John le Carré – David Cornwell as he then was – grew up among the lies of his fraudster father Ronnie. He then entered a world of secrets, reporting on leftist students when he was at Oxford before working in intelligence for MI5 and MI6. Deception was his domain and as much as he hated Ronnie he worried about coming from the same “mad genes-bank”. Instead he became a novelist; a less damaging way to tell lies.
Le Carré felt intruded on by Adam Sisman’s 2015 biography and quickly offered an “antidote” in his memoir The Pigeon Tunnel. The letters bring further exposure but they’ve been sensitively edited by his son Tim, who died suddenly in June, with the emphasis thrown on his father’s best self and industrious literary career: the days spent writing in longhand at his desk (his wife typed up the pages), the exhaustive research he carried out (both before embarking on a novel and after he’d done the penultimate draft), the firm control he exerted over blurbs, jacket designs and layout. He changed publishers and dumped editors but always with courtesy. “There’s no sillier fellow than the writer complaining about critics,” he said, but on at least one occasion he did so, protesting to the editor of the Observer about Clive James’s “sloppy” debunking of his work.
