Le Carré’s Cold War masterpieces didn’t tell the whole story
IT’S depressing, on several fronts, to read the BBC website headline “John le Carré: Espionage writer dies age 89”, though not nearly as depressing as discovering that, halfway down the piece, they thought it necessary to add a section with the subhead “What was the Cold War?”
But I’m not going to claim “le Carré was much more than just a spy novelist”, because that’s just as dismissive as the implication that genre fiction is different from literary fiction. In 2013 Ian Mcewan, describing le Carré as “perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the twentieth century in Britain”, said that he had “easily burst out of being a genre writer”; the kind of self-absorbed judgment that could only be made by someone who writes soi-disant “literary” fiction.
Mcewan went on to say that le Carré should have won the Booker prize long ago, as if that were the be all and end all of literary merit. One reason why he didn’t is that le Carré refused to allow his publishers to enter his work in literary competitions, just as he turned down the offer of a CBE and a knighthood, both of which he richly deserved.
Trying to judge the “most significant” writer of the past 50 years is about as sensible as attempting to identify the best pop album. And there’s a good case for David Mamet’s view that most of the best writers in that period have been “genre” ones, anyway.
John le Carré was a subtle and sophisticated writer who happened also to be a very successful one, and his books were often as much about personal betrayals and deceptions as they were about political ones. In his books, adultery in Hampstead, perennial subject matter of the “literary” novel, gets nearly as much attention as Estonian generals who get murdered there.
But if one of le Carré’s greatest strengths as a writer is his ability to conjure up an atmosphere of moral ambiguity, it also indicates an awkward aspect of his work when it is considered as a commentary on post-war politics. Le Carré said himself that his third novel and first great success, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, was approved by the secret service vetting procedure because it was “sheer fiction from start to finish”.
The thing that makes it an effective novel – the fact that the intelligence agencies of both sides in the Cold
War behave very similarly, which is to say badly, and without much concern for human costs – is, however, a terrible distortion of the rights and wrongs of the Cold War itself. It may be that MI5 and MI6, to both of which David Cornwell (le Carré’s real name) was recruited, were as unscrupulous and devious as they are portrayed in the novel, but there is no doubt now, and nor was there at the time, that they were on the right side.
The danger with le Carré’s books is that – because of the ambiguity which makes for such good stories – they may leave the impression that there was some kind of moral equivalence between the East and West. As with Graham Greene, le Carré’s own political views – which seem to have been of an unexceptionally centrist nature, with a generous side helping of anti-americanism – do nothing to diminish the quality of his writing. If you can’t like books, or any other works of art, that have different politics from your own, you’re the one who’s missing out, as well as being a bit silly.
But when writers take political stances that are almost cartoonishly polemical – like the work of Ayn Rand, or of Robert Tressell – it tends to make them less effective. Le Carré’s least satisfactory work, for my money, is when he’s at his angriest and most strident – the hatred of the US in Absolute Friends and the paranoid depiction of corporations in The Constant Gardener veer towards the unhinged. It’s odd that someone who made his name with brilliant depictions of moral grey areas should switch to fulminating with all the demented zeal of AC Grayling banging on about Brexit.
Le Carré’s cynical view of big business, or the US or the hypocrisy of the British establishment is all part and parcel of his appeal, but while in his earlier work it receives oblique expression through the differing, frequently unreliable, stances of his characters, in some of his later work it is merely simplistic and hectoring.
Like plenty of other people, he got very cross with President George W Bush and Tony Blair, which is fair enough. But in doing so, he lurched into a black-and-white caricature of their wickedness much more vehement than anything he ever directed at murderous dictators like Walter Ulbricht or Erich Honecker.
Perhaps it was his background in the Foreign Office. Just as George Orwell identified one of the chief characteristics of the British intellectual Left as being an inclination always to find fault with their own country, so too the Foreign Office has always seemed to be stuffed with people deeply unenthusiastic about the UK or, for that matter, the West in general. It is the most obvious example of Robert Conquest’s third law of politics, which is that “the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies”.
One of the reasons why people seem willing to take the political opinions of actors, musicians, and writers seriously is that the arts are a field in which the best practitioners convince us that they understand the motivations of all sorts of different kinds of people.
Le Carré did that so brilliantly and convincingly that the language of espionage he came up with for his novels was later adopted by the security services themselves. He seems, for example, to have invented the term “mole” for a double agent, and George Smiley is a character who will surely endure for as long as Miss Marple, Maigret or James Bond. But while the world in which le Carré’s spies operate is more plausible and much better written than Ian Fleming’s, it’s still as fictitious.
MI5 and MI6 may have been as devious as they are portrayed, but there is no doubt they were on the right side