John Le Carre's double life

After the Berlin wall came down, interviewers began to ask John le Carré whether the end of the Soviet Union had robbed him of his subject matter. The question irritated him, because it implied he was only capable of producing spy thrillers, derivative novels little better than police procedurals.

But his questioners had a point. The novels le Carré wrote in the 1990s were not his best. His Cold War writing had been charged with the urgent paranoia of the time, and by the lingering suspicion that the black and white opposition of east versus west was in fact a much greyer affair. Le Carré’s exploration of this moral landscape was perhaps his greatest achievement, but when the nuances of the Cold War vanished, it led to a corresponding loss of nuance in his writing.

Le Carré’s summary of the Cold War—“the right people lost but the wrong people won”—is a nice line and one that seems to have led him to the conclusion that, with the Soviets gone, the real enemy now was corporate culture and by association the United States. In the books of the late-1990s and early-2000s—The Tailor of Panama, The Constant Gardener, Absolute Friends, A Most Wanted Man—the earlier subtleties fell away. The US and big business were repeatedly portrayed as sinister and a new shrill tone emerged that diminished his writing.

Yet his choice of subject matter could be startlingly prescient. The publication of Our Game (1995), which dealt with separatists in the Caucasus, coincided with the climax of the first Chechen war. His most recent novel, A Delicate Truth, tells the story of a disillusioned civil servant who leaks a cache of government secrets. The book was published in April 2013, just a month before Edward Snowden, a former employee of the US National Security Agency, boarded a plane for Hong Kong.

The lesson of these later works was somewhat one-note: the west is decadent and dominated by malign interests and corporations; its apparent prosperity is based on the suffering of the developing world. But this analysis does not fit the economic facts. The world is becoming more economically equal, not less. Hundreds of millions of Indians, Chinese and Africans have been lifted out of poverty by adopting the economic attitudes that le Carré seems to deplore. Rather than pushing for global dominance, under President Barack Obama the US has retreated from the global stage, scalded by its experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It is perhaps natural that le Carré should kick against orthodoxy. He was born in 1931 as David Cornwell. His father Ronnie was an irrepressible conman who scalped everyone he met. He talked numerous people out of their life savings, including the neighbours. A superficial charmer in public, Ronnie was a monster to his family. Coming home drunk he would barge into the boys’ bedroom and fondle his sons. He was unfaithful to Olive, David’s mother, and on one occasion forced her to accept another woman into their bed. It all proved too much. One night, Olive packed a bag and while her two sons slept, she left and never returned. David Cornwell grew up motherless. He would not see her again until he sought her out in his twenties.

Ronnie was a spinner of yarns. As Adam Sisman explains in this excellent biography, when Ronnie sent his boys to public school, they were forced to become storytellers, just like their “old man.” At Sherborne, David quickly adopted the upper-middle class manners and appearance of the other pupils. Desperate to conceal his very different origins, he learned the value of invention and deception.

Aged 17, he took the surprising decision to attend the University of Berne, in Switzerland and as a young, broke, lone teenager he soon caught the attention of MI6. He did a few jobs for them—the details are vague. Later he went to Oxford and took a first in modern languages. He joined MI5 and eventually MI6, and it was then that he started to write.

Success came to le Carré at striking speed. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963) flew off the shelves. By February 1964, it was number one in America. He sold the film rights and Richard Burton, then one of the biggest movie stars in the world, was cast in the lead role. The money started to roll in. At this point, MI6 took him aside and it was agreed that he was too high profile to remain a spy.

Success caused le Carré two problems. The first was that having written a hit novel, he was under pressure to do so again. The second was that success, in the eyes of the literary world, was inherently suspect. If a writer sold too many books it was a sign that he was a bit downmarket—a genre writer.

Le Carré’s writing shows little sign of being influenced by the literary experiments of the 20th century. There is no post-modernism apparent. He does not write about writing, or draw attention to the form in which he works: there is nothing self-referential in his novels. His style is direct, but at the same time immersive, which allows for the steady build-up of narrative pressure. As a result his books are very exciting—gripping, even. But who is to say that gripping and literary should be mutually exclusive? As the works of Raymond Chandler and former MI6 officer Graham Greene make clear, a book can have both qualities.

Le Carré draws his characters with all the detail and vividness of a man who has spent his professional life closely watching other people. His best creations are irresistible. You root for them. And in rooting for them, le Carré is able to make you feel acutely their moral contortions.

Like le Carré himself, his characters are loners. You are drawn to them. His stories are of men and women who are, for whatever reason, fighting alone. You join them. How could you not? And in this way, his appeal is ultimately psychological. On one level he offers revelation, the big reveal to the whodunit. But his currency is individualism: he deals with people in situations where they can’t go back. They must go forward. Alone. Very few themes exert a greater pull.

The two novels he wrote after The Spy were well received but did not create the same frenzy. His sixth work The Naive and Sentimental Lover was a semi-autobiographical work that depicted the love triangle between a maundering English businessman and a bohemian couple. By le Carré’s now very high standards, the book was a commercial and critical failure.

Then came the three books that would come to define him as a writer. Starting in 1974 with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, le Carré produced a trilogy that cemented his reputation in the post-war British canon, and captured Britain as a nation in decline. In the dusty corridors, the drink-sodden, broken-down clubs of Pall Mall and the dilapidated offices of the British establishment, he brought to life a horrible vision of a country shorn of its empire, diminished on the world stage and crippled by self-importance.

The trilogy sold in astounding numbers. Alec Guinness took the lead role of George Smiley in a television adaptation. It was a global smash. In 1986, he released his autobiographical A Perfect Spy, which Philip Roth described it as “the best English novel since the war,” perhaps an over-statement—the two men were friends. His 1989 novel The Russia House was turned into a film starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer. He was fabulously wealthy, and at his peak.

And then the wall came down.

A great irony pervades le Carré’s career. As a spy, he worked against the Soviet Union, but when the victory came he couldn’t stomach the outcome. As a writer, he was a critic of the establishment—but he is now part of the literary establishment. He is not afraid to throw his weight about if he thinks that his best interests are not being served. According to Sisman, le Carré has been known to end 20-year commercial relationships by letter.

I wonder whether in his moments of reflection, his former capacity for doubt creeps back from time to time. And whether he perceives that he has become, in literary terms, the very superpower that he now so deftly excoriates in his captivating books.