Robert McCrum talks to John le Carr about his new novel, women and why he avoids other English writers
John le Carr was born in 1931. His third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, secured him an international reputation, which was consolidated by the acclaim for his trilogy Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People. The Constant Gardener, his 18th novel, continues his movement beyond the politics of the Cold War and into the implications of the “new world order”, exploring corporate shenanigans in the Third World.
What is The Constant Gardener about?
At the level that is closest to me it’s about somebody making an interior journey and discovering, after a flawed life, some kind of morality. Beyond that it’s about the same subject that I’ve written about right from the beginning, which is man’s relationship with the institutions he creates whether they’re intelligence institutions or commercial. Beyond that again, it’s about what we now have in place of nations: a corporate ethic subscribed to to my total frustration by the present [British] government. The extraordinary belief that at the centre of corporations lies a moral purpose, some humanitarian self-restraint. It’s nonsense.
Was there a moment of inspiration for the book?
It was cumulative. Since The Honourable Schoolboy I have started paying much more attention to the Third World. I found myself drawn repeatedly to former colonies. Cumulatively I was aware of the level of repression and bullying which was happening in the name of Western democracy.
Did you look for this subject or did it come to you?
I wanted to do corporate behaviour in the Third World. After the Ken Saro-Wiwa business in Nigeria I thought very seriously of oil. Once I started talking off the record to people in the pharmaceutical industry, and to those few brave people who have tried to unmask its activities, I didn’t look back.
Your last novel, Single and Single, was published two years ago. This seems to have been written fast.
It was written fast. Once it got going there was very little industrial waste, very little going back, rewriting. I’ve had perhaps three or four books which seem to have been carried by a surge. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was one, and so was The Little Drummer Girl. If you get all the bits right at the beginning and you come into the story at the right place and you’ve got the premise identified with the main characters, then you’re up and running.
Justin Quayle in The Constant Gardener, like the main characters in all your books, wrestles with his love for the state and his duty to himself and his conscience. Do you think betrayal is your essential theme?
Self and state, self and institutions.
Did you always want to be a writer?
Yes, I really think I did.
Can you remember a point when you said to yourself, ‘This is what I want to do’?
Yeah, at Sherborne [school]. I won the poetry prize with a perfectly ghastly poem which I’ve tried to destroy all copies of. And then, when I went into the secret world I shared a room with a writer called John Bingham, the Lord Clanmorris. John, by example, really encouraged me. He wrote whenever he had a spare moment, and it seemed a wonderful thing to have a book running as a kind of subtext in your life. When I began writing, I thought it would be a sort of antidote to the routine of a civil service existence.
Up to that point you’d imagined yourself being a lifelong civil servant?
Yes. I think they imagined it too. I suffered some kind of almost hallucinatory sense of story when I went to Berlin and saw the Wall beginning to go up. And I wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in about five or six weeks. Sometimes, as with this book, I could go for 14, 15 hours at a shot. I wrote great chunks and didn’t alter much. It was the same feeling that I’d got it right, I’d got the characters, it just seemed wonderfully easy.
Who are the writers you read as a boy, and who do you admire?
I read at the heavier level masses of Bernard Shaw, Galsworthy. And then I loved, still love, our mutual friend PG Wodehouse. Conan Doyle I thought was terrific. I still think that, although he never really brought it off, Somerset Maugham was the most polished narrative stylist of his period. Quite extraordinary. And then of course I read Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene and George Orwell. Those were my people up to 16, when I removed myself from Sherborne and chucked it all in favour of German literature.
Obviously a big influence.
It was a very big influence. Stories of the education of one man, which this is, and Heinrich Hlderlin and the Nibelungenlied. They always carried the same moral search.
Graham Greene described childhood as “a writer’s bank balance”. Do you think that’s true of you?
In that sense, I was born a millionaire. I mean it just was extraordinary.
In the past the women in your books have been untrustworthy and faithless, but the marvellous Tessa Quayle in The Constant Gardener is unswerving. Is this a turning point?
It is a sort of change in me. Going back to childhood, I had no example of a mother, because she disappeared and we were nomadic. So I never sustained relationships with women of any age, let alone girlfriends. For years I had a very, very untidy love life. Latterly it’s come all right.
You’ve always written thrillers. Why is this? In The Constant Gardener you write: “If you can’t deal with reality then dream up a conspiracy.” Is that a clue?
We were born into a great tension, my brother and I, in that our life was pretence. We were projecting ourselves as nice middle-class, short-back-and-sides young men. We learned quite quickly that our dad was a con man, that life was extremely dangerous. That tension never left me. I’m sure that if I wrote the most passive-seeming suburban novel, I would still be looking for a bunched, tense, perilous arrangement of events at the end of it.
In the United States you’re treated as a great novelist, over here as a great genre writer. Why?
I don’t know. I now have a much larger readership in Europe than in the US. And there I seem to get by as somebody who’s commented on our own time. In this country, actually to persist with one subject and to work that field as I have done is simply perceived as hack work. The notion that you might be using a microcosm to illustrate a larger context is considered pretentious.
On the whole I’ve avoided the company of my fellow English writers and that world. I think that it threatens me in a number of ways. Envy is always up and running. I’ve made a lot of money out of writing, I’ve made a name. But more particularly I fear for myself that I could be drawn towards their standards and their pretensions. I don’t read them. I’ve dipped into [Ian] McEwan, walked away again, and dipped into a number of highly rated contemporary writers. I feel we’re simply not in the same ball park. I don’t mean I’m better or worse, I mean we’re just doing completely different things. So I just feel completely out of step with the English literary scene.
Does that trouble you in any way?
Not at all. I think I’ve been so fortunate. With that whole secret world stuff I was a round peg in a round hole. It was a comedy of English manners and attitudes. I was able to write about, as you might say, the period pains of a post-imperial Britain which had had the appalling problem of winning two wars on the trot and had a self-perception that was completely irrelevant to the rest of the world. It goes on and on and on. All those changes that seemed to hang in the air earlier, they simply haven’t taken place. The public schools aren’t threatened, the Establishment still runs Britain. Go and sit in the Atheneum or any London club, you see the same suits, the same faces, the same furtive little eyes looking at you.
You’re nearly 70. This is a book that could have been written by a man a generation younger. It’s full of energy and full of drive.
It just feels like my best time now.
So do you think this is the beginning of a surge of new writing?
I hope it is, obviously. I hope it is.
What do you think your place is in English literature?
That one, thank heaven, is not my problem. As in most other departments of British life, for the few people who can actually do it, there are a great number of commentators who say how it should be done [laughs]. For that huge literary bureaucracy, we mustn’t take their bone away.