. World News – AU – John le Carré recalled writers and friends: « He always had a naughty wink. « 

Margaret Atwood, John Banville, Tom Stoppard, Ralph Fiennes, John Boorman and others pay tribute to a master who has exceeded the limits of spy fiction

We met for lunch on a rainy day late last summer at an excellent but eerily deserted restaurant in the village of Hampstead. He was already there when I arrived, sitting in a square at a small table with his back to the wall and his eyes to the door. I inevitably wondered how many empty restaurants, bars, and cafes he’d sat in and waited and watched in in the days when he was a spy. He always downplayed the importance of these days, speaking of them with ironic amusement and creating the impression that in the world of espionage he had been little more than a pen-pusher. I decided to believe him.

This meeting in Hampstead wasn’t our last? He later came to Dublin and Cork to investigate his father’s Irish roots as he thought of giving up Brexitland for Ireland. But it’s what I remember most vividly. He was 88 years old, but had the strength and vigilance of a much younger man. When I heard the news of his death, I immediately saw a picture of him walking along in the rain in his George smiley coat that day. His big, square, handsome head split the air like the handle of a battle cruiser. He was a great man in many ways.

His biographer Adam Sisman quoted him as saying, « People who have had unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves. « . In conversation he kept going back to his own childhood, which he looked back on with a kind of amazement, astonished that he had survived it; survived and thrived. His father, Ronnie, had been an impostor and chancellor on an epic scale. A person representing a London hospital showed up at his funeral to retrieve his head and claimed that Ronnie sold it to the hospital for research a long time ago. and his mother left him and his brother when they were students, never to return.

Was it his own invention? Well, aren’t we all? He seemed absolutely authentic to me, the reality, a man who fit exactly into the space that the world had allotted him. He was an old-fashioned patriot without the bombing that might imply. He loved his country, but was disgusted with the rise of Little Englandism after the Brexit referendum. He was serious about moving to Ireland, but had he settled here he would have been terribly homesick.

As a writer, he transcended the mere genre and showed that works of art emerged from the tired traps of the spy novel â ???? The Spy Who Came In From The Cold is one of the most beautiful novels of the 20th century. Century. Together with Iris Murdoch, he supported and strengthened the tradition of the English mainstream manners novel; As a planner and storyteller, he was just as great as Robert Louis Stevenson. His books will live as long as people keep reading. Samuel Beckett, when asked what he considered his friend James Joyce’s best quality, replied, « Probability. « . a???? Many of us would say the same of John le Carré and twice that of David Cornwell.

He was David to his friends, and while this company was enormous, you couldn’t help but feel proud to be part of it. The rewards were multiple. His handwriting on an envelope surpassed all other matters, and sitting at his table was conversation, education, and catching up on the news after the news. As a storyteller, he made the police force with different voices. And then there were the books; the prose, the perfect epithets, the disposable gems. We were all happy to see Smiley fumbling with the front of his shirt to polish his glasses with the end of his tie and forgetting that he was in an evening gown. It’s been so many years since I read it, but I still remember the little shock of joy I felt.

It was Le Carré to me until we became friends 30 years ago through the film The Russia House, one of the books that best showcased the amalgamation of radical anger and high romanticism that went into building the precision instrument brought this is a Le Carré novel in its prime. He recently told me that he had found his way to his next book. There was an obvious joy and also a relief in his voice. Maybe that one is lost now, but the blow of losing David is immense and personal.

My father’s hardcover copy of The Little Drummer Girl was the only novel I had as a whole on a shelf in our living room that was otherwise reserved for the « serious » ones. Books. (Namely about a dozen volumes of the OED. As such, it took me a while to read as I searched for clues about the life of my grandfather, double agent Kim Philby, about whom Le Carré publicly destroyed. Years later, I can still smell the pages when I opened them in my late teens and found myself in one of its quietly devastating worlds for the first time. Over the years, I’ve looked through every one of his books and drank his extraordinary observations on the political and the personal and how they intersect. I am so grateful to him for stories that helped me understand the world my grandfather lived in in dark gray color. As a writer, I’ve always been inspired by his ability to combine forensic reasoning, skillfully crafted plot, and a clarity about what it means to be human and flawed. and i’m totally resigned to the fact that anything i write will never touch it.

John le Carré was a towering writer whose books are a teeming Dickens’ guide to the desolate Machiavellian underworld under the international power struggles of the past 70 years. Like so many, I was first grabbed out of the cold by The Spy Who Came and then enthralled by the Smiley novels. Orwell, Greene, Le Carré? how important they are, especially now, and how bold do they make the division into « literary fiction »? and « genre ». Thank you, dear John, from one of your most admiring regular readers.

We met for the first time in the local pub, connected with the mendacity of the « war on terror ». and Iraq, and finally gave a lecture at a local school with a former Guantanamo inmate. I learned that his attention to detail and his ability to research were more than exceptional. I didn’t hesitate when he asked if I could review a manuscript to verify that the lawyers were « correct ». . (Dress, slang, style, etc. . ) It became a normal thing: the doorbell; he was standing on the porch; Hundreds of pages in one box; « Usual Procedure »? What a pleasure to receive the unvarnished double-spaced words printed on only one page and the conversations that followed. (Incredibly, in the early years my wife gave the designs to our children as waste paper. ) « No lawyer would call their client a » heart « . I could politely scribble or something in the early days, tighter as the years passed, and then bring the appropriate pages back to their house around the corner. Occasionally there was a debate, sometimes quite spirited. Usually he accepted a suggestion, but not always. â ???? Heartâ ???? Fortunately, he never made it into this book, despite forever insisting that he once hear a lawyer use the phrase « really a term of genuine tenderness. ». .

Over the years the act of reading has sown the magic of its approach to structure and text (the dialogue!) into my soul. He was warm, funny, extremely generous, and always had a naughty wink. He was a student of the human condition and a teacher forever. (“What you need to understand about Eton,” he told me not long ago when he suggested to Mr. Johnson and the place where he once taught himself, “are the students. « taught to win, not to rule. â ????) As I write this, I don’t remember the laughter, the secret rhubarb crumbs and pudding shared despite our wives’ ordinances, and the sheer happiness of every encounter with Le Carré and his wife Jane most recently on the spontaneous prelude streets of Hampstead.

When I first met David, it was love at first sight. His humor and wit were irresistible. He was a living jukebox with stories of all kinds. Was he a very attentive listener too? I’ve met a lot of people who really like their own voices and don’t really care about others, but David was really interested in other people.

With Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, he challenged me and screenwriters Bridget Oâ € ™ Connor and Peter Straughan to create our own version of his book. He visited our office often and was a guest on the set several times. It was so nice to have someone who was so supportive but not intrusive.

I remember his first reaction the first time he saw a cut in the projection room. he turned to me and said, « Chuffed as fuck. â ????

We met every now and then, the last time in January in Stockholm when he received an award. He had written the most radical speech: he was very critical of the UK’s exit from the EU and said very nice things about our former Prime Minister Olof Palme, after whom the award was named.

He was so much fun: a little boy and a patriarch at the same time. He was so ready to play and be a man of strong opinions and tremendous integrity. It’s fantastic that an 89 year old man could be 17. I will really miss him very much.

As might be expected, David Cornwell was a master of disguise, doing different things to different people in different places.

We shot our kind of traitor in five countries. One section takes place in the Bellevue Palace Hotel in Bern. As he dressed in monogrammed shirts, this five-star luxury seemed to be his natural habitat, but as we walked the cobbled streets of Bern together, he told how he first came there and talked at the age of 16 to a place at the university, how he helped himself wash elephants for a circus, how he slipped into the back of an auditorium to hear Herman Hesse give a reading. We had drinks in the bar at Bellevue Palace where he said he had gathered information in the post-war years and attended afternoon tea dances.

But he seemed happiest when he took us to fondue at the Formica tables in a little shop across the street that hadn’t changed much since it was discovered in the early 1950s. He advised us to drink all the kirsch and the wine that was on the table to aid digestion. Here he not only switched to German, but also to the devilishly difficult Swiss German of the region and against this background we came up with the idea of ​​how he would have his cameo appearance in my film as a Swiss German security guard at the Einstein Museum. With a typical attention to detail, was he very specific about the shoes he should wear? he felt that his character had bad feet and was a bit miserable because of it. The waitress who serves the fondue gave a great speech about how wonderful it must be to be British. In Switzerland you had to adapt, in Great Britain you could be anyone you wanted. The truth was, David Cornwell or John le Carré or whatever his name was that day could be anyone he wanted anywhere in the world.

The three days I spent with David in Cornwall in 2010, reviewing my first draft of Our Kind of Traitor, were some of the most memorable and enjoyable of my entire career.

He was such a movie buff that he was incredibly open to changes to his novel. He would play all the dialogue with fantastic accents and voices. It’s the only time I’ve worked really closely with a novelist on an adaptation, but I think he’s been like that on all of the projects he’s worked on.

We would work in the morning and then walk the cliffs in the afternoon. He was incredibly friendly as a host and very kind and encouraging as a staff member. He didn’t impose any status on you but would treat you as an equal. David was so comfortable with himself that he didn’t have to lay you down to make him feel big.

He had a very young mind, even into his 80s. He would always ask questions and be interested in other people, and I think you can tell by the way he would reinvent his subjects and tell new stories.

I’ve only met three or four geniuses in my life. People who make you think, oh, there’s a reason you got what you got. David was certainly one of them.

He lived at the very end of Land’s End, as far from London as possible without falling into the sea. I went to him. I was supposed to be doing The Tailor of Panama for Warner Brothers. He and I were of the declining generation who were children during World War II. He was only a year older than me. He had moved on and was in the middle of a new book. Everything he knew about Panama was in the book. He gave me some contacts and suggested that I write the script.

Although he did not want to talk about Panama, he sought to talk about everything else with the urgency of a hermit. We talked about the hopes we had from the reforming government of Attlee, which started the secondary modern schools, which for the first time taught all children about art and music, which led to the explosion of painting and music in the 1960s. We found that none of these musicians and painters came from Eton. A discussion of the class system which he believed was ubiquitous and prevented the development of England. Everything came from the absurd monarchy.

We met several times and I was always impressed by his high level of intelligence. When he was in the middle of a book, it was like writing it or it would burst inside him.

When I was approached by [producer] Simon Channing Williams in 2003 about making The Constant Gardener, I was already a big fan of Le Carré’s books. I loved the world he made. And then I met the man and he was so charming and generous and immediately available to talk about the novel and the character. I must have asked him all kinds of wrong questions, but all I remember is how sociable and excited he was about the project.

He had his eyes on the script because I believe he felt that some of the previous adjustments to other books hadn’t worked for him. The highlight had been the Alec Guinness Tinker Tailor series; Guinness came up a lot in conversations and he had lots of funny anecdotes about him that fired questions at him. It must have been flattering to feel the enthusiasm of the actors who came to see his characters. They appeal because they are so rich and human and complex – great things to get your mind, soul and imagination going.

The characters of Smiley and Justin Quayle [Fiennes’ role in The Constant Gardener] crossed with Davids in that they were all understated and courageous men determined to quietly pursue the truth. I loved David’s very strong sense of right and wrong combined with a wonderful sense of the complexities of humanity. His characters are seldom ciphers; They all wrestle with their ambitions and frustrations and inadequacies and attitudes.

David loved what Fernando Meirelles did with the film: he stayed true to the central axis of the book, but gave it a dynamic, very cinematic, kinetic spin that was very healthy for the perception of the Le Carre film world at the time. It is noteworthy that Fernando, Tomas [Alfredson] and Susanne [Bier, who made The Night Manager] are all non-English and have given the films a very different, strong interpretation element.

David and I were in touch for a while and had a little correspondence. He always sent me first editions of his new books. I was very sad that I couldn’t go to his birthday party last year; The last time I saw him was a little over a year ago at a screening of Coup 53 [Fiennes’ documentary on the 1953 Iranian coup] at the Renoir Curzon. It was very his world and it was so good to see him and Jane.

He had incredible energy and such a quick mind. He was also a very fun racer who made all sorts of votes. People have said that he could be an actor. In fact, he was a bit of an actor. He was one of those writers with a keen sense for the performative element in their works. And unlike some well-known authors, he wasn’t cagey or reserved. It was nice to meet someone who was enjoying their success in the best sense of the word. He had a wonderful confidence that was not boastful but an excitement about life. That meant he was exactly when to be, but also kind and supportive and honorable.

There are certain people you meet whose minds seem to be something, even if you never get there. He was one of them.

My late father, Ben, was a self-taught who grew up during the Depression in rural Mississippi, where education for African American children was separate and brief. He bought the Reader’s Digest to find out which books to read, and one of them was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. This was in the 1960s, and like most black children of the time, I grew up not only in the civil rights movement and at the beginning of its splintering, but also at a time when US intervention was obvious and normal. And we found it wrong; We knew that not everything was as clear as we were shown. As I read Le Carré, I saw the ambiguity of life itself, its darkness. I saw a man who chose love and got himself out of shame and lies. I never forgot the end of this novel. It taught me that life is complex and that even your country and friends can be wrong.

John le Carré brought style and substance to the spy novel and described a world full of morally vulnerable characters. More like Graham Greene than Ian Fleming, he wrote books where betrayal and betrayal were never far away and psychological drama trumped physical plot. As the world changed and the Cold War mutated, Le Carré focused on new threats and enemies that seemed not entirely dissimilar to their predecessors. For me, A Perfect Spy is his greatest novel because it brings us closer to understanding the author’s own life, his father’s adventures as a cheater, evoking a lifelong interest in cheating and duplicity. Le Carré was our great chronicler of the geopolitical. It shaped our understanding of a shadowy world that we shouldn’t know existed.

« The day his fate returned to claim him . . . « is the first Le Carré sentence I read in Absolute Friends. I tried to become a writer and I was discouraged by it: so much « set up » ???? so much anticipation in eight words. I’ve read almost all of his novels now and I’m still impressed, even more after all these years and all those thousands of words. It’s not just that he takes you with a trail of almost imperceptible breadcrumbs into worlds you never knew existed, that feel absolutely real and true, or even just the word-on-word craftsmanship and his mastery of the genre ???? it’s the characters: real, damaged, broken, the woolly patriotism and gray morality, confused by alcohol and ambition, lonely, heartbreaking. Not a single word of excessive emotion in his books, and yet in the end you will be wrung out by them, wiser and more understanding of the human condition. What a loss.

When I wrote to the Lions, I was struggling to find a title. My editor had one piece of advice: look at the titles by John le Carré and see how he does it. He is the best. a???? Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The little drummer girl. The spy who came in from the cold. The titles alone show his extraordinary manner with words, but in the novels themselves, Le Carré not only demonstrated his extensive knowledge of geopolitics, but also his remarkable understanding of humanity. He was a man of great compassion who witnessed the best and worst of people and alchemized that insight into truly majestic novels. The world has changed beyond recognition in his 89 years, but he has changed with it, seamlessly adapting from spying on Call for the Dead to the drug dealing chaos of The Night Manager. In Agent Running in the Field, published a little over a year ago, he devastated Brexit and a « damned narcissistic elitist from Eton. ». . For writers in the 21st. In the 20th century, my editor’s words will continue to resonate, but â ???? Unfortunately a ???? with a slightly different formulation: « He was the best. « . â ????

I came to Le Carré in my late teenage years through A Murder of Quality, where George Smiley works as a private detective of sorts. I naively asked the Belfast Central Librarian if there were any other secrets from George Smiley. She suggested Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and my world changed. I’d never read a thriller like this: so rich in psychological detail that the story wasn’t driven by action, but by big minds trying to outsmart each other. Le Carré’s best books took you into a deliciously poisoned demimonde, where damaged, jaded people fought each other with their minds rather than pistols. Angry at the state of the world, he rubbed his ax fairly quietly until his last books, when the desperation over Trump and Brexit almost, but not entirely, threw him off balance. He was sui generis, a true master of the arts.

John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy