R.I.P. John Le Carré

David Cornwall, aka John Le Carré, died on December 12, 2020, and in a long year of so much death, it’s hard to process the passing of people we didn’t know, and yet, his death has been so affecting to so many people and not just the bookish sorts like myself who often feel a loss when great writers and artists die. The way so many people and publications wrote about Le Carré’s death felt empty, though. Admittedly I often feel this as significant artistic talents get less coverage than celebrities or nonsense, but Le Carré has long been under appreciated, and that has continued sadly.

There’s the way that everyone felt the need to call him a “spy novelist” and of course that’s true. But it also minimizes how he was a novelist who wrote primarily about spies and espionage. Most writers have a relatively limited range of topics, ideas, places and concerns they write about. Some of deeply specific, some are much more universal. I think what so many people writing about Le Carré miss is that he was our generation’s Graham Greene.

I am not the biggest fan of Greene, admittedly, but one reason he was so beloved by so many people is that he was the first serious adult novelist they read and related to and that shaped so much of how they thought about literature. Part of the reason for Graham was that he had absorbed a lot of crime stories, adventure stories and so he was able to craft work that played with many of those tropes and ideas in different ways. And sometimes it was simply a matter of writing a philosophical version of a thriller with actual characters and political issues. Le Carré was able to do similar things. Both were writers who knew about spies, but they were interested primarily in other issues. They didn’t want to write thrillers or pulp novels, but they had been influenced by them far more than they were more ostensively literary work.

Another similarity is that Le Carré, like Greene, was a moralist. Greene of course was a Roman Catholic and religious themes and concerns run through his work in different ways, perhaps most notably in The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair, but agree with him or disagree (and I know plenty of people who love him who don’t share his politics), Le Carré was as much of a moralist as Greene in his own way.

“Ideologies have no heart of their own. They're the whores and angels of our striving selves.” It should stand as one of Le Carré’s great quotations, but it also gets at the heart of so much of what he believed and how he saw the world.

There is enough written about his own background, his father, his childhood that I don’t need to get into, but I think it was clear in many ways from the start that Le Carré was something of an outsider. That was one of the ways he was able to see the world so clearly, or at least avoid the sharp lines and idea that defined so many people. There are many who loathed how Le Carré wrote about the Cold War, but there is a reason why he’s not a “spy novelist” but a novelist. And that’s in what happened after the collapse fo the Soviet Union. Le Carré didn’t spend years writing period pieces or find other countries to be the replacement villain, but he wrote novels that were in some ways torn from the headlines.

Le Carré wrote about money laundering and arms dealers, medical experimentation, covert operations, governmental corruption, the War on Terror. In many ways he was one of the first adult authors many of us were introduced to. And often introduced to by adults. We didn’t read Le Carré in school, but were given his books by relatives or teachers. Le Carré was an entertaining writer. He could craft these incredibly tense thrilling scenes, but those moments were never the heart of the novels. The heart of the novels were these characters and the insight he had into them. Even if not spelled out, the ways that Le Carré built characters often through actions was so exciting.

I’ve often joked that for all my obsession with great prose and great writing, I love a good story. I love writers who can tell an entertaining plot driven story. But what separates Le Carré, like Greene before him, from writers who can only write thrilling plots is the characters. That he can craft believable and real characters. That he can manage to do conduct such research and impart it to the reader so thoughtfully and digestible. All these vital but often invisible aspects of crafting a story, the building of a fictional world, of being able to convey complicated ideas and structures.

Of course not every book was a winner, they never are, but Le Carré was more productive than a lot of writers – well, far less productive than your run of the mill thriller writer, but far more productive than other literary writers. But through it all he sought to try something different, to explore a new place, to play with structure. He could have simply retired after the end of the Cold War. A Perfect Spy, which was published in 1986, was probably his finest work. But he kept writing. It was by the end, simply how we able to process the world and his own feelings. Plus if he had stopped, we never would have had The Tailor of Panama or The Constant Gardener, and what a loss that would have been.

He wrote a lot about orphans – his complicated relationship with his father meant he likely found that easier – and he was so good at capturing how childhood was important. So many of the books touch on characters’ childhoods in different but important ways, which Le Carré could write about movingly, but he did so to show how our character and our values are formed early. We were playacting at that age in so many ways of course, trying to act older than we were, trying to fit in some way, which helped us find a way into these stories about people pretending to be someone or something they’re not, avoid having our secrets discovered. I think that’s one reason adults suggested these books to us when we were young. To tell us that those years, those struggles, which seemed both so big and so small, mattered. That our lives wasn’t something ahead of us, but that it had started.

Le Carré understood this. He wrote about individuals and systems and being trapped and finding escape. He didn’t make espionage romantic and exciting, like Fleming and others have done. Instead he was realistic about the world and what happened in it. He wrote about childhood and the world and didn’t tell us lies. The world was big and strange and full of possibility. Full of tragedy, yes, but also full of so many things bigger than us, which would both save us and destroy us, and give it meaning.

And in writing two of his best books - The Constant Gardener and Absolute Friends - in his seventies, it serves as a vital reminder for those of us who are now adults. That our best work, our best days, are not necessarily behind us.

Rest In Peace, David John Moore Cornwell.