{"id":6335,"date":"2015-11-02T12:46:38","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T12:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6335"},"modified":"2015-11-09T12:00:29","modified_gmt":"2015-11-09T12:00:29","slug":"john-le-carre-the-biography-by-adam-sisman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6335","title":{"rendered":"John le Carr\u00e9: The Biography by Adam Sisman"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Bloomsbury UK, Harper US<\/strong><\/p>\n

672pp, hardback, \u00a325.00\/ $28.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by N.J. Cooper<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Is John le Carr\u00e9 one of the greatest English novelists of the post-war era or a writer of overblown commercial thrillers?\u00a0 Adam Sisman’s brilliant and exhaustive biography describes the reception of each of the novels, offering the contradictory judgements of writers from Anthony Burgess to Philip Roth, but he himself does not come down on one side or the other.\u00a0 I have to declare an interest here:\u00a0 I love most of the novels, particularly the George Smiley sequence, and can re-read them with huge pleasure.<\/p>\n

Le Carr\u00e9’s great subject is betrayal, and Adam Sisman reveals the roots of this obsession.\u00a0 Le Carr\u00e9 \u2013 or David Cornwell as he is in real life \u2013 has been both victim of treachery and a betrayer in his turn.\u00a0 His father, Ronnie, was a conman, whose crowd of victims includes some astonishing names.\u00a0 He forced David and his elder brother to run errands for him, involving them in his crimes.\u00a0 On one occasion he sent them to Paris to collect money for illegal shipments of unbranded whisky from the Panamanian ambassador.\u00a0 He also wanted them to collect the golf clubs he’d left at the George V Hotel.\u00a0 In fact, he had already taken money for the whisky and never delivered it, and he had been unable to pay the hotel bill and had therefore been forced to leave the clubs as security.\u00a0 The two boys, without money, had to sleep with the tramps under one of the Seine bridges until they could get home.<\/p>\n

Their mother had run away from an intolerable life, without taking any measures to protect her young sons. David was brutally beaten at boarding school and, possibly, abused.\u00a0 \"\"<\/a>He left early and bravely took himself to Switzerland to take a course at Bern University.\u00a0 Here he had his first encounter with British intelligence and ran some spying errands.\u00a0 Returning to England, he went up to Oxford, spied on his friends, left early to marry and take a teaching job, went back to Oxford and took his degree.\u00a0 He taught at Eton, worked for MI5 and MI6, and went on to become the bestselling author of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold<\/em>, which allowed him to leave his job to write full time.<\/p>\n

Sisman traces the writer\u2019s life, achievements, friends and enemies, always showing how he used them in the novels.\u00a0 Some people are reported to have been hurt to recognize themselves in his fictional versions of their characters.\u00a0 On the way to unpicking the links between life and work, Sisman offers some shocking stories.\u00a0 One particularly nasty one involves the late politician and diarist Alan Clark, whose behaviour caused le Carr\u00e9 to end their friendship.\u00a0 Another tells of an outrageous publishing indiscretion.\u00a0 When Susan Kennaway wrote about the triangular relationship between her husband, James, and a deliberately unidentified ‘David’ (which inspired le Carr\u00e9’s Na\u00efve and Sentimental Lover<\/em>), his real identity leaked out.\u00a0 On digging a little, Susan Kennaway discovered that, in spite of her publisher’s promises of secrecy, ‘copies sent out to reviewers had contained a note, to the effect that \u201cMrs Kennaway doesn’t want you to mention that the person named David in this book is really John le Carr\u00e9\u201d.’<\/p>\n

One of the repeated criticisms of le Carr\u00e9’s work is that his female characters are unconvincing.\u00a0 Various explanations have been given for this, ranging from a mistrust of women after the departure of his mother to a never-satisfied longing for all-consuming love.\u00a0 Sisman does not address the possibility that some of the women in le Carr\u00e9’s fiction may, in fact, represent aspects of himself.\u00a0 George Smiley’s wife is notoriously unfaithful.\u00a0 In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy<\/em>, Smiley is described as being mortified to discover that she had followed her affair with the traitor Bill Haydon with as many others as she could achieve.\u00a0 Sisman writes that after the adulterous affair with Susan Kennaway, le Carr\u00e9 ‘met a very beautiful young student, with whom he went to bed.\u00a0 It was his first sexual experience that was wholly gratifying and it made him astonishingly happy…half in frenzy he emulated James [Kennaway]’s exploits in Paris the previous summer, taking woman after woman to bed, barely sleeping, drinking and drying out in saunas.’\u00a0 His second wife has ‘suffered David’s extramarital adventures, and tried to protect him from their consequences…. \u201cNobody can have all of David,\u201d she said recently.’<\/p>\n

The man who emerges from Adam Sisman’s research and analysis would be a wonderful dinner companion \u2013 clever, funny, always entertaining \u2013 but on the basis of the 600 pages of this wonderful biography you would have to be very brave to want to get much closer to him.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by N.J. Cooper<\/p>\n

Sisman traces the writer\u2019s life, achievements, friends and enemies, always showing how he used them in the novels. Some people are reported to have been hurt to recognize themselves in his fictional versions of their characters. On the way to unpicking the links between life and work, Sisman offers some shocking stories. One particularly nasty one involves the late politician and diarist Alan Clark, whose behaviour caused le Carr\u00e9 to end their friendship. Another tells of an outrageous publishing indiscretion […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6335"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6348,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6335\/revisions\/6348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}