Cloak and Dagger and Sacrifice

Book/Daddy’s Jerome Weeks opines on the three central stories around which spy novels build: the story of betrayal, the story of brutalization, and the story of sacrifice.

These are the abiding moral concerns of the finest modern spy thrillers: These books would include (but aren’t limited to) the best of Graham Greene, early Len Deighton, early-to-mid John le Carré, a couple of Alan Furst’s. All other basic narratives in espionage novels are more or less dressed-up variants of James Bond derring-do: how we trumped our dastardly foe through pluck, superior gizmos and dashed cleverness. That’s not to say such tales aren’t fun to read; but they’re not exactly in the business of seriously considering and/or questioning the espionage enterprise.

Weeks continues his argument here.