A Perfect Spy

"I think in some ways this is the perfect novel. It’s just a wonderful, heartbreaking, stunning picking apart of the world of espionage and what it does to the soul. It’s by some distance my favorite book on this list. It’s one of my top three or four books of all time. It’s the one I have reread the most in my life, because it is a book of extraordinary depth and complexity of character. If you think about le Carré, this book takes to an extreme the two sides of his writing. You have the spy craft, the dead drops, the intricacies of negotiating borders and the outward narrative engines. Then you have his inward representations of what it is to be a spy. On the cover of my copy, it has that classic line: “He had been the perfect spy, but at the cost of his soul.” It’s the encapsulation of that inward, less narrative-driven, more philosophical, what-living-a-life-of-secrets-does-to-you novel. It is full of the most wonderful writing about the soul, the love of family and the love of country, and about what betrayal is and how it endures, and whether you can ever really escape history. For people who are a bit snooty about spy fiction and think, ‘Oh, it’s just bombs and ladies in bikinis,’ this book is the absolute antidote. It’s comparable with Dostoevsky: it is that morally serious. A Perfect Spy is also, by some way, le Carré’s most autobiographical novel, and interesting to read in the light of what we have learned about le Carré—or David Cornwell, we should say—since his death. Magnus Pym is a senior British intelligence officer. He disappears at his father’s funeral, and the novel is both the search for Magnus Pym and how he avoids those who are coming after him, but also a book within a book of his own memoir, written while he’s on the run. What’s so brilliant about that is that you feel that it is le Carré’s way of writing his own memoir. Magnus Pym writes about his relationship with his father, who is a con man. It’s why the father’s funeral is this hinge point for him. Le Carré’s own father was a notorious swindler and lived double lives himself, as we know le Carré himself did. It’s a bildungsroman, the story of how somebody goes from childhood to an adulthood of betrayal, of a character that, because he can be anyone, is no one. That is the great tragedy at the heart of the book. Magnus, who is in his 40s, is completely unmoored and doesn’t know what he can believe in, because he has lied and betrayed so much. It’s incredibly confessional and heartbreaking. I absolutely love it. In some ways, the manhunt, which is the contemporary narrative, is secondary. You feel that le Carré’s heart isn’t really in it. That’s fine, because what really sticks with you is the internal stuff and getting to know this character and just how shattered he has been by a life in which there is no solid ground. I had been wanting to write about Corfu for a long time. I run the Corfu literary festival and spend quite a bit of time there. It’s a beautiful and historically incredibly interesting place. I discovered this slice of espionage history that was unknown to me, of the first joint MI6 CIA operation in history, just after World War II . It was an attempt to overthrow the communist regime in Hoxha’s Albania. It was called Operation Valuable and entailed MI6 and CIA dropping Albanian dissidents into Albania. Unfortunately, at that time, Kim Philby was intimately involved in MI6 and passed all of the information about where these agents were being dropped to the Sigurimi, the vicious secret police. Corfu was used as a launching and drop-off point because it’s so close to Albania. There’s a point near Kassiopi in the north of Corfu where it’s only a mile across the strait, and you almost feel like you could touch Albania. Corfu has always had this extraordinary strategic position, and it was just this idea that you could write a novel which made clear the geopolitical role it played in this extraordinary story. The other thing that set me off was that my mother-in-law had been on holiday with a friend of hers to a little seaside village in mainland Greece. She said all of the houses on the seafront were owned by slightly dashing, retired Foreign Office types. She realized that they were all spies, and had all gone out there together, because there was a safety and comfort in being able to talk about things that you perhaps couldn’t talk about with others. There was this extraordinary moment in the early 1990s where, after the fall of communism, MI6 carried out a purge of its spies. It was called the Christmas massacre, because that’s when all these spies—who were deeply embedded in the binaries of the Soviet/Cold War world and had been unable to adapt to the new era—were fired. So I brought all of that together and created this retirement home for spies on a little island just off the coast of Corfu. From there, the novel almost wrote itself. You set up this closed world. You set up these characters who are freighted by their own personal histories. Then you just let it play out. The idea there was to think, ‘There was a Cambridge spy ring. What if there was an Oxford spy ring that hadn’t been caught and had carried on operating within MI6?’ I did a lot of research on Philby and the others in the Cambridge Five, really thinking about how they went over to the other side and how they expressed and enacted their betrayals. The thing that was most fascinating to me about Philby is that it was so obvious everything he touched went wrong—and yet he still went up and up in the service. It was because he had been to the right school and had the right accent, and he was charming and eloquent and erudite. The book is also about what it’s like to view history from the other side, before it happened. I did that with my third novel, In Love and War , where I was writing about the British Union of Fascists, and how it seemed to some people—before all of the horrors of the Second World War—as an escape from the political world that had created World War I . We judge people much more harshly because we know what came after. In A Stranger in Corfu, I was thinking about how idealists could have been sucked into the Communist Party in the 1940s. It would have been presented as a more equal and, in some ways, more joyful way of recreating a world after the atrocities of 1939 to 1945."

"A Lonely Man got quite a few comparisons to John le Carré , which I was humbled by. It actually made me go and read more le Carré, because I hadn’t really read much—he’s one of those writers who everyone’s read a few of, right? This one particularly appealed to me, although I don’t really know why – I can’t recall ever having talked to anyone about it, or even read much about it. As soon as I opened it, I just loved it. It’s very knotty. You talked about layers—this is mille feuille. I think of a traditional thriller as the sort of thing you buy in an airport and read over a single long flight, as I did with a le Carré once, The Mission Song. But I don’t think that would work with A Perfect Spy , and not just because it’s so long. It’s a book that almost pushes you away. It takes some concentration and digging to get into the story and understand what’s happening. It’s about this spy called Magnus Pym who is undercover at the British embassy in Vienna. He leaves, and his wife doesn’t know if he’s a traitor. His MI6 handler thinks he is. They’re trying to track him down, but meanwhile he’s hiding out at a B&B in Devon, where he’s writing a memoir addressed to his son. These remembrances build up throughout the novel to encompass his later career and why he’s done what he’s done. He’s also very obsessed with his own father, Rick, who lived the highlife, but it becomes apparent it was all based on criminality and being a con man who betrayed everyone he ever knew. Later, le Carré wrote a memoir of his own and it emerged that Rick was very heavily based on his own father, so it has an autofictional element to it that I didn’t suspect when I picked it up. I guess it’s become apparent that I enjoy books that contain further books within them. That Russian doll effect. And I find it really interesting that such a big book by a bestselling author is so strange and slippery and evasive in the way it tells itself. I think it’s fascinating, although I haven’t read enough le Carré to say it’s definitively his best. There’s an outrageous quote on my edition from Philip Roth , who says “it’s the best English novel since the war.” I can’t go that far, but I do absolutely love it. That’s interesting. A Perfect Spy spoke, in a number of ways, to my experience writing A Lonely Man . In fact, if I were able to edit my own existence I’d like to say A Perfect Spy was the biggest influence on A Lonely Man . The only reason I can’t is that I wrote my novel before I read his. I didn’t. Bolaño talked about literature establishing itself in “the territory of risk”, and often played up to this romantic idea of the writer, which I can’t really subscribe to. He was partly joking, but also Bolaño’s case is very different: his country suffered a military coup and dictatorship. But for me , in my situation, being a writer seems the safest way to do dangerous things, in terms of your own psyche. There might be fear when it comes to other people reading it, because you perhaps are exposing regions of your personality you would otherwise keep hidden – and writing is always, one way or another, an exposing. But just as you’re exposed, you’re also barricaded by the form. You can say, ‘that’s my novel, not me.’ Which might be because you’re dishonest, or deluded, or because what you’re exposing is too painful to be confronted outside of fiction. So when I said, at the beginning of this answer, ‘I didn’t’, perhaps I meant, ‘I did’. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But in terms of feeling exposed, or that I’m risking something at the moment of writing, I tend to write pretty instinctively, as a lot of writers do. Even if I have an idea I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and even a scene-by-scene outline, the moment I’m actually putting one word after another, sentence after sentence on a page, is often a disembodied experience, like I’m not making entirely conscious decisions. When I come back to edit, which will ideally be several weeks if not months later, I’m in a different space to where I was when I wrote those lines, so there’s an inherent mystery. Javier Marías, in Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me , has an amazing passage about how evanescent every moment of a life is – “everything is forgotten and invalidated… how little remains of each individual, how little trace remains of anything”. Life rushes through you and is gone. Writing enacts this same process because when you come back to it, it’s already become something that someone else did; a gap has opened between you and the work. You can call it perspective and use it to do the necessary work of making the writing better and pushing it in the direction you want it to go. But at the same time, something has gone that you can’t ever recapture."