When I was 13 I picked up a paperback at a railway station book stall. I still remember, it had a coffee-coloured cover with a photograph of Berlin and the words The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, in bold yellow capital letters. It was written by somebody named John Le Carré. Obviously French, I said to myself.
I bought the book only because of the magic word “spy” in the title. I knew all about spies: they were those heroic, ultra-cool types who were spotted in places like Paris, Istanbul and Jamaica. They drank vodka martinis, drove exotic sports cars, and carried Walther PPK 7.65 pistols concealed in shoulder holsters.
They also got to have sex with some throbbingly desirable woman, usually in the last three-quarters of the book. I knew all this because I was a dedicated James Bond fan, and had read all of his novels. I was now looking forward to reading about this new spy who came in from the cold (whatever that meant).
John le Carre, who worked for the British intelligence services in the 1950s and 1960s, has 25 novels to his credit and one memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel (2016). John le Carre: The Biography was an extremely well researched authoritative biography of British spy and novelist David Cornwell, better known as John le Carre. The biographer Sisman presented the facts as found in his research and noted instances where it differed with Cornwell's remembrances. Sep 08, 2016 I n 1782, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ’s Les Confessions was published – the first modern autobiography and, two and a half centuries on, still something of a shocking, startling read. Pigeon Tunnel was published just after the very good biography, John Le Carre’, The Biography. Pigeon Tunnel may be the results of his collaboration with Adam Sisman. Having stirred up so many memories he may have decided that he should have his versions and his thoughts about specific aspects of.
But when I first flicked through the pages of this book, I felt thoroughly cheated. What was all this dreary rubbish? Page after page about some shabby character named Alec Leamas who does nothing in particular, moving from depressing locations in London to even more depressing locations in East Germany. What kind of spy story was this, anyway?
Where was the action? Where was the lifestyle? Where was the sex? In lieu of the latter, all I could find was the fleeting description of a skinny stripper with a bruise on her thigh in some seedy strip club.
I tossed the book aside, with the contempt it deserved.
I n 1782, Jean-Jacques Rousseau ’s Les Confessions was published – the first modern autobiography and, two and a half centuries on, still something of a shocking, startling read.
The end of adolescence
A few weeks later, on one of those boring, endless, summer-holiday afternoons, with nothing else to read, I picked up the book again, and looked through it tentatively. And before long I was hooked. It was, in some way, the end of adolescence and the beginning of adulthood.
That is how I got drawn into the world of John Le Carré: not merely just a series of novels, but an entire richly imagined world, like JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth or RK Narayan’s Malgudi. It’s a world populated by a set of distinctive characters – George Smiley, PercyAlleline, Tom Haydon, Toby Esterhase, Peter Guillam, and others – who come to the fore and then recede intriguingly, as the author manipulates their world over the years.
Thus Smiley, who is the protagonist of the first novel, Call For the Dead, recedes into the background, and becomes just a minor character in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and The Looking Glass War – and, in fact, disappears completely in A Small Town in Germany – before re-emerging in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy to reoccupy the centre space, and then slowly fade out again In The Secret Pilgrim. It is a complex world, and it is sometimes hard to think that Le Carré did not have a master plan in mind before embarking on the series. It’s a world that is, in fact, so complex that David Monaghan wrote a popular guide-book to help readers navigate through its many layers and translucencies.
And it is this complexity that makes Le Carré’s world so engaging: once you are drawn into its mazes, it is impossible to escape. Very often you find yourself compelled to go back and read the books once again, to grasp all of their nuances, to unravel all of their secrets, to savour, once again, the conclusions that are so deliciously inconclusive.
The sights, sounds, smells and characters
Le Carré was, of course, lured into British Intelligence while still an undergraduate at Oxford, and he grew up to become a “spy” (albeit a more minor spy than many people assume). And that is where the authentic sights, sounds, smells and characters of his world come from.
George Smiley, for example, was essentially an amalgam of two people who played an important role in Le Carré’s life, John Bingham, his devious, plotting, counter-plotting boss, and Vivian Green, his erudite tutor at Oxford. Connie Sachs, the living memory of the Circus, was based on a real-life MI5 Russia watcher named Millicent Bagot. The enigmatic Karla was supposedly based on Markus Wolf, the legendary boss of East German Intelligence (although Le Carré denies it). Smiley’s wife, the perfidious Lady Anne, was Le Carré’s own wife, Anne, though her perfidies belonged to Le Carré himself.
Alec Leamas, the protagonist of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold – and thus the character who first made Le Carré famous – had a different kind of genesis. He was based on a man Le Carré saw at London airport one morning, on his way to Berlin. He was wearing a shabby raincoat, and had a haggard, burned-out quality about him. He walked up to the bar, ordered himself a large whisky, and paid for it by pulling out a handful of coins of various different currencies. And then he downed his whisky and walked out into the morning. But in those few, fleeting minutes, Le Carré got a character-squeeze for the anti-hero of his next book, and knew instinctively that he would die at the Berlin Wall.
Leamas was, of course, the very antithesis of the heroic spy, as imagined until then. The anti-Bond. (Indeed, Le Carré buffs will tell you there are clever little Ian Fleming jokes hidden in the George Smiley narrative, for those who know where to look.)
The language of Le Carré’s world
Shoemakers: Document forgers, who provide fake passports and other documents
Lamplighters: Surveillance experts
Wranglers: Cryptographers
Scalphunters: Strong-arm agents, who handle activities like kidnapping, burglary, blackmail and assassination.
Pavement artists: Operatives who shadow people in public.
Nuts and Bolts: The engineering department, responsible for espionage hardware and devices.
Housekeepers: The finance department.
Janitors: Operations staff, such as security guards.
Mothers: Secretaries and typists.
Nursery: The espionage training centre.
Lamplighters: Surveillance experts
Wranglers: Cryptographers
Scalphunters: Strong-arm agents, who handle activities like kidnapping, burglary, blackmail and assassination.
Pavement artists: Operatives who shadow people in public.
Nuts and Bolts: The engineering department, responsible for espionage hardware and devices.
Housekeepers: The finance department.
Janitors: Operations staff, such as security guards.
Mothers: Secretaries and typists.
Nursery: The espionage training centre.
Many of these terms, invented by Le Carré, were later co-opted by British Intelligence.
Le Carré 2.0
When the Cold War ended, everybody said Le Carré was finished: now what was he going to write about, with the Circus going out of business? But he quickly reinvented himself and launched what one might call Le Carré 2.0.
Even before the Cold War had ended, in fact, Le Carré had begun to branch out into other spaces, as in The Little Drummer Girl, where he wrote about an Israeli spymaster and his quest for a Palestinian terrorist. And now he went on to explore new areas of intrigue from around the world, as if to demonstrate to us that, while everything might have changed, in fact, nothing had really changed.
Thus his new books would be set in the murk of the global arms industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the money-laundering industry, and in the sordid political intrigues of places like Central Asia, South America, Africa and Britain. Each of these new worlds that Le Carré created was as authentic as the earlier world of George Smiley had been, thanks to the meticulous research that he did, spending months on the ground, interviewing insiders – from industry experts to whistle-blowers, from war-lords to mafia bosses – as if he was an investigative journalist, and not a novelist.
And it was during this second phase of his career that he produced some of his finest works, like The Constant Gardener, Absolute Friends and A Delicate Truth, quietly reiterating the fact that he is today not merely a great writer of spy fiction, but a great writer of literary fiction.
Indeed, a question that is sometimes asked is, when will Le Carré win a Nobel Prize? Or will he be denied it, as Graham Greene was?
Short stories by a master storyteller
The Pigeon Tunnel, Le Carré’s new book, has been called a memoir, but it’s more like a set of short stories culled from a remarkable life. As a memoir, it is actually somewhat redundant, because just last year, Adam Sisman wrote a definitive 600-plus-page biography of Le Carré, with his full co-operation. So this new book doesn’t tell us very much that we didn’t already know. But, read as a collection of short stories, told by a master story-teller, it holds us spellbound.
One puts down the book with a kind of sadness, however, for one can’t help get the feeling that it could be Le Carré’s swan song. He is, after all, 86 now, and has been writing his bestselling books for over half a century. Sooner rather than later, the inevitable must happen, and Le Carré will, like Alec Leamas, the protagonist of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, finally arrive at a kind of Berlin Wall of his own.
And then, right at the end – I like to imagine – he will, as Leamas did, very fleetingly see a small car smashed between two great lorries, and a couple of small children waving cheerfully through the window. If you’re a Le Carré fan, you will know what I mean.
The Pigeon Tunnel, John le Carré, Penguin Viking.
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Alison Sharp
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One of John le Carré’s boyhood memories is clutching his mother’s hand while waving to his father, who stood high up behind a prison wall. Ronnie Cornwell was a charming rogue, a confidence man who ran frauds and visited jails all over the world. He once sent the teenage le Carré to St. Moritz to talk a hotel manager out of an overdue bill — “and while you’re there, have yourself a steak on your old man.” Yet his love for his sons overflowed in guilty tears, and his longest con was to finagle expensive private educations for them. (He later sent a bill.) As for waving to him in prison, however, Cornwell insisted that le Carré had misremembered. Cornwell had done a stretch at Exeter Jail, yes — but everyone knows that at Exeter you can’t see into the cells from the road.
Is the memory real? This question in various forms drives le Carré’s remarkable memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Le Carré began his career working for British intelligence and went on to revolutionize the intrigue genre with over twenty intricately wrought novels, like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy andThe Constant Gardener. Now eighty-four, he finds that pure memory is elusive “after a lifetime of blending experience with imagination.” He believes what his father said, but he also knows that after that remembered day, a part of him never saw Cornwell wearing anything but a convict’s uniform. One of the most haunting scenes of the book recounts the way the otherwise exuberant Cornwell would stand meekly at doors, waiting for them to be opened. As a prisoner, he had not been able to do this himself. And yet this memory is filtered as well: it comes secondhand, from le Carré’s mother, who abandoned him in childhood and was an enigma thereafter. It, too, is clouded by time’s opaque haze.
The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My LifeHardcover$28.00
The Pigeon Tunnel is an episodic rather than a chronological memoir, jumping from scene to scene in le Carré’s fascinating life. The deeply affecting chapter on Cornwell is not merely the best part of the book, it may well be the best thing le Carré has ever written. Other sections are less personal. Le Carré avoids writing about his marriages, friendships, and children, focusing instead on the relationship between his work as a spy and his chosen life as a novelist. The two careers have much in common with one another and with his father’s line of work, he asserts, not least because they involve a complicated relationship to the truth. “To the creative writer, fact is raw material, not his taskmaster but his instrument, and his job is to make it sing.”
Parts of this book sing a little too much. Fans of le Carré’s intricate novels will recognize here his jargon-filled, world-weary dialogue and suspect embellishment. Such dialogue fills the chapter on spymaster Nicholas Elliott, who interviewed the traitor Kim Philby after Philby defected to the Soviet Union. Similarly, le Carré seems to make a good story even better as he recounts trying to collect a debt for his father from the Panamanian ambassador to France at age sixteen. He writes that the ambassador’s wife, “the most desirable woman I had ever seen,” played footsie with him under the table and then nibbled on his ear as they danced into the night. Such print-ready scenes are evocative but not entirely believable, and once again implicate the fraught relationship between memory and the creative act. Le Carré’s biographer Adam Sisman contends that le Carré “enjoys teasing his readers, like a fan dancer, offering tantalizing glimpses, but never a clear view of the figure beneath.”An air of mystery suits a thriller writer — especially one who used to be a spy.
John Le Carre Book List
The Pigeon Tunnel shows that le Carré is at his best not when he renders scenes or snappy dialogue but when he simply observes. He has a marvelous eye. His diplomatic cover in the 1960s required him to escort dignitaries from place to place, including translating for a German politician meeting with Harold Macmillan. The British prime minister’s “patrician slur . . . was like an old gramophone record running at a very low speed,” le Carré writes. “A trail of unstoppable tears leaked from the corner of his right eye, down a groove and into his shirt collar.” Le Carré briefly describes his great-grandfather, “whom I remember as a white-bearded D. H. Lawrence lookalike riding a tricycle at ninety.” Best of all is a surreal meeting with Yasser Arafat, which occurred while le Carré researched the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a novel. As they embraced, le Carré sized up his man, whose brown eyes were “fervent and imploring.” Arafat’s famously patchy beard “is not bristle, it’s silky fluff. It smells of Johnson’s Baby Powder.”
John Le Carre Books
The meeting with Arafat illustrates a central concern of le Carré’s working life: his commitment to research. It is an ironic preoccupation for a self-confessed fabulist. Although his early spying looms large in the public imagination, le Carré has gathered far more material for his novels during civilian trips to dangerous places. Many of the memoir’s chapters recount these adventures. He spent time in the eastern Congo and Khmer Rouge Cambodia; he interviewed Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern terrorists. In every town he tried to find the watering hole where spies, diplomats, journalists, and men of fortune sought comfort and camaraderie. These settings and characters worked their way not just into his fiction but into his consciousness; they have set his novels apart from all other stories of intrigue. “An old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination,” he confesses, late in this book. And among John le Carré’s many talents, a splendid imagination looms large.