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Simon Schama: Why John le Carré Is a Writer of Substance
Simon Schama: What Makes John le Carré a Writer of Substance https://www.ft.com/content/04df988d-9b09-4e6a-b7d8-70b1a5e654dc: ‘Someone, sometime, had to translate Dean Acheson’s famous 1962 characterisation of a Britain that had “lost an empire but has not yet found a role” into literature. But until le Carré came along, no writer had nailed the toxic combination of bad faith and blundering, the confusion of tactical cynicism with strategic wisdom, with such lethal accuracy.... His writing did... have some precedents.... He belonged to the same “lower-upper-middle-class” as George Orwell.... Like Orwell... le Carré had a pitch-perfect ear for the disingenuous hypocrisies sustaining those who mistook “Getting Away with It” for national purpose. Le Carré’s other literary pedigree... came from Anthony Trollope: the shrewd sense that institutions had collective personalities and psychologies, as if they were extended families. As such, they were the theatre of deadly, high-stakes dramas of loyalty and betrayal…. The scene at the beginning of An Honourable Schoolboy in the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club, where “a score of journalists, mainly from former British colonies . . . fooled and drank in a mood of violent idleness, a chorus without a hero” is one of the great set pieces of le Carré writing. At its centre is one of his Dickens-Modern creations: the ancient Aussie, “old Craw” based on someone le Carré knew from that field trip to south Asia, and “who had shaken more sand out of his shorts than most of them would walk over
