0:00:22 > 0:00:27It's appropriate that the master of espionage fiction should write under an assumed name.
0:00:27 > 0:00:33David Cornwell became John le Carre when he published his first novels when working in Germany for what he
0:00:33 > 0:00:39used to call the British Foreign Service, although he later admitted that this meant being a spook.
0:00:39 > 0:00:42The success of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in the early ' 0s
0:00:42 > 0:00:47allowed him to leave the secret world, but it's remained the setting for most of his novels
0:00:47 > 0:00:51including the trilogy about the most intelligent man in British
0:00:51 > 0:00:55intelligence, George Smiley, that began with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
0:00:55 > 0:01:01Recent books have taken Le Carre away from the Cold War and its locations, to Africa in
0:01:01 > 0:01:06The Constant Gardener, to Central America for The Tailor Of Panama.
0:01:06 > 0:01:10But Le Carre's latest novel, his 21st, returns to Germany.
0:01:10 > 0:01:14A Most Wanted Man is set in modern Hamburg, where the spies of
0:01:14 > 0:01:20Britain, Germany and America fight over the identity and mission of a young Russian immigrant.
0:01:23 > 0:01:30" 'When 9/11 happened, there were two ground zeros,' he announced addressing them now from one side
0:01:30 > 0:01:37"of the gallery, now from the back, before popping up like a squat djinni beneath the rafters in front of them,
0:01:37 > 0:01:40"hands punching out the words as he spoke them.
0:01:40 > 0:01:43" 'One ground zero was in New York.
0:01:43 > 0:01:48" 'The other ground zero that you don't hear so much about was right here in Hamburg.'
0:01:48 > 0:01:50"He jabbed an arm at the window.
0:01:50 > 0:01:57" 'That courtyard out there was 100 feet high in rubble, all of it paper.
0:01:57 > 0:02:02" 'And our pathetic barons of the German intelligence community
0:02:02 > 0:02:07" 'were raking through it, trying to find out where the hell they'd gone so terribly wrong.' "
0:02:10 > 0:02:14History is full of surprises. We might not have thought Hamburg, where you were consul in the
0:02:14 > 0:02:21embassy 45 years ago, 20 years after the Cold War, we wouldn't think was a significant place, and yet, as the
0:02:21 > 0:02:27point is made in A Most Wanted Man, it's become central in what politicians call the War on Terror.
0:02:27 > 0:02:30Yes. Hamburg is a character for me,
0:02:30 > 0:02:36and in my life, I was pretty much relegated to Hamburg as British Consul
0:02:36 > 0:02:40after I became known as the author of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.
0:02:40 > 0:02:44It wasn't exactly a punishment posting, but I think the Foreign
0:02:44 > 0:02:48Office thought I would make less fuss if I was relegated to the provinces.
0:02:48 > 0:02:53And it was in Hamburg also that I had to decide whether I would go on
0:02:53 > 0:02:56being a foreign servant or be a full-time writer.
0:02:56 > 0:03:01And I took the second course, obviously, and left kind of
0:03:01 > 0:03:04in mid-tour and felt bad about it. It was like...
0:03:04 > 0:03:08leaving a love affair half finished.
0:03:08 > 0:03:14And then I started going back when I was researching for other novels that had to do with Germany.
0:03:14 > 0:03:17And on 9/11, the day,
0:03:17 > 0:03:22I happened to be in Hamburg in a television studio watching footage
0:03:22 > 0:03:29of the German radical Rudi Dutschke, who was really the inspiration for the Baader-Meinhof gang and so on.
0:03:29 > 0:03:33And Rudi Dutschke was orating, and I was making notes.
0:03:33 > 0:03:38And Rudi Dutschke said, "We must build a bridge between those who have too much and those who have nothing."
0:03:38 > 0:03:40Stuff about world poverty.
0:03:40 > 0:03:44And I got back to the hotel at lunchtime - this is on 9/11 -
0:03:44 > 0:03:49and there was a message from my secretary in Cornwall saying, "Put on the television.
0:03:49 > 0:03:53I spent the morning with Rudi Dutschke and the afternoon with Osama.
0:03:53 > 0:03:57I was in time to see the second plane go into the Twin Towers.
0:03:57 > 0:04:01And for some reason, that made a deep impression on me.
0:04:01 > 0:04:03But beyond that of course,
0:04:03 > 0:04:08Germany's often been my sandbox if you will, my playpen.
0:04:08 > 0:04:11And Germany's role
0:04:11 > 0:04:18in the War on Terror is a wonderful metaphor for where Germany stands at the moment in Europe.
0:04:18 > 0:04:22But also astonishing that you should be in Hamburg on that day, because within days we knew that
0:04:22 > 0:04:29the so-called Hamburg cell had been where some of the hijackers, the terrorists, came from.
0:04:29 > 0:04:35Absolutely, and Mohamed Atta worshipped his savage god in a small mosque in Hamburg.
0:04:35 > 0:04:40And I think six or seven of his accomplices
0:04:40 > 0:04:45were living around him, and a couple of them finished up on his plane.
0:04:45 > 0:04:50Yes, it is absolutely extraordinary and people simply
0:04:50 > 0:04:53don't realise what an exotic history Hamburg had.
0:04:53 > 0:04:57It was occupied by Napoleon. It was occupied by the Danes.
0:04:57 > 0:05:03And it became really the first aerial bombing city
0:05:03 > 0:05:08of the British and American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany.
0:05:08 > 0:05:12And more people died in, I think it was,
0:05:12 > 0:05:19July of 1944 in Hamburg in one week than died in the bombing of Nagasaki.
0:05:19 > 0:05:2145,000 died.
0:05:21 > 0:05:26And...Hamburg itself was largely obliterated.
0:05:26 > 0:05:29And all these bits of history do ..
0:05:29 > 0:05:31It's not something you put into a novel,
0:05:31 > 0:05:36but it is very nice to know what air you're breathing when you're in a city and I was conscious of that.
0:05:36 > 0:05:42But it struck me reading your books again for this that, given the flashbacks to the Second
0:05:42 > 0:05:48World War that there are in various books, we have a history of Germany over 60 years in your fiction now,
0:05:48 > 0:05:50from the Second World War to in A Very Wanted Man.
0:05:50 > 0:05:55I could say, if I were being facile, that this book began when I was 16 years old
0:05:55 > 0:05:57and ran away from my public school.
0:05:57 > 0:06:04And by accident, which I simply can't explain to myself any longer, I finished up at Berne University
0:06:04 > 0:06:10at the age of 16, and my first tutors were, of course, German
0:06:10 > 0:06:14and mainly German Jewish refugees from Nazism.
0:06:14 > 0:06:16And in 1948,
0:06:16 > 0:06:19I made it my business to go to Dachau.
0:06:19 > 0:06:24And in 1948, I was also in Berlin.
0:06:24 > 0:06:29And then for my National Service,
0:06:29 > 0:06:31a couple of years later,
0:06:31 > 0:06:39I was in...occupied Austria and then I taught German at Eton, having studied it at Oxford.
0:06:39 > 0:06:43And then later when I was...
0:06:43 > 0:06:49determined to become involved in the Cold War, I found myself in Bonn again.
0:06:49 > 0:06:52So I have a huge chunk of Germany inside me
0:06:52 > 0:06:57and an unresolved discussion that goes on, a dialogue with Germany in my own mind all the time.
0:06:57 > 0:07:02And there are a lot of historical echoes, because in A Most Wanted Man, the intelligent services
0:07:02 > 0:07:06descend on Hamburg and they fight over this man who's turned up there.
0:07:06 > 0:07:12But that clearly has parallels with the way in which they fought over Berlin in the past and divided it.
0:07:12 > 0:07:16Yes. That certainly, but I think...
0:07:16 > 0:07:21for me there was more to say on that subject.
0:07:21 > 0:07:26One must remember that Germany, once it was reconstructed, starting
0:07:26 > 0:07:33with West Germany, acquired probably the strongest and best constitution of any country in the world.
0:07:33 > 0:07:39The new Germany was put together with brilliant constitutionalists
0:07:39 > 0:07:43from America and partly from Germany and partly from Britain.
0:07:43 > 0:07:48The consequence is that the sovereignty of each individual Land
0:07:48 > 0:07:51or state of Germany is absolute
0:07:51 > 0:07:55And this included sovereignty of security matters.
0:07:55 > 0:08:01The result of that is that their entire security system is fragmented
0:08:01 > 0:08:04with separate little empires from Land to Land.
0:08:04 > 0:08:11And now the struggle is on to what extent should this become controlled by the metropolis, Berlin?
0:08:11 > 0:08:18In our security system, everything is controlled from London, very automatically.
0:08:18 > 0:08:22But Germany is quite different in that sense. We have a lot of capitals in Germany.
0:08:22 > 0:08:27You have Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Munich and so it goes on, Nuremberg and Berlin.
0:08:27 > 0:08:32And so it was really fun,
0:08:32 > 0:08:38in narrative terms, to be using the tension between Hamburg and Berlin as part of the action.
0:08:38 > 0:08:42And a lot of it... Interrogation scenes, there are often key interrogation
0:08:42 > 0:08:48scenes in your book, but the risk of interrogation is that you get what you're looking for.
0:08:48 > 0:08:50Yes, and...
0:08:50 > 0:08:53the risk of interrogation
0:08:53 > 0:09:00with what is euphemistically called "coercive methods", i.e. torture, is even greater.
0:09:00 > 0:09:05It is for anybody, like myself, who has conducted professional interrogations,
0:09:05 > 0:09:11it is anathema to be extracting information from somebody under stress.
0:09:11 > 0:09:16You don't get the right information. You get a lot of false names. You get a lot of false tracks.
0:09:16 > 0:09:19For us it was never an option in those days. Quite the reverse.
0:09:19 > 0:09:25The whole matter of interrogation rested upon a proper relationship, bonding
0:09:25 > 0:09:29indeed a measure of compassion of human understanding.
0:09:32 > 0:09:35Look, I'm not offering you wealth
0:09:35 > 0:09:36or smart women
0:09:36 > 0:09:39or your choice of fast cars.
0:09:39 > 0:09:42I know you haven't any use for those things.
0:09:42 > 0:09:47And I'm not going to make any claims about the moral superiority of the West.
0:09:47 > 0:09:53I'm sure you can see through our values, just as I can see through yours in the East.
0:09:54 > 0:10:00But also in dramatic and fictional terms, an interrogation, it's perhaps the purist form of dialogue.
0:10:00 > 0:10:04I mean, Harold Pinter has used it in different ways in his plays
0:10:04 > 0:10:08but it's so focused and so tense when interrogation is taking place.
0:10:08 > 0:10:10I love it as a...
0:10:10 > 0:10:15I look forward always to those passages of interrogation, because,
0:10:15 > 0:10:19as ever, you learn a lot about the interrogator, too.
0:10:19 > 0:10:21They're learning a lot about each other,
0:10:21 > 0:10:26and interrogation comes in so many forms,
0:10:26 > 0:10:30and so do the prisoners, so do the subjects of interrogation.
0:10:30 > 0:10:34And there can be moments when they, almost like
0:10:34 > 0:10:39the sick deer at the back of the herd, they offer themselves for the sacrifice.
0:10:39 > 0:10:43A moment when the tension is so great that finally they say, "I can't stand this anymore."
0:10:43 > 0:10:47That's not about pain, but, yes. .
0:10:47 > 0:10:52And I love the use of interrogation also to advance plot.
0:10:54 > 0:10:57Interrogation very swiftly engages the reader, too.
0:10:57 > 0:11:04The reader is either the victim or the interrogator, or both, subject or the interrogator, or both.
0:11:04 > 0:11:06So it's a very handy way
0:11:06 > 0:11:08of making story work.
0:11:08 > 0:11:13It's very striking to me in your recent books, and it shows how the world has changed, I think,
0:11:13 > 0:11:16how the range of languages has expanded.
0:11:16 > 0:11:21In the early books, we have a lot of upper-class English, because that was running the world.
0:11:21 > 0:11:27But in this book, we have people speaking Turkish, German, Russian, English.
0:11:27 > 0:11:30So it's a Babel now in these books, of languages.
0:11:30 > 0:11:33It is a Babel, and, of course, dealing...
0:11:35 > 0:11:40..as we are now, with an immensely mobile community, particularly in Europe,
0:11:40 > 0:11:42it's more than a Babel. It's a problem,
0:11:42 > 0:11:45and a fascinating one.
0:11:45 > 0:11:49But there's a very resonant phrase in A Most Wanted Man about a couple,
0:11:49 > 0:11:52a German woman who's married to an English man.
0:11:52 > 0:11:58"Sometimes they spoke German, sometimes English, and for fun, sometimes a mix." Yes.
0:11:58 > 0:12:00Now, that's also true of your books.
0:12:00 > 0:12:02I mean, you have fun with the language.
0:12:02 > 0:12:06They're very verbal books. It's what you love doing.
0:12:06 > 0:12:08Yes, I do love them.
0:12:08 > 0:12:11I know how they would have spoken to one another.
0:12:13 > 0:12:17And it would be kind of, "Darling, bist du mude tonight?
0:12:17 > 0:12:21"Willst du lie down a little bit, nicht?"
0:12:21 > 0:12:24And it's actually a delicious language that...
0:12:24 > 0:12:31In Hampstead, where I live part of time, still there are these wonderful immigrants, elderly people.
0:12:31 > 0:12:35You hear them in the delicatessen, "I want that sausage. Nein, nein, nein!
0:12:35 > 0:12:38"Nicht this Wurst, that Wurst, nicht?"
0:12:38 > 0:12:40And for me, that's absolutely charming.
0:12:40 > 0:12:46It's a kind of bridge of its own kind that moves between two languages.
0:12:46 > 0:12:50Charlemagne said, "To possess another language is to possess another soul."
0:12:50 > 0:12:52And they're sort of hopping between souls.
0:12:52 > 0:12:54You were doing the voices then.
0:12:54 > 0:12:57When you're writing, do you verbalise the voices?
0:12:57 > 0:12:59Yes, I do.
0:12:59 > 0:13:02Of course, it's a dangerous thing.
0:13:02 > 0:13:07I know for instance how my Chechen Russian
0:13:07 > 0:13:10asylum seeker in Hamburg is speaking.
0:13:10 > 0:13:15But actually... Of course, I don't speak Russian, so
0:13:15 > 0:13:17I hear the cadences in my own..
0:13:17 > 0:13:21RUSSIAN ACCENT: "Very... Poor fool."
0:13:21 > 0:13:24That kind of Russian speaking.
0:13:24 > 0:13:29First of all, Russians never let you get a word in because they make a kind of nasal hum in the middle.
0:13:29 > 0:13:31"Mmm, I would say, mmm, that, er .."
0:13:31 > 0:13:36And then there's something that comes from the back of the throat that says...
0:13:36 > 0:13:37RUSSIAN ACCENT: "I am healthy.
0:13:37 > 0:13:44Well, I cannot help hearing that stuff when I'm writing it, but
0:13:44 > 0:13:49it's a dangerous game, because I hear it, but does the person who's looking at the words on the page hear it?
0:13:49 > 0:13:53That's a quite different matter. So actually,
0:13:53 > 0:13:58the real art of making dialogue is to make the sounds legible, if one can put it that way.
0:13:58 > 0:14:03That's much more difficult. I flatter myself when I'm reading that stuff. I have to look out.
0:14:03 > 0:14:09Is it in your head, or would someone walking past your study hear a kind of United Nations meeting going on?
0:14:09 > 0:14:12I'm afraid they would hear the Babel going on, yes!
0:14:12 > 0:14:17Yes. You talked about your German language experiences,
0:14:17 > 0:14:21but the way in which languages have shaped your life is very powerful,
0:14:21 > 0:14:27because if you hadn't studied languages, you wouldn't have gone into the British Foreign Service.
0:14:27 > 0:14:31You wouldn't have got the material which has led to the writing of the books.
0:14:31 > 0:14:35Well, if I hadn't had a wildcat dad, I wouldn't have run away.
0:14:35 > 0:14:39So, I mean, in the same sense that the cause of death is birth...
0:14:41 > 0:14:44It was somehow written out before me that...
0:14:44 > 0:14:50And equally, if my father hadn't taken me to St Moritz to ski in 1936, Switzerland wouldn't
0:14:50 > 0:14:56have been imprinted on my memory as a romantic spot to go to, a kind of natural place of exile.
0:14:56 > 0:14:58So in...whenever it was, 1948, I fled there.
0:14:58 > 0:15:03That's a fascinating thing about writers' careers, that there are these bits of luck
0:15:03 > 0:15:06which can be good or bad, but give them the material. Now, your father,
0:15:06 > 0:15:13Ronald Thomas Archibald Cornwell, he was, presumably, bad luck as a father but good luck as a writer?
0:15:13 > 0:15:17I don't know that he was even bad luck to have as a father.
0:15:17 > 0:15:24Certainly now he seems to have provided me with a treasure chest of memories and so on.
0:15:24 > 0:15:27Also, because my childhood was so erratic,
0:15:27 > 0:15:32and because I was in boarding school from the age of five -
0:15:32 > 0:15:36I did 11 years in the boarding school gulag -
0:15:36 > 0:15:42the combination of exotic bouts of life with my father
0:15:42 > 0:15:49and then the hectic intermissions when he was bankrupt or at Her Majesty's leisure somewhere...
0:15:49 > 0:15:51Pleasure, leisure?!
0:15:51 > 0:15:53Pleasure! Both, yeah! Both!
0:15:53 > 0:15:59The range of the scale of experience, so to speak, in retrospect, was extremely rich.
0:15:59 > 0:16:02So I can't cry in my beer about it.
0:16:02 > 0:16:08And I guess that the experience of such intense solitude and of
0:16:08 > 0:16:13an irrational world, a completely irrational, dangerous world, where home was dangerous territory,
0:16:13 > 0:16:17those things contributed very much to the way I write
0:16:17 > 0:16:20and to the sense of tension which I can never get rid of.
0:16:20 > 0:16:22So those are...
0:16:22 > 0:16:24I'm grateful for those inheritances.
0:16:24 > 0:16:26I often quote Graham Greene,
0:16:26 > 0:16:29"the bank balance of the writer is his childhood",
0:16:29 > 0:16:32the credit balance, and in that sense I was a millionaire.
0:16:32 > 0:16:34But Graham Greene's also a very useful comparison
0:16:34 > 0:16:40because he said that he became a spy and then a novelist because of the experience he had.
0:16:40 > 0:16:43He was the son of a headmaster in a boarding school, and he talks
0:16:43 > 0:16:47about having to live a double life on either side of the door. Yes.
0:16:47 > 0:16:53Now, it's clearly explicit in A Perfect Spy that Pym has become a spy because of his background.
0:16:53 > 0:16:56But that is you reflecting your own feelings?
0:16:56 > 0:16:58Yes, it is. I mean,
0:16:58 > 0:17:03the experience of being an intelligence officer gave me a lot of things.
0:17:03 > 0:17:08First of all, it forced upon me a lucidity of prose and self expression.
0:17:08 > 0:17:13That was for the desk work. You could not be careless in writing an intelligence report.
0:17:13 > 0:17:18It mobilised my powers of observation, if you will,
0:17:18 > 0:17:25and it forced me to enter into a contemplation about the possibilities of human character, all the time.
0:17:25 > 0:17:27Who is he? What does he want?
0:17:27 > 0:17:29What can I do with him? All of those things.
0:17:29 > 0:17:33The opportunistic element of spying.
0:17:33 > 0:17:36The manipulation that goes into it.
0:17:36 > 0:17:41So I never know, I will never know whether
0:17:41 > 0:17:45I was a writer who became a spook for a time,
0:17:45 > 0:17:51or whether the experience of being in the secret world then projected me into writing
0:17:51 > 0:17:56But I think actually behind both of them is the great shadow of my father,
0:17:56 > 0:18:00and the duplicitous life that we lived as children, where
0:18:00 > 0:18:07we knew when we filled up the car with petrol at the local garage that it was never going to be paid for.
0:18:07 > 0:18:13Where we pretended to live like middle-class English boys who went to school.
0:18:13 > 0:18:16We didn't talk about our hectic background.
0:18:16 > 0:18:19So, in a sense, we were spies.
0:18:19 > 0:18:26All my father's family, all the people who lived around us, spoke with regional accents.
0:18:26 > 0:18:29But the moment I got to private school,
0:18:29 > 0:18:35which was my father's dream that I should become privately educated, I started learning the language
0:18:35 > 0:18:40And I started dressing like a gent, or trying to, and learning deportment and learning ..
0:18:42 > 0:18:45..all the curious ways in which. .
0:18:46 > 0:18:49..people of that class communicate with each other.
0:18:49 > 0:18:52I never felt part of it, but I think
0:18:52 > 0:18:55very many creative people don't anyway feel integrated in life.
0:18:55 > 0:18:59Most children have small moments of disillusionment with their parents,
0:18:59 > 0:19:02they say they'll come to the school play and they don't
0:19:02 > 0:19:06I presume in your case they were much larger, but was there a first
0:19:06 > 0:19:09moment when you thought, "This guy is not straight with us"?
0:19:09 > 0:19:12Yes, I think there was a first moment.
0:19:12 > 0:19:16And I think my elder brother would remember it, too.
0:19:16 > 0:19:19It was on some leave-out holiday.
0:19:19 > 0:19:22We were going to get half term or something of that sort.
0:19:22 > 0:19:23And we were told to wait.
0:19:23 > 0:19:30My father told me, told us, to wait at the end of the school drive at this boarding school in Berkshire.
0:19:30 > 0:19:34And the reason was he didn't want to present himself to the school.
0:19:34 > 0:19:36He hadn't paid the bill, but we didn't know that.
0:19:36 > 0:19:42So we waited at the lodge at the end of the school drive with our suitcases. And he never showed up.
0:19:42 > 0:19:45So then you're left with a dilemma.
0:19:45 > 0:19:48Huge danger of face loss among the other boys.
0:19:48 > 0:19:51So we just stayed away for the whole day.
0:19:51 > 0:19:54We had no food, we had no money but we wouldn't go back to school.
0:19:54 > 0:19:58We went back in the evening and pretended we'd had a wonderful day.
0:19:58 > 0:20:02So very interesting in espionage terms. The rendezvous collapses,
0:20:02 > 0:20:04you work out a cover story,
0:20:04 > 0:20:06you come back and dissemble!
0:20:08 > 0:20:13Love is obviously a complex word, but were you able to love him, your father?
0:20:15 > 0:20:19I simply wouldn't know whether I ..
0:20:20 > 0:20:25Love is simply not something I can mobilise in that respect, because
0:20:25 > 0:20:29so much was destroyed in the progress of our relationship.
0:20:29 > 0:20:32There were so many victims in his trail, if you will,
0:20:32 > 0:20:38that, bit by bit, whatever regard for him I had was eroded.
0:20:38 > 0:20:42And you have to remember, I had no mum on the spot, so that
0:20:42 > 0:20:47all the affection, such as you'd have for both parents,
0:20:47 > 0:20:50had to be invested and examined in one.
0:20:50 > 0:20:56So whether that ends up as love or whether it felt like love at the time, I simply don't know. Not now.
0:20:56 > 0:21:01The absence of a mother and of constant female figures in your life, that did affect you?
0:21:01 > 0:21:04Yeah, that affected me. That is crippling.
0:21:04 > 0:21:08Not only did I have no mother, I had no sisters.
0:21:08 > 0:21:13And because I was in boys' schools from the age of five onwards,
0:21:13 > 0:21:17I had absolutely no sexual education and no familiarity with women.
0:21:17 > 0:21:20I didn't know what the female body looked like until
0:21:20 > 0:21:26sort of late teens, early 20s kind of thing.
0:21:26 > 0:21:32So I think I had, in that respect, a very late adolescence and a very
0:21:32 > 0:21:39messy number of middle years, from which, mercifully, I've now emerged.
0:21:39 > 0:21:43And your female characters are often quite saintly, often quite idealised.
0:21:43 > 0:21:47Yeah. I think now and then I bring one off.
0:21:47 > 0:21:52It's only recently that I've stopped having a kind of "Oh, God" feeling
0:21:52 > 0:21:54when I create female characters
0:21:54 > 0:21:56I have to think too hard about it.
0:21:56 > 0:21:58I come from a generation where. .
0:22:00 > 0:22:02..you really couldn't...
0:22:02 > 0:22:08If you did have a girlfriend and you were living the strict middle-class life, or trying to
0:22:08 > 0:22:12you couldn't do things which these days are absolutely self-evident.
0:22:12 > 0:22:14I mean, you couldn't bring her home to bed or
0:22:14 > 0:22:19you couldn't take a hotel room unless you demonstrated you were married.
0:22:19 > 0:22:23These were very inhibited times and I was a very inhibited
0:22:23 > 0:22:25citizen of those times!
0:22:25 > 0:22:28Did you ever see your mother again in later life?
0:22:28 > 0:22:32Yes. I wrote to her when I was 2 .
0:22:32 > 0:22:36That's to say, I wrote to her brother, who had been an MP.
0:22:36 > 0:22:38And I said, "Is she alive?
0:22:38 > 0:22:40"I don't know. Never get it out of my father."
0:22:40 > 0:22:44And he said, "She is alive, and here's her address.
0:22:44 > 0:22:46"And never tell her that I told you."
0:22:46 > 0:22:49So I felt absolutely unconstrained by that.
0:22:49 > 0:22:55So I wrote to her immediately and said, "Your brother has given me your address, and can I come and see you?"
0:22:55 > 0:23:02And then I got a strange letter in unfamiliar hand saying, "How wonderful, yes."
0:23:02 > 0:23:05Like a first love letter, she wrote.
0:23:05 > 0:23:11"Please catch the train to Ipswich and I'll wait for you on the up platform," as it was in those days.
0:23:11 > 0:23:15And I took a train to Ipswich, and there three ladies
0:23:15 > 0:23:20of a certain age who were eligible mothers waiting at the barricade.
0:23:20 > 0:23:25And then one of them tottered forward, and she was suddenly my elder brother
0:23:25 > 0:23:28in a white wig, and it was absolutely unmistakable, the connection.
0:23:28 > 0:23:33And then we reached out and, you know, how do you hug a mum like that?
0:23:33 > 0:23:35It was very strange.
0:23:36 > 0:23:39And it's, er...
0:23:39 > 0:23:43The tragedy, I think, probably
0:23:43 > 0:23:44is not feeling much.
0:23:46 > 0:23:51And then later, in fatherhood, my own fatherhood, and I look at my
0:23:51 > 0:23:56sleeping children, as it were, or my grandchildren, and I try to imagine
0:23:56 > 0:24:00how strong she must have been, or how great the impulse must have been,
0:24:00 > 0:24:03simply to walk out that night and not come back.
0:24:05 > 0:24:12I feel terrible pity for somebody in those circumstances, but not a lot of affection.
0:24:12 > 0:24:13It's hard to muster.
0:24:13 > 0:24:19It's always an interesting question with writers, obviously - what did you read when you were growing up?
0:24:19 > 0:24:24Er, a lot of the stuff that you do read.
0:24:24 > 0:24:26Percy Westerman,
0:24:26 > 0:24:30Buchan, Sapper,
0:24:30 > 0:24:31those things.
0:24:31 > 0:24:34And then,
0:24:34 > 0:24:39I think somewhere around 14 or 1 , I started devouring
0:24:39 > 0:24:43the big French Victorian novels and the Russian novels, and so on.
0:24:43 > 0:24:47So, I think very humdrum stuff
0:24:47 > 0:24:54I think the book that made the greatest affect on me was read to me by my first stepmother
0:24:54 > 0:24:58when I was ill, and that was The Wind In The Willows.
0:24:58 > 0:25:04What happened was that actually I went to Berlin in '48, got mumps.
0:25:04 > 0:25:06There was no hospital that would take me in.
0:25:06 > 0:25:08I had the after-effect of mumps
0:25:08 > 0:25:12huge swellings in the groin and whatnot. So deeply embarrassing
0:25:12 > 0:25:16And I lay in bed with a very high temperature and she came and read this book to me.
0:25:16 > 0:25:20And, erm, it just, er...
0:25:23 > 0:25:26I think "mole" may have come from that.
0:25:26 > 0:25:28Yes!
0:25:28 > 0:25:31And the big subject area of your novels is the post-Second World War.
0:25:31 > 0:25:36You are eight when the Second World War broke out. What are your memories of that period?
0:25:36 > 0:25:38First of all, the declaration of war.
0:25:38 > 0:25:41I was sitting with my grandparents.
0:25:41 > 0:25:44My father was away, I think, actually, in Wormwood Scrubs,
0:25:44 > 0:25:47and we listened to Neville Chamberlain
0:25:47 > 0:25:50telling us that we were now at war with Germany.
0:25:50 > 0:25:56Then my grandmother asked my grandfather, "Frank, where will the battlefield be?"
0:25:56 > 0:25:59And he said, "My dear, it could be out there on the tennis court."
0:25:59 > 0:26:01And then,
0:26:01 > 0:26:07with my father absent again, I was entrusted to a woman who lived...
0:26:07 > 0:26:10A very nice woman he eventually married,
0:26:10 > 0:26:13who lived in London. And I came up and stayed
0:26:13 > 0:26:17with her for a while, and so had the experience of the Blitz a bit.
0:26:17 > 0:26:22Then, the end of the war coincided with my adolescence,
0:26:22 > 0:26:28and I think that to take up the German language and literature and immerse myself in it was
0:26:28 > 0:26:33a kind of adolescent revolt against the English condition and my background.
0:26:33 > 0:26:36Everybody loathed Germans and Germany.
0:26:36 > 0:26:40At my school there was a pigsty and the pig was called Germany. It was as bad as that.
0:26:40 > 0:26:43But it's also crucial to what you do, because you've
0:26:43 > 0:26:49always rejected in the novels the black-and-white morality of one side being good, the other being bad.
0:26:49 > 0:26:52And even at that stage, in terms of Germany, you felt that?
0:26:52 > 0:26:56Yes, I did. I invested Smiley with...
0:26:57 > 0:27:00..this ambiguous attitude towards Germany.
0:27:00 > 0:27:05Smiley in his young days had actually spied on Germany, in the early days of the war.
0:27:05 > 0:27:09And those first books you wrote Call For The Dead, A Murder Of Quality,
0:27:09 > 0:27:12which are separate from what follows, although Smiley is in them...
0:27:12 > 0:27:15Because they're really crime novels, in effect, much more.
0:27:15 > 0:27:17Yes, that's right.
0:27:17 > 0:27:22Well, I started writing, I mean, word one on page one,
0:27:22 > 0:27:28very much in the image of John Bingham, who was a thriller writer,
0:27:28 > 0:27:35otherwise known as Lord Clanmorris, with whom I shared a room in MI5.
0:27:35 > 0:27:40And you have to start somewhere in writing, and preferably,
0:27:40 > 0:27:42you have to meet somebody that you want to be like.
0:27:42 > 0:27:46I sort of thought, "I can do what John does." And I started
0:27:46 > 0:27:53writing on the train between Great Missenden, where I was living, and London in little notebooks
0:27:53 > 0:27:56And out of it came these first two thrillers.
0:27:56 > 0:28:00And I think I see them now as perfectly valid finger exercises.
0:28:00 > 0:28:03Many people are much entertained by them still.
0:28:03 > 0:28:08I found them, in terms of style embarrassing and mawkish, but then one does.
0:28:08 > 0:28:14But the great thing was that I'd had these finger exercises before I got to Bonn,
0:28:14 > 0:28:21and actually was launched upon from those years, sort of '59 to '63,
0:28:21 > 0:28:24about the four most exciting years in Germany's post-war history,
0:28:24 > 0:28:27which included, for me, seeing the Berlin Wall going up.
0:28:27 > 0:28:30And I could respond to that then.
0:28:30 > 0:28:34I kind of had the toolbox ready from the first books I'd written.
0:28:34 > 0:28:36I could respond to that
0:28:36 > 0:28:42with the anger and with the craft, if you like, that I had at my disposal.
0:28:42 > 0:28:46There's been, as you know, a mole-like hunt for Smiley's original,
0:28:46 > 0:28:51and people have nominated various people in Oxford colleges and Maurice Oldfield and M15.
0:28:51 > 0:28:55You've suggested John Bingham already. But was there a conscious model?
0:28:55 > 0:28:58Well, I think that
0:28:58 > 0:29:03Dr Green, Vivian Green,
0:29:03 > 0:29:07who ended his academic career as rector of Lincoln College, Oxford,
0:29:07 > 0:29:14comes closest to me as somebody of enormous compassion and great shrewdness.
0:29:14 > 0:29:21And, if you like, it was Vivian Green's interior that
0:29:21 > 0:29:27I related to, because I wanted Smiley to be sort of alien to ordinary life.
0:29:27 > 0:29:32I made him tubby and physically graceless and
0:29:32 > 0:29:36a bad dresser, but charismatic enough to obtain a very beautiful wife.
0:29:36 > 0:29:39So Vivian Green,
0:29:39 > 0:29:45in so far as his humanity inspired me
0:29:45 > 0:29:49and his observational powers
0:29:49 > 0:29:55and the pain, sometimes, that I felt was in him...
0:29:55 > 0:30:01Because seeing a lot is very painful, and I felt that of Vivian.
0:30:01 > 0:30:04So I let that influence me.
0:30:04 > 0:30:07And then, in the outward and visible things,
0:30:07 > 0:30:11I would guess that John Bingham gave me more than anybody else.
0:30:11 > 0:30:15But, you know, you can't actually make up a character out of other people.
0:30:15 > 0:30:23You simply can't. You grab the bits that are appealing to you, that touch you or alienate you
0:30:23 > 0:30:30but in the end you've got to make them sit up and run and talk and laugh and fail from bits of yourself.
0:30:30 > 0:30:36Somehow or another you've got to extend your own nature wide enough
0:30:36 > 0:30:41to be able to say, "Yes, in those circumstances I could commit murder."
0:30:41 > 0:30:44And it was entirely appropriate that you,
0:30:44 > 0:30:49as an intelligence officer, a spy, you were using a cover identity, a pseudonym. But you had to,
0:30:49 > 0:30:51that was a professional requirement?
0:30:51 > 0:30:54Well, it wasn't a professional requirement to be John le Carre.
0:30:54 > 0:30:56That was just the ethic of the business.
0:30:56 > 0:31:00If I'd been in the regular Foreign Service, the same thing would have applied.
0:31:00 > 0:31:02If you wrote a book about butterflies in those days
0:31:02 > 0:31:07as David Cornwell, you had to find another name to publish under. That was the ethic of the time
0:31:07 > 0:31:11Choosing le Carre had really...
0:31:11 > 0:31:13It was an erratic, weird thing
0:31:13 > 0:31:16I went to Victor Gollancz,
0:31:16 > 0:31:20who was my first publisher, and said, "Victor, I have to choose a pseudonym."
0:31:20 > 0:31:22And he said, "Well, my boy,
0:31:22 > 0:31:28"the best thing you can do is choose two good Anglo-Saxon syllables, like Chunk Smith or something like that.
0:31:28 > 0:31:32"That would be good." And I thought, "No, I won't do that.
0:31:32 > 0:31:35"What I need is a name that is optically arresting."
0:31:35 > 0:31:38Like N-G-A-I-O Marsh.
0:31:38 > 0:31:43And I made up a name with three bits and an acute accent at the end.
0:31:43 > 0:31:45And it's also a coded name.
0:31:45 > 0:31:51Carre in French means... A balle carre is where the girls ask the boys to dance.
0:31:51 > 0:31:54Carre also means a checked suit
0:31:54 > 0:31:57And at roulette,
0:31:57 > 0:32:01if you have a numero carre, you put
0:32:01 > 0:32:03a chip on each corner of one number.
0:32:03 > 0:32:07So it had some nice little...
0:32:08 > 0:32:13It was a little inward joke, and I never thought I was going to have to live with it on this scale!
0:32:13 > 0:32:17You were unclear for quite a long time about the fact that you
0:32:17 > 0:32:21had been a spy, but that again was a professional requirement?
0:32:21 > 0:32:28It was, yes, and for me an ethical one until I discovered that my name had been blown by all my colleagues.
0:32:28 > 0:32:31When The Spy Who Came In From The Cold came out, Sir Dick White,
0:32:31 > 0:32:34who was then head of SIS, told Alan Dulles, and it was a big joke,
0:32:34 > 0:32:36the story was all over Washington.
0:32:36 > 0:32:40All the insiders, all the embedded journalists who had their friendships
0:32:40 > 0:32:45with the CIA were cracking up about it, so it was just a futile pretence.
0:32:45 > 0:32:48I maintained it for a year or two, but then I just found myself
0:32:48 > 0:32:51overtaken by other people's indiscretion!
0:32:51 > 0:32:54You've said you'll never talk about what you actually did.
0:32:54 > 0:33:00No, I won't, no, no. And is that ethics or Official Secrets Act
0:33:00 > 0:33:03Er, it's certainly ethics.
0:33:03 > 0:33:06If you say nice things about the spooks, you can get away with murder.
0:33:06 > 0:33:10You can break every Official Secrets Act there is.
0:33:10 > 0:33:14It's when you start blowing the gaff and you're embarrassing them that it goes wrong.
0:33:14 > 0:33:17But I don't want to do either.
0:33:17 > 0:33:19I think that a great deal has gone wrong
0:33:19 > 0:33:23with the intelligence-gathering business since I left it.
0:33:23 > 0:33:26Probably there was a great deal wrong with it while I was in it
0:33:26 > 0:33:33But the one promise we did make always, and, I think, the promise we kept through thick and thin,
0:33:33 > 0:33:36was that if somebody collaborated,
0:33:36 > 0:33:42if somebody became an agent or a source or a traitor in their own country,
0:33:42 > 0:33:46that their names would never, never be known to their children,
0:33:46 > 0:33:54to their friends, to all of that, because it's impossible, even two generations down...
0:33:54 > 0:33:59You know, were it to turn out that a distinguished German of fine family had worked for the
0:33:59 > 0:34:07British in a capacity during the war that was disadvantageous to the German national cause, if you like,
0:34:07 > 0:34:11for two generations that could continue to afflict the children.
0:34:11 > 0:34:14So it's an absolute no-no.
0:34:14 > 0:34:18It's a frequent conceit in espionage fiction and thrillers
0:34:18 > 0:34:20of the spy who is haunted by things they did in the past
0:34:20 > 0:34:24and wakes up in the night and all the rest of it. Have you ever had that?
0:34:24 > 0:34:28Yes, I think so.
0:34:28 > 0:34:30Not necessarily in the night.
0:34:31 > 0:34:33I think there were things
0:34:33 > 0:34:37I persuaded people to do that I would have preferred them not to do
0:34:37 > 0:34:41in retrospect, and I would have preferred not to be the persuader.
0:34:41 > 0:34:45But at the time, it seemed to be inevitable that one did it.
0:34:45 > 0:34:49I've become much more puritanical in retrospect about some of that stuff.
0:34:51 > 0:34:54I don't think I wake up and sweat.
0:34:54 > 0:34:58It wasn't that bad, but I...
0:34:58 > 0:35:05Partly my attitude towards all that work has shifted, just as the work has shifted.
0:35:05 > 0:35:09I think that the intelligence community now in the West is so over-inflated,
0:35:09 > 0:35:13it's in many respects so uninformed and so paranoid,
0:35:13 > 0:35:16that it's almost part of the problem rather than the solution.
0:35:16 > 0:35:23We've created such circles of knowledge and secrecy within our own community,
0:35:23 > 0:35:29that we are seriously undermining the ordinary overt democratic processes in which we should be involved.
0:35:29 > 0:35:34The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which is the book that really launched you as a writer
0:35:34 > 0:35:37after the two early thrillers about Smiley, reflects your experience,
0:35:37 > 0:35:40because the central character is desperate to stop being a spy.
0:35:40 > 0:35:45Yes. And you were trying to effect your own escape by writing the book.
0:35:45 > 0:35:50I'm not sure that I knew that at the time.
0:35:50 > 0:35:52Everything converged.
0:35:52 > 0:35:57First of all, the sight of the Wall going up and the ramparts of the
0:35:57 > 0:36:05Cold War being built in the ashes of the old one, was to me appalling.
0:36:05 > 0:36:06It was apocalyptic.
0:36:06 > 0:36:12And my marriage was troubling me greatly.
0:36:12 > 0:36:15I had a great sense of personal stress,
0:36:15 > 0:36:18and of ending, really.
0:36:18 > 0:36:23There was some kind of
0:36:23 > 0:36:28anarchistic flame that was beginning to burn in me about the whole idiocy
0:36:28 > 0:36:35of the Cold War, of which that wall seemed to me to be a perfect emblem.
0:36:35 > 0:36:37And so I wrote...
0:36:37 > 0:36:42I think you only get that experience once in your life as a writer.
0:36:42 > 0:36:49I wrote almost not knowing where I was going for five or six weeks at huge heat, huge speed
0:36:49 > 0:36:54You've said even while driving your car. Yes, shamefully. Well, the car was on the ferry half the time.
0:36:54 > 0:36:57I was living one side of the Rhine and going to the other side.
0:36:57 > 0:36:59I felt led by the book.
0:36:59 > 0:37:00So that's luck, too.
0:37:00 > 0:37:06I mean, everything converging at that moment and producing a combustion which you almost don't understand.
0:37:06 > 0:37:11And then looking at what I'd written and examining, if you like,
0:37:11 > 0:37:13the debris of my private life at that time.
0:37:13 > 0:37:17I was aware of what I'd done.
0:37:17 > 0:37:23I'd made a huge statement of rejection and anger.
0:37:23 > 0:37:25Did your books have to be vetted at that stage?
0:37:25 > 0:37:27Yes.
0:37:27 > 0:37:29Absolutely.
0:37:29 > 0:37:35So Call For The Dead, then that little thriller Murder Of Quality,
0:37:35 > 0:37:37and my office was perfectly happy with that.
0:37:37 > 0:37:43And then I wrote The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and sent it to London for approval.
0:37:43 > 0:37:49And there was a loud silence, an uneasy silence. Lasted a week or two.
0:37:49 > 0:37:57And then I received a letter asking me whether I had read the double-cross papers.
0:37:57 > 0:38:02I wrote back and said no, I'd had no access to this secret document.
0:38:02 > 0:38:06And I think they, the legal department, was thinking, "If we can
0:38:06 > 0:38:10"pin on him access to a secret document, we can stop the book."
0:38:10 > 0:38:13But then a kind of
0:38:13 > 0:38:18really rather lovable sense of British fairness came into it and they let it go.
0:38:18 > 0:38:23And neither I nor anybody else, I'm sure, had any idea
0:38:23 > 0:38:29that it would suddenly take off and become one of those best sellers.
0:38:29 > 0:38:34And for several months I lived, if you will, in double secrecy
0:38:34 > 0:38:38First of all, under diplomatic cover and then in denial of having written
0:38:38 > 0:38:44The Spy Who Came In From The Cold that was roosting at the top of best-seller lists all over the world.
0:38:44 > 0:38:49And then Anthony Terry, who was a Sunday Times correspondent in Bonn,
0:38:49 > 0:38:55ran the story and so it was all out. Were you relieved when it came out?
0:38:55 > 0:38:58Er, I think I was scared.
0:38:58 > 0:39:03Not of anything but the violence with which my life changed then.
0:39:03 > 0:39:08It's terribly hard to describe quite what jeopardy had felt like.
0:39:08 > 0:39:11No civil servant likes to be named.
0:39:11 > 0:39:15No spook posing as a civil servant likes to be unmasked.
0:39:15 > 0:39:20And I was denying that I had anything to do with the secret world.
0:39:20 > 0:39:22And then,
0:39:22 > 0:39:29I realised that the condition of secrecy was a refuge for me, and I didn't like it being invaded.
0:39:29 > 0:39:33All of a sudden, there were these lights shining at me
0:39:33 > 0:39:36and I wasn't at all sure I was happy with it.
0:39:36 > 0:39:42And so then we left Hamburg quite quickly then, almost overnight.
0:39:42 > 0:39:47And I fled with my family to the island of Crete, where we lived for a year.
0:39:47 > 0:39:51And during that time, I tried to come to terms with what had happened.
0:39:51 > 0:39:56And then, you really find your voice, I think, with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
0:39:56 > 0:40:01The decision to bring Smiley back, but as a central character.
0:40:01 > 0:40:07Do you remember the decision to do that and was it a conscious decision to bring him back?
0:40:07 > 0:40:12Yes, I wanted to write initially something about Philby.
0:40:12 > 0:40:17I never met Philby, but Philby haunted my entire career,
0:40:17 > 0:40:20because the more one discovered about him,
0:40:20 > 0:40:26the more evident it was that whatever one had been doing in the past could have been compromised by Philby
0:40:26 > 0:40:29So it was a very curious feeling of, "Christ, I was there.
0:40:29 > 0:40:35"This could have happened. It must not have happened by kind permission of the KGB."
0:40:35 > 0:40:39So I wanted to write about that figure.
0:40:39 > 0:40:44So in Tinker, Tailor he became Haydon and I had no notion really
0:40:44 > 0:40:49of using Smiley at all.
0:40:49 > 0:40:55I think for about eight months nine months, I flogged away at this and there was such a huge amount
0:40:55 > 0:41:01of back history to the story that I couldn't somehow, I couldn't express, couldn't get it into the book,
0:41:01 > 0:41:06couldn't give to characters, and I thought, "I'll bring Smiley back and use his memory
0:41:06 > 0:41:09"This will be our archive for the story."
0:41:09 > 0:41:13And so it was at that moment that we rejoined, if you will.
0:41:13 > 0:41:16One of the reasons there was such a strong response to the Smiley
0:41:16 > 0:41:19trilogy was that people realised that they're all...
0:41:19 > 0:41:22Espionage is a metaphor for so many other things. Yeah.
0:41:22 > 0:41:28Adultery, the sense that people have of having different identities, fake identities.
0:41:28 > 0:41:31Were you aware of that when you started?
0:41:31 > 0:41:33No.
0:41:33 > 0:41:37For me, the secret world WAS the world
0:41:37 > 0:41:42and I began to recognise no difference between the way people
0:41:42 > 0:41:46behaved in the overt world and the way they behaved in the secret world.
0:41:46 > 0:41:50So the secret world became an exciting metaphor for ordinary human behaviour.
0:41:50 > 0:41:56I think that as a genre, the espionage novel is capable of any kind of expansion.
0:41:56 > 0:41:58You can go in any direction. You can tell a love story.
0:41:58 > 0:42:01You can tell a
0:42:01 > 0:42:04passionate social history. You can go where you will.
0:42:04 > 0:42:07So I was born to it in some way
0:42:07 > 0:42:12If I'd been born to the sea, I'd have written about the sea.
0:42:12 > 0:42:17And I was again terribly lucky because the secret world has so
0:42:17 > 0:42:21expanded, almost to overtake the real world now.
0:42:21 > 0:42:26And where it departs clearly, your work departs clearly from Ian Fleming and, say, Frederick Forsyth,
0:42:26 > 0:42:31is both those writers have a triumphalism, really, about Britain's role in all this.
0:42:31 > 0:42:34And you've always rejected that.
0:42:34 > 0:42:37I've rejected that very much, yes.
0:42:37 > 0:42:41And in this story, A Most Wanted Man,
0:42:41 > 0:42:47we do not have that compulsive loyalty to Britain in our main British protagonist at all.
0:42:47 > 0:42:52And I think that, too, is changing with the times.
0:42:52 > 0:42:56We are not the patriots we were. We are are not the loyalists we were.
0:42:56 > 0:43:01And I had hoped during the Cold War...
0:43:01 > 0:43:07I really had hoped that when the Cold War ended, something wonderful would happen.
0:43:07 > 0:43:11So when people asked me whether I'm nostalgic about the Cold War, I say, "Of course I am."
0:43:11 > 0:43:14Because at the time, we lived optimistically believing that when
0:43:14 > 0:43:18this absurd confrontation was over, we could remake the world.
0:43:18 > 0:43:23Now I'm old enough and, dare I say it, wise enough to recognise that that's not happening.
0:43:23 > 0:43:25Quite the reverse is happening.
0:43:25 > 0:43:28We're screwing up the world.
0:43:28 > 0:43:32Now, it's therefore the case, I believe,
0:43:32 > 0:43:37that my more recent books have become less ambiguous,
0:43:37 > 0:43:39more vociferous.
0:43:39 > 0:43:41They've become specifically very angry.
0:43:41 > 0:43:44They've become, I suppose, very anxious, yeah.
0:43:44 > 0:43:46Absolute Friends, The Mission Song, now A Most Wanted Man.
0:43:46 > 0:43:49Yeah. They are passionate and angry books about the world.
0:43:49 > 0:43:52Well, I don't think I've made any perceptions that ordinary,
0:43:52 > 0:43:55liberal people have not made about the world around us.
0:43:55 > 0:44:01My good fortune is that I've been able to tell stories about it and express my feelings.
0:44:01 > 0:44:04It's interesting we're talking at the moment...
0:44:04 > 0:44:07Walking through a station this morning in London, the Economist headline
0:44:07 > 0:44:13"A New Cold War", which is what lots of people are saying because of the tension between Russia and Georgia.
0:44:13 > 0:44:15Is it a new Cold War? No.
0:44:15 > 0:44:20It isn't, because, first of all, we can't occupy the positions we've taken.
0:44:20 > 0:44:25Secondly, this was an act of total folly on the American side.
0:44:25 > 0:44:29Neo-conservative influence to espouse Georgia.
0:44:29 > 0:44:31Plant expectations there.
0:44:31 > 0:44:33Send in trainers, weapons.
0:44:33 > 0:44:36And indeed the Israelis sent in trainers and weapons.
0:44:36 > 0:44:41And create an atmosphere in this very volatile country,
0:44:41 > 0:44:46where the president, I think unwisely, believed
0:44:46 > 0:44:51that he could bite the Russian bear in the backside and the Russian bear wouldn't act in character
0:44:53 > 0:44:59Once the War on Terror was declared and once George Bush had looked into Putin's eyes
0:44:59 > 0:45:05and seen his soul, then it was clearly understood that anybody
0:45:05 > 0:45:09who was Muslim and a nationalist could be written off as a terrorist.
0:45:09 > 0:45:14And that for a while defined the North Caucasus.
0:45:14 > 0:45:15And we got ourselves...
0:45:15 > 0:45:20we, the West have got ourselves into an awful tangle there.
0:45:20 > 0:45:25But I don't believe that it's the beginning of a new Cold War.
0:45:25 > 0:45:29The war that is looming is much bigger than that.
0:45:29 > 0:45:31It's about resources worldwide
0:45:31 > 0:45:37And there will be other protagonists who are perhaps more powerful than Russia or America.
0:45:37 > 0:45:39Because the shift of power is moving away.
0:45:39 > 0:45:43It is ridiculous to imagine that we're going back to the gunboat
0:45:43 > 0:45:47diplomacy of the Cold War, although it looks like that at the moment.
0:45:47 > 0:45:50It's a completely new set of cards that we're dealing with.
0:45:50 > 0:45:57You can threaten, you can shame, but how on earth if the West starts taking liberties like Iraq, how can
0:45:57 > 0:46:01it seriously start talking to the Russian empire
0:46:01 > 0:46:06about how to behave in its own backyard? I don't get it.
0:46:06 > 0:46:09I think it's lamentable and I'm terribly sorry,
0:46:09 > 0:46:13but it was I think the consequence of really lousy diplomacy.
0:46:13 > 0:46:16There's a strong suggestion in the recent books that
0:46:16 > 0:46:21what they call the War on Terror is even more of a fiction, even more of a game than the Cold War.
0:46:21 > 0:46:26Yeah, I think it's an imperialist trick basically.
0:46:26 > 0:46:29It may not be such a conscious one,
0:46:29 > 0:46:34but the great cry of "Either you're with us or against us",
0:46:34 > 0:46:38was a way of categorising Islam
0:46:38 > 0:46:42a way of demonising Islam
0:46:42 > 0:46:48and a way actually of demanding solidarity with the American cause.
0:46:48 > 0:46:53It was an extremely threatening and stupid statement basically.
0:46:53 > 0:46:59I've not been to the United States since the bombing of Afghanistan, which really...
0:46:59 > 0:47:03Or since 9/11, in effect.
0:47:03 > 0:47:05I really did feel
0:47:05 > 0:47:10that the American military reaction to what is
0:47:10 > 0:47:15really a philosophical threat, a cultural threat,
0:47:15 > 0:47:17was utterly mistaken.
0:47:17 > 0:47:24To turn the War on Terror, so-called, into a territorial war, then do it twice,
0:47:24 > 0:47:27I simply wasn't aboard for any of that.
0:47:27 > 0:47:28I was deeply shocked by it.
0:47:28 > 0:47:32But as we see in what we call, with the slightly glib abbreviations
0:47:32 > 0:47:37"9/11", "7/7", there is a physical direct threat.
0:47:37 > 0:47:40Oh, there's a huge threat. That's quite different.
0:47:40 > 0:47:44That's an intelligence problem It's also a cultural problem.
0:47:44 > 0:47:47And it's not a threat that will be solved by military means.
0:47:47 > 0:47:50We have to deploy the military means, though not in the gross way
0:47:50 > 0:47:56that we've done it so far, but more particularly we really have to look at political and cultural bridges.
0:47:56 > 0:48:01It's terribly difficult to live with other cultures so intimately now.
0:48:01 > 0:48:06I understand all that and I have been among the bad guys.
0:48:06 > 0:48:10I spent a lot of time with very militant Palestinians in South Lebanon.
0:48:10 > 0:48:15I was in Arafat's entourage for a short while.
0:48:15 > 0:48:19I know how dirty it is out there in the dark street and
0:48:19 > 0:48:23what awful language is being used and what preparations are being made,
0:48:23 > 0:48:28but that is not the same thing that I understand as a War on Terror generally.
0:48:28 > 0:48:32You might as well make war on influenza.
0:48:32 > 0:48:35Terror is a strategy. It isn't a unit that you can attack.
0:48:35 > 0:48:40Going back to the books, you've had visual interest from very early on in your books.
0:48:40 > 0:48:46I think even the first two books were filmed, but it took a long time for,
0:48:46 > 0:48:51certainly in terms of cinema, for a successful adaptation of your books.
0:48:51 > 0:48:54It wasn't really until The Constant Gardener was it, I think.
0:48:54 > 0:48:59Well, the movie of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, was pretty good I think.
0:48:59 > 0:49:01But it was fancy.
0:49:01 > 0:49:07Martin Ritt was determined to make a film noir. He actually made it in black and white.
0:49:07 > 0:49:09Then The Constant Gardener, yes, it was great.
0:49:09 > 0:49:11I liked it very much.
0:49:11 > 0:49:17But the others have been either near misses or total misses.
0:49:17 > 0:49:23Now there's a new kind of feeding frenzy on, so four of my books are in preparation for film.
0:49:23 > 0:49:29Working Title is supposed to be making the feature film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
0:49:29 > 0:49:35An American/Russian independent has bought Our Game.
0:49:35 > 0:49:39Then Simon Channing-Williams, who made The Constant Gardener,
0:49:39 > 0:49:42has bought The Mission Song and A Most Wanted Man.
0:49:42 > 0:49:46Simon's making both of them. And the experience you had as a writer when
0:49:46 > 0:49:51Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was first on television of somebody else creating your character.
0:49:51 > 0:49:52It can be difficult for writers
0:49:52 > 0:49:55Cos you were still writing about him at the time. Did you feel that?
0:49:55 > 0:49:59Yeah, I did feel it. I don't think it was a bad thing because I
0:49:59 > 0:50:04felt that Smiley and I weren't going to be together for all that time.
0:50:04 > 0:50:11And however Alec Guinness played it, he was going to be a wonderful star.
0:50:11 > 0:50:16The thing about Smiley really is that he's self-effacing and not conspicuous, but Alec, you know
0:50:16 > 0:50:20he could act with one ear and act everybody off the screen.
0:50:20 > 0:50:22And then the voice.
0:50:22 > 0:50:24The voice, every time...
0:50:24 > 0:50:26He would ring up.
0:50:26 > 0:50:29The voice was so infectious.
0:50:29 > 0:50:32"May I speak to Mr David Cornwell, please?" "Hello, Alec."
0:50:32 > 0:50:34"How did you know it was me?"
0:50:34 > 0:50:37And from then on,
0:50:37 > 0:50:42when I was writing Smiley, I had to keep Alec's voice out of my ear.
0:50:42 > 0:50:45But I quote Flaubert.
0:50:45 > 0:50:52Often when Flaubert was asked whether he would like Madame Bovary to be on the cover of the first French edition
0:50:52 > 0:50:59of his book, he said, "No, because as long as they have their own imagined Bovary, everybody's happy.
0:50:59 > 0:51:05"But if you reduce her to one series of lines and painting, you reduce the character."
0:51:05 > 0:51:10I think every writer feels that, feels a sense of anti-climax when
0:51:10 > 0:51:16the range of a character in his own imagination is reduced to one person.
0:51:16 > 0:51:18I think that's inevitable. We all have...
0:51:18 > 0:51:22It isn't just vanity. It's actually...
0:51:22 > 0:51:25It's a bit like losing a friend to the opposition somehow.
0:51:29 > 0:51:31Have you noticed, Peter,
0:51:31 > 0:51:36that whenever I really trouble one of our acquaintances
0:51:36 > 0:51:41with my questions, he'll raise the matter of my failure as a husband
0:51:41 > 0:51:44to confound me?
0:51:44 > 0:51:48Instructive. Ricky Tar tried it twice.
0:51:48 > 0:51:51Unimportant in his case. Spite.
0:51:52 > 0:51:55Well, that was sumptuous.
0:51:56 > 0:51:59Alec brought something absolutely magical to the part.
0:51:59 > 0:52:03Also it was his first shot at television, practically his last.
0:52:03 > 0:52:07He was a hugely loved actor in Britain at that time
0:52:07 > 0:52:11and so he brought the charisma of his reputation as well.
0:52:11 > 0:52:13Everybody wanted to see how he would do it.
0:52:13 > 0:52:19Alec said to me one day, "I really feel I ought to meet a real spy "
0:52:19 > 0:52:26I felt slightly humbled by this request, but I rang Sir Maurice Oldfield, who'd been head of SIS.
0:52:26 > 0:52:29"Oh, yes, David, I'd be very glad to meet Sir Alec Guinness."
0:52:29 > 0:52:33So they met and I arranged a lunch in Chelsea.
0:52:33 > 0:52:37And the two knights kind of looked at each other and
0:52:37 > 0:52:42within minutes, Alec in his own mind had joined the secret service.
0:52:42 > 0:52:45And Oldfield was saying, "You know, I think young David actually has
0:52:45 > 0:52:48"gone a bit over the top with all this spying."
0:52:48 > 0:52:49Alec said, "Oh, I do so agree."
0:52:49 > 0:52:53And suddenly, Maurice got up and said, "Well, I'm off."
0:52:53 > 0:52:56We'd had lunch and he made an abrupt departure.
0:52:56 > 0:52:58And Alec said, "Do you mind?"
0:52:58 > 0:53:02And we went outside and we watched him go down the street swinging his umbrella.
0:53:23 > 0:53:25Then he said, "Let's go back and sit down.
0:53:25 > 0:53:29"I need to ask you some questions. Those cuff links,
0:53:29 > 0:53:32"do all spies wear those very vulgar cuff links?"
0:53:32 > 0:53:36And I said, "No, I think that's just Maurice's taste in cuff links."
0:53:36 > 0:53:38He said, "May I ask you this?"
0:53:38 > 0:53:43And he picked up a glass of water and he said,
0:53:43 > 0:53:45"Now, I've seen people do that.
0:53:45 > 0:53:47"That's pensive,
0:53:47 > 0:53:49"I've seen people do that,
0:53:49 > 0:53:52"that, too, is pensive.
0:53:52 > 0:53:55"But I've never seen people do that before.
0:53:55 > 0:53:58"Do you think he's looking for the dregs of poison?"
0:53:58 > 0:54:03And it was wonderful to me, not only frightfully funny.
0:54:03 > 0:54:08I did point out that if there had been dregs of poison, that Maurice would be dead by now.
0:54:08 > 0:54:11But it was a
0:54:11 > 0:54:16perfect example of the artist keeping the child in himself alive.
0:54:16 > 0:54:23And right up to the end of his life, Alec had that wonderful quality of "let's make drama, let's pretend.
0:54:23 > 0:54:27"Now how would it be if I was this? How would it be if I was that?"
0:54:27 > 0:54:30The child-like energy
0:54:30 > 0:54:33and the urge to
0:54:33 > 0:54:36entertain in order to protect yourself.
0:54:36 > 0:54:39To maintain the initiative socially over people.
0:54:39 > 0:54:43It's like Frankie Howerd. "Why do you want to make people laugh?"
0:54:43 > 0:54:47"Because all my life I've been terrified of ridicule."
0:54:47 > 0:54:52And it was that child operating in Alec that so impressed me and made me so fond of him.
0:54:52 > 0:54:55You remain impressively hungry as a writer.
0:54:55 > 0:54:59And Graham Greene, the books he published in his 70s, they were
0:54:59 > 0:55:03little novellas or bottom of the drawer novels that he dusted off.
0:55:03 > 0:55:07But you take on these big, multi-viewpoint novels still.
0:55:07 > 0:55:12Well, I do. And if I write another novel, which is always open at my age
0:55:12 > 0:55:16and I feel very kind of cleaned out at the moment, I have nothing in mind -
0:55:18 > 0:55:21if I do write another novel, it will be of similar ambition.
0:55:21 > 0:55:23I couldn't go any other route.
0:55:23 > 0:55:28This is my 21st novel and some of my novels I like.
0:55:28 > 0:55:30Others I see
0:55:30 > 0:55:33as bridges to better novels.
0:55:33 > 0:55:34Which are they?
0:55:34 > 0:55:36Which are the ones you like?
0:55:36 > 0:55:42Erm, I'm not going to tell you which ones I don't like. I think
0:55:42 > 0:55:48probably if I were editing The Best Of Le Carre at the moment, putting it
0:55:48 > 0:55:52together in one volume or something, I think I would do,
0:55:52 > 0:55:54obviously, The Spy Who Came From The Cold.
0:55:54 > 0:55:58Tinker, Tailor, not just because it was a television story.
0:55:58 > 0:56:01The Tailor Of Panama, I think is a better book. The Constant Gardener was very useful.
0:56:01 > 0:56:08I think that actually performed practically a social duty at that time.
0:56:08 > 0:56:14There is this division in criticism on book prize panels between what they call "genre fiction"
0:56:14 > 0:56:17and "literary fiction" and you have often been put in the genre fiction.
0:56:17 > 0:56:21Do you care about that sort of border policing that goes on?
0:56:21 > 0:56:22No, no, no. Thank God I don't.
0:56:22 > 0:56:28No. I mean, literature's always supported a huge literary bureaucracy
0:56:28 > 0:56:33where people categorise and agonise and
0:56:33 > 0:56:36really it has nothing to do, as far as I'm concerned,
0:56:36 > 0:56:40with the creative process or my relationship with the reader.
0:56:40 > 0:56:43I'm delighted
0:56:43 > 0:56:46if the cab driver tells me that he didn't enjoy my last book as much as
0:56:46 > 0:56:50the one before or something of that kind.
0:56:50 > 0:56:52But I really...
0:56:52 > 0:56:57I remember a distinguished British critic coming up to me at a party and
0:56:57 > 0:57:01saying, "Have you read the review of you in the New York Review of Books?"
0:57:01 > 0:57:07And I said, "I haven't, no, because on the whole I care as much as possible not to read reviews."
0:57:07 > 0:57:11"And she said, "But you've been upgraded!"
0:57:11 > 0:57:16It was wonderful. So suddenly I was flying first class in her imagination.
0:57:16 > 0:57:18No, I really don't think so.
0:57:18 > 0:57:20And I've stayed away
0:57:20 > 0:57:23from literary prizes. I don't allow myself...
0:57:23 > 0:57:25You don't allow your books to go...
0:57:25 > 0:57:26No, I don't.
0:57:26 > 0:57:28I simply...
0:57:28 > 0:57:31Writing's been terribly good to me.
0:57:31 > 0:57:33I don't want to
0:57:33 > 0:57:35take part in a literary horse race.
0:57:35 > 0:57:37You were a reluctant spy, as we've established.
0:57:37 > 0:57:41Have you ever struggled with the vocation of writer?
0:57:42 > 0:57:44Yes.
0:57:44 > 0:57:46I have.
0:57:49 > 0:57:51In favour of doing something else basically.
0:57:51 > 0:57:57Not despair at writing, period. That, mercifully, I don't suffer from.
0:57:57 > 0:57:59I get angry with myself.
0:57:59 > 0:58:04I tear up a lot of stuff, but I always accept that taking the wrong route is very instructive
0:58:04 > 0:58:06It gets you to the right one.
0:58:06 > 0:58:09But there are times...
0:58:09 > 0:58:11I think like journalists, when
0:58:11 > 0:58:16I've been reporting on something, visiting places, when I've felt,
0:58:16 > 0:58:22"I'm such a voyeur. I'm such a creep. I should be here helping."
0:58:22 > 0:58:25Just occasionally, but thank God it only lasted about ten minutes,
0:58:25 > 0:58:29I thought I would try my hand at politics.
0:58:29 > 0:58:31But I simply...
0:58:31 > 0:58:34I would never be able to behave well enough.
0:58:34 > 0:58:36Which party would it have been
0:58:36 > 0:58:38My own.
0:58:38 > 0:58:39That's the trouble.
0:58:39 > 0:58:43David Cornwell, John le Carre, thank you very much.
0:58:49 > 0:58:52Subtitles by Red Bee Media
0:59:14 > 0:59:17'We wanna do a science fiction series.'
0:59:17 > 0:59:22CS Lewis meets HG Wells meets Father Christmas, that's the Doctor.
0:59:22 > 0:59:24Doctor Who? Hmm?
0:59:24 > 0:59:26Action!
0:59:26 > 0:59:27You've really got something here.
0:59:27 > 0:59:30Bill's not very well.
0:59:30 > 0:59:33No-one's irreplaceable, eh?
0:59:33 > 0:59:35Can't we have Doctor Who without Doctor Who?
0:59:35 > 0:59:38Travel back to the birth of a phenomenon.