Lifting the veil
One should not approach John le Carré’s first extended piece of nonfiction expecting a surfeit of candor. The son of a con man, a former lowranking member of British Intelligence and perhaps the premier novelist of espionage in the past half century, the man born David Cornwell has spent his life trading in obfuscation and make-believe.
He says as much in the introduction to his new memoir, “The Pigeon Tunnel.” “Spying was forced on me from birth much in the way, I suppose, that the sea was forced on C.S. Forester, or India on Paul Scott. Out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theater for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for the reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I’m writing now.”
A semi-authorized biography of le Carré by Adam Sisman was published last year, but readers approaching this new book by the author of “A Perfect Spy” and “Our Kind of Traitor” should not be concerned about overlap. “The Pigeon Tunnel” is anything but a standard “and then this happened to me” autobiography. Instead, the volume presents a series of artfully told anecdotes, grouped thematically rather than chronologically, from an eventful, accomplished and lengthy career.
Even though members of the public and the press presume he has access to some treasure trove of super-secret tradecraft, le Carré has always taken pains to downplay his reputation as a firsthand master of espionage. While he admits that there are aspects of his three years as a young diplomat stationed at the British Embassy in Bonn that he can’t or won’t discuss, he makes clear that his job consisted largely of overseeing the entertainment of visiting dignitaries and escorting groups of Germans to London for cultural exchange. The stories he tells about that time of his life are generally amusing, often insightful but never quite pulse-quickening.
Once the phenomenal success of “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” crests, however, le Carré finds that he can enjoy access to a more elevated range of celebrities, especially as the Cold War wanes. He spends New Year’s Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and is with dissident poet Joseph Brodsky when the former Soviet political prisoner learns he has won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
He meets two former heads of the KGB, as well as dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov. In “The Pigeon Tunnel,” le Carré describes these encounters with his characteristic eye for the telling detail, capturing some of the ambiguities inherent in these outsize personalities.
From the time of his literary breakthrough, le Carré has enjoyed interest from television and film productions, and “The Pigeon Tunnel” offers glimpses of how heady — and frustrating — that attention can be. He recalls his stint as Richard Burton’s caretaker as the thespian prepared for his role in Martin Ritt’s film version of “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.” Le Carré’s friend Alec Guinness, George Smiley in the BBC versions of “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “Smiley’s People,” receives a fond remembrance as both a brilliant actor and a dependable professional.
Stanley Kubrick, attempting to secure the rights to “A Perfect Spy” under an assumed name, makes a cameo appearance, as does an elderly, half-blind Fritz Lang, confident that he still wields enough power in Hollywood to green-light a screen adaptation of “A Murder of Quality,” le Carré’s slight second novel.
The most interesting chapters are those in which le Carré offers a glimpse of the people and situations that fueled his fiction. The author finds inspiration for “The Constant Gardener” in a female aid worker in Africa. An ebullient foreign correspondent plants the seeds for Jerry Westerby in “The Honourable Schoolboy.” The process of transmuting experience into story remains mysterious, but le Carré hints at how he sometimes spins literary gold from the straw of the mundane.
Le Carré saves his recollections of his con man father until nearly the end, because “I didn’t want him elbowing his way to the top of the bill.” The payoff proves worth the wait. Ronnie Cornwell is a monster, but a charming one, endlessly self-confident, capable of grand bouts of self-delusion, inspiring loyalty even from those he has harmed the most. Le Carré attempts to reconcile his childhood memories with the reality of the situation, but always comes up short.
“But what’s the truth?” he asks. “What’s memory? We should find another name for the way we see past events that are still alive in us.”
The title of this memoir comes from le Carré’s recollection of a shooting range in Monte Carlo, where birds captured on the casino roof were sent down a pitch-dark tunnel, emerging into the Mediterranean sunlight, where they would promptly encounter men with shotguns. Any surviving pigeons would return to the roof, ready to be trapped again another day.
It’s an arresting, if somewhat ambiguous metaphor, connected, perhaps, to the dangers of illumination or self-revelation.
“The Pigeon Tunnel” finds its 84-year-old author in fine form and good humor. His personal revelations are mild and therefore perhaps disappointing, but fans of le Carré will be mostly content he chose to expose himself to the light of public scrutiny at all. May he continue to soar for some time still.
Michael Berry writes the science fiction and fantasy column for The San Francisco Chronicle. Email: books@ sfchronicle.com