John Banville, author
We met for lunch one rainy day at the end of last summer, in an excellent but eerily deserted restaurant in Hampstead village. He was already there when I arrived, seated foursquare at a small table with his back to the wall and his eyes on the door. Inevitably it occurred to me to wonder how many empty restaurants, bars and cafes he had sat in like this, waiting and watching, in the days when he was a spy. He always played down the significance of those days, speaking of them with wry amusement, and giving the impression that in the world of espionage he had been little more than a pen-pusher. I chose to believe him.
That Hampstead meeting wasn’t our last – later he came to Dublin and Cork to investigate his father’s Irish roots, since he was thinking of giving up on Brexitland for Ireland – but it’s the one I recall most vividly. He was 88, yet he had the vigour and alertness of a far younger man. When I heard the news of his death, immediately a picture came to me of him striding along in the rain that day, in his George Smiley overcoat, his great square handsome head cleaving the air like the stem of a battle cruiser. He was a big man, in so many ways.
His biographer Adam Sisman quoted him saying that “people who have had unhappy childhoods are pretty good at inventing themselves”. In conversation, he returned again and again to his own childhood, which he looked back on with a kind of wonderment, amazed at the fact of having survived it; survived, and thrived. His father, Ronnie, had been a conman and chancer on an epic scale – a person representing a London hospital turned up at his funeral to fetch his head, claiming Ronnie had long ago sold it to the hospital for research purposes – and his mother abandoned him and his brother when they were schoolboys, never to return.
Was he his own invention? Well, aren’t we all? He seemed to me thoroughly authentic, the real thing, a man who fitted exactly the space the world allotted him. He was an old-fashioned patriot, with none of the bombast that might imply. He loved his country, but was disgusted by the upsurge of Little Englandism that followed the Brexit referendum. He was serious in the thought of moving to Ireland, but had he settled here, he would have been horribly homesick.
As a writer he transcended mere genre, showing that works of art could be made out of the tired trappings of the espionage novel – The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of the finest works of fiction of the 20th century. Along with Iris Murdoch, he sustained, and strengthened, the tradition of the mainstream English novel of manners; as a deviser of plots and a teller of stories, he was at the same level of greatness as Robert Louis Stevenson. His books will live as long as people continue to read. Samuel Beckett, asked to name what he considered to be his friend James Joyce’s greatest quality answered: “Probity.” Many of us would say the same of John le Carré, and doubly so of David Cornwell.
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