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It was a bit moving to witness famous colleagues send respectful words of remembrance when the death of the giant John le Carré was confirmed on Sunday night. There was Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Robert Harris… Thanks for everything, champ!
“In John le Carré’s books, no one came from the cold,” wrote Mårten Blomkvist in a well-formulated rune here at DN.
Unlike Ian Fleming’s brilliant James Bond, who served the Queen’s England faithfully and maintained the style and dominance of what was left of the Empire, le Carré’s antiheroes were bordered by the curses and moral gray areas of the profession. Not infrequently directly hostile to London’s arrogance and lack of understanding of the situation in small nations, where even people who wanted the good ran the risk of being crushed by the brutal logic of the Cold War.
Has said that John le Carré created the modern spy novel. It sounds grateful, but therefore it could just as quickly be transferred to genre literature and popular culture, something as insignificant as simple detective stories and romantic girls’ books.
Literature is a slow, tradition-laden art form. It has its advantages; one of the downsides is that their rigid rule-makers are often the last in the world to discover something new.
John le Carré should have received the Nobel Prize as early as the 1990s. In recent years, the Swedish Academy has broadened the field and awarded a literary reporter like Svetlana Alexeyevich and a composer like Bob Dylan.
I guess le Carré was too much fun to read. The gloomy cuckoos of central Europe and the highly literary writers for the happy few often precede the queue.
John le Carré har sagt that novel writing is reminiscent of espionage. As essayist Timothy Garton Ash has pointed out, its real subject is rather the human consequences of secrecy and the use of force.
When betrayal is neighbor to love and lie to the truth. When decent men are suddenly attached to false ideals and villains claim to be in the service of the good cause.
The conspiracy, labyrinth, and moral gray zone require cunning intrigue, startling scene changes, and slow-acting literary mediums to create the maximum load and dividend.
International circles did their part to broaden interest in le Carré’s writing. Few serious writers like to write about travel, games, and games. All the social rituals in the luxury hotels, bars, bank palaces and embassies of the glittering cities of the world. What wonderful environmental representations!
When le Carré allows two men to meet at a tavern table in, say, Zurich or Hong Kong, you know the dialogue will be as delicious as the menu.
Slightly simplified expressionThere are at least two John le Carré. The first writer of “The Spy Who Came from the Cold” and Karla’s trilogy, the great novels of the 60s and 70s, where gray and woolly London and Berlin during the Cold War are at the center.
The bridge to the late le Carré – and life after the fall of the Berlin Wall – is perhaps his most personal novel, “A Perfect Spy” (1986). Then he expands the world in books like “Night Service” (1993), “The Sluggish Grower” (2001), “The Good Interpreter” (2006) and “Our Own Traitor” (2010).
His latest topics were the international arms trade, shady drug deals, the tentacles of the Russian mafia, corruption in the banking world, and how the reckless war on terror of the 20th century undermined Western democracy.
Eventually it became too agitators for their own good? Occurred. Although the novel must also be able to debate the present, illuminate secrets and smoke with the present.
I read in the New York Times that John le Carré received a poster of his children that he put up in the studio. It says: “Keep calm and Carré him”.
Read more chronicles and other texts by Jan Eklund
Read more:
John le Carré’s free London will survive Brexit
John le Carré talks about Olof Palme
Interview: Britain is about to become a disgusting country
