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More specifically:
Harrison looked up as the door opened, closing a manilla dossier and pushing it to one side.
There's a grammatical ambiguity here which you would be unlikely to find in Greene or le Carre. The sentence could be read - stricly speaking, perhaps, should be read - to mean that it was the door which closed the manilla folder. I don't recall much Greene, but le Carre stories tend to open with a considerably higher bid than a relatively quiet meeting. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, the one I think you're leaning towards, begins with the protagonist waiting for an agent to come across the border from East Berlin. It does then go to the dim offices of The Circus, but the tone is well-established by then. I'd also expect more micro-observations - how is the office heated, is it hot, cold (it's probably stifling or arctic, depending on what you want).
I want to like 'fog-heavied', but I can't. It's not standard English, and these writers do not employ neologisms often. Unpack it, though, and you've got something. How did the coat get wet? Fog. Where was the fog? How did it smell? We know its effect on the coat, let's hear how that makes our character feel. Is it a thick coat? What's in the pockets? What can the coat tell us about the wearer?
Consider:
Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, [Smiley] appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad...
Was he rich or poor, peasant or priest?... Smiley, without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty, travelled without labels in the guard's van of the social express...
(From Call for the Dead, which I believe was the first le Carre novel.)
Also the following description of a corpse Smiley is viewing:
The white hair was cut to stubble. One strong, veined hand still grasped a sturdy walking stick. He wore a black overcoat and rubber overshoes. A black beret lay on the ground beside him, and the gravel at his head was black with blood. Some loose change lay about, and a pocket handkerchief, and a small penknife that looked more like a keepsake than a tool.
(From Smiley's People, the last Cold War le Carre novel to date.)
"Good flight, Daniel?"
"Tolerably so. Although I miss the peanuts. It's pretzels these days. Not enough grease on them to cushion a sensible dose of Collinses."
A few problems here. First, I'd expect to see 'tolerable' - the adjectival form, matching the question - rather than 'tolerably', the adverbial form. Second, I doubt you'd get the plumminess of 'tolerable' in this situation. Greene's and le Carre's heros are men who understand suffering and discomfort. They do not regard long-distance flights as something to be tolerated, although they do occasionally complain more vociferously, because things which don't matter are to be spoken of loudly, where genuine difficulty is often downplayed. So you might see:
"Good flight?"
"Bloody awful."
The fact that someone's asking irrelevant questions would normally mean that an utterly ghastly revelation is pending, or a totally unreasonable demand.
For the same reasons of spies' omerta, I doubt you'd get anyone talking about pretzels. There's a ludicrousness in that which might belong to Pinter rather more than Cold War drama.
"Times are changing, aren't they Dan."
"I suppose they are, Nicholas."
If this is meeting between an agent and his superior, it's unlikely the agent would use his boss's name. The public school/military/class infrastructure is a major factor in this kind of story.
Wilson took the cheap typist's chair in front of the desk and fished a nickelplate cigar case out of his inside pocket.
Let's look at the chair. What does its presence tell us? What can we learn from the organisation of which our characters are a part that this chair is in this room? Consider the debriefing scene in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold - Control's office has an olive green gasfire with water on top of it to keep the place humid. The head of the British Secret Service wears a nasty cardigan and his wife thinks he works for the Coal Board. Control can't find his own ashtray, doesn't have a coffee table to put it on, and has to wait for ever for coffee. The whole picture is as far from a functioning office as you can imagine in today's high-tech environment. If you were to write the story now, you'd have the head of MI6 working on a crappy Mac Classic or running Windows 3.1, and taking the batteries out of his smoke alarm so that it didn't go off when he sparked up. The description stinks of clutter, decline, and depression.
Now, as a matter of interest, you've got a lot of brand names in here. Most of the time, le Carre avoids them, the Ronson being an exception. Friedrich Durrenmatt, the Swiss writer of Das Versprechen (The Pledge) used brands to convey a cultural obsession with appearance and commerce, with consumer standards and image.
"Still dying of cancer, last I checked. Cut the shit, Nick. You didn't call me away from my boat to swap arthritis stories. This cold-warrior-out-to-pasture shit was old before the Wall came down. It's not worth my time, especially not from you. We both know that you're still as deep in the game as you've always been. You didn't rent this ugly fucking office so that I could ash in your coffee and swap Brezhnev jokes. What have you got, and why do you need me?"
To me, this reads pure American. It's more Clancy than Greene (that's unkind - it's better than Clancy). It's also vastly more self-conscious than most Cold War stuff. The idea of a character in one of these stories being aware of the body of spy fiction is alien, modernist, and seeing themselves in terms of that kind of narrative - except in moments of deep and probably private introspection - is most unlikely.
And then there's laughter. You don't get a lot of that. |
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