Book review: The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre

The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre

Reminiscences from the spy who can string a sentence or two.  And how.

Behind the smoke and the mirrors, this book,  by this onetime  MI5 agent,  is a master class in the art of story-writing,  because every one of these stories from his life are fascinating anecdotes. And while some  readers may see a clear demarcation of David Cornwell from John le Carre, many others, this reviewer included, sees the two as a seamless whole.

He wrote The Pigeon Tunnel  at 84,  and what splendid reading it makes.  “These are true stories told from memory,”  le Carre writes in the introduction, adding the swift proviso: ” … pure memory remains as elusive as a bar of wet soap. Or it does for me, after a lifetime of blending experience with imagination.“  And there you have it.

Yasser Arafat, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Graham Greene, Rupert Murdoch, Richard Burton, (`Richard needs you David,` they tell him, and fly a bemused Cornwell  down to Burton who was being in character as Alec Leamas. The task at hand? To handhold Burton) , a shady  Panamanian diplomat, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, Anthony Blunt, they all are in here.  An account of a dinner meeting with Mrs Thatcher is quite droll: she introduces him to the Dutch PM,  saying she was sure the latter would know David Cornwell better as the writer John le Carre. The Dutch PM  sits up, takes a long hard look at our man, then shakes his head no.

Then there are interesting snippets of films made and not made from his works.  Genteel bragging? Well, you do run into sentences like this one: Next morning we fly to Deauville in Sydney`s Lear. Sydney being none other than Sydney Pollack,  the Hollywood director. And for all the self- deprecatory humour, you recognise it as a great writer`s nod to his own fame.

A not-  too- close look at the psyche of a spy? Perhaps. Le Carre/Cornwell talks about the inadvertent rigorous editing his communiqués received from a senior in MI5 and how that may well have set him on the path to becoming a writer of spy thrillers! Spying and novel- writing are made for each other, he says in his defence. Both call for a ready eye for human transgression and there many routes to betrayal. Those of us who have been inside the secret tent never really leave it.

There is a glorious passage where le Carre talks of how spies were commissioned  back  in those days.

To be spotted you had to be born lucky. You had to have gone to a good school, preferably a private one, and to a university, preferably Oxbridge. Ideally, there should already be spies in your family background, or at least a soldier or two. At some point unknown to you, you had to catch the eye of a headmaster,  tutor or dean who, having judged you a suitable candidate for recruitment, summoned you to his rooms, closed the door and offered you a glass of sherry and the opportunity to meet interesting  friends in London. If you said yes, then a letter to you might arrive in an eye-catching double- sealed pale blue envelope with an embossed official crest inviting you to present yourself at an address somewhere in Whitehall, and your life as a spy might or might not have begun.  

Ah. I wonder if MI5 is still recruiting in this manner.