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.
Symbols & Motifs
Rick’s Cabinet
A cabinet filled with papers, receipts, documents, and other items accumulated during a dishonest lifetime becomes Rick’s legacy for Pym. He tells his friends that, in the event of his death, everything they need to know about his business dealings is contained inside. Even throughout Rick’s trials and tribulations, as he loses cars, houses, and fortunes, he manages to hold onto this cabinet. The cabinet symbolizes an enduring idea of Rick; it’s the fundamental essence of the man that continues, even as he adopts new identities and characters. Whether Rick is in prison, running for Parliament, or embroiled in an insurance scam, his cabinet is always present. When Pym writes his letters to Tom and Jack, he takes care to point out that the cabinet is always present in his descriptions of Rick’s life. The cabinet is the throughline, the consistent part of Rick’s persona that can never be truly hidden or disguised. In a symbolic sense, the ever-present cabinet shows that the characters may adopt new identities and personas, but a fundamental part of them will always remain. For Rick, this fundamental identity is contained within the cabinet that reveals his debts and obligations.
Pym takes great interest in the cabinet. Not only does the cabinet feature in his numerous anecdotes and memories of his father, but he takes great care to track down the cabinet after his father’s death. He arranges for it to be sent to Devon and hauls it into the small bedroom in the lodging house where he plans to write his letters to Jack, Tom, and others. Pym is an aspiring novelist, so the cabinet’s symbolism isn’t lost on him. He wants to open it and read whatever is inside to better understand his father. To Pym, the cabinet symbolizes the father that he was never truly allowed to see. Pym has always known a different Rick from everyone else, so he’s curious about the kind of man that the documents inside the cabinet might reveal. The kind, caring father figure who appeared to Pym infrequently throughout his life differs substantially from the man who drove Dot to a mental condition or Lippsie to her death. The one time Pym comes close to getting inside the cabinet is when he finds Peggy Wentworth prying it open. She immediately tells Pym the truth about his father, revealing the ways that Rick abused and manipulated her. This is the truth hidden inside the cabinet, the truth that forces Pym to reckon with the reality of his father’s abusive nature.
Ultimately, however, the cabinet remains unopened. Pym had hoped that it would contain some kind of objective truth that would allow him to settle his anxieties regarding his father. However, the catharsis he achieves comes from looking to the future rather than the past. By the time he finishes writing his letters, Pym understands that whatever’s inside the cabinet is in the past. The cabinet’s contents are as inconsequential in the modern day as the man he recently buried. Instead, Pym looks to the future by writing to his son, Tom. Pym gives Tom enough information about himself and his father to discourage Tom from following a similar path. By not opening the cabinet, Pym symbolically accepts his father’s failures, consigning Rick and his cabinet to the past and allowing them to rest in peace. The debts, the obligations, and the traumas left behind are best buried with Rick. Pym, like Rick, is a flawed man. Rick, his cabinet, and Pym are symbolically put into the past.
Pym’s Writing
A Perfect Spy is narratively divided between events that happen in the present and Pym’s descriptions of the past. After disappearing, Pym hides out in a lodging house and begins to write letters to Jack, Tom, and other people. These letters examine his past and become half the narrative. As such, they have an important symbolic meaning, as does the act of writing itself. Pym’s writing symbolizes his desire to connect with the world around him. He’s approaching the end of his life and has a clear plan for how he believes his life will end. Before this ending, the letters allow him to reach out to the people most important to him. He writes to Jack, the man whose recruitment and training helped turn him into the spy and person he came to be. He writes to his son, Tom, a young man with his future ahead of him, whom he desperately hopes won’t follow in the footsteps of his father or grandfather. While writing in the present, Pym’s letters look to the past and the future, symbolically taking in everything to set the record straight before his departure from the world. Just as symbolically important as the recipients of his letters are those to whom he doesn’t write. Pym writes nothing to Mary, barely addressing her in the narrative of his life. Her absence symbolically demonstrates that Mary never truly understood Pym, only the carefully constructed public version of Pym that he showed the world. Even after his death, he remains unknowable to her.
In addition, Pym’s writing symbolically demonstrates control. In a world where information of any sort is in high demand, in which the wrong words can lead to torture and death, Pym shows his fearlessness by writing everything down. He doesn’t shy away from the truth, even when it implicates him in a crime or a betrayal. He admits to providing information leading to Axel’s arrest, for example, and often confesses to lies and affairs that he conducted throughout his life. This blunt truthfulness is a symbolic rebuke of a life spent lying, hiding, and obscuring the truth from the world. Pym’s writing is filled with so much information and insight that it has the power to bring down the entire British intelligence apparatus overnight. For one man to have all this power and to exercise this power in an unassuming, quiet room in a lodging house in a small town in Devon illustrates the fragility of the entire institution. By writing out the truth, Pym is asserting his dominance and control over Britain’s fragile institutions.
The act of writing is symbolically important too. Pym writes the letters in a burst of energy over several days. At various points during this process, Pym exhausts himself. He’s drenched in sweat and filled with paranoia; the act of putting words on paper is all-consuming, sapping his energy and leaving him cold, shivering, and afraid. However, the act of writing is empowering too, as Pym takes pleasure in finally telling the truth after a lifetime of telling lies. In this sense, the act of writing is a form of confession. Pym is sharing his secrets with the world and unburdening himself of the responsibility of knowledge. Pym takes back control of his life by banishing his lies with (his version of) the truth. He exhaustingly sets the agenda straight, delivering one final confession before ending his life on his terms. His defiant, individualistic personality shines through one last time before he departs from the world. By writing everything down, Pym goes against every instinct and every piece of training that served him during his career as a spy. While he might have been a spy once, his act of writing symbolically reproaches his past and illustrates his desire for a truthful world.
Poppies
After their first meeting in Graz, Axel steps out of their meeting place with Pym and finds a bed of poppies. He picks two flowers, handing them both to Pym as a symbolic gesture. Pym keeps these flowers for the rest of his life. When Jack searches Pym’s house in Vienna, he finds the two original poppies stored with the equipment that Pym was using to collect and send information to the other side. Jack doesn’t understand the flowers’ significance, which hints at their important symbolic role in the novel. The poppies contain a private symbolism that only Pym and Axel understand in earnest. Their relationship is unique, crossing the established boundaries of east and west, the lines along which the Cold War is drawn. Axel and Pym have a close friendship that transcends these traditional boundaries and operates beyond the parameters of loyalty and patriotism that motivate most other characters. They’re unique and, as such, their private motivations embody a private symbology. The poppies function as codewords between spies, a way of demonstrating their relationship in a way that seems impenetrable and unknowable to anyone else. Jack thinks the poppies may refer to a source or a woman; he never guesses that they signify an emotional reunion between two spies for whom friendship transcends country loyalties.
In addition to symbolizing the friendship between Axel and Pym, the poppies represent a key difference between the public and private versions of Pym. To most people, Pym is an unassuming bureaucrat. He’s very good at his job because he is unsentimental and unemotional. He’s a black hole of interest, deflecting suspicion simply by doing everything well and playing the role expected of him. The poppies symbolize a hidden sentimentality. Pym keeps the flowers for years, even though they have no function outside their sentimental value. They mean something to him, so he treasures them for years. Pym hides his sentimental side from the world, but it clearly exists. By hiding his sentimentality, Pym demonstrates his skill as a spy. He creates identities and disguises that fool even his friends, to the extent that his wife Mary and his mentor Jack are shocked by the sentimental Pym that he has hidden from the world. The poppies symbolize the skill with which Pym hid his true self, as well as the sentimental side of his character, which provides important motivation for his betrayal. His sentimentality toward Axel means more to him than his marriage, his friendships, or his country.
Beyond this friendship, the poppies have a social symbolism. After World War I, the poppy became a symbol to honor those who died during the war—the lives lost in the brutality between warring nations. Axel and Pym talk vaguely about their ambitions; they want to move beyond the Cold War and dismantle the barriers between east and west. Their ambition is to consign war to the past, even if they never come close to achieving such a lofty goal. The poppy feeds into this symbolic ambition. By picking and sharing the poppies with Pym, Axel symbolically hinted at a larger, more altruistic goal for their relationship than mere friendship. That Pym kept the flowers shows his commitment to keep working toward this goal as well as the value he places in his friendship with Axel.
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By John le Carré
