From Cold War shenanigans to the excesses of capitalism: John le Carré was much more than a spy thriller writer

Look at the book cover blurbs of any contemporary spy thriller writer, and you’re almost certain to come across the words: “The next le Carré.” That is a measure of John le Carré’s achievement: he was a yardstick for all those who came after him.

In a way, that’s both a tribute and a disservice. His novels are nominally slotted into the genre of spy fiction, but they clearly broadened and transcended the form. As publisher Robert Gottlieb once remarked: “Calling him a spy writer is like calling Joseph Conrad a sea writer, or Jane Austen a domestic-comedy writer.”

Le Carré himself said in an interview after the publication of his last novel, Agent Running in the Field: “that intelligence experience that I had, that formative time in my life, has simply become a vehicle, a stage, a theatre, that I use to express other things.” These ranged from throwing light on Cold War shenanigans to his later indignation at the excesses of capitalism such as money laundering and unethical pharmaceutical practices.

His seedy, shape-shifting characters and the shadowy, compromised world they inhabit stand their own against the work of most writers of literary fiction. This erasing of boundaries would have been even more evident had he allowed his work to be entered for literary prizes.

Other writers, though, were well aware of le Carré’s accomplishments. Philip Roth called The Perfect Spy “the best English novel since the war”, and Ian McEwan once said that he has “charted our decline and recorded the nature of our bureaucracies like no one else has”.

The elegance of their sentences apart, one of the hallmarks of fine writers is the quality of their worldbuilding skills. In this, le Carré excelled. His murky universe of double-crossers, smooth talkers, self-preservers and out-of-place idealists was rich, fully-realised and, as he once said, made “the closed society do duty for the open one.” This is even more remarkable given the many settings of his novels: London, Hong Kong, Bonn, Panama City, and the Congo, among others.

These were some of the traits he shared with Graham Greene, an early influence. Greene’s own novels, including those with a background of espionage such as The Quiet American and Our Man in Havana, were not only set in diverse locations, but also featured morally compromised characters operating in an unstable, despair-filled environment that’s come to be known as Greeneland. Le Carré must have been delighted at Greene’s reaction to his breakout novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold: he called it “the best spy story I have ever read.”

Notably, the way in which le Carré described the craft of espionage has also taken on a life of its own. A lexicon of such terms includes the Circus (his name for MI6), the Nursery (the MI6 training centre), lamplighters (surveillance operatives), housekeepers (the finance department), and moles (agents who spy for their own country).

The name “le Carré” can itself be seen as such a term. It was a pseudonym that he, born David Cornwell, adopted because his first few novels were published when he was working as an intelligence operative. As such, he was prohibited from publishing under his own identity.

He’s widely known for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People, the trilogy featuring the dogged, cuckolded spymaster George Smiley’s quest for his Russian counterpart, Karla. But the one novel that’s even more sublime is A Perfect Spy, which masterfully combines first-hand knowledge of intelligence operations with autobiographical elements.

It deals with the rise and fall of consummate spy Magnus Pym and his efforts to overcome the influence of his father, portrayed as an amoral, charismatic swindler. Pym chances upon the credo that many of le Carré’s other characters try – and often fail – to embrace: “He was learning to live on several planes at once. The art of it was to forget everything except the ground you stood on and the face you spoke from at that moment.”

Shortly after the publication of Adam Sisman’s biography of le Carré in 2015, the novelist himself announced that he would be publishing a work of “stories from my life” titled The Pigeon Tunnel. “Stories” and “life”: the two words, one senses, are carefully chosen to bring out the divergence between the world and the way it is represented. A sentence from that memoir is one of the keys to le Carré’s body of work: “Real truth lies, if anywhere, not in facts, but in nuance.”