You'll never guess what he thought of Thatcher (Photo by Andrew Fox/Mirrorpix/Getty Images)
Halfway through John Le Carré’s final, posthumous novel, Silverview, an MI6 investigator of security breaches talks to his wife over the phone. Her story is that she’s on an archaeological dig in Turkey, and is going to stay a few days longer than intended, out of his reach, with her ridiculously handsome supervisor. He probes: “‘So you’re staying on so as not to be unfair to the others,’ he said acidly. ‘What exactly have you dug up?’ ‘Wonderful things, Stewart. You wouldn’t understand at all.’”
A glorious Le Carré moment, this sly, clever, allusive joke, and insouciantly placed to flatter the reader who gets it. He knows that when an archaeologist extracts a mouldy old pot fragment from the mud, one of them is bound to say what Howard Carter said on entering the tomb of Tutankhamun: he also knows that this kind of sardonic insiders’ joke is going to be flaunted at outsiders, especially in a marriage in trouble. John le Carré knew this stuff. He was, like many of the best novelists, intensely knowledgeable — specifically, that strain of knowledge we call worldliness. There ought to be more of it about.
The classic advice to novelists, “Write about what you know” is pretty good if, like John le Carré, you know a hell of a lot. There are probably corners in the novels which have been filled in by specific, purposeful research. But no-one can doubt that the author of these novels knew his subjects, in detail, long before he set to work. The casual placing of individuals within very specific, even recherché social worlds hardly ever puts a foot wrong, and the range is awe-inspiring. An ordinary sentence in le Carré might run: “The village was one of those half-urbanised Georgian settlements on the edge of Bath where English Catholics of a certain standing have elected to gather in their exile.” This may all be made up; my God, we trust the circumstantial detail.
We’re quite in need of worldliness at the moment. Among novelists, it isn’t compulsory, and some novelists, like poets, are very unworldly indeed. But the decline in worldliness, and the fall in our esteem for it, is to be regretted. It’s something that needs to be defined. In part, it’s the fact of having seen a lot, and gone through all sorts of different experiences. Le Carré’s life before becoming a full-time novelist is a good example: his father was a confidence trickster; he taught in a school; he worked for the security services, first as a stringer and then full-time. He spoke excellent German, and knew all sorts of societies from the inside until he had to leave the Service, his cover blown by Kim Philby, in 1964.
Having done stuff is part of it, but not the whole thing. After all, a lot of people have had interesting jobs. The difference between Le Carré’s books and Stella Rimington’s, say, is not in the experience they could draw on, but on the powers of observation and understanding. Like another very worldly novelist, Anthony Powell, Le Carré was superb at discerning “types”; small but distinct groups of individuals, sharing an apparently miscellaneous range of qualities. When Jim Prideaux explains to Bill Roach at the beginning of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy that he must be a good “watcher” — “us loners always are” — there’s someone behind that who has looked at a lot of different men and women, and understood them. This knack for analysis and categorisation sometimes got Le Carré into a little trouble with those unwilling to be so coolly categorised. Once, the film director Mike Nichols was sitting next to Mrs Thatcher at an official dinner, and said to her “My friend John le Carré says you’re a very sexy woman.” “Well,” Mrs Thatcher said. “I’m not.”
Le Carré’s worldliness consisted of these fine distinctions, and his characters — even Smiley, even Rick Pym in A Perfect Spy — are excellent examples of types we feel we could glimpse elsewhere. In that, he resembles those other very worldly writers, Dickens, Anthony Powell, Waugh and Kingsley Amis. We feel that there are other Pecksniffs out there, other Widmerpools, Tony Lasts, other Jim Dixons on the make; it is just that these are unusually good examples.
Is this kind of worldliness on the decline? It’s certainly hard to think of many novelists now who have had the kind of large-scale experience Le Carré had. Ferdinand Mount is one, having worked very close to a Prime Minister and having lived close to the great from childhood. But there’s no doubt that his novels, excellent as they are, are a little out of tune with current taste. For the most part, if a lot of current novelists want to write about public life, or a range of social settings, they are obliged to undertake research, to look at something unfamiliar from the outside. Often, it shows.
And the predominant spirit of our times might be a certain unworldliness. One of the characteristics of worldliness is taking an interest in the idiosyncrasies of very small, and perhaps very unsympathetic groups and milieu. (It’s worth remembering that Le Carré’s politics were very remote from Mrs Thatcher’s, who he found so alluring). There isn’t a lot of that sort of interest around. Recently, Sam Leith, talking about the response to David Amess’s murder, very convincingly argued that those we disagree with have melded into an “amorphous enemy mass”, not interesting individuals and small groupings, but “they’re just them: the ‘wall of gammon’, the ‘wokies’, ‘the blue-hair-and-pronouns’, the ‘Terfs’”. Reading some popular commentators, it’s striking how readily they reach for the word “we”, sometimes conflating some extraordinarily distinct groups. One such wrote a column explaining that fundamentalist Muslims and “the LGBTQ community” were basically exactly the same in the way they looked at society.
This level of astonishing unworldliness is not, perhaps, on the increase, but rarely before has it received such prominent circulation. Nor, perhaps, has it been at the expense of writers who are interested, in inconclusive ways, not in “diversity”, but in the diverse; the way that people are very different to each other, that they act very differently in different settings, and that sometimes we needn’t agree with an individual to find them fascinating, and worth spending some time with.
Some time ago, I met a middle-aged writer who declared, as a matter of pride, that she thought she could enter into any character’s mind imaginatively “except,” she went on, “a Tory MP”. Having spent time with a fair number of Tory MPs, who seemed to me to cover a fair stretch of possible human types, I thought this was a curious admission of failure. No: that kind of willed unworldliness was, in the view of the writer, a confirmation of her authenticity and even literary quality. That sort of thing is on the increase: a novelist who wrote about political actors with understanding and sympathy, whatever his or her subject’s views, would quickly find some sharp critics emerging from the unworldly grottoes of social media groupuscules.
I hope Le Carré isn’t the last of his type. The inner resources which allowed him to walk his plots from the leisurely outskirts towards the terrifying kernel, accounting convincingly for every step and milieu, never failed him — Smiley’s People, for me his masterpiece, starts from the furthest possible point. This last novel is both intricate and trimmed down, and makes a graceful gesture of farewell at the end, as the mole is hunted down, cornered, and vanishes into thin air, leaving an empty stage with no-one to take a bow. Will worldliness come back, and that will to understand, to describe, to know stuff? Sooner or later, and when it does, the readers will be waiting.
Philip Hensher is the author of eleven novels and a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University
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SubscribeBeautifully written and illuminating article.
I know what you mean.
There is an analogy with modern politicians, whose life experience is often also desperately narrow, given that so many of them nowadays know little else apart from politics. Far better when someone has had a life and a career before politics; and, similarly, far better if someone has actually lived seriously in the world, before writing about it.
Worldliness produces useful verisimilitude; and this verisimilitude can be geographical, or psychological, or cultural, or practical, etc. Re practical verisimilitude, some of my favourite pot boiler spy novels are the late ’60s ones by James Munro: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/985792.James_Munro
Apart from being rattling good reads, the author’s grasp of throwaway practical spy-craft gives you a wonderful sense of an insider’s perspective. You also see this at work in the superb 1973 version of The Day of The Jackal, shot entirely on location and starring Edward Fox as the paid killer. Fox beings a steely authority to the role, and the details of how he organises his fake passports, commissions a bespoke weapon etc are genuinely fascinating:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ZyH8yBTck
It all seems highly believable, as opposed to the usual Hollywood nonsense (blokes with oversized biceps jumping through windows clutching grenade launchers etc.).
Thank you. Both the book and the film of “The Day of the Jackal” far surpass any of Le Carre’s works.
“He was, like many of the best novelists, intensely knowledgeable — specifically, that strain of knowledge we call worldliness. There ought to be more of it about.”
Reminded me of Louis Auchincloss – what perfect little gems his novels were. He understood the world of his characters so completely that you immediately fell into that world and were swept along in the story.
Interesting article but for me Le Carre was long past his creative peak when he died. I don’t think his observations, characterisations or style ever moved on from the Karla trilogy and A Perfect Spy and I certainly neither trust nor believe the supposedly typical sentence quoted about English Catholics gathering etc. – it might have been true once but it doesn’t feel remotely accurate or relevant today. And it’s fantastically pompous. Francesca Peacock’s review over on the Reaction website pretty much nails this and elaborates on Le Carre’s anachronistic world view and use of language. I haven’t read (and neither do I intend to) SILVERVIEW but, to his credit, I think Le Carre recognised it was sub-par and that’s why he left it in a drawer.
Rather difficult to pay credence to these somewhat odd opinions when you conclude by saying you are not even going to read the latest book!
Le Carre’s strength, or part of it, lies in his understanding of how we live now. There is this part of society that has evolved slowly from what it was but goes on doing what it knows, bumping into the new aspects of our modern lives – which, allowing for passing fads and short lived fashions, turn out to be not much different. Le C acutely understood that
If you read the Reaction review (Silverview by John Le Carré review – some things are better left unpublished (reaction.life) that I refer to you’ll see that my opinions aren’t odd or unique at all. And having read Le Carre’s previous two books, both written after SILVERVIEW, they bear out my long held view that Le Carre’s understanding of how we live our lives was out of date. (His evident and furious incomprehension of Brexit makes my point, I think.) Even the names he gives his characters – all those Jakes, Perrys, Doms and Nats – feel like they’re from another age.
Only the prospect of one last payday for his family has resulted in the publication of work that Le Carre himself put aside. And on that, at least, I’m happy to trust his judgement by not reading his book.
He did not put it aside. He sent to his publisher and to his literary executors, and left the publication to them. If he had thought it no good he would have burnt it, or deleted it.
Le Carre was hardly a fan of the right or of libertarian leanings, so Reaction would always be an unlikely place to praise him, but Ms Peacock ( and your goodself) do not find much support among critics.
I am libertarian, a Manchester Liberal, profoundly pro-Brexit, etc, etc, but I do not need to have the same politics as writers, actors, and musicians whose work I admire. And Mr Le C I hugely admire, both for his analysis of deficient human behaviour and his view of our failing society and systems. I suspect his solutions and mine would be profoundly different. But he certainly saw the problems and the weaknesses of Englishness, and explored that by bolting it onto a platform of the secret services, much as Trollope used the church to explore the nature of his times
I don’t know where you got that from. According to his son (in The Times last week):
“He literally put it in a drawer”
where it remained until after his death. His youngest son only read it early this year (same Times interview) and the decision to publish was taken post mortem by all his sons.
Still, we can agree to civilly disagree. And if I’m in a minority in finding latterday Le Carre to be inferior to his best work for the reasons I’ve stated, I’m happy with that.
From a pre-publication interview in – you aren’t going to like this – The Guardian.
And apparently there are more short works and an unfinished piece in a drawer being considered for publication. Your agony is not yet over.
But as you say, let us agree to civilly disagree.
It was not just his characterisation it was also his plotting. I remember reading the ending of last book of the Karla Trilogy and suddenly realising that from the first page of the first book it was always going to end that way and that Karla knew it
One such wrote a column explaining that fundamentalist Muslims and “the LGBTQ community” were basically exactly the same in the way they looked at society.
Right, and one of the reason why the LGBTQ and LGBTQ+ community is strong in UK, is that you never really has fought against the Fundamentalist muslims. The left part of the Labour party flirt with them, you don’t see anywhere else in Europe.
Never understood people picking holes in stories. Fiction is escape and, as long as the writer doesn’t: reach over your shoulder to point out explanations, keep an elephant in the hall or mount a pistol on the mantelpiece without it being fired, he’s doing OK. If you’re not a fan of ghost stories, time travel or social comment, don’t read A Christmas Carol. On a par, or even better, Patrick o’Brien’s Jack Aubrey naval novels just paint a picture of the times, if you want something more cheerful than Cold War Le Carré. A spy too.
John Steinbeck, Jack London both worked at various manual jobs. Joseph Conrad was on the boats. Took to the sea, rather. And Dickens tramped all over the place.
Was John Buchan a worldly fellow? He was an all-rounder in that, at least I think, he had seen much of the world, in different, including official, capacities, and, with his spy novels, shown his readers that there are all sorts of interesting bands of people with their own designs on life. However, maybe he dramatised in an exaggerated fashion worldliness, if I may call it that. He certainly knew his labouring Highlands road man, from when Richard Hannay disguised himself as one to throw off his hunters, in the novel The 39 Steps. Also, in Buchan’s Greenmantle, set at the time of the First World War, in the first chapter, A Mission Is Proposed, a foreign office high official explains to Hannay that “Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other.”
That fictional description might be a faux-worldliness based on the tendency of travel to confirm one’s preconceived ideas about the other. Because, although travel may broaden the mind, it dilutes engagement. The archaeologist, however, spends time in a faraway, strange community and gets to know it. But on reading that excerpt from Greenmantle, I was struck by the similarity between the twin strategy of holy book in the one hand and sword in the other and Irish Republicanism’s political “twin strategy” of the armalite and the ballot box. I don’t know whether that strategy was more talked up by the media critical of Irish Republicans or by Irish Republicanism itself. But the politically aware in that movement, in the early days, I imagine, had, well before the Troubles broke out in the late 1960s, read popular British authors, by borrowing from libraries, and someone among them, at some point, had read that line from Greenmantle, banked it in the memory, and used it down the line for propaganda purposes by rewording it. Obviously. Where was I? Yes, talk about worldliness!