Le Carré’s ‘Tunnel’ lets in some light
But spymaster still keeps many details under wraps
John le Carré’s new book The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life ( Viking, 320 pp., out of four) is being promoted as a memoir. But it’s really more a collection of autobiographical vignettes, disclosing the genesis of the characters and situations in such classic espionage novels as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Little Drummer Girl and A Perfect Spy.
It is, in other words, more a life story of John le Carré, the author, than of David Cornwell, the onetime British Intelligence officer who took up the le Carré pseudonym to write thrillers in his spare time and, after the blockbuster success of 1963’s The Spy
Who Came In From the Cold, was empowered to write full-time.
Cornwell/le Carré plays fair with the reader at the outset by declaring that he is not using this occasion to write at length about his family life; nor he is going to add any details about his real-life spy work beyond “what is already reported, usually inaccurately, by other sources.” (If, by “other sources,” he includes last year’s
John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman, Cornwell is too gentlemanly and circumspect to say so in this venue.)
With all that content kept offlimits, The Pigeon Tunnel still comes across as an illuminating, self-effacing and pleasurable in- quiry into le Carré’s creative process, offering globe-spanning thrills of a different, but no less captivating kind than those associated with the novels.
In some ways, his accounts of going into the Far East and to Southeast Asia for research on what became 1977’s The Honor
able Schoolboy are more fascinating and more taut in execution than the novel itself.
He is just as fascinating in recounting Mideast research into 1983’s Little Drummer Girl, which included trips to Beirut, Israel’s Negev Desert and an in-person audience with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat, whom le Carré accompa-
nies on a trip to a school for Palestinian orphans.
Besides Arafat, the other reallife personalities passing through le Carré’s life include dissident Russian scientist Andrei Sakharov; “old buddy” Rupert Murdoch; Alec Guinness, the lordly actor who brought to indelible (and some say definitive) life le Carré’s owlish, unflappable master spy George Smiley; and film directors Fritz Lang, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Ritt. Ritt fought bitterly with Richard Burton during the making of his 1965 adaptation of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold.
And most of them, fascinating as they are, aren’t as intriguing in the course of Pigeon Tunnel as the more obscure, yet real-life counterparts to characters in le Carre’s fiction; most of all, his father, Ronnie Cornwell, the “fivestar con man” whose rapacious schemes and reckless behavior became grist for his son’s semiautobiographical masterwork, 1986’s A Perfect Spy.
Ronnie was a mystery even to le Carré, who at one point confesses he hired a pair of private detectives to do some digging for factual information about his family, including le Carré himself. Yet the veteran novelist by this time understands the limitations of facts, for himself as well as for his readers. “Even when they know the truth,” he writes, “it’s never enough.”