Tribute: John le Carré books and characters lofted events above genre of spy thrillers

In her recent memoir, German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck recalls sleeping “through that moment of world history” when the Berlin Wall was being knocked to pieces by crowds delirious with a frenzied joy and an inchoate freedom from fear. For many in the world, that fraught piece of world history was brought tantalisingly alive by John le Carré with a silver-tongued penmanship that detailed every restrained hope and every sinister fear of a world, which the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska described, with painful eloquence, aptly when she said “when I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past’’.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, John le Carré’s breakout book, brought Check-point Charlie into many European lives that were still trying to figure out how the war-torn continent could survive with a hard-to-pierce Iron Curtain between the lands and peoples. Richard Burton, playing Alec Leamas, enacted John le Carré’s chief protagonist and made sure that he indeed was a spy who came in from the cold, but with his dissolute nous and self-loathing impertinence, established John le Carré and himself warmly in many hearts.

In this book, George Smiley, the fictional spy who built John le Carré’s reputation, was tucked away as an irrelevance in the far-flung pages of the book. It was this Smiley—fat, slightly slobbish and rakishly righteous—who would emerge from these pages and propel John le Carré from the foggy shadows of spy fiction to the bright sunlight of literature. The battles between Smiley and Karla, who many believe was modelled on the fierce and dour East German spymaster Markus Wolf, would rage in three books: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.

These wars would be edgy, subtle and shadowy, happening at the crepuscular edges of history. These didn’t have the bombast and braggadocio of the Kennedy-Khrushchev hotline squabble; they were fought quietly in unknown and dim alleyways of the continent. Alec Guinness added his meat and bones to the MI6 spy and brought “one of those ashen Englishmen”, as one American critic put it, “like the poet Philip Larkin”, on screen.

John le Carré may have made fiercely guarded Checkpoint Charlie famous, but he himself broke the barricades when his fiction shed the derisive thriller tag and raced, with his prolific output, to the frontlines of world-class literature. But John le Carré rarely submitted his books for awards and entirely avoided the hullaballoo of the publicity circuit and ego-thrusting, network-building literary festivals. John le Carré didn’t have to press flesh; his words easily shook hands with the zeitgeist and imprinted on the literary consciousness. The American novelist Philip Roth lent his mighty weight to John le Carré’s oeuvre by calling his 1986 book A Perfect Spy “the best English novel since the war”.

The doddering Soviet Russia collapsed after Gorbachev brought in glasnost and perestroika. The lies and falsehoods and suppressions it was built on just could not withstand the new leader’s policies of openness and transparency. The twin-pronged policies also blew a hole in Berlin Wall, which was brought down with infectious elation and crazed eagerness. The Soviet satellites went out of the orbit of the Kremlin and some overeager historians and academics, overwhelmed with the grainy images of the Wall being hastily demolished and tall, sullen statues of Lenin and Stalin erratically torn down, started calling the galvanic moment “the end of history”.

Obviously, writers like John le Carré knew better. This, for him, was the beginning of a new history, as fraught and fragile as the earlier one. “Keep the company of those who seek the truth—run from those who have found it,’’ said the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel. A writer’s duty is to seek the truth and not to proclaim the end of history. John le Carré went on searching for the truth in his books that now didn’t have the playground of the Cold War available to them. The Night Manager dealt with the murky world of arms smuggling and The Constant Gardener laid bare the sly deviousness of Big Pharma. For John le Carré, “the future was a time,’’ as the Czech novelist Ivan Klima said, “that called into question everything that came before it’’. History-enders never found space in his books; his words always searched the new and perhaps nasty beginnings of history.

When Salman Rushdie got his fatwa from the ayatollah of Iran, John le Carré threw his solid weight behind Islam and railed at the writer of Midnight’s Children. “Nobody has a God-given right”, he said, “to insult a great religion and be published with impunity.’’ Rushdie, aghast, feuded with him and both brawled for some time before patching up later. In a searing es-say, he excoriated the United States for starting its never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “In the long term,” he said prophetically about Bush’s response to 9/11, it will be “more disastrous than the Vietnam War’’. For those who had so gleefully seen the dancing on the ramparts of the Berlin Wall and got carried away trumpeting the end of history, these wars and their grievous fallout brought back the deeply sharp and incisive bite of history.

Soviet Russia’s implosion also didn’t play well, causing great consternation in the camp of history-enders. John le Carré, who always had his finger on the pulse of history, was dismayed by Brexit and the looming threat to the project of European integration. He knew the jagged arc of history that led to Brexit extended back to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and he made a strong case for Europe in A Legacy of Spies, his 2017 book in which he brought Smiley back. Freedom for the wolves, said Isaiah Berlin, has often meant death for the sheep. John le Carré, the son of a flashy conman, always wanted to save and protect the sheep from the wolves of history. We can’t proclaim and celebrate the end of history.

“We cannot let all memories of war slip away,’’ says the historian Margaret MacMillan. Let us not be swayed by a deceptive calm that some countries with a strong under-current of resentments and frustrations project. “True enough,’’ said Havel, “ the country is calm. Calm as a morgue or a grave.’’ But now there won’t be a John le Carré to pierce that calmness and expose its tenuousness. Every beginning, said Szym-borska, is only a sequel. Nothing has changed. Only John le Carré has exited.