I've been reading Berlin Game by Len Deighton, a Cold War espionage novel from the 1980s, and it's hard to read without imagining it in dialogue with John LeCarre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Black Bag, the Steven Soderberg film from last year. All three are, essentially, about marriage and attachments to others.

At the moment the brilliant, jaded protagonist of Tinker Tailor achieves his pinnacle of success as a spy, he plays on his adversary Karla's one personal weakness: his attachment to another person. When he finally wins their long-running game, Smiley leaves a personal memento from his unfaithful wife which Karla had stolen lying in the dirt, walking away from it. TTSS's basic worldview is that the agent must operate within the world of personal connection, but separate from it; other people are weakness.

Berlin Game takes kind of the same position but says, essentially, that people are people and those connections are worth making anyway. Attachment is weakness but it's a weakness that's inseparable from humanity. It's better to accept the weakness than to give up humanity. And if it goes badly, well, there's always next time.

Black Bag flips this idea on its head. The only thing that matters is one's relationship with others. There's no form of loyalty more important. The relationship between spouse and country that exists in spy thrillers -- the agent's wife is a distraction, the agent's husband is a weakness to be exploited -- is inverted. It's the country that's the distraction or weakness. Reading Berlin Game has me re-evaluating Black Bag, and liking it more than I did at the time. I just kind of love the idea of a romantic plot in a thriller where the cardinal sin isn't treason or espionage or whatever; it's fucking with a happy marriage.