Can you keep a secret?

John le Carré’s cagey, clever, score-settling memoir is very revealing – in ways he never intended. Gaby Wood reports ‘But what’s the truth? What’s memory,’ asks le Carré – twice

In the final pages of The Pigeon Tunnel – a book generally understood to be his memoir – John le Carré tells a story about a green Chubb safe. When the Secret Service was due to move to Lambeth in 1964, it was agreed that the safe built into the Chief ’s private office must be opened. No one had the key. No surviving Chief had ever looked inside it. The person who had installed it was one of the founders of Bletchley Park: “Heaven alone knew what wasn’t in that green safe,” le Carré writes. The Service burglar picks the lock. The safe is empty.

Now assumed to be a decoy, it is prised from the wall. Behind it is a pair of trousers once worn by Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess. A handwritten inscription reads: “Please analyse because may give an idea of the state of the German textile industry”.

The Pigeon Tunnel isn’t as bathetic as that story, but it is the same kind of joke. “These are true stories told from memory,” he writes by way of introduction, “to which you are entitled to ask, what is truth, and what is memory to a creative writer in what we may delicately call the evening of his life?” The notion of a decoy is always present. Le Carré – or David Cornwell, as he is really called – is now 84, and the message of his first work of autobiographical non-fiction is: You’ve waited this long to hear from me; what makes you think I can be trusted?

Le Carré began writing novels when he was a spy and continued to mine that territory, though his official career in the secret service lasted no more than five years. (He resigned in 1964, after the publication of his first bestseller, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He was 33.) Ever since, people have assumed his work must have continued in some shadier capacity, but only, perhaps, because his novels were so convincing. As le Carré explains here, when he denies any continued employment as a spy, the inevitable response is: Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?

The reader who approaches this book as a seeker of the hidden may begin to feel a bit silly. If le Carré knew more about the KGB than his fictional character George Smiley did, he wouldn’t tell us – and in any case there’s no reason to suppose he does. He is a novelist. What he does know is how to keep his readers in suspense.

Readers of le Carré’s oeuvre will be intrigued to know about the real people on whom characters or plot points were based in TheHonourable Schoolboy, A Most Wanted Man, Single and Single, The Constant Gardener and The Little Drummer Girl. Dima in Our Kind of Traitor was based on a real Dima, but “in name only”. And there’s a great story about this principle in reverse – a character he has made up appears to him in real life, and gets fleshed out in a later novel.

Le Carré’s voice – that wry parcel of the familiar and the formal, always attuned to pace – is gripping whatever the tale, and his eye for human detail is as sharp in fact as it is in fiction (the talcum-powder smell of Yasser Arafat’s beard; a Russian diplomat’s “spongy hand”). He is magnificent on Germany in particular: the cumulative portrait of its post-war contradictions is drawn from a position of scholarship and love. And he seems to be having most fun when portraying his interlocutors in amused free indirect speech: the “classless” carpetbagger, the slurred war correspondent, the over-eager Russian cellist. A natural writer of novels, le Carré is at his best when showing his hand.

The book is governed by a sense of doubleness. “Spying was forced on me from birth,” le Carré writes, and his double lives are not always the obvious ones. His “indecently fluent” German perhaps says more about the British establishment life he slipped out of when he was young. Sometimes, when he’s afraid, le Carré uses his fictional characters for protection. Much as the photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White was relieved to be able to put a camera between herself and the horrors of the concentration camps, le Carré, when conducting research in war zones, made his notes in character. Along the Mekong river, he was the bold reporter Jerry Westerby of The Honourable Schoolboy; among members of the PLO he was Charlie, the British actress in The Little Drummer Girl.

A swift and over-decorous apology to his wives is all we get of his extra-marital affairs – and, indeed, more or less all we get of any reference to family life. (Le Carré has four sons.) “I don’t think that writers have much centre, really,” le Carré told George Plimpton when he interviewed him for The Paris Review years ago. “I feel much more like an actor looking for a part.” Asked how his wife felt about that, he replied, “It’s better than being married to one person.”

“But what’s the truth? What’s memory?” le Carré writes again towards the end. “We should find another name for the way we see past events that are still alive in us.” The chapter in question is the best – a heartbreaking account of Ronnie, his violent con man father, and Olive, the mother who abandoned him. The scene le Carré is recalling is one in which he waves at his father from outside the walls of a prison. “Daddy! Daddy!” he calls out, as he holds his mother’s gloved hand.

According to his father – the model for Rick Rym in A Perfect Spy – this never happened: “Sheer invention from start to finish, son”. But the invention or memory or whatever it was proved formative. Le Carré explains that he has put the chapter about his father at the end because, “much as he would like to, I didn’t want him elbowing his way to the top of the bill”.

It might have helped to read about Ronnie and Olive earlier. Le Carré refers at one point to someone with whom “shrinks would have had a field day”, and he is no doubt eager to avoid that fate for himself. But until we get to his childhood, The Pigeon Tunnel is revealing in ways he may not mean it to be.

We learn that when he comes “face to face with people of power”, his “critical faculties go out of the window”. As if to prove it, a number of chapters simply relate brushes with greatness that le Carré the novelist, rather than the autobiographer, would have done something with. Heads of state are “kind” about his work. A Nobel Prize-winner, he discovers, has never read his books. More than one man is referred to as a “knight of the realm”. Meals are “private dinners” in Hampstead (is there a different kind of dinner one can have in one’s own home?). He has a petty score to settle with Malcolm Rifkind. At one point he refers to “views that, insofar as I have any, fly directly in the face of my own”. If readers remember that remark by the end of the book, they may be perplexed by its disingenuousness. Le Carré has plenty of views, and despite his charm, he can sometimes come