Author Interviews

John Le Carre

1. How much involvement do you have with the film adaptations of your books and do you like them?

My involvement with film and TV adaptations has varied enormously.  Mainly it’s a matter, on my side, of developing confidence in the makers, and urging them to indulge their own art, and not mine.  I want to see the film of the film, not the film of the book.  Of course I want the theme and characters to remain intact, as they did in The Constant Gardener, but I respected the different route that the director and writer hit upon, and was delighted when they reached, in film language, the same destination that I had been aiming for in the novel.

2. What was it about The Congo which inspired you to set Mission Song there?

The Congo has been Africa’s greatest loser, and I am drawn to losers: colonised and exploited by Arabs, who jointly with tribal chiefs and the Portuguese got the slave trade going; horribly colonised by Belgium’s Leopold, and now permanently the battlefield for other people’s wars; cursed with vast mineral deposits and a dismal infrastructure – 30 miles of hard road in all Congo – and a sitting target for all the world’s carpet baggers, who manage, for instance, to relieve the Congo of 1 billion dollars’ worth of diamonds every year.  Beyond that, the Congo is about to change radically, for better or worse, after the first multi-party election for 40 years.  But it will be changing at a time when the world’s future conflicts will be all about resources, which means that the vultures are hovering as perhaps never before.  Hence my interest, hence my story.

3. Which of your novels are you most proud of and why?

Probably, but not certainly, A Perfect Spy, because it enabled me to jump over my father’s shadow and describe my childhood in acceptable ways.  It also signalled, for me, the end of the cold war, which took place long before the CIA woke up to it.

4. Is Smiley based on a real person?

No decent writer can invent a character without injecting something of himself into it.  That said, I suppose I had two models: Vivian Green, now dead, my long time mentor and friend, first at school, then at Oxford.  Vivian was a priest, an historian, and a wit of immense sagacity.  The other was John Bingham, novelist and Irish peer (Lord Clanmorris) who was also an extremely astute and humane intelligence officer and colleague.

5. Which of your characters do you most closely resemble?

All of them.  It depends on the weather, my mood, and the situation.  Gunther Grass observed that he could think of no crime that he was incapable of committing.  I can think of no character I’m incapable of being.

6. Which young thriller writers do you enjoy reading?

None, I’m afraid.  I read mostly classic nineteenth century fiction and contemporary non-fiction.  I haven’t read a thriller for about thirty years.

7. What did you do before you became an author?

Look me up.

John le Carré was born in 1931. He attended the universities of Bern and Oxford and later taught at Eton. He spent five years in the British Secret Service. You can get lots more on him from: johnlecarre.com