The Ipcress File

Product Information

Deighton was born in Marylebone, London, in 1929. His father was a chauffeur and mechanic, and his mother was a part-time cook. After leaving school, Deighton worked as a railway clerk before performing his National Service, which he spent as a photographer for the Royal Air Force's Special Investigation Branch. After discharge from the RAF, he studied at St Martin's School of Art in London in 1949, and in 1952 won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1955. While there are indeed differences between the Bond books and Ipcress, there are also likenesses. Both seem to offer the privileged cognitive access to a concealed world epitomized in the first line of one of the epigraphs to Ipcress, from Shakespeare’s Henry IV 1: ‘And now I will unclasp a secret book’. Deighton’s narrator also converges with Bond in his appreciation of good food. When Dalby treats his new recruit to lunch at Wilton’s, a venerable Jermyn Street restaurant, established in 1742, that exists to this day, I. takes a gourmet’s pleasure in the ‘iced Israeli melon, sweet, tender and cold like the blonde waitress’, the lobster salad and the ‘carefully-made mayonnaise’, even if his more usual lunch venue is ‘the sandwich bar in Charlotte Street, where I played a sort of rugby scrum each lunchtime with only two PhD’s, three physicists and a medical research specialist for company, standing up to toasted bacon sandwich and a cup of stuff that resembles coffee in no aspect but price’.

Weapons aren’t terrible,” I said. “Areoplanes full of passengers to Paris, bombs full of insecticide, cannons with a man inside at a circus--these aren’t terrible. But a vase of roses in the hands of a man of evil intent is a murder weapon.” The other “realistic” spy story writer who came along at about the same time as Deighton was John Le Carre. But I’ve always preferred Deighton (at least the early Deighton), as I find Le Carre’s books rather humourless and bleak. (Though the TV version of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” with Alec Guinness is brilliant.) March 19, 2022 Update I have just learned that this book is the basis for a new 6-part TV mini-series with actor Joe Cole in the Harry Palmer role, previously made famous by Michael Caine. This will surely be on Britbox here in Canada eventually, but until then, we do have the trailer.Deighton was never a spy, but rather a 1950s illustrator and ad man. As a result, his settings and descriptions of characters are more involved and painterly than is usually the case; you’ll never want for knowing what his cast and sets look like. The dialog is very of-the-moment, and Our Hero has a smart mouth on him. This is the good part.

Ipcress is not a name or a place: It is an abbreviation for “Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under Stress” -- or, in other words, brainwashing. I remember seeing the film of the book when it came out in 1965 and believed I had also read the book. Instead of a re-read, this turned out to be a first-timer. In my view, Deighton’s first few spy novels are by far his best: “The Ipcress File”; “Horse Under Water”; and “Funeral in Berlin”. I feel that after this period Deighton went downhill, losing the lightness of touch and sharpness that characterise these early books. It isn't. Much as publicists might like to see them as one and the same thing. They are quite definitely not. The unnamed hero is only partly 'Harry Palmer'. The ambience and culture of the secret service in book and film are not the same. The military aspects are downplayed in the film.

Editorial Reviews

I cannot say more realistic because there is not a great deal of realism in the novel. It is just far less of a male wet dream than Bond, less fantastic and (like all espionage novels) gives more illusion of realism (though less than Le Carre) than actual realism.