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John Le Carré
Photo:
Christian Charisius / picture alliance / dpa
No hero looks like that.
Small, plump and cumbersome: the spy George Smiley.
As John Le Carré described him, "he seemed to be spending a lot of money on really bad clothing that hung around his body like the skin of a shrunken toad."
He was the leading figure in the extensive work of the British writer and appeared for the first time in 1963 in the novel "The Spy Who Came From the Cold".
It was Le Carré's third book - and it became a global success.
As an employee of the British secret service, Smiley is supposed to check an officer, actually nothing special, but the man commits suicide.
Against the resistance of his superiors, the sad hero begins his own research.
Because behind the suicide, which soon turns out to be murder, there is more: the East-West conflict - and the question of whether loyalty to one's own secret service and thus one's own country is still possible in times of crumbling political certainties.
This question ran through all of John Le Carré's great novels.
Smiley was mediocrity personified, an ideal disguise for inconspicuously looking at the world.
Because what is a spy but a person who looks behind things?
And that is exactly the profession of the writer.
It was repeatedly emphasized that John Le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell, himself had worked as an agent for the British domestic and foreign secret service from 1958 to 1964.
A writer who has been a real spy.
A sensation?
You could also see this resume as the perfect prerequisite for creating a great fictional work.
“Once a spy, always a spy - I think that's perfectly true.
And I don't know whether I'm a writer who became a spy or a spy who eventually became a writer, ”Le Carré told SPIEGEL.
Marked by the feeling of disillusionment
His novels were marked by a feeling of disillusionment from the start.
It arose from the observation that after the Second World War there were no longer any political certainties in Europe.
In interviews, Le Carré said how much it made him think that the same British soldiers who had destroyed Germany in the bombing war later flew the cherry bombers, which were vital for the Berlin population and received with jubilation.
The theme of moral ambivalence runs through his work, which is why the books by John Le Carré are not just spy novels, not black and white stories, but rather explore the many intricate shades of gray.
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Carré was born in Dorset, England in 1931, his father was a con man who wanted to get around celebrities and shady characters;
Le Carré described him as "manipulative, powerful, charismatic, clever and unreliable".
His mother had left the family when he was five years old, sometimes it was said that she was sick, then again that she had died - he only saw her again when he was already 21.
It was an unstable and loveless childhood when Le Carré was eight years old and the Second World War began.
At sixteen, in 1947, he escaped the humiliating life at his father's side and left England to go to boarding school in Switzerland;
He then studied German and New Languages in Bern, which he finally completed at Lincoln College in Oxford.
He was recruited in Bern by a local British spy and worked undercover for the British Embassy.
He hoped for stability and stability from the organization of the British secret service.
That he had the opposite experience can be read in many of his 27 novels.
At the beginning of the 1960s, he carried out three challenging jobs at the same time: he was a spy for the foreign secret service, an embassy employee in Germany and began to write his first novels.
The brooding hero Smiley can also be understood as his author's alter ego, although Le Carré was much better dressed than him throughout his life.
As a writer, Le Carré found the role of his life in his early thirties.
The experience-filled first three decades of life provided him with the conceptual framework for his novels, the last of which, "Badminton", was published last year.
This book, too, was characterized by its complexity, refinement and moral complexity.
Le Carré died in Cornwall on Sunday.
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