The old spy returned to Hamburg, a city he once loved and was forced to abandon. His thoughts were filled with characters he'd met over the years: the drunken Scot banker who harangued him, one evening in Vienna, to open a numbered account; the aloof young Chechen with a superiority complex; the German girl of high morals and good family. In his mind, they began to talk to each other.
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He had always felt a special regret about Hamburg, invaded by Napoleon, bombed flat by the Allies, later a foxhole for the Baader-Meinhof Gang and Mohamed Atta. Perhaps by telling the city's story, he would make amends.
The journey from the city on the Elbe to the edge of the Cornish coast is a long one, practically from Europe's shoulder to its toe. At either end, you'll find John le Carré, or rather David Cornwell, as he was born and is known to friends, family and the taxi drivers of Penzance.
When Cornwell emerges into the sunlight from his cliff-top house, there's no hint of that other, twilight world; there's just a tall, courtly man holding four ears of corn picked from his garden. "The weather's been so bad this year," he says, looking at the cobs dwarfed in large hands. "Well. At least we have sun today."
This is what 45 years of successful spy writing buys you: a little bit of paradise on the edge of the world, with no other houses in sight, the sea stretching to Newfoundland, and silence as heavy and comforting as a quilt. The only sounds come from the cliff, where a shrieking falcon occasionally takes flight, and from the kitchen, where Cornwell's wife, Jane, is starting a fish pie for lunch. The only way in is a needle-narrow dirt track with a gate and a forbidding sign at one end. It is not the house of someone who craves human company.
Yet Cornwell's manner is as warm as the day, as he leads a tour of his garden, pointing out succulents and anti-war statuary, stopping to pull snails off a marble bust. "Ah," he says, gently dropping them to the ground. "Poor, blind Milton." He strides along, wearing his 76 years lightly, quite jolly — giggly, even — about a recent story that made headlines around the world, suggesting that he had once contemplated defecting to the Russians.
So much success, so much peace, so blessed in family. The jackpot question, for anyone who's read the last few le Carré novels, has got to be: Why so angry? In what furnace does he stoke his rage? The fury is, if anything, at a higher pitch in his new book, A Most Wanted Man, set in Hamburg against the backdrop of a snatch-and-grab known as "extraordinary rendition."
"I was very angry when I went to Hamburg to start researching the book," Cornwell says, settling down on his sun porch with a cup of coffee. He uses the past tense, but there's every indication, over the next few hours of conversation, that he's still enraged — about the war in Iraq, over the CIA's "black prisons" and Guantanamo Bay, over the erosion of civil liberties in Britain, and what he sees as a misplaced faith in intelligence services. Spook, heal thyself.
A Most Wanted Man, his 21st novel, centres around Issa, a young half-Chechen of enigmatic background who flees a Turkish prison and ends up in the care of an idealistic German lawyer, Annabel. The novelist specializes in these beautiful lady dreamers — Tessa in The Constant Gardener, Charlie in The Little Drummer Girl. Accuse him of it, and he says with a disarming laugh, "That's the joke about my writing — that I can't write women. It's because I grew up so late."
