John le Carré’s on-and-off lover Suleika Dawson isn’t pleased with a new book about the spy author’s private life. “As one of le Carré’s women myself, I feel in a position to take a view,” she writes in a review of The Secret Life of John le Carré by Adam Sisman.
“His thesis seems to be that it was the lavish attention, expensive gifts and exotic trips that drew each of us to [le Carré],” but, writes Dawson, “the love was real. If he believes it wasn’t then he has us all down not just as tarts but as fools too.”
In The Secret Heart, her own memoir of life with the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy author, Dawson wrote that le Carré “drove himself into me like a ploughshare” and that their affair involved “sex only the hero and heroine can have; sex for the cameras, sex for the gods”.
She criticises Sisman for indelicately mining from her book. “He read the words and either missed the message or discarded it for his own ends,” she jabs, “going so far as to appropriate the last words [le Carré] ever said to me for a meaningless chapter title.”
Sisman previously wrote the authorised biography of le Carré when the author was still alive. Le Carré asked Sisman not to write about his sex life. After le Carré died in 2020, Sisman got to work on this follow-up volume.
Dawson claims this is an attempt to "settle the score" that The Secret Life of John Le Carré is "a book centred more on its author than its supposed subject." "Frankly, I'm not even sure that women are the point of the exercise," she writes in this month's Literary Review.
