Le Carre's moral compass

The perfect metaphor for the moral ambiguities that Le Carre explores is caught in Smiley's relationship with his wife, Lady Anne

In 2011, one of the most formidable living novelists in the English language was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, awarded every two years for lifetime contribution to fiction. John le Carré, whose real name is David Cornwell, issued a statement saying, “I am enormously flattered to be named as a finalist of the 2011 Man Booker International prize. However, I do not compete for literary prizes and have therefore asked for my name to be withdrawn.”

But Le Carré’s finally got his award. He’s been given the Olof Palme Prize, instituted in 1987, which is given for outstanding achievements “in any of the areas of anti-racism, human rights, international understanding, peace and common security”. Le Carré is the 33rd recipient of the award, but only the fourth writer to get it. The three writers to get the award before him were playwright and political dissident Václav Havel (1989), who went on to become president of Czechoslovakia, Danish novelist Carsten Jensen (2009) and the Italian journalist and author of Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano (2011).

That Le Carré is one of the greatest living British novelists ought not to be in doubt. Over a writing career spanning almost four decades, he has written 25 novels, beginning with A Call for the Dead (1961) and running up to Agent Running in the Field (2019). In between, he’s written short stories and non-fiction collections, the latest of which is The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life (2016). Almost all of Le Carré’s novels are in the espionage fiction genre, save his second novel, A Murder of Quality (1962), which was a crime novel, and his sixth, The Naïve and Sentimental Lover (1971), which defies classification.

If you’re looking to pigeonhole, Le Carré was primarily an espionage novelist. He made his reputation with his third novel, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1963). Le Carré’s early novels were set against the backdrop of the Cold War — from Call for the Dead to The Secret Pilgrim (1990), his 13th novel. If anyone had even remotely feared that with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War, Le Carré’ would run out of themes and issues to engage him, they could not have been more in error. Le Carré began his post-Cold War career with a stunning debut, The Night Manager (1993), the story of an undercover intelligence agent infiltrating the inner circle of an arms dealer to eventually destroy him.

Since then Le Carré has taken on the pharmaceutical industry in The Constant Gardener (2001); the devastation of the Congo by big finance in The Mission Song (2006); the war against and destruction of Chechnya in Our Game (1995); and the horrors of the “War on Terror” in A Most Wanted Man (2008). In all, Le Carré has written 12 novels since the end of the Cold War, though he returns to that era in 24th novel, A Legacy of Spies (2017).

Many concerns and engagements interweave in Le Carré’s work. Two of the important concerns are exploring moral ambiguities using espionage almost as a metaphor. These moral ambiguities play out in arenas ranging from patriotism, an individual’s relationship with the imagined community we call a “people”, or ‘nation’, to an individual’s relationship with other individuals. This concern is embedded in a search, I believe, for a bedrock of humanism in which to anchor human existence.

The character Le Carré has chosen to be the vessel of both these themes is George Smiley, the master spy who is unlike any spy in popular imagining or fiction — a seemingly lost, utterly nondescript and donnish man. But Smiley, the protagonist of the classic Smiley trilogy — Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honourable Schoolboy; and Smiley’s People — has a moral compass that rarely betrays him even as he goes about his business without compunction.

The perfect metaphor for the moral ambiguities that Le Carré explores is caught in Smiley’s relationship with his wife, Lady Anne, who is serially adulterous, leaving him often and returning equally often, though fleetingly. But Lady Anne’s adulterous betrayals never shake Smiley’s belief in her, not even when she has a relationship with his colleague Bill Haydon, who, as part of a coterie within the “Circus”, the British Secret Service, works towards and succeeds in supplanting Smiley as number two in the service.

It is during Haydon’s time in charge that the service discovers it has been infiltrated by a “mole”— a double agent. Smiley, out of favour by then, nevertheless relentlessly pursues the mole, who turns out to be Haydon himself. Just as Smiley refuses to judge his wife, he refuses to judge the flamboyant Haydon, at one time a close friend, though he spares no effort to run him down to earth. Le Carré’s superimposition of these two betrayals and Smiley’s reaction to them seem to betoken the author’s own refusal to be drawn too easily into judgments.
 

In his Cold War novels, especially, Le Carré gestures at moral equivalences between the East and West in terms of betrayals and belonging that make it difficult for us to hold on to conventional positions predicated on ideas of patriotisms and us-and-them identities. It is here, perhaps, that he has contributed immeasurably to “international understanding, peace and common security”.

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