The late novelist, who eschewed literary prizes, was a shadowy giant of post-war British fiction
John le Carré never won the Booker prize. His genre – a mix of espionage and detective thriller – wasn’t always in literary fashion even as it was hugely popular, selling some 60m copies. Le Carré refused to let his work be entered into literary prizes, though he did in his early career and in recent years had been recognised with honours such as the prestigious Olof Palme award. The complexity and deftness of his narratives left the illusion, for some, that they somehow skimmed the surface of life. That plots overwhelmed his characters’ depth of personality.
To anyone reading Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People, A Perfect Spy or the recent Smiley retrospective, A Legacy of Spies, this is absurd. I cannot think of a novelist who intruded so utterly into the psychology of their subject’s profession as did le Carré, whose real name was David Cornwell. Each of the characters in Tinker Tailor was dismembered, frailties exposed, as was the father-and-son relationship – so close to Cornwell’s own – in A Perfect Spy. A former spy himself, he was able to penetrate the balance between personal ambition, loyalty to colleagues and duty to principle that afflicts any career. Private Eye might tease him as John le Carry-on-trying-to-write-the-great-British-novel, but in a sense this was an acknowledgement that he succeeded.
