Over the Wall, into a new year

I first met Mr. Le Carré on a cold, cold wet night while I was waiting for my child to be born in the dark autumn of 2015. At least, that is the approximate truth, and makes a neater story than the one posed by the vagaries of my memory. The bare truth is that I don’t quite remember when he and I met first, although it was around that time. I sense, though, I sense strongly that the exact shape of the truth is not as important to him or to me as shaping a hell of a good story out of our meeting and subsequent acquaintance.

I suppose you could say I can’t be sure because I’ve never met Mr. Le Carré in person. More precisely, perhaps I should say I can’t apply traditional ways of knowing to a connection that feels as live and vibrant now after his recent death as it ever did while he was alive. What I’m saying, I suppose, is I am sure in ways that matter to me that he is quite comfortable with me writing about him, although I’m not so sure how you (the reader) will feel about an author appreciation post predicated on what is essentially a relationship with the dead.

I’m very comfortable with dead people. I grew up around death as a child in Indonesia, where death is, if not especially prevalent, at least especially ill-disguised. I know what death smells like, tastes like. I have seen over the Wall into Death’s kingdom more times than I can count, and if I have failed to drop over the side as Mr. Leamas also failed to do in The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, perhaps I also have my reasons.

And perhaps, also, this is why I have found a second home in the fictional worlds created by Mr. Le Carré. Dull ones, for sure, from a certain point of view: no one knew how to describe an endless east German hallway the way Mr. Le Carré did, or the dull flickering of sodium-yellow lights in an abandoned and sickly green Moscow hospital.

Meaningful worlds, for all that, though. In the midst of a topsy-turfy pandemic year, I found myself turning once again to the work of Mr. Le Carré, because for all the enunciated vagaries of spying, his stories always contained an essentially moral core. I don’t mean the word moral in the tidy, almost evangelical sense that evokes my own early memories of The Scarlet Letter. Nor do I mean it in the more domesticated sense the word evoked for Poirot in Agatha Christie’s mysteries: where murder will out and murder is always wrong. I get the feeling Mr Le Carré has seen too much of the dark things of this world to ever believe in a moral dimension to the universe that can be measured to the fraction of a centimeter, like a suit worn by one of his more disreputable rascals (Dicky Roper, say, in The Night Manager, which was my poison of choice this fall, this winter).

Nevertheless, to stretch the metaphor beyond anything Mr. Le Carré would recognize as good Cambridge English: the suit fits. There is an undeniable moral dimension—a sense of true good and true evil—in Mr. Le Carré’s work, and that perspective was one I found I needed badly as I began to come to terms with the eventual dissolution of American democracy, and with the death of the post-war consensus, which provided a steady (if staid) mental wallpaper throughout my childhood. There was a reassuring sense when I was a little boy that the world was structured in ways that (if not always just) were at least predictable; to put it another way, there was a consensus that the world was structured along a moral axis, and there was a consensus that that fact was important, that it was real, and that it was worth preserving. In this delicate moment, Mr. Le Carré is one of those authors from a past generation who assures me I am not guilty of treacle-laced sentimentality about my own childhood. I am not misremembering. Something indeed was there, and something perhaps irreparable has been lost. It has been hard to lose that axis.  

At the same time, I grieve the loss of the canvas upon which Mr. Le Carré’s stories were written. A canvas of venal, uncertain heroes to be sure, a canvas of villains whose villainy lay as much in the cheap rye bread and bad lighting of their towns as in the torture, rendition, and disappearance they perpetrated upon his characters. You see, in a Le Carré story there is always philosophy, philosophy expresses itself in the everyday as much as in the dramatic, and philosophy always has consequences. I believe that is true. 

A Le Carré story is the living embodiment of the dictum that though the mills of God grind slowly they grind exceeding fine. I found that perspective oddly necessary and comforting in a year when large segments of the population in my country extended a penchant for fictional worlds to a point of pandemic denial, and effectively murdered a third of a million of their fellow citizens (and counting).

As a new year dawns with a sense of relief that we can close the books on what seems a uniquely grim 365-day period to many of us, I feel Le Carré is here to remind us that our choices still matter, that this is not a uniquely terrible year, and that the structural problems of a society without a consensual reality do not go away with the changing of a calendar. In fact, without a broad consensual moral compass, without the staid wallpaper that I certainly took for granted as a child (and I think many others did as well)—without this backdrop against which Mr. Le Carré shaped his stories—the problems that faced our society are likely insurmountable.

And he’s here to remind us that’s ok. And that mounting a fight in the face of an eternally renewed opponent remains necessary even if the struggle is hopeless. History is strange, after all. Heroism matters. And it’s just possible that those among us seeking to renew and strengthen the national contract in the United States shall succeed, despite the odds.

Le Carré, in a word, gives me hope. Not hope that would shift or change one iota if President-Elect Biden had truly lost in November. It is a cold hope, like a Cold War, and it keeps well. And this is the kind of hope I need in the cold January of an uncertain year. It is the reason I keep a relationship with Mr. Le Carré in my own way. Whether you are comfortable speaking with the dead or not, I hope this at least prompts you to select one of his best, pour out a dram, and read the night away. And if you need an idea of where to start, I suggest Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—because institutional renewal never goes out of style.