John le Carré

by Adam Sisman

  Later that year, on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair, David was guest of honour at a grand party in Berlin given by his German publishers, Ullstein. This was a belated celebration of Ullstein’s centenary (in 2003), and commemorated the publication of a history of the company through the troubled twentieth century. David was invited to give the keynote speech by Ullstein’s publisher and CEO, Siv Bublitz: this was an extraordinary honour for a foreign author, a mark of his significance in Germany. His speech, delivered in impeccable German, attracted loud laughter from an appreciative audience. ‘The motor of every writer’s life has three essential, working parts: childhood, education, experience,’ he said, ‘and when I came to look closely at those parts of my life, I noticed that each one had “Made in Germany” stamped on it.’

  David contrasted the book business in Germany with its equivalent in his own country. ‘British publishing remains the last outpost of the enlightened amateur,’ he suggested. ‘People seem to enter publishing by the same mysterious route that we used to enter the secret service.’ German publishing, on the other hand, was much more professional:

  Here suddenly is a publisher who has not merely bought the book, but read it. Here are editors and translators who are as obsessive as we authors are. I am thinking of those infuriating editorial questions, as unexpected as they are challenging, that start flowing in almost before the ink is dry on my contract with the German publisher. Why didn’t my British publisher pick this up? Or my American publishers? … And so it happens, far too often, that at the eleventh hour before going to press, the British publisher receives a salvo of last minute corrections, which must be passed to the American, the Canadian, Australian, and then all the other foreign language publishers. Everyone has a nervous breakdown, everyone blames the Germans.

  ‘To be published in Germany is to have our work taken seriously,’ he argued. ‘In Germany a writer is socially admissible, even respectable. His words have weight. His peccadilloes are forgiven in the name of art …’

  David’s eightieth birthday in October 2011 was celebrated with a lunch at Tregiffian. The day was planned with military precision – except the weather, which was cold. Around a hundred people came, including fifteen or so children, who were entertained by a magician and then given hamburgers. Most of those attending were members of the family, but there were about twenty other adults, including Nicholas Shakespeare and his wife Gillian Johnson, John and Miranda Margetson, James Naughtie and his wife Eleanor Updale, William Shawcross and Olga Polizzi, Eric Abraham, and Roland Philipps. Tony and his wife Nettie were invited, but he was too ill to come.

  Guests were asked to leave their cars in a field, from which they were transported to the site by taxi-van. In the gardens at Tregiffian, two long white tents flapped in a stiff sea-breeze: one for champagne, the other for the meal, provided by Rick Stein’s caterers. Plenty of staff dressed in black were in attendance, including a detail from St John Ambulance. The rumour spread that Gary Oldman was invited, to account for the presence of security men, but in fact their function was to prevent walkers on the coastal footpath from straying into the party.

  Speeches followed the meal. David’s four sons all spoke, each emphasising that David was still in the present, still living life to the full, still teaching them so much. His half-brother Rupert generously compared David’s portrait of their father to a Rembrandt, against which any version he might offer would be a caricature of the type displayed against the railings at Hyde Park. William Shawcross sprang to his feet and delivered a spontaneous tribute to his old friend. The occasion finished with fireworks, before guests departed at about 6.30 in the evening.

  It had been announced earlier in the year that David had offered his literary archive to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. ‘I am delighted to be able to do this,’ he wrote. ‘Oxford was Smiley’s spiritual home, as it is mine. And while I have the greatest respect for American universities, the Bodleian is where I shall most happily rest.’ The first batch of archival material arrived in February; previously it had been stored in a barn at Tregiffian. By 2012 the Library had taken possession of 498 boxes, containing manuscripts of books from The Looking-Glass War to Absolute Friends. In these it was possible to trace the progress of David’s novels through successive drafts, and to observe the painstaking care he took with his prose.

  On 20 June 2012 David dressed in black velvet bonnet and scarlet academic gown to accept an honorary doctorate of letters from Oxford University, at a ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre. The event was dominated by the presence of the Burmese pro-democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been awarded a doctorate in civil law back in 1993, but had been prevented by the Burmese regime from collecting it. ‘When I was under house arrest I was also helped by the books of John le Carré,’ she recalled in her acceptance speech. ‘They were a journey into the wider world, not just to other countries, but to thoughts and ideas.’

  Another of those receiving an honorary degree at the same ceremony was the former head of MI5, Baroness Manningham-Buller. In so far as they communicated at all at the ceremony, she and David were amiable, though he might have been forgiven for treating her with some reserve, after reading disparaging remarks she had reportedly made to Salman Rushdie. Not long after his spat with David in 1997, Rushdie had been invited to ‘Spy Central’ to address ‘a bunch of British intelligence station chiefs’ – or so he said, though of course MI5 does not have station chiefs. Manningham-Buller was apparently furious about David’s letters to the Guardian. ‘What does he think he’s doing?’ she demanded. ‘Does he understand nothing? Is he a complete fool?’ According to Rushdie, she had snorted ‘hah!’ when asked whether David hadn’t been ‘one of your lot’ in the distant past. ‘I suppose he did work for us in some sort of minor capacity for about five minutes, but he never, my dear, reached the levels you’ve been talking to tonight, and let me tell you, after this business, he never will.’* So Rushdie relates, though this seems an odd comment to make about a bestselling author past retirement age.

  This conversation was recounted in Rushdie’s memoir, Joseph Anton, published in the autumn of 2012. The title referred to a pseudonym he had used while living in hiding. Unusually he wrote in the third person, as if he were writing about somebody else. In the book Rushdie presented a detailed account of his quarrel with David, described by the Guardian as ‘one of the most gloriously vituperative literary feuds of recent times’.32 At its end, wrote Rushdie, he had been ‘suddenly overcome with sadness about what had happened. The le Carré of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Spy who Came in from the Cold was a writer he had long admired.’33 He quoted from the interview David had given to Rod Liddle in 2008, in which he conceded that perhaps he had been wrong; though if so, ‘I was wrong for the right reasons.’ Despite what he had said to Shawcross back in 1997, David had kept silent on the issue since then.

  Publicising his book at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Rushdie expressed his regret at their quarrel fifteen years earlier. ‘I wish we hadn’t done it,’ he said. ‘He’s a writer I really admire.’ He stated his opinion that ‘le Carré’s novels transcended the spy genre and should be considered literary’ – a considerable modification of the position he had taken when reviewing The Russia House, the piece that was generally believed to have provoked the feud. ‘I think of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as one of the great novels of postwar Britain.’

  Earlier in the year David had granted permission for Rushdie to reproduce his side of their exchange in his memoir. Now he took up The Times’s invitation to respond to Rushdie’s peace offering. ‘I too regret the dispute,’ he said in a statement.

  I admire Salman for his work and his courage, and I respect his stand. Does that answer the larger debate which continues to this day?

  My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity. Should we be free to burn Korans, mock the passionately held religions of others? Maybe we should –
but should we also be surprised when the believers we have offended respond in fury? I couldn’t answer that question at the time and, with all good will, I still can’t. But I am a little proud, in retrospect, that I spoke against the easy trend, reckoning with the wrath of outraged Western intellectuals, and suffering it in all its righteous glory.

  And if I met Salman tomorrow?* I would warmly shake the hand of a brilliant fellow writer.34

  ‘I’ve become more radical in old age than I’ve ever been,’ David told an interviewer from the Telegraph. Even so, he voted Liberal Democrat in the general election of May 2010 – the first time he had ever voted for a party other than Labour. He was disgusted by New Labour’s willingness to suspend civil liberties, its supine foreign policy and its ‘relaxed’ attitude to the rich. ‘Why did I desert Labour? Total bloody disillusionment,’ he told the Telegraph interviewer. ‘The party was a corpse. It had no ideology, it became detached, old, spineless and needed to go.’35 In 2015 he would vote Labour again.

  The theme of David’s next book would be the outsourcing of intelligence requirements to commercial contractors, which he saw as part of a larger picture of the ‘corporatisation’ of Britain. In 2005 David had suggested that Britain might be sliding towards fascism. ‘Mussolini’s definition of fascism was that when you can’t distinguish corporate power from governmental power, you are on the way to a fascist state. If you throw in God power and media power, that’s where we are now,’ he told an interviewer from the Guardian. When asked if he was saying that Britain had become a fascist state, he replied, ‘Does it strike you as democratic?’36

  By the summer of 2012 David had finished a first draft of his new novel, provisionally entitled ‘Secret and Beyond’.

  It begins with ‘Operation Wildlife’, in which American private defence contractors try to snatch a suspected terrorist mastermind as he comes ashore on the Rock of Gibraltar one dark night. The operation has been authorised by a bullish New Labour minister, who asks Christopher ‘Kit’ Probyn, a low-flying diplomat nearing the end of his career, to be his eyes and ears on the spot. Three years later Probyn, who has been unexpectedly knighted in recognition of his services, is enjoying his retirement in a Cornish manor house when a figure materialises from his past: Jeb, a Welsh special forces man also present that night on the Rock. Probyn is shocked to learn that the operation was botched, and that an innocent young woman and her infant child were killed.

  In a parallel strand of the story, Toby Bell, the minister’s young private secretary, has become suspicious of his secretive master and makes a tape recording of a meeting with the private defence contractor. The two strands come together when Bell calls on Probyn and becomes involved with his daughter, a doctor.

  ‘I seem to have written two versions of myself into it – or better, two ages,’ wrote David, in his introduction to a special Waterstone’s edition of the novel. ‘In Toby Bell, thirty-something rising star of Her Majesty’s Foreign Service, I see the striving ambitious fellow I fancy myself to have been at much the same age, until I went and messed everything up by writing The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in my spare time.’ Bell, ‘a decent, diligent, tousled, intelligent-looking fellow’ (who incidentally is also writing a novel), does his duty ‘until the day comes when his tolerance of himself snaps, and Toby the good soldier transmogrifies into Toby the scheming felon, planning a criminal act against the very Foreign Office minister he is pledged to serve and advise’. As Jon Stock, who reviewed the novel in the Daily Telegraph, would point out, ‘it’s almost as if le Carré has dropped his younger self into the modern mix, to see what he would do’.37

  David’s other secret sharer is of course Probyn, who is closer to him in age and, like him, lives in rural Cornwall.

  I’m a sucker for Kit’s humanity, his love of people, his parade-horse but genuine rectitude, and yes, his good manners. I like it that, when he goes to visit his Old Shop, as he might call the Foreign Office, he is disconcerted by the unfamiliar managerial style as it strives to emulate the jargon and manners of the private sector …

  But I like best his secret honesty with himself when, out of the blue, he is confronted with the accusing ghost of his past … And that’s how he discovers in himself wells of fury that are deeper and greater than anything he has felt in his sixty-three years till now: a fury directed not just at the Service he has so long honoured and obeyed, but at himself, at his own shaming complicity in his deception.

  And for some reason, which I have yet to discover, that seems to be the nature of the bond between us: an owning-up of some kind, a coming to terms with ourselves.

  David adopted a revised title for the novel, A Delicate Truth. In his day, the term ‘delicate’ was used in the civil service as a form of security classification, if only conversationally. Here A Delicate Truth refers to an ultra-sensitive matter which should be swept under the carpet.

  Most of the critics welcomed A Delicate Truth – except Frederic Raphael, who wrote a mocking review in the Times Literary Supplement. But he was very much the exception: most agreed with Robert McCrum that the novel represented a ‘remarkable return to mid-season form’.38 Edward Snowden’s revelations of the extent of the National Security Agency’s wiretapping activities were published in the press only weeks after the book was published, enhancing David’s reputation for prescience. ‘He’s always had his finger on the pulse of the times,’ observed the reviewer in the Berliner Zeitung, ‘but with his new novel John le Carré has surpassed himself.’39

  A Delicate Truth reached the top of the UK bestseller list, almost half a century after The Spy who Came in from the Cold had dominated the US bestseller list. To have written two no. 1 bestsellers fifty years apart was a remarkable, possibly a unique achievement; it is difficult to think of any other writer who has stayed at the top so long.

  Penguin marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of The Spy who Came in from the Cold in August 2013 with a special edition, featuring a retro cover design, archival images and a new afterword from David. The occasion prompted a number of pieces recalling the novel’s original publication in 1963 and reflecting on its achievement. ‘It’s a fabulous book and all spy fiction today is written in its deeply sinister shadow,’ wrote Robert Gore-Langton in the Sunday Express.40 ‘What is most satisfying about John le Carré’s first great success – first of many, as it turned out – is how well it holds up on this, its 50th anniversary,’ wrote Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post.41 As the novelist William Boyd remarked in a piece about re-reading The Spy who Came in from the Cold, ‘its cynicism is resolutely de nos jours’.

  One forgets just how unsparing the book is, how the picture it paints of human motivations, human duplicities, human frailty seems presciently aware of all that we have learned and unlearned in the intervening decades. The world was, on the surface, a more innocent, more straightforward place in the early 1960s: there were good guys and bad guys and they were easy to spot. One of the shock effects of reading The Spy when it was published must have been the near-nihilism of its message. It is unremittingly dark – or almost so – and this fact, I believe, lies at the root of its greatness …

  Boyd commented on the skill with which the book is constructed and written. It came after two other ‘highly creditable’ novels. ‘But there is a clear sense in The Spy of a writer hitting his stride with resolute confidence … Technically, on a purely writerly analysis, le Carré seems to me to be operating at the highest levels …’

  I think what I relish about it – and this is maybe how le Carré transformed the genre – is the implicit respect that he gives the reader. It is a very exciting read but it’s also highly complicated. There is a lot of challenging subtext, a lot is implicit, a lot seems initially confusing. In other words, it’s very sophisticated and one of the appeals of sophistication in art is the understanding that such precision, such tastes, such values, such understatements are shared. Le Carré’s novel says, as it were, I know this appears undu
ly complex and obfuscated but you, the reader, are an intelligent person: you will follow this – you will understand what is going on, I don’t need to spell it out or join the dots. The sheer aesthetic pleasure of reading is massively enhanced, thereby …42

  A film adapted from A Most Wanted Man was released in the summer of 2014, to generally positive reviews. Directed by Dutch photographer-director Anton Corbijn, it is a moody, melancholic movie, which conveys a vivid sense of contemporary Hamburg. The Australian screenwriter and playwright Andrew Bovell, whose previous credits include Lantana (2001), simplified the complex plot, omitting the role played by British intelligence in the novel. Philip Seymour Hoffman dominates the screen almost throughout, in a commanding performance as Günther Bachmann. It was the actor’s last leading role; he died only a fortnight after the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival. Other members of the cast include Rachel McAdams as Annabel Richter and Willem Dafoe as Tommy Brue, and some excellent German actors in lesser roles, including Daniel Brühl and Nina Hoss. Once again, David plays a cameo, with a beard specially grown for the part, though he is glimpsed only fleetingly in a booth of a café, next to the one where Hoffman is sitting.

  A Most Wanted Man, which was developed with Film4, was a co-production between Potboiler Productions, the company that produced The Constant Gardener, and the Ink Factory, founded in 2010 by David’s two eldest sons, Simon and Stephen. Their skills complement each other: Simon has been a London-based venture capitalist specialising in technology and the internet, while Stephen is a Hollywood screenwriter. ‘We didn’t set off with the intention of getting involved in my father’s stuff, but he found out about it when he was writing his last book, and he suggested we take it on,’ Simon told Variety soon after their start-up. ‘Financially we’re all in it together,’ he said. Of his father’s involvement, Simon commented, ‘He likes to be available as a resource to the scriptwriters, but he also hands people the flexibility to do it their way. He says don’t make a film of the book, make a film of the film.’