With the summer holidays upon us, many a suitcase heading for a sun-kissed Mediterranean, Adriatic or Aegean beach will contain some John le Carré novel or other, looking for something light but far from inconsequential, diverting but serious enough to engage Poirot’s ‘little grey cells’. Beloved chiefly by men of a certain age, and increasingly by women, too, this is a safe prediction: le Carré, the pompous pseudonym of the more prosaic David Cornwall, has sold 60 million books and counting. He wrote until his death at 89 in 2020. Up to the end he was revered in literary and cultural circles with log-rolling praise for his twenty-seven novels continuing unabated. In 2008, The Times lauded him as being among the top fifty British writers since 1945. His 1986 work, The Perfect Spy, has even been deemed by Philip Roth the best English novel of our time. Simon Sebag Montefiore praises him as ‘the titan of English literature’.
Is it therefore sacrilege to question le Carré’s position in the literary pantheon? He was certainly not a one-hit wonder. A succession of early spy novels in the 1960s and 1970s based on his own experiences in the secret service, often based around that dull, emasculated but nevertheless engrossing George Smiley character, are truly works of significant worth. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Call for the Dead; The Spy who Came in From the Cold are all among familiar titles well worth re-reading. These books and others contain excellent psychological insights and are, for the most part, elegantly written. But as le Carré progressed, and as his success became quite phenomenal, his powers waned. Not in productivity – being too industrious was part of the problem – but in originality and in succumbing to self-importance and self-indulgence. His shorter, more succinct books, work best, maintaining a sharp focus and purpose. But many then become padded, drawn-out and, quite frankly, tedious. He was outraged when Clive James rightly reviewed The Honourable Schoolboy as ‘being twice as long as it should be. It falls with a dull thud…’ How Roth could praise The Perfect Spy so unreservedly can only be put down to subjectivity, for, despite its occasional qualities, it is sprawling and poorly structured. Elephantiasis and too much heeding of praise fostered an inflated sense of amour propre.
These flaws are clearly present in The Constant Gardener (2001). Big pharma is the target here, a completely justified target, of course, but clichéd, and an indication of le Carré’s increasing champagne socialism. The richer he grew, and the more entrenched he became in the liberal cultural establishment, the more tediously earnest was his writing as he attempted, in James’s observation, to promote himself from an entertaining writer to a serious one. He failed – although you wouldn’t know it from the lavish accolades that kept coming his way.
David Pryce-Jones has drawn attention to le Carré’s hypocrisy: luxurious homes in London, Cornwall and Switzerland; a Rolls Royce; five-star hotels and first-class tickets; yet ‘nobody seems to have questioned his enjoyment of the good things in life while denigrating all those who made it possible.’ One could add private schools for his children to the list. Inevitably, he felt the luvvie compulsion to loudly express his anti-Americanism and anti-Trump and Brexit-hysteria, Brexit apparently being ‘without doubt the greatest catastrophe and the greatest idiocy that Britain has perpetrated since the invasion of Suez’. No doubt it caused some complications for his abode in Switzerland – until he took up Irish, and hence EU, citizenship.
His last, posthumously published, novel is Silverview from 2021. Here the decline is complete: the novel is little more than a tedious, third-rate domestic soap opera. But his reputation remains untarnished.
One possible reason for his continued huge success is that so many of his novels have long been made into radio, TV and film productions. And the translations usually work extremely well: better, in many cases, than the original books. In these, much of the attempted pseudo-gravitas is jettisoned in favour of intelligent entertainment. The Radio 4 and BBC TV dramatisations of Smiley’s People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy between 1979 and 1990 (when the BBC could still produce excellent drama), perfectly cast with Bernard Hepton and Alec Guinness respectively, get to the core excellence of Le Carré’s writing as a cerebral entertainer. Let us rightly acknowledge his great ability, especially in his earlier works, to make sophisticated ambiguity alluring, and to hook the reader into the unglamorous world of espionage; but we should not be swayed by his own literary pretensions.
