The unrivaled John le Carré

How the spy novelist changed English literature

John Le Carre.
(Image credit: Illustrated | iStock, REUTERS)

With the death of John le Carré on Sunday at the age of 89, the English-speaking world lost its most considerable living novelist, a seemingly tireless craftsman who wrote bestsellers in six successive decades beginning in the 1960s, a feat rivaled only by Agatha Christie and P.G. Wodehouse.

This was not the only sense in which le Carré resembled the inventor of the Drones Club and Blandings Castle. It is absurdly fitting that, like Bertie Wooster and Sherlock Holmes before him, George Smiley did not age. Recruited into the Circus, as he fittingly referred to MI6, in the years following the First World War, le Carré's most famous creation lived long enough to deplore the Brexit cause. Smiley belongs, like a reverse Pooh Bear, to a land of eternal old age, of dingy flats, warm vodka, and cigarette smoke. He is at heart a nostalgist, though his Never-Never Land is the Germany of Schiller and Goethe rather than the supposed glories of the British Empire. I could not understand the outrage that greeted the publication of A Legacy of Spies, in which our hero, making what I now sadly realize will be his final appearance in print, declares that everything he did was directed against the evil of communism in the hope of bringing Europe "out of her darkness" to a new era of romanticism.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.