The Ipcress File

I decided to re-read 'The IPCRESS File' because it's sixty years old this year. It's been forty-seven years since I last read and enjoyed this book. At the time, my eighteen-year-old self was struck by how sordid and grubby Deighton's world of espionage was but I took the rest of the Cold War context - the nuclear arms race, the permanence of the Iron Curtain, the inevitability of the British upper-class running everything and making a mess of it - for granted. I'd grown up in the Cold War and, in 1975, there were no signs that it would end anytime soon. More than a decade after 'The IPCRESS File', in my first year at university, I would still occasionally be asked by mostly well-meaning tutors who were trying to slot me into the right show more context 'What does your father do?' (what my mother did never evoked the same level of curiosity) and I knew that the answer would give them a moment's pause as they processed that, despite the impression talking to me had made, I was a working-class lad from the North of England.

Re-reading the book in 2022, I wasn't surprised that I'd missed the taken-for-granted, casual but all-pervasive sexism the first time around. It was a blindness common at the time. I was surprised that the first thing that caught my attention wasn't the content of the book but the way in which it was written.

The narrative style was distinctive but hard for me to label. It was a kind of impersonal first-person. account. This narrative style isn't just about carrying the plot forward, it's a way of building the character of our nameless narrator as an emotionally distant, insightful but unempathetic, socially dislocated, secretive, untrusting, loner. The narrative also tells the story in an oddly abbreviated way, leaving things out or passing over them or not explaining them, making the narrative more of a gestalt built by the reader's expectations rather than something assembled brick by brick by the writer. This narrator is not so much unreliable as mischievously unhelpful as he challenges the reader to piece the plot together from what seems like a series of cryptic crossword puzzle clues.

Even now, this narrative style feels modern to the point of being experimental. Back in 1962, it must have had all that 'The Shock Of The New' energy of Modern Art.

Yet the narrative seems conventional compared to dialogue. There is one wonderfully chaotic scene where our spy is talking to someone on the phone while surrounded by multiple and overlapping sets of people talking to each other and him. It wasn't easy to read but it lit up my imagination. It's the dialogue equivalent of Warhol's split screen in 'Chelsea Girls'

I realised on this re-read, that the sordid grubbiness that shocked me on my first read was just the surface representation of the seediness at the heart of the plot. I thought the plot was one of the main strengths of the novel. It tells a story of betrayal, blurred lines of loyalty and ruthless selfishness against a backdrop of the threat of global nuclear war, mostly carried out by men who still carry the scars of the last World War. I enjoyed the up close and personal way the reveals were done, especially the exposure of what the IPCRESS file referred to and who was behind it.

I also enjoyed the way Deighton juxtaposed the excessive extravagance of the American Nuclear Test Site with the unthinkably large scale of destruction they were all focused on achieving. It felt like an indictment and a warning, even though there was no overt criticism.

The IPCRESS concept itself has aged about as badly as a comment made by one of the bad guys as he explains the Realpolitiks of the Cold War and says something like. 'Do you expect communism simply to implode one day while capitalism continues on in its evil ways?'

This time around, I was much more aware of how clearly our nameless spy could see all the small ways that he didn't fit in with the Establishment types who ran the Service. He knew he could never be one of them. He also knew that he had no desire to be a working-class warrior. He was just going to win with the cards he was dealt, even though he and everyone else was cheating.

The Nameless-Spy-Explains-It-All ending felt a little weak to me. The last few chapters felt like the CliffsNotes summary of the plot for any reader who either hadn't been paying attention or was too dumb to keep up. I wondered whether Deighton added these chapters at the behest of an editor who felt a need to tidy everything up. show less

Len Deighton opens this classic spy story with a quotation from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1:

And now I will unclasp a secret book,
And to your quick-conceiving discontents
I'll read you matter deep and dangerous...

When the book (Deighton’s first) was published in 1962, it was welcomed as painting a more realistic picture of the world of espionage than did the fantasy world of James Bond. Whether it is actually a true picture or not, Deighton certainly makes you FEEL as if you are getting a glimpse of the real spy world.

I first read this book 50 years ago, when I was 15 years old. (As well as having the book on Kindle, I’ve still got my 1966 Panther Crimeband paperback edition, which has pictures of Michael Caine and Nigel Green show more from the film version on the cover.) I thought at the time that the author had a great writing style, and that he seemed to be really knowledgeable and COOL. And re-reading the book now (for about the fifth time over the years), my opinion is just the same.

In my view, Deighton’s first few spy novels are by far his best: “The Ipcress File”; “Horse Under Water”; and “Funeral in Berlin”. I feel that after this period Deighton went downhill, losing the lightness of touch and sharpness that characterise these early books.

It has been rightly pointed out that the nameless narrator (who becomes Michael Caine’s “Harry Palmer” in the films) is reminiscent of Raymond Chandler’s private detective, Philip Marlowe, but transferred from the world of crime to the world of espionage. The two characters certainly both have the same mixture of wise-cracking humour, cynicism, sharpness of mind, and integrity. (Though with Deighton’s character there is less emphasis on the last of these – his job involves more deviousness than Marlowe’s.)

The other “realistic” spy story writer who came along at about the same time as Deighton was John Le Carre. But I’ve always preferred Deighton (at least the early Deighton), as I find Le Carre’s books rather humourless and bleak. (Though the TV version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” with Alec Guinness is brilliant.)

Although Deighton’s leading character (like Deighton himself, presumably) is on the side of the West, these books convey a cynicism about both sides in the Cold War. I am reminded of what someone once said: “The Free World is not really free, and the Communist World is not really communist.” This fits with my view, which is that big capitalists rule in the West; and that the so-called communist countries were/are in fact bureaucratic state capitalist regimes that had/have nothing to do with genuine Marxism (which advocates workers’ democracy).

“The Ipcress File” is excellent entertainment, but we also need to remember that the real world of secret services is a nasty one. They do not just spy on each other. They spy on (and often persecute) dissenting voices within their own countries, and they conduct dirty tricks such as the toppling of elected governments (as the CIA did in Chile). There are no heroes or “good guys” in the real secret world: just villains on both sides. show less

My cue to read this volume came from Charles Stross, who characterized his opening Laundry novel (The Atrocity Archive) as something of an homage to Deighton. By all accounts, Deighton's first novel The Ipcress File was the place to start with this author. I'm not sure what similarities I expected to encounter, but I found a lot of what made Stross's book enjoyable to me: the syncopated plot, sardonic attitude, and partial disclosure in first-person reportage to convey the tension felt by the speaker in the events described. As a newcomer to the genre, Deighton signals his willingness to chuck its conventions in the opening pages:

"Find him?" I said. "How would we start?"

"How would you start?" asked Dalby.

"Haven't the faintest," I said. show more "Go to laboratory, wife doesn't know what's got into him lately, discover dark almond-eyed woman. Bank manager wonders where he's been getting all that money. Fist fight through darkened lab. Glass tubes that would blow the world to shreds. Mad scientist back to freedom holding phial--flying tackle by me. Up grams Rule Brittania."

Dalby gave me a look calculated to have me feeling like an employee. (15)

Another similarity to Stross was the morass of au courant cultural and technological allusions--like the verb "grams" in the preceding quote. Some of these, set in the UK a little before I was born, were pretty opaque to me, though I didn't bother to use the 21st-century Internet overmind to puzzle through them. In other cases, Deighton would provide explanation for things that were then cutting edge or semi-secret, but are now just common knowledge. It is certainly a book that has aged strangely. (Fault the world, not the text!)

The denouement and epilogue cleverly alternate silver linings with touches of gun-metal gray. I had thought to rush afterward to a viewing of the 1965 cinematic version of the story, but the fact that it's not streaming on Netflix at the moment stayed my spectacles. I'd probably rather read one or two of the sequels without being constrained by the precedent of a screen interpretation anyhow. show less

I see some reviews claim that The IPCRESS File is a "classic" of its genre, the spy thriller. I'm not so sure that I agree, simply because it is one of the best examples I have yet seen of a work that captures the essential flavor and atmosphere of its times, the very few years of the late 50s and very early 60s. Unlike a "classic," it seems only identifiable with its era. For if ever there was a "beatnik" spy novel, this is it. And it's a masterpiece of its form, with a subversive comic rhythm and challenge to authority hitherto unimaginable in polite establishment precincts of power. At least this is all true from the Americanization part of the equation adopted by Deighton, the jazz themes, the detached and humorous and sudden show more shifting of the narrative, and the "beat" of the wordplay. Oh, and, yes, the continual allusions to popular culture of the time (try asking a millennial about Steve Reeves). The fact is, it's so very easy to imagine someone in a coffee shop, wearing sandals and a turtleneck, along with a goatee, and a set of bongo drums in their lap, reading along about British spies on a South Pacific atoll watching for the test of an American neutron bomb.

Comedy on one end, then. But then there is the flip side to the cultural imprint, the far more thoroughly British one. A great deal of the humor and sadness of the novel goes hand in hand with exposing the inefficient, often doltish ways of the British elite, and the suspicion naturally directed towards someone of The IPCRESS Files' unnamed protagonist's background, from the ranks who came from a market town in Lancashire. There is more than an echo of the Angry Young Man in this novel. In fact, it sometimes seems as if Alan Sillitoe's Arthur Seaton had somehow graduated from the bicycle factory to Military Intelligence, bringing his mocking, individualistic attitude with him, always avowing, "Don't let the bastards grind you down."

So I guess that these two sides, the two cultural contexts, give the novel its final form, a work of tragicomedy. And there is nothing more difficult to pull off than tragicomedy. Deighton does it. The sort of funky anti-establishment humor of the American beat generation, especially with the word choices and the (almost) elliptical storytelling. And the drab sadness of some hidebound British traditions, which are their own worst enemy. The IPCRESS File is a snapshot of a brief moment in history, Bikini Atoll, Steve Reeves--Herculeeze, Burgess and Maclean, the Rosenbergs, and right when we were all about to be brainwashed. show less

I had a bagful of preconceptions about this legendary 'spy novel' but it was markedly different from what I was expecting. This is not a 'gripping', plot-driven airport thriller; the plot is minimal and deliberately foggy. What is really interesting about the novel is its 'voice'; what it chooses to describe (or not describe) and how it sets about describing it. The unnamed narrator is a self-consciously proletarian (though highly educated) spy moving in an ambit he feels is defined by the old boy network. His meanderings through mid-century London's Italian coffee shops, his oblique asides brimming with implications that take the place of dialogue, and his idle comments on men's tailoring are what make this novel really interesting – show more plot is a secondary concern. show less

The WOOC(P) Files
Review of the Penguin Modern Classics paperback edition (April, 2021) of the original Hodder & Stoughton hardcover (1962)

'Now my name isn't Harry, but in this business it's hard to remember whether it ever had been.' - the nameless protagonist in The IPCRESS File

I read pretty much all of Deighton's spy fiction in the 1970s to 1990s shortly after most of it was published. Deighton's nameless secret agent (aka Harry Palmer in the film series with Michael Caine) in the Secret Files, his Bernard Samson in the Samson triple trilogy, Adam's Hall's Quiller and John le Carré's George Smiley were my go-to espionage thrillers, after the obligatory James Bonds of Ian Fleming & the several continuation writers of course.

The fall show more of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War and Deighton's retirement from writing novels after the conclusion of the Faith, Hope & Charity trilogy with Charity (1996) put all that out of mind for a few decades as new reading interests took over. I recently learned of the Penguin Modern Classics republication of all of Deighton's works being planned over the course of 2021 in an online article Why Len Deighton's Spy Stories are set to Thrill a New Generation (Guardian/Observer May 2, 2021). I couldn't resist a few re-reads to see how the books stood the test of time.

Deighton's nameless protagonist works for a similarly unnamed British secret intelligence service known only by its never explained initials WOOC(P). I found that I also couldn't resist inventing a source for that and thought of it as War Office Operations Centre (Provisional). Unlike the true life spy backgrounds of some of his fellow espionage writers (e.g. Fleming & Carré), Deighton's career had previously been in art and design. He tends to go in for over-complexity in bureaucracy and acronym bafflegab to compensate. The whole case is in fact overly complex and I spent most of the book wondering what was going on. The explanation and the reason for the title does not become clear until the final few chapters clear it up. This is somewhat paralleled in the plot by the agent's perpetual lack of success in completing a crossword puzzle that his boss's secretary subsequently dashes off.

I found the crossword puzzle I had been working on. Alice had completed it. I had got ten down correct. It was EAT. ... DITHYRAMBE had been quite wrong. I don't know why I'd ever thought it otherwise.

The agent's working class origins are played up in most of the publicity of the Deighton books. This was accentuated by Michael Caine's cockney accent in the movies. This doesn't stand out very much on the page, instead of beer, the agent's go-to drink appears to be Tio Pepe sherry, sometimes Dubonnet with bitters. I did still enjoy the banter and gibes between the agent and his boss and other head office staff:

'Think you can handle a tricky little special assignment?'
'If it doesn't demand a classical education. I might be able to grope around it.'
Dalby said, 'Surprise me. do it without complaint or sarcasm.'
'It wouldn't be the same,' I said.

This is followed up later with:

'You are a bit stupid, and you haven't had the advantage of a classical education.'
Dalby was having a littler genteel fun with me. 'But I am sure you will be able to overcome your disadvantages.'
'Why think so? You never overcame your advantages.'

So overall I did enjoy the re-read, but I do wonder how long it will be before annotated editions will be required to explain long expired businesses such as IBM and BOAC and/or other late 50s/early 60s pop culture references such as Steve Reeves and Danny Kaye.

Trivia and Links
The IPCRESS File was famously filmed as one of actor Michael Caine's first major onscreen roles in The Ipcress File (1965) directed by Sidney J. Furie.
The quality of the film clips in this DVD movie review are much better than those in the dated trailer above. show less

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 show more 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. show less