I vastly prefer George Smiley to James Bond when it comes to spy-vs-spy fiction (though perhaps Mad Magazine's take on that genre is the best of all). Bond stories consist mostly of one-dimensional heroes and villains and their empty-headed sidekicks, predictably shoehorned into some Disney-style morality play, all designed to improve the public image of the CIA and the MI5/6 (both of whom were very upset about Le Carre's take on the Cold War, and basically seem to have promoted Fleming as an antidote).
Usually, when people these days want an unambigous good-guys-vs-bad-guys storyline, they have to go back to WWII and the almost-universally despised Nazi regime. This is because there's a lot of uncertainly about who the 'good guys' were in the Cold War, or even if there were any. The Berlin airlift looks good for the West, but the effort to perpetuate French colonialism in Vietnam, not so much. There are at least a dozen similar examples on both sides, from eastern Europe (USSR not looking so good) to Africa and South/Central America (lots of bad behavior by the 'pro-democracy West').
John Le Carre famously portrayed the conflict as two giant gear wheels grinding against each other and destroying the lives of people unfortunate enough to get caught in the middle, and his doubtful self-questioning protagonist, George Smiley, though obviously devoted to the West, carries that theme well. Le Carre's "A Perfect Spy" and "The Russia House" are also some of his best works, with similar themes and central characters.
> Bond stories consist mostly of one-dimensional heroes and villains and their empty-headed sidekicks, predictably shoehorned into some Disney-style morality play...
Sounds like you've seen the Bond movies. Ian Fleming wrote the books. The relationship between those often amounts to "the movie used the book's title, and the name of the book's protagonist".
Yeah even my trashy-genre-fic loving friend who's read all or nearly all the novels says only a couple are OK, and IIRC he said only one was really decent enough that he'd recommend it to others, versus the films, of which he likes a bunch. And he likes some bad novels (as he'll readily acknowledge) and plenty of older "classic" genre fic, plus some not-so-trashy British classics (Austen, Dickens, et c), so it's not a recency bias, or difficulty with the settings, topics, author's culture, or writing style.
Seems the film-makers largely agreed that it wasn't worth trying to preserve much from the books.
You’re the first person I have heard that from. We’re there any plots in particular that you thought were worse (barring man with the golden gun as that was contrived and I am not sure if Fleming even truly finished it before his death)?
Sadly, the reader probably figures out "Moonraker" within a few chapters.
In Fleming's "Goldfinger", Goldfinger is actually trying to steal the gold from Fort Knox. It was much more realistic to have him instead trying to destroy the gold to increase scarcity.
Say what you want about the film "Live and Let Die" but reading Fleming trying to write "jive" was just embarrassing.
The one I remember best was "The Spy Who Loved Me", where the plot of the novel is about a woman in a cabin or something and the relation to the movie is... Zero.
But it wasn't the plots that I thought were worse, but the writing itself.
Yes, it's the best spy series together with the two BBC le Carré series.
Le bureau des légendes is also similar to these three and just slightly worse IMO, and that mostly because of the weaker final season and an accumulation of implausibilities roughly starting in the middle (more series have that than not, sigh). But, for the most part, flawless acting.
The Night Manager is cool, too, with a very satisfying ending.
The Little Drummer Girl is also good, though there is some... uncommon? psychological stuff going on in the book that creaks even more in the series.
I prefer Le Carre also, but probably more because Le Carre does grapple with there being no true higher morale ground between two competing sides and the realism of the characters. Bond is more of a fantasy where characters in the Smiley novel are more "normal." Bond always has the Bond girl. Smiley has a rather messy marriage even with a double agent having an affair with his wife. Smiley is not attractive or slim, he is overweight, wears glasses, and such.
I've read one of each and the Le Carre novel felt more or less as it could have been written today. The Bond story did not, even if I discount that it contained a hand-by-hand narration of a game of bridge.
This is because there's a lot of uncertainly about who the 'good guys' were in the Cold War, or even if there were any.
Ends don't justify the means and there were very bad means in both sides. Probably I shouldn't be using past tense either. When there is an existencial threat to a whole country's way of living, I don't think you will find many nice guys in the game, more like those giant wheels.
But I have no uncertainty over who are the very bad guys now and then. At all.
This misses the point of the books. The question isn't whether the Soviets are morally equivalent to the west; it's whether foreign intelligence services were anything more than state-sponsored organized crime syndicates.
I wasn't talking about any book, that I haven't read anyway, just making a distinction, nitpicking if you prefer it that way, about a specific paragraph.
In it, photochemsyn states that you don't know who the good guys were, citing different episodes of the cold war, comparing it to WW2, somehow suggesting that there's a difference because Hitler was clearly bad.
But that's not how I see it. The "good guys" side of WW2 involved the URSS (and only because they were attacked, after breaking Mólotov-Ribbentrop) and at a least morally ambiguous measures like bombing civilians in Germany and Japan. So neither in the goals nor in the means I see so big of a difference.
The point of the comment is that Fleming provided a nicer narrative than Le Carré so it was prefered for political reasons.
Fleming, in the article, pretty much says that he doesn't care much about politics, that he wrote for his own pleasure and the readers'. Saying that spy agencies promoted Fleming's work is unsubstantiated. I've seem weirder, like the CIA supporting abstract expresionists, but anyway it seems more likely that Fleming was successful just because it was entertaining. Le Carré was also very successful, so no need to create a war there.
This point is unrelated to the one I made. But the preceding commenter didn't make up the fact that le Carré drew flak from the British IC; that's one of the most often-told stories about him.
For instance (first thing off the SERP, didn't dig deeper):
Not totally unfamilliar, I've probably seen some movie based on his books... I remember hearing about his troubles, maybe when he passed away.
BTW, I wouldn't need to read Tarantino's book. I watched the original sources at that time, and we had Bond in the same bag as Wang Yu, Trinidad or Bruce Lee, even if we were teens.
So I totally believe that Le Carré had a bad time, but Fleming wasn't really in the same genre to function as an antidote.
Oh, I agree that they aren't antidotes to each other. But: the moral dilemma in le Carré's work is nowhere nearly as simple as you make it out to be, and it's interesting to hear Tarantino say which movies he stole things from, and why he paid so much attention to them, and which 9 movies those movies drew from. It's a fun read.
> But I have no uncertainty over who are the very bad guys now and then. At all.
Then you don't like questionning your own side or have never talked to an actual person who lived in East Germany or in USSR.
Most of the Americans I have talked to have a very flat and somewhat caricatural view of the eastern block and few are as knowledgeable as they should regarding what the CIA did abroad. As usual, there are nuances.
To be honest, as an European with a fairly unsympathetic view of the USA, the Cold War is very much a conflict between terrible and terrible.
> Then you don't like questionning your own side or have never talked to an actual person who lived in East Germany or in USSR.
I lived beyond the iron curtain my first 14 years. I remember someone coming from "the west" and bringing me ... a small bag of candy, chewing gum and crap like that.
I rationed myself to one a day and made it last 2 months because it was stuff I had never seen before and it was all much better than whatever locally passed as candy for a 10 year old.
I could also tell you about my parents discretely asking me if i told any jokes about the current regime at school etc.
You're wrong, I'm not American. I dated an actual person that lived in the USSR. She was somehow conflicted, but talked in no uncertain terms about the soviet boot.
Also you're wrong. I question everything. Of course, you don't need to like my answers. But it doesn't help that you take for granted things that you have no idea about me.
"all designed to improve the public image of the CIA and the MI5/6 (both of whom were very upset about Le Carre's take on the Cold War, and basically seem to have promoted Fleming as an antidote)."
Can you substantiate this claim? Are there actual sources that you can quote that the CIA/MI-5/6 did this?
> "The agency’s director at the time, Allen Dulles, loved the Bond novels. Despite the derision most agents held for the series, Moran notes that he had a signed copy of each and every novel. Dulles and Fleming struck up a relationship that at times seemed mutually beneficial. Dulles peppered his public remarks with references to Bond, while Fleming dropped positive mentions of Dulles into the mouths of his characters."
Given the climate of the era, anti-communist blacklisting in Hollywood and so on, it seems fairly obvious that the Bond movies were given a clandestine stamp of approval.
I can admit I have not read Le Carre. But I have seen some movies and series, and I find them strange. It is implied the stakes are very, very high, but never is explained what exactly is at stake. Very puzzling.
>It is implied the stakes are very, very high, but never is explained what exactly is at stake. Very puzzling.
Is it rude of me to ask if you were born after about 1972 (so less than about 17 at the time the wall came down and the Cold War ended)?
Le Carre's books, even the newer ones, are deeply embedded in a grand battle to the death between superpowers. He didn't bother to explain that in his books because at the time he was writing them his readers (and most of his original film audiences) understood that context and took it for granted. By about the age of 17, most people in those days had a very clear understanding of the stakes involved in conflict or war between super powers, including for example the Cuban Missile crisis when everyone in the world understood that tens of millions of people could be killed in the next 12 hours or so (if you're not personally familiar with the era, the movie Thirteen Days starring Kevin Costner is a powerful and engaging view into what was perhaps the height of the Cold War experience).
Part of the point of le Carré is that the stakes aren't clear, and whatever they are, they're often not worth the shoddy business the Circus constantly involves itself in. The Cold War is a looming cataclysm, of course, but these fucking spies are just running around immiserating people in the (probably ill-founded) hopes that they're making the world in any way better, when really all they're doing is picking which organized crime family gets to run the heroin business in Laos.
The work Smiley does might be incredibly important, or it might not be. He himself grapples with that ambiguity (and with his oscillating affiliation with the Circus), which is part of what drives the narrative.
So the answer to your question here is basically like asking "who's the murderer" in an Agatha Christie book.
I'd consider James Bond to lie more toward the genre of "action" rather than "thriller."
An action story has three obligatory elements:
- a hero (James Bond)
- a victim (humanity, or maybe a damsel)
- a villain (rotating)
This sounds childishly simple, and it is. But it's also very easy for authors of thrillers to forget the triangle because it's not something you even notice in a well-crafted action story. But all three need to be fleshed out to the extent that the audience cares about them.
The difference between an action story and a thriller is that in a thriller, the victim and hero are the same character. For example, Stephen King's Misery is a thriller because the hero is the victim. Action stories often involve the hero's facing death, but it's done to save the victim.
Something else that's easy to forget is the human value at stake in an action story: life and death. James Bond is always on the edge of being killed, even when in extracurricular persuits. If Bond doesn't succeed, the victim is toast, and the stranger that death is, the better. At the end of the story, there's no doubt which way it went.
This is why good action stories are page-turners, or as Fleming writes:
> "You have to get the reader to turn over the page."
Humans are hardwired to pay attention when death is a possible outcome. That's why rubbernecking is a thing even though people complain about it. It's also one reason cited for the popularity of NASCAR. Death can come at any time even though the action is quite repetitive.
More than that, the scenes in an action story tend to turn on life and death. That's one place where action story authors can get into trouble: writing too many scenes that turn on a value other than life-death, or don't turn on anything. It's shockingly easy to write scenes that offer nothing more than information. One or two of them is all it takes for the reader to yawn and quit.
Not sure I agree with this taxonomy. Remember, the genre ‘thriller’ has a different meaning when applied to written fiction, as opposed to movies.
As Eddie Izzard once memorably pointed out, you get a lot of car chases in movies; very few car chases in books though.
So in movies we see ‘action’ emerge as a distinct genre, with ‘thriller’ left for more Hitchcockian psychological excitement (and then Michael Jackson comes along and confuses everyone by writing a song about horror movies and calling it ‘Thriller’).
But meanwhile in novel-land, spy stories (and detective stories) were always ‘thrillers’ - although maybe that does conjure more Len Deighton or Le Carré than Fleming… Still, from ‘thrillers’ we also get ‘techno thrillers’ which in some ways also build off Bond-like action elements.
I suppose there is the other pulp-ish fiction category of ‘adventure’, which you could also shelve Bond under, alongside war stories and explorers and space captains.
> As Eddie Izzard once memorably pointed out, you get a lot of car chases in movies; very few car chases in books though.
> So in movies we see ‘action’ emerge as a distinct genre, with ‘thriller’ left for more Hitchcockian psychological excitement
I would say that e.g. The Da Vinci Code is written with pacing that would make me characterize it as a "thriller". There's no psychological excitement going on there.
I don't think it's true that you don't see car chases, or their equivalent, in books.
You can practically see the action movie that was playing in Dan Brown's head.
It's a profoundly idiotic movie, and if anything Hollywood probably improved on it, but still. Brown's style is cinematic, or at least cinematic-aspirant.
It's a profoundly idiotic book. But the pacing achieves its goals. You're not bored while you're reading it.
What people get out of reading The Da Vinci Code, or other books in that style, is the same thing they get out of watching thriller movies. So I think it makes sense to call the book a thriller.
> Brown's style is cinematic, or at least cinematic-aspirant.
This is an interesting comment. I didn't get that vibe from Dan Brown. But Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart struck me, while I was reading it, as an effort to put a movie into book form. I was completely unsurprised to later learn he'd shopped out the movie rights.
> in novel-land, spy stories (and detective stories) were _always_ ‘thrillers’
I do not agree with regard to detective stories, because the thriller aspect varies a lot from story to story. There are many examples where the focus is primarily on the who-done-it aspect: the detective arrives at a crime scene and demonstrates his superior ability of deduction.
My remark was targeting the "always" with regard to detective stories. Of course, I would have no objections if you only claim that detective thrillers are always thrillers.
A more interesting question is what narrative principles are at work when a detective thrillers leans more towards the "whodunnit" side in contrast to when it leans more towards the thriller side of the spectrum. For example, a classic narrative strategy of the "whodunnit" story is further murders during an ongoing investigation, with the victim being the respective current prime suspect. This thriller element increases the urgency of the investigation (thriller aspect) and it at the same time is meant to impress and confront the reader with the challange that the hitherto closest explanation of the murders needs to be replaced by something more sophisticated ("whodunnit" aspect).
I was disappointed when I read the Bond books - they seemed to have no charm at all. I think it was the Italian producer (Albert Broccoli) who must have made the initial films worth bothering with.
My spy hero is Bernard Sampson from the Len Deighton Trilogies - starting with Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match. He talks about how experienced spies are like frightened old women and avoid risks and it's only the noobs who charge into things bravely. Sampson is the believable opposite of Bond who would obviously not have a long life in reality. Sampson is still extremely brave - just not idiotic - and he's very clever but human so it takes time for him to work out what's going on.
This thread is absolutely fantastic. It's hitting all the obscure spy thrillers. First sandbaggers now Len Deightons game set match. What next, Mr. Palfrey of Westminster? ?
That said, you're watching James Bond wrong. Watch it as a porno.
There's a quick excuse for a plot, then you see the "spy" doing all sorts of cool and exotic stuff.
Same thing with movies like top gun, ignore the story and just watch it as an excluse to fly $50M planes near the edge.
Len Deighton and John LeCarre are not obscure at all unless you're American perhaps and you don't want to read about non-Americans.
Also your attitude to Bond is the reason why they went wrong after Broccoli - you don't understand the romance of them - the action and gadgets are side issues - trimmings but not the meat.
"I am excited by the poetry of things and places, and the pace of my stories sometimes suffers while I take the reader by the throat and stuff him with great gobbets of what I consider should interest him, at the same time shaking him and shouting “Like this, damn you!” about something that has caught my particular fancy. But this is a sad lapse, and I must confess that in one of my books, Goldfinger, three whole chapters were devoted to a single game of golf."
"My plots are fantastic, while being often based upon truth. They go wildly beyond the probable but not, I think, beyond the possible. . . . Even so, they would stick in the gullet of the reader and make him throw the book angrily aside—for a reader particularly hates feeling he is being hoaxed—but for two further technical devices, if you like to call them that. First of all, the aforesaid speed of the narrative, which hustles the reader quickly beyond each danger point of mockery and, secondly, the constant use of familiar household names and objects which reassure him that he and the writer have still got their feet on the ground."
That's what makes action-adventure movies work. It keeps people from realizing that all someone needed to do was some simple thing, instead of the adventurous thing. That Fleming did this in his writing made the move to the screen easier.
"Above all there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders about his unhappy fate, goes over in his mind a list of suspects, or reflects what he might have done or what he proposes to do next."
Much "great literature", and wannabe great literature, is full of such introspection. Ayn Rand takes it to an extreme. The other big vice for writers is the info-dump, where there's a long description of the setting. Read anything self-published, and you'll probably find both of these problems. "Show, don't tell".
There are major action movies with voice-overs or explicit scene-setting at the very beginning, from Star Wars to Kick-Ass. But if it's in the middle, you're doing it wrong.
> Much "great literature", and wannabe great literature, is full of such introspection. Ayn Rand takes it to an extreme. The other big vice for writers is the info-dump, where there's a long description of the setting. Read anything self-published, and you'll probably find both of these problems. "Show, don't tell".
As usual, the rules can be thrown out if you're good at it. A master writes whole chapters of introspection and makes them sublime and compelling. Woolf filled the entire middle of a book with description of an unoccupied house passing the years, featuring very little that could even generously be called action and hardly even any characters to properly introspect despite the whole affair feeling introspective, and it's excellent. An author even slightly below that level of skill and talent creates only trash of one variety or another, should they attempt anything similar.
But the point definitely holds for most writers, and you're exactly right that you can dig through (especially, but not only) self-published works and easily improve most of them several times per chapter by swapping a tell for a show. I suppose one hallmark of what might be called literature—at least, the kind that truly deserves that label, not just any work that aspires to it—is that if you were to edit it in that fashion, instead of getting better, it would get worse.
> There are major action movies with voice-overs or explicit scene-setting at the very beginning, from Star Wars to Kick-Ass. But if it's in the middle, you're doing it wrong.
Same here. See: Tarantino. He interrupted a thrilling, tense narrative to have a distractingly-famous actor who wasn't otherwise in the movie explain, directly to the audience, a bit about the chemistry of film, and somehow it worked. And that's not the only time he's done something like that. Don't do it... except if you can.
Read Tarantino's recent book (it's pretty good) and you'll probably learn that any idiosyncratic thing he's done in his movies, it was done first in a 1970s movie that he loved.
Yeah, not surprised. That Star Wars-like remixing/pastiching of genre films is kinda his whole deal. I haven't seen enough of his influences to catch most of it, though. May check out the book, thanks for the recommendation.
> See: Tarantino. He interrupted a thrilling, tense narrative to have a distractingly-famous actor who wasn't otherwise in the movie explain, directly to the audience, a bit about the chemistry of film, and somehow it worked.
What an amazing read. It feels like it could have been written yesterday.
Throughout I am impressed with the value of professionalism. The most consistent artists seem to see themselves with no more sanctimony than an experienced plumber would.
I think it's precisely because he sees himself as more of a craftsman that creates entertainment rather than an artist who is trying to express the nuance of the human condition. He is secure in his work and purpose and understands just what he is doing.
I believe it's important to make distinct the difference between "art" and "entertainment". Art is inward looking and for the individual to experience uniquely theirs, whereas entertainment is for the masses and outwardly.
The mechanic who worked on Ian Fleming's yacht once worked on my boat in a small coastal town after I got caught up in a nasty storm -- bear hugging a mast in pouring rain and lightning is generally when you realize how fragile your life can be.
We had a few beers after he was finished and he told me some crazy stories... I still need to blog about that adventure; that was a highlight of my early 20's.
I'm sure I saw a text "editor" a few years back where it was impossible to actually edit the text. Adding text was the only function. It was meant to help with this style of writing.
Good read, and as engaging as any novel, but I have to remind myself that by "heroes who are white, villains who are black" he means as in black-and-white contrast...
Counterpoint: I know who Ian Fleming is, but I had to Google Le Carré. I am aware of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and some of his other works, but they aren't lodged in my head the way James Bond is.
And I think that's the point of Fleming's essay. He wasn't writing to be high art, he was writing to make money. Fleming avoided deep plots and emotional exploration, because those detracted from the guttural response he wanted out of his readers.
I don't think Le Carré was trying to write high art either, but I think they were interested in different things. Fleming wanted a fast-paced popular thriller, while Le Carré wanted a realistic depiction of spycraft.
Le Carré does provide a much more realistic depiction of tradecraft than Ian Fleming, of course, who is to tradecraft what the 60s Batman TV show is to realistic detective fiction.
I would not say that the point of le Carré is to realistically depict tradecraft. He's not a realism antidote to Ian Fleming. There's not really all that much tradecraft in a Smiley novel; they're much more about human relationships, and about the moral bankruptcy of the Cold War enterprise.
Le Carré is much closer to literary fiction than Fleming, who is a genre hack. Not so close as to be tedious; the books are all fun to read. I'd push back on the idea that le Carré wasn't aiming for art, though.
(If tradecraft is what you're after, by the way, what you really want is Hoffman's "Billion Dollar Spy".)
If you enjoy Le Carré and haven't checked out the Slough House series (novels and mini series on Apple TV) you're in for a treat. It's not exactly Le Carré, but it's definitely Cold War caliber spy fiction set in the present day with a very Smiley-esque old spy master and a budding young spy who is learning to think like a Smiley rather than act like the Bond he's been trained to be.
The conversations are pretty snappy and deadpan, reminiscent of one of the writer's previous work on Veep and The Thick of It, this show is often funnier to me than many comedies.
Interesting perspective to think that the point of each page is to get the reader to turn to the following page.
It's like a pitch deck: the point is to keep it simple but show enough ankle that the reader asks for a meeting. But really I should look at each page to see: how do I keep the reader from stopping here?
> Above all there must never be those maddening recaps where the hero maunders about his unhappy fate, goes over in his mind a list of suspects, or reflects what he might have done or what he proposes to do next.
If I may be forgiven for bringing up chatGPT, that thing LOVES to go on about the state of mind of the protagonist. Its favorite thing ever is to write some variation of the following sentence: "<main character> knew things would be difficult, but he is determined to prevail." I suspect it may have been trained on a corpus containing entirely too much fan-fiction.
Anyone good at sleuthing and not behind restrictive proxies?
The author here mentions that all her sources are online and links to one of them (which is alas a blog post with minimal references)
Would be amazing to confirm whether this source is legitimate, I feel like anything online with hand-wavy citations can just start getting treated as real so long as it's at least 10 years old
I read every James Bond book as a school kid
(eight of them, ten?).. they were fun! the Cold War themes and international mobster stereotypes were not a big deal for me at that time of life.
Ian Fleming described James Bond’s breakfast with egg and bacon in the hotel, in a way that it makes you feel you are there. I am proud to have Flemming as my last name.
My Dad (rest his soul) turned me onto Bond books. I'm surprised by the lack of appreciation in these comments - wondering if many people are going off the films rather than the books.
The thing I love is the detail he uses. Mundane objects - his watch, his meal, his car are intensely described in a way that adds to the narrative. And Bond is human - he's sometimes petty, vengeful, lustful, lazy, but appealing - our heart feels for him when his wife is killed.
Read this again with fresh eyes, then when bookmarking it saw that I had already bookmarked it back in 2019 and forgot I had. It's still great writing advice.
"But the point I wish to make is that if you decide to become a professional writer, you must, broadly speaking, decide whether you wish to write for fame, for pleasure or for money."
Because, often (though not always) you have to write in a different way to get them. It is hard to write well enough to make money purely for pleasure, as the editing/etc process can be a grind trying to make everything smooth and pleasant to read. And with caveats the writers that are most famous tend to be ones who write big L Literature, which rarely makes significant money but is the stuff you hear about on TV in the news etc.
There are exceptions but it tends to require more than a little bit of luck to hit the zeitgeist in a way to work out. Take for example Brandon Sanderson. Outside SFF I doubt almost anyone has heard of him but dude makes millions.
Because without a priority, you have no means to make a decision when the goals conflict. If what's most important to you is having cake, you might have to limit how much of it you eat. If you instead value eating cake more, you might have to give up on the idea of keeping it.
I think authors like JK Rowling, Stephen King, etc are the exception that prove the rule. The vast, vast, VAST majority of authors are ones you have never heard of, eking out a living.
In period fiction, I have seen a few times a father or other older male taking someone to a prostitute to lose their virginity. Common enough that it can't come from nowhere. Sometimes they watch. It is almost always shown as traumatic.
He was in the war though. The majority of guys who fought probably lost their virginity during the war to a prostitute. You're facing death every day, you might as well.
> My opuscula do not aim at changing people or making them go out and do something. They are written for warm-blooded heterosexuals in railway trains, airplanes and beds.
This is a bit of a turn-off. Sounds like a modern day conservative whining about not being able to say Merry Christmas and people convincing children to destroy themselves with surgery.
And I say this as someone who loved reading Moonraker...
That quote was written decades ago. It's not a reaction to "woke culture" or any of the right's current bullshit. It's just an author saying he is unapologetically writing books with tough men, hot women, and dumb action. He's admitting, proudly, to creating junk food lit.
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
Same, I stopped reading at "I recently stumbled across an essay". Really, did they trip over the essay on the floor? Ludicrous, all word definitions should be frozen in time to whatever they meant when I was in school, and let's get rid of all these confusing "idioms".
Usually, when people these days want an unambigous good-guys-vs-bad-guys storyline, they have to go back to WWII and the almost-universally despised Nazi regime. This is because there's a lot of uncertainly about who the 'good guys' were in the Cold War, or even if there were any. The Berlin airlift looks good for the West, but the effort to perpetuate French colonialism in Vietnam, not so much. There are at least a dozen similar examples on both sides, from eastern Europe (USSR not looking so good) to Africa and South/Central America (lots of bad behavior by the 'pro-democracy West').
John Le Carre famously portrayed the conflict as two giant gear wheels grinding against each other and destroying the lives of people unfortunate enough to get caught in the middle, and his doubtful self-questioning protagonist, George Smiley, though obviously devoted to the West, carries that theme well. Le Carre's "A Perfect Spy" and "The Russia House" are also some of his best works, with similar themes and central characters.