Suppose you are an aid worker, or a journalist, or a lawyer of some kind, whose work has left you with outstanding expertise in some far-flung demimonde. One day you get a message saying that David Cornwell – you might know him by the name John le Carré – is writing a book set in your part of the world. He needs an expert to help him get the fine detail right. Can he take you out for lunch? 

So you meet him at a restaurant of his choosing, some inner-circle place with white tablecloths. When you arrive he is already there, a white-haired, blue-eyed Englishman with horned eyebrows that give him a perpetually wounded expression. He orders champagne and oysters in large quantities, then turns his attention to you. Would you be willing (discreetly) to induct him into your secret world? To take him on a (well-remunerated) tour of the place you know so well? To correct the facts, fine detail and colour of the (heavily guarded) manuscript of his book? To go through draft after draft, produced with extraordinary diligence and couriered to your doorstep in a rapid sequence of cardboard boxes? 

As a new exhibition at the Bodleian and an accompanying book of essays make clear, this soft-shoed routine of approach and seduction was a mainstay of le Carré’s working method for most of his career. After looking at both, I was left with a most unliterary admiration for Cornwell’s corporate gifts: his understanding of where his knowledge ended, his receptiveness to critique and feedback, even his talent for delegation. Entire networks of people were willingly, proudly and discreetly involved in helping him produce the best book he could. At times, ‘John le Carré’ resembled a fictional institution more than a conventional author.  

Since his death in 2020, our understanding of le Carré’s life has been transformed by a series of publications, official and otherwise. First, a volume of letters gave us intimate access to the theatre of le Carré’s personality, the alternating charm and froideur that he deployed in his personal relationships. Its release was somewhat overshadowed by the publication of Suleika Dawson’s The Secret Heart (2022), a memoir of the pseudonymous author’s affair with le Carré in the 1980s and 90s. Le Carré’s erstwhile biographer Adam Sisman then published a short book cataloguing some of the many, many affairs he was arm-wrestled into leaving out of his 2015 doorstopper. The whole circus has been extremely tawdry and prurient, and naturally I read every word. 

Born the child of a scrambling and rapacious con man, le Carré studied modern languages at Oxford, taught briefly and worked for both MI5 and MI6 before his third novel, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), made him a global phenomenon (not to mention a Wilson-era tax exile). His early books were set in the familiar worlds of diplomatic Mitteleuropa and the English Home Counties. But beginning with The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), le Carré increasingly sought out distant and dicey settings for his books. He would digest the subject, tour the landscape and quietly size up the characters who struck him as the best fit for his latest story. Aged almost eighty, he visited the desperate and war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo for research. ‘Not recommended,’ he wrote to a friend upon his return, ‘food awful’.

The curators call this process ‘tradecraft’, a word popularised by le Carré to convey the intricate espionage techniques only he seemed able to describe (and in some cases to understand). I have always loved to suppose that the intricate grisaille of his fiction was really a carbon-paper tracing of some real, secret world. There is a sort of painful paradox at work, whereby the more le Carré makes me believe what he writes, the less credit I am inclined to give him. Yet as this exhibition makes clear, he worked hard to leave his readers with an impression of more-than-fictional truth. ‘Espionage is one of the few proud cases,’ he once wrote, ‘in my thoroughly biased view, in which historical truth has been better served by fiction than by … confections of warmed-up fact.’

In the low-light environment of the Bodleian’s manuscript display room sit briefings from lawyers about machine gun models, visas for Central African countries, hand-drawn maps of settings for scenes in Palestine. Huge quantities of technical research are digested into a few salient facts – the ‘novelist’s eye for detail’, about which we have all heard so much. A typed memo notes that a male body floats face down in water, while a female one floats face up. Research papers on sensitive topics are tagged with instructions for le Carré’s secretary or his wife Jane, who typed all of the densely annotated manuscripts on display here. One memo about the arms trade is marked for storage in ‘the safe’ – an indication, the curators doggedly note, that le Carré felt it was dangerous information to possess. 

Alongside this is the machinery of structure and invention, documents that are as detailed as you would expect from reading Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). Working on Smiley’s People (1979), le Carré seems to have produced a chronological plot summary to help himself understand the unfolding of events. I spent a long time looking at the red-ink mind-map-cum-flow-chart that the curators say contains the entire plot of The Little Drummer Girl (1980) without penetrating, really, any of it. It’s only to be expected. With le Carré, books often felt like a criterion of truth – evidence that we were hearing from a true pro. The most enthralling individual object in the show is a breathless longhand summary of the first chapter of A Perfect Spy (1986), in which the phrasing instinctively begins to strain towards some more final form. Marginal notes make an urgent record of solutions and structural interstices as and when they occur: ‘USE the Bournemouth bit’; ‘ARE OTHERS watching them? (Yes)’. Stapled on is a typed list of ‘questions unanswered by the end of this chapter’. Now that’s professionalism. 

Of the essays collected in the book, about half record personal encounters with le Carré, and they share a certain awed quality. Le Carré was big, and he had a way of subtly letting people know he was even bigger than they thought. He knew politicians and state secrets, was friends with spies, Hollywood actors and literary lions. He told the journalist Michela Wrong that if he was truly unhappy with a book at the last minute, he would simply order his publishers to stop the presses on 450,000 hardbacks. ‘Even with other literary giants present, he was the star,’ writes Hossein Amini, who wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of le Carré’s novel Our Kind of Traitor. 

Some of the contributors have absorbed rather uncritically le Carré’s sense of his own grandeur. The filmmaker Errol Morris says that le Carré’s anecdotal memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, ‘reinvents what constitutes biography or autobiography’ by refusing a narrative arc. In fact, the book consists mostly of pieces that were previously published, and was rush-released (as Morris does acknowledge) to overshadow Sisman’s forthcoming biography. The editor Federico Varese writes that le Carré was an author in the realist tradition of Balzac, but that ‘what David added was the political dimension’. This might have come as a surprise to Balzac. Varese’s subsequent contention, that before le Carré no one suspected the moral turpitude of Western intelligence agencies, might equally have surprised, say, Patrice Lumumba.

Claims like these invite dismissal, and obscure the more serious achievement of the author. Unlike almost every writer of straightforward thrillers from his era, le Carré has kept his readers. No one could match the brilliance of his plotting, or imitate the unfolding and rambunctious poetry of his prose. (I strongly suspect that few of his contemporaries had the same inborn capacity for relentless work.) He will never be thought of as a literary great, but why would he want to be? At the exhibition, I found myself standing next to two donnish men who had come together. ‘Remember we saw the Wittgenstein papers here,’ one of them muttered, with an air of habitual disappointment. But they stayed and read – as far as I could see – every word, their breath fogging up the glass.