by Adam Sisman
The novel opens at the Linderhof, with a reunion between Mundy and Sasha, whom he has known since 1969, when they had shared a squalid room in Berlin. Years later, Sasha, by this time an officer in the Stasi, offers to become a double agent. Though not a professional, Mundy becomes his case officer. Their loyalty to each other overrides their loyalty to family, or country. ‘You are my absolute friend,’ declares Sasha. Their friendship transcends the division between East and West, between England and Germany. It is reminiscent of the central relationship between Magnus and Axel in A Perfect Spy: Sasha is a version of Axel, and of his progenitor Alexander Heussler, with the same limp and the same quick wit. The contradictions involved in running a double agent allow David to explore notions of duality, as he had done in A Perfect Spy. ‘Let’s all pretend to be someone else,’ Mundy reflects as he is being followed in Prague, ‘and then perhaps we’ll find out who we are.’8
By 11 September David had written the first two chapters. That day the Cornwells were in Hamburg: they had spent the morning watching archive footage of Rudi Dutschke, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and other 1960s radicals, and were back at their hotel, relaxing in the bar, when they received an urgent message from David’s secretary to find a television. They rushed up to their room and switched on the set, in time to see the second plane fly into the twin towers. In the next few hours, David made impotent efforts to contact his son Stephen, who lived in California with his English wife and their eight children. Like so many other people around the world, he felt ‘an enormous, inexpressible sympathy for the victims, for America’ at that moment. As for his book, David’s immediate reaction was that it was ‘dead in the water’. Even to be contemplating a novel about a terrorist plot at such a time seemed unacceptable.9
David’s perspective soon changed, however. After President Bush had declared a worldwide ‘War on Terror’, he began to feel that his book had a renewed validity. He was horrified when the American government set up a detention camp within the US naval base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, where prisoners could be held indefinitely without trial, outside US jurisdiction and the protection of the Geneva Convention. He deplored the use of ‘extraordinary rendition’ – the abduction and transfer of a person from one country to another without legal process, much used by the Americans to bring prisoners to Guantánamo. Indeed, as the months passed, his mounting outrage at what was being said and done by the leaders of the West added urgency to the novel. He had reluctantly supported the invasion of Afghanistan, and favoured attempts to eliminate the leadership of Al-Qaeda, but was bitterly opposed to the moves to take action against Iraq, and was appalled that so many Americans had been gulled into believing that Saddam Hussein was implicated in the attacks on America. ‘The lies that have been distributed are so many and so persistent’, he would say, ‘that arguably fiction is the only way to tell the truth.’10
Anthony Barnett was the editor and co-founder of openDemocracy, a global website or ‘commons’ created to provide an alternative to the conventional, ‘corporate’ media and he brought David to meet its staff. In contrast, David’s old friend William Shawcross was one of the loudest advocates for ‘regime change’ in Iraq. David was invited by the Guardian to debate the issue with Shawcross in its pages, but David was reluctant to clash with his chum in print and declined the opportunity.
In September 2002 the Cornwells joined an anti-war rally in central London. Days earlier Tony Blair had released a document presenting the case for going to war with Iraq. The marchers, whose numbers were estimated to be between 150,000 and 400,000, were ‘kettled’ (corralled) by the police. David found the whole experience ‘extremely moving’. He was fascinated by the variety of people participating, young and old, white and black, radical and conservative: those with whom he spoke ranged from an enraged Muslim from Birmingham to a quietly spoken white doctor from Winchester. It seemed to David that the police were much more hostile to the peace demonstrators than they had been to the marchers from the Countryside Alliance, who had held their own rally the week before. ‘Jane and I marched against the war last month,’ David wrote afterwards to John and Miranda Margetson, ‘& hope we’ll get a chance to do it again before the world ends.’11 In fact they would do so again the following February, as part of a worldwide protest against plans to invade Iraq. Around one million people gathered in London for the demonstration, described as the largest ever held in Britain. When the marchers were brought to a halt in Whitehall, a huge roar rose from the packed crowd. David tried to imagine Tony Blair sitting in Downing Street, listening to that sound.
John Miller had died of cancer during the previous month, after a short illness, through which Michael Truscott had nursed him with loving care. David came over to see him regularly in the last few weeks of his life. He delivered a moving eulogy at Miller’s funeral in a Penzance church. ‘Very old, very dear friend,’ he began,
Nobody I have ever known was better prepared for death than you were. Who else would lie smiling up at me while I read these words to him? But you did. And you worried for me, that I would be too upset to read them. I had come to comfort you. But you got there ahead of me, and comforted me instead.
‘We shall never know a better man than John Miller,’ he said in his peroration, ‘or a happier one.’
About eighteen months earlier David himself had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The first advice was that he should submit himself to an immediate operation; a second opinion recommended that he should watch and wait. Since then he has undergone no special treatment. ‘I’m fine, as far it goes,’ he wrote to Kaspar and Erica von Almen in a 2003 New Year’s message. ‘A little woodworm, a little dry rot, some deathwatch beetle, notably in the form of prostate cancer, but emphatically in good health and writing, writing, because, after marching, it’s the best insurance against death.’ He referred to Alec Guinness’s death two years before, and complained that ‘we seem to spend all our Sundays at memorial services – the cocktail round for geriatrics’: ‘I have become a sort of cantor for my vanished friends, which I resent. They should live longer, and sing for me.’12
Despite his illness, David was determined to go on writing. Declining an invitation from the Margetsons to spend Christmas with them, he apologised for being so elusive. ‘I have had a very uphill struggle with the new novel, and much frustration, and at last things are beginning to look right,’ he wrote.
Endless underpainting, scraping off, and beginning again somewhere else on the canvas, standards getting ever higher, time and energy diminishing in inverse proportion – but the will, thank heaven, unbowed so far. The problem is always continuity: not stealing a few hours but getting a sustained run of weeks and months in the same place without the delightful diversions – persons from Porlock – that send one scurrying back to the beginning in order to get inside the cage again.
He had been pleased to read that Lucian Freud had recently failed to attend the opening of an exhibition of his own work in Paris because he was too busy painting – ‘so I’m not the only loony in the world after all’.13
From an invitation to speak to the editorial team at openDemocracy came the idea that David should write an article on the ever-louder drumbeat for war in America. As a publisher of a digital newsletter, Barnett thought it quaint that David should want to publish it in The Times, the ‘newspaper of record’. His article appeared there on 15 January 2003, under the title ‘The United States of America Has Gone Mad’. By this time war was imminent: coalition armies were massing on the Iraqi border, and air strikes against Iraqi military targets had begun. ‘America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember,’ David wrote: ‘worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.’
The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are being systematical
ly eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns of the East Coast press …
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America’s anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear …14
The invasion of Iraq, which began in March 2003, seemed to feed directly into David’s writing. Several of the novel’s reviewers would remark on an abrupt change of tone in chapter 11, the chapter he was writing as the war began. In this chapter Mundy is reborn (‘Mundy redux’) as David’s spokesman. Like David himself, Mundy marches in protest against the Iraq invasion, ‘with a conviction he never felt before because convictions were essentially what he borrowed from other people’:
Suddenly he is mad as a hornet … The lies and hypocrisies of politicians are nothing new to him. They never were. So why now? Why leap on his soapbox and rant uselessly about the same things that have been going on since the first politician on earth lisped his first hypocrisy, lied, wrapped himself in the flag, put on God’s armour and said he never did it in the first place?
It is the old man’s impatience coming on early. It’s anger at seeing the show come round again one too many times …
It’s the discovery, in his sixth decade, that half a century after the death of empire, the dismally ill-managed country he’d done a little of this and that for is being marched off to quell the natives on the strength of a bunch of lies, in order to please a renegade hyperpower that thinks it can treat the rest of the world as its allotment.15
David modified his original plot, to make it so that Mundy and Sasha, though innocent, are blackened as terrorists; and, though unarmed, are gunned down by American special forces, in what the docile press misleadingly refers to as ‘The Siege of Heidelberg’ (his provisional title). Some reviewers would criticise this apocalyptic finale as implausible.
By early June he had finished the book in draft. After further revision he sent it out for comment to readers, with a note asking them to forgive any topographical inaccuracies; he had never been to Heidelberg and would go there to correct these, and go back to Berlin and to Munich after finishing the first draft. ‘I have always preferred to work this way,’ he wrote: ‘first to make the story work, then to relive it on the grounds.’16 In asking Anthony Barnett to read the second draft, David made a similar point. ‘I have never found it possible to write a novel out of a mass of research,’ he wrote: ‘better to write to form the theatrical and human point of view first, & correct the backcloth retrospectively.’17 Barnett provided him with detailed notes and editorial suggestions on this and subsequent drafts.
In general, David would reveal very little about any book he was writing until he felt that it was ready to be shown to his publisher. At that stage Bruce Hunter would submit a typescript to Tim Hely Hutchinson, and they would rapidly make a deal. Then Roland Philipps became involved. ‘You don’t suggest anything,’ Hunter had advised him when he became David’s editor back in the early 1990s. ‘You talk about stuff.’ His response to a new book would be discursive rather than prescriptive: typically he would spend a couple of days with David discussing characters and themes, often while walking on the Heath or along the Cornish clifftops. David always listened carefully, and often made changes as a result of these discussions, for example, by fleshing out a character. The books almost always grew longer as a result.
For Philipps, it was always instructive to hear David’s audiobook recordings, because the characters came alive as he spoke their lines. Of course this was the wheel coming full circle, in that part of David’s method of forming a character in the first place was to speak his lines as he imagined them.
In 2004 Hodder Headline would be sold again, this time to the French publishing group Hachette Livre, which already owned the publishers Orion and Octopus, and would soon acquire the Time Warner Publishing Group, which included Little, Brown. Though Hely Hutchinson became the chief executive of the Hachette Group UK, he continued to take a close personal interest in David’s publishing.
David decided against the title ‘The Siege of Heidelberg’, perhaps because it betrayed the book’s climax; he considered ‘Sasha’s Virtue’ and ‘The Stay-Behind Man’ before settling on Absolute Friends. He had been dissatisfied with the way that Scribner’s had published The Constant Gardener and asked Bruce Hunter to find another American publisher for the new novel, which was sold to Little, Brown for $2.1 million. Even more than usual, David tested the patience of his publishers by continuing to rewrite until the very last moment, necessitating three stages of proof before he was done. The British edition was scheduled to appear in December 2003, with the American edition following a month after. Only weeks earlier, David and Jane joined Anthony Barnett and his partner Judith Herrin and at least 100,000 others to demonstrate against a state visit by President Bush. In the run-up to publication a succession of journalists made the journey down to West Cornwall to interview him, most bringing a photographer who would invariably take a picture of a windswept David against a background of sea and cliff. One of these was the young novelist Lev Grossman, who interviewed him for Time. ‘His anger burns cold and clear,’ wrote Grossman: ‘Absolute Friends is a work of fist-shaking, Orwellian outrage.’18 Another of those visitors to Tregiffian was the writer and broadcaster James Naughtie, who interviewed David both for The Times and for the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. ‘His anger is real,’ wrote Naughtie. ‘To the extent that it is possible for a figure of his upbringing, bearing and voice, he rages.’ David reserved his bitterest bile for Tony Blair. ‘To me,’ he told Naughtie in his radio interview, ‘there’s no bigger sin that a politician can commit than allowing his country to go to war under false pretences.’ His fulminations against the Prime Minister enabled The Times to use the stand-first ‘John le Carré: Blair Must Go’ to advertise the interview on the front cover of its Weekend Review.19
The anger crackling in the novel dominated the review coverage. ‘Few could fail to be thrilled by the unbridled rage that fuels his storytelling,’ wrote Robert McCrum in the Observer. ‘If he was seething when he wrote The Constant Gardener, he is now incandescent.’20 Most reviewers agreed with the view expressed by Stephen Amidon in the Sunday Times, who wrote that ‘le Carré’s anger comes across as a bit too raw to work as fiction, its rhetoric more in line with a Harold Pinter column than a Graham Greene novel’.21 T. J. Binyon, who had reviewed David’s books since the 1970s, usually favourably, described the tone of the book as one of ‘fierce moral indignation’, which by the end has become ‘wearisome’.22 For George Walden, writing in the Daily Telegraph, ‘a once entertaining writer is subsiding into ranting moralism’.23 In a comment piece in the same newspaper, Daniel Johnson wrote sneeringly: ‘John le Carré is Mr Angry now that Smiley’s Day has gone.’24 A. N. Wilson, on the other hand, gave his opinion that Absolute Friends was ‘John le Carré’s finest novel’.25 In a letter to Vivian Green, David dismissed the negative coverage as ‘an onslaught from the right-wing press’.26
One of the most thoughtful reviews came from Steven Poole in the Guardian. He dismissed the criticism that the book’s denouement was implausible. ‘Anyone betting against the deviousness of unofficial American foreign policy over the last several decades would have lost countless shirts.’ But he found the novel’s ending problematic, ‘not because it is unlikely, but because it is both over-determined and gratuitous’.
Over-determined, because in the scheme of this novel there is no other villain in the modern world than America. And gratuitous because it is a deus ex machina that merely serves to illustrate the novel’s politicised ranting …
Given
his enormous and undimmed skills as a storyteller, that could have been a brilliant book. But the sophisticated analysis of moral questions, of deceit personal and political, and of shabby ends to justify honourable means, that characterised his classic cold war novels is here finally drowned out by strident editorialising, the monotonous expression of an anger imperfectly interrogated and so unhoned. Where once there was a subtle knife, here there is only a blunt stick.27
Most of the reviewers saw Absolute Friends as anti-American. The British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft used the book as a starting-point for an article in the New York Times on the general topic of anti-Americanism; he referred to le Carré as ‘a writer who has enjoyed much success in America despite an aversion to American power dating from his earliest books, who has no very subtle political understanding, but who all too accurately voices the bitterness of national impotence and decline’.28 James M. Murphy, reviewing Absolute Friends for the Times Literary Supplement, speculated that the novel might be a Circus plot. ‘The author’s anti-Americanism is a matter of record,’ remarked Murphy. ‘But would this not provide an excellent level of cover to produce a work whose indictment of the United States so overshoots reasonable levels of credibility that it undermines the very political message it pretends to send?’29
One hazard of writing such overtly political novels was that David exposed himself to ridicule as a pundit. ‘With a political statement this pungent, le Carré knows he risks alienating his sizeable American following, even of being written off as a crank – an aging, forgotten ex-spook railing at the world from his Cornish crag,’ suggested Lev Grossman. The book was reviewed in the New York Times by Michiko Kakutani, a Pulitzer Prizewinning critic notorious for her harsh reviews; for her, Absolute Friends was ‘a clumsy, hectoring, conspiracy-minded message-novel meant to drive home the argument that American imperialism poses a grave danger to the new world order’.