“a plastic duck going over Niagara”

The expression “a plastic duck going over Niagara” captures Jay’s way of surviving political upheaval: he stays afloat by moving with the current, not by holding to a government or an allegiance. The narrator uses the image while explaining to Jean why Jay, and not a simple conversion of brainwashed people into Russian agents, lies at the centre of the IPCRESS affair.

Image and Context

The comparison follows a catalogue of governments and political changes Jay has lived through. The narrator sets his experience against the relative continuity of government in England, describing Jay as someone who has seen regimes come and go too often to rely on them. The plastic duck turns that history into a compact visual image: carried through turbulence, it neither steers the course nor sinks.

Jay’s Opportunism

The metaphor describes more than passive endurance. The narrator says Jay floated along with events by selling information, including material associated with Klaus Fuchs in Britain, Alan Nunn May in Canada, and the Rosenbergs in the United States. He later moved into kidnapping and arranging for people to travel east, but, the narrator explains, money remained the point: Jay would have served any buyer offering the right price. The duck image therefore makes adaptability sound almost weightless, while the actions it introduces are consequential and deliberate.

From Survival to Control

The explanation then turns from Jay’s past conduct to his plan. He conceived of brainwashing well-placed people so that they would send information through him and remain loyal to him personally. His experience of shifting political loyalties thus frames the network not as a straightforward instrument of Russian allegiance, but as a scheme organized around Jay’s own influence and profit. The phrase’s image of going wherever the current carries the duck also anticipates the narrator’s account of how Jay exploits suspicion: the possibility of brainwashing makes people distrust one another, while Jay stands at the centre of the information flow.