But “A Perfect Spy” is actually a meta-fiction. Le Carré knows the ways in which such people preserve recognition and intimacy—the shorthand that is just as pervasive in casual social meetings as it is in the S.I.S.
His mentor in London—the extraordinary spymaster Jack Brotherhood—wants to believe in him, but the rest of what used to be called M.I.6. As the great British critic Noel Annan wrote of le Carré in 1986, in The New York Review of Books, “The intricacy of the dense plot would be unendurable but for his talent as a mimic.” There’s the bullying authority of Brotherhood: “You’ve done your job. There are overlapping tales, stories within stories, ricocheting versions of Magnus’s career. headquarters, in London.
Worst of all, they fail to enjoy spying as a treacherous game; they think they are saving the world, whereas the Brits know that, apart from Britain’s dwindling interests, there’s nothing to be saved, just the endless struggle itself, well or poorly joined. He wants to make an accounting for himself and for his splendid teen-age son, Tom. The Americans lack style, subtlety, patience.
(the Circus) by setting traps so intricate that only a spy could fall into them (funny, in its way).Like Raymond Chandler, another so-called genre writer (in this magazine, Pauline Kael once described Chandler as a skilled creator of pulp), le Carré offers a specialized view of life, but one so persuasive that many readers begin to see things in his ripely jaundiced way.
But, most centrally, le Carré has written a book about England from the twenties to the seventies, particularly the upper-middle-class values and tone of those years, which he presents as a strange, semi-fathomable mixture of piety and duplicity. Can’t miss what you don’t care about. For le Carré, spying has always been devoted to fiction-making—the creation of false identities, elaborate mirages, lies both preposterous and subtle, many of them sustained for years. Avec « Retour de service », le vingt-cinquième roman de l'écrivain britannique, les éditeurs veulent faire revenir les Français en librairie. It will very likely remain his greatest book.What our staff is reading, watching, and listening to each week. Certainly, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” the first of the trilogy later known as “The Quest for Karla” (which includes “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smiley’s People”) is the most entertaining of le Carré’s books. By the mid-seventies, however, the author of “genre books” was obviously a major novelist who understood the complications of deceit and self-delusion as well any writer.Some time after “A Perfect Spy” came out, in 1986, Philip Roth remarked that it was “the best English novel since the war.” So that was le Carré’s greatest book. will muscle in on British operations.That goes for le Carré, too, who has always been scornful of American spying. Le Carré doesn’t just stick to Magnus Pym’s discourse; he offers the point of view of Jack Brotherhood and of Pym’s staunch and frightened wife, Mary, both of them trying to find the missing man while worrying through their memories of him. Like Rick, he betrays everyone, which is why he’s “perfect.”The book ranges over space as well as time—there are scenes from Magnus’s story set in Vienna, in Prague, in London, and even in Washington, where the C.I.A. After reading le Carré, you may think that the struggle against Communism is still necessary, but only a fool would think of it as anything but sordid. That would cover at least forty-one years, and works by George Orwell, Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Anthony Burgess, and Anthony Powell. What works in spying can also work in fiction.
Sa relation avec son père fut difficile.
begins to doubt his loyalty.
David Cornwell’s father, Ronnie Cornwell, was an ebullient criminal and a seductive charmer, whom David adored for decades—and finally loathed.
The double agents, the planted insinuations, and the endless treacheries? Can’t sell what isn’t yours.” There’s also Tom’s public-school slang, and much else.As le Carré revealed, “A Perfect Spy” is heavily autobiographical. They burst forth from an incoherent, mongrel society, innocent of family and tradition and manners—every lack that Henry James complained of a hundred fifty years ago—before departing for London.
Le Carré a trouvé, après la fin de la Guerre froide, à élargir son inspiration vers des sujets plus contemporains. (now S.I.S., or the Firm) has suspected for years that Pym is a double agent. Le meilleur John Le Carré John le Carré, de son vrai nom David John Moore Cornwell, est un romancier britannique, né le 19 octobre 1931 à Poole (Royaume-Uni). John le Carré dit qu'il n'a pas connu sa mère, qui l'a abandonné quand il avait cinq ans, jusqu'à leur re-connaissance quand il eut 21 ans.
He’s where the action is, right up to the end of his life, and Magnus adored and imitated him, becoming not a criminal but a professional con man and teller of tales, an agent.
What was won? John le Carré dit qu'il n'a pas connu sa mère, qui l'a abandonné quand il avait cinq ans, jusqu'à leur re-connaissance quand il eut 21 ans. Now, as far as I know, le Carré has never been called an experimental or modernist writer.
Magnus became a great novelist, even if his novel was created by le Carré.
By the time he wrote “A Perfect Spy,” le Carré understood that espionage is an extreme version of the human comedy, even the human tragedy.
Sa relation avec son père fut difficile.