The return of the spy thriller reflects our times

Notwithstanding the current, real world corporate spy drama taking place in headlines across the world, the genre of spy stories has been making a comeback in fiction as well. The master spy George Smiley, created by John Le Carré, is coming back in ‘The Taper Man’ which is written by Le Carre’s son Nick Harkaway. In this mix, there is also the very public search for the new James Bond actor that is creating a storm in interested circles.
From around the world, spy novels are seeing a resurgence. Viet Thanh Nguyen's ‘The Sympathizer’ and ‘A Map of Betrayal’ by Ha Jin, set in Vietnam and China respectively, show the popularity of the genre, with both these novels raking more than a million copies from their original and translated editions.
The reasons for the popularity of this traditional genre are not far to find. In a world that is steeped in conspiracy theories, digital surveillance and alien invasions, the good old people-centric spying is too good a story to miss.
Spying itself is as old as time. The famous text of the Chinese Sun Tzu, ‘The Art of War’, written around the 5th century BCE, has a whole chapter on the uses of spying, and the categories of spies. The Indian adviser Kautilya, in his ‘Arthashastra’, advocated spying as a central pillar of statecraft.
By the first world war, spying was seen to be central to waging and winning a war and there have been hundreds of stories of men and women who penetrated enemy lines to gain vital information.
The cold war only elevated interest in the spy tale. Whether through novels or films, spies on both sides of the iron curtain were depicted as traitors or nationalists, depending on the side they were on.
By the 21st century, spying became more digitalised and the human factor seemed to have disappeared, making the story feel less interesting. Also, the cold war thawed and new enemies were yet to emerge.
Today, all this is history. We are back to old school rivalries, in fact, with even higher stakes. The contemporary spy thriller is interesting because it operates in a world where the enemy is not always a bald-headed villain in a huge mansion. Today, the fight is with invisible forces and networks that are as circular as they are dense. The web of layers that need to be combed through makes the modern spy tale riveting. Often, this is complicated by the fact that real stories seem more fictional than the ones we read.
Popular culture has contributed much towards popularising this genre. Older stories are now being retold using modern, racy styles of storytelling and lending 50-year old tales with a modern twist. The contemporary ‘Day of the Jackal’, for example, has the audience almost rooting for the villain, as he is pitched as a flawed person who deserves our attention, if not sympathy.
It is this complex world of ours that spy fiction today is reflecting. According to the BBC, “With all their murky goings on, spy dramas could be resonating with viewers as they reflect on the unpredictable and unstable world we live in now; where truth is obscured by disinformation and where trust in authorities and other establishments is at an all-time low”.
The return of spy fiction is not just a nostalgic revival of the cold war stories. Its popularity reflects our world in which surveillance, geopolitical rivalry and manipulation have become common. The spy thriller has returned because the world itself seems to resemble the uncertain, morally ambiguous territory that le Carré so perceptively described.