Single & Single

"Yes, so this is for love. Absolutely. I read Single & Single for the first time before the proof stage, as I read most of these books as I got older. And I loved it, from start to finish. I recognised myself, I recognised my older brother Tim—we were blended together with, inevitably, my dad, and half a dozen other people to make Oliver Single. My long coat, Tim’s brooding desire to get things right, just these beautiful little sketches. I just fell in love with it. And if you’re looking for the sin, the sin in Single & Single is so viscerally wicked and extraordinary. I won’t say what it is, but if you are looking for a book about international wickedness in the post-Cold War period, I don’t think I can imagine a more perfect metaphor for it that is also a literal truth about the nature of the world. Something my father did extraordinarily well. Then, thrown in with that, just a wonderful riff on wicked international private banking and enforcement. It’s classic le Carré. That’s a really good question. Obviously, I think of my dad, David Cornwell. His performance piece was John le Carré. That was the coat he wore to write. And there was a difference between the two of them. You know, Dad was shy. He loved to laugh, but he was quite vulnerable and quite shy. John le Carré feared nothing, you know, and was choleric and radical, and could go out on stage and entertain the Royal Festival Hall and hold the room for hours, just at a lectern in his eighties in an extraordinary act of mesmerism. They were fundamentally the same, because there’s no such person as John le Carré without David Cornwell. And yet. The dedication to Karla’s Choice is to the both of them: the one who was the ping pong player, the drinker of wine, the walker of dogs, the teller of stories; and the one who was a novelist. There is truth in that in the same way as they were one person. We all contain multitudes. I feel this particularly strongly at the moment because I’m the Nick Harkaway who is now writing a new George Smiley novel. I’m also the guy who just released the second Cal Sounder novel , with my own hat on. I’ve also been Aidan Truhan, and they are now making a TV show of Kill Jackie . I have so many hats, and my dad wore many hats throughout his life. We contain multitudes. We do many different things. We behave differently with different people, or at least I do—perhaps some people don’t have that experience."