I was in my teens when I first attempted to read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. I stuck to it despite a few false starts. And I fell in love. With the book, the writer, the style. John le Carre moved into my inner circle of authors – those whom I read and re-read, and whom I saw as family. I read all his books.
le Carre was an introduction to adult life – where things were seldom in black-and-white, and there was room for the heroic villain or the villainous hero. Where ambiguity was a constant, and motives often unclear. Where redemption didn’t necessarily follow confession, and the apparently good didn’t live happily ever after.
When the Soviet Union disappeared, many thought it would affect ex-spy le Carre’s writing. But that was to misunderstand him. For le Carre was not a spy writer, he was an explicator of the human condition. He was not just one of the greatest spy writers of our time; the qualifying ‘spy’ was unnecessary.
I was in good company. Philip Roth and Ian McEwan thought so too. “The tropes of espionage – duplicity, betrayal, disguise, secret knowledge, the bluff, the double bluff, unknowingness, bafflement, shifting identity – are no more than the tropes of the life that every human being lives,” wrote the novelist William Boyd. Blake Morrison called him the “laureate of Britain’s post-imperial sleepwalk.”
“People who have had very unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves,” le Carre once wrote. His father Ronnie was an unscrupulous conman, a forger who was jailed for fraud and who did much worse. Le Carre – or David Cornwell as he was born as - spent 16 “hugless years” in the dubious care of his father after his mother left.
Converting childhood traumas into art isn’t unusual; converting it with such control over the craft is. If being a popular writer was the price le Carre had to pay for his seriousness of purpose, then so be it. You can read Pride and Prejudice as chick-lit or a commentary on the human condition. Likewise with The Honourable Schoolboy. A spy novel or something much larger.
The so-called genre writers – I suspect that dismissive term was used by writers who didn’t sell too many copies of their books – have been given short shrift by the establishment. When the horror writer Stephen King won the National Book Award, there was much tut-tutting. Ursula le Guin, with her speculative fiction (science and fantasy), has been one of our most influential writers, yet to dismiss such writers for their choice of subject is churlish. Le Guin was speaking for them when she said she would prefer to be known simply as a “novelist”.
In an introduction to a later edition of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold , le Carre wrote: “I had no excuses for not writing as well as I could, for not going each time to the edge of my talent…”
That is the motto for any literary giant.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
