![]() Le Carré’s world of espionage is never black and white but is a world shaded in grey. John Le Carre at the 2016 premiere of The Night Manager at the International Film Festival in Berlin, Germany (Gregor Fischer via Getty Images) This tension – whether the ends justified the means – is most obvious in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, his third novel, and the one which launched his career as a full-time writer. Le Carré’s characters continually agonised over the lengths to which liberal democracies should go, or must go, in order to defend these ideals. In a 2017 interview, he defined these ideals as “a notion of individual freedom, of inclusiveness, of tolerance. Those ideals are a central concern of his early novels. The ideals that had driven the West in the war against communism came to be forgotten, according to le Carré. Above all, le Carré showed in his later novels an increasing disillusionment with the United States as the acknowledged leader of the victors. The vacuum was filled, according to le Carré, by opportunistic politicians, rampant capitalism, nationalism, isolationism, rapacious multinational corporations, international criminal organisations and a Russian kleptocracy. Le Carré, however, welcomed plotting on a broader canvas. The fall of the Berlin Wall was predicted to spell the end of the spy novel. ![]()
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