Ricki Tarr (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rickitikitarr) wrote2015-02-28 06:08 pm
rickitikitarr) wrote2015-02-28 06:08 pm
tlv application
User Name/Nick: Steph
User DW: knights_say_nih
AIM/IM: UndrwO
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: None
Character Name: Ricki Tarr
Series: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film primarily, backstory from the novel)
Age: Early thirties
From When?: The moment of his theoretical post-canonical death, on his knees in a back alley in then-Borneo, a gun to the back of his head.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate—Ricki is a violent man, a spy, an absent father and a cad. He worked for the most violent, bottom tier of British Intelligence as raw muscle, then as a recruiter, and is as dangerous a man in that world as it as possible to be.
Abilities/Powers: A Sarrat-trained operative for the Circus, and a rough and tumble child besides, Ricki is physically human but trained and dangerous.
Personality: Ricki Tarr is one of those characters that has a series of different faces, each projected in turn as a dancing series of feints to keep strangers from getting anywhere close to him. An operative for British Intelligence, the ‘surface projection’ identity he works with is fluid, but tends to be lighthearted, a frequenter of bars, a seducer of women.
He’s observant, but quick with a smile, a quip, likes to drive convertibles around the shoreline on sunny days. Even when he isn’t working, you get a sense that the sly tongue and ready laugh aren’t entirely his persona, that he tends to be good humoured by nature. It's hard to tell where the good ends and the bad begins, because it's sort of his style to slip jabs in with a smile, but on the whole the majority of people who deal with him will have the sense that he's a nice, gregarious, man. A 'cool cat' if you forgive the seventies parlance, which is when his canon is set.
It makes his deeply violent streak all the more terrifying. Ricki works for the messiest part of the Circus, as a foreign operative doing ‘wetwork’ and recruiting sources, and kills ruthlessly, if it seems infrequently, in service of his work. His penchant for violence preceded the work, but was certainly honed by his recruitment and training. It slips occasionally into his personal life. He runs into a room and finds a disemboweled man in a bathtub unexpectedly, but beyond one blink keeps right on functioning, unruffled.
Ricki has an oh-so-slightly insubordinate way about him, but with a intelligence and charm to him that make it hard to call him on the behaviour. His boss refers to him as ‘accident prone,’ tending to get himself into situations that simply require him to go off script and abandon his handler’s directives in such a way that it seems completely necessary in the post-mortem breakdown. It makes him difficult to discipline without seeming despotic, and is part of what makes him so frustrating to deal with. He has a complex relationship with authority, thanks to an abusive father and his unorthodox career. He seems simultaneously inclined to try to nettle anyone with any sort of power over him, and yet to have to trust them suicidally and completely, despite knowing that they may very well see him as completely disposable. As closed off as he is in other respects, as immune to violence, his part in the film opens with him sitting, nervous and sometimes weeping, on his superior’s couch, telling him everything.
When you peel all that back, he’s deeply intelligent and keenly observant, thanks in part to his training but also to innate ability. He’d initially read for the bar but been too intent on breaking the law to ever work in it. The whole series is something of a push-back against the glitzy glam James Bond spy, half the characters are middle aged men leafing through notebooks and decoding more code, and Ricki is the closest thing there is to an exception to this rule. Instead of cultured, though, he’s played crass, strong and solemn and a little tatty, and not at all flash. He's actually from Asia originally, but an expat family, and you are given the deliberate sense that it's not a particularly good family, by society standards. Ricki feels rough in more ways than he does smooth.
When he tells stories, he’s described as having a total and perfect stillness to him, recalling events in tremendous detail as though hearing his own voice describe them back to him. He is patient when he wants to be.
He’s also a sort of incoherent romantic. The tears he sheds in front of his handler, earlier, were for the life of Irina, young woman whom he’d unintentionally gotten captured while in the process of turning her to their side. He talks about needing to save her, owing her, adoring her, despite the briefness of their fling and the fact that he’d been seducing her with hopes to bring her over.
He also talks about his young daughter, holing up with her and her mother during the book in their native Kuala Lampur. When he's in trouble that's where he goes. He is referenced to have ‘wives around the globe’ and the woman in Kuala Lampur as 'currently leading the pack,' but this doesn’t seem to disqualify his desire to rescue Irina. Whether he intends to add her to their numbers, or to hole up with her and his daughter and daughter’s mother one day and just get away from it all isn't clear. It's even possible that, given the brevity of their actual relationship and its' being founded so heavily on lies, she represents an idea more than a person, a deep romanticism for loving and saving women. Though it's not handled explicitly in the book, and left out entirely in the film, there's clearly some sort of dissonance going on there. I would speculate that it's related to compartmentalization, to living one life with his wife and child (actually barely living it, he's absent most of the time and in the 1970s Kuala Lampur is hardly in close and easy contact with the outside world) so rather to leaving them as a sacrosanct island, representing home and safety, that he lives largely outside of with another identity entirely, himself as spy.
As The infidelity is slightly morally repugnant, but in the context of the book and film it’s just so refreshing to see someone invested in the wellbeing of another person that it actually really touching and romantic somehow? Maybe that just provides a more stark sense of the incredibly low standards for human decency in the twisted and shady world of espionage. Him expressing genuine grief, even over such an unorthodox situation, is really striking.
With regards to the romance in particular, Ricki has a slight ability not to see his own wrongdoing at every given moment. Early in his career he had what he refers to as 'a brush with a honeytrap' meaning being seduced by the enemy. Regarding Irina, he talks about her being pushed to tears or pushed to confess things as though it had happened quite spontaneously, as though he hadn't had a role in drawing these details and things out of her. This isn't to say he doesn't feel guilty, he clearly does, but when he talks about it there's a sort of ringing disconnect between the feeling and his out-loud interpretation of the past. Remorse without explicit acknowledgement.
Summed up, his personality is best described as profoundly dysfunctional, anesthetized to the suffering of others and out of touch with his own moral compass, meaning well(ish) but ultimately a terrifying muddle.
Barge Reactions: Ricki will have his ‘spy face’ on for the Barge, and will react with bright, glossy laughing marvel, wrinkling his nose at the gross things and shaking his head at the strange things and generally putting on a shiny, candy coloured front of a nice, reasonable person. Underneath that he will be deeply, violently, brutally suspicious and will try to find a way to start sleeping with a proverbial knife under his pillow.
This is partially due to his being an inmate, which will be a profoundly triggering experience for him, thanks again to teenaged years spent as a son of a persecuted Christian minister in the Japanese Changi Prison. More than that, though, for someone so wary and used to people trying to kill him, having his world view tilt on its’ head will be traumatic. He relies on seeing, understanding and controlling his environment to survive. He’ll try to cope with some of the difference by at least keeping a good mask up, but will be in pretty constant fight-or-flight for a good long while.
If he has the opportunity he is likely to be in trouble over his adjustment period for some pretty deeply violent overreactions, purely motivated by fear and a profound lack of control. This may not happen within the first few weeks, or even the first few months necessarily. He’ll be too intelligent to slip up unless something really rattles him, but especially insightful wardens may notice he has a vague sense of the ticking time bomb about him.
Regarding his Lothario status, I don't foresee Ricki trying to pick up too many women on the Barge. He would need to be in just the right sweet spot of settled down enough and not redeemed enough, and it would need to be just the right kind of woman... chances seem small. He may very well flirt, but without much bite.
Path to Redemption: I think that a lot of Ricki’s buttons are going to have to do with trust and intelligence and boundary pushing. I can see him really testing his Warden, being good, gaming his way through the system, getting in trouble and crashing back down through it. The key to an ineffective relationship with him is getting locked into a battle of stubbornness over something petty, and the key to a disastrous relationship with him is letting him outmanipulate his warden.
Positive approaches, however, would be steadfastness and trustworthiness. I think a big part of his problems in canon, as I see it, come from being a directionless kid, age 18, recovering from his horrible parenting (seriously, his father sounds like an asshole- the guy was put in prison and continued to preach so loudly that his wife and son were both targets for religious persecution alongside him, and then when Ricki got older tried to ‘beat the sin out of him’) but instead of being taken in by someone reasonable and grown up, he fell in with the Circus who put him to work murdering people and running guns, but not before interrogating him somewhat messily and ‘training’ him for several sinister years. His devotion to his superiors is pockmarked and strange, sometimes seemingly absent and sometimes really more than they deserve. He goes on to put himself in pretty severe danger for them to save the day in the story, and throws himself at their mercy at several key plot moments.
There’s a scene in the film version where his immediate superior, Peter Guillam, walks in on him unexpectedly when he believes that Ricki has betrayed him. He grabs him by the shirt front, standing over him, and punches him several times in the face, before his colleagues succeed in pulling him off and explaining that Ricki has been framed. Throughout the attack, Ricki doesn’t protest or move to defend himself, and doesn’t seem to resent it after the fact, passively licking the blood off his lip and casting him a glance that’s only barely reproachful, continuing as though the incident hasn’t occurred. Another approach could certainly be working with someone who a) never gets him to murder people and b) doesn’t punch him in the face. Consistently morally upright instruction, ie “no Ricki, I see how it could be convenient if you did kill that person but please don’t” particularly from someone who does understand high stakes, casualties, collateral, compromise, would do him a world of good in realigning his own moral compass. He would work best with a Warden who had grappled with some of those difficult questions and come out with a good moral ballast.
He will hate being condescended to, and push back hard against any pop psychology, but definitely stands a very good chance of making it through.
History: Ricki Tarr grew up in Penang, son of an Australian solicitor and British actress. The war saw them evacuated to Singapore, which unfortunately fell a few months later, and young Ricki and his parents were imprisoned in Changi jail under the Japanese. There, his father found a renewed faith in God, and preached loud and long to fellow inmates, resulting in difficulties for the family, traumatizing for Ricki in particular because of his inability to escape or control the situation in the slightest. After they were freed, the family returned to Penang and Ricki’s run-ins with the local law began. Mild crimes escalated gradually until Ricki’s father turned to the church, and had a few rough preachers try to ‘beat the sin out of his soul,’ which was apparently how things were done in the fifties.
Ricki gave up on his family then and there and bolted to Borneo, where he got heavy into gunrunning and got into considerable trouble running scams and causing various parties on the Indonesian isles to chase alternately him and their own tails. A local intelligence man named Mackelvore found him, a little bit heartbroken, a little bit of an alcoholic, but insisted that the young man had potential and sent him off to Singapore for some higher ups to have a look at that.
From there he was sent to Sarratt, to the infamous Nursery, where he was first stripped down to base components in the ungentle way of the agency, to be absolutely sure there was no chance that he was already working for the other side. Once assured that he was theirs, he was educated in various elements of espionage and violence, and graduated a few years later. They sent him back to gunrunning, explaining his few years of absence away, not that many people asked. His old contacts were running guns to the Communists, so he worked with them for a few weeks, picking off and identifying each and every one of them in systematic order, before killing his old friends (an ex-girlfriend among them) and setting fire to their boat.
From there, more training, and off to Kenya and a somewhat ignominious career marked by several scandals. Ricki was a ‘scalphunter,’ a rough term for someone who recruits willing and unwilling sources of information, who cuts and runs and burns when he needs to. Through his twenties (and the sixties) he accidentally handled a Brazilian minister too roughly and got into a bit of a mess with the press, and then had one of his marks, a Polish diplomat he’d been working in Spain, crumple under some heavy handed blackmail and jump from a high window. These were mostly overshone by a reputation for patience, ingenuity, diligence, but despite his very best work the rest of the time a reputation like that generally isn’t wiped away.
Thus, when he disappeared off the map in Istanbul, his immediate superior, Peter Guillam, wasn’t too concerned. Tarr had a habit of going not-quite-by-the-book, so nothing more was thought of it. In fact, something serious was going on. Ricki had been following a man named Boris, whom he was convinced was a nothing, a waste of time, when he met the man’s wife. Irina seemed to have something to her, so Ricki had turned her, offered her protection in exchange for information. She had informed him that there was a mole at the top of Circus, and he had informed Circus of such. Unfortunately, his missive had clearly reached the mole, because very quickly she was moved on by Russian agents, the information that she’d trusted him with, that he’d in turn trusted his superiors with, being fed right back to the people who she’d been betraying to him.
Ricki, panicked, had gone underground before returning back to London. He’d gotten in contact with Undersecretary Oliver Lacon, letting him know that Circus had been compromised, and kicking off the entire plot of Tinker Tailor. The mole had succeeded in framing Ricki’s flight as him defecting, and so, knowing that both the Russians and Circus were out to kill him, Ricki risked life and limb to go to George Smiley, the man in charge of the operation to catch the mole, and told his story. He’d agreed to help any way he could, provided that Smiley and Guillam would try to rescue Irina, to trade for her in some way. Both agents had been already aware that Irina was dead, murdered for her treason, but Smiley promised to do his best in order to ensure Ricki’s continued cooperation.
Whether or not he’d been aware of this last doublecross is somewhat unclear. He seems so dejected that you get the sense that he simply must, but serves as bait nonetheless to capture the mole and help save the integrity of the agency. We never see his reaction to the news of her death, what he finds out or doesn’t about Smiley’s using him. He slips quietly from the picture after his usefulness has been served.
Sample Journal Entry: I must admit.
[He says, between deep, heaving breaths. He’s in his cabin, doing situps, because situps are what one does in a prison cell. The rhythm helps focus him. The words come out choppy, between each push.]
When I heard the phrase ‘space ship’ this is actually not too far removed from what came to mind.
[Ever so slightly breathless.]
However, the saucer-shapes of the twenty five cent pulp covers seem more intuitive. Less idiosyncratic. Less ridiculous.
[Letting himself, for a split second, given in to his ever so slightly foul temper, mouth curving in a deep frown. He smoothes away as soon as he catches it, and gives up on this activity, sitting up and reaching for a towel, wiping the sweat off his face as he searches for words. He should finish this with something to soften it, but just musters a grin- a good one mind you, a friendly, deprecating, earnest smile, and disconnects.]
Sample RP:
It takes several weeks for Ricki to be able to make himself stand still and look out at the stars going by. At first he chalks his reluctance up to a feeling of profound vertigo, and while that’s fair, it goes a little beyond that. When he keeps his eyes averted from the outside he can let himself pretend he’s on solid ground, or sometimes on a large and very luxe ship, or even at worst in a normal, human prison. A prison staffed by the most sanctimonious and unorthodox guards imaginable, certainly, but something from earth nonetheless. When his self-delusion persists and persists, he finally finds he can’t stand himself any longer, and moves to press his nose up against the glass- god, is it even glass? He grips the windowsill with both hands for the first few seconds, watching the nighttime swirl of lights float by, and hangs on like that, staring, until he can gradually force himself to relax each muscle individually. Until he can stand watching the vortex, posture perfectly at ease, eyes half hooded and features schooled into relaxation, casually as he might watch the sea lapping at the sides of the boats in the port back in Istanbul. At last, when even his breathing is slow and steady, in and out through his nose and to just the right depth in his chest, he turns away as though nothing has happened and ambles his way back downstairs.
Pressed to talk about the strange behaviour, he won’t.
Special Notes: None!
User DW: knights_say_nih
AIM/IM: UndrwO
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: None
Character Name: Ricki Tarr
Series: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film primarily, backstory from the novel)
Age: Early thirties
From When?: The moment of his theoretical post-canonical death, on his knees in a back alley in then-Borneo, a gun to the back of his head.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate—Ricki is a violent man, a spy, an absent father and a cad. He worked for the most violent, bottom tier of British Intelligence as raw muscle, then as a recruiter, and is as dangerous a man in that world as it as possible to be.
Abilities/Powers: A Sarrat-trained operative for the Circus, and a rough and tumble child besides, Ricki is physically human but trained and dangerous.
Personality: Ricki Tarr is one of those characters that has a series of different faces, each projected in turn as a dancing series of feints to keep strangers from getting anywhere close to him. An operative for British Intelligence, the ‘surface projection’ identity he works with is fluid, but tends to be lighthearted, a frequenter of bars, a seducer of women.
He’s observant, but quick with a smile, a quip, likes to drive convertibles around the shoreline on sunny days. Even when he isn’t working, you get a sense that the sly tongue and ready laugh aren’t entirely his persona, that he tends to be good humoured by nature. It's hard to tell where the good ends and the bad begins, because it's sort of his style to slip jabs in with a smile, but on the whole the majority of people who deal with him will have the sense that he's a nice, gregarious, man. A 'cool cat' if you forgive the seventies parlance, which is when his canon is set.
It makes his deeply violent streak all the more terrifying. Ricki works for the messiest part of the Circus, as a foreign operative doing ‘wetwork’ and recruiting sources, and kills ruthlessly, if it seems infrequently, in service of his work. His penchant for violence preceded the work, but was certainly honed by his recruitment and training. It slips occasionally into his personal life. He runs into a room and finds a disemboweled man in a bathtub unexpectedly, but beyond one blink keeps right on functioning, unruffled.
Ricki has an oh-so-slightly insubordinate way about him, but with a intelligence and charm to him that make it hard to call him on the behaviour. His boss refers to him as ‘accident prone,’ tending to get himself into situations that simply require him to go off script and abandon his handler’s directives in such a way that it seems completely necessary in the post-mortem breakdown. It makes him difficult to discipline without seeming despotic, and is part of what makes him so frustrating to deal with. He has a complex relationship with authority, thanks to an abusive father and his unorthodox career. He seems simultaneously inclined to try to nettle anyone with any sort of power over him, and yet to have to trust them suicidally and completely, despite knowing that they may very well see him as completely disposable. As closed off as he is in other respects, as immune to violence, his part in the film opens with him sitting, nervous and sometimes weeping, on his superior’s couch, telling him everything.
When you peel all that back, he’s deeply intelligent and keenly observant, thanks in part to his training but also to innate ability. He’d initially read for the bar but been too intent on breaking the law to ever work in it. The whole series is something of a push-back against the glitzy glam James Bond spy, half the characters are middle aged men leafing through notebooks and decoding more code, and Ricki is the closest thing there is to an exception to this rule. Instead of cultured, though, he’s played crass, strong and solemn and a little tatty, and not at all flash. He's actually from Asia originally, but an expat family, and you are given the deliberate sense that it's not a particularly good family, by society standards. Ricki feels rough in more ways than he does smooth.
When he tells stories, he’s described as having a total and perfect stillness to him, recalling events in tremendous detail as though hearing his own voice describe them back to him. He is patient when he wants to be.
He’s also a sort of incoherent romantic. The tears he sheds in front of his handler, earlier, were for the life of Irina, young woman whom he’d unintentionally gotten captured while in the process of turning her to their side. He talks about needing to save her, owing her, adoring her, despite the briefness of their fling and the fact that he’d been seducing her with hopes to bring her over.
He also talks about his young daughter, holing up with her and her mother during the book in their native Kuala Lampur. When he's in trouble that's where he goes. He is referenced to have ‘wives around the globe’ and the woman in Kuala Lampur as 'currently leading the pack,' but this doesn’t seem to disqualify his desire to rescue Irina. Whether he intends to add her to their numbers, or to hole up with her and his daughter and daughter’s mother one day and just get away from it all isn't clear. It's even possible that, given the brevity of their actual relationship and its' being founded so heavily on lies, she represents an idea more than a person, a deep romanticism for loving and saving women. Though it's not handled explicitly in the book, and left out entirely in the film, there's clearly some sort of dissonance going on there. I would speculate that it's related to compartmentalization, to living one life with his wife and child (actually barely living it, he's absent most of the time and in the 1970s Kuala Lampur is hardly in close and easy contact with the outside world) so rather to leaving them as a sacrosanct island, representing home and safety, that he lives largely outside of with another identity entirely, himself as spy.
As The infidelity is slightly morally repugnant, but in the context of the book and film it’s just so refreshing to see someone invested in the wellbeing of another person that it actually really touching and romantic somehow? Maybe that just provides a more stark sense of the incredibly low standards for human decency in the twisted and shady world of espionage. Him expressing genuine grief, even over such an unorthodox situation, is really striking.
With regards to the romance in particular, Ricki has a slight ability not to see his own wrongdoing at every given moment. Early in his career he had what he refers to as 'a brush with a honeytrap' meaning being seduced by the enemy. Regarding Irina, he talks about her being pushed to tears or pushed to confess things as though it had happened quite spontaneously, as though he hadn't had a role in drawing these details and things out of her. This isn't to say he doesn't feel guilty, he clearly does, but when he talks about it there's a sort of ringing disconnect between the feeling and his out-loud interpretation of the past. Remorse without explicit acknowledgement.
Summed up, his personality is best described as profoundly dysfunctional, anesthetized to the suffering of others and out of touch with his own moral compass, meaning well(ish) but ultimately a terrifying muddle.
Barge Reactions: Ricki will have his ‘spy face’ on for the Barge, and will react with bright, glossy laughing marvel, wrinkling his nose at the gross things and shaking his head at the strange things and generally putting on a shiny, candy coloured front of a nice, reasonable person. Underneath that he will be deeply, violently, brutally suspicious and will try to find a way to start sleeping with a proverbial knife under his pillow.
This is partially due to his being an inmate, which will be a profoundly triggering experience for him, thanks again to teenaged years spent as a son of a persecuted Christian minister in the Japanese Changi Prison. More than that, though, for someone so wary and used to people trying to kill him, having his world view tilt on its’ head will be traumatic. He relies on seeing, understanding and controlling his environment to survive. He’ll try to cope with some of the difference by at least keeping a good mask up, but will be in pretty constant fight-or-flight for a good long while.
If he has the opportunity he is likely to be in trouble over his adjustment period for some pretty deeply violent overreactions, purely motivated by fear and a profound lack of control. This may not happen within the first few weeks, or even the first few months necessarily. He’ll be too intelligent to slip up unless something really rattles him, but especially insightful wardens may notice he has a vague sense of the ticking time bomb about him.
Regarding his Lothario status, I don't foresee Ricki trying to pick up too many women on the Barge. He would need to be in just the right sweet spot of settled down enough and not redeemed enough, and it would need to be just the right kind of woman... chances seem small. He may very well flirt, but without much bite.
Path to Redemption: I think that a lot of Ricki’s buttons are going to have to do with trust and intelligence and boundary pushing. I can see him really testing his Warden, being good, gaming his way through the system, getting in trouble and crashing back down through it. The key to an ineffective relationship with him is getting locked into a battle of stubbornness over something petty, and the key to a disastrous relationship with him is letting him outmanipulate his warden.
Positive approaches, however, would be steadfastness and trustworthiness. I think a big part of his problems in canon, as I see it, come from being a directionless kid, age 18, recovering from his horrible parenting (seriously, his father sounds like an asshole- the guy was put in prison and continued to preach so loudly that his wife and son were both targets for religious persecution alongside him, and then when Ricki got older tried to ‘beat the sin out of him’) but instead of being taken in by someone reasonable and grown up, he fell in with the Circus who put him to work murdering people and running guns, but not before interrogating him somewhat messily and ‘training’ him for several sinister years. His devotion to his superiors is pockmarked and strange, sometimes seemingly absent and sometimes really more than they deserve. He goes on to put himself in pretty severe danger for them to save the day in the story, and throws himself at their mercy at several key plot moments.
There’s a scene in the film version where his immediate superior, Peter Guillam, walks in on him unexpectedly when he believes that Ricki has betrayed him. He grabs him by the shirt front, standing over him, and punches him several times in the face, before his colleagues succeed in pulling him off and explaining that Ricki has been framed. Throughout the attack, Ricki doesn’t protest or move to defend himself, and doesn’t seem to resent it after the fact, passively licking the blood off his lip and casting him a glance that’s only barely reproachful, continuing as though the incident hasn’t occurred. Another approach could certainly be working with someone who a) never gets him to murder people and b) doesn’t punch him in the face. Consistently morally upright instruction, ie “no Ricki, I see how it could be convenient if you did kill that person but please don’t” particularly from someone who does understand high stakes, casualties, collateral, compromise, would do him a world of good in realigning his own moral compass. He would work best with a Warden who had grappled with some of those difficult questions and come out with a good moral ballast.
He will hate being condescended to, and push back hard against any pop psychology, but definitely stands a very good chance of making it through.
History: Ricki Tarr grew up in Penang, son of an Australian solicitor and British actress. The war saw them evacuated to Singapore, which unfortunately fell a few months later, and young Ricki and his parents were imprisoned in Changi jail under the Japanese. There, his father found a renewed faith in God, and preached loud and long to fellow inmates, resulting in difficulties for the family, traumatizing for Ricki in particular because of his inability to escape or control the situation in the slightest. After they were freed, the family returned to Penang and Ricki’s run-ins with the local law began. Mild crimes escalated gradually until Ricki’s father turned to the church, and had a few rough preachers try to ‘beat the sin out of his soul,’ which was apparently how things were done in the fifties.
Ricki gave up on his family then and there and bolted to Borneo, where he got heavy into gunrunning and got into considerable trouble running scams and causing various parties on the Indonesian isles to chase alternately him and their own tails. A local intelligence man named Mackelvore found him, a little bit heartbroken, a little bit of an alcoholic, but insisted that the young man had potential and sent him off to Singapore for some higher ups to have a look at that.
From there he was sent to Sarratt, to the infamous Nursery, where he was first stripped down to base components in the ungentle way of the agency, to be absolutely sure there was no chance that he was already working for the other side. Once assured that he was theirs, he was educated in various elements of espionage and violence, and graduated a few years later. They sent him back to gunrunning, explaining his few years of absence away, not that many people asked. His old contacts were running guns to the Communists, so he worked with them for a few weeks, picking off and identifying each and every one of them in systematic order, before killing his old friends (an ex-girlfriend among them) and setting fire to their boat.
From there, more training, and off to Kenya and a somewhat ignominious career marked by several scandals. Ricki was a ‘scalphunter,’ a rough term for someone who recruits willing and unwilling sources of information, who cuts and runs and burns when he needs to. Through his twenties (and the sixties) he accidentally handled a Brazilian minister too roughly and got into a bit of a mess with the press, and then had one of his marks, a Polish diplomat he’d been working in Spain, crumple under some heavy handed blackmail and jump from a high window. These were mostly overshone by a reputation for patience, ingenuity, diligence, but despite his very best work the rest of the time a reputation like that generally isn’t wiped away.
Thus, when he disappeared off the map in Istanbul, his immediate superior, Peter Guillam, wasn’t too concerned. Tarr had a habit of going not-quite-by-the-book, so nothing more was thought of it. In fact, something serious was going on. Ricki had been following a man named Boris, whom he was convinced was a nothing, a waste of time, when he met the man’s wife. Irina seemed to have something to her, so Ricki had turned her, offered her protection in exchange for information. She had informed him that there was a mole at the top of Circus, and he had informed Circus of such. Unfortunately, his missive had clearly reached the mole, because very quickly she was moved on by Russian agents, the information that she’d trusted him with, that he’d in turn trusted his superiors with, being fed right back to the people who she’d been betraying to him.
Ricki, panicked, had gone underground before returning back to London. He’d gotten in contact with Undersecretary Oliver Lacon, letting him know that Circus had been compromised, and kicking off the entire plot of Tinker Tailor. The mole had succeeded in framing Ricki’s flight as him defecting, and so, knowing that both the Russians and Circus were out to kill him, Ricki risked life and limb to go to George Smiley, the man in charge of the operation to catch the mole, and told his story. He’d agreed to help any way he could, provided that Smiley and Guillam would try to rescue Irina, to trade for her in some way. Both agents had been already aware that Irina was dead, murdered for her treason, but Smiley promised to do his best in order to ensure Ricki’s continued cooperation.
Whether or not he’d been aware of this last doublecross is somewhat unclear. He seems so dejected that you get the sense that he simply must, but serves as bait nonetheless to capture the mole and help save the integrity of the agency. We never see his reaction to the news of her death, what he finds out or doesn’t about Smiley’s using him. He slips quietly from the picture after his usefulness has been served.
Sample Journal Entry: I must admit.
[He says, between deep, heaving breaths. He’s in his cabin, doing situps, because situps are what one does in a prison cell. The rhythm helps focus him. The words come out choppy, between each push.]
When I heard the phrase ‘space ship’ this is actually not too far removed from what came to mind.
[Ever so slightly breathless.]
However, the saucer-shapes of the twenty five cent pulp covers seem more intuitive. Less idiosyncratic. Less ridiculous.
[Letting himself, for a split second, given in to his ever so slightly foul temper, mouth curving in a deep frown. He smoothes away as soon as he catches it, and gives up on this activity, sitting up and reaching for a towel, wiping the sweat off his face as he searches for words. He should finish this with something to soften it, but just musters a grin- a good one mind you, a friendly, deprecating, earnest smile, and disconnects.]
Sample RP:
It takes several weeks for Ricki to be able to make himself stand still and look out at the stars going by. At first he chalks his reluctance up to a feeling of profound vertigo, and while that’s fair, it goes a little beyond that. When he keeps his eyes averted from the outside he can let himself pretend he’s on solid ground, or sometimes on a large and very luxe ship, or even at worst in a normal, human prison. A prison staffed by the most sanctimonious and unorthodox guards imaginable, certainly, but something from earth nonetheless. When his self-delusion persists and persists, he finally finds he can’t stand himself any longer, and moves to press his nose up against the glass- god, is it even glass? He grips the windowsill with both hands for the first few seconds, watching the nighttime swirl of lights float by, and hangs on like that, staring, until he can gradually force himself to relax each muscle individually. Until he can stand watching the vortex, posture perfectly at ease, eyes half hooded and features schooled into relaxation, casually as he might watch the sea lapping at the sides of the boats in the port back in Istanbul. At last, when even his breathing is slow and steady, in and out through his nose and to just the right depth in his chest, he turns away as though nothing has happened and ambles his way back downstairs.
Pressed to talk about the strange behaviour, he won’t.
Special Notes: None!
no subject
Sample Journal Entry:
I must admit.
[He says, between deep, heaving breaths. He’s in his cabin, doing situps, because situps are what one does in a prison cell. The rhythm helps focus him. The words come out choppy, between each push.]
When I heard the phrase ‘space ship’ this is actually not too far removed from what came to mind.
[Ever so slightly breathless.]
However, the saucer-shapes of the twenty five cent pulp covers seem more intuitive. Less idiosyncratic. Less ridiculous. The walls here make very little sense, time certainly seems all a-jumble, and I still can’t quite work out precisely how it is that we’re all breathing- and yet breathe we do.
[Letting himself, for a split second, given in to his ever so slightly foul temper, mouth curving in a deep frown. He smoothes away as soon as he catches it, and gives up on this activity, sitting up and reaching for a towel, wiping the sweat off his face as he searches for words.]
I have half a mind to search for Laika while we’re out here. Has that ever been tried?
[Perhaps he could turn her to their side; a triumph for the Circus, he’s sure. He should finish this with something to soften it, but just musters a grin- a good one mind you, a friendly, deprecating, earnest smile, and disconnects.]
no subject
It takes several weeks for Ricki to be able to make himself stand still and look out at the stars going by. At first he chalks his reluctance up to a feeling of profound vertigo, and while that’s fair, it goes a little beyond that. When he keeps his eyes averted from the outside he can let himself pretend he’s on solid ground, or sometimes on a large and very luxe ship, or even at worst in a normal, human prison. A prison staffed by the most sanctimonious and unorthodox guards imaginable, certainly, but something from earth nonetheless.
At first, it’s easy to hide. He sits with his back to the dark, which he generally prefers because it gives him a convenient view of the entrances to each room, a habit that he is too old to break. It’s the Sarrat training, he can even halfway convince himself, nothing is going to come in from out there so it isn’t a vantage point that needs to be monitored. Besides, what are the chances that someone will notice?
In realistic terms, the chance that someone will notice a man on a space ship who’s afraid of the stars is actually fairly high. When his self-delusion persists and persists, he finally finds he can’t stand himself any longer, and decides that the anxiety, the situation, as he thinks of it, has to be resolved. The Sarrat training surfaces in him again. One morning, early enough that most of the corridors are quite empty, on a day where he has nothing in particular he needs to accomplish, Ricki moves to press his nose up against the glass- god, is it even glass? He grips the windowsill with both hands for the first few seconds, watching the nighttime swirl of lights float by, and hangs on like that, staring, until he can gradually force himself to relax each muscle individually. Until he can stand watching the vortex, posture perfectly at ease, eyes half hooded and features schooled into relaxation, casually as he might watch the sea lapping at the sides of the boats in the port back in Istanbul. At last, when even his breathing is slow and steady, in and out through his nose and to just the right depth in his chest, he turns away as though nothing has happened and ambles his way back downstairs.
Pressed to talk about the strange behaviour, he won’t. However, the more observant of his fellow space voyagers may notice that he returns to the same spot the next morning, and then the morning after that. Ricki will keep this up for as long as it takes. Ricki Tarr is a man who does whatever it takes, and never let it be said otherwise.
expanded file notes
Profession: Spy, specifically scalphunter, ie man responsible for hunting out possible chinks in foreign countries’ operations, responsible for blackmailing smalltime politicians, coercion, intimidation, bribery.
Worst crimes: Murder, violence, murder of a previous intimate partner, pathological lying.
Problem cognitions: The ends justify the means, the world just is this way, I’m not a very good person.
Early Life: Ricki Tarr was born in the 1930s to two parents (unnamed in canon) who were expats. Ricki’s father was Australian (consequentially this is one of the accents he relies on most fluently) and his mother British. Ricki’s mother was a small-time criminal and would-be actress, and his father was a lawyer and preacher. The family lived in Penang, which over the course of Ricki’s childhood became embroiled in the Malayan Troubles, a series of anti-colonial activities that targeted people like his family for the undeniably dreadful things that had occurred there under colonial rule.
A part of that colonization process had been the religious indoctrination in the area. The Evangelical Church of Borneo is still strong to this day (2015) and would have formed a rich and vibrant community for the family to be a part of. Consequentially, Ricki had many other British friends for the early part of his childhood, and might have been all right in the long run, if it weren’t for Changi.
This also contributed to a strict, conservative religious education. Evangelism is a fairly strict and traditional faith, and Ricki’s father was particularly firm and devout. Ricki’s relationship with his own faith has been complicated ever since, veering towards a professed atheism, but with a deep and buried intuitive understanding of Christian traditions. Already, in his time on the barge, he has begun to reconnect with and revisit some aspects of his religious upbringing, and this will probably continue.
As the conflict heated up in Malaya, Ricki’s family decided that the safest thing to do to avoid the budding emergency was to move to Singapore. Unfortunately, this small country (then-colony) was invaded by Japan shortly thereafter and all non-native citizens were rounded up and put into camps, the little family included. Changi, actually a real historic location, was mercifully one of the prisons with the highest survival rate for inmates, but this rate was still shockingly low. Ricki dealt with three years of incarceration, starvation, improper sanitation and lack of any other resources. His education suffered, obviously, but he became tough as nails; Ricki’s father’s adamant preaching made him highly unpopular with the guards and inmates alike. Interestingly, here I find one of the very-rare historical inconsistencies in Le Carre, it seems like he describes a situation where the British prisoners were thrown in with actual Singaporean criminals, which wasn’t actually the case... the whole building was converted to a POW camp. But since canon is vague on the point so will Ricki be.
What is clear is that Ricki’s father’s convictions (pride?) made things worse for Ricki, that both the prisoners and guards persecuted him and his family for his father’s preaching, making what was already a terrifyingly bad situation worse- he would probably have been 12-16 ish over the course of the three years he spent in the jail. When the sentence ended, Ricki’s relationship with his father was fractious at best.
Flying the Coop: After Changi, Ricki began to get into serious trouble. He began initially to follow in his father’s footsteps to become a lawyer but was having trouble with the law. At this age it was things like drinking, barfights, curfew breaking, mischief, a bit of theft- nothing that wouldn’t raise any parents eyebrows but nothing exactly incredibly serious, either. To a man like his father, though, this kind of behaviour was completely unacceptable.
Things ended badly. Ricki’s father, who was presumable not a tender or light-handed man to begin with, asked a few rough preacher friends to get together and beat the sin, read, ‘beat the shit’ out of his son. This probably occurred in the context of a rough hand in the home (nothing egregious for the time period, but certainly enough to do some lasting damage, we now know) and an intolerance for dissent.
The beating was bad enough that Ricki, at the tender age of seventeen, ran away from home and into a war zone. Young, immature, but fiercely bright and self-destructive, he eventually worked his way in with a crew of gunrunners. Heedless of the fact that these were dangerous people, he decided to go about playing one side against the other, running numerous deals and small-cons and generally escaping the noose a nick at a time. He fell wildly in love with a girl named Rose, the start of a series of passionate and romantic relationships based more on whim than on actual connection.
Joining the Circus: Ricki had been working with a group of Belgian gunrunners when he and Rose called it quits. A local agent named Macklevore stumbled upon him one evening, eighteen years old and drunk as hell, crying about Rose and the untrustworthiness of Belgians. He recommended Ricki as possible talent- one observation about the spies in the LeCarre series is that most of them have absent, dead, or abusive father figures, whenever family comes up. Probably something about it making them ripe for the word of a father figure, and able to offer uncompromising loyalty, as well as relatively few connections in the world.
Those, as well as his skill with local languages, and his facility with deception, earned him a trip to Singapore for an initial screening, and then another sojourn out to Brixton where he was worked over in earnest by ‘the Nursery,’ slang for the division of the service that deals with new talent. This meant first of all extensive interrogation, to be sure he wasn’t a double agent. Ricki passed these screenings, though some of the interviews would have been ‘hostile’ and undoubtedly traumatic, the beginnings of a twisted relationship with espionage that would teach him that great amounts of pain were accepted, were necessary, for the sake of the Circus.
After that came training. Training to become a spy is varied and complicated, and involves a great deal of general education as well as some specialized streams. Ricki covered physical training- though his previous career had given him a deep and easy facility with guns- but how to fight hand to hand, how to fight with a knife, and so on. He learned how to run an interrogation, a friendly one and a not-so-friendly, though true and sustained out and out torture would be beyond him, he learned some elements of physical pressure to put on a target.
Above all, he learned the art of truly complex and ingenious spycraft- how to run a wire, a series of connections from person to person, the kind of arrangement that would bring information safely from behind enemy walls, through hand and parlour across countries and safely to a drop zone in the UK. He learned how to watch without seeming to watch, how to tell when he was being followed as well as how to follow without giving away the same tells in return. He learned how to resist torture, how to build layers around himself, to give away information in a series of feints, cracking in increments to give his friends and colleagues enough time to go to ground. He learned to smoke unfiltered cigarettes from the label end first, so that the butts would be that much more unidentifiable if they were crushed out and dropped in a hurry. He learned to code and decode transmissions, ciphers, to leave messages as safely as possible.
All that training complete, Ricki was ‘played back into gunrunning,’ meaning sent back to return to his old life, but with new directives given by intelligence. The Malayan Emergency, still going strong, was at its’ heart a part of the cold war, now a battle between colonial forces and a new communist revolution. The Circus was intent that the gunrunning trade be crippled, insofar as it was responsible for arming a peasantry with aspersions of independence. Interestingly enough, the Evangelical church of Ricki’s childhood was partially propelled forward by the conflict; many revolutionaries met in churches, conversing under the noses of English-speaking preachers, using the weekly gatherings as a way to mobilize.
Ricki, though, remained in gunrunning, rejoining his old crew to milk them for any and all information on how the weapons were moving in the area. He got them all drunk (a technique he uses more than once in the book; “I kept my foot on the vodka bottle”, and is likely to rely on on the barge) and then shot them and set fire to their boat.
Among their number was Rose. I don’t like to believe Ricki got any especial pleasure from killing the girl who had thrown him over, but I don’t believe he hesitated on it for long, either. Of all the things he’s done, I find this one one of the more personally reprehensible, but on the other hand- the intimacy between them was already over, at least.
Re: expanded file notes
He began to specialize in earnest in the scalphunter work. This involved a considerable amount of blackmail of low level government officials all around the world. He was responsible for destroying the lives of many in the name of the pettiest kind of espionage there is; hunting out information about scandal and intrigue to use to manipulate other players, collecting and turning smalltime operatives to their side, getting low grade files and data from here there and everywhere. The problem with this work was really how it could impact his targets, often resulting in serious distress and even terrible betrayals.
One of the Circus strategies was to pick up low level agents in order for their own people to be able to burn them in the future- so Ricki turns Karl against the Germans for the British, knowing full well that Karl will provide him with jack all. Peter, Ricki’s boss, meanwhile ‘runs’ Friederich, a much higher level agent who funnels important information back to their side. Peter lets Friederich know that Karl is passing information to the Brits and provides him with what he needs to know to ‘find him out.’ He does so, and Ricki’s friend Karl ends up arrested, tortured, and executed for the betrayal, while Peter’s man Friederich is seen as more loyal and unimpeachable than ever. None of this was Ricki’s idea, of course, but that’s a big part of the problem; he’s a good boy and does what he’s told, does it ingeniously and does it well, even when it’s terribly cruel.
In one case, Ricki pushed too hard on a particular bit of blackmail, and his source threatened to expose the whole racket. He either jumped or was thrown off a tall building as a result. I... will go ahead and say he was probably a jumper, but was manipulated into it- that Ricki could have stopped him but instead talked him off the ledge rather than down from it, a happy middle between both possibilities.
And then there are the girls: Ricki is also a horrible cad and a ladies’ man. He’s known to keep common law wives in numerous corners of the world. While I don’t think he goes about telling them they’re each his one and only, it would probably be more decent for him to pick one and stick to her- particularly the mother of his child. His daughter, Danny, lives with her mother in Kuala Lumpur. A child of mixed ethnic heritage in the so immediately post-colonial context of the 1960s and on would have had a tough time of it, and Ricki was a totally absent father- not for a lack of a kind of idealistic, adoring love, but lack of any ability to handle responsibility and follow-through. The fact that he is constantly fleeing countries for his life, and that Malaysia in particular is too hot to hold him certainly didn’t help.
The other main girl in Ricki’s story is the incredible Irina. Irina was a soviet trained hood who Ricki spotted as a soft mark during what was supposed to be routine scalphunter work. Through a good deal of RIcki’s own help, Irina had fallen hopelessly in love with him; Ricki swept in to save her from an abusive marriage, to offer what seemed like a chance at freedom defecting to the West. In the film, he seems to genuinely seduce her; in the book he describes her as borderline schizoid and talks about ‘keeping his foot on the vodka bottle’ to keep her talking. I veer more towards the movie on this, since that’s where his canon is drawn from- he will have met her in Istanbul (film) rather than Hong Kong (book.) But the film shows a very uncomplicated lovestory and I like the idea very much that there’s more to it than that- that Ricki does love her, or what she represents, by the end, but preserving the sense that they’re both using one another.
And man, the ending. Irina dies horribly because of something Ricki does. He reports a piece of information she gives him back to the Circus and she is immediately dragged away to be tortured and eventually shot in the head. Ricki doesn’t realize she’s been killed, hopes to death that there’s a chance of getting her back, and has a very intense reaction to her loss.
For one thing, it means that someone in the uppermost levels of Ricki’s organization has turned to the enemy side, and has kidnapped his girl and is now probably trying to kill him. He goes underground and sneaks back to England, and actually sounds the alarm on the whole situation, kicking off the investigation that will be the plot of TTSS. He also begins to wonder who he can truly trust.
The answer, devastatingly, turns out to be ‘no one.’ Ricki is labelled a traitor in his own organization by the mole, in an effort to protect his own identity. He agrees to be part of a sting that will help reveal the mole’s identity, in exchange for which Smiley (the man he has trusted with his life at this point) will try to bargain for Irina’s freedom. Knowing full well that the girl is already dead, Smiley agrees to the terms and signs Ricki on for the dangerous escapade.
Now, at this point, Ricki Tarr is a mess, a knotted ball of guilt and a panic-stricken man on the run. In his scenes in the film he weeps openly on Smiley’s couch, explaining his grief for Irina, how he’d do anything to get her back. He professes to hate the organization that took him in from a young age- and why not? After dedicating his life to the Circus, to have them turn on him and ask for his blood, when he’d been in the right? He also gets into some brutal friction with his immediate boss, Peter Guillam.
Peter falls for the story that Ricki is a traitor. He goes into work one day to run a job for Smiley, to steal some documents from the Circus that will back Ricki up. After the theft has taken place, he’s called into a meeting and his bosses interrogate him, asking where Tarr, his resource, has got to or might be hiding. Peter tells them to get off his back and that he has no idea. He storms out, and to Smiley’s office. Reacting to the pressure and guilt of having spied on his own people, when he sees Ricki he punches him in the face. It’s a scene in the movie that’s always really gotten to me, because Peter comes in from above (and is played by the incomparable and TALL Benedict CUmberbatch) while Ricki lies prone on a couch. Ricki also doesn’t fight back, and Peter is pulled off him by other staff.
After Ricki has been hit a few times, he stays down, licking at the blood on his bottom lip and giving Peter the most passively reproachful sneer imaginable. In that moment, I see a lot of his relationship to authority; he likes Peter, genuinely trusts him, instructs the Secretary of the Interior at some point that Peter is the only man in the Circus that can be trusted. He calls him ‘darling’ and ‘baby’ and tries to get under his skin. And he is not phased at ALL about being punched in the face by him. In fact, he looks in that moment like he’s actually WON the argument by frustrating Peter to blows. He likes that his self-control is better than Peter’s, likes that he, a rough kid from the wrong side of the tracks, can fuck up an upper crust posh boy- there’s something so schoolyard defiant about the whole thing. It’s over super incredibly fast, but it’s always really stuck with me.
Now, the most horrible thing about the whole movie, from Ricki’s side of the story, is the suspicion that grows in you that he knows, that he must know. When Smiley sends him to Paris to be bait for the mole, Irina has been in Soviet prisons for months now, and the MGB are not a gentle group when it comes to turncoats. Realistically, Ricki was fooling himself to think he could help her- and to some extent, I think he knew it. A kernel of him, a core of him, I genuinely believe wanted to do the right thing by the situation, to save the organization that had recruited him when he was really just a kid, decades back. At his heart, Ricki wants to be on the side of the good. Therein, probably, lies his path to redemption.
Barge and on: The problem with working in a field like espionage is you get awful content, awful quick, with a lot of the ‘ends justifies the means’ rhetoric- but in Ricki’s case it goes beyond that. In the Circus, that isn’t even a conversation that’s on the radar. They’re all so used to playing high-stakes that it’s not even a conversation that’s had any more, except in terms of ‘diminishing collateral.’ There’s a motif in the film where a lot of the characters are moved around on a chess board, and for all the bigwigs there are many pawns like Ricki.
Having spent the better part of two decades in that environment has wrought some damage, and undoing it will be slow because of Ricki’s firm belief that espionage has helped prevent the spread of communism, the horrible shit associated with, and in fact a major nuclear war. Logically, intellectually, everything he’s done is so incredibly justifiable that in some ways it’s naive to think there would ever, could ever be a world without men like Ricki Tarr in it.
Good modelling and effective relationships with authority will be a big help. Honestly, just having a sane, firm, sensible warden will do him a world of good.
The only thing that’s interesting that’s springing to mind with this right now is that the best thing for him might be an apology. Ricki is going to try to instigate a lot of punishment and discipline, and that’s likely to only increase as time goes on. The worst part of it will be how ineffective it’s going to be on him in any sort of half-measure. New assigned duties he’ll... probably just not do. Short stays in solitary he’ll be fine and dandy with. Having his privileges taken away will just make him feel more miserable but also more self righteous, like of course this was always going to get petty and he should never have trusted any of them to begin with.
The natural result may very well be that eventually, someone tries a form of discipline that really scores some points; a slightly-too-long stay downstairs (a full week in solitary is actually excruciatingly difficult and already long enough to have detrimental psychological effects, particularly if multiple short stretches are used.) A missed trip down to an important world... I don’t know what- nothing abusive, of course, but just something that really genuinely scares, upsets, or hurts him. Having been through such things many-a-time, the barge might very well be the first place anyone ever says ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that to you, it wasn’t okay and it won’t happen again.’ This will not obviously happen quickly or even easily, or necessarily at all- the actual thing would have to be genuinely deserving of an apology too- but if it does it would be a pretty much instantaneous soul-jarring step in the right direction for him.
In the shorter term, another very good step would be to get him into a conversation about his work and let him go, in all his convincing glory, about why it was important. Someone who can hear that, absorb it, and agree with some of the principles but expand to ‘and still you shouldn’t have done it’ will do way better than someone who sees the world in black and white, but the key will really be hearing him out. He’s such a shut-down character with so much trapped in his chest that in a perverse sense, he’s actually looking forward to someone having his file, to someone knowing him so thoroughly. It’s comforting for him on some level, and familiar; they’re all details his old handlers would have had, and he sought their approval compulsively for years. Being in a similar relationship, except where he feels heard and the other party cares about his wellbeing, will do him a world of good.
SO FAR AT THE BARGE: the only noteworthy thing is the fact that he has managed to procure knives, a gun, a taser, and several molotov cocktails within the not quite two months he's been here. She may want to confiscate some of those.
Further notes will soon follow.