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The great British writer John le Carr died at 89. The Guardian announces it, informing the confirmation of his family. The famous author of some among the best thrillers and espionage novels died due to a pneumonia (not linked to Covid)at the Royal Cornwall Hospital on Saturday night.
It would not only be reductionist, but profoundly unfair, to confine the English novelist John le Carr, who died at the age of 89, to the field of genre literature, to be considered in substance. the cultured and sophisticated alternative, in the context of spy stories, to Ian Fleming and his 007. It must be recognized that David Cornwell (this was his real name), was absolutely one of the most important English-language authors of the second half of the 20th century, opinion expressed by authorities of the caliber of Philip Roth and Ian McEwan.
Realistic espionage
The effectiveness of your period, the successful psychological introspection, the exceptional ability to build complex and surprising plots, in which nothing, it seems, made him a true storyteller of the first order. Excellent connoisseur of the ruthless and cynical universe of the secret services, of which (as Fleming in fact) had been a part, Le Carr had provided a realistic picture, far from the brilliant heroism of James Bond, but at the same time attractive to the mass of readers, who had rewarded his talent, without being intimidated by the fluvial rhythm of history, with extraordinary sales successes since his first world bestseller from 1963, The spy who came from the cold (Longanesi, 1964).
Against the evils of capitalism, against Brexit
Critic of the British establishment, which he called abominable
Le Carr was a leftist and did not have a Manichean vision of the Cold War: he was, among other things, invited to Moscow in the Gorbachevian era, although in his most famous novels at the end the British secret service prevails over the Soviet one. After the fall of the USSR he had declared that at that time it was necessary fight against the evils of capitalism. And then he sided with maximum energy against brexit, a position that was already reflected in the novel A past as a spy (Mondadori, 2017) and even more clearly in The spy runs through the field (Mondadori, 2019).
Parental separation, rebellion and Switzerland
David Cornwell was born in England
, in the southern city of Poole, on October 19, 1931. His parents separated when he was a child and he never saw his mother again until he was 21 years old. His relationship with his father Ronald Cornwell had been very difficult, ambiguous individual involved in opaque activities with related legal problems, who (son’s word) always managed to spend twice what he earned or thrown away. Yet future Le Carr and her brother attended expensive schools, along with scions of the good bourgeoisie, with the distinct sense of being out of place and always having to hide their true status as penniless family members. At a certain point, the rebellion of the boy intervened, who had managed to be sent to study in Switzerland. It was a turning point: both because his passion for German culture had manifested itself in Bern, which he would later put to good use and which also characterizes the most prominent character in his novels, George smiley; and because it was precisely in the Swiss capital, full of spies in the turbulent beginning of the Cold War, where the initiation into the world of the secret services took place, Le Carr said in the autobiographical volume Pigeon shot (Mondadori, 2016), when he was entrusted with the task of delivering I don’t know what to I don’t know who.
Secret Agent
Later Carr had been military in the occupation troops in Austria (where he had also served intelligence functions), student at Oxford, later professor of German by 1958 he had become a British counterintelligence agent, the Mi5, and then in 1960 it passed to the structure in charge of collecting information abroad, the Mi6. While working in Germany for covert diplomatic intelligence, he wrote and published his first novel in 1961, Call the dead (Feltrinelli, 1965). Here Smiley enters the scene immediately, a fat and lanky individual, always dressed in badly cut clothes, humiliated by his unfaithful wife and arrogant bosses, but endowed with a profusion of intuition, memory and investigative gifts. the one who solves the first intrigue.
The success
And we find him again in action, albeit retired, in le Carr’s second novel, The Detective Story. A class crime (Feltrinelli, 1963). The world fame and wealth of the English author, who wrote under a pseudonym as befits a diplomat (and, moreover, a secret agent), came in 1963 with The spy who came from the cold. An exceptional bestseller that in Britain sells half a million copies in three months and in the United States it remains at the top of the broadcast list for 43 consecutive weeks. In 1965 a popular movie of the same name was made with actor Richard Burton, directed by Martin Ritt. Many others will be transpositions for film or television of le Carr’s works. In the novel Smiley has a supporting role this time, but the protagonist Alec Leamas, victim of an intricate whirlwind of deceptions in the Berlin Wall, shares his gray background . As Oreste del Buono, a long-time admirer of Le Carr, then disappointed by some of his latest evidence, wrote at the time, the strength of these figures lies in the fact that represent the hero that normal man can be.
Karla’s trilogy
His extraordinary achievement as a novelist had enabled Le Carr to end his career in the service of the Crown and just write. An activity that, in the opinion of many, had reached its peak with the so-called Karla Trilogy, from the codename of the head of the Soviet secret services that Smiley’s rival in a long game of chess destined to unravel precisely by three hugely successful books: The mole (Mondadori, 1975), The honorable schoolboy (Mondadori, 1978) and All Smiley Men (Mondadori, 1980). The duel goes through several stages: an unsuspected KGB infiltrator, the so-called mole, is discovered at the top of British intelligence; Smiley goes from moments of great difficulty to others in which he is in charge of the Circus (conventional name Carr uses for the secret service of his country). At the end of the third novel, Karla is trapped and defeated by her usual opponent. But Smiley to defeat him had to use methods that basically repel him and bring him closer to his antagonist. Then, Carr concludes at the end, they exchanged glances again, and perhaps each of them, for a moment, saw something of himself in the other.
Latest projects
Smiley would make another fleeting appearance in the novel The secret visitor (Mondadori, 1991), to then return, many years later, in the 2017 book A past as a spy: a kind of prequel to the legendary The spy who came from the cold, in which the protagonist is another hero of the saga for a long time, Peter guillam. Meanwhile, Carr had successfully traveled other paths than that. humorous in The tailor of Panama (Feltrinelli, 1997), clearly inspired by the novel Our agent in Havana by Graham Greene, in complaint against multinational pharmaceutical companies in The tenacious gardener (Mondadori, 2001). The judgments on the second part of his work were varied: some felt that with novels like The perfect spy (Mondadori, 1997) and The house of Russia (Mondadori, 1989), Carr had reached full maturity; others were more critical, believing that it had entered an involutional phase, albeit with flashes of excellence. But it certainly cannot be contradicted by an exceptional record. No one else had been able to count the ambiguous and suffocating atmosphere of the spy environment so effectively. during the cold war.
December 13, 2020 (change December 13, 2020 | 23:55)
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