Tinkers, Tailors, Soldiers, Spies

What is genre anyway, and why has espionage fiction been confined to living inside this definition, if we consider being set inside of genre confining. Espionage, at the highest level, in literature, as in life, is art. And the finest practitioners of the craft write about spies above all as metaphors for things we all experience: love, risk, loss. Long considered Father, Son and Holy Ghost of Cold War espionage, John le Carre, Graham Greene, and Ian Fleming (all former spies in real life) are a fine starting point, though my favorite work of espionage is rarely considered espionage at all – Joan Didion’s Democracy. Everything Jason Bourne became began with these authors, and their heroes and heroines.