Spies Like Us: Sarah Lyall interviews two masters of espionage - A Conversation With John le Carré and Ben Macintyre
Their subject is
spying. Their obsessions are secrecy and betrayal. They are Englishmen of a
certain background, old friends and admirers of each other’s work. One writes
novels; the other, nonfiction. They speak in practically perfect sentences. Conversations between
John le Carré and Ben Macintyre are inevitably warm, interesting, witty,
discursive, conspiratorial and gossipy, although their gossip is often
espionage-related and more rarefied than yours or mine. They met for lunch
recently, on a desultorily sunny weekday in a private dining room at a boutique
hotel in Bristol. Le Carré, 85, had been driven from his home in Cornwall (he
also lives in London) by his family’s “outdoor man,” responsible for yardwork
and other outside-the-house tasks; Macintyre, 53, had come by train from
Winchester, where he had been speaking at a literary festival. As usual, they were in
the midst of a flurry of projects, finishing things up and starting new
ones. Le Carré, who
over a 56-year career has virtually single-handedly elevated spy novels from
genre fiction into works of high literature, has a new book, “A
Legacy of Spies,” coming out in September. Thrillingly for his
admirers, it is a coda of sorts to “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” (1963),
the third of his two dozen novels and the one that for many readers serves as
the gateway drug to full-blown le Carré addiction.
Macintyre, meanwhile, is a longtime
columnist for The Times of London and the author of 11 elegant, authoritative
and dryly humorous nonfiction works, focusing most recently on 20th-century
British espionage. He has a deep appreciation for the amusing and the absurd.
His most recent book is “Rogue Heroes,” about the origins of the British
special forces unit; he is working on a new one, about a Cold War spy case.
Early in his writing,
le Carré introduced the subversive hypothesis that the spies of East and West
were two sides of the same tarnished coin, each as bad as the other. It was a
stunning idea, espionage painted not in black and white but in shades of gray.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the author lost the scaffolding for his
fiction. His later books are angrier, more polemical, their worldview darker,
reflecting the chaotic morality of the post-Soviet era and often presenting the
United States — with its exceptionalism, its flouting of international norms,
as he sees it — as the villain in the post-Cold War era.
“A Legacy of Spies”
returns to the past from the vantage point of the present. Elderly and retired
to France, the ex-spy Peter Guillam, an old acquaintance of the attentive le
Carré reader, is made to answer for long-buried sins when the adult children of
the two principal casualties in “The Spy Who Came In From the Cold” suddenly
bring a lawsuit against the security services. Guillam is forced to revisit the
dubious setup and muddy justification for that operation, answering awkward
questions from humorless young officials who have no patience for or
understanding of how the agency operated in the old days. Even George Smiley
himself makes an appearance.
The publication of the
new work is being treated as a major literary occasion in Britain. A reading
and Q. and A. at the Royal Festival Hall in London on Sept. 7 will be broadcast
live in theaters in Britain and Europe. In real life, le Carré
is known as David Cornwell. He took his pen name to keep his day job — spying
for Britain, which he did in the 1950s and early ’60s — separate from his
writing identity. Over a bottle of white wine and, among other things, smoked
salmon served under a glass from which clouds of smoke actually billowed out,
he and Macintyre needed little prompting to speak. They all but interviewed
themselves.
The interview has been
edited and condensed.
S.L. Let’s talk about the new book, David.
It’s been a long time since you wrote about the Cold War. Why did you want to
revisit it now?
J.L.C. Because it seems to me, as Smiley says at
the end of the book, that what happened then turns out to have been futile.
Spies did not win the Cold War. They made absolutely no difference in the long
run.
I wanted to take the
characters and apply the experience of my own life, and examine what happened
to them from a human, humanitarian dimension. And then place the whole story in
this vacuum in which we live at the moment, which is occupied by really
threatening forces. What marks the Cold War period is that at least we had a
defining mission. At the moment our mission is survival. The thing that joins
the West is fear. And everything else is up for grabs... read more:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/25/books/review/john-le-carre-ben-macintyre-british-spy-thrillers.html?mcubz=1