Author’s books painted gritty portraits of Cold War spies
LONDON — John le Carré, whose exquisitely nuanced, intricately plotted Cold War thrillers elevated the spy novel to high art by presenting both Western and Soviet spies as morally compromised cogs in a rotten system full of treachery, betrayal and personal tragedy, has died Cornwall at 89.
His death Saturday was confirmed Sunday by his literary agency, the Curtis Brown Group.
Before le Carré published his bestselling 1963 novel “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” which Graham Green called “the best spy story I have ever read,” the fictional model for the modern British spy was Ian Fleming’s James Bond — suave, urbane, devoted to queen and country.
With his impeccable talent for getting out of trouble while getting women into bed, Bond fed the myth of spying as a glamorous, exciting romp.
Le Carré — the pen name of David Cornwell — upended that notion with books that portrayed British intelligence operations as cesspools of ambiguity in which right and wrong are too close to call and in which it’s rarely obvious whether the ends justify the means.
Led by his greatest creation, the plump, ill-dressed, unhappy, brilliant, relentless George Smi
ley, le Carré’s spies are lonely, disillusioned men whose work is driven by budget troubles, bureaucratic power plays and the opaque machinations of politi
cians — men who are as likely to be betrayed by colleagues and lovers as by the enemy.
Smiley has a counterpart in the Russian master spy Karla, his op
posite in ideology but equal in almost all else, an opponent he studies intimately.
The end of “Smiley’s People,” the last in a series known as the
Karla Trilogy, brings them together in a stunning denouement that is as much about human frailty and the deep loss that comes with winning as it is about anything.
“Thematically, le Carré’s true subject is not spying,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in the New Yorker magazine in 1999. “It is the endlessly deceptive maze of human relations: the betrayal that is a kind of love, the lie that is a sort of truth, good men serving bad causes and bad men serving good.”
Some critics took le Carré’s message to be that the two systems, East and West, were moral equivalents, both equally bad. But he didn’t believe that.
“There is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state,” he told an interviewer, referring to his own work as a spy in the 1950s and early ’60s.
Le Carré refused to allow his books to be entered for literary prizes. But many critics considered his books literature of the first rank.
“I think he has easily burst out of being a genre writer and will be remembered as perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain,” author Ian McEwan told the British newspaper Telegraph in 2013. Le Carré, he added, has “charted our decline and recorded the nature of our bureaucracies like no one else has.”