“I love writing on the hoof, in notebooks on walks, in trains and cafés”

September 4, 2016 9:16 AM

le Carré on le Carré [The Guardian] The many lives of John le Carré, in his own words. An exclusive extract from his new memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. Portraits by Nadav Kander. [Previously.]

“If you’re ever lucky enough to score an early success as a writer, as happened to me with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, for the rest of your life there’s a before-the-fall and an after-the-fall. You look back at the books you wrote before the searchlight picked you out and they read like the books of your innocence; and the books after it, in your low moments, like the strivings of a man on trial. ‘Trying too hard’ the critics cry. I never thought I was trying too hard. I reckoned I owed it to my success to get the best out of myself, and by and large, however good or bad the best was, that was what I did.”

- John le Carré on The Night Manager on TV: They’ve Totally Changed My Book – But It Works. [The Guardian]

“Since then, some 15 of my novels have found their way to the screen, either as feature film or television. But the transition remains as unpredictable to me, as frustrating and rewarding, as it ever was. I’ve seen fictional characters that I have spent loving years writing about turned overnight into cardboard. I’ve seen two-dimensional walk-on characters from the edge of one of my novels appear magically enlarged and remade. I have watched scenes from my novels where I sweated blood to crank up the tension, fall flat on their faces for sheer want of the most elementary stagecraft. I have seen some of my dullest, least achieved writing brought vividly to life by splendid direction and acting. In the beginning was the word. The writer lives or dies by it. To the filmmaker, in the beginning was the image. The creative battle has raged happily ever since the first movie flickered into life.

What have I learned? That any author who goes into a script conference seeing himself as the guard dog of his novel is wasting his time. The reasons are so obvious they’re silly. A novel that takes a dozen hours of patient reading is to be transformed into a film that takes a hundred minutes of impatient viewing.The most the novelist can ask is that somehow the arc of his story survives and the audience will leave the cinema having met some of the characters, and shared some of the emotions, that the reader experienced when he closed the book.”

- After The Night Manager: Five of the Best Le Carré Novels [The Guardian]

1. Call for the Dead
2. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold
3. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
4. A Perfect Spy
5. The Tailor of Panama

- John le Carré Has Not Mellowed With Age [The New York Times]

“At 81, he remains an enviable specimen of humanity: tall, patrician, cleanlimbed, ruddy-complected. His white hair is floppy and well cut, so much so that the actor Ralph Fiennes, who starred in the 2005 film version of le Carré’s novel “The Constant Gardener,” badgered him for the name of his barber. Le Carré is not a hunter himself, but he nodded at the people he knew and mounted a casual and running defense of fox hunting, as if he were doing color commentary from the 18th hole at the Masters. It’s an ancient part of the rural culture, he said. It’s egalitarian in this area (some 300 miles west-southwest of London), not an upper-class diversion. It’s also largely futile: an actual fox is rarely cornered. When one is, a trained eagle owl is brought in to kill it.”

- John le Carré, The Art of Fiction No. 149 [The Paris Review]

INTERVIEWER: Did you find it easy? Did you have great confidence in yourself as a writer?
LE CARRÉ: I have a great debt of gratitude to the press for this. In those days English newspapers were much too big to read on the train, so instead of fighting with my colleagues for the Times, I would write in little notebooks. I lived a long way out of London. The line has since been electrified, which is a great loss to literature. In those days it was an hour and a half each way. To give the best of the day to your work is most important. So if I could write for an hour and a half on the train, I was already completely jaded by the time I got to the office to start work. And then there was a resurgence of talent during the lunch hour. In the evening something again came back to me. I was always very careful to give my country second-best.
INTERVIEWER: What sorts of things were you writing in these little notebooks?
LE CARRÉ: I was writing the very first book, without any kind of skeleton, without any conscious model, but with this odd character, George Smiley, to go along with me. I’ve never been able to write a book without one very strong character in my rucksack. The moment I had Smiley as a figure, with that past, that memory, that uncomfortable private life and that excellence in his profession, I knew I had something I could live with and work with.

- Which is the Best John Le Carre Novel? [The New Yorker]

“Like Raymond Chandler, another so-called genre writer (in this magazine, Pauline Kael once described Chandler as a skilled creator of pulp), le Carré offers a specialized view of life, but one so persuasive that many readers begin to see things in his ripely jaundiced way. Chandler was a master of the sleaze and alluring amorality of Los Angeles. Le Carré recorded the club banter—suave, heartless, knife-edged—of educated Englishmen drawn to espionage. He created the cryptic jargon of tradecraft—lamplighters, scalphunters, babysitters, joes, mothers, burnboxes—some of which got taken up by actual spies. In his masterpiece “Kim,” Kipling did the same for the lingo of Russo-British rivalry (“the great game”), but Chandler and le Carré devised, as they say, an entire world, increasingly detailed and comprehensive, a joy for adepts and for the quickly initiated. By the mid-seventies, however, the author of “genre books” was obviously a major novelist who understood the complications of deceit and self-delusion as well any writer.”

posted by Fizz (24 comments total)

"Call for the dead"? No. However, I have no problem with the other four. "The Tailor of Panama" was really exciting to read, because I had no idea how good it was going in. I know of few other novelists who can conjure up rage and indignation in the reader the way Le Carre can.
posted by acrasis at 10:34 AM on September 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

I really should read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, since the movie is so very, very good and the way these things go the book is probably better. As it happens I'm reading Tinker Tailor at the moment and it's great.

BTW, we are all assuming Ann is off having James Bond style adventures of her own that Smiley is unaware of when he sulks about her being off with someone, right?
posted by Artw at 10:46 AM on September 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

I went through my le Carre phase just before Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was released. The Smiley novels are excellent and filled with some wonderful characters. I know that the film was not well received but I loved the adaptation. Putting this memoir by le Carre on my to be read list. le Carre (along with Graham Greene) is one of my favourite novelist/spies.
posted by Fizz at 10:47 AM on September 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

Hunt down the BBC miniseries, Alec Guinness is amazing in it. I'm planning on watching the movie again once I've finished the book so we'll see how that holds up.
posted by Artw at 10:48 AM on September 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

What about the worst Le Carre novel? I nominate Our Kind of Traitor, in which one of the female characters is introduced as follows:

"Nature had provided Gail with long, shapely legs and arms, high, small breasts, a lissom body, English skin, fine gold hair and a smile to lighten the gloomiest corners of life."
posted by verstegan at 10:52 AM on September 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

It turned out my significant other had never seen the "Tinker, Tailor" miniseries, so we watched that together (and every time I see it I gasp at Guinness's performance), then we listened to the very good BBC radio adaptation. Just then the movie came out, which I didn't like because it had too much action and not enough rumination. Still, it's instructive to see multiple adaptations of a good novel.
posted by acrasis at 10:55 AM on September 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

Sometimes my head just goes, "Hey, it's my friend's dad!"
posted by Kitteh at 10:56 AM on September 4, 2016

Yeah, Our Kind of Traitor is pretty bad, both in its treatment of women and in the plot. I've really liked or loved every other le Carré I've read other than that one.
posted by minsies at 11:55 AM on September 4, 2016

The Little Drummer Girl, coming out just before the bombing of the 1st Battalion 8th Marines in Beirut, was the first le Carre I read. Charle and Joseph are still more memorable than Smilely. The PLO's history coming out of a Israeli spy's mouth was just bizarre.
posted by ridgerunner at 1:03 PM on September 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

The Little Drummer Girl is all about using deception/manipulation to achieve an end. The description of Charlie and her friends bother but these folk are targets that are picked for percisely the reason of plausibility.
posted by clavdivs at 1:10 PM on September 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

Now that's a cowinkedink
posted by clavdivs at 1:10 PM on September 4, 2016

Nice post!
posted by mumimor at 1:21 PM on September 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

Sometimes my head just goes, "Hey, it's my friend's dad!"


As did Charlie's minders. "A godfather had been invented for her, he said, an old friend of her father's who struck it rich and recently died in Switzerland, leaving her a large sum of money..."
-TLDG, pg. 423
posted by clavdivs at 2:12 PM on September 4, 2016

The first Le Carré I read was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and I was struck at how prosaic, un-glamorous and nihilist it was (especially having seen the movie with Richard Burton and Claire Bloom), and I wasn't sure I liked it. I've since read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Honorable Schoolboy and the style has grown on me.

I was actually expecting something like Raymond Chandler, but I don't think they should be compared at all. Le Carré makes Chandler seem like a dram queen.
posted by maggiemaggie at 2:36 PM on September 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

I love reading le Carré. It is always a treat. I was reading Ulysses when I started A Most Wanted Man, and I put the scenes in the same sea side architecture.
posted by Oyéah at 4:42 PM on September 4, 2016

Ohhh my Xmas shopping list it complete.
posted by tilde at 6:27 PM on September 4, 2016

I got hooked on Le Carre at around 4 in the morning on a bitterly cold night in February many years ago. I was working the night shift and listening to CBC radio, which sometimes broadcast excerpts of audio-books in the dim hypnotic hours, and I listened to an excellent narrator recite the haunting scene where George Smiley interviewed the retired analyst Connie Sachs, where she recalled certain pieces of the odd events related to Control's downfall many years before...
posted by ovvl at 10:20 PM on September 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

great post.

Le Carre's one of those authors whose experience trumps all else to my mind. Not that he isn't an adept stylist, storyteller etc -- it's just he's actually been there. In the game. Nobody really knows how the world actually works, but he gets closer than most, I figure.
posted by philip-random at 10:42 PM on September 4, 2016

Interesting that you say so, Philip-random. Le carre has expressed himself in interviews a discomfort/bemusement that people regard him as a spy master. He views himself as a writer, and points out that he only worked in foreign intelligence for literally four years, and has readily acknowledged he was not very senior and that the service had undoubtedly changed a lot from his experiences.

Indeed, one thing I love about le carre are his pains to represent spy work as eccentric, but still quintessentially bureaucratic and sharing many of the same foibles the broader public service has.
posted by smoke at 11:24 PM on September 4, 2016

Thanks so much for this post. I only got into le Carre with the recent TTSS adaptation (which I loved, too). Even when he's not great, he's still good. Connie Sachs 4 lyfe.
posted by Gin and Broadband at 11:36 PM on September 4, 2016

Interesting that you say so, Philip-random. Le carre has expressed himself in interviews a discomfort/bemusement that people regard him as a spy master. He views himself as a writer, and points out that he only worked in foreign intelligence for literally four years, and has readily acknowledged he was not very senior and that the service had undoubtedly changed a lot from his experiences.

yet he still gets closer to the machinations than anyone I've ever met ... and it resonates through his work. A sense that the writer, though he may not have actually been in all of these situations -- he had access to the notes, and the people.
posted by philip-random at 12:36 AM on September 5, 2016

I have liked most of his books that I have read, and have reread a few recently as well. I love how they are about people and bureaucracies, not Jason Bourne-style action. The machinations and positionings have stayed interesting and relevant.

I reread The Little Drummer Girl not long ago, and while I loved it more than the first time I read it, more than twenty years ago, some of the gender stuff felt extremely of-its-time, to put it generously.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:34 AM on September 5, 2016

Still, it's instructive to see multiple adaptations of a good novel.

More impressively of a good novel the middle section of which is basically a guy sat alone in a room reading stuff and thinking about things.
posted by Artw at 6:20 PM on September 5, 2016

(Spoilers)
posted by Artw at 6:20 PM on September 5, 2016 [1 favorite]