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Even successful authors of espionage literature often have a hard time being perceived as serious writers. John le Carré was a rare exception. Since the British burst onto the literary scene in 1963 with “The Spy Who Came from the Cold”, he has been one of the most respected authors. Because even if spies, double agents or arms dealers act in his books, the leitmotifs of the stories were always basic themes of life: lies, love, betrayal.
And John le Carré was a master of suspense. They were people who waited in the dark for their fate, with their hearts in their throats. Lovers torn apart by the whirlwind of events. Unsuspecting people getting into a spy or mob business. Will they succeed or not? It is the question that makes the reader go faster and faster from one page to another. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, in the end most of the time no. “I rarely give good news,” le Carré himself said with a wink.
Le Carré, whose full real name is David John Moore Cornwell, was born into the art of spinning stories, albeit in a rather dramatic way. His mother, an actress, left the family when he was five years old. His father was a con man who moved between deluded wealth and jail, and much later he sometimes posed as his son, the famous writer, to impress women. “We lived in lies all the time,” remembers le Carré. “It was said that my father was on vacation. He just wasn’t on vacation, he was in jail. ”He found conspiracy and treason everywhere.
The failure with the Russian
This beginning in life gave David Cornwell an irrepressible imagination and a fight for stability that led him into the arms of the British Secret Service. In the 1950s he came to Germany in the guise of a diplomat, but was not particularly successful as an agent. Someday he should feel an opponent of the Soviets at home as a potential double agent. “The Russian came, drank vodka, played the cello and said nothing all night. It was a failure! ”He recalled. On another occasion, an agent he was supposed to wait for never showed up. Who knows what became of intelligence officer Cornwell, but then came “The Spy Who Came Out of the Cold.”
The thin book, which was feverishly put on paper in a few weeks, changed Cornwell’s life, and so did the art of the spy novel. The good and the bad were fused in gray, the agents were not heroes, but people of flesh and blood. “The best spy story I’ve ever read,” said genre veteran Graham Greene (1904-1991). The novel was published under the name John le Carré and at first no one knew who was behind it. When the truth came out, the secret service career ended forever.
Instead, le Carré wrote about the world of agents thereafter and a few years later had his greatest success with George Smiley, the disgruntled master spy who is constantly deceived by his wife and who suffers from the unscrupulous reality of his industry. . A few years ago the best-known emoticon book, “Lady, King, Ace, Spy” was remade with Gary Oldman in the title role. Le Carré revived the story of “Legacy of the Spies” in 2017, and also settled scores with the Cold War generation who could not create a better world. It could also have been called “Smileys Sins”.
“I feel ready to die”
The fall of the Iron Curtain deprived Le Carré of the well-rehearsed arena for his stories, and he turned his critical gaze home to the West. His books revolved around the arms trade, the machinations of the pharmaceutical companies, the war on terror and the influence of the Russian mafia. As a publicist, he criticized US foreign policy (“America has gone mad”) and called for more tolerance for Islam.
“Badminton,” the last of his published novels, revolved around Brexit last year. In the words of the characters, he let out many of his own opinions: that Britain with the “shitty chaos” of Brexit is going to depend unconditionally on the United States and that the president of the United States, Donald Trump, is “a threat to everything the civilized world “. Le Carré himself lamented the “utter idiocy” of Trump’s actions, which will have a lasting effect. And British Prime Minister Boris Johnson must be “stopped immediately”. «I am very afraid to leave Europe. I am convinced that if we stay, we can strengthen the spirit of Europe and help create a true counterweight for the United States, for China, “he said in an interview with dpa.
Le Carré lived in seclusion with his second wife Jane in London and Cornwall, where she died on Saturday. After a turbulent life with adventures around the world on his research trips and some marital infidelity, he had found his peace. “I feel ready to die,” le Carré said a few years ago. If it ended too soon, I would feel nothing but gratitude. It would be a sin not to be grateful for a life like mine. “(SDA)
