Exploring ambivalence

As an "espionage" novelist, le Carre broke what may be called the Ian Fleming mould

Born in October 1931, John le Carré passed away on 12 December. In mufti, le Carré was David Cornwell, beginning his professional life as a British intelligence officer who parlayed his experiences into a body of literary work that has few parallels in post-war British fiction.

Though le Carré’s reputation as one of the pre-eminent post-war British novelists is now secure, the distinction too often made between “literary” fiction and “genre” fiction has led, unconscionably, to his pigeon-holing as an espionage novelist. He was clearly much more than that.

As an “espionage” novelist, le Carré broke what may be called the Ian Fleming mould. Preceded by a handful of other writers — Helen MacInnes (1907-85) and Eric Ambler (1909-1998), for instance — he re-imagined a genre previously known for simplistic political and jingoistic certitudes, and a predilection for mindless “action”. Among the few contemporaries who accompanied him on this journey was Len Deighton (born 1929).

Le Carré’s literary career took off with the publication of his third novel — The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). His two earlier novels — Call for the Dead (1961), an espionage novel, and A Murder of Quality (1962), a crime novel set in a public school — had limited reception. His most endurable literary creation, George Smiley, was a central character in the first two novels, but played a peripheral role in the work that launched him into the big league.

Until the Cold War ended, le Carré’s reputation was dominated by the Smiley trilogy — Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974); The Honourable Schoolboy (1977); and Smiley’s People (1979) — in which the British spymaster crosses the path of his Russian counterpart, Karla, and finally reels him in.

Nevertheless, in the context of the Cold War that le Carré wrote many other classics: Pre-eminently, The Looking Glass War (1965); A Small Town in Germany (1968); and The Perfect Spy (1986). With the end of the Cold War, many may have wondered what le Carré would make of the new world in a literary sense.

As we now know, they need not have bothered. Le Carré wrote some of his finest novels in the post-Cold War era. The Night Manager (1993) dealt with the arms trade; The Constant Gardener (2001) with the delinquencies of the pharmaceuticals industry; Mission Song (2006) with the loot of Africa’s mineral wealth; Our Game (1995) with the war on Chechnya; and A Most Wanted Man (2008) with “extraordinary rendition”.

In all, le Carré wrote 24 novels, of which two — A Murder of Quality and The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971) – were not concerned with espionage. His penultimate book, The Pigeon Tunnel, Stories from My Life (2016) was an episodic memoir. His last book, the espionage novel Agent Running in the Field (2019), was a searing critique of a United Kingdom mired in the politics of ultra-nationalism, writ large in the Brexit project, and its subservient relationship with the US.

In le Carré’s oeuvre, espionage is transformed into a metaphor that is used to dissect and depict the messiness of both public life and private lives. In the Cold War novels, the contending state ideologies of “communism” and liberal democracy are not taken at face value, as are not the state systems of either the West or the Soviet bloc. Critically, le Carré is always driven to question the motives, lives and moral predicaments of the actors in the game of espionage and politics.

Smiley is a good, but not the only, example. In his private life, he is often overcome by an inability and unwillingness to arrive too easily at moral certitudes, which often drives him into a kind of diffidence. In his profession as a spy, too, he is not easily inveigled into passing judgement nor accepting at face value the shibboleths of liberal nationalist ideology peddled by his political masters.

At the same time, though, Smiley is keenly aware of not just his professional duties but the ineluctability of actions and pathways crucial to protecting national security. In the execution of his professional duties, he can be both manipulative and ruthless, despite his ambivalences.

Moral ambivalence and equivalence in both the private and public spheres is also the theme of the semi-autobiographical novel The Perfect Spy, in which le Carré locks the British double agent Magnus Pym and the Czech spy Axel in an uneasy embrace. After Pym disappears and writes a memoir to explain himself, it transpires that he has manipulated himself and people around him in so many ways and for so long that he hardly has a persona that can be grasped.

In a sense, the archaeology of human motives, moral orders, political ideologies and state systems that le Carré unceasingly undertook both subverted and reconstructed. But if readers are ready to undertake a similar archaeological project, they could well discover in his work a steadfast commitment to honest exploration.