By Matt Schudel, Washington Post
John le Carré, a British author who drew on the enigma of his incorrigibly criminal father and his own experiences as a Cold War-era spy to write powerful novels about a bleak, morally compromised world in which international intrigue and personal betrayal went hand in hand, died Dec. 12 at a hospital in Cornwall, England. He was 89.
The cause was pneumonia, his U.S. publisher, Viking Penguin, said in a statement.
In a literary career spanning six decades, Mr. le Carré published more than two dozen books. His best-known titles, including “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” (1963) and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (1974), sold in the millions and were made into acclaimed film and television adaptations. More than a master of espionage writing, he was widely regarded as an elegant prose stylist whose skills and reputation were not limited by genre or era.
After the collapse of Communism in Europe in the early 1990s, Mr. le Carré turned his attention to a changing landscape of global insecurity, sending his fictional spies to Israel, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Central America in such books as “The Little Drummer Girl,” “The Night Manager (1993),” “The Tailor of Panama” and “The Constant Gardener.”
His literary admirers included Graham Greene, Philip Roth and Ian McEwan, who once called him “the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain” and championed him for the prestigious Booker Prize. (Mr. le Carré rejected any entreaties to compete for literary honors.)
“He will have charted our decline and recorded the nature of our bureaucracies like no one else has,” McEwan told the Daily Telegraph in 2013. “But that’s just been his route into some profound anxiety in the national narrative. Most writers I know think le Carré is no longer a spy writer.. . . He’s in the first rank.”
Praised for his cunning plots, psychological complexity and flawed, many-faceted characters, Mr. le Carré also showed a deft hand for misdirection. Even his name was an act of deception: “John le Carré” was a pseudonym adopted by David Cornwell — his given name — because British intelligence officers were forbidden to publish under their own identities.
Having created such brooding anti-heroes as Alec Leamas, George Smiley and Magnus Pym, Mr. le Carré offered an understated view of the spy world that was in sharp contrast to the sex, gadgets and chase-scene formula of Ian Fleming’s James Bond.
Instead, Mr. le Carré’s agents tend to furrow their brows, adjust their eyeglasses and walk inconspicuously along rain-soaked streets, relying on careful observation and endless paperwork. Conversations are muted, offices are shabby and guns remain (mostly) holstered. Everything in his novels, from the weather to the clothing to the fine-grained moral choices, seems outfitted in shades of gray.
Tension builds through cryptic gestures, dry humor or meditative glimpses through windows. Loyalties are questioned, relationships are sacrificed, and the fate of nations seems to hinge on all-too-human frailties.
“Le Carré’s contribution to the fiction of espionage has its roots in the truth of how a spy system works,” novelist Anthony Burgess wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 1977. “The people who run [British] Intelligence totally lack glamour, their service is short of money, they are up against the crassness of politicians. Their men in the field are frightened, make blunders, grow sick of a trade in which the opposed sides too often seem to interpenetrate and wear the same face.”
During his years in Britain’s domestic and international spy services, known as MI5 and MI6, respectively, Mr. le Carré did not hold a high rank. Yet his foreign assignments and his experience in the London headquarters of the spy service — known as “the Circus” in his books — gave his fiction an air of verisimilitude.
Related articles:
John le Carré, author of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, dies aged 89
(The Guardian)
John le Carré, Best-Selling Author of Cold War Thrillers, Dies at 89
(New York Times)
