Spy writer John le Carré's new novel, A Delicate Truth, hints at personal secrets and is his most autobiographical for years, says Jon Stock.
Crime master writer John le
Carré will make his debut at the Telegraph Hay Festival 2013 Photo: Rex
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David Cornwell, better known as the spy writer John le Carré, has always
enjoyed keeping secrets — the real-life inspiration for spymaster George Smiley,
for example, or le Carré’s own role with British Intelligence. Sooner or later
he breaks, telling us that Smiley was based on the Rev Vivian Green, his tutor
at Lincoln College, Oxford, and that he once worked for MI5 and later MI6, but
you can’t help feeling that the information is always extracted under duress.
So it is a pleasant surprise that le Carré has decided to reveal, without the
use of electrodes or bright lights, that his much-anticipated 23rd novel is his
most autobiographical for years, a book that “comes closer to my skin than any
of my more recent novels”.
A Delicate Truth, serialised exclusively in tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph,
features two characters that draw on his own experience in the intelligence
services. This will be music to his many fans’ ears, as it hints at a return to
what le Carré does best: the portrayal of troubled MI6 officers wrestling with
their uniquely British consciences and dodgy foreign policies often forged in
Washington. Think Smiley, Bill Haydon, Roy Bland, Gerald Westerby, Saul Enderby,
all characters from his tour de force Karla trilogy.
“I seem to have written two versions of myself into it — or better, two
ages,” le Carré writes in an introduction to a special Waterstones edition of A
Delicate Truth . “In Toby Bell, thirtysomething rising star of Her Majesty’s
Foreign Service, I see the striving ambitious fellow I fancy myself to have been
at much the same age, until I went and messed everything up by writing The Spy
Who Came in from the Cold.”
Le Carré was serving with MI6 in Bonn and then Hamburg, but had to resign in
1964 after he was unmasked as the author of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (a
book that Graham Greene described as “the best spy novel ever written”).
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