If you’re a writer, what you’re really after is an adjective. Dickensian, Orwellian, Ballardian – watermark your world and, even if the ink fades, distant humans might still throw the word “Scrooge” at some covetous old sinner, or detect the strangest frisson in a four-car pile-up.
Pity poor old John le Carré, then, a man of such extravagant lusts and ego in his private life that we can be sure he would have loved his own epithet. He had to go and change his name from the humble but workable Cornwell to the ludicrously continental Le Carré. Because should Le Carrién (or indeed La Carriénne) ever be codified, we’ll know it when we see it.
In his most memorable novels,we’re in St James’s or Charing Cross or a cruel, drizzly prep school. The villains are handsome, the heroes are fat and the non-state actors can be either. You’ll find briefcases full of cash, women full of lies and decanters full of whisky. But drink up: Britain’s going down all hands, so we may as well tie ourselves to the mast and see the thing through.
This is a distinct space and time and temper, even if it did conjure up more universal stories about loyalty, choice and morality. The most memorable parts of the original The Night Manager TV series, adapted from Le Carré’s 1993 novel of the same name, descended from this realm: Hugh Laurie’s overgrown public-school boy, Tom Hollander’s dorm-room toady and Olivia Colman as a convincing female version of George Smiley. And the least memorable lay in the confines of conventional thrillerdom: the blandly elfin Tom Hiddleston, the accented heavies, the alternately dusty or dusky settings.
The show obviously did what was required to gain an audience (I don’t remember Alec Guinness ever baring his buttocks, whereas it was probably the top line of Hiddleston’s contract). But the reason it really flew is that it kept these elements in careful balance, its dramatic responsibilities and its unique literary source.
There was no sequel to Le Carré’s novel. And this unwise second series, forbidden by Le Carré until (the producers say) the late extraction of some sort of Edward the Confessor-style deathbed blessing, leaving them to their freehand scripting, leaves the Le Carrién behind altogether. Laurie’s Richard Roper – sort of the Richard Branson of illegal arms trading – has been felled, and his criminal network shattered (the series opens with his corpse unmasked on a cold slab).
Hiddleston, with only a minor case of PTSD, has changed his identity from Jonathan Pine to Alex Goodwin and lives in a luxury apartment on the South Bank with a cat named after Hollander’s dead character (“Corky”). Wary of frontline MI6 service, he has joined a unit called the “Night Owls”, spying on the bedrooms and baccarat tables of the city’s criminal elite.
But when he recognises a figure from Roper’s circle in an underground casino (a figure who must have occupied bare minutes of screentime in the first series, so it’s lucky there’s plenty of new characters for him to explain this to), the flashbacks from Pine/Goodwin’s past are made flesh. The dynamics of the first series quickly return: an international arms trader (this time played by the Nureyevian Diego Calva), Jonathan Pine adopting yet another false identity to infiltrate his organisation and a sneaking suspicion that parts of MI6 might be batting on the wrong side of it all.
There’s a sort of heir to the Blair crisis to this: such was the charisma of Laurie’s original performance (his cruelty, his salmon shirts, his Home Counties hauteur) you can only feel a void for the planet these lesser actors used to orbit. And, as if in recognition of this, Richard Roper’s legacy – specifically the natural-born son he’d donated to a Colombian hilltop monastery – forms the organising plot device. Indeed, things are only really set in motion once Calva’s “Teddy Dos Santos” declares himself Roper’s “true heir”.
As Hiddleston slipped back into his linens and booked tickets for South America, I began to long for Smiley’s leaky offices, for talk of Berlin and Czechoslovakia. The second season of The Night Manager is thrilling but empty stuff. “The itch after the amputation” – that’s how one MI6 officer described Britain’s global espionage ambitions after the loss of empire, the buzz of a phantom potency. It’s also much the feeling of watching a Le Carré adaptation without the Le Carré.
The Night Manager
BBC One
[Further reading: We are all le Carré’s people now]
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This article appears in the 14 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Battle for power
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