I recently watched the second series of The Night Manager and was dissatisfied with it. It didn’t feel like something le Carré might have written, and I didn’t like the ending. So I decided to read The Night Manager (1993, UK), the actual novel by le Carré, on which the first series, broadcast in 2016, was based.

I was, it turned out, both right and wrong. For the right and wrong reasons.

The first series of the television adaptation follows the basic beats of the novel’s story. Ex-Army officer now hotelier Jonathan Pine is given reason to hate international arms dealer Richard Onslow Roper, and is recruited by a UK government agency to infiltrate Roper’s inner circle. For obvious budgetary reasons, the setting for the TV series was moved from the Caribbean and Central America to the Mediterranean. Likewise the change, but perhaps more due to the number of years since publication than budget, from South American cartel villains to Middle Eastern ones. Pine’s handler, Burr, was also gender-swapped from man to woman – which was a good call (especially as she was played by Olivia Coleman). Other changes were less understandable. Roper’s girlfriend Jed is, in the novel, a vacuous upper-class English deb, but in the TV series she was re-imagined as American, and with a secret kid. Some of the characters names were also changed.

Events from the plot of the novel are there in the TV series – the murder of Sophie in Cairo, the fake murder in Cornwall, the staged kidnapping of Roper’s young boy, the incident with lobster salad… Sections were also cut-out in order to streamline the story. Pine’s adventures in Canada. His time in Cornwall is also shortened, and its nature changed – in the book, he’s well-liked and the “murder” he commits comes as a shock; in the TV series, he’s a not very convincing villain from the day of his arrival.

And then there’s the ending. In the novel, Burr’s operation to bring down Roper is being derailed by corrupt officials in the UK and US intelligence communities. They out Pine to Roper, but Burr manages to stage a monumental bluff which saves both Pine and Jed. In the TV series, Roper is brought down by Burr and Pine. To be honest, I prefer the TV ending. It’s also telling that in the book Pine is tortured and beaten before being released, but in the TV series it’s Jed who is beaten.

But then I don’t think The Night Manager is an especially good le Carré novel. He was a bloody good writer and his chosen genre has likely obscured how important he was. He was always anti-establishment, much more so in later years, but the cast of The Night Manager are, well, establishment caricatures. They’re ineptly corrupt, they talk like Harry Enfield lampooning 1950s Whitehall mandarins, and le Carré layers on the contempt so heavily it’s hard to take them seriously. In real life, members of the British establishment are corrupt or paedophiles or both, and have always been seen as such by the working class. And they have always been untouchable.

Which is why Roper remains untouched at the end of the novel.

All of which, ironically, are reasons why I didn’t like the second series of The Night Manager and accused it of not feeling like le Carré… When it’s set in South America, much like part of the original novel, and Roper escapes unscathed as he did in the book. Which actually makes it closer to le Carré’s novel than the first series…

The ebook edition I read includes an essay by le Carré on the various adaptations of his novels. He thought his work better served by TV than film, and in general agreed with the changes made to The Night Manager. Having now read the novel, I suspect he would have been happy with series two, even though strictly speaking it’s not an adaptation.