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Writer John le Carré, master of spy novels – Corriere.it dies

The great British writer John le Carr died at 89. The announcement was made on Guardian, reporting the confirmation of his family. The famous author of some among the greatest thriller and espionage novels died due to a pneumonia (not linked to Covid)at the Royal Cornwall Hospital on Saturday night.

It would be not only an understatement, but profoundly unfair, to confine the English novelist John le Carr, who died at the age of 89, to the field of genre literature, to consider him in substance the cultured and sophisticated alternative, in the context of spy stories, to Ian Fleming and his 007. It must be recognized that David Cornwell (this was his real name), was absolutely one of the most important English language authors in the second half of the twentieth century, an opinion expressed by authorities of the caliber of Philip Roth and Ian McEwan.

Realistic espionage

The effectiveness of its period, the accurate psychological introspection, the exceptional ability to construct complex and surprising plots, in which nothing as it seems, made him truly a first-rate narrator. Excellent connoisseur of the ruthless and cynical universe of the secret services, of which (as indeed Fleming) had been a part, Le Carr had provided a realistic picture, very far from the glossy heroism of James Bond, but at the same time attractive to the mass of readers, who had rewarded his talent, without being intimidated by the fluvial rhythm of the story, with extraordinary sales successes since his first world bestseller from 1963, The spy who came in from the cold (Longanesi, 1964).

Against the evils of capitalism, against Brexit

Critic of the British establishment, which he called abominable

, Le Carr was a leftist and did not have a Manichean vision of the Cold War: he was, among other things, invited to Moscow in the Gorbachevian era, even if in his most famous novels at the end the British secret service prevails over the Soviet one. After the fall of the USSR he had declared that at that point it was necessary fight the evils of capitalism. And later he sided with the utmost energy against Brexit, a position that was already reflected in the novel A past as a spy (Mondadori, 2018) and even more clearly in The spy runs across the field (Mondadori, 2019).

The separation of the parents, the rebellion and Switzerland

David Cornwell was born in England

, in the southern town of Poole, on October 19, 1931. His parents separated when he was a child and he never saw his mother again until he was 21. His relationship with his father Ronald Cornwell had been very difficult, ambiguous individual engaged in opaque activities with related legal troubles, who (word of the son) always managed to spend twice what he earned or scrapped. Nonetheless, the future Le Carr and her brother attended expensive schools, along with the scions of the good bourgeoisie, with the distinct feeling of being out of place and always having to hide their real status as belonging to a penniless family. At a certain point, the boy’s rebellion intervened, and he managed to get himself sent to study in Switzerland. It was a turning point: both because his passion for German culture had manifested itself in Bern, which he would later put to good use and which also characterizes the most prominent character of his novels, George Smiley; and because it was precisely in the Swiss capital, teeming with spies in the turbulent start of the Cold War, that the initiation into the world of secret services had taken place, Le Carr told in the autobiographical volume Pigeon shooting (Mondadori, 2016), when he was entrusted with the task of delivering I don’t know what to I don’t know who.

Secret Agent

Later le Carr had been military in the occupation troops in Austria (where he also held intelligence duties), student at Oxford, German teacher, then in 1958 he had become a British counterintelligence agent, the Mi5, and then in 1960 passed to the structure responsible for collecting information abroad, the Mi6. While working in Germany for undercover diplomatic intelligence, he wrote and published his first novel in 1961, Call for the dead (Feltrinelli, 1965). Here Smiley enters the scene immediately, a fat and ungainly individual, always dressed in poorly cut clothes, humiliated by his unfaithful wife and arrogant bosses, but gifted with profusion of intuition, memory and investigative skills. he who solves the first intrigue.

The success

And we find him again in action, albeit retired, in le Carr’s second novel, the detective story A crime of class (Feltrinelli, 1964). The global fame and wealth for the English author, who writes under a pseudonym as befits a diplomat (and moreover a secret agent), arrives in 1963 with The spy who came in from the cold. An exceptional bestseller that in Great Britain sells half a million copies in three months and in the United States it remains at the top of the broadcasting chart for 43 consecutive weeks. In 1965 a popular film of the same name was made with actor Richard Burton, directed by Martin Ritt. Many others will be the transpositions for cinema or TV of the works of le Carr. In the novel Smiley has a secondary role this time, but the protagonist Alec Leamas, the victim of an intricate whirlwind of deceptions in the Berlin of the Wall, shares its gray background. As Oreste del Buono, an admirer of Le Carr for a long time, then disappointed by some of his later tests, wrote at the time, the strength of these figures lies in the fact that they represent the hero that the normal man can be.

The Karla trilogy

The extraordinary achievement as a novelist had allowed le Carr to end his career in the service of the Crown and devote himself only to writing. An activity that, in the opinion of many, had reached its peak with the so-called Karla’s trilogy, from the code name of the head of the Soviet secret services that Smiley’s rival in a long game of chess destined to unravel precisely for three books of enormous success: The mole (Rizzoli, 1975), The honorable schoolboy (Rizzoli, 1978) and All Smiley’s men (Rizzoli, 1980). The duel goes through several stages: an unsuspected infiltrator of the KGB, the so-called mole, at the top of British intelligence is discovered; Smiley goes from moments of great difficulty to others in which he finds himself at the helm of the Circus (conventional name that Carr uses for the secret service of his country). At the end of the third novel Karla is trapped and surrenders defeated to her usual opponent. But Smiley to beat him had to use methods that basically repel him and bring him closer to his antagonist. So, concludes the Carr in the finale, they exchanged glances again and, perhaps, each of them, for a moment, saw something of himself in the other.

The latest projects

Smiley would make another fleeting appearance in the novel The secret visitor (Mondadori, 1991), and then returns again, many years later, in the 2017 book A past as a spy: a kind of prequel to the legendary The spy who came in from the cold, in which the protagonist is another longtime hero of the saga, Peter Guillam. Meanwhile, the Carr had successfully walked other paths than that humorous in The tailor of Panama (Feltrinelli, 1997), clearly inspired by the novel Our agent in Havana by Graham Greene, at complaint against pharmaceutical multinationals in The tenacious gardener (Mondadori, 2001). The judgments on the second part of his work varied: some felt that with novels such as The perfect spy (Mondadori, 1986) and The Russia house (Mondadori, 1989), le Carr had reached full maturity; others were more critical, believing that he had entered an involutionary phase, albeit with flashes of excellence. But it certainly could not be contested with an exceptional record. No one else had been able to tell so effectively the ambiguous and suffocating atmosphere of the spy environment during the cold war.


December 13, 2020 (change December 14, 2020 | 01:10)

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