John le Carre Mark Lawson Talks To...

It's appropriate that the master of espionage fiction should write under an assumed name.

David Cornwell became John le Carre when he published his first novels when working in Germany for what he

used to call the British Foreign Service, although he later admitted that this meant being a spook.

The success of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold in the early ' 0s

allowed him to leave the secret world, but it's remained the setting for most of his novels

including the trilogy about the most intelligent man in British

intelligence, George Smiley, that began with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

Recent books have taken Le Carre away from the Cold War and its locations, to Africa in

The Constant Gardener, to Central America for The Tailor Of Panama.

But Le Carre's latest novel, his 21st, returns to Germany.

A Most Wanted Man is set in modern Hamburg, where the spies of

Britain, Germany and America fight over the identity and mission of a young Russian immigrant.

" 'When 9/11 happened, there were two ground zeros,' he announced addressing them now from one side

"of the gallery, now from the back, before popping up like a squat djinni beneath the rafters in front of them,

"hands punching out the words as he spoke them.

" 'One ground zero was in New York.

" 'The other ground zero that you don't hear so much about was right here in Hamburg.'

"He jabbed an arm at the window.

" 'That courtyard out there was 100 feet high in rubble, all of it paper.

" 'And our pathetic barons of the German intelligence community

" 'were raking through it, trying to find out where the hell they'd gone so terribly wrong.' "

History is full of surprises. We might not have thought Hamburg, where you were consul in the

embassy 45 years ago, 20 years after the Cold War, we wouldn't think was a significant place, and yet, as the

point is made in A Most Wanted Man, it's become central in what politicians call the War on Terror.

Yes. Hamburg is a character for me,

and in my life, I was pretty much relegated to Hamburg as British Consul

after I became known as the author of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

It wasn't exactly a punishment posting, but I think the Foreign

Office thought I would make less fuss if I was relegated to the provinces.

And it was in Hamburg also that I had to decide whether I would go on

being a foreign servant or be a full-time writer.

And I took the second course, obviously, and left kind of

in mid-tour and felt bad about it. It was like...

leaving a love affair half finished.

And then I started going back when I was researching for other novels that had to do with Germany.

And on 9/11, the day,

I happened to be in Hamburg in a television studio watching footage

of the German radical Rudi Dutschke, who was really the inspiration for the Baader-Meinhof gang and so on.

And Rudi Dutschke was orating, and I was making notes.

And Rudi Dutschke said, "We must build a bridge between those who have too much and those who have nothing."

Stuff about world poverty.

And I got back to the hotel at lunchtime - this is on 9/11 -

and there was a message from my secretary in Cornwall saying, "Put on the television.

I spent the morning with Rudi Dutschke and the afternoon with Osama.

I was in time to see the second plane go into the Twin Towers.

And for some reason, that made a deep impression on me.

But beyond that of course,

Germany's often been my sandbox if you will, my playpen.

And Germany's role

in the War on Terror is a wonderful metaphor for where Germany stands at the moment in Europe.

But also astonishing that you should be in Hamburg on that day, because within days we knew that

the so-called Hamburg cell had been where some of the hijackers, the terrorists, came from.

Absolutely, and Mohamed Atta worshipped his savage god in a small mosque in Hamburg.

And I think six or seven of his accomplices

were living around him, and a couple of them finished up on his plane.

Yes, it is absolutely extraordinary and people simply

don't realise what an exotic history Hamburg had.

It was occupied by Napoleon. It was occupied by the Danes.

And it became really the first aerial bombing city

of the British and American bombing campaign against Nazi Germany.

And more people died in, I think it was,

July of 1944 in Hamburg in one week than died in the bombing of Nagasaki.

45,000 died.

And...Hamburg itself was largely obliterated.

And all these bits of history do ..

It's not something you put into a novel,

but it is very nice to know what air you're breathing when you're in a city and I was conscious of that.

But it struck me reading your books again for this that, given the flashbacks to the Second

World War that there are in various books, we have a history of Germany over 60 years in your fiction now,

from the Second World War to in A Very Wanted Man.

I could say, if I were being facile, that this book began when I was 16 years old

and ran away from my public school.

And by accident, which I simply can't explain to myself any longer, I finished up at Berne University

at the age of 16, and my first tutors were, of course, German

and mainly German Jewish refugees from Nazism.

And in 1948,

I made it my business to go to Dachau.

And in 1948, I was also in Berlin.

And then for my National Service,

a couple of years later,

I was in...occupied Austria and then I taught German at Eton, having studied it at Oxford.

And then later when I was...

determined to become involved in the Cold War, I found myself in Bonn again.

So I have a huge chunk of Germany inside me

and an unresolved discussion that goes on, a dialogue with Germany in my own mind all the time.

And there are a lot of historical echoes, because in A Most Wanted Man, the intelligent services

descend on Hamburg and they fight over this man who's turned up there.

But that clearly has parallels with the way in which they fought over Berlin in the past and divided it.

Yes. That certainly, but I think...

for me there was more to say on that subject.

One must remember that Germany, once it was reconstructed, starting

with West Germany, acquired probably the strongest and best constitution of any country in the world.

The new Germany was put together with brilliant constitutionalists

from America and partly from Germany and partly from Britain.

The consequence is that the sovereignty of each individual Land

or state of Germany is absolute

And this included sovereignty of security matters.

The result of that is that their entire security system is fragmented

with separate little empires from Land to Land.

And now the struggle is on to what extent should this become controlled by the metropolis, Berlin?

In our security system, everything is controlled from London, very automatically.

But Germany is quite different in that sense. We have a lot of capitals in Germany.

You have Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig, Munich and so it goes on, Nuremberg and Berlin.

And so it was really fun,

in narrative terms, to be using the tension between Hamburg and Berlin as part of the action.

And a lot of it... Interrogation scenes, there are often key interrogation

scenes in your book, but the risk of interrogation is that you get what you're looking for.

Yes, and...

the risk of interrogation

with what is euphemistically called "coercive methods", i.e. torture, is even greater.

It is for anybody, like myself, who has conducted professional interrogations,

it is anathema to be extracting information from somebody under stress.

You don't get the right information. You get a lot of false names. You get a lot of false tracks.

For us it was never an option in those days. Quite the reverse.

The whole matter of interrogation rested upon a proper relationship, bonding

indeed a measure of compassion of human understanding.

Look, I'm not offering you wealth

or smart women

or your choice of fast cars.

I know you haven't any use for those things.

And I'm not going to make any claims about the moral superiority of the West.

I'm sure you can see through our values, just as I can see through yours in the East.

But also in dramatic and fictional terms, an interrogation, it's perhaps the purist form of dialogue.

I mean, Harold Pinter has used it in different ways in his plays

but it's so focused and so tense when interrogation is taking place.

I love it as a...

I look forward always to those passages of interrogation, because,

as ever, you learn a lot about the interrogator, too.

They're learning a lot about each other,

and interrogation comes in so many forms,

and so do the prisoners, so do the subjects of interrogation.

And there can be moments when they, almost like

the sick deer at the back of the herd, they offer themselves for the sacrifice.

A moment when the tension is so great that finally they say, "I can't stand this anymore."

That's not about pain, but, yes. .

And I love the use of interrogation also to advance plot.

Interrogation very swiftly engages the reader, too.

The reader is either the victim or the interrogator, or both, subject or the interrogator, or both.

So it's a very handy way

of making story work.

It's very striking to me in your recent books, and it shows how the world has changed, I think,

how the range of languages has expanded.

In the early books, we have a lot of upper-class English, because that was running the world.

But in this book, we have people speaking Turkish, German, Russian, English.

So it's a Babel now in these books, of languages.

It is a Babel, and, of course, dealing...

..as we are now, with an immensely mobile community, particularly in Europe,

it's more than a Babel. It's a problem,

and a fascinating one.

But there's a very resonant phrase in A Most Wanted Man about a couple,

a German woman who's married to an English man.

"Sometimes they spoke German, sometimes English, and for fun, sometimes a mix." Yes.

Now, that's also true of your books.

I mean, you have fun with the language.

They're very verbal books. It's what you love doing.

Yes, I do love them.

I know how they would have spoken to one another.

And it would be kind of, "Darling, bist du mude tonight?

"Willst du lie down a little bit, nicht?"

And it's actually a delicious language that...

In Hampstead, where I live part of time, still there are these wonderful immigrants, elderly people.

You hear them in the delicatessen, "I want that sausage. Nein, nein, nein!

"Nicht this Wurst, that Wurst, nicht?"

And for me, that's absolutely charming.

It's a kind of bridge of its own kind that moves between two languages.

Charlemagne said, "To possess another language is to possess another soul."

And they're sort of hopping between souls.

You were doing the voices then.

When you're writing, do you verbalise the voices?

Yes, I do.

Of course, it's a dangerous thing.

I know for instance how my Chechen Russian

asylum seeker in Hamburg is speaking.

But actually... Of course, I don't speak Russian, so

I hear the cadences in my own..

RUSSIAN ACCENT: "Very... Poor fool."

That kind of Russian speaking.

First of all, Russians never let you get a word in because they make a kind of nasal hum in the middle.

"Mmm, I would say, mmm, that, er .."

And then there's something that comes from the back of the throat that says...

RUSSIAN ACCENT: "I am healthy.

Well, I cannot help hearing that stuff when I'm writing it, but

it's a dangerous game, because I hear it, but does the person who's looking at the words on the page hear it?

That's a quite different matter. So actually,

the real art of making dialogue is to make the sounds legible, if one can put it that way.

That's much more difficult. I flatter myself when I'm reading that stuff. I have to look out.

Is it in your head, or would someone walking past your study hear a kind of United Nations meeting going on?

I'm afraid they would hear the Babel going on, yes!

Yes. You talked about your German language experiences,

but the way in which languages have shaped your life is very powerful,

because if you hadn't studied languages, you wouldn't have gone into the British Foreign Service.

You wouldn't have got the material which has led to the writing of the books.

Well, if I hadn't had a wildcat dad, I wouldn't have run away.

So, I mean, in the same sense that the cause of death is birth...

It was somehow written out before me that...

And equally, if my father hadn't taken me to St Moritz to ski in 1936, Switzerland wouldn't

have been imprinted on my memory as a romantic spot to go to, a kind of natural place of exile.

So in...whenever it was, 1948, I fled there.

That's a fascinating thing about writers' careers, that there are these bits of luck

which can be good or bad, but give them the material. Now, your father,

Ronald Thomas Archibald Cornwell, he was, presumably, bad luck as a father but good luck as a writer?

I don't know that he was even bad luck to have as a father.

Certainly now he seems to have provided me with a treasure chest of memories and so on.

Also, because my childhood was so erratic,

and because I was in boarding school from the age of five -

I did 11 years in the boarding school gulag -

the combination of exotic bouts of life with my father

and then the hectic intermissions when he was bankrupt or at Her Majesty's leisure somewhere...

Pleasure, leisure?!

Pleasure! Both, yeah! Both!

The range of the scale of experience, so to speak, in retrospect, was extremely rich.

So I can't cry in my beer about it.

And I guess that the experience of such intense solitude and of

an irrational world, a completely irrational, dangerous world, where home was dangerous territory,

those things contributed very much to the way I write

and to the sense of tension which I can never get rid of.

So those are...

I'm grateful for those inheritances.

I often quote Graham Greene,

"the bank balance of the writer is his childhood",

the credit balance, and in that sense I was a millionaire.

But Graham Greene's also a very useful comparison

because he said that he became a spy and then a novelist because of the experience he had.

He was the son of a headmaster in a boarding school, and he talks

about having to live a double life on either side of the door. Yes.

Now, it's clearly explicit in A Perfect Spy that Pym has become a spy because of his background.

But that is you reflecting your own feelings?

Yes, it is. I mean,

the experience of being an intelligence officer gave me a lot of things.

First of all, it forced upon me a lucidity of prose and self expression.

That was for the desk work. You could not be careless in writing an intelligence report.

It mobilised my powers of observation, if you will,

and it forced me to enter into a contemplation about the possibilities of human character, all the time.

Who is he? What does he want?

What can I do with him? All of those things.

The opportunistic element of spying.

The manipulation that goes into it.

So I never know, I will never know whether

I was a writer who became a spook for a time,

or whether the experience of being in the secret world then projected me into writing

But I think actually behind both of them is the great shadow of my father,

and the duplicitous life that we lived as children, where

we knew when we filled up the car with petrol at the local garage that it was never going to be paid for.

Where we pretended to live like middle-class English boys who went to school.

We didn't talk about our hectic background.

So, in a sense, we were spies.

All my father's family, all the people who lived around us, spoke with regional accents.

But the moment I got to private school,

which was my father's dream that I should become privately educated, I started learning the language

And I started dressing like a gent, or trying to, and learning deportment and learning ..

..all the curious ways in which. .

..people of that class communicate with each other.

I never felt part of it, but I think

very many creative people don't anyway feel integrated in life.

Most children have small moments of disillusionment with their parents,

they say they'll come to the school play and they don't

I presume in your case they were much larger, but was there a first

moment when you thought, "This guy is not straight with us"?

Yes, I think there was a first moment.

And I think my elder brother would remember it, too.

It was on some leave-out holiday.

We were going to get half term or something of that sort.

And we were told to wait.

My father told me, told us, to wait at the end of the school drive at this boarding school in Berkshire.

And the reason was he didn't want to present himself to the school.

He hadn't paid the bill, but we didn't know that.

So we waited at the lodge at the end of the school drive with our suitcases. And he never showed up.

So then you're left with a dilemma.

Huge danger of face loss among the other boys.

So we just stayed away for the whole day.

We had no food, we had no money but we wouldn't go back to school.

We went back in the evening and pretended we'd had a wonderful day.

So very interesting in espionage terms. The rendezvous collapses,

you work out a cover story,

you come back and dissemble!

Love is obviously a complex word, but were you able to love him, your father?

I simply wouldn't know whether I ..

Love is simply not something I can mobilise in that respect, because

so much was destroyed in the progress of our relationship.

There were so many victims in his trail, if you will,

that, bit by bit, whatever regard for him I had was eroded.

And you have to remember, I had no mum on the spot, so that

all the affection, such as you'd have for both parents,

had to be invested and examined in one.

So whether that ends up as love or whether it felt like love at the time, I simply don't know. Not now.

The absence of a mother and of constant female figures in your life, that did affect you?

Yeah, that affected me. That is crippling.

Not only did I have no mother, I had no sisters.

And because I was in boys' schools from the age of five onwards,

I had absolutely no sexual education and no familiarity with women.

I didn't know what the female body looked like until

sort of late teens, early 20s kind of thing.

So I think I had, in that respect, a very late adolescence and a very

messy number of middle years, from which, mercifully, I've now emerged.

And your female characters are often quite saintly, often quite idealised.

Yeah. I think now and then I bring one off.

It's only recently that I've stopped having a kind of "Oh, God" feeling

when I create female characters

I have to think too hard about it.

I come from a generation where. .

..you really couldn't...

If you did have a girlfriend and you were living the strict middle-class life, or trying to

you couldn't do things which these days are absolutely self-evident.

I mean, you couldn't bring her home to bed or

you couldn't take a hotel room unless you demonstrated you were married.

These were very inhibited times and I was a very inhibited

citizen of those times!

Did you ever see your mother again in later life?

Yes. I wrote to her when I was 2 .

That's to say, I wrote to her brother, who had been an MP.

And I said, "Is she alive?

"I don't know. Never get it out of my father."

And he said, "She is alive, and here's her address.

"And never tell her that I told you."

So I felt absolutely unconstrained by that.

So I wrote to her immediately and said, "Your brother has given me your address, and can I come and see you?"

And then I got a strange letter in unfamiliar hand saying, "How wonderful, yes."

Like a first love letter, she wrote.

"Please catch the train to Ipswich and I'll wait for you on the up platform," as it was in those days.

And I took a train to Ipswich, and there three ladies

of a certain age who were eligible mothers waiting at the barricade.

And then one of them tottered forward, and she was suddenly my elder brother

in a white wig, and it was absolutely unmistakable, the connection.

And then we reached out and, you know, how do you hug a mum like that?

It was very strange.

And it's, er...

The tragedy, I think, probably

is not feeling much.

And then later, in fatherhood, my own fatherhood, and I look at my

sleeping children, as it were, or my grandchildren, and I try to imagine

how strong she must have been, or how great the impulse must have been,

simply to walk out that night and not come back.

I feel terrible pity for somebody in those circumstances, but not a lot of affection.

It's hard to muster.

It's always an interesting question with writers, obviously - what did you read when you were growing up?

Er, a lot of the stuff that you do read.

Percy Westerman,

Buchan, Sapper,

those things.

And then,

I think somewhere around 14 or 1 , I started devouring

the big French Victorian novels and the Russian novels, and so on.

So, I think very humdrum stuff

I think the book that made the greatest affect on me was read to me by my first stepmother

when I was ill, and that was The Wind In The Willows.

What happened was that actually I went to Berlin in '48, got mumps.

There was no hospital that would take me in.

I had the after-effect of mumps

huge swellings in the groin and whatnot. So deeply embarrassing

And I lay in bed with a very high temperature and she came and read this book to me.

And, erm, it just, er...

I think "mole" may have come from that.

Yes!

And the big subject area of your novels is the post-Second World War.

You are eight when the Second World War broke out. What are your memories of that period?

First of all, the declaration of war.

I was sitting with my grandparents.

My father was away, I think, actually, in Wormwood Scrubs,

and we listened to Neville Chamberlain

telling us that we were now at war with Germany.

Then my grandmother asked my grandfather, "Frank, where will the battlefield be?"

And he said, "My dear, it could be out there on the tennis court."

And then,

with my father absent again, I was entrusted to a woman who lived...

A very nice woman he eventually married,

who lived in London. And I came up and stayed

with her for a while, and so had the experience of the Blitz a bit.

Then, the end of the war coincided with my adolescence,

and I think that to take up the German language and literature and immerse myself in it was

a kind of adolescent revolt against the English condition and my background.

Everybody loathed Germans and Germany.

At my school there was a pigsty and the pig was called Germany. It was as bad as that.

But it's also crucial to what you do, because you've

always rejected in the novels the black-and-white morality of one side being good, the other being bad.

And even at that stage, in terms of Germany, you felt that?

Yes, I did. I invested Smiley with...

..this ambiguous attitude towards Germany.

Smiley in his young days had actually spied on Germany, in the early days of the war.

And those first books you wrote Call For The Dead, A Murder Of Quality,

which are separate from what follows, although Smiley is in them...

Because they're really crime novels, in effect, much more.

Yes, that's right.

Well, I started writing, I mean, word one on page one,

very much in the image of John Bingham, who was a thriller writer,

otherwise known as Lord Clanmorris, with whom I shared a room in MI5.

And you have to start somewhere in writing, and preferably,

you have to meet somebody that you want to be like.

I sort of thought, "I can do what John does." And I started

writing on the train between Great Missenden, where I was living, and London in little notebooks

And out of it came these first two thrillers.

And I think I see them now as perfectly valid finger exercises.

Many people are much entertained by them still.

I found them, in terms of style embarrassing and mawkish, but then one does.

But the great thing was that I'd had these finger exercises before I got to Bonn,

and actually was launched upon from those years, sort of '59 to '63,

about the four most exciting years in Germany's post-war history,

which included, for me, seeing the Berlin Wall going up.

And I could respond to that then.

I kind of had the toolbox ready from the first books I'd written.

I could respond to that

with the anger and with the craft, if you like, that I had at my disposal.

There's been, as you know, a mole-like hunt for Smiley's original,

and people have nominated various people in Oxford colleges and Maurice Oldfield and M15.

You've suggested John Bingham already. But was there a conscious model?

Well, I think that

Dr Green, Vivian Green,

who ended his academic career as rector of Lincoln College, Oxford,

comes closest to me as somebody of enormous compassion and great shrewdness.

And, if you like, it was Vivian Green's interior that

I related to, because I wanted Smiley to be sort of alien to ordinary life.

I made him tubby and physically graceless and

a bad dresser, but charismatic enough to obtain a very beautiful wife.

So Vivian Green,

in so far as his humanity inspired me

and his observational powers

and the pain, sometimes, that I felt was in him...

Because seeing a lot is very painful, and I felt that of Vivian.

So I let that influence me.

And then, in the outward and visible things,

I would guess that John Bingham gave me more than anybody else.

But, you know, you can't actually make up a character out of other people.

You simply can't. You grab the bits that are appealing to you, that touch you or alienate you

but in the end you've got to make them sit up and run and talk and laugh and fail from bits of yourself.

Somehow or another you've got to extend your own nature wide enough

to be able to say, "Yes, in those circumstances I could commit murder."

And it was entirely appropriate that you,

as an intelligence officer, a spy, you were using a cover identity, a pseudonym. But you had to,

that was a professional requirement?

Well, it wasn't a professional requirement to be John le Carre.

That was just the ethic of the business.

If I'd been in the regular Foreign Service, the same thing would have applied.

If you wrote a book about butterflies in those days

as David Cornwell, you had to find another name to publish under. That was the ethic of the time

Choosing le Carre had really...

It was an erratic, weird thing

I went to Victor Gollancz,

who was my first publisher, and said, "Victor, I have to choose a pseudonym."

And he said, "Well, my boy,

"the best thing you can do is choose two good Anglo-Saxon syllables, like Chunk Smith or something like that.

"That would be good." And I thought, "No, I won't do that.

"What I need is a name that is optically arresting."

Like N-G-A-I-O Marsh.

And I made up a name with three bits and an acute accent at the end.

And it's also a coded name.

Carre in French means... A balle carre is where the girls ask the boys to dance.

Carre also means a checked suit

And at roulette,

if you have a numero carre, you put

a chip on each corner of one number.

So it had some nice little...

It was a little inward joke, and I never thought I was going to have to live with it on this scale!

You were unclear for quite a long time about the fact that you

had been a spy, but that again was a professional requirement?

It was, yes, and for me an ethical one until I discovered that my name had been blown by all my colleagues.

When The Spy Who Came In From The Cold came out, Sir Dick White,

who was then head of SIS, told Alan Dulles, and it was a big joke,

the story was all over Washington.

All the insiders, all the embedded journalists who had their friendships

with the CIA were cracking up about it, so it was just a futile pretence.

I maintained it for a year or two, but then I just found myself

overtaken by other people's indiscretion!

You've said you'll never talk about what you actually did.

No, I won't, no, no. And is that ethics or Official Secrets Act

Er, it's certainly ethics.

If you say nice things about the spooks, you can get away with murder.

You can break every Official Secrets Act there is.

It's when you start blowing the gaff and you're embarrassing them that it goes wrong.

But I don't want to do either.

I think that a great deal has gone wrong

with the intelligence-gathering business since I left it.

Probably there was a great deal wrong with it while I was in it

But the one promise we did make always, and, I think, the promise we kept through thick and thin,

was that if somebody collaborated,

if somebody became an agent or a source or a traitor in their own country,

that their names would never, never be known to their children,

to their friends, to all of that, because it's impossible, even two generations down...

You know, were it to turn out that a distinguished German of fine family had worked for the

British in a capacity during the war that was disadvantageous to the German national cause, if you like,

for two generations that could continue to afflict the children.

So it's an absolute no-no.

It's a frequent conceit in espionage fiction and thrillers

of the spy who is haunted by things they did in the past

and wakes up in the night and all the rest of it. Have you ever had that?

Yes, I think so.

Not necessarily in the night.

I think there were things

I persuaded people to do that I would have preferred them not to do

in retrospect, and I would have preferred not to be the persuader.

But at the time, it seemed to be inevitable that one did it.

I've become much more puritanical in retrospect about some of that stuff.

I don't think I wake up and sweat.

It wasn't that bad, but I...

Partly my attitude towards all that work has shifted, just as the work has shifted.

I think that the intelligence community now in the West is so over-inflated,

it's in many respects so uninformed and so paranoid,

that it's almost part of the problem rather than the solution.

We've created such circles of knowledge and secrecy within our own community,

that we are seriously undermining the ordinary overt democratic processes in which we should be involved.

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which is the book that really launched you as a writer

after the two early thrillers about Smiley, reflects your experience,

because the central character is desperate to stop being a spy.

Yes. And you were trying to effect your own escape by writing the book.

I'm not sure that I knew that at the time.

Everything converged.

First of all, the sight of the Wall going up and the ramparts of the

Cold War being built in the ashes of the old one, was to me appalling.

It was apocalyptic.

And my marriage was troubling me greatly.

I had a great sense of personal stress,

and of ending, really.

There was some kind of

anarchistic flame that was beginning to burn in me about the whole idiocy

of the Cold War, of which that wall seemed to me to be a perfect emblem.

And so I wrote...

I think you only get that experience once in your life as a writer.

I wrote almost not knowing where I was going for five or six weeks at huge heat, huge speed

You've said even while driving your car. Yes, shamefully. Well, the car was on the ferry half the time.

I was living one side of the Rhine and going to the other side.

I felt led by the book.

So that's luck, too.

I mean, everything converging at that moment and producing a combustion which you almost don't understand.

And then looking at what I'd written and examining, if you like,

the debris of my private life at that time.

I was aware of what I'd done.

I'd made a huge statement of rejection and anger.

Did your books have to be vetted at that stage?

Yes.

Absolutely.

So Call For The Dead, then that little thriller Murder Of Quality,

and my office was perfectly happy with that.

And then I wrote The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and sent it to London for approval.

And there was a loud silence, an uneasy silence. Lasted a week or two.

And then I received a letter asking me whether I had read the double-cross papers.

I wrote back and said no, I'd had no access to this secret document.

And I think they, the legal department, was thinking, "If we can

"pin on him access to a secret document, we can stop the book."

But then a kind of

really rather lovable sense of British fairness came into it and they let it go.

And neither I nor anybody else, I'm sure, had any idea

that it would suddenly take off and become one of those best sellers.

And for several months I lived, if you will, in double secrecy

First of all, under diplomatic cover and then in denial of having written

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold that was roosting at the top of best-seller lists all over the world.

And then Anthony Terry, who was a Sunday Times correspondent in Bonn,

ran the story and so it was all out. Were you relieved when it came out?

Er, I think I was scared.

Not of anything but the violence with which my life changed then.

It's terribly hard to describe quite what jeopardy had felt like.

No civil servant likes to be named.

No spook posing as a civil servant likes to be unmasked.

And I was denying that I had anything to do with the secret world.

And then,

I realised that the condition of secrecy was a refuge for me, and I didn't like it being invaded.

All of a sudden, there were these lights shining at me

and I wasn't at all sure I was happy with it.

And so then we left Hamburg quite quickly then, almost overnight.

And I fled with my family to the island of Crete, where we lived for a year.

And during that time, I tried to come to terms with what had happened.

And then, you really find your voice, I think, with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

The decision to bring Smiley back, but as a central character.

Do you remember the decision to do that and was it a conscious decision to bring him back?

Yes, I wanted to write initially something about Philby.

I never met Philby, but Philby haunted my entire career,

because the more one discovered about him,

the more evident it was that whatever one had been doing in the past could have been compromised by Philby

So it was a very curious feeling of, "Christ, I was there.

"This could have happened. It must not have happened by kind permission of the KGB."

So I wanted to write about that figure.

So in Tinker, Tailor he became Haydon and I had no notion really

of using Smiley at all.

I think for about eight months nine months, I flogged away at this and there was such a huge amount

of back history to the story that I couldn't somehow, I couldn't express, couldn't get it into the book,

couldn't give to characters, and I thought, "I'll bring Smiley back and use his memory

"This will be our archive for the story."

And so it was at that moment that we rejoined, if you will.

One of the reasons there was such a strong response to the Smiley

trilogy was that people realised that they're all...

Espionage is a metaphor for so many other things. Yeah.

Adultery, the sense that people have of having different identities, fake identities.

Were you aware of that when you started?

No.

For me, the secret world WAS the world

and I began to recognise no difference between the way people

behaved in the overt world and the way they behaved in the secret world.

So the secret world became an exciting metaphor for ordinary human behaviour.

I think that as a genre, the espionage novel is capable of any kind of expansion.

You can go in any direction. You can tell a love story.

You can tell a

passionate social history. You can go where you will.

So I was born to it in some way

If I'd been born to the sea, I'd have written about the sea.

And I was again terribly lucky because the secret world has so

expanded, almost to overtake the real world now.

And where it departs clearly, your work departs clearly from Ian Fleming and, say, Frederick Forsyth,

is both those writers have a triumphalism, really, about Britain's role in all this.

And you've always rejected that.

I've rejected that very much, yes.

And in this story, A Most Wanted Man,

we do not have that compulsive loyalty to Britain in our main British protagonist at all.

And I think that, too, is changing with the times.

We are not the patriots we were. We are are not the loyalists we were.

And I had hoped during the Cold War...

I really had hoped that when the Cold War ended, something wonderful would happen.

So when people asked me whether I'm nostalgic about the Cold War, I say, "Of course I am."

Because at the time, we lived optimistically believing that when

this absurd confrontation was over, we could remake the world.

Now I'm old enough and, dare I say it, wise enough to recognise that that's not happening.

Quite the reverse is happening.

We're screwing up the world.

Now, it's therefore the case, I believe,

that my more recent books have become less ambiguous,

more vociferous.

They've become specifically very angry.

They've become, I suppose, very anxious, yeah.

Absolute Friends, The Mission Song, now A Most Wanted Man.

Yeah. They are passionate and angry books about the world.

Well, I don't think I've made any perceptions that ordinary,

liberal people have not made about the world around us.

My good fortune is that I've been able to tell stories about it and express my feelings.

It's interesting we're talking at the moment...

Walking through a station this morning in London, the Economist headline

"A New Cold War", which is what lots of people are saying because of the tension between Russia and Georgia.

Is it a new Cold War? No.

It isn't, because, first of all, we can't occupy the positions we've taken.

Secondly, this was an act of total folly on the American side.

Neo-conservative influence to espouse Georgia.

Plant expectations there.

Send in trainers, weapons.

And indeed the Israelis sent in trainers and weapons.

And create an atmosphere in this very volatile country,

where the president, I think unwisely, believed

that he could bite the Russian bear in the backside and the Russian bear wouldn't act in character

Once the War on Terror was declared and once George Bush had looked into Putin's eyes

and seen his soul, then it was clearly understood that anybody

who was Muslim and a nationalist could be written off as a terrorist.

And that for a while defined the North Caucasus.

And we got ourselves...

we, the West have got ourselves into an awful tangle there.

But I don't believe that it's the beginning of a new Cold War.

The war that is looming is much bigger than that.

It's about resources worldwide

And there will be other protagonists who are perhaps more powerful than Russia or America.

Because the shift of power is moving away.

It is ridiculous to imagine that we're going back to the gunboat

diplomacy of the Cold War, although it looks like that at the moment.

It's a completely new set of cards that we're dealing with.

You can threaten, you can shame, but how on earth if the West starts taking liberties like Iraq, how can

it seriously start talking to the Russian empire

about how to behave in its own backyard? I don't get it.

I think it's lamentable and I'm terribly sorry,

but it was I think the consequence of really lousy diplomacy.

There's a strong suggestion in the recent books that

what they call the War on Terror is even more of a fiction, even more of a game than the Cold War.

Yeah, I think it's an imperialist trick basically.

It may not be such a conscious one,

but the great cry of "Either you're with us or against us",

was a way of categorising Islam

a way of demonising Islam

and a way actually of demanding solidarity with the American cause.

It was an extremely threatening and stupid statement basically.

I've not been to the United States since the bombing of Afghanistan, which really...

Or since 9/11, in effect.

I really did feel

that the American military reaction to what is

really a philosophical threat, a cultural threat,

was utterly mistaken.

To turn the War on Terror, so-called, into a territorial war, then do it twice,

I simply wasn't aboard for any of that.

I was deeply shocked by it.

But as we see in what we call, with the slightly glib abbreviations

"9/11", "7/7", there is a physical direct threat.

Oh, there's a huge threat. That's quite different.

That's an intelligence problem It's also a cultural problem.

And it's not a threat that will be solved by military means.

We have to deploy the military means, though not in the gross way

that we've done it so far, but more particularly we really have to look at political and cultural bridges.

It's terribly difficult to live with other cultures so intimately now.

I understand all that and I have been among the bad guys.

I spent a lot of time with very militant Palestinians in South Lebanon.

I was in Arafat's entourage for a short while.

I know how dirty it is out there in the dark street and

what awful language is being used and what preparations are being made,

but that is not the same thing that I understand as a War on Terror generally.

You might as well make war on influenza.

Terror is a strategy. It isn't a unit that you can attack.

Going back to the books, you've had visual interest from very early on in your books.

I think even the first two books were filmed, but it took a long time for,

certainly in terms of cinema, for a successful adaptation of your books.

It wasn't really until The Constant Gardener was it, I think.

Well, the movie of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, was pretty good I think.

But it was fancy.

Martin Ritt was determined to make a film noir. He actually made it in black and white.

Then The Constant Gardener, yes, it was great.

I liked it very much.

But the others have been either near misses or total misses.

Now there's a new kind of feeding frenzy on, so four of my books are in preparation for film.

Working Title is supposed to be making the feature film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

An American/Russian independent has bought Our Game.

Then Simon Channing-Williams, who made The Constant Gardener,

has bought The Mission Song and A Most Wanted Man.

Simon's making both of them. And the experience you had as a writer when

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was first on television of somebody else creating your character.

It can be difficult for writers

Cos you were still writing about him at the time. Did you feel that?

Yeah, I did feel it. I don't think it was a bad thing because I

felt that Smiley and I weren't going to be together for all that time.

And however Alec Guinness played it, he was going to be a wonderful star.

The thing about Smiley really is that he's self-effacing and not conspicuous, but Alec, you know

he could act with one ear and act everybody off the screen.

And then the voice.

The voice, every time...

He would ring up.

The voice was so infectious.

"May I speak to Mr David Cornwell, please?" "Hello, Alec."

"How did you know it was me?"

And from then on,

when I was writing Smiley, I had to keep Alec's voice out of my ear.

But I quote Flaubert.

Often when Flaubert was asked whether he would like Madame Bovary to be on the cover of the first French edition

of his book, he said, "No, because as long as they have their own imagined Bovary, everybody's happy.

"But if you reduce her to one series of lines and painting, you reduce the character."

I think every writer feels that, feels a sense of anti-climax when

the range of a character in his own imagination is reduced to one person.

I think that's inevitable. We all have...

It isn't just vanity. It's actually...

It's a bit like losing a friend to the opposition somehow.

Have you noticed, Peter,

that whenever I really trouble one of our acquaintances

with my questions, he'll raise the matter of my failure as a husband

to confound me?

Instructive. Ricky Tar tried it twice.

Unimportant in his case. Spite.

Well, that was sumptuous.

Alec brought something absolutely magical to the part.

Also it was his first shot at television, practically his last.

He was a hugely loved actor in Britain at that time

and so he brought the charisma of his reputation as well.

Everybody wanted to see how he would do it.

Alec said to me one day, "I really feel I ought to meet a real spy "

I felt slightly humbled by this request, but I rang Sir Maurice Oldfield, who'd been head of SIS.

"Oh, yes, David, I'd be very glad to meet Sir Alec Guinness."

So they met and I arranged a lunch in Chelsea.

And the two knights kind of looked at each other and

within minutes, Alec in his own mind had joined the secret service.

And Oldfield was saying, "You know, I think young David actually has

"gone a bit over the top with all this spying."

Alec said, "Oh, I do so agree."

And suddenly, Maurice got up and said, "Well, I'm off."

We'd had lunch and he made an abrupt departure.

And Alec said, "Do you mind?"

And we went outside and we watched him go down the street swinging his umbrella.

Then he said, "Let's go back and sit down.

"I need to ask you some questions. Those cuff links,

"do all spies wear those very vulgar cuff links?"

And I said, "No, I think that's just Maurice's taste in cuff links."

He said, "May I ask you this?"

And he picked up a glass of water and he said,

"Now, I've seen people do that.

"That's pensive,

"I've seen people do that,

"that, too, is pensive.

"But I've never seen people do that before.

"Do you think he's looking for the dregs of poison?"

And it was wonderful to me, not only frightfully funny.

I did point out that if there had been dregs of poison, that Maurice would be dead by now.

But it was a

perfect example of the artist keeping the child in himself alive.

And right up to the end of his life, Alec had that wonderful quality of "let's make drama, let's pretend.

"Now how would it be if I was this? How would it be if I was that?"

The child-like energy

and the urge to

entertain in order to protect yourself.

To maintain the initiative socially over people.

It's like Frankie Howerd. "Why do you want to make people laugh?"

"Because all my life I've been terrified of ridicule."

And it was that child operating in Alec that so impressed me and made me so fond of him.

You remain impressively hungry as a writer.

And Graham Greene, the books he published in his 70s, they were

little novellas or bottom of the drawer novels that he dusted off.

But you take on these big, multi-viewpoint novels still.

Well, I do. And if I write another novel, which is always open at my age

and I feel very kind of cleaned out at the moment, I have nothing in mind -

if I do write another novel, it will be of similar ambition.

I couldn't go any other route.

This is my 21st novel and some of my novels I like.

Others I see

as bridges to better novels.

Which are they?

Which are the ones you like?

Erm, I'm not going to tell you which ones I don't like. I think

probably if I were editing The Best Of Le Carre at the moment, putting it

together in one volume or something, I think I would do,

obviously, The Spy Who Came From The Cold.

Tinker, Tailor, not just because it was a television story.

The Tailor Of Panama, I think is a better book. The Constant Gardener was very useful.

I think that actually performed practically a social duty at that time.

There is this division in criticism on book prize panels between what they call "genre fiction"

and "literary fiction" and you have often been put in the genre fiction.

Do you care about that sort of border policing that goes on?

No, no, no. Thank God I don't.

No. I mean, literature's always supported a huge literary bureaucracy

where people categorise and agonise and

really it has nothing to do, as far as I'm concerned,

with the creative process or my relationship with the reader.

I'm delighted

if the cab driver tells me that he didn't enjoy my last book as much as

the one before or something of that kind.

But I really...

I remember a distinguished British critic coming up to me at a party and

saying, "Have you read the review of you in the New York Review of Books?"

And I said, "I haven't, no, because on the whole I care as much as possible not to read reviews."

"And she said, "But you've been upgraded!"

It was wonderful. So suddenly I was flying first class in her imagination.

No, I really don't think so.

And I've stayed away

from literary prizes. I don't allow myself...

You don't allow your books to go...

No, I don't.

I simply...

Writing's been terribly good to me.

I don't want to

take part in a literary horse race.

You were a reluctant spy, as we've established.

Have you ever struggled with the vocation of writer?

Yes.

I have.

In favour of doing something else basically.

Not despair at writing, period. That, mercifully, I don't suffer from.

I get angry with myself.

I tear up a lot of stuff, but I always accept that taking the wrong route is very instructive

It gets you to the right one.

But there are times...

I think like journalists, when

I've been reporting on something, visiting places, when I've felt,

"I'm such a voyeur. I'm such a creep. I should be here helping."

Just occasionally, but thank God it only lasted about ten minutes,

I thought I would try my hand at politics.

But I simply...

I would never be able to behave well enough.

Which party would it have been

My own.

That's the trouble.

David Cornwell, John le Carre, thank you very much.

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