by Adam Sisman
Speculation within the industry and the press suggested that his much publicised feud with Salman Rushdie had played a part in his departure. Sonny Mehta had been one of Rushdie’s editors in England and was said to be a ‘close friend’ of his. But David denied that he had ever discussed the matter with Mehta, or with anyone else at Knopf. David’s American lawyer Rudell told the trade press that ‘this has nothing to do with Rushdie’. According to Publishers Weekly, the real reason why le Carré was leaving Knopf was the disappointing sales of his recent books. The Tailor of Panama had sold significantly fewer than The Night Manager, which itself had not earned its advance.33 ‘I felt they’d had me too long & forgotten how to sell me,’ David wrote to a friend in Panama, ‘& never considered how to present me post Cold War.’34
* In John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle (1916), set during the First World War, his dashing hero Richard Hannay foils a German attempt to foment a general Islamic uprising that threatens turmoil throughout the Middle East, India and North Africa.
* Corkoran is Roper’s factotum, a jealous homosexual, suspicious of Pine from the outset.
* Wilde had used the alias ‘Sebastian Melmoth’ after his discharge from Reading Gaol. Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is the title of a Gothic novel by Wilde’s great-uncle Charles Maturin, in which John Melmoth sells his soul to the devil in exchange for prolonging his life for an extra 150 years.
* Hodder Headline paid an advance of £550,000; by 31 March 1996 all but £40,000 of this had been earned.
* In 1999 David declined a request to write a brief introduction to a reissue of Greene’s The Honorary Consul.
* Kevin Kline was originally cast to play Pendel, but withdrew because he did not want to spend so long on location in Panama.
* In fact the two had not been close friends until this point. Their friendship survived until Hitchens’s death in 2011.
23
The Secret Centre
In a Simon & Schuster press release announcing the novel’s acquisition, Single & Single was described as ‘the masterful story of a British merchant banking house in business with criminal elements in post Cold War Russia and Europe’. Like A Perfect Spy, it was also ‘an extraordinarily compelling story of family betrayal’.
The comparison was apt, because a son’s anguished relations with his father lie at the emotional heart of the book, as they do in A Perfect Spy. In this case the father is ‘Tiger’ Single, founder of the merchant bank that bears his name; the son is Oliver, Tiger’s heir-designate. Just as Magnus Pym betrays his father in A Perfect Spy, so too does Oliver, by ‘shopping’ him to the British Customs & Excise. Afterwards Oliver goes to ground, re-emerging in a new identity as a magician and children’s entertainer in Cornwall.
Though only sketchily drawn, Tiger is a recognisable version of Ronnie, like Rick in A Perfect Spy. In this version, David imagined how Ronnie might have become if things had worked out differently:
What if my father, instead of being rumbled by the forces of the law, which sadly for him was regularly the case – what if, like so many of the bent businessmen around him, he had got away with his scams scot-free, and become, as he always dreamed of becoming, a respected fat cat of the West End, owner of an instant ancient pile in Buckinghamshire, president of the local football club, cricket club, giver of garden fêtes for the church roof?
What if, instead of merely enrolling from time to time as a law student, he had possessed enough self-discipline to study law rather than just finger it – and had thus acquired the skills that enable so many crooked lawyers to flourish in the world of finance?
David further imagined what might have become of him if, instead of sneaking off to Oxford to read modern languages, he had obediently submitted to his father’s demands to study law, as his brother had done; and if, in due course, he and Tony had meekly entered his father’s firm and had taken up the places prepared for them. The case of the flamboyant publishing magnate Robert Maxwell showed what might have happened. On the day when Maxwell’s sons Kevin and Ian were brought to trial for their alleged complicity in their father’s fraudulent dealings, David’s sister telephoned him. ‘It could have been you two,’ she said.1 In a further twist, David drew on aspects of his own sons in creating Oliver – particularly Nick, who was a juggler and always seemed to wear a heavy coat, as Oliver did.
Single & Single is the story of Oliver’s quest for his father, threatened by his own business associates after the authorities begin to clamp down on their operations. Tiger has bolted, seeking safety in flight. Guilt-stricken, Oliver goes in search of his father, following him to Switzerland and then to Turkey; and eventually finds him in the shadow of the Caucasus mountains, a half-naked prisoner in a stable, chained hand and foot, his face blackened with bruises. The scene is a heightened version of the episode in A Perfect Spy when Magnus arrives at the prison to set his father free; or of the occasion when David had done the same for Ronnie. Like Rick, and Ronnie, Tiger is belittled; once rescued, he co-operates meekly with the authorities. For Oliver, this is a moment of epiphany: ‘He had arrived at the last, most hidden room of his search, he had prised open the most top-secret box, and it was empty. Tiger’s secret was that he had no secret.’ David would later summarise Single & Single as ‘the story of how a father-obsessed son finally sprang over his own shadow and discovered the monster who ruled his life was just another sad and empty little man’.2
He made two trips to the Caucasus, one while writing the book, and a second after he had finished the first draft and then rewritten it in response to comments from Roland Philipps. On both occasions he was escorted into the mountains by two brothers connected to Georgian special forces. One drove, the other interpreted.
Even after completing Single & Single, David was still not free of Ronnie. As so often in the past, he began planning an autobiographical book, ‘one final attempt to come to terms with a mercurial, tragically driven and totally incomprehensible father’. Previous tries had made him mistrustful of his own memories; as a novelist he had quarried his own history so often that he no longer knew what was real and what was not. ‘We all reinvent our pasts, but writers are in a class of their own,’ he wrote later, in a passage looking back on this episode: ‘even when they know the truth, it’s never enough for them.’ He sought collateral information, facts to corroborate his imaginative fictions. Within weeks of finishing Single & Single, he had commissioned a pair of private detectives – ‘one thin, one fat, both recommended by a London solicitor, and both good eaters’ – to investigate his father. He gave them as many leads as he could think of and sent them out into the world to gather information about Ronnie and his business ventures. David proposed that their findings should be juxtaposed and contrasted with his own memories, on facing pages; ‘in that way my readers will see for themselves to what extent an old writer’s memory is the whore of his imagination’. But the experiment was a failure. ‘Ten thousand pounds and several excellent meals later, all they had to offer was a bunch of press clippings about old bankruptcies and the Great Yarmouth election and a pile of useless company records.’3 After six months he abandoned the project – though he was able to retrieve something from this fiasco by writing a piece about it for the Sunday Times, ‘Son of a Swindler’.4
Single & Single was published early in 1999. ‘Le Carré is more than just a great storyteller,’ wrote Tom Wolfe: ‘he captures the Zeitgeist itself, in this case the very funk of post-Soviet Euro-fear.’* Critics commented that David had once again produced a story that felt extremely topical – of greed, exploitation and callousness, of the feeding frenzy of asset stripping which had brought Russia to its knees, of profiteering by crooks and oligarchs, and of the West’s tragic indifference to the fate of its former enemy. Even so, few of them could resist the temptation to frame their reviews in terms of how successfully le Carré had adapted to the World after Communism. No matter how much he wrote about the present, it seemed that he could not escape from his association wi
th the past. For journalists, it was all too easy to depict David as a writer who had lost his subject when the Cold War had ended, though Single & Single was his fourth novel to appear since then. His supposed spikiness could be explained as disgruntlement, his apparent inaccessibility as pique. This was exasperating for David. ‘John le Carré’s silence has gone on, in England at least, for years,’ wrote an interviewer from The Times, in an especially preposterous piece:
The cold hung on long after the break-up of the Soviet Union. It deepened with the decade, and reports suggested that it was hardening into a permafrost. It was impossible to gauge the truth since the man himself was not talking. He was more remote than ever, shunning London and only breaking his silences for short, splenetic bursts. It was impossible to get to him through his friends, even if you knew who they were, as they were all so discreet, or dead, or overseas. And so he took on the air of Eighties Edward Heath, digging in for the long winter of the new order.
David could be forgiven for becoming irritable when confronted with such stuff. ‘Ridiculous,’ he snapped, when The Times man asked whether the end of the Cold War had ‘ever looked like destroying his fiction’s context and environment’. The suggestion that he had been cut off from his lifeline was ‘sheer nonsense’. On the contrary, he said: the end of ‘the supposed stand-off between the two great monoliths’ was from his point of view ‘a great relief’.5
One of the more interesting reviews of Single & Single came from D. J. Taylor, who was alive to the exuberant quality of the writing. ‘Single & Single manages to make some serious points about history amid a riot of whoops and skips, genre flourishes and delighted winks to the gallery,’ wrote Taylor in the Guardian. ‘It is an axiom, of course, that the fate of the sixty-something novelist is stylisation. They go on being themselves, only more so. And the interest in reading them lies mostly in their efforts to resist this process.’6 Single & Single reached no. 2 in the UK bestseller list, and spent fifteen weeks in the top ten; in the US, it reached no. 3.
A few weeks before the book appeared, David had given an address to an early-evening gathering of agent-runners at MI5’s headquarters, Thames House, on the north side of Lambeth Bridge. He was there at the invitation of the Director-General, Sir Stephen Lander. This was David’s second visit to Thames House; some years earlier he had read from his work at a meeting of MI5’s Bernini Society, which offered a programme of guest speakers. On this occasion Sir Stephen’s aide had suggested that he should speak on ‘Trust and Treachery in Agent Operations’: a topic of particular relevance to his listeners, most of whom were young intelligence officers, as once he had been. His insights into the process of agent-running were remarkably perceptive, not least because he was able to draw on his experiences, both as an agent-runner himself and, before that, as an agent.
David’s next novel would take him still further away from the Circus. Its origins went back twenty years, to a chance encounter one summer’s evening, when he was drinking in a beer hall in Basel. A black-bearded cyclist in a beret had ridden through the open double doors, parked his bike at David’s table and started talking. He was a former chemist, he explained, but now he was an anarchist because he refused to take part in the poisoning of mankind. The bearded cyclist filled David’s head with the wicked deeds of the ‘multis’, the multinational pharmaceutical companies clustered along the banks of the upper Rhine. They would poison the globe, he said, if by doing so they could bump up their share prices. David enjoyed a frisson of forewarning; one day, he thought, I’ll find a way to write about you and your ‘multis’. He ditched the beard, the beret and the bicycle, but stored away the cyclist’s fury for future use.7 He would often retrieve scraps like this when a suitable context arose.
About fifteen years later, David was sitting in a small London restaurant when an elegant, grey-suited man appeared with a basket of fresh-cut flowers under his arm and began bestowing bouquets on each group of diners, before accepting a kiss and a glass of wine from the proprietress. ‘We call him the mad gardener,’ she explained to David, once the visitor had shyly taken his leave. Together they decided that he must have suffered bereavement and that bestowing flowers gave him comfort. David was inspired to write the first page of a first chapter, under the heading ‘The Mad Gardener’, introducing an eccentric Englishman in a straw hat, an ageing and bereaved former diplomat who has taken himself to live in Morocco, where he tours the cafés and nightclubs in the evenings, dispensing flowers to the diners. David pinned this page on his noticeboard, where it remained for a few years, until he took it down and filed it away, apparently a lost cause; but it would prove to be the first sketch of the character at the centre of his next novel, Harry Clapham, later renamed Justin Quayle: a dignified, quietly spoken, middle-aged diplomat, a mild-mannered gardener. He too has lost someone close to him – Tessa,* an impetuous, headstrong, unswerving young woman, to whom he will remain constant, even when it appears that she has betrayed him: hence the eventual title of the novel, The Constant Gardener.
David planned to set the novel in Africa. Partly he was drawn by the lure of getting to know somewhere new; until then his only experience of Africa had been of safari holidays with the children, of ‘lines of striped jeeps queuing up to photograph the same disconsolate lion’. He retained an uneasy memory of his schooldays, when English boys were prepared for the burdens of imperial rule in the colonies: remembering in particular the flutter caused by a well-intentioned careers adviser, who had warned that anyone who condemned a native to death jolly well ought to attend his execution. He wanted to write about the crimes of unbridled capitalism – nowhere more evident than in Africa. At first he contemplated a book set in Nigeria, which had been plundered and polluted by international oil companies, but that seemed somehow too obvious. Then Ted Younie, a former SIS man who had spent almost all his career in Africa, whispered ‘pharmaceuticals’ in his ear. If one was looking for a metaphor for the exploitation of Africa, beyond even oil, he suggested, it was the pharmaceutical industry. ‘I’ll help you in any way I can,’ promised Younie: ‘this book needs writing.’ David spent some weeks in Basel talking in confidence to middle managers in pharmaceutical companies, who told him shocking stories of falsification of clinical trials, and humans in poor countries being used as guinea pigs. He had decided to set the novel in Kenya rather than Nigeria, and flew out to Nairobi a few weeks after the publication of Single & Single. He was shocked by what he found. The country had been devastated by the AIDS epidemic and by rampant corruption. ‘Nobody has so far offered me the least hope for the future of Kenya,’ he wrote in his notebook.8
In Nairobi, David met civil rights lawyers, trawled the city’s hospitals and talked to local representatives of pharmaceutical companies. One location he did not visit was the British High Commission, though the novel opens in the Commission and several subsequent scenes are set there or within the tight community of British diplomats and their families. ‘It is not the place I have described, for I have never been inside it,’ he would write of the High Commission, in an afterword to the novel. ‘It is not staffed by the people I have described, because I have never met nor spoken to them’ – though he did admit to a chat with the High Commissioner over a ginger ale on the verandah of the Norfolk Hotel. The novel would convey his cynicism about Whitehall, ‘the permanent government of England, on which her transient politicians spin and posture like so many table dancers’.
A young man in a suit appeared beside David as he was walking around Nairobi and engaged him in conversation. He introduced himself as the receptionist at his hotel and explained that he was on his way to buy flowers. Would David like to come with him to the flower market? David was beguiled by the young man’s pleasant demeanour and agreed to accompany him. He was led down a side street, straight into the arms of two men, one of whom held a knife to his throat. They wanted only cash, not even his wristwatch. Fortunately David had a couple of hundred dollars on him.
Some of the most vivid
scenes of the novel would be set in the remote north, near the banks of Lake Turkana. David engaged a pilot and a private plane to fly him up there, so that he could take a look around. Turkana borders South Sudan, a region devastated by famine, drought and a civil war that had been raging, on and off, since the mid-1950s; the government in Khartoum employed a local militia of armed horsemen, the Janjaweed, to terrorise the population and suppress the insurgency. In Nairobi David talked to fighters from one of the principal rebel groups, General Garang’s Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Under the auspices of one of the NGOs involved in the United Nations relief operation, Operation Lifeline Sudan, he undertook a hazardous journey across the border into South Sudan, as a passenger on one of the UN’s short-take-off-and-landing Buffalo transports. He stayed several nights on the northernmost food station in South Sudan, spent time with local elders and dignitaries, watched a couple of food drops and saw the local Dinka women emerging naked from the bush to collect the food. During his stay they received a red alert that the food station was about to be attacked; he and the other aid workers were evacuated to an island, where the Janjaweed were unlikely to follow.
The more that David investigated the behaviour of drug companies in Africa, the more outraged he became. They dumped inappropriate or out-of-date medicines on the Africans, suppressed information about their contra-indications and their side-effects, and encouraged their indiscriminate use. The most effective drugs were arbitrarily over-priced, and attempts to manufacture generic substitutes blocked. Africans were encouraged to buy drugs they did not want and prevented from getting drugs they desperately needed. Increasingly, the ‘multis’ used them as guinea pigs in their trials. David was shocked to discover how closely the industry was tied to Western governments: all too often, it seemed, doctors and research facilities were in the pocket of pharmaceuticals. ‘The pharmas, whether they know it or not, are engaged in the systematic corruption of the medical profession,’ he would write.9 No dissent was tolerated. ‘There has been a steady trickle of alarming cases where inconvenient scientific findings had been suppressed or rewritten, and those responsible for them hounded off their campuses, with their professional and personal reputations systematically trashed by public relations agencies in the pay of pharmas.’ David believed it possible that in extremis the most unscrupulous pharmaceutical companies might resort to murder in order to silence their critics. ‘I am sure people have died,’ he would tell interviewers.10 His novel begins with the discovery that Tessa Quayle has been found stabbed to death in the remote northern region of Kenya, near the banks of Lake Turkana. The driver of her jeep has been decapitated. Her companion, the African doctor Arnold Blum, is missing. As the story develops, it emerges that he and Tessa have been urgently trying to draw attention to the dangerous side-effects of a new TB drug, Dypraxa. Tessa has protected her husband by keeping him ignorant of her activities. After her death he tries to reconstruct what she has been doing by accessing files on her laptop. For David, this was an expedition into unknown territory: he knew nothing of computers and relied on his youngest son Nick to advise him.