Reading The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My LIfe by John Le Carre
How many of you have read, and re-read, Le Carre? I confess to going back every few years to reread Smiley's People...I do love George Smiley.
If you fell in love early with John le Carre (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? The Spy Who Came in From the Cold?), found his earlier books, and then followed his protagonists breathlessly through Hong Kong, Hamburg, Chechnya, Panama, the Middle East, you will revel in The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Le Carre shows us his charming abusive con-man father, popping up like a jack-in-the-box when least wanted, and his disappeared mother, refound later, a mystery and vacancy still. “Spying was forced on me from birth….” He describes his flight from English boarding school to the Swiss alps, passionate about skiing and German language and literature, and how that led to his first teen-aged tasks for the British secret service. We get vivid vignettes of his early service in the British embassy in post-war Bonn, including the daily exercise in mental discipline by a German death-camp escapee.
But then he’s writing, “writing on the hoof, in notebooks on walks, in trains and cafes.” He tells us his process: “Out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for the reality. Then back to the imagining….” So to the stories that emerged from his spy work he adds research, “the search for the reality.” He latches onto a war correspondent and goes to the Mekong, visits Phnom Penh in the last days before the Khmer Rouge takes over. He visits Russia in 1987, followed everywhere, and meets Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, the watchers’ flashbulbs exploding in their faces. He returns to Russia in 1993 and wangles a chilling visit with a high-level Russian mafioso, learning about vory law: “Does one vor kill another for breaking vory law?” “If it is ordered by the council.” He pursues and receives meetings with Yasser Arafat, and an Israeli prison in the Negev, perhaps background for The Little Drummer Girl. In the hair-raising chapter “Hunting for Warlords” he persuades an intrepid reporter and a polyglot analyst to take him to East Congo and the border with Rwanda, in “the search for the reality” for The Mission Song.
But there’s whipped cream and a cherry as well, in the hilarious descriptions of his contacts with the weird world of movie-making—for example, the bitter feud between Richard Burton and the director of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
At 84, Le Carre has given us another absorbing read, with the eternal themes of spies, ethical dilemmas, betrayal, and upheaval in our world. I didn’t want it to end. Five stars.
If you fell in love early with John le Carre (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy? The Spy Who Came in From the Cold?), found his earlier books, and then followed his protagonists breathlessly through Hong Kong, Hamburg, Chechnya, Panama, the Middle East, you will revel in The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life. Le Carre shows us his charming abusive con-man father, popping up like a jack-in-the-box when least wanted, and his disappeared mother, refound later, a mystery and vacancy still. “Spying was forced on me from birth….” He describes his flight from English boarding school to the Swiss alps, passionate about skiing and German language and literature, and how that led to his first teen-aged tasks for the British secret service. We get vivid vignettes of his early service in the British embassy in post-war Bonn, including the daily exercise in mental discipline by a German death-camp escapee.
But then he’s writing, “writing on the hoof, in notebooks on walks, in trains and cafes.” He tells us his process: “Out of the secret world I once knew I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for the reality. Then back to the imagining….” So to the stories that emerged from his spy work he adds research, “the search for the reality.” He latches onto a war correspondent and goes to the Mekong, visits Phnom Penh in the last days before the Khmer Rouge takes over. He visits Russia in 1987, followed everywhere, and meets Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner, the watchers’ flashbulbs exploding in their faces. He returns to Russia in 1993 and wangles a chilling visit with a high-level Russian mafioso, learning about vory law: “Does one vor kill another for breaking vory law?” “If it is ordered by the council.” He pursues and receives meetings with Yasser Arafat, and an Israeli prison in the Negev, perhaps background for The Little Drummer Girl. In the hair-raising chapter “Hunting for Warlords” he persuades an intrepid reporter and a polyglot analyst to take him to East Congo and the border with Rwanda, in “the search for the reality” for The Mission Song.
But there’s whipped cream and a cherry as well, in the hilarious descriptions of his contacts with the weird world of movie-making—for example, the bitter feud between Richard Burton and the director of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
At 84, Le Carre has given us another absorbing read, with the eternal themes of spies, ethical dilemmas, betrayal, and upheaval in our world. I didn’t want it to end. Five stars.
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