A Perfect Spy

“If a finger is to be pointed, point it here.”

Pym’s recollections about his father are a template for his own life. In writing to his son about Rick, Pym is providing Tom with everything he needs to understand Pym’s actions. Rick accepts the blame for the missing church funds, knowing that he’ll be able to charm his way out of the problem. He leans into the accusation, creating a new, unexpected reality in which he’s in charge. Rick is convinced of his own untouchability, a tendency that becomes key to Pym’s ability to lie to so many people for so long.

“Magnus keeps everything inside something. Everything must wear a disguise in order to be real.”

Pym hides everything about himself under layers of ironic misdirection, and wholesale lies. In creating this unknowable world, Pym projects it onto everything around him. Because he lives at the nexus of so much mistruth, he assumes that everyone else is operating similarly. Anything without a disguise is simply unreal, as it can’t figure into the world Pym sees as true.

“Brotherhood was more interested in the pressed flowers. He had laid them on his palm and was staring at them as if they told his future.”

Although he doesn’t yet understand the significance of the poppies, the flowers stand out to Jack because they’re discordant with his idea of Pym. To most people, Pym is a dull, unsentimental bureaucrat who’s remarkably good at his job precisely because he has eliminated every trace of sentimentality. The poppies clearly hint that this isn’t entirely true. In finding the flowers, Jack begins to realize that he doesn’t know Pym nearly as well as he believed he did.

“Old Lippsie’s got the guilts she isn’t dead like them.”

Lippsie is a German Jew who’s horrified at the reports from Germany about the terrible violence inflicted on the Jewish population under the Nazis. The British people are dismissive of her emotional response to the early reports of the Holocaust. Their attitude, coupled with Pym’s love for Lippsie, lays the foundations of Pym’s distrust of the British state. The British people, like the state, don’t truly care about humanity, so he feels no guilt about turning on them.

“Putting down his pen, Pym stared at what he had written, first in gear, then gradually in relief.”

The longer Pym writes, the more his letter takes on the tone of a confession. He claims he wishes to write a novel, but the desperate fervor with which he writes indicates that these words are more than just fancy prose. Instead, he’s pouring his soul into a document that will—he hopes—explain his actions to his son. The relief of finally telling the truth after years of lies takes a physical toll on Pym in his search for understanding, if not atonement or forgiveness.

“Betrayal as hope and compensation. As the making of a better land. Betrayal as love. As a tribute to our unlived lives.”

Pym recontextualizes the idea of betrayal. As an idea, betrayal has a pejorative tone. It’s inherently negative. However, Pym reimagines betrayal as a positive act, a way to build a better world. Key to this characterization is the portrayal of the British state as inherently broken and dilapidated. This betrayal is an act of love because the institution being betrayed is no longer fit for its purpose. By carrying out this betrayal, Pym is performing an act of mercy.

“He needed to be able to close the door on his Englishness, love it as he might, and carve a new name somewhere fresh.”

Pym’s formative experiences are inherently tied to questions of identity. He has identified himself as an English person, but as he learns more about what this involves, it no longer feels right. Pym can’t equate his idea of self with his idea of Englishness but thus far lacks the tools to completely reinvent himself. This tension regarding identity explains much of Pym’s international search for meaning and for himself.

“It was not till next morning that he discovered she had been kissing him goodbye.”

Pym’s chastening experience with the baroness is a key part of his growth from a boy to a man. In her departure, she left him with an inability to truly trust women, which will carry through to his adult life. In addition, she imbued him with a cynicism and a sense of irony; his father, the consummate con man, was conned—and forced his beloved son to play a key role. The situation with the baroness hardens Pym to the world and shows him that even the best liars can fall for the lies of others.

“He didn’t leave a headstone or a coy wood cross for her but he had taken bearings on the spot, using the church tower, the dead willow tree and the windmill, and whenever he passed it by he’d send her a gruff mental greeting, which was as near as he had ever come to pondering on the afterlife.”

For men like Jack and Pym, a refusal to think about the afterlife is a necessary part of life. They can’t and won’t think too hard about what might happen after their deaths, lest they find themselves worrying that they might be judged for their actions. While they have their motivations and their causes, they know all too well that everyone in their business can provide a reasonable excuse under pressure. Like everything in their lives, these justifications are hollow. As a result, the prospect of a final, objective judgment is too terrifying to truly think about.

“He wanted to hide his worst thoughts in a deep hole and not have to show them to anybody ever until he died for England.”

Even though he’s still a young man, Tom is already thinking about his future—and his vision already involves him dying for England. This pessimistic, sacrificial patriotism seems to him inevitable. He sees Britain as too old and broken to imagine it as anything but the justification for a patriotic death. No one who truly invests in an idea of England, as Tom does, can envision the future as anything other than a brutal end.

“Pym did his best, though he knew even less about Axel’s sexuality than his own, except that whatever form it took, unlike Pym he was on terms with it.”

Jack pushes Pym to ask questions of other people that he hasn’t even thought to ask about himself. Part of the training regimen for young spies is to gather an awareness of identity that extends beyond most people’s comprehension, noticing small details and motivations that pass unseen to the general population. Jack prompts Pym to think about Axel’s sexuality, and in doing so, Pym realizes that he hasn’t really considered his own sexuality. The process of becoming a spy teaches these characters to scrutinize themselves as much as their targets.

“I sometimes think that’s why Magnus joined the Firm. As a hiding place. Just as he married me because he was too scared to risk it with Jemima.”

All Pym’s actions are a veil to hide his vulnerability. He joins the Firm because he’s expected to do so, not because he really wants to. Not joining the Firm would reveal something about himself that he doesn’t want to acknowledge—or want the world to see. Pym’s public persona is an elaborate creation, marrying women and taking jobs to divert attention from the vulnerable, authentic Pym hidden beneath.

“What is the difference, in morality, between the totally anarchic criminality of the artists, which is endemic in all fine creative minds, and the artistry of the criminal.”

Grant Lederer compares spies to criminals and artists and, in doing so, recognizes the elaborate skill of Pym’s actions. For decades, Pym has hidden his true loyalty from the exact people who depend on it most. He has created a public identity that everyone sees as authentic, successfully deceiving some of the world’s best spies to pursue his own agenda. In terms of "fine creative minds" (207), the nature of Pym’s lies reaches heights of artistry (and—given the nature of his betrayal—criminality) previously thought impossible. In a way, Lederer envies Pym’s transcendental artistic betrayal.

“As a final swiper he suggested that Grimmelshausen’s obsession with false names cast doubt upon his authorship.”

While studying German literature at the university, Pym’s schoolwork foreshadows his future duplicity. Grimmelshausen’s book provides Pym with the code he later uses to communicate with Axel; the book itself becomes a repository of “false names” for men who create entirely new identities with ease. Men like Axel and Pym can’t be trusted given their capacity to lie and trick everyone around them. The book that Axel gives Pym is the starting point for their shared obsession with false names and dubious authorship.

“As I hear her still, an endless, needling babble of destruction.”

Peggy’s voice and words resonate with Pym because they force him to confront a difficult truth. He has always known that his father treats women abusively and destructively. These women include his mother and Lippsie, people whom Pym truly loves or loved. However, he also loves his father. As Peggy describes what Rick did to her, Pym is forced to confront the “endless” number of women whom Rick has left in his wake. This “babble” is destructive because it breaks down Pym’s carefully constructed image of Rick. Peggy is dismantling Pym’s convenient ignorance regarding his abusive father.

“Can’t lose what you haven’t got. Can’t miss what you don’t care about. Can’t sell what isn’t yours.”

The characters operate in a collapsing, hollow British society that gives them no reason to be loyal. Sefton Boyd says as much, obliquely referencing Pym’s attitude toward loyalty—that he can’t lose what he doesn’t have. Pym can’t lose his loyalty because he was never truly loyal; he never cared about Britain and never felt that it was his own. The institutions of the British state are, to Pym, empty and meaningless. Therefore, his decision to betray his country is far less consequential than others deem it to be.

“Too lowly to be taken seriously by his brother officers, prevented by protocol from mixing with the Other Ranks, too poor to revel in the swagman’s restaurants and nightclubs.”

Pym has spent most of his life on the fringes of society. He has been on the cusp of different social groups and classes but never quite fit in with any of them. His con man father was variously very wealthy and very poor, so Pym often attended expensive schools but couldn’t pay his fees. He knew rich people and poor people but never felt any solidarity with either group because he was always an outsider, with too much experience of one group to fit into the other.

“Hell hath no fury like a deceived protector.”

The novel frames the relationship between an agent and a protector like a relationship. Axel jokes about this, suggesting that he, Pym, and Jack are in a complex relationship. Axel and Jack are fighting over Pym, who is caught in the middle. Just as men of the intelligence services are almost all cheating on their wives, often with the same women, agents and protectors are caught in a similar web of relationships and loyalty, betraying one another and switching sides for personal gratification more than anything. Jack is a deceived protector, going after Pym with the fury of a man who has lost his wife to a rival.

“In my lifetime I have witnessed the birth of the jet airplane and the atom bomb and the computer, and the demise of the British institution. We have nothing to clear away but ourselves.”

Since the end of World War II, British society has changed so much that it’s almost unrecognizable. The men who learned the intelligence trade in the war’s aftermath now operate in a society that has moved beyond their understanding. They’re men out of time, antiques in a modern world. As such, their only remaining duty is to retire themselves, either conventionally or unconventionally. In a sense, Pym’s actions are an unconventional retirement in which he departs the intelligence world on his own terms, refusing to bow to the pressures of a changed world.

“Though alas we could never really have your lovely war, even if that was what we were rehearsing for.”

The men who came of age in the aftermath of World War II lacked the great motivating narrative of the fight against the Nazis. The Cold War has a different, quieter, more paranoid tone; there aren’t great battles or moving armies, only the constant grind of betrayal and mistrust that wears those involved down until they’re haggard and broken. After 30 years in this business, Pym is alienated and detached. Unlike Jack, he didn’t have a great war to fight and to win, or any way to measure his achievements. Instead, there was an unending, ungratifying effort to stave off the terminal decline of Britain. Pym and his colleagues spent a lifetime rehearsing for a war that never came—and when it didn’t, they searched desperately for anything substantial in their lives. Pym found it through betrayal.

“Rick came to the bars and put a hand each side and his face between.”

After a life of running schemes and cons, Rick is trapped in both a physical and emotional prison. His lifestyle has trapped him and allowed him to convince himself that the next con will be the last, as it will provide everything he needs to finish on his terms. Seeing Rick trapped in the jail of his own making helps Pym realize that his life mirrors his father’s. He lies and deceives people, eventually trapping himself in a lifestyle from which he knows he can’t escape. Rick is trapped in one prison, separated by bars from his son, who’s trapped in a prison of his own.

“They sat in a tense, bare Irish pub that seethed with crimes the English had forgotten.”

For men like Pym and Jack, the past is a nostalgic place. What’s nostalgic for them, however, is traumatic for others. The crimes of the British Empire in Ireland, for example, are remembered very differently on either side of the Irish sea. However, these crimes are decidedly in the past. They belong to a different age, just like Pym and Jack. In their modern day, these crimes are tawdry decorations in an inauthentic pub, a commercial venture that uses nostalgia and trauma as a marketing device. The decorations create the semblance of an identity, just as the spies create identities for themselves to further their cause. Now, however, the only cause is making money.

“Just one more con, Pym kept saying to himself; one more con will see me right.”

By the novel’s end, Pym accepts that he has become his father. Like Rick, he convinces himself that he only needs to perform “one more con” (376) to resolve the chaos in his life. He has spent so long lying to so many people that the lies have become unmanageable. Just as Rick’s crimes eventually caught up with him, Pym’s lies become uncontrollable. Also like his father, however, he’s unwilling to abandon the chaos.