Opinion The Circus ringmaster
The enduring fascination with John le Carre
One autumn evening in London,I was part of an eager throng at the National Film Theatre. We were waiting for the screening of Smileys People,the BBC adaptation of John le Carres novel starring Alec Guinness. There was an extra frisson of excitement though. Rumour had it that le Carre himself was going to be present,signing books.
Le Carre is a very private man and fans were keen for a rare public glimpse. But when we rushed in,he had already come in,signed the copies and left through a back entrance. All that was left was a pile of books on the authorial signing desk. There was no sign of the man himself.
I guess his fans would agree it was very appropriate from one of the titans of the espionage genre.
John le Carre is best known for his Smiley trilogy pitting the rumpled,unprepossessing George Smiley (a man described as having the cunning of Satan and a conscience of a virgin) against his opposite number,the Soviet superspy codenamed Karla.
Le Carres third novel,The Spy who Came in from the Cold,upended the entire genre when it came out in 1963. Gone were the flashy cars and dangerous women. Instead there was a deeply human drama,of what happens to people when two immense bureaucracies face-off against each other.
Le Carre is the rather dashing pseudonym of David John Cornwell. Cornwells turbulent childhood would mirror much of his material as a writer. At the age of five,his mother abandoned him while Cornwells father,a notorious conman,was enduring another spell at His Majestys pleasure. Cornwells father would then put the young David and his brother in a series of boarding schools and construct a cover as an upper-class gentleman. As he would later say,He sent us to public school and we believed we were part of the upper class. Then we discovered it was all a fraud. This traumatic relationship with an absent father would form a central thread in most of le Carres works.
With a natural gift for languages,Cornwell was noticed in his stint in the Intelligence Corps as part of mandatory army service. Cornwell enrolled in Oxford,but by this time he was already recruited by MI5 to keep track of fellow students. Cornwell did well in the service and was eventually accepted by MI6,the foreign intelligence division. He had also begun writing and,as it was prohibited to publish under his own name,adopted the pen name le Carre as something vaguely French sounding.
Perhaps Cornwell would have continued writing as a hobby while rising up the ranks of the Circus. All that changed in 1963,when Cornwells one-time boss Kim Philby defected to the Soviet Union. Philby had pulled off one of the greatest intelligence coups of all time he had been working for the Soviets right from his entry into British intelligence in 1933,the ultimate deep penetration agent. Cornwells cover as political consul in the British Foreign Office was one of the countless identities blown by Philby. Cornwell left the Circus to focus on his writing career,baptised as he was in his new life by one of the greatest spies of the 20th century.
Helped by his insider knowledge,le Carre became one of the finest mappers of the Cold War topography. Tom Vanderbilt in his survey of Cold War building design talks about the architecture of conjecture,as he says,the Cold War landscape was defined by what could not be seen.
This architecture of conjecture,of absence is what le Carre understands so superbly. His characters move across these shadowy terrain,establishing an endless pattern of sifting for clues,debriefings,interrogations.
Unlike Bond with his guns and gadgets,Smiley understands that a piece of paper with the right signature on it can be a far more lethal weapon in this silent war. The spies in Smileys world are like monks,governed by their own inscrutable rules,the keepers of hermetic knowledge.
While a conventional espionage adventure races from location to location,le Carres adventure moves in the landscape of the interior,the shadowy,torturous depths of a mans soul,the shores of isolation,the islands of despair. The usual props of spy novels are discarded,instead his plots hinge on some essential human frailty discovered in one of the protagonists. To crudely generalise,most spy novels and movies are concerned with what professionals would say SIGINT (signal intelligence),IMINT (imagery intelligence) and so on. Tech stuff,basically. Le Carre,on the other hand,is all about the oldest form there is HUMINT (human intelligence).
In the recent film adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (imbued with an appropriately Scandinavian chill by Swedish director Alfredson) right at the end,after the mole has been unmasked,he explains himself to Smiley. I picked a side, he says simply,I made a mark in this world.
In this tournament of shadows,where everything is as substantial as smoke,that is the ultimate reward that every spy secretly craves.
The writer scripts the Hyderabad Graphic Novel
express@expressindia.com
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