Written by the characters

John le Carre had never billed his latest and long-awaited book, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life , as a memoir. Some of the material in these “stories”, for each chapter can stand alone, has, in fact, been previously published. But it’s an indication of why he’s the beloved writer that he is, for each reference to his novels has you wanting to return to them anew.

In the introduction, le Carre explains in some detail his writing routine. He writes by hand, he loves writing “on the hoof”, and he writes after considerable research. Travelling to Phnom Penh when the Khmer Rouge were advancing on the city, trying to figure out Yasser Arafat’s inner circle when he was still in Beirut, meeting Andrei Sakharov during the early flush of Glasnost, and for a major chunk of this book recalling his time in post-War Germany, it was not just that everything was, in Nora Ephron’s memorable words, “copy”. It was also that when he scoped out the terrain for a forthcoming novel, he took his characters along. He saw the world through them.

So, he tells us, that while “these are true stories told from memory… please be assured that nowhere have I consciously falsified an event or story”. And I’d like to believe that any “false memories” were probably because of these imaginary companions, as it were, who were with him. Writing about the diverse origins of the material gathered here: “The other scribbles that survive from my travels were made for the most part not by me personally, but by the fictional characters I took along with me for protection when I ventured into the field. It was from their eye-line, not mine, and in their words, that the notes were written.”

Two particularly goose-bumpy episodes concern the characters. One, when he takes along Charlie to West Asia for

The Little Drummer Girl . And the other, which he calls “the eeriest encounter of my writing life”, when he bumps into a real-life manifestation of a character from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , Jerry Westerby, at Raffles Hotel in Singapore. In that novel Jerry had a cameo part — le Carre was in Southeast Asia for research for The Honourable Schoolboy , with Jerry in tow. And when he meets Peter Simms, “I knew here was my Jerry Westerby incarnate… We met again in Hong Kong, again in Bangkok and again in Saigon. Finally I popped the question: might Peter be willing to accompany me around the stickier corners of South-east Asia?”

Of course he was.

mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in