John Le Carré’s pen name is perhaps the greatest and most enduring of his inventions. Born David Cornwell, he wrote his first three novels while serving as an MI6 Intelligence Officer, leaving only when The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) brought him sustaining success. The alias was a proviso of his spymasters, who were happy for him to fictionalize the secret world rather than expose it in more literal ways. “How much our poor beleaguered spies,” he writes in his new memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, “must be wishing that Edward Snowden had done the novel instead.”



THE PIGEON TUNNEL: STORIES FROM MY LIFE by John Le Carré Viking, 320 pp., $28.00

Le Carré’s world of spies and Snowden’s are of course very different. Gone is the neat division between the Soviet and American empires, as well as the immediate threat of nuclear apocalypse. The clash between capitalist and communist master narratives of history has been supplanted by the reigning orthodoxies of neoliberalism. The human element of espionage and conflict has been reduced by cyber and economic warfare. Cold War spying was often done over drinks within London’s clubland, whereas British and US security services now operate under legislative oversight. And it was highborn intellectuals, like the Cambridge Five, who betrayed secrets out of allegiance to the “other side”; whistle blowers like Snowden and Chelsea Manning are democrats concerned by clandestine overreach.

Le Carré made his name as the unparalleled chronicler of the older world. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, so too did the geopolitical backdrop of his narratives. As his biographer Adam Sisman notes, “David was a victim of his own success. To most people, the name John Le Carré was synonymous with the Cold War; more than any other writer of his generation, he had shaped the public perception of the struggle between East and West”. When that struggle was over, Le Carré’s friends would ask, “Whatever are you going to write now?”

The avatar of today’s intelligence community is Snowden, not Smiley. And since 1993, when Le Carré published The Night Manager, he has made conscious efforts to move with the times. The targets of his invective remain the powerful and the corrupt. Yet the setting is no longer the confrontation between the pax americana and pax sovietica, but the lawless interplay between the state and corporate power. The Night Manager’s villain, Richard Roper, is an English businessman and arms dealer, secretly propped up by “espiocrats”—officials high up in the British and U.S. security services. The Constant Gardener (2001) takes on a pharmaceutical conglomerate that experiments on African tribal women in clinical trials. Our Kind of Traitor (2010) deals with the collusion between Russian money launderers, British bankers, and politicians. And his most recent novel, A Delicate Truth (2013), turns on the outsourcing of war to private defense contractors. “War’s gone corporate, in case you haven’t noticed,” declares one British minister.

David Cornwell, then, has had to invent two Le Carrés: If the second incarnation—the Le Carré that looks beyond Cold War and toward new world disorders—seems more relevant, it is the first—the post-imperial Le Carré—that we keep coming back to. In The Pigeon Tunnel, Le Carré tries to provide some kind of genesis story about his own relationship to the secret world, as well as those of his fictional characters. The result is not a memoir, but a disconnected set of anecdotes that, on the surface of things, do not seem to tell us more than we already know.