by Adam Sisman
For the character of the Russian gangster at the centre of the story, David retrieved a figure from his past: Dima, the huge bald man whom he had interviewed in his nightclub on his visit to Russia in 1993. The book opens in Antigua, where ‘Perry’ Makepiece and Gail Perkins, a young Oxford don and his solicitor girlfriend, are enjoying a treat, a holiday in the Caribbean. After an impromptu but fiercely competitive game of tennis with Perry, Dima asks him to act as an intermediary with the British authorities. The young couple become part of the operation to bring Dima and his family to Britain. Dima has few requests of the British: only that his daughter be allowed to attend Roedean.
While the character of Dima was taken straight from life, Perry and Gail were composites. Superficially they resembled David’s son Nick and his wife Clare, but in creating these characters he drew on other young people he had met among their thirty-something circle, and on Federico Varese, the young Professor of Criminology at Oxford, whose ‘creative and ever-patient counsel’ he would acknowledge in the book.
Like Absolute Friends, the novel ends in an apocalypse, leaving the reader shocked and pessimistic. David would entitle it Our Kind of Traitor, an ironic reference to the very English phrase ‘our kind of person’ or ‘our kind of man’, meaning someone who will not necessarily stick closely to the rules, but whose heart is in the right place, wherever that place may be. The book would be dedicated in memory of Simon Channing Williams, who died of cancer in April 2009.
Ann died in June, after a long illness. ‘She continued to be her robust, unbiddable & amazingly courageous self to the end,’ wrote David, in reply to a letter of commiseration from Philipps.19 She had lived in Coxley for forty-four years, serving as a parish councillor and governor of the village school. As she had wished, the funeral took place in the local church. The parish priest, a woman, led the simple ceremony. Afterwards Ann’s body was buried in the churchyard, next to her mother’s grave. Mourners went back to Coxley Manor, where a marquee had been erected on the lawn. David and Jane both came to the funeral. There was a brief and somewhat testy exchange between David and his former close friend Robin Cooke, though Jane, Charlotte and David’s eldest son Simon all spent time trying gently to engineer a rapprochement: sadly, none was forthcoming. More than a year afterwards, in a letter to John Margetson, David complained that he had been ‘airbrushed’ out of the funeral, ‘which really hurt me – I seem to have mourned Ann for much longer, & more deeply, than I expected, which says something’.20
It became increasingly clear that David’s next book would not be published by Hodder. ‘I haven’t been in touch because, as you will have surmised, a lot is in the air, most notably the question of my backlist, which seems to occupy many of Jonny’s working hours,’ David wrote to Philipps in April. A month or so later Geller held a meeting with Hodder to discuss David’s future; he suggested that ‘when it comes to securing an author’s posterity, Hodder cannot, & does not pretend to, match the attractions of a long-established paperback house with a world reputation & a classic list’. It was obvious which long-established paperback house was meant. The programme of making contracts with limited licences initiated by Bruce Hunter enabled David to move to a new publisher even if the old one kept the books in print. Hodder produced a ‘Le Carré Legacy Plan’, but this was just going through the motions; the decision had already been taken.
In mid-October David wrote to tell Philipps that he had decided, ‘with profound sadness’, to take his new novel, and by degrees his backlist, to Penguin, which would become his English-language publishers worldwide. The book, then as yet untitled, would be issued in hardback under Penguin’s Viking imprint; his backlist would be reissued in Penguin Modern Classics over the next nine years, as the licences expired. ‘My reasons are primarily to do with my posterity, such as it may be, and the prospect of seeing my work included on a classic & enduring list,’ he explained to Philipps. ‘In the end we must do what we believe is right for ourselves, and – in my case – for my heirs and assigns.’ In a letter to Jamie Hodder-Williams, David hinted at another reason why he was leaving Hodder after thirty-eight years. ‘Increasingly I have felt over the last few years that I was not a natural feature of the house, & that my standards were becoming egregious by comparison with those of other authors.’21
In a statement issued to the press, David paid tribute to his former publishers. He said that he was saddened to be leaving Hodder, and applauded the ‘inimitable’ team’s ‘good fellowship, unfailing support and sales energy’. However, he added: ‘The opportunity to see my life’s work presented by a classic paperback house with a unique backlist is at this stage in my career unmissable.’
Tom Weldon, deputy chief executive of Penguin UK, said he was ‘thrilled’ by the move, describing it as ‘an honour’ to have been entrusted with le Carré’s front and backlist. ‘There are very few novelists writing today who combine such terrific narrative, unforgettable characters and urgent engagement with our own times,’ Weldon said. ‘He is one of the most enthralling and important chroniclers of our age, and his books are, in the truest sense of the phrase, modern classics.’ David’s new editor would be Mary Mount, daughter of his former pupil at Eton, Ferdinand Mount.
It was hard for Tim Hely Hutchinson and his colleagues not to feel bitter, after putting so much effort into meeting David’s wishes. Nevertheless Hely Hutchinson reacted graciously. ‘Hodder & Stoughton is very proud to have been John le Carre’s publisher and we are sorry that this relationship, which was based on mutual admiration and affection, is come to an end,’ he said.22
Though he had left Hodder, David remained in touch with Roland Philipps, and continued to see him socially. After he had finished Our Kind of Traitor he wrote him a long letter of news. Yet again he was contemplating an autobiography, ‘but the prospect is so sad, and potentially disquieting for my children, & the truth of it so hard to get at, that I’m already looking beyond it to another novel, which mercifully is beginning to form on the skyline’. But he would be unable to start writing the new book until after Our Kind of Traitor was published in the autumn. ‘Writing is waiting,’ he added – an adaptation of the last sentence of The Russia House, ‘Spying is waiting,’ and perhaps a further indication that David saw writing and spying as comparable activities.23
One reason why he had been thinking about an autobiography was that he had been invited to lecture at the annual Oxford Literary Festival, and had chosen the subject. In March he spoke to a packed audience in the Sheldonian Theatre, the official ceremonial hall of the University of Oxford, designed by Sir Christopher Wren. ‘A life of writing has been extraordinarily kind to me,’ he said.
And since it began, give or take, fifty years ago, I thought it appropriate that tonight I should offer some account – heavily redacted – of the implausible route that got me from there to here, one I confess I still marvel at.
Now, I do know the pitfalls.
We all, as we grow old, meddle with the storyline of our lives, edit stuff out, re-cast the darker passages in a kindlier light.
And old novelists are the worst at this by a mile. All their lives they’ve been reshaping the truth to the point where imagined and real experience are indistinguishable.
Our Kind of Traitor was published in September 2010. Not for the first time, critics remarked on the anger propelling the story. For James Naughtie, who reviewed the novel in the Sunday Telegraph, its denouement was ‘stamped with the outrage and near-despair of late le Carré’.24 The anonymous reviewer in the Scotsman noted ‘le Carré’s familiar rage at corporate greed and amorality’, but judged that it was here kept in close check: ‘like so much of what he writes, the violence, cruelty and real horror are off-stage, while the less obvious violence is front and centre, in the amoral and treacherous world of money-broking, money-laundering, influence-selling, and unprincipled politics’.25 The Guardian gave the book to Christopher Tayler, an admiring critic of le Carré’s vintage period. ‘It’s possible t
o find some of his later novels a bit preachy without denying that they’re classily assembled or failing to appreciate the leftish indignation behind them,’ wrote Tayler, who felt that ‘his younger characters don’t always ring true’ now that le Carré was nearing eighty:
Somerset Maugham, another writer of dark spy stories, once had a character say of an aspiring grand old man of letters: ‘It is no good his thinking that it is enough to write one or two masterpieces; he must provide a pedestal for them of forty or fifty works of no particular consequence.’ Our Kind of Traitor may fall into the second category, but it’s good to see Le Carré having fun as he reinforces the pedestal under his classic productions.26
Once again, the review in the New York Times came from Michiko Kakutani. This time she seemed to have got out of bed on the right side: she praised Our Kind of Traitor as ‘the author’s most thrilling thriller in years’, and rated it as ‘part vintage John le Carré and part Alfred Hitchcock’:
Though set in the present, the novel’s plot involving British intelligence officers and Russian operatives is reminiscent of the many cold war face-offs – with defections or purported defections propelling the story – that animated the author’s most keenly observed earlier work. And its depiction of two unsuspecting civilians who find themselves caught up in a dangerous, high-stakes espionage game summons memories of those classic Hitchcock movies starring the likes of Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart as innocents who abruptly stumble into exotic, life-threatening situations on the international stage …27
One evening David received a telephone call from John Makinson, chairman and CEO of Penguin. Makinson had been asked to sound him out about whether he might accept a knighthood. There was a reluctance to make him a formal offer, given that he had turned down a CBE in the 1980s, and since then had often expressed his unwillingness to accept an honour in public. ‘I will never be Sir David, Lord David or King David,’ he had told an American interviewer back in 2004.28 More recently, however, he had accepted a French honour, which suggested that his attitude might be softening.
In fact David did not hesitate to decline, saying that he did not want his name to go forward for consideration for a knighthood. He explained that while working in Bonn he had been privy to the disputes about which German dignitaries should be offered British honours, and on what grounds, and thought the whole process corrupt. ‘Titles do disagreeable things to people,’ he said; he had observed several instances of this among former Foreign Office friends and preferred not to expose himself to that risk. The British, unlike the French or the Germans, threw all their titles into one hat, lumping artists together with party-political donors, arms dealers, and so on, ‘which seems to me to devalue the coinage’. Moreover he did not want to be welcomed by the establishment: ‘I prefer to stay outside the tent.’ A cynic might say that the tent was bulging with angry old men such as Sir David Hare, Sir Salman Rushdie, and Harold Pinter, Commander of the British Empire,* all fierce critics of New Labour as they had been of Thatcherism.
Afterwards David wrote to his old friend John Margetson, who had been knighted in 1986, towards the end of a distinguished career in the Diplomatic Service. ‘Did I tell you I passed on a K? All right for public servants, not good for artists, writers & the like.’ Margetson disagreed.29
Some months later David caused a stir by asking for his name to be taken off the shortlist for the 2011 Man Booker International prize.
The £60,000 prize is awarded every two years to a living novelist, in recognition of his or her lifetime contribution to fiction. It is connected to, but separate from, the better-known Man Booker prize for fiction, which is awarded annually to a specific book. A panel of three judges chooses writers to be considered for the award, then selects a shortlist and finally a winner – unlike the annual Man Booker prize, which is judged on submissions from publishers. In this case there was a shortlist of thirteen.
‘I am enormously flattered to be named as a finalist of the 2011 Man Booker International prize,’ David said, in a statement issued through his publishers. ‘However, I do not compete for literary prizes and have therefore asked for my name to be withdrawn.’
Rick Gekoski, the chairman of the judging panel, respectfully declined the request. ‘John le Carré’s name will, of course, remain on the list,’ he said. ‘We are disappointed that he wants to withdraw from further consideration because we are great admirers of his work.’
The prize was awarded to Philip Roth.
A feature film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was released in 2011. The project had been initiated by the screenwriter Peter Morgan, known for his fact-based films, including The Queen (2006), Frost/Nixon (2008) and The Damned United (2009). Morgan developed a script in collaboration with David. Back in 2008, he had told a reporter about a conversation between the two of them. ‘When you return to earlier work,’ David said, ‘you feel two rather unpleasant emotions. One is God, this is awful; and the other is, how can I ever write something as good ever again?’30
Morgan wrote a draft of the screenplay and took it to the production company Working Title, but withdrew after his mother became seriously ill; the task was completed by the husband-and-wife team of Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor, with input from David. This was the first English-language film directed by the Swede Tomas Alfredson, who had made the cult horror movie Let the Right One In (2008).* It starred Gary Oldman, the sixth actor to play the part of George Smiley;† other members of the cast included Benedict Cumberbatch as Guillam, John Hurt as Control, Colin Firth as Haydon, Kathy Burke as Connie and Mark Strong as Prideaux. David played another cameo, as an unnamed figure seen joining in an ironic rendition of the Red Flag at a Circus Christmas party.
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a critical and commercial success, becoming the highest-grossing film at the British box office for three consecutive weeks. It was nominated for eleven BAFTAs, but faced strong competition from The Artist, and picked up only two: Outstanding British Film and Best Adapted Screenplay. It would also receive three Academy Award nominations: Best Actor for Gary Oldman, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score.
The film attracted much attention and comment. Many viewers said that they found the plot difficult to follow. Inevitably it drew comparisons, some unfavourable, with the beloved television series adapted from the same novel, which viewers had found equally incomprehensible, if not more so. Perhaps such comparisons were unfair. The film is just over two hours long, the television series more than five hours. Inevitably the longer version provides greater suspense and more opportunity for the audience to become involved with the characters.
Much was made of Alfredson’s evocation of London in the 1970s, which he remembered from a visit at the time as brown and grey, a city of shadows and uncovered light bulbs, and dirty streets. In a witty piece the New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane warned cinemagoers to ‘brace themselves for an explosion of brown’:
Welcome to the fashionable nineteen-seventies, where your walls matched your sideburns. The sealed, podlike chamber in which the high priests of intelligence convene is a nightmare of muddy orange, and Guillam, the resident cavalier of the Circus, drives not a sporty MG, as he did on TV, but a Citroen DS the color of light manure.31
In June 2011 it was announced that David was to receive the Goethe Medal, in honour of his life’s work. The Goethe-Institut, founded in 1952 to promote German culture and language abroad, awarded a handful of medals each year to those ‘who have performed outstanding service for the German language and international cultural relations’. Also being honoured with David that year were the French filmmaker Ariane Mnouchkine and the Polish journalist and human rights activist Adam Michnik. Among British citizens who had received the Medal in the past were Karl Popper and Ernst Gombrich.
The announcement cited David as ‘Great Britain’s most famous German-speaker’. It referred to the keynote speech he had given at the national ‘Think German’ conference the previous year. ‘Le Carré h
as always been convinced that language learning is the key to understanding foreign cultures.’
The Medal was awarded later that summer at an event in Weimar, where Goethe had spent much of his adult life; in fact the ceremony took place in a room dedicated to his memory within the Stadtschloss Weimar, which had been rebuilt under the supervision of a commission directed by Goethe himself after it had been destroyed by fire in 1774. The event lasted over a weekend, and included banquets and group discussions. In the ceremony itself, which took place on Goethe’s birthday, the Goethe-Institut’s president, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, described David as an author of great humanistic literature, a critical and astute observer of current affairs with a ‘feel for global shifts and turbulences’ and a ‘great interest in other cultures’. He outlined David’s writing career. ‘Now 80 years old,* le Carré continues to write about current political issues, including terrorism, corruption, and the Mafia,’ concluded Lehmann. ‘He’ll never run out of material.’
In his speech of acceptance David spoke of his lifelong love of German language and literature. He traced his experience of Germany, beginning with the moment when, as an eight-year-old boy, he had heard Neville Chamberlain announce that Britain was at war and had looked out nervously at his grandparents’ tennis court. David speculated on what the giants of German literature would make of the state of Europe today. ‘Europe is in a frightful muddle,’ he stated. ‘There has never been a time when members of the European family needed one another more – or needed the new Germany more.’