On Halloween, it seems only fitting to talk about ghosts, and what better subject than the ghost of a spy, who left the business in disgust (so he says), and who wrestled spy fiction away from James Bond and sent it down a far more complex allegorical path.
The ghost of John Le Carre, deceased December 12, 2020 at the age of 89 years, has been given a wonderful stage by the documentary film maker, Errol Morris. His “The Pigeon Tunnel” (an evocative recurring motif) is now showing on Apple TV.
Beyond the grave, as it were, Le Carre has continued to produce, even before Morris came along. There was a posthumous novel, Silverview, published in 2021. His son, Tim Cornwell, published a massive compilation of Le Carre letters, A Private Spy, in 2022. Not to be outdone, his biographer, Adam Sisman has recently come out with an addendum to his first study of Le Carre (published in 2015 and grandiosely sub-titled The Biography—doubt it) with a new volume called The Secret Life of John Le Carre, which wades into his sex life—what one reviewer called a life of “hectic adultery.” This was Sisman’s revenge for Le Carre shutting the door on this material in his life-time. (Please don’t take this as a recommendation.)
None of this rivals The Pigeon Tunnel. I have to say I think Morris’ documentary is a masterpiece. Its wonderfully shot and sequenced and Morris wisely stays mostly out of the frame. He is a disembodied voice putting dull, predictable and sometimes distracting questions, which Le Carre spins into much finer stuff. The ghost completely commands the stage.
At its heart, the Morris documentary is a story about how betrayal fashioned Le Carre the writer. Betrayal was everywhere in his life, his armature. Betrayed by his con man father, Ronnie; betrayed by a mother, Olive, who disappeared from his life at an early age; learning himself the art of betrayal as an informer for MI5 about the activities of the Communist Party at Cambridge where he was a student. Betraying his best friend at Cambridge was some kind of early trifecta.
His adult professional career, first in MI5 and then in MI6, was profoundly affected by betrayal. There was the shocking news that descended on his head while Le Carre was working for British intelligence in West Germany—that none other than Kim Philby, one of the alleged great talents of British intelligence and once tipped to head MI6, was a long-time Soviet agent.
Then there was a different kind of betrayal, also experienced by le Carre while serving for SIS in Germany—the civilizational betrayal represented by the erection of the Berlin Wall. He called the Wall “the most obscene symbol.” The Morris documentary recreates his witness of the desperate attempts by people to flee from East Germany.
The Berlin Wall was the catalyst for le Carre’s first great spy novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, published in 1963. He told Morris that he knew he “wanted to write a strong novel about the thing.” And so he did, and forever changed the course of the spy novel.
Kim Philby, a master betrayer who clearly sits on Le Carre’s soul, “lit the path” for another great le Carre novel, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974). There is a unforgettable line about Philby in the Morris documentary, where le Carre says that if you had given Kim Philby your cat to look after for a couple of weeks, “he would have betrayed your cat somehow.” Its likely, by the way, that Philby destroyed Le Carre’s career in British intelligence by revealing his identify and undercover activities to his Soviet masters. By this time, Le Carre was souring on what he later made into his fictional “circus,” believing that British intelligence was, as he put it, “a tragically reduced crowd,” driven by nostalgia. In the Morris documentary he seems to have some regret about peopling his fictional world of British intelligence with spy masters of the order of George Smiley.
Betrayal also fueled his semi-autobiographical novel, A Perfect Spy (1986), which le Carre says he was “released” to write by the death of his father. As his tells Morris, the ultimate betrayal that his father practised on him was to try to reduce him to a victim of his con-man tactics (with near success).
If there is a clue to Le Carre’s art, spoken by the ghost, it is a simple one—that he sought to make “credible fables out of the worlds that I visited, or visited me.” The ghost’s last word is a claim and a plea—“I am an artist.”
Yes, rest assured, good ghost.
I saw the trailer for "Pigeon Tunnel" on Apple TV and am very excited to watch ...but the screen on my iPhone is too small and I'm not quite sure my 25 year old TV will connect to it. I'll have to see if I can MacGyver something. I do think sometimes of writing a children's book about a Secret Squirrel called, "The Squirrel Who Comes in from the Cold" though.
Thanks for this piece, I am just in the middle of the Biography by Adam Sisman and now must see the Pigeon Tunnel to get an even finer grained view of Le Carre.