RIP John le Carré

Just saw the news yesterday that John le Carré passed away, and wanted to write a quick tribute to an author who was probably my favorite outside the SFF genre.

Because of my dad's interest in mysteries and thrillers, le Carré was one of the names I remember seeing on the bookshelves from my earliest childhood, along with Agatha Christie. I never picked up anything of his, however, until my early 20s, when I discovered copies of his two earliest books, hidden away on a bookshelf at our house in Italy.

I read A Murder of Quality and Call for the Dead, le Carré's second and first novels, in that order, and then went on searching for more of these books featuring George Smiley. Soon after I moved to London and found Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, followed by The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, as well as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I didn't love all of these - Schoolboy I found a particular slog, and I also don't remember being so dazzled by Spy Who Came in from the Cold - but the ones I did like I liked enough to keep looking.

Part of it, of course, was my personal circumstances. When I found Tinker Tailor I'd just moved to London and was experiencing firsthand much of what le Carré was writing about. It's hard to really appreciate the London of the 70s when you're sitting in sunny California, but if you're actually surrounded by the flock wallpaper and hissing radiators it's easier to imagine the milieu that Smiley's traveling in.

Over the years I read a few more of his novels, but none grabbed me quite like those first two, or Tinker Tailor and Smiley's People. Still, there were also the adaptations - Tailor of Panama, The Constant Gardener and so on. I remember, after the latter movie, being struck that le Carré had done well to identify unscrupulous corporations as the real villains of the 21st century after the end of the Cold War. Indeed the reviews of his books from the 90s to now have focused on his anger at the more venal aspects of the establishment - whether it's illicit arms sales, pharmaceutical malfeasance or the War on Terror. 

A recent pleasure was reading The Night Manager, and contrasting it with the TV version that came out a few years ago. I'd say le Carré was rather well-served by adaptations, as the TV version of the Night Manager updated and streamlined the novel quite well, and Tailor of Panama boasted a wonderful cast in Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Lee Curtis and Geoffrey Rush. But the two best have to be the BBC miniseries of Tinker Tailor and Smiley's People.

Featuring Alec Guinness as George Smiley, these two miniseries from the early 80s are probably the most faithful adaptations of his work that I've seen - and when I saw faithful I mean to the spirit of the books, rather than slavishly following exactly what happens in the pages. The film version from 2011 is decent enough, if slow and a bit hard to follow, but doesn't quite get across the time period as well as the earlier versions.

Citing an author as an influence is always tricky, because we cite authors and books that we think make us look more clever than we really are. However, it's fair to say that le Carré and George Smiley are all over my current work in progress, a melding of spy thrillers and fantasy novels. My main character is clearly based on Smiley, though I hope it's not arrogant to say that I'm trying to say something very different with my own character than le Carré was with his.

Regardless, I'm sad that another author I admire has gone. He himself may have despaired of how the public assumed everything he wrote was how the spy business is in real life, but his gift was that his world felt true. Moreover, as I wrote in my blog about the Night Manager, he had a gift for setting his scene, and for bringing to life the worlds his characters inhabited. There won't be any more from him, but I'm reassured that I don't have to venture much farther than my dad's bookshelf to find more books by le Carré that I have yet to read.