Pigeon Tunnel was published just after the very good biography, John Le Carre’, The Biography. Pigeon Tunnel may be the results of his collaboration with Adam Sisman. Having stirred up so many memories he may have decided that he should have his versions and his thoughts about specific aspects of his career. In A Perfect Spy, his most autobiographical novel, John le Carr. Occasional jailbird”, as he wrote in his memoirs, The Pigeon Tunnel. The best books of the week. May 10, 2017. The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life is published by Penguin. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online. The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life was a delightful, entertaining and very personal memoir written by one of my favorite spy novelists, David Cornwell, best known by his pen name of John le Carre. As you settle in to immerse yourself and listen to one of our greatest raconteurs, it becomes clear that the life of David Cornwell as a British. . The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life is published by Penguin. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online. THE PIGEON TUNNEL. By John le Carre. Viking, $28, 320 pages. TOP STORIES Democrats hope wins in Georgia runoffs will spell end to Senate filibuster. The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life was a delightful, entertaining and very personal memoir written by one of my favorite spy novelists, David Cornwell, best known by his pen name of John le Carre. As you settle in to immerse yourself and listen to one of our greatest raconteurs, it becomes clear that the life of David Cornwell as a British.
John le Carré is dead. Chronicler of British decline; realist assassin of 007 fantasy; as terse and brutal a stylist as Larkin or Orwell – the spy novelist was both the most English and the least English of writers, and he remains indecipherable. The obituaries will trace a decent silhouette of his life: first a childhood marked by a conman father and boarding-school rigours, then seasons as a teacher at Eton and a spy in Germany, then marital failure, then sixty years making sense of it all. That silhouette becomes a pencil-sketch in Adam Sisman’s competent biography and in le Carré’s evasive memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel. Read them when you read him.
Le Carré – whose real name was David Cornwell – was born in a world of empires, class and silence, and leaves behind a world of superpowers, money and noise. Political journalists, who love him, laud his interrogation of deceit and venality in successive historical theatres: barbed-wire Europe, blood-money Africa, demented England. For sure, le Carré was both a political moralist and a political satirist: in his books, a very English aversion to hypocrisy puts paid to no end of English pieties, whether those of national honour, democratic integrity or global significance. He mattered because he told us, in tones as free from nostalgia as from relish, that we no longer matter.
He mattered because he told us, in tones as free from nostalgia as from relish, that we no longer matter.
But not only because of that. Like comparable spectators of decline – Houellebecq, Murakami, either Roth – le Carré was also a sharp portraitist of male emotion. Taking politics as the centrepiece of his oeuvre mistakes its backdrop for its theme, which was love. The most resonant moments in his books are when yearning and fear burst through the fluent, vicious banter between his public-school spies. The title of his 1963 breakthrough ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ alludes to just such a scene. The watchful spy chief ‘Control’ observes to his underling Leamas that
Image credit: The Wall Street Journal‘We have to live without sympathy, don’t we? That’s impossible, of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren’t like that really. I mean… one can’t be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold… d’you see what I mean?’
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He continues:
‘I mean, in our world we pass so quickly out of the register of hate or love – like certain sounds a dog can’t hear. All that’s left in the end is a kind of nausea; you never want to cause suffering again.’
The cajoling questions, the prophylactic metaphors, the redundant clauses muting the eloquence: here we have an Englishman trying to talk about his feelings without talking about his feelings. In banishing sympathy and demanding hardness, the shadow-world of espionage pulls English masculinity to the edge of tragedy. And all this comes before Leamas, acting on Control’s orders, seduces an innocent young woman and uses her in a plot against East German intelligence – only to realise Control has betrayed the pair of them. As bullets fall around him at the foot of the Berlin Wall, Leamas dramatically ‘comes in from the cold’. Control was right: it is impossible to live without sympathy.
Le Carré’s novels are full of cynical seductions and cool betrayals, and none more so than his 1974 masterpiece Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The set-up: a Soviet agent has infiltrated the highest ranks of British intelligence; the retired, impotent spymaster George Smiley has to root him out. The book is not a whodunnit, since it is patently obvious to most of the characters and to the reader who the mole is. Rather, the drama lies in the mystery of why it is not obvious to Smiley, Britain’s best spy even in his dotage. The answer: exploiting Smiley’s hopeless love for his faithless wife Ann, the Soviet spymaster Karla has ordered the mole to seduce her without secrecy. The consequent envy and bafflement and humiliation stops Smiley from seeing straight. To open your heart to sympathy, then, is to open it to betrayal.
It is all very lonely. As Smiley, ‘deceived in love and impotent in hate’, lies in wait inside the mole’s safe-house
‘His thoughts, as often when he was afraid, concerned people. He had no theories or judgments in particular. He simply wondered how everyone would be affected; and he felt responsible. He thought of Jim and Sam and Max and Connie and Jerry Westerby and personal loyalties all broken; in a separate category he thought of Ann and the hopeless dislocation of their talk on the Cornish cliffs; he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion; he wished he could just get up and walk out before it happened, but he couldn’t. He worried, in a quite paternal way, about Guillam, and wondered how he would take the late strains of growing up. He thought again of the day he buried Control.’
How good men are at acting – at playing the cynic, the clown, the brute, at pretending they have no thoughts of love. I first read this passage when I was about fourteen, in the library of a boys’ school quite similar to the ones where le Carré grew up and later taught. I was too shy to face the cafeteria, so I used to spend every lunchtime hiding behind the library’s fiction and history shelves, until my mother noticed how much weight I had lost. I would usually pull out a book to pass the time, and after I first tried a le Carré – Our Kind of Traitor, not his best – I never really stopped. His spy stories excited me and fed such curiosity as I had about the world beyond England, but more than that they showed me that I was not alone in the way I felt. That gave me cause for hope.
Gritty realist that he was, le Carré made little use of religion. In taking the measure of such a writer, talk of ‘memory’ and ‘legacy’ seems more than usually trite. And yet, ambushed by such a loss, it seems more than usually difficult to accept this: that there exists on the far side of the grave nothing of warmth or hope or sympathy, only silence and mud. Our lives are shabby, false and short. They mean nothing without love.
The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le Carré, the legendary author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; and The Night Manager, now an Emmy-nominated television series starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie.
From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth; visiting Rwanda’s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Year’s Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood.
Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer’s journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.
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“Recounted with the storytelling élan of a master raconteur — by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“An illuminating, self-effacing and pleasurable inquiry into le Carré’s creative process, offering globe-spanning thrills of a different, but no less captivating kind than those associated with the novels.” —USA Today
“[Le Carré] is a polished raconteur, with an actor’s protean self-presentation, gifts of pace and timing, aptitude for entrances and exits.” —Wall Street Journal
“This incisive and witty memoir, by the man who long ago set the gold standard for modern espionage novelists, is a glittering treasure chest of great stories.” —The Seattle Times, 'The Best Books of 2016'
“The Pigeon Tunnel is the literary equivalent of a long night spent in the company of a grand storyteller, who has saved up a lifetime of his best tales to share with you over several rounds of fine scotch. The collection leaves the impression of a man who has gone to impossible lengths for his words, bringing the farthest reaches of the globe, some of its cruelest inhabitants, and a small handful of genuine heroes back home for all of us.”—Entertainment Weekly
“The name ‘John le Carré’ attracts the audience, but it’s David Cornwell confiding in us here, as if over dinner, then chatting long into the evening over snifters of brandy, or, as he unspools memories of Russia, glasses of vodka.” —Associated Press
“The Pigeon Tunnel contains what le Carré calls 'tiny bits of history caught in flagrante,' all of them borrowed from the lived experience of a novelist whose career has more closely resembled that of a war correspondent than a literary celebrity....Spies are le Carré’s preferred subject, but through them he grapples with larger human truths that transcend the cloak-and-dagger underworld.” —The American Scholar
'Looking back on a life rich enough to spawn multiple globe-spanning novels...le Carré showcases his grand, cinematic sense of place and...the ineffable quality that defines a professional raconteur....The inviting, drinks-beside-the-fire style from a master of the craft never overtakes the details of le Carré's remarkable life or his strong insider's opinions on issues of geopolitical import since World War II.' —Library Journal, starred review
“Always insightful, frequently charming, and sometimes sobering, the memorable tales told by master storyteller le Carré about his life will surely delight both longtime fans and newcomers.” —Publishers Weekly
'For all the cinematic glamour of le Carré's experiences, reflections on the workaday realities of fiction writing may provide the most engaging aspect of this colorful valediction. A satisfying recollection of a literary life well-lived.” —Kirkus Reviews