February 18, 2016 British author John le Carre (David John Moore
Cornwell) attends a screening of Berlinale Special Series “The
Night Manager” during the 66th Berlinale Film Festival in Berlin.
John MACDOUGALL / AFP
John le Carre, the British writer best known
for his Cold War espionage novels “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and
“The Spy Who Came In From The Cold”, has died aged 89, his agent
and family said Sunday.
The author, a former British intelligence officer whose real
name was David Cornwell, wrote 25 novels and one memoir in a career
spanning six decades, selling 60 million books worldwide.
His wife of nearly 50 years, Jane, and sons Nicholas, Timothy,
Stephen and Simon, said in a statement that he died on Saturday
night after a short battle with pneumonia.
“We all grieve deeply his passing,” they said, thanking staff at
the hospital in Cornwall, southwest England, for their care. “We
know they share our sadness,” they added.
“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” was adapted for television in 1979,
with Alec Guinness starring as the enigmatic spycatcher George
Smiley, and became a classic. Gary Oldman reprised the role in the
2011 film, winning an Oscar the following year.
“All who follow are in his debt,” Oldman said in a statement.
“His characters were drawn deftly and deeply… For me, inhabiting
George Smiley remains one of the highpoints of my life.”
His friend, the novelist Robert Harris,
called le Carre “one of those writers who really was
not only a brilliant writer but he also penetrated popular culture
— and that’s a great rarity”.
Harris told Sky News television “The Spy Who Came In From The
Cold” was a “masterpiece”.
“It’s an incredibly engrossing tale and very deep, and it
transformed the writing of spy fiction. It was a brilliant,
psychological portrait of spying and of betrayal and of the decline
of British power.”
Stephen King, the best-selling US author,
called le Carre “a literary giant and a humanitarian
spirit”.
Jonny Geller, le Carre’s literary agent, said: “His
like will never be seen again, and his loss will be felt by every
book lover, everyone interested in the human condition.”
And historian Simon Sebag Montefiore said he was heartbroken at
the death of a “titan of English literature”.
Tailor’s shop
Le Carre’s life could have been the stuff of fiction and he
once said he owed his career in the shadows and later literary
success to an “impulsive adolescent decision” to flee an unhappy
home life.
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It involved a spell in Bern, Switzerland, learning German, where
he took his first steps in British intelligence, doing odd-jobs
across the border in Austria.
From Switzerland, he returned to Britain to study at Oxford
University, then went on to teach at the elite Eton school before
joining MI5, the country’s domestic intelligence agency, in the
late 1950s.
He later transferred to the overseas spy agency MI6, serving in
the West German capital Bonn, where he witnessed the building of
the Berlin Wall.
It was as an MI6 officer that he had his first success with “The
Spy Who Came in from the Cold” in 1963. For obvious reasons, he had
to use a pseudonym.
“I was asked so many times why I chose this ridiculous name,
then the writer’s imagination came to my help,” he told The Paris
Review in 1996.
“I saw myself riding over Battersea Bridge (in London), on top
of a bus, looking down at a tailor’s shop… and
it was called something of this sort
—- le Carre.”
Big Pharma to Brexit
If Cold War intrigue and its tense, often bleak backdrop made
his name and his books best-sellers, le Carre found
new subject matter and a litany of characters and causes as the
world changed.
They included arms dealers, Russian gangsters, financiers and
Big Pharma, which he portrayed in the 2001 novel “The Constant
Gardener”, later adapted into a film starring Ralph Fiennes and
Rachel Weisz.
Despite his establishment education and
career, le Carre — a traditionalist who admitted he
could not type and wrote by hand — often railed against it.
He turned down a knighthood and was suspicious of literary
honours.
An avowed Europhile, he was also an outspoken critic of Brexit,
and at the last general election in 2019 told AFP that Britons
should “join the resistance” against Prime Minister Boris
Johnson.
“My England would be the one that recognises its place in the
EU,” he told a US interviewer in 2017. “The jingoistic England that
is trying to march us out of the EU, that is an England I don’t
want to know.”
AFP
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