When John le Carré (the pen name of David John Moore Cornwell) died on December 12, 2020, the world mourned the passing of a master storyteller who redefined and elevated the spy novel. Reading le Carré did not mean revelling in the thrills, babes and fast cars that served to prop up the impossible plots and wafer-thin characterisations of others writing in the same genre. No, reading a le Carré meant taking your pleasure in well-crafted sentences, sleight-of-hand changes in points-of-view and bearing his weariness and cynicism about how the world had grown more complex in the wake of the second world war.
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, widely considered his masterpiece and a modern classic, was only le Carré’s third novel and published in 1963 when he was 30 years old. It is set not long after the building of the Berlin Wall and continues the story that le Carré had begun in his first two novels, Call for the Dead and A Murder of Quality. George Smiley, his greatest creation, appears here too along with the Circus (the name of the British intelligence service in the majority of his novels) and Control who heads operations.
The book reads like it was written by a world-weary veteran — the author had himself been working for the British intelligence services for a little over a decade when it was published. He later described his own time in the service as one of unending boredom and it was through this frustration that the almost nihilistic world view of Alec Leamas, the lead character, came about.
Towards the end of the book, Leamas disabuses the naïve notion that a spy is some kind of a superhero. Instead, he describes them as a “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors, too, yes” who do what it takes to ensure that their side comes out with as minimum damage to the larger population as possible. They resort to less than noble acts — the plot of The Spy… involves a triple bluff that has been orchestrated by the British — in order to preserve their assets in the enemy camp. In these tales of European capitals during the Cold war, there are no motorboat chases in Venetian lagoons that end with the good guy reigning supreme. Instead, you may find that your own sense of morality is outraged by the grey area in which these drab little men in rainy cities operate. But, as Leamas asks in The Spy…, what other option is there really? Have the various -isms and ideologies duke it out and have millions of people die? In the years that followed the publication of The Spy… and his leaving the service, le Carré mentioned his frustration at being called a spy-turned-writer, when he preferred greater focus on his writing talent. While the back story of the author gives this tale a whiff of authenticity, it is his ability to capture the moral conundrums of 20th century politics that shine through.
The author is a Bangalore-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.
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