David Cornwell, aka John Le Carré, the master of the spy novel, died this week. There are a thousand obituaries of Le Carré online, but perhaps it is worth the
Mekong Review remembering the author’s writing on Asia. For those obsessed with South East Asia Le Carré’s
The Honourable Schoolboy, published in 1977, is without doubt the most engrossing espionage novel of the region. For Le Carré fans it is the novel in which his greatest character George Smiley begins to rebuild an effective British intelligence service in the wake of the unravelling of “the Service” following the revelation of a senior Soviet mole in
John le Carré, 1931-2020
Image credit: The Wall Street Journal
John le Carré is dead. Chronicler of British decline; realist assassin of 007 fantasy; as terse and brutal a stylist as Larkin or Orwell – the spy novelist was both the most English and the least English of writers, and he remains indecipherable. The obituaries will trace a decent silhouette of his life: first a childhood marked by a conman father and boarding-school rigours, then seasons as a teacher at Eton and a spy in Germany, then marital failure, then sixty years making sense of it all. That silhouette becomes a pencil-sketch in Adam Sisman’s competent biography and in le Carré’s evasive memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. Read them when you read him.
Troubled spirit: John le Carré
Credit: Hulton Archive
John le Carré spent most of his childhood pining for his mother and much of his adult life wishing his father would disappear. In later life he stated frankly that the absence of one parent and the overbearing presence of the other were the key to understanding his life and his fiction.
It is Ronnie and Olive Cornwell we have to thank for giving their son David the gifts and temperament that would transform him into John le Carré, the outstanding spy novelist of the 20th Century. His intertwined careers as an intelligence officer and as a writer seem, in retrospect, inevitable, given the events of his youth.