A Perfect Spy

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-10

Chapters 11-14

Chapters 15-18

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Themes

Changing Identities

The world portrayed in A Perfect Spy is fraught with changing identities. The spies, agents, defectors, and con men excel at lying about their names, histories, and intentions, so much so that identity is never fixed for long. These lies shape the characters themselves, and they’re never truly sure who they are and what they want. For most characters, these changing identities result in dissatisfaction. In the espionage world, however, these changing identities are an opportunity too. Pym is the best demonstration of the close tie between alienation, changing identities, and espionage. For his entire life, he has shown the world a calculated and ever-changing identity. He lies often, telling people what he wants them to hear. His family backstory changes depending on his audience, so his teachers, friends, and employers all hear a different version of his father Rick’s life story. Pym lies about his past and, in doing so, changes his identity to suit his environment. He learned this from his father, copying Rick’s charismatic con-artistry and applying it to the world of intelligence. In addition, Pym uses his changing identities to mask his vulnerabilities. He shows a version of his identity to the world to escape judgment. If no one knows the true Pym, he hopes, then no one can judge him as he judges them. Pym’s ability to change identities masks the vulnerable self underneath, becoming a deflection and a coping device to hide his real self from the world.

Because of Pym’s changing identities, the other characters never truly know him. His disappearance is the catalyst for the novel’s plot, as his failure to return from his father’s funeral ignites a race against time for Mary and Jack to find him before the Czechoslovakians do. The physical search for Pym mirrors the search for his real identity: Jack, Mary, and Axel realize that Pym’s ever-changing, ever-evolving persona has hidden his true character from the world. He’s a double agent gone rogue, to everyone’s surprise. Jack’s pursuit of Pym is an attempt to understand the identity buried deep beneath the decades of lies and distractions that Magnus Pym has left scattered across the globe. In trying to better understand Pym’s true identity, Jack comes to better understand himself. By chasing Pym across the changing identities of the past, Jack must confront his own identity and his failure. Jack has always regarded himself as an intelligent man and a good judge of character. Pym’s actions, however, make him realize that he has failed to understand Pym for many years. This realization shocks Jack and foreshadows his retirement from the world of espionage. Through his obscured identity, Pym changes the identities of others.

In a storytelling sense, one of Pym’s identities is narrator. Half the novel is composed of Pym’s letters to the important people in his life and, in these letters, he isn’t always a reliable narrator. Pym is a natural liar, so his narration is subjective and potentially dishonest. The contrast between the objective present day and the subjective past creates a juxtaposition between Pym as the world sees him and Pym as he sees himself. The version of Pym that emerges from his narration is the final identity, the one that Pym wishes to leave behind through his letters. Even in his final hours, Pym is gently manipulative. He’s so adept and so invested in changing identities that his final act is to create one last version of Pym to further obscure any attempt to understand him.

Changing Loyalties

Magnus Pym’s actions raise questions about the fundamental meaning of loyalty. Although a British spy, Pym spends years passing information to Czechoslovakian communists because he’s disillusioned with his own country and unsure where his loyalties lie. Eventually, however, he loses his loyalty to this arrangement and goes into hiding. By the novel’s end, he’s loyal to no one. For men like Pym, traditional ideas of loyalty are empty and meaningless: Patriotism, morality, and institutions such as marriage are disposable and fickle. Pym is the logical extension of this sentiment, showing how loyalty itself doesn’t exist in the world. Loyalty is a sham, for example, when spies entrusted with protecting their countries can’t stop cheating on their wives. These men can’t be loyal to a spouse, yet they’re expected to be loyal to their country. Pym simply goes one step further. He abandons the traditional loyalty to his country, having become disillusioned with the idea of respecting patriotism at all. The geographical happenstance of his birth is ultimately meaningless in a world where ideas and ideologies are so much more interesting. Pym is an egalitarian with socialist sympathies; to him, the British capitalist state has done nothing to earn his loyalty. Loyalty is demanded of him, so he deliberately reveals it to be an absurd, hollow concept. For years, Pym pretends to be a patriot, while his true actions reveal his complete disregard for loyalty. After a lifetime of lies, grand ideas like patriotism and morality are as devoid of meaning as the expectation of marital fidelity.

Most tellingly, Pym is far from alone. Men like Jack are heralded as legends in the world of espionage. Every younger spy looks up to Jack; even the American and Czech agents respect him. However, Jack isn’t a loyal man. He may proclaim to be loyal to his country, but he’s more invested in his personal relationships than anything else. He has numerous affairs and has no problem lying directly to people like Mary or Tom, who respect him. His loyalty to them is unilateral and self-serving. His loyalty to Pym is deeper but still self-serving, given how Pym’s actions reflect on Jack, who reasons that if a legend of British espionage has such changeable loyalty, the men who work under him need not be any better. Jack’s inability to demonstrate loyalty as anything other than a personal validation reveals the rot at the heart of the institution. The institution itself is broken and unworthy of loyalty, proving Pym right. Loyalty, in the world of espionage, is a mirage used to disguise self-interest.

In a world with shifting, dubious loyalties, Axel and Pym have the only enduring bond. The friendship that begins in a cheap boardinghouse in Bern becomes a point of reference for two people sinking deeper into the murky world of espionage. Axel and Pym have an enduring respect, so much so that each is willing to risk his life for the other. They both feed information across the Cold War divide, willingly flaunting their loyalty to their country to show their loyalty for one another. However, this enduring example of loyalty is itself fraught with betrayal. Pym is the man responsible for Axel’s original arrest in Bern, as Pym is willing to sacrifice his friend for advancement in the eyes of his mentor, Jack. Likewise, Axel’s careful manipulation of Pym demonstrates the self-serving nature of his loyalty. Pym never truly trusts Axel, even when he’s risking his life on Axel’s behalf. He fears that Axel’s friendship with him at that point may be revenge for Pym’s original betrayal, so he eventually abandons Axel, just as he abandons Mary, Jack, and his country. In a novel built on changing loyalties, even the most enduring friendship is never truly secure.

Hollow Lives

A Perfect Spy is set during the Cold War. A generational divide exists between the older characters who fought in World War II, such as Jack and Axel, and the younger characters who came of age in the postwar world. Men like Jack fought and won their war, while Pym and his peers lack grand motivation on a similar scale. As such, Jack and his generation benefit from a validating narrative that justifies their actions. They can point to their victory in World War II and take pleasure in their achievements. The Cold War offers no such opportunity for validation. In the murky, obscure world of postwar espionage, moral lines aren’t as distinct, and the conditions for victory aren’t as clear. Pym was raised in postwar Britain and came to see his country as a continuation of the fascist states defeated in World War II. Lippsie is traumatized by her family’s suffering during the Holocaust, for example, and Pym watches British people sneer at her reaction and downplay the genocide of the Jewish people. The older he gets, the more he realizes that the victory of Jack’s generation was meaningless if it served only to establish a new baseline of inequality and immorality. Pym comes to view the British state as a hollowed out, vapid institution unworthy of his loyalty or respect. The British people, he believes, are living hollow lives in service of this deplorable state. He chooses to betray his country because in a postwar world, Britain isn’t worth fighting for.

Britain’s decline is a recurring idea throughout the novel. Each institution, whether it’s an intelligence service or a government body, is hollowed out and ineffective. Decades of material decline have taken a toll on the British state, rendering it so ineffective that Pym and Axel spend years manipulating its once-proud intelligence service. In contrast, the US is on the rise. It uses modern technology in place of alienated, unreliable humans. Based on data, a computer pinpoints Pym as a potential traitor—an accusation rejected by the British and, most fervently, by Jack. Americans like Grant Lederer have the same fervor and patriotism that men like Jack once did. They truly believe in their cause, while the British spies are a mess of anxieties and conflictions. The British are all engaged in extramarital affairs, creeping into the vestiges of middle age, and complaining about the overreaching bureaucracy that has rendered their service ineffectual, while still clinging to their misplaced belief in one another. With their empire in decline and their country faltering, the British characters look nostalgically to the past because the present has nothing more of interest to them. Rather than fighting for a moral cause, they’re operating via muscle memory, negotiating the terms of their exit from the world stage as they come to terms with their national decline. They’re hollow men in service of a hollowed-out country.

Pym’s death by suicide occurs in this context. He embodies Britain, a formerly powerful man who has lost his way ideologically and can no longer reckon with the lies and trauma of his past. He wants to set a narrative and control his destiny rather than sink into perpetual, immiserating decay. Pym wants to be what Britain isn’t: in control of his destiny and working toward a cause that truly motivates him. His death by suicide is an act of defiance, the behavior of a man asserting agency over his life in a way that his country no longer can.