By GILBERT WONG
The question we want the answer to about John le Carre is what sort of spy was he?
His voice is very Oxbridge, as smooth as expensive brandy. "I was the lowliest worm in the secret service."
We must take that with a grain of salt, because whether it is his reputation as an author or his untold history as a spy, le Carre is the sort of person who can arrange lunch with Sir Maurice Oldfield, ex-head of MI6, or meet up with Yasser Arafat in a bombed-out Beirut warehouse. He has a mystique which continues to drive much of his myth.
At 69, le Carre holds to a code of patriotism and honour that can seem both quaint and admirable in a world where the confessional book and reality TV have become grist to the mass media mill.
Yes, le Carre has read some of The Big Breach by Richard Tomlinson, the ex-New Zealander and former MI6 agent.
"I was sickened by what I read. Not because of the content, but the very act of writing about this topic. The confidence of agents in the field is a sacred trust."
Le Carre, the first guest of the New Zealand Herald/Dymocks literary luncheons, defied expectation at the Sheraton Auckland yesterday.
The image gained from his fiction is of a shy, reclusive figure. One expected the author to be like his finest creation, George Smiley, a creature without "wealth, family, regiment or club."
That assumption has stood because le Carre is famous for his reticence. He has claimed to have never been interviewed for 27 years.
Yet here le Carre was in Auckland, raising laughs with self-deprecatory anecdotes about his fame.
He told of one of the few previous literary luncheons he had attended, held to celebrate the success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. He was mistaken for the chef Robert Carrier and asked how to stop souffles sinking.
So why has le Carre the author come in the from cold?
"I suppose I was getting older and was becoming more and more upset by what was written about me. I wanted to take control back, if you like, of this fictional le Carre that had been created."
The reality could be the stuff of fiction. His real name is David John Moore Cornwell and he was born in 1931 in Dorset. His mother abandoned him when he was 5. From 5 to 16 he was sent to boarding schools. He fled his final public school, Sherbourne, because his father, convicted conman Ronnie Cornwell, was no longer able to afford the fees. The shamed young Cornwell fled England, to Bern University in Switzerland, where he was recruited for the secret service.
Later, he completed a degree at Oxford and taught briefly at Eton before joining the Foreign Service as a diplomat and being posted to Bonn.
In Germany, he saw Berlin partitioned and the raising of the wall that became the concrete symbol of the Cold War.
"I remember succumbing to a state of fugue and absolute frustration because this was such a foul chapter of history."
He began to write, in longhand, as he still does. The result was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
Today, le Carre feels comfortable with his formerly secret history. His father is dead, his books have become worldwide bestsellers and the subject of film and television adaptations. His books have cross-pollinated the trade that is their subject. Terms such as "mole," "babysitter" and "pavement artist" have become the language of real spies.
No less an authority than Markus Wolf, the former head of the Stasi in East Germany, has complimented le Carre on his accurate depiction of interrogation techniques and other tricks of the trade.
But whatever the reality of his time as a spy, le Carre wants it left in the past.
"In a way I want to answer all those people who wrote my epitaph as a writer when the Cold War ended. They said my subject matter had also come to an end."
It has not. Le Carre's themes are human secrecy, the need to tell lies as individuals, nations and corporations.
His latest book, The Constant Gardener, targets the multinational pharmaceutical companies whose power and influence, le Carre accuses, have led to moral corruption on a grand scale.
As long as anti-retroviral drugs were protected by patents and priced according to what the American markets would stand, he said yesterday, they would not get to the people who desperately needed them - in particular, the 34 million people in Africa who were HIV-positive.
"People will die at a rate of three to four million a year without any help from us," he said. Is that something a civilised world should countenance? Nobody was brave enough to say he was wrong.
Agent author returns to literary limelight
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