Philippe Sands - Conversations with John le Carré // Le Carre's 2003 essay 'The United States of America Has Gone Mad'
The master novelist discusses spooks, the ‘secret world’, Edward Snowden and Syria with his neighbour
Who is his greatest hero? Andre Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, who came to recognise the dangers of his own work (“He realised he’d given the bomb to a bunch of gangsters”).
many of his recent books draw on recognisable characters, with a serious political message. A Most Wanted Man (published in 2008, currently being filmed with the wonderful Philip Seymour Hoffman), concerns what he considers to be a gross overreaction to Islamic threat. It’s a “war on terror” story, drawing on the real events that befell Murat Kurnaz, a 20-year-old Turkish resident of Germany, whom le Carré has befriended and whose book (Five Years of My Life) also came out in 2008. Kurnaz was caught up in the post-9/11 events, detained, tortured, then incarcerated in Guantánamo for five years, despite the early recognition that he was wholly innocent.
I am sitting in a sunny and perfectly ordered garden in north London, engaged in tea and conversation with my neighbour David Cornwell, the writer John le Carré. We cover our usual topics (Hampstead, Britain, his books and films, my legal cases), reflecting on the state of the world and his appearance at the Hay Festival earlier this summer, where I had interviewed him. “I do think we live in most extraordinary period of history,” he says now. “The fact that we feel becalmed is the element that is most terrifying, the second-rate quality of leadership, the third-rate quality of parliamentary behaviour.”
Richard Burton in 'The Spy Who Came in From The Cold', 1965
Who is his greatest hero? Andre Sakharov, father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, who came to recognise the dangers of his own work (“He realised he’d given the bomb to a bunch of gangsters”).
What does he think about Britain’s relationship with the US? He’s not anti-American, just opposed to British parasitism and being “harnessed” to American power.
What’s his greatest regret? He wishes he’d started writing earlier, and that he’d not turned down the offer to meet Kim Philby, who was keen to see him when he was in Moscow (“I must have been a fool”).
I am sitting in a sunny and perfectly ordered garden in north London, engaged in tea and conversation with my neighbour David Cornwell, the writer John le Carré. We cover our usual topics (Hampstead, Britain, his books and films, my legal cases), reflecting on the state of the world and his appearance at the Hay Festival earlier this summer, where I had interviewed him. “I do think we live in most extraordinary period of history,” he says now. “The fact that we feel becalmed is the element that is most terrifying, the second-rate quality of leadership, the third-rate quality of parliamentary behaviour.”
Richard Burton in 'The Spy Who Came in From The Cold', 1965
The exceedingly rare public appearance at Hay (“my swansong”, he told a delighted audience, although I didn’t really believe it) had been preceded by two lengthy lunches, as he is meticulous in preparation. It coincided with the publication of his latest novel, A Delicate Truth , as well as the 50th anniversary of his third, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, which brought fame and liberation from a life in the British intelligence services. In the course of a relaxed performance – what Peter Florence, the festival’s director, described as “an extraordinary combination of gracious wit and political savagery” – the audience obtained an insight into the complexities and depth of the man described by The New York Times as one of “the finest writers alive”.
I got to know John le Carré by accident, 10 years ago, at my local pub, The Wells, after we were introduced by a mutual friend. Before that he’d been a recognisable regular (white hair, warm eyes, brown suede shoes, safe and establishment look) but I had no idea who he was. Our first conversation was coloured by the unfolding disaster in Iraq and allegations of detainee abuse. We’ve not looked back, lunching at The Wells every few months, topping the hours with a rhubarb crumble and a fight over the single scoop of vanilla ice-cream that we allow ourselves, fearful of our respective wives.
The relationship is forged on the anvil of those post-9/11 issues, events that reset the national debate on the relationship between the individual and the state. They are matters on which we share a strong interest. A central spine of le Carré’s work – reflected in 23 novels written over five decades – is the responsibility of the individual who faces a fork in the road, required to take a decision that will have morally dubious consequences. My own work, in which he shows considerable interest despite certain reservations (“I have a great distrust of lawyers,” he has repeatedly and pointedly told me), largely focuses on the flip side of his concerns, the rights of the individual.
Over the years, we have not lacked in matters to engage. This is the age of national security and liberty, a constant debate about balance that often turns around the role of the intelligence services. Our interest is mutually self-serving: he might ask me to review a draft that raises a legal point, I might seek his opinion on a matter that draws on his former life in “the secret world”, as he calls it, or on his life’s experience. He is wise and his life, I have come to appreciate, has been informed by a very particular past.
Le Carré believes that the credit balance of the writer is his childhood, citing Graham Greene. By this standard, le Carré was an early millionaire. He was born in 1931, in Dorset, to a family that he celebrates despite (or perhaps because of) its manifest dysfunctionality. With a largely absent mother, his father became the central figure in his early life. Ronnie Cornwell was “seriously bent”, volatile, a convicted fraudster, yet also “exotic, amusing” and lovable. He avoided military service during the war by standing as a parliamentary candidate, an Independent Progressive. The postwar period offered Ronnie a goldmine of shady activity, allowing his son to enter maturity in an unpredictable environment populated by racehorses and Bentleys, passing from St Moritz to the Savoy Grill in the company his father kept, which included the Kray twins (“lovely boys”, his aunt called them)...
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http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fd09ae7e-15a4-11e3-950a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2e9gcNZ26
'The United States of America Has Gone Mad'
God also has pretty scary connections. In America Texas
'The United States of America Has Gone Mad'
America has entered one of its periods of historical madness,
but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay
of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the
Vietnam War. The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have
hoped for in his nastiest dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have
made America
the envy of the world are being systematically eroded.
The combination of compliant US
media and vested corporate interests is once more ensuring that a debate that
should be ringing out in every town square is confined to the loftier columns
of the East Coast press. The imminent war was planned years before bin Laden struck,
but it was he who made it possible. Without bin Laden, the Bush junta
would still be trying to explain such tricky matters as how it came to be
elected in the first place; Enron; its shameless favouring of the
already-too-rich; its reckless disregard for the world's poor,
the ecology and a raft of unilaterally abrogated international treaties. They
might also have to be telling us why they support Israel
in its continuing disregard for UN resolutions.
But bin Laden conveniently swept all that under the carpet.
The Bushies are riding high. Now 88 per cent of Americans want the war, we are
told. The US
defence budget has been raised by another $60 billion to around $360 billion. A
splendid new generation of nuclear weapons is in the pipeline, so we can all
breathe easy. Quite what war 88 per cent of Americans think
they are supporting is a lot less clear. A war for how long, please? At what
cost in American lives? At what cost to the American taxpayer's
pocket? At what cost because most of those 88 per cent are thoroughly
decent and humane people in Iraqi lives?
How Bush and his junta succeeded in deflecting America's
anger from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein is one of the great public relations
conjuring tricks of history. But they swung it. A recent poll tells us that one
in two Americans now believe Saddam was responsible for the attack on the World
Trade Centre. But the American public is not merely being misled. It is being
browbeaten and kept in a state of ignorance and fear. The carefully
orchestrated neurosis should carry Bush and his fellow conspirators nicely into
the next election.
Those who are not with Mr Bush are against him. Worse, they
are with the enemy. Which is odd, because I'm dead
against Bush, but I would love to see Saddam's downfall just not on Bush's terms
and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.
The religious cant that will send American troops into battle is perhaps the
most sickening aspect of this surreal war-to-be. Bush has an arm-lock on God.
And God has very particular political opinions. God appointed America
to save the world in any way that suits America .
God appointed Israel
to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy, and
anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American,
c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist.
