The novelist John le Carré has died at the age of 89. In this 2015 essay taken from Reaching for Utopia: Making Sense of an Age of Upheaval, New Statesman editor Jason Cowley explored why "le Carré remains an enigma even to himself".
In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) George Smiley is recalled from retirement to investigate whether there is a double agent, or “mole”, operating at the highest level of the intelligence service, which John le Carré calls the Circus. Melancholy and introspective - le Carré writes of the aged spymaster’s "spiritual exhaustion" - Smiley is drawn back reluctantly into a crepuscular world of secrets and subterfuge, where even long-time friends and associates cannot be trusted. Smiley, le Carré writes, "had that art, from miles and miles of secret life, of listening at the front of his mind; of letting the primary incidents unroll directly before him while another, quite separate faculty wrestled with their historical connection".
Making slow progress in his investigation, Smiley returns to Oxford — his “spiritual home” — to see a former colleague, Connie Sachs, who is an expert in Soviet counter-intelligence and renowned for her exceptional memory. In the BBC adaptation of Tinker Tailor, the first episode of which was broadcast in 1979, a few months after the election as prime minister of Margaret Thatcher, Connie is played by Beryl Reid and Smiley with fastidious, low-toned deliberation by Alec Guinness, in one of his most celebrated roles. Their conversation takes place in near darkness, in a room lit as if only by candles, like the setting for some venerable college feast.
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