The Ipcress File made a big impact when it was published in 1962, partly because it coincided with the release of the film of Dr No. Critics tended to see Deighton’s book as a more realistic take on the world of espionage.
Re-reading it again recently I was struck by just how cryptic and complex it remains. It’s a playful and modernist take on spy fiction. This is reflected in the visual presentation of the book. The black and white photograph on the dust jacket of the first edition, a stark image of a revolver and a coffee cup, was something new in book design. The novel is subtitled “Secret File No. 1” and the prologue starts with what looks like a copy of a memo, summoning the narrator to the Minister’s office to explain the case to him.
The conceit that this is actually a secret document is continued with the use of appendices. Quite important information about major characters, that would be incorporated into the main text in a more conventional novel, is given in this way.
We never find out the narrator’s name. When someone hails him as “Harry” he tells us: “Now my name’s not Harry, but in this business it was hard to remember whether it ever had been.” He has several sets of false identity documents as “a spy’s insurance policy”. Nor do we ever find out the full name of the department he works for, WOOC (P). War Office something something (Provisional) is as near as we get.
There’s a certain irony in the fact that when the novel was filmed in 1965, it was perceived as a more downbeat alternative to Bond, despite being co-produced by Harry Saltzmann, one half of the Bond production team.
The book actually has some things in common with Fleming’s work, most specifically Moonraker. There is the authentic civil service atmosphere at the beginning and also the fact that it is the hero’s female assistant who discovers the crucial clue that cracks the case in both novels.
The film is justly remembered as one of the most gripping and believable of all espionage films, but it is quite different from the book. The book does have quite a lot of description of a changing London, although Deighton was to develop this further in Funeral in Berlin. There’s a sharp contrast between the “official” London of Whitehall and the War Office, and the location of the provisional unit in Charlotte Street, Fitzrovia (“one of those sleazy long streets in the district that would be Soho, if Soho had the strength to cross Oxford Street”).
Whereas the film mostly takes place in London (possibly for budget reasons), in the book our hero travels to Beirut, as well as to a Pacific atoll where a hydrogen bomb test is about to take place.
One of the most interesting changes from book to film is the character of Jay. The book gives a lot of information about his Polish origins and earlier career as a spy and peddler of information. He is rumoured to have been the figure behind the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Crucially, he has friends in very high places, as the phone call to the mysterious “Henry” reveals. He ends up working for the British. So that’s why we are told his codename has been changed to “Box Four” in the memo right at the beginning! You really do need to read this more than once, and pay attention while you are doing so.
The title of the novel is an acronym. IPCRESS stands for Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex with Stress. The treatment of the brainwashing theme is more realistic in the book than in the film. It is based on recognised techniques, such as disorientation and sleep deprivation. In the film, crucially made a few years further into the 1960s, it has become a psychedelic sound and light show.
What was behind the 1960s obsession with brainwashing? I suppose it was the idea that “altered states” could have a military as well as a hedonistic purpose. There were those crazy American ideas about putting LSD in the Moscow water supply, for example. I believe there was also a fear at the time that television advertising, then relatively new, was manipulating peoples’ minds in ways they were not aware of.
I think the first novel to deal with it was Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate in 1959. A Clockwork Orange, with its suggestion that the minds of criminals could be re-programmed to alter their behaviour, was published the same year as The Ipcress File. Many books and films used the brainwashing idea and the interest was still going strong in 1967, when the first episode of The Prisoner shared a certain feel and a couple of cast members with the film of The Ipcress File.
On a more personal note, it is wonderful what a little internet research can reveal these days. The first TV screening of The Ipcress File was in 1972, 28 May I think. That’s when I saw it for the first time and thought it was the best film I had ever seen. I vividly remember the preview clip, the land rover crashing through the factory door, and thinking this was something I had to see.
Also running on TV around the same time, was a series called Spy Trap. The BBC in their wisdom have wiped the tapes of this one, so it exists in memory only. It was actually very good, with Paul Daneman as the ex-navy officer head of a counter-intelligence department. The funny thing is, it was originally shown in the early evening slot across four days of the week. A spy soap opera! This was the cold war and spies were the thing, not the lives of people in east London. Perhaps these were the formative experiences that pointed me towards a lifelong interest in spy fiction.
The Good Reader 