I. I still remember the weird thrush I got on first reading The incoming spy from the Cold, John le Carré ‘s third novel, published in 1963, and the man who made a name for himself and gave it lasting international success. I must have been in my early 20s, I believe, but I well remember that feeling of opportunity that the book gave you – as if you were admitted to a private club, a hidden world for adventures. -only. It was a very difficult novel, too, and that added to the promise. When I came to read more with Carré I found out that you, the reader, expected to pay attention. Only in this way could you participate in the slow and tedious decryption of what was to be published as the unreported statement. The close reading work became almost a physical pleasure. The self-conscious problem was, deliberately, tight about his novels – for me, of course, and I suspect for almost all of his readers – his distinctive trademark. Reading a novel by Carré became an act of collaboration between reader and author: what the author was referring to or referring to and what the reader had to take away. It was an awesome connection and he handled it with extreme skill.
John le Carré did not create the literary literary novel. He embraced tradition, and made it fresh and vibrant. It’s a very British tradition, too. No other literary culture has embraced the espionage novel as we have. You can argue that Joseph Conrad was the first proponent of his books The secret agent (1907) and Under the western eye (1911). W Somerset Maugham wrote spy fiction, as did Eric Ambler and Lawrence Durrell (Mountolive it’s a spy novel, a complex one) and, also, most notably, Graham Greene.
Greene is a useful name to associate with Carré, both the men who were spies and business novelists with big oeuvres. To my generation, Carré has cited Greene as an example of the last literary professional, writing hard at the top of his game well into his 80s, engagé, controversial, worldly, passionate about working in all areas of fiction – the short story, film, TV – as the opportunities arose.
And like Greene, he both understood and was skeptical of a deeply rooted British society class system and its hidden hegemonies. Le Carré once wrote that “an Englishman is branded on the tongue”, and one of his great achievements is to settle that world of middle-educated, learned mandarins with such precision and so detailed that only an infamous messenger can deliver.
In writing his novels, most notably the “Karla trilogy”, he has created a literary image in the person of his great spy, George Smiley, who has a mythical status. join the exclusive club featuring Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. Smiley alone would be enough to secure Carré’s literary immortality but that would not do him full justice. I once described him as the “Dickens of the cold war”, and I think the celebration is a quick and valid way to assess the true range of good qualities and achievements as a writer.
He made his bed and chose to lie there, so to speak, he seldom went out of the purlieus of the novel spur and, on those rare occasions when he did, with results that were not so successful. I think he noticed – as do many other novels – that the real spy novel has a strong advantage over other genres. The tension and emotions in the world of spying, whatever the age, are familiar to all readers. It may sound like paradoxes but the ropes of spirits – duplication, betrayal, disguise, clandestinity, mysteries, the bluff, the double bluff, bafflement, moving identity – are no more than the tropes of life that each living man, except that in the context of spies and spying they are great: there is much more at risk. As it turned out, everything he needed to describe the human condition was available to him in a spirit novel and he came to take control of that realm as a colossus. However, it is in the nature of a colossus that it can be seen from other parts of the landscape. Le Carré ‘s true achievement as a novelist is a great loom over 20s and 21st century British literature. I have a strong opinion that it will stand.