John le Carré: Novelist of the moral battlefield

William Cash | 15th December 2020 | Culture & Travel

John le Carré at the "Zeit Forum Kultur" in Hamburg on November 10th 2008 (CC BY 3.0)

British espionage writer John le Carré has died aged 89. William Cash reflects on his legacy

A novelist in our post-God world where ideology has so often replaced faith, and where the very value of truth and what constitutes betrayal (that most Christian of themes) becomes a moral battlefield.

My favourite novel of le Carré’s is A Perfect Spy. There is one line in Magnus Pym’s beguiling and brilliant 20th century fictional confession that has long haunted me. I can remember quoting it once in a wounded love letter to a girlfriend I had loved very much who had dumped me – or rather “betrayed” our love as I thought narcissistically at the time. However much pain she caused, she managed to act in a way that seemed true to herself. “Betrayal is like imagining when the reality isn’t good enough … Betrayal is love, as a tribute to our unlived lives”.

Perhaps only le Carré could write such a sentence. I met le Carré – or David Cornwell to use his real name – a few times, including when he visited his journalist son in LA in the nineties. The first was in November 1989 when he had published The Russia House and came to address the Cambridge Union on the fall of the Soviet empire. I managed to get an unlikely interview as the literary editor of Varsity, the university paper.

As we sat in the Union bar, I remember being struck at the immediate contrast between Cornwell the confident and successful author and his creation, the shy, tubby and bespectacled George Smiley, the …

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