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John le Carré, who forged thrillers out of equal parts adventure, moral courage, and literary talent, has died at 89.
Le Carré explored the gap between the bombastic rhetoric of Western freedom and the stark reality of defending it, in novels like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Night Manager, which earned him critical acclaim and made it a worldwide bestseller.
On Sunday, his family confirmed that he had died of pneumonia at Royal Cornwall Hospital on Saturday night. “We all deeply regret his passing,” they wrote in a statement.
His former agent Jonny Geller described him as “an undisputed giant of English literature. He defined the cold war era and fearlessly spoke the truth to power in the decades that followed … I have lost a mentor, an inspiration, and most importantly, a friend. We will never see someone like him again. “
His companions lined up to pay tribute. Stephen King wrote: “This terrible year has claimed a literary giant and a humanitarian spirit.” Robert Harris said the news had left him “very distraught … one of Britain’s great postwar novelists, and a unique and unforgettable character.” Adrian McKinty described Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as “simply the best spy novel ever written,” while best-selling book author Richard Osman called him “the wisest and best storyteller we had. What an extraordinary career. “
Born David Cornwell in 1931, Le Carré began working for the secret services while studying German in Switzerland in the late 1940s. After teaching at Eton, he joined the British Foreign Service as an intelligence officer, recruiting, directing and guarding spies behind the Iron Curtain from an administrative office in the MI5 building on London’s Curzon Street. Inspired by his MI5 colleague, novelist John Bingham, he began publishing thrillers under the pseudonym John le Carré, despite his publisher’s advice that he opt for two Anglo-Saxon monosyllables like “Chunk-Smith.”
A Bingham-inspired spy who was “astonishingly ordinary … short, fat, and quiet in character,” taunts an East German agent in Le Carré’s 1961 debut, Call for the Dead, his character’s first appearance. enduring, George Smiley. . A second novel, A Murder of Quality from 1962, saw Smiley investigating a murder in a public school and was positively reviewed. (“A very complex, superior intrigue novel,” was the Observer’s conclusion). But a year later, when his third thriller was released, Le Carré’s career rose to a whole new level.
Smiley is only a minor figure in The Spy Who Came from the Cold, but this tale of a mission to confront East German intelligence is filled with his world-jaded cynicism. According to Alec Leamas, the fifty-something agent sent to East Berlin, the spies are just “a sordid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; queers, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten up their rotten lives. Graham Greene hailed it as “the best spy story I’ve ever read.”
According to Le Carré, the great success of the novel left him at first in awe and then in conflict. His manuscript had been approved by the secret service because it was “pure fiction from beginning to end,” he explained in 2013, so it could not represent a security breach. “However, this was not the point of view adopted by the world press, which with one voice decided that the book was not merely authentic, but a kind of revealing Message from the other side, leaving me with nothing to do but sit and to watch, in a kind of frozen amazement as it climbed the best-seller list and stayed there while expert after expert announced it as real. “
Smiley took center stage in three novels Le Carré published in the 1970s, tracing the feud between the burly British agent and his Soviet nemesis, Karla. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, he unmasks a mole on the highest echelons of the British Secret Service, while in The Honorable Schoolboy he pursues a money laundering operation in Asia, before rebuilding Karla’s Swiss connections to Smiley’s People. The world of “ferrets” and “bluffers”, “vagabonds” and “pavement artists” was drawn so convincingly that their former colleagues from MI5 and MI6 began to adopt the jargon invented by Le Carré as their own. .
When the cold war came to an end, his friends would stop him in the street and ask him: “What are you going to write now?” But Le Carré’s concerns were always broader than the confrontation between East and West, and he had little patience with the idea that the fall of the Berlin Wall would mark some kind of end either to history or to the espionage that greased his mechanisms. He tackled the arms trade in 1993 with The Night Manager, Big Pharma in 2001 with The Constant Gardener, and the war on terror in 2004 with Absolute Friends.
Meanwhile, a steady stream of his creations made its way from page to screen. Actors like Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Ralph Fiennes and Gary Oldman enjoyed the subtleties of his characterization even as audiences applauded his plot prowess.
Le Carré returned to Smiley for the last time in 2017, closing the circle of his career in A Legacy of Spies, which reviews the failed operation at the heart of the novel that made his name. Writing in The Guardian, John Banville praised his wit and skill, stating that “since The Spy has not exercised Le Carré his gift as a storyteller so powerfully and to such exciting effect.”
After decades of being painted as a shadowy, mysterious figure, largely due to his lack of interest in publicity or joining the festival circuit, Le Carré stunned the world in 2016 with the publication of his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. In detailing his fractured relationship with an abusive and con-man father and a lonely upbringing after his mother abandoned him at age five, Le Carré detailed the strange life of a spy-turned-author, whom Margaret Thatcher and Rupert Murdoch invited him to. to have lunch. After spending four decades living in Cornwall, married twice, and raising a son, Nicholas, who would write novels himself under the name Nick Harkaway, Le Carré admitted: “I have not been a model husband or a model father, and not I’m interested in showing up that way. “
The constant love of her life was writing, “scribbling like a man hiding in a tiny desk.”
“From the secret world that I once knew, I have tried to make a theater for the larger worlds that we inhabit,” he wrote. “Imagination comes first, then the search for reality. Then let’s go back to the imagination and to the desk where I am sitting now. “
