Dusk in the le Carré household, and the lights do not go on. We sit in the
gentle crepuscular gloom of his bolthole at the end of the world, the grey
Atlantic breakers hammering at the cliffs down below, the writer and former
spy clutching his glass of calvados as the last suspicion of sunlight
dissolves in the sea, an easy dying of the light.
Due west from here, from this last rocky gobbet of mainland Britain, there is
nothing but cold, gunmetal-grey sea until you hit Nova Scotia 3,000 miles
away - but even in the other direction, inland, le Carré is safely insulated
from civilisation, five hours from the jabbering clamour of London, down the
bottom of a bumpy mud track, a stone’s throw from Land’s End. Le Carré -
real name David Cornwell - and his wife Jane enjoy the distance and the
peace and the gathering dark: he has lived here happily enough for 40 years.
And only when it is pitch-black are the candles lit.
It is a fine, intimate setting for the divulging of confidences, and luckily
Cornwell - along with maybe Graham Greene, an old enemy of sorts - is
perhaps our finest storyteller of the past century. He has done unusual and
startling things, after all. And then there are the things he didn’t do but
perhaps almost did - such as defecting to the Soviet Union when he worked
for MI6. This is the sort of confidence I hadn’t expected, to tell you the
truth.
“You were genuinely tempted?” I ask him, in some surprise.
“Yes, there was a time when I was, yes,” he says.
“For ideological reasons, like the rest of them - Blunt, Philby, Maclean?”
Le Carré is considered to be on the left these days, of course - a consensus
arrived at largely through his visceral dislike of recent US foreign policy.
One of that coterie of British literary greats - Pinter, Hare, Amis -
railing at the supposed cretin in the White House, snarling about rendition
and Guantanamo and Halliburton. Surely, though, he was notthatfar to the
left, back then?
“God, no, no, no. Never for ideological reasons, of course not . . . ” “Then
why?” Not money, surely, I think to myself.
“Well, I wasn’t tempted ideologically,” he reasserts, in case there should be
any doubt, “but when you spy intensively and you get closer and closer to
the border . . . it seems such a small step to jump . . . and, you know,
find out the rest.”
This is maybe less surprising than at first it seemed: we are in true le Carré
territory, nuanced and complex, where the spying is sometimes an end in
itself and where there is rarely an easy, Manichaean split between the good
guys and the bad guys. Defecting was a temptation the writer resisted, to
our good fortune.
Still, his early books were required reading at KGB headquarters; the Russky
spies loved them every bit as much as we did. He is that doubly rare thing:
a genre writer who transcends his genre, a serious writer whose work has
mass appeal. These days, his books are turned into films before you can get
your hands on the books.
Espionage has always been a popular genre (especially with men), but it is the
subtleties within le Carré’s work that enthral; he is far closer to Conrad
than he is to, say, Robert Ludlum. In a way, it is those occasional moments
with le Carré when nuance is lacking entirely, when there is no empathy with
the other side at all, that most surprise and discomfort. There are some
things that he simply cannot stomach, times when the acute and dispassionate
observer of human behaviour disappears and the reaction is immediate and
visceral.
This is understandable when we are discussing the case of Kim Philby, for
example; at other times, less so. Philby was the spy who really did defect,
for ideological reasons, of course, and received one of the highest Soviet
accolades, the Order of the Red Banner, for having done so. After his death,
in 1988, he was commemorated on Soviet postage stamps even as the country -
and corrupt ideology - that he served was entering its death throes.
Philby’s defection in effect put paid to the youngish Cornwell’s career with
MI6 - as it did, in a more violently final way, to those of many of
Cornwell’s former colleagues - so there is a personal element to what
follows.
It seems that in 1987 le Carré was offered the chance of a meeting - and thus,
one assumes, an interview - with the traitor, fixed up through a shadowy
Russian intermediary. For a writer or journalist, this is a little like
having Lord Lucan, Stalin and the Pope, all rolled into one, offered up on a
plate: an unmissable opportunity, an opportunity to die for. But le Carré
demurred; he could not dine with Philby. “I just couldn’t do it. I said no.”
Why? “I just couldn’t do it.” He pauses for a moment. “There was always an
instinct towards corruption in him. And remember, he was responsible for
sending countless British agents to their deaths, to be killed – 40 or more
in Albania . . . ”
All the more reason to talk to him, I suggest – and later he admits that in
retrospect, then, yes, the two men should have met.
“I was trying to convey my emotional response,” he says, “the churning of the
stomach . . . ”
There is a similar stomach-churning, I think, when it comes to the Bush
administration; and, to be critical, a similar refusal to engage in
dialogue, even to accept that the other side might have a point, or that its
leading figures might be as nuanced and three-dimensional in their
individual lives as the various Russians and Muslim terrorists in whom le
Carré invests humanity.
Le Carré’s latest book, A Most Wanted Man, is the story of a half-Chechen,
half-Russian bastard Muslim refugee called Issa (a name that means, in case
we miss the point, Jesus), adrift in Hamburg, pursued by a clutch of
competing security services, which fear, on the slenderest of grounds, that
he may unleash fundamentalist mayhem upon the country. It is a beautiful
book - his best, I would reckon, for 10 years or more - and you could
scarcely wish for a novel moreau courant.
Further, le Carré has succeeded where others, such as John Updike, have
failed: in nailing our post9/11 paranoias and getting inside the skins of
those who are averse to our culture and hegemony. Issa (an irritating
character, to be frank - I’d have handed him over to the Russians or the
Yanks by page 25 for a spot of intensive waterboarding) is protected by an
uneasy alliance of well-meaning babe lawyer, floundering and fusty British
banker and rough but honest German spy.
Le Carré has done his usual clever stuff of understanding and even empathising
with perspectives that are, in some cases, clearly not his own. He has given
them, his people, a lot of thought. And then the hideous Yankees arrive,
painted with one broad and garish stroke of the brush. Think Bruce Willis in
a cap-sleeve T-shirt with a sub-machinegun and an inarticulate snarl. Do the
swaggering neocons not deserve the same attempt at empathy as the others?
Le Carré sort of half-accepts the point, but I do not think he really believes
it. I don’t think he could stomach making the neocons credible and human,
any more than he could sit down to dinner with Kim Philby: it’s a visceral
thing. He parries a little - the American characters, he says, are drawn
that way for shock effect. But this is also his equivalent of Pinter’s
infamous “f*** Bush!” tirades; a polemic, born of fury and distaste.
And then there is his well-publicised spat with Salman Rushdie, whom he
accused of knowingly offending Muslim sensibilities with his publication of
The Satanic Verses; of deliberately causing trouble.
“You, I would have thought, would at least agree with one of my reasons - that
the entire liberal establishment turned out in force to support Rushdie,” he
says.
Well yes; but Rushdie was challenging a system of thought that he thought
iniquitous - isn’t that what writers are sometimes supposed to do, and to do
fearlessly, with our support? Le Carré thinks about this for a while.
“Yes, in retrospect I think that probably is right. It just seemed to me
unreasonable to expect Islam to suddenly reach the same stage of development
as our own religions. But perhaps I was wrong.” Pause. “If so, I was wrong
for the right reasons,” he adds.
His latest book reveals an ambivalence towards the war against terror with
which we have been familiar these past seven years. A war he feels needs to
be fought, but not in the way it is being fought right now. He still thinks
that the invasion of Iraq was a “juggling trick”, to associate in the public
mind Saddam Hussein with Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 bombers when, as we knew at
the time, there was no such association between them.
But there is also, in the background, the presence of another war, one with
which le Carré is extremely familiar, the “new” cold war. He is outraged and
appalled at what he sees as a deliberate attempt to taunt and provoke Russia
and remembers with sadness those years, after the break-up of the Soviet
Union, when the Russians made plaintive requests to be allowed to join Nato
and were rebuffed.
“Such a thing now,” he says, “would be genuinely unthinkable and unplayable.”
More’s the pity. Western politicians’ sabre-rattling at Russia is partly born,
he says, of an “intense kind of nostalgia” for the old order, for the way
things once were, the yearning for a more comfortable war. “I have the same
feeling with the spooks over here,” he says.
Russia, at least, presents a known quantity, a threat we can grapple with,
rather than a shadowy and ephemeral franchise of terrorist cells that may or
may not have some sort of leadership hidden away in the tribal lands of
northwest Pakistan.
Again, le Carré is energised and angry: “What’s happened to diplomacy?” he
asks, presumably rhetorically, of the West’s “completely archaic” response
to the mini-crisis in Georgia recently. “If you bite the Russian bear on the
arse in its own back-yard, then you know what will happen: it will react
brutally.”
It was “completely wrong”, he argues, to have attempted to coopt Georgia, an
encouragement that in his view led directly to the Georgians sending tanks
onto the streets of South Ossetia and thus provoking an immediate Russian
military response.
He goes further: “I think it is outrageous and unnecessarily provocative to be
establishing that nuclear shield in Poland, on Russia’s doorstep. How did we
think the Russians would react? It didn’t need to be there.”
A day or so after the interview, when I ring le Carré to check one or two
facts, he goes still further. Echoing Vladimir Putin, this former MI6 spy
says that the furore over Georgia, the whipping-up of a confrontation with
Russia, was quite possibly a deliberate act by the US, done out of fear that
the war in Iraq had quietened down a little too much. The Republican
candidate John McCain needed a new war in which he could be seen to act. In
effect, he says, the Americans substituted one war for the other.
Diplomacy, he suggests, was a discredited notion for the neocons in and around
the White House. “In the past eight years of US government, diplomacy was
written off as liberal territory.”
And he has no kinder words for David Cameron and David Miliband, both of whom
had parroted antiRussian propaganda “to show what big balls they had”. A
ludicrous and dangerous business, he contends - regardless of the real
threat from the Russians, militarily, which he believes we have been
inclined to overstate recently.
If there is a subtext to his latest book, it is our shortness of memory; our
ability to forget the crimes we committed only a generation ago in our late
imperial pomp. Engineering a coup in Persia to ensure it had a
western-friendly dictator, the shah, in charge for nearly 40 years; and then the Suez debacle; and before that, Palestine - it’s a long list, the list of
people we’ve transgressed somehow. As Abdullah, the twinkly-eyed Muslim
scholar in A Most Wanted Man, puts it: “The Americans are worse than you
British but they have an excuse . . . their excuse is ignorance. They don’t
know what they’re doing is wrong. But you English know very well. You have
known it a long time. And you do it all the same.”
Le Carré says: “We are very quick to forget, and also to assume that others
will forget as well. But of course they don’t forget.”
And the concomitant notion is that in the not forgetting, new wars are born.
The battles of today are informed, if not actually determined, by the
atrocities of yesterday. The Muslim world treats us with suspicion, le Carré
argues, with some good reason, because of what we have done in the past.
Soon the television crews and the foreign journalists will be beating a
similarly laborious path to his front door, and welcomed with gallant
hospitality - what with the publication of A Most Wanted Man and the film
already under way. He will be busy these next few weeks: you will be seeing
a lot of him.
It is 45 years since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which made his name,
and le Carré is now in his 77th year. He does not bridle at being considered
a “genre writer” - his often terse and chilly prose is rightly well
regarded, in any case. And he points out that his last big success, The
Constant Gardener, did not have a spy in it at any point. “Nobody noticed
that,” he says, chuckling.
One thing is for sure - he will not win the Man Booker prize this year, or the
next. That’s because he forbids his books from being considered for the
idiotic award, disliking the notion that writers should judge other writers.
Given the selection of this year’s short-list - even more banal than before -
one supposes that this was a wise move. That old enemy Salman Rushdie is the
archetypal winner of the Booker, a different kind of writer altogether and
certainly not a better one. Le Carré has no use for such baubles; he is his
own man and, you suspect, has all the acclaim he needs anyway.
I wish he would treat the Americans with the understanding and leniency that
he shows to Muslim fundamentalists, but there is something to be said for
such a usually clinical and dispassionate writer allowing passion to get the
better of him every so often.
No British fiction writer - and precious few worldwide - has dealt with
contemporary political events with such acuity and imagination as le Carré:
out there by the Atlantic, with the peregrines darting back and forth and
the night drawing in, he is still in a league of his own.
John le Carré will speak at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, on October 1 at
8pm. For further details call 0871 663 2509
