John le Carré, king of spy novels, died



[ad_1]

Holiday 444 Circle

I am joining

At age 89, according to its editor, David Cornwell, the former intelligence turned classic in the modern spy novel John John Carré, died of pneumonia.

Not only did it come out of the pen of genre books or bestsellers after the calls, it was welcomed by high literature and praised by writers such as Philip Roth or Graham Greene. Thanks to the countless movies that emerged from his books and the stars who acted in them, even those who hadn’t read a line knew about it. If we take just the montage above: The Persecuted (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Willem Dafoe), The Panamanian Tailor (Pierce Brosnan), Night Service (Tom Hiddleston, Hugh Laurie), Tailor, Tailor, Baka, Spy (Gary Oldman), Smiley’s People (Alec Guinness), The determined diplomat (Rachel Weisz, Ralph Fiennes).

Le Carré at the Berlinale 2016Photo: JOHN MACDOUGALL / AFP

He had a novel life, despite spending most of his time writing novels.

Born in a town in southern England on the banks of the English Channel in 1931, his mother left him and his father, a well-known rogue, out of jail at age 5, whose long absences the explanatory boy explained working as Secret Agent. Their relationship is pretty well described by the fact that his father also threatened the already successful Le Carre with a lawsuit if he did not give him money, and the writer paid for his funeral after his father’s death but did not go to see him.

However, his father always gave him good attendance at school. He was barely 18 when he was recruited by British intelligence as a student at a Swiss university, for which, with minor interruptions, he worked for about 16 years. He first became MI5, an anti-espionage officer who watched Soviet-friendly students at Oxford University. After graduating and teaching for a few years, he worked as a foreign intelligence agent, MI6, under diplomatic cover in Bonn and Hamburg. During his career

conducted interrogations, intercepted telephones, organized robberies and directed agents.

In the early 1960s, he was simultaneously secretary to the embassy, ​​later consul and secret agent, and writer. He asked his bosses for permission to publish his novels under a pseudonym because they did not believe that he would reveal secrets. Readers, on the other hand, may have felt that this world is very much alive, in which the UK is represented not by the ever-triumphant James Bond, but by disgruntled and bureaucratic agents. Among other complicated things, just two years after his debut as a writer, he reached the top: he appeared and was a worldwide success. The spy who came from the cold which is considered by many to be an all-time spy novel and one of the greatest literary achievements of the 20th century.

In the same year 1963, Kim Philby, one of the most notorious double agents in history, one of the leaders of MI6, fled to the Soviet Union. Tailor, tailor, baka, spyhe was captured by Le Carré ten years later. However, Philby’s betrayal had very real consequences for the author’s life, as it became clear that the Soviets could learn the identities of British agents working undercover in Europe. Le Carré said in a later interview that in 1988, when he was first admitted behind the Iron Curtain as a celebrated writer, Philby wanted to meet him in Moscow, but he refused.

1999Photo: leemage via AFP

Le Carré left the services, an English newspaper revealed his identity, and then he lived only to write.

Due to his previous job, he still had to keep some secrets and lived a retired life for a long time, which gave him a mysterious aura together.

Its main character is the unhappy and brilliant George Smiley of MI6, and its most important medium is the Cold War, which told as a story of people falling rather than heroic Westerners and weedy Orientals and the systems that crush them. He is also accused of these equally degraded regimes in the novels, but Le Carré himself refused to mix western democracies and totalitarian regimes.

The espionage chronicle novels have transformed not only the way society views this occupation, but also, for example, the way spies themselves think and speak. Slang classics like brick or simply the honey trap, the sex trap. In a 2013 interview with the Hungarian Orange, they were also asked about their famous saying that “he who was once a spy will always be a spy”: “You were once part of the system, and this may be familiar to many Hungarians, so once you were part of the intelligence world, it is first affected personally. Because the system is one way or another, but it deforms the personality. Manipulation, theft, anarchy: if a person puts his tendencies in this direction at the service of the state, if I have to deal professionally with how I can relate, persuade, put the other person at my service every day, it also changes me. And this is the only thing on everyone’s mind in this profession. How can you buy, seduce, convert the other? “

Here, however, we already feel that there is much more than intelligence. As Timothy Garton Ash said:

its real subject is not espionage,

but “an endless and deceptive labyrinth of human relationships: betrayal, which is a form of love, a lie, which is a form of truth, good people serving bad purposes and bad people serving good purposes.”

Of the two dozen novels, London’s Cold War street images flash for the first time in the minds of most, but their heroes traveled to Rwanda and Chechnya, the Caribbean and the Far East, writing about the drug lobby. , the arms trade, the Palestinian-Jewish conflict and terrorism.

2012 Oxford Honorary Doctors: Eliza Manningham-Buller, former MI5 Le Carré leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu KyiPhoto: BEN STANSALL / AFP

A hermit farmer atop a Cornish cliff heard his voice as a public figure in the new millennium – he made his first memorable outburst against the Iraq war, forcing forced interrogations from the Bush administration, professionally so to speak, not just inhuman but also amateurish, but Trump had unsolicited words. On Putin’s tandem, as well as European politics: “I think something similar happened in the 1930s in Spain, Japan and, of course, Germany. Today’s signs are clearly similar to the rise of fascism and it is contagious. Fascism is becoming more and more overt in Hungary and Poland. You also receive great encouragement. “

According to the obituaries, the last years of his life, torn from private crises, were full of family happiness, 14 grandchildren and 3 great-grandchildren. From his first marriage he had three children, and from the second he had a boy who also became a writer. He got the poster from them, which hangs on his worker’s wall with the inscription:

Keep Calm and le Carré.

(NYT, Guardian, BBC)

2020 was an extraordinary year. The coronavirus epidemic and the deepening economic crisis that followed put us to the test, and the government has also used this dire crisis to further strengthen its already unprecedented power.

However, thanks to the readers, the 444 not only survived, it was able to grow stronger. Five new hires have arrived, five new blogs have started, regular podcasts have started, the second Macro has been completed, our new newsletters are being prepared on a weekly and daily basis, and not casually – our attendance has also increased.

In order for the newspaper to continue to operate and expand within a stable and predictable framework, we will launch a new system in 2021. There will be exclusive articles, newsletters and many other benefits.

Join us, support yourself, become a member of the 444 community and contribute to the growth of the Hungarian free press!



[ad_2]