Working under the cover of a junior diplomat, he handled ex-Nazis and encountered sketchy Eastern bloc cultural attaches, but did not, in this book anyway, do a lot of cloak-and-dagger adventuring. Instead, Greene ended up being awarded the Order of Merit.)Īnd, whether out of discretion or sheer caginess, le Carré doesn't allow that he has much to offer about his early years in Bonn with MI6. For a while, le Carré scanned the papers every morning for news of Greene's arrest over tradecraft he revealed in Our Man in Havana. (Although, le Carré notes, that didn't seem to stop Graham Greene. And there's still material that's off limits because le Carré, the pen name of David Cornwell, remains bound by London's Official Secrets Act. For one thing, it wasn't that long a career. And that's true again in The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life.īut the memoir, told in a quilt of out-of-order episodes, includes less than you might expect from le Carré's years as a spy.
Like spy-turned-novelist colleagues from Ian Fleming to Jason Matthews, le Carré often has drawn on his years in MI5 and MI6, the British intelligence analogues to the FBI and CIA, for his fiction. It's his life - or, at least, the version he's willing to tell of his life. John le Carré's new book has everything you'd expect from a le Carré novel: starchy Brits, tough Russians, foreign landscapes, lost causes, financial chicanery, self-delusion, deceit and betrayal.īut here's the thing: le Carré's new book is not a novel.
0 kommentar(er)
