A Delicate Truth: John Le Carre Gets Personal For New Novel

 

Jon Stock in the British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece on spy thriller writer John le Carre's new novel.

David Cornwell, better known as the spy writer John le Carré, has always enjoyed keeping secrets — the real-life inspiration for spymaster George Smiley, for example, or le Carré’s own role with British Intelligence. Sooner or later he breaks, telling us that Smiley was based on the Rev Vivian Green, his tutor at Lincoln College, Oxford, and that he once worked for MI5 and later MI6, but you can’t help feeling that the information is always extracted under duress.

So it is a pleasant surprise that le Carré has decided to reveal, without the use of electrodes or bright lights, that his much-anticipated 23rd novel is his most autobiographical for years, a book that “comes closer to my skin than any of my more recent novels”. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9972523/John-le-Carre-gets-personal-for-new-novel.html

You can also read my review of John le Carre's previous novel, Our Kind of Traitor, which appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, via the below link:

http://home.comcast.net/~pauldavisoncrime/pwpimages/LeCarreOurKindOfTratiorReview.jpg

And you can read my Crime Beat column on John le Carre and Ian Fleming, Spy Writer vs Spy Writer, via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2010/08/spy-writer-vs-spy-writer-john-le-carre.html