Three years after le Carré’s death, his official biographer reveals the adultery that was off limits during his lifetime. Does it further our appreciation of his work?
oon after the deaths of John le Carré, AKA David Cornwell, and his wife, Jane, weeks apart in 2020 and 2021, a long silence came to an end. In, a memoir published last autumn, le Carré’s sometime research assistant, Sue “Suleika” Dawson, outed herself as one of more than a dozen women to have had an affair with the former intelligence agent after the success ofby Adam Sisman, who hadn’t previously written about a living subject. Dealing with le Carré, he soon found, was different.
It’s morbidly fascinating to contemplate Jane’s midwifery of these books, tales of deceit that were also products of it I wish I could say different, but I’m not sure the books survive quite the level of daylight Sisman lets in on his subject’s writing process. Not for him the second cup of coffee or sly KitKat to fire the synapses; le Carré required nothing less than the prospect of extramarital sex in exotic locales . His jet-set research, already dubiously self-important – war-torn Cambodia, Chechnya, Congo – can’t help but be diminished by its dual purpose.
No wonder Sisman wants to take back control with this coda, a jigsaw of offcuts and previously thwarted lines of inquiry. Not all of it is revealing – just because le Carré vetoed something doesn’t mean we need to read it – but it’s useful to know he offered to broker a deal for Sisman to write the biography of his friend Tom Stoppard.
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