English novelist David Cornwell, who wrote under the pen name John le Carré, and who was known for his Cold War espionage novels, died of pneumonia on Saturday night (12/12), at age 89.
He had worked as an intelligence agent for both MI5 and MI6 during the 1950s and 1960s; his career in espionage ended in 1964, after his identity was compromised by double agent Kim Philby.
Oh dear… another one. 
Damn. Rest in peace.
Only book of his I’ve read was “The Spy Who Came In From The Cold,” and…um…I didn’t much like it. (Didn’t care for the movie, either.) His ethic seemed to be “both sides are corrupt, to the degree of absolute depravity,” which I can’t reconcile with the fairly bright good of democracy fighting against the blatant evil of Stalinism. The book was difficult to read.
Still, he was wildly successful, with a long and extremely productive career. So hats off to the memory!
In this longer BBC obituary for le Carré, they mention exactly that aspect of that novel (which seems to have been a general hallmark of his work):
Ah, yes, I saw that. I really enjoyed his books and had read all but the most recent, and some of the older ones many many times.
One thing I liked a lot was that he didn’t explain everything, so that yes, you felt at sea sometimes, but it also felt like you were learning along with the protagonist.
RIP to a terrific author.
Good, I’m not alone. I found it crushingly boring, but that was many, many years ago. Perhaps I’d like it better now.
Spycatcher: Wright, Peter: Amazon.com.au: Books covers some of the same material (the internal poitics, not the external stuff), in an un-authorized version.
When I read le Carre’, I read that implicit stuff about being a member of the right clubs, knowing the right people, and having gone to the right school, as just part of the story. No, it turns out he was just being polite about it. Because he was being allowed to publish, because he’d been to the right school, knew the right people, and was the right kind of man.
Peter Wright didn’t go to the right school, and reading him you realize that le Carre’ was still telling just enough of the truth to advance his own interests. He was still one of his own characters.
RIP, John. I liked a lot of his books but not most of his more recent stuff.
Damn. He’s the best espionage author I ever read, but I could only take one of his books every five years or so. Their plots tend to be:
Every time I finished one of his books, I wanted to go hide under the bed.
He was one of the greatest writers in English of the last century. His major themes weren’t political, but personal: the construction of identity through self deception and the toll that takes on the soul. The impossibility of ever fully knowing yourself, let alone anyone else. He had a melancholy view of human existence, but his. insights were universal and poetically expressed.
Excellent long article:
I’ve only ever read his The Tailor of Panama and The Night Manager, and I’m just starting The Little Drummer Girl. Based on the comments in this thread, I suspect the first two on this list, at least, are atypical of his more regular/earlier output. I particularly enjoyed The Tailor of Panama, which I think is an original idea (I won’t say what that original, central idea is, as it would be a massive spoiler). Those who don’t get on with his other work may like to try this one. I suppose it is still a bit dystopian.
A Perfect Spy is widely regarded as his best novel.
His last novel was published in 2019, Agent Running in the Field.
I haven’t read it, but apparently he didn’t mince his words about current politics.
According to a review, he called Brexit an “unmitigated clusterfuck” and an “act of self-immolation in which the British public is being marched over a cliff by a bunch of rich, elitist carpetbaggers posing as men of the people”. Boris Johnson is a “fucking Etonian narcissistic elitist without a decent conviction in his body bar his own advancement”.
Trump is described as “Putin’s shithouse cleaner”.
He memorably said, “Now we have defeated communism, we are going to have to set about defeating capitalism.”
That’s not at all my experience with his books. He had other themes, but his loathing of the powers that be, and his pessimism that they can be defeated, are central to the books of his that I’ve read.
I’ve read pretty much all his spy output and think accolades about him being one of the finest post-war writers in English are merited.
He does not make it easy for the reader - patriots are fools or are taken advantage of, selfishness is not far from the surface, plotting is intricate. Taken together, its an epic chronicle set in the middle of European history covering more than half a century.
I can’t really think of any of his books that have the plot, which ones are you thinking about?
Not to speak for LHOD, but allowing a little leeway in “all the good guys” getting murdered, it seems pretty fair for: Constant Gardner; Night Manager; Absolute Friends; Mission Song
(I realise it doesn’t make a lot of sense to spoiler titles, because it gives the whole game away, but it seems worse to just leave them in plaintext, so to speak. Click at your own risk, I guess.)
These are mid-to late- Le Carrés. TSPWCIFTC has a similar plot except
The people who kill everyone and cover it all up are geopoiltically speaking, the good guys and are not, in fact, in it for a profit
In TTSS and its sequels the good guys win more or less but the main theme is that Britain’s security services are staffed by traitors, time-servers, hatchet-men, pocket-liners and other moral detritus who spend as much, if not more time, maneuvering the few capable people out a job as they do actually safeguarding the realm.
The general theme of Le Carré is something like; Espionage is a filthy business and the few people who enter it with ideals and a strong moral core end up disillusioned, dismissed or dead while lesser men* triumph by abusing power and status for their own ends.
*Pretty sure it is always men, and not by accident.
My objections are that the good guys are only occasionally murdered, the good guys usually win (though I agree it inevitably has some bitter flavor), and also the bad guys rarely (never?) reap tidy profits.
I agree there is much squalidness, and the protagonist is often somewhat unlikable, but also, there are veins of moral strength running through it.
I haven’t read the whole canon by any stretch, but my sense is that your take sums up the earlier works whereas LHOD’s covers the later period. Certainly I can think of two from my list where the good guys are murdered, and two - it might be three but I’d have to check - where the bad guys profit (the overlap covers one.) Moral strength in these books exists not to win a small but vital victory, but to be beaten down in return for at best a consolation prize.
I’ve read them all (inluding “The Naive and Sentimental Lover”) and love them all. Love Le Carre’s British perspective on what is effectively my own British lifetime.
Sorry, though:
No, its a rip-off of Graham Greene. JLC himself called it an ‘homage’ to “Our Man in Havana”. Sorry for the spoiler. readers.