He was surprisingly frank about his intelligence days. I was met by a perfect English gentleman with a shock of white hair and seemingly burnished pink cheeks that made him look as if he had just come in from a bracing walk on the cliffs near his home in Cornwall. I confess I was trepidatious he had a reputation – then, at least – of being a bit terse with journalists. I interviewed him when he came to Melbourne to talk about The Constant Gardener. "But by 2020, I don’t think he thought that." McKinty said Smiley was able to win because le Carre believed the Soviet Union was morally worse than the West. If the empire was Britain's poisoned chalice, since the end of empire the poison was leaking into the body." He saw the country as morally compromised and in terminal decline. "On good days he was a pessimist in his attitude to Britain on bad days his attitude was cynicism. He points to the psychology of the characters, the slow build of the story and the brilliance of the denouement. And, of course, there was frequently the added hindrance of a traitor – a mole, a term le Carre coined in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – in their midst.Īdrian McKinty, the Australian Irish crime writer, rates Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as the greatest spy novel ever.
Indeed, it's arguable that how he thought about running agents in East Germany for MI6 determined the nature of his novels, and particularly the three great Cold War novels featuring his best-known protagonist, George Smiley: there was a lot of talk, a lot of thought and a lot of smart people trying to get a handle on what the Soviet Union was up to. In that interview, he also spoke of his strong commitment to a sense of right and wrong. He died of pneumonia on Sunday morning (Australian time) just as the British government was stumbling towards the final deadline for Brexit, a development he loathed. That was John le Carre, who has died at the age of 89, talking to The Age in 2001 about his experiences with the British secret service before he embarked on his long and more successful career as a spy novelist and fierce critic of the hypocrisy and moral and political decline of his country – and, indeed, the West.
John le Carre wrote 26 novels during his career, the last coming out in 2019.
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