A Delicate Truth: A Novel

"I think A Delicate Truth is an absolutely cracking modern novel. I just love it. Let’s just put that on the table before we get donnish about it. I read it in a single sitting, and then I read it again a couple of years ago. I just love this book. It’s about misdeeds, political interference at high levels, wickedness inside the British establishment. It dovetails very nicely with The Night Manager and Single and Single . It’s seen from a completely different angle of view—it’s seen in retrospect. And it’s about uncovering the misdeeds of the cover-up. I think one of the reviews from the moment it came out said that the American characters were, I think, ‘cartoonishly wicked.’ I don’t think that stands up in 2025 as a critique. They look reportage-real. I think he saw it before we did, before the first Trump presidency, and he put it on the page, and people reacted the way they did before the first Trump presidency, by saying, well, this could never happen. These people are impossible, implausible, preposterous. No, as it turns out, they were not. So there’s that. And, as I say, the misdeeds of Britain are in the foreground. It’s a really cracking read about the rot inside the doors of our establishment. It’s a great spy story. I think so. You know, I’m not a proper le Carré-ologist. There are people who devote themselves to this, who do textual analysis at a deep level. I have simply never done that. It’s not part of how I work. Having said that, I think the first three books have a kind of linear narrative. They observe unities of time and place—not properly, but the take place in relatively short periods of time and they rattle along, and they have very little meandering or digression. Then you get an intervening period, then you get to Tinker, Tailor, which is much more discursive, beginning by discussing Jim Prideaux at his school, and the characters move around. There’s a lot of ornamentation and sleight of hand to convey information. It’s much less direct. You get that with the core Karla-versus-Smiley trilogy: Tinker, Tailor; The Honourable Schoolboy ; Smiley’s People . Smiley’s People brings the Cold War to a close. Then you get these transitional books. People look at them and say, well, you know, he’s finding his feet. No, he was absolutely, perfectly iterating what was happening in the world; the world was finding its feet, and the books reflect that. Then you get into the strongly post-Cold War books, like Single & Single and The Night Manager , which are different again. You’re looking at a new style, a shift in perspective, which comes in around the second decade of this century, where he’s working much shorter, more concise, more reflective. The politics becomes more naked in the later books and less abstract. But it’s always about who is getting stitched up like a kipper, who is getting destroyed for no reason—and how we can stop that from happening. I find that through-line very persuasive. It’s not difficult to work out. I have a hobby horse at the moment, which is to remind people that he was fun. There have been so many wonderful books and pieces about his ability to determine the geopolitical future, which he did simply by opening his ears and listening to people who understood the cross-currents in the world. People would bring him stories. You know, the inception of The Constant Gardener was people coming to him and saying: If you want real wickedness, you need to look at drug testing in Africa and how that works. Not to say the pharmaceutical industry does not also save lives, but it’s a huge money industry and with that comes corruptive drift, let us say. So he wrote into that space, and people say, rightly, that it was prophetic, incisive, and so on. But the thing that I want to say all the time is that he was fun, and he was mischievous. When you read these books, you get rippling moments of laughter which can catch you by surprise, and those moments indicate more what it was like to be with him in the day to day than I think people realise. They assume he was a very serious, very angry fellow. But he was impish and joyous and hilarious to be around. Recently I’ve started saying that out loud, lest we forget that."