The books don’t stop: after John le Carré’s death in 2020 came his 26th novel, Silverview, published last year, and now further treasure arrives from the vault in the shape of A Private Spy, a 750-page selection of le Carré’s letters over the course of his long life, taking us from wartime schooldays to locked-down old age, as he deplores the “unholy mess” of a pandemic-ravaged Britain nearing hard Brexit.
Yes, the editorial introduction more or less admits that Adam Sisman has already plucked the juiciest items for his 2015 biography John le Carré. Still, this is a companionable volume all the same, rich in local interest from starry correspondents (Margaret Thatcher, Stephen Fry, Tom Stoppard – who hears that le Carré “wasn’t convinced, wasn’t moved” by Silverview, which he “dumped” in 2014), as well as enjoyable exchanges with fans: when a high-up at Avis writes in delight that one of le Carré’s characters uses his firm, le Carré jokes he’ll be sure to make his villains use Hertz in future.
He’s huffy as well as warm, haranguing Clive James’s editor over a bad review and ticking off an American cartoonist for a gag about his obsolescence after the fall of the Soviet Union. Both hit sore spots. The idea that he was a genre novelist always rankled and probably fed his notoriously adversarial post-fatwa response to Salman Rushdie (“Would the same people have leapt to the defence of a Ludlum or an Archer?”). The letters show too how he strove with increasing energy to keep his books topical once the cold war receded from the headlines. “I… am trying to set a novel around the fortunes of a young Chechen Muslim who finds himself in Hamburg,” he writes to a German human rights lawyer while at work on A Most Wanted Man (2008). “I would love the opportunity of a background briefing from you concerning the Muslim community in Bremen and in Hamburg.”
