12 . 18 . 20
After the death of John le Carré was announced a few days ago, a friend asked me where I thought the creator of George Smiley and the Circus would rank in a generation. I told him I didn’t have the faintest idea. Where does he “rank” now? Most of the younger people I know (“younger” meaning under forty) have never read le Carré; if they know his work at all, it’s via adaptations for TV and movies. As for the critics, they’ve preferred to slot him as a chronicler of “the Cold War,” a term that is at once indispensable and nearly meaningless, so profligate is its misuse. Never mind that many of his books take us well past that era.