The passing of John le Carré, who has died at the age of eighty-nine, leaves not so much a gap in the market as a hollow space in the world. It is unlikely to be filled. There will not be another writer of his ilk, largely because the ilk was him. On the page—and, by all accounts, in person, though he was an accomplished mimic and would have made a delightful actor—he sounded like himself and nobody else. It was only between hard covers, you might say, that he was happy for his cover to be blown:
It is the final detail that cuts deep. The passage is taken from “The Spy Who Came In from the Cold,” le Carré’s first triumph, published in 1963, and it illustrates his abiding themes. His own father, famously, had been a confidence trickster, and le Carré was therefore all too well equipped to mount a lifelong investigation into the uses of roguery, not to mention sleights of hand, some of them amounting to a national disgrace. But let’s be honest; there are many authors who, consciously addressing themselves to matters of psychological intensity or grave historical concern, produce dull and ignorable books. What set le Carré apart, gave him his edge, and kept it whetted from one decade to the next was his forensic skill. Ideas and passions, under his guiding hand, are never floated; they are tethered down and incarnated in his characters—in their particular speech patterns, and in the inch-by-inch inflection of their movements. Le Carré is fluent in body language. He is no more at the mercy of the abstract than an oncologist, or a sushi chef.
Consider, say, Toby Esterhase, plucked long ago by George Smiley from the gutters of Vienna, trained in the dark arts of espionage, and thenceforth to be found, as often as not, at George’s side. Something of a dandy, Toby runs a rough assortment of helpers—babysitters and pavement artists, in the argot of the trade. Backed into a corner, in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” and asked some uncomfortable questions, he gives “a very Hungarian movement of the hand, a spreading of the palm and a tilting either way.” There he is. We see him.
There is a small-scale literary form of the old school, the pen portrait, which is rarely heard of these days, maybe because so few of us pick up a pen. Yet the form remains indispensable for anyone seeking to snare the reader’s attention. No wonder it was mastered by le Carré, who kept and enjoyed an extensive readership. (It was wider by far than that of many authors who were judged to be more serious than he was, the joke being that he was in fact their superior. What counts is not prizes but being prized.) Given his skills as a portraitist, is it not a cause for mild regret that he strayed so rarely into nonfiction? Who, for example, could this be?
The answer is Rupert Murdoch, complete with his sniper’s gaze, and this account of meeting him at the Savoy Grill, for what Murdoch regarded as a leisurely lunch (it was over in twenty-five minutes), comes from “The Pigeon Tunnel,” a bundle of autobiographical sketches that le Carré produced in 2016. The book is, as expected, both revealing and concealing, and it’s notable how many of the anecdotes with which he regales us conclude in half-truths, quarter-truths, and candid bafflement. The tone is set by his reminiscences of the period that he spent, as a junior member of the British intelligence community, in Bonn, in the early nineteen-sixties. It was a time, he tells us, when clean and productive lives were being led, in the spirit of public service, by Germans with filthy pasts, and that conundrum—how on earth can you proceed and prosper, either as a nation or as an individual, when to do so demands a monumental act of forgetting?—clearly stayed with le Carré, and stuck.
So notoriously charming was he, in the flesh, and so suave—if unfathomable—a master of ceremonies does he appear to be, in “The Pigeon Tunnel,” that it’s easy to overlook le Carré’s wrath. The rules of the spying game, as laid down in novel upon novel (one of them, from 1995, is actually called “Our Game”), divert us to such an extent that we can, if we’re lazy, avert our eyes from the real human nastiness that lies, lightly buried, beneath the thrills. But it’s there, in the books, if you know where to look. They are frequently violent, yet the violence does not meet us head on, for le Carré is allergic to sadism; rather, it is recalled by its long-suffering victims, or witnessed secondhand, and is all the more striking for being held at that remove. Take Jim Prideaux, in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” who was captured, imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, and interrogated. “A lot of the muscle was done electrically,” he says to Smiley, much later, back in England, and the calm words carry a shock. Then there’s Salvo, the hero of “The Mission Song” (2006), who, in his capacity as an official interpreter, winds up listening in real time, through headphones, to a scene of torture.
That book concerns an underhand plot, financed by Western backers, to secure mineral rights in the Congo. It’s fair to say that, wherever in the world a malevolent or mercenary pulse happened to be beating, the finger of le Carré was liable to find it. He wrote about the satanic business of arms dealing, in “The Night Manager” (1993), whose drawling British villain is referred to as “the worst man in the world”; about the corrupting influence of grand pharmaceutical companies, in “The Constant Gardener” (2001); and about Russian money laundering, in “Our Kind of Traitor” (2010). Even in the absence of physical brutality, the mere fact of political foolishness, as le Carré saw it, was enough to rile him; his final completed novel (so far as we know) was last year’s “Agent Running in the Field,” which included a thundering broadside against Brexit. True, it was a character, on center stage, who delivered the speech, but le Carré, you felt, was prompting from the wings. One has to reach back to Yeats, perhaps, to find a writer so emboldened by the fruitful furies of old age.
