Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Tinker Tailor Soldier Scribe

The writer within
by
January-February 2023, no. 450

A Private Spy: The letters of John le Carré edited by Tim Cornwell

Viking, $39.99 pb, 713 pp

Tinker Tailor Soldier Scribe

The writer within
by
January-February 2023, no. 450

Was he John or was he David? That’s the trouble with being a literary double agent: there’s always the significant other to consider. David Cornwell, alias John le Carré, devised his pseudonym in 1958, on the same day he also created his most famous character, George Smiley, on the opening page of his first novel, Call for the Dead. This was when le Carré – a fresh recruit to MI5 and on his daily two-hour train commute into central London – ‘just began writing in a little notebook’.

The bounty contained within this and succeeding notebooks has resounded with far greater global impact than le Carré’s all-too-brief career as a professional spy. While MI5 and then MI6 both lost a diligent and dutiful servant, English fiction gained a master chronicler whose work spanned the building and knocking-down of the Berlin Wall and beyond, up to the age of Tony Blair and Brexit – both anathema to le Carré. Along the way, le Carré’s prodigious quest for knowledge and his innate creative ingenuity transformed the spy novel into great literature. He also provided the English language with a host of new meanings for such familiar words as ‘circus’, ‘mole’, ‘babysitter’, ‘lamplighter’, ‘pavement artists’, et al.

By the time he died in December 2020 at the age of eighty-nine, le Carré had bequeathed the world twenty-five novels (an additional one, Silverview, was published posthumously), plus a book of memoirs, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from a life (2016). Intriguingly, the latter was published just a year after the excellent biography of le Carré by Adam Sisman, which le Carré at first supported, then resisted. As Sisman wrote archly later: ‘Memoir is what you can remember: biography aspires to objective truth.’ (Bearing this in mind, I recommend, when reading le Carré’s letters, to keep Sisman near to hand.)

A Private Spy: The letters of John le Carré

A Private Spy: The letters of John le Carré

edited by Tim Cornwell

Viking, $39.99 pb, 713 pp

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Comment (1)

  • Talking of John le Carré’s secrets, Dead Lions and the excellent TV series SAS Rogue Heroes (and even Ungentlemanly Warfare), by now most of us have read Ben Macintyre’s SAS Rogue Heroes and Giles Milton’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. However, there existed a less renowned but SAS related clique of maverick and patriotic British reprobates in British Intelligence called Pemberton’s People who worked for Colonel Alan Brooke Pemberton CVO MBE.

    During the Malayan Emergency (really a war) British Intelligence and covert units such as the Special Air Service worked closely together under the eagle eyes of Field Marshal Sir Gerald Walter Robert Templer and his ADC Alan Pemberton who in 1952 in Malaya oversaw the establishment of 22 SAS Regiment. Since then its home has been in Hereford, England. Malaya proved to be an exquisite training ground for all involved in the dark arts of modern warfare.

    Even the notorious spy Philby tried to get in on the act to support the communist backed insurgents and later some of Pemberton’s People starred in the real Clockwork Orange Plot as to be depicted in Samuel Martin’s The Ghost of Harold Wilson.

    If you are interested in this and more besides do check it out at TheBurlingtonFiles website and see the News Article dated 31 October 2022 … Pemberton’s People, Ungentlemanly Officers & Rogue Heroes.
    Posted by Harry Disper
    30 December 2022

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.