59 pages • 1 hour read
John le CarréA Perfect Spy
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Magnus Pym, a “powerful but stately” (14) English spy, arrives in a small coastal town in the southern country of Devon, England. He goes straight to a boarding house operated by Miss Dubber, who is happy to receive him despite the late hour, though she refers to him as Mr. Canterbury. She insists that he remove his black tie and politely accepts his gift of a “thickly knitted cashmere shawl” (15). They sit, drink tea, and talk, and Pym is very “attentive.” He plans to spend two weeks at her guest house, where he has rented a room for years but appears only intermittently. Miss Dubber later hears him singing to himself in his room.
Three hours earlier, Pym’s wife, Mary, stands at her bedroom window in Vienna, Austria. She waits for either her husband or Jack Brotherhood, who calls her on the telephone to announce his imminent arrival. Many of Mary’s male relatives have been died “fine deaths” in service to England. Although Mary is fiercely patriotic and believes she’s dutiful, she still regrets an incident in Greece with her husband and is desperate to apologize. She now has no idea of Pym’s whereabouts and hopes that Jack can tell her.
Mary remembers hosting a dinner party when Magnus worked as an intelligence chief at the British Embassy in Vienna, in charge of “Certain Unmentionable Matters” (20). During his career, they also lived in Washington, DC, in the US and in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Throughout his career, Mary has been happy to help him by playing the role of diligent wife and hostess, praising her husband’s resourcefulness despite his father’s ongoing illness. At the party in Vienna, Mary watched Pym’s American equivalent Grant Lederer and his wife, Bee. She suspected a “conspiracy” exists between them and Pym. The party was interrupted by a phone call for Pym, who waited until the guests left to tell Mary that his father, Rick, had died. Mary, confused, burst into tears. Mary’s reveries are interrupted by Jack’s arrival.
Pym settles into his room and thinks about his career. He reviews the emergency money and documents he stashed in the room, the products of a “lifetime of symbols and codenames” (26). After decades of selfless service to his country, he noticed that he was being watched at his father’s funeral. Rather than return to Vienna, he traveled to Miss Dubber’s guest house, meticulously covering his tracks to ensure that he wasn’t followed. Somehow, he feels that he planned this escape “on the day [he] joined the Firm” (27) but only realized it after his father’s death. He begins to write on a piece of paper, planning his future. He assures himself that sometimes “we have to do a thing in order to find out the reason for it” (28).
Chapter 2 Summary
Pym writes to his son, Tom. He describes the life of his father, Rick. Pym tells the story of how his parents met in a small town in Devon before World War II. His mother, Dot, was an “unreal, empty woman permanently in flight” (32). Dot and Rick attended the church services of Sir Makepeace Watermaster, a Welsh priest who preached about the dangers facing “sinners.” In addition, Rick was a member of the Appeal Committee, a charity fundraising organization run by Makepeace’s church. One day, Makepeace confronted Rick in front of the committee to ask, “Where’s the Appeal money gone?” (36). Rick claimed full responsibility for the missing money and charmed the other committee members into believing that he spent the money to “improve mankind” by purchasing a new bus to bring more people to the church. On days without any church services, he said, he’d run the bus as a “commercial operation” and thus make even more money for the church.
Makepeace was suspicious, especially because Rick wouldn’t talk about anyone else involved in his scheme due to “confidentiality,” though he mentioned that Dot was involved. Dot’s involvement gave Makepeace pause. He didn’t trust Rick and he tried to pay him £500 to leave the town for somewhere like “outer Australia.” Rick spent the money on a party for his friends and then left town for many years. Rick and Dot married in secret the next day, and Pym was born six months later. The bus was never seen, and Rick soon set up a business using money from an unknown source.
Chapter 3 Summary
Jack Brotherhood speaks to Mary. He’s worried that Pym has vanished and demands answers from Mary. She insists that she has received “no word from anyone” (44). Two operatives from the Home Office, Georgie and Fergus, arrive with luggage. Jack wants them to keep watch over Mary while pretending to be mourning family members. Increasingly exasperated and anxious, Jack demands to know whether Pym has ever talked about moving abroad or even “going over to the other side” (45). Mary insists that she knows nothing, especially about Pym’s drinking, potential affairs, and the unmentioned incident on the Greek island of Lesbos. The only part of Pym’s itinerary in England that Jack can confirm is that Pym visited Tom at his boarding school. As Jack’s deputies set up phone taps and other devices, Jack asks about Grant Lederer and complains that his bosses are “stiff with theories and begging for time” (48). He wants Mary to pretend that nothing untoward has happened.
Mary watches Jack search her house. Jack takes the preliminary notes for a novel that Pym began writing during the trip to Lesbos. Mary resents being bullied by Jack, who was once her “older lover at a time when [she] thought [she] needed one” (51). The phone rings, despite the late hour. Mary hears a strange “metallic ping,” a call code but nothing else and can’t keep the caller on the line long enough for Jack’s men to trace the call.
The worry that Pym might have been kidnapped forces Mary into a recollection. She remembers being recruited for the Foreign Service, where she was taught “to forge documents for British spies” (54). She first met Jack when she was sent to work in Berlin. In the present, Jack quizzes her on her relationship with Pym and his “estranged” relationship with his father, Rick. She recalls the night Pym learned about his father’s death. He seemed “empty. Like an actor without a part” (56), and he went for a walk alone in unsuitable shoes, holding a daily newspaper to read in the dark. Under Jack’s relentless questioning, Mary reluctantly reveals that she noticed a pattern in Pym’s behavior: He’d leave the house late at night with a rolled-up newspaper whenever he mentioned a meeting with a person named “P” in his diary. Jack’s people rummage through the closets and rip up the carpets. They find a white shoe box hidden in an unused chimney flume. Inside is a camera, film, filters, other equipment, and two pressed red flowers. Mary is distraught. She insists that the equipment must be innocent and not at all “sinister.” She screams at Jack and tries to hit him. Jack subdues her with force as the doorbell rings downstairs.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The plot of A Perfect Spy is structured as a mystery. Pym goes missing, and his colleagues, family, and friends want to find him, though the author reveals Pym’s physical location. In an example of dramatic irony, Pym sits in a small room in Devon, England, while Jack and the Firm trawl through Europe searching for him—but the search for Pym’s location closely mirrors a search for Pym’s real identity. After he goes missing in the wake of his father’s death, the other characters suddenly come to terms with the reality that they barely know or understand Magnus Pym. He lies to everyone, presenting a slightly different version of himself to so many people that no one can be quite sure that they really know him. Through his letters, Pym begins to reveal it. However, the reliability of his narration is uncertain given his character. Jack’s search occurs in parallel with Pym’s letter writing, verifying and confirming some information. For everything else, Pym’s letter writing is the only source.
Pym plays a dual role in A Perfect Spy as both the protagonist and, for half the story, the narrator. The narrative has two parts: In the present day, Pym goes missing, and an objective third-person narrator tells the story of Jack, Mary, Tom, and the others searching for him. At the same time, Pym goes to a prearranged, secret rented room, where he writes numerous letters to those closest to him. These letters are the second half of the narrative, delving into the past, with Pym as the narrator. His narration gives insight into his character. He narrates in a detached way, often even referring to himself in the third person, as though he doesn’t recognize his younger self and almost considers Pym an entirely different person. Similarly, he occasionally addresses those to whom he’s writing the letters directly. He pauses his narrative to address Tom or Jack, imagining them reading his letters and hoping to cajole them into a certain way of thinking. This attempt to charm is part of Pym’s character. He lies and manipulates the truth to perform for his audience, presenting himself as a version of Magnus Pym that he hopes they’ll like. In real life, he changes his biography to impress whomever he’s talking to. In his letters, he encourages his audience to accept his version of events as true. As such, Pym’s past remains somewhat mysterious. His letters are just like his history as a spy and a con artist: He’s attempting to manipulate people’s idea of Magnus Pym, and he can’t be trusted to tell the truth. As a narrator and character, Pym is intriguing and charming but ultimately unreliable and untrustworthy.
Tellingly, Pym introduces his father quickly. When thinking about his own youth, he recalls a time before he was born. The story of Rick and the stolen church charity funds provides important context to Pym’s life because—in his own opinion—Rick had a huge influence on his life. In trying to tell his story, Pym thinks he must begin with the story of his father’s first notable crime. The theft of the church funds marked the moment when Rick became a professional con man. When the crime was revealed, he was sent away from his town, becoming unmoored from the expectations, conventions, and scrutiny that were likely in a community where everyone knew his name. Outside his town, he could transform himself into whoever he needed to be at any moment. This freedom shaped Rick’s life and laid the foundation for Pym’s character. Pym grew up in this environment, seeing Rick lie and manipulate those around him. Pym’s self-reflection suggests that he now understands his father’s malignant influence, drawing on his father’s descent into dishonesty to explain why he chose to betray everyone he knew. This introduces the themes Changing Identities and Changing Loyalties.
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