British author John Le Carré attends the U.K. film premiere of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in London on Sept. 13, 2011. Le Carré, whose elegant and intricate narratives defined the Cold War espionage thriller, has died at 89.Sang Tan/The Associated Press
John le Carré, whose exquisitely nuanced, intricately plotted Cold War thrillers elevated the spy novel to high art by presenting both Western and Soviet spies as morally compromised cogs in a rotten system full of treachery, betrayal and personal tragedy, died on Saturday in Cornwall, England. He was 89.
His death was confirmed on Sunday by his literary agency, the Curtis Brown Group.
Before le Carré published his bestselling 1963 novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which Graham Green called “the best spy story I have ever read,” the fictional model for the modern British spy was Ian Fleming’s James Bond – suave, urbane, devoted to queen and country. With his impeccable talent for getting out of trouble while getting women into bed, Bond fed the myth of spying as a glamorous, exciting romp.
Le Carré – the pen name of David Cornwell – upended that notion with books that portrayed British intelligence operations as cesspools of ambiguity in which right and wrong are too close to call and in which it is rarely obvious whether the ends, even if the ends are clear, justify the means.
Led by his greatest creation, the plump, ill-dressed, unhappy, brilliant, relentless George Smiley, le Carré's spies are lonely, disillusioned men whose work is driven by budget troubles, bureaucratic power plays and the opaque machinations of politicians – men who are as likely to be betrayed by colleagues and lovers as by the enemy.
Smiley has a counterpart in the Russian master spy Karla, his opposite in ideology but equal in almost all else, an opponent he studies as intimately as a lover studies his beloved. The end of Smiley’s People, the last in a series known as the Karla Trilogy, brings them together in a stunning denouement that is as much about human frailty and the deep loss that comes with winning as it is about anything.
“Thematically, le Carré's true subject is not spying,” Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. “It is the endlessly deceptive maze of human relations: the betrayal that is a kind of love, the lie that is a sort of truth, good men serving bad causes and bad men serving good.”
Some critics took le Carré's message to be that the two systems, East and West, were moral equivalents, both equally bad. But he did not believe that. “There is a big difference in working for the West and working for a totalitarian state,” he told an interviewer, referring to his own work as a spy in the 1950s and early ’60s.
Le Carré refused to allow his books to be entered for literary prizes. But many critics considered his books literature of the first rank.
“I think he has easily burst out of being a genre writer and will be remembered as perhaps the most significant novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain,” the author Ian McEwan told the British newspaper The Telegraph in 2013. Le Carré, he added, has “charted our decline and recorded the nature of our bureaucracies like no one else has.”