A Writer For Our Time: Why John le Carré’s Work Remains More Essential Than Ever

Sometimes a great writer sneaks up on you. You’ve known his name for years, seen shelves of his paperbacks in every bookstore, watched adaptations of his novels for the screen. But you’ve always found reasons to leave him on the periphery: his historical moment has passed; he’s too mannered, too British, too middlebrow; and anyway you’re seeking out literature, not genre fiction. Then your shield cracks.

Perhaps you’re on vacation with your family in the Sierra Nevada. It’s unseasonably hot in early summer. You’ve hiked all day over rugged terrain, cooked dinner, drunk a third pilsner. Now darkness has fallen, your wife and children have gone to bed, and in the dull light of the cabin’s main room the books you’ve brought—To the Lighthouse, say, and a collection of Chekov’s stories—suddenly seem daunting.

On a side table, between a boxed jigsaw puzzle and a water-damaged guide to the region’s trails, stand a few volumes that others have left. None of the titles surprise you. There are books by Lee Child, Barbara Kingsolver, and Stephen King, along with what’s probably John le Carré’s most famous novel, the one you’d name if you were answering a trivia question: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. You pick it up, sit in the armchair, and begin to read.

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The novel, le Carré’s third, is a short book comprised of short chapters. Its action begins and ends in frozen darkness at the Berlin Wall. The barrier not only separates two empires and ideologies, but cleaves the psyches of the characters themselves. They pass through checkpoints on forged papers, while guards watch from the towers with guns drawn. Anyone who doesn’t wear a uniform speaks in a whisper. The dialogue is terse, the pace relentless. Double-crossers betray double-crossers, conspiracies ripen until vaster conspiracies subsume them, and the bonds of love and friendship drag the central and most admirable characters into disaster.

Le Carré evokes the curdled atmosphere of 1960s Berlin and London so convincingly—justified paranoia, tawdry nightlife, terrible weather—that you emerge from his pages longing for clear skies and a glass of freshly-squeezed orange juice. The book is a spy novel in same way that 2666 is a noir or Pride and Prejudice a romance. It demonstrates once again that there is no enduring divide between genre and literary fiction, or higher and lower literary forms. There are only good novels and weaker ones, in any tradition. And when you encounter a great book, you hold it close.

Le Carré’s most enduring character, the owlish and unfailingly polite intelligence officer George Smiley, plays only a minor role here. He comes to the fore in the other Cold War novels. His appearance and mannerisms remain constant over the decades, while historical events—the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War—sweep on. He hardly ages, wears expensive but ill-fitting clothes, wipes his glasses with his tie, and, during his periodic retirements from government service, studies Seventeenth-Century German poets. His wife, who occupies a higher social station, conducts notorious affairs, but Smiley’s affection for her persists.

In le Carré’s second novel, A Murder of Quality, Smiley plays the gentleman detective, investigating a boarding-school murder with the courage and tact of a latter-day Father Brown. He seems immune to the class prejudice that infects the teachers and administrators who run the place, acts decisively, and emerges from the pages unstained by the sordid events he uncovers. But his character takes on a more troubled cast in the espionage novels proper. You begin to wonder whether his personal restraint conceals a ruthless streak.

In The Looking Glass War, the author’s fourth book, the Circus (le Carré’s version of MI6, Britain’s foreign intelligence agency) dispatches Smiley to West Germany to clean up another outfit’s botched operation. A military intelligence unit has lost an operative over the border. Extricating him is impossible, or would at least be embarrassing to the British government. Smiley orders the staffers to pack up the equipment, leave the farmhouse they’ve commandeered, and abandon their man to the East German police. The agent will face interrogation, trial, and a lonely execution in a foreign land, but at least, on Smiley’s side, men of rank have sidestepped a public scandal.

The pattern recurs. Agents die in the field; bureaucrats toast their memory over glasses of port. You’re always happy when Smiley shows up in the books—you love the contrast between his shambling appearance and the precision of his intellect, and appreciate his mastery of the tools of his trade (dead drops, coded messages, considered flattery)—but you can’t ignore that he’s up to his neck in a dirty business. After all, every spy traffics in manipulation and deceit. Smiley never acts for personal gain (though his skills do earn him the directorship of the Circus, by the time of 1977’s The Honourable Schoolboy). He is concerned only with the interests of the nation and bureaucracy to which he belongs. Still, what are those interests? Who, ultimately, does Smiley serve?

Rarely does the reader sense that the Circus’s operations will tip the balance of power: the agency is an enfeebled auxiliary to the CIA; Britain, a client (at best) of the United States. Le Carré is not writing of ticking time bombs or plots to overthrow democracy, but of minor skirmishes behind the lines. Smiley turns a foreign agent, unmasks a mole, bolsters the Circus in the eyes of government ministers. He wins his battles; the Cold War grinds on.

Read in order, the novels recount an unrelenting sequence of moral compromise, betrayal, and murder. Smiley increasingly seems weighted by sadness—the sadness, perhaps, of a man who cannot shake his own doubt. Even when he triumphs over Karla, his brilliant Soviet adversary, in the 1979 novel Smiley’s People, he exits on an ambivalent, rather than triumphal note. So are the novels, in the end, tragedies—narratives of the private toll of service in a noble struggle? Or do they record an angrier and less exalted vision of suffering? What, in short, were all those deaths for?

Reviewers in the first half of le Carré’s career identified him as a conservative of a now-vanished kind: a man suspicious of wealth and bemused by ideology, whose writing is suffused with nostalgia for forms of British life that were already waning before Thatcher, privatization, and the bankers finished them off. More broadly, critics have described spy fiction as an inherently conservative genre, for the spy’s role is to guard the existing order against those who would subvert it. But such readings can hardly account for the urgency, and occasional stridency, of le Carré’s post-Cold War novels. Whereas Smiley is uneasy about the intentions of the Circus’s CIA cousins, le Carré’s later protagonists express their fury at the injustice of an American-dominated global order. As Smiley himself admits in The Secret Pilgrim (1990), “the right side lost, but the wrong side won.”

Often, American intelligence officers serve as the literal villains of the post-Cold War books. In Absolute Friends (2003), a CIA officer turned private contractor invents a terrorist plot, and frames and murders a retired British agent, in a scheme to buttress German government support for George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror.”  In 2008’s A Most Wanted Man, the CIA snatches an innocent Chechen refugee from the streets of Hamburg to interrogate (and presumably torture) him in a secret prison. Le Carré takes on gun-runners (The Night Manager, 1993), money launderers (Single & Single, 1999), pharmaceutical behemoths (The Constant Gardener, 2001), and Russian oligarchs (Agent Running in the Field, 2019). He writes against state violence and private greed. His protagonists assert a lonely humanism, before power sweeps them away.

Critics haven’t been as kind to these later novels. They are longer, less disciplined, and more polemical than the Cold War classics, the argument goes. Take Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review of Absolute Friends. The novel is “ham-handed and didactic,” she writes, becoming, by its concluding sections, “a clumsy, hectoring, conspiracy-minded message-novel meant to drive home the argument that American imperialism poses a grave danger to the new world order.”

But is the critique fair? Le Carré’s description of CIA-style abductions, where massed operatives overwhelm their target, bind his hands, and dress him in black goggles and headphones engineered to block all sight and sound of the outside world, derives from contemporary journalistic accounts. We know, from later reporting, that FBI informants baited vulnerable Americans into participating in concocted terrorist plots in the years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, that the NSA illegally sought to sweep up all domestic and foreign communications through dragnet surveillance, and that the CIA tortured and murdered suspected terrorists, including innocent men, at its black sites. Meanwhile the toll of civilian dead, from American or American-funded wars in Iraq and across the greater Middle East, now stretches into the many hundreds of thousands.

Under the present administration, the American government no longer even invokes the language of universal human rights. Our president threatens to take what he wants, including foreign territory and treasure, with brute force. It’s difficult to charge a writer with clumsiness or conspiratorial thinking when reality has since demonstrated that there is no lower limit to our degradation.

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I’ve lived more than half my life in the United States, and English is my native language, but I’ve sometimes had the sense—while reading the news, or discussing politics or foreign affairs with friends—that others are speaking in tongues. Official propaganda, repeated often enough, infects both journalism and private speech. For years at a stretch, certain words and phrases disappear from polite discourse: “kidnapping,” “torture,” “murder,” “war crime,” “genocide.” New locutions— “extraordinary rendition,” “enhanced interrogation,” “targeting,” “collateral damage,” “precision strikes”—abruptly replace them. There are writers who participate in that public erasure, and others who stand against it. Le Carré belongs to the second group.

Read him from the beginning and you discover a novelist who wrote himself toward ever more terrifying truths. His novels explore the moral squalor of all wars, justified or not. His most admirable characters rebel against the bureaucratic and corporate systems that wield human beings as tools. He is not an idealist—he knows these men and women are doomed—but an existentialist who dramatizes the necessity of individual struggle. He is a spy novelist for whom espionage itself becomes a social poison. Although he writes novels of the exterior, of historical event rather than human memory and desire, his plots reveal much about the state of our souls. His body of work, sixty years in the making, shows the world as it is.

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The Snares by Rav Grewal-Kök is available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.