John le Carré’s ‘A Perfect Spy’ Turns 40

‘A Perfect Spy’ By John le CarréPenguin Books, 1986When John le Carré died in 2020, the obituaries were laudatory. They might, in fact, have been a little too glowing — don’t speak ill of the dead and all that — on the grounds that le Carré, aka David Cornwell, had been largely consumed with writing increasingly tiresome left-wing agitprop towards the conclusion of his writing life. It is hard to find a book of his that has any serious literary merit after 2001’s “The Constant Gardener,” and it is tempting to describe him, like so many of his peers, as a once-great writer who started to repeat himself, to increasingly diminishing returns.Still, when le Carré had been on song, he was very, very good indeed. The recent success of “Slow Horses” owes a vast amount to the world that le Carré created in his Smiley novels, complete with ‘the Circus’ and East-West antagonism. This is epitomized by the battle of wits between George Smiley, the methodical spymaster, and Karla, his Soviet opposite number. Novels such as “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” are rightly regarded as some of the greatest post-war English writing, which is what makes it even more surprising to note that it was “A Perfect Spy” that at the time of its publication was widely acclaimed as his masterpiece.“A Perfect Spy” swiftly became the benchmark not only in le Carré’s career but in fiction writing more generally. Philip Roth lauded it as “the best English novel since the war.” It has acquired a totemic standing that has only grown since the publication both of Adam Sisman’s magisterial, carefully researched 2015 biography of le Carré and its more gossipy, prurient companion piece, “The Secret Life of John le Carré,” made up of the offcuts, mainly to do with the writer’s compulsive infidelities, that could not be published in his lifetime.Le Carré himself regarded “A Perfect Spy” as his magnum opus, a novel that transcended the espionage genre — as, in fairness, his work had been doing since his breakthrough with “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” in 1963. and would tell anyone, generally interviewers who might then report his words as fact, that it was his greatest novel and one that would last the test of time.Reconsidered four decades after its publication, it is tempting to take le Carré at his word and describe “A Perfect Spy” as a masterpiece that both defined and redefined his career. Yet what makes it so interesting, and presumably why it spoke both to its creator and those other writers who have led double, if not treble, lives — including Roth — is that it takes the trappings of the espionage thriller and then shows relatively little interest in their mechanics. It prefers instead to focus on the central dynamic that lies between Magnus Pym, a high-ranking intelligence officer who one day disappears from his post in Vienna, and his late father Rick, a monstrous yet charismatic fraudster whose overarching impact on his son’s life taught him the whys and wherefores of betrayal.The novel is explicitly autobiographical, and when Sisman’s life of le Carré was published three decades after its original publication, it was fascinating to explore the precise parallels between Magnus-David-John and Rick-Ronnie Cornwell. The latter was a crook who his son both dismissed and grudgingly lauded as “an epic con man of little education, immense charm, extravagant tastes but no social value”. While le Carré was going through the typical education of an upper-crust Englishman (Sherborne School and, belatedly, Lincoln College, Oxford) Ronnie was committing insurance fraud on a grand scale, as well as associating with the Krays, the gangsters who tore apart London in the Sixties while coming perilously close to becoming respectable.It is this tension between respectability and chaos that makes “A Perfect Spy” such a fascinating delve into le Carré’s psyche. Magnus appears, at first, to be the epitome of a smooth, successful spy, masquerading as a high-level diplomat and enjoying an energetic and vigorous sexual and romantic life with his wife Mary, as well as his much-loved son Tom. Yet the reader is tipped the wink from the beginning that Magnus is not on the level, even as far as his own side is concerned, thanks to his masquerading as a “Mr. Canterbury” and maintaining rooms in a frowsy Devon boarding house, where he retreats shortly after he learns of the death of his father. The event throws him into a tailspin that leads him to question his loyalties, even as it becomes clear that Magnus’s professional career has been a complex one, bedeviled by his father’s malign influence.The book is really two novels in one. The first, the more conventional spy thriller, is fine without being especially revelatory. As often with le Carré, the female characters leave a good deal to be desired — Mary is especially thin — and while there is the intriguing figure of Jack Brotherhood, Magnus’s friend and former mentor who is charged with leading the investigation into his disappearance, the arguments about private deception versus public loyalty are familiar to anyone who has read a book by this author.What makes “A Perfect Spy” so compulsive, and fascinating, is instead the autobiographical material, which is far more compelling than le Carré’s own treatment of his life in his 2016 memoir “The Pigeon Tunnel.” Rick is a barely concealed version of Ronnie, even down to the “court” of hangers-on who would accompany him and participate in his schemes, and le Carré’s treatment of the young Magnus, who was simultaneously fascinated by and increasingly repulsed by his father’s ever-more-elaborate schemes, is shot through both with sympathy and the detachment of an older man looking back on the folly of his younger self.I would even go so far as to suggest that the novel that “A Perfect Spy” represents most closely isn’t anything to do with the espionage genre, but Dickens’s classic novel “David Copperfield.” In both novels, there is a sense of a traumatic past being exorcised through the writing, and indeed fresh recreation, of a story that its creator now wishes to own afresh.“A Perfect Spy” does not need to be a sprawling 680 pages long, and some readers may miss the more visceral gamesmanship of the Smiley novels. Yet even down to its bitterly ironic title, it has a charge to it that few other contemporary books come close to matching. It compels, haunts and, eventually, devastates, and achieves the near-impossible: You feel sorry for its privileged, successful, womanizing creator, who offered his readers such an unvarnished glimpse into his tormented soul.

John le Carré’s ‘A Perfect Spy’ Turns 40

John le Carré’s ‘A Perfect Spy’ Turns 40

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