The Cooling Of John le Carré

 As I noted in my Washington Times review of a biography of the John le Carre, I’ve been a reader and admirer of Mr. le Carre since the 1960s, although I don’t subscribe to his leftist views and his anti-Americanism. 

His later novels are not as good as his earlier ones, in my view, as they are marred by his political shrillness. Yet I continue to read Mr. le Carre because he is, after all, a fine writer. 

Michael J. Lewis at the New Criterion offers a piece on the late spy novelist. 

John le Carré died at the age of eighty-nine last December, a good thirty years after the end of the Cold War that his spy novels chronicled. He certainly knew whereof he wrote. As a British intelligence agent stationed in West Germany at the height of the Cold War, he had an insider’s view of two of its key crises: the shocking creation of the Berlin Wall on a single day in August 1961, and the defection to Moscow of Kim Philby in early 1963. Those events provided the raw material for his best books. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) begins and ends with the shooting of agents trying to cross the Berlin Wall. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) was the story of a Philby-like “mole” who successfully burrowed himself into the topmost echelons of the secret service. 

Despite le Carré’s political turn, which became painfully anti-English and anti-American, I continued to read every new novel the week it came out. What made these and le Carré’s other dozen-odd Cold War novels so remarkable is their distinctive point of view, which is not that of a glamorous jet-setting spy like Ian Fleming’s James Bond (introduced in 1953 with Casino Royale) but that of the colorless bureaucrat working behind a desk. 

Le Carré’s rejoinder to Bond was the laughably unglamorous George Smiley. Short, pudgy, and nearsighted, he was a devotee of seventeenth-century German poetry and the perpetual dupe of his lovely but straying wife. But he was not lacking in courage, having worked undercover in Nazi Germany. A Murder of Quality, le Carré’s second novel, gives a deft sketch: “Looks like a frog, dresses like a bookie, and has a brain I’d give my eyes for. Had a very nasty war. Very nasty indeed.” 

Smiley’s bureaucratic world—that of tiresome interviews and equally tiresome debriefings, of battered iron desks and shabby damp raincoats—is essentially that of le Carré himself, who did his spying under diplomatic cover, first in the British embassy in Bonn and later as Consul in Hamburg. He did his writing undercover as well; protocol required him to conceal his real name, David Cornwell, under a penname, for which he chose the French for “the square.” For much of his career he maintained the polite fiction that he had been a minor diplomatic functionary; not until 1993 did he formally concede that he had indeed been an intelligence officer, something that had been obvious to the whole world from the beginning. 

… Some were affronted by the new and strident note of anti-Americanism of books like Absolute Friends, whose “politicised ranting” startled even the left-wing Guardian: “in the scheme of this novel there is no other villain in the modern world than America.” Others were dismayed by what seemed to be an increasingly flat and schematic characterization. 

… Le Carré seemed to have lost what had been his strong suit, his gift for suggesting the unspoken transactions that take place beneath an intimate conversation—the resentments, manipulations, tacit understandings—the conversation that is at once negotiation, interrogation, and seduction. 

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

The cooling of John le Carré by Michael J. Lewis | The New Criterion 

You can also read my Washington Times reviews of John le Carre’s books via the below links:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Washington Times Review Of 'John Le Carre: The Biography'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Washington Times Review Of John le Carre's 'Agent Running In The Field'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Washington Times Review Of John Le Carre's 'A Legacy Of Spies'

The Other Solzhenitsyn

Brian C. Anderson at The New Criterion offers a review of Danile J. Mahoney's The Other Solzhenitsyn. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s reputation has waned in the English-speaking world. The Russian writer still gets credit, at least from sensible quarters, for revealing the Soviet Union’s infernal system of forced labor and institutionalized mendacity in the series of works that includes One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the three-volume “experiment in literary investigation,” The Gulag Archipelago, the publication of which in the West in 1973 sounded the first death-knell of the Soviet Union and made its author a household name. But Anglophone critics have tended to dismiss Solzhenitsyn’s later output—and that’s when they’ve bothered to acknowledge its existence. Diminished interest in Solzhenitsyn is reflected in the fact that much of his post-Gulag writing—including the bulk of his multi-volume literary and historical narrative about the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel—remains untranslated into English, six years after his death from heart failure at eighty-nine.

The notion that Solzhenitsyn is of merely historical interest in a post-totalitarian age is one likely reason for this neglect. The other is political. The American left, never fond of Solzhenitsyn, began actively to despise him after his 1978 commencement speech at Harvard, “A World Split Apart,” which denounced the rise of moral relativism in the West, praised the idea of liberty under God, and blasted anti-war activists for forcing the United States to withdraw militarily from South Vietnam, leaving that country prey to the Communists—views that were anathema to elite opinion, then as today. As one journalist then put it, Solzhenitsyn “is not the ‘liberal’ we would like him to be.” Around this time arose a perception of Solzhenitsyn, sold primarily by the left but endorsed by some on the right, that provided an excuse not to read him: he was a tsarist reactionary, an Orthodox Christian ayatollah, a hater of democracy, a Russian ultranationalist. None of this was true. Solzhenitsyn wasn’t just dismissed; he was demonized.

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

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Solzhenitsyn-s-permanence-8077

Note: I've read several of Solzhenitsyn's books and I'm especially fond of The First Circle. This is a brillant novel. In one chapter alone, Solzhenitsyn captures Stalin better than the many other books I've read on the Communist dictator and mass-murderer.