When it was announced that The Night Manger was actually going to continue a year or two ago like they teased back in 2019, I decided to finally recap season one like Chrissy had been begging me to for a while. But I also tried to find the original LeCarre book in audio because I am too busy to be able to sit and read much these days, so I needed something I could listen to while driving, cleaning, etc. I found a copy on cassette read by LeCarre himself. Which would have been great except it was abridged. I listened to it anyway while putting up (or taking down, I forget which) a Christmas tree. I finally got hold of an unabridged copy and I thought I should do some comparisons or gap filling like I did with Marvel when I started reading a bunch of the comics.

Let's start with character descriptions...

Richard Roper: "Gorgeous" "Tall, slender and at first glance noble...a face to play cards against and lose."

Sandy Langbourne: "beautiful" "pretty" (like, repeatedly) and having a "long blond ponytail". A "weapons freak" who "prides himself on his killing skills"

Jonathan Pine: "compact...nimble...he had trim curled hair and a pugilist's thick brow." "lacks charisma" "not street wise. He's not wise at all. He's putty."

Yeah. This might partly explain why Hugh Laurie initially thought he should play Jonathan. To be fair, there are a couple women who describe Jonathan (or one of the aliases they know him by) as pretty or at least good looking later. Also, Sophie refers to him as the "Flower of England", which, when I mentioned it in a group text, prompted Chrissy to make a crack about "deflowering" and Emilio to send this:

I do like this comparison from Burr: "When God finished putting together Dicky Roper, he took a deep breath and shuddered a bit, then He ran up our Jonathan to restore the ecological balance."

Roper and Burr are described as perfect adversaries. Burr refers to Roper as "our Dicky" and "the Roper" and is, in fact, obsessed with taking him down. And I keep using the last name because we already knew the character Olivia Coleman plays was a man in the book. Leonard became Angela. But weirdly, Rex Mayhew was originally Rex GOODhew and it's not really clear why that change needed to happen. But this seems to be one of the things they sort of recaptured with the second season, by giving Jonathan the alias Alex Goodwin. Also the alias of "Max" which they give another agent Jonathan contacts while in Colombia. Another thing that made its way into season two is "Operation Night Owl", something in Jonathan's file that Leonard is unable to find any details on because it is deemed "too highly classified".

I assumed that Angela's aversion to guns was some sort of British commentary on Americans in the show, but it is actually a character trait of Burr's in the novel.

Sophie's dog is gruesomely slaughtered along with Sophie, which I recall being grateful the show didn't do.

The cook Jonathan is working for when the whole kidnapping plot happens is named Mama Low. And he is...problematic. Probably a pretty accurate depiction of a creole guy in the 90s though. Complete with very liberal use of the "n word" as found in the lyrics of every rap song. LeCarre was British. Which I recall being the excuse of why he thought Jemima was a common name for an American woman too. Speaking of Jed, I remembered a mistake I made in the original season 1 recaps where I thought the sexist nature of her backstory was owing to the age of the book, which I assumed was 20 or 30 years older than it actually is. It turns out her actual backstory is MUCH MORE HORRIFYING. Like, she's a survivor of MULTIPLE abusers. Also, despite the fact that they end up together in the end (more on the ending later), Jed and Jonathan never actually have sex while the operation is being conducted. Although, Burr describes a transcript of a phone conversation between them as ending with "a lot of huffing and puffing while they get off listening to each other's breathing."

I recall a brief mention in the show about Jonathan being married for, like, six months at one point and figured this was what inspired Matthew's backstory about an ex-wife in France for season 2. She actually shows up in the book in the middle of the whole establishing a criminal record as Jack Linden plot. Her name is Isabelle and she refers to him as "Corporal Pine" which probably indicates how long ago the marriage was. Apparently, for the brief marriage he did all the traditional housewife work so she could focus on becoming an artist, which might explain why she says this when they meet again: "what are you doing for sex? I always thought you might be queer." "Good lord, no," he says before immediately changing the subject.

At one point, Mama Low is talking about the mussels he ordered Jonathan to make: "Mussels goes straight to the balls, Mass' Lamont. Ladies n' gentlemen gon' screw their hearts out tonight, all on account yo' mussels." Which might explain the suggestive way Corky kept obsessing over the "saucy mussels" Jonathan made for them. To a certain extent, he does that in the book too. Before blatantly admitting he's gay (in 90s British terms a "poof") and bemoaning that his little interrogation would be so much easier "if I had you under a bright light with me playing James Cagney and walloping you with a dildo."

Also, Corky repeatedly refers to killing as "topping" when speaking to Jonathan as in "surprised you didn't top him too". I'm sure this is not at all sexual sounding to a Brit in the 90s. Nor is this: "Roper's going to feel your bones for himself." Side note: it is a bit weird that his kid is calling him Roper.

When Jonathan gets beaten up saving Danny from a kidnapping, Roper checks on Jonathan and the audiobook narrator hilariously fails to make this sound NOT suggestive:
"Can you feel my hand okay?"
"Yes."
"Here, too?"
"Yes."
"Here?"
"Yes."
So yeah. I think I'm starting to see the homoeroticism the show writer was talking about. But also, this scene was noted by a Spanish fan page for its parallels to the scene in season two where Roper's son absolutely IS taking advantage of the situation to feel Jonathan up.

Names Jonathan uses in the novel: Jacques Beauregard, Thomas Lamont, Derek Thomas, Jack Linden. Only one of those was in the show and it was the only one that had any connection to trees, so that whole in-joke was apparently all on the writers of the show. Two were Canadian and seemed to communicate exclusively in French, fooling a mother and daughter who didn't even realize he was British. Which might say something about how convincingly they felt Tom would be able to pull off accents. The daughter of the French Canadian is the one whose name he accidentally says while loopy and recovering from being beaten half to death: Yvonne. The mother's response upon finding out he had lied to them was a rant about how he seduced everyone (including her, but she doesn't acknowledge it).

Senor Robinson is an alias a different character uses for receiving messages from Jonathan after he has been compromised and claims to have a bad case of Montezuma's Revenge that requires frequent trips to the bathroom where he can write messages in private. This not at all glamorous but probably more realistic depiction of spy work was likely left out of the adaptation for obvious reasons.

Which brings us to the ending and the most significant change. I read on a Reddit post that the ending of the book is actually pretty common for LeCarre. Nobody really "wins" in the end. In this case, Burr chooses saving the life of a good man over catching a bad one. Because in the book, Jonathan is captured and held for days in something like a storage closet on Roper's yacht, being tortured and almost killed multiple times. Obviously, aside from a brief period in the 70s when everything was bleak as fuck, this sort of ending is generally unacceptable to a film audience. The proof is that when season 2 ended with the bad guys winning and pretty much everyone who was helping Jonathan dying, most people responded with "I hated how it ended" and AO3 saw a spike in fanfiction with alternate endings (which I am still participating myself in as of my writing of this addendum to the recap). The show changed it to Jed being tortured and used to try to pressure Jonathan into going along. Also, with Jonathan killing Corky and pinning blame on him so they don't suspect Jonathan until it's too late. I feel like the process of writing my own fanfic series has given me insight into how little changes can completely alter the direction of the story later on. Little tweaks here and there start piling up. And when your goal is to get a more palatable "good guys win" end result, it's very easy to manipulate all the moving pieces to make that happen and have it make sense. It is more satisfying. And LeCarre himself was understanding and happy with it and prompted the idea of continuing the story. So it really feels like anyone who would complain about the ending changing is just being a pedantic buzzkill. Whether the second season is on the same level of writing is a completely separate argument and harder to defend. As I'm mapping out important events and tracking which ones did and did not happen or happened but were completely different in my series (link goes to second installment), I find myself running into the same realization repeatedly: that there are several very heavy handed plot contrivances. I get why the writers needed to do things a certain way and how events unfolding the way they do makes sense within the parameters they set, but...sometimes it requires you to just accept really weird story manipulations and I just don't understand how Roper was so chill with Juan being inexplicably absent at the drop or how he could have outmaneuvered everybody with TWO planes and WHAT THE FUCK MADE ME THINK I COULD WRITE THIS SHIT?!

Ahem. Sorry. Anyway...I will leave you with a link to the article I found written by LeCarre himself discussing his feelings on adaptations and this one in particular. It turns out, he was one of the people who read the relationship between Roper and Jonathan as homoerotic.