reverie app

PLAYER
» HANDLE: Steph
» CONTACT: UndrwO on Plurk
» AGE: 28
» CHARACTER(S) IN-GAME: Jasnah Kholin (veristitalian

CHARACTER
» NAME: Ricki Tarr
» CANON: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011 film)
» CANON POINT: Post canon.
» AGE: Late thirties

» SETTING: Ricki comes from a version of Earth with no extra magic or powers of any kind. The Smiley books are written by an actual retired British spy, so represent an only slightly sensationalized version of what espionage was actually like at the time. The Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy film is very loyal to the books. Where there are conflicts, I'll defer to the film (ie, Ricki meeting Irina in Istanbul rather than Hong Kong) but I intend to flesh out his backstory with information from the novel.

The story takes place in the 1970s, at the height of the cold war. Ricki's part in the tale begins in Istanbul, where he's caught up in an extremely bloody bit of spycraft. His story in the city gives the viewer a sense of how the British and Russian spies of the time played out little power struggles in all corners of the world, finding and fighting and seducing and turning each other.

Ricki is a spy, and was called in to Istanbul when the country office was having some trouble tailing a trade delegate. The man was a drunk, and so a rich target to be turned, blackmailed, brought over to their side. Ricki spent one night following him and realized Boris was actually a spy was well, a dangerous bit of bait trying to get a read on British activity in Istanbul. He called the surveillance off and was in the middle of packing up to go home when he noticed Boris's wife, Irina. Something about her stirred Ricki's instincts, and he approached and seduced her and was gratified when without much prompting she offered to provide valuable information to his side in exchange for safe harbour in the west. Ricki insisted she tell him what the information was, playing on her trust for him to get her to admit that there was a high level traitor at the top of the Circus (M16). Not quite willing to believe her, Ricki cabled home this message to the top leadership of the group. Irina was immediately abducted, and the staff at the country office all killed. The spy was so highly placed that he'd seen Ricki's message and arranged to frame him as a defector.

Ricki comes back to London in a hurry and gets on a payphone to call a Secretary in the Cabinet Office, passing the information allong and triggering the investigation into this mole that is the plot of the film. Very quickly, Ricki finds himself betrayed and fleeing back to London, where he offers reports on his travels to little old men with thick glasses in a series of dusty parlours and shabby hotel rooms. He goes over his time in Istanbul in detail for the investigation.

The biggest qualitative difference between this spy story and the other famous ones is that the people who do the 'wet work' in this world are the ones with the least power. On the surface, Ricki is the closest thing there is to a James Bond in the film; he seduces the girl, exudes menace, is capable of tremendous violence and drives around in a convertible. But, he ends up siting on George Smiley's couch, weeping openly while he provides his report, going over the details over and over again. He's the most junior in the hierarchy of spies we meet in the film by far. Ricki is a useful weapon, but ultimately a pawn in someone else's game.

» SHORT DESCRIPTION: Playful, dangerous, deceptive, untrusting, devoted.

» INFLUENTIAL EVENTS:
[Content warning for discussion of some of the grimmer history of Southeast Asia and British colonialism in the 1940s-70s. Not graphic, but a legitimatey horrible period.]

1. Changi: Ricki had a terrible childhood. He was the only child of British and Australian parents living in Penang. During WWII they evacuated to Singapore, which fell soon thereafter to the Japanese. The family spent the rest of the war in Changi jail. It would have been a traumatic experience at any age, but especially for someone so young. Ricki made it out of there mistrustful, with an antiauthoritarian streak a mile wide and fundamentally totally socially maladjusted. The book doesn't go into the effects in detail, beyond detailing the event having happened. Instead it goes on to portray a casual killer who was flagged as having enormous potential and thrown headlong into some of the extremely immoral aspects of espionage.

2. Parenting: After the war ended, Ricki was interested in following in his father's footsteps and going into law. Unfortunately, he had a criminal streak by then, and years of bad behaviour eventually culminated in his father getting together a group of preachers to 'beat the sin out of his soul.' That was the last straw in dealing with his father's zealotry and abuse. Ricki ran away from home when he was still a teenager and lacking other choices, became a gun runner in Borneo. He joined a small crew of Belgians and moved weaponry all around the Indonesian islands during the Malayan emergency. He was generally drunk, in trouble, and at any given moment in middle of a tremendous and nervy swindle and doublecross. It represented the real point of no return in terms of him living a normal life.

3. Purpose: The thing that saved Ricki's life was being recruited to MI6. He was picked up by an agent named Macklevore who flagged his terrible decision making and manipulative streak as a sign of tremendous potential. Just like running away from Penang set him on one potential course, this took him right off it and put him on another. He was first played out in an operation against the Belgian crew he'd been a part of, working a few more jobs for them in order to collect and systematically take out their network before killing all of them for the sin of running weaponry to Communists. Based on this promising start he was imported to Brixton, given the intensive training of a proper spy, and then sent out in the world. Ricki was brought on board at a tremendously impressionable age, and is wholeheartedly devoted to the Circus, putting himself in frequent and tremendous danger for his bosses. He's not quite the fanatic that some characters are, but he is fiercely loyal to his people, most of all the men directly above him in the chain of command.

4. "Accident Prone": Despite the consummate loyalty, Ricki is also kind of a disaster as a spy. He has a reputation as trouble; he pushes a bit of blackmail too hard and the person chooses to kill themself rather than caving in, and leaves a note exposing all. He falls in love with a Polish girl who turns out to be a spy who's playing him. He has a bad habit of calling his boss (a prim and stuffy Benedict Cumberbatch) 'baby' now and again. He's totally banned from going back to South America at all, ever, for any reason. When the mole in the Circus frames Ricki, it's credible, because he's kind of a black sheep because of these procedural lapses.

5. Irina: I talked a bit in the setting section about meeting Irina, but the added dimension to the story there is that Ricki was in kind-of-love with her. "She wasn't even my type," he complains, while tears streak down his face. He's married with a young daughter, to make matters worse. But after his slip results in Irina being taken, Ricki makes a couple of interesting choices. Instead of vanishing back into the wilderness in Borneo he returns to warn Britain that MI6 is terribly compromised. Then, when he seeks out the people running the investigation (despite the fact that both British and Russian spies all have orders that he's to be shot on sight) he insists that he'll do anything he can to help, but he wants Irina rescued, he wants them to trade for her to get her back out of Russia. Most tragically of all, he doesn't know she's already been killed. Smiley and the rest of the investigation string Ricki along, promising to do their best to get her out if he agrees to be used as bait to flush out the mole, and Ricki agrees. He can probably make a pretty educated guess that he's being played, but Ricki Tarr is an emotional soul, and kind of fundamentally heartbreakingly loyal. He goes along with the plan, for the chance of saving her, and the chance of saving the Circus. He's lived his entire adult life as a cog in this machine. The last shot of him is his standing in a rainstorm in Paris, expression completely still. This event doesn't so much change him as changes his life irreperably. He'll be arriving on the station just in time to have to figure out how to pick up the pieces.

» FIT: Ricki is a good fit for an action setting, because he's going to want to get right in the thick of it. He's an excellent fighter. He'll be incredibly invested in station politics and will undoubtledly end up involved in many intrigues. He's amoral and totally ruthless, but also an incredibly charismatic character who makes friends easily and wants to know everything. He's extremely adaptible and will blend into the setting easily.

» POWERS: None. Purely human.
» NOTES: None.

» SAMPLES: Log starters.

Some time in the early 1600s in Japan, a young woman had a rather illicit relationship with a Chinese pirate lord. The unlikely pair had a son who they christened Zhèng Chénggōng, who grew to by a fine young man with a very determined streak to him. It was whispered to me that the man had been raised by freed Muslim slaves, and may have practiced that faith in secret, though the official histories all refer to Confucianism.

Our story finds him in the waters between Xiamen and Taiwan. At that time, Xiamen was a young port city, whose traded goods included silver, imported from Spain into China. This trade route was a ripe target for local pirates, in particular the Dutch. Don’t ask me about that historical context, I have no fucking idea. They snuck their boats in among the myriad of little islands at the mouth of the Nine Dragons, or Cửu Long, we called it, where I was growing up. Zhèng Chénggōng, also known as Koxinga, succeeded in fighting a short and brutish war that resulted in the Dutch fleeing Taiwan entirely. This was all accomplished while the young man was also embroiled in some of the ugliest dynastic struggles in history. He had narrowly survived his own father's terrible betrayal to the Qing family- thus followed a convoluted mess that ended with his father's imprisonment and the then-Emperor being thrown into a well.

My favourite part of the story was always the rumour that Koxinga's death was the result of a sudden fit of madness. His son had apparently had an affair with some very inappropriate lady, and the father ordered that he should be executed. The guards hesitated, and when he was disobeyed, Koxinga flew into the sort of rage that could stop a man's heart, though he was only thirty seven. The books in London lack imagination, and credit malaria.

There was a statue of Koxinga in Xiamen when I was there last, though it may very well be torn down by now. I remember seeing the stonework, but I only read the proper story when I made it back to London.

So. Why, from all the vast and fascinating scope of human history are we all clustered in here from the last forty years or so?

What kind of piracy do we have to fear up here, Dutch or otherwise?