Yesterday, Thursday, a new novel by the British spy novel king, John Le Carré, entitled "Silverview", was published in Britain, about a year after his death, while his son announced his intention to publish other new novels.
The novelist, who sold millions of books, whose real name is David Cornwell, would have celebrated his ninetieth birthday on the 19th of this month if he had been alive, but he died on December 12 last at the age of 89 due to complications from pneumonia.
During the announcement last spring of Silverview's release, his literary agent promised readers that in this 26th novel they would find the "distinguished voice" of Jean le Carré.
In this book, which brings the intelligence services back to the fore, the protagonist of the story, Julian Lundsley, leaves a prestigious position in London to take over a library in a small English coastal region, according to the book summary published by Penguin Vikings.
Just a few months into this new journey, a visitor comes to disturb Julian's good life.
It seems that this man named "Edward", a Polish immigrant residing in Silverview, knows a lot about Julian's family and is overly interested in his new activities.
The late writer's agent said that Le Carré "given his blessing" to the publication of the novel by his sons, who are working with the help of an archivist to create a schedule for his previously unpublished works.
Nicholas Cornwell, Le Carré's youngest son, confirmed that his father's archives include unpublished stories of George Smiley, the shy spy and the novelist's favorite hero.
"We don't know yet to what extent these stories are up-to-date and ready to publish and can be collected, and this is something we have to find out," he said.
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The king of spy novels
Le Carré, born David Cornwell in 1931, worked for MI5 and MI6 during the 1950s and 1960s.
The novels of the late writer revolved around the Cold War and depicted the world of espionage in that era, which knew exciting stories of American and Soviet spies alike.
Le Carré presented a different picture of the British intelligence world, where the lines between right and wrong blur, and the ends justify the means, away from the idealistic and romantic images drawn by other novelists who wrote in detective and espionage literature.
Secret life became famous novels
Le Carré lived a difficult childhood with his father away from his mother, and moved to Switzerland to join the University of "Bern" to study modern languages, and there he was recruited by a British spy working undercover at the embassy, where he began a life of espionage for nearly 16 years before turning his experience into espionage to write about it.
For a brief period, he lived a tripartite life: a diplomat, a spy, and a novelist, and the authorities prevented him from writing in his name, so he chose the "Jean Le Carré" for which he was famous.
Objectively speaking, Le Carré's real subject is not espionage, Timothy Garton Ash wrote in The New Yorker in 1999. It is an endless deceitful labyrinth of human relationships: betrayal is a kind of love, a lie is a kind of truth, good men They serve bad causes and the bad people serve the good," according to the New York Times.
Some critics considered Le Carré's message that the two systems - East and West - are morally equivalent, and both are equally bad, but he did not believe this, as "Le Carré" said in one of the interviews, "There is a big difference in working for the West and working for a state." totalitarian,” referring to his work as a spy in the fifties and early sixties of the last century.
About him, author Ian McEwan told the British newspaper "The Telegraph", in 2013, "I think he easily came out of being a writer of the literary genre, and will be remembered as the most important novelist of the second half of the 20th century in Britain," adding, "Mapping our decline And record the nature of our bureaucracies as no one else has done."
In 1954, Cornwell (Le Carré) married Allison Ann Veronica Sharp, and they had three children - before they divorced in 1971 - and the following year he married Valerie Jane Eustace, a book editor for the prestigious "Hodder & Stoughton", They had one son.
Le Carré is best known for his international novel "The Spy Who Came from the Cold" (1963) which was turned into a movie, and his novels, including "Plumber Tailor Soldier Spy" and "Most Wanted Man", were also made famous films.
Distinctive Vocabulary
In his books, the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6, was the "circus", agents were "frustrated", operations involving seduction were "honey traps", and agents deeply entrenched within the enemy were "moles". It is a term that has been attributed to him in wide use and may have been invented by him.
Such terms were used by real British spies to describe their work, just as the mafia absorbed the language of the "godfather" in their legends.
In his career spanning more than half a century, Le Carré has written and published more than 20 books as far afield as Rwanda, Chechnya, Turkey, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.
He tackled topics as diverse as the power of pharmaceutical companies, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall his novels became more controversial.
his political positions
Le Carré criticized writer Salman Rushdie for the latter's book The Satanic Verses, stating that "no one has a divine right to insult a great religion and publish this insult with impunity," the Economist reports.
In January 2003, two months before the US invasion of Iraq, the British newspaper The Times published an article "Le Carré" entitled "The United States has gone crazy" and the article included criticism of the escalation of the war in Iraq and President George W. Bush's response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, He said it was "worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs. In the long run it may be more disastrous than the Vietnam War and beyond anything Osama bin Laden hoped for, during his evil dreams," as he put it.
In 2017, Le Carré expressed his concerns about the future of liberal democracy, saying, “I think of all the things that were happening all over Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, in Germany. To me, there are quite comparable signs like the rise of fascism. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There is encouragement," he later wrote that the end of the Cold War left the West without a coherent ideology, in contrast to the "idea of individual freedom, inclusiveness, tolerance - and all we call anti-communism" prevalent during the time.
Le Carré opposed both former US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, arguing that their desire to seek to preserve their countries' standing as superpowers had caused an "oligarchy" impulse to reject truth, and contempt for voters and the democratic system. The United States is "heading straight down the road toward institutional racism and neo-fascism," he said.
In his latest novel, "An Agent Running in the Field," he wrote that Putin was a "fifth-grade spy... who interpreted life from a conspiratorial perspective" and ruled Russia with "a gang of unrepentant Stalinists", while criticizing Trump's foreign policy as subservient to Russia and obstructing the government. Britain to continue to cooperate with the United States, under his presidency, which is indifferent to European unity, NATO, and human rights.
Le Carré was an outspoken advocate of European integration and was highly critical of Brexit, and Le Carré accused right-wing politicians such as Boris Johnson of promoting national nostalgia for the class system, World War II and the British Empire, arguing that politicians were creating a false nostalgia. To England is not real, something we can't go back to!
In 2019, Le Carré wrote that he believed his ties to England had "failed considerably over the past few years. This is a kind of liberation, albeit sad."