There's something about the English that loves a spy. Last week, like a dormant virus, there was a renewed outbreak of Smiley fever. Several broadsheets devoted many column inches to the career of a deceased MI5 man, John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris.
An MI5 leak played its part, of course, but this was chiefly because, in the words of the Daily Telegraph, Bingham was "the man who inspired George Smiley". As an extra spike in the temperature chart, it was also alleged that Smiley's creator John le Carré "was in love with wife of spy hero" (the Times).
All of which goes to demonstrate that, with the possible exception of JK Rowling, no living writer exerts quite the same grip on the British imagination as John le Carré and his Smiley novels. Once again, fans and critics, writers and readers, have been asking themselves: how does he do it?
The enigma of le Carré is an old story, and almost as sprightly as the 82-year-old author himself. He was born David John Moore Cornwell in 1931 to Olive and Ronnie Cornwell in Poole, Dorset. Until Adam Sisman's biography is published later this year, the story so far is that it's the father who holds the key to the man – a view richly endorsed by A Perfect Spy (1986).
Ronnie Cornwell was a confidence trickster who made and lost a number of fortunes and was, at least once, imprisoned for fraud. "Thanks to his father," says a friend, "David doesn't really know who he is. Actually, he never did know who he was, or where he fitted. One minute, there was a mock Tudor mansion in Maidenhead; the next, his father was in jail."
From an early age, Cornwell was making up stories to cover his tracks and explain things away, a gift that became essential when, as a teenager, he was sent to board at Sherborne school. Cornwell did not fit in and left early to make his way in the world. Later, he wrote: "People who have had unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves."
Being untruthful became a habit of being. After studying abroad, he attended Oxford, joined MI5, later transferring to MI6, adopted his nom de plume and began writing fiction. Le Carré's work has always been more autobiographical than most readers realise. His first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), featured George Smiley. Soon, he found his subject and his voice when he put his MI6 experience to work in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, an international hit hailed by Graham Greene as "the best spy story I ever read".
With Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, (1974), originally titled "The Eternal Autumn of George Smiley", le Carré became the storyteller of the national myth and the master of moral complexity in the looking-glass world of secret conflict. Smiley, who is partly based on Bingham but also on the Sherborne chaplain and le Carré's Oxford tutor Vivian HH Green, joined the immortals of English fiction such as Sherlock Holmes and Bertie Wooster. Le Carré, who cherishes the work of PG Wodehouse, takes an almost Victorian satisfaction from watching his characters become braided into the imagination of the ordinary British reader.
Smiley and "the Circus" of MI6 have a threefold appeal. First, by an extraordinary sleight of hand, le Carré contrived to make a fictive world seem tangible and real, what he has called "a spook world better suited to my needs". So potent was his art that former colleagues in MI5 and MI6 began to adopt his invented lingo of "lamplighters", "moles", "ferrets", "pavement artists", and the rest. Unconsciously, no doubt, his devoted readers became complicit with his fabrications. In his 2008 essay The Madness of Spies, he wrote of doing "a sort of Tolkien job" on his experience. Thus, he said, it was his fantasy to dream "the Great Spy's Dream" [of being] "at the Spies' Big table, playing the world's game". Needless to add, he has occasionally asserted the exact opposite.
Second, mixed with his lifelong fascination with a class to which he knows he can never belong, there's le Carré's abiding love for the adulterers, depressives, alcoholics and con men who people his plots. At heart, he is a romantic who is charmed by the seedy, the marginal and the betrayed, but from the inside. Accordingly, he bestows a weird humanity on the flotsam and jetsam of the secret state. This is the le Carré whom some, exasperated by the etiolated condition of British "literary fiction", celebrate as our greatest postwar novelist. Such praise is not just insular sentiment. Philip Roth has described A Perfect Spy as "the best English novel since the war."
Above all, as an inside-outsider, the writer with the double life, he has used the reflecting mirrors of the secret service to explore the nature of English society at the end of empire, especially as it affected the "poor loves" denied their global inheritance. In The Secret Pilgrim (1990), he gave George Smiley a speech that is almost a summary of le Carré's visceral intuition about Britain's post-imperial upper class:
"The privately educated Englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth… Was, is now and ever shall be for as long as our disgraceful school system remains intact. Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he's been a damn fool. Nobody acts braver when he's frightened stiff, or happier when he's miserable; nobody can flatter you better when he hates you than your extrovert Englishman or woman..."
In conclusion, le Carré (Smiley) might be speaking about the Philbys, Burgesses and Macleans who so comprehensively betrayed the covert society he joined in the late 1950s: "He can have a Force 12 nervous breakdown while he stands next to you in the bus queue and you may be his best friend but you'll never be the wiser. Which is why some of our best officers turn out to be our worst. And our worst, our best. And why the most difficult agent you will ever have to run is yourself. "
In his prime, as Smiley's Boswell, David Cornwell conducted himself, Greene-like, as the invisible man, rarely giving interviews, sequestered in his clifftop Cornish retreat, secure in the company of his second wife, Jane. But then history caught up with him, the Wall came down, the cold war ended, and he had to leave Smiley, who had become another kind of father figure, behind.
These were difficult years. He continued to write obsessively, as he has always done, but his imagination was misfiring. The naysayers, who class him as merely a popular genre writer, jeered that, with the fall of the USSR, his day was over. Far from it: he simply reinvented himself, reconnected with the world, and came up with The Constant Gardener (2001) and A Most Wanted Man (2008), mature novels of savage indignation. For a writer who first became a bestseller when Harold Macmillan was prime minister, it was a remarkable late flowering.
There have been some health scares but now, as he approaches his 83rd birthday, he's running in the posterity stakes, as painfully sensitive to his reputation and record as ever. Like Prospero, he manipulates from afar. An interview here; a démarche there (often focusing, in the last decade on the war in Iraq and its consequences); anon, a letter to the newspapers. Unlike Shakespeare's magician, he has not yet "drowned" his book, however, and continues to write himself out of trouble from day to day. To his friends and admirers, he remains the best company in the world – sharp, witty and well informed, a wicked mimic and a brilliant raconteur.
This promises to be a big year. The film of A Most Wanted Man, starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, will excite widespread interest. In the autumn, there's Sisman's John le Carré: The Biography, published by Bloomsbury.
Not even Cornwell knows exactly what skeletons his biographer has turned up, and there have been some jumpy moments, notably a wild rumour that the old wizard was going to upstage himself and release a competing memoir.
Sisman, who says it is hard not to be seduced by le Carré, insists he has preserved his splinter of ice. Speaking to the Observer last week, he said: "Far from slowing down as he enters his ninth decade, [David] seems to be speeding up. He's infuriatingly difficult to pin down, and half a century after The Spy who Came in from the Cold, John le Carré remains an enigma. At the top of his genre, I'd rate him as one of the most important writers of our times."
