“She feels compelled to tell the truth”

Daniel Gooding begins a series of articles looking at libraries and librarians in fiction with Bayswater Library for Psychic Research and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.

IT IS common for many library staff to have arrived at their current career from a number of different routes – in Alec Leamas’s case, just two jobs (besides a long and chequered career in intelligence) precede his appointment at the Bayswater Library for Psychic Research, each one lasting only a week: the first with a firm of industrial adhesive manufacturers, which left him reeking of decaying fish oil “like the smell of death”, and the second an even less successful stint selling encyclopaedias door-to-door. “They’re an odd lot,” the man at the Labour Exchange tells him when he takes the library job, “but then you’re not a stayer anyway, are you?”

The library itself seems quite austere, and le Carré’s stark description of it almost anticipates a later crucial scene in the story:

“The library was like a church hall, and very cold. The black oil stoves at either end made it smell of paraffin. In the middle of the room was a cubicle like a witness-box and inside it sat Miss Crail, the librarian.” The library is described as an endowment, with thousands of donated volumes to be checked through and presumably catalogued; the only actual work we see in the book is some shelf checking, with boxes of index cards that only the head librarian, Miss Crail, is allowed to annotate in pen.

Meet the librarians

The only two other members of staff besides Leamas are both very much the stereotypical spinster librarian, but despite their shared vocation, there are distinct differences between the two. Miss Crail believes only in the rules of the library, and becomes agitated into mild apoplexy when these are contravened: Leamas takes a half hour lunch break on his first day, and is then upbraided by Miss Crail for leaving his shopping bag in a corner of the library; when he later hangs his raincoat on her designated peg, she literally trembles with repressed rage before phoning her mother to inform her of this latest affront. 

While Miss Crail seems resigned to living the rest of her life with her mother, assistant librarian Liz Gold is more sentimental, and her lonely life is soon turned upside down by the unexpected arrival of the sullen and mysterious Alec.

“She was a tall girl, ungainly, with a long waist and long legs. She wore flat, ballet-type shoes to reduce her height. Her face, like her body, had large components which seemed to hesitate between plainness and beauty. Leamas guessed she was twenty-two or three, and Jewish.”

She is also blessed with a keen sense of awareness that Miss Crail lacks. When Alec fails to turn up one day, only Liz suspects that something is wrong; when he is absent again the next day, she goes to his flat and finds him stricken with fever, proceeding dutifully to nurse him back to health. Sometime later, as Alec prepares to leave for good this time, she feels helpless to do other than let him go, but somehow senses what he has been up to all along, even knowing that his attack on the grocer was pre-meditated rather than the sudden ­assault it was made to look like. Miss Crail on the other hand, possessed with an ­intense hatred of Leamas since day one, feels only relief at his departure; at least until she discovers that he hasn’t bothered to collect his outstanding wages, which sends her again to the telephone and her mother.

Higher purpose

Unlike Miss Crail, Liz feels a sense of loyalty to a higher purpose than the library, and it is this, along with a self-proclaimed belief in history, that leads her to join the Communist Party of Great Britain, a decision that pulls her into the action of the story, and pushes her towards her fate. Her sense of awareness never leaves her, even when she is summoned to East Germany and stood before the Tribunal as a witness for the defence. Knowing somehow that Alec’s fate is irrevocably bound to the outcome of the trial, she is desperate to know what to do and say to help him; but like all conscientious librarians she feels compelled to tell the truth, and without Alec to guide her words, this is exactly what she does: the case for the prosecution falls apart, Mundt is vindicated and Alec and Fiedler are apparently both condemned to death. By the end of the story, both Liz and Alec realise that their meeting in the library was more than just chance, and that their relationship has had a greater impact than either of them could have realised.