About John le Carré . . .
	It seems that every foreign-intrigue novelist who is passably literate and possessed of a mild sense of irony is said to write like John le Carré. Which of course is patent nonsense, because only David Cornwell writes like John le Carré. Probably the worst such comparison is the plug that Robert Littell's publishers have been using for years: "Robert Littell is the American le Carré." – New York Times. I've tried to find the original quote, but the Times has no record whatsoever of it. (Could it have come from one of Littell's editors in a Letter To The Times?) On the basis of Littell's The Company, despite its enthusiastic reception by critics, I'd characterize Littell as the non-Carré. "The American le Carré?" If there is an "American le Carré," I promise you he's not Robert Littell. (I'll give Littell this: He's no Robert Ludlum – and that's a very large compliment.) I've also been compared to le Carré, and at first I embraced the comparison. Recently though, after some 30 years of reading and unconsciously deconstructing le Carré's novels, as writers will, I've begun to shy away from such comparisons. What le Carré does really hasn't been duplicated by anyone that I know of, certainly not by me. That's not to say his style and technique can't be duplicated – or that others haven't tried – but no one seems to have pulled the hat trick yet. Among other things, le Carré has a genius for digressing egregiously from his story-line while carrying you along without complaint. (The opening passages of The Russia House, and Jerry Westerby's Italian idle in The Honourable Schoolboy, come immediately to mind. They could have been edited down or even completely out, with no loss to either story. But the joy of reading this stuff overcame any piddling quibbles about Aristotelean unity.) And there's his gift of injecting artificial but thoroughly entertaining conflict in otherwise routine information dumps. Lauder Strickland's snotty attacks on Smiley in Smiley's People is a good example. Without Strickland, the chapter would simply lie there - another boring "so here's what happened" scene. And, oddly enough, he's not really a writer of thrillers. A "thriller" must have a looming, significant threat, either to a person or a place. Tinker, Tailor – my favorite of all his novels – is at first a mystery (and a procedural), and at the end a caper when Smiley sets the trap for "Gerald." Ditto Smiley's People; though Ostrakova is in jeopardy throughout, her risk isn't a big deal, and certainly it's not central to the plot. First mystery, at the end a caper. Above all, le Carré's greatest strengths are his talent for bringing real and magnificent people to the page, and his gift for implying threat in the most entertainingly oblique fashion. Much as I admire Eric Ambler, I have to admit that the greatest opening of any novel of intrigue was Chapter One of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Yet there's le Carré's occasional odd lapse, as with Jim's arrival at Thursgood's during a pelting rain in that opening chapter of Tinker, Tailor. Jim drives his Alvis and its trailer through this downpour into the Dip – an excavation for a planned swimming pool. But, oddly, there's no mention of the fact that the Dip would have collected as much as seven feet of water, sinking the car and perhaps floating the trailer. Jim blithely drives in and sets up housekeeping. Hello? Though mention is often made of le Carré's similarity to Ambler, I don't entirely see it. Ambler is funnier (le Carré's weak suit is humor) and where Ambler serves up wry irony, le Carré gives us bitter observations – particularly about Americans. If le Carré is similar to anyone, it seems to me – on the basis of no evidence but my gut feeling – that he's channeling Dickens and Thackeray . . . and perhaps Balzac. Even so, he's really a one-off: As I said, only David Cornwell writes like John le Carré.
	© Roy Hayes