Morals and duty clash in le Carré’s tale of a bookseller caught in a spy leak
• Fintan O’Toole on the last twist in le Carré’s tale
• Writers reveal their favourite le Carré
Category Archives: John le Carré
The reputation game: how authors try to control their image from beyond the grave
The row over a new biography of Philip Roth has exposed the way agents and estates restrict access and manage archives to maintain a writer’s posthumous good name
Writers and critics are raising questions over the role that agents and estates play in managing archives and limiting access to biographical material.
Fresh worries have been fuelled by the continuing fiasco over the publication of Philip Roth: The Biography, with accusations that access to the famed US author’s archival material is being unfairly constrained.
Continue reading...Canada spy agency unwittingly seeks double agent in Le Carré ad gaffe
CSIS included quote from A Perfect Spy in tweet about job postings, bewildering Twitter users
For an intelligence agency seeking new recruits, the promises of adventure and intrigue found within the pages of famous spy novels might seem like a useful recruiting tool.
But promoting a double agent who lies to his family, betrays his country and ultimately takes his own life, is possibly not a strategy that will produce the best candidates.
Continue reading...John le Carré remembered by writers and friends: ‘He always had a naughty twinkle in the eye’
Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Tom Stoppard, Ralph Fiennes, John Boorman and more pay tribute to a master who transcended the limits of spy fiction
John le Carré obituary
Writer whose spy novels chronicle how people’s lives play out in the corrupt setting of the cold war era and beyond
John le Carré, who has died aged 89 of pneumonia, raised the spy novel to a new level of seriousness and respect.
He was in his late 20s when he began to write fiction – in longhand, in small red pocket notebooks, on his daily train journey between his home in Buckinghamshire and his day job with MI5, the counter-intelligence service, in London. After the publication of two neatly crafted novels, Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962), which received measured reviews and modest sales, he hit the big time with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963).
Continue reading...‘My ties to England have loosened’: John le Carré on Britain, Boris and Brexit
At 87, le Carré is publishing his 25th novel. He talks to John Banville about our ‘dismal statesmanship’ and what he learned from his time as a spy
I have always admired John le Carré. Not always without envy – so many bestsellers! – but in wonderment at the fact that the work of an artist of such high literary accomplishment should have achieved such wide appeal among readers. That le Carré, otherwise David Cornwell, has chosen to set his novels almost exclusively in the world of espionage has allowed certain critics to dismiss him as essentially unserious, a mere entertainer. But with at least two of his books, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and A Perfect Spy (1986), he has written masterpieces that will endure.
Which other writer could have produced novels of such consistent quality over a career spanning almost 60 years, since Call for the Dead in 1961, to his latest, Agent Running in the Field, which he is about to publish at the age of 87. And while he has hinted that this is to be his final book, I am prepared to bet that he is not done yet. He is just as intellectually vigorous and as politically aware as he has been at any time throughout his long life.
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