The art of deception

Adam Sisman’s Life of John le Carré (TLS, December 18, 2015) left out both the full extent and all the fine detail of its subject’s persistent philandering. In the wake of the publication of a memoir by one of le Carré’s mistresses and, separately, some of his letters, including those to lovers, and with both le Carré and his long-suffering wife now dead, Sisman has felt able to provide this slim addendum – which he variously describes as a “coda”, “annexe” and “supplement”: “What Was Left Out”. Or perhaps “the portrait in the attic” – an allusion Sisman makes himself about the corrosive effect on le Carré of his own deceitful and manipulative behaviour. The deleterious psychological effect of that behaviour on so many of his lovers, and on his family, is horribly evident, his self-justification predictable and risible.

Very little in Sisman’s new book wasn’t by now either known or guessable, and the rest is a miserable recital of the infidelities: a routine of flirtation, seduction, flattery, control, denigration, paranoid accusation, ghosting. Sisman isn’t really convincing that this book is crucial to an understanding of le Carré’s books, nor that he himself doesn’t have any agenda beyond “a duty to the truth”. “In writing this book I have been conscious”, he says, “that it could be considered an act of revenge or betrayal.” Indeed, he spends the top and tail of the book discussing the circumstances that led to his earlier book’s suppressions and distortions. It does feel as if, despite his protestations, Sisman too might be working through a few difficult feelings about how le Carré treated him, and how that now looks.

In terms of le Carré’s work, the inability to write well about women has been often remarked upon. In the original biography Sisman, a superfan, was quite forgiving on this point: but in the new book, noting that in his seventies le Carré was no longer an active philanderer, Sisman is strikingly dismissive of his former idol: “He continued writing up to the end but it is perhaps no coincidence that the novels became less interesting and more formulaic. Without a new muse for each book, his inspiration dried up”.

One thing that has perhaps been overlooked is that in those later books the female characters undergo a small but striking change. For most of his career (The Little Drummer Girl aside) they are modelled on his mistresses, and are simply two-dimensional objects of desire, until Tessa Quayle in The Constant Gardener (2001), based on the activist Yvette Pierpaoli, with whom le Carré had a brief affair before the relationship became a deeper and more serious friendship. Thereafter we mostly encounter attractive young professional women such as the bike-riding lawyer Annabel Richter (based on the journalist Carla Hornstein), and the barrister Gail Perkins (partially based on le Carré’s daughter-in-law Clare Algar). Might le Carré have been waking up, if only a little, to the challenging fact that even beautiful women have both intelligence and agency?

The truly dreadful novel A Legacy of Spies (TLS September 8, 2017) – in which octogenarian ex-spook Peter Guillam must acknowledge his dismal past of murky spy operations and lifelong promiscuity under the unforgiving questioning of personified posterity (“History as an expressionless woman with short hair, brown eyes and no make up”) – can now be plausibly seen as a reaction to Sisman’s probing discoveries in the preceding years, and the panic they induced in le Carré before he persuaded Sisman to remain silent. Guillam is forced to go over all the documented evidence by his pitiless interrogators: “Intermittently he is so appalled by the antics of his earlier self that he is on the verge of denying them, until the evidence condemns him out of his own mouth”.