Le Carré


My tribute to the author whose works  gave me many  pleasant hours in my childhood:

James Cornwall passed away  on Dec 12 this year at the age of 89, a victim of pneumonia. He is more popularly known as John le Carré. 

His first novel that I read was 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold'. It fired my imagination. He elevated the espionage novel to a totally different level. One can say that Le Carré was to the spy novel what O. Henry was to the short story. 

He seemed to  made the cold war come alive on a  chessboard, with the spymasters manipulating their human 'pieces' with a skill which players like Fischer, Kasparov,  Carlsen can only dream of attaining. Many of the cognoscenti regard his novels as the best works of English fiction to be published in the latter half of the twentieth century. 

His hero in most of his novels was George Smiley, the very antithesis of James Bond when it came to women.  However, Smiley's craft and his modus operandi in matters of  espionage was incomparable. Le Carré took his readers into the drawing rooms of  spymasters, and walked us through the working of their minds. It of course helped that he himself  had worked for many years at MI5, the British counter-intelligence service.

Le Carré  did not have a very happy childhood. His father Ronnie was a con artist who had many brushes with the law. His mother had left her husband when he was very young, and the young David often used to be welcomed home by his father's mistress  - who used to be a  different woman very frequently.

At school he developed a passion for foreign languages, and German in particular.  He graduated with a degree in modern languages from Oxford, and taught German at Eton for a while. With his love for foreign languages, it was inevitable that he was recruited by  British secret service. 

His experience there made him discover his eventual calling - writing spy novels, for which he will be remembered by generations of  readers who grew up in the last decades of the 20th century.

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