John le Carre and the art of deception

At the heart of espionage and fiction is the art of deception. Spies as well as writers love to be flies on the wall, observing people, collecting information, working out plots, and uncovering motives. These overlaps between the language of spycraft and the language of authorship are a testament to how both lines of work use deception in service of a greater truth. If fiction is a deception, then espionage fiction by nature is doubly so. Spy novels are premised on performance, imposture, misdirection and chicanery. Readers are invited into a world whose binary framework of good and evil are clouded by moral ambiguity.

When le Carré speaks, there is that same artful eloquence to his voice, that same mindful economy in his words, that same evocative power of his anecdotes, as when he wrote his greatest novels, from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) to A Perfect Spy (1986). Add to that the intimacy of hearing it all straight from the horse’s mouth, from a natural raconteur and an enigmatic author. Morris indeed is no stranger to profiling tricky subjects who tend to be slippery with the truth. In The Fog of War (2003), he got the buttoned-up former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara to admit to behaving as a war criminal. Over the years, he has unmasked the many faces of malicious obfuscation: Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter in Mr Death (1999), Iraq War architect Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known (2013), and Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon in American Dharma (2018). Going by past profiles, decoding the enigma that is le Carré should have been right in his wheelhouse.

At a runtime of around 90 minutes, The Pigeon Tunnel thus plays like a compact but censored cut of le Carré’s life and career. Building on an idea from his own novel The Secret Pilgrim (1990), le Carré speaks of how spies and writers alike go on a futile search for meaning, truth, understanding in an “inmost room” that is ultimately “bare.” There is a similar emptiness within him, he claims. But it’s impossible not to wonder if this claim is nothing but an evasion strategy of a master compartmentalizer. Is the poker face he holds, the words he uses, the anecdotes he chooses, the foggy memories he layers upon the truth, all part of an act to eternalise his mystique? After all, he does declare in an opening statement, “This is a performance art.” Scepticism does come with the territory. We are talking about a man who was an artist of deception in more ways than one.

Before he became a novelist, le Carré, born David Cornwell, was educated at Oxford and taught at Eton. While at Eton, he joined the British secret service: first, the MI5, and two years later, the MI6. But he grew disillusioned with both. Seeing former Nazis in East and West Germany, as if the war had never happened, felt like a betrayal — a theme he keeps circling back to and traces to a difficult upbringing under the thumb of a conman father. Ronnie Cornwell emerges as a towering presence whose shadow loomed large over le Carré’s entire life. While dad Ronnie spent most of his life in and out of prison, mom Olive snuck out on the family when he was five. The pain of these betrayals became the drip-feed energising the betrayals in his fiction. “Childhood is the credit balance of the author’s inspiration,” says le Carré, quoting fellow spy-turned-novelist Graham Greene.

Besides Ronnie, another charismatic but treacherous figure who left a lasting impact on le Carré’s work was Kim Philby, the MI6 agent who turned over classified information to the Soviets for years before defecting. This betrayal fed directly into Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in which the mole Bill Haydon bears a close resemblance to Philby. Cold War rhetoric in the West may have been quick to cast the Soviet Union as the antagonist, and the US and its allies as champions of the greater good. Le Carré however refused to take a dualistic view of good and evil. As a former spy, he understood that espionage took its moral character from those who sanctioned it. As a novelist, he staged the theatre of war in all its moral ambiguities. Idealism curdled in the face of dirty schemes on both sides. Loyalties became divided.

What made le Carré stand out from most other writers of espionage fiction was his knack for couching social criticism in the conventions of the genre. Britain, in his novels as in reality, was a country which concealed its cruelty and darkness behind a veneer of civility and righteousness. “The privately educated Englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth,” says the veteran spy George Smiley about the ruling class in The Secret Pilgrim. “Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damn fool. Nobody acts braver when he’s frightened stiff, or happier when he’s miserable; nobody can flatter you better when he hates you than your extrovert Englishman or woman.”

Le Carré himself didn’t enjoy the self-imposed schizophrenia. Nor did his creations, be it Alec Leamas, George Smiley or Magnus Pym. James Bond may have. But Le Carré’s world of spies was much murkier, seedier, harsher than Ian Fleming’s. Smiley, for example, could be considered the beta to Bond’s alpha. He is short, fat, bald and serially cuckolded. He isn’t romancing shell riders and fighting giant squids. Observation, not seduction, is his MO. Being unassuming, not flashy, is his style. He is a reluctant hero striving to do the right thing as the world keeps changing around him. Le Carré does not glamourise the dirty work spies are authorised to do in the name of national security. “What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx?” Leamas asks the woman he loves and betrays at the end of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. “They’re not. They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?”

On watching a recreation with CGI pigeons in the film, the answer shouldn’t be as elusive to us. The tiny window of freedom embodies the hopes of East Germans who risked their lives to flee across the Iron Curtain. The fate of the pigeons mirrors the fate of spies, both agent and victim of their own deception, being sent on deathly assignments. The wounded creatures looping home speaks to how le Carré, even as an old man, remained caught in a loop, revisiting the mystery of his upbringing, scarred by a fraught relationship with his father. Above all, the image of the pigeon tunnel drives home the inescapability of the past. Those who don’t learn from it are doomed to repeat it. Only those who do can break out of its loop.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.

At the heart of espionage and fiction is the art of deception. Spies as well as writers love to be flies on the wall, observing people, collecting information, working out plots, and uncovering motives. These overlaps between the language of spycraft and the language of authorship are a testament to how both lines of work use deception in service of a greater truth. If fiction is a deception, then espionage fiction by nature is doubly so. Spy novels are premised on performance, imposture, misdirection and chicanery. Readers are invited into a world whose binary framework of good and evil are clouded by moral ambiguity.

PREMIUM

When le Carré speaks, there is that same artful eloquence to his voice, that same mindful economy in his words, that same evocative power of his anecdotes, as when he wrote his greatest novels, from The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) to A Perfect Spy (1986). Add to that the intimacy of hearing it all straight from the horse’s mouth, from a natural raconteur and an enigmatic author. Morris indeed is no stranger to profiling tricky subjects who tend to be slippery with the truth. In The Fog of War (2003), he got the buttoned-up former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara to admit to behaving as a war criminal. Over the years, he has unmasked the many faces of malicious obfuscation: Holocaust denier Fred Leuchter in Mr Death (1999), Iraq War architect Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known (2013), and Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon in American Dharma (2018). Going by past profiles, decoding the enigma that is le Carré should have been right in his wheelhouse.

At a runtime of around 90 minutes, The Pigeon Tunnel thus plays like a compact but censored cut of le Carré’s life and career. Building on an idea from his own novel The Secret Pilgrim (1990), le Carré speaks of how spies and writers alike go on a futile search for meaning, truth, understanding in an “inmost room” that is ultimately “bare.” There is a similar emptiness within him, he claims. But it’s impossible not to wonder if this claim is nothing but an evasion strategy of a master compartmentalizer. Is the poker face he holds, the words he uses, the anecdotes he chooses, the foggy memories he layers upon the truth, all part of an act to eternalise his mystique? After all, he does declare in an opening statement, “This is a performance art.” Scepticism does come with the territory. We are talking about a man who was an artist of deception in more ways than one.

Before he became a novelist, le Carré, born David Cornwell, was educated at Oxford and taught at Eton. While at Eton, he joined the British secret service: first, the MI5, and two years later, the MI6. But he grew disillusioned with both. Seeing former Nazis in East and West Germany, as if the war had never happened, felt like a betrayal — a theme he keeps circling back to and traces to a difficult upbringing under the thumb of a conman father. Ronnie Cornwell emerges as a towering presence whose shadow loomed large over le Carré’s entire life. While dad Ronnie spent most of his life in and out of prison, mom Olive snuck out on the family when he was five. The pain of these betrayals became the drip-feed energising the betrayals in his fiction. “Childhood is the credit balance of the author’s inspiration,” says le Carré, quoting fellow spy-turned-novelist Graham Greene.

Besides Ronnie, another charismatic but treacherous figure who left a lasting impact on le Carré’s work was Kim Philby, the MI6 agent who turned over classified information to the Soviets for years before defecting. This betrayal fed directly into Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in which the mole Bill Haydon bears a close resemblance to Philby. Cold War rhetoric in the West may have been quick to cast the Soviet Union as the antagonist, and the US and its allies as champions of the greater good. Le Carré however refused to take a dualistic view of good and evil. As a former spy, he understood that espionage took its moral character from those who sanctioned it. As a novelist, he staged the theatre of war in all its moral ambiguities. Idealism curdled in the face of dirty schemes on both sides. Loyalties became divided.

What made le Carré stand out from most other writers of espionage fiction was his knack for couching social criticism in the conventions of the genre. Britain, in his novels as in reality, was a country which concealed its cruelty and darkness behind a veneer of civility and righteousness. “The privately educated Englishman is the greatest dissembler on earth,” says the veteran spy George Smiley about the ruling class in The Secret Pilgrim. “Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damn fool. Nobody acts braver when he’s frightened stiff, or happier when he’s miserable; nobody can flatter you better when he hates you than your extrovert Englishman or woman.”

Le Carré himself didn’t enjoy the self-imposed schizophrenia. Nor did his creations, be it Alec Leamas, George Smiley or Magnus Pym. James Bond may have. But Le Carré’s world of spies was much murkier, seedier, harsher than Ian Fleming’s. Smiley, for example, could be considered the beta to Bond’s alpha. He is short, fat, bald and serially cuckolded. He isn’t romancing shell riders and fighting giant squids. Observation, not seduction, is his MO. Being unassuming, not flashy, is his style. He is a reluctant hero striving to do the right thing as the world keeps changing around him. Le Carré does not glamourise the dirty work spies are authorised to do in the name of national security. “What the hell do you think spies are? Moral philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx?” Leamas asks the woman he loves and betrays at the end of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. “They’re not. They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me: little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?”

On watching a recreation with CGI pigeons in the film, the answer shouldn’t be as elusive to us. The tiny window of freedom embodies the hopes of East Germans who risked their lives to flee across the Iron Curtain. The fate of the pigeons mirrors the fate of spies, both agent and victim of their own deception, being sent on deathly assignments. The wounded creatures looping home speaks to how le Carré, even as an old man, remained caught in a loop, revisiting the mystery of his upbringing, scarred by a fraught relationship with his father. Above all, the image of the pigeon tunnel drives home the inescapability of the past. Those who don’t learn from it are doomed to repeat it. Only those who do can break out of its loop.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.