![]() ![]() His quiet anguish, as he struggles with ideas of loyalty and morality, epitomise his country’s larger dilemmas. Le Carré’s best known character, the master spy George Smiley, hero of the trilogy of novels, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) and Smiley’s People (1979), is one of the archetypal English characters of 20th century fiction. The novels that made him famous, after his third thriller, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in 1963, form a penetrating anatomy of Britain's decline as a world power. Under his real name of David Cornwell, le Carré served as a British diplomat and, secretly, as a spy for the counter-intelligence agency MI5. ![]() In a BBC documentary to be broadcast on Saturday, le Carré’s son Nicholas says his father, bitterly disillusioned by Brexit, embraced his Irish heritage and became an Irish citizen before his death last December. ![]() In a twist worthy of his great thrillers, John le Carré, the most English of contemporary novelists, “died an Irishman”. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |