THE PRESCIENT SPYMASTER
Even decades ago, le Carré knew old order was changing, Jamie Portman writes.
When the Soviet Union collapsed three decades ago, there were those in the literary world who wondered about the future of John le Carré.
He had become the commanding figure in spy literature and a defining presence in Cold War fiction thanks to novels including The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
But now the Cold War was over, le Carré — whose real name was David Cornwell — was 59 and the grey, murky world he wrote about so brilliantly had no further reason to exist in fictional form.
Or so some thought.
Thirty years ago, le Carré sat down with reporters in Los Angeles to talk about the new film version of his novel The Russian House. But he had something else on his mind, as well — the future of the spy novel.
“I was sick of the Cold War and wanted it to finish,” he confessed. “I felt that as a novelist I was tied into something I'd exhausted.” But that didn't mean the genre was dead. He argued that recent dramatic changes in history had opened up a new range of opportunities — a range that had not existed since the 1930s when le Carré's great predecessor in the genre, Eric Ambler, was exploring a Byzantine world of international intrigue.
And le Carré himself had a new novel, The Secret Pilgrim, coming out and his most famous fictional creation, spymaster George Smiley, was being brought out of retirement. Its narrative framework would be Smiley's remarks at a “pass-out” ceremony for young people who had been training for the British secret service. The writer explained his purpose this way: “The whole story unfolds within the text of his address ... so it's both a look back and a look forward … a memory piece that looks ahead into the uncertainty of a world that's no longer stretched tight by the East-west conflict.”
When this Postmedia journalist asked the craggily charismatic author what issues were now seizing his attention, his reply was prompt — “the West's identity problem.
“With the Cold War, we have had a licensed role as custodians of democracy. Anything we did in the name of capitalism justified what we did.”
But in that new novel, he would have Smiley warning his young listeners that things were no longer that simple. “He says that now we have beaten Communism, we have to take on capitalism as well, that there are new enemies of a far more elusive sort.”
Those remain controversial thoughts. But not surprising from a from a man who would go on to write The Constant Gardener, a savage attack on the international pharmaceutical industry. Meanwhile much of what le Carré said to Postmedia in December 1990, has an eerie prescience when we look back on those words three decades later.
“Forget the Cold War,” he said. “Now we want to know what Saddam Hussein is up to. We want to know what the Israelis are up to. We want to know what half the world is up to!
“When you discover that the Soviet monolith is no longer what it once was, the problem of observing its future is far more complicated. We have to know now what the Armenians are going to do, what the Lithuanians, the Georgians, the Ukrainians are thinking. Each provides a separate problem,” le Carré said, “so it's boom time for intelligence writers around the world.
“The whole of the future is as yet unwritten, whereas during the Cold War it seemed pre-written. So it's back to the Ambler era. I think the spy story's going to be a damn sight more fun in the future. We lazy writers are going to have to pack our bags and go to where the new action is and start thinking a little more realistically about the way it's changing.”
And, as he was leaving the room, a parting shot. “Watch out for China.”
In the final third of his life, le Carré continued to address such issues in more than a dozen more bestsellers.
He was still at it before his death in Cornwall last Saturday at the age of 89.