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Nick Cohen takes John Le Carré away for a spot of waterboarding After writing his three great novels — The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Perfect Spy — it is easy to agree with the conclusion ofPrivate Eye’s critic, who said le Carré had become “his own tribute band”. You know now how his books will go. There is a decent Englishman. He comes across skulduggery. He is persuaded to fight it by an honest spy, who teaches him tradecraft, but instead finds he must fight Western corporations and governments whose cynicism knows no limits. In the case of The Night Manager, the reason, of course, why the British government is unconcerned by illegal weapons sales is that MI6 is in the pay of the villainous arms dealer.
– Nick Cohen, reviewing the recent TV adaptation of The Night Manager.
For what it is worth, although I like the George Smiley books and also enjoyed A Small Town in Germany, a lot of Le Carré’s other material is as Cohen describes it.
Here is a nice appreciation of the George Smiley books, which in my view are still riveting reading, all these years’ later.
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Though I read them years after Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, A Small Town In Germany (and so on), I also recommend strongly the following novels by John le Carré:
Call For the Dead, 1961, which introduces George Smiley and is also le Carré’s first novel;
The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, 1971.
Best regards
It’s been years since I read The Night Manager. Having said that, it’s my memory that the salient point wasn’t that MI6 was in the pay of the bad guys, but that MI6 appreciated that the bad guys were arming the “right sort” of third-world tyrants and killers.
I do agree with your main point: that LeCarre really only wrote one book, over and over. The Constant Gardener, which was my most recent LeCarre read, fits your plot summation (“There is a decent Englishman. He comes across skulduggery . . . “) to a “t”.
And yet, I read them all, some several times, and enjoyed each one. You just have to remember, as you read, that each book is informed by LeCarre’s politics.
Call For the Dead, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and A Murder of Quality are good, short, plot-driven thrillers. You can read any of them in an afternoon. After that he was still writing 150-page thrillers, but taking 500 pages to do so. He filled up the space with guff and agitprop. Still it sells.
I’d say spot on – and why ‘The Tailor of Panama’ is really good and ‘The Constant Gardner’ kind of shit.
One is about a guy who gets caught up among forces beyond his control who use him for their own ends and the other is a ‘corporations ‘r bad, m’kay!’ movie.
There is a decent Englishman. He comes across skulduggery.
Reminiscent of ‘The Riddle Of the Sands’, then. So one of the finest spy books ever written, BTW…
I have an entirely different take on the loathsome Le Carre.
He is and always has been a communist fellow traveler, a leftist sympathizer writing solely to depress and enervate the west.
No, I think Le Carre is simply reacting against the James Bond style of movie- super spy beats the non-british baddies just because he’s British, with a lot of help from fantastic gadgets.
So pretty much like Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt series, same book, different place and treasure. And product placement, lots of product placement.
And recently watched Spy Who Came In From The Cold, with Richard Burton as the lead. Enjoyable, liked the glimpses of London and Berlin in an earlier age.
I found The Russia House and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy to be good reads, but for some reason forgot the plots to such an extent that when I watched the film of the latter a short time later I didn’t recognise the story. I read A Most Wanted Man and found it to be largely shite: the main character is a Chechen man who behaves absolutely nothing like a Chechen man. I think Le Carre wanted a particular character and decided to make him Chechen without knowing much about Chechens with the result that he came across more Pakistani.
Trying to open the Geo Smiley link unleashed some sort of computer warning about the site. It almost read like some kind of ransomware but I managed to get task manager to get rid of it–so it can’t have been.
You might want to check it out if more people are going to go there.
It did nothing of the sort for me on two different computers, Anon.
What Stephen K said; except that, in the books which i have read (all of them featuring George Smiley, at least in a minor role), the filler was not “guff and agitprop”: more like stream of consciousness and apparently unnecessary dialogue.
Actually, a bit of agitprop can be found already in Call for the Dead (although arguably one of the best, for other reasons) where le Carré subtly implies that to be anti-communist is to be a bit of a nazi. Speaking of which, le Carré seems to be an antisemite himself, according to Cohen. I saw the movie version of The Little Drummer Girl, a long time ago, and do not remember any antisemitic or anti-Israel views; but from the wikipedia summary, it seems that there was some ambivalence in the book.
An off-topic parallel, I’ve noticed that Lee Child’s books are written like right-wing revenge fantasies, but they all have distinctly right-wing villains. From rich southern slave-owning families to back country sheriffs, evil corporations and racist militia groups. If there is an assassination, it was the CIA. If there is a terror attack, it is white people (somehow). It’s humorous, the guy obviously put a lot of effort into learning to write about the US, the military, guns etc. But he can’t ever hang the villainy anywhere near real life.
I have actually got this article – it was in a copy of “Standpoint” that I bought.
The first copy of “Standpoint” that I have ever bought – and I like it.
It is much better than the Spectator.
As for the spy book writer.
I am no judge of writing – but I know a bad man when I see one, and the “Tinker, Taylor” writer is clearly a bad man.
I suspected that when I read the book (as a child) – the traitor tries to justify himself at the end of the book with a lot of Communist propaganda, and “George Smiley” (who is clearly the projection of the writer) mentally agrees with what the traitor has to say “that is undeniable” he thinks (or some such drivel).
Then I watched the man being interviewed – years ago.
He was clearly a Red – it was obvious.
Only in the modern world could a traitor be a success writing books about hunting for traitors.
Having now read the thread – I note that Fred Z. got there before me.
I agree with Fred Z. on this matter.
Particularly the term “fellow traveller”.
The man (I forget his real name) does not have the mental discipline to be a proper Marxist – but he agrees with their aims, death-to-Big-Business, death-to-The-Rich, death-to-The-West.
The one thing I remember from “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” is the outrage of the East German public when one of their border guards is killed by a British Agent. This struck me at the time as runaway moral equivalence; and in fact, later events proved the Grepos to be unloved.
Thinking about it, one other thing: the seventeen-year old border guard, who is introduced and murdered in a single paragraph, is the only character in the book who is not wallowing in doubt and self-loathing. It’s probably just as well that Le Carré didn’t give him a second paragraph.
I recently saw a German series about the Berlin Wall, and an escaping family were involved in shooting a border guard, who died, and was lauded by the East German press, a ‘martyr’ to Marxism. The border guard probably knew no better, poor sap- still, rather him than the family who were fleeing.