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John le Carré: the art of lying and spying| Alan Taylor

蘋果日報 2020/12/20 11:17


AS the bells began to toll for the end of this grim year, the news broke that John le Carré had died, aged 89. He was a victim not of coronavirus but pneumonia, which Sir William Ostler famously called “the old man’s friend”, because it brought a relatively painless and swift close to life. Le Carré published what turned out to be the last of his twenty-five novels in 2019. If not quite on a level with his best work, Agent Running in the Field kept his many fans happy, not least because of the missiles it launched at Brexit, the US president and the rise across the globe of right-leaning nationalism. “What about President Donald Trump then?” rants one of the book’s main protagonists. “Do you or do you not regard Trump, which I do, as a threat and incitement to the entire civilized world, plus he is presiding over the systematic no-holds-barred Nazification of the United States?”
At least le Carré – the pseudonym of David Cornwell – lived long enough to witness Trump’s defenestration. Brexit, alas, is not so easily rejected. The only good thing to be said about the dread virus is that it kept it out of the headlines for a few days. Le Carré, needless to say, believed Brexit to be a catastrophic error on the part of the British electorate who, faced with “the most important decision...since 1939”, elected to jump off a cliff without a parachute. Who knows where we will now land. For le Carré, the laureate of the Cold War, when East and West snarled at each other across the Berlin Wall, like two rabid dogs spoiling for a fight, Brexit was an unnecessary and dangerous risk.
The world which le Carré made his own has its roots in that bleak era. It is the definition of seediness; colour is conspicuous by its absence and cloud covers the sky. Writing a few years after Ian Fleming created James Bond, le Carré offered his antithesis. There is no way George Smiley could have been played by Sean Connery. He was portrayed on screen by Alec Guinness and never has a fictional character been better realized. Small of stature, portly of frame, bespectacled and middle-aged, he is the kind of man who melts into a crowd. He doesn’t wear a hat because he knows – and has been told by his unfaithful wife Ann – it makes him look ridiculous. In another life, he might have been an academic, specializing in German literature, but his vocation is that of spymaster and spycatcher. He is loyal to what le Carré termed “the Circus” – the intelligence service. His job is to run British agents operating behind the Iron Curtain and to unmask “moles” who have burrowed their way into positions where they can leak top secret information to the Russians. Thus he is a poacher and a gamekeeper.
I have been reading le Carré's novels for as long as I can remember. Throughout that period, though he did not lack discerning admirers, there were always those who refused to take him seriously and dismissed him as a writer of “mere” spy stories. Such is the fate of authors shelved with genre fiction. It is an unhelpful distinction. Books divide into two camps: those that are well-written and those that are not. Le Carré's best work is a joy to read. When I pick up one of his novels I am soon seduced by the sheer power of the storytelling. The language is rich, cadenced, inspired, seductive. Familiar words and phrases– lamplighters, scalphunters, pavement artists, stock, safe house, nursery and many more – were given inspired new meanings. It all contributes to the aura of deceit and the sensation that you are entering a clandestine society with its own rules, customs and jargon.
“I’m a liar,” le Carré once confessed. “Born to lying, bred to it, trained to it by an industry that lies for a living, practised in it as a novelist.” His being born and bred to lying, I believe, is an acknowledgment of the part played in his formation by his father. Ronnie Cornwell was a crook and consummate conman who could charm birds from trees and transform water into wine. Or so he’d promise. To his son, observing him move among high society at the Royal meeting at Ascot or lording it over his equally dodgy confederates, he was an object both of fascination and horror. Le Carré would like to have forgotten all about him but this proved impossible. Ronnie would turn up when least expected, looking for handouts, pretending to be acting on his successful son’s behalf, swanning around as if he owned the Houses of Parliament.
All his son could do was try to get rid of him quietly. On one occasion, as le Carré's biographer, Adam Sisman, notes, Ronnie appeared in Hong Kong, rented a villa in Repulse Bay and “presented himself as very rich, discreet and well connected”. He even offered to sign copies of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold “for friends and business associates, inscribing them ‘with best wishes from the Father of the Author of this book – my son, David’.” Readers familiar with le Carré's oeuvre will be aware that in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and its immediate sequel, The Honourable Schoolboy “a fog-laden rock called Hong Kong” features significantly. In the latter, as a typhoon approaches, a score of journalists congregates in the bar of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, drinking in “a mood of violent idleness, a chorus without a hero”. I like to think that their successors are there to this day, determined, as le Carré was, on speaking truth to power.
(Alan Taylor was deputy editor and managing editor of the Scotsman newspaper. He was a Booker Prize judge in 1994. His latest book is Appointment in Arezzo, an account of his friendship with the novelist Muriel Spark.)
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