Le Carré (1931-2020) saw himself that way, a bohemian tinkerer and a tinkering bohemian. His father, Ronald Cornwell, was a shady West Country con artist and rake whose sins Le Carré was eager to atone for and feared to repeat. Le Carré wrote of the great German playwrights (Schiller, Goethe, Kleist, Büchner): ‘I was as much affected by their classical austerity as by their neurotic excesses. The trick, it seemed to me, was to disguise one with the other.” And so David Cornwell of Dorset became John le Carré, who remained not so secretly John the Square.
The product of this clever, secretive, melancholic mind is a body of work that is extraordinary in its breadth, consistency, generosity and wit – if not always its variety. Familiar characters come and go under new names. Crooked fathers and troubled sons abound, as do apathetic, listless wives and love affairs with foreign beauties. These incidental acts are elevated by its themes (loyalty, betrayal, nostalgia, belonging, brotherhood, and patriotism), by its plots, and by its verdicts.
And of course by George Smiley. Le Carré’s donnish, bespectacled hero arrives in his first novel, “Call for the Dead” (1961). Brilliant and sleazy, savvy but cuckolded, Smiley is le Carré’s caustic answer to James Bond. He appears in nine novels; he is the star of five. People miss him when he’s not there. But for those times when Smiley is off the page reading German literature in a stuffy study in Cornwall, other unforgettable characters fill his (ugly, practical) shoes. My favorites – Magnus Pym, Jack Brotherhood, Richard Roper, Barley Blair – are fixated with sonorous, Dickensian names that stick in your head long after you’ve finished their stories.
This is all to say that le Carré wrote many good books, and a handful of great ones. A spy must learn to distinguish signal from noise. Here are his best works.
