a more traditionally military thriller but lacks coherence. It all hangs together (just) but with something of an 'in one bound, they were all free' air to it at the end. The only way to deal with the book is to go back to this idea of the unreliable narrator and see our hero as a pawn in a much bigger game where his own narration tries to hide his naivete. In that respect, the film is impossible without the book - not because of the plot or the hero but because the scriptwriters picked up the essence of our hero as he more objectively might have been and reconfigured the story accordingly. Film cannot do literary experimentation pace Resnais. A second read was thus more educative than inspiring, a snapshot of a moment in cultural history that is just as much a part of the shift from Macmillan's era to the Swinging Sixties as Cliff Richard or 'That Was The Week That Was'. Deighton (and he returns to the war a lot in his writings) was born in 1929, lived through the war as a teenager and was National Service. National Service ended between 1960 and 1963, precisely the transitional period we are looking at here. This book is transitional.

S. R. Spencer

'A stone-cold Cold War classic' Toby Litt, Guardian A high-ranking scientist has been kidnapped. A secret British intelligence agency must find out why. But as the quarry is pursued from grimy Soho to the other side of the world, what seemed a straightforward mission turns into something far more sinister. With its sardonic, cool, working-class hero, Len Deighton's sensational debut The IPCRESS File rewrote the spy thriller and became the defining novel of 1960's London. 'Changed the shape of the espionage thriller ... there is an infectious energy about this book which makes it a joy to read' Daily Telegraph

The IPCRESS File

Manuel J. Rivera

"A dazzling performance . . . A remarkable talent." The New York Times Book Review What must a lone spy do to survive? The classic spy story that reinvigorated a whole genre!

The Ipcress File

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