Alphabet John le Carré

British writer John le Carré, who died in Cornwall on Saturday at the age of 89, was both a public figure and a secret man hiding in plain sight, a spy in the deadly Cold War game and a successful storyteller. world.

He revolutionized the espionage novel, which he turned into high literature.

Some thought that his fictional world had ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but he continued to publish magnificent novels, which managed to capture the contemporary world.

John le Carré, master of the spy novel, dies at 89

"For a lawyer, the truth is unadorned facts," he wrote in his memoir,

Volar encircles (Planet,

like all his work in Spanish)

,

in which he tiptoes over his role in the British secret services.

“Whether it is possible to find them or not is another story.

The real truth does not lie in the facts - if it resides anywhere - but in the nuances ”.

His life and his work were undoubtedly full of them.

The last sentence of his last book can serve to summarize his life: "I wanted to tell him that he was a decent man, but it was too late."

Here are 10 concepts, a Le Carré alphabet to try to define an author who always wanted to escape any definition.

Brexit

John le Carré wanted to end his career as a novelist in 2013 with

A Delicate Truth

, a classic spy novel.

However, outrage at the UK's departure from the EU after the 2016 referendum led him to write a new book,

A Decent Man,

in which he resurrects his most famous character, George Smiley.

The history of the publication of this farewell novel reflects the ups and downs of Brexit, because Le Carré wanted it to come out just as the United Kingdom was leaving the Union.

However, he ended up editing it earlier, in the fall of 2019, because in the absence of an agreement, Brexit was delayed again and again and he, suffering from cancer, felt that time was running out.

In the end, the writer has died two weeks before the final release takes place.

It was a subject that outraged him.

Le Carré was a friendly and funny man, tremendously polite.

However, when talking about Brexit they took the demons.

"It is without a doubt the biggest idiocy the UK has perpetrated since the Suez invasion in 1956," he explained in an interview in 2019.

Cinema

Few contemporary authors have been so many times taken to the cinema: many of Le Carré's novels have been turned into films, some excellent ones such as

The Spy Who Came from the Cold, The Constant Gardener, The Mole

or

The Most Wanted Man

, and in series.

In fact, one could say that the BBC's planetary success with

Coppersmith, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

(original title of

The Mole

) and

Smiley People,

starring Alec Guiness as George Smiley in the 1970s, anticipated the era of the global series we live in.

In the last adaptation,

The infiltrator

, he participated as an executive producer with his children.

However, his flirtations with cinema went far beyond his own films.

He loved to tell anecdotes about Stanley Kubrick, with whom he was friends and who closed a movie theater for him so he could see

The Shining,

but especially about Sydney Pollack, with whom he undertook several projects that never came to fruition.

They locked themselves in to write a script based on

A Small Town in Germany

in the house in Switzerland where the Le Carré family spent their winters.

But Pollack discovered skiing and went down the slopes.

It became so common in the Alpine chalet that he ended up taking trusts like lending it to Robert Redford.

"Unfortunately I never met him, but for many years thereafter every time I went to town I was surrounded by the prestigious aura of being a friend of Robert Redford," he wrote in

Fly in Circles

.

Cornwall

Cornwall, in the southwestern tip of England, is a land of legends and mysterious prehistoric stone circles.

There is the mythical origin of the legend of King Arthur.

And there too, in a place called Tregiffian, on the southern coast of the peninsula, John le Carré made his home when he bought a piece of land after the success of

The Spy Who Came From The Cold

.

He found his place in the world on an abandoned farm: fruits that grew earlier than the rest of the country were grown there and shipped by train to London.

When, thanks to aviation, they could be brought in from southern Europe, it was deserted and it was a bargain.

The house grew over the years, with homes for their children and grandchildren, souvenirs and books.

With an imposing view of the sea and the neighboring meadows, it is a place as simple, humble and welcoming as Le Carré itself.

Nearby he died last Saturday to enter, he too, into the legend.

'The spy that emerged from the cold'

This novel represented a before and after in his life.

His third book, published in 1963 when he was still working for the secret service under diplomatic cover, allowed him to dedicate himself to writing, a job that he was passionate about.

"I love doing what I'm doing right now: smearing a piece of paper like a man in hiding, on a small and uncomfortable desk, on a stormy early morning in May," he said.

Adapted very early to the cinema, in 1965 by Martin Ritt with Richard Burton as the protagonist, it is considered one of the best spy novels of all time.

Its influence on how we view the Cold War is difficult to measure, but it certainly changed perceptions of the past.

It is a sad, hard book, starring an antihero, Alec Leamas, and in which his most famous character, George Smiley, already appears.

The setting is Berlin shortly after the construction of the wall and in its plot the betrayal, the lie, the Faustian pacts that must be accepted in the name of a greater good, the fight for freedom against totalitarianism, in short, the great issues arise that marked his life and work, which can be summed up in one: the fight to remain moral in an immoral world.

Cheated

When Le Carré was asked about his favorite novel, he hardly thought about it:

A Perfect Spy

, one of his most voluminous and complex books.

And he was not the only one of that opinion.

Philip Roth, for example, was also an enthusiast for its author's most personal novel (even more than his autobiography).

The great themes of this book are deception and family secrets, which appear again and again in his literature.

But above all,

A Perfect Spy

represents a reckoning with the most important character in his life, his own father, Ronnie, whom he defines as "a trickster, a fraud and an occasional visitor to prison."

Ronnie was a liar, a white-collar thief (and sometimes not so white), a guy who could get on the most wanted list for scam and flock to Ascot races like a millionaire.

The figure of Ronnie made Le Carré a skeptic about the human race, but also someone who considered ethics and moral decisions very important.

"The decent option is something that marks my own life," he explained in an interview.

“What to do with my father when I realized he was a scammer.

Warn people not to deal with him?

My solution was to escape to Switzerland at the age of 16 ”.

Cold War

He considered himself a soldier of the Cold War.

He was recruited in 1958 by MI5, the British internal secret services, and in 1960 he went to MI6, the foreign espionage and was stationed in Bonn and Hamburg.

He left the service in 1964, when his literary success was beginning, because he was one of the many agents reported by Kim Philby.

In interviews, he explained that he was in contact with old friends from the secret services and active agents.

But he never wanted to reveal what he did because, he maintained, he had a duty (towards his colleagues and towards his country) to maintain secrecy.

However, his biographer, Adam Sisman, reveals in

John le Carré.

A Biography

, a book published in 2016 and not translated into Spanish, some secrets of the author.

When he was at MI5, Le Carré reported on his comrades, went into their rooms to snoop, denounced their communist affiliation.

"They asked him to adopt a leftist personality," he writes

.

"His job consisted of infiltrating extreme left groups, reporting who was present and identifying hitherto unknown communists."

In a conversation with Timothy Garton Ash, he confessed that what he did in those years haunted him for the rest of his life.

With the disintegration of the USSR, some doomsayers considered that their literature was over, that their masterpieces such as

El Mole

,

La gente de Smiley

or

El honorable colegial

would never be repeated

.

However, he continued to publish great novels, some masterful.

He dealt with topics such as the power of big pharma in

The Constant Gardener

, torture in the fight against terrorism in

The Most Wanted Man,

tax havens and shadow powers in

El sastre de Panamá

and

Single & Single

.

New times came, but Le Carré continued to be great.

Invasion of Iraq

George W. Bush's war on terrorism and the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, with the support of the José María Aznar government, turned John le Carré into a militant.

One of his best friends, Philippe Sands, a successful lawyer and writer with

Calle Este Oeste

, relates that he met him precisely in a meeting with a prisoner from Guantánamo.

He wrote articles, novels like

The Most Wanted Man

, gave lectures.

It was a subject that haunted him.

He thought that everything that had been done to win the Cold War, that all the moral sacrifices, all the betrayals, only made sense if they led to a more just and free society.

"Our main defense against terrorist attacks is to be an open and democratic society, the best we can," he said in an interview in 2009. He saw many of those ideals collapse since September 11, 2001.

Le Carré, John

John le Carré's real name is David Cornwell.

He had to adopt a pseudonym because when he started publishing novels he was still working for the secret service.

The problem is, you don't know what it means.

"The name is a mask," writes his biographer, Adam Sisman.

“Although his cover was discovered a long time ago, it has helped keep the public at a distance.

It is one of several means he has used to hide his tracks and confuse those who track him.

His decision to adopt a pseudonym was understandable;

but his choice of the name John le Carré remains mysterious.

Over the years he has given various explanations about it, but has admitted that none of them is true. "

Philby, Kim

He was the best double agent of all time.

Together with Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, Kim Philby formed the so-called Cambridge Circle, which managed to infiltrate the highest echelons of British power, not just the secret services.

Until his escape to Moscow in 1963, Philby reported dozens of British agents.

One of them was Le Carré himself.

Over the years, they tried many times to reunite them, but the writer always refused.

"I couldn't have shaken his hand," he said in an interview.

“I was soaked in blood.

It would have been repulsive. "

On the other hand, as Adam Sisman explains, he would have loved to meet him from a strictly literary point of view, because Philby embodied all the themes he had dealt with in his books: the double game, loyalty to ideals, even if they were tremendously wrong, the ability to sneak away.

Smiley, george

He is the central character of his literature, a tired old spy who from the Circus controls double agents and, at the same time, looks for them.

George Smiley appears in ten of his novels and returns in the last pages of his latest book,

A Decent Man

.

Nobody better than the words of Le Carré himself to define what this character who carries the entire burden of the Cold War on his shoulders represented: “Smiley knew that he had used the methods of absolutism to defeat Karla and felt that he had sacrificed his own humanity, who had betrayed himself.