A U T H O R    I N T E R V I E W S J O H N    L E    C A R R E www.johnlecarre.com Interviewed by John Connolly In a very lovely, very private house in the north London district of Hampstead, the sins of the father still rest heavily on the son. He is 69, and his father has been dead for many years. His own children are now grown, with children of their own, and his relationship with them is, he says, "the glory of my life". He is about to publish his 18th novel, and a film of his 16th is set for release shortly after, but still the shadow of the Old Man hangs over him. He has tried to exorcise his ghost, most famously in the semi-autobiographical A Perfect Spy and again, more than a decade later, in Single & Single, but it has not gone away. The Old Man's legacy has dominated his life and much of his work. It will, most likely, follow him to the grave, and then his father will be buried a second time. For, in a strange way, the writer John le Carré has become his father. * * * John le Carré does not give many interviews, and his reputation is that of a man with little affection for the press. It is a reputation that is hard to equate with the relaxed, hospitable individual who, on an overcast winter's day, has opened his house and his Scotch to talk about his life and work. But then, the writer born David John Moore Cornwell in Dorset in 1931 (the pseudonym "John le Carré" adopted because his first three novels were written while he was still working for the British secret service) has reason to feel some small measure of contentment. He is happily married - to Jane, his second wife - and can laugh with his children. He professes himself pleased with John Boorman's soon-to-be-released film of The Tailor of Panama, which was shot in Ireland with Pierce Brosnan, Jamie Lee Curtis and Geoffrey Rush, and which le Carré co-scripted from his own novel. Meanwhile, his latest book, The Constant Gardener, is very good indeed, his righteous anger at the machinations of big pharmaceutical corporations lending the book an energy and power which would be be admirable in a writer at the beginning of his career but is remarkable in a novelist with 17 previous books under his belt. But despite his successes, all roads in le Carré's life still seem to come back to his childhood, and to Ronnie. Ronnie: the would-be politician who swindled the gullible out of their savings. Ronnie: the bankrupt who tried to sue his own son for not mentioning him in a documentary. Ronnie: the failed father who inadvertently equipped his son to become both a writer and a spy. The con-man Ronald Thomas Archibald Cornwell was half-Irish: his grandmother came from Co. Cork and may have been a Jewish immigrant, but like so much about Ronnie the truth is difficult to establish. He was jailed for the first time as a young man and sent to the Victorian surroundings of Wormwood Scrubs prison. Later, he would add prisons in Indonesia and Switzerland to the list of penal institutions unwillingly visited. He acquired, and quickly disposed of, an array of cars, racehorses, houses, and women. At the age of 64 he faced the London Bankruptcy Court with liabilities of #467,949 and assets of #246. As one of his father's henchmen explained to le Carré after Ronnie's death: "David, we was all bent, but your dad was very, very bent indeed." "It was an extraordinary childhood," le Carré recalls, remembering how, as a small boy, he would trawl through his father's letters and files in an effort to find out more - or anything - about him. "It still haunts me, and though I did succeed in writing about it in A Perfect Spy after my father had died, I was never really able to cope with the real black underside of it. He attempted various orthodox businesses but he had a devil in him that made him look for the crooked way to do something. There were times when you just cracked up because it really was terribly funny, but the collective effect of it was, in some instances, disastrous to the little people." Le Carré's mother disappeared when he was five, abandoning her two sons to the care of Ronnie. Le Carré eventually tracked her down when he was 21, and met her for the first time in 16 years at Ipswich railway station. "I think my greatest curiosity when I went to see her was, I think, to find out about my father, not about her." His youth was spent in a succession of boarding schools, instilling in him a hatred of oppressive institutions, whether educational, literary, or govermental, that continues to this day. Occasionally, he would be placed in the care of his father's criminal associates or would be conscripted to play some small part in one of Ronnie's latest scams, most memorably his abortive attempt to become a Member of Parliament. It was only by fleeing to Switzerland at the age of 16 that le Carré first began to shake off Ronnie's immediate influence. Father and son were never reconciled. He studied at Bern University then, following his National Service, attended Oxford. But his experiences on the road with his father, and the fact that he had been forced to fend for himself for so much of his childhood, had changed him in ways that made him eminently suitable for his subsequent choice of career: spying. "It made me extremely wary, very furtive and shifty. It was the only way to respond to that kind of menace as one person alone: through craft, false associations and affiliations. I naturally fitted into the intelligence community, but with the addition of putting my larceny at the service of the state. I had learned the black arts from my dad and I put that to practical use." He worked for both M15 and M16, but dismisses his role in the espionage business as comparatively minor, describing himself as "a mouse". More important was his discovery that the Cold War world was one about which he could write, pseudonymously publishing his first novel, Call for the Dead, in 1961. It introduced the world to his most enduring character, the spymaster George Smiley, based in part upon an MI5 spy named John Bingham and immortalised on screen by Sir Alec Guinness. But it was not until 1963 and the publication of his third book, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, that le Carré's career took off. The story of Alec Leamas, a burned-out British spy who is persuaded to attempt the assassination of a sadistic East German intelligence officer named Mundt, it emerged from a period of personal and professional discontent in le Carré's life that ended with the collapse of his first marriage, his retirement from the service, and the start of a new career as a novelist. Since then, le Carré has produced a new book every two or three years, most famously the trilogy of novels comprising Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People, and the dense, troubled exploration of his father's life and legacy, A Perfect Spy. Yet despite the seeming authenticity of the books, le Carré simply made up a great deal of the espionage material. In a case of life imitating art, some of the terms he coined for his fiction later found their way into the real-life vocabulary of the spy. " I think I incurred the anger of the spies initially because they felt that I had impugned their honour," he says. "It's always the pride of those services in our country that they don't do terrible things, which is odd because in a sense they are paid to do with the left hand what the government can't do with the right. Now I think they are pleased with me because I have given them a mythology." Spies are not the only people to have been displeased by le Carré. At various points the charge of anti-Semitism has been levelled at him, most recently when a critic for the New York Times Book Review, reviewing The Tailor of Panama and confusing the author with his characters, accused him of getting in touch with his inner anti-Semite. It's a charge that le Carré, who was greatly affected by visits to Belsen and Dachau shortly after the end of the Second World War, and who worked with displaced Jews in Austria as a young army officer, has always rejected. Then, in 1997, le Carré became involved in an exchange of letters in the Guardian newspaper over the Salman Rushdie affair, after he expressed the view that Rusdie could hardly be surprised at the fact that Muslims had been offended by The Satanic Verses. Rushdie called him a "pompous ass", but Le Carré is unrepentant. "I don't regret a word I ever said about the Rushdie affair. I think that the thing I found impossible to take was that an absolutist doctrine of free speech was being propagated in the name of tolerance. If you actually call a book The Satanic Verses when every Muslim knows that is a vile play of words, you are asking for a black eye." Le Carré is often perceived as, first and foremost, a spy novelist, but he argues that what connects the novels, both espionage and non-espionage, is the relationship between individuals and the groups, societies and institutions that they serve, the capacity of seemingly humane individuals to perform terrible acts when acting in concert with others. It is a relationship explored once again in The Constant Gardener, this time against the backdrop of mutinational corporations and Third World aid. It is perhaps ironic that a writer who spent a formative part of his life working for the British secret service in the fight against communism should now be concerned with the threat of global capitalism, but for le Carré the progression is unavoidable. "I waited in vain for a new order to be offered to us after the Cold War ended," he explains. "There was no new order, there was no Marshall Plan, there was nothing. Everybody just wanted to get rich and stay home. The dignification of greed became absolute and I think the consequence of that is we have licensed the great corporations to go out and kill for us wherever they want. And if in order to do that you have to turn the Third World into a third class farm to fund our lifestyle, let it be done. The idea that corporations should have an ethical centre of their own is just grotesque. They haven't, and that is what nations are for: to control them." The "constant gardener" of the book's title is Justin Quayle, a British diplomat in Kenya whose wife is murdered while travelling through the north of the country. Quayle sets out on his own search for the truth, piecing together elements of his wife's past while being hunted by both his own people and the men responsible for his wife's death. The villains are, appropriately, faceless, the instruments of a large drug corporation that is using poor Kenyans as human guinea pigs in the testing of a new, and fatally flawed, anti-TB drug. It is a novel that is uncomfortably close to the truth of how western drug corporations are sacrificing African lives for commercial gain. "When you discover, as I did, that pharmaceutical companies are dumping expiring medicines in the Third World, medicines that are no longer recommended in the Western World, and vastly overcharging for them while crediting themselves with tax breaks for charitable purposes, then it becomes a metaphor for the most cynical exploitation of the poorest and most wretched of the earth," says le Carré, his voice rising with his temper. To support his argument, Le Carré quotes from estimates provided by one US drug manufacturer. The AIDS triple therapy drug costs $10,000 per year, but the manufacturer consulted by le Carré claims that he could make the same drugs available to sufferers for $230 and still turn a decent profit if he didn't have to respect patents filed by the drug's originators, ostensibly to cover research and development costs. "But you find very often that what these corporations have done is that they have bought in substances developed under subsidy in other countries. They haven't paid the R&D themselves. Perhaps it is an old man's anger at discovering how base, how vile, human nature can be. I've always hated bullies, from childhood onwards, it's as simple as that, and this is monstrous bullying." With that, the interview draws to a close, but not before le Carré does a pretty fair impression of an intoxicated Graham Greene attempting to poison the elderly patrons of a boarding house by switching their medication around. "It was an absolutely wicked thing to do, monstrous," says le Carré, "but the imp in him was sleepless. "There is an imp in le Carré too, an imp bequeathed to him by his father that has brought him fame and wealth but also alienation and unhappiness. It is the imp that made him a good spy, and a better writer, but at the cost of a happy childhood and a peaceful adulthood. "Writers are not the heroes of society," he concludes, "but its betrayers, its sneaks. There is larceny in us, for which we do not have to have the example of a wicked dad. "But," he adds, "it helps..." The Constant Gardener will be published in January 2001 by Hodder & Stoughton.