John Le Carre - High Spy

John Le Carre - High Spy

The wave has broken. The opinion-formers have stepped ashore, raising their surfboards to the sun. It’s a long way from Islington to Mallorca but they made it! Thumbs are up. High fives have never been higher or fivier. Time for cool wine on a marble terrace and a complementary seat next to a gently-dozing old party called David Cornwell. Apparently the set crew forgot to wake him when they moved on. But he’s here. And he’s a seer, all-knowing when it comes to spies and tradecraft. Plus, of course, The Night Manager is an unqualified triumph. And the cast – well my dear! Perfect in every way. A true television event and cheap at £3M an episode.

John Le Carre has been doing this sort of thing for decades.

     David Cornwell is smarmed by Pine, post-Corky

How did it happen that a moderately competent spinner of yarns, which uncomfortably suggest that Britain was post-war and remains today in thrall to a clique of sex-terrified public schoolboys, came not only to be revered but actually believed? And that a structure devoid first of credible women and then of any semblance of humour in particular and real life in general was accepted as historically sound and admirable?

Perhaps it was the alias that did the trick. Or pen-name, as it would be called were any less self-avowedly mysterious figure involved. Maybe it was the gagging credulousness of generations of reporters who bought his qualifications as an “insider” and believed the shadows he cast were cool shade indeed. Then again, why blame journalists alone when the high-end literary world has conspired so enthusiastically in the Le Carre elevation? If Philip Roth, no less, announces that 1986’s A Perfect Spy is “the best English novel since the war,” it must surely be true. Peak Le Carre was reached in that year and he has been roaming unfettered in the uplands of approbation ever since.

Of course I exaggerate. A little. There is the Le Carre whose reputation as a writer is based more on TV adaptations and Alec Guinness than true literary worth - but is still undoubtedly and fairly rooted in the virtues of his best book, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. And there is the Le Carre, as we have seen, accepted by lazy journalists and come-day media types as the go-to guy for spy lore and far-sighted power prophecy. The man who designates the baddie without challenge as “the worst man in the world” and who decides that the MI6 building at Vauxhall Bridge is known in government circles as "The River House."

    The worst man in the world

Which brings us back to The Night Manager. When David Cornwell played Hitchcock, sitting at lunch as an extra in that terrace restaurant scene, suffering a tongue-lashing from Corky and then a soothing smooth-over from Pine, even he could scarcely have anticipated the unlicensed critical salivating which the series would provoke. No matter that the sharp angles of Tom Hiddleston’s face and his ultra-exquisite pronunciation raised a hint of Kenneth Williams. Irrelevant that Olivia Colman turned in another in a long line of Olivia Colman performances, this one as Connie Sachs reborn, improbably pregnant and even more questionably at large in a twenty-first century office with 1950s-style broken radiators. Forget the impossible prospect of Hugh Laurie, immortal leader of the Trinity College Tiddlywinkers, being menacing. And, above all, overlook the fact that absolutely none of what happens in The Night Manager is remotely based on real power, real espionage or real criminality.

This would be fine were it not for the fact that Le Carre imposes upon his flimsy inventions the veneer of certainty-via-experience. 
It is, as it has been for fifty years, Le Carre’s truth.  And therefore to an extent both alarming and risible, our history