by Adam Sisman
As I understand your letter of 11th April, you have responded to my criticism of your personal performance in the American market with an ultimatum covering all your work that the agency does for me worldwide. In short: give me America, or go. You know me very little if you believe I would remain with you under such a threat …
Let me remind you again that I have persistently praised Higham’s performance. I have occasionally, but not very often, criticized it. I remain of the opinion that you did not serve me well in America in recent years, and I have said so. To most observers, that would be normal commercial discourse. To you it is, somewhat insultingly, an old man’s anger and he must pay for it.
What a pity. What a waste. What vanity. What folly.
In reply, Hunter restated the problems of territory and timing of publication. ‘Splitting up the world English language market is not the answer,’ he maintained. He suggested that they should meet face to face to discuss the issues. But David was in no mood for a meeting. ‘You have been less than gracious about my age, and pretty much implied that I am an insufferable person to deal with,’ he responded. ‘You have managed to paint me in the colours of an ageing nuisance who must be slapped down once and for all.’ He suggested terminating their professional relationship.
At this stage Jane took over the correspondence with Hunter. A compromise was speedily agreed whereby Rudell would handle American rights, while Higham’s would continue to represent David’s work in the rest of the world.39
By October 2005 the new novel was sufficiently far advanced for David to send a first draft to Michela Wrong. She responded with sixteen pages of detailed notes, and over the following months she would provide further feedback on successive drafts, informed by her knowledge of the region, by her local contacts and also by her own dual heritage (she is half Italian) – for example, she pointed out that people tend to take on the personality of the language that they are speaking, an idea that David has Salvo voice: ‘An Englishman breaking into German speaks more loudly. His mouth changes shape, his vocal cords open up, he abandons self-irony in favour of dominance. An Englishwoman dropping into French will soften herself and puff out her lips for pertness, while her male counterpart will veer towards the pompous.’ She was impressed by how quickly David picked up on her editorial suggestions, by his readiness to accept her recommendations, even on matters outside her areas of expertise, and by his willingness to make significant changes, right up to a very late stage in the process.* Among her many recommendations was that he should cut down the ‘gooey’ sex scenes between Salvo and his girlfriend Hannah. To confirm her feeling that a proposed alliance between the rival warlords in the region was not credible, she consulted her friend Jason Stearns, then a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group,† who had spent three years in eastern Congo working for human rights groups and the UN peacekeeping mission. ‘It’s all about character,’ David remarked in response to her qualms – ‘plot doesn’t really matter.’ She recommended that Congo should be more present in the book, to compensate for the fact that the action never takes the reader there: the story would benefit from ‘more of the sights, tastes, smells and sounds of the place’, expressed in Salvo’s thoughts, dreams and memories. For his part, David felt comfortable with Salvo, but he was less sure about the warlords whose conference formed the central part of the plot. To trust in the characters he had invented, he needed to meet their real equivalents, in their own environment.40
Even after the book was finished and in proof, David was still considering whether or not he should go to eastern Congo. He had written the book in a period when he had felt unable to leave England. Now he was tempted to make the trip, not only to connect with the subject matter of his novel, but also from a sense of intellectual honesty, and the knowledge that the book would have more credibility if he had been there himself. And he wanted to prove he could still go out into the field in his seventies. But the Foreign Office cautioned him against doing so, and his friend Al Alvarez loudly echoed this advice. David’s Congolese contacts in Britain had added their own dire warnings about the risks of entering such an unstable and precarious zone; though, as Michela Wrong suggested, such exiles tended to exaggerate the danger because they did not want to be sent back. She and Jason Stearns offered to accompany him on a trip. They could make it easy for him, as they knew the kind of people he needed to meet and the locations he needed to see. Wrong tried to reassure him about security, though she would be the first to admit that it was a frightening place to visit. ‘The quiet thud of fear would be there throughout my time in Zaire,’ she had written on the opening page of her book. As David would remark afterwards, he had done a lot of travelling in his life, but had never before been in a country where people talked so casually about killing. Moreover it was one thing for her and for Stearns, both comparatively young, to go back to a place with which they were familiar; it was another thing for David, at his age, to disregard the warnings he had received from almost every side. Nonetheless he decided to do so.
In April 2006 the three of them flew in to the Rwandan capital of Kigali and then travelled by car into eastern Congo. En route they stopped at Murambi, where twelve years earlier a massacre had taken place: people who had taken shelter in the local technical school had been hacked to death, their bodies dumped in trenches and covered in lime. More recently the school had been designated a genocide memorial centre: 800 mummified corpses had been exhumed and were laid out on display. The three visitors explored this grisly exhibit alone and in silence. David was understandably distressed by what he saw.
They drove on into eastern Congo, to the regional capital, Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu, where David would spend five nights, staying at the Hotel Orchid, a gated, low-built lakeside colonial villa in lush gardens, dotted with discreet cabins. It was an idyllic setting – though not a place of calm. The hotel’s Belgian owner had been held up at gunpoint numerous times and regaled Wrong with the story of how he had been shot in the leg during a firefight. Only two years earlier the city had been sacked by troops of a renegade general. Even while David was there, rioting broke out after unpaid soldiers had broken into a house and killed its owner in order to steal his money. If this were not enough, there was a flash flood, stranding a man in his car only a few yards away from where they stood. Never being able to relax was tiring. David felt ill much of the time, an effect perhaps of the powerful anti-malarial drugs he was taking.
They travelled around Bukavu without a bodyguard. David recorded his impressions in notebooks, using a Parker rollerball pen with refills. He seemed to Wrong remarkably observant: he noticed everything, even in such an alien situation. He was especially interested in dialogue, and relished the African habit of peppering conversation with proverbs. It struck her that David’s pseudonym enabled him to travel in his real identity ‘under the radar’ – indeed, as the author of a recent book on Congo, her name was more often recognised than his. Even when she introduced him under his pseudonym, there was sometimes confusion: one Catholic missionary took him to be the author of The Hunt for Red October. On the other hand, the former Rwandan intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya knew exactly who he was when they were introduced in Kigali. ‘When you said a well-known author,’ Karegeya said to Wrong, ‘I didn’t realise that you meant this author.’ He and David recognised each other as kindred spirits, fellow practitioners in the same game. David would be haunted by this encounter, as it was already clear that Karegeya was doomed. He was a prominent figure in the opposition to the Rwandan President, Paul Kagame. After surviving several assassination attempts, he would be found strangled in a Johannesburg hotel room on 1 January 2014.
Stearns refused to accept payment for his help on the project. When David was insistent, Stearns suggested that instead he might like to make a contribution to StandProud, a charity providing funding to help Congolese young people with disabilities, assuming that the sum would be a thousand dollars or so. He was therefore stunned to learn t
hat David had in fact made over $25,000. Later that year David would collaborate with Stearns in writing an ‘op-ed’ piece for the Boston Globe, urging the World Bank to investigate mining deals made by the Congolese transitional government in 2005 – deals that, according to the article, signed away, on terms that will not benefit the Congolese people, 75 per cent of the country’s copper and cobalt reserves for the next thirty-five years.41
The Mission Song was published on both sides of the Atlantic simultaneously in September. After all the kerfuffle about the American rights, the book had been sold to Little, Brown, David’s existing publishers. The critics seemed to like the book more than its predecessor. The reviewer in the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, welcomed the more relaxed tone of the novel, which he found much less strident than in its two immediate predecessors: ‘le Carré has regained his lighter touch’. He saw The Mission Song as ‘a marvelous return to the John le Carré of old, with all the captivating characters, finely rendered landscapes and messy complexities that have always powered his best work’.42 The journalist Philip Caputo, best known for his memoir A Rumor of War (1977), praised the book in the Washington Post. ‘To categorize le Carré as a “spy” novelist is to do him a disservice,’ wrote Caputo: ‘he uses the world of cloak-and-dagger much as Conrad used the sea – to explore the dark places in human nature.’43 On the other hand the Boston Globe reviewer found the novel disappointing, and expressed the wish that le Carré would go back to ‘the good old days’ of the Circus.44
‘At 74, le Carré’s eye is undimmed, his passion for his craft as strong as it ever was,’ wrote Robert McCrum in the Observer. ‘He delivers a tale that few could equal and none will surpass.’45 For the reviewer in the Sunday Times, John Dugdale, this was a ‘thriller without thrills’; nevertheless, he noted le Carré’s ‘distinctive ability to fuse social comedy with moral anger’.46 ‘Salvo is one of the most beguiling characters Le Carré has teased into life,’ wrote the South African novelist Christopher Hope in the Guardian; ‘this is very much a book shaped and fuelled by anger, but the anger has been given a perfect foil in the imperturbable, gentle, unstoppable Salvo’.47 In contrast, William Finnegan, reviewing The Mission Song for the New York Review of Books, found Salvo ‘annoying’, and thought it implausible that Salvo should not have smelt a rat sooner: ‘his egregious naïveté lasts far too long’. Finnegan, who specialised in writing about Southern Africa, thought it had been a mistake to place such tight constraints on the story. ‘To say that staying in Europe, mostly talking, attenuates the inherent drama of this African war story would be too diplomatic,’ he wrote; ‘it very nearly starves it. The liveliest discussion at a conference center is still a discussion at a conference center.’48
‘This is my last book,’ David had told his travelling companions in Bukavu. ‘It’s time for me to stop.’ He wanted to concentrate on writing shorter pieces, and perhaps to write plays, an as yet unrealised ambition. He had, for example, long contemplated a play about Nicholas Elliott and his friend Kim Philby.* Secretly, he suspected that this might be easier than writing novels. After The Mission Song he once again began toying with a memoir. A fragment exists from this period, describing the moment in the spring of 1961 when the half-dozen new recruits to MI6 sat aghast in a safe house in Victoria, as the head of training told them that the service had a traitor in its midst, and then broke down in tears. Its title, ‘Scenes from a Secret Life’, indicates that he envisaged a companion piece to the essay about his father published in the New Yorker. But the fragment amounts to only a few pages, suggesting a lack of commitment to proceed.49 Besides, ‘an extraordinary stroke of luck’ had given him an idea.
* Almost certainly in the early 1970s, when both men were living in West Cornwall. Hilton died in 1975.
* Several reviewers would suggest that this was the first time that le Carré had written a novel in the first person, forgetting Our Game and The Secret Pilgrim.
* At the time of writing he is still President, thirty-five years after seizing power.
* An English version appeared in the volume Fire in a series published in support of Oxfam, ‘Ox-Tales’ (Profile, 2009).
† That is, since David arrived at Sherborne.
* While in Moscow in 1986 Graham Greene met a cosmonaut who had taken a copy of Our Man in Havana with him into space, as one of only three books he was allowed. He told Greene that he had read his novel three times during that mission. In a subsequent interview with Nicholas Shakespeare at his flat in Antibes, Greene produced the tatty paperback which the cosmonaut had insisted on giving him.
* When she was writing her book about a Kenyan whistleblower, It’s Our Turn to Eat (2009), David suggested that she should show him the typescript, and in due course returned it, marked up with his suggestions and advice. She was struck by his willingness to help. ‘How many writers of his stature would offer to act as editor to someone like myself?’
† The International Crisis Group describes itself as ‘an independent, non-profit, nongovernmental organisation committed to preventing and resolving deadly conflict’.
* The subject of Ben Macintyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (2014), to which David contributed an afterword.
25
Beating the System
‘I’m going for a new novel,’ David wrote excitedly to Nicholas Shakespeare, only a couple of months after publication of The Mission Song.1 He had that very day returned from Hamburg, a city crammed with associations for him. It had been his home during an unsettled period in the early 1960s, when he had been hopelessly in love with a married woman, while his life was being transformed by the extraordinary success of The Spy who Came in from the Cold. He had gone back to Hamburg in 1978 to check the locations for Smiley’s People; this was where George Smiley had put on his German identity like a uniform and picked up the trail in his long pursuit of Karla. In the 1990s he had explored the Turkish community in Hamburg, for a novel set in the Muslim diaspora in Europe, which he had then abandoned. And it was in Hamburg that he had learned of the attack on the twin towers; he did not know then, of course, that the Al-Qaeda cell which had carried out the attacks on 11 September 2001 had been formed there.
‘Today it’s a pounding, thriving, beautiful, confident city,’ David would write: ‘the richest city in Europe.’2 But Hamburg was also a ‘guilty city’, haunted by ghosts of terrorists and uneasy about the strangers in its midst. The German authorities were anxious to refute American accusations that they were ‘soft’ on terrorism; rival organs of the security apparatus jostled with each other in their attempts to detect those who might commit further outrages.
‘An accident of life’ had started David on a journey towards the new book. Some months earlier he had gone to Hamburg to do a television interview. The programme’s researcher, a young journalist called Carla Hornstein, had mentioned another story that she was working on, that of a twenty-four-year-old due to be released imminently from the detention centre in Guantánamo. This was Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen living in Germany, who had been arrested on a visit to Pakistan and flown to Guantánamo Bay in shackles, clad in a muzzle, opaque goggles and sound-blocking ear muffs. During his four and a half years in detention he claimed to have been tortured by electric shocks and waterboarding, denied sleep for weeks on end and kept for periods in solitary confinement. When he had gone on hunger strike in protest at his treatment, he had been fed through the nose.
Hoping that David might write a book on the case, Hornstein arranged for him to meet Kurnaz at his home in Bremen, where he interviewed ‘the poor bugger’ over two days. ‘My hat, there’s a grown-up!’ he exclaimed afterwards to Shakespeare. ‘He’s now conducting useless lawsuits against the Germans, US & Turks. Nobody suggests he was ever guilty of being anything remotely like a terrorist.’ Afterwards David would refer to his feelings of guilt, protectiveness and debt towards those who have been wrongly imprisoned and maltreated: ‘the tortured are a terrible aristo
cracy’.
The encounter with Kurnaz fired David to write a novel about a suspected terrorist on the run, a potential victim of ‘extraordinary rendition’. Moreover he had stumbled across a human story to set against the theme. ‘I will write a story about you, Murat and me,’ he told Carla Hornstein. He imagined the sexual tension between a young Muslim man who had not been in the company of women for years and an idealistic young Western woman moved by his plight. At one point, the three of them had been together in a car: the bitter former detainee, the secular German idealist wearing a headscarf in deference to him, and the worldly older novelist. ‘I thought, “Let’s imagine the circles of desire here that are unfulfilled,” ’ David would tell an interviewer after the book was published.3 He envisaged an aloof young man suspected of terrorist involvement and sought by the forces of the state, an attractive young woman trying to help him, and an older man besotted with her. ‘It was a circle of frustrated love,’ he would say in another interview: ‘for me the chemistry worked.’
Though Kurnaz’s lawyer was a man, Bernhard Docke, his fictional equivalent would be a woman: David drew on his perception of Carla Hornstein to create the character of Annabel Richter, the high-minded human rights lawyer from a ‘good family’ with a rebellious streak who represents the interests of the suspected terrorist, and who finds herself emotionally involved with him. He would describe Annabel as ‘puritanical but free-thinking, anti-establishment but part of it, and decorous to a fault’. For the characters of the two men David delved into his past. He remembered a tall, emaciated boy named Issa* – Chechen for Jesus – whom he had met in Moscow in 1993, the product of the union between a colonel in the Russian army of occupation in Chechenia and a Chechen village woman, whose family had killed her, as a matter of honour, after deciding that she had acquiesced in her rape. When the colonel had been posted back to Moscow, he had taken Issa with him and tried to turn him into a good Russian; the young man had converted to Islam in memory of the mother he had never known, and taken up the cause of Chechen separatism to spite his father. In David’s novel the colonel has died, but not before telling his son of a fortune awaiting him in the West, deposited in a private bank. Issa makes a clandestine journey to Hamburg to claim his birthright. Knowing that he has arrived illegally and is wanted by the Russians, he takes shelter with a family of Turkish immigrants.