The spy novel is silly, when it isn’t claustrophobic; urgent, but with an urgency severed from any link to the various impending geopolitical alarms — German invasion, Soviet infiltration, Chinese technological advancement, terrorist havoc — that the genre’s history continually sounds. There is something in the condition of existence in these novels, the presuppositions of their world, in other words, that seems, finally, to be at once illness and cure.

American spies are naïfs or pallid sidekicks

The mole offers the spy story its mise en abyme: their every act is at once real and false, an embodied double negative; they threaten at every moment to double or triple themselves

Even the spy’s sexiness is bathetic

The agency may in fact be the villain in most postwar spy stories: it tries to eliminate Jason Bourne, it traduces its employees like Milo Weaver or David Morgan