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
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.”
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.
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.”
John le Carré, Best-Selling Author of Cold War
Thrillers, Dies at 89
Graham Greene called “The Spy Who Came in From the
Cold,” featuring the plump, ill-dressed George Smiley, the greatest spy story
he had ever read.
John le Carré (David Cornwell) in 2017. He “will be
remembered as perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the
20th century in Britain,” the novelist Ian McEwan said.
Sarah Lyall
By Sarah
Lyall
Dec. 13,
2020
LONDON —
John le Carré, whose exquisitely nuanced, intricately plotted Cold War
thrillers elevated the spy novel to high art by presenting both Western and
Soviet spies as morally compromised cogs in a rotten system full of treachery,
betrayal and personal tragedy, died on Saturday in Cornwall, England. He was
89.
The cause
was pneumonia, his publisher, Penguin Random House, said on Sunday.
Before Mr.
le Carré published his best-selling 1963 novel “The Spy Who Came in From the
Cold,” which Graham Greene called “the best spy story I have ever read,” the
fictional model for the modern British spy was Ian Fleming’s James Bond —
suave, urbane, devoted to queen and country. With his impeccable talent for
getting out of trouble while getting women into bed, Bond fed the myth of
spying as a glamorous, exciting romp.
Mr. Le
Carré upended that notion with books that portrayed British intelligence
operations as cesspools of ambiguity in which right and wrong are too close to
call and in which it is rarely obvious whether the ends, even if the ends are
clear, justify the means.
Led by his
greatest creation, the plump, ill-dressed, unhappy, brilliant, relentless
George Smiley, Mr. le Carré’s spies are lonely, disillusioned men whose work is
driven by budget troubles, bureaucratic power plays and the opaque machinations
of politicians — men who are as likely to be betrayed by colleagues and lovers
as by the enemy.
Smiley has
a counterpart in the Russian master spy Karla, his opposite in ideology but
equal in almost all else, an opponent he studies as intimately as a lover
studies his beloved. The end of “Smiley’s People,” the last in a series known
as the Karla Trilogy, brings them together in a stunning denouement that is as
much about human frailty and the deep loss that comes with winning as it is
about anything.
“Thematically,
le Carré’s true subject is not spying,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The New
Yorker in 1999. “It is the endlessly deceptive maze of human relations: the
betrayal that is a kind of love, the lie that is a sort of truth, good men
serving bad causes and bad men serving good.”
Some
critics took Mr. le Carré’s message to be that the two systems, East and West,
were moral equivalents, both equally bad. But he did not believe that. “There
is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian
state,” he told an interviewer, referring to his own work as a spy in the 1950s
and early ’60s.
Mr. le
Carré refused to allow his books to be entered for literary prizes. But many
critics considered his books literature of the first rank.
“I think he
has easily burst out of being a genre writer and will be remembered as perhaps
the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in
Britain,” the author Ian McEwan told the British newspaper The Telegraph in
2013, adding that he has “charted our decline and recorded the nature of our
bureaucracies like no one else has.”
Mr. le
Carré’s own youthful experience as a British agent, along with his thorough
field research as a writer, gave his novels the stamp of authority. But he used
reality as a starting-off point to create an indelible fictional world.
In his
books, the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as M.I.6., was the
“Circus,” agents were “joes,” operations involving seduction were “honeytraps”
and agents deeply embedded inside the enemy were “moles,” a word he is credited
with bringing into wide use if not inventing it. Such expressions were taken up
by real British spies to describe their work, much as the Mafia absorbed the
language of “The Godfather” into their mythology.
“As much as
in Tolkien, Wodehouse, Chandler or even Jane Austen, this closed world is a
whole world,” the critic Boyd Tonkin wrote in The Independent. “Via the British
‘Circus’ and its Soviet counterpart, Le Carré created a laboratory of human
nature; a test-track where the innate fractures of the heart and mind could be
driven to destruction.”
In a career
spanning more than a half-century, Mr. le Carré wrote more than two-dozen books
and set them as far afield as Rwanda, Chechnya, Turkey, the Caribbean and
Southeast Asia. He addressed topics as diverse as the power of pharmaceutical
companies, the Arab-Israeli conflict and — after the Berlin Wall fell and his
novels became more polemical, and he became more politicized — American and
British human-rights excesses in countering terrorism.
If he had
political points to make, and he increasingly did, he still gift-wrapped them
with elegant, complicated plots and dead-on descriptions; he could paint a
whole character in a single sentence. He was a best seller many times over, and
at least a half dozen of his novels — including “A Perfect Spy” (1986), which
Philip Roth pronounced “the best English novel since the war” — can be
considered classics. But he will always be best known for his Cold War novels,
a perfect match of author and subject.
A Turbulent
Childhood
John le
Carré knew deception intimately because he was born into it. (For one thing,
“John le Carré” was not his real name.) Born David John Moore Cornwell in
Poole, Dorset, on Oct. 19, 1931, he had a ragged, destabilizing childhood dominated
by his father, Ronald, an amoral, flamboyant, silver-tongued con man who palled
around with celebrities and crooks, left trails of unpaid bills wherever he
went, and was forever on the verge of carrying out a huge scam or going to
jail. (He was in and out of prison for fraud.)
“Manipulative,
powerful, charismatic, clever, untrustworthy,” Mr. le Carré once described him.
The family
lurched between extremes. “When father was flush, the chauffeur-driven Bentley
would be parked outside,” he said. “When things were a bit iffy, it was parked
in the back garden, and when we were down and out, it disappeared altogether.”
Often, debts would be called in.
“You have
no idea how humiliating it was, as a boy, to suddenly have all your clothes,
your toys, snatched by the bailiff,” Mr. le Carré told an interviewer.
The boys’
mother, Olive (Glassey) Cornwell, walked out of the family house and into the
arms of another man when David was 5. He has little memory of it — his father
intimated that she was ill, then that she had died — and he did not see her
again for 16 years.
As crooked
as he was, Ronnie Cornwell craved establishment respectability for his
children, and David was sent to prep school and then to Sherborne, a boarding
school, which he hated so much, he decamped for Switzerland at age 16 and
enrolled at the University of Bern to study modern languages.
There he
was recruited by a British spy working undercover at the embassy, and so his
life of spying began. Except for two years when he taught at Eton, England’s
premier secondary school, Mr. le Carré was a spy of some kind for 16 years, for
both M.I.6. and its domestic counterpart, M.I.5.
It was not
until years later that he owned up to his earlier profession — it was a relief,
he said, not to have to lie about it any more — and he was always vague on the
details. But while a student at Oxford, where he went after Bern, Mr. le Carré
kept an eye out for possible Soviet sympathizers in left-wing groups. In 1960,
he moved to Germany, posing as a British diplomat; his work included conducting
interrogations, tapping phones, organizing break-ins and running agents.
Briefly, he
led a triple life: diplomat, spy, novelist, writing his first book, “Call for
the Dead” (1961), in longhand in red notebooks. The story of the unveiling of
an East German spy operation, it was notable mostly for the introduction of
Smiley and his faithless wife, Ann. (Ann was the name of Mr. le Carré’s wife at
the time, though when they divorced, in 1971, it seems to have been his
infidelity that was a problem, not hers).
Forbidden
by his employers to write under his own name, the author fixed on “John le
Carré.” Over the years he gave various explanations for it, finally admitting
that he could not remember which, if any, were true.
“The Spy
Who Came in From the Cold,” the author’s third novel, was published to instant
acclaim and worldwide best-sellerdom. It was a shock of a book. Its hero, Alec
Leamas, is a worn-out spy sent down a rabbit hole of deception, betrayal and
personal tragedy in a mission that he thinks is one thing but that is really
another. To readers used to tidy fantasy endings, the book’s conclusion is like
a blow to the head.
“In its
way, it marked a boundary between two eras: the era of God-is-in-our side
patriotism, of trust in government and in the morality of the West, and the era
of paranoia, of conspiracy theory and suspicion of government, of moral drift,”
Stephen Schiff wrote in Vanity Fair. As many of Mr. le Carré’s books would be,
“The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” was made into a movie; Richard Burton
starred as Leamas.
Fathers and
Sons
The success
of the novel — and the fact that a British paper revealed its author’s true
identity — allowed Mr. le Carré in 1964 to quit his undercover work to write
full-time. He produced book after book set against the Cold War backdrop,
including “The Looking Glass War” (1965); “A Small Town in Germany” (1968); the
Karla Trilogy, and “The Russia House” (1989).
In addition
to the Cold War books, his most celebrated novels include “The Little Drummer
Girl” (1983), about an undercover operation by a passionate young
actress-turned spy; the book performs the seemingly impossible trick of evoking
genuine sympathy for both the Israeli and Palestinian points of view. ‘“The
Little Drummer Girl’ is about spies,” William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in The New
York Times, “as ‘Madame Bovary’ is about adultery or “Crime and Punishment’
about crime.”
“A Perfect
Spy” (1986), Mr. le Carré’s most autobiographical work, tells the story of
Magnus Pym, a double agent with a con man father modeled after le Carré’s own,
and how the two deceive and are deceived by each other in an intricate skein of
lies. Mr. Schiff called it “one of the most penetrating depictions in all
literature of the links between love and betrayal.”
The author
ultimately broke off contact with his father, who continued to hound him for
money, styled himself “Ron le Carré” and once threatened to sue him. After
Ronald died, Mr. le Carré paid for his funeral but did not go to it.
The women
in Mr. le Carré’s early books were often caricatures — the ingénue, the
adulteress, the sexless crone — and that was so, he once said, because “I grew
up without them and they have always been strangers to me.”
But he made
a conscious effort to address the lapse in later books. In “A Constant
Gardener,” a diplomat, seeking the truth about his murdered wife in Africa and
filled with remorse about how little he understood her, resolves to redeem
himself by continuing her work and finding a way inside her, almost, by trying
to see the world as she had seen it.
If Mr. le
Carré’s painted his Cold War world in shades of gray, his post-9/11 books
seemed increasingly black and white.
They had
the familiar le Carré flourishes: multidimensional chess games of plots; biting
characterizations; the sense of weak and sometimes decent individuals caught up
in situations they barely understood; in-depth on-location research that he
compared to “a perfectly normal espionage operation — it’s just good
reporting.” But he became bitterly disillusioned with Britain and America after
the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the war on terror.
He was
particularly angry at reports of Western torture, something that did not happen
when he was a spy, he said.
“It was a
softer world, of course, mine — the Cold War,” he said in an interview in
2008. “I know about interrogation. I’ve
done interrogations, and I can tell you this: by extracting information under
torture you make a fool of yourself. You obtain information that isn’t true,
you receive names of people who are supposedly guilty and who aren’t, and you
land yourself with a wild-goose chase and miss what is being handed to you on a
plate, and that is the possibility of bonding with someone and engaging with
them.”
The
unadorned politics that characterized this later period — and a newfound
activism that included joining demonstrations and writing angry editorials —
alienated some readers. But only some. In 2011, a new movie adaptation of
“Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” — the first in the Karla trilogy and the account
of Smiley’s painstaking unmasking of a Kim Philby-esqe Soviet mole working at
the Circus — brought renewed interest in Mr. le Carré’s work and sent backlist
sales soaring.
Frontlist,
too.
‘The Top of
His Game’
“Le Carré
is still writing at something close to the top of his game,” Dwight Garner
wrote in The New York Times Magazine, speaking of “A Delicate Truth” (2013),
the author’s 23rd novel, which he called “an elegant yet embittered indictment
of extraordinary rendition, American right-wing evangelical excess and the
corporatization of warfare.”
His last
novel, another spy thriller, titled “Agent Running in the Field,” was published
in October 2019, full of vintage moral outrage. “He remains angered by what
should anger us all: duplicity, treachery, the arrogance and indifference of
wealth and power, the readiness to use others as mere instruments,” Allan Massie
wrote in The Scotsman.
Wry, dryly
funny, patrician, a great mimic, a seasoned anecdotalist, handsome into old
age, his spoken sentences as beautifully constructed as his written ones, a
lover of the crystalline prose and perfect plotting of P.G. Wodehouse, Mr. le
Carré charmed the armies of interviewers who came to his cliff top house in
Cornwall, where he liked to go for long walks. (He lived part-time in
Hampstead, London, but avoided the literary social scene.) Spies came to visit,
too, treating him like a kind of oracle for their own profession.
In 2017, he
published “A Legacy of Spies,” a coda of sorts to his Cold War novels that
revisited “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” from the perspective of the
present and took no solace in what it found. “What happened then turns out to
have been futile,” Mr. le Carré said at the time, speaking of the intelligence
services. “Spies did not win the Cold War. They made absolutely no difference
in the long run.”
He said he
would never accept a knighthood or other state honor, though there were offers.
“I don’t want to be Sir David, Lord David, King David,” he said. “I don’t want
any of those things. I find it absolutely fatuous.”
His first
marriage, to Ann Sharp, ended in divorce in 1971.
His married
Valerie Jane Eustace, a book editor, in 1972; she later served as keeper of the
schedule and typist of the manuscripts and general provider of sound counsel
for her husband. Their son, Nicholas, became a successful novelist, too,
writing under the name Nick Harkaway.
They both
survive him, as do his three sons from his first marriage, Simon, Stephen and
Timothy; 14 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.
In later
years, Mr. le Carré delighted in his extended family and found a new domestic
happiness. He displayed on the wall of his office a gift from his children, a
poster playing on the famous motivational one in World War II Britain, reading,
“Keep Calm and le Carré on.”
He toyed
for years with whether to allow a biographer access to his papers, his friends
and himself, accustomed as he was to so many layers of secrecy, especially in
his own life.
Even in
Adam Sisman’s definitive 2015 biography, written after many hours of
conversations with Mr. le Carré as well as archival access, Mr. le Carré held things back.
“He has
reimagined incidents in his past for his fiction,” Mr. Sisman said, “and what he
remembers afterwards tends to be the fictional reimagining rather than what
actually occurred.”
Soon after,
Mr. le Carré published “The Pigeon Tunnel,” a vignette-filled sort-of memoir in
which he assiduously avoided subjecting himself to the same piercing scrutiny
he applied to his fictional characters. He was nimble that way.
“I’m
horrified at the notion of autobiography,” he once said, “because I’m already constructing the lies
I’m going to tell.”
Correction:
Dec. 13, 2020
An earlier
version of this obituary misspelled the surname of the British writer who
called Mr. le Carré's novel "The Spy Who Came in From the Cold" “the
best spy story I have ever read.” He was Graham Greene, not Green.
Sarah Lyall
is a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture,
Media and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London
bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro Desks. @sarahlyall
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