John le Carré
David John Moore Cornwell, born 19 October 1931 in Poole, Dorset, England, is far better known as John le Carré, novelist of spys, spycraft, the Cold War, and intricate, noir-ish novels of espionage and moral ambiguity. Think of him as a modern Joseph Conrad, an updated Eric Ambler, an international Raymond Chandler. Just after WWII he cultivated a gift for languages while studying at the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 1950 he joined the Intelligence Corps of the British Army and worked as a Cold War interrogator in Austria. He later worked for the intelligence services MI5 and MI6 (with occasional overlapping jobs as a teacher in French and German) until the huge success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). His pseudonym (French for “John the Square”) was required since he was an active Foreign Service officer, and he kept it as his books became regular bestsellers and adapted for film and television.
John le Carré’s great creation is George Smiley, a career intelligence officer with The Circus, the Brtish overseas intelligence service. Smiley is a deliberate anti-James Bond, an unglamorous intellectual who outthinks and outmaneuvers his targets, his competitors both within the service and the country’s enemies anywhere in the world. Le Carré deep and sophisticated interest in all participants of this Cold War, those witting and unwitting, make his canvas rich and broad. His elegant style elevates his novels beyond plot to psychological dramas and moral dissections. John le Carré is not only a writer of his time, but he has become an artist of our time.
P.S. If you ever get a chance to hear Cornwell read his own work, seize it. Only two titles currently have him as a reader, Agent Running in the Field and The Pigeon Tunnel, but older (sometimes abridged) titles are out there in out-of-print-land. He is a terrific reader.
Our Game
Our Game
At forty-eight, Tim Cranmer is a secret servant in premature retirement to deepest rural England. His Cold War is fought and won, and he is free to devote himself to his stately manor house, his vineyard, and his beautiful young mistress, Emma.
But no man can escape his past, and Tim's lives twenty miles away, in the chaotic person of Larry Pettifer: bored radical don, philanderer, and for twenty years Tim's mercurial double agent against the now vanquished Communist threat. Between the two stands an unresolved rivalry.
As the story opens, Larry and Emma have disappeared. Setting off in pursuit of them, Tim discovers that he too is being pursued, by his former masters. The hunter becomes the hunted. Raiding his own past like a thief, he follows Larry and Emma into the minefield -- physical and emotional -- of their new allegiance.
Our Game is John le Carre at his incomparable best.