Book Review

The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre, Viking.

‘Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I’m sitting now.’

David Cornwall, better known as John le Carre, is a master storyteller. But as a number of reviewers of this new memoir have pointed out, “look behind the smoke and mirrors and you will find a more reflective and slightly chastened figure, all passion spent, and perhaps less comfortable than hitherto in the world of cross and double-cross he has created around himself.”

In The Pigeon Tunnel le Carre, perhaps for the first time, discusses his father Ronnie at some length, and also his mother Olive, absent for much of his life. Ronnie was a con artist who could sometimes seem to lead a life of glamour and luxury, but was also a violent and cruel man who left devastation in his wake wherever he went. Lies and deceit were the norm in le Carre’s childhood, and it is not hard to see the link to the later intelligence officer and later still writer of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. What these memoirs also demonstrate is the enormous amount of research that lies behind these gripping stories, the adventures involved in doing that research, often in dangerous places and amongst dangerous people, and le Carre’s evolving social conscience, clearly seen in The Constant Gardener and The Night Manager amongst his other titles.

Alan Bellamy