John le Carré: The Naive and Sentimental Remainer

A writer’s reputation seldom stands higher than in the immediate aftermath of his death. A combination of friends’ tributes, readers’ eulogies and a natural spirit of “De mortuis nihil nisi bonum” create a climate of acclaim that is often largely well merited. Later, when a decent interval has elapsed, come the questions, the reassessments and the research that may significantly modify the reputation of the deceased.

John le Carré, or David Cornwell, as preferred – but let us call him by his literary pseudonym in this instance – is currently subject to the hagiography that immediately follows decease, though it is only fair to say that much of the praise being heaped on his writing is well deserved and unlikely to be reversed. A novelist is judged by his characters and George Smiley alone is testimony to the subtlety of le Carré’s creative genius, which sometimes attained Dickensian proportions. Then there is the atmosphere created around the “Circus”: persuasive, unique, inventive and satirical.

Le Carré’s invented argot – “the lamplighters”, “the pavement artists”, “the mothers” – flattered the reader with a sense of being admitted to a secret world on privileged terms. Such slang, of course, had long been current in the intelligence world: during the War, Anthony Blunt’s team of operatives in MI5’s B Division, who specialized in opening the diplomatic bags of neutral embassies, were known colloquially as “the night watchmen”. Le Carré’s skill in creating an atmospheric vocabulary greatly enhanced his novels; it was just one of the many gifts he brought to the writing of fiction.

Granted, there were longueurs. Not in his earlier, tighter works; but as the books grew fatter, self-indulgence crept in. The Honourable Schoolboy was probably the volume in which it first became noticeable; but what is literary success for, if not to enable a writer to indulge himself, provided he can keep his readers, and le Carré clearly did?

It is on more substantial grounds that Le Carré’s oeuvre invites reappraisal. The critical consensus is that it views the intelligence world through a moral prism. Of course, le Carré was too skilled a writer ever to preach: rather, he presented a narrative in which flawed characters behaved immorally, sometimes aggressively so, irrespective of which side of the ideological divide they were on, and left his readers to draw their own conclusions. That earned him praise for alleged realism, detachment from national or ideological prejudices, and a more sophisticated interpretation of the espionage genre than the crude violence and unblushing patriotism of Ian Fleming’s James Bond canon.

What were the morally abhorrent elements that le Carré pilloried in his novels and denounced in personal discourse? Any list would include unaccountable power, unelected authority, impersonal bureaucracy, privileged secrecy, office politics and power broking for personal advantage, corruption, undemocratic procedures and indifference to the public interest. Many other evils could be added to the list, but those headline moral categories convey the main thrust of Le Carré’s ethical posture.

So, the question must be asked: how could anyone who deplored those abuses spend the last phase of his life as a fanatical apologist for the European Union? The EU encapsulates, to the point of caricature, everything that le Carré professed to deplore. It is the closest soft-power equivalent to the hard-power Soviet Union. The worst excesses of the Circus are practised with tenfold intensity within the EU bureaucracy. In jockeying for power, callously betraying national interests and using deception as a daily tool, Percy Alleline, Toby Esterhase and Bill Haydon could not begin to compete with the apparatchiks of the European Commission.

Who needs Moscow Centre when we have the Berlaymont building? Those who hold real power within the EU institutions are unelected – at least on any scale beyond the franchise of Britain’s pre-1832 rotten boroughs. Yet le Carré preferred their rule to that of wholly elected British politicians. He is usually represented as a maverick, an individual standing against impersonal power. Yet, on analysis, his attitudes can be seen as ultra-establishment and nowhere more so than in his support for the EU.

Every interview he gave, railing against Brexit, put him alongside Heseltine, Blair and every other icon of establishment groupthink. In his last years, his anti-Brexit utterances sounded like a pensioned-off Chekist from Dzerzhinsky Square deploring the downfall of the Soviet Union due to traitors and fools. How could the moralist who wrote The Spy Who Came In from the Cold view the European Union as a benevolent institution?

It was in an interview with John Banville last year that le Carré exposed the depth of his delusion and his complete misapprehension of reality, when he said, again in relation to Brexit: “It’s almost unbelievable that these people of the establishment – Farage, for instance – are speaking of betrayal…” Of all the 67 million people in the United Kingdom, to single out Nigel Farage – the ultimate outcast in the eyes of the elites – as belonging to the establishment demonstrated le Carré’s inverted sense of reality.

Beyond that, his wider geopolitical judgement was caricature left-establishment: “Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary”… “If people would look at the map and see the extent to which Iran is encircled by nuclear powers, they wouldn’t take it perhaps quite so seriously that Iran is seeking to arm itself – if it is – with nuclear weapons.”

Nor was this a reflection of changed views late in life. As long ago as 1993, in an interview on American television, he called for a United Nations army, to intervene militarily wherever it saw fit. That took globalism a step further, by effectively endorsing world government.

Nothing could be more removed from accountable democracy. To replace a monolith such as the Soviet Union with even larger power structures is a classically Utopian view – like the Utopian beliefs that created the Soviet Union. But how a man who proclaimed the values that le Carré did could find them compatible with a desire for gargantuan government, far removed from democratic accountability or the individual citizen is a mystery; in fact, that circle cannot be squared.

As for artistic freedom, le Carré’s response to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses – “nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity” –  had a refreshing robustness, but put a question mark over his support for freedom of expression.

The conclusion to be drawn from all these contradictions is that le Carré was as much an establishment figure as the senior spies he satirised: more Percy Allaline than Alec Leamas. He confessed that in his youth he thought security was to be found in institutions, beginning with school. That ended badly. His period in intelligence has often been characterised as low-grade; but an agent whose cover is Second Secretary at a British embassy is a little more than an office boy or back-room researcher.

The unsympathetic depiction of British intelligence in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, hailed as refreshingly objective, might have afforded the first insight into le Carré’s flaws, had it not been interpreted as a purely literary phenomenon and well-timed, coinciding as it did, in 1963 with the beginnings of British self-flagellation and antipathy to the Cold War in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis. But, although le Carré never went so far as to attribute moral equivalence to the Cold War contenders, his audit was unfairly weighted against the West.

Granted the immoral conduct, on occasion, of Western intelligence agencies may have matched that of their opponents, that regrettable moral relativism should not obscure the hinterland: the vast chronicle of torture and mass murder of millions underpinned by the KGB and GRU, as against the societies being defended by Western agents. That deserved to be spelled out more unambiguously. How many people were shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall from West to East?

A novelist has an absolute right to perpetrate any number of inconsistencies and deceptions, especially in espionage novels; but it is preferable, since art and truth should enjoy a symbiotic relationship, that a consistent thread of moral principle should ultimately be discernible; in real life, it is essential. Le Carré’s contradictions, camouflaged in his fiction but nakedly exposed in his real-life opinions, suggest that this master of stratagems succeeded in deceiving himself.

For a writer regarded by millions as a beacon of moral principle to end up championing an institution so notoriously corrupt and blatantly undemocratic as the EU was an embarrassing spectacle, but it also cast some light on the personal reality underlying the Byzantine intrigue of his works of fiction. None of which should prevent us from enjoying his highly skilled novels.