The Ipcress File

An unnamed narrator is transferred to a small intelligence unit and assigned to recover a missing biochemist, one of several scientists who have disappeared and in some cases returned unable to work.

The investigation moves between Lebanon, a Pacific atoll and a great deal of London office politics, and the narrator spends as much time on expense claims as on fieldwork.

A spy novel in which the protagonist's main opponent is his own department's accounts procedure.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The narrator is from Burnley, grammar-school educated, and permanently conscious that his colleagues are not. The novel's running subject is an intelligence service staffed by a class that does not include him.

Deighton's innovation was to make the insubordinate working-class professional the hero at a moment when the genre's protagonists were uniformly gentlemen.

Requisitions, security clearances, interdepartmental rivalry and expenses are described at length and with obvious relish.

The administrative comedy is genuine and is also doing serious work: the novel's argument is that intelligence is a civil service function and behaves like one. Deighton had worked in advertising and as an illustrator before writing, and the eye for institutional absurdity is plainly drawn from somewhere real.

The narration is dry, sardonic, digressive and frequently interrupts itself to explain something tangential.

It is the book's principal pleasure and is the element most clearly descended into later British spy fiction. The narrator is funny in a way le Carré's characters are not permitted to be.

The plot is deliberately hard to follow, with information withheld, chronology disrupted and several sequences that only make sense retrospectively.

Deighton has acknowledged the opacity. Readers frequently report finishing without being certain what happened, and the novel is not much interested in resolving that. The confusion is also thematically defensible, since a narrator inside a compartmented organisation would genuinely not know how the pieces fit together.

The book includes footnotes, appendices and a fictional government document, which supply background the narrative withholds.

The apparatus is part of the construction rather than supplementary, and readers who skip it will understand less of the plot than the ones who do not. Deighton continued the practice across his later books, and the apparatus became one of the recognisable features of his work.

The IPCRESS material — induction of psychoneuroses by conditioned reflex under stress — draws on contemporary Cold War anxieties about conditioning.

It is handled with less confidence than in The Manchurian Candidate and is correspondingly more plausible, since Deighton is vaguer about what is actually possible.

The narrator cooks, discusses recipes and notices restaurants, which was unusual in the genre and has become one of Deighton's signatures.

The domestic detail humanises a character the novel otherwise keeps deliberately opaque, and it serves the class argument by establishing competence outside the office.

Both published debut spy novels within a year of each other and both rejected Fleming's model, but by different routes: le Carré through moral seriousness and Deighton through class and comedy.

The pairing defines British spy fiction of the period, and Deighton is consistently the more underrated of the two.

The 1965 adaptation gave the narrator a name, Harry Palmer, and Michael Caine's performance has defined the character publicly.

The novel's narrator remains unnamed and is considerably more abrasive, and the film simplifies the plot substantially, which most viewers count as an improvement. The film also invented the spectacles that became the character's visual signature, and which have no basis in the novel at all.

Three further novels follow the same narrator, and Deighton later wrote a much longer series of trilogies beginning with Berlin Game.

The later work is more conventionally plotted and more emotionally serious; this is the fastest and funniest of his books. Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain follow, and both were also filmed with Caine, which has kept the sequence unusually visible.

Readers who want spy fiction with a sense of humour and a class argument, and who do not need to follow every plot development.

It is short and consistently entertaining. Readers who found le Carré airless frequently find Deighton the more enjoyable of the two.