I've been wandering down Memory Lane with John le Carré lately. I suspect when I mention him, most of you will have the reaction, 'Oh, yeah. He wrote spy novels. Terribly British. I like James Bond better.' Yep, I bet you do.

I don't. Ian Fleming's stuff is glamorised violence with its roots in the Second World War. Le Carré's grow out of the dreary experience of the Cold War. Le Carré knew these spies: he was one of them. His stories are more about collecting intelligence than driving around in sports cars. No gadgets, just a lot of talking. His spies need good memories and sound detective skills. Nobody cares how they like their martinis. They don't want to be noticed.

Not wanting to be noticed came naturally to the author, I suspect. Even a cursory reading of his biography makes me suspect that he was a survivor of childhood trauma. That sort of experience makes one a permanent outsider, hypervigilant, and sharp observer of other people. Those are also good skills for a novelist.

I happened upon a trilogy of his earlier novels, starting with his debut effort, Call for the Dead, then A Murder of Quality and his breakout work The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I'd tried to read Spy when I was about 14: this was a bad idea on my part. I found the story perplexing and the people incomprehensible. Now, as an official Old Person Who Has Seen Some Things, I find le Carré's work a lot more approachable.

If you're like me and always trying to learn more about writing as a craft, you'll enjoy Call for the Dead. Why did the author write it? What was his motivation? Was it the dream of fame, fortune, the joy of giving readings in chi-chi bookstores?

'I was going mad with boredom,' writes le Carré. Now that is a motivation I can relate to.

He writes, 'The world I inhabited in London was a paper world. A security service marches on its files, and I was one of the infantry. Like Bob Cratchit in his Tank, I toiled from morning and often till late into the evening at the dossiers of people I would never meet. . .' This is what real work in MI5 was like. No wonder his novels are so talky that the tv version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy nearly sent Elektra to sleep. (She never developed the German attention span, in spite of our years in that country.)

And no wonder George Mikes, the Hungarian humorist, called his hilarious novel The Spy Who Died of Boredom. I also recommend reading that one. Mikes fled the communists and entertained everybody in the UK with such works as How to Be a Foreigner. He was also a journalist, and probably knew a lot of spies – unlike me. I only knew a few of them. They were probably dying of boredom, too.

Apparently, le Carré wasn't the only one in that Whitehall office who was bored. His boss wrote something like 17 detective novels. My cynical thought is, 'At least they did something useful in their free time.'

So if you read Call for the Dead, h2g2 writing friends, you'll see what a very clever, well-educated (and polyglot) person who had inside knowledge of his subject could come up with in the form of a novel without being trained in the dubious art of pulp fiction. I spotted a few n00b errors in the first book – mostly to do with the way he handled shifts in POV, introducing new characters, finessing one's way through too-convenient coincidences necessary to the plot, things like that. I wanted to yell, 'Why didn't the editor catch that and make rewrite suggestions?'

But hey, it's a superbly entertaining book as it is, and his prose is as tasty as a rich dessert. I enjoy le Carré's writing. I love his observational style. And when he describes something I've experienced myself, I think, 'Damn! That's spot-on.'

So, for practising independent writers who'd like to polish up their fiction, I recommend le Carré's books. Study them to watch him learning how to move stories along: how to handle the reveals and walk the reader through the conflicts. How he builds tension. The way he slips in his reflections on the nature of the world he and his characters are inhabiting. I think you'll be glad you did.

For those who haven't the slightest interest in 'wordsmithing': read him as an eyewitness to a certain kind of history. He was there in Bonn when the Berlin Wall went up. He says all the spies were caught napping. Shortly after, he started writing The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. In notebooks. On the ferry from Königswinter to Bad Godesberg. In his car. Which was often parked next to Konrad Adenauer's car. . .

I love knowing that. It makes it real. I studied in Bonn for a year in the mid-70s and I know about that ferry. I remember the political cartoons about the waiters asking restaurant patrons to 'lean in closer to the floral centrepiece' when having conversations. There's nothing weirder than a provincial place (student graffiti read 'Bonn ist ein Kuhdorf') that is full of exotic diplomats and furtive spies. You could find yourself in some surreal conversations even if you weren't in the business. And you can't beat a novel written in the middle of the Rhein in the early 60s for acquiring authenticity of setting.

So, yes: I recommend these books as an antidote, not only to bad spy novels and tv shows like The Americans, but also as a way to get around the 21st Century's terrible habit of falsifying the past. 'Oh, it doesn't matter,' I read again and again. 'Sure, my story has Harry Houdini in a hot romance with my main character, who is really me, and I know it didn't happen and he was happily married, but I said 'inspired by', so it's all right. Anyway, my version is better.'

I say, without any respect, that this is not true. It does matter. Try to get your sense of the past from someone who was there, as the Fourth Doctor said about the Big Bang. You'll discover so much that way: some of it might even be useful.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

30.09.24 Front Page

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