First published 2016
John le Carré opens his memoir by drawing from decades serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War and his subsequent writing career. He traveled from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut before the 1982 Israeli invasion, from Russia before the Berlin Wall fell to Rwanda after genocide. Le Carré brings the same moral complexity to real events that marks his fiction. He describes a Beirut hotel parrot that mimicked machine gun fire and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. He spent New Year's Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat, interviewed a German terrorist in a Negev prison, and met two former KGB heads. He listened to Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov and watched Alec Guinness prepare to play George Smiley in the BBC adaptations. The author reveals how a female aid worker inspired The Constant Gardener's main character. Le Carré combines humor with insight, making readers laugh while reconsidering familiar events and figures. The memoir traces a writer's six-decade journey hunting for the human elements that animate his fictional characters.
Genres: 20th-century, autobiography, biography-memoir, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: memoir, non-fiction
Setting: Beirut, Cambodia, Germany, Israel, Rwanda, Russia
Period: 1982, Cold War, Pre-Berlin Wall
320 pages · Hardcover · Viking