Roland Freudenstein, December 2020
“Ten minutes to midnight: a pious Friday in May and a fine river mist lying over the market square. Bonn was a Balkan city, stained and secret, drawn over with tramwire. Bonn was a dark house where someone had died, a house draped in Catholic black, guarded by policemen.” – These are not only the greatest opening lines of any novel I’ve read: The meter and alliterations make them sound more like a poem, an incantation, than ‘normal’ prose. They’re also, incidentally, the best poetic description I know of the “Small Town in Germany” I grew up in, and a hymn as well as a damning verdict on the Homburg hatted Federal Republic of my childhood whose non-capital it used to be, self-pitying at times and boastful at others, ridden by complexes and concealed resentment, never quite ready to go into open battle against the ghosts of its own, eerie, not-too-distant past.
And so this book made me see what I took to be intimately familiar, even part of myself, with the eyes of a stranger – a literally eye-opening experience, and one of the best things literature can do for you. I can proudly claim to have read, and in most cases re-read, all le Carré novels up to the late 2000s. My all-time favourites, such as the aforementioned “A Small Town in Germany”, “Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy”, “The Honourable Schoolboy”, “Smiley’s People” (written between 1968 and 1982, his best period) I must have read five or more times each, which produces its own effect when different aspects come to light depending on the different phases of your own life you read them in. I remember being glued to “The Honourable Schoolboy” while riding through a snowy Northern GDR on an overnight train from Hamburg to West Berlin and on to Poland to link up with the anti-communist opposition there in March 1983, knowing I would soon trade in the fictional Cold War in Hong Kong for the real one in wintry Warsaw.
So it’s no exaggeration to say that le Carré’s glamourously unglamorous spies, all the George Smileys, Peter Guillams, Connie Sachses, Jerry Westerbys and Alan Turners, became familiar characters in my universe, sometimes shape-shifting in my mind’s eye, depending on which movie or serial based on le Carré I had last seen. At times I also had my very own idea of what they must look like – Jerry Westerby of Hong Kong fame, to me, is still clearly David Bowie of around 1980, when he stopped using makeup. Whereas Smiley is, of course, Obi-Wan Kenobi, i.e. Alec Guinness, after the BBC mini-series “Smiley’s People”, forever clumsily cleaning his glasses with the fat end of his tie.
As to le Carré’s politics, I admit my feelings have evolved over time, and not for the better. His Cold War maxim was rock solid and spot-on: that we’re fighting for a good end (against the likes of Karla, the Soviet spymaster), but that we always, always, always have to question our means, and that despite our best intentions, we sometimes screw up, morally as well as factually. On Germany, he got so many things right – in his first decades. On the Middle East, a bit less. He ends “The Little Drummer Girl” (1982) with Israel’s alleged choice to either become “a Jewish homeland, or an ugly little Sparta”: as if these things could be neatly separated, and as if some of the latter weren’t indispensable to remain the former – how quaint! How very European! And as for Russia and the Cold War, by 1988/89 (“The Russia House”), he lost me politically. Increasingly, for him, the capitalist West was no better than the communist East had been, the West allegedly humiliated Russia in the 1990s and le Carré’s universe of villains-in-chief became populated by morally and financially corrupt Western spies, arms traders, pharma bosses and Eton-bred criminals speaking Whitehall cockney. Add to this his visceral hatred of the US neo-cons of the George W. Bush era, compared to which Graham Greene’s “Quiet American” is an almost loving portrayal.
Am I unfair in assuming his narrative powers waned over time? Maybe. By the time of “A Most Wanted Man” (2008), set in Hamburg and very much about the global war on terror, some novels rather had the authorly punch of a short story – not to mention, in this case, the limitless understanding for victimised Muslims and persistent demonisation of the evil Americans. (The 2014 movie version with a stellar performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman is better than the book). Equally by that time, the truly heroic Germans in his books had almost invariably become human rights lawyers politically somewhere between antifa and Greenpeace, whose idea of a drink at the Hotel Atlantic in Hamburg was flat water without lemon or ice, served at room temperature.
For le Carré, throughout his oeuvre, spying was more than intelligence gathering – it was a condition humaine. In, time and again, betraying what we love, and those we love, and sometimes even for a good cause, we are all lifelong spies. There is also a degree of Englishness about le Carré’s topic: No wonder spies, and writing about them, thrive in a country that has self-control and hiding one’s real feelings so deeply woven into its cultural fabric. And no wonder that, for example, Sid Meier’s turn-based strategy computer game Civilization V gives you an extra spy if you play as Britain. But in my eyes, the even more remarkable fact about his writing is his incredible gift for rendering spoken language, with its jargons, sociolects, culture-driven thought patterns and even personal quirks shining through just a few sentences of direct speech. In one of his early masterpieces in this respect, “A Small Town in Germany”, in the tense ministerial briefings and awkward Godesberg diplomatic dinner parties, you can literally hear the German accents without the author having to change one letter in the spelling. Another such marvel is the vulgar nouveau-riche cynicism echoing in every sentence by Sir Anthony Joyston Bradshaw who makes a brief but memorable appearance at the end of “The Secret Pilgrim” (1990, actually a short story collection and one of le Carré’s hidden gems), only to become a major figure in “The Night Manager” (1993).
His last two works deserve special mention: In “A Legacy of Spies” (2017), in which his disdain for Brexit and confessed Europeanness perk up at the very end, for the first time in an eternity our own spies aren’t always the villains, and their detractors in the shape of parliamentary committees or children of former MI 6 victims aren’t always saints. But whatever political sympathy I started feeling at the time, his last novel, “Agent Running in the Field” (2019), pretty much nixed it. Le Carré, the Snowdenversteher: A post-Brexit MI 6 leadership conspiring with the cousins across the Pond and the idiot in Number 10 to destroy the remaining EU and driving an idealistic young cypher specialist into Putin’s arms – not my idea of a spy novel at a time when so many real-world villains (i.e. Putin, Xi Jinping, Khamenei, Lukashenka, maybe Orbán…) and their cynical corruption of our open societies offer such rich material to write contemporary thrillers.
But late politics aside, I can’t complain. It’s as simple as this: I wouldn’t be the same without John le Carré. His characters have been with me ever since I devoured “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” as a teenager. And when I think of him now, I picture him in his days as an MI 6 agent in Bonn in the early 1960s (and this you will not read in the many eulogies that are appearing today, but I know it for a fact), taking the morning ferry across the Rhine from his house in Königswinter, below Chamberlain’s Hill, to the office in Her Majesty’s battleship of an embassy, ever so coincidentally the same ferry that Konrad Adenauer used on most days from his Rhöndorf house, and ever so casually manoeuvering his bicycle close to the Chancellor’s black Mercedes in order to peer through the rear side window and see which newspaper articles the Old Man read with special interest, and marked with his pen. And have a few fun facts for his daily sitrep to the Circus.
Thank you for the stories, David John Moore Cornwell/John Le Carré, and R.I.P.!
