The extinct darkness and the sterile demons of Le Carré

We must not forget that we will hardly find a George Smiley on any ordinary day in this time that is now ours.

It will be decisive not to forget that the possibility of meeting our George Smiley is terribly low not because he no longer exists, but because he has been permanently withdrawn, resigned to an inner conviction that his place and his world have been suppressed.

Our ability to understand the existence of a distinction between extinction and recollection is fundamental.

Our George continues to exist, but our George is no longer part of the network that dominates the visible reality of most of us.

It will not be our Georges who we find in the Prime Minister’s office, in a top post in Foreign Affairs, at the head of an intelligence or criminal investigation department, who will decide the front page of the newspaper, or in the university chair, some of the posts which belonged to them and which they have abdicated or been forced to abdicate.

We will not then have the opportunity, probably forever, to have someone tell us how the nights when Shostakovich waited for the executioners to arrive allow us to understand Stalinism, that Philby is one of the symbols of a utopia that has contaminated the Western bourgeoisie, that Langley is not the center of the good side of the war but only the center of one side of the war, or those young fundamentalists of European nationality are dragged into terror for the first time in their lives having discovered the power of the ideal.

In other words, the gathering of our George in a reserved abode, seated in a chair, with the paper in hand, Mahler in the air, wrapped up in a state of boredom controlled only by the hope of the return of one of the as yet unclosed stories of the past, is for us the disappearance of a world that until recently was dominant, but also of intimacy with the history that was precious.

The death of David Cornwell, who signed as John Le Carré, and from 1961 to 2019 published twenty-five fictional texts, is the extinction of the perhaps unique literary cycle that revealed, dissected, and shared knowledge about the world to which our Georges and many of us belong.

The dominant feature of this world has been the conflict without direct and total armed confrontation between the two candidates and their main allies for global superpower status.

The fundamental, but all too often silent, traits of this world were the permanent construction, by the two superpower candidates and their allies, of battlefields in all dimensions that touched and influenced the course of each of us, from cultural to mental, from economic to ideological, from emotional to affective, from military to security.

As Le Carré himself wrote in the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition of “The Spy Out of the Cold”, it was the global world in which “for hardliners in the East and West, the Second World War was a distraction. Now that it was over, they could continue the real war, which had begun with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and had since continued under different flags and disguises”.

Believing this to be the place that Le Carré chose, the fictional work that he raised for 58 years, from 1961 to 2019, is based on the fundamental, renewed attempt at each new text to reveal the way in which the war for global supremacy determined the course of states, of our Georges and of each of us.

No one was clearer about his interest than Le Carré himself when he pointed out that “out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit”.

The “larger worlds we inhabit” investigated, lived, and designed in his fiction by Le Carré can be charted to the east and west of the chronological boundary raised by the fall of the wall.

To the east of 1989 we have the visceral bipolar world, fanatical but also idealistic, which determined the “realpolitik” of states and built the destinies of men dragged into a battle of two centers, but of multiple fronts and long duration.

It is the desperate world of Alec Leamas unable to perceive and escape the countless shades of grey from the darkness, in “The Spy that came out of the Cold”, and the world of demons and men of duty and honor destroyed by the absolute need to do harm of Smiley and Karla told in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”, “The Honourable Schoolboy” and “Smiley´s People”.

The border to the East of 1989, which will have only a partial exit from the bipolar world with the publication in 1983 of “The Little Drummer Girl”, will be closed twice, in 1986 and in 1990.

The first date welcomes the publication of “The Perfect Spy”, pointed out by insiders and outsiders as the best candidate for Le Carré’s supreme work, the second date marks the publication of “The Secret Pilgrim”.

In fact, the two novels are the double face of the closing.

The Magnus Pym of “The Perfect Spy” is the devout idealistic soldier who becomes a demon wrapped in the darkness of lies and betrayal.

Ned, the “secret pilgrim”, who will never have a family name, is the devout idealist soldier who has never betrayed his conscience, but who does not escape the price of doing evil to defend Queen, country, and the West.

Magnus and Ned, and so many others, from Leonardo Burr to Tim Cranmer, are the characters with whom Le Carré draws paths and answers to the question that guides his work, put in the foreword cited in this text. “The bad dream was after all a dream that a lot of people in this world shared since it posed the same old question that we ask ourselves today, fifty years later: how far can we go in the just defence of our Western values, without abandoning them along the way?

Le Carré crossed the border to the West in 1989 with the publication of “The Night Manager” in 1993, detecting and building other “larger worlds we inhabit” which are now both those of the precarious and unstable realignment of nations, especially of the United Kingdom, caused by the fall of the wall and those of the countless ways in which global, regional and national power is being fought.

However, it should be pointed out that Le Carré is fictionally moving westwards from 1989, but without ever leaving the East or its central importance in its territory and its imagination.

We have without any doubt the larger worlds that give rise to arms trafficking, in “The Night Manager”, new powers rising for limited supremacy, such as the pharmaceutical multinationals, in “The Constant Gardener”, the international financial system, in “Single & Single” and in “Our Kind of Traitor”, among others, the dispute over African natural resources, in “The Mission Song”, and the new paths of espionage and war generated by Islamic terrorism in “A Most Wanted Man”.

But the “larger worlds” of all these novels, as well as “A Legacy of Spies”, and all the others published to the West in 1989, are still those of British and Russian men, and more distant from American men, united by the bipolar geostrategic matrix designed in 1945.

As Simon Schama recently wrote in the Financial Times, Le Carré’s work should be read as “a sharp-focused portrait of an age; attuned to the manipulative mischief of power, dwelling in the light-deprived burrows where underground creatures scurry around (…) to carry out, as best they can, the dirty business of state”.

To the darkness and demons of our Georges and their comrades and enemies of a journey, now in function and in action in new contexts and some new places, those generated by China or by the ideological and existential evil that roams the interior of the United States of America have not been added.

Similarly, in the territory that Le Carré researched to the west of 1989, the global technological and digital entities, the war for computerized viruses or the existential risk generated by the climate crisis are not visible, to name but a few of the new actors and larger worlds through which the struggle for global power is passing today decisively.

The stories published by Le Carré to the last, dated 2019, are still the worlds of our Georges, although these are increasingly peripheral and we rarely find them today.

A rigorous mapping of Le Carré’s fictional work must also focus on the fact that the darkness where war is waged and the power played out, where espionage is a bigger battlefield, are just context and stage.

As he himself confesses, again in the foreword already quoted here, he never abandoned the “anger because from the day my novel was published I realised that from then on, and forever, I would be labeled as the spy who had become a writer, rather than a writer who, like many of his kind, had made a leg of the world of espionage and written about it”.

Thus, the fixation on the classic territory of the struggle for the acquisition of power, by blocks, states, and men, did not prevent Le Carré from keeping his fundamental fictional theme untouched from text to text.

What was decisive for him, and guided the narrative in each text, was to discover and share the marks that the war for global supremacy left on the soldiers and victims who made it and suffered it.

Le Carré’s theme is the excavation of the human experience of those who have been subjected to a limit to which they have no defenses.

Perhaps it was Timothy Garton Ash, in a text published in 1999 in The New Yorker, who most clearly deciphered the fictional core of the writer. “The real theme of Le Carré is not espionage. It is the infinitely deceptive labyrinth of human relations: betrayal that is a kind of love lies that are a kind of truth, good men serving bad causes and bad men serving good causes”.

Where Garton Ash wants to get to is the fundamental point that the fiction of Le Carré uses the world of shadows of espionage as the scenario to narrate the price that each one dragged into war has to pay for serving the cause and securing power.

What interests Le Carré is not only the detailed narration of each movement of the countless contemporary variations of the increasingly dirty great game but the darkness they trigger and the demons that remain forever in the minds of those who get involved or dragged into the theatre of operation.

What Le Carré tries to share with us, and what we look for in each of his texts, are exactly the marks on women and men that the greatest and endless war leaves.

As Boyd Tonkin wrote many years ago in The Independent, “via the British ‘Circus’ and its Soviet counterpart, Le Carré created a laboratory of human nature; a test-track where the innate fractures of the heart and mind could be driven to destruction”.

There is no more terrible personal human destruction than that of Jim Prideaux, condemned forever to live with the demons of torture, betrayal, and vengeance, or that of Annabel Richter when she discovers that the price of loving her Issa is to fight uselessly with the dark face of the Western system that German law has taught her to respect.

As Schama notes, Le Carré’s work “will harden in the great pantheon of English literature (…)”, essentially because it had “(…) the bloody beat of life pounding away on every page”.

The closing of John Le Carré’s work should above all be referred to as a chronological landmark.

The darkness in which our Georges were enveloped has been extinguished and the demons created by the bipolar world have been sterilised.

We will forever miss talking to our George in a decrepit corner of our geographic society, while we are consumed by the fear that the new darkness and the new demons we face now do not have a writer capable of putting them on-page.