by Adam Sisman
Our Game was published in America in April 1995, and in Britain at the beginning of May. Reviews in both countries were generally favourable, some very much so. ‘It’s an extraordinary novel,’ enthused Michael Ratcliffe in the Observer. Sean O’Brien in the Times Literary Supplement rated it ‘far superior’ to The Night Manager, ‘an absorbing and thought-provoking piece of work, a clear return to form’. Louis Menand, writing in the New York Review of Books, was not the only reviewer to detect allusions to Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim: ‘the Conradian undertone is hard to miss’.4
John Updike, on the other hand, heard echoes of Kipling, Rider Haggard and A. E. W. Mason. Our Game took him back ‘to Victorian times, when the great multicoloured globe existed as a vast playing field on which truehearted Englishmen could chase their personal rainbows while the picturesque heathen cheered’. Updike bracketed le Carré with Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsyth, as authors of Cold War thrillers read on aeroplanes by men in business suits – ‘rather, in business trousers, with their jackets nicely folded in the overhead rack and their neckties loosened away from their shirt collars an artful inch’. His review, which appeared in the New Yorker, was both witty and malicious. ‘Le Carré’s prose has an overheated expertise about it,’ wrote Updike, ‘as if it wished to be doing something other than spinning a thriller.’5 David believed that Tina Brown had orchestrated a wounding review ‘as a punishment for making a public fool of her’.6
Updike was one of several reviewers to observe that the psychological tension in the novel derives from the uneasy relations between Cranmer and Pettifer. The reader gains a vivid sense of the two men’s contrasting characters, while the woman in the triangle remains a remote figure. David’s depiction of women has often been criticised. ‘Le Carré’s women consist of physical attributes but not much else,’ wrote Richard Boston, in a typical comment. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are objects of desire, invariably beautiful and almost always unattainable. If many of le Carré’s women are viewed from afar, that is how his men see them. If Emma is enigmatic, that is because she seems so to Cranmer, the novel’s narrator – as Camilla does to Guillam, or Ann to Smiley. Such incomprehension is perhaps regrettable, but it is surely credible. The women in le Carré’s novels are more complex and convincing than the ‘love interest’ of the James Bond novels, and more substantial than the female characters (such as they exist at all) in most of the airport fiction mocked by Updike. The character of Roper’s mistress, Jed, is all too believable. She is shallow, naïve and infuriating: like Lizzie Worthington, a rich man’s plaything. It may be deplorable that men should be attracted to such women – but it is surely unrealistic to deny that they are.
In a piece published in 1999, the novelist Diane Johnson would comment on the fact that le Carré’s heroes seldom have satisfactory relations with women. ‘Le Carré’s women are faithless, restless, complicated, and kept, the men mistrustful and always forlornly adoring of some unworthy woman who has gone off with another male, like a cat.’7
The British edition of Our Game would be a milestone, as the first mainstream novel to be published in hardback outside the terms of the Net Book Agreement (NBA). For almost a century this pact between publishers and booksellers had ensured that British books were sold at fixed prices. It had been established to allow the largest possible number of dedicated booksellers to stock a wide range of titles, safe in the knowledge that they could not be undercut by predatory retailers selling only bestsellers at a discount. Its detractors argued that this was an old-fashioned, paternalistic measure that kept prices artificially high and depressed sales.
By the 1990s the NBA was coming under pressure. Several retailers had started selling paperbacks at discounted prices, under the flimsy pretence that they were damaged copies. One publishing group, Reed Books, withdrew from the Agreement in 1992; and two years later Hodder Headline did the same. ‘The NBA is crumbling around the booksellers and publishers,’ Tim Hely Hutchinson told the Independent. ‘If people feel they are just performing a King Canute act they will give up.’8 But there was strong resistance within the book trade, particularly from booksellers, who feared losing business to supermarkets and other mass retailers. Some made disdainful references to books being sold alongside tins of beans. The Bookseller, ‘The Organ of the Book Trade’, led the defence of the NBA.
Hely Hutchinson had decided to use Our Game as a trailblazer for his new policy. Le Carré’s unusual status, as an author whose writing appealed to every segment of the market, made his novel ideal for such a trial. Hodder Headline set a target of 200,000 sales – a big increase on the 130,000 sold of The Night Manager, and more than double the quantity Hodder had expected to sell of a le Carré in the 1970s and 1980s. In April 1995, a month before the book’s UK publication, the Bookseller ran a story claiming that booksellers were cutting their orders for the novel. W. H. Smith’s fiction buyer announced that he would be ordering only 1,500 copies of ‘the new le Carré’, far fewer than his usual order of 5,000.9 In contrast, the bookselling chain Dillons doubled their usual order for a le Carré novel, and proposed to sell the new book at £12.99, a substantial discount on the recommended retail price of £16.99. The supermarket chain Asda discounted the book further, to £8.49. ‘I can’t really see the point of backing a book that will be sold more cheaply by other groups,’ the Smiths buyer was quoted as saying. ‘As for le Carré himself, I wonder what he thinks about being treated as a mass-market author, being sold in supermarkets and service stations? Not a lot, I should think.’
‘Actually,’ countered Hely Hutchinson, ‘the author would like as many people as possible to read his stories. He is very keen to reach beyond a literary or a committed book-buying elite in order to embrace a new readership. He is supporting everything we do.’
David was irritated to be ‘dragged into this battle’. He fired off a fax to Hely Hutchinson, in which he took strong exception to the way in which he had been spoken for. ‘You really did not have my authority to say that you have my blanket support, nor to represent my views.’10 Nevertheless he would be delighted by the book’s sales. Asda sold a thousand on its first day. The book rocketed straight to the top of the UK bestseller list, fuelled by aggressive marketing and widespread review coverage. Three weeks after publication David congratulated Hodder’s managing director, Martin Neild, ‘on a splendid sales performance’.11* The eventual number of sales of the Hodder hardback edition would be half as many again as for The Night Manager. In the US Our Game reached no. 2 on the bestseller list, kept from the top spot by a hugely popular piece of hokum called The Celestine Prophecy.
‘We left the net book agreement because we wanted to expand sales across the industry and bring a greater sense of excitement to the book market,’ said Hely Hutchinson. ‘There is no doubt that this initiative will bring le Carré to a wider market than ever before and will set the agenda for the future expansion of books.’12 When two more large publishing groups withdrew from the NBA in the autumn, the Agreement was effectively dead. David was invited to make a speech at the annual Booksellers’ Association conference, held in the Stationers’ Hall in London. It was the year of the BA’s centenary, so it was a special occasion. Unfortunately the circumstances were not ideal for an after-dinner speech: listeners were distracted by the clatter of plates being cleared and the hubbub as people left the table to stretch their legs.
The brouhaha surrounding the book’s publication helped make Our Game a success, stimulating stories on the financial as well as the literary pages. A piece in the Observer was accompanied by a photograph of the book nestling among groceries in an Asda supermarket trolley.13 A bookshop in Milton Keynes issued a statement that it would continue to sell the book at full price, but offered customers a free can of beans with every copy purchased.14
Francis Ford Coppola showed interest in adapting Our Game for the big screen, and invited David to come and stay several days at his Napa Valley ranch, to discuss t
he matter. Back in the late 1970s Coppola had been interested in filming The Naïve and Sentimental Lover, but the discussions had come to nothing, as so often happens in the movie business. During his four or five days with Coppola, David was sufficiently enthused to write a screenplay. The intention was that Harrison Ford would star, but he withdrew, perhaps realising that to portray an introverted Englishman was beyond his powers. Coppola would not commit to directing it himself, though he continued to toy with the project. He wanted David to go back and rework the script with him, but David saw little point in doing so until a director was aboard. Besides, he was now deep in another novel.
In his letter to Martin Neild, David had mentioned that he had been out of the country at the time of publication, travelling in California and Panama, and thus had been able to avoid the NBA controversy. ‘Mercifully a new novel has taken me over, and I barely lift my head,’ he wrote.
David’s visit to Panama while researching the arms industry for The Night Manager had made him ‘determined’ to set a story there.15 Panama was effectively an American creation: a nation that had come into being solely in order to allow its powerful neighbour to implement a grand engineering project, a canal linking the Atlantic to the Pacific. By supporting the rebels who had founded Panama at the beginning of the twentieth century as a breakaway from Colombia, the United States had gained sovereignty over the so-called ‘Canal Zone’, despite the fact that this strip of territory had cut the new nation in two. Under the terms of a treaty made in 1977 the Zone was due to revert to full Panamanian control on 31 December 1999, though this outcome remained uncertain as the country was bedevilled by corruption, political instability, coups and uprisings. In 1989 an American invasion, Operation Just Cause, had ousted the government of President Manuel Noriega. ‘They got rid of Ali Baba but they forgot the forty thieves,’ ran a popular joke in Panama.
David was drawn by the prospect of a tiny, much colonised country asserting its independence. He was intrigued by Panama as ‘a microcosm of the United States’ colonial experience’ – a colony of the great nation that was not supposed to have colonies – and was particularly fascinated by the peculiar community of ‘Zonians’, ‘the mostly American employees of the canal company who, unable to own property in the Zone, had reverted to a kind of watered-down Christian Communism dating from the 1920s’. He was struck by the fact that Panama’s contribution to the great anti-Communist crusade had died at the very moment when American colonial tenure in Panama was coming to an end. Above all, he was drawn to the canal: as a power symbol, as an item of colonial nostalgia, and as a geopolitical wild card at the end of the twentieth century. As the deadline for ending American control of the Zone approached, other powers were said to be lobbying for influence, particularly the Japanese. David envisaged that Western spies would take a close interest in such developments.16 He imagined an agent with access to some of the most important people in Panama – a hairdresser, perhaps, whose upmarket clientele would be attracted by his proficiency and flair. He pursued the story for some months, but the character remained elusive.
Then John Calley, in London on a visit from Hollywood, insisted that the two of them should drop in on Doug Hayward, known as the ‘tailor to the stars’, who specialised in making suits for showbiz customers. Hayward turned out to be an amusing personality, whose effortless charm was said to have inspired Michael Caine in creating the role of Alfie. He aimed to make his customers feel comfortable. ‘You’ve got to make them feel good before you can make them look good,’ he would say. His Mount Street premises were reminiscent of a relaxed gentlemen’s club, with a cosy old sofa, and a low table strewn with books and magazines. Callers could expect a chat and a glass of champagne or a cup of tea, without any pressure to buy.
It was this chance encounter which inspired David to contemplate a tailor as the protagonist of a novel. He noticed the discreet atmosphere, which encouraged customers’ confidences. It occurred to him that a tailor with well-placed customers could be a valuable agent, especially in a hothouse of rumour like Panama. Though Harry Pendel, the character he created, was nothing like Hayward, he shared some of the same origins. David acknowledged that Hayward had allowed him ‘his first misty glimpse of Harry Pendel the tailor’. Hayward had almost entirely shed his cockney accent, but he remained proud of his working-class roots. ‘If you close your eyes one quiet summer’s evening in his shop, you may just hear the distant echo of Harry Pendel’s voice extolling the virtues of alpaca cloth or buttons made of tagua nut.’
He imagined Harry Pendel as half Jewish, half Irish, a former East End boy with a prison record who has found what seems to be a safe berth as a high-class tailor in Panama. Married to a beautiful Zonian and blessed with children, he is outwardly content. But, unknown to his wife, his success is illusory: he has mortgaged his business to meet the debts from the struggling rice farm on which he has squandered her inheritance. Pendel is a self-made man in the fullest sense; he has invented himself just as he invents others. His business, Pendel & Braithwaite, formerly of Savile Row, is based on a fantasy; Arthur Braithwaite never existed, nor had Harry Pendel ever worked in Savile Row. He is a fabricator, both literally and metaphorically. Pendel was already playing a part before his controller, the unscrupulous Old Etonian Andrew Osnard, walked into his shop and tempted him to dissemble further.
David saw how a tailor, like a novelist, could be a fabulist. He depicted Pendel as an impersonator, imagining himself in his customer’s clothes and becoming that person. Pendel went further still, seeing himself as the creator of character, both in dressing his clients and in imagining worlds for them. He even had a neologism for it – ‘fluence’.
It was tailoring. It was improving on people. It was cutting and shaping people until they became understandable members of his internal universe. It was fluence. It was running ahead of events and waiting for them to catch up. It was making people bigger or smaller according to whether they enhanced or threatened his existence … It was a system of survival that Pendel had developed in prison and perfected in marriage, and its purpose was to provide a hostile world with whatever made it feel at ease with itself.17
David continued tinkering with the text until the last moment, removing a total of fifteen pages at proof stage, all in small chunks (the British edition went through four stages of proof).18 The result was a book that he would rate as one of his best – together with The Spy who Came in from the Cold, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Constant Gardener – though not, perhaps surprisingly, A Perfect Spy.19
Though it stands on its own, The Tailor of Panama is an obvious tribute to Graham Greene, the writer with whom John le Carré has most often been compared.* In the 1980s David had re-read Greene’s Our Man in Havana, which he found even more enjoyable on the second reading. The notion of an intelligence fabricator would not let me alone,’ David wrote in his acknowledgements. Like Greene’s Wormold, Pendel would cook up intelligence for his controller, to feed the appetites of his greedy masters back in London. Like Our Man in Havana, The Tailor of Panama is a black comedy, a satire set in a chaotic environment where no story seems too fantastic, no conspiracy too far fetched, and where the separation between tragedy and farce is paper thin.
The Tailor of Panama was published in the UK on 14 October 1996. Three weeks after publication it had reached no. 3 in the Sunday Times bestseller list, and remained in the top ten into January. By this time actual sales of the British edition had overtaken those of Our Game, reaching over 110,000. Knopf published simultaneously, with an advertised first print run of 300,000 copies. Perhaps American readers did not share David’s distaste for American meddling in their own back yard; or perhaps they were disconcerted by a comic le Carré, which was seen as something new for him – though David himself sees a comic thread running through his fiction, which he believes has gone largely unrecognised. Whatever the reason, American sales of The Tailor of Panama were disappointing by comparison with its predecessors; it reached no
higher than no. 7 in the New York Times bestseller list, and by Christmas had dropped off the list altogether.
There was a bizarre postscript to the publication of The Tailor of Panama. A letter arrived at Hodder Headline from a man called Sior Pendle, saying that he was the son of the late George Pendle, a director of Pendle & Rivett, cloth merchants to Savile Row. It seemed that Pendle Senior had lived in Paraguay, where he had been on close terms with ministers in the Paraguayan government and other leading personalities; and further, that he had been recruited to act as an agent for SIS by an Old Etonian, Eugen Millington-Drake. His wife had been born in Argentina, where she had inherited a share in a struggling family ranch.
‘This book is clearly based on part of my father’s life,’ wrote Sior Pendle. He wondered who had been given access to his father’s Foreign Office file. He and his family felt that it was ‘very unfortunate’ that they had not been consulted about this book in advance, because, ‘in spite of the very many exact parallels’, his father had never served a term in prison. They had always sought the utmost discretion regarding his activities, he wrote, and asked for a ‘full and immediate’ explanation.