John le Carré RIP

[Sheilbh]

John le Carré, author of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, dies aged 89
Thriller writer most famous for stories of complex cold war intrigue began his career as a real-life spy in postwar Europe


'I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit' ... John le Carré. Photograph: Jane Bown/The Guardian
Richard Lea and Sian Cain
Sun 13 Dec 2020 22.00 GMT

John le Carré, who forged thrillers from equal parts of adventure, moral courage and literary flair, has died aged 89.

Le Carré explored the gap between the west's high-flown rhetoric of freedom and the gritty reality of defending it, in novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Night Manager, which gained him critical acclaim and made him a bestseller around the world.

On Sunday, his family confirmed he had died of pneumonia at the Royal Cornwall Hospital on Saturday night. "We all deeply grieve his passing," they wrote in a statement.

His longtime agent Jonny Geller described him as "an undisputed giant of English literature. He defined the cold war era and fearlessly spoke truth to power in the decades that followed ... I have lost a mentor, an inspiration and most importantly, a friend. We will not see his like again."

His peers lined up to pay tribute. Stephen King wrote: "This terrible year has claimed a literary giant and a humanitarian spirit." Robert Harris said the news had left him "very distressed... one of the great postwar British novelists, and an unforgettable, unique character." Adrian McKinty described Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as "quite simply the greatest spy novel ever written".

Born as David Cornwell in 1931, Le Carré began working for the secret services while studying German in Switzerland at the end of the 1940s. After teaching at Eton he joined the British Foreign Service as an intelligence officer, recruiting, running and looking after spies behind the Iron Curtain from a back office at the MI5 building on London's Curzon Street. Inspired by his MI5 colleague, the novelist John Bingham, he began publishing thrillers under the pseudonym of John le Carré – despite his publisher's advice that he opt for two Anglo-Saxon monosyllables such as "Chunk-Smith".

A spy modelled on Bingham, who was "breathtakingly ordinary ... short, fat, and of a quiet disposition", outwits an East German agent in Le Carré's 1961 debut, Call for the Dead, the first appearance of his most enduring character, George Smiley. A second novel, 1962's A Murder of Quality, saw Smiley investigating a killing at a public school and was reviewed positively. ("Very complex, superior whodunnit," was the Observer's conclusion.) But a year later, when his third thriller was published, Le Carré's career surged to a whole new level.



Alec Guinness as Le Carré's spy, George Smiley. Photograph: taken from picture library

Smiley is only a minor figure in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but this story of a mission to confront East German intelligence is filled with his world-weary cynicism. According to Alec Leamas, the fiftysomething agent who is sent to East Berlin, spies are just "a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives". Graham Greene hailed it as "the best spy story I have ever read."

According to Le Carré, the novel's runaway success left him at first astonished and then conflicted. His manuscript had been approved by the secret service because it was "sheer fiction from start to finish", he explained in 2013, and so couldn't possibly represent a breach in security. "This was not, however, the view taken by the world's press, which with one voice decided that the book was not merely authentic but some kind of revelatory Message From The Other Side, leaving me with nothing to do but sit tight and watch, in a kind of frozen awe, as it climbed the bestseller list and stuck there, while pundit after pundit heralded it as the real thing."

Smiley moved centre stage in three novels Le Carré published in the 1970s, charting the contest between the portly British agent and his Soviet nemesis, Karla. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, he unmasks a mole in the highest echelons of the British secret service, while in The Honourable Schoolboy he goes after a money laundering operation in Asia, before piecing together Karla's Swiss connections in Smiley's People. The world of "ferrets" and "lamplighters", "wranglers" and "pavement artists" was so convincingly drawn that his former colleagues at MI5 and MI6 began to adopt Le Carré's invented jargon as their own.

As the cold war came to a close, friends would stop him in the street and ask: "Whatever are you going to write now?" But Le Carré's concerns were always broader than the confrontation between east and west, and he had little patience for the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled any kind of end either for history or the espionage that greased its mechanisms. He tackled the arms trade in 1993 with The Night Manager, big pharma in 2001 with The Constant Gardener and the war on terror in 2004 with Absolute Friends.

Meanwhile, a steady stream of his creations made their way from page to screen. Actors including Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Ralph Fiennes and Gary Oldman relished the subtleties of his characterisation even as audiences applauded the deftness of his plotting.

Le Carré returned to Smiley for the last time in 2017, closing the circle of his career in A Legacy of Spies, which revisits the botched operation at the heart of the novel that made his name. Writing in the Guardian, John Banville hailed his ingenuity and skill, declaring that "not since The Spy has Le Carré exercised his gift as a storyteller so powerfully and to such thrilling effect".

After decades of being painted as a shadowy, mysterious figure, mainly for his uninterest in publicity or joining the festival circuit, Le Carré surprised the world in 2016 by releasing a memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. Detailing his fractured relationship with an abusive, conman father and a lonely upbringing after his mother abandoned him aged five, Le Carré detailed the strange life of a spy-turned-author, being asked to lunches by Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch. Having spent four decades living in Cornwall, married twice and raising a son, Nicholas, who would write novels himself under the name Nick Harkaway, Le Carré conceeded: "I have been neither a model husband nor a model father, and am not interested in appearing that way."

The consistent love of his life was writing, "scribbling away like a man in hiding at a poky desk".

"Out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit," he wrote. "First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now."

RIP

[Josephus]

awww shit.

[grumbler]

The man had "it" as a writer.  Even his worst book was outstanding.

RIP 

[The Brain]

RIP

[Sheilbh]

The man had "it" as a writer.  Even his worst book was outstanding.

RIP 

Yeah - one of the greats and one of the best examples of why the divide between "genre" and "literary" fiction is absurd. He was a great post-war writer (and I think the spy novel or shades of it attract decent stylists for some reason - Conrad, Greene, Le Carre, Ambler).

[jimmy olsen]

Really great writer and interesting fellow.

Here's a more in depth obituary

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2020/dec/14/john-le-carre-obituary

[Sheilbh]

Great piece on Le Carre in film in the Guardian. I was thinking about this because several adaptations of Le Carre novels are excellent. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is, I think, the best spy film ever made - with Burton at his best. I love both versions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and really rate The Constant Gardener. There's plenty left to adapt and a few underwhelming adaptations ripe for a remake so I hope we see a little bit:

The don of disillusionment: John le Carré on film
The paranoia and cynicism of Carol Reed's The Third Man fired Le Carré's imagination, while Tomas Alfredson updated Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the Iraq war era


The magnum opus ... Gary Oldman as George Smiley in the 2011 film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Photograph: Allstar/Focus Features
Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Mon 14 Dec 2020 13.38 GMT
Last modified on Mon 14 Dec 2020 13.40 GMT

I met John le Carré once, in 2016; appropriately enough, it was in Berlin where the TV adaptation of The Night Manager was getting a showcase premiere at the film festival — and the city where, as an MI6 agent in 1961 he had witnessed the construction of the Wall, which inspired his breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He was instantly charming, eloquent and inexhaustibly curious and knowledgeable about the movies showing in Berlin that year, especially Alex Gibney's Zero Days, a documentary about cyberwarfare. While always very relaxed, he had that alpha-donnish skill in asking you questions – including detailed questions about my own recent reviews. To my shame, I committed the No 1 error of protocol with him. As he had called me "Peter", I replied by calling him "John". (Please. It's "David", and only if you're at that pay grade, which I wasn't.)

Le Carré's fiction had a twine of celluloid in its DNA: particularly the movie-making of Graham Greene and Carol Reed in The Third Man. The dark shadows of that movie loomed over his imagination, from a city (Vienna) divided up by the second world war's victorious and now mutually resentful allies. The paranoia, the sense of postwar peace perennially threatened and undermined by some new terrible incursion, the theme of personal betrayal, and the vivid nightmare of "going over to the other side" in a theological or geopolitical sense: it all informed his writing. Orson Welles's breezy Harry Lime talking about the happy Swiss inventing nothing more interesting than the cuckoo clock was the tone of complaisant, emollient cynicism that Le Carré was to encounter in the real-life British establishment, and which he satirised and anatomised in his own work. (And at one further remove, Le Carré's darkness and sense of sin maybe had something of the German expressionists, Peter Lorre's child-murderer in Fritz Lang's M, on the run from his accusers.)


Misery and fear ... The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Photograph: Allstar/Paramount

The 1965 film version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, directed by Martin Ritt, in austere monochrome and with a mordant leading performance from Richard Burton, has that shadowy Carol Reed sense of misery and fear. But Burton's agent, Alec Leamas, does at least take up a proactive position: he wants out and in the classic style of Hollywood heroes, is prepared to take on "one last job" in return for a promised exit from the whole grubby business of espionage. So, however imprisoned, he is a hero of sorts, though more of an inaction man than an action man. Le Carré said that he owed a great deal to Ian Fleming for creating an audience for him. In this movie, Rupert Davies (elsewhere, Maigret on TV) had a small role as the later-to-be-iconic George Smiley.

The cold war was still in full swing when Le Carré adapted his The Looking Glass War in 1970 for director Frank Pierson, in which Anthony Hopkins's spy sends a Polish defector back into East Germany to check on missile sites. Though a bit convoluted, it does arguably have a pair of classic Le Carré establishment figures in Paul Rogers and Ralph Richardson.


A bit convoluted ... The Looking Glass War. Photograph: Allstar/Columbia

After the BBC's classic miniseries version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley set a new benchmark for Le Carré adaptations and for event TV generally, the movies looked for the bigger picture in this author; often for international locations and for a grownup, flawed sense of personal romance as the corollary of ideological betrayal. Director George Roy Hill took on The Little Drummer Girl in 1984, starring Diane Keaton as the troubled American actor with a tricky personal relationship with the truth, dragooned by Mossad into entrapping a Palestinian. It was a so-so movie that didn't find that personal register of personal passion which unlocks the political dimension – Korean auteur Park Chan-wook directed a TV miniseries version two years ago with better results.

And then, at the end of the 80s, the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union unravelled, glasnost began, and the movies had to find a new way of representing Le Carré's work just as the author himself had to adapt. Tom Stoppard was the ideal choice to adapt The Russia House in 1990, with Sean Connery as the boozy, stroppy London publisher who goes to Moscow to meet Klaus Maria Brandauer, the author of a sensationally revealing (or misleading) manuscript about Russian nuclear capabilities – and he falls for the intermediary, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. It's a very cerebral, non-action movie, but was the whole idea out of touch?

The next two Le Carré movies found a surer and more satisfying register. Andrew Davies adapted The Tailor of Panama, directed by John Boorman in 2001, which returns us to the Greeneian black comedy of a shabby tailor in Panama (Geoffrey Rush) who is pressured into working for British intelligence and begins making things up. Harold Pinter has a potent cameo as this man's late uncle, giving him advice from beyond the grave. In 2005, director Fernando Meirelles put a new rocket-thrust of energy into the whole idea of the Le Carré adaptation, with his version of The Constant Gardener, a conspiracy-thriller-cum-love-story with Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz, showing that the movies do not have to approximate a torpid melancholy and resignation. Susanna White directed a tough, watchable version of Our Kind of Traitor in 2016.


Rocket thrust of energy ... The Constant Gardener. Photograph: Snap Stills/Rex/Shutterstock

But there is no doubt about it. The late-period Le Carré movies that work best are the ones flavoured by disillusion. Philip Larkin said that deprivation was for him what daffodils were to Wordsworth ... and he might have added, and what disillusion is to Le Carré on screen. Anton Corbijn directed a terrific version of A Most Wanted Man, with Philip Seymour Hoffman giving his final performance.

And in 2011, we returned to the magnum opus — somehow, this is the Le Carré masterpiece that floats above them. Screenwriters Peter Straughan and Bridget O'Connor created a superlative new version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, directed by Tomas Alfredson, which, though set in the same period, resonated with the new mood, accommodating the world after 9/11 and after the disastrous retaliatory Iraq war. The film is now a period piece, superbly and meticulously recreated: shabby, pompous Britain mismanaging its own decline.

The best Le Carré movies amplified the best in Le Carré himself: the satire, the black tragicomedy, the national pantomime of secret misery, and the final paradoxical possibility of redemptive human decency.

I think I mentioned in the film and TV thread but I've been on a bit of a kick of watching paranoid 70s thrillers which I feel should make a comeback because the mood feels similar. I sort of feel the same for jaundiced Le Carre films - but they never went went away though.

[Habbaku]

So what's the #1 recommendation for what I should read of his?

[Sheilbh]

So what's the #1 recommendation for what I should read of his?

I would start with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (and the film).

Then probably the Smiley trilogy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People. After that A Perfect Spy is great.

For post-Cold War (and post-9/11 Le Carre) I'd recommend Our Kind of Traitor and A Most Wanted Man.

[Habbaku]

That's more than one, but I'll take it. 

I'll start at the top and continue from there if I enjoy it. Thanks!

[Sheilbh]

Sorry - but yeah start with the first one and see if you like it

[grumbler]

That's more than one, but I'll take it. 

I'll start at the top and continue from there if I enjoy it. Thanks!

You really can't go wrong starting at the beginning of the Smiley Saga and going to the end, but if you have time for just one, it's Tinker, Tailor...  Book and (I hate to say this, because Alec Guinness) the 2011 film version of the book.  The TV miniseries is 5 hours rather than 90 minutes, so covers the book better, but the acting in the movie is something the Beeb could never afford.

[Gups]

So what's the #1 recommendation for what I should read of his?

I would start with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (and the film).

Then probably the Smiley trilogy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People. After that A Perfect Spy is great.

For post-Cold War (and post-9/11 Le Carre) I'd recommend Our Kind of Traitor and A Most Wanted Man.

I only started reading Le Carre about 5 years ago and have only read a dozen or so but would endorse Shelf's recommendation that you start with his berakthrough book. I would say although his books aren't difficult to read at all, the plotting is pretty dense and so it's best to be in a focussed kind of mood with them.

[Admiral Yi]

I would start with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (and the film).

Then probably the Smiley trilogy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley's People.

This is what I did.

[Sheilbh]

Great appreciation by Tom McTague:

John le Carré Knew England's Secrets
He revealed more about the country's ruling class than any political writer of his era.
Tom McTague
December 14, 2020


Terry Fincher / Express / Getty

Writing about John le Carré is intimidating. Writing an appreciation after he has died feels doubly so. In some ways, this fear says much about the England that le Carré was so masterful at capturing: the class consciousness and fear of straying beyond your place. Le Carré inhabited an England beyond my horizons, not just the cloak-and-dagger one, but the one that exists at Eton and at Oxford and in many parts of London, lands that remain foreign to most of us. To write about him, then, is to risk exposing yourself—for missing the subtlety of a particular line of dialogue, or the joke woven into a novel that others can see because they know and you don't.

Many of us relied on le Carré to reveal our own country to us. Through his novels, we got to spy on England's crumbling ruling class. In A Perfect Spy, seen by many as le Carré's autobiographical masterpiece, he writes that our rulers are not bad people, just "men who see the threat to their class as synonymous with the threat to England and never wandered far enough to know the difference." Le Carré is not only an English shapeshifter, a man who bridges classes and professions, but one who knows the world beyond England too.

Because of this, le Carré, who died of pneumonia yesterday at 89, is a hero for many Englishmen like me, those who move between the subtle strata of England's classes, each heaped on top of the other, the lines between them difficult to discern. The son of a con man who smuggled his son into the English upper class through boarding school, le Carré went on to be a student at Oxford, a teacher at Eton, and, of course, a spy, before becoming a writer. Even as David Cornwell—the novelist's real name—he was a romantic figure, the liver of an unobtainable life, one of us and one of them. Who hasn't secretly wanted a tap on the shoulder to see whether you would be prepared to serve Queen and country; to have country houses, where one could read medieval German poetry and deal with Hollywood filmmakers; and to live during the Cold War, when Britain still had an idea, and a side—when it was still just about able to convince itself that it was not the "poor island with scarcely a voice" that le Carré identified.

The thing about le Carré is that he was so penetrating. Reading a le Carré novel often feels more revelatory about England, and the world, than any op-ed. Because he was writing fiction, he captured the real motivations of men—and they were usually men—who drove politics, and so got to something we journalists usually cannot. Almost every le Carré novel I have is full of pages whose corners are folded down to mark something that I thought was especially great and that I could squirrel away for a future piece to make me look clever or well read.

In A Perfect Spy, he writes of America, "No country was ever easier to spy on ... no nation so open-hearted with its secrets, so quick to air them, share them, confide them." Presenting the country as the opposite of England, rather than its logical extension as is often assumed, he continued: "They loved their prosperity too obviously, were too flexible and mobile, too little the slaves of place, origin and class." Driving through Ohio, welcomed into homes and college campuses to report on American decline and rebirth, I remember thinking of these lines.

Or listen to him on political fanaticism in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, writing of Karla, the Russian spy chief: "Karla is not fireproof, because he's a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall." It is an insight that has stuck with me since.

Yet the most penetrating observations in his espionage novels were not about foreign adversaries or global conflict—they were about decaying old England. "They are the body corporate I once believed was greater than the sum of its parts," he wrote of the ruling class in A Perfect Spy. "In my lifetime I have witnessed the birth of the jet aeroplane and the atom bomb and the computer, and the demise of the British institution." It is impossible not to read those lines and think of Brexit and the disastrous response to COVID-19.

So who are the ruling class? "The privately educated Englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth," le Carré's most famous character, George Smiley, says in The Secret Pilgrim. "Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he's been a damn fool." Who today can look at the former premier David Cameron, or current Prime Minister Boris Johnson—both the products of Eton and Oxford—and not smile reading these lines?

To watch Johnson in particular—a cosmopolitan with a bohemian multicultural background, born in New York, named after a Russian, great-grandson to an assassinated Turk, who nevertheless presents himself as the most English person of all—is to see the shadow of Jerry Westerby, the tragic hero in The Honourable Schoolboy, another outsider inside the upper class, like le Carré himself. Westerby's speech is full of "good old boys" and the like. But, as le Carré writes, there is a "hardness buried in the lavishness." And, as with all le Carré's characters, a romanticism underneath the world-weary cynicism.

Le Carré also presents a bygone Englishness that many of us wish still existed. How, for example, does Smiley react to his ultimate victory in Smiley's People? "Did I?" He responds to the news that he has prevailed over his nemesis. "Yes. Yes, well I suppose I did." Oh, how Johnson must wish he could find a way to reenact that scene with Brexit, or the coronavirus. Did I win? Oh, yes, I suppose I did. England's tragedy today is that it has allowed the part of the understated victor to slip from its grasp; now it must beat its chest in a way Smiley would loathe.

In fact, the reality is that the English upper class doesn't just con its fellow countrymen, but the wider world as well. I've lost count of the number of times European diplomats and officials have told me of the brilliance of the old British civil service before Brexit. Even as the wool is pulled from their eyes, they still don't see that they've been conned, that the British foreign office was never a Rolls-Royce, just richer and better dressed than it is today. Even now, a certain type of Englishman, eyebrow permanently raised, can prosper mightily abroad by presenting this same cultured cynicism and easy wit.

Smiley is the central hero of le Carré's works, and like le Carré himself, the kind of hero a certain part of England loves: calm and pudgy and resolute and cultured, driven by inner passions that he must occasionally escape to the countryside to soothe lest they overwhelm him. "George doesn't alter," le Carré writes in A Legacy of Spies, his final Smiley novel. "He just gets his composure back." He is a cynical romantic with a terrible domestic life who commits himself to England for reasons he is never quite sure of—a player of the great game, but wise to it. He is an outsider uncomfortable in any social class, but capable of moving through them all. To be English, after all, is to always feel a little bit out of place, even in England.

Smiley—and, by extension, le Carré—also embodies a different England. In A Legacy of Spies, Smiley looks back on his career and what it was all for. Was it for world peace, whatever that is? "Yes, yes of course." But that's not really the answer. "In the great name of capitalism? God forbid. Christendom? God forbid again." So was it all for England, Smiley wonders. Perhaps. He is a patriot, but a moderate one. And, anyway, he asks: "Whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere?"

This is le Carré the fierce anti-Brexiteer, whose politics were never far from the surface in his novels. "I am European," Smiley says. "If I had a mission—if I was ever aware of one beyond our business with the enemy, it was to Europe. If I was heartless, I was heartless for Europe. If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still."

In A Perfect Spy, le Carré is back grappling with the same question of human motivation. What is it that drives us to spy or fight or hope or kill? For England, or for class, or for Europe, or for America? Under all of it, he was also a kind of romantic, just one who is well hidden. I wonder if it's for this reason that Smiley and his creator remain the heroes many of us Englishmen most want to be? But enough of that, or as Smiley himself said, closing le Carré's final Smiley novel, "Forgive me, Peter. I am pontificating."