He had a long and productive life, and I hope a happy one, but this is still a great loss.
So many of the books are magnificent in their depth. So are the filmed adaptations: the BBC productions of Smiley's People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and the more recent film of the latter; and the Night Manager miniseries.
What has also given me a lot of pleasure was the BBC Radio productions of the eight George Smiley books [1]. They've often kept me company: sometimes on long car journeys, sometimes when I'm feeling contemplative but need distraction. Such a treat.
In addition to the Night Manager (2016) with Hugh Laurie's skillful (and very scary) portrayal of a weapon's dealer, there was also BBC's version of the Little Drummer Girl (2018) based on John le Carré's novel with the same name. If you like John le Carré adaptions, both are highly recommended!
It's sad that he's gone, his novels are masterpieces, especially the later ones like the Constant Gardener in which he addressed topics that go beyond what's usual in spy novels.
His was the most interesting character in the series I thought. The most unsure, the most to lose should things turn against him. Unlike the other characters he had no out, no one or not enough money to make an exit with if necessary.
It's interesting that you mention this. He had a very difficult father, and a difficult relation with him. Obviously he overcame that hurdle and became quite successful. However, his half-brother, 15 years his junior, who also successfully wrote for a living (as a journalist), apparently suffered a lot more from it.
Source: he was a family acquaintance, and it's mostly public knowledge on Wikipedia. Since both brothers have passed away now, I believe it's reasonable to write this.
I had tried watching the recent movie adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and was so put off that I had really low expectations when I happened into a copy of A Perfect Spy.
I was blown away by reading APS, I think it's really a masterpiece and would recommend it to anyone who has ever had a family, a job, or a secret.
I've since read most of the rest of his work and while APS is the best, the Smiley series was also very good and I felt genuinely moved by the conclusion of Smiley's People. You don't really have to read the rest in order but read Smiley's People last.
its surprising how many le Carré novels have been filmed, and I'm with you especially the Alec Guinness Tinker Tailor. It is such a great antidote to all the James Bond inspired spy stories. To use a line from the book “Good intelligence work, Control had always preached, was gradual and rested on a kind of gentleness.”
Some years ago the editor of the New Yorker at the time was interviewed - probably "Fresh Air" on NPR or something like it, maybe a podcast, I don't honestly remember. But I do remember the conversation - the editor was asked what he did to relax away from his duties at the magazine, what did he do to unwind? He replied that he watched the BBC series "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Smiley's People", over and over again because he thought they were absolute perfection, something that could never be improved with change. I tend to agree, thank you John le Carre' for bringing these stories and characters to life. Thank you Sir Alec Guiness for being - and I mean being - George Smiley.
The TV series really were perfection and not just down to Sir Alec Guinness. Ian Richardson, Bernard Hepton, Michael Jayston etc were all wonderful - not to mention Arthur Hopcraft's adaptation. The opening scene with four men, an office, no action and four words of dialogue, yet a world of detail sets the tone for the rest of the series [1]
Recently re-reading TTSS with Alec Guinness's Smiley in my imagination was a wonderful experience. Thank you John Le Carre.
PS One oddity is that in TTSS Toby Esterhase has a British accent but in SP he's acquired a broad Hungarian one!
Toby Esterhazy does mention that he tried his hand at playing the English gentleman, and was quite done with it. I would like to have known some more background of Toby. Especially, how Hungarians came to Britain in the mid 20th century. Not quite totally unrelated is the Monty Python sketch on the Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook, which also alludes to the wave of Hungarian migrants:
I have some anecdotal experience here - my supervisor at College in Britain in the 1980s was a Hungarian mathematician who left Hungary in the late 1960s having had difficulties with the authorities. He vowed never to return to Hungary and had fairly trenchant views on the regime!
Incidentally, my supervision partner was also Hungarian and has now returned and is running a bank in Budapest.
In the novel of TTSS, it is explained that Toby was a starving (literally rather than figuratively) student living in Vienna after WWII and Smiley recruited him there to the Circus (MI6).
I often wondered if this was on purpose. He was known for affecting a very English Gent persona and by SP he was openly living as a fraudulent art dealer after leaving the Circus under a cloud
That sounds like a possibility. On reflection the accent in TTSS - with no trace of his original accent - is the oddity. But then I guess he was a spy so would be good at that sort of thing!
One of the locations used for the TV series was the BBC technical training centre.
As an 80' graduate engineer I "enjoyed" the "behind the iron curtain" feel to the accommodation. The onsite bar made up for it.
Sorry! I'm taking pigeon stories as his autobiography[1], there was a biography that came out a year earlier, but that wasn't written by him.
I normally don't like autobiographies because they are usually just bad stories expertly written by ghost writers.
[1] its not really an autobiography, However pigeon stories is a series of short stories that give the background to either his characters in his books, or the situations his books cover.
My dad did the same and got me into it. Whenever I came home to visit, we'd end up watching Smiley's People. I didn't really appreciate it at 19, but by the time I was 27 I realized it was a masterpiece.
These two series are absolutely the best that has ever been produced for British TV. I am enthralled every time I re watch them, which is maybe once a year.
Thank you John le Carré for such an outstanding, mesmerizing story. Thank you Alec Guinness for bringing to life one of the best characters ever created. I guess I will have to sit down and start my yearly ritual next Saturday.
the one thing I dislike about the movie is the "Christmas party". Its not from the novel, and is there primarily to elucidate some of the relationships in the novel like Bill Hayden and Jim Pridoux, but it seems very out of place in the story.
One of my professors was the student of the don at Oxford who recruited John le Carré into MI6. I love le Carré's books so I was really intrigued by this, and asked him if he ever got recruited to MI6.
To my surprise, he said yes. But it was done in a very le Carré-esque style. My professor had an interview with MI6 which he thought he bombed, and then didn't hear back from them, confirming his assumption... until he got a completely out-of-the blue job offer from an obscure UK government agency that involved lots of travel to Norwegian fisheries. He told me with a smile that it wasn't until he turned down the offer that he realized that he had gotten the MI6 gig, but he failed the final test!
I'm now imagining a Pythonesque comedy sketch where he accepts the offer, but it turns out it really is just some obscure agency, and your professor goes wandering around the fjords talking in code to perplexed Norwegian fishermen.
The ability to detect that things are not what they seem? Ability to deal with bureaucracy? The British intellectual passion for indirection and euphemism?
I read a few of his novels and watched a couple of series, movies based on those.
For me, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy... with Alec Guinness was the best of these.
But one thing I noticed and liked is how dull the novels are. Not much happens.
Till then I had read/watched Bond and similar fiction. And John le Carré was different. The complexity, uncertainty, deliberation, etc. was far better IMO than Bond's action and cigarettes.
It was like watching Morse after Jack Bauer. And while saying one is better than the other is probably a matter of taste ("Bond lit his 70th cigarette of the day"), I liked le Carré more.
I remember finishing The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (age 19 or so) and thinking that a) I absolutely loved it and b) nothing happened in it. It seemed like the entire novel was hints and suggestions and beaurocracy and yet somehow it was absolutely riveting.
A few days ago I started watching the Alec Guinness Tinker Tailor and my wife commented on basically the same thing. Where other spy novels/shows are "bondian" and glamorous Le Carré is shabby and beaurocratic and magically more compelling.
The movie is very, very good too. Richard Burton is outstanding in it, and his laughter is unmistakable. Too bad we barely get any Smiley at all, and what little there is, is totally forgettable.
Have you watched "A most wanted man". It's a really good film, and even less happens in it than, Tinkor Tailor Soldier Spy.
Not that nothing happens, it's just at the end you normally expect there to be a conclusion, but it feel very much like just the beginning of something.
Even the recent film adaptation of Tinker Tailor was good with a stellar cast.
Of his novels I liked 'The Honourable Schoolboy' the best, its great complexity, its descriptions of the byzantine bureaucracy of Britain and the moral ambiguity of it all, which is missing from most of genre fiction.
His novels were "literary" spy novels. A major loss.
He was a phenomenally economical and powerful writer. I've literally pored over individual sentences in his books trying to pull apart how he did so much with so little.
Some of the books are gripping without much happening, but some of his books are just shit. I feel like I’ve rarely come across an author who’s able to combine such great books (Spy who came in from the cold) with such dross (Looking glass war).
Let me start by noting that my opinion of this book isn’t particularly novel: «The book received a mixed-to-negative critical response, which le Carré credits to readers being upset that the book presented blatantly incompetent and largely unsympathetic characters. Writing in 2013, le Carré said that his "readers hated me for it"»
It’s a book about a bunch of idiots bungling stuff. Perhaps if I was in the IC or had come of age during the dusk of the empire I’d get its alleged biting satire, but otherwise it’s just very slow moving, without compelling characters or a particularly interesting or intelligent plot.
I didn't enjoy reading The Looking Glass War, but it stuck with me in a big way.
A lot of the other novels are about intricate chess games, where you spend the time waiting for the other shoe to drop that clicks everything in to place.
TLGW continues with the format, but the other shoe just never drops. There's no payoff. The novel ends. That's a shit thing to read, and I'll never reread it.
But it makes the rest of the novels more bleak and sinister. You get the feeling that while the author is focusing on the Smileys and Karlas of the world and the games they play, TLGW is what happens when normal people take the reins without interference - and that's the norm. It's the author pulling away the veneer of glamor around the world of spying that he's intricately built up.
That's just my interpretation, though. It could just be a shit novel.
That's basically my reading of it too. Almost everyone is incompetent or deluded, there are no heroes, and in the end Leiser is simply abandoned for reasons that are basically squalid and dishonourable. That this end happens fairly abruptly and we never discover his fate presumably reflects the reality of espionage.
According to Wikipedia [1], le Carre said that he wrote the book to satirise the idea of spying as a romantic endeavour, and British nostalgia for ww2. He also said that he regarded it as one of his most authentic works.
Robert Baer's excellent book See No Evil gives a fairly detailed account of what it's like to be an intelligence officer (in his case for the CIA) - you are basically identifying people who have useful information and then persuading them to do that, by whatever means necessary:
I didn’t know that because I’ve only read good stuff from him (The spy who came in from the cold and Smiley’s People) and found it sublime, but this seems to be an occurrence with prolific artists. I feel the same about Woody Allen...
His autobiography, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from my Life is very good, and an excellent audiobook because it is read by him, recounting his own memories and doing his own accents of other people he once knew.
The book is a little more compelling if you've read a lot of his work but even if you've only read one and loved it, its almost certainly worth your time.
If you've only seen the 2011 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy movie, do yourself a favour and watch the 1979 miniseries with Alec Guinness and the sequel Smiley's People.
I came to speak highly of the 2011 film. I remember rushing to read the book before the film. The cast was just perfectly chosen, Oldman makes a perfect Smiley. The pacing and the intrigue are just palpably juicy. It's been an annual watch for me, luckily Netflix still stocks it.
Absolutely. I found myself completely bewildered on my first watch of the film. For whatever reason I watched it a second time a little while later and found it absolutely enthralling.
I think my biggest issue with the film is there's the scene where he finds the mole, then the next scene is after the mole has been arrested and plans are underway for what happens to do next but Smiley and the mole are just having a quiet conversation about tidying up matters in the mole's personal life. If you're not paying attention, it's easy to miss the climax and reveal has happened.
That's my favorite part of the film, in turn. A climax that's really an anti-climax (I too didn't realize the big finale had just happened on first watch) is a perfect fit for a film that pretty much makes a fetish out of being understated and difficult to follow.
Well, having watched both the film and BBC series, I would rate the BBC series better if for nothing else then for the length of time/ space it provides to a complex novel, characters to develop. Highly recommended.
I found the original series so much better than the film. The film was good. I like Gary Oldman but I remember being so disappointed that he shouted at the end. Couldn't imagine Alec Guiness doing that. Very un Smiley.
Yes it's a fabulous cast. Colin Firth is fantastic, especially as a lothario, but Ian Richardson is marvelous too, so toffy. But there is so much material cut to make it fit into a feature film, so if you can tolerate the slow burn pace, check out the series.
Absolutely, a well made film with an amazing score. My annual christmas watch along with Michael Clayton. I hope someday they will make a sequel for this gem.
Warning: Do not bother with this movie if you haven't already read the book. Incredibly confusing because every character is an identically dressed identical looking old British man, all having identical hushed conversations in identical looking rooms.
This comment strikes me as odd. Do you think Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, and Benedict Cumberbatch (!) look identical? And what does their being British have to do with it? Are Americans more easily distinguished from each other?
Agreed; the plot is all about who knows what about who else, and the subtlety of the ways that Smiley makes breakthroughs means that the film feels rushed and confusing by comparison.
Also, while neither actor really looks the way that Smiley is described in the book, Guiness gets the behaviour right in ways that Oldman can't manage.
Thinking about it, this kind of plot – about who knows what and about who – is the kind of thing that David Fincher is really into (as described very well in Every Frame A Painting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPAloq5MCUA). I wonder if we'll ever see him do an adaptation of something by Le Carré?
I liked the NY Times obit better [0]. Goes a bit deeper into his troubled childhood, the fact that his father was a charlatan etc. A memorable quote from the article is that his children gifted him a poster playing on the famous motivational one in World War II Britain, reading, “Keep Calm and le Carré on.”
In terms of language change, i wonder when the phrase "carry on" changed.
Historically I've heard it often said to ones valet for example when one is done with them. Famously "Carry on Jeeves", but i'm sure it was very much used in this sense as a polite stoic dismissal to return to work
Then the "Carry On" bawdy farce comedy Movies starting in 1958, double entendre laden as they are, implying the historical reference as well as the implication of horse play and frivolity
And then in my lifetime in my part of the world it was vernacular for "messing around" or something that has happened which is very much unbecoming. Often my parents would say things of the type "You grandmother lost her glasses on the bus, it was a while carry on" or if children were being raucous, "Would you stop carrying on like that"
From the same article :
"“A Perfect Spy” (1986), Mr. le Carré’s most autobiographical work, tells the story of Magnus Pym, a double agent with a con man father modeled after le Carré’s own, and how the two deceive and are deceived by each other in an intricate skein of lies"
"A Perfect Spy" is a devastating, powerful book. I'm happy Le Carre survived his life better than Magnus Pym did. "A Perfect Spy" is truly a work of art.
I first read The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I was hooked. Espionage after reading him would never be the same again. I can attribute my Cold War 'philia' just to him, I reckon. I am yet to read his autobiography.
Other than some well-made new TV works based on his work like The Night Manager and The Little Drummer Girl, you might want to check out the excellent works on TV in the 80s and 90s; usually done by the BBC.
He was the master of unhurried, ruminating, and unostentatious spy craft writing. Tasteful.
The Alec Guinness adaptations are wonderful. Similarly unhurried, a great word to describe it. It's all long, patient shots of people, sometimes having quiet conversations in bland offices.
My dad was a huge fan of Le Carre, and would rewatch the series only when we weren't around. I assumed it was too salacious for us kids, turns out it's just too quiet, and a noisy house ruins it.
Besides the Smiley novels, The Perfect Spy is one of the most beautifully crafted of John le Carre's novels. Beautifully written with layers upon layers of meaning - each time you reread a Carre you see another facet.
If there was a theme across his books - he was always concerned with the nature of betrayal. "Love is whatever you can still betray". Betrayal of country, of a spouse, and even of a parent.
Much as I love Le Carré (and I say that as someone who has read every one of his books at least three times), I have to give one “criticism” which is that nearly all his books deal with decent but flawed upper middle class public school boys who went to Oxbridge, were more or less abandoned by their parents and have difficulty relating to the other sex.
When you read a perfect spy, you understand why :)
In a lovely interview from last year 'My ties to England have loosened': John le Carré on Britain, Boris and Brexit (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/11/john-le-carre-...), he discusses his life and career. His father was an interesting character ("I Googled him the other day and under ‘profession’ it said: ‘Associate of the Kray brothers’").
I highly recommend, to the point of pain, the late 70s series British TV series “Sandbaggers”[1]
“ Special Operations doesn't mean going in with all guns blazing. It means special planning, special care, fully briefed agents in possession of all possible alternatives. If you want James Bond, go to your library. But if you want a successful operation, sit at your desk and think, and then think again. Our battles aren't fought at the end of a parachute. They're won and lost in drab, dreary corridors in Westminster, and hopefully in Oslo.”
I have this series but I have not been able to find subtitles for it (even in English), and the accents make it hard for my non-native ears to understand everything that's being said. I would LOVE to get my hands on working subtitles; any suggestions?
Tangential, and I don't know if I'm just getting "old"; but does this obituary really need a segment "What was the Cold War?"
I was born some years after the end of the SU, and I and everyone I know were still raised fully aware of what the Cold War was. Who is the BBCs target audience here?
Surprised that the 'The Honourable Schoolboy' hasn't received more mentions or discussion. Nominally a George Smiley book, it was the character of the 'honourable schoolboy' - Westerby - that dismantled the romanticism usually found in espionage thrillers. A very poignant end.
I thought it was a really ambitious novel that didn't quite live up to its ambitions -- for example, the ending, while poignant and "surprising but inevitable," as they say, was a bit too abrupt for me. I would have liked to see more of a denouement, especially around Elizabeth Worthington.
One part that stays with me is Westerby's travel through Vietnam and a few other countries (maybe Thailand, Cambodia, Laos?) -- vivid, atmospheric, chilling, suspenseful -- just stunning.
Big loss, he was so much more than a spy thriller author, he was a scholar of the German language and literature, lead an interesting life and always had fascinating interviews. And his books weren’t so much spy novels as a gritty, realistic look into the world of espionage, crime, British high society etc. Its often pointed out but who but Le Carre could have come up with George Smiley, a soft spoken, frumpy bureaucrat who gets cheated on by his wife and yet is somehow heroic.
He had a very good innings, but what a shame. In every instance I have seen him speak he was always very thoughtful and prescient (The only thing I've heard him say that I recall disagreeing with was his view on the Hollis affair). One of the very last remaining survivors of that era of British intelligence, too.
For those who haven't seen it, the most recent adaptation of TTSS is a near-masterpiece (especially in what it has to narrow down to an hour or two).
Both Alec Guinness and Gary Oldman borrowed from le Carre when performing his character.
Oldman's performance is on film, so it's not quite as subtle and slow as Guinness's but he captures the "Home is is where Smiley is least comfortable"-aspect rather wall.
I believe it was at a scene where they were having dinner (lobster?) at an expensive restaurant, and one of them goes ballistic for some reason. Le Carré was sitting at the next table, if I am not mistaken.
I’m sure a lot of people here will comment on his Cold War novels and their TV adaptation, but what is truly impressive to me is how he managed to switch gears mid-career and write blisteringly powerful indictments of the modern world. The little drummer girl (there’s a good BBC series of this, if you liked TTSS or NM check it out), Absolute Friends, the Constant Gardener..
I remember a review for the Little Drummer Girl that said (paraphrasing): "This book has achieved the rare miracle of making you feel sympathetic to both the Israelis and the Palestinians."
I read my first of his, The Night Manager, almost by accident and was immediately struck with the precision of his thoughts and his ability to convey them. I had never touched anything in the spy genre, aside from the requisite odd Ian Fleming, and thought "damn, this guy really knows his stuff," although I haven't the background to actually know.
As a teenager, I picked out a copy of The Little Drummer Girl from a used book store quite by chance. I expected a simple spy action story, but what I read was a deep and anguishing examination of the personal impact of geopolitics on a someone’s identity.
If you’re new to Le Carré and want to tip your toe in, I’d recommend watching The Night Manager mini-series.
For someone who already enjoys Le Carré, it would be a shame to overlook A Perfect Spy, which is his most autobiographical and soul-wrenching work. Both the book and 1987 mini-series are excellent.
> A spy modelled on Bingham, who was “breathtakingly ordinary … short, fat, and of a quiet disposition”,
One of the defects of James Bond is he has too much charisma. If you ran into him, you would never forget him. That is actually, a downside for a spy. For the most part, you want someone who will just fade into the memories of those who encounter them, as just another face in the crowd, nothing special. Looks like le Carre painted a more realistic picture.
There's also "telling everyone your real name", "believing you can survive that", "not showing up to either the government- or court-ordered sexual harassment seminar", alcoholism, and "unwillingness to fight international conspiracies that will severely impact the United Kingdom but happen to be headquartered in a drab location".
He was also linked to the folks who started SOE who were the people who did actual Bond like things in WW2 and who were hated by MI6 and the traditional armed forces (particularly the RAF):
Of course James Bond is way too obvious, but a technique is to send a few decoys to focus enemy attention on them while the real spy is quietly doing the job.
Well, part of Guy Burgess's cover (if you will), was that he was so gay, so posh, and so drunk that it was impossible someone like that would be a spy.
Maybe it's a bit out of place here. But if are into Stephen Fry And Hugh Laurie act, I'd recommend watching spy agency parody in addition to BBC's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
A very good writer. I only read my first le Carré about three years ago: The Spy Who Came in From The Cold. A great book and I saw why he was so highly rated. Since then I've read a lot of them and came to see, once again, how there are good writers and GREAT writers; le Carré in the latter category. His set pieces and dialog are mesmerising. I'm glad to still have many books of his to read but they'll always be ones I keep and can return to.
I've read and enjoyed quite a few of his books and also enjoyed the TV adaptations. I happened to pick up a copy of Agent Running in the Field in a second hand bookshop last week so I'm looking forward to reading that in his memory.
So many of the books are magnificent in their depth. So are the filmed adaptations: the BBC productions of Smiley's People and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; and the more recent film of the latter; and the Night Manager miniseries.
What has also given me a lot of pleasure was the BBC Radio productions of the eight George Smiley books [1]. They've often kept me company: sometimes on long car journeys, sometimes when I'm feeling contemplative but need distraction. Such a treat.
Thank you for it all Mr. Le Carré.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/smiley-season/