A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: John le Carré (pseudonym of David John Moore Cornwell) is an English author of espionage novels, several of which have been adapted for film and television. He worked for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and 1960s, before leaving the secret service to devote himself to writing after the success of The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. He was regarded by many as the foremost spy novelist of his time because his works go beyond being mere thrillers. They recreate the gritty realism of the spy business, exploring relationships among people and between humans and modern institutions--themes which qualify him for consideration as a serious writer. In his works the author has explored the moral problems of patriotism, espionage, and ends versus means. Le Carré's style is precise and elegant, and his novels are noted for skillful plotting and witty dialogue. Familiarity with intelligence agents connects le Carré to the long tradition of spy/writers from Christopher Marlowe, Ben Johnson and Daniel Defoe to the modern day writers, such as Graham Greene, John Dickson Carr, Somerset Maugham, Alec Waugh, and Ted Allbeury. The son of Richard Thomas Archibald (Ronnie) Cornwell (1906–1975) and Olive (Gassy) Cornwell, John le Carré was born in Poole, Dorset, England on 19 October 1931. He has a brother Tony, a retired advertising executive, who is 2 years older, and the actress Charlotte Cornwell is his younger sister. Le Carré states he did not know his mother, who abandoned him at the age of five, until he was reacquainted with her at the age of 21. He had a difficult relationship with his father, who had been jailed for insurance fraud and was constantly in debt. According to the author, this has been one of the factors of his fascination with secrets. He began his formal schooling at St. Andrew's preparatory school near Pangbourne, Berkshire, and continued at Sherborne School but he was unhappy there with the harsh regime typical of English public schools at that time, and dropped out. He also disliked his housemaster, Thomas, who was a strong disciplinarian. From 1948–49, he studied foreign languages at the University of Berne. In 1950 le Carré joined the British Army's Intelligence Corps in Austria, where his German proved useful in interrogating people who had fled westward across the Iron Curtain. In 1952 he returned to England to study at Lincoln College, Oxford where he carried out secret assignments for MI5, which included joining far-left groups in order to collect information about possible Soviet agents. When his father went bankrupt in 1954, le Carré had to leave Oxford to teach at a boy's prep school. However, he was able to return to Oxford a year later, where he graduated with a First Class Honours B.A. degree in 1956. He then taught French and German at Eton College for two years before joining MI5 as a full-time official in 1958. His work in MI5 consisted of running agents, conducting interrogations, tapping phones, and performing authorized break-ins. In 1959 le Carré became a member of the British Foreign Service in West Germany, where he made friends of German politicians. Later he was consul in Hamburg. The most famous double agent of the Cold War, "Kim" Philby (1912-1988), betrayed le Carré, and gave his name among others to the Russians. He started his first novel, Call For The Dead, while employed in the operational section of MI5, encouraged by Lord Clanmorris (who wrote crime novels under the pen-name of John Bingham). Lord Clanmorris was one of the two men - Vivian H. H. Green was the other - who inspired le Carré's most famous character, George Smiley, a Chekhovian character and shadowlike member of the British Foreign Service. Green first met Cornwell as a schoolboy when he was the Chaplain and Assistant Master at Sherborne School (1942–1951), and then later as Rector at Lincoln's College. Unlike James Bond, Smiley is quite ordinary. He solves cases through painstaking detective work and intelligent deduction. He is married but his wife, Ann, cheats on him. What distinguishes Smiley and endears him to readers is his humanity. Though he functions in the complex shabby world of the Secret Service, he retains his integrity and compassion. In 1960, le Carré was transferred to Hamburg as a political consul. There le Carré wrote his next 2 books: A Murder of Quality, a detective story, and The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, which became an all-time best-seller after its publication in 1963. Cornwell wrote under his pseudonym of John le Carré because it was not acceptable for members of the Foreign Office to publish under their own names. In 1954, he married Alison Ann Veronica Sharp; they had three sons, Simon, Stephen and Timothy. They divorced in 1971. In 1972, he married Valérie Jane Eustace, a book editor with Hodder & Stoughton; this marriage produced one son, Nicholas, who writes as Nick Harkaway. The first 33 years of his life shaped the vision which informs Le Carre's novels. Though he did admit once in an interview that he was "for a time engaged in that work," he refused to talk about it, and no one is certain of what connection he had to actual spying. His books, however, suggest an insider's view of the mundane details of intelligence, the inefficiency of a bureaucratic institution, and the pettiness, rivalry, and back stabbing among agents, gleaned obviously during his years of government service. His fascination with spying and his mistrust of institutions can also be attributed to his experiences at public schools, where he always felt like an outsider. There he could observe the conduct of the privileged class with its dedication to British tradition and class snobbery, the group raised to protect the status quo and, incidentally, to enter the world of espionage. After the success of his third novel, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1963), le Carré began to devote himself full-time to writing. In 1964 he won the Somerset Maugham Award, an award established by Maugham to enable British authors under the age of 35 to enrich their writing by spending time abroad. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold is the story of a frustrated British agent, Alec Leamas, whose life is far from the glamour of James Bond's world: he has a love affair with a lonely, unpaid librarian, not with a fashion model. After his sub-agents in East Germany have been killed, Leamas travels behind the Iron Curtain to destroy the head of the East German Intelligence, who has directed the killings. Soon he finds out that his own people had framed him in order to frame Fiedler, an East German. In the world of double-crossing, Leamas has no way out - he is used and destroyed by his superiors. Looking Glass War (1965) continued the exploration of the intrigues of the Intelligence Service. It began with the death of a courier, who had been sent to Finland, one of the spy centers of Europe, to collect films taken by a commercial pilot, who had flown off course while over East Germany. Orders are given for the planting of an agent in this territory where, it is suspected, a new type of rocket site is being set up. A Small Town in Germany (1968) was set in the same town, Bonn, where le Carré had worked. In this novel Second Secretary in Chancery, Leo Harting, has disappeared. The story deals with topical issues, student riots and rising neo-Fascism, with an ambiguous message about what might happen in the near future in Federal Germany. The Little Drummer Girl (1983) was narrated in the second person, and was about the cause of Palestinian liberation. The central character is an actress, who is persuaded by an Israeli agent to lose her Arab sympathies and spy for them. The book was made into a film in 1984, losing in the process le Carré's intricate plotting. Before the last or latest Smiley novel, The Secret Pilgrim (1991), le Carré published A Perfect Spy (1986), drawing on his own relations with his domineering father, and The Russia House (1989), a response to the end of the Cold War, where a British publisher becomes involved in espionage by a Soviet woman, who acts as emissary for a volatile friend. The novel was adapted for screen, starring Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer. Nearly all of his novels fall in the spy-thriller genre, with a particular emphasis on the Cold War. One notable exception is The Naďve and Sentimental Lover (1971), which has autobiographical elements based on the author's relationship with James and Susan Kennaway following the breakdown of his first marriage. Le Carré's first two novels, Call For The Dead and A Murder of Quality, closely follow the mystery fiction approach, where the emphasis is on a complex riddle that hero George Smiley must solve. In later, longer works, such as The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and The Night Manager (1993), Le Carré approaches his material more as novelist and less as a mystery writer, focusing on the in-depth development of his characters. Le Carré's work is in many ways a critical and reasoned response to the lurid sensationalism of the James Bond genre of spy writing. His heroes are three-dimensional, their engagement with the world is more realistic, and their circumstances are markedly unglamorous. There is little of the action thriller in his stories, no high-tech gadgetry and only a limited degree of violence; the drama comes primarily in the intensive mental activity of his protagonists. In some novels, such as A Small Town in Germany, almost the entire story unfolds in the form of dialogue between the major characters. Le Carré is widely hailed as writing some of the most literary and philosophically significant genre fiction of the 20th century. In 1954 le Carré married Ann Martin. He lived in the 1960s on various Greek islands, but then returned to England. After divorce he married again in 1972. He has four children, three from his first marriage. The fall of the Soviet Union and reunification of Germany left spy fiction adrift and le Carre turned his attention to the new roles of cloak and dagger people. The Night Manager (1993) was about drug smuggling and in Our Game (1995) two former spies and a woman find the end of their road in the mountains of the Caucasus, reflecting the new situation and the end of the Cold War. The Tailor of Panama (1996) has as its background the future of the Panama Canal. Single&Single (1999) was a father-and-son story which also dealt with a Russian mafia family. The Constant Gardener (2000), le Carré's 18th novel, was set in Africa. Justin Quayle, the middle-aged gardener of the title, is married to a much younger wife, Tessa, a lawyer and activist. Justin is a disillusioned humanist, who doesn't know much of Tessa's attempts to reveal an international pharmaceutical intrigue. Justin's passivity ends after her death but he eventually shares Tessa's fate. Absolute Friends (2004), accused of anti-American bias, follows the lives of two man, friends from the radical 1960s, who still try to keep their anti-establishment idealism in the new millennium. Eventually they are crushed by international political intrigues. The Mission Song (2006) takes the reader into the complex relationships between business and politics in Congo. In 2005 Britain's crime writers' club awarded him its Dagger of Daggers for The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. |
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