Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

The 1965 film version of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, directed by Martin Ritt, in austere monochrome and with a mordant leading performance from Richard Burton, has that shadowy Carol Reed sense of misery and fear. (And at one further remove, Le Carré’s darkness and sense of sin maybe had something of the German expressionists, Peter Lorre’s child-murderer in Fritz Lang’s M, on the run from his accusers.) Orson Welles’s breezy Harry Lime talking about the happy Swiss inventing nothing more interesting than the cuckoo clock was the tone of complaisant, emollient cynicism that Le Carré was to encounter in the real-life British establishment, and which he satirised and anatomised in his own work. The paranoia, the sense of postwar peace perennially threatened and undermined by some new terrible incursion, the theme of personal betrayal, and the vivid nightmare of “going over to the other side” in a theological or geopolitical sense: it all informed his writing.

The dark shadows of that movie loomed over his imagination, from a city (Vienna) divided up by the second world war’s victorious and now mutually resentful allies. Le Carré’s fiction had a twine of celluloid in its DNA: particularly the movie-making of Graham Greene and Carol Reed in The Third Man. It’s “David”, and only if you’re at that pay grade, which I wasn’t.) As he had called me “Peter”, I replied by calling him “John”. To my shame, I committed the No 1 error of protocol with him. While always very relaxed, he had that alpha-donnish skill in asking you questions – including detailed questions about my own recent reviews. He was instantly charming, eloquent and inexhaustibly curious and knowledgeable about the movies showing in Berlin that year, especially Alex Gibney’s Zero Days, a documentary about cyberwarfare.

I met John le Carré once, in 2016 appropriately enough, it was in Berlin where the TV adaptation of The Night Manager was getting a showcase premiere at the film festival - and the city where, as an MI6 agent in 1961 he had witnessed the construction of the Wall, which inspired his breakthrough novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré