This is an excerpt of a review of A Private Spy: The Letters of John Le Carré from our partner Book Post. Subscribe to Book Post, the newsletter that brings the most thoughtful reviews in small packages.
The name “John le Carré” evokes, alongside some very specific imagery (smoke, fog, cobblestone, codebook, desperate men in crumpled suits), a tedious argument that has flared up with some regularity over 60-odd years now: is he the most major of genre writers, in his case, the spy thriller, or the most minor of the all-time titans?
This dichotomy is not just spurious but carries a whiff of envy. After all, le Carré, who died in 2020 aged 89, has lived an impossible literary dream: he wrote great novels at the velocity of pop (25 in all) and with the sales to match. Shoving his work into the “genre” bracket is an openly therapeutic measure for whoever’s doing the shoving—as is the patronizing claim that he has somehow “transcended” it. Spycraft and all its musty crevices are le Carré’s milieu, not his genre, the same way Jane Austen’s is the Regency-era landed gentry. He wrote his world.
So here’s what le Carré actually was, by dint and by accident of his expertise, biography, and time on earth: our ultimate chronicler of the postwar world order. His early novels take place in a substrate still shaped by Churchill and the Blitz; his latest ones deal with Brexit, Putin, and Trump. In other words, his corpus spans the political and spiritual epoch that began in 1945 and ended, it is now clear, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Continue reading the review of A Private Spy on Book Post.
—Michael Idov is the author of the memoir Dressed Up for a Riot, the novel Ground Up, and copious magazine articles. He was also screenwriter for, among other projects, the TV spy series Deutschland 89.
If you're new to the remarkable legacy of John le Carré, these are five of his 25+ novels we would recommend starting with.
1. This 1963 novel depicts Alec Leamas, a British agent, being sent to East Germany as a faux defector to seed disinformation about an East German intelligence officer.
"The spy novel was being reshaped with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold — it was a paradigm shift in the genre — it would never be the same again and indeed its wider influence in literary fiction was manifold." —Novelist William Boyd in The Guardian
2. The first novel in John le Carré's celebrated Quest for Karla trilogy follows the efforts of aging spymaster George Smiley to uncover a Soviet mole in the British Secret Intelligence Service. Fandom of the film adaptation with Colin Firth and Gary Oldman may eclipse that of the book, but we say reading it first is a must — it is incredibly entertaining.
"Seeing your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes." —John le Carré
3. Little Drummer Girl, first published in 1983, follows an Israeli spymaster who intends to kill a Palestinian terrorist as well as an English actress who is a double agent working on behalf of the Israelis.
"It would be a shame to call The Little Drummer Girl a novel of espionage, though it has all the virtues of one — so let's say instead that it is about whether love and beauty are proof against bombs and, if they are, how they can be used to repair the damage." —Anatole Broyard in the original New York Times book review
4. This is le Carré's most autobiographical book, as much of the plot seems to mirror the author's early life as an M16 intelligence officer. But there are no allegations (yet) that le Carré's ever betrayed his country like the troubled protagonist Magnus Pym.
"By the time he wrote A Perfect Spy, le Carré understood that espionage is an extreme version of the human comedy, even the human tragedy. It will very likely remain his greatest book." —David Denby in The New Yorker
5. The Constant Gardener (2001) is less of a spy novel and more of an assault on corporation corruption and the way the world works. Based on a true story, the book follows a British diplomat in Kenya as he tries to solve the mystery of his activist wife's murder.
Le Carré actually won a $100,000 human rights prize for his contribution to democracy with the book. The Olof Palme Prize organizers praised "his engaging and humanistic opinion making in literary form regarding the freedom of the individual and the fundamental issues of mankind."
Read the spymaster's belles lettres in A Private Spy, this collection compiled by his son Tim Cornwell.